Then and Now (3 page)

My daddy's mom was the best cook in the family, but we were living with my mama's mother, and she made what she called goulash—elbow macaroni with tomatoes and green peppers. There would be delicious home fries and dripping-with-grease apricot or peach turnovers made in the frying pan. Fried tripe. Salmon croquettes. It sounds sumptuous but it was basic and it had to feed six women. The big meal of the week, which they cooked on the kerosene stove, was Sunday dinner. I actually came to dread those Sunday-afternoon meals on account of the kerosene stove: the fumes from the kerosene were so awful that I couldn't go into the kitchen without my eyes streaming tears and my throat burning.

We were desperately poor. So often you hear people say, “We were poor but we didn't know it”—well, I knew it. I felt so deprived. One of my chores was fetching kerosene from the store in a can. The can had lost its cork, so my grandmother had a small sweet potato screwed into the top. I was deeply embarrassed to walk down the street carrying a can with a sweet potato sticking out of it, so I finally refused. The solution was to put the can in a paper bag, which soon got stained from the kerosene; in the end, the paper bag proved to be just as mortifying as the sweet potato.

MY ANXIETY PROBLEMS
were not the only ailments I suffered from as a child. When I was about seven or eight it was discovered that I was anemic, but this turned out to be a really good thing. The doctor prescribed exercise, and I talked my mother into letting me have tap lessons. I took to it instantly, and earned the first money I ever made—fifty cents!—performing a little military tap number in between shows at a movie house. That money went a long way in the 1930s: fifty cents would buy ten loaves of bread or ten quarts of milk.

I especially adored movies, spending as much time in movie theaters as I could—the better to escape my unhappiness at home. The movies were a readily accessible, dream-fulfilling way to drift into a different, more glamorous, and altogether more wonderful world. It was actually from the movies that I learned to love classical music: Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald were my absolute idols. Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad. Grace Moore. For a poor little girl in Georgia the very names evoked a world of culture and glamour. I had a bedroom with no windows which opened on to an inner stairwell, and I would sit on the floor, light candles, and listen to classical music for hours on end.

At a very early age my Saturday afternoons were given over to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. All the neighborhood kids would be out in the yard playing and I would be inside listening to
the opera, utterly transported by the music. Here was grand opera from the biggest, brightest city of them all—New York. So swept away was I by the broadcasts that I didn't rush out to play with the kids after the program concluded. In fact, if I heard a performance that really impressed me, I couldn't bear for anybody to speak to me afterward. I wanted to remain inside that experience, become the story or the protagonist myself. I was not, to say the least, the easiest kid to be around.

When I was twelve years old the world premiere of
Gone With the Wind
was held in Atlanta. You can't imagine what that novel meant to Atlanta, and the movie was even more momentous. The city staged a parade for the film's premiere, and I remember standing on Peachtree Street with my mother that evening before scurrying to the Lowes Grand, which had been redecorated with a false façade to look like Tara. And finally, there they were—sitting in the back of their open cars—Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier. WOW! Many years later I was at a party and met Vivien Leigh. I was performing in
She Loves Me
and she was in the process of winning a Tony Award for her performance in
Tovarich
, her one Broadway musical. My leading man, Daniel Massey, introduced us and of course I wanted to tell her how much that far-away evening in Atlanta had meant to me; when I broached the subject she all but froze and almost literally turned away from me. I think I'd stupidly told her how old I was that night in Atlanta and she sure as hell didn't want to hear about that.

Going to the movies consumed the little spending money I had. I would get twenty-five cents to spend on a Saturday: the movie cost ten cents, I'd get a hamburger for ten, and a dill pickle for five. That was my treat. The Temple was our local movie house, and I
was sometimes in there longer than the ushers. I'd start with the first show in the morning and see the picture four times in a row. One of my aunts would eventually come storming down the aisle looking for me. I literally had to be dragged out of the theater.

What I loved most of all was any movie that had a stage show at the center of the plot: movies like
42nd Street
and all of the Mickey and Judy “let's put on a show” extravaganzas. And—at the very top of my list: Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. As a youngster, the idea of being in films seemed outrageous to me—Jeanette seemed like an untouchable goddess—so I fixated on the idea of performing onstage. I remember saying that I wanted to perform in “musical comedy” even before I knew what musical comedy was.

I saw every one of Jeanette and Nelson's movies ten or twelve times. I just loved them—no, I wanted to
be
them. I wanted to be both of them. Here's how much my love for Jeanette impressed itself on my brain: at some point during the 1970s I began telling people, “The most wonderful thing has happened to me. Jim Broderick and I were having lunch at the Russian Tea Room. I looked across the way and there was Agnes de Mille. And guess who was sitting with her—Jeanette MacDonald! I said to Jim, ‘Please excuse me. I have to table hop a second.' I went over and met JEANETTE MACDONALD!! ‘Oh!'” I'd tell everyone. “‘She was so nice and so beautiful.'” I told everyone this story. There was just one problem: it never happened.

Some years after this supposed meeting I was looking through the latest
Theatre World
, which is an annual publication about the most recent theater season. And in the front of the book were photographs of actors who had died. And oh my God—it turned out that Jeanette died before I even met Jim Broderick! WHAM!!
Something's wrong here. I talked to Jim Broderick about it. He said to me, “We never had lunch at the Russian Tea Room.” I asked Agnes de Mille, who shot me a look and said, “I never met you at the Russian Tea Room.” I wasn't lying and it wasn't a dream—I just completely and totally believed it. So—it looks like you can't trust anything I say . . .

The movies provided much-needed solace during my childhood, because my mother and I moved around a lot, having left my grandmother's after a particularly acrimonious “falling out” between my mother and grandmother. Actually I'm not sure they ever had a “falling in,” so contentious was their relationship—two strong-willed women butting heads over issues both large and small. My mother found a job as a telephone operator at the Biltmore Hotel, and sometimes she couldn't avoid taking the night shift. I'd come home from school and in order to avoid being alone in our dark, solitary apartment, I would go to the corner drugstore and do my homework at the counter. The man there was very kind and would give me a soda, probably because he felt sorry for me. Eventually I'd have to go home. Oh, how fearful I was. We lived in one room in a big emptyish dark, dark building. I remember rushing up big, wide stairs before slamming the door shut. I'd bolt the door before drifting off into an uneasy sleep.

I spent a great deal of time on my own, yet in some ways I was hopelessly immature when it came to the requirements of daily living. My mother did everything for me, a state of affairs which, believe it or not, seemed to have begun with her visit to a fortune-teller when I was eight years old. This visit occurred during the Depression, when a lot of people visited fortune-tellers because of life's uncertainties. Off my mother went to the fortune-teller, and when she returned home a few hours later, she sat me down and
with great portent relayed what the fortune-teller had told her. She took my hands in hers and, leaning close to me, explained that the fortune-teller said I was going to be a great singer—that unlike other children I was a creative artist and that she should never expect me to do any sort of menial work. She shouldn't ask me to wash dishes and do normal chores around the house—and she never again did. I was always free to dream and read and listen to the music that I loved. In other words, I grew completely out of touch with the ways of the world.

By the time I got to high school my mother had moved us to one of the nicer areas in Atlanta, called Druid Hills. We were actually just on the edge of Druid Hills, living in the worst apartment in a nice building. I went to school at Girls High School, one of only four high schools in all of Atlanta in those years. I didn't know a lot of people there who had the same interests I did, namely music, art, and theater. The other girls were interested in clothes, and I couldn't afford clothes. I got teased about wearing the same clothes all the time. They joined sororities, which I couldn't afford, and it was unusual to have divorced parents. I just did not fit in. I had one particularly close friend in high school, Jo Forrester, who was one year older and shared my passions, but for the most part I felt alienated from the rest of the kids, set apart both by my comparative poverty and by my interests.

And yet, I made momentous discoveries there, too. Although I had been tap dancing for years, as well as singing in Christmas pageants and in the school production of
The Pirates of Penzance
, it was during a high school English class that I was struck with the thought that I might have some acting talent, too. We were all doing scenes from plays, and for some reason I chose a solo scene from a play about an older married couple. The man is dying, but
his wife has assured him he will live long enough to hear the cuckoo in the spring. She knows he won't really live that long, so she goes out in the garden and pretends to be the cuckoo. It sounds laughable to me now, and I can imagine it being greeted with titters by high school kids. But nobody laughed—in fact, everybody was in tears. I remember the teacher saying that in all the time she'd been teaching she'd never heard anything like it. I was good—I could act!

I was dying to tell my mother. But somehow I waited until we'd had dinner. Then I sat her down and said, “I have something very important to tell you. I can act.” It was clear that it didn't mean a thing to her. “That's nice, dear,” I think she said. In later years she took great pride in my performances, but at the time I think she couldn't fully believe that I had any talent. I was such an extension of her, and she had such a low opinion of herself, that she couldn't believe that I could be exceptional.

If it had been possible to open our skins and pull us together, that's what my mother would have done. She had no one else, so she poured all of her need for intimacy into me. We slept in the same bed all those years, not so much out of financial straits—although certainly we were always poor—but because of her need.

This unnatural idea—that I was part of her, that I
was
her—manifested itself in a far more sinister way on at least one occasion. My mother rarely dated, but one Saturday night when I was just ten or eleven she invited a man over for dinner. We were living in a one-room apartment with a Murphy bed, so I simply pulled the bed down and went to sleep when it was my bedtime. At one point I woke up, with the lights out in the room and my mother and this fellow necking on the sofa. I went back to sleep, and when I woke up the next morning, my leg thrown around what I assumed
was my mother, I found that the body next to me was her date from the night before. He had apparently had too much to drink, and, unbelievably enough, she let him sleep in the bed with me, rather than on the sofa. She probably thought the man should get the most comfortable spot—the bed. Never mind the fact that she was putting this man in bed with her young daughter. Better that than making him sleep on the couch . . .

It was the first time I remember not just being mad at my mother but being volcanically enraged. She didn't seem to understand how violated I felt. I don't think she could grasp how appalling it was because once again she felt me to be such a part of her that it was as if it had been her sleeping in bed with him. Fortunately he was so drunk that there was no danger of something truly terrible happening. Sadly, I think my mother never understood what an egregious thing she had done.

GROWING UP IN
Atlanta, I thought there was something wrong with me because I never felt that I fit in. I was like a little girl with her face pressed against the glass of life and I couldn't get in. I dreamed of New York—literally, and in color.

I had actually taken a brief school trip to Manhattan when I was still in the W. F. Slaton Grammar School. The principal was a very kind woman who realized I had some talent, and nurtured me: I had crooked teeth and perhaps with an eye toward my undertaking a performing career, she talked to me about fixing them, but of more immediate benefit to me at age twelve was the fact that she made my trip to New York possible. Students who worked as school crossing guards were rewarded with a trip to the 1939 World's Fair in New York, and although I was not one of them, the principal allowed me to go on the trip. We were required to pony up about ten dollars; now, my mother made thirteen dollars a week, so this was a huge sum for us, but she made sure I had it because she knew how much it meant to me. Here was a first step toward answering the refrain I was already hearing with increasing frequency from family friends, teachers, and even total strangers: “You should go to New York. You could sing in the theater.”

First stop on the train was Washington, D.C., but I have no memory of that part of the journey. It was the New York City glimpsed in the movies that had always captured my imagination,
and when we finally arrived in Manhattan, it was completely mind-blowing to be walking down the very streets I had seen onscreen. I had no idea that many of the movies I loved were shot on Hollywood studio sets—to me it was all the same. The New York of the movies equaled the New York I was now avidly exploring.

The World's Fair itself was the highlight, but I also had the chance to see my first Broadway show,
The Hot Mikado
, which was an all-black swing version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, starring Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. The show seems, in retrospect, a curious choice for a bunch of Georgia kids. Maybe they reasoned that Gilbert and Sullivan would at least be good, clean fun? Believe it or not, I left at intermission. My first Broadway show, and I was somehow unimpressed.

I can't say I stepped off the train back in Atlanta fired with the knowledge that I would return to Manhattan and storm the city with my talent. But as I grew up and continued to perform, it naturally became the focus of my dreams. I kept tapping throughout my high school years, even as I began to discover the glimmerings of an acting gift. Just before entering high school I had joined the chorus line put together by a woman named Mrs. I. W. Curry. She organized performances for the Elks and Masons in various small towns in Georgia. Each of the girls in the tap line performed a specialty number, and there was often a guest star, usually a musician or a tumbler. This was before the USO existed, and we occasionally performed for servicemen at Fort Benning. I had a sweet, light soprano, and I remember resenting, just a little, that I never earned quite as much applause as Marguerite Davis, who really wowed the boys with her flirtatious version of “You Made Me Love You.”

But the opportunities to perform in Atlanta were relatively few, even after I won an amateur singing contest at age fifteen singing
“My Devotion.” The singing contest, oddly enough, was part of a rather polite burlesque show. When I told them I could tap, they offered me a job with the show. The law said I had to be sixteen but I was only fifteen, so of course I lied and became the newest member of the so-called Tiller Line (the concept of a line of girls kicking their legs up was first created by a man named Tiller). In show-biz lingo, the dancers were also called “ponies.” I worked in the show all through the summer of 1943, and with the two young daughters of the producer in the show, there was nothing really down and dirty going on. At one point there were two semi-nudes onstage—one painted gold and the other painted silver. The law insisted they stay absolutely still. One move and we could all be carted off to the hoosegow. That was the first professional show I was ever a part of. It was hard work—several shows a day, and long hours—but I was earning money, and sometimes they allowed me to sing in the overture, which meant earning twenty-five dollars extra per week.

Because I was pretty short next to the showgirls, I was always a “pony.” But—in the final shows, before I went back to high school, they let me be a showgirl. They gave me the highest heels they could find and stuffed my bra to the gunnels. I had a ball prancing around in all my feathers and sequins. The only negative was that working in a burlesque show—tepid or not—earned me a questionable reputation, and at least one mother refused to allow her daughter to double-date with me.

After graduating from high school I glumly fell into a series of routine clerical jobs for which I was singularly unqualified. The war had ended in August of 1945 and I went to work for the government as a civil-service employee in the Navy Materiel Redistribution and Disposal Office—NMRDO. Translation: the Navy needed to get rid of a lot of trucks.

My mother was thrilled that I was in the civil service. I'd have a steady job, and those had not been easy to come by in our family. Even better, because it was the civil service, it wasn't easy to terminate anyone's employment. There was just one small problem: I probably should have been terminated before I even began, because I was spectacularly incompetent as a file clerk. As months passed, however, and people left the office, I somehow was moved into increasingly more senior positions, at one point finding myself the chief file clerk. Since I spent much of my time daydreaming about performing or fantasizing about the last movie I'd seen, not much got filed. It got so bad that one day everything stopped while all the naval officers did the filing. Eventually even the civil service caught on and I was gently demoted to a less senior position.

In the midst of my brief foray into the world of filing, I was still performing in the tap chorus for Mrs. Curry, and during one performance at an Atlanta hotel I met the man who would change my life. It was the start of a pattern repeated throughout the years: imperfect as my relations were with many of the key men in my life, it was sometimes they who gave me the courage to really take chances. In this case it was Herb Shriner, a comic actor and raconteur in the vein of Will Rogers.

Herb would tell funny, homespun stories about life in his fictional Indiana hometown, chatting in a low-key style with an aw-shucks, deadpan drawl—he even played the harmonica. He was a little bit Will Rogers, a little bit Garrison Keillor, good-looking and utterly charming. He had worked as a performer with the USO and eventually went on to become a radio and television personality with his own television show,
Herb Shriner Time
. When we met he was playing a local Atlanta nightclub, and during his time in
town, he happened to catch one of the Curry troupe performances. When I came on for my specialty song, he was smitten and asked me out to lunch. I was smitten right back, and we started going out constantly during the couple of weeks he was in Atlanta. I was thrilled to be dating a professional performer, and the romance of being with a man in show business added to his allure.

Soon enough I was in love for the first time, and it underscored my hunger to move on with my life and pursue the destiny I'd been dreaming of since I was a movie-mad child. Herb had to leave Atlanta, but we kept in touch through letters. It was 1948, and I was twenty years old, convinced that my future, whatever it was to be, lay outside of Atlanta. I had by this time acquired another deadly secretarial job, this time for the Federal Housing Administration, and when my mother suggested that we take a two-week vacation in New York, I jumped at the chance. I was ecstatic at the idea of spending time in Manhattan, only I wasn't so sure about the trip's two-week limit.

My mother had a friend whose brother lived uptown, near Columbia University, in a rambling apartment with plenty of room for guests. His two sons were away at school, so my mother and I were invited to stay; I'm sure we couldn't have afforded the trip otherwise. As we were preparing to leave Atlanta, my mother noticed that I was packing rather heavily for a two-week vacation. The fact was, I wanted to remain in New York, and I hesitantly told my mother that's what I was contemplating. I don't think she believed I was really serious, but in the end I packed just about every piece of clothing I owned. I didn't know if I'd have the courage to actually stay in New York, but I knew that Herb Shriner was in New York, and I was in love with Herb Shriner. I also realized
that any possibility of pursuing a career in theater could only materialize if I took my chances in the unquestioned center of theater in the United States: New York City. I was ready.

Mother and I spent the two weeks in February as most tourists did, and still do, seeing the traditional sights. Herb was rehearsing a Broadway revue called
Inside U.S.A
., which opened in April of 1948, starring Beatrice Lillie. As the days passed, my conviction to stay grew, and I even went on a couple of auditions. Arthur Godfrey told me that I had a lovely voice, but his television show already had too many singers. I was, however, quickly learning that you need to take advantage of any possible contacts you make, no matter how remote, and our host up near Columbia was friendly with a woman who was the switchboard operator at the Irving Berlin publishing offices. She arranged for me to sing for Helmy Kresa, a songwriter and arranger for Mr. Berlin. I chose “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” and Mr. Kresa's reaction is imprinted in my memory bank to this day: “You have a really pretty voice, but you don't sing with feeling. You've got to learn to do that.” Sixty years later that piece of advice has informed my entire professional mission.

Oh, how I loved New York! And, oh, how I loved discovering that the city seemed to run on nickels. A nickel would get you a phone call, a ride on the subway, entrance to one of the locked toilets at Rockefeller Center, and a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. I took that ride to Staten Island twice, just for the sheer fun of it. Holy Hannah, I was in NEW YORK CITY!

As the time approached for our return to Atlanta, I grew firmer in my conviction that I was going to stay. It wasn't just that I wanted to live in Manhattan; I simply knew that I belonged nowhere else but in Manhattan. New York City meant boundless opportunity,
and I knew, with absolute certainty, that if I didn't try to find a way to sing it would be a terrible waste of talent, opportunity, and life. That I had at least one friend in New York, Herb, probably bucked me up, for in truth I didn't have an overwhelming confidence in my talent. I knew what I wanted to do with my life, but it still seemed almost unfathomable that I could actually make it happen. I was much younger than my twenty years in oh-so-many ways: I had, after all, been sleeping in bed with my mother for most of my life, including, on this exciting, anxious, and life-altering trip to the big city.

The man who had hosted our visit agreed to allow me to stay on in his apartment with him for a few more months, and I broke the news to my mother that I was determined to remain. I remember standing on the platform at Penn Station, watching my mother board her train back to Atlanta. She was clearly devastated and worried about me. I had been her life, day in and day out, for twenty years. I was an extension of her—her arm, her leg—I belonged to her. Completely.

We were now about to live nearly a thousand miles apart, but her attempts to cajole me into returning with her were useless. The truth is, I was so happy at the prospect of independence and a life in New York that I did not give much thought to my mother's state of mind. For the first time in my life I felt free. Despite any anxieties and fears, I had a strong will—if I hadn't, by this point my mother would have subsumed me entirely. I was, I realize now, more than a little ruthless in my determination. There was no way my mother could have stopped me from staying, short of handcuffing me and dragging me onto the train behind her. I don't remember seeing her cry, but she must have on the way home. As a mother myself, I can imagine how frightened and sad she must have been on that
train back to Atlanta, but back then I had one all-encompassing thought: I was in New York with the possibility of an exciting future ahead of me.

I was in love with Herb, but it was never a serious love affair from his perspective. In the beginning he was clearly attracted to me and made all the moves, but I was truly crazy about him—he was my first love. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was incredibly naïve, very needy, and, probably because of my father having left, still had an overwhelming desire to be loved, cared for, and protected. I can remember actually saying to Herb: “Please love me.” If there's a phrase that is sure to make a guy run, that's gotta be it. I remember the moment I said it, thinking that it was the wrong thing to say. It's embarrassing to admit, and embarrassing to remember, but it's also the truth. I was one very young, impressionable, naïve young woman. Eventually Herb got married and had two boys, one of whom he named after Will Rogers—Wil Shriner.

With or without Herb, I was on my own, yet not at all lonely. I had few acquaintances, and was by myself much of the time, but I was having a love affair with the city, overwhelmed with a sense of freedom and exhilaration. I had never been away from home before—I hadn't gone to college—so this was the first time that my life belonged completely to me.

I'd wake up at dawn and just lose myself wandering the streets as the city was coming to life. I would stop at diners and have a cup of coffee, which I imagined to be a very adult thing to do. The sounds of the city delighted me—even the early-morning groans of the garbage trucks seemed musical to me. The winter of 1948 proved to be particularly frigid, and snow from a December blizzard was still piled up along the sidewalks. But even the cold held
an enchantment for me, since I knew with absolute certainty that I was finally where I belonged.