My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (9 page)

Hugh was attached to the house, I thought probably for the same reason I was: the promise of something he never got. In 1964, our parents sold it to us for a dollar and we took out a mortgage on it and gave them the money to retire to Santa Fe. The first thing Hugh did was throw all of Mummy’s pots and pans out of the kitchen window. We were free at last from her constant demands to wash the dishes, mow the lawn, set the dinner table, empty the garbage, and paint the porch. I thought we’d just go on living there as carelessly as we always had. I wanted to hang on to the past, wanted the house to stay the same with its cramped little bedrooms upstairs under the rafters, it’s mattress-ticking sofa, rickety lamps, and posters tacked to the unfinished homasote walls. What Hugh wanted was to destroy the past, remake it in his own image.

Phyllis came up with Hugh every weekend, and while he started renovating, I was slowly preempted by her in the kitchen and the garden. When I complained to him, he agreed to have her up every other weekend and I’d have my friends up on alternate ones, but on those weekends he refused to speak to me. His silence was devastating. He and Phyllis didn’t try to hide their active distaste for my friends. Eventually I let him buy me out.

Hugh got his revenge on our father by ultimately transforming his little clapboard cottage into Mad King Ludwig’s hunting lodge. The living room ceiling was removed and the little cramped bedrooms upstairs became balconies, and the Homasote walls were covered with wood varnished a deep golden, every inch hand-done by him; carved columns, cornices, niches, and finials, gold-leafed words up the side of the stairs: “I cannot know how far I can go until I go as far as I can.” The exposed beams were hung with tassels, flags, and velvet draperies. He was a discerning flea market shopper, and assorted animal skulls, putti, plaster busts, and death masks encrusted the walls. It took him years, but he completely effaced the place I loved.

We eventually agreed to split the property in half: he got the lower part with the house, and I got the wooded lot in back, on which I eventually built a house.

T
HAT SUMMER OF
1964 I
WAS TOURING IN A SUMMER STOCK PRODUCTION
of
Oklahoma!
starring John Raitt as Curley. I played Ado Annie. Most of the leads had made careers of their roles. The Laurey had played her part so many times she was a blank-eyed automaton in rehearsals, boasting of the twenty meat loaves she had made and frozen for her family back home. Aunt Eller also displayed a plastic heartiness, and the Hakim character was a dentist who took summers off every year to play the part with all the skill of a dentist. This shocked me. I was fresh off my first Broadway show. What was I doing here? On top of this, the guy playing Will Parker opposite me took an instant dislike to me. In rehearsals he would refuse to work with me on the grounds that I was upstaging him, which was impossible because we were playing in the round. On the other hand, I probably was playing all by myself. I didn’t give a hoot about his lasso tricks.

Alfred Cibelli, “Chibbie” had played Judd in all of Raitt’s tours over the years, but his lack of freshness was less obvious because he wasn’t obliged to be cheery. Later on I discovered he was incapable of cheery. He really was as morose as Judd. Possibly more.

We were playing the Melody Fair tent in North Tonawanda, New York. The motel where we were put up was in the middle of an abysmal wasteland of stubbly fields and abandoned factories. There was no place to hang out besides the restaurant, the swimming pool, and—for laughs—the gift shop, which sold plastic Indians, canoes, and toilet ashtrays.

I was very lonely. Chibbie also seemed to be alone, sunning himself by the swimming pool day after day. He was exotically handsome, dark-skinned with burning blue eyes and a Quixote beard. He looked like an El Greco—not at all my type. But we had both gotten bad reviews in the North Tonawanda paper: his Judd was too mean and my Ado Annie was too nymphomaniacal. I approached him with this bit of shared fate. He was passively available. I just grabbed hold and held on.

C
HIBBIE AND
I
HAD A DATE TO MEET AT MY APARTMENT AFTER WE
got back to New York. When he didn’t show up I fell apart. I had no idea he was living with a girlfriend. I was still smarting from being treated as if I didn’t exist by my previous lover and my brother. I started drinking vodka gimlets and swallowing the painkillers I had for my teeth, which were beginning their long process of falling out. I only wanted to kill the pain I was in, not myself. I woke up in intensive care at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Somebody was laughing. Deep, gut-busting laughing, coming from the nurse sitting at the foot of my bed. It must have been something the other nurse said. But I started laughing, too, and when the nurse saw this corpse with tubes up her nose laughing, she laughed even harder.

I was probably still a little high, but life seemed wonderful to me. I was detained by law for two weeks. Chib came to see me in the hospital. I don’t know how he found out what I had done but I suspect he saw himself as the cause. The psychiatrist there informed me that Chibbie was a “bum” and that suicide was a sin. I refused to see this jerk again. While I was there I saw these other shaky, defenseless souls—I think now they were mostly alcoholics—who were being given spinals. Some of them said it made them violently ill. Early one morning, a nurse woke me up and took me to have a spinal, and I wept so noisily they let me go. Later a social worker sidled up to me in the hall and whispered, “Miss Wilson, you don’t have to have a spinal if you don’t want to.” The final stupidity was releasing me with a big bottle of Thorazine. The pills that got me in there in the first place weren’t yet out of my system. I began to nod off while standing up in the street. When I mentioned the Thorazine to my regular doctor, he threw a penlight at the wall. It had given me what he called a “low-grade kidney infection.” Once I stopped taking them I got my energy back and went looking for a new apartment.

Phyllis had an apartment on West 12th Street. She knew a man who could see from the back of his brownstone in the next block that the apartment in the building next to hers was empty. The rent was $175 a month, shockingly low even back then. It was what was called a “parlor floor-through,” two big high-ceilinged rooms with marble fireplaces and back windows overlooking a garden. Soon after I moved in, Chibbie left his girlfriend and joined me.

J
UST AROUND THE TIME
I
WAS RECOVERING
, J
ANE
C
ONNELL CALLED
me about a role in this new musical she had just read for,
Flora the Red Menace,
she said I was perfect for it, that I should audition. Nobody does this kind of thing; nobody calls up another actor to recommend a role they’re up for themselves. Jane was a rare bird, a truly good soul devoid of malice. Her mate, Gordon, was the same. Gordon and I worked on songs and in shows together for over thirty years.

This role was Ada, a stiff, humorless Communist and Best Friend to the Star. I was indeed perfect for it, and I got the part. This was John Kander and Fred Ebb’s first Broadway musical. George Abbott was the director: tall, intimidating, and, at 77, a living legend. Mr. Abbott didn’t like to work with stars. The role of Flora was given to nineteen-year-old newcomer Liza Minnelli. One day early on, Liza said to me, “We have to get together! Get a hamburger or something!” We never did. She was soon so distracted that when we passed each other backstage, she didn’t seem to know who I was. She was a wild-eyed colt.

Mr. Abbott didn’t like double names. He called me “Marylouisamayallcott.” Mr. Abbott ruled absolutely. There was no dissension in the ranks, no behind-the-scenes skullduggery. The actors were shocked that he gave them line readings. Apparently when somebody once asked him, “What’s my motivation?” he replied, “Your paycheck.” I got it that musicals have abbreviated narratives and giving line readings was his way of working in shorthand. One day in New Haven, he came down the aisle chortling, and said to John and Fred, “I’ve got a grand idea!” In the first act, Ada had a scene with a character called the Cowboy. Then in the second act there was a scene with Liza sitting on a park bench while other characters made crossovers behind her. When the Cowboy crossed over and Liza said hello, he said “Howdy.” Then I crossed the other way, Liza said hello and I said hello. Mr. Abbott’s “grand idea” was that I would say “Howdy” instead. John and Fred were mystified. That night, the Cowboy said “Howdy” and crossed over, then I came the opposite way, said “Howdy,” and the audience exploded. From that one word they knew Ada had fallen for the Cowboy.

Mr. Abbott was brutal with me. I had a big number, “The Flame,” and he had a big whistle. We were trying out the show in New Haven. I stood there stiff as a board singing the song, and he blew that goddammed whistle at me again and again. He yelled at me and I had no clue what he wanted me to do. I wasn’t “taking stage,” but I didn’t know that. I was still telling myself, Just stand there, don’t do anything to destroy the laugh. I went back to my crummy room in the Taft Hotel. The walls were paper thin; every night I sat in the tub with the faucets thundering and wailed my heart out.

Something else that made matters worse was my rocky romance with Chibbie. He came up to visit me in New Haven, and the first time Mr. Abbott laid eyes on him he glared holes through him. Mr. Abbott would have objected to any kind of distracting liaison, but in this case he was personally infuriated because, as I found out later, Chibbie had at one time married a girlfriend of Mr. Abbott’s. Chib was fifteen years older than me and had three former wives. Now in New Haven he was behaving badly, throwing chairs and threatening to leave me. I was afraid he would walk out. In the midst of a yelling match, I suggested we get married. When the show got to Boston, we went before a justice of the peace. The minute the man said, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” I felt iron gates slam shut behind me. I knew it was a mistake, but I went ahead with it anyway.

Mr. Abbot, famous for pinching pennies, travelled on the bus with the cast to New York. He got wind of the marriage just as we boarded, and all the way down to New York he fulminated on the evils of smoking, drinking, and marriage. He was no celibate; Mr. Abbott was in splendid condition, and there were tales of his chasing young things around his hotel suite.

I had my own private hells. There were high notes in “The Flame” that made my throat raw. I was hyperventilating at the dinner table with my mistaken husband, and I had such a bad case of hemorrhoids that, two nights before we opened, I went to a doctor. With my ass upended on the table, the doctor leaned down to my face and asked, “Can you get me two tickets for opening night?”

Flora
opened to mixed reviews. Mr. Abbott came around and apologized to the cast for not realizing that, in the Cold War, the audience wasn’t ready to accept New York Communists. Liza won a Tony anyway. And Mr. Abbott turned to me and said, “Ada? You’re great.” The cast sent him a gift for his 78th birthday and in return we got typed thank-you notes. Written in ink across the bottom of mine: “You’re a grand actress.” Maybe everybody got a line like that, but after what he put me through, I cherished mine.

I
NDUSTRIALS WERE EARLY MORNING BREAKFAST SHOWS HELD IN
hotel ballrooms. They were live commercials put on for the trade. They became a hot ticket for people from our business when clever writers like Marshall Barer, Burt Shevelove, and Ronny Graham began writing for them. They wrote funny lyrics about shirts and polyester and gas to well-known Broadway tunes. In the Men’s Sportsman Show, Larry Kert, the star of
West Side Story
sang to the tune of “Maria”: “Banana, the color this year is banana …”

For a while there in the late sixties, I was the Industrial Queen. The Men’s Sportswear Show cast was comprised of young, good-looking Broadway singers and dancers, a couple of seasoned funny men, and myself, the lone female. The first show I did, I walked into the rehearsal room and ten chairs scraped back and ten gorgeous men stood up to greet me. We did a number to the tune of “The Continental,” and I was dancing with these guys, being tossed hither and yon, swaying and kicking. I felt like Ginger Rogers. I loved it. The comedy-sketch guys, George Irving, a gentle bear with a deep basso, and Morty Marshall, a pint-size, grizzled-voiced misanthrope, were my sketchmates, both very funny men. And they let me be funny, too.

This was all going on at seven in the morning. We had to be at the hotel by six to get ready. Once I was sitting in the backstage area pasting a fake diamond in my navel for a belly-dance number while having a conversation about which was better, Greenwich Village or the Upper West Side, and I suddenly thought, If I can do this—get up this early and have an argument while pasting a diamond in my navel—I must belong in show business.

One year, Ronny Graham wrote and performed in the Men’s Sportswear Show. Ronny was a dark, skinny, deeply funny guy with a permanent five o’clock shadow and a hipster manner. He was funny just standing there. To the tune of “Money” from
Cabaret,
a chorus of guys sang “leather, leather, leather, leather” while a hirsute Ronny came onstage in leather “hot pants,” mesh hose, and high heels, flicking a toy whip at the business men at the front tables and hissing in a German accent, “Eat your eggs!” He also wrote dirty lyrics to the Peggy Lee song, “Is That All There Is?”, which I sang wearing leather “hot pants.”

The Milliken shows were lavish productions held in the ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria for five consecutive mornings. Milliken Mills was advertising polyester; the cast was costumed in permanent press and sang songs about no-iron wear. The shows had twenty “Beautiful Milliken Girls,” big stars and famously huge bonuses. The first one I did starred Bert Lahr. The first day of rehearsals he walked in, picked up the script, and said to nobody in particular, “How many woids?” He treated the audience like faces painted on canvas. Each morning he appeared onstage with the twenty Beautiful Milliken Girls lined up behind him and hissed out of the corner of his mouth, “What’s my line?” Twenty Beautiful Milliken girls murmured back, “Good morning.” “Good morning!” he would bellow at the audience. “Good morning!”