My First Five Husbands (23 page)

She said, “I put your picture in a casting directory with my name and number—”

“You what?”

“Rue! I have a job for you! Norman Lear wants you for
All in the Family
! He wants you to audition for the director, John Rich.”

Okay. Well. That’s an audition, Joyce, not a job, but still—the heart goes
bam! bam!
An audition for
All in the Family
! Straight to the moon! Not even tempted to look this gorgeous gift horse in the mouth.

Broadway plays are dark on Mondays, so I flew out Monday morning, knowing full well Joe Papp wouldn’t let me out of the play for a week—and that I’d have to be up front about that. Both Norman and John were tickled pink with my audition.

“Don’t worry,” said Norman. “I’ll find another role just as good, as soon as you can get out of the play for a week.”

After toting fudge for another couple of weeks, I was offered a juicy part in a PBS production of
The Rimers of Eldritch
: a lonely woman in a repressed town, in which everyone thinks she’s an ungodly tart.
Yummy!
Ungodly is my favorite flavor for tarts! But Mr. Papp laid down the law. “I never let anyone out of a play to do another job. It sets a bad precedent.”

I cajoled. He relented. Those saints were back on my side. Almost. The night before I departed for the PBS job, during the fight scene between Ozzie and Harriett, I banged my wrist on the back of the sofa and the next morning it was swollen up like a boxing glove. I put ice on it, but it kept swelling. While
Rimers
was shooting, I took painkillers and devised ways to keep it covered. A dishtowel in one scene, a sweater in another. In the bed scene, I managed to hide it beneath the sheet while being smolderingly sultry. I ended the scene crying, which was easy, because my wrist throbbed like blue blazes.

The Rimers of Eldritch
is a beautiful play by Lanford Wilson, and PBS did an excellent job translating it to the small screen. A murder in a tiny town sets off the dangerously religion-soaked provincials, leading to the hysterical trial of the wrong person. I played the owner of the hilltop restaurant who befriends a young biker. Her only other friend is an addlepated old bum whom she allows to live in the shack behind the restaurant—a ragged fellow played touchingly by Will Hare. Also in the cast were Frances Sternhagen, K Callen, and Susan Sarandon, and the young biker was played by Ernest Thompson. This was long before he wrote
On Golden Pond
. Goodness, I think Ernest was all of twenty-two. We had some piping-hot scenes, culminating with the one in bed when he tells me he’s moving on, leaving me in anguished despair. (With a throbbing wrist, to boot.)

This was the first film for respected stage director Davy Marlin Jones, who was hampered by the assistant director and others, who took advantage of his inexperience, constantly objecting, “You can’t do that, Davy. That’s not how it’s done, Davy.” But most of his fresh, exciting ideas did make it to the screen. He gave K Callen a marvelous piece of business during a scene where she’s working a jigsaw puzzle on a glass table. Davy shot from beneath the table, the camera on her face. The pieces fill the space, and in the last scene, she places the final piece in the center as she says her last line, obliterating her face. Neat, Davy!

All the subplots were good. Sarandon played a frivolous high school senior who gets knocked up just before graduation and, to her teeth-clinching chagrin, is bullied by her parents to marry the boy. In the final scene, she is successfully seducing the biker. Go, Susan! My swollen wrist was killing me, but it helped me play the role of a painfully unhappy woman. Actors have to use infirmities to advantage. Playing a bristly, short-tempered person, put a few sharp pebbles in your shoe—that sort of thing.

Just as I was finishing the shoot in Maryland, Norman Lear called.

“I’ve got a perfect role for you on
All in the Family
. Can you be here next week?”

Damn! And
hot
damn! That darn Saint Dymphna was having a ball.

I nervously called Papp and requested two more weeks. He was not a happy camper. But because my wrist was still hurt, he agreed, God bless him, and I flew to L.A. to start work on “The Bunkers Meet the Swingers”—a superb script in which Edith Bunker sees a personal ad in a throwaway paper and invites a couple over to dinner, thinking they want to be pen pals. What they want is to be bed pals. Appalled, Archie orders them out. In a moving final monologue, I apologized quietly for the misunderstanding, explaining that this wife-swapping experiment was saving my marriage. Vinnie Gardenia, always such a dear Uncle Earth to work with, played my husband with his customary ebullience.

The cast and director were divine. I’d been warned that Carroll O’Connor could be of fierce temperament, known to tear up scripts and generally have conniption fits. Not the Carroll O’Connor I saw. From day one, he was happy, funny, and full of great ideas. Jean Stapleton was a warm hearth. Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers were professional and cooperative. Not a prima donna in the bunch. We had a beautiful rehearsal week, and the episode won an Emmy.

Norman took me aside the third day of rehearsal and asked if I could stay a bit longer. His new show,
Maude,
was in rehearsals on the adjoining stage, and the actress playing Vivian, Maude’s best friend, wasn’t working out. I’d have to rehearse both shows simultaneously, running from stage to stage, tape
Family
Friday night and
Maude
the following Tuesday night. Just my meat! But holy cats. Mr. Papp was not going to be jumping with joy.

After hearing my request, there was a long pause on the phone line.

“Rue,” he finally said, “I
never
let anyone out of a show to do another job! I let you out for
Rimers,
I let you out for
Family
—now you’re asking for a
third
out?”

“Mr. Papp, if you’ll do this, I’ll let my understudy continue to play Harriet. When I get back, I’ll understudy
her
.”

“You want it that bad?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Rue. But don’t ask for any more outs!”

I didn’t have to. The play closed a month later, leaving a trail of fudge behind it.

N
o one but Bea Arthur could have played the title character in the groundbreaking series
Maude,
the first (and only) sitcom to successfully portray the emerging feminist sensibilities of the “Women’s Lib” movement in a way people were willing to embrace. (Well,
some
people, anyway.) Like
All in the Family,
it presented prickly issues to the mass audience with whip-crack comedy writing and a super-talented cast.

Catapulted into my first episode, I found Bea wonderful to work with—and watch. She was powerful, smart, statuesque, with surgically precise comedic timing, and she wore her star quality like a cherry on top. The moment I walked onto the
Maude
set, she came striding over to welcome me and immediately launched into catching me up on the scenes between Maude and Vivian, since I was a day behind.

Bea and I clicked from the start. She appreciated my talent, and I learned from her daring choices. I was never intimidated, but Bea threw the fear of God into a lot of other people. She abode by a strict work ethic and brooked no fools, but she genuinely appreciated the talents of her coworkers, particularly her director and writers. She had a sharp wit, which did definitely slice and dice someone every once in a while, so not everyone saw the Bea Arthur I came to know over the years. Bea could be dissolved to tears by a careless remark, but she was nevertheless prone to harsh comments of her own—usually muttered
sotto voce,
under her breath, more for her own benefit than to intentionally hurt anyone. Something as innocuous as a backward baseball cap brought down a swift indictment in that famously deep voice: “Scum.” Anything she disagreed with elicited an abrupt “Oh, hump!”

When I got back to New York, everyone said, “Ooooh! You worked with Bea Arthur! Weren’t you scared?”

Scared? I had a ball! She was a kick in the pants! In fact, all the actors were great fun to work with, as was Hal Cooper, our cheerful director. The writers were still figuring out the Vivian character. She was Maude’s best friend, two weeks older. That’s all we knew. So I just played her off the top of my head. That first segment I did is the only one with that particular Vivian, levelheaded and low-voiced with gray hair. By Vivian’s second segment, months later, she’d been rewritten giddier and younger, and by the time she became a regular weekly character, Vivian emerged as the ditsy, sexy air-brain I came to love.

I couldn’t have had a better introduction to prime-time television. Two happy Norman Lear sets, two fabulous scripts, two great characters—I should have sent Saint Dymphna a dozen roses!

Back in the Italian lady’s apartment—and now understudying my understudy—I was brushing up my tap skills, taking lessons nearby. One day after class, I encountered a dirty, exhausted dog in the parking lot—a brindle about the size of a German shepherd, tits down to the ground, obviously homeless, thin from hunger, but with an eager, intelligent face. She’d had a litter and been abandoned, I surmised, and was waiting patiently for her owners to return.

Could I turn my back on that? Ignore a lost animal? Not quite hardly.

“You want to go home with me?” I asked, opening the car door for her. “Come on, Gretl. They’re not coming back. Let’s go home. It’s the best offer you’re going to get.”

She hesitated, hopped up with a small yelp, and trotted over to climb into the backseat like a smart, well-adjusted pooch. We had sized each other up very well. Fortunately, an acquaintance, Trish Tucker, the new house manager at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, was looking for a dog. She came to see Gretl and said, “Oh! She’s a Rhodesian Ridgeback! See that tuft of hair on her back? I’ve always wanted a Rhodesian Ridgeback!”

They immediately liked each other. I hated to let Gretl go, but I was still in an apartment with a landlady who didn’t want dogs, and I knew Trish would give her a good home.

A week or so later, a
Times
ad caught my eye:
Mini-estate on one acre in Closter, New Jersey. Three-story house with four bedrooms, two baths, and artist studio. $60,000.
I drove out to see it, and—
zowie!
Proudly surrounded with trees and greenery, it stretched from Closter Dock Road to the city woods. I bought it, intending to move in before Mark returned from Ardmore for the school year.

Oh, I know what you’re thinking.

“Hey, didn’t Rue just buy land up by Brent and Murph a few pages ago?”

Well, yes. I did. Some people follow baseball, some play the horses or the stock market, some engage in esoteric hobbies they share with weirdos of the same persuasion, some join cults, some become politicians. Me? I like acres.
Lots
of acres. And finally, I had a steady income, so I was in a position to do more than dream.

Of course, I had no furniture, but Trish, who’d had a monumental fight with her roommate and wanted to move, had a lot of furniture. We decided to pool our resources, and she and her stuff—and Gretl!—moved into the Closter house. Mark returned from Oklahoma with Sandy and our cat Panther, and—
voilà!
—we were a family. After about a week, Trish brought in another cat, a dear old gray-and-white tabby with big round eyes and a very gentle nature who’d been bullied in his former home. I named him Grover, and we all gave him a lot of love, which he slowly learned to accept. (Later on, Lette coined the term “Grovering,” which applied to anyone needing a little extra love.)

Mark and Trish soon had seven large fish tanks lining the dining room—six for freshwater fish and one that held Mark’s saltwater beauties. Held them until they jumped out onto the carpet, that is. Mother came up and bought him a forty-dollar triggerfish that committed hari-kari within hours, somehow finding a small opening near the filter system to leap through. The tanks looked beautiful against the big dining room windows looking out on the front yard. Gurgling and burbling, they provided an ongoing show. Mark was quite knowledgeable about all the varieties: which ones were compatible, which ones weren’t, their peculiar qualities.

Beyond the dining room windows was his large new trampoline. Yes, finally I could afford one! He learned a lot of daring trampoline stunts, and I shot videos of him and Phillip flying through the air. I could do a few leaps, but I never tried anything too Flying Wallenda. I’m athletic but no damn fool. For his fourteenth birthday, I bought him a spiffy new Honda SL minicycle like the one he had in Oklahoma, and we took it up to Murph and Brent’s, where there was room to ride it.