John had already been accepted to Chicago’s Goodman School of Drama and was really talented, because he made me believe that he actually wanted to kiss me. I faked a cough so he wouldn’t see me blush. That night I took Aria da Capo to bed with me and rehearsed the various ways I could say, “Pierrot, a macaroon! I cannot live without a macaroon!” I’d never had a macaroon and wasn’t big on sweets, so I’d have to work up an appetite. “Pierrot, a macaroon! I cannot live without a macaroon . . . I cannot live without a macaroon . . . I cannot liiiiivvvve . . .”
It didn’t take me long to realize that I’d been horribly miscast. Columbine was a joyous, frivolous flirt, and I was none of those things. Though Mrs. Bennington urged me to relax and have fun, I was terrified of making a fool of myself, and since Columbine reveled in her foolishness, I was stuck. I wished they’d selected a more suitable play for my debut, such as Shaw’s Saint Joan. I was more likely to hear voices and save France than die for want of a macaroon.
John had no problem playing the self-centered, seductive Pierrot, and offstage he could be an awful flirt, reciting Pierrot’s lines as if he meant them for real. One night, sneaking up behind me, he whispered, “Let’s drink some wine and lose our heads and love one another.” I became so flustered I didn’t know what to say, until I suddenly remembered the follow-up: “Pierrot, don’t you love me now?” From then on, whenever he flirted with me, I’d remind myself that he was only staying in character, and I’d throw Columbine’s lines back at him so he’d know I was in on the trick. To make sure he didn’t think I actually liked him, I also made a point of treating him badly and being as sarcastic as possible. Yet deep down, I kept hoping that a part of him, the non-actor part, was interested in me, and on the days we didn’t rehearse, I longed for him so badly it actually hurt. Though I’d had crushes on Nathan and Francis What’s-His-Name, this was different. I could practically feel my chest collapsing under the weight of my own emotions.
Before each rehearsal, Mrs. Bennington led us in a series of relaxation and postural exercises and then directed us to take our places on the stage. John and I sat on high-backed chairs at opposite ends of a long, narrow banquet table and ran through the play. By now it was pretty obvious to everyone that I wasn’t a natural-born seductress. I overheard Mrs. Bennington say to her husband, “The girl’s a disaster.” They even debated getting one of the shepherds to play Columbine. “It could be revolutionary,” Mrs. Bennington said. Every time I had to recite the line “I’m hot as a spoon in a tea cup,” I kept thinking of little Maria Goretti getting stabbed for a macaroon.
While John and I waited backstage for the two murderous shepherds to kill each other, I did a few neck rolls to loosen up. John came up behind me and began rubbing my shoulders. I closed my eyes and tried to give myself over to the sensation. When he finished, he whispered, “My only love, you are so intense,” which was a line from the play, but then he added, “Can I kiss you?” At that point, I was totally confused. The correct line was “I’ll kiss you if it’s Tuesday,” but it was Monday, so did he still want to kiss me?
“Pierrot, a macaroon,” I said, playing it safe. “I cannot live without a macaroon.”
He took his hands off my shoulders and backed away. “Ah, Columbine,” he sighed. “You are so literal.”
When I got home that night, my mother had skimmed the play and did not like it one bit. “I hope you are not playing that Columbine woman. She’s immoral.”
“Rest assured I’m not Columbine,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a lie—my mother could have asked Mrs. Bennington and everyone in the cast and they’d have said the same thing. “I’m the Masque of Tragedy,” I added. “A shepherd stabs me at the end because he wants my macaroons.”
“Oh, that’s fine, then,” she said.
With two weeks to go before the performance, Mrs. Bennington took me aside for a “little talk.” I figured I was going to get fired.
“Have you ever kissed a boy for a very long time?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said, which was definitely a lie.
“And didn’t it feel like you just wanted him to rip off your clothes and let him lick you everywhere?”
“Sure.”
“So why can’t you conjure up that sensual feeling for John? He’s awfully sexy.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I stood there with a stupid look on my face.
“Oh . . . wait a minute,” she said. “Don’t tell me.” She whispered, “You’re not attracted to men.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Please. I went to Bennington. But remember, acting is all about pretending. Can you do that? Can you pretend he’s sexy?”
“I’ll try.”
At the dress rehearsal, I finally saw my outfit, which was made of black-and-white geometric cotton and resembled a Marimekko tablecloth. It started at my neck and ended at my ankles. When I asked Mrs. Bennington why she’d decided to dress me in a straitjacket, she replied, “The design is very Op art, and besides, we needed to steer clear of décolleté.”
Why? Because I had small breasts? Or because she thought I’d freak out if I wore something low-cut?
I asked Bumpa to drive me to Reinhold’s so I could at least buy a pair of sexy shoes. Though I had my driver’s license, I was petrified of getting behind the wheel. My first time out, I hit a dog, on Easter Sunday, with my mother in the passenger seat. Ultimately, the dog emerged with fewer scars than I. From then on, whenever I attempted to drive, my mother would remind me not to kill any animals, which had the expected inhibitory effect.
Since I couldn’t get myself to say the word sexy in front of Bumpa, I tried to describe what I wanted in a roundabout way. I must have succeeded, because the salesman presented me with a pair of high-heeled bedroom slippers. Since I didn’t want to be taller than John, I managed to mumble, “Sexy but flat.” The salesman returned with a pair of shoes that we now call ballerinas but were then known as “the kind of shoes Audrey Hepburn wore.” These were cut lower than usual, revealing what is currently referred to as “toe cleavage.” “These are definitely sexy,” the salesman said admiringly. “They’re low on the vamp.”
“What’s a vamp?” I asked.
“Clara Bow, Theda Bara, Louise Brooks,” Bumpa explained, while the salesman pointed to the shoe’s front opening. How perfect! I was a vamp with a low vamp.
Though I didn’t have cleavage up top, I could have it below. I could be sexy in flats and still be flat. Brilliant!
With the help of my new shoes, I tiptoed out of my shell—or rather Columbine did, while I went along for the ride. Dazzling John with my shoe-based acting skills, I pranced, preened, and flirted, nuzzling his neck and staring up at him in a totally adoring way. He was literally eating the macaroons out of my hand. “What the hell happened to you?” he asked afterward. “You were great.” I didn’t tell him about the shoes but instead, quoting Columbine, I laughed and said, “La indeed!—How should I know?”
I told my mother that she shouldn’t bother coming to the play because the Masque of Tragedy only had a small role and anyway I died. “Sounds good,” she said, chasing Nancy around the living room. I insisted she stay home. “Really, it’s not worth your time.”
When I got to the theater, John was already in his clown suit and Mrs. Bennington was painting his face white, drawing black triangles around his eyes. Careful not to smudge anything, she fastened the big ruffled collar around his neck and helped him put on a conical-shaped hat. While he waited outside, I slipped on my dress, and Mrs. Bennington, who had a flair for makeup, turned me into a smoldering sexpot. Looking in the mirror, I hardly recognized myself. Then I put on my cleavage-baring flats. La indeed!—The transformation was complete.
As the audience filed in, we took our places at the banquet table, and John toasted me with a glass of Welch’s grape juice: “Columbine, my love, you’ll be a star by five o’clock.”
I rolled my eyes. Once we finished the play, I hoped we could have a normal conversation without Edna St. Vincent Millay providing the dialogue for us.
“Here we go,” Mrs. Bennington whispered, raising the curtain. I took a deep breath. “Pierrot, a macaroon! I cannot live without a macaroon.”
John gazed at me with his electrifyingly sexy eyes. “My only love, you are so intense.” He reached across the table to give me a macaroon and, grabbing his hand, I began nibbling his fingers and soon I was draping my arm around his shoulder, licking his ear, burrowing my head in his wide-ruffled collar. When it came time to say, “I’m hot as a spoon in a teacup!” I made it obviously clear what I was hot for, wriggling my hips and giving the line a Mae West delivery. The audience loved it.
I was starting to relax, forgetting about everybody except Pierrot, who, beneath the clown makeup, seemed totally entranced by me. Modeling my dress for him, I kept twirling around, until I fell purposely across his lap. John was reciting his next line when I caught sight of someone in the audience: my mother.
“My love, by yon black moon, you wrong us both,” John said, giving me a little spanking. My mind went blank.
“My love, by yon black moon, you wrong us both,” he repeated.
I’d wronged my mother too. By yon black moon, I’d lied! How was I going to convince her that Columbine was also the Masque of Tragedy? By having a total meltdown on stage—that’s how!
“There isn’t a sign of a moon, Pierrot!” Mrs. Bennington whispered from the wings.
I thought of all the time I’d spent getting into character. I thought of my shoes. Cleavage. Vamp.
“There isn’t a sign of a moon, Pierrot,” I said, getting back into character again. The audience laughed; they thought my temporary amnesia had been part of the play, and from then on, everything went smoothly. The shepherds killed each other, and the Masque of Tragedy shouted, “Strike the scene!” At the end when we came out for our bows, we got a standing ovation and five curtain calls. John kissed my hand, and up until then, except for when I got my ears pierced, it was the single happiest moment of my life.
The group’s founder invited everyone back to her house for a cast party. John was already wiping off his makeup, and while I didn’t necessarily want a clown for a boyfriend, I didn’t want him to revert to being John just yet.
“Are you going to the party?” he asked
I shrugged, as if I had a hot date that night. “I’m not sure. Maybe, maybe not.”
I hoped he’d say, “Let’s drink some wine and lose our heads and love one another,” or the contemporary equivalent, but all he said was, “Well, I guess I’ll see you sometime.”
“Yeah.”
I was too dejected to go to the party, so I went home. I’d completely forgotten about my mother, who was waiting at the kitchen table, looking none too pleased.
“I thought you said you were playing tragedy,” she said.
I broke down in tears. “I’m playing it right now. Happy?”
“Pierrot was really cute,” she said. “Reminded me of Paul McCartney.”
This made me cry even harder, and suddenly Emily and Nancy came running downstairs. They wanted to know what was going on.
“Nothing,” my mother said. “She just experienced a tragedy, but she’ll get over it.”
“What kind?” Emily asked. “Did somebody die?”
“Yes,” I said. “I did. Inside.”
“You know what you need right now?” my mother said. “Macaroons!”
“I never want to hear the word macaroon again!”
“Well, you won’t because we don’t have macaroons in the house anyway.”
“Macaroons, macaroons, macaroons,” Emily and Nancy began chanting.
I went to bed, while they ate Oreos. All I could think of was that in a couple of weeks, John would be in Chicago, and I’d never see him again. I was heartsick. No, crushed.
Postscript: I did see him again—three decades later. By then he’d had an impressive stage career and had been nominated for a Tony. He was then appearing in a TV drama with my friend Glynnis, who knew the background story and mentioned my name to him. “He told me that he’d really liked you,” she explained, “but you were cold and sarcastic. He thought you hated him.”
Several weeks later, we had lunch together—salad, coffee, no macaroons—and by yon black moon, we were both now married and middle-aged, and the play seemed like a lifetime ago.
By senior year, I’d fully accepted that going to Naz was like going to Danvers. Sister Alberta, our ancient English teacher, was too tired to conduct class, but managed to work around the issue by convincing us that we were too tired to learn. After instructing us to put our heads down on our desks and “rest,” she read to us, as if we were still in kindergarten. She preferred Southern writers with a flair for the macabre. Her favorite short story was Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” about a reclusive Southern spinster who feeds her lover rat poison and then cohabits with his corpse. After she finished reading it, she didn’t call for a class discussion because the class was asleep. I thought I’d enliven things by asking if the story was about necrophilia, but Sister Alberta said, “Just put your head down on your desk, dear, and it will be over soon.”
In addition to the nuns, we had several lay teachers, including Mrs. Barnett, who taught drama and speech. She was pretty and smart, and because she wasn’t insane, I adopted her as my role model. Some of the other students criticized her for using a depilatory on her mustache. Since I’d never heard the term depilatory, one of the Italian girls explained that Mrs. Barnett’s upper lip was red every week before speech class—a sure giveaway that she was using something to get rid of excess hair. She began calling her Mrs. Depilatory. Given the stunted education at Naz, Mrs. Barnett’s mustache seemed a refreshing symbol of growth. I began taking private drama lessons with her after school.
With Mrs. Barnett’s encouragement I become president of the drama club and starred in a play about nurses who become addicted to heroin. I overdosed in the end, performing what I thought was a brilliant death scene. Since the nuns were preoccupied with staging our spring musical—Flower Drum Song—they hadn’t paid any attention to the content of the play and when they finally saw it, I was called into Sister Superior’s office.
“A play about a drug addict?” she said. “Have you totally lost your mind?”
After I told her that the nurse died for her sins, she was somewhat pacified until she noticed I was wearing mascara. “Take that off immediately!” she said. “Next you’ll be wearing eye shadow and rouge, and then what?” In her mind, mascara was a gateway cosmetic that would inevitably lead to an acting career and depilatory addiction.
The spring dance was the final event before commencement, and I didn’t have a date. Mrs. Barnett fixed me up with her nephew, who went to Phillips and who came from a prominent Andover real estate family. The other girls were going with boys from the local Catholic prep schools, or ones heading off to the military or possibly jail. I needed a dress, a really great one. My mother, acknowledging the importance of the occasion, took me to Yankee Lady, a small boutique off Main Street. It sold preppy Lily Pulitzer–type prints and other emblems of the WASP lifestyle. For years the store’s most covetable item had been a straw fishing tackle bag with a long leather strap. I wanted it more than anything, and when Bumpa bought it for me, I was thrilled.
The saleswoman wore her steel-gray hair in a chin-length bob and spoke in an affected accent. I’d carried my straw bag to show that I wasn’t just any non–Yankee Lady who’d walked in off the street.
“She needs a dress for the spring dance,” my mother said.
“Oh, at Phillips?” the saleswoman asked.
“No,” I said.
She was nosy and wouldn’t let it go. “So where?”
“Nazareth,” I mumbled.
&
nbsp; “Isn’t that in the Holy Land?”
“It’s in Wakefield,” my mother explained. “She’s dating a Phillips boy.” She casually dropped his name, and the saleswoman immediately perked up.
“Oh,” she said, smiling. “Then you need something very special.”
I tried on numerous dresses, each worse than the last. I wasn’t the Lily Pulitzer type. Finally, the saleswoman showed me a long dress covered in tropical splashes of fuchsia and lime. It reminded me of the gowns Oleg Cassini had designed for Jackie Kennedy, if Jackie had been color-blind and forced to attend a black-tie luau.
“That really brightens her up, don’t you think?” the saleswoman said to my mother, who agreed. She was tired of looking at dresses.
The store carried a small selection of shoes, and the saleswoman said she had a perfect match. She presented me with a pair of patent-leather heels in a brilliant shade of ruby. It wasn’t a color I’d normally wear, but the dress wasn’t something I’d normally wear. Going to a formal dance wasn’t something I normally did, and going on a date was something I never did. All in all, it was virgin territory.
Mrs. Barnett’s nephew turned out to be adorable, with dark brown hair and eyes and the cutest smile. He was sweet and polite and never complained when the nuns kept a vigilant watch on our dancing, making sure the boys weren’t spilling their seeds on our new dresses, resulting in mortal sin and costly dry cleaning. Afterward, he drove me home, kissed me good night, and never called again. It was obvious that he was only doing his aunt a favor, and that was okay. I had my ruby slippers, and I’d go wherever they’d take me.
8
To Oz and Back
The shoes took me to Washington, DC, where I spent my freshman year at the Catholic University of America. I know what you’re thinking, that by now I should have tried something different, like a yeshiva, or even the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, where according to the school’s brochure, little monkeys jump among the trees. But the Catholic University of America had one thing the Catholic University in Rio did not and that was a great drama department with teachers who spoke English. I’d read that several famous actors had attended the school, including Jon Voight, who played Rolf in the original Broadway production of The Sound of Music. That was enough for me.
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