My First Five Husbands (32 page)

Before we taped the pilot, I had to do a quick movie shoot in Cuernavaca, Mexico—two days’ work in
Balls,
a film about tennis (it was renamed
Players
for release) starring Ali MacGraw, Steve Gutenberg, and Dean Martin’s gorgeous blond son, Dino (who was tragically killed in a small plane crash shortly afterward). Ali and I strolled through Cuernavaca, chatting and shopping.

“There’s a king-sized hand-embroidered quilt on my bed at the villa,” I told her, “and I want to make one just like it.”

I bought a passel of handmade embroidered coasters, thinking I could sew them together and fill in the spaces with my own embroidery. I figured it would take me a while, and so far it’s been twenty-nine years. Don’t ever try to embroider a king-sized quilt if you have anything else to do in your life.

I was in Cuernavaca only two days, but I managed to get the trots from the ice in my drinks, so when I returned to California—
oooooh,
boy, I was sick as a
perro
. The night before we were to begin rehearsing
Apple Pie,
I was in my office going over the script, my stomach raging with Montezuma’s Revenge, when The Greek appeared at my door, looking hangdog.

“When are you coming up?” he whined.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m starting the pilot of my series tomorrow morning. I’m feeling sick, and I need to study the script.”

“But I miss you! When are you coming up?”

I stared at him, astounded. This series was a huge opportunity for me, and I was consumed with the task before me. My intestines were doing a Mexican hat dance, and he obviously didn’t give a rat’s
culata
about anything but—

“Soon, soon,”
I answered, wishing he’d just go away.

That was it, as far as I was concerned. As soon as I got the pilot of
Apple Pie
in the oven, he was gonna be out of here.

T
oo bad I’ll never know how Tony Curtis would have been to work with.

With Norman Lear there to keep a close eye on us, Dabney Coleman behaved himself and was wonderful in the role of Fast Eddie. Much of the action depended on exquisite timing, and he was right on target. The daughter and I got to do a nifty little tap dance. Jack Gilford managed to just miss knocking down any of the furnishings with his flailing cane. It was an hourlong pilot, with James Cromwell coming in as a nervous burglar. After all hell breaks out, we tie it up in a neat finale, with Fast Eddie Murdock saying he’ll stay around another week to try the arrangement—but no promises. At the curtain, the audience was on its feet, screaming unanimous approval.

Now we had to wait to see if ABC would pick it up as a series.

Unfortunately, Norman Lear was leaving television, going off to China for a while. Ahead of his time (as usual), he was deeply concerned about the plethora of extreme right-wing evangelists and propagandists and was launching People for the American Way, his liberal activist organization, which is still thriving. It worried me that he wouldn’t be around to shepherd us, but Fred Silverman, the head of ABC, who had set the series in motion for Norman, was still very enthusiastic. In late June, we got the word: Our little hourlong pilot would be shortened to a half hour, one of the sons eliminated, the other recast—but we’d been picked up for seven glorious shows, with Charlie Hauck (that terrific writer from
Maude
) as producer and Peter Bonerz of
The Bob Newhart Show
directing. Boola boola! We began shooting early in July, overjoyed.

Well, sir, that’s when the caca hit the fan.

With Norman out of the proverbial picture, it was up to Charlie and Peter to keep order, but they had more than they could handle with Dabney Coleman, who behaved as if the series were his own private Idaho. He monopolized rehearsal time, changed the scripts to suit him, consumed precious time with his demands, and drove the writers bonkers. Maybe I should have locked horns with him, but I’m a team player and the stress of dealing with his shenanigans had me pulling my hair out. The rest of the cast was composed of professional, hardworking actors dedicated to making our new series an ensemble hit. Only one of us was doing
The Dabney Coleman Show
.

Launching another cannonball into our bow, Fred Silverman, who’d supported
Apple Pie
from the get-go, left ABC to become head of NBC, leaving his former subordinate Marcie Carcy of Carcy/Warner in charge of all new ABC series. When the seventh segment was in the can, we limped off, exhausted, to await news of how many—if any—more episodes would be picked up. We didn’t have long to wait. Carcy quickly dropped us from the fall lineup after airing only two episodes, with scant publicity, never giving the show a decent chance.

A bitter pill, my darlings, a bitter pill.

I’ll bet Norman Lear would have taken the show to Silverman at NBC, but…
c’est la guerre
. At least I’d gotten to do a soft-shoe number with one of my dancing idols, Ken Berry. And I no longer had to endure being around Coleman. And I do understand the reasoning behind it all: ABC had premiered two heavily advertised new series,
Mork and Mindy
and
Vegas,
two blockbusters. They felt no need to serve up
Apple Pie
for dessert. But the audience was robbed of a really terrific little offbeat series. And my big chance to have my own show got blown away like corn floss in one fell swoop.

I
didn’t sit still for long. NBC offered me a year’s contract to be exclusively theirs for two new pilots and two Movies of the Week—pay or play, for $100,000—and I took it. Let me tell you about those two pilots, dear souls. Fred Silverman had an Asian comic he was pushing. I was to play his mother-in-law, with a Vegas comic…I’ll think of his name…I will…I will…

I won’t. I’ve blocked it out.

Anyway, Mr. Vegas comic was to play my husband. Neither of these guys had ever done any acting. The Korean comic wasn’t funny, and the Vegas comic couldn’t speak lines and do business at the same time. In one scene, he was to pour a glass of iced tea while speaking his lines, and he never got the hang of how to stop pouring while still talking, so while the speaking went on, so did the pouring, until the tea ran right over the lip of the glass, down onto the counter, and onto the floor, even while we were taping. Need I say the pilot did not get picked up? Need I say
hallelujah
?

Then Fred Silverman came up with another novice he was grooming for stardom, a pretty little blonde in her twenties who looked like a glass of milk—and acted like a glass of milk. This was supposed to be a
comedy
. It was called
Mom and Me, MD
. You can guess from the title how hilarious it was. I was cast as the head nurse of a big hospital, where she—glass of milk girl—was a doctor. To prepare for the role, I arranged to be shown the ropes by the head nurse at a large hospital.

I arrived at the crack of dawn to scrub up and get into booties, gown, and cap, first to observe an abdominal surgery, then visit the children in the burn unit. The nurse ushered me into the operating room, where a female patient was prepped for exploratory surgery to find the cause of abdominal blockage. I was placed about five feet from her head, just above the anesthesiologist. Two surgeons flanked her, one on either side. The head nurse told me to watch as much of the surgery as I could tolerate, and if I began to feel faint, to calm myself by looking up around the ceiling of the room where various antique operating tools were displayed, and not look back at the procedure until I felt steady. (Antique operating tools, I marveled. Now, there’s a sight to calm a woozy person right down. You betcha.)

The operation began with one of the surgeons expertly opening the abdominal cavity with a scalpel. Very neat. So far, so good. Then they reached over and pulled her abdomen apart and began hauling her intestines out, piling them beside her on the operating table. Great handfuls of intestines. As the doctors chatted and dug around, I felt a sudden burning interest in the array of fascinating antique operating tools on the ceiling.

Hmm,
I thought,
what’s that thing? Looks like a garden trowel. Wonder what that was for?

Down at the operating table, playing “Gut, gut, who’s got the gut?” one surgeon asked the other, “Did you get to the shore over the weekend, Harold?”

“Oh, yeah, great fishing. Almost landed a marlin.”

“Wow. Well, I don’t see anything unusual in here, do you?”

“Nope, nothing cancerous. Pull out some more of that gut on your side.”

And I’m musing,
Gosh
,
that rusty little hand saw up there must have two dozen teeth.
..

“Wait a minute, Harold, what’s that mass there, under the colon?”

“Oh, yeah, let’s see…well, my God, Mike, look at this!”

“Bingo! There’s our problem!”

I peeked down at the operating table. Harold and Mike were pulling out a length of stiff intestine about three feet long, black as coal. They clamped off both ends, cut it free, and laid it aside. A few more seconds of rummaging revealed no more dead gut.

“Okay, I think we got it all, Harold. Let’s get her stitched up.”

At that point, the head nurse appeared at the door and asked if I was ready to visit the children’s burn ward. And you know, I was. After a very educating morning, I felt ready to play a head nurse. But definitely not ready to
be
a head nurse. It turned out the pilot wasn’t ready to be a series, either. It was only slightly funnier than abdominal surgery and did not get picked up.

Now I’d done my two obligatory pilots for NBC and started reading scripts for the two-hour movies of the week they sent me, none of which was worth doodly-squat. The contract was for play or pay, so I didn’t have to do any of them, but my agent and I agreed that I should be a good scout and find two I could bear. In
The Day the Bubble Burst
, which had a few pithy scenes, I played a blue-collar wife in the Great Depression. My contract almost over, I agreed to do
The Great American Traffic Jam,
playing an upper-crust wife who, with her husband—Ed McMahon—gets stranded in a limo on the freeway.

Oh, it was about as funny as
Mom and Me, MD
.

I
see you back there. You with the beehive hairdo. Waving your arms from the back of the theatre, calling, “But Rue! What happened with The Greek? Don’t leave us dangling!”

Good Lord, Luanne, do we really have to go there? It was a divorce. Connect the dots. He juiced me like a ripe tomato. My lawyer wasn’t able to protect Mark’s college fund, but he did earn himself a hefty legal fee. Thirty grand, as I recall.

When the worst of the carnage was over and it came down to dividing the last trappings of our so-called marriage, we agreed to divide the wedding gifts equally—with one caveat: The Greek insisted that he keep all the wedding gifts that came from his guests and I keep the gifts from mine—a considerably smaller number, since he’d invited three times as many people.

But I said, “Okeydokey!”

Lette came over, I uncorked a bottle of wine, and we cracked open the wedding gift book—a three-ring loose-leaf binder in which Lette had carefully recorded each gift as it was received so I could, like a well-brought-up Southern girl, write thank-you notes. Since it was in her handwriting and the loose-leaf pages were easily removed and replaced, we went through it page by page, making what I decided were a few well-deserved adjustments.