Hold the Roses (36 page)

I couldn't wait to get home. Bernice, Harry, and Noop met me at
the airport, and I did what the Pope does-I bent down and kissed the
ground of America. Things hadn't changed with Peter and me, and again
that inner voice said, "Don't get married." I can't tell you why I felt like
that, but as I said before, I wanted him to get settled first. He was hanging out with the Danish Mafia and drinking too much. They were egging him on about getting married, which I knew bothered him, but I
wasn't going to get into something I knew wasn't right. We went on as
before, only this time he wanted to go to Denmark to see his mother. His
father had died the year before, and he hadn't gone back for the funeral
because he was working at the Travelodge in San Diego, which I thought
would be the answer to all of this-but he quit there too. So he thought
he should go see his mother.

I said, "That's fine-maybe you can get yourself set with something
there. Then I'll sell the house and move to Denmark." Yes, I really said
that. I figured I could be a producer or director for Danish TV. It was
about ten years behind time and maybe I could really do something like
that. It sounded good, but we would just have to wait and see.

He went to Denmark. I finished the last year of The Doris Day Show
and was doing some Squares here and there-enough to keep busy. Peter's
letters from Copenhagen were a lot different this time. He was staying at a
hotel owned by a family that he had known as a kid. The daughter was
running it now, and she was also a heavy drinker and had been married
many times. Peter didn't particularly like her-he told me all about herbut he knew that he could stay at the hotel for free.

He was gone about two months, and he said he was coming back to
get the things he had stored in my garage because he might get set up with
being the manager of seven hotels in and around Copenhagen-which
sounded good. He came back-and he was another person. I knew something was up. He said this woman who ran the hotel was really out of her
mind and that he was helping her try to run the hotel! But he wanted to
see if he could get that job with the seven hotels.

I said, "Let me know. Noop has moved out on her own, has a job at
NBC on the Tomorrow Show and is doing great. So I can do what I want."

Peter just looked at me and said, "Would you really sell the house and
move to Copenhagen?"

I said, "Of course. If you're set with something good, we can get
married."

I don't think he believed me...and frankly, I didn't believe myself?
But never say die. I think we both didn't want to admit it was over. He
went back to Copenhagen and again his letters were strange.

I wrote to his mother, whom I had met that first year when we went
to Copenhagen to celebrate his father's 80th birthday and their 50th wedding anniversary. They were dear people, and I know they liked me. So I
wrote her and asked her what was going on; I told her that if Peter got set
up with this job, I would move to Copenhagen and we would get married.
She wrote back telling me to wait and see what happened with the job,
because she didn't like the idea of him being at that hotel with that woman.
She didn't like her at all! That's about all she said, except that she would
love it if I moved to Copenhagen. She sent me some beautiful linens that
she had. She said she wanted me to have them.

Things went on for about another month... letters, no phone calls. I
got an offer to do a Broadway show, Fun City, with Joan Rivers. I didn't
want to do it. It would mean being away for Christmas and I didn't like
that, but Joan Rivers and Alexander Cohen, the producer, came out to
California to talk to me and tell me I had to do this show... that I needed it!

I said, "Why? I'm working on Squares, I do a lot of guest shots like
Kojak, Adam-12, Mod-Squad. I had the ideal way of working! Home and
still working!"

But they convinced me I should do a Broadway show. I finally said,
"Okay."

I called Peter that night and told him about the show: "Should I take
it?"

He said that was up to me. He told me that his mother had died-he
had never mentioned this before! And he was now running the hotelwhich I'm sure he loved.

I said, "Are you sleeping with her?"

He said, "Well, you kept saying we'd get married when you came
back from Australia."

I repeated, "Are you sleeping with her?"

"You never said when we would get married and you kept putting it
off."

I said, "Are you sleeping with her?"

He said, "Yes. I've known her for years and she needed help, so I
started running the hotel."

I said, "You're not a man, you're a male whore. You just wanted someone to support you, which is something I would never do. So now you
have what you wanted-a drunken broad who'll drink with you and who'll
support you. I feel sorry for her," and I hung up!

I was glad it was finally over between Peter and me. We really were getting
no place, but for six years, it was very romantic and something I guess I
needed at the time.

Bobby was a hard act to follow!

I did some more dinner theater engagements. Joy Tierney was with
me on all of them. We went to Pheasant Run again and did a show called
Everybodys Girl, by John Patrick. He also wrote Teahouse of the August Moon.
Everybody's Girl was originally written for Vivian Vance-she had played
Ethel on I Love Lucy. I don't think it ever opened on Broadway, but it was
a good show for me.

I played it in Chicago, Dallas, and Seattle. Curtis Roberts was the
producer. In Seattle, ours became a great friendship-he knew theater inside and out. Joy, Curtis and I would go out every night after the show.
We'd talk showbiz and theater all night. Everybody's Girl did well, but it
really wasn't that good of a play. Robert Nichols, whom I had met when I
did Bye Bye Birdie in California (only this time with Dick's brother, Jerry
Van Dyke), played the part of the father. When Curtis called on Robert to
direct Everybody's Girl in Seattle, I was thrilled. He also played the stranger
in the show. He not only is a very fine actor; he's a helluva director and
really made something out of Everybody's Girl.

One night he said to me, "This play is all right, but you really should
be doing a good play. I'm going to write one for you."

I said, "Fine, go ahead," never figuring that in two weeks he'd show
me a script.

The show was called Up a Tree. He said, "It was taken from a true
story, and it just wrote itself."

I said, "Okay, one night we'll get the kids from the show and Curtis
and we'll sit around my suite at the hotel, order some pizza and drinks and
we'll read the script," which is exactly what we did.

The script was wonderful-fresh, funny, and very well written. I told
Bob Nichols, "We're gonna do this show someday, I promise you," and we
did. But more on that later.

I went back home and got a call from Sammy Lewis, who had booked
me at the Band Box. They were doing Call Me Madam in Anaheim, at a
theater in the round. Merman was all set to do it, but then she backed out.
They called Kay Starr and she turned it down. (The wheel goes around:
years later I would work with Kay in 4 Girls 4...for eight years!) They had
had Merman's clothes custom made and they fit me beautifully-a little
nip and tuck here and there and I was all set.

I loved doing that show. After all, how can you go wrong with a
Merman show? It's all laid out for you. The whole gang from The Dick Van
Dyke Show came down, except for Mary-she sent a wire. Dick, Morey
and his wife Kay, Richard Deacon, Larry Mathews and his mother and
father, plus most of my friends. To top it off, Merman sent flowers and a
wire.

The show went well! It only played for two weeks, but it was good for
me because it was home and the reviews were great. You always like to be a
hit at home!

I then had to go to New York to start rehearsals for Fun City, the Joan
Rivers show. I was to play Joan's mother. It was madness. She and her
husband Edgar and Les Colodny were down as writers, Alexander Cohen
was the producer, and Larry Adler was the director-no, not the harmonica
player. It was a mish-mash from the beginning, but we did have a terrific
cast. I met Renee Lippin, who was in the show. She became like a second
daughter to me. She is married to a wonderful writer, Allan Leicht. We
became good, good friends. So at least something good came out of that
show.

We rehearsed every day, and they would change it every night. We
never knew what we were doing. We went to Washington, D.C., to break
it in. As before, we rehearsed every day and they would rewrite that night
and we'd rehearse the new lines the next day. Gabriel Dell, who was the
male lead, played the part differently every time he did it, which is very hard to follow. You never knew which way he was going to go on any
particular night. Joan didn't have too much theater experience and had her
back to the audience a lot of the time. She was really working hard trying
to make it right. We got along all right, but it was hard to talk to her.

With Ethel Merman and Richard Deacon

I would say, "You can't do joke after joke after joke. You have to give
the audience time to catch a breath and hear the next joke." She couldn't
understand that. I told her, "Neil Simon takes five pages to tell one joke,
but when it comes, it's a big one."

I asked her to write normal dialogue, like "Hello, how are you?"

She'd always say, "I'll write you some better jokes."

I said, "I don't want better jokes, I want dialogue leading up to the
good jokes you wrote."

Well, we opened in Washington D.C. The show was not bad-better
than I had expected. I got a good hand and I thought I must be nuts, they
liked it. The reviews came out and they lambasted it. It's funny, they never even mentioned the other actors, including me. The reviews were all about
Joan: how badly written it was, and that it was not a good show.

So once again we would do the show at night, they would rewrite
that night, and the next day we'd rehearse what they had written. At one
point, we did the first act of one show and the second act of another show.
I think Joan was used to working alone as a stand-up, and it was hard to
change her style.