Still Talking (12 page)

The enterprise started out happily. My collaborators were a funny former agent named Lester Colodny, who had written jokes for me, and Edgar, who was excellent at plotting, but with his precision mind, he would say about a joke, “That is grammatically incorrect.” And we would say, “But, Edgar, that’s why the joke is funny.”

During a year and a half, much of it touring, the play evolved into a comedy about women’s liberation and the difficulty of urban living. My heroine, Jill, wanted New York to secede from the Union and become a country. Because she was so busy going to rallies and being the liberated woman, she was breaking up with her boyfriend of seven years-while enduring the barrage of troubles that

can happen to any poor schlepp who lived in a New York City apartment house.

Our agent sent the script to Alexander Cohen, a top Broadway name, very experienced. One day in 1971 he arrived in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes at our summer rental in Bedford, New York, and sat on our terrace and told us he wanted to produce the play.

We went into rehearsal in Washington, D.C. We had very little interest in anything else. The Vietnam pullout negotiations, Nixon directing NASA to build the space shuttle, were insignificant. Edgar and I were living the romance of those books we had read-rewriting the play late into the night, sleeping four hours, memorizing and rehearsing new lines, running on all cylinders, making huge decisions like, Should my liberated-woman character go braless on stage.

Edgar was in his element, standing in the back of the theater each night making notes, telling us afterward that this line is not working but that one is. Then reality hit us. The day before our opening in the National Theater in Washington, a stagehand grabbed me and said, “A play just like yours was here last month. The Prisoner of Second Avenue. ” We were competing with the same theme as Neil Simon, the undisputed master of Broadway comedy.

To keep myself functioning, I started my mind games, saying to myself over and over like an incantation, “There’s room for both of us. The audiences are laughing. There’s room for both of us.” Then the second hammer blow hit. The Washington reviews were bad. I started a new mantra, “We’ll make the New York reviews good. We’ll make the New York reviews good.”

Then the real crusher came. Alex Cohen announced that he was closing the play out of town. Still, I refused to give up. After the evening’s performance I left on my makeup, kept my hairdo, and over my sweater and slacks put on a gorgeous, dramatic purple Yves Saint Laurent velvet cape.

Then in Alex’s suite I played a scene so melodramatic, so worthy of a grade-B movie, that I cannot believe that Alex never laughed.

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Full of theater, I stood in the middle of the room, stumpily regal at five feet two inches, and said, “You cannot close the play. You’ve got to let this open. You must bring it into New York. Just listen to the audiences laughing. The play is funny.”

Alex, right in the mood, said, “Only Vivien Leigh could move me this way.”

He had an investor come down from New York the next day, and I did the same performance, this time adding tears, and he gave us the money to open on Broadway.

After a month in Washington we moved to the Morosco Theatre in New York and into the company of such plays as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Butterflies Are Free with Gloria Swanson, Applause, Jesus Christ Superstar.

I remember standing in front of the theater and looking at the cast pictures they had posted. I was so happy. My name was up on the marquee.

Just bliss. I was on Broadway at last. Next would be the movie of Fun City.

At last I was on my way. And so was Edgar. In the city that never sleeps.

For the first time in my life, I put aside my expectations of disaster and allowed myself to truly believe.

We opened on a Sunday night, January 3, 1972. The TV reviews were good. But the next day’s newspaper reviews were poor. So we put all our hope on Walter Kerr, the premier New York critic, who would appear in the Sunday Times. He had come to dress rehearsal and Edgar and Alex had watched him laugh. Even the stagehands had peeked through the curtain to see his reaction. We were elated that he would save the show.

I was up late Thursday night waiting for the preview edition of the Arts and Leisure section. Alex called us. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “Kerr panned it. He loved Joan. Hated the play.” I said, “That’s impossible. You saw him laughing, Alex.” I told Edgar, “Walter Kerr hated it.” He got on the phone, too, and was devastated. Afterward, he did what became his pattern. He took a sleeping pill and checked out. I tried to talk to him, and he said, “Joan, I took a pill. I’m going to sleep.”

This was our first failure as a team, the first major stress on our marriage, and we did not band together. We did not go to each other for comfort. We drew apart. That is what sometimes happens when you are husband and wife and business partners. When the business goes sour, you somewhere down deep blame each other-“It sure wasn’t me.

That night, I could not sleep. I did anything to distract myself from my helplessness-checked Melissa, made coffee, went through my mail, tried to read-but could not concentrate. I felt utterly defeated. Nobody can buck the Times. Its power to take away your dream is absolute.

I wanted to be in theater so badly. Melissa was crayoning at the Morosco in Ralph Richardson’s old dressing room. I wanted to be part of that room’s history. I wanted the stage doorman to say, “Good night,” and I’d say, “Pops, here’s the key.” I wanted to walk down Forty-fifth Street-the street where I had gone as a child with my mother, my head full of dreams-and see my name in lights.

So I decided to buck the Times anyway. As long as there is any possibility, you cannot give up. I did what I always do. I worked twice as hard. Alex had said, “If we can run six weeks, we’ll run forever. If you can get the money, we’ll keep it open.” We put twenty thousand dollars of our own money into Fun City, and I went on every television show, every radio show, saying, “I’m looking for somebody very rich. It’s a funny play …

somebody very rich.”

You try anything. I called a warlock; I figured it couldn’t hurt. The warlock had been a guest on That Show, and his great-great-great-grandfather had been hanged in Salem. I told him, “You’ve got to help me.” He said, “My whole coven is meeting Friday night. “

Sure enough, a southern gentleman flew into town in his private plane and loved the play. He offered us sixty thousand dollars, which would have kept us open another two weeks. But by then we knew Alex had no faith. He had not even printed posters. Our agent warned us that Alex would not mount an advertising campaign. He would

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just use the money and close anyway. At dinner at Sardi’s we gave the gentleman back the check.

We closed on January 8, 1972, after eight performances. I have a tape of the last performance, and the audience was screaming with laughter. After that we went to Sardi’s-the only time in my life I got drunk. I drank a full bottle of wine by myself. At home I lay on the bathroom floor in my dress, vomiting into the toilet and passing out and waking and vomiting again. Melissa came in and said, “Daddy, why is Mommy sleeping in the bathroom?” Edgar said, “Mommy’s unhappy.”

For three days, in an agony of confusion and fear, I wandered and paced.

The foundations of my life had been shaken. Whether Fun City was a good or bad play was not the point. The issue was one that would return again and again-with The Tonight Show, with Fox Broadcastingeach time altering my life. What I thought was funny had been rejected. This attacks a comic’s very being. In standup, at least the audience decides whether you are funny and whether you remain onstage. But I had tackled Broadway, the cruelest arena, and for the first time I was facing one of the brutalities of show business, the fact that a few individuals, this time the critics, can carry your fate in their hands.

My sense of helplessness was a kind of grief. For the first time I had put all my energies behind somethingeverything I had-and been unable to move it with sheer force of conviction. At my very core-then and still today-is the belief that willpower can do anything. Will plus hard work equals success.

But now-as it would be again with my Fox show-my faith was shattered. But only temporarily. I have another article of faith: If one door doesn’t open, you can find another. That faith has kept me going all my life.

A few nights later Melissa fell asleep listening to a Sesame Street record.

I came into her room and turned off the machine. I flicked off the light and suddenly from the shadows of this enchanting child’s room I could see, spread out seventeen floors below, Central Park white with snow, backed by dark towers twinkling with lights. I said out

loud, very dramatic, “You don’t want me, New York, I don’t want you. We’re out of here!”

So Edgar and I moved to Hollywood, seeing ourselves as two talents moving to a land of larger showbusiness opportunities. Every friend who had gone there was doing well. We had no idea that as the plane flew over the Mississippi toward Los Angeles, Edgar’s doom was sealed. After so much struggle in his life, after finally experiencing his dream in New York, he was on his way to the one place in the world where he could never be appreciated for himself, on his way to becoming a star’s husband.

6

WHEN I moved to Hollywood, I thought I was the golden girl. I was arriving as a hot new comedy name, a guest host on The Tonight Show, which was now in California, a television veteran.

Together Edgar and I were the team who had created and produced a TV show that ran for a year. And how many people write a play that actually reaches Broadway? Our friends who preceded us were doing very well. My bridesmaid, Treva Silverman, was writing scripts for the Monkees and Mary Tyler Moore.

Kenny Solms and Gail Parent were a team writing sketches for Carol Burnett.

Rod Warren was musical director for The Pearl Bailey Show. Edgar and I looked down on Hollywood from the altitude of our New York sophistication, symbolized by a moving van full of something never seen out there before-namely, boxes of books. We thought this town was going to be duck soup.

Edgar planned to be an independent producer, and he immediately rented himself an office and hired a secretary, Tracy Hotchner, the daughter of the writer A. E. Hotchner. Though he would still keep a paternal eye on my affairs, Edgar had every intention of making it on his own. He put me in the hands of one of the top management firms, Katz, Gallin, which also handled Mac Davis, Dolly Parton, and Cher.

We wanted to conquer Hollywood and, indeed, doors did seem to open immediately. Jim Nabors, that lovely man, gave a huge party for me. The party was extremely California-catered by a major French restaurant, twelve 85

men waiting to park your car. Jim Nabors’s public-relations people had done the invitations, so he, too, was being introduced to some of the guests-in his own home. “Joan and Jim, this is Tony Orlando and Dawn.” “Oh, very nice to meet you. ” Can you believe it? That was my first lesson that in Hollywood what really matters is names, and whether in the business you are hot or cold.

Edgar and I, so sophisticated, laughed when a string quartet played a little recital and some of the guests applauded in the pause after each movement, thinking the piece had ended. I felt superior about my dress. The other women wore the California look-whatever was the latest trend to make them seem fourteen years old. I had on a spectacular New York dress designed by Halston at his height, the sort I could wear only because I was extremely thin then. It was made of a lightweight silk crepe, very slinky, all one piece, no seams, cut low in the back with a halter in front that tied around my neck. All I could wear under it was panty hose. In that dress you did not slouch.

My second Hollywood lesson came when a producer’s wife walked up to me and said, “How nice to meet you. Next time I would like to meet you dressed.”

That was my introduction to the not-so-subtle competition in Hollywood.

I also was unprepared for the opulence in California. Size meant success.

Everything-sofas, lamps, tables-was oversized. Jim Nabors had the biggest marble bathroom I had ever seen-an all-glass shower with room for four, a double-sized tub, a TV recessed into the marble work, fabulous plants everywhere. I was so stupid, I thought he must have a real green thumb.

So Edgar and I right away felt like fish out of wateror in very shallow water. But we handled our new environment in diametrically opposite ways.

I was willing to play the Hollywood game. I had never been a Greta Garbo-“I am here. I am a star. Come to me.” My persona had always included self-deprecation-“You think you’ve got troubles? My body is so bad, a Peeping Tom looked in the window and pulled down the shade.”

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Through my years of struggle my reflex had always been to play up to anybody with power-“Help me. I’m a little piece of nothing. Help me”-and then “Thank you, thank you.” That was my role professionally with Johnny Carson. I once kissed Ed Sullivan’s hand on camera. I had no trouble going to Hollywood parties and saying to Shirley MacLaine, “You’re the best actress in the whole world”which is what you do in a town where Barbara Eden in 1 Dream of Jeannie was a power. You had to be able to say, “You’re absolutely right. The Hunchback of Notre Dame should be played by a woman.”

But such sucking up is not the basis for friendships. I think Edgar believed he was married to a showbusiness insider who could bring him in-only to find that I was an outsider, too. Like him, I never fit with the right people, never had that knack, have always been a white-and-black penguin when all the others were black-and-white.

Edgar, for better or worse, had too much pride to try to fit into that California world-and I respected him for his integrity.