Then and Now (13 page)

My next show,
She Loves Me
proved to have a much happier ending than
The Gay Life
. We opened in April of 1963 and ran for 302 performances, closing in January 1964. I had actually first heard about the show years before it happened; David and I were having dinner at Sardi's and lyricist Sheldon Harnick came over to say that he and Jerry Bock were writing a show for which I'd
be perfect. That sounded great, but years went by and I forgot all about it. All I can say is that I'm glad it took them so long to get it right.

The basic story—we had a beautiful book written by Joe Masteroff, who went on to write the superb book for
Cabaret
—had previously been utilized for the film
The
Shop Around the Corner
with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, and also for the Judy Garland/Van Johnson musical
In the Good Old Summertime
. I was to play the role of Amalia Balash, a clerk in a Budapest parfumerie who exchanges love letters with a man she has never met. When the man turns out to be her detested coworker, delicious complications ensue. It was tried-and-true material, but previous versions and all, Joe, Jerry, and Sheldon brought a completely fresh spin to the material; the first time I heard the score—sitting on a piano bench next to Jerry while he played—is one of my happiest memories. I thought it was sensational from that very first listen! Once my participation was set, I auditioned with several actors, including Tony Perkins, before Hal Prince, who was directing a show from scratch for the first time, settled on Daniel Massey as the male lead.

Hal is a terrific director and a true man of the theater. His twenty-one Tony Awards as director and producer attest to the breadth and depth of his career. I admire him greatly, but he also did not always make things easy, for one basic reason: he wants to direct every detail of your performance down to the way you crook your pinky finger. I think what he does is sit at home with a script and put it into a Moviola that runs through his head. Then, in rehearsal, what he wants to do is fit you into his Moviola. Of course, he's one of our greatest theater men, so what saves him is he comes up with great Moviolas. However, by working this way we'll never know what's missing by not allowing the actors to ex
plore and come up with their own ideas. Having said all that,
She Loves Me
was his first time directing from scratch, and I have no way of knowing what his method is now.

Hal has gone on record as stating that the show's four leads—Daniel Massey, Jack Cassidy, Barbara Baxley, and me—comprised “four of the most accomplished, quirky and specific performers” he had ever known. In the liner notes for the cast album reissue he noted: “We fought every day. I prevailed.” That's not the way I remember it. There was contention from time to time as there always is when putting a new show together. But I also remember how thrilled I was when I saw what we had to offer. I loved working with Hal—we could always see that his ideas were moving us ahead. For instance, at one point we needed to show the passage of time, so he came up with the device of having Arpad, the messenger boy, ride his bike across the stage to mark the passing of seasons: as leaves were falling Arpad would say, “Look, autumn!”; or as snow was falling, he'd exclaim, “Look, winter!” So simple, so effective.

When we first started rehearsals I had a very pretty, madrigal-type ballad to sing, but Sheldon came to me and said, “This song just doesn't advance the story. We're going to write you a new song that will further the plot, provide you with a great tune, and also give you a showstopper.” My first thought was, “Good luck” . . . But—Sheldon was right. That new song turned out to be “Vanilla Ice Cream,” which, along with “Till There Was You” from
The Music Man
, became one of my two signature songs. I've sung “Vanilla Ice Cream” in my concerts for years and it never fails to receive a great response. I love that song.

I became even more fond of Jack Cassidy, who at one point during our out-of-town tryouts talked to me about his frustration
with the role of Stephen Kodaly, which he felt was not working for him. He explained that he was thinking of leaving the show. I said to him, “When any one of us is offstage—even when we're waiting in the wings—we are still all onstage, because the entire show is a team effort. We're like a string quartet. You have to stay.” He did—and won a Tony Award as Best Supporting Actor in a Musical.

Jack was a funny, stylish, sometimes wicked man, who endured some tough times in his life. He had a breakdown in later years, and in the aftermath of that breakdown developed the sweetest, most endearing personality. We lost him much too soon—he was only forty-nine when, in 1976, he tragically died in a fire. He had always liked my singing and called me “the best singer in the world.” There may not be any such thing as the best singer in the whole world, but I was very touched that, per his request, one of my recordings was played at his funeral. I miss him very much.

Daniel and I got along okay, with the exception of one major blowup during a performance. He was going through a difficult time with his wife at the beginning of our run, and I feel sure that's the main reason we didn't get along. It all came to a head during a performance when I objected to the way he grabbed me onstage during a particular scene, and I just got madder and madder during the remainder of the show. The stage manager told me, “Barbara, don't say anything now. We'll go in and see him together at the end of the performance.” I worked up a real head of steam and then just as we entered his dressing room at the end of the show, Daniel looked at me and said, “You're right. I've been behaving badly and I'm sorry. It won't ever happen again.” All my righteous anger melted away instantly and for the rest of the run we had a terrific relationship. I cared for Daniel very deeply and saw the
difficulties he was having with both his wife and his father, the actor Raymond Massey. Raymond came to see the show one night and in front of many of the cast members he proceeded to criticize Daniel's performance in detail. It seems I was not the only one with a difficult parent . . . When Daniel died in 1998, at age sixty-four, I was very touched that his daughter asked me to sing at his funeral in London. He was a good and dear friend.

The
She Loves Me
company was a good one. Hal cast us very wisely, and audiences really loved the show, but we were overshadowed by the big brassy blockbusters of the time. We were a smaller, chamber-like show compared to say,
Hello, Dolly!
, the show that overshadowed us at the Tony Awards, and we also had much more music than did other musicals of the time. We were all a bit surprised that after our good reviews we only ran for nine months, but it has given me great pleasure to see that this little jewel of a show has only increased in stature through the years, having two major Broadway revivals in 1993 and 2016. The cast recording we made not only won the Grammy Award for Best Score from an Original Cast Show Album, but has remained in print to this day.

BY THIS TIME
my career was in high gear, and even when a show flopped I remained in demand. Unfortunately, the problems that arose in my personal life started right around this time, too.

Those problems actually went back several years. When my career had first started to take off, in the early fifties, David's career was still floundering, so it was a big break when, late in 1952, George Abbott asked him to appear on a television variety show he was directing called
Showtime, U.S.A
. We were both very excited; but at the very last minute David's appearance was canceled, a turn of events that had a profound effect on him. After that lost opportunity he never again made another effort to perform his comedy routines, which was a huge loss because he was good. Really good. He didn't tell jokes, but rather performed comic characters in scenes that he wrote himself. It was exactly the sort of work that Sid Caesar did so well.

I really believe that that one canceled television appearance did something to David's basic personality—he never had the same kind of get-up-and-go after that. It exposed a very fragile place in him. In retrospect, I realize that David was like all of the men in my life who were supposed to protect me—turns out I was stronger than all of them put together, only I didn't know it at the time. The same thing happened during my decades-long association with Wally Harper, which began in 1974. As my accompanist, ar
ranger, and friend, Wally really helped rescue me from years of unemployment; but he, too, was really a very fragile person. He had a problem with alcohol that he simply couldn't conquer.

When David lost that television appearance he shut down his performing career and settled into doing all sorts of odd jobs. He began studying with Lee Strasberg, and became an observer in the Director's Unit of the Actors Studio. He was a very, very talented man and could have been a really fine director. I emphasize the words “could have been.” The problem was that he proved unwilling, or unable, to put himself on the line. He was in the Director's Unit for nearly ten years, but only observed, never participated. I can't imagine being in an atmosphere like that and not wanting to have my say. As scared as I would have been in his shoes, there's no way I'd wouldn't have said, “Let me give it a shot.”

Throughout the 1950s, as I performed in
Plain and Fancy
,
Candide
, and
The Music Man,
it was David who helped me work on my characters for those shows. Somehow he was able to do it in a way that never interfered with what the director wanted from me, and other actors began to notice. “Who do you study with?” they would ask. When I told them that David coached me, they asked if he would help them, too. I suggested a number of times that he start teaching, but he kept finding reasons not to. Finally, after I asked him yet again about teaching, he said “Okay, I'll do it if you find the space and the students.” I found a room with a little stage on West Forty-sixth Street in midtown Manhattan, and he was in business. The first class consisted of exactly three people.

Those three people soon became five. Five became ten. The class built because David was a very good teacher, and mad as I would get at him, I learned a great deal from him. I know that some people could not work with him because he held forth as God in
that room, but he was a very fine teacher. The years studying with Lee Strasberg had given him a solid foundation—there was a lot of Method sense memory in his approach, and the knowledge I gained has continued to be a major part of my approach to singing for fifty years now. David had a great ability to see what was actually going on in a scene underneath the words; he really understood subtext and was able to help actors find the core of a scene. Sense memory has always come easily to me, and at first I didn't understand why other people didn't employ it. “Hey,” I would think to myself, “it's helpful and very easy.” Then it occurred to me—maybe it ain't so easy for everyone. We all have different strengths.

David's classes began to do very well. The problem was that he would not advertise. I thought a few ads in the trade papers would help considerably, but he adamantly refused—“No, I only want students who have been personally recommended or know my work through word of mouth.” He simply wasn't practical, either about teaching or directing. When I tried to interest him in seeking work as a director he would always say, “I'll direct when I have complete control.” I told him that it doesn't work that way; you have to earn that control—it isn't just handed to you. David didn't want to hear that.

I don't know why he felt so strongly about advertising, but I have theories. (Oh God, the desire to psychoanalyze is huge. Forgive me, but . . . ) His demons, and we all have them, were such that he often felt he didn't deserve good things.

I have a rather strongly held theory about success. I've come to believe that we are as successful as we allow ourselves to be. Our inner dialogue runs along the lines of “I can have
this
, but oh, no, no, I don't deserve
that
.” Case in point with David: he asked me to go shopping with him one day, for sport coats. Together we chose
two beautiful tweed sport coats, but right before we finalized the purchase he said to me, “Aren't they too good? Don't they look too good?” He would only allow himself to have so much and then no more. I said, “David, you're getting the coats. Both of them.”

As to this theory of mine about success—it does not just refer to David. I sure as hell include myself in this theory as well. I never knowingly held myself back, but I suspect there was always a residue of guilt about my sister that kept me from fully plunging ahead. I experienced the success that I allowed myself to have.

Another big problem in my relationship with David lay in the fact that although he complained all the time that I needed to “grow up,” in fact he didn't really want me to act or dress like a mature woman. He didn't like me to wear dresses; he preferred me to dress in skirts and sweaters, like a schoolgirl. I wanted one basic black dress, but he was against it so I had to lie: I told him I needed the dress for an audition. I'm still not sure why he was so insistent. The best I can come up with is that he felt that if I dressed in a more womanly way, I would be more attractive to other men and that thought threatened him.

I was thirty years old at the time. This was not the way I wanted my marriage to work.

Motherhood had significantly changed my self-image. I know this sounds self-serving, but I realized that I had a capacity for growth that David didn't possess. I had originally been attracted to his certainty because I needed somebody to be strong and take care of me. The problem lay in the fact that what he believed about the world at age twenty-eight had not changed in the ensuing years. I felt like I was stuck in a box, which is something David's second wife later told me she felt as well. If you stay in that box you cannot develop your authentic self. This is true of many, many
relationships in which one partner doesn't want the other to grow and change, and wants, almost demands, that you stay as you were when you first met. It's another way of saying, “I need you to be the way I need you to be. Period. No discussion.” When I think deeply about David's need for total control, I realize that it was not just limited to me; if we attended a dinner party, David would not really participate in the dinner table conversation, but, inevitably, at the end of the party he'd finally participate by holding court, feeling the need to sum up the entire conversation for everyone's edification.

It's not as if David and I were having big fights. We did occasionally, of course, one of which featured an old pine table that we used in the kitchen at mealtimes. We had driven home one night after one of my performances and we were having a snack. I distinctly remember that as we noshed on knockwurst with mustard we suddenly got into an enormous fight. I lifted up the entire table and threw it right on top of David! There he was, sitting with a table on top of him, covered in mustard. Suddenly we both started laughing. Thank God we laughed as I tried to sponge the mustard off of him.

We had our moments, but most of the time we got along. That “getting along” actually revealed the root of our problem: we “got along” because I kept my mouth shut. I kept so much—too much—bottled up inside. I'd become furious with David, but I'd internalize it and head to his closet. Why? To go in there and throw all his clothes on the floor—and then I'd put them all right back. He never knew anything about it because I carefully neatened the closet after my tantrum. I should have spoken up about why I was so mad but I didn't. (I had a different sort of closet problem with my mother; she would come to the house while I was out and com
pletely rearrange all my closets without asking. It was, in a word, infuriating.)

I realized after giving birth to Adam that things had changed; having my husband pat my head and say, “There, there,” no longer cut it. I was a woman and responsible for the care and welfare of another human being. I was growing up. David expected me to be the same little-girl woman he'd always had, but there's no way I could continue in that role. There began a kind of emotional push-pull that was tearing us apart because I could no longer pretend to be okay with all of his rules, with not being allowed to have a dress.

It was the same thing when it came to food; I tried to remember to have radishes in the house—yes, radishes—because he loved radishes, and if I didn't have them in the refrigerator it somehow meant that I didn't care about him, that I didn't love him. I couldn't just have forgotten them the way we all forget items at the store; no, in David's mind the missing radishes were somehow symbolic of my lack of caring.

Household chores became a source of real tension. David wanted to be in charge of all home repairs and outdoor work, but after I asked him repeatedly to wash the outdoor window screens and he never quite got around to it, I washed them myself; in the process I overstepped his strictly drawn boundaries as to suitable chores for men and women. Discovering that I had undertaken the work myself, he grew livid, yelling at me: “That is for me to do, not you!” It grew worse on the day I asked him to help me pack two suitcases, work he considered suitable for a woman, not a man. He was so angered by my request that he simply looked at me and said, “I love you, but I don't like you.” I was devastated.

David's exacting demands even extended to the appearance of our bed. We had a king-size bed, and because David had grown
up with comforters (while I had never even seen one until we slept under one at his mother's house), I had to try and find a king-size comforter. The problem was comforters weren't a common store item in the 1950s, which made it very difficult to find the right size; in order to cover our king-size bed we had to buy two regular comforters, and David always insisted that his comforter overlay mine when the bed was made. Always. Inside I may have been thinking, “Oh fuck, first the damn radishes, now the comforters,” but I didn't say anything. It was just easier to keep my head down—go along to get along. I felt even more stifled because I couldn't enjoy the great tension release of cursing out loud. I wasn't allowed to say anything. No “damn,” let alone “fuck.” David considered it unladylike. Inwardly I seethed.

So what did I do? Nothing smart, I can tell you that. I had a little dalliance with a coworker, an affair that did not mean a great deal to me. My coworker told his wife, and she informed him that she was going to call David. I stupidly decided I should tell David first. How cruel of me. His reaction was awful to see. David was a deeply moral person, and on some level I knew he would not be able to handle the information. I begged him to forgive me, to allow us to go back to the way our marriage used to be. Of course that was impossible—there's no way we could really be together after that, but we lived and slept together for four horrific years after my confession. Of course, the wife never called David and I never really
had
to tell him.

Now, I think this is all something I unconsciously set up: I was deliberately trying to end my marriage. Point is, if that's not what you have in mind, you should just keep your mouth shut. A little piece of advice here: if you do have an affair, live with your guilt and don't tell your spouse. Years down the road, I have often won
dered if my having hurt him so terribly with this brief affair may have expiated some of his guilt about success so that now he could allow himself to experience good fortune. What I do know for sure is that after I told him about my affair he suddenly advertised and became a very big New York acting teacher, one making a great deal of money.

As the tension in our marriage increased, alcohol slowly but surely began to appear with increasing frequency. As it usually does, it started off in a very low-key manner. On Saturday nights when I was in
The Music Man,
for instance, I would allow myself a little treat: some very sharp cheddar cheese, popcorn, and one beer. Occasionally I'd have two bottles of beer. I'd notice it the next day, but that didn't stop me. David himself was not a big drinker, but he did like a scotch or two.

The combination of liquor with one of my mother's visits always caused problems. In truth, even after she had moved north late in 1951, months would pass when we would not be in touch. I know that must have been very painful for her because I was her life. She never had many friends in New York; she had her work as a switchboard operator and she had some friends in her office. That's it. She didn't go to movies or plays, nor did she go out to dinner with friends. She worked, she took care of her little dog, and she slept. My God she slept, sometimes up to twelve or fourteen hours a day on the weekends. Now I look back and I believe she was not well, but then I just thought that no matter how often I tried to have a good relationship with her she was simply too difficult and so very unpredictable.