My First Five Husbands (25 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I
n the 1790s, to serve the newly founded America, John and Abigail Adams had to move from New York City to Philadelphia, the capital at the time, prompting the above statement from Abigail. In the 1970s, to serve my newly burgeoning career, I had to move from New York City to the film capital, Los Angeles, and let me tell you, Abigail had it right—it sure as all heck wasn’t Broadway.

In the United States, the acting profession is divided between New York and Los Angeles, some 3,000 miles apart. As everyone knows, the best stage acting is found in New York. You’ve heard it a thousand times: “If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere!” On the other hand, films and television are concentrated in L.A., so which coast one lives on determines the “kind” of actor one is thought to be by many producers. All too many.

It’s even more finely segregated in L.A., where TV actors are shrugged off by the film industry. If you make your name in television, most movie producers won’t even see you for an audition, judging you incapable of big-screen roles, an inferior talent who can’t cut it in films. Of course, if you get your start in films, you can move into TV. And Broadway producers are happy to have a big Hollywood name they can post on the marquee, but most of them assume that television and film stars really can’t handle stage work. Too often, they’re right.

New York stage acting being the acid test for serious talent, most film and TV stars just don’t measure up on or off Broadway. And, to be fair, some New York stage actors can’t handle sitcoms, because sitcoms require not only a gift for comedy but a lightning-quick memory and instant invention of characters in four days. Accustomed to having weeks to learn roles before having to perform at top level, stage actors aren’t trained to deliver so quickly. For film stardom, you need one major attribute: gorgeousness. This is a generalization, of course. Some actors are transcendently talented enough to make it big as movie stars, regardless of their not-quite-classic looks. (Witness Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Gene Hackman—not that y’all aren’t good-looking, kids! But you ain’t exactly gorgeous.) A few actors who start on TV go on to film stardom—Sally Field, Bruce Willis, George Clooney, Steve McQueen—but since these are talented, highly charismatic actors (as well as damned good-looking) for the most part, the rule holds.

In England, an actor is an actor is an actor, and since most of their work is done in London, actors can do TV in the morning, a film job in the afternoon, and end with a stage role that night, but in the USA, with our most peculiar geography, we’re stuck with those built-in prejudices. There are some of us actors who excel in all three arenas, but we must repeatedly break down those prejudiced walls to prove it.

It’s maddening, I tell you, my dears, maddening!

During nine difficult years in New York, I did eight Off Broadway plays, five Broadway, one in England, four in New Jersey, three major movies, three soap operas, four commercials, two summers of stock, various voice-overs, and a backers’ presentation for an unfunded play. I got every acting job but two that I auditioned for. And eight were simply offered, without auditioning. Do I sound like I’m blowing my own horn?

Good! Because most of the time it was a trumpet solo.

In the spring of 1974, Norman Lear called and asked, “How would you like to move to the West Coast and become a regular on
Maude
?”

“Perfect timing,” I said. “I just bought my first house a few months ago, so of course, I’d love to move to California!”

That made him laugh. He wanted me to start the new season in three weeks. I called Mark, and he was all for moving back to L.A. I contacted a realtor and put the Closter house on the market, then advertised a garage sale, selling everything we didn’t absolutely need, including the trampoline, the Honda minicycle, my VW, and (alas!) Mark’s hypnotically lovely fish. I asked Trish to send Sandy and Panther to me when I got settled. Meanwhile, Trish rented the bedrooms to several lesbian friends of hers until the house sold.

Lette Rehnolds had moved to L.A. to marry one of her conductor loves, Fred Sharp (whom she called “F Sharp”), and divorced him within the year, surprising me not. She and another actress, Linda Palmer, were now sharing a condo in North Hollywood. When I arrived in L.A. with nothing but my matching
It Could Be You!
suitcases, both Lette and Linda were about to leave town to do summer stock for six weeks, so I moved into Lette’s room and bought my first brand-new car, a blue Mazda wagon, in which I could trundle back and forth from the condo in the hills to the CBS studios in the heart of Hollywood.

That first morning felt like a giant leap forward. We sat down to read through the script, and I looked around at my illustrious coworkers. Bea Arthur, Bill Macy, Conrad Bain, Esther Rolle—what talent! What comedy expertise! And lest we forget, beautiful Adrienne Bar-beau was in there to spice things up. Working for Norman Lear is the best thing that can happen to an actor. He is brilliant, cheerful, funny, handsome, self-effacing, and runs a happy ship, demanding the best writers and applauding top-notch performing. He also has a will of steel. Of course, I had a crush on him. Who wouldn’t? (He was married, so I didn’t even think of such things. Well, I thought them, but—y’know.)

We had the same director, Hal Cooper, for every show, giving us a cohesiveness you don’t get when the directors change each week. After six weeks, we had five shows in the can and would complete a few more before the fall season premiered. I was earning $1,500 a show—hardly a fortune by Hollywood standards, but so what! I was working with the
crème de la crème
! And I hadn’t forgotten the good ol’ days of biting off tongues for forty bucks a pop. My part was small, not much to do, but as the writers got to know me, sexy Vivian began to take shape.

“How do you come up with this stuff?” I asked, and one of them said, “We watch
you.
”

We heard every week: “Let’s not forget: The name of the show is
Maude
.” Our head producer, Rod Parker, gave many funny lines to Bea Arthur that had been written for Bill, Conrad, or me. But we offered no complaints. The rest of us had our share of zingers, and with Norman there to keep things on an even keel, we were a happy cast. His humane use of time and talent made it the easiest job I’ve ever had. And I learned that if there is a sane, well-balanced, brilliant person at the top, he’ll hire similar people right down the line.

We began our workweek on Wednesday morning at ten, gathering around the big table on the sound stage to read through the new script. We discussed it, trying new lines, then the writers went off to rewrite, tweaking it for time and punching up the laughs. Meanwhile, we got our blocking (which means figuring out who goes where at any given moment), getting new pages from the writers all day long. Thursday morning, we read the new script, blocking it anew, and then the writers came in to see us do it on our feet, and then once again, we all sat around and discussed changes.

In my experience, Norman was unique in that he encouraged actors to contribute ideas. Most producers keep the actors on a shorter leash, but Norman wanted us to contribute. Bill Macy was always spit-balling ideas, most of which were too impossibly far out to use. Undaunted, he kept throwing out ridiculous suggestions that made us either groan in disbelief or break up laughing.

We were whisked to costume fittings during the second and third day, on a packed schedule, which often took at least part of our lunch break. On the weekends, the writers rewrote like mad. On Mondays, with yet another rewritten script, the cameras and sound came in to learn their moves. Three cameras had to learn the blocking as precisely as the actors, and we actors had to be carefully placed for our lines. A fourth camera picked up whatever wild shots Hal Cooper wanted, in case he could use them in editing. Monday afternoons we did a run-through in costumes. Tuesdays at 11:00
A.M
., we read the (again) new and improved, freshly revised script and went through the play for cameras and sound. Then off to hair and makeup, costumes, and finally, at five o’clock—a live taped performance on camera for a full audience. In between, I often took naps on the carpet behind the sofa.

We broke for dinner in a big hall, getting new lines while we ate. Back to touch-ups, and—whammo!—we were on for the eight o’clock show, wondering how much of the just-revised script we’d actually remember with no additional rehearsal. We had to hit marks and wait a split second before delivering our lines, to coordinate with the cameras instead of using stage timing. You can see why sitcoms were beyond many stage actors. They are hair-raising!

“This is somewhat reminiscent of acting,” I used to say. Or maybe it’s more like walking a tightrope across Niagara Falls without a net. Bea Arthur always made the sign of the cross before her first entrance. And she’s Jewish!

We taped three weeks, then had a week off so the writers could develop ideas for new shows. During the week off, I often appeared on game shows. (The PR firm I hired got me just enough game shows to pay their fee.) By working three weeks on and one week off, we got the entire year’s work in the can in eight months, wrapping in late February and resuming the new season in early July. So we taped about twenty-six shows a year, half a year’s salary.

Today’s sitcoms are not usually done this way. Some don’t even have dress rehearsals. If the star of the show is also the producer, you might even find ad-libbing going on, and you’ll also be likely to find that the show doesn’t have a long run. Although
Maude
was a superb comedy, it wasn’t picked up to rerun in syndication until fairly recently. Ahead of its time, you see. A show about a militant feminist is almost as tricky in the twenty-first century as in the twentieth. Many weeks, we were right up to taping time, 8:00 P.M., with a full audience, while Norman Lear and the network locked horns over whether we’d be allowed to put that outrageous script on the air. Norman always won. Except once. A minor loss. The CBS station in Cleveland refused to run an episode that dealt with abortion. Our “warm-up” guy, writer Charlie Hauck, who entertained the audience before we started taping, happened to be from Cleveland. Taking questions from the audience, he planted a member of our crew to ask him, “Do they show
Maude
in Cleveland?”

“Yes, they show it,” Charlie would reply, “but they don’t get it.”

It was also Charlie who came up with a great line for me to say in a last-minute note session. We needed a good punch line for a bit about inventors, and Charlie suggested Vivian say in her big-eyed way, “I had an uncle who invented a universal solvent, but he couldn’t find a container to keep it in.”

Was that brilliant, or what? To be honest, I had a tiny crush on Charlie, too.

W
ith Mark coming out in a few weeks to start tenth grade, I needed a permanent place to live, so when Lette and Linda returned to L.A., I suggested the three of us lease a house together. They liked the idea. We figured we’d have fun, not to mention being able to get a much nicer place than any of us could afford separately. I looked. And looked. And looked…and finally—found!

Pacific Palisades is an upscale community overlooking the Pacific coast, about a forty-five minute drive to CBS. A university couple going on sabbatical for nine months wanted to lease their large furnished home with a backyard and pool for only $625 a month—a fraction of what that place would lease for today. It was beautiful, laid out to perfectly accommodate three single women and a teenaged boy. I installed Linda in the spacious lower level, a private suite with an upright piano and private opening onto the backyard and pool. Lette, Mark, and I took the three small bedrooms on the main floor. I proposed Linda and I each pay $250 per month and Lette pay $125, since she had only her bedroom and would be sharing a bathroom with Mark and me. In late August, we moved in and Linda went off to New York for two weeks.