My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (21 page)

We rehearsed on one whole floor of a loft building. The director sat cross-legged on the floor; she had recently had a big hit with a cast of children. Most of us were well into our middle years. I was damned if I was going to sit on the floor. There were a couple of wheeled office chairs in the loft; I commandeered one and the fine unsung actor, John Christopher Jones, got the other; I seem to recall that Chris kept his raincoat on the entire time.

I watched Meryl improvise the scene where Alice drinks from the bottle marked “drink me” and suddenly grows huge. She let out a terrifying scream, “WHAT’S HAPPENING TO ME?!” and instantly I saw the onslaught of puberty and the frightening changes that entailed.

Each day this child/director brought in a few paragraphs of Lewis Carroll’s words set to a tune and played it for us to learn. There was a minor insurrection one day when some actors complained of not being singers, not being able to hit some of the notes. The director’s response was to tell us that when the composer Charles Ives found a broken tuba lying under a tree, he composed music for it. Silence, then Olympia, slowly, lowly growled, “Are you saying that we are broken tubas?”

After weeks of breaking us down again and again, Joe Papp stopped by, smoked a cigar, and talked and talked. Finally, Olympia interrupted: “Joe, are you firing us?” He was. He fired us. All but Meryl and three others. Some of us were crying. Joe looked at me: “You’re crying!” He was shocked. He must have thought I was a very tough broad. It was ten in the morning. We who’d been let go repaired to the bar downstairs, then Olympia walked across town to the West Village with me, buying a loaf of Zito’s bread on the way. She sat in a chair in my apartment, ate the whole loaf, went into the john and threw up, then went home.

Actors are generally most friendly after the show they were in together has closed. Especially if the show was a bomb.

For a week or so after
Alice,
Elizabeth Wilson and I talked on the phone. She told me all about her sisters, her life, and I thought with pleasure, We’re going to be friends! But it didn’t last.

I couldn’t understand it when actors were unwilling to be friendly. I took it personally. I think now the truth is there are actors who are naturally exclusive and other actors who are naturally inclusive. It’s that simple.

I’m in the theater to hang out with actors. I go to the theater to see actors. They amaze me. They thrill me. I think, My God, how did they do that? A single gesture in a play can illuminate a whole world.

I once saw Nancy Walker in a production of T.S. Eliot’s
The Cocktail Party,
a morbid drawing-room drama. Walker played the grande dame, the Dame Sybil Thorndike role. Seated on the sofa in her furs, her feet barely touched the floor. I was feeling bad for her, and then the butler proffered her a tray of canapés, causing her to peremptorily flip her hand at him. I gasped. That hand flip was so funny and so much bigger than the entire rest of the evening. I thought, That’s what sets comedy apart from drama. It’s just as real, but bigger.

You may have guessed by now that I am mad about great comediennes. Beatrice Lillie in
Ziegfeld Follies
in the fifties: the curtains opened on a seraglio; houri girls swiveled around the stage, and up in a turret stage left a tenor in a turban warbled some
Arabian Nights
ballad. Above the set was a series of arches; a few moments went by and then Miss Lillie appeared in one of the arches holding a box of Kleenex. She turned around and went back in. Moments later, she came out another arch without the Kleenex. She looked vaguely around, came down the stairs, sat down on a lounge with many pillows and started trying to arrange the pillows. There was absolutely nothing going on, but the audience was laughing hysterically. Lillie’s feet were funny. At one point in
High Spirits,
the musical version of Noël Coward’s play
Blithe Spirit,
she was behind a screen and the sight of her bunny slippers set the audience off.

Ruth Gordon’s mouth as Dolly Levi in
The Matchmaker,
the play that became the musical
Hello, Dolly!
—those red, red lips with the lines radiating out from them were practically the heart of the play. Every time they opened, you knew another lie was about to be spoken.

An interesting side note: Nancy Walker was not a pretty woman; she was short and stocky with a horse face, but she dressed like a beautiful dame: fox furs, slinky, low-cut dresses, and fuck-me shoes.

Bea Lillie was dapper and immaculate, her hair perennially pulled back into a toque.

Once on the lingerie floor of Saks Fifth Avenue, waiting for the elevator, I noticed this chic little woman standing next to me. She was humming. She turned and smiled a little closed-mouth smile at me. That mouth! Ruth Gordon! Another not-beautiful actress beautifully dressed. She loved clothes so much she wrote about them in her memoirs. I get that.

B
Y THE LATE
1970
S
H
UGH WAS CHAIRMAN OF THE
E
NGLISH
D
EPARTMENT
at Wagner College and he and Phyllis lived together. They were married for about ten minutes in the early sixties and then divorced, and then a few years later he moved into her 12th Street apartment and they stayed together for the rest of their lives. He never pretended he wasn’t gay—one of his most attractive traits was his lack of pretense—he never had a boyfriend; sex was always with strangers.

On weekends in Connecticut, I socialized with their circle of married couples, me the odd woman out. The scales fell from my eyes one night at a dinner party. We were all pretty squiffed. Instead of my wonderful brother, I suddenly saw a fat-bellied, pontificating old fool. He was starting to look and sound like Mummy. When he began to aim thinly veiled insults at a houseguest of mine, I told him to shut up. “What?” he said.

“I said shut up.”

He then hauled off and socked me in the eye. This was the fight we should have had when we were kids. He called up the next day abject, apologizing, but I told him I couldn’t be around him anymore. I knew, dimly, that I had to break away. He was very angry. I was now the enemy. We stopped speaking for several years. Eventually I sold the Connecticut house and moved to an old farmhouse in upstate New York.

Weird fact: We lived next door to each other in the country and in the city. All during the years we were estranged, I heard him yawn every morning through the apartment wall.

F
OOLS
IS ABOUT STUPID PEASANTS, AND PROBABLY THE ONLY PLAY
of Neil Simon’s I rarely hear mentioned. It’s very funny, but it bombed, I think, because his audience, upper-class New Yorkers, couldn’t identify with retarded peasants. I read for the stupid wife. This was the rare occasion when an audition went well: my stupid husband ordered me to “lower my voice” and I instantly bent my knees, which delighted Neil. The stupid husband was played by Harold Gould, a wonderfully eccentric actor; in rehearsals he was forever trying to work out the illogic of these peasants, muttering to the air, “If I wash my face with fish, then I would probably use fish to clean my shoes,” etc.

Neil Simon was fun to watch during rehearsals. He sat along the wall looking into the distance, his lips moving, testing out funny lines. If Neil Simon could have his way, his actors would not move. He felt any action was a distraction from his lines. He even complained about the set being too distracting: “It looks like a gingerbread house,” he moaned. I had a Hula-Hoop in my skirt that drove him mad.

There were problems with the script, and at some point Mike Nichols was brought in to fix things. There were scenes in the play when Gould had a funny line or action and my character had no response. Gould at one point shut the door in my face, and my response as given in the script was simply to re-enter. Since everything these characters did was counterintuitive, I decided to pull the door instead of push, and finally climb in through the transom. Neil hated it but Mike loved it. Each day as we rehearsed the rewrites, he gave me more and more funny things to do. Once during this period, Mike pulled me under the backstage stairs and whispered, “I adore you.” Naturally, I was thrilled out of my mind. I looked up and my erstwhile friend Pamela Reed who played the ingénue was standing there watching us. She grabbed me: “What did he tell you?” Like an idiot I told her, and the next day with everybody onstage she called to Mike, “Hey Mike, who else do you adore?”

It was thrilling to be directed by Mike Nichols; he came out with these insights in rehearsals that illuminated everything. And the best thing about him was his love of funny women.

I
’
M PRETTY SURE
N
ICHOLS SUGGESTED ME TO
W
OODY
A
LLEN TO
play his evil sister in
Zelig
. I didn’t get a script; Allen was famous for not letting anybody see his scripts, but then, I didn’t have any lines.

Before filming began, I was called in for a costume check. The genius Santo Loquasto was doing the costumes. I may not have had lines, but I had an extensive wardrobe. This test day I was put into an outfit and taken up some stairs to a makeup room for Allen’s approval. Allen was sitting in the makeup chair, watching a ballgame on television. When he turned to check out my outfit, half his face was black with big lips and bushy black brows. I went away, put on another costume, and came back. This time he was putty-faced with Asian eyes. I couldn’t control myself, I burst out laughing. I learned later that
Zelig
was about a man who turned into whomever he was with; if he was introduced to an African-American he turned into an African-American, if he was with an Asian, etc. I played his evil sister and was seen with him in countless newsreel shots.

On the first day of shooting, Allen turned to me and said, “Don’t act!” I shot back, “Don’t worry!” And that was about the extent of our conversation. Over the next couple of months, I climbed in and out of several Hispano-Suizas with him without exchanging a word. Now and then an inadvertent giggle escaped me. Nerves.

There were a lot of crowd scenes in
Zelig
. One day, the streets of Bensonhurst were teeming with Hasidim in black hats, and the next day they were filled with Nazi soldiers. It was like living inside a Woody Allen dream. One location was the enormous lobby of an old movie palace in some outer borough. I was costumed and told to wait. Hours went by; I fell asleep on somebody’s coat in a van. Around 3
A.M
., I was shaken awake and escorted into the theater. The lobby was jammed with two hundred extras in evening wear, and every single one of them was holding a lit cigarette.

When I wasn’t in the shot, there was no designated place to hang out other than the street. One day the crowd was milling around in drab thirties costumes when the lunch break was called, and a guy on a dolly high above us with a bullhorn started yelling: “Move back against the wall! Back against the wall!” He was trying to get the principals in line before the extras, but it felt a bit too reminiscent of another time. I was also in a drab thirties getup, and when the bullhorn tried to herd me back with the crowd I barked, “I am not an extra!” It sounded in my ears like, “I am not a Jew!”

Fortunately, I knew the makeup lady, Fern, from another job. Fern and Romaine, the hair lady, rescued me. Fern and Romaine were known as the Lettuce Sisters. They let me hang out in their trailer and filled me in on the script.

Another time we were in a holding area in a school basement in some suburb, when I looked across the room and saw Hitler sitting there. Suddenly he saw me and, waving excitedly, shouted, “Mary Loueese! Hi!”

U
NDOUBTEDLY THE STANDOUT FOR LOUSY FILM EXPERIENCES WAS
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
. I was hired for three days’ work on location in Edna, Texas. I had just finished playing a featured role on Broadway, so perhaps I went down there with a slightly inflated level of self-worth. I was to play a nervous townswoman in one big scene.

The actors were put up in a motel on a lone stretch of highway about an hour and forty minutes from the set. This was Texas; from motel to set we drove past one man’s ranch the whole way. I was picked up at dawn and sent to Hair and Makeup’s trailer, and as soon as I got in the chair a production assistant popped a head in and barked, “Mary? They need you on the set in five minutes.” Hair wound my locks into a Leaning Tower of Pisa and Makeup dabbed on eyes and mouth and I went to the set.

The scene I was in was with Burt Reynolds, Jim Nabors, and a stunt mule. The mule was supposed to sit on the hood of a car. We rehearsed; I had studiously practiced my Texas accent, but after standing next to Jim Nabors for five minutes, it reverted to a Jim Nabors accent. It didn’t really matter because we didn’t shoot the scene that day, or for the next two weeks, because either the sun would go behind a cloud or the mule would refuse to sit on the car or Burt would refuse to come out of his big black trailer. Every morning, I was called to the set at six and hurried through hair and makeup, and then they moved to another shot and I spent the rest of the day standing on the sidewalk in the blazing heat with this ridiculous hairdo among a crowd of onlookers who took me for one of their own. The alternative was to sit in my “trailer,” which was more like an air-conditioned coffin. Young girls had come from miles around to catch a glimpse of Burt. One I talked to was determined to somehow smuggle herself into Burt’s trailer and go away with him. She might have done, for all I know.

This went on for thirteen days; twelve nights spent in a motel room with nothing to read or drink. Morning after morning, as I sat down in the makeup chair, tears rolled uncontrollably down my face. The makeup man dabbed at my cheeks and patted my shoulder.