(My Travels with) Agnes Moorehead – The Lavender Lady (7 page)

Looking back now I can appreciate her even more. I can see now how dedicated she was, that she meant what she was trying to accomplish, even though it didn’t always work out the way she expected and fantasized. The passion she had for her school was genuine even though, on a whole, the school itself was a fraud. It was a fraud because Agnes had flaws like the rest of us.

I think, in a way, I even went beyond her. I don’t think she ever went beyond her fantasy, not really. That’s why, when her school closed a few years later, without a living soul in attendance, she became absolutely livid. Her face contorted maniacally. She raged and stormed and shrilled like a demon because she had never accepted the reality of the way the school was run anymore than she understood the public or private myth of her son. Of course, that’s just my opinion, not gospel. I only feel certain of my own growth. I transcended the Agnes within me by accepting the void in myself as my own to be filled by my life actions and not phantoms of someone else. But that transcendence occurred gradually with Agnes, through her and her school. Then I kissed off the acting school.

Why did the school fail? One, because the business side of it was poorly run; two, because Agnes was not a realist. She didn’t know the proper price to charge or what to give her students. She did not put up any kind of a front, even a phony front, which was necessary. She knew little about how other schools were run. She was friends of many important stars. She could have invited them down; producers, directors also. Also, there was no curriculum. It was helter skelter. Students didn’t feel they were working toward a goal. She didn’t help students who graduated get jobs. Or if she did, she did not make a point of it. There were certain reasons why the school failed and yet it was probably among the most worthy of all schools. If one accepted it in its proper light, its proper direction, as I did, it was worth a fortune because it not only taught acting, it taught life. It taught you how to live and it taught you how to enjoy life and to make the most out of yourself. And, as a matter of fact, how to accept others to compromise, to exchange ideas, not to be too critical or too less critical. The Agnes Moorehead School of Acting should have been number one in the nation. It wasn’t.

CHAPTER FIVE

DRUDGE AND MORE DRUDGE

After just a few sessions I believed I had my money’s worth and plus. And Agnes Moorehead thought the same way—about me and all the others.

She said, “I’m doing this, because I care about the theatre and I want to help those who have the gumption to help themselves.” She reminded us of this all the time. “The twenty-five dollars you pay me for your tuition, which is used to pay your instructors and the rental of the school, you are investing in yourselves. I want to help make the theatre better. I want to help give it some good actors.”

She wanted to counteract all that was going on around her that she didn’t like. “Know what you are about. I can’t teach you acting but I can give you “the basics,” and handing out any books or Xeroxed lectures or notes or whatever was necessary. She was the business end. On the other hand, Agnes carried on with great flare on the small stage. Agnes, in an imperious manner, without explanation, took the stage and announced as number one item on the agenda, “I won’t be here next week.” Then, instead of explaining why, she told us who she was going to have substitute for her. There were several muffled moans of disappointment. In fact, one was mine. She was aware of it. I thought, “Oh gee, she has this school that she talked about everywhere. Why would she not show up?’ Somebody had nerve enough to get up and say, “Why won’t you be here, Miss Moorehead?” It didn’t get them anywhere. She merely said, “I have to be away.” She said it airily and it brought no argument. Before I could really question it, which I didn’t want to do anyway, I found myself caught up in what she was saying next.

Agnes never talked in anything but a stentorian tongue and she announced, “Mr. Lane will be coming next week. For anyone of you who doesn’t know, he is the head of the make-up department at Columbia Pictures. Now, “she instructed us, fastidious but forceful, “I want you here on time and don’t be unprepared. Be prepared. Don’t be silly. Don’t ask silly, idiotic, ridiculous questions. You’re older and you should know a lot better. Be prepared and, by all means, be enthusiastic.” She suggested, “Think about it for a few days foundation, so you know what’s required. I can teach you an assurance and a confidence on stage, if you are willing to work. I can teach you to think on your feet. This is the polish of an actor and this I can teach you.”

And she did. I think I remember this above anything else in the world—“the polish of an actor.” This was the acting thing she did really truly teach us. Whether she was non-profit designed, I question. She loved money. Yet, why did she spend all of this time and effort for so little here at the school? It will always be a mystery. Certainly, she was a divided personality—one who adored money and one who sacrificed herself without a great deal of money to help others.

At this point, for some reason that escapes me, I had one thing in mind. One ambition—to have Miss Moorehead notice me. To know who I was. To understand me. I had been there for three or four weeks and I began to feel that part of my life was dramatically missing. I was always clean and neat, and I kept thinking she probably liked having me around because of it. But I hadn’t done any pantomime or scenes for her yet. This created an emptiness. I saw the others in scenes and some of them were very good. I felt lost.

With all of the adoration of her, I still was afraid of her. A lot of the students who had been there a long time seemed to ask the right questions. And when they did, WOW! How she would just go and I would sit by very quietly, listening and learning. On several occasions I would raise my hand, but it seemed to me she was so into what she was doing that she wasn’t aware of me. When she saw my hand, she demanded, “Yes? Yes?” impatiently, brusquely and that would frighten me again. So I would ask my question and she would just kind of slough it off with, “Oh, you know . . . It made me feel small and unimportant. I couldn’t understand why with all the feeling I had for her, it wasn’t returned. Her reaction to me made me feel as though my questions were dumb, the way she would disparage it or argue. And it was getting me down.

To complicate matters at that time, I was having a hard time in therapy, going through some very tough incidents. I was very vulnerable and Agnes was very strong and I wanted to reach out to her as if to a mother. I wanted my Mommy is what I wanted, although the awareness of that was only subliminal. I did know, though, that I needed strokes from her and I just wasn’t getting them. Believe me, I spent hours thinking about it, planning, scheming. Nothing worked.

One day in a lovely little garden at Sutro’s, I caught her after class.

Boldly I said, “Miss Moorehead, I just want to reassure you that the reason I’m not so good in class, if you didn’t think I was too good . . .” I was already putting myself down without knowing what she thought. But I wanted so urgently for her to know. “The thing is, I’m in therapy and I’ve been quite upset and distraught. But I’m growing and I’ll do better. I just want you to know that.”

It really caught her by surprise. I had finally broken the barrier.

“Therapy? What do you need with therapy? Oh, my dear,” she scolded high-handedly. Then she proceeded to give me a ten minute lecture. “I’m a great believer in making your weaknesses your strengths. I have practiced to good advantage, turning my problems over to prayer. You don’t need therapy. It will ruin your eccentricity and creativity. All you’ll need is God and the Bible.” (Only she pronounced God as Gawd.) She continued, “And you just have to know what you are about.”

As she always did, it was the old story—if you asked what time it was, she told you how to make a watch. She went on and on. That was not what I needed at the moment and I felt lousy. I was unhappy with myself for opening my mouth. It was sort of like when my mother would send me to church for her own convenience. “The nuns are good ladies and they work themselves to a frazzle trying to make something of you. So you just go to church and do what they tell you, do you hear?” my mother would say. All that she could worry about was herself and she had us kids and had to let the nuns worry about us. Babysit. And the nuns just heaped these dogmas and bullshit on us. Hell and the Madonna, and all.

I had this talent and my impressionability which could have been directed into theatre, but it was all turned into fear and guilt. Now, here was Agnes and I wanted her to do what my mother and the nuns had never done. Instead of being supportive, Agnes was very facile about throwing her own religious dogmas at me. I needed her encouragement for the theatre and here she went and brought God down on my head. It was very unsatisfactory—mostly because she didn’t understand me. Oh, I don’t know, I thought with a sigh. I guess I’ll just have to try and reach her some other way.

The next week that she was there (it wasn’t very often). I did a pantomime for her. The reason for that was that she loved pantomime. It was her big thing. Everyone had to do pantomime and I really hated it, actually because I never really knew what I was doing. But I tried. I was enthusiastic, because Agnes said that pantomime was the basis for all acting.

“Pantomime makes you think on your feet,” she informed us in her no-nonsense voice. “You take the word circus. You can be anything you want in the circus. An animal, a clown. You can do trapeze.” I once did a little boy being taken to the circus by his father, though later in the semester and not for Agnes. “But you will never know what the pantomime is going to be until you get up there on the stage.” She really had her own way of teaching. She would give us a variety of words: “circus, church, park” and when she gave it, you had to be finger-snapping quick to decide what you were going to do and just to do it.

“You should be alert. You should be imaginative. You should be able to think inventively on your feet. And you should be able to relax through nuances, the whole story. To do effective pantomime, the audience should know what I’m doing without any words. When you can do pantomime well,” she explained, “then you put props, lights and words, then you are well ahead of the game.”

Then she would talk about her hero, Marcel Marceau. She just adored him and kept promising to have him at the school. She told us that he was the finest pantomimist in the world, because he could do a whole two hour show and thrill people the whole time. So basically, that’s what pantomime was all about.

Here she was talking about pantomime and I was trying to find myself, both as a person and as an actor. She was gone for a couple of weeks after that for a stay at Sutro’s, but when she came back after her lecture, she asked for pantomime. I raised my hand and she called on a few others and then me. When I got up there on the little stage, she said, “Park.” And I just did it. I was beginning to understand her. When she said, “Park” she wanted us to do something in a park. I played an old bum on a park bench covered with newspapers and asleep. The sun prompted me to cock one eye open. Then I sat up, yawned, scratched and stretched. I did all kinds of things. I gleamed, “It’s good to be alive.” I went over to the garbage can to get my dinner.

Agnes said it was “very imaginative.” But Agnes never praised anyone one hundred percent. She told me “It could have been better.” And she was right, but I had done something on my own and she critiqued it and gave me something else to think about. It was tremendously exciting and, oh, how I looked forward to the next time. I had tasted blood.

I expected and dreamed and lived every Saturday, hoping and waiting for it to happen again. Some of the others did more pantomime for her. They were more advanced and I was glad to watch them, because I learned a great deal from them. But that park pantomime was the only one that Agnes ever saw me do.

Agnes saw quite a few students perform that day, so I imagined my own pantomime was lost after a while. But at least I had built the bridge between us.

The classes had Agnes’ personality. They were without discipline, going from one thing to another, never spending enough time on each. They were interesting, but episodic. The problem with the pantomime class was that it was nebulous. It should have been done religiously every week. It wasn’t. It was just used as a filler, to throw in when there was nothing else. I gradually realized that much of the classes were “stall” techniques. When Agnes wasn’t there, they’d go into scenes, pantomime, a lecture or just comments. The class really sung when she was there, but otherwise it sagged. It was just those four things—scenes, pantomime, lecture or comments—and they just sort of floated in or out and there was no rhyme or reason. This was supposed to be a school. It wasn’t. It was a stage for Agnes. I know Agnes would have liked it to be a school. Like you come in at nine o’clock and you have Religion and at ten o’clock, you have Chemistry. But it never worked that way, except that when she finished her part of the class, the dialectician would come in and do his “thing.” Ballet was ballet and fencing was fencing, but her “thing” was always very loose. There was no strict curriculum. Everything depended on her moods.

Sometimes she came in and did pantomime right away. And then there would be a lecture. Sometimes she would come in and say sternly, “I want a scene. Don’t let that stage be bare when I get here. I want to see you up there working. You must always be working.”

On other days, there’d be no scenes at all, just lecture. Drudge, drudge, drudge. It was structurally slipshod. Really, there was no structure at all.

Leon Charles always saw that we had scenes and pantomimes, but with Agnes you never knew what she was going to do. You never even knew if she was going to be there or what time. Yet, there was something fascinating. Her personality, her aura surrounded us. She knew no ruler, no boss, no conscience. She would be there, then she wouldn’t. She’d show up one week and then disappear for two or three weeks. Then she’d take on a few classes and lecture, then disappear again. Then I began to realize that what was “important,” what kept her away was an invitation to go somewhere with actor friends or make a personal appearance somewhere. Or opening a big shoe store with Debbie Reynolds (whose husband, Harry Karl, owned the Karl’s Shoe Stores). It was something for herself. In other words, she really was selfish. She would come to school if it were convenient or if she were in town and had nothing better to do.

Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s the way I felt at the time and I have a lot of actions to back it up.

Then when she did teach a class, sometimes she arrived all elegant and coiffed; sometimes, she came in looking as common as a house frau, instead of a glamorous movie star. I found out later that she’d get her hair oranged on Saturdays and she arranged her presence at school accordingly.

You are now getting the impression, aren’t you, that on her list of those things important, school was way down. She usually had her appointment in the morning. So she’d do her shopping and go to hairdresser at the Beverly-Hilton in Beverly Hills and would come sashaying into class at ten-ish or eleven-ish. She rarely turned up on time. And if she couldn’t get a morning hair appointment for some reason, she’d show up for class looking more or less disheveled and leaving early. In that sense, it was a very strange school. Believe me, I had no idea that it would be like that.

Well, I had done one pantomime and I was dying to get up there and do a scene now. I felt I had accomplished one step of the way, I needed the next. But I procrastinated. This was a true test. First of all, I don’t care how good a scene it was, it could be the greatest thing since sliced bread and she’d pick the hell out of it and be very picayune. I knew it and dreaded it. Other students would do their scenes and I would think, Oh—it’s marvelous! They’re so believable! But she wouldn’t say one good thing about it. You can see why I dreaded to do mine. I really thought she was cruel—but, then again, maybe that was her method to bring out the best. She reminded me of those damned nuns. You could he good, yes—but that wasn’t Christian perfection. You had to be perfect!