Moose Murdered: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Broadway Bomb (18 page)

Around this time we heard the first radio spot on WNCN. It was awful. Mara sounded stagey, the announcer sounded bored, and the background music was absurd—but not in a good way. There was nothing unique about it. It was dishearteningly forgettable.

To make matters worse, we had to listen to it with Dennis’s mother, Mary Ann, who was visiting from Massachusetts. She’d refused to stay at a hotel, because she didn’t want to miss a single second of what was going on. She was, in fact, staking her entire future on this production’s success, and this lousy ad did nothing whatsoever to encourage her. She droned on and on about it, demanding to know how we could let something like this be aired in public
(Mary Ann, this is just the radio ad
—
wait’ll you see the play
!), and there was no place we could hide from her in that tiny apartment. Finally, to shut her up, we gave her some money and pleaded with Jane to take her out shopping for an opening night dress.

Luckily for us, Jane was in pretty decent spirits these days. She’d received a copy of the dust jacket for
Murder on Cue
with her name and a full photo on the back. Nice butch haircut, very authorish.

“Next time I’ll have them shoot me with a cigarette and a glass of Scotch,” she said. “Move over, Lil Hellman.”

She’d been assured by the publisher that she’d have an initial sale of at least 3,000 copies to libraries, since the book would be part of the Doubleday Crime Club. And even better, she’d just been reviewed well by
Kirkus
—they’d found the bitchiness of her main character to be a total delight and a major compensation for any lack of credibility in the story line. She had always wanted to hold her publication party backstage at whatever theater was going to house
Moose Murders
, and, with this impressive review under her belt, she now wanted to invite other show business personalities who had also doubled in the mystery-writing genre.

“Tom Tryon should be a shoo-in! “she said. “We always feature his books at Murder Inc.”

“Whatever you want.” I said. “Just take Mary Ann out to buy a dress. And please. Take all the time you need.”

This initial outing did not go especially well. Jane took Mary Ann to a few places, but nothing was appealing, nothing fit, nothing was quite right for this most important night of all nights, past or future. It took a while to exhaust her patience, but Jane finally hit her spiritual nadir and was forced to leave Mother alone to fend for herself at Lord and Taylor’s. Dejected, bitter, alone, and in tears, Mary Ann returned to the apartment only to discover that neither Dennis nor I was in any condition to console her.

The runthrough that Monday—just four days before we opened this thing to the public with our first preview—had been catastrophic. Not merely unprepared, Eve was now listless and sluggish. No command. No lines. Her final scene with Nelson came off as if she’d glanced at the script briefly for the first time only yesterday. I knew that couldn’t be the case, because this was the scene she’d had me rewrite to her exact specifications. We were told later that they’d run this scene three separate times after we’d left, and that Eve still had suggestions for things to add and things to cut.

“No more,” John told her. “Please learn what you
have
.”

John also revealed that she had been coming to him privately throughout the rehearsal process with certain insertions or rewordings and that he had always told her to “check with Arthur.”

“She stopped doing that back in Los Angeles,” I reminded him.

I’d stayed home for the first part of the rehearsal on Tuesday, thinking I’d have the place to myself. Mary Ann was out continuing the great opening night dress search and I figured I’d be safe for quite some time. Not even an hour after she’d hit the streets, Mother made her triumphant return with the perfect black dress she’d picked up at a department store right there in our neighborhood.

Oh, good. We could open the show; Mary Ann had her fucking dress. But I also had this still very unhappy lady’s company for the rest of the morning. Things just couldn’t get any brighter.

About the same time Mary Ann turned on the TV to watch one of her “stories,” the phone rang.

It was Ricka with some news to disprove my theory.

We would probably still be opening the show.

But maybe
not
with Eve Arden.

“Like sands through the hourglass,” blared the TV announcer, “so are the days of our lives.”

The official
Moose Murders
logo. Artist: Jerry Bahl

Eve Arden poses with her Moose Murders co-star. P
HOTOGRAPH BY
G
ERRY
G
OODSTEIN

Hedda Holloway and her loathsome brood. from left: Scott Evans as Stinky, Eve Arden as Hedda, Lillie Robertson as Lauraine, and (front) Mara Hobel as Gay. P
HOTO BY
G
ERRY
G
OODSTEIN

Hedda and Cast. from left: Mara Hobel, Scott Evans, Eve Arden, and Lillie Robertson. P
HOTO BY
G
ERRY
G
OODSTEIN

“Something has gone terribly wrong.” The first body is discovered. Back row (from left): Dennis Florzak, June Gable, Don Potter, Lisa McMillan, Mara Hobel, Eve Arden. Front: Nicholas Hormann, Lillie Robertson, and Scott Evans. P
HOTO BY
G
ERRY
G
OODSTEIN