My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir
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Authors: Mary Louise Wilson
Tags: #BIO005000, #BIO013000, #BIO026000
30 BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOGRAPHS
Mary Louise Wilson became a star at age sixty with her smash one-woman play
Full Gallop
, which she co-authored, portraying legendary
Vogue
editor Diana Vreeland. But before and since, her life and her career on stage—including the Tony Award for her portrayal of Big Edie in
Grey Gardens
—as well as film and television, has been enviably celebrated and varied.
Raised in New Orleans with a social climbing, alcoholic mother, Mary Louise moved to New York City in the late 1950s; lived with her gay brother in the Village; immediately entered the nightclub scene in a legendary review; and rubbed shoulders with every famous person of that era and since.
My First Hundred Years in Show Business
gets it all down, story by tantalizing story. Yet as delicious as the anecdotes are—and they truly are—the heart of this book is in its unblinkingly honest depiction of the life of a working actor. In her inimitable voice—wry, admirably unsentimental, mordantly funny—Mary Louise Wilson has crafted a work that is at once a teeming social history of the New York theater scene of the past fifty years and a thoroughly revealing and superbly entertaining memoir of the extraordinary life of an extraordinary woman and actor.
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2015 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
For bulk and special sales, please contact
[email protected]
,
or write us at the address above.
Copyright © 2015 Mary Louise Wilson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Frontispiece photograph copyright ©
The New Yorker
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1224-9
1991: First Reading of Full Gallop
1991: A Reading at Playwrights Horizons
1993: Full Gallop Juilliard Benefit
Summer 1994: The Way of the World
November 1994: Full Gallop with the Allens
To my friend and guide,
Dennis
I was swimming around in Edwina’s pool having such a nice, refreshing time, when she said “You know, Diana, your future’s behind you.” “Your future’s behind you!” I nearly DROWNED!
—Diana Vreeland, D.V.
I
WAS SITTING AROUND A TABLE WITH THE REST OF THE CAST ON THE
first day of rehearsals for
Macbeth
at the Public Theater when the director rose from his chair, turned to me, and said, “First Witch? I’m giving your chestnut speech to the younger, prettier witch.” Now, I wasn’t crazy about playing this witch; let’s face it, it’s a generic crone role! But I hadn’t worked on the New York stage in a long time.
For the past few years the only parts I was getting called to read for were washroom attendants and bag ladies on television. I was even going up for parts against actual bag ladies. I had gone from featured roles on Broadway to playing parts labeled “Woman” with lines like “Hello.” So now I was telling myself well at least I’m
first
witch. Then this director took away the one thing that made me first: the chestnut speech.
I was shocked. I thought the best thing about performing a dead playwright’s work was that your lines couldn’t be cut. A director could make me wear a hat that covered my face or a farthingale that wouldn’t fit through doors, but nobody was going to fiddle with my words. Especially not Shakespeare’s. Not that I had a clue what the chestnut speech was about, but it had lovely, tongue-rolling phrases like “aroint thee” and “rump-fed runyon” and “mounched and mounched and mounched.” And now this guy was stripping me of my epaulettes in front of the whole damned company. To make matters worse, the witch he gave it to really was young and pretty, so he was not only rewriting Shakespeare, he was having a cheap laugh on me. This wasn’t a career I was having, it was an exercise in humiliation.
How the hell did I end up here? I felt it was my fault, that I had caused or allowed it to happen. At the same time, I certainly didn’t feel like I belonged down here.
There’s an old refrain about the five stages of an actor’s life:
1. Who is Mary Louise Wilson?
2. Get me Mary Louise Wilson.
3. Get me a Mary Louise Wilson type.
4. Get me a young Mary Louise Wilson.
5. Who is Mary Louise Wilson?
I was somewhere between stages four and five. I was dimly conscious of my own culpability, but at the same time I bristled at being taken for,
mis
taken for, a modest talent only suitable for maid parts.
You have to have a dream of something, you know, if you’re going out to buy a pair of bedroom slippers, you have a dream of what you want …
F
OR A FEW MONTHS NOW, MY FRIEND
M
ARK
H
AMPTON—NOT THE
deceased decorator, but the very funny and very much alive writer Mark Hampton—and I had been fooling around with the idea of writing a play about a woman named Diana Vreeland. She had been a powerful magazine editor and well-known figure in New York social circles for decades. Now Mark had become fascinated by recent newspaper accounts of her being blind and bedridden, her once jet-black hair turned white, and her jewelry and other personal effects being auctioned off at Sotheby’s. We were both touched by her sad fate. I picked up her book,
D.V.,
a collection of her reminiscences and pronouncements as edited by George Plimpton, and reread it. I had read it years earlier, when it was given to me by a pal, Nicky Martin. At that time I simply thought it was wonderfully silly. We took turns reading passages aloud and keeling over laughing. This time, though, I fell in love with her unique use of language.
Just for kicks, I sat in a chair across from Mark and read a couple of her stories aloud. We looked at each other. This was great stuff. We knew it. We talked about the possibilities and the difficulties of writing about somebody still living. Mark had already been to hell and back writing a musical about the Boswell Sisters while one of them was still alive. Besides, I doubted we could get permission. Then one morning we came across her obituary in the
Times
. August 23, 1989. It hit me then that if we didn’t make a move, somebody else was going to get their hands on that book and I would regret it for the rest of my life. So now, sitting stewing in the rehearsal hall, it occurred to me that I had nothing left to lose. On the first break, I went to the pay phone and called a lawyer I knew about getting the rights to
D.V.
I was going to write a play based on this book, and I was going to perform it in broom closets, if necessary.
I
N THEATRICAL CIRCLES, MENTIONING THE NAME
“M
ACBETH
”
IS
believed to bring on extremely bad luck. If an actor utters it or any line from the play inside a theater, he or she must perform a ritual. There are variations of this ritual, but the one I know is to spit three times as you turn around three times in the dressing room doorway. It is consequently always referred to as “the Scottish play.” Directors of the Scottish play seem to me to get hung up on the witches. The witches are their big, if not only, chance to exercise their directorial style. I’ve seen or heard of the witches appearing as pretty fairies, giant puppets, or male goth rockers. They can be played as real or they can be supernatural. Our director informed us that we were real, and that we lived off the refuse of the battlefield. In other words, we were bag ladies.
Maybe Richard felt bad about taking away my chestnut speech, because the second week he gave me a tumbrel. The idea was that I would lug Banquo around in it. This tumbrel looked like something out of
The Flintstones
. It had big clunky wheels and on its trial run down the aisle it got stuck. It was built too wide. I saw the set designer slap his hand over his face. After that I just lugged Banquo on and off upstage left. I can’t remember now where I was lugging him to, or why.