Life Is Not a Stage (9 page)

All throughout this time, I kept up the friendship with Ira Bernstein from afar despite being out on tour. We exchanged letters, and he came out to see me a couple of times on the road. He said to me after he saw me for the first time, “You just make love to the audience.” Part of that probably was due to the fact that I am always very grateful to the audience, what Oscar Hammerstein called the Big Black Giant. When you come from that place of gratitude, I think it opens up the potential of what can happen, some of which can almost seem supernatural. When you listen to actors talk about their experiences on the stage, some remark about their ability to see all around them onstage as if they truly had eyes in the backs of their heads. For me, there were two sensations. First, I had the sensation that I could reach out and touch the person in the last row of the balcony. And second, I felt like I physically grew larger on the stage. To this day, people come backstage after a show and comment how they were certain I was a half a foot taller when performing than in reality.

Being on tour in a long run introduced me to another challenge—doing the same show over and over night after night and keeping it fresh every time. I learned very quickly to say to myself, “This is a new audience. They haven’t seen it. I want it to be as good for them as it was for the audience the night before.”

Sometimes, circumstances onstage intervened to break the routine in horrifying, hilarious, and unforgettable ways. For example, it does not matter how perfectly well you know all your lines. All it takes is a momentary lapse in concentration. You’re singing a song, everything is going fine, and all of a sudden the lyrics are gone! It is not the same as if you are just speaking lines and someone whispers to you the cue to get back on track after a few seconds of uncomfortable fumbling. No, the music doesn’t stop for you when your memory hits a glitch. Instead, the only thing you can do is vamp a little, make up some lyrics, and grab back your place a bar or so later or as quickly as you can. It is the strangest sensation, and it scared the heck out of me the first time it happened.

One little incident I found fascinating came as the result of meeting a blind woman and her guide dog on one of those train rides on the tour. I talked to her for a while and got to know the dog a little as well. As we were both getting off, I invited her to the show. There is a scene in
Oklahoma!
where Jud tries to grab Laurey and kiss her. She pushes him away and makes a strong speech to him. When I got to that part, struggling to push him away, the woman’s dog started whining from the audience. He was worried about me.

Some years later, I was doing
The King and I
, playing Anna opposite Ricardo Montalban. In a very dramatic scene as the King lay on his deathbed, Ricardo began to whistle “Whenever I Feel Afraid” as the scene required. But that day, his whistle didn’t wet. The blowing from his puckered lips was barely audible to me and certainly not to the audience. So I had little other choice than to take over. I leaned over him, my shoulders shaking, lamenting over the dying king. To the audience, it looked like I was crying. But in truth, this outpouring of grief was my attempt to hold back an attack of laughter. And Ricardo, who was supposed to be on death’s doorstep, had to harness all the self-control and acting ability he could muster to keep from cracking up too.

Sometimes the spontaneity came from malfunctions of some otherwise brilliantly fabricated sets. Many years later, I was portraying the answering service switchboard operator Ella Peterson in
Bells Are Ringing
in a scene together with another girl. I looked around and noticed that the set was moving, heading east toward me. I signaled to the other girl. We both got up from the switchboard and started to hold the scenery back from closing in on us until the stagehands jumped in to save us. We milked that one for a big laugh. When you slip out of character for a moment, it is called “breaking the fourth wall”—the one that separates the actor from the audience. In this case, all four walls were breaking.

The same thing happened to me another time, but this one was hardly a laughing matter. “It’s all so wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.” I was singing the lyrics in the lovely coronation scene from Noël Coward’s
The Girl Who Came to Supper
. The set was a cathedral. I was supposed to be in the center box surrounded by royalty, adorned with the ermine fur, jewels, and crowns, when suddenly the fantasy dissolves. The girl is left on a stool, the trappings stripped from her, and the cathedral backdrop splits in two and is pulled off to the sides of the stage. But one evening, things took a decidedly different direction. Someone put the contraption into reverse, and the shell of the cathedral started to collapse on me. I had to jump out of the way quickly before the winching mechanism that held the set onto its tracks literally cut my feet off. I looked like a flamenco dancer. The demolished stool that I had sat on seconds before left little to the imagination of what could have been my fate. A few moments later, after they got the set moving back in the right direction, I went over and picked up a couple pieces of the former stool and waved them to the audience’s cheer. Survived again!

Sometimes a problem onstage would be more personal in nature. God forbid you should get the runs when the curtain rises. It happens often enough that most theaters have a toilet within easy reach of the stage. I was doing
The Sound of Music
and had an attack of acute food poisoning in Chicago. Everyone in the cast and crew knew I was sick, so when I would finish a scene, I made a dash to the bathroom and rushed to be ready for the next scene. John Meyers was my leading man, the Captain. In one of the scenes, the Captain asks Maria to stay for dinner. At first she says, “No, I couldn’t,” but then changes her mind. As I was going up the stairs on the set to exit the stage, just about overdue for my next pit stop, John said his next lines, “You’ll have to hurry. You’ll have to change.” I gave him the most pathetic, most sarcastic of all looks. The audience was certainly not in on the joke as he doubled up laughing.

The other thing that could mess with an actor’s mind during the performance was if they knew that someone important was in the audience. Thinking about that tough critic or one of your peers or idols sitting out there could drive you crazy. However, nothing came close to playing Maria in the aforementioned
Sound of Music
with the real Maria von Trapp watching me play her from the front row below. Yikes!

Perhaps the most special guest in the audience was during the first year of the tour of
Oklahoma!
—my mother. When we hit Cleveland, I got in contact and invited her to come see the show. We had corresponded throughout the years, but this would be the first time I would have face time with her since she left Rockport. When I saw her it was clear that she was little changed in physical appearance outside of a few extra pounds around the middle. Some hours later, I could safely say that nothing was radically different about her personality either. She carried on in her inimitable spirit of forthrightness and frankness, doing what she wanted to do and fairly oblivious to the feelings of those around her.

After the show, she went out with us to a restaurant, ordering her usual can of beer. She got on like fire with my wild former roommate, kindred spirits.

“You must be very proud of Florence,” someone said. Her reply was always the same and very protective.

“I’m proud of all my children.” She was not one to gleam with satisfaction. “I loved you. You were wonderful.” I knew she was happy for me, but she never made a big deal out of it. But one other side of it was no doubt the frustration that such success did not happen to her in her lifetime. I think she would have loved to be there onstage herself and command all that attention.

That night after the Cleveland show, she did get a different sort of attention. We went back to the hotel, where in the room there was a jump rope that we used for exercise. My mother grabbed it and demonstrated her prowess. The people on the floor below complained about the noise from the ceiling. When the front desk called, she responded, “Tell them not to worry about it. Think nothing of it!”

I think I inherited some of my mother’s forthrightness. I can also be very frank and spontaneously carefree in what I say and do, but I think it has served me better because I learned to temper it with a little more awareness and sensitivity. A few years later, I invited my mother to see
The Sound of Music
in Chicago. I didn’t want to be embarrassed, so I told John Meyers preemptively, “Please do not ask my mother anything about my childhood.” We went to dinner after the show, and the first thing John did was turn to my mother. “Elizabeth, tell us what Flo was like as a child.”

My mother looked up and didn’t miss a beat. “Just like a fart in a whirlwind!”

CHAPTER 7

The Big Break

T
he chance to star in the motion picture version was all part of the deal for signing on to go back out on the road for the second season of
Oklahoma!
The actual filming would be done several months later once the tour came off the road. It was all very rushed, and I was clearly feeling uncomfortable. I had flown out from New York and booked into the Studio Club in Hollywood for the quick one-night stay before having to fly back the next day. The Studio Club was the West Coast equivalent of the Three Arts, a chaperoned dorm where Marilyn Monroe and dozens of other leading ladies passed through in the early part of their careers. The next morning, I reported to the studio at the appointed hour for a screen test.

After makeup and wardrobe, I took my place on the mark on the set indicated by the gaffer’s tape and waited as the crew made the last adjustments. The director was Fred Zinnemann, a four-time Oscar recipient who helmed such classics as
High Noon
,
From Here to Eternity
, and later
A Man for All Seasons
. The man walking around and giving instructions about the lighting was no slouch either, the legendary Academy Award–winning cinematographer Harry Stradling. He filmed virtually all the great leading ladies of Hollywood in the 130 films to his credit, including
Easter Parade
and many others that I had seen as a child at the movie house in Rockport. And there I stood on the threshold of fulfilling that little girl’s wildest fantasy.

But I didn’t get the part of Laurey in the movie. When I got back to New York to rehearse for the second season of
Oklahoma!
I discussed the bad news with Jerry White. He told me, “Don’t be depressed about this. In the scheme of things, you’ll see that it’s going to be all right.”

“I’m not depressed,” I told him, although my eyes could not hide the fact that I had been crying. It was the first time in my young career that I did not get something that I wanted. “I’m a little discouraged.” But I assured the director that I would do the second season as I had promised and told him I would make it even better than the first one.

Although the screen test was hurried, they had treated me fairly. I was probably awful. With no experience working in film, I sang with too much intensity, projecting as I normally did to be heard live by hundreds of people. Preparing for this screen test with an acting coach would have been a good idea had I possessed the insight at that age and the luxury of time. But as often was the case, perceived negatives sooner or later turned into positives, as Jerry had promised. One of those pluses was getting back in front of New York audiences for a run at City Center, which generated great reviews. And while the film was not my fate when the season concluded, another dream come true would take its place—the chance to headline a smash Broadway show.

Leaving the touring company after the second season was bittersweet. The experience of being on the road that so many had thought would be a good education for me felt fairly complete. I learned the true meaning of “the show must go on.” You were expected to be there and perform at one hundred percent every night whether you felt sick or had a broken toe, cracked rib, or whatever. Gone were the crazy roommates. And the chapter was closed on the crush on my leading man. The fact that I got to kiss him every night onstage wasn’t so bad. As I mentioned, he was married, but he was very obviously still a player with the ladies. I thought he was great, but my upbringing kicked in to save me many times. Nevertheless, when you are in a long engagement, the crew and your fellow actors become your family. One of the hardest things in our business is always saying goodbye. But then, if we’re lucky, we get to say hello to a whole new group.

Fortunately, leaving
Oklahoma!
was not the end of my personal relationship with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. I was willingly on call to sing whenever they had special events and performances. At one such occasion, they asked me to perform at a private event at the Waldorf for Aly Khan and a big group. Two memories stand out the most. First, it was the first time I ever saw Marilyn Monroe in person, and her beauty more than lived up to the hype. More important, when I was singing “When I Marry Mr. Snow” from
Carousel
, I knew right away that I had goofed and inverted a couple of lyrics. I also was certain that my transgression would not go by unnoticed. Afterwards, Oscar, that great big teddy bear of a man with the trademark crew cut and the lovely smile, came up to me.

“You sang very beautifully, but—”

I cut Oscar off. “Don’t say it, I knew the second I did it that you’d get on me for it!” We had a great laugh.

Oscar had a shy quality about him. He was a big man, while Dick Rodgers was shorter, and both had wives named Dorothy. Whenever we were together, they were all incredibly kind to me. I had the chance to spend the weekend at the Rodgers home in Fairfield, Connecticut, right after doing a concert for them in the area. I took the opportunity to ask Dick a question about how he worked with Oscar.

“Do you write to Oscar’s lyrics or does he write them to your music?” I was curious to know.

He walked me through the process. “I’m very disciplined. I get up in the morning and write. I write the music first, then Oscar does the lyrics.” He mentioned that sometimes Oscar would write a dummy melody to his lyrics, but the music, according to Dick’s opinion, was not that memorable. Whatever dynamic they had, it created unquestionably the greatest catalog of theatrical music and some of the most beloved and timeless songs in history.

Unfortunately, my time with Oscar was limited. He passed away in 1960 shortly after the opening of
The Sound of Music
on Broadway. I continued to work and sing with Dick all the way until the end when his health deteriorated in the late 1970s. I will never forget the time in 1962 when he asked me to come over to his home to sing a song. Some big producer from Hollywood was interested in doing a remake of
State Fair
and wanted to hear some of the music Dick had written. I sang “I Love a Pig.” Despite all of his great accomplishments, I could see that Dick was nervous about this “audition.” To make matters worse, he threw his back out when he sneezed the wrong way. But the deal was done, and the film got made.

Off the road from
Oklahoma!
and back in New York, I sublet a lovely apartment on 58th Street from a singer named Genevieve that had a living room with a wonderful view of Central Park. The transition was hard in the beginning. It was a time of loneliness and insomnia. After a couple of months, I brought Babby to live with me. I also started seeing more of Ira. He lived with his parents at the Gorham Hotel, occupying a small apartment. “How do you manage?” I asked him. His family had lived in a lovely home in Brooklyn, but when his brother was killed in the war, things were difficult for his mother, so they moved to the city. His father was one of the biggest press agents on Broadway.

I went and auditioned for
West Side Story
for Leonard Bernstein. He was lovely. I sang well, and they were pretty serious about me. But there was one problem—I didn’t look very Puerto Rican. Next up, I was called in to audition for the lead in the musical
Fanny
with a high recommendation from Rodgers and Hammerstein. It was for Josh Logan and composer Harold Rome, who certainly remembered me from
Wish You Were Here
. It was a dramatic role, playing a young woman whose childhood love goes to sea for five years. Right after his departure, she finds out she is pregnant and is pressured by her mother to marry an older man. It was certainly a big departure from Laurey in
Oklahoma!
to say the least. I had the chance to play a serious love scene, taking a guy to bed and getting pregnant. Hmm, would I be setting a bad example from a religious standpoint? I ultimately decided to not let that stand in the way.

I felt fairly confident, despite having my slip fall down in the middle of the audition. (Yes, we wore underslips in the 1950s.) I discreetly crouched behind a sofa on the stage to pick it up. I had not been home to Rockport for quite a while and would be leaving town right away, I told them, as I finished the final audition. “We’ll let you know,” they said.

The minute I got to Rockport, there was a telegram waiting for me. It read, “Congratulations, Fanny. Come back.” It was unbelievable. After a hello and goodbye to my family, I returned immediately to New York.

Becoming a leading lady on Broadway for the first time felt a bit like Alice entering Wonderland. Walking through that doorway, I was suddenly working with the best of the best. We started rehearsals in August 1954 and worked out the kinks in Boston and Philadelphia in advance of the premiere that November. The Italian opera singer Ezio Pinza and Austrian-born actor Walter Slezak were my costars. Lehman Engel was the musical conductor. Trude Rittman wrote the dance music. Everybody in the crew was also at the top of their craft.

Fanny
was my introduction to the legendary producer David Merrick. The British singer/actor Anthony Newley once said of him, “Hitler didn’t die at the end of World War II. He went into show business.” Phyllis Diller went even further: “If anybody needs a heart transplant, try to get David Merrick’s. It’s never been used.”

Merrick was the biggest producer of them all, and he had a well-deserved reputation for being strong and tough. He possessed such an intense drive for success that he would kill you if you got in his way. I had a healthy respect and admiration for strong people, so he never really intimidated me.

He said to me once in the break in between two shows in one day, “You should go out and be seen. We need publicity.”

I told him getting prepared for the show was my most important priority. I also had to eat something, and he could see that I had a meal waiting for me.

“Don’t think that you’re not going to do what I tell you, because this is my baby,” he barked. “I would kill to keep my baby alive.”

“Okay, Mr. Merrick,” I replied. “Thanks for the advice. But I’ve got a show to do. And doing it well is how I’m going to keep
your baby
alive, so you’d better go now.”

One other colorful aspect of David Merrick was his showmanship, thought by many to be the second coming of P. T. Barnum. If the ticket sales began to slack after the show had been running for a long time, Merrick and his wonderful PR guy Jim Moran would come up with some sort of gimmick or publicity stunt. Merrick even hired someone to bring an ostrich he named “Fanny” to the front of the theater. The stunt backfired because I think it bit someone. He wanted me to sit on the back of that big bird for a publicity photograph. Not in this lifetime!

Whether it was with Merrick or anyone else, the ability to stand up for myself was a newly acquired skill at the time. Prior to that point, I was more timid with authority figures like parents, teachers, and priests or nuns. Women of my generation before the women’s liberation movement were expected to be more subservient. It was difficult to suddenly realize that I had a voice and I could say to someone like Merrick, “No, I understand, but I know what I’m doing.”

Mary Tarcai, the wonderful acting teacher I studied with during
Fanny
, really helped me crack through that reticence. I might have benefited from going to a shrink, but the class worked almost as well. With my upbringing, I didn’t even know therapy was an option. Instead, whatever you had weighing on your heart and spirit you could tell it to the priest. But the norm was to keep things inside, where they would sit and stew for the eventual fireworks show later on.

Mary knew how to push me. Chain-smoking cigarettes for the entire three-hour duration of the class, she was extremely wise and homed in on exactly where I needed help both professionally and personally. I was not as forceful as I could be, she recognized. It was very difficult to go into deeper emotions, especially because of my childhood embargo against crying. But that wasn’t going to cut it in her acting class. Honesty and courage to delve into these deeper dimensions were demanded.

Thanks to what I learned from Mary, I was so much stronger in my bearing and gained greater confidence to no longer take guff so lightly. As far as I was concerned, if a producer or anybody else did not want to treat me with dignity or respect, they could gladly hire someone else. People tell me stories about how badly they were treated, and often it was because they were women. Luckily, I never felt that, maybe because I wanted to be so good at what I did that people rarely gave me a hard time. That was always my protection. You have to back it up and deliver the goods when the curtain rises or you won’t last very long.

I continued to take acting classes for three hours a day and studied voice daily as well. I never missed a show for a year and a half. Regarding my voice, the only time in my whole career that I ever got into any difficulty was during out-of-town tryouts for
Fanny
. Those performances were designed to test audience reactions and work out the kinks at large theaters in outlying cities (usually Boston, Philadelphia, and Toronto) before opening on Broadway. They had wanted me to sing more forcefully. Belting-from-the-chest singing was becoming popular, so they had me work with a Broadway conductor named Herb Greene. He instructed me to hold my jaw down in a certain way and do a number of things that I knew were wrong. It injured my vocal cords. My teacher had me do some exercises that smoothed things over so surgery was averted. I was very blessed to have very good teachers, and I was lucky to avoid those who were not. I saw too many horror stories. The bad ones want to make you so dependent on them that you can’t sing without them. Others can criticize to the point that it destroys your confidence. My teacher right before I got
Oklahoma!
had the right spirit. He said, “You can do it. Just remember what I taught you. And warm up your voice.”