Born with Teeth: A Memoir (4 page)

A pause, and then Mother said, “If you keep crossing your eyes like that, they’ll stay that way, so stop it.”

But Tessie couldn’t stop it, neither the crossed eyes nor the headaches that attended them. Exasperated, my mother said, “Okay, I’m going to take you to the doctor and then we’ll settle this nonsense once and for all.”

Mother and Tess didn’t come home that night, and neither did my father, and the next day we were told that they had taken Tess to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

It seemed a very long time before we finally saw Dad’s car coming down the gravel road, and I have little recollection of what Tess looked like or what was said, but that was the moment when we all understood that something irreparable had happened and that Tessie would never be the same again. My
mother came into my room that night, climbed onto my bed, and said, “Your sister has what they call a butterfly tumor—it’s spread throughout the brain. It’s inoperable, so your father and I have decided to keep her here at home.” She looked so weary. I wanted to comfort my mother, but I didn’t know how—those vacant eyes weren’t looking at me; they were looking past me. Sitting there on my bed, she seemed to have left the room and disappeared into another world altogether.

The house became quieter, more subdued. Tessie tried to go back to school, but the headaches got the better of her, reading and writing became increasingly difficult, and, when her balance was compromised and the kids at school made fun of her accidental pratfalls, my parents decided it was best to let her stay at home. She was taken to Mayo a few times for cobalt treatments, but those, too, were ultimately discontinued, and instead, my mother was given a two-year supply of morphine and told to take her daughter home. Tessie tied one of Dad’s red handkerchiefs around her balding head, and that became her signature style, a concession to modesty and vanity both.

Although no longer able to perform her duties, Tessie was still my slave, and this gave me certain privileges. One night I crept into where she’d set up camp, in the old maid’s room, and sat next to her on the bed. It was late, and moonlight was pouring in through the window. Even at night, she wore her kerchief, but now she pulled it off, exposing her bald head, and whispered, “Why me, Kate? Why do I have to die? It’s not fair. I’m the good one in the family.” Tears started down her cheeks, and in order to hide my own, I pulled her to me and held her, not knowing what to say or how, only sure that whatever I said would have to be the truth, because that was our pact. “You’re right, sweetheart, it’s not fair and it doesn’t make any sense, because you
are
the good one in the family. You’re the best one in the family, and everyone knows it.” I don’t know if this comforted her, but soon
she fell asleep, and I stayed with her for a long time that night, holding her hand and memorizing it. To this day, etched in my memory, are those beautiful hands—long, slender, elegant fingers, perfect nails, and her skin, so warm.

I had been accepted at New York University, into a new theater program that would allow me to earn my academic credits while studying almost full-time uptown at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. It was the beginning of my adult life. It was the beginning of my life as an actress. It was the beginning of a journey that, by necessity, meant the end of my girlhood.

The night came when I was to leave. It was an evening flight because Dubuque was a small town and the regional puddle jumper only flew twice a day to Chicago. My suitcases stood by the front door. Had I said good-bye to everyone? Was it my mother in the car outside, or was it my father? All a mystery now, the details that marked that leave-taking. All but this: Just as I reached for my suitcase, I heard a noise, and when I looked up, I saw Tessie sitting at the top of the stairs. Her little red kerchief was slightly askew, and she was crying softly. I had to strain to hear her say, “I don’t want you to go, Kate. I’m scared. I’m going to miss you so much.”

I looked at my little sister sitting there, and even though it was impossible to say good-bye, impossible to think of what lay ahead, and impossible to understand how desire and despair can conspire to lead to a moment such as this, I knew I had no choice. Tess knew, too, and in the twinkling of an eye—like a whisper, like a dream—she flew up the stairs and was gone.

The traffic, the pavement, the patterns, the lights. I was home, and I knew it. In a taxi hurtling across the Triborough Bridge, the cabbie and I traded barbs and bon mots as if this was just another day and I was just another fare headed downtown to Washington Square. I jumped out of the taxi on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eleventh Street, grabbed my bags, and swung through the revolving doors of the Samuel Rubin International Residence Hall, where life would begin.

It was understood that I would be taking my academic courses downtown and studying acting uptown, but from the very beginning this arrangement did not suit me. Too much distance between what I craved and what kept me from it. The academics suffered from the get-go, but it was a different story altogether once I got off the subway on Fiftieth Street and Seventh Avenue and entered the doors to the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, situated in the north side of the City Center Building. On the floor that shaped me as an actress, there were
three rooms, and in the largest of these rooms there was a throne, and upon this throne sat a queen.

Stella Adler regarded herself as royalty, and so, as a consequence, did we. She was a tall woman of indeterminate age, blond hair masterfully coiffed so as to look at once unstudied and very chic, ropes of pearls draped around a long neck, a white silk blouse (the collar of which was perpetually ringed with makeup) revealing a full bosom, and a face unlike any I had ever seen. It was rubber; it was marble; it was sadness; it was joy—it was anything she wanted it to be, and she wielded those sudden transformations like a weapon. Stella did not suffer fools—not lightly, not briefly, not ever.

Students were dismissed for wearing blue jeans, for chewing gum, for looking bored, and woe betide the person whose insecurity masqueraded as arrogance. “You have somewhere you’d rather be?” she once asked a young man who was holding an unlit cigarette in his hand. He smiled seductively. Then she struck a match, and when he put the cigarette to his lips, she instead touched the flame to his hand. The young man didn’t flinch. She blew out the match. The room was dead quiet.

“Get out,” she said to the young man, “and don’t come back. You’re in the banker’s way!”

The “banker’s way” meant that you were not fit for acting, not able to channel passion, not sensitive to the subtleties of human nature. In other words, you were a creature of the material world and therefore neither welcomed nor suited to this life, where money was regarded with disdain and personal sacrifice was the order of the day. By Stella’s decree, our mettle was tempered in her classroom, and those who lacked the spine simply disappeared.

Stella was not sympathetic. “Who’s ready?” were the words that opened the day. Heart in my throat, I raised my hand and took the stage. To show Stella that I was a fearless contender and
here to stay, I chose Maggie’s opening monologue from
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Perhaps three lines escaped my lips before she called out, “Stop!” Then she rose to her full, imperious height and, approaching me, asked, “Where are you from, sweetheart?”

“Dubuque, Iowa, Miss Adler.”

Pause. “Well, that’s not your fault.” Laughter. “And don’t call me Miss Adler, my name is Stella. Tennessee Williams understood the meaning and the power in that name, and in every line he wrote.” She took ahold of my ponytail and shook it. “Maggie the Cat is fighting for her life. Her
life!
She isn’t sweet, she isn’t cute—she’s dangerous, and she’s on fire. No Iowa in Maggie, and by the time you find out who she is, why she is, and what she is, there won’t be any Iowa left in you, either.” She dropped my ponytail and took my chin in her hand. “Bring it back next week and get out of the Midwest, I never want to see it in you again.”

I had my small band of comrades-in-arms at the acting studio, but ours was an uncertain intimacy, one in which we viewed one another as fellow survivors on a life raft. When we weren’t sharing a common bowl of lentil soup at the hole-in-the-wall across from the studio, I would take my meals in the mess hall at Samuel Rubin. With a book propped in front of my face, I could observe the room at leisure. Who were these young women and what were they studying at New York University, what great passion inspired them, what greatness did they hope to achieve? I observed, and I learned. The vast majority of the girls living in this dormitory were upper middle class, Jewish, and good-looking. They all had a common interest and one that absorbed their every thought: men. In particular, young men pursuing pre-med or pre-law degrees. It was a marriage market, full of chatter, perfectly manicured nails, and Louis Vuitton bags of every shape and size, all placed smack in the middle of tables that were, of course, devoid of food.

I watched all of this from the vantage point of my hiding place, in which I was made all the more invisible by virtue of my books, my plate of fried chicken, and my freckles. Freckles were not widely on display, and so I was caught off guard one night when my eye fell on a face that was full of them. She sat a few tables away from me, lost in a manual of some kind, a cloud of black hair framing a face that I recognized, on some primitive level.

When the crowd had thinned out and she and I were pretty much alone in the room, I lifted my hand in greeting and called out, “You’re Irish, aren’t you?”

She looked up, bright blue eyes full of mischief, and said, “You guessed it. You too, huh?”

We both laughed, and then I proposed the most natural thing in the world. “Drink?”

She smiled and gathered her books. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Her name was Beth Kehoe, she was from the South Side of Chicago, the oldest of five in an Irish-Catholic family, and she wanted to become a doctor. We spent the entire night comparing notes until, hesitant but hopeful, she asked me to recite something for her. A monologue, she said, or a poem. We were in my cramped room on the fourth floor of the dormitory, and all I had easily at hand was my constant companion,
The White Cliffs.
She adored it, and wanted more, so from memory I performed my monologue from
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
It was now past midnight and we both had early class in the morning, but it was clear that we didn’t want it to end. When we had serendipitously caught each other’s eye in that dormitory cafeteria, we had struck gold, and we knew it. Here was a spirit that quickened, a curiosity that shone, and a heart that sympathized. We were two Celts lost in Jerusalem.

Uptown, the stakes were high. Stella wanted more from me, and I wanted nothing more than to deliver. There was no time
for anything else and little need for courses in modern philosophy or English lit when I spent my days under the tutelage of a woman who freely quoted Goethe and Rilke, a mentor who, in the course of an afternoon, could open our imaginations to the life and times of Harold Clurman and the Group Theatre, what it meant to be the daughter of the great Jacob Adler, and how she had transformed the Stanislavski method into a style of acting that was inimitably her own. We didn’t have to ask how; she told us. “I found Stanislavski in Paris and I sat at his feet and I listened, until I understood.”

At the end of the year, I decided not to return to NYU but to engage full-time in the acting conservatory. I conveniently failed to share this information with my father, knowing that this would only confirm his worst suspicion, that I was indeed out of the gate and galloping headlong toward a broken neck. But choosing between my father and Stella represented the proverbial fork in the road. Where my father feared disappointment, Stella embraced it. “Use it,” she advised. “Williams was disappointed, Turgenev was disappointed, Odets was disappointed! Do you think you can understand what epic is without being disappointed?”

Stella lifted me up and filled me with the desire to throw away all the baggage I didn’t need, to become the actress I was meant to be. To that end, I took an apartment uptown on West Seventy-Sixth Street, which I shared with a few friends, and to pay the rent I got a job waiting tables at the Friar Tuck, on Third Avenue. Stella did not seem in the least concerned that I had dropped out of school. “You’re in the only school you’ll ever need!” she declared, and I believed her. Still, I was impatient to work at the craft, dying to get out there and strut my stuff. This, however, did not fly with Stella. She had an inflexible rule that you could not work professionally while you were still in training, and the full course of training was two and a half years.

I broke this rule when I stole into the offices of Hesseltine, Baker Associates one sweltering summer’s day on my way to work. I had done some research on Stark Hesseltine, had learned he was one of the most highly regarded theatrical agents in the business, that he loved the opera, and that he had a weekend house in East Hampton.

I handed the receptionist my picture and résumé and said, “Mr. Hesseltine may not remember me, but we met at a party in East Hampton, and he told me to come by and see him in the city when I had a chance.”

The woman looked at me skeptically, then, placing my picture on a tall, sloping pile of similar pictures, she pressed a button on the phone and said, “Stark, there’s a young lady here who says she met you in the Hamptons and that you asked her to come by.” Pause. “What’s your name, dear?”

“Kate Mulgrew,” I answered, fighting back the first palpable surges of terror. She put the phone down and indicated that I should take a seat.

Forty-five minutes later, a tall, courtly, and formidable-looking Stark Hesseltine strode into the waiting area, took one look at me, and said the words that separated him from every other theatrical agent in New York: “Miss Mulgrew, why don’t you follow me? And while you’re walking, you can rehearse your little story about our fateful meeting in East Hampton. The rest of the office will be all ears.”

Half an hour later, after I’d treated the office staff to Maggie the Cat as well as the abridged version of my life, Stark walked me to the door and said, “Go buy yourself a pretty dress and some new shoes. We’ll schedule a photo shoot, and I’ll have a contract ready for your signature next week.” I stood there, incredulous. “And one more thing, young lady,” he said, opening the door to let me out. “Don’t ever lie to me again.”

I didn’t have to. Within just a few weeks, I was in serious contention for the role of Emily in
Our Town
at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut. Michael Kahn, the artistic director, had put me through my paces and demanded nothing less than three auditions.

Clearly, he was hesitant about taking a chance on an unknown who he wasn’t sure could deliver. After the third audition, wearing a synthetic wig I’d bought on the cheap in the Fashion District, and a long white dress I’d found at a flea market, I got down on my knees and looked into Michael Kahn’s shrewd brown eyes.

“Mr. Kahn,” I said, “if you give me this chance, you won’t be sorry. I’m ready for this and I promise that I will not let you down.”

The man was not unkind, but neither was he stupid. He said, “I’ll let you know by Friday.”

The following day, which was Thursday, I’d agreed to meet my grandfather for lunch at the Russian Tea Room. Frank Kiernan, my mother’s father, was a dapper man, some might even say elegant. I liked him for his vitality and sense of fun, but I measured myself when I was with him. After all, this was the man who had let go of his little girl’s hand, and so I knew him capable of selfishness, and I didn’t ask for or seek his love. When we parted at the end of a very lively and pleasant lunch, he plucked an anemone from the table vase and pulled it through the buttonhole of my new jacket. “For luck,” he said, kissing me on the cheek.

In a building not far from the Russian Tea Room, I took the elevator to the eighth floor, where Shirley Rich kept her offices. Shirley Rich was a casting director of some repute, and she had arranged an appointment for me to meet with the creator and head writer of a new soap opera called
Ryan’s Hope.
I walked into the anteroom and was immediately escorted into Shirley’s
office, where a statuesque woman with sparkling brown eyes and a cap of chestnut hair stood up to greet me.

“I’m Claire Labine,” she said, taking my hand, “and
where
did you get that anemone?”

When I told her my grandfather had given it to me as a token of good luck, she threw back her head and laughed, delighted. She asked me about my background, and with every detail I shared about my Irish-Catholic upbringing, she would look quickly at Shirley, then back at me, and then she would briefly close her eyes, as if processing the information and storing it somewhere.

They were looking for “the girl,” she told me, the central character in a story that involved an Irish-Catholic family whose patriarch owns a pub in New York City. Da and Ma had come over from the Old Country and begun their life afresh, producing four children, all of whom contributed to the drama, dreams, and high jinks of life in an Irish bar, but none more so than Mary Ryan herself, who, Claire assured me, would bear all of the trademarks of a heroine. She would be smart, brave, funny, strong, and fiercely loyal. The serial would be unlike anything ever before done on daytime television. It would grapple with politics, ideas, family dynamics, religion, power, and, of course, romance. It was Claire’s baby, and she meant to cast it to perfection, bringing new faces and fresh talent to the screen. Leaning forward, she asked me if I would agree to a test at ABC studios, and the sooner the better.