atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business
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Authors: Peggy Pope
atta girl
Tales from a Life in the
Trenches of Show Business
peggy pope
iUniverse, Inc.
Bloomington
atta girl
Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business
Copyright © 2011 by peggy pope
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ISBN: 978-1-4620-4098-8 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4620-4100-8 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4620-4099-5 (ebk)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011913260
Printed in the United States of America
iUniverse rev. date: 11/02/2011
Front cover picture by David Rodgers
Back cover picture: “Nine to Five” (c) 1980 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved
C
ONTENTS
Learning Curves: The Elegance of Lisping
Madame Modjeska Gives Me the Nod
July 1954: If Only It Hadn’t Been Raining
Psychology of an Enchanted Evening
“What’s a Nice Girl Like You—?”
But What Did You Do out There?
For
Alain Chuat of
Schweiz/Switzerland
who sent me two dollars for an autograph on September 29
th
, 2008
and thus reaffirmed for me that I was still marketable.
Let Me Entertain You
About two weeks after Nine to Five opened, four young men in a convertible were passing the Egyptian movie theater on Hollywood Boulevard, where the stars leave their hand—and footprints on the sidewalk. I was on the sidewalk, too, my Rent-A-Wreck car having broken down again. When the boys saw me, they started screaming: “Nine to Five! Nine to Five! Loved you in Nine to Five! Seen it seventeen times!”
I was startled, not knowing how to respond and wondering if they might give me a lift, but then thinking better of that. They might ask me for money. They might be on drugs. Jane Fonda was still getting death threat letters twelve years after Vietnam, and I’d been in the movie with her. They might add me to their hit list. I wished they’d go away, but when they did, I felt lonely. What is that all about?
I once saw Dustin Hoffman on a talk show, and he told how he hated being recognized and hassled by fans but said that if he walked down the street and they didn’t recognize him, he’d begin to worry about his career slipping. So he’d go stand in front of Bloomingdale’s until somebody would say, “Oh, look, Dustin Hoffman! The Graduate!”
The fellows in the convertible weren’t kidding. The movie Nine to Five was a cult film. When the video came out, people rented it, invited their friends over, and said all the lines together while they watched it. Twenty-seven years later, they’re still at it.
It was a hit, globally, and through the miracle of dubbing, I became an instant linguist in French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, German, Japanese, Greek, Hungarian, Portuguese, Swedish, and Urdu. It was one of the highest-grossing pictures of the eighties. There was an immediate identification with this film based on the true stories of sexual harassment and the indignities suffered by secretaries in the seventies, before they found out could sue the bastards. Possibly 90 percent of the urban population works in an office or has done so at one time. Casting Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin as secretaries, ludicrous as that may seem, was brilliant. How could it not be a hit?
I almost didn’t get into the film. I’d read about it and tried to get an interview for it, as there had to be a lot of parts for women playing secretaries. I called and wrote, but no, they weren’t going to see me—“No,” “Not interested,” “Wrong time,” “No, no, no,” “All cast,” “Forget it.” It got through to me that I wasn’t wanted, and that was that.
The weekend before filming started, my agent called and said, “Would you like to go in on Nine to Five? They want to see you.”
They? I thought. Who are “they”? They who have decided to control my life. The script came, and when I looked at it, I saw that mine was yet another very small part.
For twenty years before going to California, I had been doing leads in plays. Hollywood was a place where, if you got a part saying two or three lines along with a close-up, it could overshadow all the leading parts in all the plays you’d ever done. Everybody would know you the next day. That’s why I was in this godforsaken town. It’s called building a career.
With this in mind, I went to the interview with a kind of exhausted indifference. It was just another couple of lines to me. As I waited to see the director, a woman with white hair came in, and I thought, Oh, I see. That’s probably who they want. Then someone said, “Peggy Pope, will you come in, please?” I went into the cramped office and sat down at a small desk across from Colin Higgins, the writer and director. After some pleasantries, he said, “Actually, I had a somewhat older woman in mind.” I said, perhaps a little too brusquely, “Oh, well, if you want old, there’s old sitting out in the waiting room. Why don’t you get her?”
He straightened up in his chair. It was like I had swatted him.
He said, “You know, I’ve never heard an actress talk that way.” He paused and said, “Since I wrote this script, I could, with a flick of my pen, make her younger.”
He seemed to be asking my advice, so in my new position as co-writer, I said thoughtfully, “Yeah, you could do that.”
He said, “Could you, ah… would you mind reading a little of this for me?
Having spent eighty bucks on a coach to work on the part with me the day before, I said, “Sure, of course.
Colin Higgins, God bless him, gave me a leg up that day with a flick of his pen, casting me as the office lush secretly sipping away from a little flask kept in the file drawer. Every time Dolly, Lily, or Jane stormed out of the boss’s office in a righteous rage, it was up to me to cheer her on with an “Atta girl!” I was a sort of boozy Greek chorus.
It was a good movie and a good part; at the end, my character comes back from rehab, hair combed, looking spiffy, and ready for the sequel. Under-dogs climbing to the top is a fine formula, and it’s always good to be in at the end of a film so that people remember you were in it.