My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (20 page)

Bonnie Franklin had won a Tony for her appearance in the Broadway musical
Applause
. I didn’t see the show, but apparently she sang and danced on tabletops, and now she was our foremost authority on Broadway and she liked to talk about “acting beats.” Having been in that world myself for some twenty years, her pronouncements on these subjects tended to add bitters to my gall.

My character was Ginny Wrobliki, cocktail waitress. I wanted to see the script before rehearsals started but was told it was under wraps until the first read-through. What the hell was in it? Atomic secrets? When we sat down around the table, I opened it and read my first line: “Hello girls.” This being the first time to see them, I read the lines without much inflection. On the lunch break, the casting lady, Marion Dougherty, bustled in, took me aside, and told me the producers had caught Lear just as he was boarding a plane to tell him that I wasn’t funny. He sent back a message for me, “Just yell your lines.” So I yelled them for the rest of the day.

I was trapped in some kind alternative universe. Instead of increased concentration, time slowed; after the first reading, the next four days were spent in a sunny studio doing camera blocking: walk here, sit on couch, move to door, move to chair, the cast goofing their way through it. The only break in the tedium came when somebody brought in the show’s weekly ratings. The cast was instantly galvanized. Everything stopped while they were pored over.

This was a four-camera show; you said your line when the red light on the camera went on. I come in the door and say “Hello girls” to camera one, and there follows a pause longer than the river Styx before the light on camera four goes on and Valerie Bertinelli says, “Hi Ginny.” I was used to the George Abbott school of lickety-split delivery.

Ginny’s waitress getup was a bustier, a tutu, black mesh stockings, and stiletto heels. This costume was no doubt suggested by my skimpy attire as Tessie Tura in
Gypsy,
where Lear first saw me. I look pretty cute to me now when I see re-runs, but at the time I felt utterly ridiculous.

Lear showed up for the taping of my first show. An actor I knew, Tom Lacy, was playing a sleazy rug salesman. Lear got a rubber cigar stub for him to jam in the corner of his mouth, and in a scene where we had an argument, he gave me the line, “What is that? A growth?” Huge laugh. It was the only laugh I recall getting that wasn’t based on holding up a pair of pantyhose or saying, “You turkey.” What was it with this “You turkey” line anyway? I was told it was a saying of the Fonz’s on
Happy Days,
a big hit in the seventies.

On most theater stages the actors are not seen until the curtain rises when they are revealed as the characters they’re playing. In television, just before the show begins, the cast runs out front in their bathrobes pumping their arms like prizefighters to the cheers of the audience. Then, “Places, please!” Time suddenly speeds up. A man with headphones standing next to you holding fingers in your face hisses, “Four! Three! Two! And go!” No time to think, much less clear your throat. Through the door, then “Hello girls,” then all the air goes out of the balloon again waiting for camera four. Things get slower than real life.

We do two shows a night in front of two different audiences. The physical space between them and the set is filled with television cameras, cranes, and crew; they sit in bleachers watching us on suspended televisions. The shows are taped and live laughter is supplemented with canned when needed. The point is, the laughs must come at regular intervals.

We do the shows with a forty-minute dinner break in between. During dinner, any jokes that didn’t get laughs are cut and we’re handed rewrites. Now and then I get a laugh on a line not written to be funny, and the writers, somewhat suspicious, look at me: “Hey, you got a laugh there!”

Lear hired New York actors as guests to appear on the show every week; I greeted each one like a soul from a distant star. Mac Dixon of
Stewed Prunes
played a drunk that the daughter played by Mackenzie Phillips was trying to rehabilitate. Sitting at the breakfast table, he picked up a glass of orange juice in his violently shaking hand and the juice sloshed up into the air and hovered there for what seemed like an eternity before returning to the glass without a drop spilled. He did this not once but four times, two rehearsals and two shows. He also picked up his coffee each time with the tip of his necktie draped over the lip of the cup.

While Mac was in L.A., he looked up his idol Buster Keaton in the phone book, and there he was: “B. Keaton.” He went to visit him.

I was asked several times to stay after the last show for “reaction shots.” “React to what?” I barked. “Just react,” they said. I didn’t get it. I finally watched an episode: I’m saying my lines in my quick style and the camera is on and off me in a flash while it lingers seemingly forever on the others’ faces, particularly Bonnie Franklin’s. They were reacting. The whole bloody show was reacting. I can still see in my mind those interminable closeups of Bonnie Franklin’s face, the Dutch-boy bob, the dimpled chin thrust up, and those tiny, slightly crossed eyes registering mild disgust.

So here I was in a show with no funny lines and no character to play. I was subletting a beige shoebox with one window overlooking Highland Avenue in West Hollywood, just down the street from where the Black Dahlia murder victim was found. I learned the hard way not to call actors I knew from New York who were living here. They were not glad to hear from me; in fact they were downright rude. Maybe it was the note of hysterical loneliness in my voice. There is no easy way, in any case, to socialize in L.A., since you have to drive miles to get anywhere, and when you get there there’s no place to park.

I was weeping around the clock. I drove around in my Rent-A-Wreck VW Beetle, crying my head off. Pulling up at stoplights, drivers on either side stared in disbelief. I was weeping over the frozen-food bin in Hughes Market when an actor from New York came around the corner. “Hey! You out here, too? Isn’t this great?” “Oh great! Great!” “What are you doing?” “Oh,
One Day at a Time
…” “Great! I’m on
All in the Family
!” “Great!!!” As soon as he disappeared I went back to weeping over the frozen food.

I felt terribly wrong to be so miserable. I knew this was the kind of break actors longed for. I saw the way people, even my own parents, reacted after seeing me on “the tube”—they didn’t care about the quality of the work, I was famous! So what the hell was my problem? I couldn’t fathom my own inhibition.

Aside from Lear, nobody thought I was funny. Hollywood’s idea of funny wasn’t mine. I felt stripped of my one strength, my one ace in the hole. To make matters worse, each character, according to the show’s formula, had to have a “serious” moral dilemma at some point, and I was given some problem about an illegitimate child to work out in these embarrassingly sentimental scenes that made my bowels shrink. After a few weeks, I asked to see Lear. He sweetly took my hand and told me that when the ferociously funny stage actress Nancy Walker first started on his show
Rhoda,
she was unhappy, too, but she eventually found her sea legs.

Before coming out to L.A., I had won a lucrative four-year contract with Maxwell House Coffee playing the niece of the former Wicked Witch of the West in
The Wizard of Oz,
Margaret Hamilton. Miss Hamilton was the official Maxwell House spokeswoman, chortling “Good to the last drop!” When she broke her hip, the sponsors cynically invented a clone niece, just in case, and I won the part by doing a perfect imitation of her. A year later, when I appeared on
One Day at a Time
dressed in a bustier, tutu, and fishnets, I was called to a meeting with a man from Maxwell House who informed me that the contract had to be terminated. My agent argued that Nancy Walker was on
Rhoda,
while simultaneously doing her Bounty paper-towel commercials in which she famously snapped, “Bounty. The quicker picker-upper.” The man from Maxwell House carefully explained that coffee was not a “demonstrable” product. There was no way to show that their coffee was better than any other except through the believability of the character. I noticed that the man from Maxwell House was wearing a necktie decorated with little coffee cups spilling their last drops.

At the end of the first season of
One Day at a Time,
I came back to New York and made a lunch date with Richard, my agent. While waiting in the restaurant, I noticed a weird-looking guy in a big fuzzy hat coming through the door. He came over to the table. It was Richard. For years we had been conferring mostly by phone. Anyway, I told him how miserable I was, and he patiently explained the value of doing the show. I would come back to New York with a bigger name and be up for bigger stage roles. I took this in. He was flying to the coast the next morning to see Lear about me and another client, and he told me to think about it and let him know. Dumbbell that I was, I had not realized the effect television could have on a stage career. After mulling it over, I decided to stick with the show. I called Richard’s hotel in L.A. the next evening. I forgot that it was three hours earlier out there. It was only three when he landed, and he had already seen Lear that afternoon, told him I was unhappy, and Lear, gent that he is, had released me.

I was relieved, but filled with guilt. Like a murderer. Not long ago, while brushing my teeth, it suddenly came to me what I could have played: Tessie Tura! All I had to do was play Tessie’s disdain—
“I don’t do no scenes. Now go screw.”
The disdain I already so deeply felt for the whole proceeding. Then I could have made music with lines like “Hello girls,” or “You turkey,” whatever they threw at me. But I didn’t think of it. I had tortured myself and whoever else would listen, howling about having nothing to play, and the answer had been staring me in the face.

M
AUDE
WAS THE SERIES
I
WOULD LIKE TO HAVE BEEN ON
. I
T
starred Bea Arthur, a woman who could make you laugh saying, “Pass the salt.” I knew Bea from the old days. She had a voice like a tuba. It was a sonic boom from some underground cavern that instantly triggered hilarity in the listener. She came to a matinee of
Hot Spot,
and afterwards, sitting with her at a table within earshot of Judy Holliday’s table, I asked what she thought of the show. She immediately boomed, “A faggot’s fart in a windstorm.”

While I was in
Gypsy,
I got a call to do a guest spot on
Maude,
which was in its first season. Because I was Angela’s understudy, the producers didn’t want to give me the time off, but I begged and they finally relented, and I bought them all expensive thank-you gifts, and then the call came from L.A. that they were “going in a different direction.” They cast the actress Elizabeth Wilson in the guest spot instead. I was heartbroken.

Elizabeth Wilson and I could not be more different, but as far as Los Angeles was concerned, we seemed to be interchangeable.

Years later, I got a call to fly out at the last minute to replace somebody on an episode of
Maude,
and that somebody turned out to be Elizabeth Wilson. “Get that other Wilson girl!” The character was supposed to drop dead on the show, and they said Elizabeth “couldn’t die funny.”

At last I was going to be on
Maude
! I joked to Marion Dougherty that dropping dead didn’t bode well for my future appearances on the show and she shot back, “It doesn’t matter, because this is the last one.”

I
NO SOONER ESCAPED FROM
O
NE
D
AY AT A
T
IME
THAN
I
WENT INTO
The Importance of Being Earnest
at the Circle in the Square Theater, now uptown at 50th Street. Elizabeth Wilson, that “other Wilson girl,” was Lady Bracknell and I was Prism. The beautiful Kathleen Widdoes played Cecily. Our director had a slight problem with narcolepsy. During rehearsals one day Kathleen stopped and sweetly said to him, “Steven, is there anything we could do to make you less sleepy?” We had beautiful costumes made by Ann Roth. She made me a bosom of lentil beans so that, when pressed, gave a little. Following our dress rehearsal, Circle’s head Ted Mann stood up and said “Folks, I’ve just seen the most fabulous show,”—we all inhaled with pleasure—he continued “across the street.
Beatlemania
!”

Playing Prism after the scanty meal of Ginny Wrobliki was sheer delight. I had no scruples about emulating the great Dame Margaret Rutherford who played the part on the London stage as well as in the film. A story I heard about the stage production inspired me: apparently the director kept complaining about whispering going on during the rehearsal until it was explained to him that it was Dame Margaret sitting upstage talking to her handbag. The
Times
review of our
Earnest
opened with the line “[The director] could direct this play with his eyes closed.” We posted it backstage. Kathleen and I became good friends during and after the show as Village neighbors. I loved her for her kindness, her cooking, her flaunting the rules, her playfulness. Backstage in the “voms” i.e., the dark connecting passageways underneath the seats, we enjoyed hiding and scaring the hell out of each other.

M
ORE THAN ANY AUDIENCE
, I
DEARLY WANTED THE APPROVAL OF
my fellow actors. I wanted allegiance; no upstaging, no eye crossing, no scene stealing. I imagined there was a group somewhere, a club of mutually admiring performers that excluded me.

On the other hand, I felt I could never be in their circle. I was the perpetual outsider.

In rehearsals for a production of
Alice in Wonderland
at the Public Theater, with Meryl Streep as Alice and a pride of established theater actors including Elizabeth Wilson as the White Queen, we had been coerced by the child director into weeks of improvisation; we squawked like birds and rolled around on the floor like lobsters. Crawling around on the floor caused us to become strangely vulnerable to each other. In spite of ourselves we were bound together like galley slaves. It was a reluctant intimacy. In the middle of a conversation one day, the Queen of Hearts, Olympia Dukakis, burst into tears and moaned, “I’m always alone! I’m never part of anything!” It thrilled me. Olympia was not yet a film star, but she was a busy stage actor and teacher. Her words were mine: Always alone. Separate.