B00C4I7LJE EBOK (12 page)

Karen was not much of a meat eater and ordered fresh brook trout. I wondered where on Earth they got brook trout in the middle of the desert and very much doubted it was fresh.

“Fresh-frozen,” the waitress confirmed.

Just as our food came I heard my name over the page.     

“Don’t answer,” Karen advised.

“How can I not answer? They know I’m here.”

“Pretend you didn’t hear the page.”

I knew that if I did that I wouldn’t enjoy my meal. Reluctantly, I excused myself and went to the house phone. It was Warde, as I knew it would be.

“Are you eating yet?” he asked. I told him we had just been served. “Well, don’t interrupt your dinner. We just wanted you to know that we’re going to stay backstage for the show. When you’re through eating you can come on back.”

I didn’t know if it was an invitation or a command. I told Karen, and we made dinner last as long as possible. I even ordered wine to go with my steak. I seldom drank, and never while working, but that wasn’t exactly working.

By the time we got backstage, it was between shows and no one was around. We wandered back out to the casino, and I watched Karen feed a few dollars into a slot machine, but the machine didn’t reciprocate and she walked away a little poorer. The second show would start at midnight and by 11:30 the joint was jumping. We decided it was time to go backstage.

The dressing rooms in Las Vegas were plush. They usually consisted of two rooms—a reception-type room with a bar and several chairs and couches, pictures on the walls, and a television. It almost looked like someone’s living room. The actual dressing portion of the room was separate and fairly large, with a long, well-lighted dressing table and an entire wall of closets and shelves. An entertainer could have several people in her dressing room and still have her privacy by going into the inner room.

Phyllis and Warde were sitting in what I thought of as the living room portion of Debbie Reynolds’ dressing room, talking quietly. Karen and I settled on the couch, waiting to find out what we should do. Debbie was in the inner room with her mother, brother, and daughter. Debbie’s brother stepped into the living room, closing the door behind him. “Would you like to go out front and watch the show?” he asked.

Phyllis and Warde declined, and Karen wasn’t interested, so I declined as well. I didn’t want to sit out front by myself.

“Once the show starts,” Phyllis told us, “you can watch from the wings if you like.”

It wasn’t long before the “five minute” call came over the speaker, followed by “two minutes to show time, ladies and gentlemen. Two minutes.”

I’d never been really enamored with show business, but every time I heard that announcement, with the cacophony of the orchestra tuning up and the last check before the curtain went up, it made my heart beat a little faster. Somehow, it seemed magic.

We waited until Debbie went onstage, then Karen and I found a place where we could watch without being in the way. Debbie danced and sang, sashaying around the stage in a lovely, sparkly dress. After about a half hour she approached the audience.

“Do you mind if I sit down?” she asked as she sank gracefully to the floor and dangled her feet over the edge of the stage.

“Could I have a glass of water?” she called out toward the wings, and the stage manager came out with water and a towel.

“I’m exhausted,” she confided to the audience. “I’ve been sick but thought I could make it through two shows. I hate to disappoint my audiences.” Her smile beguiled and begged for indulgence.

About that time I became aware of a whispered argument going on behind me. I glanced around to see Debbie’s mother and daughter, Carrie, who must have been about thirteen. The teenager seemed distressed.

“Please don’t make me,” she pleaded. “I don’t want to do it.”

“After all your mother has done for you!” the older lady remonstrated. “Here she is night after night knocking herself out. She’s worked herself into a state of exhaustion, and she’s doing it all for you. You have to help her.”

“No, I don’t want to.”

I thought the girl was going to cry.

“You have to!” the grandmother said. “You have to help your mother.”

I glanced at Karen. She’d heard the exchange, too.

Only a moment later, Debbie told the audience she would ask her daughter to come sing for them. The grandmother propelled Carrie, who looked frightened and clutched a guitar, into the spotlight. She sang a couple of songs, neither badly nor well, while her mother beamed from her perch at the edge of the stage.

I wondered what long-term effects, if any, the coercion and guilt would have on a child. I felt sorry for her and embarrassed that I’d overheard such a private conversation.

The show mercifully ended, and Karen and I went to find Phyllis and Warde. They were still in Debbie’s dressing room, so we left them there and called it a night. We had reservations for a flight at noon the next day and nothing more needed to be done until morning.

As we checked out, the desk clerk scrutinized our bills before we signed them.

“No meals?” she asked.

“I beg your pardon?”        

“You didn’t eat while you were here? There aren’t any meals charged.”

“We paid cash.”

“Oh,” she said. “Didn’t anyone tell you that your meals were comped? You didn’t have to pay.”

16

P
hyllis had nothing on the schedule for the ensuing week, so when my friend Barbara invited me to come to San Francisco for a few days, I accepted. Barbara and I had been secretaries at the American Embassy in Pretoria and shared a flat for over two years. She’d quit the Foreign Service and moved to San Francisco a year before I left London. Barbara and I had a great time, going to the opera and visiting museums. I returned to Phyllis’s a week later feeling totally refreshed.

The morning I got back, there was a flurry of activity, and I heard Val tell Maria, “They’re going to come see her this afternoon.”

“Who’s coming to see her?” I asked Maria when we were upstairs in the office.

“Oh, it’s some men who want to manage her.”

“I thought Mr. B was her manager.”

“He’s her business manager,” Maria said, “but these people want to manage her career.”

“But she’s got an agent. Why does she need a manager?”

“Well, the way I understand it,” Maria began, “is that the agent works for the agency and they handle lots and lots of people.”

The William Morris Agency was in fact the largest agency in the business at that time. Their office building teemed with agents and assistant agents and administrators and secretaries and all kinds of people bustling about, many wearing gold chains. I’d only been there once to pick up something for Phyllis, but I could readily believe that their main interest would be the agency rather than the client.

“The manager,” Maria went on, “only has a few clients and he works for them. He goes out and gets bookings for them. The agent waits for the bookings to come to him, and then he finds the right client to fill the booking.”

“Do they get 10 percent, too, or do they split it with the agent?”

“I’m not sure, but I think they get 10 percent, too.”

It seemed to me that a lot of people were taking a percentage of Phyllis Diller—her agent, her attorney, and her publicist, and it looked as if there would be a manager, too. On top of that, she had to pay her staff and someone to handle her fan mail (the routine fan mail was answered by a professional who had stacks of pre-autographed pictures for that purpose) and her costume designer, Omar. What with all that and the expenses of keeping a house and family, I concluded show business wasn’t quite as lucrative as I’d assumed.

Shortly after 3:00 P.M. I heard the doorbell ring, followed by a muted bustle and the buzz of the intercom.

“Mr. Gerber and Mr. Weiss are here to see Miss Diller,” Val said. I found Phyllis in the Doris Day Room and told her the managers had arrived.

Phyllis came out and escorted them into the dining room, which was one of the few rooms in the mansion with doors that closed. The meeting went on for two hours. When they emerged, we nearly collided as I headed for the front door, on my way home. I gave them a quick look-over. They both impressed me, but why I couldn’t really tell. The next morning, Phyllis called me to her room and said, “Roy Gerber and Norman Weiss are going to be my personal managers.” She handed me two business cards and told me to add them to the Rolodex.

“I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing,” she said, “but I’m going to give it a try. They say they can double my bookings.”

That’ll be fun,
I thought. More places to see. I also figured that if they doubled her earnings, 10 percent of that would be very well spent.

Phyllis had scheduled a meeting with Roy Gerber, who worked in L.A. Mr. Weiss returned to his home in New York. When Roy came back to the house, Phyllis told me to sit in on the meeting. We met around the large table in the dining room.

“So, you play the piano?” Roy asked.

Well, you could hardly miss seeing the huge concert grand in the living room.

“Yes. Not as much as I’d like to,” she said.

“Why not put that in the act?”

“I started my career by vamping around a piano. I used it as a prop and I don’t need to anymore.”

“But you sing.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got an idea. How about ending your performance with a song?”

Phyllis squinted and looked off into the distance.

“You’ve already done Broadway,” Roy said. “Why not use that song, the one about the parade?”

“
Before the Parade Passes By
,” Phyllis said.

“Yeah, that one.”

Because it had been barely a year since Phyllis had played the lead in
Hello, Dolly!,
she already knew the song and it was indeed a rousing number.

“It would be a terrific close to your show,” he said.

Phyllis didn’t answer right away. Finally, she shrugged. “Okay, let’s try it.”

Her lack of enthusiasm puzzled me, as if she didn’t want to do any of it. I wondered if Mr. B had urged her to try something different.

She practiced the song and Roy had the music written out for the orchestra. As far as I was concerned it meant one more bag to count and a real rehearsal on every engagement, not only for the orchestra, but for the sound check and the lighting, too.

The first time Phyllis tried it, she was pleased with the audience’s reaction. People actually stood and cheered as she reached the finale. Although her primary talent was certainly not singing, her enthusiasm and determination carried the day.
Parade
provided an exciting end to her performance. Somewhat grudgingly, I felt, Phyllis admitted that Roy had been right.

Once she felt comfortable with it in her show, Roy brought up the idea of the piano again. “How would you feel about performing with a symphony orchestra?”

 “Concerts?” I asked Karen later. I couldn’t imagine Phyllis Diller playing with a symphony. As it turned out, the idea wasn’t as farfetched as it sounded. Celebrity appearances with an orchestra were becoming a fad. Danny Kaye was perhaps the most popular of these guest celebrities; he did talking numbers such as
Peter and the Wolf
or
Tubby the Tuba
.

Phyllis’s first concert booking was with the Pittsburgh Symphony and its “pops” program. It turned out to be a happy mistake. They weren’t aware that Phyllis actually played the piano, and Phyllis didn’t realize they didn’t know. She practiced two Bach études, then wrote a whimsical skit about a little old lady on a park bench to be done to her own composition,
The Diller Waltz
. She sent her program to the symphony manager, and apparently he thought her playing the piano was some kind of joke.

At the rehearsal, Phyllis sat down at the piano and began playing Bach. Few people knew she had once studied to be a classical pianist. Very quickly the noise in the auditorium abated as everyone, including the musicians in the orchestra, watched in astonishment as Phyllis Diller ripped through the Bach étude. When she finished, they rewarded her with enthusiastic applause. That was probably the most fun they’d had at a rehearsal in ages.

Meanwhile, I sat sewing together a “boa” out of moth-eaten fox pelts Phyllis had received from Goodwill, her pet charity.

When she had a break, I asked, “How do you want these foxes stitched?”      

“I just want one long string of them so that it sort of drags on the floor.”

“No, what I mean is, do you want them nose-to-tail or nose-to-nose?”

“Oh.” She picked up a couple of pelts and tried them both ways. “What do you think?” she asked.        

“Well, nose-to-nose is going to be a little awkward, but nose-to-tail is sort of obscene.”

We both looked at the bedraggled pelts again.

“It’ll look funny tail-to-tail and nose-to-nose, though,” she mused. “No, I think nose-to-tail is how it’s got to be.” She held a pair of them up that way and broke into a huge laugh. “Maybe a little obscene,” she said as she walked away.

So while she continued the rehearsal, I sat surrounded by a pathetic pile of pelts and stitched diligently. Ordinarily, it would be Karen’s domain, but Karen had gone to a department store to buy a couple of yards of white material to add to the end of one of Phyllis’s gloves so when the “little old lady” took off her glove it would seem to be miles long.

Phyllis had come up with all of this just before we left L.A. As show time approached, we worked frantically to pull it all together.

The audience that night had no idea what was going to happen. The first half of the concert was a regular symphony performance. After the intermission, the lights dimmed and the concert master walked onstage to applause. The orchestra conductor followed him to more applause. Then an announcer from backstage intoned, “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we are honored to bring you the concert stylings of the legendary
Dame Illya Dillya
!”

Phyllis swept onstage wearing a stunning floor-length, blue-satin coat and a white fur stole around her neck. The audience applauded wildly. She then removed the stole and slowly took off her gloves. Finally, she unzipped the satin coat to reveal a magnificent white satin dress covered in beads and crystals. At this point the audience was in stitches and all she’d done so far was take off a few clothes. Then she sat down at the piano. No one expected funny-lady Phyllis Diller, with the houseful of unironed laundry and dumb kids, to actually sit down and play a concert grand.