My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (14 page)

Another tour buddy was Rex Robbins, who played Herbie. We had worked together in Julius Monk revues. On previous tours Rex had befriended local citizens in every town, and they would invite him to dine with them. I was appalled by the idea of spending time with the locals, but in Oklahoma City he persuaded me to come along with a couple who took us to dinner in a revolving restaurant on top of the tallest building in town, which was maybe ten floors high. As the restaurant turned, we viewed a gas tank, an empty field, and a couple of cows.

In L.A., Rex persuaded me to go with him on our dinner break between shows to a pool party given by a woman we knew from our Julius Monk days. He said there would be plenty of food. As we drove up, the woman gestured to us from behind a tall fence to come through the gate. This was the seventies, remember: we entered just as a nude guy rose from his lawn chair and strolled to the bar with a leaf stuck to his bottom. All the guests were nude, including our hostess, who had a horrifying scar across her belly. I struggled not to stare—it was like trying not to notice a boa constrictor. Everybody was not looking anywhere, faking nonchalance. Rex sportingly wore a small towel, I clung to my bikini. But what infuriated me most was that there was nothing to eat besides salsa and chips.

W
HEN GIVEN A CHOICE OF DRESSING ROOMS
, I
OPT FOR EITHER A
private or a ward. During the New York run of
Gypsy
at the Winter Garden Theater, Sally, Denny, the new Mazeppa Gloria Rossi, and I asked to share a dressing room, which was ideal. We could be silent when we chose or gab our heads off. We had a wonderful time together. No semiprivates; I was once trapped in a dressing room in a long run of
How to Succeed in Business
with one other person and her telephone, and her endless conversations combined with the piped-in music of Burt Bacharach was my idea of hell on earth. A ward is the best; the play always goes better when all the actors are in the same room. All in the same room and all paid the same. Things go wonderfully well onstage.

The de Lys dressing room was a narrow galley divided into stalls. It was up a steep flight of stairs and you had to squeeze past the enormous, grim-faced wardrobe woman sitting like Cerberus at the top. She scared the hell out of me. The pay phone was on the wall over her head; actors just leaned into her immovable bulk to make calls. Opening night telegrams were sent to former cast members who had moved on; every time the same message: “A warm hand on your opening.” Foul language, raspberries, and fart noises flew between the stalls; I felt like Bo Peep in their midst. It was a breeding ground for the raunch required onstage.

Performing
Royal Family
in Washington, the Kennedy Center dressing rooms were chilly, bathroom-tiled cells a few floors below the theater. You took an elevator. The elevator was as big as a living room, I suppose for deploying scenery as well as actors; it moved at the speed of a snail. I was filled with angst; I couldn’t imagine how to gauge the time I would need to make my cue. When it finally let me off, I was in the middle of a vast space, empty except for a basketball court; in the distance I could make out the tiny box of the stage area itself. I ended up hanging around in the wings when offstage.

On the television show
One Day at a Time,
my dressing room was a brown cubicle with a sofa, table, and lamp. Air occasionally blew in through a vent in the wall. In the expectation of making the place more personal, I left my toothbrush and a book behind, but it turned out the rooms were used by actors on other shows on other days. I spent centuries in that hole during tech rehearsals, lying on the hard sofa, smoking jays, in an existential drift.

The hallway leading from my dressing room to the set was lined with doors opening onto offices with people busily shoving things into printers and typing away, not even glancing up as I wobbled past in my stiletto heels and tootsie getup. What these offices were doing there I have no idea. I could have passed by wearing nothing but the stilettos and they still wouldn’t have looked up.

W
HEN THE
G
YPSY
TOUR BEGAN TO HEAD BACK TOWARD
B
ROADWAY
, I started to obsess about what I would wear to the opening night party at Sardi’s. I was forty-one, I had a great role in a hit show, and I was flush with money, so I decided that what I needed was a mink coat. Stuck in my mind was the image of Bette Davis in
All About Eve
, half into her mink and wearing one diamond earring. The quintessential Broadway actress. What was she wearing underneath? I don’t know, who cares? So in Chicago, Philly, D.C., and Boston, I visited fur salons with Sally—Sally, of course, knew a great deal about furs. She knew about pelts. We sat on a sofa while the salesman slapped furs down on the carpet and wiggled them backwards so we could examine the pelts. We must have looked at a hundred minks. I couldn’t find the classic Bette Davis style. Finally, in that desperate sweat when you are about to spend an obscene amount of money on something you know in your heart isn’t the One, I chose a princess-style mink with sable cuffs and collar. Beautiful, but not really me.

Opening night came, I put on my mink and sailed into Sardi’s. The hat-check girl tried to take it from me. I demurred, went to my table. After fifteen minutes I was suffocating. I realized that I wouldn’t be able to eat without dipping a sable cuff into the marinara sauce, so I had to take it off. Underneath I was wearing a boring little black jersey dress.

This is when I learned a valuable rule: Before you buy an expensive item, remember that it’s going to require maintenance. Manhattan was crime-ridden in the seventies. I was afraid my apartment might get robbed so I got one of the
Gypsy
carpenters to build a secret panel into my closet to hide the mink. The only problem was that there was a hot water pipe in the wall, and it was pointed out to me that heat was death to mink. This was around the time I was getting calls every other week to fly to L.A. for television tests. I took the mink with me in a pillowcase. It was easy because, really, you cannot imagine how lightweight real fur is.

And really, until you have slept under it in sub-zero weather, you have no idea how warm real fur can be.

The
Gypsy
tour ended just before Christmas. Denny and I set out to spend the holiday at my house upstate. We started off in unusually mild weather, but as we drove north the temperature began to plummet. There was no heat in my little VW Beetle. Snow was falling in buckets. We had to stop talking because our breath was fogging up the windshield. Finally we reached the house, slogged through ten-foot drifts to the front door, stepped inside, and were greeted by the sound of gushing water and a freezing interior. The furnace was off and pipes had burst. Nothing cut the cold out until we were huddled nose to nose under the mink. That silly mink saved our lives. Eventually, having no place to wear it, I sold it to the Ritz Thrift Shop on West 57th Street.

M
ARK AND
I
WERE FINDING MORE AND MORE ARTICLES ABOUT
Vreeland with quotes from people who knew her:

W
E NEEDED TO COMPOSE CONNECTIVE TISSUE BETWEEN THE
stories. We needed to re-create Vreeland’s idiosyncratic speech. I thought of the famous monologist Ruth Draper. I actually saw her perform at a matinee on Broadway soon after I arrived in the city. I was completely entranced. I couldn’t believe it when I heard on the radio three days later that she had died. It was a tremendous thing that somebody thought to make recordings of her monologues. The list of people who love her is long and disparate: Mike Nichols, Lily Tomlin, Charles Busch, Julie Harris, Tom Waits, John Gielgud and Uta Hagen were just a few of her fans.

I knew by heart Draper’s sublime monologue, “The Italian Lesson.” The society matron’s conversation is littered with references to jade eggs, brass frogs, yellow lamp shades, golf clubs, pigeon pie, camembert cheese, Dante, Virgil, and puppies. Vreeland, who had the bottoms of her shoes polished and her money ironed, was similarly preoccupied with detail.

I liked also the Orson Welles school of action, beginning in mid-stream, so I wanted, as the lights came up on the empty living room, to hear Vreeland’s voice offstage giving orders:

A
S THE RESULT OF A CASUAL REFERENCE TO OUR PLAY ON A BUS
from upstate to Manhattan, we managed to get a one-night gig at a benefit in the city. Margot Harley, head of the Acting Company, was sitting next to Mark Chmiel, an actor friend of mine. She happened to mention she was looking for something to present and Mark, bless him, mentioned my play and she remembered seeing the reading at the Cosmopolitan Club.

B
EFORE THIS READING
, I
SCREWED MY NERVE TO THE STICKING
place and telephoned Paul Huntley, the undisputed king of wig design. Before Paul had arrived from England, wigs were made out of horse hair, and everybody who wore them looked like Princess Tonawanda, even the men. Actors tended not to wear wigs at all unless they were playing Hawaiians. After Paul arrived on the scene, productions of all sizes, types, and periods started using wigs. His creations were transforming. As Miss Prism in a production of
The Importance of Being Earnest,
he gave me pale, thinning wisps. I appeared to be slightly balding. As First Witch, he gave me a long, tangled mane. So I called him: might he have an old hank of hair lying around somewhere that I could use to play Vreeland for this performance?

“Well, darling,” he said in his lovely British accent, “Is this for charity?” I said it was, and he said, “Well then, why don’t I just make you a wig?”

He not only made it, he came to the performance to put it on me. That wig was utterly transforming. In his hands it looked like a little marmoset; on my head, I was Vreeland. It strengthened my faltering belief that this play was really going to happen.

I wore this wig through all the proceeding productions. After the yearlong run off Broadway, when I left to reprise it in England, Paul refurbished it and stuck a beautiful little tortoise-shell comb in the little hump at the top.

I
WAS PERFORMING ON A SET FOR ANOTHER PLAY, BUT WE MANAGED
to get a proper sofa arranged on it. At this point we hadn’t staged it, I was still just sitting there, talking.

We needed to hire a maid. We asked a friend of a friend of Mark’s. I’ve forgotten her name. My only memory of her was her complaint later that she caught a bad cold that night, and for weeks afterwards we heard how it developed into the flu and then pneumonia, and from there to a long hospital stay. I knew it would be hard to find anybody aside from a complete nut to play this role.

The house was packed and they roared. Afterwards people surrounded me. It was a thrilling night. I thought we were surely launched. A producer I knew, Edgar Rosenblum, was there, and I fished, “Well, what did you think?” He smiled enigmatically and said, “Ditch the maid.”

A
FTER THE
J
UILLIARD READING
, M
ARK AND
I
WERE RUNNING UP
all avenues, looking under rocks for anybody who might have the slightest connection with Mrs. Vreeland or fashion, and could help us get produced. The fashion people we approached either refused to speak to us or were extremely amenable, like Boaz Mazor who worked for Oscar de la Renta. Boaz Mazor is, as quoted by others, “One of the nicest men in New York Society, one of the nicest in International Society, one of the nicest in the world.” And he was lovely to us. We made friends with D.D. Ryan, a socialite who worshiped Vreeland. We never knew what Vreeland thought of D.D. She affected a Japanese-mask look: chalk white makeup, hair dyed black-black, parted in the middle and pulled tight on her skull into braids. Lips scarlet, of course. I remembered seeing her in the audience at Julius Monk’s shows. She had seen us at Bay Street and was very moved. She showed me the right shoes to wear for Vreeland. Mark and I met her for lunch at Shun Lee a few times. But there was no future for our play there. Generally, fashion people have a deaf eye for theater. They deal in surfaces. The ones who were interested could only conceive of our play as a commercial for a fashion show. We were always looking for backers, but I realize now, fashion people are always looking for backers for themselves.