Audition (10 page)

There were more and more showgirls to deck out in Erté’s unique costumes. There were thirty-six young women in the chorus line, more than any Broadway musical today. Once or twice a year my father went to Europe and came back with new chorus girls and dancers, sometimes more than a dozen at a time. The girls’ pay in postwar Europe was a pittance compared to the seventy-five dollars a week my father was willing to pay them. The most prized were the cancan dancers he brought back from the Lido nightclub in Paris. The Parisiennes not only did splits, but defied gravity and anatomy by jumping high in the air and landing
in
the splits. My father’s American cancan dancers were somewhat intimidated by the French, but the Latin Quarter audiences loved them.

The only thorn in my father’s side, besides my anxious mother, was his partner in both the New York and Florida clubs, E. M. Loew. Perhaps because the one in New York was known as “Lou Walters Latin Quarter,” and my father was well-known, the celebrity, E.M., as he was always called, felt compelled to throw his weight around. He had a lot of weight.

He was a large man, loud and vulgar, and he tried his best to make my father seem small, and not just in physical size. He was heavy-handed, the kind of man who would whack you on the back to make a point. He spoke with a thick Russian accent. Well, so did my beloved grandmother, but when Loew spoke it was guttural, and he often spit as he talked. He always called my father “Louie.” My father hated being called “Louie.” Still, I think my father could probably have lived with that. The real problem was that Loew was a bottom-line bean counter, the dark counterforce to my father’s dazzle. He fought every production penny my father spent, every hand-sewn sequin, everything that made the Latin Quarter so singular and special. “Louie,” Loew would say. “Vy do you have to get new costumes for the finale? Keep last year’s. Who vill know the difference?”

E.M.’s wife, Sonja, was also hard to take. She was noisy and proprietary at the Latin Quarter, demanding special service, ordering everyone around. “I am Mrs. E. M. Loew,” she would proclaim. “I own this place.” While we always sat with my father in the back of the club, Sonja insisted on being seated at a table in the front row, though those prime, ringside tables should have gone to paying customers. She always had half a dozen hangers-on at her table who drank too much, as did Sonja. Perhaps you have picked up on the fact that the Loews were not my favorite couple.

In retrospect, however, I have to admit that Loew’s iron hand on the Latin Quarter’s purse strings probably accounted for my father’s spectacular fifteen-year run in New York. By reining him in Loew boosted the club’s profit margin, but I couldn’t forgive him for diminishing my father. Even though I had my own problems with Lou Walters, I recognized his dignity. And after all, he was my father.

Mercifully Loew lived in Boston and was not always on the scene in New York. When he did come, it was as if darkness descended. I had murderous dreams about Loew. They were sometimes so real to me that, in my fantasies, I tried to figure out how I could get away with his murder. Of course I didn’t kill E. M. Loew, and he would outlive my father by seven years, dying in 1984. I did not go to his funeral.

During my last two years of high school I was having smooth sailing. I was unhappy at first that Fieldston had refused to readmit me, thanks to my erratic attendance record, but I soon made new friends at Birch Wathen. Again, I studied hard and got good grades. I began to date. Mostly we went to the movies or to another friend’s house. Sex was not even a remote consideration. We were years away from the birth control pill. All my girlfriends were virgins. Me, too.

It was a special time to be in New York. On Broadway a whole new kind of musical was gathering steam, shows with songs and lyrics that sprang from and were integrated into the plot. My father took us to many opening nights, and those evenings were as glamorous as you could get. Women dressed in long gowns, often with pearls around their necks and sometimes white ermine coats over their shoulders. Men wore tuxedos. I marvel today when I go to the theater and see much of the audience in jeans and T-shirts.

My father took us to the opening of
Oklahoma!
, which made show business history, thanks to its glorious score by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and ushered in what became known as the golden age of musicals. We saw them all. We went to the opening of the revival of the 1927 epic
Show Boat
, to the romantic
Carousel
, also by Rodgers and Hammerstein, at the Majestic Theater, to Irving Berlin’s
Annie Get Your Gun
, which starred Ethel Merman. I’ll never forget the opening night of
South Pacific
in 1949, with another exquisite score by Rodgers and Hammerstein and opera bass Ezio Pinza singing “Some Enchanted Evening” to Mary Martin. During this period my whole life felt enchanted.

Our summers were as busy as our winters. At this time there were quite a few big, rambling resort hotels that were open only in the summer—the Lido in Long Island; another, the Griswold, in Connecticut; still another, the Sagamore in upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains. We went to all of them. They were full of kids my age and were very popular.

On weekends the women got dressed up and decked themselves out with all their jewelry. The men, who came from the city only for the weekends, wore dark blue suits and ties. During the week the wives took dance lessons, and on weekends they showed off their fancy new rumba steps to their husbands.

We teenage kids took dance lessons too. One of the instructors had a little crush on me and asked me to dance as often as he could, but he also was paid to dance with my sister. Jackie had no sense of rhythm and sort of had to be pushed around the floor, but she loved it. I had to promise the instructor that I would give him one dance for every dance he gave Jackie. Otherwise she just would mostly have sat on the sidelines.

In my senior year at Birch Wathen, the subject turned to college. I wanted more than anything to go to Wellesley, a renowned all-female college then and now, on the outskirts of Boston, and I applied there. Some of the smartest women I would come to know later in my life graduated from Wellesley—women like Hillary Clinton, Lynn Sherr, and Diane Sawyer. I also applied to Pembroke College in Rhode Island as my “safe” choice. My third application went to a small college located in Bronxville, a town in nearby Westchester. The college was named Sarah Lawrence.

Sarah Lawrence was an all-female college, barely twenty years old, and considered to be very avant-garde and progressive in its education. There were no exams, no required core curriculum, and no actual grades. You took only three major subjects per semester and worked closely with a professor who, following the British tradition, was known as your adviser, or “don.” It was a college that attracted the adventurous, the arty, the self-starter scholar, and the debutante. I was none of the above, but I applied because my then best friend, Shelby, was applying.

Sarah Lawrence had a unique admissions process. When you applied you were sent a form and asked to write answers to specific questions, such as, “Name two books you have read recently which you disliked. Tell why.” And “Are you concerned with any problem in the fields of government, politics, or economics about which you would like to learn more? Why?” These questions are actually lifted verbatim off my own fifty-year-plus-old admission application, which at my request, Sarah Lawrence recently sent me as research for this book.

I did fine on the two books I disliked—
Eminent Victorians
, by Lytton Strachey, whom I criticized for his lack of “color and realism” in his characterizations, and
The Snake Pit
, by Mary Jane Ward, for being “repetitious” and “not offering the slightest hint as to how to remedy the sorry conditions in mental hospitals.” I also did fine on the government question, waxing on and on in my cramped little handwriting about the battle of Labor vs. Capital, about which I cared little, to be honest, but was prompted by reading about a series of recent strikes: a teachers’ strike and one targeting AT&T.

However, my hair stood on end when I read the barefaced lies I proffered to Sarah Lawrence so many years ago. My response to “What has meant most to you in your education outside of school?” was: “Sunday school, which helped me appreciate the force of God and enabled me to increase my faith and understanding in His power.” Well, I never
ever
went to Sunday school! Did I think a nun was going to read my application? And then absolve me of my sin? I must have, because I can come up with no other explanation.

Another whopper came in my answer about the experience I had had in the arts. While part of my answer was true—I was indeed “particularly fond of dramatics” (I had been in several school plays since my debut as a bird)—what was unbelievable was my claim that I had worked in a summer stock company in Connecticut and “so gained much valuable technical experience.” Good heavens! I never worked in summer stock in my life. Thank goodness Sarah Lawrence never checked the facts.

But what was really myth shattering was the portion of the admission forms assigned to my parents. All my life I thought my mother had filled it out and that my father had added one withering, dismissive line: “Barbara is a very normal girl with normal interests.” Period. I thought he hadn’t given the whole thing much thought. But no. Looking at the original admission forms, it turned out to be my father who had written the entire four-page evaluation and it was immensely tender.

Asked about my high school experiences, he wrote that I took a “good interest” in my schoolwork; that I was proud of my “good work and good marks” that I make “friends easily and hold them.” Asked about my interests, he described me as being “literary-minded” and backed it up by saying that I read “a great deal.” He also wrote that I was interested in “dramatic theatricals,” had both “initiative and creative ability,” and that I expressed myself “clearly and tersely.” As to what present interests, if any, he would like me to outgrow, he replied that I had “no trait” that upset him, nor did I appear to him to have “any bad habits.”

All this he summed up at the end in that one sentence about my being a “normal” girl. (That’s probably what got me into Sarah Lawrence.) But he was no normal, average American father. I held that against him for years and judged what I had always thought to be his one-sentence contribution to the application as proof that he didn’t know me at all. Reading now what he actually wrote, I realize that it’s quite the opposite—I didn’t know him.

In any event I went off to visit Wellesley and was immensely impressed. Along with Shelby, I also visited Sarah Lawrence for a personal interview. The school seemed small, which I liked, but my heart wasn’t there.

This is what happened. Wellesley put me on the waiting list. I would not know until late summer whether they would have room for me. Pembroke, my “safe” school, turned me down. Sarah Lawrence wanted me. I was back to the insecurity of Kappa Pi versus Lambda Pi. What if Wellesley didn’t accept me after all? Where would I go? I had applied to only those three schools. I didn’t have the confidence to wait to see if Wellesley might take me or the courage to call the school and try to convince them that I would be a perfect candidate. So Sarah Lawrence it would be.

Sarah Lawrence

I
NEVER TOOK A
science course at Sarah Lawrence College. I never took a comparative religion course or a language course or a math class. For years afterward I used to say I didn’t learn a thing. And I would jokingly add that if I had, I might have made something of myself. But when I read the course material Sarah Lawrence recently sent me, I realized that was not true.

Part of the reason I didn’t delve into the more important academic subjects was that I took a course called “Theater” for my entire four years. At Sarah Lawrence you signed up to take three major subjects in three different areas. One of the majors was Theater. This was amazing to me—one could really just study theater? It was also a solution to a real dilemma: I had absolutely no idea what I really wanted to do “when I grew up.” Perhaps because I had spent my whole life in the world of show business, going to clubs and plays and meeting performers and behind-the-scenes people, I thought “Theater” was where I belonged. For me, lacking any other direction, it certainly seemed like a promising course to take. I liked the idea of learning how to construct scenery, familiarizing myself with costume design and lighting techniques, but most of all it was the idea of acting that interested me. I could imagine losing myself in the role of a totally different person. Somehow I felt I would be able to do that.

We were also assigned great plays to read, among them
The Glass Menagerie
by Tennessee Williams,
A Bill of Divorcement
by Clemence Dane, T. S. Eliot’s
The Cocktail Party
, and plays by Anton Chekhov and Sean O’Casey. I was especially moved by
The Glass Menagerie
, because it reminded me so much of my sister’s situation. In the play there is a rather frantic Southern mother who is trying desperately to find a “gentleman caller” for her emotionally and physically fragile daughter, who spends her days playing with her tiny glass animals. There is also a son, and when the mother too often forces him to find “gentlemen callers,” he abandons the family and is then racked with guilt. Although the situation was not exactly like mine, it was similar enough to resonate with me then and even today.

To my joy, in my freshman year, I auditioned for and won the part of Mary Boyle, the lead in Sean O’Casey’s
Juno and the Paycock.
We performed the play for three days. The audience was made up of students and any residents of the neighboring towns who might want to come. I remember the thrill of hearing applause and the joy of getting laughs, especially when the laughs came where they belonged. In many of my future interviews with actors, I so often heard that it was in college or university that they first got the acting bug. That was the case with me. I was going to be an actress. I had found my calling.