Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny (12 page)

Chapter 20
My Big Brown Eyes

I
guess it was inevitable that I’d go into the family business. I started by doing plays in little theatres in and around Los Angeles—Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theatre, the playhouses at Laguna, Ojai, San Diego. Getting laughs from an audience clicked right into my DNA. The sound, the rhythm of the comedy, came out of me like a song that had been playing in my mind all my life. And I was never happier than when I got to sing it.

The one thing I wasn’t ready for was that every review and interview compared me to my famous father. Would I be as good as Danny Thomas? As funny? Last as long? God, it was scary. Would I ever be able to get out from under his giant shadow? And be judged on my own? Would I ever be seen just for myself? I felt I had no place to hide, no place where I could fail unnoticed. And how do you learn if you can’t fail?

But I just kept going, mostly in comedies—
Gigi
,
Two for the Seesaw
,
I Am a Camera
,
Blithe Spirit
,
Under the Yum Yum Tree
—and some
not
comedies—
Our Town
,
Glass Menagerie
,
View from the Bridge
. I had gone to USC for four years to become an English teacher, but I had studied for this all of my life.

One summer, I was doing a light comedy called
Sunday in New York
with John Aniston, Jennifer’s father, at the Civic Playhouse in L.A., when David Dortort, the producer of the hit TV western
Bonanza,
knocked on my dressing room door. He asked me if I could do a Chinese accent. Silly question to ask an actress.

“Of course, I can do a Chinese accent!” I said.

“Great,” he said. “I’ve got a wonderful part for you.”

He needed to fill a guest role on the show that had been written especially for the actress Pat Suzuki, who had just scored a big success on Broadway in
Flower Drum Song
. The episode was to shoot the following week, but Pat had the flu and wouldn’t be able to fly in from New York. David had been searching for another Asian actress with the same kind of “spitfire,” as he called it, but was having no luck. That’s when he got the bright idea that I could do it. All I needed was a little eye makeup and a decent accent (which I said I had) and he’d have his perfect Tai Li, a Chinese mail-order bride for the character of Hoss, played by Dan Blocker.

Once he left my room, I anxiously called Sandy Meisner, the great acting teacher, to find out how I could learn a Chinese accent in three days. I had studied with Sandy for a year in Los Angeles, when he took a hiatus from the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York to help 20th Century Fox build a new stable of stars from young hopefuls. It was a great idea for the studio, and a terrific opportunity for budding actors to study with a master—for free. I was one of the kids Sandy chose. It was an exciting year, and even though Fox didn’t pick up the option on any of us, I had made a friend in Sandy.

When I reached him, he told me to go to Ah Fong’s, a Chinese restaurant on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills, and hire one of the waitresses to come to my apartment to work with me. By spending time talking with her, Sandy said, and having her read my part on tape, I would easily pick up her accent.

Yup, that’s me—as a Chinese mail-order bride
on the TV western
Bonanza
.

So I went to Ah Fong’s, ordered dinner (Peking duck, always) and tried to figure out how to propose this idea to the waitress without sounding like I was offering a different kind of proposition. But she was as young as I was and happy to make the extra money. So we did what Sandy suggested.

The next step was to look Chinese. I don’t think David Dortort realized how hard that would be. They tried “applications”—tiny pieces of rubber to make my very round eyes look oval-shaped. They tested me on film with them, but I could barely see. I also kept blinking, like I had something in my eye. Well, no wonder—I did. So that didn’t work. Then they tried creating the look just with makeup, and we tested that, too. Better, but my eyes were still too round.

Nothing was working, and time was running out, so they pulled a classic Hollywood maneuver: They wrote into the script that Tai Li had a Persian mother.

So with a cockamamie accent and not too oval eyes, I played the part of a Chinese mail-order bride (with a Persian mother) who turned out not to be the supplicant bride Hoss had hoped for, but, instead, a feisty revolutionary girl who was trying to unionize the Ponderosa.

Just as my character was becoming successful with her mission, Hoss was to pick me up angrily and throw me into a water trough. Dan Blocker weighed close to 300 pounds. He was huge. So when he threw my 98-pound body into that tiny, half-filled trough, I hit it with a thud. Tears poured down my face, but on film the splashing water hid them. So, thankfully, I didn’t have to do the scene again.

I took away three things from that experience: (1) a bad back, (2) the realization that I was not a stuntwoman, and (3) the lesson that you should always politely ask the director to try not to kill you.

Funny about my eyes. When I was a little girl, my grandma, the Lebanese one, would take me to the grocery store with her. The man behind the counter would always give her a piece of candy for “your granddaughter with the big brown eyes.” My grandmother would then spit on my head three times to shoo away the bad spirits who might have overheard him and be jealous.

When my agent sent me to meet the casting director for the detective series
77 Sunset Strip,
the first thing she told me when I arrived was how beautiful my big, brown eyes were. I was, of course, pleased. Then the
director came in.

“Look at her eyes!” the casting woman said. “Aren’t they great?” The director heartily agreed, so now I was really pleased.
Boy,
I thought,
my eyes are really going to do it for me
.

I was given a part and I was ecstatic—I didn’t even have to read for them. The scene would take place in an operating room. The man lying on the table had a time-bomb planted in his stomach that was about to go off—it needed to be removed and defused in just seconds. I played the O.R. nurse and wore a surgical mask, so all you could see were my eyes. I was told to look from the patient to the clock at several intervals during the scene. Back and forth, forth and back, back and forth. The idea was that the ticking clock and my darting eyes would dramatically build the tension of the scene.

No wonder I didn’t have to read for them. They only needed a pair of big brown eyes. Had I known, I would have spit on my head, turned around three times and headed for the door.

But I had lots of little jobs like that in the early days. No one was really paying any attention to me at the factory-like William Morris Agency, except for my childhood pal Barry Diller. Barry had been a close friend of Terre’s since they were little kids, and was always at our house. He was family. So when he became the assistant to Marty Dubow, a big TV agent at William Morris, he also became my secret agent. Typically, assistants were only supposed to answer the phone. But Barry would sneak a peek at the casting breakdowns on his boss’s desk and get me an audition for whatever small roles were available on TV. I’d land a part, get paid $400, and you’d have thought we’d robbed a bank. We were like Mickey and Judy, putting on a show in the barn.

Shortly after that, I was sent out on a call to read for Elizabeth Ashley’s New York replacement in Neil Simon’s comedy hit
Barefoot in the Park
. A chance to work on Broadway! I was so excited—and I was ready. The role of Corie Bratter was just the kind of part I had been playing for the past few years—vivacious, optimistic, funny.

When I got to the theatre, my heart sank. There was a very long line of young actors—male and female—waiting outside to audition for Mike Nichols, the director; Saint Suber, the producer; and Neil Simon. Then a man came out to the line and gave us each a number that signified who we would be reading with. My partner was Marty Milner. I didn’t know him then, but years later he would have a successful TV series called
Route 66
.

But that day we were two little nobodys among hundreds of nobodys. We finally got in and read for Mike Nichols. He was extremely encouraging and kind. He laughed at what we did, and when we were finished he hopped onto the stage, gave us notes and asked us to do it again. That was a good sign.

The next day I got a call to come back. After reading for them just one more time, I was told I had the part. I was beyond thrilled—that is, until I found out that I hadn’t been reading for the New York replacement after all. Penny Fuller, Ashley’s understudy, had been promised that plum. Instead, I was being offered the year-long national touring company.

I turned it down. My agents were stunned and asked me why.

“I just cannot travel this country for a year being compared to my father,” I said. “I’ll go crazy giving interview after interview answering questions in every city, not about my work, but how it feels to be Danny Thomas’s daughter. It will be a nightmare for me. It will kill my spirit.”

My agents threatened that I would never again be taken seriously after turning down such a break. That stopped me.

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Who did the great Anne Bancroft part for the national company of
Two for the Seesaw
?”

Silence.

So I didn’t do it.

Months later, I read that they were casting for the London company of
Barefoot
. I knew that would be just what my spirit and I needed—to get out of the country, go where my father wasn’t so well known, and stand or fall on my own. I wanted to try out for it, but I was afraid my agents had had their fill of
Barefoot
and me and wouldn’t be supportive.

I paced in front of a phone booth in Greenwich Village and finally got the guts to call Mike Nichols at his office at Warner Bros. I feared he wouldn’t take the call—but he did. I asked him if he remembered me. He did. I asked him if there was a chance I could read for the part of Corie for the London company.

Silence.

“What a good idea,” he said.

I don’t know if it was the sweat from my hands or the tears from my eyes, but everything was so slippery that I actually dropped the phone. I got the part and went to London.

We had a terrific cast. English actor Dan Massey played the Robert Redford part, and Kurt Kaszner and Millie Natwick had come from the New York company to re-create their roles. We “toured the provinces,” as they say, trying out the play in Bournemouth, Brighton and South Sea. They’re summer resorts, really, so most everything was closed up, and our only entertainment was each other. So we all hung out together and became close friends. (Dan and I became even closer.)

Giving ’em hell as Corie in
Barefoot
in London.

I’ll always remember the opening night at the Piccadilly Theatre in London. The audience laughed nonstop, but nothing was as funny as what happened just offstage. Dan was a terrific actor, but he had a hard time with the last moment of the play, when he had to laugh hysterically as he drunkenly headed for the door. Everything had gone so well up until then. We were on the five-yard line, and I remember thinking,
Go for it, Danny!
But that night when he opened the door, Kurt was standing on a chair—out of the audience’s eyeshot—bent over, and all you could see was his bare butt with a daisy sticking out of it. Dan laughed hysterically all right. Only problem was, I had to chew off half my cheek not to laugh, too. God, it was a funny sight.

It was a great night. My parents had flown over for the opening, and it was
a triumph—for Neil Simon and all of the actors. At the end, the ovations seemed to go on forever. My dear parents told me later that they had sat on
their hands throughout the applause, so no one would think they had started it.

The excitement in my dressing room after the curtain came down was thrilling. My mother was ecstatic—everyone was happy and crying. Then I saw my father. He looked like he had just finished the triathalon. I knew he had lived through every moment of the play with me. And he was drained.