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by Harper, Valerie

  Marjorie Taub, the central character of The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, is an extraordinary role. Marjorie is originally working class from the Bronx but now lives in upscale comfort with her allergist husband, Dr. Ira Taub, on the Upper West Side. She spends her days struggling to shed her Bronx origins and improve herself by going to art openings, music recitals, and other cultural events. Despite her efforts, she becomes convinced that she will never be better than mediocre, which leads her to a have an emotional breakdown in the Disney Store, smashing many popular figurines. While recovering from this embarrassing outburst, Marjorie is visited by her childhood friend Lee Green, played by Michele Lee, whose flamboyance draws Marjorie out of her crisis.

  The play was screamingly funny, insightful, and mysterious. Busch’s terrific dialogue, full of intriguing literary and cultural references, tapped in to a particular New York neurosis that audiences adored. Marjorie was exactly the sort of woman whom Rhoda would have tormented in high school for her pretentious ways. No doubt Marjorie’s elderly mother, played by eighty-year-old actress Shirl Bernheim, would have been a friend of Ida Morgenstern’s. Her crass complaints, fixation on her bowel movements, and hilarious vulgarity brought the house down at every performance.

  After Cristina’s June graduation from Beverly Hills High and before starting college, she went with us to New York City to help me set up a place and have some fun. Cris and I haunted Bloomingdale’s for towels, bedding, and dishes before she had to return to Los Angeles for college. We had to work fast because rehearsals began soon after for a July 28 Broadway opening. We rented an apartment on Central Park South with a lovely view of the park and a not so pleasant odor of horse dung from the passing hansom cabs. We kept the terrace doors closed in summer.

  The actors—Tony Roberts, Michele, Shirl, and Anil Kumar, who played the doorman (again with the doorman!)—were all playing in Allergist’s Wife when I arrived, so I rehearsed with the understudies. When you replace an actor in a running show, it’s like jumping onto a fast-moving train. Coming into Allergist’s Wife was not unlike when I replaced a dancer in Abner, although this time there were words—a lot of words—to learn.

  My role required several very quick changes, from a robe to a pantsuit to a cocktail dress. Before my very first entrance, I stood in the wings, terrified that I’d get trapped in my clothes, flub my lines, or not be there for the other actors. Then I remembered Mary’s advice to me the first night we filmed The Mary Tyler Moore Show: “Just take it one scene at a time, Val.”

  It worked. I calmed down and started to work through the play as it happened, not thinking ahead or worrying about what came next. Two hours later, I had gotten through my first performance. The toughest part was over. That night the Manhattan Theatre Club threw me a glamorous opening-night party on the top floor of the Marriott Hotel on Broadway.

  At the party a large group of Japanese guests, all of whom were dressed in black tie, suddenly rushed over to Tony and started bowing to him. One by one they insisted on having their picture taken with my husband—dozens and dozens of pictures. Lynne Meadow saw what was going on and began to laugh hysterically. “Who do they think he is? De Niro or Pacino?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they think all Italians look alike.”

  When Tony was free of his paparazzi, he joined us. “They’re going to get back to Japan and proudly show these photos to their friends. And one of their friends is going to look at my picture and say, ‘Who is this schmuck?’ ”

  The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife played at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Forty-seventh Street, just down the block from the Biltmore Theatre, a gorgeous old venue that had been sitting empty for fifteen years. Rats and bugs abounded. Rain coming through holes in the roof had damaged the interior, which had become a haven for the homeless.

  The Manhattan Theatre Club had taken possession of the Biltmore with the intention of transforming it into a state-of-the-art Broadway theater. Lynne asked if I would accompany her and Barry Grove to Albany on my day off, to request financial support from the state legislature to help revitalize the Biltmore. I immediately agreed.

  I drove up to Albany with Lynne and Barry. The first person we met with was the Democratic speaker of the assembly, Sheldon Silver. We explained the historical importance of the Biltmore and the goals of the Manhattan Theatre Club’s restoration. MTC wasn’t simply going to stage productions; they were going to transform the Biltmore into a vital community resource. “This will be a place for students from public schools all over the city to come and learn about theater,” I said. “They will have educational programs and symposiums. We need state money to move it along.” I went on to explain that the theater would provide a home for new American playwrights.

  When the speaker heard from Lynne and Barry that Manhattan Theatre Club had already raised ten million dollars, he was impressed. He was accustomed to people coming to him hat in hand, with very little capital raised. The Republican head of the state senate, Joseph Bruno, and the governor’s office each joined in and contributed a total of $800,000 to the effort.

  With money from Albany and New York City added to the donations from the MTC board, major foundations, as well as corporations and private donors, the Manhattan Theatre Club was able to start on the renovation of the Biltmore, which became the restored yet modernized Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Not long after they began to gut the theater, I started to notice a few creepy-crawlies backstage at the Barrymore. That didn’t bother me; it was to be expected, with all the construction going on down the block.

  One evening during a scene with Michele Lee, I noticed something moving along on her paisley-print shawl. A fat two-inch-long cockroach was slowly crawling up the folds of her scarf toward her neck. It was that unpleasant roach-y color, sewage brown, and had long, grotesquely intelligent-looking antennae. Though I was horrified, I managed to continue my lines, but I was transfixed as the bug crept closer to Michele’s face.

  She was oblivious to her little visitor. My mind was racing. I knew I had to get him off her and out of our scene. I waited for her to finish her line, then I swatted him, a monumental smack. The bug flew, and I heard it splat on the set behind us.

  Michele was shocked by what I had just done. “I’m sorry, Lee,” I said, staying in character. “I thought I saw something on you.”

  Right after our scene, when I explained to Michele what had really happened, she was deeply grateful. After the close encounter with that monstrous bug, we always made sure to shake out costumes during the quick changes in the wings.

  Frantic costume changes aside, my role in The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife involved a lot of screaming and yelling, which resulted in acute laryngitis. I went to a great vocal specialist, Dr. Scott Kessler, who diagnosed a blood blister on my vocal cord and prescribed complete and utter silence.

  This was scary. I couldn’t afford to lose my voice or damage my vocal cords, so I obeyed the doctor’s order and scrawled notes to Tony instead of talking. On the Tuesday morning following my first appointment with Dr. Kessler, I was scheduled for a checkup. I was sitting alone in our living room when Tony ran in yelling, “Val, something terrible is happening at the World Trade Center!”

  Like everyone else in the country—the world, even—we ran to our television and watched the tragedy unfold. As the towers fell, I furiously scribbled notes to Tony because I’d been ordered not to speak. Finally, neither of us could take our inactivity anymore. We flung on some clothes and ran to the nearest hospital to give blood. We were not the only New Yorkers with this idea. The sidewalk around the entire perimeter of Roosevelt Hospital was packed with people lined up like the audience at a Stones concert. In her dorm room in California, Cristina was wakened by a call from a classmate at six A.M. “Turn on the TV!” Half asleep, she saw what she thought was the Bill Pullman film Independence Day. Switching from channel to channel, she wondered why all the stations were playing the same movie. Turning up the sound, the horrible new
s hit her. She spent a panicky morning trying on three phones to get through to us.

  Terrible news poured in throughout the day. “The Pride of Midtown” firehouse, located a block from the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, lost fifteen men on September 11, 2001. Michele Lee, who had gotten to know many of the firefighters and their families during her run in Allergist’s Wife, was devastated. This disaster was a most shocking, horrific reality to confront.

  Two days after 9/11, I got a call from the producers to come to the theater. The whole cast and crew assembled onstage, crying and comforting one another. Our show, like most on Broadway, was reopening that evening with a dimmed marquee.

  Lynne was a rock. “I hate to have you guys go onstage,” she told the cast. “If it were up to me, we’d stay closed all week. But we need to be here for people who’ve bought tickets and want to come.”

  We all agreed that was what we should do.

  “But first,” Lynne said, “we need to rework some sections of the play.” I knew exactly what she meant.

  There were several jokes referencing terrorism in Allergist’s Wife. Three days earlier, these seemed both completely innocuous and very funny. Now they were totally unacceptable. Charles Busch, our brilliant playwright, was on hand to rewrite. He instituted changes throughout the play, transforming lines such as “Golda Meir was a terrorist?” into “Golda Meir was a spy?” It was a consolation to be together, working on the script with our theater family during this time of unspeakable sorrow.

  I knew that we owed it to our audience to perform, but like everyone else in New York, I was severely rattled by the events of 9/11. I was afraid that the audience might not be ready to laugh and that I wouldn’t be able to deliver what they needed so soon after the terrorist attacks.

  “Remember,” Tony said, “the Taubs and the other characters in this play haven’t experienced 9/11 as we have. They are living in a New York City with the Twin Towers.”

  My wise husband! My character, Marjorie Taub, was a citizen of a New York that existed a week earlier—a time when it was possible to lose yourself in theater and art. I needed to remind the audience of that time, and I needed to suggest that it would return. Tony even made an offer to the producers that I would take no salary until business picked up. They were very appreciative, but declined.

  The Ethel Barrymore seats over a thousand people. On September 13, roughly two hundred seats were filled. Before the curtain, the stage manager invited everyone to come down as close to the stage as possible and fill the orchestra seats. Given the fear in the city, it was a wonder anyone showed up.

  Before the show started, I peeked out at the audience and was inspired by what I saw—a brave little group of individuals sitting there because they believed in the theater. Anil, who played Mohammad (of all names!), hugged me before we went out for the opening scene. “Come on, Val. Let’s do this,” he said. And we did.

  Charles had written a short curtain speech for me to deliver at the end of the show, thanking the audience for their extraordinary courage in being able to set aside their fears of another attack, and for coming out in support of us, New York City, and the country.

  The next night there were four hundred people in the audience. The next night, five hundred. As time went by, the crowd continued to grow, and my speech got cut off earlier each night with grateful applause. Soon the show was selling out once again. People would wait outside the stage door and tell me how far they’d traveled to New York to support the city and the theater. Two pretty thirtysomethings had flown in from Houston. A group of seniors said that, despite their fears of traveling through a possible target like the Lincoln Tunnel, they’d all come in on a bus from Union City, New Jersey.

  Post-9/11 was an emotional and thrilling time to be on Broadway. The entire theater community banded together. There are so many ancillary businesses dependent on Broadway that the city needed audiences to come back. Besides my own cast, lots of stars in New York at the time—Helen Mirren, Kristin Chenoweth, Joel Grey, Brooke Shields, Harvey Fierstein, Glenn Close, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Susan Lucci, Alan Alda, Nathan Lane, Bernadette Peters, B. D. Wong, Matthew Broderick, and many more—did extensive outreach: talk shows, press conferences, public service announcements, whatever we could to urge audiences to come back to Broadway.

  One afternoon virtually the entire cast of every Broadway show congregated in Times Square and sang “New York, New York.” We had prerecorded the song earlier that week, grouped in fours around microphones. My group included Patti LuPone, Bebe Neuwirth, and Michele Lee, all of whom have powerhouse voices. I’ve never sounded so good!

  Rosie O’Donnell also had me on her show with Christine Ebersole, who played my neighbor back on the Valerie NBC show, and Mario Cantone from Sex and the City. When she introduced the three of us, Rosie explained that we were the three comforting pals she wanted around at this terrible time. Meanwhile, Ms. O’Donnell was spreading around plenty of comfort on her own. Rosie also lightened the mood by revealing that she had gone to audition for a part in a play years before. After hearing her thick New York accent, the creepy guy running the auditions yells out, “Thank you, thank you, but the part of Rhoda Morgenstern has already been cast.” How mean! How dumb about talent!

  I shared some excruciating moments with Michele at our local Broadway firehouse. It was “The Pride of Manhattan,” “Never Missed a Performance,” Engine 54, Ladder 4, Battalion 9, fifteen good men gone. The two of us tried to provide some comfort, but mostly we encountered bravery. We met a terrific woman named Rosemarie Foti, a mother of two firemen, Joseph from this firehouse and Robert of Engine 16, Ladder 7 on East Twenty-ninth Street, who died at the Towers. We chatted with the families, bought Beanie Babies for the kids, held some fund-raisers, attended funerals, cried a lot, and laughed, too. Many months later, when Michele hosted the unveiling of a memorial to the fallen men on West Forty-eighth Street and Eighth Avenue, just around the corner from the firehouse, I sat with Rosemarie Foti.

  Sometimes people asked me how I was able to perform in the face of so much tragedy. This is what I told them: “I can do it because of people like Rose Foti. She lost one son, and the other son is down at Ground Zero digging every day to see if he can find his brother. He and his colleagues are doing their jobs with tears streaming down their faces. The least I can do is get my butt on a Broadway stage and try to make people laugh.”

  It was that simple. Whatever your job is, you keep going. If you can make people laugh during tough times, you do it. Over the years, I’ve heard from a multitude of fans how much joy Rhoda Morgenstern brought into their lives even during their toughest times. I thought that Marjorie Taub could do the same. I know she did.

  chapter

  FOURTEEN

  In 2005 Tony received a phone call from David Fishelson, the lead producer of the Broadway smash Golda’s Balcony. The play, which had recently become the longest-running one-woman show on the Great White Way, was written by the inimitable playwright William Gibson, author of The Miracle Worker. Tovah Feldshuh had received a Tony nomination for her portrayal of Israel’s first female prime minister. A national tour of the play was planned because it was clear that there was a whole country waiting to see Golda’s Balcony. I was asked to step into Golda’s shoes.

  How could I not jump at the chance to play Golda Meir, one of the towering figures of the twentieth century? Her strength, unshakable resolve, and pioneering spirit were heroic. And a hero she was, not just to the Jewish people but to women and people of conscience everywhere.

  Coming off of All Under Heaven, I felt completely prepared to carry another one-woman show. I knew the play, and I knew how much work was involved. But I welcomed the challenge. As coproducer of the tour, Tony began dealing with the business side of things, while I dove into preparations for the role. Not yet fully conversant with the Internet, I went to the Santa Monica Public Library and plunged myself into Golda’s life, checking out an armload of books, including her autobiography, My Life.
I was with Nicole and her then husband, Lowell, at a jammed Madison Square Garden in June 1967. The whole world thought Nasser’s Egyptian Army would push the Jewish state into the sea. We all sat holding candles and our collective breath and literally prayed. As a result of the highly coordinated, surprise bombing of the Egyptian airfields, the Israelis won a stunning, rapid victory in the Six-Day War.

  In the 1960s and 1970s, during my involvement with the feminist movement and the Equal Rights Amendment, I had often seen Golda in the media or in New York, at a TV press conference or a fund-raiser for Israel. She was an icon, a champion. During those years, she had been voted the Most Admired Woman in America by the Gallup Poll in 1971, 1973, and 1974. Hanging in the offices of many women’s organizations was a poster of Golda’s unmistakable face with the sardonic caption: “But Can She Type?”

  Golda was a diminutive but sturdy woman. With her frizzy gray hair in a bun, thick stockings, and trademark orthopedic shoes, this powerful international leader looked like a granny—dowdy, homely, though tough as nails. I discussed Golda’s hair with my phenomenal British stylist, Heather Lloyd—she and her daughter Francesca Windsor, a superb colorist, have both worked diligently to take years off my appearance. I suggested that I let my hair go gray with its natural kink so that I wouldn’t even need a Golda wig. Heather didn’t say a word. She stared at me speechless, as if she’d turned to stone. I dropped that idea as fast as I’d expressed it.