My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (6 page)

I still get laughs when I don’t mean to. The first time in front of an audience, I often get them. The other actors eye me suspiciously. Then the next night the laughs won’t be as big, and the night after that, smaller, until finally they won’t be there at all. I didn’t understand why. What did I do differently from the night before? I didn’t have any control over it. For a very long time this made me extremely tentative about doing anything to meddle with my performance. I told myself to just stand there and say the lines. I agonized over this. I had to get laughs. I needed them. It was the only arrow in my quiver.

T
HE
B
ARROW
S
TREET BUILDING WAS CONDEMNED AND
I
HAD TO
vacate my apartment. Up popped George Furth, an actor I knew, telling me about the empty apartment next door to his, on West 4th Street. George had a spastic energy, as if he were being repeatedly shot from a cannon. He was constantly telling me what to do: “You should put your hair up, wear makeup, and say ‘blast!’ instead of ‘fuck.’” “I was talking to Hal Prince today, and he said if you stopped putting yourself down you could be the next Elaine May.”

It was often some celebrity I didn’t know that he claimed to be schmoozing with about me! It annoyed the crap out of me. “Dick Cavett says you should get your agent to send you up for leading lady roles.”

George had been hovering near me since college. He was a class behind me, this pesky fly who kept diving into my face and shouting things.

After I came to New York he showed up at Fuchsia Moon. He was getting a graduate degree across the street at Columbia and he would drop by after seeing some Broadway play, and while I was practicing my shorthand, he would proceed to act it out, all the parts. As Linda in
Death of a Salesman
he shouted, “Attention! Attention must be paid to this man!” The windows were open, and someone across the alley shouted, “Hey George! Pipe down!”

I ended up moving into the apartment next door to George, and for the next few years we might as well have been living together. These were fifth-floor “cold water flats”: toilet in a closet, tub next to the front door. The rent was $37.50 a month.

I was usually unprepared for George’s onslaughts. He’d knock while entering, babbling. I hated that he could see the muddle I was in. On the other hand, he seemed not to notice, he was so filled with his own pronouncements. He couldn’t hear me. If I told him I was thinking of killing myself, he would tell me about his lunch with Helen Hayes. It was like bullets ricocheting off steel. But at the same time that he was deflecting me, he was constantly telling me what I should do with my life.

George wore a rug; in those days you couldn’t be balding and get young leading-man parts. He gave his rug a weekly shampoo, and while it dried he wore a towel topped by a golf cap. I had my hair up in giant rollers under a pink hairnet and together we ate Sara Lee coffee cake and watched
Queen for a Day
and
The Burns and Allen Show
on his tiny television set. The one thing we shared in spades was a passion for great comedy. We went together to see Bea Lillie in
High Spirits
and Ruth Gordon in
The Matchmaker,
hugging each other with delight over these two incomparable performers.

Still, I deplored George’s taste. Helen Gurley Brown’s
Sex and the Single Girl
had just come out and I was entertaining a new boyfriend, serving him a roast-beef dinner while wearing a ribbon in my hair, when he barged in with a canned pear floating in a green plaid dish. “I thought you might want this,” he barked, giving my boyfriend the once-over. The thing that annoyed me most was the plaid dish. He had his entire apartment wallpapered in a beige print of Civil War soldiers, suitable for a schoolboy’s bedroom. Horrible.

During a period of unemployment, George had been summoned downtown to report for jury duty and was officially declared a pauper. He was so unnerved he sat down and started writing these one-act plays. He showed them to me, but I didn’t think they were very good. Eventually he showed them to Stephen Sondheim and they became the book for the musical
Company
. Five years later, it opened on Broadway and George won a Pulitzer.

W
ORKING WITH
M
ARK ON THE PLAY MADE ME HAPPY.
M
RS.
Vreeland was nourishing. We began finding other sources of information besides
D.V.
We heard about an interview she had with Lally Weymouth in
Rolling Stone
in 1977. In those days you looked at back issues on microfiche in the library. It was very difficult to get a copy to take away with you. It was like getting hold of the Dead Sea Scrolls. When we finally did, we read parts of it aloud to each other. It was a revelation. Up to this point I think we both thought of her primarily as a woman who told hilarious stories. Now we saw there was more to her.

This last one took me years to grasp. I quoted it long before I thought to apply it to my own life.

The public at large saw Vreeland as a silly old gorgon in a turban shouting, “Think pink!” We fought this image all along the way to getting our play on.

An agent we submitted the play to wrote us that while she had enjoyed reading it, she was afraid that the subject had “no redeeming social value.” She suggested a better subject might be Rose Kennedy. ’Nuf said.

I
WAS CURIOUS ABOUT WHAT POWERFUL PEOPLE DID WHEN THEY LOST
their high place. I once read a small item in the
Times
just after Clinton was elected; the ousted James Baker apparently approached Clinton about possibly staying on as Secretary of State. I thought, What chutzpah. What desperation.

When she came back from Europe, what did Vreeland do?

Mark and I went to Montauk for a long weekend in April to do some concentrated work. We stayed at the Montauk Inn and walked along the beach talking about how the ousted powerful find work. Mark fantasized a dinner party where influential friends throw out ideas; “Diana, why not design a line of bed linens?” “Diana you should start your own magazine! Call it ‘D.V.!’” They would discuss ways to get backing.

At this point, we were so determined to avoid the biographical evening that it didn’t even occur to us to use the facts surrounding the job she eventually got at the Metropolitan Museum. Looking back, it seems benighted of us.

How could we show who she was? She was no Madame Curie. This is something that bothers me in solo shows, the character having to supply her own biography: “I was the most powerful fashion editor of the last four decades.” “I invented electricity,” blah blah blah. We couldn’t have the maid do it. I became obsessed with the opening lines of the play. I wanted Vreeland’s first words to give all the information needed: who what where when and why. We were going to have to resort to that tired old conceit, the telephone. We had sworn we would not use the telephone. In order to deal with this problem, Mark devised a brilliant gimmick. He invented an article in the
New York Post
which Vreeland picks up and reads aloud:

She throws the paper down at this point, but picks it up twice more during the evening, supplying more information. Everyone assumed we got the piece from the archives, but Mark made it up.

Another thing I loathe about solo shows is when the person onstage, supposedly in the privacy of her own bedroom, turns front and starts talking. She’s addressing the cosmos. (When anyone at my family dinner table said, “Pass the salt,” my grandmother would query, “Are you addressing the cosmos?”) At least Mrs. Vreeland was in her living room, but she couldn’t very well tell her life story to the maid.

So whom is she talking to? I saw the brilliant comedienne Pat Carroll in her solo show
Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein,
in 1980. When she talked to the audience, I imagined I was attending one of her famous salons. Maybe Hemingway brought me along. On the other hand,
Tru
on Broadway in 1989 drove me nuts. Bobby Morse was so good he was heartbreaking, but the script by Jay Presson Allen had him home alone, yet playing to a theater audience. At one point he even went over to the curtain and fondled it, as if to say, “This is only a play.”

I worried over this problem for months; we were lucky in that these were stories she had actually related, they had the feel of being spoken. I ended up making the audience a worshipful, unimportant young person whom she could ignore or confide in, could be uninhibited in front of, as her mood dictated. If I believed that enough, maybe the audience would, too. Beyond that, it would have to be a magic act.

I
WAS IN
T
HREEPENNY
FOR ABOUT A MONTH WHEN
G
EORGE BURST
in announcing that Jane Connell, one of the performers in Julius Monk’s revue, was leaving to play Mrs. Peachum in Carmen Capalbo’s West Coast production, and that I had to go uptown immediately and audition for her part.

Jane Connell was a goddess to me. With her blonde thatch of hair and her warbling soprano, her imitation of a folk singer rendering “The Race of the Lexington Avenue Express” was a masterpiece. Of course I refused. I was scared. I couldn’t imagine myself being part of this glamorous venue that I worshipped from afar. I protested that I had just gotten into
Threepenny
. George went crazy; he wouldn’t let up, he kept hammering away at me. He’d admitted that he had lied about Helen Hayes, but he was still genuinely adept at befriending big names, and now he got famous people I didn’t know, like Burr Tillstrom of
Kukla, Fran and Ollie,
to call me. (When I told this to John Wallowitch, who thought I should stay with
Threepenny,
John snarled, “Did Burr tell you about his whips and chains?”) Anyway, I finally buckled.

The Upstairs at the Downstairs was on West 56th Street, just off Fifth Avenue. I was told to arrive at 10
P.M.
, between shows. The bar area just inside the door was jammed with people laughing, shouting over each other. A tall, distinguished-looking gentleman, beautifully dressed, came toward me through the crowd. This must be Julius, the man I came to sing for. He was speaking to me in an accent: British? Southern? Southern/British? Southern/British/Affected? His words came out in soft hoots from under his impeccable mustache. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. He led me into the red-draped Downstairs room, empty except for a gracious young man seated at the spinet piano. I handed him my sheet music. I was scared witless. I stood on a tiny stage in front of the piano and launched into my comedy number, “Something Wonderful” from
The King and I
. The song was originally intended as a loving tribute to the King by one of his many wives, but I took it a bit further and sang it as an abused woman. On the words “he will not always do just what you’d have him do,” I cringed and rubbed my arm. While singing “he has a thousand dreams that won’t come true,” I looked over my shoulder and hissed in terror. Was it going over? I think I saw his mustache twitching. In my crazed performance I shouted the high notes, and at the end I flung my arm out in a wild gesture and knocked a pitcher of water into the innards of the piano. Mr. Monk remained unflappable. He invited me to sit down at the table with him while a sweetly smiling waiter swabbed up the water. The waiters, everybody, seemed to be smiling sweetly.

I still couldn’t understand a thing Mr. Monk was saying. Every now and then a word was hooted into the clear—“tessetura,” “rodomontade,” “post-prandial.” I couldn’t tell if he was hiring me or letting me down. Then he took me upstairs to meet the cast, and I thought, Well, he must be thinking about hiring me, if he’s doing this. He knocked on the dressing room door, the Inner Sanctum. It slid open and there they were, my idols, smiling out at me. I couldn’t believe I could be one of them. At the same time, I knew this was exactly where I belonged.

We rehearsed in the Upstairs room. I loved the smell in there of stale booze and cigarettes. The maitre d’, poker-faced actor Bruce Kirby, stuck his head in and said, “You kids keep it quiet up here.” When Bruce seated women customers who asked “What do I do with my fur?” he recommended they have the hem taken up or down a couple of inches.

Julius Monk had the title of each sketch and each musical number written on Tiffany notecards, which he propped up on a table in front of him: little white tents that he moved back and forth, playing chess with the running order. His secret talent was knowing how to follow an act. If, during previews, one of us had a number that elicited too much applause, he would move it to another position, which was mystifying to me at the time. He wouldn’t use sketches that were too hilarious. No showstoppers allowed! His reasoning was that the show had to flow as one continuous unit. I remembered when I saw it being charmed by the way the whole thing moved seamlessly from beginning to end, no one performance standing out above another.