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T
HE MARK HELLINGER
Theater on West 51st Street was originally built by Thomas W. Lamb in the 1930s as a movie palace for Warner Bros. Herman Levin, our producer, took a gamble when he chose the venue as a home for
My Fair Lady,
since, before our occupation, it had been a bit of a white elephant and was situated a few blocks uptown from the main Broadway area. But it was a beautiful theater, especially the front interior of the building, the lobby being exquisite and ideally matching the elegance of our show. Though a little shallow backstage, it was one of the largest and best equipped of the New York theaters, and it had a seating capacity of eighteen hundred people.

Much later, in 1970, the Nederlanders purchased it, but after a string of flops, they leased and eventually sold it to the Times Square Church in 1989. Various parties have tried to reclaim the building as a legitimate theater in the years since, but to no avail—which is truly a shame, since Broadway must and should preserve every great theater that it can.

MY FAIR LADY
opened on March 15, 1956. After more tech rehearsals, we had had one paid preview only, which the audience received enthusiastically. On opening night, Moss gathered the company onstage before the curtain went up. He gave a short, charming speech telling us that we were all wonderful, and if the audience didn’t love the show—well, what did they know! He added, “I have only one thing left to say: God bless us every one…and screw Tiny Tim.”

The audience
did
love us. The reaction at the end of the performance was as phenomenal as any I can remember. People rose from their seats, seeming to want to storm the stage in their excitement. There were repeated bravos and many curtain calls. The reviews the following morning were ecstatic. Broadway embraced us and took us to its heart.

I wish I could tell you every detail of that opening night. I cannot. I doubt that even Alan or Moss gave accurate descriptions of it. It was so stunning, so overwhelming, and I think we were all dazed from the effort and the extraordinary reaction afterward. Was there a cast party? Did I go to Sardi’s? I think Lou Wilson was with me that night. My family sent telegrams from home, of course, as did Charlie Tucker.

Tony Walton and I had been exchanging Dictabelts when I was out of town with the show. This was a new way of corresponding at the time. We would record our voices onto a plastic roll inside a compact little machine known as a Dictaphone, and send each other the roll in an envelope on an almost daily basis. Alas, the Dictaphone is defunct these days, and there is no way to gauge what I relayed to Tony in terms of that opening night, but he remembers that the recording was euphoric.

The high of the opening was followed by the immediate pressure to make the cast album, which we recorded a week later, on a Sunday. More stress on the vocal cords, more exhaustion—because we gave it our all and we didn’t have a day off.

Our press department was bombarded with an assault of epic proportions from the media. All the daily papers, evening papers, and magazines wanted their own photo calls, and there were long nights after the final curtain came down when the company stayed on in the theater. Suppers were brought in; we changed scenes and costumes endlessly. Each session was a marathon for the photographers as well as the cast, and each shoot required discipline and as much conservation of time and effort as possible. Many a night we didn’t get to bed until three
A.M
. or later.

THUS BEGAN THE
great learning period of my life. Knuckling down, working, discovering what it is like to be in a great show and a very long run. I divide the experience into four distinct sections.

Right after the opening, one feels as if one has never learned a single
line of dialogue. For the first three months there are panicky moments when, because you’ve had your head down for so long, nothing has been totally absorbed and it’s almost as if you have to relearn the play: “Is this the right line here? Is that what I meant to say?” Then you really cement it.

The next three months of the run are pure enjoyment; fleshing out the role, giving it the best you have, playing with it, finding depth.

The following three months, one searches for anything to keep focused: listening to countermelodies in the orchestra that you’ve never heard before, reworking a line for better effect or finding something new.

The last three months are sheer slog: everything you can think of to concentrate, to be disciplined, to bring to bear all that you have learned.

And I had another year to go after that!

Overnight, it seemed, tickets to the show were like gold dust. The advance sales were tremendous. We heard that a couple had received a pair of tickets anonymously in the mail. Though they had no idea who had sent them, they decided to take advantage of the generous gift. They came to the theater, had a wonderful evening, and went home to discover their house had been burgled. The burglars had left them a note saying, “
Hope you enjoyed the show.
” Pretty creative, if you think about it!

The first weeks of a show’s run, audiences consist mostly of theater parties. These are audiences who have paid over and above the ticket price to benefit some charity, and patrons arrive stuffed with pretheater goodies and drinks, and are a little annoyed at having paid through the nose. They are inclined to sit on their hands with the attitude, “You’re a hit—show me!”

In the case of
My Fair Lady,
our theater parties continued for almost three months, and though word was out about how good our show was and those audiences did indeed enjoy the performances, there was a marked difference when we finally began playing to regular houses. Then we
knew
we really were a hit.

I recall the wonder I felt whenever a great audience reacted to Eliza’s outburst at the end of the Ascot scene. She is trying so hard to be a lady,
but in the excitement of being at the race track, she completely forgets herself and encourages her horse by yelling at the top of her voice, “Come
on,
Dover! Move your bloomin’
arse
!” It was an extraordinary experience to feel an entire audience rock back in their seats as one body, with total surprise and helpless laughter.

TONY ARRIVED IN
New York City in the middle of April. He sailed over on the
Queen Mary
, and Lou Wilson and I went down to the docks to meet him. He moved into the room next to mine at the Park Chambers, and from then on we were inseparable. He came to see
My Fair Lady
immediately (a matinee performance), and he described the afternoon as being “magical.”

I couldn’t count how many times he saw the show in all, but he visited often and would sometimes walk through the pass door separating the backstage area from the front of the theater to watch a favorite moment.

Rex was dating his future (sixth) wife, Kay Kendall. She was a good actress and comedienne; generous, beautiful, fine-boned, a thin delicate nose, long legs, and an exquisitely small waist. She was all heart, all fun.

She and Tony were the “bachelors” (the theater widow and widower, if you will) flung together by the circumstance of their respective partners working nonstop in a Broadway show. Many evenings Tony and Kay would saunter off together for some jolly escapade, and afterward, they would tell Rex and me all about it.

I began to observe Rex at work, and was filled with admiration for his talent. He had an instinctive sense of timing. If somebody coughed or made a sound in the audience, his senses were so attuned that he would adjust accordingly and hold a certain line or repeat it. His technique was outstanding, and he moved like a dancer, sometimes on his toes or drawing his entire body up much like a human exclamation mark, his arms above his head for emphasis.

He continued to worry about hearing the orchestra correctly. Higgins’s last song in the show, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” was sung downstage, outside Higgins’s house. The song begins softly, and Rex insisted that no scene change could be made behind him until the
tempo of the song picked up and the orchestration was fuller and louder. That way, nothing distracted him or interfered with the quiet moment.

One night a frayed rope holding a flat, which was stored in the flies of the theater, came apart. The heavy piece of scenery swung sideways, then fell at an angle, skewering the stage with a terrible crash, just behind the painted scrim where Rex was standing. The scrim ballooned forward from the draft, splinters and debris spilling out beneath it.

It just so happened that not a single person was backstage at this moment, because of Rex’s edict that the scenery not be touched. Nobody was hurt—which was a miracle. But the crash was horribly loud, and the orchestra came to a grinding halt, Rex came to a grinding halt—then, with great presence of mind, he said to Franz Allers, “Well, come on,
come on
—give me that bit with the ‘clarionet.’” The audience burst into applause, the show picked up again, the stage management hastily cleared the broken set behind the drop, and we finished the show.

Rex and Kay occasionally invited Tony and me to the country house that they had rented. It was lovely to get away on a Saturday night after the two shows and to have a decent rest in fresh air, except that life at the Harrisons’ was anything but peaceful. Everything was a drama.

One evening Rex was discussing with Tony the merits of a little painting by the French naïve artist Bombois that he had just acquired.

“I bought it because I like it,” Rex said to Tony, “but what is it about the artist that makes him so special?”

Tony offered whatever insight he could, but was distracted when Kay walked in covered from head to toe in mud, leaves, and twigs.

“What on earth have you done?” Rex was astonished.

“I was walking the dogs and I fell in a bog in the woods,” she declared.

“Rubbish,” said Rex. “You did it to make an entrance.”

Kay just smiled.

Everything about their lives together seemed heightened, crazy, funny. Tony and I enjoyed being observers.

Another time, they invited us to join them and then completely forgot that they had done so. Tony and I were packed and ready, but Rex
and Kay didn’t appear. We found them just as they were exiting the stage door. Trying to be casual, we asked, “Are we on for this weekend?”

They apologized. “Oh sorry, not possible this weekend. We completely forgot.”

We went to see a movie instead.

MOSS VISITED OFTEN
after we opened. He burst into my dressing room once in a brand-new Aquascutum raincoat and said with considerable glee, “Want to see something? Ta-da!” He opened the coat as if to reveal some dirty postcards. The inside was lined with mink.

He explained, “I just bought Kitty a new fur and told her it was a shame to waste the old one, so I decided to use it.”

He loved money, loved what he did with it. He relished it in an appropriate way, delighting in his good fortune.

HOOKED ON AMERICAN
milk shakes and occasional boiled potato sandwiches (my favorites), I became somewhat overweight. Moss said tactfully, “You’re looking a bit broad in the beam, darling, particularly in the last dress.”

“I know it, Mossie!” I confessed. “I’ve been wondering what to do about it.”

“I have an infallible diet,” Moss replied. “I do it all the time. Just halve your portions. If you normally have two potatoes for dinner, cut it down to one. If you normally have one potato, cut it in half and relish it all the more. That way you don’t deny yourself a thing.”

It worked beautifully, and I slimmed down.

BIFF LIFF CALLED
the show from a tall desk in the wings. He would stand wearing headphones to cue the lights, sound, and scenery. If I had a moment, I would give him a hug, and he would acknowledge me with a nod and a smile as he busily got on with the show. While he was preoccupied, I would very gently remove his tie clip or sneak the wallet out of his back pocket. Later he would pretend to look for it and I would magically produce it. I am sure eventually he was on to me, but he allowed me to play the silly game anyway.

The company had bonded out of town, but now the real friendships began.

Robert Coote, who played Colonel Pickering, fondly called me “Baby Doll,” which then became shortened to “BD.” He would burst into my dressing room before the show calling, “BD, BD! Hello, BD. How are you today?”

I’d be hurrying to get ready, but I always stopped to chat for a moment.

Coote would continue, “I walked around the Central Park Reservoir this morning and then I had a
wonderful
swim at the Athletic Club.” He would give himself a hearty slap on the diaphragm. “Then I had a good lunch…,” and he would describe it in detail. Everything with “Cooter” was about physical fitness and health. He’d inhale deeply and say he was feeling fit as a fiddle, and indeed, with his ruddy cheeks and sparkling eyes, he looked it.

Stanley Holloway was always adorable, as was his wife, Lainie. The two were inseparable. She was blond and petite, and Stanley was forever hail-fellow-well-met. He had a booming voice, probably because he was a little deaf. We shared the same birthday, and would celebrate together. The couple had a son called Julian, now a well-known actor in his own right.

Cathleen Nesbitt, who played Henry Higgins’s mother, was a woman of grace and beauty. She had actually played a small role in the 1938 film version of
Pygmalion
. Beaton had dressed her exquisitely in the show, with frills about her wrists and gloves on her hands. You would never have guessed that she suffered dreadfully from rheumatoid arthritis. The great love of her life had been the poet Rupert Brooke, who died tragically in the First World War. She often talked about him.