Heart of Glass

by Wendy Lawless

  Wall Street money from the go-go eighties was rapidly changing the low-key, old-money tone of East Hampton and creeping out toward Amagansett and Montauk. Even Grey Gardens, the famously dilapidated haunt of Big Edie and Little Edie Bouvier, had been completely renovated—its creepy, broken-down charm just a memory to be visited in the Maysles brothers documentary. We’d walk to the beach at the end of the street and eat fries and greasy burgers to ease our hangovers, while Ali, who was now five, ran around in a bathing-suit bottom, digging in the sand and splashing in the water. Sometimes we’d get a babysitter and go out dancing. Other times we’d watch The Money Pit or Witness, dunking Oreos in Maker’s Mark bourbon or eating Häagen-Dazs out of the container with the same spoon. We comforted each other, commiserating over the end of her second marriage, and my seeming inability to navigate relationships at all. Grateful for her care and concern, she felt like my older sister, truly. I had always been the big sister to Robin, and though we were close, our birth order informed our relationship. In the same way I had protected and “mothered” my sister to a degree, Didi looked after me, gave me security and happiness, despite my tumultuous love life and challenging career.

  All through that summer, I continued my therapy sessions with Elaine once a week. I was still struggling to resolve my issues with my mother on my own. But now I felt strong enough to take action, to reach out to my mother in an attempt to make some kind of peace, if that was possible.

  So I called my mother, careful to say Georgann instead of Mother and to keep things on a light, even keel. It was a fairly civil—if chilly—conversation, during which she told me she was proud of my accomplishments as an actress. She was working in Connecticut for a company that placed retired senior executives in temporary consulting and advisory positions with companies and nonprofits. She liked it and got on well with the people there and had even made some friends, though I couldn’t help but think they wouldn’t last long. I gave her my phone number, and we agreed that it would be nice to talk occasionally and keep up with each other.

  Then, as they always had, things went bad.

  “I’ve been raped!” she screamed into the phone, startling one of Dave’s boarders at Ninety-seventh Street. Hearing her shriek from across the kitchen, I took the receiver from his hand, attempted to talk to her calmly, and ended up having to hang up.

  The crazy calls started again—a couple, several, sometimes ten times a day. Most of them were hang-ups, but she also left messages on the answering machine—her voice a hoarse whisper as if she was calling from her desk at work. After one of her calls, I crawled into a dark cupboard underneath the bathroom sink and stayed there for an hour, sobbing.

  “Well, Wendy, this is one way of dealing with your problem.” Elaine recrossed her legs, switching the legal pad to the other knee.

  “Whaddya mean?” I had been up all night, after another horrid telephone call from Mother. I hadn’t picked up but had listened to her poison-filled voice on the message ­machine—the usual tirade about how she was sick, or broke, and I couldn’t muster the strength to care.

  “If you don’t eat and sleep, you’ll make yourself sick. Then you won’t have to worry about dealing with your mother. You won’t be able to.”

  Suddenly, I saw what she meant. By being a big mess, I wasn’t taking responsibility for my life or my actions. I wasn’t taking care of myself. Maybe this had been what Phyllis had meant about deciding to grow up.

  When Mother called back a few days later, shouted her usual tirade, and hung up hysterical, I paused for a second, then called her back.

  “Hello . . . ?” she answered in her calm voice, one that I hadn’t heard in quite some time. She sounded as if she was sitting on her living-room couch, reading a magazine. At that moment I realized that it was, once again, all an act; and it certainly wasn’t worth losing sleep or crying over.

  “Georgann, if this is the way you’re going to behave—the robo-calling and the nasty messages—I just don’t think we can be friends.”

  Silence.

  A declaration of boundaries clearly wasn’t the response she had been expecting. She would have preferred if I’d been crying and had snot coming out of my nose.

  “Well, Wendy, that’s fine. I don’t want to be friends; I am too angry at you.” She hung up.

  A huge rush of relief swept over me. I had drawn the line and she had made her choice, opting out of contact with me. As I turned this small victory over in my mind, I realized that, in a larger sense, all the hurt she’d caused me in the past was over, done with. She could never do that to me again. I simply wouldn’t let her.

  • • •

  Except for Shakespeare in the Park, summer is traditionally a pretty dead time in the city for work in the theater. I had my unemployment and then got a short-term temp gig answering phones at Juilliard’s traveling company, the Acting Company, where Nina was now working with her old boss Gerry Gutierrez. I just took down messages on little pink pads of paper and transferred calls—a skill for which the deli had trained me well. It gave me a place to go in the morning, for which I was grateful. The people were nice, and so was the income.

  I took the subway to Times Square, but from the subway station, walking Forty-second Street to Eighth Avenue, the commute could be treacherous, calling for serpentine moves to avoid the bums and drunk guys who harangued me and asked, “Can I see your pussy?”—or if they were slightly more sober, tried to grab my boobs. I carried my cup of coffee like a weapon, in case any of them came too close.

  The Acting Company office was a shabby little hole on the second floor, ruled over by a mercurial, fireplug-shaped force of nature named Margot Harley, who yelled a lot in a Bryn Mawr accent and expected everything to be done perfectly, which of course meant her way.

  “Get Edward Albee’s agent on the phone!” she’d roar at me, even though her desk was less than four feet from mine.

  I’d look the number up in the Rolodex and place the call. “Hello? It’s Margot Harley calling. You know, Harley, like the motorcycle?”

  Margot basically ignored me unless I was placing a call for her, but I enjoyed trying to get her attention and crack that frosty, upper-class veneer that she was either born with or had picked up from her predecessor, John Houseman.

  Nina’s boss, Gerry, often called the office and always pretended to be some famous actress—sometimes dead, sometimes a lesbian, always female. I took messages from Rosalind Russell, Agnes Moorehead, Mary Martin, Bea Arthur, and Dame Judith Anderson. When he found out I’d been through a classical-acting program, he asked if I wanted to audition for the company. I had never been sure that he even liked me, so I was touched by his generosity. I did my pieces for him and Nina and was called back and offered the job: small roles and understudying the other actors on the next tour, all of them from Juilliard. Afterward he took Nina and me across the street to a crappy Mexican restaurant to talk more about what we’d be doing. From his point of view, he was giving me the chance of a lifetime—to work with people from the top school in the country. Juilliard actors were the crème de la crème, along with NYU graduates, or kids from Yale.

  “And let’s face it, darling,” he said as he started in on his fourth martini, “it’s not like you’ll ever be Kevin Kline. I mean, you’re good, but you’re not that good.”

  I smiled and sipped on my jumbo-sized margarita on the rocks with salt.

  “It’ll be great to have you along.” Nina smiled, reaching over to squeeze my arm.

  I was torn. I’d be on tour, living out of a bus with a group of strangers, who most likely had all been classmates. I was afraid of being lonely and far away from my friends—the only family I had, here on this coast—and then I had my appointments with Elaine. Without my newly woven safety net, I suddenly saw myself buying crack in a supermarket parking lot in Nebraska. I stalled for a week, agonizing over whether I should take the job.


  When I told Didi about it, she didn’t try to hide her disdain. “What the hell are you going to do on a tour bus, playing a lady-in-waiting, booked into every shit-hole town in America?!” She felt I should commit to staying in New York, or at least on the East Coast.

  “But I don’t have anything else.” I moped, imagining the headline: “Classical Actress in Period Costume Jumps off Grain Silo After Bus Stalls in Dubuque.”

  “Well, I have an audition for you for Midsummer Night’s Dream at Hartford Stage tomorrow. Mark Lamos is directing. Here are the sides they want you to read. It’s for Helena. You’re probably not gonna get it because you’re not tall enough, but give it a shot. Just go in there like you already have the job.”

  I knew Helena’s big speech in act 1 by heart because I had watched an actress named Lisa Sloan do it every night at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, when I was working as a dresser eight years before. So I was able to go in and do it off-book. I had always adored the speech—all about unrequited love and peppered with beautiful images and words. Helena enjoys her suffering and is totally desperate, throwing herself at this man whom she adores. I identified with her “love is a many-tortured thing” attitude. I had tried to make guys want me and had longed to be truly and deeply loved, searching in all the wrong places for that man who would devote himself to me and our life together. Perhaps that showed because Mark Lamos offered me the job right there in the room.

  “I’m sorry. What?” I knew I’d heard wrong.

  “I want you to come to Hartford and be my Helena,” he repeated with a sort of kindly delight. A slim, puckish fellow, he wore tennis shoes and practically flew around the room like Peter Pan.

  I stammered and shook my head, not knowing what to say. I told him I’d been offered a job with the Acting Company.

  “Have you signed the contract?”

  “Uh . . . no.” I almost blurted out my vision of the dive off the grain silo, but stopped myself.

  “Well, I think you should come work for me.” He smiled. “Unless you’re afraid of Margot. Are you afraid of Margot?”

  I shook my head. Of course I was a little afraid of Margot—everyone was.

  “So, tell her you got another offer—no, tell you got a better offer! And I’ll see you in two weeks.”

  “Thank you, I’m so excited!” I wanted to kiss him, but instead I skipped out of the room and down the stairs out into the street. I found the nearest phone booth right away and called Didi. The theater had already called her with the offer. I asked her why she had said that I’d never get the part.

  She laughed. “I had to psych you out or you’d overthink it. Now you have a job near the city. See?”

  When I told Gerry that I was taking the Hartford job, he looked down at me disapprovingly and made it clear that he believed I was making a big, career-killing mistake. It might be, but I knew that for my mental health I was making the right decision. Like ending my relationship with Stewart and standing up to my mother, I had done the right thing for myself—and it was getting easier every time.

  • • •

  Mark only liked to rehearse for four hours a day—he believed that after four hours, your brain just couldn’t absorb any more information. Helena was a demanding part—she’s brainy and loquacious. Mark told me that I was often behind the metaphorical horse, holding on to its tail, in terms of keeping up with the language. Striving to run faster, keep up, and perhaps eventually jump up on the horse, I felt challenged and lucky to be surrounded by talented people. I worked hard and wanted madly to make the director happy with me.

  Hartford was an oleo of ugly, new glass skyscrapers and gorgeous, old brick and brownstone buildings built in Victorian or Colonial Revival style. It had been the home of Mark Twain, would be Katharine Hepburn’s final resting place, and contained the oldest public museum in the country, the Wadsworth Atheneum. I found the city a bit gray and sketchy in terms of safety; it went block to block as in New York, but the actors always traveled in a pack from the theater to our housing, which was on the second floor of a shopping mall, usually stopping off en masse at the Irish bar on the first floor. I had an enormous apartment all to myself, big enough to ride a nonmetaphorical horse around in. It was a very social group—lots of parties, poker games, and barhopping. I had a crush on the guy playing Demetrius, the object of my affection in the play, but luckily he had a serious girlfriend. Bradley Whitford lived down the hall from me and would stop in for a sandwich; everyone at the theater lusted after him, except me. We were just buddies, and I was done with actors.

  That didn’t mean I wanted to be ignored by them. Since I was running around in little dance tights and a sports bra during most of the play, I joined the YMCA and started doing leg lifts like crazy. Being practically naked in the show put the fear of God in me and my dimply thighs.

  Jenny’s due date approached; every time I called her house and she didn’t answer, I worried that she was giving birth in her car or something. Her son Nathaniel came right on time, but sadly, three weeks later her dad succumbed to cancer. He had been in remission, but then the cancer suddenly and swiftly returned. I was happy he got to see his grandson and hold him, but everyone was devastated by his death. I took the train down on my day off and spent a sad afternoon at Ninety-seventh Street with Jenny and Dave. I wasn’t able to go to the memorial service because I had two shows and no understudy. I felt that I was letting them down by not being there, but the show had to go on.

  The play was up and running and very physical—the fairies all flew in the production, and I thought that the moment when Bottom flies off with Titania into the night was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. I also learned why Peter Pan is usually played by a woman: if a man wore those harnesses, he could end up with earmuffs made of his own testicles. The lovers ran around and jumped in and out of a large pool of water in the stage floor during the second act. Invariably, the first two rows of the audience got as soaked as if they were watching Shamu at SeaWorld. I had to wear knee pads to prevent carpet burns and accidentally pulled Demetrius’s pants off completely one night groveling after him.

  Lots of people—friends, roommates, ex-roommates, and family—came to Hartford to see the show. Didi came with her new fiancé, even though she wasn’t divorced from her second husband yet. His name was Michael, and he was an actor, an ex-marine with red hair and a salty sense of humor who I thought was a good match for her. Michael appealed to the bawdy, bourbon-drinking broad in her as opposed to the WASPy boarding-school side. My sister, Robin, who had recently moved to New York, came for opening night and quickly developed a crush on my castmate Brad Whitford.

  “He’s so hot!” She giggled and fanned her hand in front of her face.

  “His girlfriend just dumped him—want me to introduce you?” I batted my eyes at her, calling her bluff.

  “No, thanks. I just like to look.”

  My sister’s track record with men was no better than mine. She had a penchant for difficult, withholding types and bad boys just as I did. So far, that hadn’t worked out for either of us.

  Being in Midsummer felt like the most rewarding experience of my short career; I learned so much from Mark and my fellow actors about pacing, endurance, and the pow-pow-pow of doing Shakespeare and turning on a dime. Performing the play was exhilarating, like running a race and winning every time. But when the play ended, I went back to the city and again took up my place in the registration line at unemployment. My high was over.

  I was broke. I had sold my car for $1,000, and the money from my grandfather had run out despite my frugal living. I made ends meet temping for a few agencies for nominal pay, since I didn’t know how to type. I worked as a reader at auditions. I got a one-week gig on a soap opera called One Life to Live, playing a debutante in a big dress, which paid the bills for a month and let me work with Celeste Holm, the Oscar-winning actress. I got to spend a w
eek with her, laughing and listening to her stories about double-dating with JFK and his older brother, Joe, the one who was killed in World War II. She drove the wardrobe people crazy by taking home parts of her costumes, the Ferragamo shoes especially. “They’re mine,” she’d declare indignantly. Perhaps she was confusing ABC with RKO or some other movie studio from her glittering Hollywood past. Or perhaps she remembered just how quickly a run can end and where the unemployment line begins. Either way, she was gracious, hilarious, and very kind to me, even though I don’t think she even knew my name.

  No sooner had I paid up my rent and share of the bills than I had to move. Dave had a new girlfriend, and they were serious. With two jobs and a ridiculously low rent, they didn’t need to sublet rooms anymore, and they wanted to be alone—to have a grown-up relationship in an apartment decorated with unbroken furniture and items brought inside on purpose. It was the end of almost a decade of roommates and boarders and of the apartment at Ninety-seventh Street serving as a crossroads or way station between school and real life. I understood, but the timing wasn’t great, as I had $75 left in my bank account.

  Maybe out of guilt for kicking me out or maybe just because he was a nice guy, Dave helped me get a job hostessing at Bouley. When David Bouley had left Montrachet to start his own restaurant, he had taken Dave and a couple of the other young stars of the kitchen with him. The new restaurant was a huge success and always overbooked; I took reservations over the phone during the day and seated people in the evening—an upgrade from the days of indecipherable sandwich orders. It was a crazy kind of glamorous, getting seriously dressed up every night, putting on heels and standing up to the Masters of the Universe as they foamed at the mouth and threw their platinum cards at me to try to get a table for their supermodel girlfriends or Valentino-jacketed wives. Only in Manhattan can a girl just over five feet tall in borrowed designer clothes and getting paid eight bucks an hour in cash wield so much power. My first night on the job, the waiters took me out after closing to a dive bar a few blocks away called Puffy’s to celebrate my survival. After a few too many drinks, I ended up singing on top of—and then drunkenly falling off of—the jukebox. The management asked us to leave, and the thrilled waiters hoisted me up in the air above their heads and carried me out to the street to put me in a taxi home. Apparently, I’d passed the test. The next morning I had a bruise the size of a basketball on my butt.