My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (17 page)

Mary Beth Fisher and MLW in
The Birthday Party
Huntington Theatre, Boston (Photo Gerry Goodstein)

MLW as Queen Elizabeth with Mark Harelik, New York Theater Workshop 2003,
The Beard of Avon

The Way of the World
, MLW as Lady Wishfor’t, Old Globe Theater, San Diego, 1994

Eva Le Gallienne, Kate Burton, MLW, 1982,
Alice in Wonderland
(Photo Martha Swope)

MLW with David Aaron Baker, Signature Theater, 1999
Bosoms and Neglect

MLW as Diana Vreeland,
Full Gallop
, 1996 (Photo Carol Rosegg)

Revival of
Cabaret
: MLW as Fräulein Schneider with Ron Rifkin, 1998

Backstage: MLW as Mrs. Morehead,
The Women
, Roundabout Theater, 2001

MLW as Big Edie in
Grey Gardens
, 2007 (Photo Joan Marcus)

MLW with Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical 2007 for
Grey Gardens

E
LLIS
R
ABB OFFERED ME THE PART OF
K
ITTY
L
E
M
OYNE IN
T
HE
Royal Family
. I didn’t want to do it, the part was so small. There were rumors that Ellis wasn’t going to pull it off, and as weeks passed without further word, I wondered if it would happen at all. Meanwhile I heard about this other play,
A Matter of Gravity
by Enid Bagnold, and starring Katharine Hepburn. I loved Bagnold’s plays, and I’d worshiped Hepburn ever since the night I saw her on Dick Cavett’s show, when he asked her why she had no children and she fairly bellowed, “YOU CAN’T HAVE IT ALL!”

The part I wanted to play was Hepburn’s maid. She was described as an alcoholic lesbian who levitated when she was upset. I had to have this part. I marched into the casting woman’s office, a kindly lady who looked worried. “But aren’t you doing
Royal Family
?” I asked her to let me read anyway. The maid was supposed to be fat. I wrapped towels around my middle under a loose dress. This was one of the very few times I went after a role. I was asked to come back and read again for Ms. Hepburn. Strangely, that night I was watching a low-budget British vampire film on TV and recognized the director of
Gravity
playing the vampire. He was very hammy. I read again, but then I was given the date for first rehearsal of
Royal Family,
so that was that.

I played Kitty LeMoyne, a Cavendish in name only. Here is the authors’ description of her:
About forty, but doesn’t believe it. An actress for many years, never more than mediocre.
This description infuriated me. Even the authors detested her. I crossed it out. Of course I, Kitty, believed I was just as good an actress as any of these Cavendishes.

Seventy-eight-year-old Eva Le Gallienne played the family matriarch, Rosemary Harris played her actress daughter. The John Barrymore role was George Grizzard and, later, Ellis himself. Fanny’s brother and my husband was Joe Maher, and the role of the manager was Sam Levene. Grand actors each and every one.

This play was to be part of a series of American plays produced by Roger Stevens, then head of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. It was given to Ellis to direct and on the first day of rehearsals he told us he didn’t know what it was about. I felt the same when I read it, it seemed to be nothing more than a series of entrances and exits and breakfasts and telephone calls and shouting matches. We had been rehearsing for about a week when Ellis suddenly stood up and in his drawling baritone said, “I have just realized what this play is about. Everybody gets
work
!” This was a terrific insight. This play was about actors entering, exiting, having breakfast, making phone calls, and having shouting matches. Actors marry, have children, get sick, go blind and die, but above all that, there’s the work. If an actor is a pallbearer at his mother’s funeral and he gets a call, he’ll drop the coffin and hop in a taxi.

Sam Levene kept his hat on all through rehearsals. He skulked in corners studying his script, and if I said good morning to him he gave a surly grunt and turned away. One morning I came into the rehearsal room early when only he and the stage manager were there. Suddenly emboldened, I said, “Mr. Levene, I dreamt about you last night.” This was true, I had. “I dreamt you took me to Paris. You invited me to a drug store and bought me a seltzer.” He grunted “Yeah?” I didn’t realize that I had made a friend.

The day before our first tryout in Princeton, Sam came over to me and asked if I was driving down and could he get a lift. I gulped. There he was the next day, this famous and famously grumpy movie actor standing on my doorstep with his Gladstone bag. We drove down the New Jersey Turnpike in my VW Beetle in the pouring rain. That night he took me to dinner and told me his life story. It was the saddest story I’d ever heard. He only married once, late in life, to a “beautiful young girl” and she gave him a son, but he left her. Why? He shrugged. He didn’t know why. He loved her but he had to leave her. He moved into a room at the Hotel St. Moritz, where he lived for the rest of his life.