By Myself and Then Some (74 page)

Yet this was definitely my time. There were no qualified reviews, at last I had the adjectives I’d been waiting for. Walter Kerr was so
flattering I blushed on reading his words. He said what I’d worked so hard to have said – that I was not just a movie star dabbling in the theatre. I was a full-fledged star of the stage. Thank you. The compliments were wildly extravagant and I reveled in them. It was almost like being discovered for the first time. I had a new career, a musical career. And the audiences were fantastic.

Len and I were still involved with each other, although real life changed our habits considerably. Of course I, being a romantic and unrealistic, wanted it to continue. It couldn’t. There were times we were together, and that was always terrific fun. He loved all my friends and many aspects of my life. And eight times a week we were those other people – Margo and Bill. As long as that remained, our involvement would go on too. He was many years younger than I – as with our characters in the play. It all fell neatly into place. Yet he was a curious combination of social inexperience and a very mature, settled man. He had planned his life, figured out what he wanted, how he wanted to live, and would fight against anything threatening his plans. Meeting me had thrown him a little off balance and he didn’t like that. I remember showing him a line in Chapter 13 of John Fowles’
The French Lieutenant’s Woman –
‘A planned world … is a dead world.’ He wasn’t crazy about that. I never could figure out how such a young man could be so closed to personal change when here was I, having lived many lives, always open to new people and things, possibilities, adventure. I still cried into my pillow over relationships. I don’t believe he did. Every other week I’d give myself a good talking to – ‘Forget him except at the theatre. Part-time lovers are not your bag. Never have been, never will be. He’ll go his own way – he has to – enjoy your time together, don’t fret about the rest.’ Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Mostly not. But it had to, for the sake of the show. And he never lied to me. He was not careless with me – just careful of himself. He’d been straighter, more honest, than most men I’d known, which is why I could never stop liking and respecting him. That’s why we are still happy at the sight of each other. It’s a good feeling to be glad to see someone you were once mad about. I haven’t had it about many.

D
uring our first month the
Tony nominations were announced – the show, Ron, Len, and myself nominated, plus one of our supporting
actors, Brandon Maggart. I was so excited! I couldn’t believe it. At last, my very first nomination for anything, anywhere. Katie was nominated too, for
Coco
. Of course I wanted to win, but Katie – my friend, one of the women I admired above all others, set apart, and such a truly wonderful actress. I adored Katie so – it was ridiculous, actors in competition for a prize. But what a prize! It shouldn’t mean so much, but – admit it – it does. As long as awards are being given, it’s better to get them. Katie and I joked about it. She wouldn’t go to the award presentation, she’d never gone to any function like that. Laughingly she said, ‘If I win, you’ll accept it for me, won’t you?’ And how I would! I was sure she
would
get it. Why couldn’t we both get it, damn it?

Jason had married again. I wasn’t on the greatest terms with him, felt he’d been very careless about Sam. I prevailed on him to tell Sam about the marriage himself. Certainly Sam had been hoping from the beginning we’d get together again. That was his own hope – he hadn’t been led into it by either one of us. Now he accepted the new marriage, sort of. Well, he had to. I had made it clear to Jason that when he saw Sam I wanted him to see him alone, not yet with his new wife, not with his other children. Sam worshipped his father, and needed time alone with him. With Steve away, Jason was the only man in his life. I was sometimes at home when Jason would come to take him for the afternoon, but I wouldn’t stay – it had to be a special time for the two of them, alone. Sam continued to astound me. I recall his coming into my dressing room after a matinee, having seen the show from the wings, saying to me, ‘Who is your new playmate, Mommy?’ He’d only met Len once or twice.

The Tony Award show was some night. My dressing room in the Palace was afloat with friends coming in for a drink. Then to my seat in the audience for the early awards. God, I was nervous. Cecil Beaton won the costume award for
Coco
. We didn’t win anything until Ron’s name was announced – first for choreography, then for direction. I screamed – we all did – my voice was totally shot. And I still had my number to do.

Then Walter Matthau – another irony – announcing best performance by an actress in a musical. The names of the nominees – my heart thumping, then stopping altogether. Opening of the envelope. And I heard it – ‘Lauren Bacall for
Applause.’
I screamed again, jumped out of my seat toward the stage. My friends in the audience were on
their feet stamping. I could only make foghorn noises of shock. I’d never won anything before – some actresses did, not this one. I finally gathered myself together enough to thank Ron and the company of
Applause
and the authors for the biggest, best love-in of my life. By the time I was to wind up the show with ‘Welcome to the Theatre’ (from
Applause
, of course) I had almost no voice. It was an unforgettable night for me. Totally rewarding. It left me exhausted – and happy.

From the age of nineteen I had been made aware of the pitfalls of awards. And, as my career moved on its zigzag course, I never contemplated winning one. I still don’t think actors, directors – any creative artists – should be pitted against one another. There is the high in winning, the low in losing – and the human frailty of resentment that the loser feels toward the winner. That uses up energy where it should not be used, energy that is needed. For the real stakes in the theatre are high – they are life stakes. That’s what I love about it. You gamble with your life, and that’s a gamble worth taking.

Still thinking back to that Tony night: I was a winner, but I was alone, and that was a glaring fact of life to me. Crazy to look at it that way? Of course I’m crazy – but alone is definitely alone. Work is essential to me – really using myself, really functioning, body and mind at their best – but it only heightens my emotional needs, it doesn’t lessen them.

The night after the Tonys, the show went fantastically. The audience knew I had won, and the opening scene itself was all about the Tony Awards, so the applause on my entrance had two meanings. That communication between actor and audience is incredible fun – the lift it gives is indescribable – but again, it basically deals with emotions, with people. And there’s nothing like it. It’s love. But it ends when the curtain comes down. I remember that after Johnny Negulesco saw the show he said, ‘You can never have a high like this anywhere else – you don’t need a man, there isn’t a man alive who could ever make you feel the way that audience makes you feel.’

Wrong!

There
is
a man alive, I’m sure, who might make me feel that way. The only question is whether or not I will find him.

Nonetheless, from a work point of view,
Applause
continued to be the most rewarding experience of my life. I just wanted to have everything.

There came the devastating night of Friday, July 31. At the
beginning of the disco number, as I raised my right leg for a high kick, my left leg buckled – a rip-like thunder to me. The kids thought I had slipped, then realized it was something else and caught me before I hit the stage. I knew something terrible had happened, but kept on going in the show, God knows how. I was filled with terror. The leg buckled another couple of times, without warning. The doctor was waiting for me in my dressing room at the interval. My knee started to puff. I started to cry. All I could think was that my brief moment of glory was over – I might be incapacitated for weeks. Len came into the room, helped put make-up on the white tape that was holding the hated Ace bandage in place. One of the young doctors told me to call Dr James Nicholas’ office on Monday so that he could examine my knee and prescribe my future course of action. That was to be the beginning of one of my luckiest medical associations.

I missed no performances, but we eliminated the disco scene until we could hear Dr Nicholas’ diagnosis – which was that I had torn the other cartilage in that knee. Treatment was prescribed. The doctor impressed on me the necessity of keeping the muscles around the knee strong – only possible by working with weights. The disco would have to be dropped from the show for three weeks, and I’d have to wear the bandage until the swelling went away. Later I discovered that Dr Nicholas was Joe Namath’s doctor, as well as doctor for dozens of other athletes who had a knee, elbow, or foot problem. And they were followed by Nureyev, Baryshnikov…. Dr Nicholas kept me from surgery and from missing a performance, and I could never be grateful enough. I’ve been lucky so far – got through almost five years of
Applause
and a few after without a major mishap. No more taking my body – or luck! – for granted.

The first time the disco went back in the show I was very nervous. Had to think of that knee constantly, figure out where to put my weight, how to favor the right leg, without the audience being aware. I worked with weights before my daily body warm-up and I go on doing it to this very day.

One night at the interval I was told that Bette Davis was in the audience. That she had said she would come on two conditions: (1) that she did not sit up front, and (2) that there would be no pictures. I almost died. God – the creator of Margo Channing in
All About Eve
, the
definitive performance. My childhood idol was in the audience watching me play
her
part.

I had never known her well at Warner Bros. – had only seen her a few times there. I was apprehensive about meeting her afterward – about how she would feel, what she would think of the show, of me. I opened my dressing-room door in answer to her knock and there she was – my dream, my fantasy actress. Every part she had ever played – and I loved her in all of them – flashed before me.

I offered her a drink, which she declined – she had to get back to her daughter in Connecticut. She sat on a chair, not on the love seat, which might have indicated she would stay awhile. I stammered something about how ridiculous it was for me to be playing her part. She said, ‘Funny – I’d never thought of this as a musical.’ She was reserved, polite – rather closed. And I was uncomfortable. My admiration couldn’t be lessened – I was just personally uncomfortable with her. After a few more exchanges she rose to leave. Her last words were, ‘No one but you could have played this part – and you know I mean that.’ I thanked her and she left. There was so much more I had wanted to say to her, but I was too self-conscious, and her reserve kept her in check. If we’d had fifteen minutes, it might have been warmer, I might have made her realize how much her being there had meant. That woman who was the biggest woman star in motion pictures in the Thirties and Forties, Garbo notwithstanding, actually took an ad in the Hollywood trade papers saying she was looking for a job – was ready, willing, and able. That that should happen is the horror of this business.

And now she is being appreciated as she should be – saluted by her peers, her contribution to film recognized as unique. That’s part of the glory of this business.

So the months went by, the Palace Theatre filled to capacity at every performance, well-known people from all walks of life coming backstage unexpectedly. It was always rewarding, always gave me a lift. One of the most unforgettable nights that I still think about, and will always, was about six weeks after opening night. Noel Coward brought the Lunts. They stayed in the dressing room – I wouldn’t let them out. Len sitting at Lynn Fontanne’s feet – me hanging on to Alfred Lunt’s every syllable – Noel enjoying it all. Three people whose contributions had been immeasurable and everlasting. One night Paul Lukas came
aged, white-haired, still good to look at. My mentor of thirty years earlier. He was proud of me, he said. ‘So you finally have done what you set out to do.’ Sitting in my dressing room, I could picture vividly the reverse scene at the Martin Beck Theatre – all our conversations. I had forgotten nothing. And it was a good feeling, to remember.

The problem with a hit show, of course, is that the longer it runs, the harder it is to perform. Outsiders don’t understand that. To keep it fresh – to have each new audience feel you’re doing it for the first time – that is the discipline of the theatre, that’s what’s tough. No matter how you feel – sick, unhappy – you have to forget all that and just go out on the stage and do it. That’s the greatest lesson one learns, the important one.

I had decided early in
Applause
that I would not plan my social life. If someone invited me to supper a week, even days, in advance, and had to know definitely, I would reply, ‘Then don’t count on me.’ I had never lived my night life loosely, but I knew it was time for a change. How did I know if I’d feel like going out that night? Or, indeed, if I wouldn’t get a better offer? Not socially better – emotionally better. It created problems with some friends, but I decided, ‘The hell with it – I’m going to be selfish and only do what I really want to do.’ It was time in my life for that. I’d lived so many years on other people’s demands – husbands, children. It was time for me to live on my own.

My whole day was geared to that day’s performance. Not too much time on the telephone – bad for the voice. Plenty of rest – nap from four to five. Eat something on a tray – red meat preferably, but not too much – at five. Voice lesson at six. To theatre by seven for body warm-up and work with the weights. Ready to make up at eight for an eight-thirty curtain. When we were on the experimental seven-thirty curtain, everything moved up an hour. My only time to play was after the show – that was for me and I was going to keep it that way. I put out so much onstage, I had to do my own thing when that curtain came down. I’ve never regretted that choice and have continued it since. That is the extent of my self-indulgence.