Then stand back to avoid the stampede.
The first time I made Boodle’s Orange Fool, my irreverent, outrageous, courageous, and hilarious best friend, Lette Rehnolds—she of “Two Little Pussycats” fame—helped me. It was New Year’s Eve in Fort Lee, New Jersey, a few months after I returned from England. The Italian was out of town. He did a pretty good Bogart impersonation, so he was regularly cast as Bogie in Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam, playing theatres hither and yon for weeks at a time. It was the only time Mark and I could relax and be happy. So I decided to throw a New Year’s Eve party and asked Lette to come early and help, since she was not only an excellent cook but a big kick in the butt. We made dinner and the Boodle’s, thirty-odd (some very odd) people arrived from Manhattan, and we had a blast. Mark couldn’t sleep that night for the noise, so he got up and sat on the stairs, watching the show. Snapshots show everyone in awful seventies garb and haircuts, looking very happy, consuming Boodle’s Orange Fool, and drinking like fish.
This is how Mark and I lived those last few years with The Italian. When Husband was home, we tiptoed around and did our best to not incur his wrath. When he was not home, life resumed. It was party time! We laughed, played, and pretended life was normal. Rather than think about it too much, I immersed myself in work.
All my professional life, I’d wanted to be a member of the Actors’ Studio, an exclusive workshop for actors. Membership is by audition only, so I worked with a partner on a scene from Tennessee Williams’s Twenty-seven Wagonloads of Cotton (the play that became the film Baby Doll). I played Baby Doll. The actor who played Vacarro, the overseer who taunts and stalks Baby Doll, was talented but neurotic. We worked up the scene and presented it at The Studio on the allotted night. Everything started as rehearsed, but this nutty guy suddenly started pelting me with raw green peas that stung like sharp little rocks, and then, out of nowhere, he slapped my face—hard!—which threw our audition into a cocked hat, and neither of us was accepted. We were told to work up new scenes with different partners and come back the following spring. Poop! That unprofessional twerp was worse than the Three Little Kittens.
In a dry spell workwise, I did some presentations for backers of an Irish play about Sinn Fein. Playing a seductress, I straddled a young man seated in a chair, wrapped my legs tightly around him, kissed him passionately, and bit off his tongue. I dreaded every performance, but it was $40 a pop. In cash. And not nude. Another challenge was a two-character one-act done in a church basement. I played a housewife, innocently dusting the living room. Ding dong. The doorbell rings. It’s a blind piano tuner with dark glasses and cane. As he tunes, she gets excited and begins removing her clothes, until she’s down to bra and panties, in a frenzy on the carpet, having one heck of an orgasm. The upshot is that it’s her husband in disguise. I don’t know what it meant, but it took all my courage to do it realistically. I’m glad it was a play, not a film, because I wouldn’t want anyone—including myself—to see it now.
I got cast in three films (fully clothed in all of them!), including The People Next Door, in which I played the tough secretary—and mistress—of Eli Wallach’s character. In our major scene, he abruptly announces he’s breaking off the affair and the mistress/secretary barks furiously, “Don’t think you can just throw me away like an old Kleenex!”
With Eli Wallach in The People Next Door. (“Don’t think you can just throw me away like an old Kleenex!”)
Some line, huh? What dramatic power! What content!
It hurt my toenails. Like an old Kleenex? Yep. And say it like you mean it, honey.
I also did the wonderful movie They Might Be Giants, playing Daisy Playfair, the innocent, wide-eyed sister-in-law of George C. Scott, who thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes. His psychiatrist, played by Joanne Woodward, begins to believe her patient actually is Sherlock Holmes and joins his crusade to hunt down the villainous Dr. Moriarty, along with a gaggle of eccentric street people and Daisy in her heels and mink coat. We shot during the winter in snow-covered Manhattan, we actors standing on big sheets of cardboard, our feet frozen into ice sculptures. In my fur coat, I was luckier than the others in their cotton and wool.
I worked six weeks and had several good little scenes, some of which were filmed on location in the Victorian dining room of the Players Club in Gramercy Park. I became a member of the Players in 1997 and had attended many fetes in that room before I learned, at a 2004 screening of They Might Be Giants honoring Anthony Harvey and me, that this very room was Holmes’s laboratory! Things like that amaze me. The circles and intersections.
Life just loves to fiddle around with us.
In February of 1971, Oliver Hailey offered me the job of standby for the two thirtysomething leading ladies—Marian Seldes and Brenda Vaccaro—in his new play, Father’s Day. Oliver sent me the script, and I called him immediately after reading it.
“I have a real handle on the role to be done by Vaccaro,” I told him.
He said, “I’m sure you do, Rue. But we want a name in every role.”
And I was definitely not a “name.” I couldn’t argue that.
They went into rehearsal, and I learned both roles in the unlikely case I’d get to play one. It was excruciating, because Miss Vaccaro wasn’t comfortable in the role. Lines were changed to try to help her, but she just never clicked into the character. The play opened March 16, 1971, and closed March 16, 1971. It was like driving through one of those tiny towns in North Texas. Blink and you’ll miss it. But even with only one performance, Marian Seldes was nominated for a Best Actress Tony. (Now, that’s an actress!) But Oliver was once again denied a hit show in New York, and I felt terrible for him. The next day, Ken Kercheval, who was also in the cast, arrived at the theatre, as did I, to clean out our dressing rooms. He had brought liquor and proceeded, as did I, to get sloshed. We tried to console each other but were too smashed for romance. He fell asleep, and I went home and poured myself into bed.
That spring, I made another try for the Actors’ Studio. A few months earlier, I’d workshopped some scenes from Dylan, in which I played Dylan Thomas’s volatile wife, Caitlin, opposite the wonderful Will Hare—who was a pro, a gentleman, and a member of the Actors’ Studio. We presented the opening scene from Dylan, and I was accepted as a lifetime member of the Actors’ Studio. One of the sweetest accomplishments of my career. (So much for you, Mr. Slap-happy Pea-shooter.)
I began the summer at the Hampton Playhouse, but just a few days into rehearsals was called to return to New York to appear in the soap opera Another World. I’d all but forgotten the audition I’d done for producers at NBC a couple months earlier. The Playhouse brought in Katherine Helmond to replace me (gotta love Katherine as the dizzy wife in Soap and the sexy mom on Who’s the Boss?), and I began a new phase in my career—soap opera actress. The best thing about it: Mother and her customers at the beauty parlor tuned in religiously. Finally, she figured her little girl had really made it! I never heard another word about a dance school in Ardmore.
My Another World character was Caroline Johnson, cook and nanny to Pat and John’s infant twins. The best nanny in all Christendom, and one hell of a great cook, to boot. The infants love her, Pat and John love her, the audience loved her. The character was so popular, the producers upped my appearances from three shows a week to five a week at $150 per show! Going to the mailbox and taking out those blessed paychecks was like Christmas every week.
Caroline’s one teeny flaw: She was crazier than a bedbug. Many episodes ended with her sprinkling a mysterious white powder in Pat’s soup, which resulted in dramatic hospital scenes for Pat and cleared the way for Caroline to be alone with John. She fancied him, you see, and her nefarious plot was to slowly poison Pat, marry John, and live happily ever after with “their” children. This went on for over a year’s shooting time, during which the newborn twins turned two years old. Even worse, in a previous story line, before she became pregnant with twins, Pat had had a hysterectomy. Ah, the magical world of soa
p opera!
Poor Pat kept getting dangerously sick but always recovered. One day, I got a letter from a fan saying, While I admire your tenacity, you’re obviously using the wrong poison. And then she named the poison to get at the pharmacy, promising it would work, adding, Just use a pharmacist who owes you a favor, like I did, and soon you’ll be happily married to John. It worked for me! Sincerely, Mrs. X.
I turned it over to the show’s producers, toot sweet. We were always getting letters from fans warning us to look out for another character or giving us advice. Soaps are a strange world with a strange audience. It’s also the most stultifyingly boring work I’ve ever done. After fourteen months of this nonsensical plot, which moved forward like a glacier on a mudflat, Caroline was finally hauled off to jail or the funny farm or somewhere, mercifully rescuing me from impending stupor. It was even more mind-numbing than Upjohn Pharmaceutical.
But as fate would have it, Caroline departed Another World on Friday and I replaced a lead actress on the CBS soap Where the Heart Is on Monday. This character was also a killer, but at least she was a successful one! Barbara Baxley, the actress who was leaving, had been playing her role at the usual soap pace, a combination of treacle and molasses, often reading cue cards. I had my lines down so pat I could fire them off like a horse race announcer. So the viewers got treacle on Friday and popcorn on Monday from the same character—who, after five more months of trying to kill her nine-year-old nephew by various means, chases him across a frozen lake and breaks through the thin ice to her well-deserved fate.
Now I’d done soaps on NBC and CBS. Just to cover all bases, ABC hired me for four episodes as the beer-guzzling mother of a rebellious teenage girl on one of their long-running daytime dramas. That was a bit more interesting but still not really my cup of Palmolive. Soaps aren’t funny. They’re soggy cereal. Personally, I like snap, crackle, and wit, fast-paced top-rate writing, brilliant costars, bravado challenges. And, kids, there ain’t much of that in soaps. Or anywhere else on TV, for the most part. Top-of-the-line writing is extremely rare.
I supplemented my sudsy roles with commercials. A wife rubbing Absorbine, Jr. on my husband’s shoulder. A zany shopper trying on girdles in a posh shop for I Can’t Believe It’s a Girdle. A leggy cocktail waitress exchanging wisecracks with beefy guys for…gosh, what was that? Something for the beefy guy target market. Hey, it’s a living. I was glad to get these gigs after sixty—yes, I counted them—sixty fruitless auditions over four years. Commercial producers had always told me, “We just can’t pin down your type.”
My type? Maybe I’m the type who can be any type.
I think that type is called an actress.
Two dear friends, Henry Murphy and his main squeeze Brent Hicks, bought an old house upstate in the Hudson River Valley, and Mark and I sometimes went up for weekends. The house was—to put it kindly—a fixer-upper. There was an open void at the center of the second-story floor, so we had to edge very carefully around the perimeter to get to our rooms, or we’d fall smack through into the living room. It was a wonderful place, full of adventures. Brent taught me to do a time step in the kitchen. Another regular guest, a lovely actress named Louisa Flaningam, made whole-wheat-crust apple pies with apples from the ancient trees outside. That ramshackle old house is now the upscale Inn at Green River, one of the best B&Bs in the United States, but back then it was our beloved wreck, a welcome respite from our city lives.
Mark turned thirteen in the fall of 1971, his voice changing from soprano to baritone. He was my height, hormones running rampant, his conversation more adult and funnier than ever, his demeanor more assertive. As he changed, I had to change with him, learning to deal with this emerging critter. I wanted him to have a place to grow, so Murph, Brent, Lette, Mark, and I drove around upstate looking at land for sale. Four miles from Murph’s place was a gorgeous forty-five-acre lot, ablaze with fall colors. Lette and I threw ourselves down in the maple leaves and rolled like horses. I was salivating to buy the place, but it was $32,000 and the owner wanted half down. Not gonna happen.
On Halloween night, our hosts always organized a ghost hunt. About eight of us would line up in single file and follow Murph out to the meadow and across the brook. Every now and then, Murph would call, “Anybody see the ghost?”
“No…” And on we trekked, the new kid always last in line.
Suddenly, Murph would stop and whisper, “Look! Over there! What is that?”
About forty yards away, a huge billowy white form sailed against the black sky, clearly free of the earth, traveling parallel with us, puffing in and out like a beautiful giant jellyfish.
Murph would shout, “RUN FOR THE HOUSE!” and we’d all turn tail and gallop back over the creek. But on Mark’s first Halloween, he walked over to get a better look at the apparition. Turns out the ghost was Brent dressed in black, running along beneath a parachute they’d found at a surplus store. We all hooted about it over hot chocolate and s’mores—graham crackers covered with melted marshmallows and Hershey’s bits.
It had been a year or so since I started those weekly sessions with Mandrake Penobscot, learning a lot about myself, the dusk panics, recurring nightmares, my compulsive need for a man. But I still couldn’t bring myself to end the disastrous marriage. The Italian and I had settled into an uneasy, always-about-to-blow relationship, made bearable only by the fact that one or the other of us was often out of town.
“I think you should begin group therapy,” said Manny, taking a sip of water. (He always sipped water constantly during the sessions.) So I found myself in a circle of eight troubled souls, some with destructive parents, others with abusive mates. Every week, people told the same miserable stories, blind to the obvious solution: Get away from that person! NOW! I thought, Hmm, I fit right in with these nuts.
One night, Mark said something flip and Mr. Congeniality set off up the stairs after him, catching him in the bathroom. I heard slapping and shouting, but I was terrified to intervene. I heard something metal break and fall. Then, in the quiet, I heard Mark say, “You know, this really isn’t the way to communicate with me.”
“No? Then what is?”
“You could just talk to me. You don’t have to yell or hit me.”
“How do I know you’d listen? My dad always hit me!”
“Well, you might try it. I’d listen.”
“Yeah? Well, then. Just…go on, I guess…go on to bed.”
And Mark went to bed, leaving me astounded at the foot of the stairs.
The next day, I asked Lette if Mark and I could stay a few nights in her place in the Ansonia Hotel until I could think what to do. She didn’t like kids or dogs, so she wasn’t happy to have us, and I wasn’t happy to move in on her. To make things worse, Mark’s dog made a dump on the carpet under the grand piano. The next day, The Italian called and nicely said he had to talk to me. I told him to come over that night at eight and sent Mark out with a friend.
“I need you to call every twenty minutes to see if I’m still alive,” I told Lette and, always ready for drama, she agreed, staking us out from her neighbor’s apartment next door.
The Italian arrived promptly at eight and began apologizing, asking me in a calm voice to come back home, saying we could work it out, but I kept refusing.
The phone rang.
“Lette Rehnolds’s residence.”
“Hey, Baby Rue, are you okay?”
“She’s not home right now. May I take a message?”
“For Christ’s sake, I want to know if you’re okay!”
“Okay, fine. Just fine. She’ll be back any minute.”
“I’m calling again in fifteen minutes! Good-bye!”
More entreating from Cuddles for me to come home, all in his sweetest, most rational and reasonable demeanor. More standing my ground.
The phone rang.
“Lette Rehnolds’s residence.”
“This is the FBI. Are you okay?”
“That’s right, but she’s due hom
e soon.”
“I’ll call again in ten minutes. What on earth is going on over there?”
“Okay, thank you. I’ll tell her.”
Another onslaught of apologies, entreaties, promises to never fly off the handle again. My resolve was breaking down. What could I do? I really had nowhere to go.
The phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Look, Baby Rue, are you okay or what? I’m getting drunk.”
“Lette? Is that you? When are you coming home?”
“Right now! I’ve had the ass of this!”
“Okay! See you in a few minutes.”
With nowhere else to go, Mark and I returned to Fort Lee the next day, but Mark told me, “Mother, I can’t live with you anymore unless you leave The Hulk.”
In Manny’s familiar circle that week, I told them about the incident with Mark, the threats that kept me silent, and a terrible moment in the kitchen some months earlier when I thought he just might kill me.
“He laced into me about something or other,” I said. “And I slammed the refrigerator. Suddenly, I was pinned against the fridge, his thumbs pressing hard against my larynx. I couldn’t breathe. Just as I felt like I was going to pass out, he released me and I fell forward, struggling for breath. He said it was all my fault, since he’d warned me never to display anger toward him. I was shooting a movie—They Might Be Giants. On the set, I pretended to have laryngitis.”
When I finished, the craziest guy in the group asked me, “What do you like about him?”
I thought for a few seconds, then said, “I can’t think of anything.”
“So why the hell don’t you divorce him?” the crazy guy challenged.
Something clicked into place. Plunk! Like a ball rolling into a socket. I was ready to do it. Just like that. I drove back to Fort Lee and told Mr. Hyde, “I’m divorcing you. There’s no need to discuss it. You have to move out.”
My First Five Husbands Page 16