On top of dealing with my father’s death and all the stress of opening night in New Haven, I caught a cold. The show must go on. When you are the lead, you bear extra responsibility, and you do what is necessary. I went to a doctor and he gave me an injection. It killed the cold all right, but came close to taking the rest of me along with it. The first thing I noticed was that my fingers swelled up. Then the same thing happened to my legs and to my feet, which looked like piano legs. When I couldn’t get the Mary Janes on my swollen feet, the wardrobe person improvised and cut up a pair of black house slippers. Every night I would go to sleep with my legs propped up on the hotel bed headboard to cut down on the swelling. I was in so much agony with the pain. I prayed that it would be gone by the morning, but when I woke up it was just as bad.
I prayed more and said my rosary but also questioned God why He wasn’t helping me. Onstage, the pain in my knees and all my joints made each movement a torture, and I did everything I could to minimize my limping. I had to dance during the “Many a New Day” number, and it hurt like hell. Adrenaline kicks in and you find a way to tough your way through it. The cast and crew were very supportive, but looking back, I wonder how I made it and whether any performers today would have gone on under such circumstances. “What did I do to deserve this?” I questioned God in my prayers. Was this some kind of divine retribution because I didn’t go to my father’s funeral? Was it payback for when I told him I’d rather see him dead than in that condition? With my upbringing, it was so easy to go there.
When we left New Haven, the next stop was Asbury Park, New Jersey. A group of us went to the beach during the day, and I noticed that people started looking at me funny. It turns out that I was getting hives on my face and lips from being out in the sunlight. My tongue had also begun to swell up. They took me back to the hotel, and the front desk called a doctor. He came and looked at me. “My God, child, don’t let anybody ever give you penicillin.” No one else had thought to question that, but Dr. Alvin Weinstein, who would become a lifelong friend, recognized it immediately. He told me that he was in the Army during the war and quarantined a whole group of men, thinking that it was an outbreak of measles. But on further investigation, it turned out it was a toxic reaction to penicillin. The antibiotic was still relatively new, only in widespread use since the end of World War II. As an antidote, he gave me a shot of adrenaline and cortisone.
“Will it be okay?” I asked him. “I have a show to do tonight.”
“You can’t. You can’t sing like this,” he answered. I told him I had to, so he came to the show and gave me another shot just before I went onstage. He treated me for the whole week we were there and never charged me a dime. We had a nurse with the show, and she continued to give me the injections for a few more weeks as we traveled onward, until the poison finally got out of my system. I was lucky that I hadn’t dropped dead.
Once I was feeling better, I settled into the routine. On average, we spent about five days in each city, the tour lasting from September through May. I thought it was the most exciting thing in the world to travel. I was given the stateroom on the train because I was the leading lady, but I gave it instead to Mary Marlowe, a veteran actress who played Aunt Eller. I took the berth instead—after all, that’s what they did in those movie musicals. Sometimes we would end up on a bus if the trains didn’t run. It sounds romantic, but when you’re in a blizzard in Minnesota and the driver is lost, it wears thin.
“What’s the best way to Duluth?” he asked a passerby.
“Oh, that’s right up next to Bemidji.”
“Where in the hell is Bemidji?”
The first year, I had a roommate, a fellow cast member who was supposed to look after me, since I was still just eighteen years old. But it turned out to be the other way around. She was a few years older, and she was wild. She would frequently get bombed, and it was a nightmare to try to get her up to catch the train when we were leaving town. When she was drunk, she would tell me all sorts of tragic stories that had happened to her, about abortions and other traumas, and it would keep me awake at night thinking about it. If she had a boyfriend in that town, she would show me the hickeys she got from the night before. It was a baptism by fire and a teachable moment for what I did not want to become when I grew up.
Another ritual of the road was the brainchild of Owen Marshall, a wonderful man who played the Sheriff. He explained it when I was first invited to dinner with the others.
“Okay, we’re going
