Life Is Not a Stage (7 page)

On the singing and comedy front, the instruction at the academy didn’t add all that much to my skill set. George Burns used to say that you can’t teach comedic timing; you can improve upon it with practice, but you either have it or you don’t. I think the same goes for having a good sense of humor. You can’t teach it if it’s not already there. Looking at some of my earliest childhood photographs, you can see in my face that I was born with the desire to make people laugh. And all those times I got in trouble for mimicking my teachers at St. Francis were now being put to good use.

What was more challenging was learning how to work with the sadder spectrum of feelings. They taught us about sense memories—how to go back in time to mine your own experiences to bring forth in your performance a desired emotional state. I got depressed in one of the classes because I started thinking too much about my father. “I don’t want to do that again, it’s too hard,” I thought.

Learning how to cry was harder. It too was about getting in touch with your feelings, specifically about something that made you very sad. You would think that I had a reservoir that could unleash a torrent of tears. Just flick the switch. There was one problem, though, and it is a reason why I still have trouble crying today. As a child, it was not permitted. “Don’t you cry, don’t cry,” my mother would warn me, with the unspoken threat that if I did, then she’d give me a real reason to cry by whipping the gizzard out of me. So I’d suck in whatever was bothering me, take a deep breath, and say, “Oh, all right.” In fact, I had only seen my mother cry once, when I was a little girl and had accompanied her to church on Mother’s Day. The priest gave a sermon apropos of mothers. Whatever the priest said penetrated the barrier she constructed to help her get through her hard life. She was quietly crying and trying to hide her face. It made me so sad. I put my little arm through hers and tried to comfort her.

There was also much to learn from watching the other students. They may have come from all parts of the country and diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, but there was great camaraderie. We were all striving for success, yet despite the competitive climate, fellow students were generous in helping one another. Thanks to that quality, my studies at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts would soon come to a sudden and abrupt end.

CHAPTER 5

Wish You Were Here

I
t was my first audition, a cattle call at the Alvin Theater for a part in the chorus in the original cast of the musical
Wish You Were Here
. “You can sing, so you should go,” my fellow students encouraged me. Some of them had already auditioned for the show, but nobody had gotten a job. I was told to bring a bathing suit, but of course I didn’t have one. One of the students, Candy Parsons, who was in
South Pacific
with me years later at Lincoln Center, lent me hers. Another student gave me a piece of sheet music to take with me and told me how to get to the theater.

Ask any successful actor and each will have his or her own version of this rite of passage. For example, when Martin Sheen and Zalman King were starving young actors in New York, they actually shared the same suit for an audition. When the first finished, they went into the restroom so the other could change into it. Luckily, they were the same size. Unfortunately, Candy and I were not.

I arrived with my long blonde hair and simple clothes, bathing suit in tow, and took my place in line. When it was my turn, I handed the sheet music for “Only Make Believe” from
Showboat
to the pianist and sang to the darkened audience. When I finished, the director and cowriter Josh Logan and composer Harold Rome emerged from the shadows and addressed me from their seats below: “Did you bring a bathing suit?” I told them that I had. “Go down to the basement and put it on and come back.”

Downstairs, an old stagehand named Charlie Bauer heard me in distress.

“What’s the matter?”

“This bathing suit doesn’t fit,” I told him. It was both too wide and too low-cut over the breasts. I was struggling to hold the back end and the top part up at the same time.

“Hold on. I’ll get some safety pins,” Charlie offered.

It is one thing to be terrified about going to your first audition, but the added worry about accidental nudity (displaying more of your talents) did not help. The bathing suit was required because there was a real, fully functioning swimming pool in the middle of the stage. The musical was based on a play,
Having Wonderful Time
, by Arthur Kober, about a Jewish summer camp for young people in the Catskills.

I went on the stage, but the safety pins were not doing the job. Everyone must have laughed as I sang and tried to hold myself together and keep the suit from falling down. “Are you okay?” they asked.

“No. This isn’t my bathing suit. I borrowed it.” They laughed again. Luckily, I did not panic during the performance, and was spared the nightmare of a wardrobe malfunction.

“Will you come back in a week and sing for us again? And bring a bathing suit that fits!” More laughter.

So that is what I did. I came back. I had purchased a bathing suit that fit. There is a lot that can go wrong during a live performance. Who knows? Perhaps the fact that I showed some fearlessness and spontaneity under that pressure and turned the negative situation into an advantage gave me the decisive edge. I got in the show. I won the role of the New Girl. I would sing in the chorus. I would also be given one line: “Can I still see the game?” I will never forget that line!

After the audition, I went back to the head of the school to get his advice. I had only completed a year, but had been invited back for the second year and was loath to quit. I explained to him that I had been offered the job and asked him if I should take it or stay in school.

“What, are you crazy? That’s why you’re here!”

Out of school and starting off in the play, I was so eager and exuberant that some of the older chorus girls said some mean things, trying to put me down for my desire to be good and get better. It was ironic in this new phase of my life how the deprivation of my childhood proved to be an unexpected ally, not just in this situation, but other times when things could feel threatening or overwhelming. It maybe also helps explain why the bathing suit debacle did not take me off my game.

It was a consequence of that law of the jungle, how only the fit survive, mixed in with another axiom—how what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I had learned the hard way as a small child to not be dependent on other people. Away from my immediate family and close friends back home, I had no one I could count on. It forced me to become very resilient. When things were especially tough, I had to somehow find a way to sustain enough courage to keep going every day. With that life experience, I was not going to let the chorus girls’ comments affect me or take me down to that level. I was prepared with a good stockpile of fortitude, something that would prove very useful as my career soon began a rapid upward trajectory.

Being on my own without much cushion of support, I had another resource that kicked into high gear. I put my faith into action, that tremendous faith that I retained since childhood, and it did not disappoint. I had seen how God would help you, but it wasn’t for the lazy. You had to pitch in and do the work too. I went to church almost every morning. I knelt down every night and said my prayers. I asked for guidance. I asked for success. It was not a hollow, naïve, or egotistical mental concept or fantasy, but a mystical presence that I felt deep in my core. I did not feel alone, even back during the hardest moments of my childhood. Honestly, I felt that I was protected, and that I had a special pipeline to a greater force that could help me, assuming that I had talent. And by this time, judging by the reactions of people, it appeared that I did have something to offer.

Although my formal schooling ended when I joined the cast of
Wish You Were Here
, the real education began when I entered the stage door and began learning from the great masters, the best of the best. Josh Logan was one of them, a very brilliant but also a troubled man who suffered from a bipolar disorder. After the play finished its run, he had a total breakdown. Some people were afraid of him, but I never was. You could learn a lot if you just listened and watched how he worked.

The girl who was the lead was fired. She was apparently a malcontent from the start. “He’s putting his tongue in my mouth,” she complained about the guy with whom she was doing the kissing scene. Josh put up with that for the time being, but soon his patience ran out. When she was onstage in full rehearsal and failed to step into her spotlight he had had enough. “If you can’t find the light on the stage, then you don’t belong on that stage,” he told her as she was let go.

I may have only had that one spoken line in the play, but Josh taught me a valuable thing: “Make sure the audience can understand you. If they can’t hear you or don’t understand what you’re saying, they immediately dislike you.” That’s true in life as well. Similarly, I learned that whoever had the strongest intention on the stage is whom the audience would find most compelling. Having performed in one way or another since I was a small child, I knew how to get attention, and I loved it when I did. But advice like this and practice applying it took things to a more refined level.

I also learned that when you entered that stage door, whether you were in the chorus or were the leading lady, it was a responsibility and a privilege not to be taken for granted but cherished with the highest respect. My first stage manager, Bobby Griffith, who went on to produce some big Broadway shows like
The Pajama Game
, ran the theater in a no-nonsense manner. One evening I was running downstairs to change for the new scene for my “New Girl at Camp” line, singing at the top of my lungs from excitement about being in the show. There was an opening downstairs leading to the orchestra pit for the musicians to enter, and my voice was floating out through that opening. “Who in the hell is down there singing?” Bobby screamed wrathfully. “Jack Cassidy [the male lead in the show] sounds like a soprano!” He was so strict that it could be terrifying, but working with people like that sets you up and teaches you discipline. If you didn’t get to the theater on time, you had better have been hit by a car on the way. For that reason, I always make it a point to show up early.

When
Wish You Were Here
opened, it was one of the hottest nights on record in New York City and the air-conditioning in the theater broke. The reviews were mixed. Josh called the cast and crew together after the first few performances and stood up on a chair. “Don’t worry, I will make this a hit,” he said. And he did. The show went on to sell out performances for the next two years.

What also made a difference was a segment on Ed Sullivan’s television show, then entitled
Toast of the Town
. Sullivan had been a very powerful newspaper columnist in New York when he made the move to hosting a variety program on this emerging new medium. For our performance, Sullivan went to the trouble of having a replica of the swimming pool built on his stage. It was only a foot or two deep, with mirrors placed on the bottom to create the illusion of deeper water. It was my first TV appearance, although only in voice singing off camera. Lines formed at the ticket office the next morning after the broadcast.

Television was just starting to emerge out of the novelty stage and become the major communications medium of the masses. It is funny to admit that I was on television a few times before I ever owned one. But that wouldn’t be for long. And for what he would do for Elvis and the Beatles and hundreds of other acts that he helped launch, Ed Sullivan became the king of Sunday night in America for the next two decades.

In the meantime, Broadway was in its golden age from the post–World War II era well into the late 1950s, and its cultural influence was at its apex until Elvis and the Beatles took over. Although there are still packed houses today and just about every able-bodied actor wishes they could do Broadway, it was truly in the stratosphere back then. The biggest hit songs most often came out of the productions. If you opened on a Wednesday, you would be in the recording studio on Sunday doing the cast album, and within weeks it would be up at the top of the pop charts. Eddie Fisher would later have a number one hit with the title song, “Wish You Were Here.”

When I got the play, I moved out of the Three Arts. One of the girls in the chorus, Margaret Ann Cooper, who was also from Kentucky, told me that two other friends and she were going to get an apartment and asked me if I wanted to share. Sounded like a good idea at the time—a fifth-story walk-up on East 61st Street near Bloomingdale’s. It could be fun, I thought. And I didn’t mind being around a lot of people. There was a fairly large bedroom that could accommodate a bed for each of us. There was a bathroom we shared that could only be accessed by walking through the living room. That proved to be a problem. If one of the girls was seriously dating, she and the guy would take over the living room. You hoped and prayed during those times, “Lord, please get me through the night.” You tried to visualize desert sandstorms instead of cascading waterfalls if you felt your bladder reaching capacity. There was no way you wanted to interrupt the festivities on your way to the toilet.

Jerry and I were at the tail end of our dating at the time, but safe passage through the living room was guaranteed whenever we were there. I also dated the noted writer William Safire for a little while, and went out with Tim Murphy, an acquaintance of a cousin who studied with him at Georgetown Law School. He was in the military and a strict Catholic. He was not one to cross a street against a red light, so it figures that he went on to become an important judge, and we still correspond to this day. But most of my energy was concentrated on learning my craft and building a career. My personal life took a backseat, at least for the moment.