My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (22 page)

The entire set was in an ugly mood, from the top down to the production assistants, who yelled at us like we were cattle. Maybe they were hired cowhands, but someone was treating
them
like shit. One night, as a van full of actors pulled away from the set, Dom DeLuise stuck his bare behind out a window and mooned the crew.

I was finally released without shooting the scene. A month later I was flown out to Hollywood, where Burt and Jim and I filmed it in a back lot, sans mule.

I
T SEEMS TO ME THE FEW TIMES
I
EVER ATTEMPTED TO PROMOTE
myself were doomed to failure. A fortyish actress I knew had managed to get herself on talk shows by proclaiming that she had chosen to be celibate. Never mind that the only way a woman in her forties gets laid is by tying herself to railroad tracks—it got her on talk shows. This wouldn’t have worked for me. But in 1980, as I was going directly from Ellis Rabb’s
Philadelphia Story
at Lincoln Center to Neil Simon’s
Fools
on Broadway and getting film work all in one season, I imagined that I was moving to a higher place in the pecking order, and consequently required better representation.

The eighties was the era of big shoulder pads and celebrity agents like David Geffen and Sue Mengers. This was when meeting an agent he gave you his résumé rather than the other way around. I had been with Richard, one man in a one-room office in the Steinway Building on West 57th Street, for fifteen years. I wince now to think of my disloyalty, but I dumped him for a fancy mega-agency called Triad, recommended by my erstwhile friend Pamela Reed.

The day I signed with Triad I was ushered into a room to meet their “people.” They sat in a circle around me smiling, expectant. I was back in the high school principal’s office. What was I supposed to do? I had no ability to schmooz. It had not occurred to me before that personal charisma had anything to do with an actor’s success. In the silence that ensued, the agency head quietly informed me that they were not averse to letting actors go if the fit wasn’t right. In other words, the shoe was now on the other foot.

There was no fax, and no email then; actors had to go to the office to pick up their “sides,” or audition script bits. The reception room featured unborn-calf-leather sofas and a giant slab of granite on which sat a six-foot floral display. The receptionist was a bored young man in Armani and a string of pearls. When asked for a script, he gestured languidly to a cardboard box on the floor, which I had to squat down and scrabble through to find my four lines.

There was one good egg there, Joanna Ross, who did what she could for me. I was happy when I heard she quit and moved to Italy with her husband and child. They bought an old house and I heard they made their own olive oil.

T
HIS WAS MY FIRST EXPERIENCE WITH BEING
“
PACKAGED
.” T
HE
agency sold a star to a film along with other clients in smaller roles. I found myself being shoehorned into “woman on the telephone” roles. There were four or five years of no work except for these filmettes. They were usually already in production, and I would arrive at some bleak motel off a thruway with instructions to stay in my room and wait for the call to the set. “Six
A.M.
call, Mary.” (Evidently the part was too small to warrant learning my full name.) “Be in the lobby at five
A.M.
for pickup.” Once on the set, the actors and crew, having been together for months, indulged in an easy camaraderie over and around my head.

At the same time I was trying not to meet the eager glances of the people commonly known as “extras,” but officially referred to as “background.” I was invariably seated among the “background” in church pews or courtrooms, my two lines a skimpy dress separating me from them, and I was desperate not to be seen as one of them. While I was busy ignoring them, the stars were often doing the same to me.

Some of the films I had teensy parts in over the years were
Up the Sandbox, Teachers, The Money Pit, King of the Gypsies, Pet Sematary, The Adventures of Huck Finn, Mr. Wonderful, Everybody Wins,
and
Stepmom
. Some of these films didn’t even make it to the big screen. They went straight to the video store, back when there were video stores. In
Stepmom
I only had three lines, but for some reason my billing was enormous. Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, worked on
King of the Gypsies
. I only had a few lines here, too, but I had some great close-up shots. In
Mr. Wonderful,
my part was one scene where I performed a trick at a company dinner of removing my bra while remaining fully clothed. I played a granny in Stephen King’s
Pet Sematary
. I didn’t want to do it; I had been offered Lady Bracknell in
The Importance of Being Ernest
in Baltimore, but they kept coming back with more and more money until I succumbed. Now some twenty years later, though you’d be hard put to find me in that film, I’m still receiving hefty residual checks.

A side note on the background in
Pet Sematary:
in the church funeral scene, the pews were filled with local townspeople playing local townspeople. In this scene, the little white coffin of the demon infant gets jostled, and a tiny arm falls out, whereupon everybody reacts. I couldn’t believe the wailing and screaming and tearing of bodices of these people. In take after take, as that little arm fell out of the coffin again and again, I was finding it very hard to sustain a look of horror, much less keep myself from ogling them as they went crazy again and again, groaning, keening, real tears flowing down their cheeks, pounding their fists on their heads, throwing themselves on the floor.

The irony didn’t escape me that I was making good money from these jobs. This was at a time when residuals paid handsomely: foreign rights, television rights. The more the checks poured in, the more depressed I got, not doing anything that made me feel like an actor.

I
HAD A SLIGHTLY BETTER ROLE IN
G
REEN
C
ARD
. B
UT IN A SCENE
with Gérard Depardieu, I was surprised when the camera was turned to face me that he stayed put, sitting on a box next to the camera, to do his lines with me. I still anticipated being invisible to him as we sat waiting for lights, camera, action, so I kept my head down, but Depardieu was having none of this; I think he felt ignored. He took to muttering the titles of films he had been in. I wasn’t familiar with them; each night after work I went to the video store and rented
Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, The Last Metro,
and
Going Places
. They were terrific films. I came back the next day and told him how much I loved each one. He was happy.

I
N THE EIGHTIES
I
STARTED TO AUDITION FOR THESE NONPROFIT
off-Broadway theater companies: Manhattan Theater Club, Playwrights Horizons, and Second Stage. The people who ran them all seemed to be young, upper-class preppies; the plays they produced seemed to be mainly about people like themselves: young, upper-class preppies. The actors’ salaries were laughable. It was a whole new scene. I couldn’t get over it, I took enormous umbrage to all of it. But at this point in my life I was taking umbrage to everything. I was filled with resentment and terribly lonely. The thing I loved most about being in the theater was being part of a family and going out drinking with everybody after the show. But for a quite a while now, when the curtain came down the other actors were going home to their own families. I was going home to drink myself to sleep. I had been drinking myself to sleep every night for the past thirty years.

My drink of choice was wine. I ran out one day. I was in my house upstate, and didn’t feel like driving all the way back to town, so I went to bed without drinking. I didn’t buy a bottle the next day so didn’t drink that night or the night after that and in that way without making a conscious decision I stopped drinking altogether. A year later, almost to the day, I was “slipped a micky,” as W.C. Fields would have put it—a waiter innocently put a jigger of vodka in my grapefruit juice—and that scared me so much I started going to AA. It took years for my outlook to change, but it did. Eventually.

A
ROUND THIS TIME
I
CALLED MY AGENCY AND SOMEONE FROM
William Morris answered the phone. Morris had swallowed Triad, and a few of their clients had been spit out along the way, including myself. It frightened me not to have anybody looking out for me, even though they were lousy at it, but by this time I was too deeply invested in the Vreeland play to care too much. And I pretty quickly found another agency, a small one, to take me on.

B
Y
J
UNE, NO DATE FOR OUR PLAY AT THE
O
LD
G
LOBE HAD BEEN
set, but we were hopeful. We were working on the script at my house upstate when I got a phone call from the producer, Lewis Allen, who said he and his wife were interested in producing it on Broadway. Lewis’s wife, Jay Presson Allen, was the writer of the stage adaptations of Muriel Spark’s
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
and Truman Capote’s
Tru,
two very successful Broadway plays. Lewis said they’d heard talk about our Vreeland play at a dinner party and they wanted to meet with us. A Broadway production! Money! A sumptuous set! Real peonies and parrot tulips and forced quince! We sent a script to them and in a few days it was arranged that we would meet for lunch at Fred’s, Barney’s chic restaurant.

Jay Presson Allen, a rangy, imperious Texan, did all the talking, regaling us with stories of her derring-do. She reported with glee how she got even with a guy she didn’t like by dragging her car key along the flank of his brand-new Mercedes. She told us how she couldn’t get Bobby Morse to stop crying during rehearsals of
Tru,
what a pain in the ass he was crying all the time, she wanted to fire him. She informed us that our script was “almost there.” “It’s almost there, it just needs one more thing, one more little something to make it click. But don’t look at me to fix it,” she warned. “I have no intention of doing any writing on it myself!” As if I was itching for her to get her paws on my baby.

In July I went out to do
The Way of the World
. When I got back in September, Mark and I met again with the Allens and Jack O’Brien at the Four Seasons Brasserie, a gay, laughing affair, though nothing was firmly stated as far as I could tell. Finally, we got the word:
Full Gallop
was set to be staged at the Old Globe Blackbox Theater in December.

Two days before leaving town, Jay Allen suggested that she, Mark, and I meet to “workshop” the script. Mark tape-recorded the session. She had a lot of ideas, and I wanted to be open to them, but I was aware of a wall going up inside me. Mark, on the other hand, was growing increasingly jubilant with her every word. She suggested that Vreeland should call Swifty Lazar a “little Jew.” “Add some shock to the mix!” “Yes!” shouted Mark. Then she said why not have Vreeland lift her pant leg above her knee, plop her eyeglassses on it, and say, “This is what Swifty looks like.” “Yes!” shouted Mark again. It was obvious he was captivated. This was almost the end of the fifth year of working on the script, rearranging, refining, re-refining it. And I was starting rehearsals in two days.

When somebody asked who Jay Allen was, some wag replied, “A Park Avenue matron who says ‘fuck’ a lot.”

The smaller stage at the Old Globe was an awkward round with audience seating on three sides. I wondered how the hell I would be able to sit on a sofa and talk to three sides. I decided there would be a couple maiden aunts who sat upstage left and right. It wasn’t much help, but it was all I could come up with. On top of this, I would be obliged to make my entrance down a long stairway.

The first night I arrived, Nicky and I met with the set designer over dinner. He sat silent, his eyes bugging as we babbled away, describing Vreeland’s Garden in Hell. We didn’t see him again. He skipped town. The next day I got a load of what had been dragged up from the theater’s storeroom: fumed oak bureaus and chairs suitable for a production of
The Wild Duck
. I looked at Nicky; Nicky is, if nothing else, the consummate home decorator. His Village apartment was done to perfection in French Provincial: touches of red, lots of toile, and tasteful objets d’art, books, photos, and mementos up the wazoo. “Nicky,” I said. “Look at this furniture. Is there a single piece here that you would put in your living room?” He got the point. The set became somewhat more elegant, somewhat more red, but in the end it was still nowhere near her Garden, or anybody’s garden. I mean, God, there were no walls!

T
HEATER IN THE ROUND IS A PIG IN A POKE
. I
T
’
S A MONEY-SAVING
device that goes along with the demise of a separate entrance for actors and that lovely old fixture, the stage doorman. You make your way to and from backstage through the lobby so there’s no way to avoid audience members you may not want to see. In
Blithe Spirit
in Chicago, when Jean Marsh as Elvira the ghost waited for her entrance cue at the top of the aisle of the McCormick Place theater in the round, in her mauve ghost makeup specially sent for from New York and her mauve gown and mauve nail polish on her bare feet, couples came up to her and handed her their tickets.

The de Lys was a musty old house when I was there years ago. It had rats. It probably still does. But that stage, deep and wide, is still an ideal playing area, in perfect relation to the orchestra and the balcony. This is not often the case. I’ve played in huge old theaters with cavernous orchestra pits yawning between stage and first row, obliging the actors to come down to act on the lip, leaving the furniture upstage. I once played in a space that doubled as a soup kitchen with plastic chairs arranged in a circle where the actors were directed to stand or sit according to sight lines. The Cincinnati Playhouse stage is edged with a cement moat you have to keep one eye on at all times to avoid falling into it. Most non-proscenium stages are all too comfortably within reach of the front row, so you have to die or cry while stepping over feet, programs, coats, and the occasional sleeping head. There’s the present-day Circle in the Square which, unlike the original Circle with its gently sloping benches and broad playing area, really ought to be called the Tongue in the Groove. The stage is a gulch, a crevasse between towering cliffs of audience members who have an excellent view of each other while the actor below has no place to stand without blocking himself and/or his fellow actor.