Heart of Glass (17 page)

We had a funny little man backstage named Freddy, who had a limp and dressed like the skipper on
Gilligan's Island
. Freddy was in charge of the costumes, assigned our dressing rooms, and delivered our mail, telegrams, and flowers. He showed us a brick wall backstage where all the actors who had ever worked there had signed their names. Huge framed headshots of Grace Kelly, Julie Harris, Burgess Meredith, and many others hung high above us. It was surreal to imagine these legends walking the same boards as I was—as exhilarating as it was humbling. The bar was high, and I imagined them all watching us from their picture gallery up above.

The Elitch was run by a charming older couple in their
sixties who both had been actors in the theater, television, and movies before becoming producers. Haila Stoddard and Whit Connor had old Hollywood charm, simply oozing grace and glamour. Whit was tall and handsome with a Clark Gable, toothy smile and a head of silvery hair. Haila was a petite, bubbly blonde who told fabulous stories about palling around with Noël Coward and understudying big stars such as Rosalind Russell in
Mame
and Uta Hagen in
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
I was starstruck and developed an instant mom-crush on her—she was part gentle June Allyson combined with a wisecracking-dame sense of humor à la Eve Arden. Haila was an actress, a mother, and a writer who had forged her own career in the arts, someone I could look up to and try to emulate. She was kind to me, perhaps sensing that I was motherless and a bit lost in life. I was sure that we would have been best friends if only I'd been born sooner.

We packed the Elitch every night of the two-week run—the screams from the roller coaster accompanying the laughs in the theater. The reviews were glowing, and the audience went wild every night, often jumping to their feet at curtain call.

“I got a standing ovation,” Daddy would say, coming offstage after the show. “How'd you do?”

Haila and Whit threw a party at a Mexican restaurant after our last show, complete with a mariachi band. Everyone got wasted on margaritas, and while we were conga-lining across the dance floor, Mary Sue shrieked into my ear as she
was goosed by the guitar player when we bopped by. The next morning we all staggered down to breakfast, hungover, and said our good-byes. Knowing we wouldn't be meeting up in the evening and twice on matinee days to play together was bittersweet, but I didn't have time to dwell.

My only full rehearsal for
The Marriage of Figaro
at the Guthrie with the cast and crew was the following ­afternoon—in true showbiz, flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants tradition, I'd be going on that evening. It was a bit of a struggle remembering the blocking I had been given, and I warmed up my roller-skating skills in the halls beneath the stage to get ready. I had never met any of the other actors in person—when I skated to sit down next to the man playing the Count, he turned, looked at me, and purred, “I think you're wearing the same cologne that I do,” which I was—still Givenchy Gentleman. This was David Warrilow, a founding member of the avant-garde theater company Mabou Mines and renowned interpreter (and friend) of Samuel Beckett. Dandily dressed in a cream-colored suit and tie, his hooded eyes were reptilian, and he was as slim as a cigarette, of which he must have smoked a lot, as his voice was gargling and low, tangy with nicotine.

In the first act, I had to sing a song to the Countess, while her maid, Susanna, accompanied me on the guitar. The simple tune was not difficult to perform, but Jana Schneider, who was playing Susanna, decided it would be funny to play off-key so that I sounded awful, and she would mug to the audience and stick out her tongue. She got a big laugh. Being
a replacement means fitting in to the way the originator of the part played the role, not giving your own interpretation. So I incorporated everything my predecessor had done, including bits of business like that with the other actors.

Opening night, I somehow remembered everything I'd practiced—even though I had a few
I Love Lucy
moments, where someone had to whisper to me from behind a piece of scenery or their fan, “Go over there!” or “Exit stage right!”

When I got back to my dressing room, I answered a knock on the door to find Mary Sue with a chilled martini and a small tin box that had a scantily clad man in a leopard-­print thong and pasties dancing on a stage on the front. Opening it, I found a condom inside—a great example of her raunchy sense of humor. Daddy and Sarah came in to congratulate me on my Guthrie debut, hugs and kisses all round, and we went upstairs to the bar to continue the celebration.

I enjoyed doing the show for the rigors of the skating and for the spectacle—but it was completely different from any other experience I'd had. It seemed superficial, as if we were puppets, with our stylized movements and white face makeup. I felt I was working from the outside in, instead of the other way around. It wasn't realistic, nor was it psychological. I finally decided I was part of a pretty picture and left it at that.

Even though I loved living with my dad and Sarah, after a few months I moved into a studio apartment in an older building on Oak Grove Street, near the Guthrie, just off
Loring Park. Many of the other actors in
Figaro
had places on the same street and had told me the neighborhood was just fine as long as you avoided the park at night, which was a notorious gay-cruising destination. I didn't have much in the way of furniture—my friend Louise loaned me a bed and a table. My stepmother gave me some spare dishes, silverware, and kitchen equipment from her cupboards, as well as a set of sheets and some towels. The rest I cobbled together, but it was quite spartan.

Despite my newfound privacy, my love life was fairly nonexistent. I had a few dates—an usher at the theater who was only eighteen years old, a grain salesman, a mannered and lugubrious actor someone set me up with. None of them panned out or even made it to a second date. I got a lot of reading done, caught up on old movies on TV, and wrote long—perhaps too long—letters to Jenny and Pete and my sister. Sometimes I'd go out to see a Prince concert at First Avenue by myself or go to a double feature at the Uptown. I would take a sandwich and sit in the dark watching
Les Enfants du Paradis
,
Hiroshima Mon Amour
, or
Seven Samurai
. I tried to be Zen about my lack of friends, but I was lonesome.

The show closed the first week of October, and it grew cold and dark outside. By Halloween, it was freezing and snow was on the ground. Just as after
Spring Awakening
, I had hoped my successes would translate into more work, but the phone didn't ring with any offers. I auditioned for the Guthrie's annual production of
A Christmas Carol
but
wasn't cast. I ended up getting a holiday sales job at Dayton's department store, in the toy department, right outside the Santa World display. Mary Sue went home to her boys; Louise moved to Florida with her soon-to-be husband. Brian took a job at an arts center in Staten Island. I would come home at night hoping to see the light on my answering machine blinking—but it rarely was. On Sundays, I went to Daddy and Sarah's house for dinner, which I looked forward to, even though it made me feel a bit low as I had no other invitations and yearned to be with people my own age.

Then one night I was out to dinner with Dad, Sarah, my stepsister Jules, and her boss, Chris Kirkland, from the Playwrights' Center, a local arts organization that supported new playwrights and their work. We were at the Black Forest Inn in Minneapolis, a German restaurant with blue-checked tablecloths and antlers on the walls above large paintings of German castles and farmhouses. In a small-world coincidence, Chris was Haila Stoddard's son from her first marriage. A few people were at dinner from the Children's Theatre, where Sarah worked, including a young playwright who had tagged along, probably hoping for a free meal. Chris's half brother (Haila's son by her second husband) was in town visiting from Denver and was sitting at the opposite end of the table from me. Chowing down on spaetzle, bratwurst, and Wiener schnitzel—I also appreciated a free meal—I noticed Chris's brother. A big guy, Tarquin was red haired with a kind of Henry VIII exuberance, a larger-than-life quality. He was a misfit mongrel like me, a stepchild from
the theater who'd grown up in a multiply divorced home with half brothers and sisters who were ballet dancers, journalists, and playwrights. Our eyes met across the table and we ended up together in a corner.

He wasn't in the arts, though his father had been a producer and a director. Living in Denver, he was a lawyer working on behalf of men wanting sex-change surgery in the prison system in Colorado. His job seemed exotic and dangerous to me—I imagined hormone-charged convicts growing out their hair and painting their nails, brandishing their tease combs in the cafeteria; it had miniseries potential.

He sent me an eight-page, poetry-laden letter the next day, with a mysteriously beautiful silver pin of a face. I hardly knew him, but he invited me to go to Nassau with him to an annual charity ball that raised money for disadvantaged Bahamian children with heart defects. The Sir Victor Sassoon Heart Foundation Ball was being thrown on the island over Valentine's Day weekend. Lady Evelyn Sassoon, an American who had been married to the late Lord Sassoon and founded the charity after her husband's death, would preside over the affair, and Tarquin and I had been invited to stay at her house. I just needed to buy my own ticket and meet him in the Bahamas. How could I resist? It all felt heady and tragically alluring, like a scene from
Brideshead Revisited
, which I was currently reading after watching the PBS television adaptation starring Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons.

Tarquin and I hadn't even exchanged a kiss yet, which
made it all seem courtly. It was certainly more attention I'd had from a man in ages. And it meant a break from the bleak Minnesota winter.

When I arrived at Lady Evelyn's estate after my flight and taxi ride, a sixtyish, diminutive bleach-blonde greeted me wearing an aqua-blue, floral one-piece bathing suit, silver high heels, and a pearl necklace. I introduced myself, wondering if I was supposed to curtsy, then decided not to, as she was in a swimsuit.

“Aren't you a pretty young thing!” she exclaimed warmly, then, without even looking, lifted a goblet off a waiter's tray next to her and presented me with crushed peaches in champagne. My first Bellini.

“I'm Lady Evelyn, but you can call me Barnsie. I'd like you to sit next to me at dinner, my dear.”

“Thank you, um, Lady Evelyn. I mean, Barnsie.”

As she went off to greet her other guests and dispense glamorous cocktails, I drifted over to a grand piano in the corner, where a morose man with a retreating hairline and slightly bulging eyes in a plum-colored velvet jacket and monogrammed evening slippers was tinkling on the keys.

“My name is Wendy.”

He looked up at me glumly. “And I'm Peter Pan.”

I found out later that his name was Stephen Barry, and he'd been sacked by Princess Diana, who felt that Prince Charles shouldn't have a gay valet. It seemed the fairy-tale wedding that Robin and I had watched all googly-eyed on the small television in the Rocky Mountains hadn't worked
out so well for Barry in particular. I wanted to ask him for some juicy insider details, but he probably hated the princess's guts and didn't seem keen to gossip.

Tarquin appeared, looking wrinkled and sweaty in a seersucker suit, mopping his forehead with a cocktail napkin from his flight. We were shown to our room by a maid wearing a pink uniform. I was relieved to see it had twin beds, like in a
Thin Man
movie, because the moment I saw Tarquin again, I knew nothing physical would happen between us—he was sweet, but with his ginger hair and beard and large, pale, doughy body, I wasn't attracted to him. Luckily, I had paid my own way, so I owed him nothing except to be his occasional arm candy.

That evening at dinner, I wore the little black dress I used to go clubbing in with the pearl earrings Lee had given me. A wire-haired, bespectacled composer I had never heard of was there, with his frowsy wife, and some snooty society-type Brits in from London, a leathery-tanned lady antiques dealer who had a shop in town, and a photographer who was covering the event for the local paper. The composer stood to raise his glass and toast all the white people on the island; I reflexively pulled a face and looked around to see if anyone else thought this guy was as much of an asshole as I did. Stephen, who was there with his eighteen-year-old boy toy, fell asleep in his dinner. He began to snore loudly, but everyone politely ignored him and simply raised their voices over the noise.

The next day, I was sitting on a deck chair under an umbrella on the terrace reading
Brideshead
with great relish.
I'd even dressed that day like the main character, Sebastian Flyte, in white trousers and shirt with one of my striped ties threaded through my belt loops and knotted at my waist. Suddenly, Stephen was standing next to me, in a tiny Speedo, his white skin seemingly untouched by sunlight during all those years in Buckingham Palace. He held two bottles of beer, one of which he offered to me. I stood up, and we walked to the wall that looked out over the ocean that churned below us, filled with brown seaweed. It looked as if a huge teapot had been emptied. I sipped at the icy beer, which I didn't normally care for but it seemed perfectly suited for the scorching sun and a decadent daytime libation.

“Oh, Wendy!” Stephen exclaimed dramatically, raising his pale, skinny arms up in the air as if addressing not me but the heavens. “Whatever shall I do?”

“Do?” I wasn't exactly sure I knew what he was talking about, but I had an idea.

“About work. You've probably heard I was sacked by that viper, Diana.” He spat out her name as if it were a hot coal.