Underfoot in Show Business Page 3

  She wasn’t; she was exercising her vocal cords. You do this by taking a very deep breath, opening your mouth very wide to achieve a full-throated scream, starting your “Oh, NO” at high C and then wailing straight down the scale to the lowest bass note you can reach. Like this:

  It greatly increases your vocal range, not to mention the tempers of the people living underneath you.

  When she got through with her vocal cords, Maxine limbered up her tongue, teeth and palate. This limbering-up involved the Peter-Piper-picked-a-peck-of-pickled-peppers exercise, extended to include Sam-sometimes-sends-sister-Susie-sums, and Tom’s-thumb’s-thinner-than-Tim’s-thumb-thus-Tim’s-thumb’s-thicker-than-Tom’s.

  Sam-and-Susie was the hardest because you had to pronounce the last s on “sometimes” and the first s on “sends” separately, and the last s on “sends” and the first s on “sister” separately. When you’ve got that one licked, try saying “granddaughter,” pronouncing each d separately.

  Once Maxine’s cords, tongue, teeth and palate were loosened up for the day, she got to work on her resonance. If you want to be sure your stage voice will positively reverberate with resonance, start humming, and as you hum put your index fingers lightly on each side of the bridge of your nose and see whether your fingers can feel any vibration. (Your nose will vibrate lower down but this doesn’t count; it has to vibrate up at the bridge.)

  If the bridge isn’t vibrating, you’re humming back down in your throat instead of up front in your resonance chamber, which is in the same neighborhood as your sinuses. You have to bring your entire hum forward and then push it up and keep pushing it farther and farther up till your fingers can feel the bridge of your nose vibrate.

  Once the bridge vibrates, you’re on the right track but you’ve still got a long way to go, because to attain really first-class resonance you have to push your hum clear up through your nasal passages to the beginning of your forehead. Maxine eventually achieved this. She put my fingers between her eyebrows and hummed and I almost died of awe when I felt her forehead vibrate.

  (After that, when I took my daily hike through Central Park—so my hips would be as slim and my posture as perfect as Maxine’s—I worked on my hum. But I never even got it up to the bridge of my nose except once, and then it occurred to me that a playwright’s resonance didn’t come from the nasal passages so I gave it up.)

  When she was working and in funds, Maxine augmented the training of her Instrument with singing and dancing lessons. It was during that first winter that Maxine told me she was starting singing lessons with a vocal coach recommended by Terry, and the phrases “singing lessons” and “vocal coach” filled me with respectful admiration. After that, she began talking learnedly about Vocal Technique and Projection. But one day when we were window-shopping on Fifth Avenue and talking about a new musical, I began to sing one of the songs from it under my breath. Maxine joined in, in her authoritative, resonant voice, and after two bars I stopped and stared at her.

  “You’re singing it all on one note!” I said.

  “I know,” said Maxine. “I can’t carry a tune.”

  I don’t know how many singing teachers wore themselves out trying to teach Maxine to carry a tune. None of them ever succeeded. Which was unfortunate, because producers assume that any actress can sing passably enough to manage the refrain of a popular song if a scene in a play happens to call for it.

  So a procession of vocal coaches worked long and hard before they abandoned their efforts to teach Maxine to sing and, instead, taught her to manipulate her speaking voice and project it in a large theatre. With phenomenal results: Maxine’s powers of projection were such that she could turn to me, in the first balcony of Loew’s Eighty-third Street movie theatre, and whisper:

  “Do you think it’s safe to use the ladies’ room here? I have to go,” and be heard clearly by everybody sitting below us on the orchestra floor and above us in the second balcony, not to mention the people on our own level who turned to stare at us from rows around.

  Then there were dancing lessons. In pursuit of that grace and lightness necessary to the perfection of her Instrument, Maxine decided to take up ballet. For a whole year, we took ballet lessons from a Greek who taught us a little Greek classic dancing on the side. I went along, partly because Maxine said it would tone up my system, but mostly because I was studying Greek at the time and had visions of carrying on chatty conversations with the ballet teacher in beginner’s ancient Greek.

  (Studying Greek was one of the things I was doing to perfect my Instrument. My Instrument was the English language—and since the English language derives so largely from Latin and Greek, how could I hope to select the precisely right English word every time I wrote one, if I didn’t know the Greek or Latin root of every word in the language? as I explained impressively to Maxine.)

  Every morning after she trained her Instrument, Maxine prepared for her second activity—making the rounds—by spending a painstaking hour applying street makeup. First she pencilled feathery brown eyebrows over the pale pink ones God had thoughtlessly given her. Then she overlaid her pale pink eyelashes with feathery brown mascara. Next came rouge and lipstick, each chosen with no more care than the average girl would spend in choosing her wedding dress; and finally face powder, dusted on and then carefully brushed off. When her makeup was complete, Maxine looked as if she were wearing no makeup at all. This job done, she climbed into high heels and a chic suit and was off on her rounds of producers’ and agents’ offices.

  In every one of these offices, there was a sign on the wall saying, No casting today. Please leave your name; or, more cheerily, No casting today but keep in touch! You could walk into the office of a producer who was casting a new musical, and find a horde of young actors and actresses who’d been summoned to audition overflowing the sofas, chairs and windowsills till late arrivals had to sit cross-legged on the floor, and above them on the wall a large sign stubbornly insisted, No casting today. The signs were like pictures; they were never taken down.

  So kids making the rounds learned to ignore them. They also devised ingenious methods for forcing the attention of the receptionist in the producer’s outer office, who was usually the only person they were permitted to see. Say you were a young actor or actress making the rounds and you walked into the office of a producer who was casting a new play. You stepped up to the desk and asked politely if you might see the producer.

  “No-casting-today,” said the receptionist in a bored tone and without looking up. “If-you-want-to-leave-your-name—” And her pencil moved to a pad, but she still didn’t look up. This was very frustrating because you might have heard you were exactly the physical type the producer was looking for, and how could the receptionist know this if she didn’t look at you? So you invented a trick to force her to focus on you. Bill Flanagan of Flanagan’s Law, for instance, changed his first name to Brazelius and added the initial P. when he made the rounds.

  “She asks you to leave your name,” he explained to me, “and if you say ‘Bill Flanagan’ she writes it down without looking up. But if you say ‘Brazelius P. Flanagan’ she looks up. She asks you how to spell it, she stares at you to see if you’re serious—and she remembers the name later.”

  He claimed he got a lot of work on the strength of that Brazelius. Of course, when he signed a contract, he reverted to Bill.

  Maxine’s trick was not to answer when a receptionist asked her name.

  “You-wanta-leave-your-name?” the receptionist would mumble, pencil poised above her writing pad, eyes on her manicure. Maxine would stand silent until the receptionist was finally forced to look up to see if she was still there. Once the receptionist looked up, she saw Maxine’s mop of flaming red hair, which was dramatic enough to be remembered.

  Having made the rounds of producers’ and agents’ offices faithfully, Maxine was regularly rewarded by being asked to audition for some new Broadway play. Those auditions not only aged her parents considerably and ruined
their digestion and mine; they also conformed to Flanagan’s Law by simply defying expectation.

  Take, for example, the afternoon when an agent named Eddie sent for Maxine to tell her she was to audition the next morning for the producer and director of what promised to be the new season’s outstanding production. The playwright was famous, the two stars were internationally known, the director was the most sought-after. The cast was set except for the comedy-ingénue.

  “You are so right for the part,” said Eddie, “that after they’ve seen you I don’t think they’ll bother to hear anybody else read for it! Provided”—and he paused solemnly—”provided—you give the best damn audition you’ve ever given. This is a top-drawer production, dear. I don’t want to send you over there unless you feel you can give a top-drawer reading.”

  Now in the best of times and under tranquil conditions, Maxine was by nature highly emotional. (We were both by nature highly emotional.) Under the conditions Eddie had created, she was Joan of Arc and The Snake Pit combined.

  She phoned me that evening and, with death in her voice, asked me to come to her at once; she couldn’t stand to be alone and she couldn’t stand to be with her parents and she was feeling nauseous and so forth. I hurried up to West End Avenue, arriving just as Maxine’s parents were leaving for the movies (I gathered they couldn’t stand to be with her either), and Maxine’s mother, looking careworn, said:

  “She’s in her room, dear. You’d better knock.”

  I went down the hall and knocked timidly on Maxine’s bedroom door. When she opened it, I said, “Hiya” hollowly, took off my coat and hat and dropped them on the bed—and Maxine promptly had hysterics. That’s how I found out it was bad luck in the theatre to put hats on beds.

  When we both stopped crying I asked her what kind of temperament the role called for.

  “I don’t know,” said Maxine coldly. “It’s a secret! I don’t know whether to look ingénue or sexy or sophisticated. First Eddie says I’m exactly right for the part, now he admits he hasn’t seen the script! Nobody’s seen the script!”

  She plucked an invisible eyebrow and glared at me in the mirror, her brown eyes snapping with fury.

  “...incredible people, they have the bloody play MIMEOgraphed and then they dig a hole under the subway and BURY all five hundred copies, God forbid anybody who’s going to audition for it should read it!”

  “What else has Eddie sent you out for?” I asked. “What type does he think you are?”

  The tweezer froze in Maxine’s hand. She stood a moment in the attitude of one listening to the distant roll of the tumbrel. And she whispered in horror:

  “I’m coming down with a cold.”

  In Maxine’s life this was the overriding catastrophe. A cold ruined you, it ruined your looks, your resonance, your projection, everything.

  “It’s not a cold, it’s just nerves,” I said.

  “There’s a prickle in the back of my throat, I’m getting a cold!” She went out to the kitchen and heated a kettle of water and draped a towel over her head and spent the rest of the evening steaming her sinuses while we discussed what she should wear to the audition, what material she should use if they asked her to do her own material, and whether she should tell the blonde star that redheads look very well under pink lights so the star wouldn’t veto her as interfering with blonde lighting.

  At midnight, when I left her, she was icily calm. She stood in the doorway in her blue bathrobe and bare feet, her fiery hair stuck up in curlers, her nose slathered with freckle cream and her face beet-red from the long steaming, and said in a remote voice:

  “I may not call you tomorrow. I know definitely now I’m going to give a ghastly audition.”

  “You’re going to give a wonderful audition,” I said.

  We were both wrong. You were always wrong. You persisted in assuming there were two possibilities and there were always three: the two you thought of and the one that happened.

  Maxine arrived at the producer’s office and the secretary ushered her into an inner office where four men were waiting for her: producer, director, author, casting director. One sat behind the desk, one was in an armchair, the other two were on the sofa. Having announced Maxine’s name, the secretary withdrew, leaving Maxine standing alone in the middle of the room.

  The four men stared at her. Nobody spoke. Nobody asked her to sit down, nobody introduced himself, nobody asked her to read. The silence lasted for several minutes during which they went on staring at her. Finally, one of the men spoke.

  “I don’t see it,” he said.

  “I told Eddie what we wanted!” (That was the casting director.)

  “I don’t see this at all,” the third man agreed. The fourth man said nothing. He had a hangnail and he was working on it. The first man pressed a buzzer and the secretary appeared. Looking past Maxine as if she didn’t exist, the first man said to the secretary:

  “Who else is out there?” The secretary named another young actress, and the producer said: “All right, send her in.”

  The secretary ushered Maxine out. The audition was over. Maxine met me for lunch afterward at the Astor Drugstore, which was a theatre kids’ hangout, and she had even the countermen clutching the walls for support as she acted out the audition for everybody.

  There were auditions where she walked out on stage to read and was stopped before she opened her mouth because she was too tall, or too short, for her scene with the leading man. There were auditions where they decided they didn’t want a redhead or had thought she was British.

  And there was the winter when she was in Florida with a stock company and got a telegram from an agent saying CAN YOU FLY UP SUNDAY IMPORTANT AUDITION MONDAY MORNING and she flew up and phoned the agent and discovered she was to audition for the New Opera Company.

  Nothing daunted, she went out on the New Opera Company stage and did her best comedy material, after which the fat little director came hurtling down the aisle crying:

  “Magnificent, Liebchen, absolutely perfect for ze part! Now let’s hear you zing zomezing.”

  Boom. Don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you.

  Never mind. Once a year came the audition when she actually got the part; and on that day, my friend Maxine owned the earth. She sailed down Fifth Avenue or floated up Broadway in a radiant glow that caused people to stare after her, bemused. Or, as one of her beaux observed to me with a wistful sigh (he wasn’t in the theatre):

  “Maxine with a job is like any other woman in love.”

  Of course, after the successful audition came the first five days of rehearsal during which Maxine and her parents and I all lived in a permanent state of acid indigestion because during the first five days of rehearsal, an actress could be fired. Not till the sixth day was she given a contract. I spent the five probationary evenings cueing Maxine in her lines (while she steamed her sinuses) and saying hello and good-bye to her parents who went off nightly to the movies looking more and more careworn.

  From the day she signed the contract, there was nothing more to worry about till the night before the opening when pre-opening night nerves set in. At 11 P.M. on the night before one opening, she threw the New York telephone directory at me (I can’t lift it myself without using both hands), whereupon I stalked off and went huffily home to bed, to be awakened at 1 A.M. by the telephone conveying weeping apologies from West End Avenue. (Such evenings consoled me for what I put Maxine through when I was out of work and no producer would buy my play, which was most of the time.)

  On opening nights, Maxine’s parents were lucky: they weren’t allowed to go; they might make her nervous. They went on the second night when the crisis was past.

  I was allowed to go to the opening. I sat through each one with my stomach churning and all my fingers crossed. Maxine never gave a bad opening-night performance, but most of the plays she appeared in were the kind of total flops we referred to as “dawgs.” I’d sit through the three acts gamely and, as soon as the final curtain fell, hurr
y backstage to Maxine’s dressing room and say the wrong thing.

  An actor I knew did a very funny act at parties in which he mimicked the well-meaning friends who always came backstage after an opening to offer foot-in-mouth congratulations. The funniest bit in his act mortified me because it was what I invariably said to Maxine after every one of her openings. I’d hurry backstage, knowing the play was a dawg that wouldn’t last a week, walk into Maxine’s dressing room and say earnestly:

  “I LIKED it! I really did!”

  If you can’t do better than that, just leave a note with the stage doorman telling your friend she was sensational and go on home.

  Maxine appeared in eleven Broadway plays, most of which opened on a Tuesday night. On Wednesday came the flop notices, on Thursday an empty house, on Friday the closing notice went up, on Saturday the show closed and on Sunday Maxine slept it off.

  And so, on Monday, she was once more to be found in her parents’ apartment on West End Avenue ready to resume the normal daily life of a glamorous young actress by screaming “Oh, NO!” in the bathroom.

  3. IF THEY TAKE YOU TO LUNCH THEY DON’T WANT YOUR PLAY

  WHEN A YOUNG PLAYWRIGHT—temporarily starved out of New York and back in the bosom of her family in Philadelphia—receives two phone calls from two Broadway producers in the same afternoon, and each producer says: “You’ve written a wonderful play. When can you come to New York to see me?” the playwright naturally assumes that both producers want to produce her play.

  Not until she has hurried off to New York and seen both producers and been left stranded at Penn Station at three in the morning with thirty-five cents and her play unsold does it occur to her that there must have been a flaw in her thinking. Somehow or other, she has failed to understand how producers’ minds work.

  The phone calls came on a Tuesday in March, a month after I’d gone home for a second wind. I’d hung on in New York for a couple of years after my fellowship year ended, keeping alive on dreary office jobs, from which I was regularly fired for typing my plays on company time. That February, I’d lost the one job too many and when my capital had shrunk to the price of a one-way ticket to Philadelphia, I’d packed my bags, left a new play at my agent’s office, said a tearful good-bye to Maxine and crept mournfully home.