My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (3 page)

As a grown-up he was both erudite and very funny, holding forth on such topics as Tristan and Isolde from the point of view of “poor King Mark,” or on how Desdemona caused all the trouble because she lied about the handkerchief. At the same time, he could be physically hilarious, imitating a big-bottomed premiere danseur strutting around the stage or a mentally challenged king bopping his subjects on the head with his scepter. He considered being an actor for a while, but decided it wasn’t a respectable occupation for a man. He became an English professor instead. Thank God. I could not have followed him onto the stage.

My sister Taffy had as little to do with me as possible while we were growing up. “Stay out of my room!” “Don’t touch my things!” She was dainty, fastidious, with small feet and clean fingernails and all the boys fell in love with her—the exact opposite of me. Her funniness didn’t seem to threaten her feminine charm. She could convey her opinion of something pompous or silly-looking with a grunt that made people burst out laughing. And she could move her body around like a soft custard, dancing to Zydeco, pallumping around the stage. She settled in New Orleans, raised three children, and was a much beloved actress in community theater productions. We stayed connected through the years, although she, like Hugh, couldn’t ever quite bring herself to acknowledge my success. For years she sent me news clippings about actresses who had become drunks or thrown themselves out of windows.

Later, when the family came to see me perform, they were invariably at a loss for words. If I asked them how they liked the play or my performance, they looked uncomfortable and muttered something about the set or the music. When I once asked my sister about this, she said, “Well, maybe we’re embarrassed.”

It was inevitable that I should grow up believing the most important thing in the world was to make people laugh. It was the only thing. I had to get laughs. I got them in school by telling stories about myself. When people laughed I felt exonerated, relieved of my shame. At the same time, I was reinforced in my sense of lacking substance.

I often think of something I once read in a
Reader’s Digest
: A colonel in India had a pet monkey that was pooping all over the house. The colonel proceeded to spank the monkey and throw him off the balcony every time he misbehaved, until finally the monkey learned after pooping to spank himself and throw himself off the balcony.

I constantly informed others of my flaws. It became a lifelong habit, a tic I wasn’t even aware of. When anybody attempted to see something in me, I immediately felt it necessary to disabuse them. I had to keep my light under a bushel. On the other hand, when people took me at my word, I was furious. They were supposed to snuffle out my true worth without my help.

As an adolescent I was always getting lost, taking the streetcar the wrong way or taking detours to school, seeing men with their penises out and being terrified they would follow me.

I was ten when my mother embarked on the first of a succession of illnesses that would continue for the rest of her life. She developed an embolism in her leg and, on doctor’s orders, she lay in bed in a darkened room for six months. Doctors also advised a couple of drinks a day “to keep her veins open.” My siblings were old enough to escape after school to friends’ houses. I came home to an otherwise empty house and my mother’s moans and calls for more ice. I was in the sixth grade at Louise S. McGehee’s School for Girls and I was out of control. I shouted in the halls, I couldn’t stop talking, I was always in hot water because of something I said. One day I was called to Miss McGehee’s office. Mummy was sitting there. She had gotten out of bed. She was wearing a fur piece I had never seen before. It seemed I had bullied a classmate so much that she had some kind of breakdown, and I was being expelled. Driving home, Mummy addressed the cosmos: “Any other mother would have thrown herself off a bridge.”

B
UT NOW HERE IS ONE OF THOSE MEMORIES THAT CONFLICTS WITH
this view of myself as a totally despised miscreant. I must have been about twelve when I memorized the entire first act of
Arsenic and Old Lace,
playing all the roles—I practiced the lines in my bedroom closet so my siblings wouldn’t hear—and I performed it, using a different voice for each character, at a parent-teacher meeting. It was a success, I repeated the performance at another adult gathering, and again it went over well. I don’t recall the circumstances, who put me up to it, but it must have been an adult who noticed something good in me.

After this I was invited to enter a speech contest at a tiny college in northern Louisiana. My competition was a buxom girl who performed a dramatic poem called “The Highwayman.” While reciting it, she impersonated the maiden with hands tied to the bedpost behind her so that with each cry of “The highwayman riding comes, riding comes!” she thrust her ample bosoms forcefully this way and that way, and she won first prize. This was my first taste of what I would be up against, so to speak, in future years. I came in second. My diploma read, “Second Prize (Comedy Division).” That last bit annoyed the hell out of me. It still does. Why is comedy not as respected as drama?

A
ROUND THE AGE OF FIFTEEN
I
TURNED INTO SOMETHING OF A
swan. I caught my family’s sideways glances. They stopped laughing at my looks, at least. High school was more fun because of boys and dances. We were dancing to “Moonglow,” “Mam’selle,” and “Prisoner of Love.”

Everybody read
Life
magazine in the forties. I loved the series “
Life
Goes To.” The picture stories of New York City made a huge impression on me. One was a day in the life of a fashion model. The first photo showed a young woman gazing out her window while holding a cup to her lips. The caption read, “5:30
A.M.
Betsy takes her last sip of coffee before heading out for her 6
A.M.
modeling job.” The next photo showed her standing on the curb with her hatbox in one hand—all the models carried hatboxes instead of purses—and waving with her other hand. “5:45
A.M.
Betsy hails a cab” and so on through her day. There was “
Life
Goes to Broadway,” which showed a young Julie Harris at an audition and a method acting class. I was also avidly listening to recordings of
Oklahoma!
and
South Pacific
.

Mr. Fredericks, the dour high school history teacher, had been assigned, I’m sure against his wishes, to put together a girl’s cheerleading team. With some reluctance, he let me join. “You have great energy,” he said, “you just need to
channel
it!” I didn’t realize how much my insides jarred with my outside. I had a large presence, which was often scary to the gentler sort. Voice, gesture, everything about me was big. We were holding a pep rally for the football team in the auditorium because it was raining. In my new capacity as cheerleader, I got up on the stage and yelled, “Leeeet’s go!!!” To my astonishment, the entire auditorium responded with a tremendous roar. Usually when I yelled, people yelled back “Shut up!” “Pipe down!” Now, for the first time, I experienced a positive power I didn’t know I had.

One day in senior year, Mr. Fredericks stopped me in the hall and asked where I was going to college. I had no plans, my grades were atrocious. I probably would have followed the plan my parents had for me. Along with the other “nice” New Orleans girls, I would have gone to Newcomb College for two years, then made my debut, then probably married some drunk with an old family name, and ended up divorced or dead, if Mr. Fredericks hadn’t said, “You should go to a college with a good theater school. You have talent.” Nobody, no adult, had ever said such a thing to me. I applied to Northwestern University’s School of Speech, and to my complete surprise, I was accepted.

N
ORTHWESTERN STUDENTS STRUCK ME AS CORNY
. H
ORRIBLY RICH
, Midwestern hayseeds. Cashmere sweater sets, Buick convertibles, mandatory sorority serenades, and Frankie Laine’s “Mule Train” and “Cry of the Wild Goose” gave me the pip. Everybody drank Moscow Mules.

Question: Is mimicry the same as acting? Is the ability to become another person, to imitate, less than the ability to create a character from a written script?

By the end of freshman year, competition had knocked all the wind out of me. In New Orleans I had been the unchallenged clown among my classmates. Here, in the acting class you had to push and shove your way past everyone else to get your name up on the board in order to do a scene. And the scenes were from Odets and Lorca and Ibsen. I only wanted to be funny. I wanted to be Ado Annie. I came home on vacation and went to see Mr. Fredericks. I told him I felt like I wasn’t an actress. He shrugged and said, “Well, maybe you’re just a mimic.” I was crushed, to say the least. “Just a mimic” haunted me for years afterwards. I lacked the depth to be an actor. I couldn’t cry on cue.

W
HEN THINGS WEREN
’
T WORKING OUT FOR ME IN THE THEATER
department, I switched my focus to English literature. Northwestern had wonderful English professors. I had never read a good book. In high school I passed up
Silas Marner
on the reading list for my mother’s copy of
The Lovers of Lady Bottomley,
among other bodice-rippers she got from the library. I pored over
This Is My Beloved,
a steamy missive she had hidden in her underwear drawer. Now, I was devouring
Madame Bovary, The Magic Mountain, Crime and Punishment,
and
Ulysses
. The exams were generally “discussions”: “Discuss Hans Castorp’s declaration of love to Clavdia Chauchat”; “Discuss Emma’s need for luxury”; “Why did she take a lover?” My God, “discuss!” I was the queen of bullshitters. I was getting As with red exclamation points on my papers. I discovered I had a brain. I decided to be an intellectual. I quit the sorority, played Brahms and Beethoven symphonies at top volume in my dorm room, and my roommate and I wore trousers and hung out in bookstores with guys who played chess.

This was when my brother Hugh began to accept me into his world. We were very much alike in looks and wit and rage against our parents. He saw me as his acolyte, I saw him as my lifesaver.

A
FTER GRADUATION
I
CAME STRAIGHT TO
N
EW
Y
ORK AND MOVED
into an apartment on West 114th Street with Hugh and his girlfriend Phyllis Starr. The apartment was dubbed “Fuchsia Moon Flat” because one of the Princeton aesthetes Hugh hung out with had said, “People like us meet only once in a fuchsia moon.”

Philip, Wayne, Joel—these were his literate, witty young friends. I was thrilled to be included in their circle. They were my introduction to camp. There was much imitating of homosexual behavior, much wrist-flapping and lisping, “Get you, Ella.” I thought it was so funny. I went around flapping my own wrist and lisping, “Get you, Ella.” It didn’t strike me as odd, much less offensive. I certainly didn’t think that any one of them might be homosexual. I mean, here was Hugh’s girlfriend, and then Philip kept flirting with me. Philip had a plummy voice and a mellifluous laugh; he kept grabbing me and tossing me around, gurgling, “I’ll tame you yet, you gypsy wench!” Of course they were gay, but this was the fifties. You might as well have had smallpox.

We bought the furniture for Fuchsia Moon at the Salvation Army store on 125th Street, a veritable gold mine of mahogany dinner tables, bureaus, elaborately carved throne chairs, Tiffany lamps, and fumigated mattresses, as well as twenties evening gowns, fur coats, beaded dresses, Bakelite bracelets, feather boas, and fedoras that were bought for a song and put into the “drag chest” in our living room. Hugh, naturally, formed a court. He made crowns out of wire and beaten tin and we were given titles. Philip was the Duchess of Larchmont, Wayne the Duchess Biddy de Ripon, and Joel, Princess of Palestine. Phyllis was Princess of Panola because she grew up on Panola Street, and I was the Marchioness of Mauweehoo, which was the name of the lake in Connecticut.

Every morning the three of us put on our little seersucker outfits and trotted out the door to work. Every night we came home, climbed into the “drag,” drank beer, and danced around the living room to Berlioz or Prokofiev or some other bombastic classical piece. There generally were a few straight friends—college acquaintances—hanging out on the sofa enjoying the show. Hugh sashaying around in a strapless evening gown with chest hairs sprouting from the top was a sight to behold. He was too hilarious to be seriously fruity. He was never serious about anything. It was forbidden. He talked about something he called the “emotionless criteria.” I didn’t completely get it, but the message sank in: no talk about your inner life or the state of the world, and no discussion of feelings.

I was terrified of the city. I had to get a job, but I couldn’t imagine who would hire me, much less actually pay me. I was afraid I might starve to death. My roommates, both English majors, had editorial jobs in publishing. I figured the only thing I could be was a secretary but you had to know shorthand to take dictation. I tried pretending to do it on a couple of job interviews with humiliating results so I got my parents to cash in a WWII war bond they had taken out for me and I enrolled in a summer secretarial school on the fifteenth floor of the Radio City Music Hall building. In the classroom I became the same disruptive element I had been in high school, giggling over the corny inspirational sayings posted on the blackboard and being generally obnoxious. We were in a room high above the city taking dictation from the elderly instructor who would mutter “Dear sir,” “Dear sir,” and immediately drift off to sleep. We sat there, vacant summer sky floating outside the open windows and the voice of Mario Lanza singing “Be My Love” wafting up from the Music Hall far below until I couldn’t contain myself any longer and burst out laughing and he woke up glaring at me. Needless to say I didn’t graduate.