My First Five Husbands (7 page)

Over the summer, it became increasingly clear that I simply couldn’t marry Marino, and in September I returned his ring. It hurt him and I felt terrible, but we remained friends, and I was relieved to give up the whole Catholic charade for good. With a degree in theatre and three summers of stock to my credit, I was chomping at the bit to attack the Real World of Professional Theatre in New York, and I persuaded my high school pal, Lynn Pebbles, who wanted to be a journalist, that she should head north, too. Everyone at home was aghast. Leave Ardmore? It made no sense—not common, not book, not horse! Damn foolishness! When I left, Lynn still seemed a little stunned herself.

I arrived in New York in January of 1957 with one suitcase and enough money to see me through two frugal weeks. I checked into the YWCA on Eighth Avenue for a week, then found a large one-room studio in a brownstone at 27 West Seventy-fourth Street. The rent was $97 a month. Lynn and I could swing it. The strange room had once been the dining room at the end of the dark hall on the ground floor of a Victorian mansion, all polished mahogany, with winged wooden cherubs peering down from all four corners of the high ceiling. (Oh! The things those cherubs saw! No wonder there was a slight blush on those chubby cheeks!) In a small alcove was a high double bed. Two tall chifforobe closets flanked the overstuffed chairs and sofa. Heavy drapes shrouded the windows. I’d never seen such a place in Oklahoma—so dramatic and thrilling! I moved in and wrote Lynn that she should come at once.

I didn’t know a soul in the city except a few fellow would-be actors from college and summer stock, including Norman, Marino, and Jim Broadhurst, who’d had a crush on me when we were in the Jatoma Players. These three aspiring actors, all of whom had some sort of romantic history with me, had found quarters together in Murray Hill with a fellow who took in roommates. The original guy slept in the bedroom, and my three friends rotated between a sofa, a thin mattress on the floor, and only a quilt for the unlucky third guy. I spent the night there twice, sleeping on the floor on another quilt. I wasn’t about to commandeer the sofa or the pallet. It was all good fun. Eating beans, sleeping on the floor.

Lynn arrived and, walking from the bus station, had a harrowing experience that almost convinced her to run right back to Oklahoma. She was distraught: She’d seen a couple walking down the street holding hands, one white person and one black.

“Don’t make up your mind yet. I have a welcoming party all set up for you. Try it a few days,” I begged her, and she reluctantly agreed.

I had invited Norman, Marino, Jim, and some people I’d met in acting class, including a delightful guy I’d met at Perry-Mansfield. Bill Smith, an exuberant dancer from New York, was not only gay but black, and astonishingly, my mother had gotten a huge kick out of him that summer we were all in Colorado. I had seen a lovely new side of my southern Oklahoma mama. The party was bouncing along nicely when the doorbell rang just as I was getting more hors d’oeuvres. Lynn opened the door to find Bill and a friend—a tall, handsome black actor who was beginning to make a name for himself—and she turned away, ashen and shocked.

“Oh, Bill!” I called. “Get in here, you little skink, and meet my friend, Lynn.”

Mr. Personality bubbled in. “Hey, Eddi-Rue! This is my friend, Jacques.”

“Lynn, this is the dancer who became such good friends with my mother,” I told her. “What would you guys like to drink? Lynn, would you find a vase for these flowers?”

We played show tunes on the turntable, everyone jabbering away, eating, drinking. About an hour later, I looked over and saw Lynn on the lap of the handsome black actor, chatting away, happy as a clam. After that, she took to New York rather quickly and never mentioned leaving. In fact, Miss Pebbles had herself a high-heeled time.

Norm, Marino, and I auditioned for the renowned acting coach Uta Hagen at the Berghof Studio and were accepted as first-level students in her eight-week course. Her classes were notoriously difficult to get into, so I was ecstatic. I enrolled in dance classes with the phenomenal modern jazz teacher Matt Mattox, Hanya Holm for classical modern,
and
at the Metropolitan School of Ballet with Myra Craske, the ballet mistress from Jacob’s Pillow. I also worked for Brown’s Steno Service as a part-time file clerk, which paid just enough (with a twenty from Mother now and then) for living expenses, classes, and even an occasional beer.

I felt particularly close to Norman. We’d meet near my apartment on West Seventy-fourth and spend hours in a nearby bar, talking philosophy and theatre and God knows what over beers into the wee hours. Once we talked all night, and then I got dressed in my conservative suit and went, bleary-eyed, to do the loathsome filing for eight hours. Norman walked me to work, all the way from West Seventy-fourth to the forties, as the pinkish dawn broke over mid-Manhattan.

What the heck
, I thought,
I’m in New York and this is Show Business!

CHAPTER THREE

U
ta Hagen was a force to be reckoned with. The exercises in her first course were primarily sense memories: carry an imaginary cup of hot coffee across a room without spilling it, rush to do something important with a broken arm, eat a formal dinner with a badly dripping nose. Then we began working on partner scenes from well-known plays. Meticulous and somewhat abrasive, Hagen did not suffer sloppy work gladly and was as tough as her reputation. After eight weeks, Norman and Marino had had enough and opted not to reenroll, but I thrived on that demanding regimen. Cast as Gwendolyn in
The Importance of Being Earnest
—the scene in which Gwendolyn comes to tea in Cecily Cardew’s garden—I finished what I thought was a damned good presentation, then got a critique from Uta that let me know I didn’t know squat about professional acting. Four years of college acting hadn’t given me an inkling.

“Tell me, Eddi-Rue,” she began, “what kind of ground were you walking on? Grass? Cobblestones? Where was the sun? In your eyes? You had a parasol. Why didn’t you use it? Was there a breeze? Where had you just come from? Did you have a toothache? A headache? What, in other words, was really going on? You must enter a scene with total preparation and react moment to moment!” A brilliant revelation! She pulled the veil from my eyes.

L
ynn had taken to staying at a friend’s apartment overnight from time to time, and on one of those nights when I had the apartment to myself, Norman spent the night with me. It was my first sexual…I mean, I lost my…how best to say this?

We had sex.

I was still a Goody Two-Shoes, but I was interested in growing up, and Norman was a trusted friend, so we plunged in. Okay, maybe “plunged” is not the right word. It wasn’t exciting or amazing or anything else I’d heard. Where was the blood? The big virgin experience? Had dance training broken my hymen without my ever knowing it? The fact is, I loved him like crazy from the neck up, but we simply didn’t fit each other down below. Damned unfortunate engineering. Norman, however, seemed pretty excited by me.

“I’ll never get married, Eddi-Rue,” he told me, “unless I marry you.”

Newcomb Rice had founded a summer arts camp near Terrero, New Mexico, in the Sangre de Christos mountains and offered me a job teaching modern dance the summer of 1957. I suggested Norman as drama teacher, J. Martene Pettypool as accompanist, and an art major friend to teach pottery. That glorious month in the mountains was a creative joyride with my friends. Norman composed irresistibly witty piano music for Rudyard Kipling’s “The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo,” and I created whimsical choreography to fit it. We were decades ahead of
Cats
! I waded chest-deep in the ice-cold Pecos River, sometimes sharing the river with water snakes. We drove to Santa Fe and saw an excellent
Così fan tutte
that actually made me like opera for the first time. J. Martene Pettypool got monumentally drunk and lost a shoe as we carried him to the car, and we got back to camp very tired and very happy.

While I was out west, a college friend, Mac Forrester, who was teaching English to challenged third-grade boys in Denver, invited me to spend a few weeks with him in Estes Park, Colorado, square-dancing, mountain-climbing, and getting better acquainted. Bill Bennett and I had double-dated with Mac and his girl a few times at Spring Creek, floating on inner tubes, sleeping in sleeping bags, roasting wieners and marshmallows, singing songs, and playing Lummi Sticks, an old Indian game. (Back then, the phrase “gone wild” still meant nature!) He was vivacious and hilarious, with a big grin and an easy laugh. The night I arrived, he parked outside his friend’s house and, before I knew it, we were doing things I hadn’t thought possible in such a small car. Right there at the curb, streetlights on, people likely to pass by any minute! The most daring thing I’d ever done. We spent a night on a steep mountainside in the Rockies. Who felt any rocks? Not me. So
this
was what the fuss was all about! Fun Quotient? A big ol’ A!

I’d gotten a job as a chambermaid—three jobs, actually, in three motels—making beds and running vacuum sweepers. My eyes and nose ran like faucets. Dust aggravated the gargantuan hay fever I’d developed in that clean-air capital of the USA. But I was a top-notch chambermaid. One day, as I folded the bedsheet corners in an expert Army-grade crease, my supervisor observed, “My, my, you are going to make some man a wonderful wife!” And I thought,
Is that what you think it takes? Guess again, sister.
But in his practical way, Mac also saw me as a fitting life companion. I could square-dance and hike. I was a willing, if untalented, cook. We were terrific in bed. I even wrote and illustrated a book for his students,
A Pig in a Pit
. The fact is, we
were
excellently suited, but when he asked me to marry him, he said, “Eddi-Rue, I told my girlfriend I was going to ask you first, and if you turned me down, I’d marry her, and she said okay.”

Excuse me? Girlfriend?
Okay?
That is one understanding girl! But I didn’t want to be a mountain-climbing schoolteacher’s wife. I
had to be
an actress. I had to get back to New York! So I sent Mac back to that astonishingly patient girl, and I’ve been told they did get married. He was a marvelous guy, well worth waiting for. We all did the right thing.

Some decisions actors have to make along the way are gut-wrenching. The only thing that makes them possible is when the compulsion to become an actor is unshakable. Like an edict from God. I don’t understand it, myself, but I experience it every time I walk out onto a bare stage in a dark, empty theatre. It’s a religious experience for me. I stand on that stage and I feel complete, blessed, at home, where I belong.

M
elinda was only seventeen, but she was madly in love with none other than that strange, angel-faced tenor Sheridan Kinkade, and they got married late that summer. I was maid of honor, resplendent in a gathered chiffon frock that made me look like an exploded peach. I remember sobbing to Norman, “Oh, they’re going to have such beautiful children!” And they did. Four of them. My beloved nieces and nephews, Marcia, Brendan, Sean, and Amelia.

A few weeks later, I boarded a train for Pennsylvania. The Erie Playhouse had offered me a job, beginning in September: a full season as the ingénue/leading lady. Not exactly New York, but I’d be acting my trim little ass off for a steady paycheck, putting into practice everything I’d learned from Uta Hagen and hopefully making some good East Coast theatre connections.

Back in Estes Park, Mac had told me, “Eddi-Rue, if you’re going to be an actress, you have to do something about that name of yours.”

“I know!” I said. “But I can’t find a last name to go with Eddi-Rue!”

“Your last name isn’t the problem,” he said. “It’s the Eddi. Drop it. Become Rue.”

“Rue?” I said. “Just…
Rue
?”

What a revelation! Well, well, just Rue. I liked it! So as Rue McClanahan, I arrived in Erie, Pennsylvania, on September 14, 1957, to begin a brand-new adventure at the Erie Playhouse.

And, as fate would have it, to meet…take a big breath…Husband #1.