My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (5 page)

Mark had set up an industrial sized fan in back of the audience, and during the reading he squirted an atomizer of Chanel No. 5 into the breeze over their heads. This was another one-time experiment; we were later informed that some people were allergic to scent. Despite or because of all this, the reading went over really well. People laughed! They loved this stuff! We hugged each other in glee. We sat down and started working on who we could send the script to, to get us produced.

Back in the sixties, in a summer stock production of
The Boy Friend
in Princeton, playing Alphonse opposite my Dulcie was Tyler Gatchell, a sweet, very funny thirteen-year-old with a terrible summer cold. Tyler was now a Broadway producer, but still just as lovable. I called him and asked if he would read our script. He said send it. We did. We heard back pretty quickly: we didn’t have a play, we had a monologue. He added, “Ditch the maid.”

We now realized we needed some kind of plot.

Tyler did give us a wonderful quote to use: Referring to her lipstick, she once asked a friend,
“Is it too much? Or not enough?”

F
UCHSIA
M
OON DISBANDED AFTER TWO YEARS WHEN
H
UGH, FEELING
“hag-ridden,” couldn’t get far enough away from us. He moved to Wisconsin to get a master’s in English literature. I was lost without him.

By this time, Philip of the “gypsy wench” business had made his way into the Greenwich Village theater scene and was beginning his career as a director. Philip Minor never had any money himself, was not well-known, but he was charming and cultivated, and he had a knack for befriending important people. I was once invited to his fourth-floor walk-up apartment on the unfashionable Lower East Side for dinner with Jason Robards Jr. and his then-wife, Lauren Bacall. It was like trying to converse with Jove and Hera. I could not bring myself to address her as Betty. I said something that she took great exception to, some stupid remark about Hollywood actors onstage. I thought she was going to leap from her chair and strike me. To this day I am extremely uncomfortable in the company of famous people. I invariably behave like an idiot.

I later learned that Bacall was discovered by Mrs. Vreeland. She modeled for her before going to Hollywood.

Once when I was clowning around, Philip said, “Mary Louise, you really ought to be in the theater.” That was all I needed. Permission. He told me to come down to the Village and see this play
Summer and Smoke
at the Circle in the Square Theatre. This was the original Circle, on West 4th Street, opposite Sheridan Square. I loved the smell in there of rotting wood and musty velour. They passed a hat around for admission. I hadn’t been in a theater like this before; the stage was a wide rectangle with plain wooden bleachers running along three sides; no set, no proscenium or curtain. We seemed to be in the same room with the actors. The main character, Alma, was played by an unknown actress, and as I sat watching her I felt I was eavesdropping. It gave me goose-bumps. It was partly the proximity, but it was also this actress, Geraldine Page. She was so real, so anxious and trembling and—palpable! I could have, I very much wanted to, reach out and touch her.

Then I took myself to see
The Threepenny Opera,
starring the great Lotte Lenya at the Theatre de Lys—now called the Lucille Lortel Theatre—on Christopher Street. I had been reading Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood stories in college and this production—the rackety sound of the little orchestra, the grungy actors—was wonderfully authentic. The clincher was when Lenya sang “The Black Freighter,” and lifted her arms high, revealing underarm hair. No woman in America in the fifties went around with underarm hair. To me, this was proof, if any more was needed, that she was the living embodiment of Weimar Germany.

I fell in love with the Village, the funky bars, the scruffy poets and actors. It brought out the beatnik in me. I moved into an apartment in a tenement on Barrow Street, around the corner from the Circle, for $90 a month. I had two roommates. One worked for Murray’s Earth Shoes making plaster casts of feet which she brought home: tiny, twisted feet; beautiful feet; huge feet with hairs sprouting from the toes which we used for doorstops and bookends. We had orange burlap curtains and our chairs and tables were found in the street.

George Segal and his girlfriend, Marion, lived on the floor below us. The first time I saw George I was in awe of his leonine handsomeness, but he was completely disarming, funny and gregarious. He loved to play the banjo. “Yamma Yamma Man” was his big number. The Korean War was on, he got drafted and wangled himself into a “special services” unit. He put together a Dixieland band called Bruno Lynch and His Imperial Five. I still had my office job, but he made me the band singer, billed as “Pearl Fletcher, the Last of the Red Hots.” We only played a couple of times, including a USO gig on Staten Island. The women’s room was full of Spanish-speaking girls in bloated crinoline skirts yelling
“Mira! Mira!”
I stood up to sing “It’s A Long Way to Tipperary,” and I got as far as “It’s a long way—” when a deafening roar went up. I don’t know to this day if it was a roar of approval or the other, but I went sky-high on the lyrics and had to sit down. The ladies of the evening started yelling, “Marengue! Play marengue!” George had to put away his banjo and get out the maracas.

In what seemed like a week, George Segal went from serving lemonade in the Circle lobby to being a Hollywood star.

I went to parties with the Circle crowd and met José Quintero, Circle’s brilliant director, a lean, charismatic Panamanian. I was accepted as Philip’s friend, but I felt like a visiting debutante. There was no way I was going to give up my paycheck, but I prowled around the theater scene like a hungry animal.

I slipped into the Circle night after night to watch
The Iceman Cometh
. Jason Robards Jr. played Hickey. Hickey seemed so charming, such a great guy that I absolutely bought his message: “What have ya done to the booze, Hickey?” I thought it was the playwright’s message, until Hickey imploded. During his epic monologue near the end, agonizingly, slowly revealing his crime, a drunk would cry out, “Aw, Hickey, get on with it!” and a mournful voice from the audience would occasionally echo, “Yeah, Hickey. Get on with it!” O’Neill was very long-winded.

But this was a thrilling production and Robards was superb. On opening night, I stood with a small group in the shabby lobby waiting for the
New York Times
review. When it came, Ted Mann, Circle’s producer, read it aloud. It was a paean to O’Neill and to Robards. Jason had slipped out to get a beer, and just as Ted finished reading, he appeared at the top of the steps. We started cheering, yelling, jumping up and down. Jason stood there gaping at us, his hand moving to his chest, as if to say, “Me?” I knew I was witnessing a great moment. It was the making of the Circle, Quintero, and Robards.

A
T THIS TIME
I
WAS A RECEPTIONIST IN ARCHITECT
M
ARCEL
B
REUER
’
S
office. Breuer was a kind, quiet man who called me “Mary Louis” and found me amusing. I loved being around these young, good-looking architects. I dated most of the single ones at one point or another. I was posing as a secretary; I managed to mess up the filing system so thoroughly that after I had been let go they had to call me back to straighten it out. And almost every day for three years, I arrived late for work. You have no idea how degraded I felt. It was simply not in my power to get up on time. I would sleep through the alarm, wake with a shout, dress in an awful panic, scrambling in the closet for a lost shoe or through a drawer for two quarters, ride the subway in a stupor, then try to slink to my desk unseen, only to meet the disgusted glare of my immediate superior. I felt like a bum. I’m sure they only kept me on as long as they did because I had good legs and I was fun at office parties.

O
NE DAY
M
R.
B
REUER SAID
, “M
ARY
L
OUIS
, I
HAVE TO LET THE
unmarried ones go.” Almost that same day, Quintero called and asked me if I wanted to be in Circle’s next production of
Our Town
. The pay was $27 a week. I played Second Dead Lady and Lady in the Audience Who Asks the Stage Manager If There Is Any Culture in Grovers Corners. My first professional stage job. I went up like a balloon. No more worries about oversleeping! No more riding the subway in rush hour! I could sleep late and hang out all day in leotards and sneakers in coffee houses! Oh, yeah.

T
HERE WAS SOMETHING PERFECT ABOUT A
P
ANAMANIAN DIRECTING
uniquely American plays by Eugene O’Neill and Thornton Wilder. In rehearsals for
Our Town,
Quintero rhapsodized to the cast in his Panamanian accent about the town, the morning, the evening, his arms extended, his beautiful, long-fingered hands suspended in flight, he wove a spell that embraced us all, from the leads to the paperboy with only one line. The play was another hit for Circle. Wilder himself came to see it, and when the cast came out to meet him, he ran toward us with his arms extended as if to embrace us all in one hug.

T
HE
V
ILLAGE CLUB SCENE WAS THRIVING, EVERYBODY HAD AN ACT.
Joan Rivers was trying out her material at the seedy Upstairs at the Duplex on MacDougal Street, and over at the Bon Soir this child Barbra came onstage wearing what looked like her grandmother’s tea gown, opened her mouth and sang like an old black blues singer. We knew we were seeing something.

Another night at the Bon Soir a nerdy-looking guy, Woody something, got up onstage and did a very funny routine about his kitchen appliances, and once, late, I went into the Village Vanguard for a drink at the bar. It was between jazz sets, the place was almost empty, when this guy with a mike wandered onto the floor, stepping through a jungle of music stands and started holding forth. I thought, This guy is brilliant. Then I realized, “this guy” is Lenny Bruce.

Two actors, MacIntyre Dixon and Richard Libertini, had an act called “The Stewed Prunes” that was truly brilliant. Their sketches were like tiny Pinter moments:

W
HEN
O
UR
T
OWN
CLOSED
, I
HEARD THAT
T
HREEPENNY
WAS
losing their Lucy Brown. Bea Arthur originally played Lucy. She sang the wonderful “Barbara Song”:

The show had been running for two years; it was a rite of passage for many actors. In some cases it was a pit stop, in others a swinging door as, with much fanfare and many toodle-oos, someone would leave for a Broadway show that then flopped and back they came again.

Everybody was telling me I should go for the Lucy role. One afternoon I walked over to the de Lys and asked the stage manager if I could audition. He told me to come back with my accompanist and sing a song. I didn’t have an accompanist. I hadn’t ever had an audition, much less a singing audition.

Slightly prior to this, I had spotted this snappy-looking guy with round-rimmed glasses and a bow tie playing the piano at a party on the Upper East Side. I’d sidled over to him and shyly mumbled how I’d love to be onstage. Without looking up, still plonking away at the keyboard, he shot back, “Chutzpah, honey, you gotta have chutzpah!” What the hell was “chutzpah?” I didn’t know. But a few days later, damned if I didn’t spot this same guy going into the basement apartment of my building on Barrow Street. I knocked on his door and said I had an audition and asked if he’d play for me. He snapped, “It’s going to cost you,” and let me in.

This was the beginning of a long relationship with the eccentric performer and songwriter John Wallowitch. John had the distinction of playing for Faith Dane when she went up for the role of the stripper Mazeppa in the original
Gypsy
in 1959. He told me she auditioned in pasties and a G-string and blew taps on a trumpet through her legs. All of which, of course, ended up in the actual production. Those watching the audition were reduced to tears, including Gypsy Rose Lee, whose mascara ran black rivers down her cheeks.

For my
Threepenny
audition I wore a red dress, let my hair down to my shoulders, and sang Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling In Love Again” in basso profundo, the only vocal register available to me at that time. As I was singing, I could see the stage manager out front shaking his head “no, no, no.” Then I heard chuckling coming from the balcony. It was the director Carmen Capalbo, who just happened to be there that day picking up his royalty check. He came down the aisle and said, “You’re very funny. What’s your name?” He not only hired me to play Lucy Brown, he coached me, fixed my hair, even plucked my eyebrows. He loved the idea of discovering new talent.

Standing behind the curtain surrounded by
Threepenny
’s rollicking, raucous overture, I was thrilled out of my skull. This was real theater! Most of the grizzled character guys had been in the show since it opened. This was my first taste of “long-run-itis.” Hands pushed and prodded me into my exact position in the gallows scene, as if footprints were painted on the floor. They instructed me on how to get my laughs: “Take a pause then say the line.” “Stand like this, and then turn.” I didn’t get that at all. I only got laughs when I paid no attention to what I was saying. And I kept losing laughs because I didn’t know how to stop paying attention to them.