“We’re doing The Red Mill,” I said.
“Well, let it be a lesson to you. No one is going to see you here, and you’ll see the reaction. When you do a serious role they’ll be out there oohing and aahing.”
“I’m doing Tea and Sympathy at the end of the season,” I said.
She looked at me critically. “You can handle that. Boarding school student? Yes, but just. If you’re going to do it, now’s the time. How old are you?”
“Twenty-five,” I said.
“You’ll change a lot in the next five years. Not for the worse. But you’ll get more serious looking. Don’t try to do Shakespeare before you’re thirty.”
“Romeo?” I said.
“Don’t ever do Romeo and Juliet. The public is sick of it. So am I. Besides, everyone knows the plot. Who cares about doomed young love anymore? Nobody’s doomed anymore. They just take pills and go to the analyst.”
“How astute you are, Estelle,” I said.
“Are you making fun of me?” She fixed me with that gimlet eye of hers.
“I am, sort of. But also I hoped that we know each other well enough now I could get away with it,” I said.
“So what gives with that boyfriend of yours? How’s that going? You’re a great-looking couple. Although you’re going to have to lie about this later and pretend that you’re straight. Unless the two of you quit this gig altogether and go into nursing.”
I decide to put a hold on the nursing concept and concentrated on my long speeches.
Toca finally decided on six different places around the Abbey. He added one scene in the Abbey courtyard, another by the stream that ran at the edge of the lawn in front of the Abbey terrace, one with Estelle and I leaning out of a window on the second floor. “It suggests a bedroom,” he said. And one final scene with the entire cast leading the audience for a grand finale onto the stage of the stable/theater.
It seemed very ambitious to me. We were not going to wear microphones, and someone was going to have to carry the lights here and there. “We’ll carry torches,” Toca said. I prayed that togas would not be flying up or flaring up in the night.
Toca was successful in enlisting townspeople as extras. Most of them were from the foreign community, but Madame Cerise, the baker’s wife, started appearing at rehearsals, as did the wife of the butcher, two elderly ladies who lived on the corner beside the café who turned out to be mother and daughter, and the hotel keeper’s wife, a strident blonde who perhaps hoped Estelle would drop dead at the last minute.
The lady who ran the electric products store also appeared at the final rehearsals. She was the other major blonde in town and, despite her hearing aid, brought a bit of flash to the doings around Cornichons.
Graham was called upon to be part of the Greek warrior contingent, and so was Cass the Heartbreaker. The dentist, Monsieur Fusil, decided to show off his tennis legs in a tunic, and Toca thought a party of five would be quite adequate to represent the warriors. He ordered tunics, with metal breastplates, and helmets and boots that laced up our calves, all from Paris. We were quite a sight. My outfit was scarlet, and I mean scarlet. Steve had to work to keep up with me in his sky-blue costume. Graham put us all in the shade in his silver and white. Cass got black and silver, and the leggy dentist got navy blue, which suited him quite well. He had a good profile under his helmet. We made quite a dashing suite, to tell the truth.
Nina had been enlisted to be Estelle’s handmaiden, and she added some beauty to the front ranks of the Trojan ladies. It was actually quite a good-looking company, which was fortunate for all of us as opening night was a disaster. We were only planning five performances of each play, and rehearsal times were, of necessity, brief.
The semiprofessional company held themselves together rather well, although there were little screams from the French ladies as they tried to cross the wet lawns in their spike-heeled shoes. No Greek sandals for them. Cass fell into the creek and lost his helmet. Steve said he was quite sure M. Fusil pushed him in. He had heard that Cass had been seen talking at length with Madame Fusil at the bank.
Estelle’s coronet came off and fell out the window and hit Monsieur Ramponneau, the roofer, in the head. He put it on and wore it the rest of the evening, which made it difficult to convince our rambling viewers that this was a serious drama.
The audience was the real problem, as they had trouble finding us as we drifted like will-o’-the-wisps about the Abbey grounds. The little Greek dance was rather successful, and the kids capered about nicely as the portable CD player floated the music of shepherd’s pipes into the night air. Little Henrietta was particularly good miming that she was playing a flute. There is something a bit possessed about Henrietta. She will go far in the theater.
However, the kids weren’t sure where the next scene was so they led the audience around the back of the Abbey and into the parking lot before Toca could chase them down and lead them back to the main entrance. The ladies of the court were assembled under the cedar of Lebanon, and my party looked completely ridiculous standing in front of the café ready to stride through the Abbey gates as we waited.
It was a long evening and the audience began slipping off to the café every time we shifted from one venue to another. By the time we finally got them into the theater, only a handful of them were left and the cast itself was footsore and careworn. It was also almost midnight.
At the end there was a weary little round of applause and the few stalwarts who had managed to see the whole thing through staggered into the night. Estelle turned to Toca and said, “That was a nightmare.”
Toca said, “It will be much better tomorrow night.”
It rained the next night, and we performed the entire thing under umbrellas, cast and audience. At least it wasn’t very cold. Nina seemed to be enjoying it very much. I didn’t get to talk to her because I was changing my costume in Steve’s room and then spending the night there, because when we got done doing the big ugly I didn’t want to wake them up climbing the stairs to my tower room and risk waking up Theo.
The photographs of the production looked splendid. You would never have guessed that much of the lighting came from car headlights and that everyone was wearing rubber boots under their togas because of the rain, dew, fog, and other moist activities prevalent in the Loire Valley in midsummer. Estelle said later that it was “outlandish.” I guess that pretty well wraps it up. Listen, it was one more thing for my résumé.
Estelle Tells It Like It Is
“I have to work or I’d do nothing but think about young men,” Estelle said.
I had just asked her if she worked because she needed to or because she wanted to.
“I’ve really done nothing in my whole life except work as an actress and be involved with men. If I’d had my own way I wouldn’t have even been an actress.
“I’ve always had a horror of a domestic life. My mother and father fought all the time, so they hardly set me an example of marital bliss. And you know I started out working very early. I was one of the children in Watch on the Rhine. During the war I was in I Remember Mama with Montgomery Clift. Talk about earning a living. That wasn’t a lot different from working at Woolworth’s. But I did that for two years until I got too big. That play ran forever.
“I probably worked a lot because of my hair. It was blond and thick, and I looked like a little angel. Which I wasn’t. I understudied Patty what-the-hell-was-her-name in The Bad Seed. I understudied Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker where she played Helen Keller. Of course she was never sick, the little bitch. She would have gone on if she had the measles, whooping cough, and the plague all at the same time. I already had a boyfriend at that time. How old was I? I said I was eleven, but I was actually thirteen. We used to neck a lot backstage because I only had to be in the theater ten minutes before curtain time and sit around with nothing to do until the curtain came down. One of my parents delivered me to the theater, and a friend of theirs picked me up after the show and brought me home. H
e gave me my first real kiss in a taxi one night. He wanted to do more, but I was in love with my little boyfriend and after that my boyfriend and I went home on the subway together. I was thirteen and convinced my parents that I was old enough. And then the show closed, and I wasn’t out late anymore. By the time I got into the chorus of Bloomer Girl I was nineteen and nobody had to pick me up anymore. God knows, plenty tried. I wouldn’t say I was a hot number, but I had something.”
“Did you always love acting?” I said. “Did you ever wish you’d done something else?”
She said, “First you have to realize I’m from an era when women didn’t work for the most part. My something else would have been being married to someone or working as a secretary. It’s only very recently that women are expected to have careers. So I was lucky that I could work at something that paid pretty well and let me sleep in in the morning.
“And it was the only thing I really have a talent for. I cannot sing. Never could. I can dance a little, but that’s an even more unlikely career than being an actress. If you’re not a star your career is over by thirty anyway.
“What really interested me were men. I will say that acting was the only thing I loved that wasn’t another human being. So I undoubtedly threw myself into the right thing. But I would always have dropped everything for a man. I always lived so I could leave for parts unknown . . . Denver, San Francisco, Venezuela . . . on one day’s notice. I did leave for San Francisco on one day’s notice. We hadn’t crossed the George Washington Bridge before I realized I had made the mistake of a lifetime. That was with Punto Carretas. I was with Punto off and on for thirty years.
“Do you ever get the feeling that God is trying to head you away from someone because they are really wrong for you and that you insist in going in that direction anyway?” Estelle said.
“I think maybe I am right now,” I said.
“Yes. Hmmm. Steve. Well, you never know,” she said. “I’m sure if I hadn’t insisted on being with Punto that my life would have run a lot more smoothly. But on the other hand, I was never with anyone else who made me feel so complete sexually. So if I had sort of gone along with God’s plan for me, I would have had a more orderly life, but I wouldn’t have felt that I lived it so thoroughly. What do you think of that?”
“Well, if you sense there is a plan for your life and you refuse to go along with it, I guess you only have yourself to blame,” I said.
“That’s right. No kvetching later. Really. Only human beings would think they know better than God.”
“Do you think there is a plan?” I said.
“Absolutely. All those missed taxis have made it quite clear to me,” Estelle said. “Why don’t you get me a Coca-Cola?”
“Diet?” I said. We were sitting at a table in front of the little café near the Abbey gates. The students and teachers hung out there, but we were the only clients on this sunny, heavy-shadowed afternoon.
“Oh no. I need all the energy I can get,” Estelle said. When I came back, I sat down, put her Coke in front of her and said, “What about all those missed taxis?”
She said, “I know there is a God because every time I approach a street corner looking for a taxi one goes by, sometimes several, just as I am about ten feet too far away to hail it. And when I get to the corner there is no taxi in sight anywhere. This happens to me constantly, no matter what city I am in. It has my whole life.
“It is quite clear to me from this that the hundreds . . . thousands? . . . of times taxis have just missed seeing me indicates a pattern. I have no idea what the pattern is and I make no pretension that I ever will. I think these totally unimportant clues let you know that you are caught up in some kind of master plan. It’s like déjà vu. I have that quite often, when I sense that I have already dreamed or imagined or perhaps lived in another life some event. But it is always totally unimportant. Turning to someone at a party, putting a dish on a shelf, things like that. Yes, I’m convinced that we are part of some great tapestry being woven, but I’m also convinced we’ll never know what it is and we are quite unimportant in the overall web and woof. That’s why I didn’t mind screwing up a little bit by having my way and pursuing someone like Punto Carretas.”
“He was a singer, wasn’t he? Singer and guitar player? Something like that?” I said.
“Yes. A complete fake. He always tried to pass himself off as a Latin lover. Actually, he was Chilean. And they’re about as Latin as Santa Claus. I was absolutely loony about him. I went out to Hollywood with him and of course they weren’t interested in him . . . or me. I turned down the second lead in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf because Punto was singing in a hotel in Chicago and wanted me to be with him. Uta Hagen could have killed me. I was her student. She’s really the best actress the United States ever produced. Then Kim Stanley. Then me. Don’t talk to me about Meryl Streep. When she did Sophie’s Choice I always called it Sophie’s Nose. I hate that school of acting that’s all about ‘Look, I’m acting.’ She has skill. She doesn’t have charisma.”
“Glenn Close?”
“Please. She looks like Andrew Jackson. And so serious. When she does comedy it makes me want to weep. She was in some horrible Christian youth singing group when she was young and never got over it. Life is so serious. All those people are basically unsophisticated. Marlon Brando is to blame.”
“Forever a teen,” I said.
“Exactly.” She gave me a look of approval and turned her attention to her Coca-Cola. “Is there something wrong with the straws in France? When I first came over years ago there was always something wrong with the toilets. Now they’ve got almost everything right, but they still don’t think you should drink through a straw. Maybe they’re right. Where did that idea come from?”
“Atlanta, probably,” I said.
“Yes. It probably took too much energy for Southern ladies and gentlemen to lift their glass in all that heat. Anyway, you know what sophistication is, don’t you?”
“Do I?” I said.
“It’s the period between disillusion and defeat. If a person isn’t disillusioned I could hardly say that they are grown up. It’s that battle to remain undefeated that makes for character.
“I often think of people like Picasso or Leopold Stokowski or Brando or most of the Rockefellers. They’re always men. They have never known disillusion. The world treated them very well, and they got their own way practically from the beginning. You don’t grow up under those circumstances. Most men don’t grow up anyway. Unless they’re gay. That forces you to grow up.”
“What a nice thing to say,” I said.
“Oh, no. Gay men and all women have the same row to hoe. Except that women always understand that their looks may be one of their most powerful bargaining tools, but they have a limited shelf life. You have to get your bargaining done early. Gay men don’t always understand that and are surprised at the age of forty that no one is interested in them anymore. They always thought it was their personality the other guys found so fascinating. Funny, isn’t it?”
“You are very observant,” I said.
Estelle pushed her empty glass away. “And what is it with the ice in this country? They act as though the ice cube was made of gold. Observant. Yes. I think that’s what you’re supposed to do with your time. I observed Punto. After a couple of years I noticed that when he was foul-tempered he was hungry. We’d be driving along, and he’d be saying, ‘You have no friends.’ ‘Nobody likes you.’ ‘You have no talent.’ ‘If you ever had an idea I gave it to you.’ And I’d say, ‘Pull over, Punto. There’s a diner.’ And we’d go in, he’d feed up, and suddenly I was the one woman for him in the whole world. He had his moments. He used to say, ‘You dance to my music.’ And he wasn’t referring to his guitar playing. I did and wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I’ll say this, when you were fucked by Punto Carretas, you stayed fucked for awhile.”
“When did he die?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s not dead.” Estelle looked at me
sideways.
“He’s not?” I said.
“No. He’s in Philadelphia with a bad back. I see him about once a year. Bad back? It’s more like a pain in the ass. He’s lost his looks completely. He does nothing but complain. I bought the stupid house for him. I must have fought my way back to my own destiny because I’m not with him today. God didn’t punish me that much for my waywardness.”
“Here comes Toca,” I said.
“Talk about being punished for my waywardness,” Estelle said, turning toward him. “Hello, Toca. We were just running our lines. Tomorrow we’re going to start getting ready for Tea and Sympathy.”
Brigitte Balnéaire
“She’s all painted up like a stolen car,” Henrietta said. Actually she said, “Elle est maquillé comme une voiture volé,” which is funnier in French. Particularly when coming from the lips of a ten-year-old.
I said, “You’d better be careful, Henrietta. We’re doing Phedre, who is a very mean person. Mlle. Balnéaire might treat you very badly on stage if she hears you criticizing her.”
Henrietta replied, “Je m’en fou,” which roughly translates as “I don’t give a fuck.”
I said, “You could at least say, ‘Je m’en fiche,’” which translates as something like “I don’t give a darn.”
Henrietta looked at me as though I was the biggest kind of fool. “Mais, je m’en fou!” she said. “But I really don’t give a fuck.”
Miss Balnéaire looked to be something of an “I don’t give a fuck” kind of person herself, as our group watched her descend from her limousine. She was what the French call une monstre sacrée. “A sacred monster.” She had great legs. She had the nerve to be wearing a miniskirt. Her upper body was vague, encased in some kind of marabou feather jacket, pink, of course, which only revealed ample cleavage. Hair. Blonde, of course, and practically covering her eyes in a sheepdog bang. And it was true, she had not neglected the makeup department. Since she had been a starlet in the 1960s she was obviously somewhere between fifty and death, but it was impossible to pick out an exact age. The range was large.
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