My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (24 page)

In Baltimore, Manny Azenberg tells us he had “very exciting news.” The tour will be extended another three months. A voice in the ranks mutters, “There goes my marriage.” After Washington there will be a three-week break for rewrites, then back into rehearsals with a new director and then to L.A for a month!! My heart is sinking. No way to jump ship. No unemployment benefits if you quit. We are headed for Broadway. Manny keeps saying, “Nothing’s engraved in stone!” but it feels like a gravestone to me. This is just supposed to get me through the holidays. What is the alternative? No work, sitting upstate freezing in snow, nobody around. If I walk, I will be demonized by Neil and my agents, who, as it is, treat me like crap.

The
Washington Post
said that I was the only person onstage who appeared to be acting. Uh-oh. When I come down the hall, all the dressing room doors are closed. I hear hissing. I had been hearing hissing for a while now. Like an over-zealous radiator. It’s coming from Vera’s room, a long string of “she’s,” “she’s,” “she’s,” “she says,” “she’s so,” “she’s such,” a perpetual, paranoia-induced hiss.

We wait onstage after the final curtain to meet our new director, Gene Saks. I knew Gene when he was Bea Arthur’s husband. Pep talk. Applause.

In rehearsals in New York, Gene is giving me funny bits, throwing me a nickel here, a dime there. Each time he does, Rita wails, “Ohhhhh, that’s so fun-ee!”

In notes session each night after the show in L.A. Gene cuts a funny bit he gave me, one by one, until they are all cut. I keep asking why, he just looks sheepish, but then Gene always looks sheepish. He has no reason he can give me.

In the hall backstage in L.A., Manny, Neil, and Gene—tanned, tailored, middle-aged producer, writer and director stand with their new young wives genially conferring with each other while rheumy coughs issue from the dressing rooms of six middle-aged, worn-out actresses.

Except for
Promises, Promises,
this is the only long run on Broadway I had ever been in. It ran for 295 performances. I lasted three months. Every day on the way to the theater, I remind myself how great it was to have steady work, but every day as I stepped through the stage door, I entered a decompression chamber. Nobody talking, nobody having any fun, just the sound of hissing behind closed doors.

W
HEN
I
HEARD THAT
H
UGH HAD CONTRACTED AIDS
I
ASKED
my sister’s son Duncan, who was close to him, to keep me posted on what was happening. When he went into the hospital I went to see him. The disease had hit his brain. He was sitting up in bed babbling, but some part of him knew what was happening. He was eating everything on his plate. He mumbled, “Got to build myself up.” He was going into the hall and buying candy from the machine. On my next visit I brought him a mango. He bit into it, the juice rolled down his chin. He mumbled “It’s delishush.” A wave of gratitude went through me. I felt as if for the first time in our lives he was allowing me to give him something. After two weeks in the hospital he was moved to a hospice. As he wrestled with the nurse who was trying to get him into his bed he roared, “Unhand me, woman!” The nurse said these were his last words.

All his life he desperately wanted respectability. I found it so strange that this cultured, eccentric man, a PhD and member of MENSA, should want nothing more at the end of his life than to have his name in the New York Social Register. He wrote letters to them but received no answer.

M
ARK ARRIVED IN
S
AN
D
IEGO WITH SCRIPT CHANGES HE HAD
made with Jay Allen. He showed up at the theater and tried to give them to Nicky Martin. I was outraged. I told him I was not having this and to go away, and after that, Nicky obliged me by barring Mark from rehearsals. He didn’t go home, he stayed out there.

I didn’t want to have anything to do with Mark at this point. He was having a lark, driving to L.A. in an upgraded rental convertible while I was hard at work rehearsing and learning how to make an entrance down a flight of stairs. One day he accosted me in the parking lot. As I was getting into my car, he screamed: “If you weren’t half a millionaire you’d be in an insane asylum!” It really hurt to be screamed at, but at the same time it struck me as hilarious. Sometimes at the most serious moments …

It was announced that the Allens were coming out to see the show. I was still hoping they would produce it “as is.”

We four met, and again Jay Allen told me she had no intention of writing it herself, that it only needed “one more little thing to make it work.” Then she said Vreeland should talk to Reed, her dead husband. I relented, wrote something along the lines of, “Oh, Reed, I do miss you! You were such a picker-upper, blah blah blah.” I felt like Dolly Levi in
The Matchmaker
. I was embarrassed by it, it was so out of character.

I don’t know how I got through this run. Well, I do. The sheer pleasure of rolling Vreeland’s words out. All the rest was up for grabs.

Nicky’s William Morris agent, Gilbert Parker, came out to see the show. Parker seemed to handle all the working directors and playwrights in town, he was a direct conduit to off-Broadway theater companies like Manhattan Theater Club, Playwrights Horizons, and Second Stage. And Parker adored Nicky. So William Morris became our agent for
Full Gallop
. I have often thought that without Nicky’s adorableness, we might never have seen the light of day in New York City.

Mark was in love with this Jay woman. He admitted as much later on. He was still working with her when we got back to New York. She was all for injecting shock into the play, making the character ribald, even offensive, and Mark shared that desire. On the other hand, I took a surgeon’s view of the script, scrupulously mining it for anything that didn’t ring true, anything that sounded the least like braggadocio. Mark and I had a tussle over a line he invented that I thought didn’t sound like her: “As Joan Crawford once said, ‘If you want the girl next door, go next door.’” He won that fight and it is often quoted as one of the more memorable lines from the show. What bothered the hell out of me about Jay Allen was that she didn’t give a damn about being true to Vreeland’s character.

I once thought Mark and I were as close as any married couple. Our relationship was one of the most intimate I have ever had. I didn’t have a mate and he did, so naturally he had a bifurcated fealty. Still, his continuing to work with Jay absolutely crushed me. I told him our contract forbade him to work on the play with another writer. He said, “I don’t agree,” and when he said that, a surge from the bottom of my gut rose up, a tsunami of rage stored from years back, and I let him have it. I said a lot of things, I felt so betrayed, but the words didn’t matter, it was the power of the onslaught. Mark told me later that even in the teeth of it, he was thinking, “Boy! If she could ever do that on stage …”

Back in New York, a couple of months after San Diego, I got a call from Jay. She chirped, “Well, I’ve rewritten your script, and it only took me two hours.” My mumbled retort: “And it only took me six years.”

“Well, darling,” she said. “You’re not a writer.”

I prayed, I really prayed, that I would love the script, but reading it was like being slapped in the face with a wet flounder. The most infuriating thing was her careless insertion of anachronistic clichés. Vreeland never resorted to clichés. She
coined
clichés.

I called Jay’s agent as instructed, and told him I wasn’t interested.

I didn’t think Mark should be reimbursed for his living expenses in San Diego since he spent his time out there working against me. William Morris withheld the money, and Mark’s lawyer threatened a suit. This just as we were on the verge of making a deal with the Manhattan Theater Club in New York. Mark refused to sign unless he was paid.

As far as I understood it, he was suing me. I sensed vindictiveness. I was still smarting from being billed by him and his mate Michael Sharp for the huge amount they lavished on the set in Sag Harbor without consulting me. I was the Money Bags for this show.

As long as this was happening, there would be no contract with the Manhattan Theater Club. I appealed to our agent, Gil. He shrugged helplessly. There would be no assistance coming from William Morris. I was in agony. Months went by. I was finally obliged to pay up so that we could proceed with negotiations, but I couldn’t bear to have anything to do with Mark for a long time after that.

A
FTER EACH PERFORMANCE IN THE PAST, NO MATTER HOW POSITIVE
the response had been, we seemed to fall back into the void; exactly where we had been before. Now, starting with the performance at the nightclub McGraw’s, it was like a slow-moving freight train. There were stoppages, longueurs, gaps along the way, but things lurched inexorably forward. Interest in the play and Vreeland had developed a momentum of its own: the Allen and O’Brien meetings that spring and summer leading to the run at the Old Globe in December, then to the Manhattan Theater Club the following September.

I started taking tango lessons. Vreeland adored dancing, she wanted to be a dancer, and I wanted to perform at least a couple of tango moves in the play. This was dangerous, it was difficult to trust that I wouldn’t look ridiculous. It had to be beautifully executed. My partner was a young woman. After six weeks with her leading me around, I could manage to let myself go with the hip sway, the sinuous glide for whole moments at a time. I discovered an exciting Astor Piazzolla tango that had the necessary
oomph
to launch me into it.

I also wanted to illustrate dance steps from
The Dying Swan
. I went to the Lincoln Center Library and studied Pavlova dying, swooping her arms over and down, and bending her torso over one extended leg. I tried it out on the porch one day in front of my buddy Carol Morley. She didn’t laugh.

Other things happened in this period. While I was in San Diego an Argentinian woman I let stay in my apartment painted the whole place in lurid pinks and purples. Quite a feat considering the 25-foot ceilings. I told her I hated it and fled upstate. She repainted it all white again. She was fast but she was furious. I kicked her out and found out later she had informed the rent control authorities that I owned another residence. Meanwhile a group of young filmmakers asked if they could rent the apartment for two weeks for $5,000. Not knowing if we were going to get the play on at all, I accepted and went back up to my house. The two weeks turned into three and still going—they built a kitchen in my living room—and MTC was now happening, so I had to move to a hotel with 22-year-old City Kitty who was on a hydration regimen requiring needles, an IV stand and several plastic bags of fluid.

We opened at the Manhattan Theater Club in September of 1995. The MTC audience is infamous for resembling the living dead. Even the management jokes about it. The first preview audience literally screamed at every line; this had happened to me before, I supposed these were extreme fans. But after that, the regular subscribers sat there like Easter Island heads.

The Manhattan Theater Club stage was an open square with seats on three sides, once again lessening the effect of direct address. I just decided to ignore the seats on the sides. A few feet separated the acting space from the first row, which was on the same level and highly visible in the light spill; there were times when I found myself inadvertently locking eyes with individuals in workout suits with shopping bags, or friends, or Al Hirschfeld. Disconcerting to say the least.

Nicky told me he had hired the perfect stage manager for me. “Divas love him. He’s great at massaging feet!” The idea that Nicky saw me as a diva was perplexing. The man was very sweet, but entirely unequipped to call intercom, doorbell, and phone cues, which were so bloody important and they were coming in consistently late or not at all, and driving me insane.

Various luminaries came backstage. Kenneth, the premier hairdresser of the eighties, a big, dashing man who recalled dyeing and re-dyeing Vreeland’s hair as she kept complaining, “Not black enough!” Richard Avedon came back—boyish looking, tousled white hair—and demonstrated for me her exaggerated posture. When he first came to work for her, she called him “Aberdeen.”

Ali MacGraw came back, she had been an assistant under Vreeland before her film career. She told me how terrifying she was. Assistants were called “Miss,” as in, “Miss! Hand me that photograph.”

I was not blind to Mrs. Vreeland’s downside. There were people who loathed her, and probably with good reason, but I couldn’t go there. People asked me if I had ever met her; I didn’t want to, I think she would have been supremely uninterested in me.

My old pal George Furth showed up. He called to me over the heads of the backstage crowd: “You don’t have an ending, you know!” This infuriated me, as usual. As usual, he was right. We didn’t have an ending for the play.

A year passed between the end of the run at the Manhattan Theater Club and the play opening at the Westside Theater, but it was hardly a dull one. I went up the Amazon with Patricia Neal. I replaced the vacationing Parthy in
Show Boat
on Broadway for a month. I won a Drama Desk Award and an Obie. The
New Yorker
magazine called, they wanted to photograph me as Vreeland. I panicked. Once again, Bettie O. came to my rescue, fixing my wig, running out to buy false fingernails, gluing them on and painting them red—all in about fifteen minutes.
Women’s Wear Daily
also photographed me in costume. Finally, and not incidentally, I was evicted from my apartment of thirty-seven years and I had to put down my beloved twenty-three-year-old City Kitty, aka Sydney.

There were meetings with the producers Fran and Barry Weissler, their protégé David Stone, and Amy Nederlander to produce the play. Nothing was certain. There were tenants in the Westside at the time, we had to wait.