Life Is Not a Stage (8 page)

CHAPTER 6

Hitting the Road

M
y one little line of dialogue in
Wish You Were Here
quickly opened some doors. A top agent suddenly wanted to represent me. The production company also started sending me out to do publicity for the show (including that off-camera Ed Sullivan performance with the chorus). Don’t ask me why—maybe they saw something refreshing in a young face getting a big break, since the show was openly giving that chance to a few newcomers. It was something to see my name in ink for the first time in newspaper columns. Television talk shows were just getting started and Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg, who pretty much invented the genre, had me on theirs. They thought the country accent that I had worked so hard to lose was the funniest thing and wanted me to demonstrate it. That was easy enough.

There was no videotape in television’s infancy and no retakes, although some programs were recorded in kinescope for rebroadcast in earlier time zones (by literally pointing a film camera at a TV monitor). Everything was live, which some performers found absolutely terrifying. But it did not bother me. Instead, I learned quickly through necessity that you had to be prepared when you went on television, not just with stories to tell but also to expect the unexpected. It helped that I had that early-acquired sense of what it took to make people laugh. You also had to be flexible and roll with the punches because the host might go off on a tangent and other things might not come off as planned. Once I was on a radio show hosted by Barry Gray broadcast live on WMCA from a restaurant. If memory serves me right, it must have been my birthday, because they brought out a birthday cake to the table on the raised platform where we did the interview. But the cake never made it to me. It got diverted at the last second onto the nicely dressed and very stunned businessman seated at the table below. Too bad it wasn’t captured on television, but I’m sure the way I was laughing must have left little to the imagination for those listening at home. It was uncanny how in the blink of an eye the cake had jumped off the table and deposited itself on his shoulders, plastering his hair and face.

When not at the theater or doing interviews, I was studying. I had met a wonderful voice teacher named Dolf Swing and took lessons with him. Twice a week, I had a three-hour acting class with Mary Tarcai (Charlotte Rae was in my class). I was also going out on auditions, including for the part of the leading lady in
Wish You Were Here
when the actress was suddenly fired. I didn’t get that part because they told me I didn’t look Jewish enough. A beautiful dark-haired actress named Patricia Marand got it. Jack Cassidy remained the leading man.

When you went out on an audition, the decision-makers sat in the shadows in the seats below.

“Can you come back in the afternoon and sing for my partner?” asked one of the strangers in the audience after I finished one tryout.

“Who’s your partner?” I asked.

“Oscar Hammerstein,” the man replied. That probably meant that the man I was speaking to was Richard Rodgers. So it was. The Ouija board back at the Three Arts wasn’t lying. I found out I was up for the lead as the farm girl Laurey in the last national touring company of the musical
Oklahoma!
I was the right age and had the right accent—again, the one I had just gotten rid of!—so they must have sensed how easily Laurey came to me. They offered me the role that afternoon. I had been in
Wish You Were Here
for two months by this time.

Here I was, suddenly elevated from the chorus to the chance to play a leading role in a major production for my idols, Rodgers and Hammerstein, a dream that came true so quickly it was almost ridiculous. But I had some serious doubts about taking the job. My goal was Broadway, to be on the stage in New York. I thought that if I went out on the road I would be out of sight, out of mind, out of the mix, and unavailable if any other big roles came up. Nor would I be able to continue with my studies and keep learning and growing. I was still very much a teenager, so this display of impatience and chutzpah could be chalked up to that. I was also not worried that if I said no to this part I wouldn’t get another big shot. But it was a big decision, and to hedge my bets I still went out on other auditions, one of which was for
Guys and Dolls
.

The casting director for the musical, Ira Bernstein, knew that I had already been offered the role in
Oklahoma!
He strongly recommended that I take the job and have the experience of playing a leading role on the road. “You can really learn your craft.” My voice teacher Dolf concurred, emphasizing that doing eight shows a week on tour would be an invaluable education. So I took the job.

In the interim weeks before rehearsals for
Oklahoma!
began, I still appeared in
Wish You Were Here
. I walked each afternoon the twenty blocks from my apartment on the East Side to the theater on the West Side with blisters on my heels. The stage door to our theater was right next door to the one for
Guys and Dolls
. I saw Ira standing outside that door, and I went over to thank him for his advice and told him that I had made my decision. “Maybe we could discuss it over dinner,” he suggested. He was a very charming and handsome man, but we just kept it on a platonic level. We dated a few times, but that came to a temporary stop out of necessity when I went out on the road.

We rehearsed in New York for three weeks before the opening night in New Haven, Connecticut. Jerry White, the director, was tough and demanding, but it was something I really liked and never found intimidating. The thought of going from the chorus in one play to the lead in the next, one might assume, would be stressful. The leads in the one high school operetta and the community theater piece I did before leaving for New York were not comparable. But my ignorance proved a great blessing. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Since playing Laurey was like second nature to me, I hardly fretted.

However, that stress-free experience was short-lived. I didn’t realize all the reality checks that would quickly be coming my way. It was on the last days of these rehearsals and right before we were to open in New Haven that I found out my father had died. My understudy was not yet prepared, so the trip home for the funeral was out of the question. It was incredibly hard, but like so many other times of adversity, when faced with little other choice, I stoically barreled through it. Only this time it proved to be a lot more complicated. Cause and effect created a spiraling outcome.

On top of dealing with my father’s death and all the stress of opening night in New Haven, I caught a cold. The show must go on. When you are the lead, you bear extra responsibility, and you do what is necessary. I went to a doctor and he gave me an injection. It killed the cold all right, but came close to taking the rest of me along with it. The first thing I noticed was that my fingers swelled up. Then the same thing happened to my legs and to my feet, which looked like piano legs. When I couldn’t get the Mary Janes on my swollen feet, the wardrobe person improvised and cut up a pair of black house slippers. Every night I would go to sleep with my legs propped up on the hotel bed headboard to cut down on the swelling. I was in so much agony with the pain. I prayed that it would be gone by the morning, but when I woke up it was just as bad.

I prayed more and said my rosary but also questioned God why He wasn’t helping me. Onstage, the pain in my knees and all my joints made each movement a torture, and I did everything I could to minimize my limping. I had to dance during the “Many a New Day” number, and it hurt like hell. Adrenaline kicks in and you find a way to tough your way through it. The cast and crew were very supportive, but looking back, I wonder how I made it and whether any performers today would have gone on under such circumstances. “What did I do to deserve this?” I questioned God in my prayers. Was this some kind of divine retribution because I didn’t go to my father’s funeral? Was it payback for when I told him I’d rather see him dead than in that condition? With my upbringing, it was so easy to go there.

When we left New Haven, the next stop was Asbury Park, New Jersey. A group of us went to the beach during the day, and I noticed that people started looking at me funny. It turns out that I was getting hives on my face and lips from being out in the sunlight. My tongue had also begun to swell up. They took me back to the hotel, and the front desk called a doctor. He came and looked at me. “My God, child, don’t let anybody ever give you penicillin.” No one else had thought to question that, but Dr. Alvin Weinstein, who would become a lifelong friend, recognized it immediately. He told me that he was in the Army during the war and quarantined a whole group of men, thinking that it was an outbreak of measles. But on further investigation, it turned out it was a toxic reaction to penicillin. The antibiotic was still relatively new, only in widespread use since the end of World War II. As an antidote, he gave me a shot of adrenaline and cortisone.

“Will it be okay?” I asked him. “I have a show to do tonight.”

“You can’t. You can’t sing like this,” he answered. I told him I had to, so he came to the show and gave me another shot just before I went onstage. He treated me for the whole week we were there and never charged me a dime. We had a nurse with the show, and she continued to give me the injections for a few more weeks as we traveled onward, until the poison finally got out of my system. I was lucky that I hadn’t dropped dead.

Once I was feeling better, I settled into the routine. On average, we spent about five days in each city, the tour lasting from September through May. I thought it was the most exciting thing in the world to travel. I was given the stateroom on the train because I was the leading lady, but I gave it instead to Mary Marlowe, a veteran actress who played Aunt Eller. I took the berth instead—after all, that’s what they did in those movie musicals. Sometimes we would end up on a bus if the trains didn’t run. It sounds romantic, but when you’re in a blizzard in Minnesota and the driver is lost, it wears thin.

“What’s the best way to Duluth?” he asked a passerby.

“Oh, that’s right up next to Bemidji.”

“Where in the hell is Bemidji?”

The first year, I had a roommate, a fellow cast member who was supposed to look after me, since I was still just eighteen years old. But it turned out to be the other way around. She was a few years older, and she was wild. She would frequently get bombed, and it was a nightmare to try to get her up to catch the train when we were leaving town. When she was drunk, she would tell me all sorts of tragic stories that had happened to her, about abortions and other traumas, and it would keep me awake at night thinking about it. If she had a boyfriend in that town, she would show me the hickeys she got from the night before. It was a baptism by fire and a teachable moment for what I did not want to become when I grew up.

Another ritual of the road was the brainchild of Owen Marshall, a wonderful man who played the Sheriff. He explained it when I was first invited to dinner with the others.

“Okay, we’re going to say it’s my birthday. They’ll know we’re from the show. That way, we’ll get something extra to drink or a dessert on the house.” Per the plan, we sang “Happy Birthday” to him. And sure enough, we would get it. Once we did it at a very fancy and expensive place. Owen said after that meal, “All that service, white gloves, and eighteen-karat gold plates, and the food stunk!” Maybe that was payback for all the freebies, but we did have fun. A lot of laughs were also to be had hanging out with the male dancers, most of whom were homosexual. I was further educated in the diverse ways of the world. All of that proved to be a helpful diversion from my own little melodrama. I had a crush on my leading man, who was married. That, of course, was a nonstarter and the end of the story, but I sure loved kissing him onstage!

I trust that the statute of limitations has run out on this accidental crime I committed during the second season in
Oklahoma!
No fingers were pointed at the time, but here, for the first time, you have my confession. Barbara Cook (who played Ado Annie in the second year) and I had our dressing room together backstage in the theater in Pittsburgh. In those days, we had a very neat trick for thickening our eyelashes. We had these little containers of wax with a small candle underneath. We’d melt the wax and put it on our eyelashes. After we would finish at night, we’d cover the makeup on the table with a towel and leave. That’s what I did one Friday night. The next day, we came in to do the Saturday matinee and learned that there had been a fire in the theater backstage. My costume, which was a little white dress, was an absolute mess with black soot on it. Pittsburgh was known in those days for having a lot of soot from all the coal-burning steel mills, but this was ridiculous. I paid no attention to it. The show had to go on. When Barbara Cook came out onstage dressed as Ado Annie, she not only had soot on her dress but also on her face, on the rose on her head, and all over. A little more and she could have done the show in blackface. I took one look at her and became hysterical. So did she, and we fell into each other’s arms. The stage manager was yelling at us from the wings to get on with the show, but it took a while before we finally stopped laughing. It didn’t take an arson expert to notice that my makeup table was more severely burned than anything else around it. Hmm, someone must have forgotten to blow out that candle. It was pathetic, and I felt bad about it. But now I’ve finally gotten it off my chest.