Body movement and how you carried yourself on the stage was also an art like choreography. We trained how to faint without killing ourselves in the process. There was a specific way you could gently go down so as to not crack your head open. In another class, we trained on how to look like you were straining to push against something very heavy like a huge rock. Anytime I find myself standing with my shoulders slumped and my posture looking more like a question mark than an exclamation point, I still hear Sarah Mildred Strauss barking at me with her aristocratic rolling R’s, “Rrrrribs up!” I will also never forget a comment she made to the class that I think she did for my specific benefit: “Remember that the boy you think you love at eighteen is the same one you won’t spit on at twenty-one.”
On the singing and comedy front, the instruction at the academy didn’t add all that much to my skill set. George Burns used to say that you can’t teach comedic timing; you can improve upon it with practice, but you either have it or you don’t. I think the same goes for having a good sense of humor. You can’t teach it if it’s not already there. Looking at some of my earliest childhood photographs, you can see in my face that I was born with the desire to make people laugh. And all those times I got in trouble for mimicking my teachers at St. Francis were now being put to good use.
What was more challenging was learning how to work with the sadder spectrum of feelings. They taught us about sense memories—how to go back in time to mine your own experiences to bring forth in your performance a desired emotional state. I got depressed in one of the classes because I started thinking too much about my father. “I don’t want to do that again, it’s too hard,” I thought.
Learning how to cry was harder. It too was about getting in touch with your feelings, specifically about something that made you very sad. You would think that I had a reservoir that could unleash a torrent of tears. Just flick the switch. There was one problem, though, and it is a reason why I still have trouble crying today. As a child, it was not permitted. “Don’t you cry, don’t cry,” my mother would warn me, with the unspoken threat that if I did, then she’d give me a real reason to cry by whipping the gizzard out of me. So I’d suck in whatever was bothering me, take a deep breath, and say, “Oh, all right.” In fact, I had only seen my mother cry once, when I was a little girl and had accompanied her to church on Mother’s Day. The priest gave a sermon apropos of mothers. Whatever the priest said penetrated the barrier she constructed to help her get through her hard life. She was quietly crying and trying to hide her face. It made me so sad. I put my little arm through hers and tried to comfort her.
There was also much to learn from watching the other students. They may have come from all parts of the country and diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, but there was great camaraderie. We were all striving for success, yet despite the competitive climate, fellow students were generous in helping one another. Thanks to that quality, my studies at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts would soon come to a sudden and abrupt end.
CHAPTER 5Wish You Were Here
It was my first audition, a cattle call at the Alvin Theater for a part in the chorus in the original cast of the musical Wish You Were Here. “You can sing, so you should go,” my fellow students encouraged me. Some of them had already auditioned for the show, but nobody had gotten a job. I was told to bring a bathing suit, but of course I didn’t have one. One of the students, Candy Parsons, who was in South Pacific with me years later at Lincoln Center, lent me hers. Another student gave me a piece of sheet music to take with me and told me how to get to the theater.
Ask any successful actor and each will have his or her own version of this rite of passage. For example, when Martin Sheen and Zalman King were starving young actors in New York, they actually shared the same suit for an audition. When the first finished, they went into the restroom so the other could change into it. Luckily, they were the same size. Unfortunately, Candy and I were not.
I arrived with my long blonde hair and simple clothes, bathing suit in tow, and took my place in line. When it was my turn, I handed the sheet music for “Only Make Believe” from Showboat to the pianist and sang to the darkened audience. When I finished, the director and cowriter Josh Logan and composer Harold Rome emerged from the shadows and addressed me from their seats below: “Did you bring a bathing suit?” I told them that I had. “Go down to the basement and put it on and come back.”
Downstairs, an old stagehand named Charlie Bauer heard me in distress.
“What’s the matter?”
“This bathing suit doesn’t fit,” I told him. It was both too wide and too low-cut over the breasts. I was struggling to hold the back end and the top part up at the same time.
“Hold on. I’ll get some safety pins,” Charlie offered.
It is one thing to be terrified about going to your first audition, but the added worry about accidental nudity (displaying more of your talents) did not help. The bathing suit was required because there was a real,
