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by Harper, Valerie

I got to Utah a couple of days early. The director told me that I should drive out into the desert to a ranch and meet Simbi, my feline costar. When I heard the name, I breathed a sigh of relief. Simbi was clearly a miniature Simba. I was expecting to meet a diminutive, playful cub.

  Out at the ranch I was greeted by a tanned, blond, long-haired husband and wife named John and Bev Pinder who had rescued Simbi when he was little. They told me all sorts of charming stories about their lion—how bonded he was to their dog, a crazy black mutt called Edsel, and how much he enjoyed frolicking with their cattle. They gave me some fragrant branches of herb that Simbi enjoyed, so he would like me and feel safe with me. I went around to the back of their house, ready to meet this gentle creature.

  Simbi was no cub. He was an enormous four-hundred-pound lion, a veritable king of the jungle. He was massive and pretty terrifying. The couple instructed me to approach him holding out the branches. When I got within reach, Simbi lowered his head and put his mouth around my ankle. Not a bite, just a hold.

  “Do not move,” John said.

  I didn’t. Did the guy think I was nuts?

  “Simbi, let go.” Slowly, the lion released his jaws. Later that evening, bruises welled up under my skin.

  The couple had a very strange method for getting Simbi to obey. Bev would wield a pink and teal plastic lawn chair while saying, “Bad lawn chair. Bad lawn chair.” That giant beast was petrified of a cheap, spindly chair. To him, it was worse than a whip. While she waved the lawn chair, John held a vacuum hose. He had only to show Simbi the vacuum cleaner to make the lion cower.

  When it came time for me to film the scene with the lion, the Pinders were ready with their strange tools. They stood nearby, lawn chair and vacuum at the ready. The stage manager took all necessary precautions. The craft services trailer was shut down. There could be no cooking smells or sounds of clattering dishes. The crew was instructed to wear gloves to minimize noise. They even went so far as to banish menstruating women.

  Luckily, Simbi performed without a hitch. He didn’t snarl or growl; nor did he open his jaws. The lawn chair and the vacuum did not come into play. But Simbi was definitely my scariest costar. And I’ve had some doozies.

  In one telephone scene, an actor I was working with was told by the director to “let the anger out” and pulled the prop phone out of the wall, taking a chunk of the wall with it. It took an hour to repair the set and reattach the phone. Another well-known actor I worked with on a television show was a sweetheart all morning, helping me with my role. After lunch, he became a snarling, furious lunatic. Major Jekyll and Hyde demonstration! I think he’d hit the Scotch at noon.

  After my harrowing guest spot on Promised Land, I did a couple of pilots that didn’t get picked up. It was becoming harder and harder to get a show onto network TV. I also appeared on a short-lived, but excellent, comedy called The Office (different Office), written by Susan Beavers, who now writes Two and a Half Men. It was a very clever sitcom about a secretarial pool and interoffice politics. It was great fun to be directed by Jay Sandrich again and to work with a terrific actress, Debra Jo Rupp, who later played the mom on That 70’s Show. When The Office was canceled after six episodes, I began to entertain the notion of getting back into theater. I missed the stage and thought that perhaps the fates were telling me it was time to return.

  As so often happens, out of the blue, I got a call from a man named Julian Schlossberg who was a producer on an off-Broadway show called Death Defying Acts, a collection of three one-act plays written by David Mamet, Elaine May, and Woody Allen. The show had been running for six months, and they were looking to bring in an entirely new cast. Julian, a truly lovely guy, wanted me to replace Linda Lavin in the May and Allen plays. Here were Linda and I changing places once again, and not for the last time. Although Linda and I look nothing alike, fans often mistake us, asking me how Mel from Alice is doing and asking Linda, “How’s Bren?”

  It was a perfect reentry into theater. Death Defying Acts featured an ensemble cast portraying delightful nutcases on the verge of nervous collapse while facing their own mortality. It was witty and mischievous, written by three gifted playwrights at the top of their game. The show was running at the Variety Theatre, a historic off-Broadway theater on Third Avenue, which once showcased vaudeville, burlesque, and later porno movies. Ah, the ever changing face of Manhattan.

  Our family moved to New York. We rented an apartment in the Tower Records building on Fourth and Broadway in the Village. It was a real show business building. Diane Keaton, Cher, and Tempestt Bledsoe (of The Cosby Show fame) had all been tenants at one time. Our duplex was owned by Thomas Keneally, the gifted Australian author of Schindler’s List. His previous tenant had been Jude Law.

  Cristina, now twelve, was excited by the move. She loved our apartment because she had her own little bedroom and bathroom, accessed by an open stairway. The day we moved in, she discovered a clear shower curtain in her bathroom with a funky black design. “Mommy, can we keep this?” she asked, unfurling the curtain. Stretched wide, the pattern revealed itself: SEX printed in giant black letters across the clear plastic.

  “Sure, honey,” I said. “But we have to wash it first.”

  “Okay, Mom. But don’t worry. I’m sure Jude Law is a very clean person.”

  Cristina didn’t just love the apartment; she loved New York. On weekends, she often visited Angela and Ginger in New Jersey. We enrolled her in the seventh grade at the exquisite Grace Church School, built by the same architect who designed the famous St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The school was walking distance from our house, a few blocks north on Tenth and Broadway.

  I was able to walk to the theater on Third Avenue between Thirteenth and Fourteenth streets, where Death Defying Acts played, so my entire world was centered in the Village. In my fifties, I suddenly had the bohemian downtown life that Iva and I had dreamed of when we were eighteen-year-old dancers. My treasured longtime friend Gene lived around the corner on Lafayette in what had been Enrico Caruso’s building. Whenever possible I spent time with him and his partner, Lad, who was an artist. Although we never saw Caruso, Gene and I once shared a glimpse of a pale blue figure whom we presumed to be the ghost of Lady Astor. She, too, had lived in Gene’s building. Dressed in a long gown and bonnet, she would walk into his closet as she put on her gloves. Later on, Gene, who saw her often, found out that his closet had originally been the door to the hallway she would have taken to go out.

  The minute after relocating to New York, I started rehearsing with my new cast mates, Kelly Bishop, John Rothman, Brian Reddy, Aasif Mandvi, Paul O’Brien, Tari Signor, Cynthia Barlow, and Dan Desmond. There was barely enough time to prepare before opening night. Woody Allen’s act was about an Upper West Side woman whose husband leaves her for a much younger girl. It was, as you can imagine, classic Woody—ripped from his own headlines.

  In Elaine May’s play, I was a depressed hooker on hold with a suicide hotline. Elaine’s writing was hilarious and so insightful about the difficulty of getting through bureaucracies like the phone company. The only trouble was, Elaine’s piece featured numerous page-length telephone monologues that I had very little time to learn. With phone calls, you have to learn the lines and intentions of the person on the other end of the call. Yes, double memorizing.

  At night, after rehearsal, I’d head over to Washington Square Park and walk around the perimeter with Archie, our snow-white American Eskimo (sort of a spitz), on his leash, running my lines aloud until past midnight. This was before everyone had cell phones, when a person talking to herself on the street still looked crazy. Although, in the Village I think I came off as commonplace. Sometimes Tony watched me from a distance, making sure I didn’t get mugged and Archie didn’t disturb the peace with the shrillest barking ever heard on earth. Occasionally, he had to come out to the park and drag me back to the apartment when it got too late.

  Learning the monologues was difficult and frustrating. I had no choice but to pinch my
buns together and get down to it, memorizing pages and pages of text so that the words flowed from idea to idea. Some actors strategically place crib sheets around the set, on tables, on the backs of chairs, wherever, to prompt them. I have never felt that would work for me, especially since I’m nearsighted. I was also afraid that this theater was small enough that the audience would be able to see if there were notes anywhere. I devised a strategy with the stage manager. He would stand just offstage and if I got lost, I’d simply walk in character to the wings, continue speaking into the phone and say, “I don’t know what you’re saying,” while staying in character. God bless him, the stage manager would always throw me a whispered line, and we’d be back on track. Before long, I no longer needed the “walk to wing” survival system.

  Death Defying Acts was directed by the extremely talented Michael Blakemore, a witty and wise Australian. He had directed the first cast and was rushing to prepare the replacements in time. He knew that we were pushing our luck. On opening night he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we haven’t had enough time. Godspeed.”

  After the first few performances, the whole cast started to get our sea legs. Whenever Cristina came to the show, which was frequently, she would be the first to jump up and give me a standing ovation on my bow. I suggested she let the audience stand if they wished to. “But Mom, sometimes they’re shy. If I stand, they’ll all follow.” My own little ovation shill!

  Once I’d mastered my roles, Death Defying Acts was great fun to play. However, there was one dreadful occurrence during the run. It was the only time in my entire career when I missed a cue. I was backstage chatting with crew members when Kelly Bishop came into the hall, yelling my character’s name: “Carol! Carol!” I rushed onstage. John Rothman started shouting, “Carol, where have you been?”

  I could see how angry he was—and with good reason. “In the bathroom,” I yelled back, joining John in trying to play it off for the audience.

  It was the most horrible, humiliating feeling to have left my fellow players stranded out onstage, adrift. With my carelessness, I had endangered the play. I had never missed a cue before and haven’t since.

  When my off-Broadway run ended, Tony and I decided to remain in New York. We sold our house in Beverly Hills and rented my sweet friend Carol Kane’s apartment on Central Park West and Sixty-fourth. Several luminaries lived in the same building, including Madonna. Cristina enrolled in high school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart at East Ninety-first Street and Fifth Avenue, and our lives resumed uptown.

  During the run of Death Defying Acts, Tony started looking around for material that he could develop into a theater piece for me. As with Valerie, he thought it wise to have ownership in a project and not just be a gun for hire, so to speak.

  Inspiration comes from the most unexpected places. Every year we received a Christmas card from Carol and Dom DeLuise on behalf of Pearl S. Buck International, a humanitarian organization devoted to fighting prejudice and cultural intolerance, as well as facilitating international adoption. “You know, Val,” Tony said, looking at the pretty white-haired woman surrounded by beautiful mixed race children on our yearly card, “she seems like a fascinating person. I bet you could play Pearl.”

  I was interested because Pearl Buck had been my mother’s favorite author. She seemed like a great subject to dramatize and someone worth investigating. Tony drove out to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and met with Janice, Pearl’s living daughter. He got her blessing to begin to develop a play about her mother.

  The more I learned about Pearl’s life, the more passionate about the project I became. A daughter of missionaries, Pearl was taken to China as a baby and raised bilingual. After coming home to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virgina, Pearl returned to China to care for her ill mother. There she met John Lossing Buck, an agricultural specialist. They married and moved to a small town in rural China. Her experiences with peasant life there became the inspiration for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Good Earth. Later, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

  In 1934 Pearl and her family returned to the United States to escape the fallout from the struggle between the Nationalists and the Communists, which had created an unstable environment for Westerners. While Pearl continued to write prolifically, she became a champion of many humanitarian causes, especially cross-cultural understanding and racial harmony as a means of achieving world peace. She was an outspoken supporter of the civil rights movement in the United States.

  Since she had such an unusual background, referring to herself as “culturally bifocal,” and had accomplished so much, I was drawn to Pearl’s story. Tony and I thought it would be interesting to develop a one-woman show that incorporated many of the fascinating characters from Pearl’s life—her Southern mother; her elderly nanny, Wang Amah; and Tzu-Hsi, the Dragon Lady empress of China. He got in touch with Marty Martin, who had written the one-woman show Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein for the wonderful Pat Carroll. Marty got to work writing the play, which he called The Dragon and the Pearl.

  After Marty completed a draft, we started to workshop it. Developing a one-person show is a slow process that involves a lot of researching your subject and reworking the script. The first director we hired, Kathy Berlin, who ably started us out on this process, suggested that I try working with an earpiece so I could be fed lines if needed during performances. But the sound in my ear only confused me. I wanted to think the thought, feel the feeling of the character, and have the lines right there without struggle or tension.

  Also, I knew that if I momentarily lost my way, I’d paraphrase to get me through the moment. I knew the story, after all. And I was the only one onstage. I could improvise without fear of confusing other actors. I was thankful for all those years of Second City improvisational training under the tutelage of Viola Spolin and Paul Sills. They gave me the tools to perform the show when my lines weren’t as absolutely solid as they should be.

  The first thing Tony had to do was find us a venue. He picked up a directory of American regional theaters and began cold-calling them. He explained the nature of the play and that I was the star. Since The Dragon and the Pearl was in the development stage, we wanted to start in a small theater, work out the kinks and see what we had before we brought the show to a bigger city. I had no idea that Pearl would take us on a journey of several years.

  Tony booked our first tryout at a summer theater in New Hampshire that had a roof made of corrugated iron. When a New England downpour hit during a performance, I could not make myself heard over the pounding on the metal roof. The audience was very goodnatured and would wait out the deluge while I walked around the stage in character, occupying myself with props (books, files, tea!) until the rain abated.

  We stayed in New Hampshire for five weeks in a large, comfortable cottage next to the woods. Cristina spent hours checking Archie for ticks while I diligently checked her. After Marty completed more rewrites, we brought The Dragon and the Pearl to Chicago with yet another excellent director, Susan Booth. What a hardy breed Midwestern theatergoers are—wrapped up in parkas and mufflers like mummies. Through the blizzards they came! One gave me an invaluable tip about walking on ice-covered sidewalks. Having watched me fall twice in one block, this kind fellow called out, “Hey, don’t pick up your feet!” It worked. I shuffled along and reached the theater without falling a third time. Once during our run there was a complete blackout in the theater and the Chicagoans all stayed in their seats as I finished the show “radio style” in the pitch black.

  Despite the supportive audiences, the show still wasn’t working. So it was back to the drawing board once again. Back at home in New York, through Joanne Woodward, we met a gifted young director named Rob Ruggiero who was interested in working on the play. Under his direction, we brought the show to Cambridge to the Hasty Pudding Theater in Harvard Square. Rob had a terrible time hearing me in rehearsal as the Krokodiloes, the Hasty Pud
ding’s a cappella group, were singing at the top of their lungs next door.

  When we returned to New York to rework the material we mutually decided to part company with Marty. Tony and I were still committed to finding a way to tell the great story of Pearl S. Buck. My husband was determined to see our project through to a New York City theater and when he decides to do something, rest assured, it gets done.

  Through Rob we found a talented playwright named Dyke Garrison with whom I could collaborate. I had read most of the over one hundred books Pearl had written and I had done an extensive amount of research on her. For two months, Dyke, Rob, and I gathered around my kitchen table on Central Park West and created the show from the multifaceted elements of Pearl’s life. Rob, a terrific dramaturge, kept pushing us to “find a strong dramatic event” and “a more powerful first act break.”

  We decided to open the play with Pearl as an old woman at her home in Bucks County, waiting for her visa to arrive so she could visit China. Pearl had written so openly against the Communist Party that she had become persona non grata, barred from the country she had loved for many years and where her parents were buried. Suddenly, we had a through line. As she waited for the visa, memories would return to her—eighteen different voices. A knock from her secretary on the door would trigger a memory of when Pearl and her family hid from the Chinese Kuomintang as they searched villages, looking to execute foreigners. A host of characters parade through Pearl’s life. We called this new version All Under Heaven, taken from a Confucian saying that states that everyone on earth is all one family regardless of race, religion, or gender. It was also the title of Pearl’s final book.

  Tony came up with the brilliant idea of asking Pearl’s alma mater, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, to host the first production. Pearl is a beloved figure on campus, so the school was more than willing. The students built sets and did a lot of the tech work, and we opened to much regional fanfare. The run was such a success that we extended it.