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by Harper, Valerie

  Besides Golda’s look, there was the way she sounded. I had heard Golda speak, and I knew that I could re-create her accent. The trick would be to capture her inner strength and her single-minded dedication to the Jewish people and the state of Israel. I had to explore and discover what gave her so much conviction and determination—in essence, what made Golda Golda.

  Becoming Golda Meir presented much more of a challenge than I’d faced with becoming Pearl Buck. Pearl was known to the public more through her writing than through her appearance and personality. Golda was world-famous, iconic. In the 1970s she was ubiquitous: People knew her; they’d met her; they’d seen her speak in person or on television. Thousands of Americans had stories of meeting Golda, of what she was like. On her endless fund-raising tours across the country, she had stayed in private homes, sleeping on couches or wherever people could accommodate her. She made an impression on everyone she met. I had to honor these memories of Golda Shelanu, Hebrew for “Our Golda.”

  One of the interesting aspects for me in playing Golda was to reach inside myself and find a sense of stillness. By nature, I am an active, in-motion kind of person. But to play Golda, I had to slow down and find inner calm in order to channel her singularly focused mind.

  Golda was born in Russia, where she grew up speaking Yiddish. When she was eight, she moved to Milwaukee and learned to speak English like a midwesterner. Listening to tapes of her speeches and interviews, I could hear the blend of these influences. My friends Iva and Penny offered their husbands to coach me, Ron Rifkin for Yiddish and Zvi Almog for Hebrew. Better, more committed teachers I couldn’t have.

  Golda’s voice was quite deep. After some practice, I was able to capture her register. The only difficulty that posed was when I had to create male characters such as Moshe Dayan and Menachem Begin. Then I’d have to lower my voice even further. (David Ben Gurion was no problem, as he had a high, piercing voice.) The play called for over thirty distinct characters, which made it really challenging but great fun to work on.

  In order to prepare for Golda’s Balcony, I did something I’d never done before: I learned my lines before I started rehearsal. Normally, I would stay on book, gradually discovering the performance. But with limited rehearsal time, the mother lode of memorization, and the directors blessing, I decided to learn the text before making any decisions about how I was going to play it.

  Every day that I sat down to learn Golda’s Balcony, I grew more and more thankful that I had a project like All Under Heaven under my belt. Even on my darkest, most difficult days, when I simply couldn’t make it through more than several pages, I knew that I’d be able to accomplish it.

  Unlike All Under Heaven, a two-act play, Golda’s Balcony ran for an uninterrupted ninety minutes, which takes stamina but was great in another way. You’re on. You go for it. You’re off.

  While I was watching DVDs of Golda, studying Jewish history and practicing accents, preparations were being made for the national tour. Right before I flew to New York to film the commercial promoting Golda’s Balcony, the lead producer, David Fishelson, called to discuss my costume.

  “Val,” he said, “Golda, as you know, has a prominent . . . very large nose. Tovah’s nose is very small, so we had a false nose made for her. But what I’m thinking is that since people know you as Rhoda, maybe you shouldn’t use the nose.”

  “David,” I said, “have you seen my face? My nose is smaller than small. That’s not something I can act.” Never mind the fact that people were coming to see Golda, not Rhoda, though I refrained from pointing that out to David. I recognized the impulse, if not the logic, of his thinking. People like having Rhoda around—she’s certainly been great company to me over the years.

  A false nose wasn’t the only prosthetic I needed. For the first time onstage, I actually wore padding to beef up my figure. What a change! Instead of worrying that I was too big for a role, I was too small for Golda. This time there would be no corrective underwear, no Spanx, no constricting girdles, no sucking in and pinching. I wore a padded undergarment that made me stocky and gave me ample breasts. I could gain weight on the tour—something that tends to happen—and it wouldn’t matter at all. Until later.

  After the costume fitting, nose sculpting, wig styling, filming the commercial, and shooting promotional material, rehearsals began. I knew my lines—thank God—and I was ready to go. Scott Schwartz, who had directed the Broadway production, worked long and hard to get me comfortable with the role without ever suggesting I do it “the way we did it before.”

  Much appreciated, Scott!

  Our first preview was on a Thursday in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at the Parker Playhouse. The theater critic from the local paper was scheduled to come in on Sunday, when I’d have a couple of performances under my belt.

  For a few days, the National Weather Service had been issuing warnings about the impending hurricane, Wilma. What nobody told me was that in order to avoid the hurricane, the critic came to one of the first shows, when I was still finding my way. I didn’t learn that he had come early until his tepid review came out. Aaarrgh.

  On Sunday, the day I expected the press to show, Tony and I relocated from our beach hotel to a smaller place inland, where Erin Roth, my makeup and wardrobe assistant, was staying. Wilma hit Fort Lauderdale with full force, and our rooms were plunged into darkness, so we fumbled our way down to the lobby, which was floor-to-ceiling windows.

  “Guys,” said Erin, our dry-wit voice of reason, “I don’t think being surrounded by glass is our best choice.”

  Just outside the lobby was the pool, which was blanketed in whitecaps from the strong winds. I had never in my life seen whitecaps in a pool! The sound of the wind was deafening, and power lines came down. It was eerie and surreal.

  In the morning we saw that the damage was extensive. The city was flooded. There was no electricity so the elevators were out of service, and we had to trek up and down stairs to fill wastebaskets full of water from the pool so we could flush our toilets.

  We needed to stay in Florida until we knew if our show would reopen, so we drove north to Orlando and found rooms there that had electricity. Yaaay! Now the problem was gas. We waited in line for six hours along with everyone else, so it was kind of an adventure!

  Since the theater was flooded and inoperable, it was decided that we all head home, and then reconvene in Detroit in a few weeks as scheduled. Shut down by a hurricane! This was a new one.

  Tony and I returned to Los Angeles, and in preparation for Detroit, I rearranged all the furniture in our living room and ran through Golda’s Balcony every day from start to finish, as if I were performing. Well, it worked for me when I practiced ballet in my parents’ house as a kid!

  We opened in the Fisher Theater in Detroit in early November. We had a three-week run that really allowed me to develop my performance. I’d remembered Tony Roberts, my costar in Allergist’s Wife, once telling me, “You don’t fully have your performance until twelve weeks after your Broadway opening night.” Wise Mr. Roberts.

  The reviews in Detroit were excellent and set the tone for the rest of our midwestern tour—Milwaukee (Golda’s hometown), Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus. Wherever we performed, I was greeted by Israeli consuls general, delegates, members of Jewish organizations, and, most touchingly, Holocaust survivors. I was taken to local Jewish museums and given tours of memorials. In every city we visited, people came up to me and said, “We knew her. It was like seeing her again. Thank you!”

  The reviews got better and better as the tour went on. However, one critic—only one—said, “There’s a bit of Rhoda in Golda.” I wanted to scream. Yes, Rhoda and Golda are both Jewish-American women who shrug and say funny things. (Golda had a sharp, natural wit. “I can understand that the Arabs want us dead. But do they really expect us to cooperate?” she once famously said.) Humor aside, you have to be a fool to go see a play about the amazing Golda Meir and look for Rhoda Morgenstern onstage, especially with me in my
Golda drag. Talk about inability to suspend disbelief. Sometimes critics have their review written before they enter the theater.

  The tour of Golda’s Balcony lasted just about a year. Sometimes there would be enough time between shows to return to Los Angeles; other times we’d stay out on the road for months at a time. When there was a break in the tour, Scott Schwartz would fly to Los Angeles or whatever city we were in to help me refresh the show.

  As satisfying as it was to play Golda and to see how her story inspired and delighted audiences, the play exhausted me. From time to time, I felt like some sort of indentured servant. No matter how tired or, heaven forbid, sick I was feeling, I could not miss a show. There was no understudy. Most matinee days, I ate alone in my dressing room and made myself not talk, lie down, and try to nap. (I took my mom’s advice: Even if you can’t sleep, just lie there and rest.)

  The tour concluded with terrific runs in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Hartford, where Penny came to the show with her husband, Zvi, my very proud Hebrew coach and Israeli history tutor. We also returned to Florida, where we played to sold-out audiences who had missed their chance to see Golda’s Balcony on account of Hurricane Wilma. Happily, along the way we won the Touring Broadway Tony Award of 2006.

  When I was first contacted about taking on the role of Golda for the national tour, Tony negotiated a deal for me to also star in the movie version of Golda’s Balcony, which he secured the rights to produce with David Steiner of Steiner Studios New York City.

  The movie was filmed at the conclusion of the tour. Our director, Jeremy Kagan, who had directed me in an episode of Columbo in 1971—you see, if you stay in show business long enough, you’ll encounter everyone at least twice—did a masterful job of adapting this one-woman play for the screen. We shot for five days in Calabasas. It was very much a family event—Tony produced, and Cristina was hired as a production assistant but was quickly promoted to production coordinator. She was absolutely indespensible given our super-short shooting schedule. (I’m speaking as an actor, by the way, not a mom!)

  It was a strange transition from stage to screen. I was used to running through ninety minutes of text without a break. Because I knew the material so well, I was doing two to three pages without stopping. After one very long take, the cameraman said jokingly to Jeremy, “Doesn’t this broad ever take a break?”

  What works in the theater doesn’t always work on film, especially in the case of a one-person show. Rather than shooting the play as it would have been presented on a stage, Jeremy had me do all the scenes in front of a green screen, which allowed him to show whatever background he desired in post-production. Jeremy used archival footage, original artwork, and photographs to underscore Golda’s memories. He also helped me tremendously in modulating my performance for the camera.

  The film opened at the Quad Cinema in Greenwich Village, then played a range of theaters around the nation. Beyond providing a record of William Gibson’s play in performance, the DVD of Golda’s Balcony was used as an educational and fund-raising tool for Jewish organizations in numerous cities. It seemed a fitting end point to my portrayal of Golda—traveling the country just as she had, sharing her magnificent life to raise money for the very causes she championed.

  Golda’s Balcony had been a thrilling and challenging experience. The tour was exhausting, but each performance was rewarding. Coming off of Golda’s long run onstage, and then the subsequent film adaptation, I had no idea what to expect next. Golda was a tough act to follow. Besides, some badly needed R and R, Iva and I quite impulsively jumped on a plane together to surprise Nicole in New York for her milestone birthday celebration. We left our respective husbands, screamed with laughter on the plane, and stayed in Iva and Ron’s exquisite Soho apartment. What a great trip! We were eighteen again but in a vastly improved space; with great patina on the friendship.

  In 2008 Tony received a call out of the blue from Matthew Lombardo, who had written a play called Looped, based on an actual recording or “looping” session during which the divine Tallulah Bankhead had to redub lines of dialogue for her film Die! Die! My Darling!

  I was fascinated by the thought of playing Tallulah. Back in my days of acting class in New York, my pals and I had done impressions of her. An attractive aspect of Looped was that it had three characters—Tallulah, the sound editor, and the studio tech—which meant less pressure on me than in my previous two productions.

  The play was very funny. In the first act, Tallulah arrives at the recording studio divinely high, somewhere between unwilling and unable to work. She may be looped, but quickly sizes up Danny, the editor, as a closeted gay and begins to draw him out and break him down, revealing intimate details about both of their lives in the process. Although the second act needed work, Looped seemed like it could be a lot of fun.

  Tony and I got in touch with Matthew, who offered to send us a tape from the studio session that had inspired Looped. The tape was a riot but also quite touching and extremely valuable to me in capturing this flamboyant, larger-than-life woman. Here was the real Tallulah, unaware that the tape was running between takes, behaving and sounding as she did in life rather than in a performance.

  I was drawn to Tallulah, a singularly vibrant personality and one who could not have been more different from Golda Meir. Tallulah was extravagant, self-involved, and committed primarily to having a good time. She was also indulgently crazy, shockingly brash, and hilarious. Tallulah, a great talent, once was serious about the theater and acting, but by the time of Looped, she had dwindled to a faded and filthy-mouthed old glamour-puss. I wanted the part.

  Tony and I called Rob Ruggiero, our director from All Under Heaven, to see if he might be interested in directing Looped. By one of those unexpected coincidences, he and Matthew Lombardo both lived in Hartford, Connecticut, and knew each other. Rob gladly came on board.

  Preparing for Tallulah presented some different challenges. Like Golda, Tallulah was a chain-smoker, so I dusted off my old trick for passing as a lifelong smoker onstage. I couldn’t inhale (I’d cough), and I certainly didn’t want to learn. I drew the smoke into my mouth, raised my chest as if inhaling, and then exhaled without letting the smoke touch my lungs. Smoking was one of Tallulah’s lesser vices. During her recording session, she drank Scotch and took cocaine. I had to learn to fake scooping out a little of the (fake) powder on my pinkie nail and lift it to my nose like an experienced addict.

  Creating Tallulah’s distinctive gravelly voice was one of the biggest challenges. My voice is moderately pitched. Tallulah’s voice wasn’t just low, it was in the basement. Every time I thought I had achieved it, Rob would call out, “Lower, Val. Lower!”

  Then Matthew would chime in with a deep baritone: “Dahling,” and Tony would pile on by emphatically pointing toward the floor. And then I would scream in frustration, “Ruggiero, Lombardo, Cacciotti—what is this, the voice mafia?!” We all laughed but these three guys helped get me “low down.”

  With Rob directing and Tony producing, we were set to open Looped in the Pasadena Playhouse where Matthew had a commitment for a production. Everything fell into place so quickly that I had little time to prepare before the opening. Since the commute between Pasadena and the beach where we live would cost me three hours a day that I could spend learning the part, I checked in to the Pasadena Marriott in order to study, stay rested, and get ready to become Tallulah.

  After only seventeen days of rehearsal, we previewed at the Pasadena Playhouse. With so little lead time, Looped was still a work in progress. Nevertheless, we did tremendously: Looped played to nearly sold-out houses for five weeks. Even with an older, conservative audience, the raunchy humor elicited enormous laughs.

  In theater, it’s a great gift to be supported by friends and family. Cristina and Sue Cameron were there opening night and my Second City Story Theatre compatriots came in a group. Iva and Ron, Arlene, Wendy, Nicole (who flew in from New York), plus my Mary Tyler Moore buddies Ed and Gavin, all came d
uring the run. Betty was out of town but stepped up in another way. When Cristina saved a tiny black kitten stuck in the fountain pipes in the restaurant where she was working, it was Betty, animal lover extraordinaire, who got my daughter to a no-kill shelter. Vigilant Ms. White also warned us to be especially careful with black kitties around October because of the danger of Halloween abuse at the hands of disgusting people. I love Betty and have so much respect for her.

  Our next stop was West Palm Beach, Florida, where we could do extensive rewrites and work on the show for two months. We all stayed in an offbeat but charming bed-and-breakfast and worked on the play. We even celebrated a whimsical Floridian Christmas together.

  Because Looped was such a wild ride from start to finish, reaction from the seats was often sidesplitting. The theaters in Pasadena and Florida were midsized, and the audience sat close to the stage, which I guess made them feel as if they were part of the production. Sometimes people would talk back to us as we performed. The sexually explicit jokes brought the house down. When I delivered them, I could hear young guys howl, “Oh no!” as if watching someone miss the ball at a game.

  During one show in Pasadena, when Tallulah begins questioning Danny about his closeted homosexual past, she asks, “Who was he?”

  A man in the second row spoke out louder than he realized: “Who was he?” He obviously thought I’d misspoken and meant to say she.

  I glanced at Chad Allen, who played Danny. He was struggling to keep his composure. I knew that every inch of him wanted to burst into laughter. Finally, he pulled himself together and continued the scene. “Just a guy,” he said.

  “A guy?” the same man asked, incredulous. The poor thing couldn’t get with the program. Later Michael Orenstein, who played Steve, the unseen studio tech (another Carlton in my life!), was afraid he had shaken the darkened sound booth from laughing.