(My Travels with) Agnes Moorehead – The Lavender Lady (9 page)

I had my moments and with them behind me, I finally found a nice girl from that class and started preparing a scene. We took a month to get it ready. We worked incredibly hard. It was a damned good scene from “Pajama Game” and it was such a groovy part for me. I even got the professional piano accompaniment put on tape so I could take my tape recorder to class. When the time came, I brought my tape recorder and the accompaniment and Varcazzi said, “Scene,” and oh God, I was so excited. The girl and I did our scene. Agnes didn’t get to see it, because she never once attended the musical comedy class, but, of course, the other students loved it because it was so good. They all just hovered around me, complimenting me on my wonderful voice. Even Varcazzi changed his tune toward me—but just a little.

So there was the musical comedy class where I was the star and the fencing class where I was working and learning, and Hank Moonjeans—when he was there—and some of the people Agnes pulled into lecture. These things were all building my confidence and energy. Then there was Agnes, herself. Agnes was still the center of my life. When she was there, no matter how she repeated herself, you couldn’t take your eyes off her, even as time went on. I enjoyed her tirades, even though they were performances, because each one was a little different. It was like the continuation of a TV series. The same basic thing. The same basic format. But there was always something new she might read in the paper and expound on it, or she’d go on a trip and share something of it with us. Or she’d talk about a play she was doing or tell us about her friends in the theatre and her experiences. When she’d tell these stories, she played all the parts making the whole thing live for us. She’d be the actor in trouble or whatever. The audience responding. The actor acting. And she, making her point. Sometimes she’d used broad comedy with large, expansive gestures. Often, her performances were as subtle as they were on the screen and you could feel the changes as she told the stories. You could feel the parts she played, so visually, audibly. If you tried to pin it down with dramatics, the role was almost indefinable.

If she were talking about her early days in the theatre, wondering “Will I make it?” her voice grew softer, almost girlish. And you could discern, like a ghost on her face, her young self as she spoke. She was a genius. Other times, she’d have a high, chittering, insipid tone—yet other times she might caw like a parrot as well as repeating like one. Agnes used words like hammers, emphasized them, repeated them, and drummed them in. She hit them like a batter with the bases loaded. She did the same thing with sentences. She’d question fiercely, and then quietly, intensely she’d answer her own question. She’d state an important statement augustly and then repeat it more softly, reflectively, more strongly than the first time. Or intensely, searchingly, as if inexorably prying out its true meaning. But her repetition was always an echo that we would continue inside ourselves.

Then there were the stories themselves. She quoted Orson Welles and Charles Laughton, right and left. She revered them. They were her great, good friends. Orson Welles—“Divine, divine.” The Mercury Theatre and later her one-woman show were the delights of her life. “It was Charles Laughton who insisted I create a one-woman show. He told me it would make me independent and it has.” She cherished that independence: “Charles worked with me for months, advising me, helping me to devise a format for my one-woman show. I learned a great deal from him. One should watch great artists to see what it is that makes them great. Charles was disciplined. That was the center of his brilliance. Orson is wild, but a genius.” She laughed remembering, “Orson once told me ‘be a clinging vine, Agnes.’ It was the one thing I never could do.” She laughed and we all laughed with her. We had our little secrets.

My guess is that it was a sarcastic remark on Welles’ part, because the last thing in the world that Agnes Moorehead could ever do was be “a clinging vine.” And I’m sure Orson Wells perceived that. Certainly, a man of his talent is sensitive enough to understand people, especially performers. In fact, that statement of his indicated the basically distant personal relationship he had with Agnes.

Although he always called her in on films, although he respected her professionally, no end, he wasn’t really the good friend she painted him to be. Maybe that’s what she wanted to believe. When I was working closely with Agnes the next year, she wanted to contact him and had me writing him letters in Rome and London. I finally found out he was in Los Angeles, filming “The Dean Martin Show.” I called him on the set. He couldn’t come to the phone, so I left word that Agnes wanted to reach him. He never called her back. Does that tell you something?

“He might visit us,” she now informed us, “if you work hard.” Orson Wells lecturing!

Part of Agnes’s spell power lay in the promises she’d cast. Typically feminine, but more so even with Agnes. A lot of actors would come to her thinking that she was going to do something for them, but she never did anything. “If you’re good, if you work, if you’ll get screen tests at the semester,” etc., etc. We never got the tests. “We’re going to have a show at the end of the season for all the big producers and studio heads.” We never had the showing. Maybe she believed all of this and that’s why she was able to say it.

But knowing Agnes, she felt it was unimportant. Little innocent lies and promises like that. She wanted us to get “Red Pepper” a charming English musical. We were going to do it for Tony Charinoli, the famous choreographer. She had already somebody, some name she was dropping. Something that was going to happen.

Tony Charinoli, showings, screen test, Orson Wells, Marcel Marceau. She built us all to the sky with namedropping. They were promises that kept us going, but they never transpired. Agnes would get us all fired up like the nuns. “You’re going to get jelly beans, if you’re good.” We’d never get the jelly beans. We were never good enough to get the jelly beans. That’s the way it was with Agnes. She painted beautiful pictures, but they were just colored smoke in the sky.

And yet, she was irresistible. Especially to me. A promise in herself, whose colors and brilliance made some of the students follow her blindly, like I was doing, as far as acting was concerned. I’d go around expounding to all my friends about these things that Agnes was saying in class. Everything that came out of my mouth was from Agnes. I even sounded like her. What an impression she made on me. I mimicked her to the nuance. I quoted her. And all my friends said, “My God! Who do you think Agnes Moorehead is?” They were more realistic, practical and earthy than I was.

Most of my actor friends were going to these method schools, where they would be an apple or a cucumber or whatever. And Agnes would say that was “all hogwash.” And I would say it was “all hogwash” Some of these people knew that I was going to Agnes’s school and some didn’t know. Those who didn’t know thought I was some sort of creature who had landed from Mars or something. They thought I was a real nut or a snob and I probably was. But Agnes was very strong and I was very impressionable. She would utter a dynamic, enlightened, “Ah-h-h.” And I would utter a dynamic, enlightened, “Ah-h-h-h,” and I would almost have an orgasm. What an impression she made on me.

What motivation she gave to the already motivation I had. Those first few months, especially, when I was so paralyzed, my desire for her recognition was becoming an obsession. I was having dreams of Agnes and discussing all of them with Dr. Stone, my psychologist. We discussed my mother. I was still on that “mother thing,” but it finally spurred the intimidating things about the class more into the background and after about four months in school, I decided I just had to do a scene for Agnes. I searched and searched until I found exactly the right thing. I was always so careful, so meticulous about that. I found a scene from “The Moon Is Blue” and I selected a partner, one of the girls, and we rehearsed for weeks. We worked hard and I was proud. Agnes was going to critique a scene of mine and I fantasized about it a great deal. The big moment was just about due.

The day of the performance, I brought out my trusty tape recorder and got all dressed up. I’m going to sit up at the front of the class and she will see me and call on me and then, I thought, she will finally see me do something. This was to be my big moment. I went to class and sat up in front. When she said, “Scene.” All right, I want to see a scene,” my heart was crashing against my ribs and I flagged her with my hand, waving at her wildly, enthusiastically, eagerly. Behind me, the omodom snarled. He was doing a scene and she took him. I was crushed. After his scene, she talked and talked. He was the only one to do a scene that day. From that time on, I left the school psychologically.

I did eventually do the scene, but not for her. I never did a scene for her. That’s sad, isn’t it? She was gone a lot and I didn’t care. I did some scenes for Leon Charles, just the things I liked. I said, “Screw it!” Of course, in those days, I wasn’t “screwing it” or using any other impassioned words, but I was just let down.

I still liked being around Agnes, but not as much. Again, like my mother, I’d go to her for strokes and just receive coldness. You know what that does to one? It destroys you. And so, with Agnes, I had that old paranoid feeling. Self-pity. No one really cares what I do.

Then the musical comedy class was cancelled. I was dancing now as well as singing. I was really “grooving” in that class. It was the one thing I could do and I excelled in it, and they cut it out because no one could sing. And because Varcazzi got temperamental and said he couldn’t do it, or they couldn’t find a piano player. I don’t know. It could have been anything. Anyway, it was just too good to last, I thought, sinking further in—gloom. But things could get worse.

We left Sutro’s somewhere at Christmas time. They needed it for other things, or the rent went up, or something. I don’t know. Anyway, after the holiday vacation, we had to go to an awful repertory workshop theatre over on Wilshire, across the street from the park of the La Brea Tar Pits and next door to The Egg and I, restaurant—art shop. The theatre was a depressing, ramshackle thing on the outside and inside there were black curtained backdrops and black walls, with no windows. It was the most depressive thing you can imagine. It was stuffy and smelly, particularly in summer. When you opened the door for air, you were bombarded with the sound of Wilshire Boulevard traffic roaring past. On top of that, the people who owned the theatre were building sets or something behind the curtain and they were always hammering, almost as if in defiance of us. As if Agnes’s school was an intrusion on their tacky little theatre, with its folding chairs and black walls and backdrops, and so on. They were hammering us into the ground. They started hammering at the end of Christmas, when we moved in, and they were hammering when the school ended in the spring.

Agnes would periodically throw her hands to her temples, exclaiming, “I must get another theatre!” She shouted it. She groaned it. She screamed it. She mumbled it. She was almost ashamed, but she said she just couldn’t get anything better and added, “Well, this is a theatre and we must go on.” And they kept banging. Really, I think they were trying to drive us out, but we stayed. I stayed, because I wanted, despite everything, to be around the great Agnes and because my dedication to the theatre was very strong—because, exactly like Agnes, I was not then and never will be a quitter. So I stayed to the very last day of school.

On that day, at the end of the session, Agnes told the class, “I don’t know where the school will be when we open in the fall.” That’s the first time I saw her at a loss, as if in a daze, without an answer to something. “We’ll have to let you know. Kathy will let you know.”

She didn’t know what was going to happen, but just couldn’t come back to this theatre: “But you don’t know how difficult it is. I’ve cajoled, begged, pleaded with producers I know—directors—and they all said they would try to find me a theatre for this school. None of them could do it. So, we’ll just have to wait and see.”

She alternately lamented and raged about it for fifteen minutes. After class—I don’t know where I got the nerve, but I had it—I walked up to her. Though we’d rarely spoken outside of class, and the only thing she saw me do was the park pantomime, still I was a little more comfortable with her now. I had a little more guts and I was being more and more of a man. But it was more than that. It was as if something came over me. It was a pleasant, warm day. Somewhere in the background, they were banging away, as usual, and I thought, By God, I’ll reach Agnes. I’ll show her I can do it. That I can do something important.

I said, “Miss Moorehead, I will get you a theatre for your school.”

She peered at me through narrow, thick, black lashes and skeptical blue eyes. “Oooh,” she intoned emphatically, as if to say, “Better men than you have tried it.” She then repeated, “Did you hear what I said for the last fifteen minutes?”

After all, here was this little nothing milk dud, me, that had been sitting in her class all year and never opened his mouth and had never done anything. This little boy, with his tail between his legs, comes up and says that he was going to do what no one else could.

“Well, my dear, If you can do it, fine,” she humored me. “That would be nice, but it’s really impossible to get a school. I’ve done everything but turn the world upside down.”

And she told me in detail once again all her plans and how they’d fail to come through.

I repeated, “I will do it.” I was as emphatic as she was. I was driven as that first day the thought of acting with her entered my life. “I’m a salesman in Los Angeles County (at that time, I was selling office machines) and I will do it.”