My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (18 page)

There was a point in the play when Joe, Le Gallienne and I waited offstage in the so-called library, while onstage Levene delivered a long, eloquent speech to Rosemary. Joe and I paced back and forth, smoking (incredible now to think we were allowed to smoke backstage!), while LeG sat in a chair. One night she crooked a finger at me; I came over, and as Sam’s speech went on, she hissed, “This should be cut.” The play was three hours long, but Ellis fluted, “I can’t possibly cut any of it, because it’s all
texture
.” Another time LeG called me over and whispered, “I was horrid tonight. I was like Helen
Haaaayes,
” dragging out the word in a mordant tone. I demurred heartily in pantomime and walked away. She called me back and whispered; “She’s not a friend of yours, is she?”

The theater we were in was called the Helen Hayes. Le Gallienne had starred in
The Swan
in this same theater in the thirties when it was called the Fulton. Joe and I always called it the Fulton in her presence.

This was an old-fashioned play with a large cast and several people sitting onstage at one time. I was on the whole first act and had very few lines. I worried how I was going to keep from losing focus, sitting there all that time with no lines. I remembered this actress I knew who, when you bumped into her, her eyes roamed all over your person while talking to you until she would suddenly interrupt the conversation to demand to know where you got your shoes or your dress or who cut your hair. She molested friends with her eyes, desiring this girl’s suit and that girl’s scarf. “Is that a Liberty blouse?!” “Where did you get that necklace?!” “Are those real leather?!” and so on. This mentality was wonderfully useful to me. As I watched Rosemary Harris float down the stairs in lavender chiffon each night, I would think, “I saw that same dress in pink in
Vogue
magazine,” or, “Lavender doesn’t suit her at all.” Or I would look at Joe and note that he had put on some pounds, or look at Sam to see if he was going bald. It served me well night after night.

After Princeton, we went to the Kennedy Center in D.C.
A Matter of Gravity
was also in town. I ran into Christopher Reeve, who was in it, and he went into a heartbreaking spiel about the miserable experience he was having. Hepburn wouldn’t let anybody move, not even their faces, and Ms. Bagnold kept running down the aisle in a tea gown and bare feet, yelling at the actors. Chris said she had wooden teeth. So much for idols.

In Washington the audience thought I was a bitch. They greeted my lines with little gasps, or
“tsk tsk”
noises, as if I was delivering gross insults. Kitty made tactless remarks, was stupid and silly and wore vulgar hats, but I didn’t think she deserved to be hated. That’s when I realized the role had been written as a foil for the noble Cavendishes. I was there to make them look superior.

New York audiences found Kitty funny, a great relief to me, but double-edged; in New York, Kitty was a pariah. The terrible thing was I couldn’t separate myself from the role. When people told me how good they thought I was, it made me miserable. No matter how I sliced it, it was painful. I spent hours weeping inconsolably in the therapist’s office.

Actors, if they’re any good, tend to take on the personalities of the characters they’re playing. While I was suffering more and more, the members of the Cavendish family were becoming more and more grandiose. After a while it seemed they were starting to overreact to me. I happened to glance upstage once, on my first entrance, and saw the actress who played the maid going berserk with grimaces and gestures of distaste. I hadn’t even said anything yet. In the second act, night after night, just as I began to speak to LeG, as if I was vapor Rosemary leaned over to her and started whispering in her ear, apparently about the toilet running in the upstairs loge. (The theater was on its last legs; it rained onstage.) Then I began noticing Joe Maher rolling his eyes just as I started to speak. I loved Joe; we were drinking buddies. Now, though, I was wishing he wouldn’t do what he was doing. I decided to speak to him; I went to his dressing room. “Joe, could I ask you to not roll your eyes until after I’ve finished my line?” A brief silence, followed by an explosion. His face turned the color of maroon pajamas and his eyes bulged dangerously: “How DARE you accuse me of doing such a thing? How DARE you criticize my acting?” I was aghast. He scared the hell out of me.

Still, I wasn’t imagining it, I was being preempted. Nobody believes this kind of thing happens, but it does. It does. If you play a despicable character, you should prepare to be treated despicably, and not excluding stage management and the general public.

In fact, the general public is great at this game. At those cocktail parties where the patrons get to mingle with the actors, players of kings are treated like royalty, commoners are ignored, and anybody playing a servant, if standing too near, is apt to be handed a napkin full of olive pits.

Anyway, years after the fact I was telling my friend, actress Carol Morley, how hurt my feelings were in
Royal Family,
and Carol shot back, “That’s why you were so good!” God bless her.

I
DON
’
T CARE IF IT
’
S
E
LEONORA
D
USE UP THERE, ACTORS WILL KILL
to get their laughs. Actors everywhere are cherishing their laughs. King Lear is looking out for his laughs: “Hey, you know when I turn to Regan and tell her to butt out? I get a nice little laugh there.” And Gloucester thinks, That’s my laugh! When I give him that look!

They’ll also try to kill, at least maim, any laughs you’re getting. Lynn Redgrave told this story about being in her first play, in a scene with Dame Edith Evans. First night out, Lynn, seated in a chair, got a nice little laugh on her line. The next night, just as she finished the line, Dame Edith crossed in back of the chair to the other side of the stage and killed it. So Lynn knocked timidly on Dame Edith’s dressing room door; “Oh, Dame Edith, I have this nice little laugh there where I’m sitting on the chair, and I wonder if I could trouble you to just wait for it before you start your cross.” And Dame Edith replied, “Of course, darling! I’m so sorry I didn’t notice!” The next night, Lynn said the line and Dame Edith again immediately made her cross. Lynn said, “Dame Edith, could you possibly hold your cross until I’ve said the line?” Dame Edith: “Certainly, dear girl, certainly.” The next night, the same thing happened again. Finally, the night after that, Lynn said her line, then stuck her foot out and blocked Dame Edith’s cross, at which point Dame Edith whispered, “You’re learning, darling, you’re learning.”

In the all-star production of
The Women,
when Rhonda Fleming joined the cast, she co-opted most of my character’s lines (“I’m Mary’s best friend, shouldn’t I be saying that?”), but I still had enough wisecracks left. Nobody paid much attention until we were in front of an audience and I got laughs. One by one, the stars called me into their dressing rooms. Sitting on a silk chaise with Alexis Smith: “You got a laugh on that line,” she said, as if I had swallowed a goldfish in the middle of things. “Yes” I replied. “I must leave a space for it,” she said. “Please don’t,” I said, but it was no use.

In the sixties I played the ingénue in
The Milliken Breakfast Show,
starring the Cowardly Lion, Bert Lahr. We had a tiny scene together, maybe four lines, and I got a couple of laughs. After the first show I was summoned to his dressing room. He squinted at me and said, “Whaddever you’re doing, cuddidout.”

Funny men can’t abide funny women; they go berserk. When you get a laugh, they look at you like you just stuck a shiv in their gut. In
The Philadelphia Story,
at Lincoln Center, in a scene with this one actor, he managed to preempt the laughs I was getting by emitting strategically timed “whoops.” Just at the end of each line I spoke, he let out a “whoop.” I couldn’t believe his gall. The theater was so huge you could imagine that nobody out there heard him, but I heard him, and to this day I’d like to strangle him.

In
The Gnädiges Fräulein
in Baltimore, the Cockaloonie Bird was played by a resident mime; all during my monologue he was jumping and leaping and pooping and running around upstage of me. When I asked him to cool it, he said, “I can’t help it. I’m a bird!”

If you can’t get laughs, there’s always weeping. I played Martha in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
in Rochester, New York, and the actor playing George started weeping as soon as we came in the door from the party, and continued to weep for the rest of the evening. One night I heard an audience member mutter about me, “Boy, what a ballbuster!”

W
OODSTOCK
, N
EW
Y
ORK, IS ABOUT A HALF HOUR AWAY FROM
my home upstate. One day Gloria, a dour, humorless woman I knew only slightly, approached me. She had overheard me talking about my play and said she was forming a woman’s theater company in Woodstock and suggested she produce it. And so we put it on in the art gallery there for three weekends in May.

After much agony Mark and I had finally settled on the stories we could use. There wasn’t any place for the one about being poolside in Sidi Bou Said and spotting King Farouk lounging on what appeared to be big pink pillows, until he got up and she realized the pillows were him; or the one about how a formula for chip-free nail enamel that she, Vreeland, brought over from her Parisian manicurist ended up in the hands of a young Charles Revson. It was agony to jettison these and other stories we loved, but they had to be at least somewhat relevant to the moment.

This time, Mark got his mate Michael Sharp to design the set. Michael was a real artist, and he created a beautiful set that we later discovered would have to be dismantled every night after the show so that the gallery could function as usual during the day. What with the “management” which consisted of Gloria and her “producer” sidekick Jerry, a hyperactive hairdresser who commuted from Poughkeepsie and when needed was never anywhere to be found, the dismantling usually fell on Mark to do. The “management” was heavily into EST and they were often stuck in a weepy hug in the middle of the aisle when we were trying to set up.

An actress Mark knew, Kate Skinner, volunteered to play the maid. She was too young and pretty for the role, but she was still game. We had a lot of fun together. It was early May and the quince bushes were in bloom, and on the drive to Woodstock Mark and I kept spotting quince bushes in front yards and stopping to steal branches for Vreeland’s floral arrangement.

I made my entrance through the
EXIT
door. If it was raining outside, I entered with an umbrella. To get the audience in the proper mood, we played Louis Armstrong singing “You Do Something to Me” as they settled into their seats. We wanted them to feel they were at a cocktail party. However, just when things were pleasantly abuzz, the music was cut off and Gloria stumped out. In a voice of doom she thanked people for coming, asked for money, and then droned on about the next play about breast cancer. As she stumped off the lights went up, and on with the show! Gloria’s speech got longer and more doleful with every performance. We stood backstage listening to it metastasize.

Jerry, who ran the lights and the phone buzzers, didn’t show up one day, and Mark, hysterical, had to do it all. This whole thing reeked of flop sweat. However, we had full houses the entire run, predominately women. It hadn’t occurred to me before that the play had a special appeal as the story of an older woman overcoming the odds. One of the great things about Vreeland was that she had a successful life. Was it a happy one? I don’t know, but it was the life she chose, and she didn’t end up on a slag heap.

A
FEW WEEKS AFTER
W
OODSTOCK, WE GOT A NIBBLE FROM
S
YBIL
, Sybil Christopher, at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. We were invited to perform five readings, but we were past readings now.

Once again, Michael Sharp did the set, and this time there was much more to it. Mark had these huge screens made and brought out from Manhattan in a rented van. The sofa was rented and covered in red flowered chintz like the one in her Garden in Hell. I didn’t question, didn’t even think about who paid for it all until months later, when Michael gave me the bill. It was a rude shock; and all mine to pay.

From time to time during rehearsals, I could hear Sybil’s deep-throated laughter. I was buoyed by it, but it was hard for me to understand why she kept saying the play should be done in a cabaret setting. She booked the show for two weekends, which meant we didn’t have the advantage of reworking the script. The insinuation that the play was too slight to warrant a regular two-week run rankled me.

Here again, the pre-show music was cut off, and the stage manager clunked out and droned on about upcoming shows.

The Sag Harbor audience was embedded with Hamptons socialites. Somebody would rush back and say, “Chessy Rayner’s here!” “Pat Buckley’s out front!” These ladies left at intermission. When told there was more to the play, they looked surprised, because of course they had dinner parties to attend.

S
YBIL INVITED US BACK FOR THREE PERFORMANCES IN THE FALL.
“But,” she said, “ditch the maid.” This time we complied. Kate Skinner was replaced by an intercom.

Through Kate we met a young director, Daniel Fish, and we asked him to direct our play. He had the same fondness we did for the avant garde. The set became more stylized: stacks of Louis Vuitton luggage and pairs of strappy shoes were perched here and there on the stage.

We were still looking for an ending to the play; some kind of “ta-da!” moment. There was this image Mark kept bringing up. He’d gotten into an elevator one day with a bike messenger in a glistening black Lycra bodysuit with one red stripe across the chest, his helmet shiny black with a touch of red, his skin a beautiful chocolate brown. He wanted to see a creature like that onstage with Mrs. Vreeland, perfectly mirroring her. In the same way we’d fantasized about a scene of her having tea at the Savoy with punk rockers, comfortable with their dyed black hair, tattoos, and safety pins in their noses.