My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (11 page)

I don’t know if André saw the reading, but we got a call a few days later inviting us to meet with him in his Lincoln Center office. He told us he didn’t know how much general interest there was in the world of fashion, but he offered to introduce us to a friend of his who belonged to the Cosmopolitan Club, a prestigious women’s organization. Former members included Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen Hayes.

A
FTER
F
LORA THE
R
ED
M
ENACE
,
I
WASN
’
T GOING DOWN, BUT
I wasn’t going up either. I was going on commercial auditions.

For the better part of the sixties and seventies, I traipsed up and down Madison Avenue. I told myself that it was underwriting my stage career, but it felt like my main occupation. I went on an average of fifteen auditions for every commercial I got. Some actors were getting very rich from them. Sitting in the waiting rooms, I heard about the number of spots they had made that were “in the can.” They chatted away about their farms in Bucks County, their children’s enrollment at L’Ecole Française, and their private planes.

One big irritation was the clothes. I thought one of the best things about being in the theatre, besides not having to take the subway during rush hour, was that I wouldn’t ever have to wear office clothes again. I could wear jeans and sneakers in real life, and don gowns, cocktail hats, boas, and farthingales on stage, playing countesses, spies, and madwomen. The trouble was that the characters on commercials were “real” people. I had to put my office outfits back on again. And of course to get to an audition, I had to ride the subway at rush hour because the calls were invariably at nine Monday morning or five Friday afternoon.

T
HEN THERE WAS THE BUSINESS OF MAKEUP AND HAIR
. U
NTIL
the sixties, the only makeup respectable women wore was lipstick. Lipstick was mandatory; you couldn’t leave the house without lipstick, along with the cone bra that didn’t show your nipples and the girdle that made a board of your bum. Men would actually become indignant if they noticed your lipstick had worn off, which is probably why lipstick back then was the texture of road tar. You could use face powder, because God forbid you should have a shiny nose, but that was all. Even Mrs. Vreeland wore only lipstick in those days. Then the sixties exploded, and suddenly the fashion was Cleopatra eye makeup and false eyelashes. I put on makeup for the show at night, but street makeup hadn’t been perfected yet, and applying No. 6 Max Factor base and rouge to go to auditions in the light of day made me look like a fifty-year-old prostitute.

In the seventies it got so you couldn’t go to the corner grocery without your false eyelashes. My struggles with gluing the goddamned things on usually reduced me to a sobbing wreck. By the time I finally had it down, they were out of fashion.

In the 1970s, the cry from casting offices heard ’round the world was, “What about her hair?” The requisite hairdo had become the bouffant. Or the bubble. Around this time, Vreeland began to be more visible to the outside world. She had worn her hair pulled back in a little snood until she, along with Jackie Kennedy, went to Paris and had their hair bouffant-ed by the famous hairdresser, Alexandre de Paris. Immediately everybody had to have the bouffant. There could be no wrinkles or dips in your hair, no strays, it had to be a lacquered dome. Like the hood of a car. Women with naturally kinky hair were having it ironed. When I wasn’t sleeping with anybody, I went to bed with toilet paper wrapped around my head.

Mrs. Vreeland stuck with this look forever after, even exaggerating the slight mound, the little hill at the top of the crown that was part of the bouffant. She had it regularly dyed black, so black it looked navy blue.

I attempted the bouffant at home by rolling my hair up on empty frozen orange-juice containers. In my struggle to pin it up, all the blood would rush out of my arms and I would have a breakdown. Even with an entire can of hairspray, your coif could be completely undone by the wind of an oncoming A train.

Things got surreal in the mid seventies, when the hippie revolution finally reached Madison Avenue. Ad executives were wearing jeans, beads, and long hair and the receptionist with her tie-dye and flowing locks looked like La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The waiting room was designed like a “pad,” and instead of sofas there were low poufs on which we actors in our Republican getups attempted to maintain a purchase.

Some auditions called for you to make a headache face. Or to burble like a coffee percolater. At one audition I was asked to laugh. Laugh at what? Nothing, just laugh. Make a big fool of yourself.

When I did get a job, the first thing was a call from the wardrobe department asking if I could bring in a housedress. Never mind that at this point housewives all over America were wearing jeans. A housedress? I was a New Yorker, for God’s sake! Everything in my closet was black!

The call was for 6 a.m. I came into a space the size of an airplane hangar and a crew guy sitting on a wooden box sipping coffee said, “You Talent? See Makeup, then Hair.” Makeup, an anorexic gentleman with dyed black hair and a buzz saw voice was smoking and coughing and yakking and cackling with Hair, a plump, surly woman wearing what looked like an orange fright wig. Without ceasing to yak, smoke, cackle, and cough his lungs up, Makeup motioned me to a chair, threw a plastic sheet over me, and started to jab and punch at my face with a sponge. He held my head in an arm grip as he applied mascara. My eyes kept watering. “Keep your lid up!” he yelled. “I can’t!” I yelled back. He sniffed, sniggered to Hair, “Get a load of this one.” At last he said, “Ok, you’re done.”

I looked in the mirror, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was a nice-looking woman when I came in, now my eyebrows looked like Groucho’s and my mouth was nowhere near the lipstick. I said, “Would you mind if I re-do my lips?”

“Can you believe this?” he shouted. “Can you believe the balls on this one?” His voice followed me down the hall. “She’s got some balls on her, that one.”

Actors were getting ill from having to eat Sara Lee cheesecake or drinking Vicks cough syrup over and over, thus the introduction of the “spit bucket.” Heights of tables and chairs were adjusted for camera angles, which meant sometimes I was obliged to squat for great lengths of time next to a washing machine, looking perky and delivering lines. Lines were spoken while moving the product, say a bottle of Listerine, to invisible marks in space, and walking to various tape marks on the floor without looking down. In between takes, people rushed in to stir up soap suds, squirt glycerin on spaghetti or spray a wayward hair on my stiff head. On the breaks there was no place to sit. A row of agency “suits,” happy to be out of the office, lounged in all the available chairs. The actor was the prop, the product was the star.

I ingested busloads of words by sheer force of will: “Vicks vaporizing cough syrup is a non-enteronically, alcalizing, fast-acting, germ-eradicating, doctor-tested cold medicine.” I was great at rattling them off, but if it wasn’t “in the can” before lunch, it was impossible for me to retain the words afterwards, and the rest of the afternoon was spent doing take after take after take.

At first only comedy actors did commercials. “Serious actors” wouldn’t lower themselves until they copped to the money. In the end, even Orson Welles was hawking beer and Sir Laurence Olivier, Polaroid. Every time a commercial aired you got a residual check. I didn’t make nearly as many commercials as others, but I still earned enough to install a Vicks VapoRub septic tank, dig a Cheer detergent well, and build an Excedrin deck for my house in Connecticut.

T
HERE WERE MANY TIMES WHEN
I
WAS CONVINCED MY STAGE
career was over and that I needed to find some other kind of work, but there was nothing else I was any good at. In one long fallow period, I decided I would go into the landscaping business. I worked with an insane Frenchman planting ornamental evergreens in the pouring rain and mud. Another time I thought I might teach acting at the local college, SUNY New Paltz, and I went to an interview with the head of the drama department. He effectively prevented me from submitting my résumé by giving me his critiques of current Broadway plays, pelting me with names like Betty Buckley and Patti LuPone while sitting at a desk in a small clearing of a jungle of men’s suits and coats; apparently the men’s costume department.

I spent a year in a writing course at Columbia University. The professor encouraged my writing, but when he announced to the class one day, “You can’t do it alone!” I was daunted. On another seemingly interminable hiatus, in a moment of incipient hysteria I walked into a secretarial hiring office and tried to talk to the lady behind the desk, explaining in low, modest terms that I was an actress, but I had been a secretary before that and now would like to get back into that line of work. The lady didn’t seem to hear me. It was as if I was air. I can’t explain it. I think I must have been whispering. I drifted out the door.

T
HE LAST TIME
I
HAD THE TEMERITY TO COLLECT AN UNEMPLOYMENT
check was in 1984. I was able to register near my house upstate, I only had to go into the office once, and the rest of the time the checks were mailed to me. As it happened, the one time I had to show up at the office I was in the city the night before. I got up at dawn the next day, put the cat in the car along with a thermos of coffee, and took off. Halfway up the parkway, I started to open the thermos and lost control of the car. We did a U-turn and ended up in the middle of the road facing oncoming traffic. Thank God at that hour there wasn’t any, but I got out with my cat and stood on the curb, hysterical. A surly cop emerged out of nowhere, stood there while I turned the car around, and gave me a $100 ticket. However, this brush with mortality galvanized me to go home and write about actors and unemployment, which eventually turned into an article published in the Arts & Leisure section of
The New York Times
.

The first time I collected unemployment insurance was in 1957, and it was a weekly trip to Dante’s Inferno. The office was a whole floor of a building on Rector Street. We called it “Rectal Street” because when you walked in you were assailed by the odor of diarrhea. The grim-faced staff displayed the attitude that anybody who was unemployed was ipso facto a bum. In the fifties, waves of Puerto Ricans were arriving in the city and looking for work, and the staff had no knowledge of Spanish and no idea how to deal with them. Lines led up to the counter where you signed for your weekly check. When you finally got up there, the lady behind the counter barked, “Did you work last week?” “No.” “Are you ready to work?” “Yes.” “Are you willing to work?” “Yes.” “Are you able to work?” “Yes.” I was terrified that they would make me take an office job. I had just escaped from office jobs.

If you missed your assigned day or time to report, you were sent to Section B. You didn’t want to go to Section B. You could be sent to Section B for no reason you knew and sit there all afternoon. Low moans came from Section B. Patricia Brooks, a beautiful soprano I knew who was eight months pregnant, was sent to Section B. After an hour she stood up and announced, “You think I’m not able to work?” then threw her head back and let out a gorgeous High C.

I
T SEEMS TO BE A GIVEN THAT THE CALL FOR A JOB ONLY COMES
after you’ve surrendered and bought a one-way ticket to Paris or enrolled in medical school. It seems as if it always must interfere with something else. With what, I ask myself? Isn’t acting my life? But what is that other stuff called, those long stretches in between? When an actor’s working, you’re told where to be at what time, what to wear, what to say, and who you are. Then when the show’s over you’re suddenly stripped of all these directives. No reason to get out of bed. I once told Mac Dixon I thought the most important thing an actor can have to survive was a low rent. Mac disagreed. He said the most important thing is having something else you love to do. I have a garden.

A
FTER EACH PERFORMANCE OF
F
ULL
G
ALLOP
,
WE WOULD GET A
surge of new ideas and go back to working on the script. But there were long periods—months—when there was no prospect of a gig, and we spent all our time trying to peddle the play. This was one hell of an operation, believe me. Email didn’t exist in the eighties. Computers were barely in use, and getting a script together was no minor feat. Mark knew how to use a computer, but they had incompatible systems. Sometimes whole pages disappeared with no hope of retrieval, and drafts and rewrites were impossible to keep track of. We went absolutely nuts. But Mark somehow always managed to turn out a crisp new copy with a nice cover to mail to each person. It was expensive and labor intensive and a huge distraction from writing. Not to mention deeply depressing. Those few times we got a response, we were told it had been handed over to somebody who, we knew, would put it at the bottom of a ten-foot stack of submitted scripts. So many alleys we went up were dead-ends. It hadn’t occurred to me how little clout I would have, less than a stranger’s.

We spent weeks, sometimes months, bereft of inspiration. We had staring contests. Then we went out and ate a lunch someplace that left us even more stupefied. But we kept on showing up. I often think if either one of us had called and said we couldn’t make it that day, it all might have crumbled into dust.