I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (24 page)

T
he first Neil Simon play I ever did was
Plaza Suite
in 1969 at the Doolittle in Los Angeles. Mike Nichols was the director, and rehearsals for the L.A. run were held in New York, where Maureen Stapleton and George C. Scott were playing it on Broadway. Neil Simon was absolutely vehement that every word of his play be accurate—from the beginning. As an actress, I always ended up delivering the playwright’s words as written, but allowed myself to fill in lines as needed in early rehearsal, to improvise my character’s intentions, till I knew the lines and had had a chance to study them. Mike was watching me from the front row. Neil Simon—“Doc”—was sitting in the middle of the theater someplace. I was rehearsing the first of the three wife characters in
Plaza Suite
, the fiftyish wife who discovers her husband is having an affair.

The phone in the suite was ringing as I ran into the room from the hallway with a bellboy. I picked it up, out of breath. I forget what the
point of the phone call was, but suddenly I heard Mike speaking in an unfamiliar staccato, like a music teacher accompanying his words with waves of a baton: “If, But, Which, Can, Do!” “What?” I said. Mike leaned back with his arms extended across the seats on either side of him. “Those are the words you left out,” he said. “Come in again.” I went offstage and ran around to make myself breathless a second time. The bellboy opened the door; the phone was ringing. I picked it up. “If but which can do!” I said, stunned. The words were engraved in my brain. It frightened me. An actor’s sensitivity to suggestion onstage and in film is so acute that it can override her basic intelligence. Mike may have been bored to death—he has a low threshold for boredom—or Doc may have come down front and said something to him, but its effect shocked me. Those meaningless connector words took over my head. How vulnerable we are. I’d always had stage fright, always had rituals—penny in my shoe, say “Good luck” to me three times, exercises—but that was the first time in my life that I became afraid of forgetting my lines.

•   •   •

N
ow it was 1973, and I’d had a huge career in Hollywood—wonderful nonstop roles, another Oscar nomination for
The Landlord
. I’d come back to Broadway to do Neil Simon’s
The Prisoner of Second Avenue
. Once again, the director was Mike Nichols. I’d committed myself to a year’s run in New York, rented out the Red House, and found an apartment on Riverside Drive and a private school for Dinah to attend. Joey was out on the road doing commercials.

Mike was especially sensitive in his preparation, molding me, without my even knowing it, for what was essentially a two-character play, Peter Falk and me. After our first reading, Mike turned to me: “You’re the gardener, he’s the flower.” The blood drained out of me. I
had not rented the Red House for a year, I had not moved to a strange apartment, I had not put Dinah in the New Lincoln School to come to Broadway as the gardener.

I was familiar with being a gardener, as were all the wives at 444 Central Park West.

We’d been good gardeners. Truly concerned with our husbands. Endlessly worried and wordless. Money, bills, rent, our husbands’ states of mind.

But I was a leading lady now. I’d dreamed I’d return to Broadway in a smash hit and be rediscovered and celebrated. I had come to be the flower.

But in a split instant, I recognized my fate and accepted it. Two actors cannot have nervous breakdowns on the same stage. Peter was the flower. I had no choice but to be his loving gardener. And I was.

In rehearsal, Mike Nichols had us lie on a cot together in the dark backstage and go over and over our lines with a girl prompter sitting on a chair at the head of the bed.

It was wonderful direction. Peter and I breathing our lines to each other became comfortable lying so close together. Relaxing into each other like old friends. Like husband and wife. Mike forced us to trust each other totally. The prompter kept us from getting self-conscious about our bodies and intimacy.

Peter breathed in and I breathed out.

•   •   •

I
t was the last week of the run for both of us. The play had been a huge hit, 798 performances and four previews.

Compulsive superstition is part of my baggage as an actor. The more religious among us can pray, cross themselves, legitimize the need for help from their god, before opening night and every night
thereafter. (Matinees come with a free pass from anxiety, unless we know someone important to us is in the audience. That’s why I like to go to matinees; the actors are less guarded, more relaxed.)

The person we depend on to send us safely off to the stage is usually our dresser—the one to put the penny in my left shoe, to whisper “Good luck” three times before sending me out the door. To knock wood and light candles before we take our great leap into the void. Donald, my young, handsome, gay dresser for
The Prisoner of Second Avenue
, was with me every step of the way, hand in hand, every performance. Breathe on intake, ready for crisis.

It was lonely for me without Joey. Dinah was in private school, hanging out with a bunch of stoned, bearded, Deadhead classmates whom I abhorred, sitting cross-legged on the floor of our sublet apartment. It was time to discuss birth control. She was sixteen and had been kidnapped by trolls.

I begged Joey to come to New York for a week, ten days, to fill my empty bed. His commercial business was taking him all over the country.

“I’ll be a nun for you,” I promised. “You can fuck a nun—” desperate, “Sister Anastasia.”

I had Donald rent me a nun’s habit. When I turned the knob of my dressing room door a week later, it was locked. I could hear something inside. I had my suspicions.

“Donald?” I called. “Open up.”

“Just a minute.”

“No—now. Now, Donald!”

The latch clicked, the doorknob turned, and there was sweet little “Sister Donald,” with eyes downcast. Caught.

“I only put it on to see where the pieces go. It’s complicated!”

The habit hung like a ghost in my closet on Riverside Drive till Joey arrived. While he lay in bed, watching television, still in the
clothes he flew to New York in, I hurriedly added layer after layer of Bad Nun, then silently appeared by the side of the bed.

Joey flew into the air like a cartoon cat, backing across the room against the wall, sliding away from me.

“Come to me, my boy,” I intoned. “Come to Sister Anastasia.”

He pointed to me. “Take off the rosary, take it off . . .”

You can take the boy out of Catholic school, but you can’t take Catholic school out of the boy.

Every time we’ve gone into a church, for weddings, memorials, funerals, particularly in St. Anthony’s parish in Wilmington, beads of sweat appear on Joey’s upper lip. He’s a guilty eight-year-old kid all over again.

“I don’t think I can do that,” he hisses to his sister, Phyllis, as a line for Communion forms.

“Yeah, you can,” she says as she joins the line.

His ears sticking out, his neck stiff with guilt, he joins her. He knows God’s gonna strike him dead. Particularly as he’s there with me, the only Jew in church.

So to do a sacrilegious act with me, wearing Sister’s holy garb, was not the turn-on I’d hoped for.

•   •   •

I
thought I had a cold all winter, when what I’d actually done was overdose on Neo-Synephrine. I had three inhalers stashed onstage so when my nose stopped up, I could clear it. Joey knew I was hooked and made our doctor, Lou Cooper, intervene. When I gave up Neo-Synephrine, I couldn’t breathe through my nose for a week. Also, I’m sure I damaged my brain, the memory part, with heavy-duty sleeping pills and Irish whiskey chasers. Sleep was eluding me. I was getting up later and later. New York days are short in winter; it starts to get dark at three in the afternoon. I was lonely without Joey and my friends in
L.A. Isolated. Just Peter Falk and me, except for one scene in the second act with Peter’s character’s family.

I think it is Neil Simon’s best play. Terrible and funny.

In a week, Peter and I would go back to our real spouses in California, and other actors would take our places in the hit play.

It was during a Wednesday matinee that my mind went into its first subconscious slip. I think it had to do with the rent we were paying, Peter and I, in the play. I said, “Two thousand, five hundred dollars,” which was my weekly salary in my first film,
Detective Story
—so much money that I never forgot it. It came out of some subconscious place onstage. A totally inappropriate amount. I think the correct line was seven hundred. I said, “Two thousand five hundred.” Peter’s head swiveled. He looked at me hard.

A few hours later, the Wednesday night performance, second act. Peter’s lost his job, he’s sitting in our apartment in his pajamas, and I come in the door. I’m now the breadwinner. The second act is my hit song, my solo turn, my big moment. Three straight pages of Doc Simon dialogue, backed by Mike Nichols’s brilliant staging. It’s a brilliant tour de force—like doing forty-eight turns en pointe in ballet. I come home from work to make lunch for Peter. I take off my coat and boots, unpack the big paper bag of groceries, pour him tomato juice, make him a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch in the toaster oven, put out the silverware and napkins, serve him, and tell him about my day while he eats. Without stopping for a breath. I’ve done back-to-back matinee and evening shows every Wednesday, eight shows a week, for a year.

That Wednesday night, my last week in the run, while I was pouring the tomato juice, I went up. My mind had gone completely blank. I had no idea what to say next. It struck me as almost funny, because, thank God, Peter would save me. As actors do. Actors go up
all the time. And always save each other. Disaster recovery is part of theater lore.

I went up.

I said, “Here’s your tomato juice.” The ball was in his court.

Every actor has forgotten his or her lines in theater. Theater is a war zone. You’re in the trenches with your fellow actors. Actors love each other. It’s an adventure.

Not this time.

Peter was staring at my apologetically smiling face as I placed the tomato juice in front of him.

“Here’s your tomato juice,” I said again.

Suddenly he turned to the audience and gestured to me with his thumb. I felt cold. In my mind, he’d named me. The audience laughed. They were complicit.

I ran into the wings and looked at the script. The words meant nothing; there was a buzz in my head. I had entered the actor’s nightmare. I was alone. I was out of it. I could feel the blood draining from my head. Peter and the audience were looking at me. He was still pointing. I put the TV dinner into the toaster oven upstage and called out to the stage manager: “What’s the next line? What’s the next line?”

The stage manager came out from wherever he was schmoozing, his face an O of panic, scrambling to find where we were in the script. He couldn’t find it. Peter was walking up and down the stage, gesturing to the audience. The stage manager found the page. I looked at it. The words were as alien as the lyrics of an ancient musical. Dead. No connection to the stream of life and action I brought onstage.

“Pull the curtain,” I said. “We’ll start after the monologue.”

They pulled the curtain.

Peter was white as a sheet. I was cold and grim. I felt I’d been turned in by a former friend to the Un-American Activities Committee
with a flick of his thumb. We were all shaken as we quickly discussed where to pick up the play. They had pulled down the curtain. We would start after the monologue. The curtain went up. I smiled at the audience, sharing what we’ve all been through. Suddenly, an ovation.

An ovation! The audience was saying, “Thank you for sharing. Thank you for letting us see pain and confusion in real life.”

They wouldn’t stop till I bowed, smiled, and held up my hands for them. At curtain it was the same. The audience felt so privileged to be included that Wednesday night. That’s the lesson I never appreciated enough: Let them into the play.

•   •   •

B
ut it was my last night as a glorious theater artist. I could no longer count on my talent or my instincts. I was wounded. My wonderful superstitions weren’t strong enough to save me. I didn’t trust them anymore.

I called the jolly little Catholic priest from the Actors’ Chapel, a few blocks away. He’d stopped by a couple of times a week during the run, just sat in the dressing room, relaxing in an armchair, to make cozy small talk for fifteen or twenty minutes. He’d always ask if I knew Penny Singleton—she’d played Blondie in the Blondie and Dagwood movies in the thirties, forties, and fifties. I’d always tell him, “No, I never met her.”

“Oh, you should have known Penny,” he’d say. “Wonderful, wonderful girl.” And, I expect, a good Catholic.

I asked the priest to come and sit in the dressing room every night before the show. I knelt obediently for his blessing before I went down to my cot backstage, from where I made my entrance. His gentle holy Catholic hand patted my sick Jewish head, and I finished the run.

Some mysterious component in my brain had now played the same
trick on me it had when I had blurted out the names of two women in front of the HUAC lawyers in Washington years earlier. From that day on, I forgot the last name of every one of my friends when it came time to introduce them. Blank.

“Introduce yourselves,” I’d say.

Now the Greek god of punishment had made off with my lines and my security. My circle of talent, which had seemed infinite, was shrinking to a small circle of light in the corner of the room.

I’d found unexpected strength when it came time to fight the outside world, but I had no resources to fight my inside world. When you see a performance on the stage or in film, where something is happening that lifts a lid on something fresher and more truthful than truth, when an actor is living dangerously through a part, taking private chances in public, exposing himself or herself in a way that makes you, watching it, say, “Oh, I see,” makes your heart beat faster, or makes you laugh or cry or feel something in a new way—then they’ve done their job as an actor. That was my job—reckless endangerment. And it all worked, up to this point.