We were behind schedule with The Red Mill. The casting was done. Steve and I were to play Con Kidder and Kid Conner, the two Americans touring Europe. Steve’s foot was much better, and he didn’t have to move around much. E. L. Losada got the Burgomaster part mainly because it really required his voice. The women were cast from the school. Bertha, the leading role that Kitty Carlisle Hart had played originally, was taken by Leslie Myriam, who really was ready to go to Broadway even if she was only seventeen. Tina, the sidekick role, went to the American girl who was a vegetarian. She had no sense of humor at all in person but was quite funny on stage. The love interest went to Danny Fandom, who was always wandering around with earphones plugged into his head. He only has one duet and was stalwart looking on stage and would do fine. Did I mention that his character’s name is Doris Van Damm? Not Horace. Doris. Hmm.
Estelle Anderson was playing the Countess de la Fère, a small part which involved her being an automobile enthusiast. Could a woman driving an automobile have been amusing in the 1930s? I wouldn’t have thought so but live and learn.
What was slowing us up was that Kitty and Cranston had completely different techniques in handling actors. I think Kitty felt there were many different ways to perform a role, and it was all about the audience being captivated by the performer.
Cranston Muller was of another school altogether. He had the role in his head, and he wanted it played in a very precise way. He gave line readings, which I had been trained to think was an absolute no-no. If I have any talent at all it is in playing against another actor. I can get a lot of laughs and audience attention from my reactions to what the other actor is saying. This is something no director ever seems to want to pay attention to. They only direct the speaker. And my role is kind of a silly one. Steve and I as Con and Kid just knock about the stage and by rehearsing together got a kind of comedy thing going. Steve was the handsome one, and I was the sort of goofball. Abbott and Costello. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. There’s a lot of precedent for this in American theater.
I wonder who wrote librettos for Victor Herbert? The plot line in this show has to do with a young girl in a Dutch village being married off to the local Burgomaster. She is really in love with Captain Doris van Damm. Could that name have been another joke, lost in the mists of the 1930s? The two Americans try to skip out on their hotel bill because they are broke, are put in jail, and then made to work off their bill in the hotel, which is The Red Mill. Then they try to help the girl, Gretchen, escape and marry Captain Doris. This is some plot, right? No wonder Oklahoma did so well.
I think Cranston wanted to play it in a sort of silly, “we’re all so perky” kind of period manner. And Kitty was really trying to help the performers develop some stage presence. What Kitty thought of Cranston’s directing she kept mum about. And Cranston could have killed her for making his cast less malleable for his “do it my way” directing technique, I’m sure.
I have to admit that were I to direct, I’d probably want to do it more like Cranston. Particularly with some of the student cast, who weren’t remarkably talented and needed to be handled like puppets on a string.
Cranston was extremely good, however, at moving people around the stage. This was important for this show with a lot of jolly villagers. He knew exactly how to get them on and off and circle here and stand there. I learned a lot just by watching him do this. And it was fine as long as we were on stage in the riding arena. But this show requires a large mill center stage. With big turning sails. And the production was planned to be done outdoors. There was the remains of an old stone defensive tower out at the very edge of the Abbey grounds. Cranston decided we would convert that into the mill. The fact that there was no light, no sound, no seating did not deter him. He kept shouting, “I’ll pay for it myself. I’ll pay for it myself!”
It was a really bad idea. The windmill sails had to actually turn because when the leading lady escapes, she does so by hanging onto a sail and riding high into the night to leap off and meet her lover. I have no idea how this was done in the original production. But in ours, Steve and I were to help the leading lady escape by swinging on the sail and pulling her up with us. Cranston Muller’s plan for accomplishing this was to have a stage crew all in black pull ropes down on one side of the windmill sails and thus pulling the other side up with its human cargo.
The human cargo was less than thrilled with this idea. Particularly when I learned that Cass Brewster had been hired to convert the tower into a fake windmill. I had visions of the whole thing collapsing and dropping Steve and I with Leslie clasped in our arms right into the audience.
The further we got into the production, the more we began wondering why we were doing this show. Cranston Muller must have dangled the production in front of Kitty Carlisle Hart to lure her into the Loire Valley. Her name was adding luster to his festival in someone’s eyes in New York, I suppose. I don’t think Cranston was at all familiar with the show or he would have anticipated the problems with the damned mill from the beginning.
I asked Kitty how the escape scene was done in the production in which she starred. “We junked it, finally,” she said. “I think in the original casting they had some kind of vaudeville acrobats in mind who were going to hang off that windmill and snatch me up, and they weren’t at all funny so they were replaced with comedians who weren’t at all athletic. They tried it on one of the chorus girls and they almost dropped her and that’s all I had to see. I told Lou Manolis, the producer, I wasn’t going to do it. And he said, ‘Then you’re out of the show.’ And I said, ‘Fine. I’d rather be out of the show and living than in the show and dead.’ I went home to my mother and cried. I told her ‘There goes my first big break, and I’ll never get another one.’ My poor mother. We lived on Park Avenue. She never understood why I wanted to be a musical comedy star in the first place. Ladies didn’t do that kind of thing. But it was the 1930s and actually we needed the money. I remember my mother saying, ‘If Tallulah Bankhead can make it, anybody can make it. Everybody talked about the fact that her father was Speaker of the House, as if that meant someone had talent!’”
“So you never even did that escape scene?” I said.
“As I recall, I climbed up a ladder on the side of the windmill and stood on a little platform beside the sails. Which did not turn because if they did they would have knocked me off. I don’t know why but they were very keen on having artists perched up on things in those days. They wanted me in a show in Radio City Music Hall where I was to sing standing on a platform that came up out of the stage that was two feet square and went up about forty feet into the air. I told them they were mad, but they found people who would do it. They didn’t give a damn. There were no unions. There was no insurance. And everyone was desperate to work. You can imagine the combination of actors who want to perform plus it being the Depression. That’s why Busby Berkeley did those production numbers in Hollywood with hundreds of girls. He wanted to give them work. I was lucky. The show was very close to opening, and the understudy really wasn’t up to holding a show together so they called me back in. As though nothing had happened. And I went to Hollywood from that show.”
Which left me wondering what I was supposed to be doing in our show. Fortunately, they couldn’t get the windmill sails to work, so we were spared rehearsing that scene. “Just fake it,” Cranston Muller would say.
As we finished rehearsals one day, Cranston passed me in the seating area and said, “You can have the Burgomaster role, you know.”
“What about E. L.?” I said.
“He can have your role,” he said.
“We’re so far down the line in rehearsals I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I said.
“That’s my worry, not yours. I think you should have a more prominent role if you’re going to star in Tea and Sympathy next. Get audiences used to thinking about you in leading roles.”
“That’s very nice of you, Mr. Muller. And if you’re thinking of me for the leading role in Tea and Sympathy, that’s even nicer. But I like my role. It’s giving me a chance to play comedy. I like it, and I like working with Steve.”
“I hear that’s not all you like to do with Steve,” he said.
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” I said and walked away.
Estelle was sitting at the café by herself, and I joined her. “I think Cranston Muller is coming on to me,” I said. I ordered a Diet Coke.
“Did you think he wasn’t going to?” she said.
“I suppose it’s kind of obligatory,” I said.
“People would think he wasn’t being professional if he wasn’t chasing one of the best-looking men in the cast,” Estelle said, stirring up the sugar in the bottom of her espresso. “On the other hand, you are pretty hot. And blond. That’s not so common these days since Robert Redford suddenly got so old.”
“I thought he was going to hang on forever,” I said.
“He almost did. Faye Dunaway and he. I thought I was going to go to my grave with those two still playing romantic leads.”
“You’re fun, Estelle. Mr. Muller said he was looking forward to my playing the lead role in Tea and Sympathy. Am I going to have to put out to hang onto that role?”
Estelle looked shocked. “Not for a summer stock lead. Who cares if you don’t get that lead? You’ve already done your thing here. You’re doing leads, and you’re still in your mid-twenties. Listen, I never slept with anyone in the theater to get ahead. I slept with some guys because they attracted me, and sometimes they were instrumental in my getting roles. But the way I looked at it was that they were lucky to get me. They could have put some dodo in the part who wouldn’t have been as good as I was, and they would have paid the penalty. I’m good. You’re good. We are not exactly a dime a dozen. There are tons of people who want to be successful in the theater. There are only a few that have something to bring to it other than their physical beauty. You can really act, Hugo. E. L. can really act. Steve can’t really act. He’s just gorgeous. You don’t have to sleep with anyone to make it. That’s your call. And now I really must go.”
“You always leave as though you’re going somewhere more interesting,” I said.
“Lucky me,” she said and went walking away in her starlike manner, always with a flying scarf or a flip of a skirt, across the place and toward the gates of the Abbey.