My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir (8 page)

Meanwhile, Miss Holliday kept dumping her scenes. In the end she didn’t even have one with her leading man. Her boyfriend at the time, saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, told her, “You’re a singer, babe, you don’t need scenes.” When we got to New York, the film director Herbert Ross came onboard and stuck. Maybe he had guessed the Riddle of the Sphinx.

Every scene Miss Holliday dumped, the writers had given to me, and now, two days before the New York opening, they were all taken away. No explanation. I remember George yelling “That’s not fair!” Not that there was ever a chance of me casting so much as a breath of a shadow on her.

The show now consisted entirely of a series of big musical numbers separated by “crossover scenes,” with George and me down in front of the curtain, which lasted just long enough for Judy to change costumes and take a drag on her oxygen tank. New numbers were being ghostwritten by friends. Once, coming into rehearsals, I saw a man sitting onstage astride a chair wearing a homburg, dove grey gloves, and a jaunty smile. Adolph Green. I’d swear he was also wearing spats, but probably I just dreamt that.

On opening night in New York, in our dressing rooms getting ready, the cast was rattled to hear completely unfamiliar music. Were we in the right theater? Stephen Sondheim had written a new opening number that afternoon. Judy had been dragging through the show for weeks, but this night she rose like a phoenix and gave a tremendous performance. She got great reviews. The show closed three weeks later.

After
Hot Spot
closed, George signed a players’ contract with 20th Century and moved to Los Angeles. I thought, Great! He always wanted to be in movies, and now at last he’s off my back. No more bursting into my apartment unannounced and telling me what to do with my life. But I wasn’t prepared for living next door to his empty apartment. For the first time since coming to the city, I was on my own. Nobody was around. Nobody was interested in telling me what to do.

I
N THE FALL OF
1963, I
WAS IN AN IMPROVISATIONAL REVUE WITH
MacIntyre Dixon and Dick Libertini of the Stewed Prunes, Paul Dooley, and a three-months-pregnant Jane Alexander. We wanted to call it the William Howard Taft Memorial Revue, but the club owner balked and renamed it Twice Over Nightly, which sounded almost as anarchic. There were some really funny sketches in this show, but there was no publicity and nobody came to see us. Paul Dooley used to introduce the show, “Good evening, lady and gentleman,” or sometimes, “Good evening, table and chair.”

I was putting on my socks watching television on my little television set when the news broke in: President Kennedy had been shot. All of the following week it seemed the world did nothing but watch television, replays over and over again of the cavalcade at Dealey Plaza, the shooting of Oswald, and the funeral. Jackie Kennedy in a black veil bending over her little boy raising his arm in salute. It seemed as if everything changed after that. There was the world before and the world after. A lightness, a gaiety, was gone forever.

A
FTER THIRTEEN YEARS AS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF
V
OGUE
MAGAZINE
, Mrs. Vreeland had been fired. We were curious about what she did immediately afterwards. We knew it had been a blow, a bomb dropped. There were conflicting accounts. George Dwight told us she took to her bed for six months. Someone else said she went to Europe for four months with her friend Kenneth Jay Lane, the high-society costume jeweler. Somehow we wangled an audience with this man.

We were ushered into the living room in his mansion on Park Avenue, an enormous octagonal seraglio swathed in drapes, sofas, pillows, and poufs, and there he was, semi-recumbent in a Savile Row suit, sucking on a cigarette. His speech was a startling replica of Vreeland’s. While he talked, the ash on his cigarette dangled perilously over his impeccable shirtfront; I kept resisting the urge to leap forward and catch it, but he would pull the cigarette away just before it dropped.

Kenneth told us a story about Vreeland’s search for a certain shade of blue. She could see it in her mind but she couldn’t find it in the real world. Friends were calling her and saying, “Diana, is it the blue of the Aegean you’re looking for?” She was driving everybody crazy trying to find this color blue. Friends suggested the blue in the Fragonard skies at the Frick, the blue of the little boiled snails in Corfu, the blue of the Duke of Windsor’s eyes—she had once said there had never been a blue like the blue of the Duke of Windsor’s eyes—but to all of these she shouted, “NO! No, that’s not the blue I’m looking for!”

Finally, Kenneth called her one day and said “Diana, do you remember that time a few years ago when we were up in the hills above Antibes, we were riding on these charming little donkeys, and the donkeys had those beads around their necks, those blue beads?” There was a long silence on the other end of the line, and then a deep, conclusive, “Donkey.”

He told us that the entire time they were in Europe, she said nothing about what had happened and was usually up for fun, except for one night in Madrid. She told him that he should go out to dine without her, that she was tired, would dine early in the hotel dining room, and then retire. He offered to keep her company while she ate. The dining room was almost empty, it was only eight o’clock, and the Spanish didn’t dine before ten. They were sitting there when an orchestra in the lobby started to play. Through the doors they heard the faint strains of “Fascination,” an old familiar tune. He glanced at her; tears were streaming down her face. He told us, “She didn’t say a word, and neither did I.”

I wondered if her tears were because of her job loss, or was it the memory of hearing this tune with her adored husband, Reed? Who knows? That’s what I love about her. Some things remain a mystery. Was she really born in Paris? Did Lindbergh really fly over her lawn in Brewster, New York? Some people thought it was their duty to prove her a liar. Who cares what the truth was? She found fantasy much more interesting. She was born in Paris, but real facts bored her so that when interviewers asked, she made up birthplaces: Vladivostok, Kathmandu, Timbuktu. She was a reporter who saw herself as being there on the spot when big things were happening. She was there when the international playboy Alfonso de Portago was seen kissing the film star Linda Christian just before driving off in a car race and losing his life in a spectacular crack-up. She was there when Cole Porter’s horse fell on him and broke his legs.

As for her tears, was she not, as some said, like so many fashionistas, incapable of deep feeling? Or was it that she didn’t believe in showing her grief? Her beloved father used to say in bad times, “Worse things happen at sea.” In any case, we determined that the time for our play to take place would be just after Vreeland had been fired.

I
WAS AUDITIONING FOR THE LEAD PART IN MUSICAL AFTER MUSICAL
and not getting hired. One thing that didn’t help was the current call for “kookie.” Goldie Hawn on
Laugh-In
was “kookie,” meaning funny and cute. Not in anyone’s wildest dreams could I pass for kookie. Much less cute. “Ethnic” was another big casting trend. I blame “ethnic” on Barbra Streisand, who was zooming past us on her way to the stratosphere. In her wake, it became the thing to have a New York accent. Somehow if you had a New York accent you were more believable. I was a hopelessly well-spoken Presbyterian.

I had no clue what I was doing. I had nothing to hang on to, I was going out there on a wing and prayer. I decided to take some acting classes. In the 1960s, there were three major acting schools: the Actors’ Studio; HB Studio, run by Herbert Berghof and his wife, the renowned actress Uta Hagen; and the Neighborhood Playhouse, run by Sanford Meisner. I signed up to study with Uta. The first scene I did was from a J.D. Salinger story, which took place between an adolescent and her older sister’s boyfriend. I remembered when I was that age, having a self-conscious fixation on my big feet in their orthopedic shoes. On instinct, I concentrated on my feet through the whole scene, and every line got a huge laugh. Uta roared. Following protocol, we repeated the scene the next week, but this time there was not a laugh in a carload. What happened? Uta would surely know, she would be able to tell me what was different, but she threw her hands up. She had no idea. Comedy was not her strong suit. She assigned parts to me to work on, like Hilda Wangel in
The Master Builder
. Uta’s method to make it real was to study the boots Hilda wore, maybe she had corns from all her walking to get to that house; and her corset, maybe it itched; her hair, what soap she used; her surroundings, family illnesses, the weather, all the minutiae, the physical facts. But Ibsen was miles away from me, across a vast expanse of ocean. I hated Ibsen.

A year or so later I started taking classes from Sanford Meisner. “Sandy.” Sandy had this exercise he was crazy about, and had us doing it for weeks on end. It was called the “repeat” exercise. Two actors sat facing each other; one said something mundane like, “You have brown hair,” and the other repeated the words back, then he repeated them again, and so they would go back and forth for an interminable length of time. The object obviously is to learn to respond to the tone of voice rather than the words. It can be very boring, but it helped me enormously.

Sandy, like Uta, gave us scenes from podgy old plays like
The Children’s Hour
and
The Gordian Knot
, but when I was doing a scene in class I just concentrated on that one thing, what the other actor was giving me. Sandy’s favorite saying was, “Acting is reacting.” His other favorite was, “Acting is behaving truthfully in imaginary circumstances.” He helped me join in my mind being funny with being truthful.

One day Sandy stood in front of us and told us about his vacation cabin in the Maine woods, how he got up at dawn and raced down to the frigid lake and jumped in, how he made a wood fire and cooked an enormous breakfast, flapjacks and syrup he got himself out of his maple trees, and on and on until we were mesmerized, and then he said he made it all up. He actually had a place in the Bahamas. He was not a proponent of sense memory, the idea of which had always made me squirm. The few times I observed it in various other classes I had dropped in on, people were reliving their rape scenes and such with abandon and I felt personally violated. He believed that emotions could be called up by the imagination. Everybody fantasizes, whether it’s the thrill of getting a role in a play, or the pain of a pet or person dying.

One time a student was supposed to enter in a scene, but she was taking a very long time. Sandy called to her; she said she was supposed to enter screaming but was having trouble calling up the proper emotion. He said, “Go out, shut the door, and just come in screaming.”

He reminded me of the forties’ comedian Jack Benny. He stood in front of us, contained and dapper with his hands folded in front of him, and when a student rudely asked, “What do you do in a real play when the other actor won’t work with you?” he turned his head to one side, rolled his blue eyes to the ceiling, and gave a huge shrug. Sandy had no interest in the current theater world. In fact he despised it. The only people he praised were the famous lieder singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and the actress Kim Stanley in
Séance on a Wet Afternoon
. I believed he liked me, and saw something in me. When I left class to go to Cincinnati to play Lady Would-be in Ben Jonson’s
Volpone,
he did not approve. He was right—I probably would have learned more if I had stayed with him.

I never wanted to be in the center of the spotlight. Too much expectation. I saw my niche as Best Friend to the Star; the Sidekick. The Über Sidekick was film actress Eve Arden, sitting on the sofa arm, clutching a foot-long patent leather purse, and making wisecracks out of the corner of her mouth while Joan Crawford chewed the scenery. And on stage there was Alice Ghostley, Jane Connell, Nancy Walker, and Bea Arthur. They weren’t the stars, they were “the best things in it.” I liked that idea.

The problem is that the show business you dreamt of is never the one you end up in.

S
HERMAN
, C
ONNECTICUT, WHERE WE SPENT OUR CHILDHOOD
summers, was Eden. My father had built a cottage with plans from a Sears and Roebuck kit up the hill behind his parents’ farmhouse, and we summered there on and off from the time I was born until the sixties. There were birthday parties and picnics and swimming and fireworks. The sight of watermelons cooling in the brook filled me with excitement: soon I’ll get what I’m missing, soon I’ll be happy! For years afterwards, it remained a time and place I longed to be.

Later in our twenties when we went there, my mother and brother would become locked in combat over house chores, mowing, raking, painting, etc. One night in the living room, all of us drunk, Mummy on the sofa sounding off for the fiftieth time about how she was going to “sell this house.” Hugh grabbed me in the kitchen and snarled, “Remember King Lear!”

When he and I were living in New York we came up on weekends with assorted friends. Hugh was Captain of the Games. For birthdays and holiday celebrations, he blew up the balloons and chose the music and broke out the costume trunk. We put on all the hats and cloaks and Mardi Gras ball gowns and gaudy finger rings from Woolworth’s. Sometimes we spent so much energy getting into costumes and crowns and rings and things that, once completed, there was nothing left to do but sit there. It was exhausting. Hugh made films with my father’s 16mm camera starring Philip, Phyllis, me, and himself. “Frenzy in Old Rome” was one. It was set to the music of Prokofiev’s “Symphonie Fantastique” and we caromed around the local cemetery in bedsheets. The film was about seven minutes long.