(My Travels with) Agnes Moorehead – The Lavender Lady (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

IN THE BEGINNING

How did all of this happen . . . my meeting with Agnes Moorehead . . . which resulted in a chunk of my life that is part of theatrical history? It goes back to September, 1964. I had decided to audition for Agnes Moorehead in order to get into her acting school. The first thing to do when auditioning is to select the right kind of material. On the way there I was torn by doubts and also how I’d react if I failed. It was important to me. How strange that it was that important. Fate must have jogged some little gadget in my brain letting me know that this was a turning point in my life. I tried to ease my way by thinking, “What’s the worst that could happen? I just won’t get it.’ Even saying the word made my stomach sink and then I thought, “What if I do get into the school?” Then my feelings soared.

I had heard so much about her and that she was very selective. I also heard she was difficult, bitchy, and lovely. There were so many rumors, I couldn’t pin down a fact, but I was on my way to meet the so-called “great lady.” I wondered would she like me and, then again, would I like her. I worried about the clothes I was wearing. Did she like blue? Did she like red? I had to chance it all. It was time for fate to take a hand.

I had been very careful about my grooming. I was neat. I felt handsome. I had the manners and looks of a good Catholic young man. I felt that I had dressed to suit her tastes. Instinctively, I knew that she liked clean-cut types and I was the epitome of clean-cut. I was sensually in tune with my blue cashmere sweater and neatly pressed gray slacks. They all seemed right to me.

Over and over again I remembered a friend saying, “She doesn’t select everyone, you know, for this school. You’ve got to really be right for her.” I was full of anxiety. I decided I just had to study acting with her. That was my way to break into the profession and, would you believe it, I was forty years old. If life ever was going to begin at forty, I was the one it had to begin with and I felt that, at forty, I was just beginning my life. The beginning had to be right. If she accepted me for the school, I felt I would go on to greater things. Actually, I did, but not in the way it finally turned out.

Why was I starting over again at forty? Why had I fled my home in Columbus, Ohio? It started with a disastrous marriage, terrible Mafia-like in-laws (I was at the wrong end of the “Godfather”). The divorce, the guilt, the church, they’d all piled up on me. It was too much. There was a feeling of being chased, a wanted person on the FBI Ten Most-Wanted List. I couldn’t sleep at night. Everybody was after me in and out of my dreams. It was like a nightmare.

You want a laugh? Two of my brothers were priests! There was a church that was oppressing me, especially with the divorce. My brothers’ hands went up in horror, mouths agape, “Oh, he divorced her. He’s attacking all the morality of the human race, the millennia, God himself, the angels. He’s possessed!” They couldn’t believe it was happening. They really believed I was possessed. It scared me. There I was, a good Catholic man, and they were saying I was possessed. ‘You’re going to Hell. We have to excommunicate you.” I was terrified for months.

Then I got my second wind. Something inside rebelled. “Alright,” I said, “excommunicate me.” I reached the point where I just didn’t care. Do it. I became rebellious, impossible, and that attitude didn’t add to my popularity. Yet I felt everyone was turning on me. Actually, they were all good Catholics that just didn’t understand. I got desperate. I acted wild. I started saying crazy things. I told the oldest of my two priest brothers, “Take your Roman collar and shove it up your ass.” I was saying very real things. My brother didn’t represent Christ, not to me. He was a brother, that’s all. I was fighting back. But to them I sounded crazy. I was saying, “Please let me breath’. I want to live. You’re killing me.”

I did the sensible thing. I went to a marriage counselor. They agreed with me. Even though she was Catholic, she said, “They’re killing you. They’re out to destroy you physically. You can’t fight them. Save your life, get out.” Sometimes a marriage counselor is the only bridge to reality. I had two boys. The court had given me custody of them. They were my only other solidity in life. But after talking to her several times, I realized that she was right. I had to get out. The boys understood. I told them, “I have to go.” They said, “Yes, we know.” That whole conversation put the lock on the decision. I gave custody of them back to my ex-wife and I left. It was as simple as that.

At that time I was just looking for peace and quiet. I wanted to start a new life. So many do, but I did it. It wasn’t just a wish. My thoughts were that I wanted to pursue what I’d begun in Ohio. It was all interrupted by my marriage. The background fitted into my plans. I worked successfully for RCA records as an executive in sales and promotion, but I looked forward to going home at night where I wrote my own songs, trying desperately to peddle them, and sometimes successfully. Perry Como published one of the best songs that I ever wrote and I signed a contract with him. Tony Perkins recorded another song and it sold over a hundred fifty thousand copies. It was released worldwide. But my wife fought me over it. “Song writing’s a trashy thing,’ she screamed. I don’t know why she objected so much to the creative side of me. It was the main problem in our marriage. She just had to stifle my creative drive. It killed our relationship.

After I left Ohio, song writing was my main love. That’s why I loaded up a trailer full of all my songs and copyrights, an extensive record collection, and hardly anything else. Almost my only clothing was what I was wearing. And then I set off for Hollywood. It would be a new life, a new hope. I started pushing my songs, picking up on contacts I’d made at RCA. It’s not easy. I hadn’t expected it to be, but it was a lot harder than I thought. I breathed Hollywood air and I told myself “I’ve got to be here. This is where I belong.” But my songs weren’t selling. Contacts I thought would be excellent just weren’t. The whole thing turned sour. There was a flash that told me that it was easy writing songs safely in an empty room in the middle of nowhere as a little adjunct to the hard work during the day. But this was reality. I was confronted with the real world, not the fantasies.

A year after I arrived in Hollywood, I sought professional help. Someone recommended me to a good Jungian therapist, Dr. Harold Stone . . . and that after leaving Ohio . . . was the next major step that took me into a complete rebirth to Agnes, becoming her good friend and personal manager. It was Dr. Stone who led me to Agnes Moorehead. Of course, we didn’t know it at the time. Like all important things in life, it happened haphazardly, without a plan, by a stroke of luck or fate.

If one were to draw a graph of one’s life, it probably would be clearer as to the direction that would lead to a life work. In my case, it was probably destined from the beginning. Actually, both Agnes and I grew up in Ohio. That in itself would be a bond. We both, as children, had a common love of the theater. It started with my family. My rewards were the theater. If I were good, my mother would allow me to participate in the annual school senior class play. However, and I never quite understood why, I wasn’t allowed to go to a lot of movies, no matter how much I loved them. But because my mother loved musicals, I would get to the movies when musicals were showing. I saw all the great Betty Grable movies, also the movies of Alice Faye, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, all light, fun-and-games movies. Those were my rewards when I was a “good boy.” I suppose my fabulous love for musical comedy started there. It also started my love for singing and song writing.

I loved to entertain. I started giving recitals at night for the family and sometimes neighbors and family friends. My sister would play the piano, my older brother the clarinet and I would sing and fantasize about being John Payne or Gene Kelly. I used to long for those recitals with my mother. I suppose it was because it was the only time I felt she cared for me. I had reason to think that way. It was the only time my mother altered her normally negative reaction to me, her everyday blood and guts, hell and damnation, work and guilt attitude. So many parents are like that, of commanding fear and respect with that ramrod-spined and no-nonsense posture. It was head up sharply, chin righteously jammed into a fleshy neck as she took that gestapo-like stance. She fixed me with her powerful, domineering hazel eyes beneath that crown of orange-red hair (similar to Agnes Moorehead’s). On recital nights, she would lounge back luxuriously like a grand dame in her overstuffed chair and listened as I sang and I loved doing it. Those were good days.

My sister would accompany me very often and I’d go to all the local Grange meetings and all the women’s clubs and all the conventions in central Ohio. I entered all the contests and I usually won. They kept their fingers on me, but music was my outlet. They did permit me to do that much and I must give credit to my mother and sister in another direction. They groomed me for these recitals and contests and instilled in me a patience with detail that enabled me to later handle all of Agnes’ business better than anyone ever had. Agnes said that many times. That was one of the things Agnes liked most about me. My sister, who was very effective and a perfectionist, was the one who taught me to be meticulous and very careful . . . Agnes loved that! My mother, on the other hand, had that strength and the drive and the talk. It was incessant, like Agnes and me, too. The coincidence is that my mother, orange-haired, iron-handed, righteous, the grand dame, was so much like Agnes, so negative, thus planting in me the urgent search for a creative mother—image. I wonder if that’s what drew me to Agnes Moorehead.

“Go to your room,” my mother commanded, the classic punishment for little boys of that day and that place. Up to my room I’d go. I didn’t mind it because I’d sit there and make little stages. That’s right, stages, sometimes out of a cigar box, and I’d talk to it. For the neighbors, I’d give little shows out the window. “Hey, Cora, Effie, Imogene, Mabel, look. And now, let’s start the show.” They’d laugh, but enjoy it. Making stages, what a strange talent, what a strange way of life. It’s what I enjoyed. I don’t know where that’d ever come up in the family before but it was instilled in me to appreciate and love the stage. If there wasn’t one of normal size somewhere near me, I’d make my own stage. Sometimes it was a cigar box and sometimes it was the placement of chairs which would bring the wrath of my mother who would say, “who’s been rearranging the furniture?’ Of course, she knew. That was her way of disapproving.

It wasn’t only the stage I manufactured. There were paper dolls on sticks, a miniature puppet show, and little French windows. All these miniatures took hours of laborious work. I’d make curtains from pieces of a tie or a jacket or anything I could find. Those were the curtains. While other boys were excited about a skirt blowing up, I was more excited about a curtain going up. I got goose bumps from curtains opening up. Years and years later, when I went on the road with Agnes Moorehead’s one-woman show, “An Intimate Evening With The Fabulous Redhead”, I made sure that they always went up with Agnes and they always did. So the stage was instilled in me from early childhood.

In those days when I was growing up, my fooling around with miniature stages was considered eccentric, to be kind, but in these days of enlightenment and psychiatry, it would have been clear that I had a love for show business even then. If I wasn’t around when I was expected to be, my parents, asking anybody, would get the answer, “Oh, he’s playing with his cigar boxes and rags again. Lord, what are we going to do with that child?” But I progressed from putting on window shows from my room to real shows in my garage every summer. They were attended mostly by friends and the joy was in doing it. The bonus was the applause. Fate decreed that four blocks down the street Paul Lynde, at the same time, was having shows in his garage. We knew each other, but just to say “hi”. His father was my family’s meat man. Years later the roads, after separating, came together again and Paul became a semi-regular on “Bewitched” while Agnes Moorehead was one of the stars of the show and I was there constantly on the set. I would run into Paul at Agnes’s gala, star-studded Christmas parties.

The advantage of my little shows in those days (I would be pleased to tell anyone who would listen), was “I direct, I produce and I star, too.” I could have added, “And I create the scenery and the setting.” I’m no psychiatrist but it would seem that all this was my way of fantasizing away from the authoritarian discipline of my family and church. Ironically, I got much more love from the theater than from the church. True, I was an altar boy. There were the rituals, the liturgy and, to fit in with my fantasies, the velvet drapes and stage settings of the church itself. Mass was a great drama with a cast of thousands.

This was a parallel start to Agnes Moorehead’s, who began her career through her religion at the age of three when she sang, dressed delicately, and danced at her father’s parsonage. She was a basic Presbyterian fundamentalist, but they all had theatrics, too. Was Agnes religious? ‘Yes,” she said, ‘and I had many religious experiences as a child.” So her religious beliefs stem from childhood just as mine did.

All children have imaginative childhoods and go around playing cowboys and Indians and shoot with their forefingers and thumbs, but my dreams were much more elaborate. First of all, I’d have a script, a few lines written out on a sheet of paper. Then I’d cast it carefully. There’d be dancing and there’d be cowboys and Spanish senioritas and everything you could think of and my gangsters looked like gangsters. Six year olds wore derby hats with cigars in their mouths. Sometimes I played every role, all costumes. It wasn’t always drama, either. There was a young boy with a harmonica who could supply the music or we could just drum with sticks on the curb.