“Tell me, Eddi-Rue,” she began, “what kind of ground were you walking on? Grass? Cobblestones? Where was the sun? In your eyes? You had a parasol. Why didn’t you use it? Was there a breeze? Where had you just come from? Did you have a toothache? A headache? What, in other words, was really going on? You must enter a scene with total preparation and react moment to moment!” A brilliant revelation! She pulled the veil from my eyes.
Lynn had taken to staying at a friend’s apartment overnight from time to time, and on one of those nights when I had the apartment to myself, Norman spent the night with me. It was my first sexual…I mean, I lost my…how best to say this?
We had sex.
I was still a Goody Two-Shoes, but I was interested in growing up, and Norman was a trusted friend, so we plunged in. Okay, maybe “plunged” is not the right word. It wasn’t exciting or amazing or anything else I’d heard. Where was the blood? The big virgin experience? Had dance training broken my hymen without my ever knowing it? The fact is, I loved him like crazy from the neck up, but we simply didn’t fit each other down below. Damned unfortunate engineering. Norman, however, seemed pretty excited by me.
“I’ll never get married, Eddi-Rue,” he told me, “unless I marry you.”
Newcomb Rice had founded a summer arts camp near Terrero, New Mexico, in the Sangre de Christos mountains and offered me a job teaching modern dance the summer of 1957. I suggested Norman as drama teacher, J. Martene Pettypool as accompanist, and an art major friend to teach pottery. That glorious month in the mountains was a creative joyride with my friends. Norman composed irresistibly witty piano music for Rudyard Kipling’s “The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo,” and I created whimsical choreography to fit it. We were decades ahead of Cats! I waded chest-deep in the ice-cold Pecos River, sometimes sharing the river with water snakes. We drove to Santa Fe and saw an excellent Così fan tutte that actually made me like opera for the first time. J. Martene Pettypool got monumentally drunk and lost a shoe as we carried him to the car, and we got back to camp very tired and very happy.
While I was out west, a college friend, Mac Forrester, who was teaching English to challenged third-grade boys in Denver, invited me to spend a few weeks with him in Estes Park, Colorado, square-dancing, mountain-climbing, and getting better acquainted. Bill Bennett and I had double-dated with Mac and his girl a few times at Spring Creek, floating on inner tubes, sleeping in sleeping bags, roasting wieners and marshmallows, singing songs, and playing Lummi Sticks, an old Indian game. (Back then, the phrase “gone wild” still meant nature!) He was vivacious and hilarious, with a big grin and an easy laugh. The night I arrived, he parked outside his friend’s house and, before I knew it, we were doing things I hadn’t thought possible in such a small car. Right there at the curb, streetlights on, people likely to pass by any minute! The most daring thing I’d ever done. We spent a night on a steep mountainside in the Rockies. Who felt any rocks? Not me. So this was what the fuss was all about! Fun Quotient? A big ol’ A!
I’d gotten a job as a chambermaid—three jobs, actually, in three motels—making beds and running vacuum sweepers. My eyes and nose ran like faucets. Dust aggravated the gargantuan hay fever I’d developed in that clean-air capital of the USA. But I was a top-notch chambermaid. One day, as I folded the bedsheet corners in an expert Army-grade crease, my supervisor observed, “My, my, you are going to make some man a wonderful wife!” And I thought, Is that what you think it takes? Guess again, sister. But in his practical way, Mac also saw me as a fitting life companion. I could square-dance and hike. I was a willing, if untalented, cook. We were terrific in bed. I even wrote and illustrated a book for his students, A Pig in a Pit. The fact is, we were excellently suited, but when he asked me to marry him, he said, “Eddi-Rue, I told my girlfriend I was going to ask you first, and if you turned me down, I’d marry her, and she said okay.”
Excuse me? Girlfriend? Okay? That is one understanding girl! But I didn’t want to be a mountain-climbing schoolteacher’s wife. I had to be an actress. I had to get back to New York! So I sent Mac back to that astonishingly patient girl, and I’ve been told they did get married. He was a marvelous guy, well worth waiting for. We all did the right thing.
Some decisions actors have to make along the way are gut-wrenching. The only thing that makes them possible is when the compulsion to become an actor is unshakable. Like an edict from God. I don’t understand it, myself, but I experience it every time I walk out onto a bare stage in a dark, empty theatre. It’s a religious experience for me. I stand on that stage and I feel complete, blessed, at home, where I belong.
Melinda was only seventeen, but she was madly in love with none other than that strange, angel-faced tenor Sheridan Kinkade, and they got married late that summer. I was maid of honor, resplendent in a gathered chiffon frock that made me look like an exploded peach. I remember sobbing to Norman, “Oh, they’re going to have such beautiful children!” And they did. Four of them. My beloved nieces and nephews, Marcia, Brendan, Sean, and Amelia.
A few weeks later, I boarded a train for Pennsylvania. The Erie Playhouse had offered me a job, beginning in September: a full season as the ingénue/leading lady. Not exactly New York, but I’d be acting my trim little ass off for a steady paycheck, putting into practice everything I’d learned from Uta Hagen and hopefully making some good East Coast theatre connections.
Back in Estes Park, Mac had told me, “Eddi-Rue, if you’re going to be an actress, you have to do something about that name of yours.”
“I know!” I said. “But I can’t find a last name to go with Eddi-Rue!”
“Your last name isn’t the problem,” he said. “It’s the Eddi. Drop it. Become Rue.”
“Rue?” I said. “Just…Rue?”
What a revelation! Well, well, just Rue. I liked it! So as Rue McClanahan, I arrived in Erie, Pennsylvania, on September 14, 1957, to begin a brand-new adventure at the Erie Playhouse.
And, as fate would have it, to meet…take a big breath…Husband #1.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Good manners make any man a pleasure to be with.”
—BRITISH AUTHOR PETER MAYLE
“Dreary Erie, the Mistake on the Lake.”
This unfortunate appellation was due to the weather in Erie from September to April: rain, sleet, snow, or ice. Or heavy overcast threatening rain, sleet, snow, or ice. The sun took a bow at the autumn solstice and made his next appearance around the Ides of April. This didn’t bother me a bit. I was happy to be in a winter stock company, performing six nights a week, rehearsing six days a week, and enjoying a steady paycheck of $55 a week—$42 after deductions. Cha-ching! I even put $20 a week in savings. I ended up sharing a one-room apartment with a pull-out sofa with another actress. One of many one-room apartments, at least three of which had pull-out sofas, that I shared with roommates over the next seven years.
Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington.
The company consisted of a core of three women and six men, with other actors coming in occasionally for a role or two. Jean Tarrant, the temperamental but talented wife of Newell Tarrant, the managing director, was on hand to play leads and character roles. I was a little scared of her. A tall, taciturn character actress named Nora handled supporting roles, and here came Rue McClanahan for the ingénues and younger leads. The adolescent roles were played by Robin, a talented little bundle of energy with an irrepressible personality and colorful expressions like “Oh, for crying out tears!” She always made me laugh.
Years later, Robin came to see me at a theatre in New Jersey. In her midtwenties now, all married and settled down, she was still adorable.
“You got me through some pretty rough patches there in the Erie dressing room,” I told her. “I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.”
And she said, “Oh, Rue…for crying out tears!”
In October, a beautiful, voluptuous blonde came in from New York to play the role that made Jayne Mansfield in Will Succes
s Spoil Rock Hunter? Since her name eludes me, I’ll call her Va-voom. She was jaded, well acquainted with the hard facts of life, but Va-voom loved to tell ghost stories in the dressing room, and curiously, they always made her cry. Looking like a Playboy centerfold, she’d relate some spooky tale, tears running down her cheeks, always apologizing, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I can’t help it.” I found it unique. Endearing, if a bit odd.
Of the six male actors in the company, I immediately developed a crush on not one, but two—both out of the question. Jack Shapira, a fine actor from New York, was solid, loving, and good-tempered, but married, and I liked his wife fully as much as I liked him. Southerner Jason Crane was hilarious and talented, but seemed possibly gay. (In hindsight, it was only my Okie naiveté that allowed any “possibly” about it.) He’d been around the block. There was a mean streak in his humor, but oh, my, he could make me laugh. A very good actor named Bob took on the “older” parts (as in over thirty). Joey Phelps, from Montreal, was very blond and very gay. (No doubt even in this little Oklahoman’s head.) He was the first Canadian I’d ever known, so I found him terribly exotic. Tall, dark, and handsome Corbin Willis built the sets and played bit parts, and a few years later, he and Jason Crane formed a business (and more) partnership, building sets in Hawaii. Who’da thunk? My naiveté always dismays me. Bea Arthur always thought I was faking, but I wasn’t. I was sheltered as a child. What can I say? Maybe duh.
Rounding out our merry troupe was Thomas Lloyd Bish, a handsome musician who’d moved to Erie from Jamestown, New York, after being discharged from the Army. He was an apprentice, hired at half-salary because his experience was not in acting. He’d played trombone and sung in an army band and was charming enough, courteous, up to the task of his first small role. But he didn’t grab my fancy. In Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? however, he played a reporter coming to interview the blond bombshell, and every night he invented a new name to introduce himself. And every night he got funnier.
“Hello, I’m Ferd Raffleholder.”
“Hello, I’m Jerkin M. Smurt.”
I suspect he was doing it more for Va-voom than for me, but one night during the usual dressing room gossip, Va-voom said, “I don’t like that Tom Bish.”
“Why?” I asked, but she just smiled ruefully and shook her head.
It bothered me, because that sense of humor, that bit of improvisational derring-do had piqued my interest. Suddenly, I noticed the smoldering good looks and army-built body I’d somehow overlooked, and…hey, this guy was yummy.
I played Rachel in Inherit the Wind, the sweetheart of the schoolteacher on trial for teaching Darwin. There was a scene with a chimpanzee, who was kept in a cage in the prop basement. One day, I went to the basement to put some props in order and the male chimp started banging and rattling his cage, creating quite a ruckus. His screams got louder, more insistent, and I started to get nervous. I fled upstairs, and Newel assigned one of the men to put props in order until the chimp left. Apparently, male chimps get excited when a female human comes around them during her monthly period.
Terrific. The chimp was the first male to show any interest in me since I got there.
In November, I learned that a pain I’d been feeling at the base of my spine was from a pilo nidal cyst. A pilo nidal who? Apparently, soldiers get pilo nidal cysts from bouncing around on unpadded jeep seats. The doctor asked if I’d ever landed hard on my coccyx, and yes, in sixth grade, I’d come down the slide at recess, missed my footing, and landed with a wham on my—what do they call that? The sits bone? The sitz bone? Well, where you sits. So now—gloriosky—I had this pilo nidal cyst that required surgery. We had no understudies; during an earlier production, I’d played several nights with the flu, delivering comedy lines with a fever of 102, so dizzy I couldn’t stand up straight. And now I had to have an operation. Well, fudge.
I told Newell Tarrant I’d need a week off, wrote to my parents, and on a cold, gray Sunday morning, packed to check into the hospital. I’d never been a patient in a hospital before and I was scared, but my new roommate, an actress who’d arrived from New York a few days before, sensed my terrified state and kicked into an extemporaneous comedy routine that had me howling. What a gift she was giving me! The gift of laughter.
“Okay, toots,” she said after twenty minutes of clowning, “get over to the hospital.”
I picked up my suitcase and set forth across town, feeling blessed. It would have been nice if someone had offered to take me, but it never occurred to me to ask. I’d never hired a cab in my life, or considered the possibility. I had driven myself since I was sixteen. Without a car, all I thought of was walk.
The operation was, shall we say, less than pleasant. A day or two later, I had my first visitor. There in the doorway stood Tom Bish with flowers, smiling sheepishly. I was astounded to see him. And touched. The Shapiras brought me the book The Road to Miltown by S. J. Perelman, and I still have it. It’s moved with me across the country, put up in innumerable bookshelves, for almost fifty years. It’s showing signs of wear. (Hell, so am I, but we’re both still good to take to bed.)
Mother came to Erie to be with her recuperating daughter and meet everyone, and she said, “If you take up with any of these actors, I hope it’s Tom Bish. He’s the most courteous.”
And he was. He opened doors for ladies and displayed a very well-brought-up demeanor. He had nice manners. But there was a hidden side—the side Va-voom had hinted at, a side I didn’t meet until after we were married—a selfish, terrified little boy, rattling to get away from anything that confined him.
Not unlike that unruly chimp.
Tom and I started going together to the pub where all us actors convened after the shows to drink beer and watch TV—The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Humphrey Bogart, The African Queen with Bogart and Katharine Hepburn—and then he’d walk me home. One night, as we stood on my door stoop, chatting, I remember thinking, It’s getting time for me to get married. Melinda was married. And pregnant. Women my age were supposed to be married, weren’t they? As a mature, sophisticated woman, shouldn’t I have a life partner by now?
He kissed me goodnight and I went in. And pretty soon, Tom went in with me.
We made love, and it was a sweeter, deeper, more thoughtful experience than any I’d ever had. It touched a different place in me, and moved by the moment, I said, “So this is what it’s like.” I was aware he might think I was implying he was my first. He was, by the numbers, my third, but it was the first time like that, and I wasn’t making a literal statement, I was just—oh, all right, I was fudging. What—you never did that? Not even once? Well, bully for you. It’s very dumb. A Crime of Omission. And it can get you into mighty hot water.
One night shortly afterward, Tom was drunk and got ugly about it.
“Did you think you were fooling me? You liar!” he belittled and baited me. “Who was the first? How many have there been?”
“It doesn’t make any difference in how I feel about you,” I said, squirming with guilt, but he demanded I tell him, chapter and verse. “It’s none of your business. Unless you want to tell me all about your sexual history!”
“I was thirteen the first time,” he said grudgingly.
“Thirteen?” I was amazed. “With whom?”
“A red-haired movie star.”
“Oh, my God, that’s…that’s absolutely fabulous.”
Dying to hear the whole fascinating story, I begged for details. It was in Florida. That’s all I got out of him, darn it. After that, every time I saw a 1940s movie star with flaming red locks, I wondered, Was it her? Of course, I have a prime suspect, and I wonder if I’ll ever meet her—and if I’ll be tipsy enough to ask her if she was in Florida in 1947.
This was the first—and least important—of the many things he never told me. As it turned out, Tom was a young man full of dark secrets.
During December, we dated, slept together a few more times, and even talked of getting married. We performed on
e play at night, rehearsed another during the day, did a kids’ show on Saturdays, and toured high schools with The Miser two afternoons a week, carting sets from school to school, getting into costumes in empty classrooms, trying to interest teenagers in Molière. There was a good bit of horseplay from Tom and others onstage, which grated on my serious Uta Hagen nerves. Rehearsals are the time for joking around. I didn’t (still don’t!) find it funny when people fall out of character, giggling like—well, like those three silly little kittens.
Tom bought me something feminine and pretty for Christmas, and I bought him a pair of Levi’s. All the boys in Oklahoma wore Levi’s; I thought Tom would look sexy in them and hoped he’d think it funny to get them as a Christmas gift. He didn’t. He was insulted, and he let me know it. That was my first Christmas away from my family. Mother sent me a box full of white things—a fluffy white scarf, a white evening bag with rhinestones, white gloves, everything white. I thought that was awfully clever, and the tenderness of the gesture made me homesick. I still have the evening bag.
Erie was unrelentingly overcast and bitterly cold. But hey! I was a working actress!
Norman Hartweg came by Erie for New Year’s Eve, opening night of The Desk Set. Afterward, there was pizza (actors are always fed pizza, because it’s cheap) with champagne (also cheap) and music at the theatre. Actors were dancing in the aisles, and I was itching to tango. Norman didn’t fancy himself a dancer, but Tom squired me up and down the aisles until just before midnight, when we all headed for a party at a patron’s house. I was already woozy from champagne, but off we went. Tom and I wandered around but didn’t see Norman. Later, we tumbled into someone’s car. I vaguely recall climbing the stairs with Tom, my head reeling…and the next thing I knew, I woke up in my sofa bed with a sizable lump under the quilt next to me. I was in my slip. And I was sure I’d worn a dress to that party.
My First Five Husbands Page 5