To my mind, this was a perfectly natural thing to do, but The Greek didn’t see it that way.
“Rue, he’s your ex-husband, for Christ’s sake!”
“He’s one of my dearest friends!” I shot back. “And the man is in a wheelchair. He needs a little help right now, and God knows, he’s helped me more than once.”
Norm had a tube attached to his bladder that drained into a bag he had to empty several times a day, and sometimes during the night it leaked onto the mattress. He was with us for six weeks, and when he moved, I washed the mattress and put it out to air, which didn’t bother me a bit. He’d have done the same for me. But The Greek was furious and spent the next several days treating me like the amazing invisible woman.
I was trying to keep this Edsel on the road, though, so I quickly agreed when he came to me and said, “I’d like to stop working and go to commercial real estate school for eight months. Could you handle the mortgage and the bills by yourself? It would be maybe a year before I could expect to start earning money again.”
“Of course,” I said. “If that’s what you want, you should do it. I’ll handle the bills.”
But when Mark graduated from high school in June, he said he’d like to take a year off before deciding exactly what he wanted to do, and The Greek thought this was a terrible idea.
“He should be doing something useful with his life,” he said. “Something that will help him get ahead.”
Like what? I wondered. Marrying a celebrity?
It made me heartsick when I thought of what Mother might have thought about the way I’d been sucked in again.
By the end of 1977, I couldn’t take any more of The Greek’s bloody don’t rain on my people who need misty watercolor memories Streisand ad infinitum—in short, I could no longer stand him. In December, I told him I wanted a separation and, without much argument, he moved into one of the suites at the Magic Castle Motel in Hollywood. Ah, but my dad came out to visit us for Christmas with Marie, with whom he’d become quite tight, and finding his football buddy banished from the house, scolded me repeatedly, “Oh, Eddi-Rue, he’s a good man. Get him back home. It’s Christmas!”
I could barely stand the thought. But I drove to the Magic Castle Motel and asked The Greek to come home for the holidays. I didn’t love The Greek, but I did love Bill. There was nothing Bill wouldn’t do for me, and this was one of the rare occasions he was asking me to do something for him. We all spent Christmas together, Bill and The Greek happy as clams, watching four jillion football games.
But after Bill and Marie left, The Greek stayed on.
There are sea-change moments in a sitcom when cast members move on, writers move on, child actors grow up, or an older actor dies. The little snow-globe world that was so carefully created over the years is suddenly shaken up. The trick is knowing when to persevere through the ensuing blizzard and when to call it quits. In March of 1978, at just that sort of crossroad, Norman Lear proposed moving Maude to Washington to become a member of Congress, but Bea Arthur chose to decline. You know what they say: A lady knows when to make her exit. As we wrapped the series and said fond good-byes, Norman proposed a new series starring none other than yours truly.
Yes, me! In my own series! Yippee! Hooray! (Do you sense that I was a tad excited?)
Set in Kansas City during the Depression, Apple Pie was based on a little New York play that Norman was having rewritten. A terrific story. I would be playing Ginger Nell Hollyhock, who finds herself alone in a big old Kansas City house during the Depression and advertises in the newspaper for members of a family. Having found a blind grandfather (played perfectly by Jack Gilford) and two sons and a daughter, the pilot opens with Ginger Nell interviewing men to be the father—her mate. Norman called me in to help audition male leads, and I read scenes with several guys, our two top choices being film veteran Tony Curtis and Dabney Coleman, who’d been hilarious in Norman’s offbeat series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. We debated their relative merits, considering the qualities of the character—Fast Eddie Murdock, a charming con man on the run. After much discussion, we made the tough decision to cast Dabney Coleman, and I listened while Norman called Tony Curtis to tell him, marveling at Norman’s finesse.
Before we taped the pilot, I had to do a quick movie shoot in Cuernavaca, Mexico—two days’ work in Balls, a film about tennis (it was renamed Players for release) starring Ali MacGraw, Steve Gutenberg, and Dean Martin’s gorgeous blond son, Dino (who was tragically killed in a small plane crash shortly afterward). Ali and I strolled through Cuernavaca, chatting and shopping.
“There’s a king-sized hand-embroidered quilt on my bed at the villa,” I told her, “and I want to make one just like it.”
I bought a passel of handmade embroidered coasters, thinking I could sew them together and fill in the spaces with my own embroidery. I figured it would take me a while, and so far it’s been twenty-nine years. Don’t ever try to embroider a king-sized quilt if you have anything else to do in your life.
I was in Cuernavaca only two days, but I managed to get the trots from the ice in my drinks, so when I returned to California—oooooh, boy, I was sick as a perro. The night before we were to begin rehearsing Apple Pie, I was in my office going over the script, my stomach raging with Montezuma’s Revenge, when The Greek appeared at my door, looking hangdog.
“When are you coming up?” he whined.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m starting the pilot of my series tomorrow morning. I’m feeling sick, and I need to study the script.”
“But I miss you! When are you coming up?”
I stared at him, astounded. This series was a huge opportunity for me, and I was consumed with the task before me. My intestines were doing a Mexican hat dance, and he obviously didn’t give a rat’s culata about anything but—
“Soon, soon,” I answered, wishing he’d just go away.
That was it, as far as I was concerned. As soon as I got the pilot of Apple Pie in the oven, he was gonna be out of here.
Too bad I’ll never know how Tony Curtis would have been to work with.
With Norman Lear there to keep a close eye on us, Dabney Coleman behaved himself and was wonderful in the role of Fast Eddie. Much of the action depended on exquisite timing, and he was right on target. The daughter and I got to do a nifty little tap dance. Jack Gilford managed to just miss knocking down any of the furnishings with his flailing cane. It was an hourlong pilot, with James Cromwell coming in as a nervous burglar. After all hell breaks out, we tie it up in a neat finale, with Fast Eddie Murdock saying he’ll stay around another week to try the arrangement—but no promises. At the curtain, the audience was on its feet, screaming unanimous approval.
Now we had to wait to see if ABC would pick it up as a series.
Unfortunately, Norman Lear was leaving television, going off to China for a while. Ahead of his time (as usual), he was deeply concerned about the plethora of extreme right-wing evangelists and propagandists and was launching People for the American Way, his liberal activist organization, which is still thriving. It worried me that he wouldn’t be around to shepherd us, but Fred Silverman, the head of ABC, who had set the series in motion for Norman, was still very enthusiastic. In late June, we got the word: Our little hourlong pilot would be shortened to a half hour, one of the sons eliminated, the other recast—but we’d been picked up for seven glorious shows, with Charlie Hauck (that terrific writer from Maude) as producer and Peter Bonerz of The Bob Newhart Show directing. Boola boola! We began shooting early in July, overjoyed.
Well, sir, that’s when the caca hit the fan.
With Norman out of the proverbial picture, it was up to Charlie and Peter to keep order, but they had more than they could handle with Dabney Coleman, who behaved as if the series were his own private Idaho. He monopolized rehearsal time, changed the scripts to suit him, consumed precious time with his demands, and drove the writers bonkers. Maybe I should have locked horns with him, but I’m a team player a
nd the stress of dealing with his shenanigans had me pulling my hair out. The rest of the cast was composed of professional, hardworking actors dedicated to making our new series an ensemble hit. Only one of us was doing The Dabney Coleman Show.
Launching another cannonball into our bow, Fred Silverman, who’d supported Apple Pie from the get-go, left ABC to become head of NBC, leaving his former subordinate Marcie Carcy of Carcy/Warner in charge of all new ABC series. When the seventh segment was in the can, we limped off, exhausted, to await news of how many—if any—more episodes would be picked up. We didn’t have long to wait. Carcy quickly dropped us from the fall lineup after airing only two episodes, with scant publicity, never giving the show a decent chance.
A bitter pill, my darlings, a bitter pill.
I’ll bet Norman Lear would have taken the show to Silverman at NBC, but…c’est la guerre. At least I’d gotten to do a soft-shoe number with one of my dancing idols, Ken Berry. And I no longer had to endure being around Coleman. And I do understand the reasoning behind it all: ABC had premiered two heavily advertised new series, Mork and Mindy and Vegas, two blockbusters. They felt no need to serve up Apple Pie for dessert. But the audience was robbed of a really terrific little offbeat series. And my big chance to have my own show got blown away like corn floss in one fell swoop.
I didn’t sit still for long. NBC offered me a year’s contract to be exclusively theirs for two new pilots and two Movies of the Week—pay or play, for $100,000—and I took it. Let me tell you about those two pilots, dear souls. Fred Silverman had an Asian comic he was pushing. I was to play his mother-in-law, with a Vegas comic…I’ll think of his name…I will…I will…
I won’t. I’ve blocked it out.
Anyway, Mr. Vegas comic was to play my husband. Neither of these guys had ever done any acting. The Korean comic wasn’t funny, and the Vegas comic couldn’t speak lines and do business at the same time. In one scene, he was to pour a glass of iced tea while speaking his lines, and he never got the hang of how to stop pouring while still talking, so while the speaking went on, so did the pouring, until the tea ran right over the lip of the glass, down onto the counter, and onto the floor, even while we were taping. Need I say the pilot did not get picked up? Need I say hallelujah?
Then Fred Silverman came up with another novice he was grooming for stardom, a pretty little blonde in her twenties who looked like a glass of milk—and acted like a glass of milk. This was supposed to be a comedy. It was called Mom and Me, MD. You can guess from the title how hilarious it was. I was cast as the head nurse of a big hospital, where she—glass of milk girl—was a doctor. To prepare for the role, I arranged to be shown the ropes by the head nurse at a large hospital.
I arrived at the crack of dawn to scrub up and get into booties, gown, and cap, first to observe an abdominal surgery, then visit the children in the burn unit. The nurse ushered me into the operating room, where a female patient was prepped for exploratory surgery to find the cause of abdominal blockage. I was placed about five feet from her head, just above the anesthesiologist. Two surgeons flanked her, one on either side. The head nurse told me to watch as much of the surgery as I could tolerate, and if I began to feel faint, to calm myself by looking up around the ceiling of the room where various antique operating tools were displayed, and not look back at the procedure until I felt steady. (Antique operating tools, I marveled. Now, there’s a sight to calm a woozy person right down. You betcha.)
The operation began with one of the surgeons expertly opening the abdominal cavity with a scalpel. Very neat. So far, so good. Then they reached over and pulled her abdomen apart and began hauling her intestines out, piling them beside her on the operating table. Great handfuls of intestines. As the doctors chatted and dug around, I felt a sudden burning interest in the array of fascinating antique operating tools on the ceiling.
Hmm, I thought, what’s that thing? Looks like a garden trowel. Wonder what that was for?
Down at the operating table, playing “Gut, gut, who’s got the gut?” one surgeon asked the other, “Did you get to the shore over the weekend, Harold?”
“Oh, yeah, great fishing. Almost landed a marlin.”
“Wow. Well, I don’t see anything unusual in here, do you?”
“Nope, nothing cancerous. Pull out some more of that gut on your side.”
And I’m musing, Gosh, that rusty little hand saw up there must have two dozen teeth...
“Wait a minute, Harold, what’s that mass there, under the colon?”
“Oh, yeah, let’s see…well, my God, Mike, look at this!”
“Bingo! There’s our problem!”
I peeked down at the operating table. Harold and Mike were pulling out a length of stiff intestine about three feet long, black as coal. They clamped off both ends, cut it free, and laid it aside. A few more seconds of rummaging revealed no more dead gut.
“Okay, I think we got it all, Harold. Let’s get her stitched up.”
At that point, the head nurse appeared at the door and asked if I was ready to visit the children’s burn ward. And you know, I was. After a very educating morning, I felt ready to play a head nurse. But definitely not ready to be a head nurse. It turned out the pilot wasn’t ready to be a series, either. It was only slightly funnier than abdominal surgery and did not get picked up.
Now I’d done my two obligatory pilots for NBC and started reading scripts for the two-hour movies of the week they sent me, none of which was worth doodly-squat. The contract was for play or pay, so I didn’t have to do any of them, but my agent and I agreed that I should be a good scout and find two I could bear. In The Day the Bubble Burst, which had a few pithy scenes, I played a blue-collar wife in the Great Depression. My contract almost over, I agreed to do The Great American Traffic Jam, playing an upper-crust wife who, with her husband—Ed McMahon—gets stranded in a limo on the freeway.
Oh, it was about as funny as Mom and Me, MD.
I see you back there. You with the beehive hairdo. Waving your arms from the back of the theatre, calling, “But Rue! What happened with The Greek? Don’t leave us dangling!”
Good Lord, Luanne, do we really have to go there? It was a divorce. Connect the dots. He juiced me like a ripe tomato. My lawyer wasn’t able to protect Mark’s college fund, but he did earn himself a hefty legal fee. Thirty grand, as I recall.
When the worst of the carnage was over and it came down to dividing the last trappings of our so-called marriage, we agreed to divide the wedding gifts equally—with one caveat: The Greek insisted that he keep all the wedding gifts that came from his guests and I keep the gifts from mine—a considerably smaller number, since he’d invited three times as many people.
But I said, “Okeydokey!”
Lette came over, I uncorked a bottle of wine, and we cracked open the wedding gift book—a three-ring loose-leaf binder in which Lette had carefully recorded each gift as it was received so I could, like a well-brought-up Southern girl, write thank-you notes. Since it was in her handwriting and the loose-leaf pages were easily removed and replaced, we went through it page by page, making what I decided were a few well-deserved adjustments.
We were careful not to change the more obvious gifts, since I knew The Greek would remember certain ones, and there were quite a few I didn’t need or particularly like from my side of the aisle, which I magnamimously donated to him.
“A garden fountain shaped like the Statue of Liberty,” said Lette, raising her wineglass to the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
“Definitely not from any friend of mine. He can have it.”
“Cuisinart food processor?”
“Mine. From Norman Lear.”
“Hand-painted five-foot wooden screen of Mohammed’s life, huge plastic salad bowl, and a bronze eagle to go over the fireplace?” said Lette. “To the asshole?”
“Oh, yeah!” I raised a toast to her.
I had personally selected all the dinnerware at the wedding shop, but most of it had come f
rom his friends, so I had to let go of the lovely twelve-setting dinnerware ensemble.
“Hey, wait a minute, Baby Rue. He ended up with fourteen plates,” tallied Lette.
“Credit the two extras to my aunt Wenonah Sue!” I told her. “Hell, I shopped till I dropped for that pattern.”
Lette and I got shnockered on red wine and laughed till we ached.
And I still have those two plates.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Never sneeze into a full ashtray.”
—RUE McCLANAHAN
Once when Lette was out of town, she asked me to guard her little trunk with her birth certificate and other papers. She was hardly out the door before I rushed to check her birth date. I knew she was a Taurus and was tickled to see that we were born the same year.
“I have a confession to make,” I told her years later. “I peeked.”
Astonished, she said, “Why, Baby Rue, I would never have done that!”
But my feeling was “What red-blooded best friend could possibly resist?”
By that time, Lette and I had shared plenty of drama and comedy, onstage and off. But she hadn’t told me her age. And she didn’t tell me she’d discovered a lump in her breast. Returning to L.A. from a brief trip to New York, I was stunned to learn that she’d had a mastectomy and was still in the hospital.
“Hey, Baby Rue.” She waved from her bed, blond and smiling, sitting up, sassy, “Surprise!”
She soon went into remission and kept performing, singing as powerfully as ever. She left The Jolly Cocksucker for a much better gig at Maldonado’s, a popular Pasadena restaurant. I went to hear her perform, and she was invariably hilarious. When she and Jack moved to a North Hollywood apartment she called “The Piss Pit,” she had to sell her grand piano, which she’d painted fire-engine red, so I bought it and had it refinished in mahogany. She gave me voice lessons, and I got her to go to French classes with me. Later, she started chemotherapy and we girlfriends took turns taking her to the hospital, where she sometimes stayed for a week or two. I visited, confused. The nurses behaved as if she would soon be out for good. I never asked Jack or anyone else what her prognosis was. I assumed she was going to get over it, and she seemed to think so, too.
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