My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (2 page)

A week after my first call to the lawyer, he called back; our quest for
D.V.
was hopeless. The famous agent Swifty Lazar claimed “planetary rights.” My heart sank. Who would give me the rights anyway? Me, a fiftyish, thoroughly demoralized, demoted first witch? I didn’t have the standing. The awards. Not to mention the shoes.

Something was definitely amiss in the Public Theater’s prop department. We witches were told we would have bloody animal parts and entrails for the “boil and bubble” scene. What we got were little sticks with feathers glued to them, and our entrails were surgical hoses that bounced unconvincingly. Our cauldron was the size of an ashtray with a sliver of dry ice inside that refused to boil or bubble during our incantations. It waited until our backs were turned to burp a trickle of smoke, like a rebuke for being yelled at. The audience giggled.

The lawyer called again; apparently Swifty had been speaking allegorically. The rights to
D.V.
were in the hands of the Vreeland family. Their lawyer was George Dwight. We called Mr. Dwight and he invited us up to his office. He was very cordial, a gentleman of the old school. He seemed intrigued by the idea of a play about Vreeland, perhaps sensing money to be made, but we would need the approval of her sons, Tim and Frederick. He said he would contact them. Things seemed possible now. Mark and I went down the street to an expensive Italian restaurant and ate an enormous lunch.

I
N THE SECOND WEEK OF PREVIEWS, A DESPERATE, SWEATY
R
ICHARD
suddenly decided that the witches controlled the weather. Confusion among the witch ranks: we thought we were real people. Nevertheless. He gave us instruments: a little drum for Second Witch, a triangle for Third, and a recorder for me. We reminded me of a kindergarten band. Three little witches from school. We were supposed to summon wind, thunder, and lightning with our instruments, but the sound and light cues consistently came too early or too late, causing more giggles from the preview audience.

G
EORGE
D
WIGHT CALLED. THE SONS WERE INTERESTED, BUT A
grandson, Alexander, objected to the idea of his grandmother being portrayed onstage. It was a fact that drag queens were “doing” her everywhere, and he feared, quite rightly, that we would make her an object of camp. So, down, down I went, “like glistering Phaeton, into the base court.”

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE THE LAST PREVIEW
, R
ICHARD, HAIR ASKEW
, wild-eyed, said to me, “You know what I want.” I was very much afraid I did. “You want me to appear in the sleepwalking scene as the witch,” I said. “Right,” he replied.

I had been going along with the tradition of doubling as Lady in Waiting in the sleepwalking scene. Nightly, I traded my rags for a gown and a wimple. But now he wanted the hag standing behind Mrs. M. while she bemoaned her fate. “Give me one good reason!” I snapped. “Well,” he thought for a minute, “the Macbeths are having a servant problem.” I went to Lady M’s dressing room and told her what he wanted me to do. She was a young thing, fresh out of Juilliard, possibly dating Richard. She didn’t see a problem. “But it will steal focus!” I shouted. Shrug, no worries.

My actor buddy and occasional personal analyst John Seidman was staying with me at the time. I consulted him the next morning over coffee as I lay in bed and he sat alongside me in his briefs. I wanted to call Actor’s Equity, but John advised going along with it. “He won’t keep it in,” he said. He was right. When I appeared that night in my foul rags, audience heads swiveling from Lady M back to me created a susurrus that nearly blew her candle out.

B
UT
I
DIDN
’
T GIVE A DAMN WHAT HAPPENED ONSTAGE NOW, BECAUSE
Dwight had just called back again: the sons had decided to ignore the grandson’s objections he said, they were in favor of a play about their mother. Oh joy! And then he said “Frederick Vreeland, ‘Freckie,’ wants to meet Mary Louise.” Oh, God! This had not occurred to me. Of course he would want to see what I looked like! How could I possibly pass muster? How could I ever convince him I could play his mother? This woman dominated the fashion world for three decades. What to wear? What to wear? That persistent cry. This was the eighties and my uniform was hip-hugger jeans and turtlenecks. I no longer had a blueprint for myself in a dress. I ended up buying something in a mall—a noncommittal black linen sack and a pair of excruciating black leather pumps—and when I got it all on, combined with a pair of black stockings, I looked like somebody’s Sicilian mama.

It was a boiling hot June day. The vestibule just outside the apartment door was lacquered red, and on the wall hung a painting of young Diana in a dress with a floating white collar. I stood there in my widow’s weeds, stockinged legs itching, feet aching in my hard leather heels. I was back in dancing school, standing against the wall in a velvet dress that didn’t fit, my precipitate breasts squashed under the bodice, my size-eight Mary Janes looming below me.

I rang the bell. Freckie greeted me wearing tennis whites, shorts, and a polo shirt. He didn’t give my wardrobe a glance. He was gracious and easy. He took me to lunch around the corner. He was funny like his mother, and he chatted freely about her. He said she was not a very good mother—she was not around and had no sense about money—but when I told him that I revered her, he looked surprised and pleased. He told me that even when she was ill and bedridden, she continued having dinner parties. The maid would serve and the guests would talk to her through her closed bedroom door. Freckie’s comment was, “Mom never liked to appear unless she was at full gallop.”

After a few agonizing days, Dwight called to say I had passed inspection. Mark and I went to his office to sign the contracts giving us exclusive rights to
D.V.
Oh joy, oh rapture! We floated out of the office and down the street to another expensive restaurant and ate another gigantic lunch.

I
MAY HAVE BEEN BITTEN BY THE
V
REELAND BUG AT A VERY EARLY
age. Growing up in New Orleans in the forties, I was fascinated by the women my mother invited to our house to play bridge: elegantly dressed ladies with their little hats, their bright red lips and nails, their husky voices and phlegmy smokers’ coughs. The way the metal clasps on their purses clicked open and closed importantly, their lipsticked cigarettes smashed in the ashtrays. Looking back, I realized that their drawls had the same touch of Brooklynese that Vreeland had. They weren’t necessarily pretty; one or two of them looked like wizened little monkeys, but chic little monkeys, with diamonds in their ears. And they were often funny. I was an untidy child, big for my age with scabby knees and exploding hair, yet I longed to be like these women, to be glamorous and funny.

We moved to New Orleans from Connecticut when I was seven. My mother found and renovated an old house in the Garden District: white columned facade, high ceilings, marble fireplaces, and living room windows that went right to the floor. The rooms were beautifully furnished. My mother had a genuine talent for decorating. She had to have the best and the latest of everything. I think we had the first automatic dishwasher in the city; when turned on, it “walked” across the kitchen floor, scaring the hell out of the cook. But this house was to be my mother’s dream fulfilled, the stage for her career as a New Orleans society hostess. Where the money came from to pay for all of it, none of us would ever know. When I looked at the mountain of bills cascading off her desk, I could feel the anxiety flowing out of it. It may be that some people were never paid. My father had been hired as an associate of the esteemed Ochsner Clinic, but he was a tuberculosis doctor, the “poor man’s disease.” I’m sure his salary was modest.

My father was handsome and charismatic. I was madly in love with him, but he stayed aloof behind his newspaper while our mother tyrannized us. My mother’s mother was an Anglophile who worshipped the King of England and the little princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, who called the Queen “Mummy.” Consequently, our mother instructed us to call her “Mummy.” My brother used to say, “Mummy is the root of all evil.” To us, she was a regular Hitler giving out endless orders and rules about manners: “Sit up,” “Sit down,” “Curtsy,” “Say ‘Sir’ and ‘Ma’am.’” Even now, in my eighties, I start to stand up when an adult enters the room. My mother taught us when sitting down at the dinner table to unfold our napkins and put them in our laps. I somehow missed the order about what to do with it when dinner was over, and to this day when leaving the table my napkin slides to the floor and I trip over it.

Mummy’s father was a distinguished Presbyterian minister, and she saw herself as descended from royalty. She was obsessed with social rank. She wasn’t ever where she thought she ought to be in the hierarchy, and her unhappiness was a black cloud over the family. Her feelings were forever getting hurt and her tears were a constant oppression. There was nothing we could do to stop the flow. It trickled down on us and divided us, and made us cruel. My father teased my mother until she cried, my older brother and sister teased me until I cried, and I teased the dog until she bit me.

The one thing that kept us all from killing each other was humor. We shared a highly developed sense of the ridiculous. My father was a champion scoffer, and he could not refrain from teasing our mother for her pretensions. We not only had a cook (in those days most Southern middle-class families had cooks), but also a butler. Family dinners got fancier and fancier, with linen napkins, candelabra, salad plates, salad forks, and finger bowls. When he got a load of the finger bowls, my father twitted, “What’s this for, dear? For germs? I washed before I came to the table. What? What?”

Watching our father tease our mother thrilled us children. One night she started to say, “When I was abroad—” when he interrupted “You were a broad, dear?” We became hysterical. She had her moments. One night after some hectoring, the butler entered with dessert and placed it in front of her: molded grape Jell-O on a crystal plate. She rose from her chair, stood for a moment staring dreamily down at the quivering mound and then she slapped it. She slapped it so hard she broke the crystal plate and to our utter delight bits of Jell-O shot all over the table. Some even hit the wallpaper. She wailed, “I always wanted to do that!”

Another time the family was spending a Fourth of July weekend at a fishing camp and while Mummy was visiting the outhouse, my brother threw a lit firecracker onto the tin roof. There was a terrific explosion followed by dead silence and then Mummy stepped out. With great dignity she murmured, “it must’ve been something I et.”

My mother inherited her timing from her minister father, who incidentally was an actor until he realized he would never get leading roles because he was short and his head was too big. He went into the pulpit instead and thrilled his congregation by reading from the Bible in a roaring baritone, tears pouring down his cheeks. He could be very funny at his own dinner table, and his grandchildren inherited his timing—a blessing from the grave. It’s innate; you either got it, or you ain’t, and we got it.

My brother and sister were both very funny people. Hugh was four years older than me, and Taffy was five. I longed to be accepted by them, but they weren’t having any of that. We had a costume trunk in the attic. Didn’t every family? In there were World War I puttees, top hats, ancient evening gowns, tailcoats, and fur pieces. It was family tradition to “dress up” on party occasions. One night, Hugh in an old tailcoat and Taffy in a tea gown danced a wild tango around the living room to a recording of “Jealousy,” and my stern father laughed so hard tears ran down his face. I tried to join in, but was roundly rejected. I was only funny when I didn’t mean to be. The sight of me wearing my dress inside out or my shoes on the wrong feet or coming home from kindergarten inexplicably covered in green paint made my siblings roar.

I don’t recall ever being taken seriously. Tears were “crocodile tears,” and temper tantrums—usually the result of being ignored—meant being sent to my room. To solitary.

When we were little, Hugh was constantly trying to kill me off. We spent summers in Connecticut with a bunch of cousins, and we used to play in an old boathouse down by the lake. It had a big upper room once used for Sunday bible meetings. Down below, there were rowboats rotting in the muck. One day, Hugh made up a game called “Heaven and Hell.” The upper room was Heaven, the muck was Hell, and he was God. If you did what God told you to do, you got to go to Heaven and run relay races, and if you didn’t, you went to Hell in the muck. I was five and Hugh was nine. He was letting all our cousins into Heaven. When it was my turn, he told me the next time a car drove by to pull my pants down. A car drove by, I pulled my pants down, and he sent me to Hell anyway.

In later years, if we were playing Monopoly and I somehow acquired Park Place and Boardwalk, Hugh would put hotels on his Railroads illegally and charge astronomical rents. When I squealed, he said, “Don’t be such a brat,” and I gave in. I somehow knew he had to win.

Like our mother, Hugh had a royalty complex. From the time he was born, he was captivated by kings and princes and popes, and he loved despots and palace intrigues and panoply. When he was fourteen, he retired from the family to an attic room at the top of the house, only leaving it for school and meals. He was a brilliant student, top of his class in English and physics, and he was endlessly creative with things mechanical and structural. His room, which I was once allowed to enter, was filled with gadgets, buzzers, bells, and a miniature theater with tiny spotlights and motorized curtains. He taught himself to play the piano; once in a while he descended from his lair, sat at the living room grand, and banged out “The Great Gate of Kiev” so loud the table lamps jumped. I didn’t understand at the time that he was tortured because he was gay and his father treated him with contempt. He was filled with fury against both our parents.