Underfoot In Show Business (6 page)

“Do you accept stamps?”

There was a brief pause, and then Maxine amplified:

“Postage stamps. In exchange for tickets.”

She listened a minute, said, “Thank you” warmly and hung up.

“They’ll take them,” she said. “Where did you put them?”

“It’s stealing!” I said.

“On what you’re paid?” said Maxine coldly. “You were supposed to leave an hour ago. Are you being paid for overtime?”

So a few minutes later we pushed two dollars and fifty cents’ worth of stamps across the counter at the box office of the Capitol Theatre and went to see Humphrey Bogart in
Casablanca.

While free entertainment was something we both required, free clothes were needed only by me, since Maxine’s parents were still happy to keep her supplied with Bendel’s best. My clothes problem was chronic but I was blessed with affluent friends who were always generously deciding they never wore that old plaid suit anymore, or With skirts getting longer that raincoat was really much too short. And if a skirt was too large at the waist or a dress, in Maxine’s phrase, “hung like a bag” on me, I’d early resigned myself to the fact that I couldn’t sew and couldn’t afford alterations and I went around unconcernedly pinned together. So whenever Maxine and I were strolling on Fifth Avenue and she wanted to stop in at Bergdorf’s or Bendel’s, she’d pause on the sidewalk in front of the store, run an eye over my conglomerate outfit and say simply:

“You wait out here.”

But of course there were critical producers’ lunches and large romantic evenings for which I had to look the part. On most of these occasions I just borrowed Maxine’s clothes, having had the forethought to get thin enough to wear them. But every now and then, both of us had important engagements for the same day or evening and Maxine would report with distress that she didn’t have two suitably elegant ensembles on hand.

In such emergencies I followed her instructions. I went to Saks, bought a beautiful dress or suit on my charge account, took it home, wore it on my big date, and returned it to Saks the next day. (Except that, being sloppy, I generally got a spot on it, in which case I kept it and paid it off at the rate of five dollars a month for a year or two so that by the time I threw it out it was all paid for.)

Maxine borrowed my clothes only once. She borrowed a ruffled organdy blouse handed down to me by some sadist, my five-year-old black suit and a beanie my mother had knitted, which was my hat wardrobe that season.

“What do you want them for?” I demanded. Maxine looked evasive.

“I’ll take care of them,” she said.

Two weeks later, when she returned them, I found out she’d worn them on location in a rooming house in Brooklyn, where she’d played the lead in a documentary film on gonorrhea.

When it came to vocal lessons for Maxine, and Latin and Greek lessons for me, we hit our first snag. I’d been trying to teach myself Latin and Greek and she’d been trying to teach herself to carry a tune and neither of us was doing too well.

Private instruction being both necessary and expensive, Maxine decided that the solution for both of us was to Sell Something. This led to two exhausting Saturdays, the first spent haggling with the Empire Diamond and Gold Buying Service over the value of my high school graduation ring and a ring my parents had given me with a minute diamond in it, for both of which Empire gave me a stingy fifteen dollars, and since this wouldn’t buy much Greek I bought Shaw and Shakespeare with it instead.

The second Saturday we spent trotting from secondhand clothing store to secondhand clothing store trying to sell Maxine’s mother’s fifteen-year-old Persian lamb coat. That coat gave Maxine nothing but trouble anyway. Her mother had passed it on to her a couple of years before, and for a whole season Maxine had worn it with chic assurance. But during the second season, she made the mistake of wearing it on a picket line she had volunteered for. You turn up on a line of starving strikers wearing a Persian lamb coat and you are liable to be stoned to death. Maxine escaped without injury but she lost her taste for the coat, so one hot Saturday in August we lugged it to the Ritz Thrift Shop ready to trade it in for vocal lessons.

“How much are you asking?” said the man at the Ritz Thrift Shop, running a practiced eye over the coat.

“I thought two hundred,” said Maxine in a tone that managed to be both haughty and friendly.

“Oh, we can’t even talk!” said the man. When pressed, he allowed the coat might be worth forty dollars to him. Outraged, we stalked out of there and lugged the coat in and out of all the secondhand stores on Sixth Avenue and Eighth Avenue and then we went across town and lugged it down Second Avenue and up Third, and at five o’clock we gave up and lugged it back to the Ritz Thrift Shop and Maxine took the forty dollars, which paid for eight vocal lessons.

The problem of my Greek and Latin lessons remained unsolved. I wrote dignified letters to all the free city colleges, none of which, it turned out, gave free night courses in Latin and Greek. I took my one remaining piece of jewelry—a lapel watch—down to the Empire Diamond and Gold Buying Service and they wouldn’t even make me an offer. Just as I was getting completely discouraged, Maxine, as usual, came through with the solution.

“Why don’t you run an ad in the Personals column of the
Saturday Review
?’ she suggested.

“The problem isn’t finding a tutor,” I said. “It’s finding the money to pay him!”

“That’s all right,” said Maxine reasonably. “Just mention in the ad that you can’t pay anything.”

And if you think I got no response to an ad that read:

“Wish to study Latin and Greek.

Can’t pay anything.”

you underestimate the readers of the
Saturday Review
. I got five offers, one from a German refugee who said he would teach me the Latin and the Greek if I would teach him the English, two from retired professors, and one from a Lebanese rug merchant who didn’t know Latin but offered to teach me modern Greek and Arabic instead.

The fifth letter came from a young man who wrote that he’d graduated from the Roxbury Latin School and Harvard; and after careful consideration, Maxine advised me to award the coveted post to him.

“In the first place, he’s young and he might be cute,” she pointed out. “And in the second place, you can’t do better than Harvard.”

So Tom Goethals, who turned out to be six-feet-four, lean and shy-looking, and whose grandfather had built the Goethals Bridge, put his Roxbury Latin School and Harvard education to use by teaching me to read Catullus and trying to teach me Greek grammar.

Maxine phoned me after the first lesson.

“How was he?” she asked.

“Oh, he’s great!” I said.

“I told you to stick to Harvard,” she said. “Taking somebody second-rate would be like sneaking into theatre and sitting in the balcony, or borrowing clothes from Gimbel’s instead of Saks. If you’re getting things for nothing, it’s just as easy to get the best.”

We always got the best.

“I HAVE TO STAY HOME tonight,” I told Maxine on the phone one April evening when she wanted to go to theatre. “I have to write my summer-theatre letters.”

“I’m set, thank God,” said Maxine. She’d been hired for the summer as a member of the resident company trying out new plays at the Theatre Guild’s summer playhouse in Westport, Connecticut.

The summer-theatre furor always began in April when the new
Summer Theatre Directory
appeared on the Times Square newsstand. The day it came out, you tore down to Times Square along with every other brat in show business, bought your copy and took it home, and spent the evening making a list of first-, second-, and third-choice barns to spend the summer in, as a member of the acting company, the backstage crew or the producer’s staff.

Somehow, anyhow, you got yourself set for the summer, and in June you quit your winter job and set out for the Adirondacks or the coast of Maine where you had an absolutely wonderful two months on a schedule that would have put a normal person in a sanitarium and at a salary Charles Dickens would have refused to believe.

There were two kinds of summer theatres: the pre-Broadway try-out house, like the Guild’s playhouse in Westport, and the “package” theatre, where each week a star arrived with an acting company (the “package”) with which he or she was touring the summer circuit in some old war-horse like
Candida or Charley’s
Aunt.

I didn’t care which kind of theatre I worked in, and that night I wrote to a dozen summer-theatre producers offering myself as prop girl, scene painter, assistant stage manager or typist willing to double as usher. (The only category I omitted was box-office ticket seller. I can’t add.) A few weeks later I landed a job and had myself a superb summer but it got off to a demoralizing start.

One of my letters had gone to a man who ran the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania, not far from Philadelphia. He had phoned me, interviewed me and engaged me as his secretary for the summer. I was to report at Bucks on June 20.

On June 20, I arrived in New Hope and hauled my two suitcases into the playhouse office. The producer looked up from his desk and stared at me blankly.

“What can I do for you?” he asked. I told him he’d hired me as his secretary for the summer. “Oh!” he said. “That was last spring, wasn’t it? I thought my secretary was going to be working for Bela Blau up at the Deertrees Theatre in Maine. I talked her into staying with me.” I must have turned pale because he added: “Maybe they haven’t replaced her yet. Why don’t I phone and see if they can use you at Deertrees?”

He phoned Deertrees, chatted a minute, hung up and said:

“They can use you.”

I was to go back to New York and report to Bela Blau’s office. Two members of the Deertrees staff were driving up that afternoon and Bela would phone his office and tell them to wait for me.

First I took a bus to Philadelphia, having a filial urge to see my parents and borrow the fare to Maine in case something went wrong in New York. Then I took a train back to New York and lugged my suitcases into Bela Blau’s office and met the Deertrees stage manager, Bill Flanagan of Flanagan’s Law, and the assistant stage manager who drove us to Maine in his elderly cream-colored Ford called the Beige Bee because he’d bought it with money he’d earned on a radio show called The Green Hornet.

The town of Harrison, Maine, lay between two lakes with mountains rising beyond them and was as beautiful a spot as I’ve ever seen. It was a tiny town—pop. 200—with three streets. We found the theatre just beyond the third street and it was as enchanting as its setting. The handsome log-cabin playhouse stood in the center of a hushed clearing circled by pine woods. As we walked around to the back of the theatre to Bela Blau’s office, the ground under our feet was a thick carpet of pine needles.

Bela shook hands with me and said, beaming:

“Your partner will be very glad to see you! She’s a local girl and she almost quit when she thought she was going to be in there by herself. She’s never worked in a box office before.”

I did not say “
In a where
?” and I did not tell him I couldn’t add. If Bela Blau wanted me looking after his finances for the summer, that was his problem. Mine was to get myself installed in a summer theatre. After a day of considerable mental anguish I was finally installed in one and I wasn’t leaving.

Still, as I crawled into bed that night, in an airy bedroom in an old-fashioned frame house that let rooms to “summer people,” I couldn’t help feeling Bela Blau was in for a nerve-racking summer. And boy, was I right.

I met Reta Shaw, my cell-mate, the next morning. Reta was a stout schoolteacher with a pretty face and the most cheerful, unruffled disposition I’ve ever had the privilege of working alongside. She must have caught Theatremania in that box office because the next year she gave up teaching and went to New York to crash the theatre—and did. She began turning up on Broadway as a comedienne in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Picnic
and
The Pajama Game
and so forth; she was very much in demand for years.

She couldn’t add either.

The two of us were on duty in the box office from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M. daily including Sunday. Salary: $17 a week. Eight of it paid the rent on the furnished room with breakfast thrown in, a dollar went for cigarettes (thirteen cents a pack in Maine that summer) and the remaining eight dollars bought seven lunches and seven dinners. The town of Harrison had one restaurant: Ken’s Koffee Kup. If you didn’t feel like eating there you could always starve. I have fond memories of Ken’s place. The
cuisine
may not have been very
haute
but you got a lot of food there for eight dollars a week.

Deertrees ran on the package system. In successive weeks, we had Tallulah Bankhead, Ethel Barrymore, Grace George, each with her touring company and her ancient hit. Grace George, who had been a reigning star when my father was a chorus boy, had long since grown old enough and rich enough to spend her summers sensibly in Europe. Instead, she was touring the summer circuit in
Kind Lady
.

She arrived with her company at nine o’clock of a rainy Sunday night, having spent the day on the road from New Jersey where she’d played the week before. She announced that she would run through the play then and there, so that she and her company could accustom themselves to the new stage before the Monday night opening. But as I said, it was raining. Grace George walked into the theatre and realized there was going to be a hitch in her plans.

Deertrees was built entirely of pine logs, by somebody who didn’t realize that the sound of steady rain on pine walls and a pine roof is deafening. During a heavy downpour, the players’ voices were completely drowned out and the show simply stopped. When the rain let up—ten minutes or two hours later—the show resumed. So at nine o’clock that Sunday night, Grace George and her company sat down in the damp playhouse to wait out the storm. The crew and staff drifted in and we all sat around, listening to the racket and batting at the bugs which had hurried in out of the wet. At ten, we began to wonder when Miss George would give up and go to bed.

At a little before eleven, the rain stopped. And Grace George went up onstage with her company, and instead of walking through the play as the old lady held prisoner by two strangers and their half-witted daughter, gave a harrowing, electrifying performance that froze us to our seats. The performance ended at 1:30 A.M., after which Grace George, seventy if she was a day, sashayed serenely off to bed, looking forward to eight performances in the next six days with another traveling Sunday at the end of the week and
that’s
what I mean by Theatremania.

Her opening-night performance was fine, but no finer than the performance she’d given for the staff and crew at midnight the night before, so we toasted her at our regular opening-night gin picnic. Each week, every member of the staff and crew gave Flanagan thirty-five cents and he bought gin and pretzels with it, and after the opening we had a gin picnic on the playhouse lawn. One Monday night we drank two-hundred-proof hospital alcohol instead. One of the boys on the crew had a brother who was an intern at a local hospital and he filched us a bottle of hospital alcohol which we cut with Coca-Cola. You can get higher on that than you can get on Cutty Sark. You can get positively looping till after a while you can’t feel your arms or legs or anything.

As I said, Maxine was spending the summer at a “try-out” playhouse. A letter from her described the daily Westport routine and at first glance it seemed to be the standard schedule for an acting company at any summer theatre where a new play was tried out every week.

9:30 A.M.—Breakfast.

10:00 A.M.—Everybody off to study his-or-her lines in next week’s play.

11:30-4:30—Rehearsal of next week’s play.

4:30-6:00—More studying of lines in next week’s play.

6:00-7:00—A light supper.

7:15—Arrive in dressing room to mend and press costumes and apply makeup.

8:30-11:00 P.M.—On stage in this week’s play.

11:30—Late supper and then home to bed at one in the morning, in order to be up at nine and start the whole thing over again.

Wednesdays and Saturdays the program changed to include a matinee performance, and Sunday was entirely different: dress parade in the morning, dress rehearsal all afternoon and evening and far into the night.

Perfectly normal summer schedule. But Maxine’s letter had been written in somebody’s car on the way to Mount Kisco, New York, thus revealing an extra feature of the Westport company’s schedule.

At Mount Kisco, which was forty miles from Westport, there was a playhouse of the “package” kind; and that summer Westport and Mount Kisco traded plays. Every alternate week, Westport sent its new try-out play to Kisco for a week’s run, and Kisco sent its star “package” to Westport for a week. The “package” company, of course, just moved to Westport for the week. But the Westport company had to be in Westport during the day to rehearse next week’s play, so instead of moving to Kisco the company commuted nightly.

So every second week, the six o’clock supper was sandwiches eaten in the car on the forty-five-minute drive to Kisco, and the eleven-thirty supper was sandwiches eaten in the car on the way back. It made a nice change for everybody.

By comparison, Reta and I had an easy summer in the box office. We whiled away the long hours between customers by playing word games and paper-and-pencil games: Battleship and Hangman and Associations and Twenty Questions and What Is It? On non-matinee days each of us was allowed to take the box office alone for two afternoon hours while the other went swimming or rowing—or just stood outside and felt the sun and saw the sky, which all by itself was a change.

Those afternoons gave us the strength to face the trauma of matinee days. The trauma was due to a crisis which arose absolutely incessantly.

As regularly as Wednesday matinee time arrived, either (a) some camp descended on us, 200 campers and 15 counselors strong, demanding the tickets they’d sent us a check for—only we’d thought they were coming Saturday so we’d saved 215 Saturday seats and sold today’s seats to 215 other customers, and since the theatre only seated 300, there was no place to put the camp; or (b) we had 215 seats saved for the camp and the camp never showed up, having meant their check to cover 215 seats for
next
Wednesday.

This crisis took a lot out of us every time, not to mention what it took out of Bela Blau. He was a very kind and good-humored man and he never once lost his temper with us, but after the first three or four matinee days he began to acquire a hunted look. By the end of July all the fight went out of him, and for the rest of the summer the three of us simply resigned ourselves to a succession of traumatic Wednesday and Saturday afternoons.

Saturday was frantic altogether. Ticket sale in the morning, then the matinee crisis, then the evening ticket-sale rush, and at nine o’clock, when we closed the box office to the public, we had the entire week’s receipts to tot up and balance. Including subtracting the tax on each ticket. I suppose if you had any talent for math you could have totted up our week’s gross in half an hour, but it took Reta Shaw and me from nine till midnight, even with Bela helping. And when we were all through we were usually a dollar short.

At midnight on Saturday, we went into the theatre for our voluntary job of keeping the backstage crew awake and on their toes all night as they struck last week’s set and mounted next week’s. Reta and I made coffee and played records for them till four or five in the morning while they hauled scenery under Flanagan’s supervision.

I’ll tell you how he happened to explain Flanagan’s Law to me. It was on a horrendous night when the male star of the show arrived in his dressing room fifteen minutes before curtain time, roaring drunk. Flanagan came charging out to the box office to tell us the news and describe the uproar backstage. Since the play was a comedy, I said:

“He may get through it, drunk as he is. The audience may think he’s just playing the part very broadly. Otherwise it’ll be a fiasco and we’ll have to return their money.”

“Neither will happen,” said Flanagan, “because you predicted them. If you can predict it, it doesn’t happen. In the theatre, no matter what happens to you, it’s unexpected.”