Read atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business Online
Authors: Peggy Pope
atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business (14 page)
“What is the stars? What is the stars?”
—Captain Boyle in Juno and the Paycock by Sean
O’Casey
The day Vanna White won the job of turning the letters on television’s Wheel of Fortune, she was fighting the despair of unemployment. She was facing “the dark night of the soul.” She had to take her mind off her career going down the drain before it even got started. I’ll clean out the garage, she thought. That will cheer me up.
So she put on some gloves, and after a few hours of sorting, lifting, throwing out, cleaning, sweeping, and sweating in the heat of a Los Angeles afternoon, the phone rang. It was her agent.
“Vanna, they want to see you over at NBC this afternoon. Can you get there by 3:10?”
“It’s three thirty now, Teddy. I could never make it.”
“Yes, you could. Just hop on up Laurel Canyon, and you’re there.”
“I’m a mess. I’ve been cleaning out the garage. Could I go on a call-back?”
“No. This is the day. It’s now or never.”
“Well, okay, but I’ve got to take a shower.”
“That’s my girl,” Teddy said, and he hung up.
When Vanna put down the phone, she realized that she was in no shape to go to an audition. She’d never get the job in her current state of exhaustion. There would be hundreds of girls competing who had washed their hair just that morning, so she finished up in the garage instead.
At six o’clock, the phone rang again. It was Teddy. He was excited.
“You got it!” he said.
“I didn’t go,” she said.
“You didn’t go?” he said.
“No, I didn’t go,” she said.
“But you got it!”
What happened was that at the end of the day, the casting people took all the head shots and spread them out on the floor to remind themselves of who had been there. During the day, they had each made critical notes on the back of each actress’s picture. Because the back of Vanna’s picture was blank, they decided there was nothing wrong with her and that they had all loved her unconditionally. And that’s how she got the job on Wheel of Fortune and won the fame and riches she deserved.
So goes the story
I missed out on the sixties—the flower children, the Vietnam War, Bo Diddly. My life was filled with acting in plays, so there was no time for a “real life” beyond the stage. I was guest starring in regional theater that whole decade, in Boston, Philadelphia, Palm Beach, Coconut Grove, Hartford, New Haven, Williamstown, Minneapolis, Denver. I would “job in” for a particular part in a play that couldn’t be cast from within the permanent company. It would be a kind of offbeat character that would have been considered outside the range of the usual leading lady type. A leading lady was like a straight man who could move around from part to part throughout the season in variations of herself. I was too much of a character actor to do that. It was a somewhat precarious way for an actress to earn her bread and butter, but it suited me. I didn’t want to be out of town for a whole season. I didn’t want to lose touch with New York. I never mastered the art of being the new kid on the block, but the parts were great and the plays were classics: Shakespeare, Shaw, Molière, Coward, Wycherley.
It was good training. The plays were well written, the characters were bigger than life, and the words were the literature of drama. In order to perform in these plays, I had to stretch every fiber of my body and brain to fulfill the roles. They demanded big emotions and bold comedy, and if you could master them and remain believable, you were in good shape.
I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being a gypsy, packing suitcases and collecting unemployment insurance. I had a five-year plan for when the next lull came: California. TV and Film. Then everyone would know me, and I’d get to act on the stage in New York all the time. That will be the fulfillment of my dream. I got out the I Ching sticks, and they said, “Go to California.” So I went.
When I first got there, I stayed with Frances, my best friend from New York, and I found that I could no longer talk to her. She was deeply involved in Werner Erhard’s self-improvement program, EST, which scared me because it had changed her personality from when I knew her back east. EST was a form of mind control consisting of meditation and brainwashing techniques. Large groups of people paid lots of money to sit in hotel ballrooms for three days while “trainers” insulted and berated them, telling them to “be in the present” and “get it.” This would be followed by periods of relaxation during which they would sometimes lie on the floor and listen to a visualization conducted by the trainer. It was a post—New Age cult that practiced mind over matter with the goal of success dancing in your near future.
Frances had become a stranger. She seemed to be on a different page than I was, with things going on in her head that I wasn’t let in on. Her horizons extended way beyond mine. She was on a stairway to the stars. I was simply after the next job.
She lived with her husband in one of the mansions lining the wide, leafy streets of Beverly Hills. The first thing she said to me after “hello” and a hug was, “I want you to see my orchard.” We went through the back door, and she pointed to some frail saplings spaced in a haphazard manner right in front of us. She moved through them like a kind of wood nymph and spoke as if in a dream.
“This is a cherry tree… and that’s an apple tree… a grapefruit tree. This one’s an orange tree.” She patted it. “A lemon and a lime… a fig tree.” She gazed off somewhat vaguely and said, “Over there is jasmine and a grapevine and some mint. This is my orchard. Doesn’t it smell great? I’m working on bottling it and selling it as a perfume to Neiman Marcus. They want to call it Redondanse. It’s got a nice resonance to it, don’cha think? I buy all my clothes there now. And there’s my Olympic-size swimming pool. I don’t swim in it anymore. I was swimming in it every day, but my hair started falling out. So I stopped.”
“Oh, Frances, I’m so sorry,” I said.
“That’s all right. It’ll grow back. Do you like the wig?”
“Oh, I didn’t realize—well, yes.”
Then she showed me her scream room. We had both been in scream therapy in New York. We had sat in a group therapy circle and screamed at one another while a shrink monitored us with comments like, “Go ahead, Peggy. Get it out,” and “Louder, louder. Let us hear you.”
Then he’d put Frances in a celebrity group because she’d made a wonderful movie. I had a small part in the movie as a member of a therapy group, but the only time I was in the celebrity group with Frances in real life was when the secretary made a mistake and put me there by accident. I was extremely uncomfortable. The group was filled with celebrities and their wives or husbands, and I was sitting there, a nobody, doing my best to scream with the rest of them, when suddenly I went unconscious. When I came to, Frances was sobbing and the doctor was saying, “Peggy, why do you hate, hate, hate Frances and wish she were dead?”
I was in a daze and didn’t know what he was talking about. Everybody in the room was uncomfortable. Then the doctor told Frances and me to hug each other, which seemed to me somewhat unproductive. We did as he told us, but it was never the same between us again, although we pretended it was.
Now here she was showing me her scream room in the den in California. It contained a soundproof padded area under a bed so as not to disturb the neighbors, who had complained. The cook, the chauffeur, the maid, and the secretary were urged to use it as well.
There was a full-length portrait of Frances in the living room from the set of one of her movies, and it dominated the large, high-ceilinged, many-windowed space to such an extent that when Frances was in there as well, I couldn’t think straight.
She spent a lot of time staring at me, and I would start to giggle. She would say, “What are you laughing at?”
“I don’t know,” I would tell her. “You’re staring at me, and I don’t know what to say.”
So I had to move. We had been close friends for ten years, seeing each other or talking on the phone every day. And now we had nothing in common, not even my boyfriends, to whom she had often taken a fancy in the past. What we’d had in common was our hunger to act and work, and now there was this huge gap between us. I didn’t measure up in this strange, foreign setting; I didn’t even want to.
I wanted to act, and she wanted to be a star with all the fringe benefits: the best table at the restaurant, the VIP upgrade on the airplane, celebrity parties, awards, limousines, clothes, hairdressers, trainers, stuff I didn’t even know about. I had an orange Rent-a-Wreck car parked in her driveway, and, like me, it just didn’t fit in at Frances’s place. I will always remember her generosity, but it cost too much.
I took to the hills. I sublet a house from an actress named Jennifer who was trying to live on both coasts at once. After I moved in, she called and asked if she could come and stay with me.
“I’ll sleep in the attic,” she said. “You won’t even know I’m there.”
So back she came with her dachshund, whose name was Tom. We chatted for a while. Jennifer talked at great length about her lovers, and then she pulled a ladder of stairs down from the hall ceiling and said a cheery good night. Tom tried to climb up after her but couldn’t make it as his legs were too short and his belly sagged and scraped the risers. He had to stay downstairs with me. He was infuriated by this and went around peeing on all the furniture.
In the morning, I told Jennifer that I didn’t think it was right what was happening. I had just had all the furniture covers cleaned, and now they were going to smell bad again. She seemed shocked and hurt.
“Heavens, I never dreamed I would be made to feel persona non grata in my own home!” she said.
“Well, that’s the way I feel,” I said and went into the kitchen to do the dishes she’d left in the sink because I didn’t want the ants trailing in.
After some marathon phoning, she took off, leaving me a check for $3.21. I assumed it was her estimate for sub-subletting the attic for a night.
That year in that house, I turned fifty—old no matter how you looked at it, and older than that if you lived in Hollywood. It was even older if you lived alone in a house where a dog had peed on the furniture. There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. I called my sister in tears. What was to become of me, a fifty-year-old gypsy?
“Oh, Peggy. After fifty everything gets so much better,” said Adeline. She sounded so sure of it that I believed her. She wasn’t acting in order to cheer me up. I was the actress. She was the writer. I could tell the difference.
Finding work in LA was like looking for an oasis in a desert. It was another medium in another country. When I first got there, it was Halloween. I went to the bank to open an account. It was only ten in the morning, and the tellers were all dressed up to go trick-or-treating. I had a choice of Clark Gable, a skeleton, or the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz. I picked Clark Gable and asked him if he’d give me some play money as I was going to be working in films now. He didn’t get it. He said he was writing a script.
LA was the first time I saw bank tellers in costume on Halloween.
In LA, thinking I should review my acquaintance with the local movie culture and re-read What Makes Sammy Run? By Budd Schulberg I got a blank look from the salesgirl in the book store and after she thought it through she said, “Maybe try the children’s section in the back.” Wctch up on the c
My first job in Hollywood was a part in Oh, God! starring George Burns. I had met the director, Carl Reiner, when he was casting offbeat types for the opening scene, in a supermarket. There were no lines. It was an establishing shot, from which the audience gets the style and place and tone of what’s to come. It was also background for the titles, and for the latecomers who were still getting seated and generally annoying the rest of the moviegoers.
Carl was one of my heroes. I had adored him since I’d heard him interview Mel Brooks as the 2000 Year Old Man. When I got to the set, Carl looked at me as if he’d forgotten who I was. Then he said, “Oh, oh, I know. Go over there and shoplift a lamb chop. Put it under your raincoat. Wardrobe, get her a raincoat!” I saw the film recently and thought I was fabulous, a natural, experienced, desirable and on my way. But I don’t think anyone else ever noticed me. It may always be Carl’s and my secret.
Then there was a long period of going on interviews. I was a new kid on the block, and a call for a reading meant that I had to go in and read three different times for three different episodes of the same show over the course of several weeks before the casting people felt they knew me well enough. Then they’d take a chance and have me in for the director.
Thinking I wasn’t going to get a job for a while, I tried out for a part in a play at a little theater at the east end of Santa Monica Boulevard. LA stage work at that time left something to be desired. Actors might leave a production at any moment if they were offered a TV show or a film. Someone else was always ready to go on as a replacement at the last minute. The play would suffer, but what the hell. Actors were out there to break into movies and television, where the money was. Acting on stage in LA served mainly to keep one’s chops salivating. Actors ran the risk of rehearsing alone with just the director while the other actors in the scene were off auditioning for screen roles.
Then I got a call to read for Barney Miller. I went, not expecting to get it, and didn’t think to mention the play I was in, Midnight Moon at the Greasy Spoon, as I didn’t think they’d be interested. When I got the call to be on Barney Miller, I found that it would involve working during the week the play began performances. I’d have to miss opening night.
Steeped in theater tradition as I was, I didn’t think about it. I couldn’t leave the play in the lurch like that. The theater is a temple. You just don’t do that.
My agent was bewildered.
“But, Peggy, we’ve got to get you started,” she said.
I was firm and went to rehearsal at the theater. The first preview was to be the next day. When I got there, I learned that they hadn’t gotten me a costume yet. Fate was taking care of me. I thought of the I Ching sticks that had told me to come here. I had turned down Barney Miller, one of the foremost TV shows of the time, for a stage play in East LA where they had no clothes for me to wear. I started to have second and third and fifth thoughts. It got to be midnight and then one o’clock. At two o’clock in the morning, I said to my room at the Sunset Marquis, “I gotta talk to someone about this.”
There was an old character actor in the compound whose light was always on. I knocked on his door.
“Come in,” he said.
I told him my story.
“Emory,” I said, “do you think I made a mistake?”
“Ye-e-e-s,” he drawled, deadpan. “I think you did.”
At nine o’clock the next morning, I called Marsha, my agent, and asked her if I could change my mind, if she thought they had cast it yet.
She said she’d find out.
I was very lucky. They still wanted me. I went to meet Danny Arnold, the producer/writer/director. When I got out of the elevator, the casting director was there to meet me. She was as white as a sheet washed in too much Clorox. I’d never seen anyone so white before.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I didn’t get much sleep last night,” she said. “C’mon, let’s go.”
She pushed me back into the elevator, and we were off to another floor. I found out later that she had almost lost her job because of me. No one turned down Barney Miller. Everyone in town would kill to be on it. She’d had a huge scare. I felt awful about causing her such a fright and relieved that she went on to bigger and better jobs.
Danny Arnold was an actor’s guardian angel. Before he wrote a guest part, he would cast the actor so the two would fit together like a hand in glove. And they were outrageous parts. I played a cat burglar’s widow who was carrying on her husband’s business. Still very much in love with him, I was cat burglaring because it made me feel close to him. After that, I played a woman who made a date through a personals ad, and, when the guy arrived and pulled out a gun to rob her, she shamed him into first eating the dinner she’d cooked for him. Another time, I took the police station hostage with a pressure cooker that I said had a bomb in it, because I thought the police were responsible for my husband’s impotence. I also played a woman who became so engrossed in soap operas that she thought she was seeing real life through a window in her apartment. She would call the station and report crimes and clues from the plots. These women weren’t me, yet they were because Danny wrote them for me. He slanted and filtered them through me, as he slanted and filtered all of the characters on the show through the actors.
The regular cast was based on aspects of Danny’s own personality; he split himself up into five guys. It worked well. The stories were true, taken from actual New York City police files, and the set was a copy of the Sixty-Eighth Street precinct.
It was the first time I heard actors talking no louder than a whisper to each other. It was quiet as a laboratory on that set. It was my introduction to “less is more” on camera. Keep your head still and do nothing. It’s all in the eyes. Danny would stand close by and act silently with the actor.
He also laughed so quietly that the mike couldn’t pick it up, but the actor could. This gave us a “live” audience—a gift that makes for a better performance. If you don’t believe this, try telling yourself a joke in an empty hall and see how funny it isn’t.
Danny used four cameras shooting simultaneously from different angles, cutting down on the number of takes and keeping the spontaneity of the scene. It normally takes five days to film a half hour sitcom, but Barney Miller was so well written that one year we did a complete show on the last day of shooting before the season’s contract was up. At midnight, they would have to dip into “golden time” and pay triple the salaries. Hal Linden and I did a six-minute scene—walking, talking, opening file cabinets, drinking coffee, getting up, sitting down, taking out a gun, and strapping it on—in one take.
In the episode where I watched the soaps, I got to say, “Only his chauffeur knows for sure” about a corrupt judge. It was a take-off on a catchphrase of the day about a blonde and her hairdresser. I’m quite certain that scene helped Noam Pitlik, the director, win an Emmy.
Hal Linden and his regular staff of officers, Steve Landesberg, Ron Glass, Max Gail, Ron Carey and Jack Soo were amazing actors and lovable, real people and always applauded the guest actors when their work was finished. It was the first time I’d experienced that.
Danny Arnold was a tremendous talent with the energy to work around the clock on a production. He made everybody look good. I was lucky to have been there to look good, too.
