A Little Bit Wicked (9 page)

Finally, she sighed and said, “Well. You have to do what makes you happy.”

“Thank you for understanding.”

She remained supportive, but I could hear the deep disappointment in her voice.

She’ll come around,
I figured. I was on my way, doing a show in New York, auditioning, taking meetings with agents. I made a few false starts in that area, had to kiss a few frogs before I met the handsome princes of Bauman-Hiller, which later became BRS—Bauman, Redanty & Shaul. I loved wise Dick Bauman, and I’m so glad I had the chance to make him proud of me before he died. David Shaul was a brick house of support during my early L.A. days. But Mark Redanty—he was the first one to
get
me. And not very many people did. All the other agents I met with wanted to slap some kind of label on me: singer who dances. Dancer who sings. Comedienne. Character actress. The short girl.

“I see you as everything,” Mark said. “That’s how we’re going to submit you.”

He busted out the hustle and moved my career rapidly forward over the next several years, holding my hand and being an unfailing stud muffin through it all. My size and my voice worked against me at a lot of auditions. When I was plugged into a dance line, I couldn’t see the chorus for the trees.
(Ba-dum-bum-CHHH!)
But ultimately, being different is a plus, and Mark made sure to send me to auditions where those liabilities became my greatest strength.

The audition fairy sprinkled some magic dust on Denny as well. He nailed a great gig at a professional theater in Houston and headed down there after just four weeks in the tiny one-bedroom sublet on Eighty-first near West End—the first of many apartments he and I have shared over the years—just a hop and a skip from Café Lalo, where we could get dessert on Friday nights for less than $10. (It’s still one of my favorite places, with its tall, open windows, creaky wood
floor, and boisterous breakfast crowd.) Before we got to be pros at subway surfing, we’d walk dozens of blocks, going to auditions, ferreting out the best bargain shopping, and hitting the off-, the off-off-, and sometimes-even-offer-Broadway plays our friends were in.

When Denny split for Houston, Ashley Mortimer, one of our music friends from school, moved in, and she and I shared the bed Denny and I had been sleeping in. (It took up the entire bedroom, leaving only a few inches between the mattress and wall on any side, so sleeping on the floor was not an option.) After the sublet ran out, Ashley and I moved to a place all the way down on Forty-fifth. Denny came back and squeezed into the little apartment with us. We slept on futons laid on the floor “tic-tac-toe, three in a row,” as Ashley used to say. That sublet ran out, and we got a minuscule studio in Midtown.

Denny left to do a tour of
My Fair Lady
. Then I went to Birmingham to do
Little Me,
leaving Ashley to fend for herself, and when I came back, she and Denny were off to somewhere else. I know I’m not keeping all this straight. Denny’s the one with the time-line savvy. Knows every show I was ever in. Knows what I wore to lunch on June 6, 1989. He’s my touchstone. For me, it all blends into one big, noisy production number. What I do clearly recall is the three of us schlepping Ashley’s and my little cardboard dressers through Times Square like a troupe of vagabond players. Which we were.

Completely new to me was the concept of readings and workshops. When a show is in development, the first step is to get a group of actors together with the writer and the director, give the script a voice, and see what pops and what flops. Sometimes it’s just the creative team; sometimes potential investors are checking it out. A workshop probably involves getting on your feet a little, possibly putting in some rehearsal time. There might even be minimal set and props, plus a few more people in the audience. You might memorize some of the script and dive into it a bit more as an actor, but you’re still on book—you have the script in your hand.

When I got back from Birmingham, I auditioned for a workshop of
Zombie Prom,
a crazy cool pop-rock opera about a heartbroken guy who hurls himself into a nuclear power plant and comes back as a zombie to win the heart of the girl who gave him the air. (The movie featured RuPaul, which pretty much says it all.) Everyone in town wanted to be in it. I looked around the audition, saw all the usual suspects, and figured I was out of luck, but I got cast, and it was a month of pure fun.

After
Zombie Prom,
I was off to Germany, touring with
Phantom
—and I don’t mean
Phantom of the Opera
. I’m talking about
Phantom,
the American musical by Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit. (Yeston calls it “the greatest hit never on Broadway.”) Yeston and Kopit actually started their version first and held the American rights to do a musical version of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel,
The Phantom of the Opera
. Unfortunately, the novel was already in public domain in Great Britain, and when Andrew Lloyd Webber announced his plan to do a musical version, it squashed the Yeston/Kopit version like a bug until four years later, when they revamped the script and produced it as a miniseries on NBC. Same network as My Huge Hit Sitcom
Kristin
. (Huge hit. Beverly Hills breast-implant huge. Until it got squashed like a bug.) The only music in it was opera, and for my taste, if I may be so bold, it’s better than the blockbuster. Incredible, beautiful, beautiful play. So much better to sing. (But I love you, Andrew Lloyd Webber! Call me?) Literary and musical purists love the thing, and it’s been done all over the world. Just not on Broadway.

The show that toured Germany was—not surprisingly—in German, a language I know my way around, but don’t really love. It seems to use a lot of this sound that Maddie makes when she’s been licking herself too much. I also didn’t love the producer. As the all-powerful elfin queen of my book, I’m going to call him…Herr Upderkeister. Herr Upderkeister is brilliant; just ask him. An artist’s artiste with Beethoven hair and piano keyboard teeth, he constantly scolded me
for riding in the back of the bus with the French and Polish chorus people. He didn’t want fraternizing across the caste-system boundaries, I guess, but I wanted to practice my French, and they were a fun crowd back there. None of them acted bored or thought they were slumming; they were grateful to be making the money. (If you think it’s tough to make a living as a dancer in New York, try it in Sarajevo.) A particularly lovely dancer named Katja struck up an exuberant cross-cultural connection with me, and we rode along laughing and mangling each other’s language for hours. She was in love with this little Hello Kitty jean jacket I had, and when I took it off and put it around her shoulders, not quite sure how to say “Keep it,” she was so touched, she had tears in her eyes.

“I tell you und tell you,”
Herr Upderkeister shouted at me during a rest stop at some
Gott
-forsaken schnitzel-pit,
“der leads needs to ride in der vvvvront of der bus!”

“Yeah, well, you need to get a haircut,” I said, “but I don’t think that’s gonna happen either.”

Nothing at the front was worth giving up the camaraderie back in the cheap seats, but even with the Katja fun factor, I was truly beginning to loathe that bus. I swear, from the first day I could feel my butt expanding to twice its normal size. The German countryside is stunning, and the people are good—I don’t blame them for not knowing that corn doesn’t belong in salad—but when Herr Upderkeister asked me to continue on with the tour at the end of my contract, that was a big no,
danke
. Crabbiness, bus butt, the phlegmy language and lardy cuisine—throw the Holocaust in there, and like the song says,
Good-bye to you, Mien Herr
.

A few years later, I heard through the grapevine that Katja had been in a train accident in Poland. Her leg was irredeemably crushed and had to be amputated. My first thought was
Oh, no! She can’t dance anymore!
Because I knew that for her, the reality that she couldn’t
walk
anymore was secondary to that. She and I had kept in touch for only
a short time after the tour, so I had no idea how to reach her. It might seem silly, but I was so glad I’d given her that Hello Kitty jacket. I hope she still has it. I hope she can feel my arms hugging her close when she pulls it around her shoulders.

Connections like that are precious to me. People stay with me, even when their phone numbers and addresses don’t. And screw anybody Upderkeister if he thinks that some people are not worth knowing or that snobbery is a hallmark of success. I can’t bear to imagine the many dear friends I would have missed out on if everyone thought that way. There is, indisputably, a hierarchy in theatre, but it’s up to each of us if we want to participate in it. It’s good to learn early that every show is a family—complete with dysfunctional relationships, tough love, and plenty of occasion for forgiveness—and my goal is to be the cool aunt.

During a recent revival of
The Apple Tree,
I took the cast out to the Palm for dinner. It was the first Broadway show for a lot of these people, and I just wanted to help them enjoy this moment to the hilt. I like to love people up the way my cool aunts loved me up when I needed it, and just to make sure there’s plenty of sugar, I always bake my famous White Trash cookies to pass around backstage or on the set.

In an effort to promote world peace, I will now share with you the recipe for…

Chenolicious White Trash Cookies

• Take a cudgel of that frozen chocolate chip cookie dough you buy at the grocery store and resist the temptation to eat most of it raw.
  
• Bake as directed on plastic wrapper.
  
• Lick plastic wrapper.
  
• Crack open a can of Betty Crocker ready-to-spread vanilla frosting and slather that on the bottom of each cookie with a butter
  knife—liberally if you’re a Democrat, prudently if you’re Republican.
  
• Lick butter knife.
  
• Clap two cookies together forming one big, fat good-time sandwich. Done!
  

It also works with Oreo cookies if someone’s recently broken up with you and you don’t feel like baking. Or if you’re interested in finding your insulin-shock threshold.

Full disclosure: A few years ago, I made these cookies during the Broadway run of
Epic Proportions,
and one of my castmates, the dear and brilliant character actor Richard Shull, ate several before we left the theater after the show. I had to do a reading for
Thoroughly Modern Millie
the next day, and afterward I saw the director talking to Jerry Zaks, the director of
Epic Proportions
. They asked me to step into the dressing room. Never a good thing. I thought I was being fired.

“Kristin,” Jerry said in the one-stroke, get-it-over-with-way your mother rips a Band-Aid off your knee, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Richard died.”

“
What?
Oh, my gosh, but—what—
when
?”

“He went peacefully in his sleep last night after the show.”

This was at 4:30 p.m., and we were supposed to go on at eight. The cast gathered at the theater, heartsick and crying. He’d been so special to all of us. Richard was one of those old pro, the-show-must-go-on types, and he had a great understudy who was ready to step in, so we knew we had to go ahead and do the show, but it was hard to imagine getting out there and giving the audience a big laugh riot.

“How did it happen?” I asked. “Did he have a heart attack or…”

“He was getting up there in years,” said the director. “He had a great run.”

Ross Lehman piped up and said, “I think it was those cookies.”

We all fell out laughing. Truvy’s life-giving laughter through tears. It was a great show that night. We sucked it up and got out there and did it for Richard. The audience never knew a thing was off until the very end, when I stepped forward and gave a brief curtain speech, explaining Richard’s absence and saying a few words to honor him.

Flash forward to the set of
The West Wing
in 2006.

I made the cookies. John Spencer ate several. He died two days later. I’m not accepting any liability here, but I will never again make those cookies for anyone over the age of fifty. Denny calls them the “death cookies” and swears he’ll never let another one touch his lips.

Apparently, they’re just that good.

M
adeline Kahn Chenoweth is a Manhattan dog and could not be happier to be back on her home turf. As we breeze through the lobby of our apartment building, I snap a retractable leash onto her bedazzled collar.

“Say good morning, Maddie.” I help her wave her little paw at the doorman.
“Good morning, Georgio!”

“Good morning, Maddie,” Georgio deadpans. He’s a man of great self-control. “Good morning, Ms. Chenoweth.”

Outside in the sunshine, I breathe in a deep whiff of Upper West Side and scruffle Maddie behind the ears before I set her down on the sidewalk. Cesar the Dog Whisperer would say she’s the one walking me on a leash. She’s a spunky thing who dodges and weaves and refuses to commit to one side or the other. (She and I have a lot in common.) A perfectly nice little schnauzer walks by and wants to play, but
Maddie will have none of it. A block up the street, we meet an English bullmastiff walking in the opposite direction, and Maddie gets all feisty, threatening to beat him up. It’s like seeing a side of beef challenged by a kernel of popcorn. He humors her with a brief, condescending sniff and walks away, shaking his head.

“Didja tell him, Mads? Mommy’s little baby told that big doggie, yes, she did.”

I admit it. I’m one of those freaky dog people I used to hate, promenading my pooch around New York City, talking baby talk to her. I can’t help it. She
is
my baby, and she probably doesn’t remember any mommy other than me; she was the size of a shortbread cookie when I got her from Little Annie’s Pet Salon on Staten Island. My best gal pal, Erin Dilly, has two Pomeranians—Ozzie and Harriet—and she decided I needed a baby of my own. I’d been thinking about getting a Maltese, so we hopped the ferry and went on over to look at a litter of puppies. Two Maltese puppies were still for sale. One was perfectly marked, quiet, and loving, a regular little Marilyn Monroe. The other was more of a Fanny Brice type, the scrawny runt of the litter, cockeyed and hyper. When I picked up the Marilyn puppy, the Fanny puppy raised a big stink, crying and caterwauling. That was Maddie, and she was not about to let me walk out that door with the wrong dog. I picked her up, and the connection was Jello-O instant pudding love.

She wasn’t quite old enough to leave the litter, so the day I was allowed to bring her home was the day after the opening night of
Wicked
. Mom and Dad had flown in for the show, so we made an event of it, traveling by stretch limo, dragging Denny and my manager, Dannielle Thomas, along for the ride, to collect Maddie from Little Annie’s.

“My grandbaby,” Mom cooed as Maddie nuzzled her chin (and the rest of looked on, thinking,
How sad is that
). Then we took Maddie out to the limo, where she settled into the Corinthian leather seat with a distinct air of
I could get used to this.

Now that I think of it, my connection with Erin Dilly happened just that quickly. I’d been hired to do a pre-Broadway production of
Babes in Arms
at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. I was starting the show in a walking cast because I’d stepped in a hole and broken my ankle during previews for
Strike up the Band
at the Goodspeed Opera House. (I’ve done that show twice, and I have the scars to prove it; I doubt I’ll ever feel the need to do it again.) When I arrived at the airport, gimpy and short on sleep, I saw a girl slumped in a plastic chair near the gate. I figured there would be other people from the show on this flight and instantly recognized that particular brand of physical and mental exhaustion that hallmarks a working actress, so I went over and said, “Hi. Are you by chance Erin Dilly?”

She looked up at me wearily. “You’re Kristin.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I know we’re going to be best friends,” she said, “but right now, I’m so tired, I just can’t make the effort.”

“Me, too.”

I slumped into the chair next to her, we gave each other an interpersonal hall pass—sort of a get-out-of-small-talk-free card—and have been best girlfriends ever since.

The Guthrie was great. The score had been updated with permission from the estates of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and they’d spared no expense on the costumes and set. The story line is pure Depression-era rhubarb pie—a boy puts on a show to keep from being sent to a work camp—and the music is legendary: “My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” and several other great old standards.

That job led to another job somewhere else, which led to a workshop in New York, which led to an off-Broadway play, which led to something else. That’s the way it went, but I couldn’t seem to make my father understand that this made it impossible to write that thesis paper I still owed. “I’ll get to it,” I kept promising, and he kept asking, “When?” Finally he and Mom came to New York to visit, and while we were eating lunch at Subway, they pressed the issue to the wall.

“Kris, it’s been over a year,” said Mom. “You can’t come this close and not get your master’s degree for the lack of that paper. Just get it done.”

“I will. I promise.”

“You promise what?” Dad flipped over his paper place mat on the table, clicking a pen from his pocket. “I want it in writing.”

“I promise to write the paper, okay? Soon.”

“Within six months.” He wrote out the parameters of the agreement and pushed the Subway place mat across the table. “Sign. Right there at the bottom.”

“But it doesn’t say what you’ll give me if I do it.”

“Why should I give you anything?”

“Well…I mean…you know. What do I get?”

“The degree!”
he roared. “You get the
degree.
”

“Fine.”

I signed the place-mat contract, applied myself to the paper for several weeks, and turned it in. It was accepted without too much rigmarole, thank goodness. When the degree arrived in the mail, I had it framed and presented it to Dad for Christmas. It hangs in his office still today. He is some kind of proud of that master’s degree. And I have to sheepishly concede that he did me a huge favor taking me to task about it. At the time, I figured,
Hey, I’m getting the work; what difference does it make?
But of course if makes a lot of difference. I have a master’s degree in a classical discipline. That’s a little bit of
boo yah!
in the ol’ curriculum vitae, if I do say so myself. (Thanks, Mom and Dad. I couldn’t have done it without you.)

It’s not that I was being lazy. Quite the opposite. I was running myself into the ground. We all were. Before Mark Redanty signed me up, I didn’t fully understand that it’s de rigueur for New York actors to spend half their time elsewhere. I knew that to make it on Broadway, I needed to be based here, but I embraced the stage experience and growth offered by all the out-of-town jobs. There’s no place like New York, but excellent theatre is happening all over the country with top
directors either visiting or in residence. Once you get that Equity card, you’re in like Flynn. I see God’s handprint on each of those steppingstones that took me exactly where I needed to be to learn what I needed to learn.

After I returned from Germany, I landed a role in
The Fantasticks
at the Sullivan Street Playhouse. I’d studied the show in college, of course, so I knew when I got cast that this was an opportunity to be a small part of New York theatre history. The show was written by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, who’s first collaboration was a musical review called
Hipsy-Boo!
(I know, right?) which opened in Texas in 1950 and did well enough to eventually get them to New York, where they began working on a musical version of a little-known Edmond Rostand play called
Les Romanesques,
in which two fathers—knowing that children always do what their parents forbid—build a wall between their houses in hopes that it will make a boy and a girl fall in love. Jones and Schmidt struggled with the script; three weeks before the show debuted at Barnard College, they threw out everything except the song “Try to Remember” and started from scratch.
The Fantasticks
opened to mixed reviews on May 3, 1960, and played 17,162 performances before closing in January of 2002. I joined the cast in 1995, the forty-first actress to play Luisa, the role originated by Rita Gardner. The pay was lousy, but the experience was priceless. The very essence of off-Broadway. And the job kept me in New York, which I loved.

Housing was a perpetual challenge, but we did what we needed to do to make it work, living out of suitcases, sleeping in whatever space was available, and vying for closet space. While Denny was out of town, Ashley and I got a lead on a place near Seventy-second and Broadway for just $800 a month. It seemed too good to be true, so naturally it was. The day after we handed over the lion’s share of our meager resources, we saw the landlady’s mug shot on television. Denny came home to find us in a panic. He called a friend he’d worked with
at Six Flags back in the day—a flight attendant named Brad, a lovely Southern gentleman, who had the biggest heart in the world and a one-bedroom apartment outfitted with four bunk beds, which he generously offered to his fellow airline workers, theatre people, and other wanderers.

Brad loved the
Jenny Jones
talk show, pageants, and
The People’s Court,
so he had a huge bank of VCRs, all set to record various programs while he was flying around. The guy seemed as gay as a morning glory, but staunchly remained closeted, and that was fine by the three of us. Whatever floats your boat. We were just incredibly grateful to have a place to live. It was a little odd, however, to share those bunk beds with a revolving cast of strangers, and since everyone came and went on different schedules, you couldn’t even count on getting into the same bed every night. I’ve been told they call this hot-racking in the navy, and that really doesn’t help, but you have to understand how deeply, truly exhausted we were. By the time we dragged ourselves home after a show, we just wanted to lie down, and we didn’t much care where. Everyone was in the same boat with never enough money or space or privacy to go around. Those were luxuries we were willing to compromise on in order to be New Yorkers.

Denny was temping for Clinique between shows (foreshadowing his later rise to cosmetics world dominance—he’s now their executive director of North American marketing), and he was growing disenchanted with me for several reasons. Brad’s place was outfitted with the Clapper (you know—“Clap on! Clap off! The Clapper!”), which turned the lights off every time I sang a high note and turned them on in the middle of the night if I sneezed. Cell phones were just beginning to come into vogue, but none of us could afford that or an answering service, so all our casting calls came to the apartment. For whatever reason, Brad had several phones strategically placed throughout the apartment, so every time a call came in, it rang everywhere, including the inside of your head in twelve different ringtones. I was
dating three different guys at the time, so an unbalanced number of the calls were for me, and this began to be a source of stress. Denny was irritated at having his business calls interrupted with my social life, and I was irritated at having my social life interrupted by
Denwhah
not-so-cagily asking my dates, “Which one are you?” Between all that and the platinum-precious bar space in the narrow closet, tempers simmered one
clap on!
from boiling over.

The summer was hot and muggy as a dog’s mouth, and I wasn’t feeling well at all. One night after the show, Denny and I were in the grocery store, and the next thing I knew I was flat on the floor, blinking up at his startled face.

“Kris? Are you okay?” he asked, patting my cheek, pushing my hair back from my forehead.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. You’re eyes rolled back in your head, and you were
out.
”

He supported me back to the apartment, where I crawled into an available bed. Sharing the bunk below me was an older couple who were visiting New York on their honeymoon, and the bride happened to be a nurse.

“Your temp is up to 103,” she said, pressing a cool cloth against my neck. “It’s not appendicitis. Based on what you’re telling me, I’d say it’s some kind of parasite. You’re getting seriously dehydrated. Sweetie, you need to be in the hospital.”

I lay in a ball in the top bunk, and Ashley was kind enough to take care of me while my dad sped from Pennsylvania to pick me up. I was delirious with pain by the time I got to the emergency room. They dosed me with morphine, ran tests, and confirmed the newlywed nurse’s diagnosis.

“You need to come home so I can take care of you,” said Mom, and I didn’t argue. Dad took me back to the apartment and waited with the car down in the street while Ashley helped me get my things.
It took most of my strength to gather a few clothes and stuff them into a bag. What energy I had left, I devoted to an all-out hissy fit.

“This is great. This is terrific. I’m livin’ the dream now, aren’t I?”

Suddenly the beaten-down feet, the inadequate sleep, and the too-many-gerbils-in-the-shoe-box dynamic of the past several months started venting out of me much the same way everything else had been venting from my twisted stomach. Desolate and dizzy, I launched into a tirade against the travesty of life in general and underfunded New York apartment life in particular. Because he was standing there, I railed at Denny about cramming his stuff too close to mine in the closet and how I was sick of showing up to auditions looking like I’d just crawled out of the trunk of a car, and he railed back at me about hogging a diva’s share of the space. That spiraled into a diatribe about the Grand Central Station sleeping arrangements that had me snoozing sixteen inches from a different stranger every night, which brought out a bunch of hostility from Denny about the phone situation. Next I went off on Brad and his Clapper and his pageants and the idiotic Flintstones sheets on his bed and the ridiculous “Yeah, sure, Brad’s as straight as a hitching post” pretense we were all supposed to uphold.

“I just want to shake him by the neck and say, ‘
Bradley! Baby!
Clap on, pal. You’re
gay.
Everybody knows it. You’re blipping the gaydar, dude. You’re Anne of Green Gaybles. If you were any gayer—’”