The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (68 page)

“How can I find a good teacher?”

The singers were as curious about his answer as I. They looked at him.

“Now that’s another intelligent question,” his voice boomed. “As a matter of fact, I plan to leave
Porgy and
Bess
and relocate myself in San Francisco. I am willing to take you as a student if, and only if, you work hard and listen to me. I don’t have time for any more students; however, I want to help you. If you don’t get help, you not only won’t be able to sing, you’ll hardly be able to talk.”

Robert Breen,
Porgy and
Bess’s
good-looking and balding producer, came to the Purple Onion the next evening accompanied by his wife, Wilva, a pleasant little blond woman; the business manager, Robert Dustin; and an attractive, well-built woman who was introduced to me as Ella Gerber, company drama coach. When we shook hands, her dark-lashed eyes studied me.

Breen said he had heard I was a professional dancer. I admitted that.

“We may have an opening soon for a dancer who sings. Would you come to the theater and audition for us?”

I thought about my contract. I would not be free to take the job for nearly three months. Should I tell them? It would be honest and fair to leave the job open for another dancer. I told myself that I loved honesty
and openness, not so much for its own sake but for its simplicity—I would be free from apologies, recriminations and accusations. Then I thought of Leesa Foster dancing to the sound of great voices, tossing herself into music and movement as if within that marriage lay all human bliss.

“Would I have to audition to a record or could I work with the company?”

Breen turned his pink, baby-skinned face to Dustin.

“We have a full rehearsal scheduled,” Dustin said, “and if you want Maya to try out, that could be arranged.”

They looked at me, Ella Gerber’s eyes computing the length of my legs, the size of my brain and the amount of my talent.

Breen suggested a date and I agreed. We drank a cold white wine to the audition and they left.

I went to the bar and told Ned about the conversation I had had with Breen. “Dance, darling.” He raised his hands to eye level and snapped his fingers. “Dance until they see Nijinsky in a duet with Katherine Dunham.” Snap!

—

All the singers were in street clothes, as if they had stopped by the theater en route for something more important. Some stood on the empty stage, others stood in the wings or lounged in the front row of the theater.

Billy Johnson, assistant conductor, waited while the musicians warmed up and tuned their instruments in the orchestra pit. Trills and arpeggios of voices came from backstage.

The stage manager, Walter Riemer, had a flashy smile and was as elegant as John Gielgud, whom he resembled. He took a position just off the stage. “Watch me, dear, when I do this”—he waved his hand like a flag in a high wind—“that’s your cue.” And he left me.

I sneaked around the curtain and watched as Billy lifted his arms as if he was trying to pull the orchestra out of the pit by invisible strings. The music began to swell, the singers poised.

At a casual indication from Johnson’s right hand the voices exploded, ripping shreds in the air.

When Riemer’s hand floated my cue, I was laughing and crying at the wonder of it all. I ran on stage, stepping lightly between the singers’ notes. If I was supposed to portray a woman carried away by music, blinded and benumbed by her surroundings, enchanted so by the rhythm and melody that she fancied herself a large, gloriously colored bird free to fly rainbows and light up the winds, then I was she.

Three days later, Bob Dustin offered me the job.

I said, as if newly indignant, that the Purple Onion would not let me out of my contract. Dustin commiserated with me and added, “We’ll be auditioning people for the next two months. We have to have a lead dancer before we go back to Europe.”

Even my imagination had never dared to include me in Europe. Whenever I envisioned foreign countries, I saw them through other people’s words or other people’s pictures. London to me was as Dickens saw it, a folk song in a cockney accent, Churchill V-ing his fingers, saying, “We shall fight on the beaches,” and so forth. Paris, in my mind, rang with the hoofbeats of horse-drawn carriages from the age of Guy de Maupassant. Germany was Hitler and concentration-camp horror or beery burghers in stiff white shirts sitting on benches photographed by Cartier-Bresson. Italy was the hungry streets of
Open City
or curly-haired people singing and eating pasta.

The images had been provided by movies, books and Pathé News, and none included a six-foot-tall Black woman hovering either in the back or in the foreground.

When
Porgy and Bess
left San Francisco I resigned myself to the nightclub routine, and the burden of life was lightened only by twice-weekly sessions with Wilkie and Lloyd and the romping growth of Clyde.

Three days before my contract ran out I received a telephone call from Saint Subber, the Broadway producer, inviting me to come to New York City to try out for a new show called
House of Flowers
. He said Pearl Bailey would be starring and he had heard I was a great deal like her. If I satisfied him and got the role he had in mind, I would play opposite Miss Bailey.

New Yorkers may love their hometown loyally, but San Franciscans believe that when good angels die they stay in northern California and hover over the Golden Gate Bridge. I appreciated the chance to try out for a Broadway show, but the invitation did not make me ecstatic. It meant leaving San Francisco, without the prospect of Europe with
Porgy and Bess
.

Mom and Lottie and Wilkie encouraged me to go. The voice teacher and my mother had found that they had much in common and Mother invited him to move into our house. He came bringing his piano, students, huge rumbling voice and his religious positivism. He could cook nearly as well as the two women and the kitchen rang and reeked with the attempts of three chefs to outtalk and outcook one another.

They would take care of Clyde until I found an apartment and then he could fly to me. Of course I was going to get the part. There was no question of that.

I arrived in New York and went to a midtown hotel which Willkie had suggested. The congested traffic and raucous voices, the milling crowds and towering buildings, made me think of my tiny fourth-floor room at the end of a dark corridor a sanctuary.

I telephoned Saint Subber, who said I must come to his apartment. I wriggled around his invitation, not wishing to face the street again so soon and hesitant about going to a strange man’s apartment—especially a New York producer’s apartment. Hollywood films had taught me that breed was dangerous: each one was fat, smoked large smelly cigars and all said, “All right, girlie, ya got talent, now lemme see ya legs.”

“Mr. Saint Subber”—or was one supposed to call him Mr. Subber?—“I need to have my hair done. May I see you tomorrow?”

He blasted my excuse. “No, no matter, I won’t be looking at your hair.”

See, my legs. Just as I thought.

“I want to see what you look like.” He gave me his address and hung up.

I had come three thousand miles, so surely I had the courage to go a few more blocks.

A uniformed doorman in front of a neat East Side apartment house raised his brows when I told him my destination, but he walked me into the lobby and reluctantly handed me over to a uniformed elevator operator. The operator pulled his face down as if to say “So, hot stuff, huh?” but he said “Penthouse,” and we began our smooth ascent. When we stopped he rang a bell and the door opened.

A beautiful blond young man offered me his hand. “Miss Angelou?” He did not look as if my legs would interest him.

“Yes. Mr. Subber?”

The elevator door closed and we were in a beautifully furnished living room.

“No, I’m not Saint. My name is Tom. I’m helping on the production. Please have a seat.” He led me to a sofa. “Saint will be with you in a few minutes. What can I get you to drink?”

While he was away I looked at the room and wondered about the tenant. Paintings adorned the walls and flowers were fresh and gay on little tables. A man’s voice in argument came through a louvered door.

Tom returned with a gin and tonic in a very tall, extraordinarily thin glass. He asked about my trip and tried to reassure me when I told him I was nervous.

A man rushed through the shuttered door; he was small and thin and his dark hair was cut in a “Quo Vadis.”

“Well, that’s over. Oh, my God!” He threw himself on a chaise longue and gingerly put both hands to his head. “Oh, God! What do they want? Oh, my head. Virginia!”

A large Negro woman came through another door. She wore the kind of apron I had not seen since I had left the small country town in
Arkansas. It was white, bibbed, starched and voluminous. She went directly to the man and began to massage his temples.

“That’s all right, Saint honey, that’s all right, you hear. Now don’t think about it, honey. Everything’s going to be all right.”

I could not believe it.

Neither had taken notice of me and I was so enthralled I frankly stared, recording the scene.

Tom and I could have been an audience while two actors performed a scene in experimental theater.

It was decidedly too new, too strange. I started laughing.

The man sat bolt upright. “Who are you?”

“I?” I held the laughter. “I’m Maya Angelou.”

“You can’t be.” He was still sitting straight.

“But I am, I am Maya Angelou.” I was willing to swear to it.

“Well, my God, how tall are you?”

“I’m six feet.”

“But you can’t be!” He seemed sure.

“I am, I am too.”

“Stand up. I don’t believe it.”

I stood up, hoping I had not shrunk in the plane or in the taxi or in the elevator.

“My God, it’s true, you’re six feet tall.”

I laughed because I was happy that at least my height had not betrayed me and because he was funny.

“And a great laugh, too. Oh, my God, I know, you’re a Black Carol Channing.”

That made me laugh again. He stood up and came to me.

“We’ll do your hair red. Will that be all right? Red or blond?”

I said, “I don’t think so.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t like that?” It was a sincere question.

“Noooo.” I pictured myself with hair as red as Gwen Verdon’s and started laughing again. “No, I don’t think it would work.”

“All right.” He chuckled, too. “We’ll think of something else.”

I was still laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

When I could catch my breath I told him. “I expected you to smoke a cigar and pinch my cheeks, to roll your eyes at me and make some lewd proposition. I’ve been dreading that all the way from California, and I get here”—the funny bone was struck again—“I get here and … Tom and you and Virginia and my red hair.” He, too, began to laugh at the absurd situation. Tom joined in.

Saint Subber said impulsively, “Stay for dinner. Virginia, we’ll be another for dinner.” For all his theatrics, or maybe because of them, I knew he was a strong man. I had always been more comfortable around strong people.

After a dinner of frogs’ legs (I had never eaten them before and had to ask if they were eaten with a knife and fork or with the fingers like spare ribs), he told me to come to the theater the next morning and not to sing any special material, because Truman Capote was going to be at the theater and “Truman hates special material.”

I thanked them both for their hospitality and went back to the hotel to telephone Mom. “Do your best tomorrow” she said, “and don’t worry. Remember, you’ve got a home to come back to.” I spoke to Clyde, who sounded fine, and hung up and went to bed.

The Alvin Theater was on Broadway and I had been asked to go to the stage door around the corner. I walked quite cheerfully among the crowds on the sidewalk. I had stopped at a music store and bought a copy of “Love for Sale,” for no reason except that it had been on display and I had heard it sung so often. If Truman Capote did not like special material, I would sing a standard for him. I noticed only after I had turned the corner at the theater that a line of Negro people stretched around the block headed in the direction I was taking. I exchanged smiles with some of the young standees and gave good mornings to some of the older women with pleasant faces. The line stopped at the stage door. I had never auditioned in New York and thought maybe all Broadway shows had their tryouts in the same theater.

I knocked at the door and Tom opened it. I would not have been surprised if I had been given a number and told to take my place in
line. Instead, he said, “Oh, Miss Angelou. Please come in. I’ll tell Saint you’re here.”

He led me to a corner and excused himself. The blurred forms inside the theater became more visible. There were over a hundred Negro people lined up along the backstage wall, waiting, alert.

Tom waved me over and whispered, “Saint will hear you now. Have you your music?”

I said, “Yes.”

“Give it to me,” he said, “I’ll take it to the pianist. Do you want to run over it with her?”

I did not think so—after all, it was only “Love for Sale.”

“Just a minute and I’ll call your name. Walk right through here.” He showed me to the wings and an entrance stage left. “The pianist is in the pit. You nod to her and she’ll begin.” Just like the old Purple Onion days.

“And there’s nothing to worry about.” He added, “Truman Capote is out there and Saint and Yip Harburg and Peter Hall. Do your best.”

I waited, trying not to think about trying out and thinking about New York. The Apple. I would make it and send for Clyde, then we would spend afternoons in Central Park, perhaps not as nice as Golden Gate Park, but then … I would find a lover, too; among all those millions of people there had to be a man who had been waiting for me to come along and cheer up his life. I would not think about trying out. Just wait until my name was called and then go out and sing.

“Miss Angelou, Maya Angelou.”

I walked out in front of the velvet curtain. The lights were bright and hard and white, and the theater seats, only dimly lighted near the stage, darkened into oblivion. I saw a small clump of figures in the distance. On the right side of the orchestra pit a woman sat patiently at a grand piano.