(My Travels with) Agnes Moorehead – The Lavender Lady (10 page)

I remember well that she looked at me very strangely, as if to reappraise me and it registered in my mind that this was the first time that this woman ever saw me there, except the day of my audition. Because all that time in the school I had never shown that strong side of my personality, but I had been a very successful salesman. A P.R. man, who’s twelve years with R.C.A. was successful and I was very strong. It was just that in that school, I felt like a child, a lost puppy dog, a duck out of water. Acting was new and Agnes was like my mother and the church, and I guess around her I just fell into a passive, frightened, dependent role.

But I’d worked through some of that during the year and now I was a man saying, “I will do it!” and she loved that in people. And then getting it together with something that meant something to her and she looked at me like she knew who she was talking to. So I made her a promise and I left the school when it closed for vacation.

I thought, “Ha!” Feeling my acting oats, I auditioned for a part in “Little Mary Sunshine” at the Morgan Theatre in Santa Monica and God, how I fought for that part. It was the first real fighting thing I did and I won. I got a gem of a part. I played the juvenile and I knew I was good. I could sing and even dance it.

I called Agnes and I told her. She used to go to see some of her students and I thought, “Ah, she’ll come and see me.” She’d finally see me in something where I shone and the reviews were good. You know the answer. Of course, she didn’t come. That was a very big blow. The show played for six weeks and each week I hoped. Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. She never came and again I felt very paranoid. Again not good enough and she’ll never know I am good enough, because she’s never seen me do anything. And now that I’ve got some balls and I’m starting to arrive—I had a show-stopping number that stopped the show every performance and I was damned proud of that—and although I didn’t consider myself a dancer, I moved well and all my friends were there: Dr. Stone and his wife. They were all crowding around me and congratulating me.

“Quint we didn’t know you could dance. It was like you were flying through the air.”

Thanks to my beautiful choreographer and to Agnes, I never forgot she’d taught me the fundamentals—but she never came. However, someone else did. One night there was a producer in the audience. He came backstage after the performance and gave me his card. “I liked your performance tonight and I want you for the lead role in a movie I’m producing,” he said.

Well, I was just as excited as hell. I was elated. I thought, God, my experience with Agnes must have paid off. I used in the show a lot of the techniques I had learned from her—the feet, the hands, laughing arid crying—and I felt in retrospect those months and months and hundreds of dollars at Agnes’ school weren’t all in vain.

I called Agnes and told her about my movie. I thought this was it. This was really it. I pictured her saying, “That’s fine, I’m proud of you.” Then I’d say, “Well, maybe.” I wanted her to help me, coach me with the script. I thought she might do that. I knew that she had helped some of the other students on other occasions. I had all those fantasies, but she was completely disinterested. Why, I’ll never know.

“I believe that one should work for the glory of the part and not for personal glory,” Agnes admonished me. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

It didn’t stop me. I was just as excited. I wasn’t getting swell-headed.

She went on, the instant lecturer, “Of course, it’s human to enjoy fame, if that’s what should happen to you. But don’t expect it. And, if it should come, I believe—strangely enough—that anonymity contributes to such joy.” Nothing you’d especially an opening to expand the relationship. Really, she couldn’t have cared less.

After she considered her religious observations, she started on the drudge. “Drudge, drudge, work. That’s what you need. Just concentrate on what you have to do and don’t fantasize about fame.” It was very depressing. Here I am, on my toes and I still can’t reach high enough.

Finally, I thought, to hell with Agnes Moorehead! It was another mood. They liked me at the Morgan Theatre. The director of the play had even gotten me involved with the theatre’s Board of Directors. I was emerging in the theatre and Agnes had nothing to do with, not directly. On my own, I had gone out and gotten that role. I fought for it and I was a success. I got the movie, started shooting it, and began doing P.R. for the Morgan Theatre and I started using my business acumen in the theatre. To hell with her!

Meantime, remembering my promise to her, I decided that the Morgan Theatre was the ideal place for Agnes’s school. It was a bolt from the blue. What a wonderful idea!

You see, the Morgan Theatre was all the things Agnes talked about. On the outside, the architecture was modern. As you entered, the lobby was clean as a pin with a quiet, almost academic air. It was decorated with art and architecture and in the foyer hail there was a picture gallery. With each show, they changed about once a month; they gave a showing of a different artist. Inside the auditorium itself, there were graduated rows of red covered seats and you could see the stage from every seat in the house. The acoustics and the lighting for the stage were excellent. The walls of the auditorium alternated dark cork and rough-hewn wood panels. The whole thing had a very nice, clean way about it. Nothing of the gaudiness of a working actor’s theatres although—of course—they were always working with an almost continuous turning out of new shows, every six weeks. The sets were good and solid—too solid, really. Sets should be able to be more easily dismantled and reassembled. But for Agnes it was perfect. It was just built for her. I felt it in my bones and I was right. She could start here and when she got into it, I thought she could build her own theatre. She could teach, have plays and everyone would come.

I spent more time planning her future than my own. She’d have students from her school give these plays under her tutelage and she’d have the best people in the business involved both with the plays and in seeing them. I was aware of all the flaws in the way that her school was run, but I thought that maybe with a decent theatre, she might different. So this is what I thought I’d be getting into when I approached the Morgan Theatre’s Board of Directors.

They weren’t sure. They were very protective of their theatre and they had literally built it from the ground up and they regarded its well-being with a kind of professional amateurism. It was their theatre and they wanted it the way they wanted it. Still, they were willing to make some concessions to commercialists. They needed financial support and were always looking for new avenues of income. So, salesman that I was, I gave them a sales pitch.

They weren’t using the theatre Saturday mornings and afternoons, anyway, and “how would you like Agnes Moorehead to conduct her school here?” Not telling them, of course, that she needed them more than they needed her. I told him, first of all, that Agnes would give them extra money. I knew that Agnes was very chintzy, so I told them, “Oh, her school is very poor, but—“I played both ends against the middle, trying to get a palatable deal for them. Seventy-five dollars a week is all she paid and most theatres in Los Angeles cost much more. Besides, the rent she’d be paying them, I told them she would bring tremendous publicity and prestige and interesting people to their theatre. Then, too, Agnes was like a pack-rat. When she did these TV shows, some of them gave her props. All the scrim, backdrops, see-through stage things, and I knew that they were gathering dust in her garage. I thought maybe I could persuade her to donate them to the theatre and I told this to the Board of Directors. I told them, too, since they still hesitated a little, “If the stage is set for a show, Miss Moorehead will conduct her classes in front of the proscenium curtain on the stage apron, so as not to interfere with the current attraction.” You see, I had been thinking a lot about it and I had it all planned out in my mind. I said anything I could think of to get them to take her, because I wanted to do this for Agnes. By the time I was done, they were sold on it and they were thrilled to death.

I closed the deal and promptly telephoned Agnes to tell her the news.

“Hello-o-o,” she said, in her low intimidating, “I’m-listening-but-it-better-be-important” voice.

“Miss Moorehead,” I said, and I identified myself, “I’ve found a theatre for your school.” And I cannot tell you the emotions that went through me. I was proud as could be. I was really bringing in a plum. I was really bringing the bacon home.

“Oh?” she said in disbelief. She was very suspicious.

“Yes, it’s a lovely theatre and it’s so you. I know you’ll love t. I think you can get it for your price.”

She asked me a lot of questions about it. The feeling was, “I don’t believe what you’re saying, but I’ll play along with your game.”

‘When would it be convenient for you to see it?” I asked. “I’ll be happy to drive you to the theatre so you can see it and meet with the members of the Board of Directors, who have agreed to meet with you.”

Then we set a date.

CHAPTER SEVEN

JELLY BEANS

When the date came, I picked her up at her Mediterranean style home in Beverly Hills and I expanded my new role. Eliminating the cashmere sweaters, I dressed in a nice business suit, like I was the realtor showing off the estate. It was a complete change of personality. This time, I was a businessman, a salesman, the confident man and I think that Agnes sensed it. This was what she needed, strength against strength.

Of course, when I picked her up, there was still beneath the confidence a tremendous gushing of excitement. This casual thing you do every day, drive up into a driveway, pick someone up and leave, a casualness, yet the immediacy of being at Agnes Moorehead’s house, picking her up at her own house, was overwhelming. It was such an ordinary thing, and yet, so fraught with the intimacy of the familiar. Her house was two stories and extended quite a ways into the back. It looked like it had about twenty-five rooms or more. From the street to the house was about ten yards of lawn and then, covering the whole front of the house, there loomed what looked like a forest, a jungle of greenery, climbing vines, ferns, plants and small blue flowers. Through all this, through a bunch of leaves, you could just see in the center of the front of the house, the black of the front door. There were black pillars on either side of the door, but you couldn’t see them for all the foliage. She called her home the “Villa Agness,” of course.

On the right side of the house was the long, narrowish driveway. I turned into this and drove to the side door, as per Agnes’ instructions. Now, I was at the house, which was painted pale lavender. Ahead of me stood a black, wrought-iron, grilled gate. It was closed. Beyond it I could glimpse the garage.

I went to the side door and rang. I didn’t have to wait long. Agnes came out wearing a lavender suit. She was very pleasant, but aloof, afraid not to be nice because she didn’t know what was going to happen and looking forward to whatever might happen, but still keeping the wall between us.

“Joseph,” she announced as we started off, “we don’t go on the freeways. I don’t like freeways.” We took Motor Avenue past M.G.M., Agnes’s old home studio.

“All right,” I agreed and took a winding way.

Half an hour later, we arrived in Santa Monica. I parked and pointed the theatre out to her. She looked at it noncommittally, not ready to release her observations. We entered the theatre together and then, as she stepped over the threshold into that quiet, clean, arty, almost academic theatre, I saw her face change. I was happy to see it. She didn’t say anything, but I could tell that she was really astonished. After all, she’d been used to all those crummy, tacky, little non-theatrical dumps and here was this perfect little theatre and she’d never had a theatre that nice. I think she was almost awed that I was the one who had gotten it for her, after all her powerful friends had failed. Having everything drawn up with the theatre people beforehand, I took Agnes to them and made the introductions.

I let her close the deal and then I took her on a tour of the theatre, showing her everything. I had on my salesman cap now, metaphorically speaking, and I was the man in charge, sure of myself. This was my thing, selling, and I played it to the hilt. She responded. What a victory this was for me. I could tell she liked my enthusiasm and the theatre was right for her, and she was very, very lovely to me. She just radiated. I had never seen her ever, in my whole time with her, like that. Not caustic, but very serene, very sweet, very relating. I felt like a young boy who’s done something for the first time and shown his mother and the mother was proud. “He’s grown. He’s a man.” I savored every moment of it.

The next thing I knew, I was driving her home and Agnes started talking to me. Mind you, not me talking to her, but her to me. She saw that I really liked her and I agreed with her, basically, about the order and discipline and I cared about the theatre. She just raved.

“Ah, this theatre. It’s absolutely perfect! A lovely theatre. You are right; you know what you are about.”

And she thanked me for doing this for her and suddenly the whole picture changed. It was all different. Agnes now openly acknowledged me as an equal and instead of school marm to student; it was one human being to another. I became an ally, a brother, a keeper. It was if she recognized something valuable in me and she wanted me on her side. And I was on her side. I felt like she was a long lost friend. A trust bond was born in that long, lovely, forty minute ride from Santa Monica back to her Beverly Hills home.

She asked me about my background, what I had done. I covered a great deal about my life in capsule form. I told her a little about my growing up in Ohio and my marriage, my children, the divorce, St. Vincent’s and the nuns. We talked a little about religion and that was when she told me that she, too, had been raised in Ohio on a farm (I saw suddenly the source of that pioneer woman she played so much on the screen) and we talked briefly about that, speculating on the coincidence. But mainly the questions she asked took me through my business history. She was zooming in on my business acumen, I realize now.