My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (26 page)

The dressing rooms were old-fashioned, two to a floor, with the chorus at the top, five flights up. Across the hall on my floor were John Benjamin Hickey and Denis O’Hare. John is irresistible, the most sociable of creatures. I had a terrific crush on Denis, something about his perfect teeth. His lack of ego playing a clarinet in the band while playing a featured role, his passion for poetry and art, as well as his brilliance as an actor makes him a truly rare bird. Ron Rifkin and I seated backstage right waiting for our cue, would watch Denis stage left perform brilliant little pantomimes with his hat, newspaper and briefcase, never acknowledging his audience or our pantomimed applause. The backstage precision of quick changes was wonderful to watch. I can still see the row of pre-rolled pink stockings for the Kit Kat Girls lined up along the back of one set. The backstage crew knew how tough “Vut Vud Yoo Do?” was. When I came off after the song, they greeted me with silent applause. One night they were holding up signs with “7s” on them, like figure-skating judges.

Alan Cumming was adorable. We went to tea together one day and, leaning over the steaming pot, he murmured in his lovely Scottish burr, “Mary Louise, would you care for some Ecstasy?” He was living life like a cabaret. There were some pretty naughty goings-on in that theater after-hours.

About three months into the run, the Condé Nast building under construction next door collapsed and fell onto the theater, along with other buildings. The show was shut down until they could move it into Studio 54. I left at this point to do
Full Gallop
in London.

I
PLAYED THE
H
AMPSTEAD
T
HEATER
. T
HE PRODUCTION WAS NOT
the success it had been. The Hampstead audience seemed generally mystified. I think the Hampstead’s relationship to London is rather like that of the New Jersey Rep to Manhattan. I don’t think Londoners ordinarily make the trip out there to see a play.

I read the reviews years later and was surprised to see they were pretty good. But there was no publicity. Every night when I came out to go home, the lobby would be empty. One of the few moments I recall with pleasure was coming out to find the actor Jonathan Pryce waiting to see me. That was a thrill.

One unexpected benefit from our labors has been the demand for
Full Gallop
in countries all over the world. It’s a perfect vehicle for older actresses not only in the U.S., but South America, Sweden, France, Germany, Denmark, and Italy, and some sixteen years later it’s still going. The latest production was done last year in Paris.

W
HEN
I
GOT A CALL ABOUT A MUSICAL BASED ON
G
REY
G
ARDENS
, that depressing film about those two pathetic old bags in their filthy house with cat piss everywhere, I thought, Oh boy, good luck with that. But I wasn’t asked to audition and it was only a workshop, and this was December and the workshop was in Florida, so I said yes. The role was Big Edie. Christine Ebersole was going to play Little Edie. The show’s composer, Scott Frankel, had requested us for the roles. How often does that happen in an actor’s life?

The first time I saw Christine, on the plane down to Florida, I was too intimidated to say hello. Once, years ago, when we were both in a one-day backers’ audition, she caught me borrowing her curling iron backstage and I thought she was going to slug me. But she didn’t seem to remember, and we got along fine. As things turned out, we didn’t see a lot of each other, because most of the time in Florida was spent working on the first act, with her playing Little Edie. Big Edie didn’t appear until the second act, so I stood around a lot. Scott told me he was writing a song for me called “Jerry Likes My Corn.” He played it for me. I loved it. But I was grumpy, as usual, feeling neglected. The one great treat was playing running charades with the cast and crew in the big main living room, a game that apparently started in Hollywood with film actors—funny ones like Mike Myers and Julie Kavner, who, to escape rabid fans in public places, rented a hotel ballroom to play.

There were more workshops over the next year, and I was always available. I still didn’t see what I was being given here. In my usual way, I was waiting for the letdown, looking at the whole project with a huge stick up my rear. At the same time, I was watching the
Grey Gardens
DVD over and over, getting Edith Beale in my head and under my skin, rolling her words around on my tongue.

Michael Greif, the director, was very tolerant. I had a hard time with the song lyrics, especially since I was now at an age where nothing came easily to mind. He seemed to trust me, and that gave me permission to flourish. Michael is a complex individual. I wish I knew him better, could sit down and have long conversations with him about life in general.

I loved all these guys, for themselves as well as their talent: Scott Frankel; Michael Korie, who wrote the lyrics; and Doug Wright, who wrote the wonderful book; and Paul Huntley, who, of course, made me a gorgeous wig of long white hair.

For the whole second act I was onstage in bed. I sang in bed. My voice never felt so full and easy. I don’t know why that should have been. When words occasionally deserted me, Christine bailed me out. Except once, when she couldn’t, because it was the last line of the show; in previews we were trying out different show endings, and I had the line, “Well, you still have your dancing” as the light fades to black. One night, as she told me later, I apparently said, “Well, you still have your tennis.” There’s no tennis in
Grey Gardens
. As for Christine Ebersole, I loved her, too, still do, with all my heart. Working with her was an unexpected bonus. We were a team.

G
EORGE
F
URTH POPPED UP IN MY LIFE ON A REGULAR BASIS OVER
the years. He would call from L.A. to tell me how to change my life, how so and so had been living in her car and wrote a book about it and was now on all the talk shows, and once in the Seventies we went to Europe together with his script for what would be become Kander and Ebb’s musical
The Act
starring Liza Minnelli. He asked if the writing was keeping me up (no computers or tablets in those days, just paper and pencil) and I told him no, only the erasing. There was a good deal of erasing. And then the hotel maid in Paris accidentally threw the script out. He was a Christian Scientist so he worked through this calamity.

George was a compulsive gossip. He would never allow himself to be interviewed or appear on a talk show because he knew he’d be sued by somebody. He drove me mad repeating things I had said to perfect strangers. But in the last few years he would call to tell me funny jokes. He seemed to me to have mellowed. We started talking about taking trip to Mexico together. I knew in my heart it was probably not a good idea but I put off telling him. He said he had a cold that wouldn’t quit and he was going to San Francisco for the weekend, and a couple of days later I heard he had died of a heart attack. I felt a large wedge of my life fall away.

I
T STRIKES ME THAT
I
WOULD NOT HAVE SUCCEEDED IN THIS BUSINESS
without the gay men in my life. I would have been up a creek without their encouragement and their sensibility. Most straight men reacted poorly to my clowning. They didn’t get me, but the men I knew and worked with did, they gave me my career.

W
HILE WE WERE STILL AT
P
LAYWRIGHTS
, I
GOT AN INVITATION
to the Obie Awards. When I got an Obie in 1995 for
Full Gallop,
the evening was very Village, anarchic and fun. I recall Uta Hagen mounting the stage to receive a lifetime achievement award. She was wearing a hat. She stepped up to the podium and said, “Excuse the hat, my hair looks like ka-ka today.”

The 2005-2006 Obies were presented at NYU’s Skirball Center. I wore a dressy dress and little backless pumps, and took a cab across town. In the lobby people were milling around; I spotted Christine standing with Scott and Michael and Doug and joined them. The awards began, we went in, took our seats. A lifetime award was given to the actor Reed Birney. I was astonished; I had worked with Reed years before, he was so talented, and I had wondered ever since what became of him. Obviously he had been having a great career I knew nothing about. Then Michael Feingold got up and read a list of actors who had died that year. He left out Maureen Stapleton, a rather large omission, and I almost yelled out her name. I didn’t. The usually loose occasion had become formal. Then, Christine got up to get her Obie. The awards went on and my face and arms began to burn as it dawned on me that I wasn’t going to get one. How could I have imagined, just because I got an invitation … but it was because I got the invitation that I thought …

The awards ended. I saw Christine, Scott, and the others, and somehow I thought I would join them upstairs. I waited as people filed past toward the doors, but when they didn’t appear after a while, I couldn’t stand there any longer. I walked back toward my apartment. I saw the window of a coffee house on the corner of Waverly Place, still open, only two others in it. It looked like a Hopper painting. I went in, sat at the window with a cup of coffee, marveling that I had walked all the way from Washington Square back to Seventh Avenue in those stupid little backless pumps.

Grey Gardens
went to Broadway with an army of producers. The main money one was a wildly wealthy couple who lavished expensive gifts on the cast members—genuine cowhide satchels that required a forklift to get onto your shoulder with only a banana inside, humungous triple-thick terry robes, and floral displays worthy of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier—but at the same time they seemed amazingly short-sighted in their dealings with us. Christine once referred to their representative as “dumb as a box of hair.”

There were two little girls in the show, so they had what is called on Broadway a “wrangler” to look after them. This rather large woman took up permanent residence on the stairs outside my dressing room door and reported to the producers every wild joke I made at their expense. They were very upset when my dresser, Vangeli Kaseluris, gathered up a bunch of different-colored Crocs that had been given to everyone in the cast and sold them on eBay. A long-standing custom on Broadway opening nights is for the producer to give every company member a show memento. These days, what with the slew of producers required to produce a show, it’s possible in a single night to acquire a truckload of Tiffany key rings, ashtrays, picture frames, diaries, hats, jackets, and mugs, mugs, mugs, all embossed with the show’s name. I don’t have a special memorabilia cabinet in my rec room, so what to do with them? I don’t need coffee mugs, I don’t really want to wear advertisements on my back, and I could use the silver picture frame, but not with “
Godspell,
1985” engraved on it. For these same reasons I can’t pass them along as gifts, so I end up shoving them in closets. Now, happily, it’s becoming the custom in many shows to sell them on eBay. They make dandy souvenirs.

Except for a few minutes at the top of the first act, I was offstage while everybody else was on. I would have been very lonely if it hadn’t been for the sweet, young, sensitive and funny Vangeli, who dressed me. As different as we were he and I connected. Van was invaluable as a stylist, helping me choose gowns for important occasions and then making it possible to return them the next day. I objected that I was too old to wear this gorgeous red chiffon gown he borrowed for opening night, but it worked, I looked pretty fabulous.

In 2007, Christine and I were both nominated for Tony Awards—her for Leading Actress in a Musical, me for Featured Actress. Van and I shopped for hours looking for a gown. We finally chose something very simple, black, with a neckline that ran across the collarbone. We brought it to the dressing room and invited Christine up to have a look at it. She was shocked, and adamant: “Oh no, you can’t wear that!” She said it looked like something you would wear to a cocktail party, not to a major event. It wasn’t nearly formal enough. But Van and I stuck to it. I wanted to look understated. Elegant. To quote Mrs. Vreeland, “Elegance is refusal.”

T
HERE IS NO DESCRIBING THE AGONIES THAT GO ALONG WITH
these events. Leading up to the Big Night, there are endless functions that a nominee is expected to attend. I recall, at one of these in the upstairs Sardi’s room, seeing Jane Alexander stump glumly through the crowd wearing what looked like an ordinary cotton dress; she must have gone through this so many times.

The Tonys are supposedly given by actors to their peers. I’m often surprised to learn who the Tony voters are, and wonder how they came to be chosen. The actual Tony presenters are television and film actors. Bleachers are set up across the street from the theater for the Great Unwashed to watch and scream when they spot a television star. There is a paparazzi room you must pass through, just like they do in Hollywood, for cameras that are really waiting for the television and film stars to come through.

For a nominee, the evening is one long slog. Once you’re in your seat, it’s rare to spot fellow sufferers in the crowd; the audience appears to be entirely made up of marketing people. Sitting there on the night I won, I joked that if I didn’t win I was going to get up, give the camera the finger, and march back up the aisle. I was able to invent a scenario for losing, but apparently not one for winning. I couldn’t prepare a speech “just in case.” Of course I wanted to win, I had been nominated for a Tony in
Cabaret
. There’s nothing more painful than being nominated and not winning.

This night, when my name was called, I went numb. I walked up there and Donny Osmond, of all people, handed me the Tony, kissed me on the cheek, and stepped aside. I looked at the audience. I was completely blank. Into my head popped this hound dog I knew that could howl “Happy Birthday.” I howled. I mumbled something about wondering if I ever won would I feel like a fraud, and then added that I didn’t. As if I’d said the wittiest thing in the world, wild applause. Then I was hustled through an interminable gamut of paparazzi cameras flashing—I had no idea there were so many news outlets. “Look over here, Mary Louise!” “Look this way!” “Look here!” “Look up!” “Look down!” My feet were killing me. The first moment I experienced real pleasure was in the grocery store the next day, when I saw my picture on the front page of
The New York Times.