(My Travels with) Agnes Moorehead – The Lavender Lady (8 page)

In September we were promised jelly beans by the nuns if we were good (the Ronald Reagan Syndrome) and at the end of the semester in June, we never quite deserved those jelly beans. And that was Agnes. Of course I didn’t understand it—who could? But I rationalized. Agnes would tell us, “No one can teach acting. It has to be something inside you. I give you a basis in technique, things you should know how to do as an entertainer.” That’s usually true of all art and the things she picked at were technique things, so I would accept her explanation. I suppose that she had a reason for doing things the way she did and it wasn’t for us to question.

“I never tell a student that he’s a failure as an actor, because,” she said, “I don’t know that someday he won’t find the guts and the wits to succeed. I never encourage your daydreams, but I can teach you enough that if you ever do get a role, you’ll know what to do with it.” It made sense. It was all true, of course, but knowing what I do now about acting, I realize that she could have been much more encouraging, much more inventive.

“Well, that was very interesting. But if you do a little more of this or work it like this and try that. Let’s try it again, with this in mind and without such and such.”

In fact, she told us how Orson Welles in “The Magnificent Ambersons” had her do a scene once as a child, once as a woman, once as this, once as that. She ran through it twenty-eight times or thereabouts and she wondered what he wanted. For the final version, he said, “Now, do it the way you originally did.” And her performance contained her original intuitive spark as well as elements of all the other ways she had done it and it won her an Academy Award nomination. So they both knew what they were about.

But with us, there just wasn’t time for doing scenes more than once. You were lucky if you managed to do one, even that often. In other words, she’d preach one thing and did another. The students she did pick to do scenes were usually the pros. The advanced students sat in the front of the class and knew how to get her attention and how to act. There was a young French actress, Nadine Arlen and another guy who was very good. We used to love to see them do scenes. I was always glad to watch them work.

Agnes said, “You learn by watching others.” I did learn a lot from them. But I wanted to do my own scenes for her and didn’t know how to go about it.

When Agnes wasn’t there, Leon Charles also seemed to favor the ones who were really pro’s. Ego was very big there, as it always is among the creative. He really didn’t critique the novices. When I did scenes for him later in the season, he just said, “Well, yes, that’s all right. You’ve got the right idea.” But he was very vague and very brief. And it wasn’t just me. I don’t mean to sound like I’m paranoid—although I’m allowing for that side of me. At lunch break, some of the students would get together to rap and share feelings about Agnes and her seeming unconcerned and lack of support for us students. A lot of us had this feeling of loneliness and frustration, so I knew I wasn’t that far off. And I saw this with other students, after I left the school. There were a couple of people who really had potential, but they just got burned out by the way things were run. What a pity.

Basically, Agnes’ idea was right. The things Agnes taught us were true and valid, and she did bring in occasionally guest lecturers to teach us as well. Lawrence and Lee, who wrote “Mame”, lectured and they told us how “Mame” was done. I, and the other students, loved it. It was the whole, intimate backstage story. They really explained it and we could feel how “Mame” was a labor of love. What they said supported a lot of what Agnes told us, but in a way that was fun and that we could understand. Then there was Ben Nye, the famous makeup artist from Columbia Pictures, who came to substitute for Agnes once and was also very good. Then Agnes appointed Johanna Harding, the 1936 Olympic Fencing medalist, as our regular fencing instructor and she was a very lovely woman. She, too, was good. Everyone liked her. Her class was one of the most exciting, because she had you doing things. She was not only a fine fencer, but she could instruct very well. And Hank Moonjeans taught us movie and camera techniques. He, too, was excellent. He actually blocked scenes for the camera and used all of us. He came on Wednesday nights when he wasn’t busy working on a film . . . which was most of the time. But I did get in four or five sessions with him and that was very enlightening. When he wasn’t there, we’d just get up there and do scenes ourselves . . . Mickey Mouse around . . . the blind leading the blind.

Karl Malden substituted for Agnes a couple of times. You know him, the well-known actor. He was good, but he was an actor not a teacher. He was doing his own thing and like many of the other instructors, he was doing it, I felt, for the money—even though it wasn’t much. Maybe I was wrong, but so it seemed to me. He dealt with some troubled scenes and solved some things—but, again, the professionals got all the help. He really didn’t take the uninformed, like me, who knew nothing and say, “Okay, get up there and do a scene” or make some attempt to bring out the talent in any of us. Not Agnes, Karl Maiden or Charles. Not many of her instructors at all. Agnes knew her craft well. All her instructors did. They were all well qualified to do their own thing, but usually not to teach it effectively. That is the biggest thing that I and most of the students had against the school.

I realized that a lot of my personal problems were my own neglected responsibility. But I also felt that if you can’t relate it to me and get me to do it, something’s wrong. You’ve got to be motivated. You’ve got to be encouraged. I wanted to be shown how and they didn’t.

CHAPTER SIX

THE UGLY DUCKLING

There were other problems in this school. Of course, you get to know the problems the longer you stay in a place and I was sensitive to them.

There were about eight potentially good actors in the class. Some of them already professionals and some of them already quite excellent. But the rest of the students were all carrying on as if they thought they were Dame Edith Evans or else they were floundering misfits, like I was, or else they just didn’t care. And many of them were weird. That is to be expected in any creative profession, but they were really weird.

The worst was the big bully of the class, the big omodom (the nuns used to say that, “Don’t be like a big omodom” which had the sound of something big and gross and lumbering and trumpeting wildly). He was a big, gross bully, apelike, large with long hairy arms and very messed up in the head. He’s difficult to describe. He was just uncouth. He used to intimidate the students. Everyone thought he was a psycho—which he was. I was frightened to death of him. The women were afraid of him, but I was afraid as a man. At the time, it seemed a very important distinction.

I remember I offered to drive him home from school one day, just to try and get in his good graces. Believe me, it was purely out of fear. However, he was Agnes’ pet. Figure that out. She would always call on him to do something in class—a scene or pantomime or whatever. I resented this and so did the others. He would monopolize the class, monopolize the stage.

Agnes would ask for scenes and he would growl, “I’m doing it!” And he would do it. Then, of course, she’d usually view one scene—his—and then end up talking, so that almost no one but the omodom and the experienced ones who knew the game gave scenes. Once in a while, when the big guy wasn’t there, someone else who wasn’t great would get up and do one, like the day I did my park pantomime. But that was only once or twice.

Whenever the omodom wanted to do a scene, Agnes called on him. He was like a huge, spoiled brat. He would get up and swear and throw a tantrum like a little boy. In the ballet class, he didn’t want to wear the leotard. That Agnes demanded of all the students. So he didn’t wear the leotard. Although Agnes insisted that he had to, he didn’t pay any attention to her. He wore dungarees.

He was all the things that Agnes was against and I never understood why she had him there. It was almost as if she were the kindly mother who was going to save him—the Messiah. If he didn’t get her first, I thought.

It wasn’t just bad vibrations that indicated that he had a violent nature. He did a pantomime once. The pantomime lesson was called “Do something from the circus. You can be anything in the circus that you want to be.” This character, big, huge, lumbering omodom—what do you think he was? He was the lion who ate the lion tamer and it was the most frighteningly realistic thing I’ve ever seen on the stage. It was really imaginative. It was brilliant and it was very well done. This insane man just loved to do an act of violence. It was just as if you were watching it happen. But this man chose to do this thing and it showed his character. He pantomimed every gruesome detail of the lion tearing a man limb from limb and chewing each morsel. It was a very traumatic experience for a class. Agnes liked it. Of all things—Agnes liked him and liked it.

At the fencing class one night he threw the rapier at the instructor. But Ms. Harding, though she was a small woman, was emotionally very strong
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So she stood up to him and wouldn’t take his crap and made him back down. But she and Agnes were apparently the only ones who weren’t afraid of him. Agnes stood up to him at ballet class one night. On Monday nights at the English Village in Westwood, we had the fencing class and the ballet class. And Wednesday night was the musical comedy class and when the instructor was there, Hank Moonjeans, the class in movie and camera technique. Agnes almost never attended these classes, but this particular class, she did happen to be there at the ballet class. We had a male ballet master and he was a prissy sort of guy—Mr. Varcazzi. I hated his class and I hated him. So did everyone else, except Agnes. She loved him. He acted so grand. Agnes would point at him with regal pride, lecturing us, “He was the danseuse with the Paris Conservatory”—or something like that. And I thought, well why didn’t he just stay there? He was a bitter man, not a whole lot older than I was and I guess he wanted more success than he had. He was a little fish in a little pond and he wanted to be a big fish in a big pond. And he was always whining. Even when he talked he had a whine to his voice. If you know Italian men, you know what I mean. It’s a syndrome with some of them. And when he wasn’t whining, he was giving everyone hell because he had the authority—that was the only place he had power. And, boy, he used it for a fare-thee-well. He would get up there, very disciplinarian like Agnes, but even worse because he was Italian. He was rude; he didn’t have any feeling at all for the people. Here I am, a big, clumsy, forty year old man going into ballet for the first time and these other fellows, these all are big men, and none of us wanted ballet. And Agnes insisted. I couldn’t figure that out.

“You need discipline!”—which I tried to appreciate. So they made us wear leotards and ballet shoes, all these big, strapping guys—except the bully, as I’ve mentioned. Then Varcazzi strutted and pranced around. “All right, position one,” he sneered, and everyone but me took position one, because they all had ballet before. But I didn’t know what the hell we were doing and I asked him what the hell position one was. He just snapped, “Shut up and do it. You are not babies in here.” Well, I didn’t expect to be a baby, but I was trying to learn something that was totally new to me and I was eager. He could have said, for the sake of the beginners, “There are five positions, etc.” and explained everything. At least give us five minutes to answer some questions. But he just said, “Shut up and do it.”

It rubbed off on you. “Don’t worry,” he literally said. But then he added, very Italian, “I’m godfather here. I am the Mafia. I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse.” And that’s exactly what it was. He was the ruler. After that first ballet class, I went home devastated. Out of desperation, I did eventually learn the positions with the help of Ms. Hardy and the books she recommended that I get from the library.

Varcazzi, unlike the other instructors in Agnes’ classes, was as ineffective in communicating with advanced students as he was the novices. Because of his total lack of empathy, everyone hated him including this violent guy, the omodom, the class bully. He took off his ballet shoes one night and threw them at Varcazzi. That was the only time we liked the bully. He called Varcazzi something very uncomplimentary, some derogatory term, and threw those shoes at him and got that look in his eyes like when he was the lion eating the lion tamer. That psychotic, wild, animalistic look. He moved toward Varcazzi and he had that heavy walk like a wild beast stalking his prey. Varcazzi was speechless. We were all petrified. We thought the bully was going to break Varcazzi in two. We held our breath. We were hoping he would kill the bastard.

But Agnes, on one of the rare occasions she was there, straightened up and strode up to the omodom and said, “Now just a minute.” In retrospect, knowing her as I do now, I realize that she was terrified, too, but she wasn’t about to show it. She marched over and stood right up to him. “Now, don’t you do that in my school,” she lectured adamantly, wagging a forefinger at him. It was the meeting of the giants. He glared down at her. We stared. He was so big and ugly looking, I was afraid. We were all afraid he was going to knock her on her ass, but he must have recognized something in her that he could respect. He had done some acting in prison and I think that he wanted to be an actor more than life. He had the makings of a fine actor and I think Agnes knew that and she cared, Maybe he saw that, because he succumbed to her authoritarian mothering. But that didn’t stop the rest of the students remaining scared to death.

Sometimes I wondered what the hell I was doing in that school. I got on well with some of the other students, Bobby Vee, the singer, and Valentia Skelton, Red Skelton’s daughter, and Tanya, the nurse who seemed like a sensible and intelligent person I could relate to well. What with that big bamboozle, and then there was this fat, dumpy, paranoid girl, Tina. If you said hello to her, she seemed to panic and get very bitchy. She was another of Agnes’ pets. She seemed to ask a lot of dumb questions in class. Agnes always answered her very condescendingly, “Oh yes, Tina,” that was the attitude.

Again, it was Agnes, the savior. Tina had a face like a bulldog and when she got upset, she’d get very puffy and real red. She might have become a good character actress, I guess, but she was just a sickie who seemed to have a lot of problems that she was unaware of. That’s all I can say. Anyway, that was the way I perceived her. I had to realize that she was clinging to Agnes like I was. She needed that strength, that mother image.

So, anyway, there was this big bamboozle and this dingbat, Tina, and then Tanya, a very attractive blonde. I dated her a few times, both in school and afterwards. She was there for the same reasons as the rest of us. She would ask Agnes questions and bat her blue eyes and play up to Agnes and be very obsequious, doing all kinds of things for Agnes, trying to get in good with her. Eventually, she would. She’d get in so good with Agnes that she would take my place when Agnes and I separated. She contributed some very bad feelings and misunderstanding. Naively, to a certain extent. Then she helped Agnes as a nurse in Agnes’ clandestine illness and was with her during her last months before her death.

Another one of Agnes’ pets was a hippy girl who was very Flower Childish—long stringy hair, many skirts, sort of carousing around, sleeping with guys. Anything but a good upstanding girl by Agnes’s standards. She was also very flamboyant and to Agnes she was very “nicey-poo.” Agnes loved her. The girl once did something on Channel 28. She played a whore or a nympho and Agnes pretended, since the girl was her star, her pet, and Agnes overlooked the sordid character the girl played. Believe me, it was type-casting. Agnes ignored all her own bullshit about dull reality and sordid theatre and raised her arms to the ceiling in praise of the girl. “Oh, isn’t it marvelous?” She even consulted professionally with the girl, coaching her on the script. That was Agnes.

Then there were others in class, always mouthing off about Agnes. “God, we’ve had this lecture—how many years?” But they were still there, so I thought they were just trying to be very mod. They’d go across the street and lunch time to drink beer and smoke, things that Agnes abhorred. They really weren’t bad, but they weren’t acting the way that Agnes wanted and I was. I desperately wanted her recognition. She didn’t know I was alive.

I wanted to do a scene for her. I thought maybe that was a way to get her attention. She told us, “Pick a partner.” But, because of all my insecurities being enhanced by these negative aspects of the school, I procrastinated. Weeks. Months. However, there was one scene that I did do during that time, though not for her. There was one place where I did feel secure and that was the musical comedy class. Mr. Varcazzi taught that class, too, but he wasn’t as bad there or else it was just that this class made more sense to me than the ballet. He would teach us a pirouette and other things, actually a little dance routine. He used the ballet steps, but it wasn’t ballet. I caught on pretty fast. Maybe it’s because I understood musical comedy. As I said, I was already a musical comedy buff and he didn’t have to relate it to me. He didn’t have to teach. Then, too, Penelope Chandler, a very good fun teacher who was also a student from England, also substituted for him. So there was the dancing and, of course, when it came to singing—when you put that with the dancing, I excelled in that class, above everyone. You see, I was about the only one who had a voice trained for the stage (Bobby Vee never attended these classes. In fact, he dropped the whole school after a couple of months. I suppose he got the message pretty quick).

Now this is something phenomenal. All these people, a few of whom were very good actors, and Agnes being the great actress who was not “of the mumbling school of acting”—they never, never seemed to be aware that almost no one had a voice. In that small hall, you still couldn’t hear most of them. They couldn’t project their speaking voices, much less sing. And, wonder of wonders, Agnes never did anything about it. She never worked on voice or diction with the classes. We did dialects, accents. I couldn’t talk fast and speak well. I’d resort to my Ohio twang, so I was supposed to work on it. Read a paragraph aloud very fast. Of course, as you might expect, judging by the other problems with the school, when I did it for Mr. Evans, the speech instructor, he didn’t pay too much attention to me. Aside from the fact that I was a beginner, he had invented this phonetic alphabet for dialects and was obsessed with it. And that’s all he seemed to care about. He made us recite it on and on, forever. That was the most boring class of all. I did it, because I thought “drudge, drudge,” but it wasn’t helping us for stage or anything. It was all Mickey Mouse.

After Agnes’ first lecture, she gave us these diaphragm exercises and that was the only time she ever taught us anything about diaphragm control or breathing or voice, the whole time I was in the school.

So, when I went to the musical comedy class, of course, that was my bag. I had some professional singing and was training in earnest privately with one of the finest voice builders in the world. Maestro Giuseppe Balestrieri (The Supremes, Frieda Payne and Jack Albertson, were some of his current students). I had studied with him before I came to Agnes, when I wanted to be a singer so much. Now, when I sang in class everyone would gather around me. “Oh, where did you get that marvelous voice?” In fact, a lot of them started going to Giuseppe themselves, because they could see the results. Here, this little wallflower emerges in the musical comedy class and no one has ever known I’d existed. I had felt like a whipped dog and suddenly I was a star.