Some years later, I was doing The King and I, playing Anna opposite Ricardo Montalban. In a very dramatic scene as the King lay on his deathbed, Ricardo began to whistle “Whenever I Feel Afraid” as the scene required. But that day, his whistle didn’t wet. The blowing from his puckered lips was barely audible to me and certainly not to the audience. So I had little other choice than to take over. I leaned over him, my shoulders shaking, lamenting over the dying king. To the audience, it looked like I was crying. But in truth, this outpouring of grief was my attempt to hold back an attack of laughter. And Ricardo, who was supposed to be on death’s doorstep, had to harness all the self-control and acting ability he could muster to keep from cracking up too.
Sometimes the spontaneity came from malfunctions of some otherwise brilliantly fabricated sets. Many years later, I was portraying the answering service switchboard operator Ella Peterson in Bells Are Ringing in a scene together with another girl. I looked around and noticed that the set was moving, heading east toward me. I signaled to the other girl. We both got up from the switchboard and started to hold the scenery back from closing in on us until the stagehands jumped in to save us. We milked that one for a big laugh. When you slip out of character for a moment, it is called “breaking the fourth wall”—the one that separates the actor from the audience. In this case, all four walls were breaking.
The same thing happened to me another time, but this one was hardly a laughing matter. “It’s all so wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.” I was singing the lyrics in the lovely coronation scene from Noël Coward’s The Girl Who Came to Supper. The set was a cathedral. I was supposed to be in the center box surrounded by royalty, adorned with the ermine fur, jewels, and crowns, when suddenly the fantasy dissolves. The girl is left on a stool, the trappings stripped from her, and the cathedral backdrop splits in two and is pulled off to the sides of the stage. But one evening, things took a decidedly different direction. Someone put the contraption into reverse, and the shell of the cathedral started to collapse on me. I had to jump out of the way quickly before the winching mechanism that held the set onto its tracks literally cut my feet off. I looked like a flamenco dancer. The demolished stool that I had sat on seconds before left little to the imagination of what could have been my fate. A few moments later, after they got the set moving back in the right direction, I went over and picked up a couple pieces of the former stool and waved them to the audience’s cheer. Survived again!
Sometimes a problem onstage would be more personal in nature. God forbid you should get the runs when the curtain rises. It happens often enough that most theaters have a toilet within easy reach of the stage. I was doing The Sound of Music and had an attack of acute food poisoning in Chicago. Everyone in the cast and crew knew I was sick, so when I would finish a scene, I made a dash to the bathroom and rushed to be ready for the next scene. John Meyers was my leading man, the Captain. In one of the scenes, the Captain asks Maria to stay for dinner. At first she says, “No, I couldn’t,” but then changes her mind. As I was going up the stairs on the set to exit the stage, just about overdue for my next pit stop, John said his next lines, “You’ll have to hurry. You’ll have to change.” I gave him the most pathetic, most sarcastic of all looks. The audience was certainly not in on the joke as he doubled up laughing.
The other thing that could mess with an actor’s mind during the performance was if they knew that someone important was in the audience. Thinking about that tough critic or one of your peers or idols sitting out there could drive you crazy. However, nothing came close to playing Maria in the aforementioned Sound of Music with the real Maria von Trapp watching me play her from the front row below. Yikes!
Perhaps the most special guest in the audience was during the first year of the tour of Oklahoma!—my mother. When we hit Cleveland, I got in contact and invited her to come see the show. We had corresponded throughout the years, but this would be the first time I would have face time with her since she left Rockport. When I saw her it was clear that she was little changed in physical appearance outside of a few extra pounds around the middle. Some hours later, I could safely say that nothing was radically different about her personality either. She carried on in her inimitable spirit of forthrightness and frankness, doing what she wanted to do and fairly oblivious to the feelings of those around her.
After the show, she went out with us to a restaurant, ordering her usual can of beer. She got on like fire with my wild former roommate, kindred spirits.
“You must be very proud of Florence,” someone said. Her reply was always the same and very protective.
“I’m proud of all my children.” She was not one to gleam with satisfaction. “I loved you. You were wonderful.” I knew she was happy for me, but she never made a big deal out of it. But one other side of it was no doubt the frustration that such success did not happen to her in her lifetime. I think she would have loved to be there onstage herself and command all that attention.
That night after the Cleveland show, she did get a different sort of attention. We went back to the hotel, where
