Read atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business Online
Authors: Peggy Pope
In the spring of 1960, divorced and free, I saw an ad in the trades for actors to be in a production of Him by E. E. Cummings. It would take place at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. Cummings was a poet who didn’t believe in punctuation or capital letters, but that didn’t bother me. I gave one of my best readings for a handsome dreamer of a man called Harry Joe Brown Jr. His name alone inspired trust in me. My name surely inspired the same in him. I was off to Italy, where Gian Carlo Menotti, the head of the festival, awaited me, where a new continent beckoned and a new life would begin. The sordidness of my previous one would be bleached out of existence like a fade-out at the cinema.
There was a whole month before rehearsals: May, the perfect time to see Paris, the Riviera, and Rome. No last-minute deal this, no hop on a train and be there yesterday, as I was used to doing when I got a job. No. A leisurely ocean crossing was in store, complete with deck chairs and stewards swooping over with lap robes and whiskey sours and the captain’s table with tinkling laughter rippling around it at something I’ve said. European society would embrace me, and I would become its darling.
A producer or two might be among them. A film career could open up. There was no limit to the gifts life would hand me on the aptly named Liberty Ship from WWII.
The second night out looked promising. I was invited to a party and immediately felt popular. It took place in a cabin only slightly larger than mine that was filled with a crowd of heavy drinkers. It reminded me of a college frat party in one tenth of the space. I sat down on a bunk with a fellow who seemed pleasant, though somewhat mild-mannered. We talked for a few minutes, until suddenly, he threw himself on top of me. I was wedged under him with my head against the wall, my neck bent at an odd angle that made me feel like it would break any second. Breathing was on hold, and nobody seemed to notice. The man was small but very strong and very determined, and I couldn’t budge him off me. We really don’t know each other at all. Is this what you call love at first sight? What on Earth could he be thinking of? And then—Is he actually… ?—yes, he was trying to rape me in this crowded, noisy room with some horrible music in the background while nobody paid any attention. It dawned on me that I was powerless under him. I couldn’t move any part of myself without him being there ahead of me, blocking a leg or grabbing a wrist. I cried, I screamed, and I shrieked. Nobody could hear me over the din. Or perhaps they thought it was a joke. It wasn’t, and it took what seemed like a day and a half to get help that was just inches away. At last, a couple of guys pulled him off, and made him apologize. He didn’t seem sure about what he was apologizing for, but I didn’t care. I was unable to express myself and was probably in shock—deep fear shock. I went back to my cabin and didn’t leave it again until we docked at Le Havre.
Porters and staff formed two lines in the hall and waited outside our doors to collect tips. I marveled at the young girl, my cabin-mate, who had no money—none—and was going to hitchhike to Germany to meet her brother and his wife. Word had gotten around, and they had her number. She hadn’t left the waiters in the dining room any tips at all. She put on her backpack, opened the door, thanked them all effusively, handed each one an envelope, and ran off. The envelopes, of course, were sealed and empty. She never knew it, but her courage got me going again. I still think of her now and then. She makes me happy.
My book lay on the table beside the bed in my hotel room: Paris on $5.00 a Day. What a ridiculous concept. Whoever heard of linoleum on a hotel floor?
I didn’t have a plan. I thought it would all just happen to me. Getting up in the morning and climbing a tower, walking along the Seine and looking at the lovers embracing, going into a church and getting depressed because of all the crucifixes started to make me feel a little creepy, like I was a stranger to myself. I couldn’t talk to anybody because, in those days, the French were still busy healing themselves from the German occupation. When I asked directions, nobody understood my Kimberley Day School French. The girl I was then was shy, scared, and naïve, with poor social skills. She is somebody that has a place inside me today, but it’s because she has nowhere else to go and I agreed to take care of her.
I went on to Rome and was looking at a poster on a billboard showing where the Theatre Guild tour was playing. A man there was looking at it as well. He was an American.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but you remind me so much of an actress I know in New York.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Her name is Peggy Pope.”
I couldn’t put it together right away. I tried to think whether I knew this Peggy, but I couldn’t quite place her. I had become so distanced from myself on account of not talking to anyone for a month that I had forgotten who I was.
Still groping around in my mind, I said vaguely, “I know her.”
He looked at me as if he expected something more.
“I mean… that’s me,” I said. “I’m Peggy Pope.” I was pleased with myself for remembering. It all came back, of course. The man was Stuart Vaughan, who had directed me in a workshop of a play in New York two years before. He looked at me as if I weren’t all there. But an explanation from me at the time wasn’t going to help. I was far too flustered. So I said, “Well, nice to see you again, Stuart, I have to go. I have an appointment.” I could have been the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland.
I probably should have gone to a rest home and recovered from the divorce before I attempted this trip in the first place. However, I was sure that once I got to Spoleto and into rehearsal, I’d be okay.
I managed it. Spoleto is a beautiful, small medieval town in the mountains seventy miles north of Rome. It was a going-back-in-time trip. I stepped into a picture book of narrow streets running between stone buildings, including a church and two theaters, the Teatro Nuovo and the Teatro Piccolo, where we would be performing. The piazza, with its magnificent stairs, was where everyone in our group was supposed to meet, which they did—about three quarters of an hour later than the agreed-upon time. Everyone else knew one another. They were excited about the festival, friendly, and eager to help a lost actress wandering around looking for Gian Carlo Menotti.
“He’s home in his house,” I was told at the office. “Go over there. You’ll find him.”
“Don’t you think you should call him?” I asked. “Tell him I’m here?”
“Oh, just go on over. He’s having lunch. He won’t mind.”
I found him, the thin, dark, friendly man loved not only for the operas he had composed—Amahl and the Night Visitors, The Consul, The Medium, and The Telephone—but also for bringing Spoleto to a position of international importance in the musical world. Because of him, Spoleto was blossoming as it recovered from the state of near-poverty in which the Nazis had left it. Who wouldn’t love a man who could accomplish all this?
He welcomed me with contagious Italian pleasure, offering me lunch. Then I told him why I was there.
“Ah, but we are not doing that play. The producer did not raise his money.”
“But I… I bought a one-way ticket. How am I going to get home?” It was all my own fault. It wasn’t Menotti’s problem in any way, but it was the last straw for me. This adventure was turning into a never-ending debacle. I burst into tears.
In my life I have never met anyone more gracious, more generous, more Italian than Gian Carlo.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Come into my bedroom. We’ll look in my trunk. We’ll find a script for you there.”
Then it became a conspiracy. He got quiet. He confided in me. “I have interns from America. They will be your acting company, your supporting cast. That way you will have room and board and salary to go home.” I had no shame. I followed him into the bedroom.
The setting was simple, full of light. Behind a large bed, he had placed a gilded wooden arch from an old church as a headboard. He had found it lying in an alley behind a church that had recently been restored. The workmen had left it there, discarded, abandoned, forgotten. He was very pleased with himself as he pointed it out to me.
“Isn’t it magnificent?” he said.
I dried my tears and made the transition with him. “Oh, my. Yes, indeed.”
As we admired it together, I wondered if a priest somewhere was still looking for it.
The trunk was at the foot of the bed, and he shuffled through it. “No, that’s no good. No. No. No. Wait a minute… no. Ah, here’s something,” he said. “It’s by Jules Feiffer. He’s very good. You can do it in the Album Leaves section of the festival. It’s perfect. It’s short, and to make up for that, you could do a monologue as well. Do you have a monologue? You could get someone to write you one.”
Elizabeth Diggs was a writer on the interns list. She wrote me a wonderful monologue for an aerobics instructor with a body tic giving a class. This was very physical.
And since the class spoke only Italian, they thought the body tick was part of the aerobics workout. Every time I did the body tick the audience found it hilarious because they were watching me teaching this class and everyone in the class thought the tic part of the exercise only it wasn’t. It was the teacher’s body tic. And I would get mad because they weren’t doing it right and I have no memory now of how it ended except that it was tremendously funny.
Crawling Arnold by Jules Feiffer was the main piece and a bit of a challenge. It’s a hilarious verbal comedy about a family in the fifties with a bomb shelter in its basement. The son, Arnold, is a businessman who refuses to grow up. When he comes home from work, he immediately takes off his jacket and starts crawling around the living room. Shirley Verrett came by from the opera company to play the maid. She had a one-word part. She had to cross the stage from left to right while Arnold’s mother asked her, “Where were you today?” And Shirley would answer, “Rioting.” What a good sport she was.
I played what Feiffer called a psychiatric social worker who comes in to treat Arnold. And get him to give up crawling and stand up. It was interesting doing a comedy for an all-Italian-speaking audience. They didn’t laugh once. It didn’t matter. We were having an adventure, and I was its star that summer.
Molto grazie, Gian Carlo.
A Brush with Shakespeare
Joe Papp was a slight man with dark hair, dark eyes, and a soft voice, a man of courage with a passion for Shakespeare, a sort of DuPont of the people. Remember “Better things for better living through chemistry”? His motto was “Better living for better people through Shakespeare.”
I didn’t know Joe Papp well, but I worked for him on a school tour of Twelfth Night, playing Maria. I had been calling him for eight years to get a job. You could do that in those days. You could call a producer directly, sometimes even get him on the phone or leave a message for him, knowing he’d return it. It was a smaller world then, more personal, less bureaucratic. Today, with more people, there’s less humanity.
Twelfth Night was a tour of public schools in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. We performed at ten in the morning at each school. I didn’t care. It was thrilling to be playing Shakespeare for Joe Papp at whatever time he decided. It was a good company that included Charles Durning, Mitch Ryan, and Karen Black.
Joe Papp’s idea of directing was interesting. His solution for the comedy scenes was to cut everything that didn’t work the first time we did it. Although alarming to the actors at the beginning, this approach turned out to be a good thing. A lot of the humor involved puns and topical references from Shakespeare’s time. The audience would have needed footnotes in the nonexistent program.
One day during rehearsals, Joe called a special meeting to say he was sending a telegram to the federal government to protest the treatment of Judith Malina and Julien Beck of the Living Theatre. When the IRS come to collect back taxes and close them down, Malina and Beck had climbed out the back window and become fugitives. Joe said we should all sign the telegram and that it was going out at five o’clock the next evening.
Let me say up front that the McCarthy years scared me. I had watched him on TV and worked with actors who had been blacklisted and were in weakened health and spirit owing to his persecution. Having met actors whose lives had been destroyed by the blacklist, even to the point of dying before their time from the stress of it, I was haunted and insecure, worried about becoming blacklisted myself if I signed something Joe Papp dreamed up. The government has pretty much established its right to collect taxes, I thought. How they did it was questionable, and it scared me to think that they’d come after me for protesting such treatment of a tiny, out-at-the-elbow, avant garde theater downtown. I didn’t want to sign something that would get me in trouble with the federal government. I had no idea what the Living Theatre’s productions were about; they didn’t make any sense to me. Leave me alone, I thought. Just let me act.
Joe, on the other hand, had survived the blacklist of the fifties. Fired from his job and left to his own resources, he had founded the New York Shakespeare Festival, “a free theater” on a little outdoor stage on the East River. This quickly grew into quarters on Astor Place, for which he paid the city a dollar a year. He had built six stages in this old white elephant, producing plays by authors living and dead, known and unknown. Some of the plays moved to Broadway and to film. A major cultural force, it is called the Public Theater today.
I also didn’t have his strength, brains, or business acumen. I didn’t want to be told what to do politically, even by Joe Papp.
As Tennessee Williams might have commented, “Self, self, self. That’s all you ever think of, honey.”
Right. True. But I had also grown up hearing, “Don’t sign anything until you’ve read the fine print.” Five o’clock came and went, and I didn’t sign the telegram. Nothing more was said about it, although Joe Papp didn’t hire me again.
Rehearsals continued. We got to the technical and dress rehearsal, which is always a nightmare because you get the lights, sound, and props for the first time. I also got a fifty-pound costume, which of course made me forget all my lines. At one point, I had difficulty balancing four long-stemmed goblets, each a foot high, on a small, round tray as I kicked my dragging dress around at every turn, looking for my exit door.
The set was merely a suggestion, so it could travel easily from school to school; it included three slender arches to indicate the doors, easy to shift around for scene changes, and no furniture. However, the doors all looked alike, and I got confused with my tall goblets teetering and my lurching costume attacking me. It was the only time in the theater that I’ve ever felt really alone. It was my exit, and I couldn’t find my arch. There was the dead sound of complete quiet around me. There was no one to talk to and nothing to say. I had said everything. I could say something else, but that wasn’t going to solve my problem.
Had everybody gone to lunch? Was there a fire drill taking place? Finally, I stopped dithering about and called out to the gods of tech rehearsal, “I don’t know where to go!”
A calm, dryly amused voice from the depths of the auditorium came back with, “Why don’t you just… go home?” It was Joe Papp. For the briefest of moments, the idea flickered in my mind. Does he mean it? Should I have signed the telegram? Then I decided, No. He’s hilarious. He’s a hilarious sadist. He’s been sitting there the whole time, enjoying my predicament. Relaxed, laughing, and loving that kind of humor, I found the right door and got out of there.
Just as we were getting used to performing on a bare stage at ten o’clock in the morning and discovering the truth that all an actor needs to perform is “two boards and a passion,” I noticed something odd. The ingénue was making her entrance later and later, until it became necessary for me to lace her into her costume onstage during the performance. She was coming on half-dressed.
There’s a certain kind of actress who just has trouble keeping her clothes on.
So I’m lacing up Olivia, saying my lines into her back while she shakes her hair in my face and wiggles her hips as the scene starts. Viola, disguised as a boy, delivers a love message from Orsino to Olivia. Olivia, who is attracted to Viola, thinking her a handsome fellow and wanting to know more about him, says, “You might do well. What is your parentage?” To which Viola responds, carefully so as not to give the game away, “Above my fortunes yet my state is well. I am a gentleman.” One particular day at this point, a boy in the audience shouted out in total disbelief, “Oh, yeah? Show us your cock!” And this was only Act II.
It was deadly quiet for about seven seconds, and then the girls started to crack up, first Olivia and then Viola. Then there was pandemonium in the auditorium. Finally, the principal barged into the room and everybody quieted down. He stayed to see the rest of the play, but that scene was damaged forever. The cast would watch from backstage and take bets on who would laugh first at the memory of the debacle.
We ran into some really tough audiences toward the end of the run of Twelfth Night. We were all getting weary. Falling out of bed at six o’clock in the morning to frolic around in a Shakespeare comedy at ten was turning into a kind of Chinese water torture. It was a wet November, undecided on whether to snow or rain or give the sun one last chance. We were schlepping out to the boroughs to perform for these hooligans who had to be guarded by monitors in the aisles. One day I was doing a scene with Charlie Durning, who was playing Feste the clown. He was singing, “O mistress mine, where are you roaming?” when I felt a sharp pinprick on the side of my neck, then another on my hand, then others that made a ping sound on different parts of my costume before the tiny pieces of metal bounced onto the stage, sounding like rain falling.
Joe Papp felt it was important to show kids in outlying schools, who had never been to a play, what it was like to see one. Their only frame of reference was, perhaps, a shooting gallery at a carnival—sitting ducks. The boys brought paper clips with them, which they opened up into V’s and sent flying, powered by elastic bands. They didn’t throw tomatoes. They shot us.
I was furious. I wanted to scream at them, “My face is my fortune!” Instead I turned upstage under the storm of paper clips and special-delivered my lines to the back wall.
Not Charlie Durning. Awarded the Silver Star in WWII, he was already carrying a half-pound of shrapnel around in his body. A few paper clips couldn’t faze him. He took a hit just below his eye that could have blinded him, but the war hero never flinched. He kept right on playing his lute and singing his song: “Journeys end in lovers’ meeting/Every wise man’s son doth know.”
Afterward, during the talkback, Charlie answered a question addressed to him, “What is the time of this play?”, by saying, “About two hours.” He cracked me up. I’ve known Charlie Durning since he was making the rounds to get work, teaching dancing at Arthur Murray’s for a living and playing a cherub in a church play on weekends. I’ve always loved him, as I imagine everybody else has.
We were to play until Thanksgiving, but on November 22, while the kids were shooting paper clips at us, someone else was shooting President John F. Kennedy in Texas. The cast was told quietly backstage that he might die but that we were to continue to the end of the play, as there was fear of what might happen if we stopped in the middle. The school staff wanted to get everybody out of the auditorium and back into their classrooms in an orderly manner before they announced the news to the students. Viola, the woman disinclined to wear clothes, lost it. She started to become hysterical, until somebody slapped her. I have a memory of the thought passing through my mind that she had always wanted to be Marilyn Monroe, and the idea that she might never get to sleep with Kennedy was too much for her.
I did the unforgivable some years later, cornering Joe Papp during an intermission in his theater and saying, “Mr. Papp, I called you for eight years before you gave me a job. Am I going to have to call you for another—” He interrupted me pleasantly with, “Do you realize how many people call me for more years than that—their whole lives, sometimes—and still don’t work for me?” You don’t corner Joe Papp. I decided to take it as a compliment and felt lucky.
On the other hand, Twelfth Night is the setting for all my actor’s nightmares, in which I don’t know my lines or where my costume is, don’t have time to make my entrances, don’t know where to go, and don’t have a friend to reach out to for help.
Hey, easy come, easy go. It’s a tiny price to pay. Minuscule.