Read atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business Online
Authors: Peggy Pope
atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business (7 page)
He gave me a funny salute like he couldn’t find his head for a minute. Then he said, “Oh, there it is.” In his finest Durante style, he shuffled off, mumbling, “The Case of the Missing Volley Ball Net. Inka dinka doo, a dinka dee, a dinka doo. Ah doo. Ah doo.”
I walked down the hall, thinking about all the men in this building we’d never seen, the ones in the beds and the wheelchairs, those with the missing limbs and eyes and faces. It was suddenly very cold. I ran to the changing room, threw the beaded costume into its box, dressed, and raced back to my future.
The men of the Johnny Appleseed production crowded around as Irving, under the night guard’s supervision, held the front door of the VA hospital open for us.
“Come back next week,” said Fish. “We’ll play some volleyball.”
There was a chorus of “Oh, yeah!” from the vets.
“You bet,” I said, but my throat hurt.
“A bientôt, then,” from Dee.
“Thanks again,” said Biz.
“‘Night,” said Annie.
Lynn didn’t say anything. She was wiping her glasses with a mitten, which caught in one of the hinges.
“Hey, it’s snowing!” said Sam. “Geez, I haven’t seen snow… in a long time.
When I told my mother that I wanted to be an actress, she was horrified. Mom was a widow by then, and when she consulted her bridge partners about this, their raised eyebrows conveyed their opinions: “fallen woman,” “damaged goods,” “ruined.”
Halfway into the twentieth century, Queen Victoria cast a long shadow. Mom was totally committed to my happiness but worried endlessly about doing the “right thing” according to what would have been my father’s wishes.
She made a deal with me: If I earned a college degree that would guarantee me a “real” job, she would support me for the first year of the pursuit of my desire to become an actress. “So long as you have a degree to fall back on,” she said.
The idea of “falling back” on anything was appalling to me. To fall at all—back, forward, over, down, out, or in—was equated with humiliation and failure in my mind. I had fallen off a horse twice. I fell down in the old Madison Square Garden four nights in a row while ice skating in front of four thousand people. That’s more than sixteen thousand major falls right there, and I was still in my teens.
I chose Smith College because it offered a theater major and Hallie Flanagan Davis, onetime head of the Federal Theatre Project, was dean of the theatre department.
Hallie Flanagan was a groundbreaker. She had led the Federal Theatre, the only national theater our country ever had, during the Depression. She created work for playwrights, actors, directors, designers, artists, and stagehands. She came up with the Living Newspaper form of theater: pageant-style plays drawn from the headlines of the day. Subjects like poverty, housing, and diseases needed attention. One Third of a Nation dealt with syphilis in America, a shocking subject at that time that was spoken of only in whispers, but Hallie was fearless. Under the Works Project Administration umbrella, the Federal Theatre was the only project that earned a profit as long as it existed.
Hallie attracted the attention of the entire nation. Senator Joseph McCarthy of the House Un-American Activities Committee, in his pursuit of celebrities in the arts, wanted her name on his blacklist. When she took the stand during the hearing that ensued, he asked if it was true that she had presented a play called Dr. Faustus written by the communist Christopher Marlowe. She replied that Marlowe had been a contemporary and friend of William Shakespeare and had written plays three centuries before Karl Marx was born. McCarthy immediately declared a recess, and Hallie Flanagan was through with him in time for lunch. It was imperative that I take a seminar with this extraordinary woman.
Unfortunately, by the time Hallie got to Smith, she was fighting Parkinson’s disease and was not able to teach the three of us in her playwriting class, who had no idea how to write anything at all.
At the end of the term, when we had to hand in some evidence of our work, I was in a state of alarm. I had nothing to show her. I was going to flunk the course. I was saved by a girl in my dorm who suggested a little-known author whom I could “adapt.” She’d read his first book of short stories, and said there was one that was practically all dialogue. It was called “My Side of the Matter.” I could get it out of the library. It was by a fellow named Truman Capote.
Hallie gave me an A minus. Soon after, she stopped me in the hall outside her office and looked at me curiously. I always felt she could see right through me.
“You know, I’ve never read that story. I must go over to the library one day and take a peek at it,” she said.
I quickly pedaled my bike to the library, grabbed the only copy on the shelf, stuck it inside my jacket, and never looked back.
Truman Capote was at the time sharing his life with an English professor at Smith. That’s probably why his book of stories was in the campus library; he had yet to become the talk of New York. I owe this then-stranger a lot. I had never met him, yet, through my college chaos, he reached out to me from the world where I longed to be more than any other. He pulled me through to my graduation as if from prison to a life that had been on hold for the previous sixteen years. The safe deposit box was cracking open.
The last obstacle to getting a degree was the final exam in the History of the Theater from the Greeks to Modern Times, which was also taught by Hallie. Her idea of teaching this course was to hand out a twenty-page reading list and, while we read the books, let us discuss projects we wanted to take on after graduation. I chose “How I Would Start a Community Theater in my Community.” I found a book I could copy out of to produce the required paper.
The afternoon before the final exam, Hallie threw out a few trial questions, and it immediately became obvious that none of us had done any of the reading. How could we? We had been lugging furniture around the stage in a production of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which featured a male-dominated cast made up of various campus gardeners, associate professors, and a fellow from Amherst. Women were no longer playing men as they had in the previous decade. We were moving the scenery instead.
Smith was the first of the gender-segregated colleges to put men and women onstage together. It was a huge step. There were no more young women dressing up in suits and pasting mustaches and sideburns on their faces. While Harvard clung to its Hasty Pudding shows, we were making history. Yet plays at that time were focused on men, who outnumbered the one or two lucky women onstage with them, as in The Trial. So once again, we were trumped. The show must go on, however, and Hallie’s reading list never got read. When Hallie grasped this fact, she seemed stunned and ended the last session early with “Well, good luck.”
Back in the smoking lounge at Gardner House, where most of the theater majors lived, we gathered in a panic. “What are we gonna do? How are we going to pass this? What the heck is the Commedia del’Arte?” We made such a commotion that Helen Slotnick, a junior who later became a lawyer, approached us and said, “I think I can help you. Wait right here. I need to go up to my room. I’ll be right back.”
I felt like I was on the Orient Express and someone was about to divulge a major clue to me. In a few minutes, Helen returned with a book she’d used in seventh grade. It was called History of the Theatre. Inside, the pages had wide margins. Each century was covered in two pages: one page of print facing a one-page illustration. For example, a picture of an actor in costume for Hamlet faced a page of big-print text that was titled, “The Elizabethan Age.” We each got a half-hour with the book, and we all earned A’s and B’s on the exam.
I asked the college registrar to mail my diploma, and it arrived in a nice leather folder. I figured someone else might have use for the folder, maybe as a table mat for a hot plate. I gave it to the Salvation Army. I didn’t go to the graduation ceremony, and I didn’t say good-bye to Hallie. I headed straight for New York.
Disclaimer:
Sophia Smith founded Smith College for Women in 1871 with the help of her advisor. Single women had male advisors in those days—I know about this because my great-aunt Addie had one—and these men were usually ministers, counselors, or other men of that ilk. My mother had an advisor, a lawyer she couldn’t understand, and she’d often make the trip into the city again to clarify what he’d told her in their previous session.
Sophia Smith lucked out. Her advisor gave her a newly invented stereopticon. When she looked through it for the first time, she said, “Why, Reverend Brentlow, ‘An Enlarged View of the World.’ That will be my motto for the college.” Smith became a formidable school and today is coeducational, with a graduate program, a junior year abroad program, and a strong school of social work.
When I was there, Theatre was known as a “gut” course, an “easy A.” Every college has them. One of the girls in my class had picked it for her major because she fell asleep in the T’s while browsing the catalogue. The college was swarming with women whose goal in those days was to get married as soon as possible after graduation.
There were good teachers at Smith, and very smart students took their courses. Bobbie Fatt was one of them. But even Bobbie Fatt, bright and independent as she was, worried about what people might think of her. The society page of The New York Times announced engagements by heading the story with the bride-to-be’s last name joined by a hyphen with the groom-to-be’s last name. Because of this practice, Bobbie Fatt almost didn’t marry Andrew Heine, the man she loved. Well, can you blame her?
. . . and the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, where
there is ‘for every broken heart a lightbulb.’
A fair exchange, I thought.
“But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends.” I saw Judith Anderson in Medea on Broadway.
It was 1947. I was fresh from a Greek drama class at college that had left me cold. I had expected to experience the great catharsis around overweening and hubris that I had heard so much about in these dramas. Didn’t happen. The professor was beyond dreadful. I sat next to a girl who was using her mother’s notes from his class twenty years ago. She even had his exams, with the same multiple-choice questions. The translations read like a road map, and the professor stuttered. Why the Greeks of the day had flocked to the theater, as they did centuries later to see Melina Mercouri in Never on Sunday, was beyond me.
Then Judith Anderson and Robinson Jeffers, the poet who adapted Euripides’ Medea for her, came to Broadway. I sat in the last row of the balcony and was riveted for two hours, along with the rest of the audience. Euripides was the last of the great tragedians and the impetus for modern theater. You might say he moved drama out of the “war and incest” arena and into boy-meets-girl territory. After Jason marries the sorceress, Medea, she helps him capture the Golden Fleece so he can regain his kingdom. Two children later, he falls for a younger woman and tells Medea to get out of town. So Medea sends the new mistress a gown that bursts into flames when she puts it on and burns her alive. After that, she kills Jason’s and her children. It’s a regular Daily News, “see pages 4 and 5 melodrama. Rave.
And I sat there rooting for her. Medea! Medea! Go, Medea! I totally got how she could murder four people in two hours. I was right back there with the Greeks in the amphitheater. I had never seen anything like it before, and haven’t since. This was the real goods. I felt my psyche shifting inside me. I must have been shaking all the way home because a couple on the 104 bus asked me if I was all right. When I told them I’d just seen Medea, they understood immediately. The wife said, “Oh, of course. You’ll be all right in a couple of days.”
I was thrilled to be joining this astonishing profession. I stood on the beach that summer, an apprentice at Ogunquit, roaring lines from Medea, timing them to drive back the ebbing waves, dreaming of my own power, waiting for me to catch up.
In the fifties and sixties, when an actor went to audition for a Broadway show, a play or a musical, here’s how it went.
You took the 104 bus or the Seventh Avenue subway or walked over from a cold-water flat in Hell’s Kitchen to the theater district. You entered through the stage door into one of the solid, well-designed, acoustically perfect—sans amplification—intimate, delicious theaters that lined the side streets east and west of Broadway in midtown.
The stage door was usually down a dark alley alongside the theater. It led directly to the dimly lit backstage area, where an ancient doorman in a rumpled uniform and a slouch hat sat in a minuscule office, with mailboxes and a Seth Thomas clock on the wall above his head. He ruled from a desk just big enough to accommodate his solitaire setup. He said, “Yes?” without taking the cigar out of his mouth.
You told him who you were and what time you were expected, and he pointed you to a waiting room with a George Booth lightbulb stuck in a wall socket. You could wait there if you wanted to be with other actors who were trying out for your part, or you could wait in the hall, which was cramped, airless, and lacking windows. Or you could sit on the metal stairs leading up to the dressing rooms or go down into a mold-filled basement where the stagehands hung out when the show was on.
Everybody was nervous. It was a big deal. You had dressed up for the audition. The men wore their best suits, and the women wore high heels they had gotten for free from the union at the A. S. Beck shoe store on Forty-Seventh Street. The shoes were guaranteed to ruin your feet for the rest of your life because of their pointy toes and thin stilts, but they made they your legs look swell and gave you confidence. You wanted to make a good impression with every step. This was Broadway, the Great White Way, and there was a broken heart for every lightbulb on it. And, oh yes, your competition was the cream of the crop.
As it got closer to your turn, as you moved nearer to the wings, to the darkened area just off the stage, you could hear and see the audition of the actor ahead of you. This could be unnerving or reassuring depending on how it was going. Did she get cut off early? Did the director engage the actor in pleasantries? Did the actor have a unique take on the script that had never occurred to you and had made everybody laugh hard and long, even applaud? Should you just go home and clean the oven? And then put your head in it?
No! You’ve stepped onstage, into another world. Space. Light. You could almost see your script by it. Sometimes the paper shook. Sometimes it didn’t. You could never count on anything. You were introduced to a row of people halfway back in the auditorium. You couldn’t see them. It was dark out there. Sometimes they would say hello or something friendly like, “So you’re going to read for us? Well, go ahead.” But mostly they talked among themselves, whispered, laughed, and ate sandwiches.
It was up to you to start or to signal to the stage manager who read with you to begin, depending on who had the first line, and you read a scene from the play that was going to be the liftoff for your future. The stage manager stood downstage from you at an angle, out of the light, with his back to the auditors so they would see only you and every aspect of and flaw of you. He read in a monotone so that you could do all the acting. You couldn’t touch him at an appropriate moment as you might in real life, because that would put you in shadow with him. He never moved. You never saw his face, and so nothing could happen between you emotionally that might contribute to your performance. You were as alone as you were ever going to be.
When you finished reading, and shaking, and squinting, you would be thanked—with only a “Thank you”—from the darkness and led away like a dog in a dog show by the stage manager. Or you might be asked to read another scene, to wait and read again after they had eliminated some of the competition, or told to keep the script, which was a good sign because it meant they might call you back another day so they could determine if you were what they wanted, like a new car.
And then you went and had coffee and wondered if there was a lightbulb on Broadway with your name on it.
Today, when it costs a fortune to turn on a lone work light in the theater, auditions are held in office buildings. You get on an elevator with a lot of ordinary people, get out, sign in, wait in a hall, and go into a bare room lit by fluorescents. You read the script or sing the song to three people sitting ten steps away behind a table and in front of a window so you can’t see them against the backlight. They’re looking at you or not looking at you. It’s nice if they look at you, but often they’re eating the eternal sandwich and looking at your résumé while you’re acting. The reader they’ve hired to read with you doesn’t want to be touched any more than the stage manager did.
So you do the best you can and go for coffee and wonder if there is a lightbulb left over for you.