Mom Doth Murder Sleep

by James Yaffe

  The unspoken message in all this—but it came across loud and clear—was that nobody in this hick town could possibly be good enough to handle such a demanding role. Cunningham was cast as Macbeth’s fellow soldier Banquo, who gets killed off halfway through the play.

  So there was a lot of tension during rehearsals. Everybody, even the stage crew, kept saying what a success the show was going to be. Osborn kept telling us what a superb job we were doing: “It’s about time this town got exposed to some real theatre!” But the fact was, you could cut the tension with a knife.

  And then came that Sunday afternoon, the twenty-ninth, four days before opening night.

  * * *

  The cause of all the trouble was that Allan Franz sat in on the rehearsal.

  Everybody was pretty excited about that, naturally, Franz being one of the biggest directors in Hollywood today. He comes out with a new picture every three or four years, and I’ve seen and loved them all, even the last one, that big epic about the building of the Panama Canal, and how the United States corrupted the natives.

  He was in town that week because his daughter Laurie, who was starting her sophomore year at Mesa Grande College, was playing Lady Macduff. Osborn told us he never knew Allan Franz back in his Hollywood period, but that didn’t stop him from asking the great man to make a few comments afterward to the cast.

  I recognized Franz right away, because I’d seen pictures of him in film magazines. He was a middle-sized man, in his fifties, not too fat or too thin, with a bald head and thick horn-rimmed glasses; he looked more like your garden-variety shoe salesman than a Hollywood big shot. He spoke with just a touch of a Brooklyn accent. He was born and brought up in Brooklyn, and he had never been ashamed to tell that to the interviewers.

  He began his comments after the run-through by clearing his throat a few times, running his hand around his collar, looking up at the ceiling and down at the floor.

  “It’s good,” he said. “It’s a very creditable effort. I’ve seen plenty of professional productions of the Scottish play that weren’t nearly as creditable.”

  I’d better explain that remark. Actors are notoriously superstitious—who wouldn’t be, in such a risky profession?—and one of their oldest superstitions is that Macbeth is jinxed, that productions of it are disaster-prone. This doesn’t mean that it’s never performed; as a matter of fact, it’s performed more often than any of Shakespeare’s tragedies except Hamlet. But precautions are always taken to keep the bad luck away, and one of the most important is that the name of the play must never be spoken out loud inside the theatre—unless the actors have to speak it in the course of rehearsals and performances. “The Scottish play” is the most popular euphemism by means of which the roof of the theatre is prevented from crashing down on everybody’s head.

  All of this, incidentally, I learned from Martin Osborn, in the speech he made at the beginning of our very first rehearsal. When somebody asked him if he really believed in that superstitious crap, Osborn drew himself up and said, “Of course I don’t. What do you think I am, some gibbering old gypsy crone? I haven’t got a superstitious bone in my body. However, I don’t see the point of taking unnecessary chances.”

  Anyway, as Allan Franz started talking, most of us were sitting around on the stage, gazing down, hanging on his words, and he was leaning back and looking up at us from the aisle seat. Osborn was sitting in the seat next to him.

  “One thing I like,” Franz said. “You’re doing it fast, with plenty of cuts. All Shakespeare plays should be done with plenty of cuts. He was a big overwriter, that was the style in those days. He’d never get away with it these days. That’s why I’ll never make a movie out of one of his things. If you trim the fat the way you ought to, the college professors and the critics jump on you. If you leave him alone, you bore millions of people to death, and you die at the box office.

  “Now, here’s some other things you’re doing that I like. Macduff and our hero, that’s a good sword fight at the end. You’re really working up a sweat. Lots of grunting and thrashing around, practically Kurosawa. Shakespeare always threw in a good fight at the end, he knew he had to make up for all those long dull speeches. Only suggestion I’d make to you fellows—go even further, throw yourselves into it even harder, draw blood.

  “Also, I very much like the scene with Banquo’s ghost. The way he comes rising up from the trapdoor, looking like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, and the kid who’s serving dinner drops the tray—that’s good strong horror stuff. And you deserve praise that you don’t use that trapdoor any other time in the play. Most amateur theatres, if they’ve got a trapdoor they can’t keep their hands off it, they’re sending people up and down it so often it’s like a public elevator.

  “Now about your directional concept, Marty. Setting the Scottish play in the old West and dressing everybody up in cowboy suits. It’s interesting all right. It’s original. Makes the audience look at the play in a fresh light.”

  “That was the idea, Allan—”

  “Only problem I’ve got with it is the language. That’s pretty fancy English you’ve got those cowboys talking. Thee’s and thou’s, and blank verse, and all those complicated metaphors. But maybe, after a while, people won’t notice. They’ll just take it for granted this is the way cowboys talked in Elizabethan times.

  “Now I’ve got some suggestions for some of you actors specifically. Most of you are doing a terrific job, understand that? If I give you a suggestion, it’s not because I think your performances aren’t great. It’s because I think you could make them even greater. Okay, let’s start with the leading role.…”

  And Franz ran down the cast list, one person at a time, always finding something to praise before he got to something he didn’t like. He even touched on me, for a second or two. “Fleance, Banquo’s son, that’s a good scream for help you’re letting out in the murder scene. Could you make it even louder and more bloodcurdling on the night of the show? Doesn’t matter how sophisticated people are, a good old-fashioned bloodcurdling scream is still surefire.”

  Then Franz turned his attention to Laurie. She was his daughter, a tall redhead with incredibly delicate features and a body there was only one word for, willowy. Franz addressed her just as impersonally as he had everybody else. “Lady Macduff, I like your general idea about the character. I agree that she’s a tough Scotswoman who’s been through the wars. I am getting tired of teary, trembling Lady Macduffs who faint away at the sight of blood. But if I can give you one word of advice—watch out you don’t carry it to the other extreme. She isn’t some kind of floozie selling her body along Hollywood Boulevard. She’s a lady. She’s got class, elegance, education, self-control. When she pleads with the murderers to spare her son, she isn’t coming on to them for an evening’s trade. Not that you’re creating that effect all the way through, just here and there, so I’m only asking you to be careful.

  “Now who else? Oh yeah, the little fellow that’s playing the Third Murderer? I like what you’re doing, Mr. er—uh—It’s only five or six lines, but you’re making the most of them. I like that funny little lisp you’re giving him. That’s a terrific idea, this murderer has a lisp, he’s a kind of pansy, right? Makes him even more sinister and frightening. Positively Hitchcock!”

  The Third Murderer was Harold Hapgood, who ran an insurance agency in the daytime. He was very short, shorter than anybody else in the cast, and he had a round face that looked as if it wasn’t quite out of baby fat, though he was probably in his early thirties. The lisp that Franz had praised so much was Harold’s normal way of talking, but this didn’t stop him from blushing and murmuring, “Thank you, Mr. Franz. It’s so gratifying. You try your best. No such thing as a small part, only a small actor—”

  Franz had already turned away from him and was blinking around behind his thick glasses. “Have I covered everybody? No, there’s one performance I left out.”

  He turned in Lloyd Cunningham’s direction. “I’ve been s
aving you for last, Banquo, because you’re the one performance that I think is seriously wrong. I mean, all wrong.”

  Cunningham, who was tall and broad-shouldered, with a lot of beef on him, met Franz’s gaze without flinching, a faint smile on his face. I had to admire his cool.

  “You’d be doing a terrific job, Banquo, giving a great performance,” Franz said, “if you happened to be acting in some other play. You’re supposed to be Banquo in the Scottish play, or am I mistaken? So why are you playing Hamlet? All that sweetness and gentleness and nobility! Didn’t it ever occur to you that Banquo is sore at M——at his friend? They both got predictions from the weird sisters, but the only one who’s benefiting from them is the other guy. And that’s because he’s taken matters into his own hands, right? Banquo would like a little slice of the pie himself. Why should he be left out in the cold, especially since he knows for sure what his friend’s been up to? In other words, you’re turning him into a lily-livered pansy. Hamlet, did I say? What you’re playing is Torch Song Trilogy.”

  All through rehearsals Cunningham had been careful to keep himself under control, to be cooperative, to take direction patiently, even though Osborn had done him out of being the director and the star. Cunningham was the closest thing to a professional that the Players had. But what Franz had just said to him, it seemed to me, was enough to make any actor hit the ceiling.

  And it got even worse, because Osborn, like a damn fool, had to speak up too. Couldn’t resist the temptation to brownnose the great Franz.

  “I’m glad you agree with me about that, Allan,” Osborn said. “I’ve been telling Lloyd exactly that since the first rehearsal. Give it some anger, some threat, some balls. All that sweetness and nobility is getting too sticky and boring. But Lloyd just hasn’t been able to see the point. Actors get stuck in a bad interpretation, and it takes dynamite to blast them out of it. Well, maybe he’ll listen to you.”

  Cunningham started looking dangerous. He had let it drop once that he worked out every morning at a gym. But he didn’t get violent, he kept his explosion to words. “Okay, Martin, you don’t like how I’m playing Banquo, you want more anger and hostility? I’m glad to oblige. I’m feeling nothing but anger and hostility for how you’re screwing up this play! And since I never have enjoyed funerals, I’m quitting as of now!” Then Cunningham threw his script across the stage, and it hit Osborn right in the nose. After a lucky shot like that, how could Cunningham find an exit line to top it?

  Well, he did. He strode across the stage, turned to face the group, and said, “Good luck to all of you. I hope you have a big success—with Macbeth!” He spit out the last word and disappeared into the wings.

  The rest of us had our jaws hanging open. I suppose everybody was thinking what I was thinking: This was Sunday, and Thursday was the opening. How were we going to make it? Was the old Macbeth jinx starting to operate already?

  But the Banquo problem disappeared a few seconds later. As soon as Cunningham was out of there, Osborn announced he would take over the part of Banquo himself. Years ago, when he was an actor in New York, he had played it to great critical acclaim—as he had already told us about a thousand times during rehearsals—and he knew all the lines. In my opinion, he didn’t look particularly unhappy that the whole thing had happened.

  But Cunningham’s blow-up seemed to set off a delayed reaction in everybody else. All the tension that had been building up for the last three weeks came bursting out in one big tidal wave: people screaming at Osborn, people defending him and cursing Cunningham, people turning on each other and saying all the things they had been too polite to say up to then. A lot of the hostility was directed at Randolph Le Sage, the New York actor who was playing Macbeth. Some people were saying he was the cause of all the trouble; Osborn never should’ve brought in this outsider, and he wasn’t giving that good a performance either.

  The person saying this the loudest was Sally Michaels, who was playing Lady Macbeth. Sally taught third grade in one of the public schools, but she had been acting with the Players for years; she did most of the leading women over forty.

  She was rather tall and busty, went in for long strings of beads and gaudy knitted sweaters, and had the world’s heartiest laugh. She used a brand of perfume that she referred to as “Magnolia Blossoms, inspired by Gone With the Wind.” I kind of liked her, to tell the truth, and I could see why a lot of men found her attractive. I don’t think she meant badly, it was just that she couldn’t keep her mouth shut.

  Naturally, Le Sage wasn’t going to sit quietly while she attacked him, so he hit right back with some remarks about the unprofessionalism of his fellow cast members, especially female cast members who jumped into bed promiscuously with every male in sight. The louder and more vulgar the male, the better they seemed to like him. If there was anything Le Sage deplored, in or out of the theatre, it was vulgarity and bad taste.

  Sally turned a few shades of red and purple at this. I don’t think she minded being called promiscuous nearly as much as being told she had bad taste.

  Then Bernie Michaels joined in on the free-for-all. Bernie was a chiropractor in real life, and also Sally’s ex-husband. They had split up years ago but were still on friendly terms, so naturally he couldn’t let Le Sage insult her. Bernie had struck me from the start as one of the gentlest, most easygoing guys in the world, perfect casting for King Duncan, whom he was playing in Macbeth. It really amazed me to see him turning into a towering inferno when the old chivalric knight in him got aroused.

  While all this ensemble screaming went on, Allan Franz had his chin down and was huddled in his aisle seat. He looked sort of pained and brooding, as if he was blaming himself for stirring up this storm and praying for it to die down.

  A personal note: During the storm the only thing I could think about was poor Laurie. I could see her in her corner of the stage, looking bewildered and stricken and all those other things that make your heart go out to a pretty girl in trouble. So I started across the stage to her, but there were too many people in the way, yelling at each other and in no mood to step aside for me, and before I could reach her I saw her jump off the stage and run down the aisle to the back of the theatre.

  Her father saw her too. The sight seemed to jolt him out of his brooding silence. He got to his feet and followed Laurie down the aisle. So I decided to hell with it.

  Martin Osborn had joined the shouting match now. For some reason he had decided to pursue one of his favorite beefs against Sally. “Good God, are you wearing that horror again? I hope you’re not planning to expose our audience to that piece of junk on opening night!”

  He was referring to Sally’s ring, a heavy silver band with a huge red stone that more or less looked like a grinning face, whether animal or human was hard to tell. Sally had been wearing this eyesore to rehearsals, and Osborn had been nasty about it two or three times already.

  As usual, Sally put on her dignity act. “As I’ve explained to you till I’m blue in the face, I chose this ring especially for my role in this play. It’s been in my jewelry box for years, ever since it was given to me, in happier, more innocent days, by one who truly loved me. Hopelessly, I’m sorry to say. Feelings can’t be forced. But I always revered and respected his love, though unable to return it, because he was a person of impeccable good taste, as this beautiful heirloom of his family clearly proves!”

  “It looks like something he picked up on the boardwalk in Atlantic City,” said Osborn. “You’re supposed to be Lady Macbeth, Queen of Scotland, a woman of the highest classiness. You wear that monstrosity in a performance, the audience’ll think you’re a dance-hall hostess. They’ll laugh you off the stage.”

  “I don’t perform,” Sally said, “for the type of louts and rowdies that apparently form your circle of acquaintance. This ring happens to be perfect for Lady—for the Scottish lady. This ring is every inch the Queen. You might as well know I have no intention of taking it off. I expect to wear it on opening night and for ev
ery performance after that.”

  Osborn looked as if he’d be happy to go on with the argument, but by that time it was six o’clock and he had to let us go. So I got in my car and drove uptown to Dave’s mother’s house for dinner.

  * * *

  During that dinner I told Dave and his mother about the rehearsal, doing my best to make the story coherent in between mouthfuls of food. I finished along with the dessert, and was wolfing down one of the strawberry tarts and using my coffee to soften it up for the trip, when the old lady leaned forward. Her voice was very casual. “This girl you were feeling bad for, this movie director’s daughter? You got to know her well since the rehearsals started?”

  I pretty much knew what this question was all about—I do have a mother of my own—but I made my voice casual too. “We’ve been out for coffee a couple of times.”

  “You like her maybe?”

  “She’s a wonderful person. She’s had everything she ever wanted all her life, being brought up in Hollywood and all, but you wouldn’t know it from the way she behaves. She’s just as simple and unspoiled—”

  “Maybe, after the play starts, you could bring her here for dinner. She eats food, don’t she, like ordinary people?”

  Dave broke in at this point; I think he felt sorry for me and was trying to rescue me by changing the subject. “Do you suppose Lloyd Cunningham could’ve been planning this all along, Mom? He was mad because he didn’t get to direct Macbeth or play the lead. So maybe he accepted the part of Banquo intending to quit at the last moment and ruin the production.”