Still Here by Alexandra Jacobs

Author:Alexandra Jacobs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Self-insulated though she was from the political roiling of the moment, Stritch had to confront, at least, that her version of Manhattan was changing. Walking into another pub, a bunch of young men were hanging around the jukebox.

“Play Tony Bennett,” Stritch suggested.

“Fuck Tony Bennett,” one of the men said.

At evening’s end, Elmore took her through the lobby of the Chelsea and up to her room, where he chastely put her to bed.

“That’s the first time I’ve gone to sleep without removing my makeup first,” Stritch told him the next day.

Finally, she had occasion to incorporate the intimacy and warmth and despair of these many late nights, the sawdust-floor ambiance, into her acting. John Cunningham, cast as one of the husbands, Peter, remembered the first time he heard “Drinking Song,” with just the piano as accompaniment. Stritch was wearing her now customary rehearsal costume of an oversized white oxford-cloth shirt over black tights. “A picture of it burns in my brain,” Cunningham said. “It was like the barroom—echoing, emptyish. It wasn’t this kind of Broadway thing.”

After she showed up late to one 11:00 a.m. call, Fritz Holt, the stage manager, was given the responsibility of making sure Stritch got to and from practices and then performances in a timely manner. “When she got really soused she would stand outside of the theater before the curtain went up and entertain the audience on the sidewalk, and the stage manager would have to bring her into the theater,” Barrie said. Holt was dark, tall, and younger, and though (or partly because) he was gay his charge quickly developed “a sneaker” for him. “I was just mad about Fritz,” she said. “We got along so well.”

Stritch was voluble in rehearsal. “It was well deserved, the reputation coming ahead of her: that she could be a gigantic pain in the ass,” Cunningham said. “It was, somehow, ‘Wait a minute; it’s all about me and my problem.’ But the other way that I look at it is that she was fixed on trying to get it right. She didn’t say, ‘No, I’m going to shoulder everyone else out of the way.’ It was because she felt that she had to get it right or she couldn’t do it.”

“She and Steve and Hal would have a lot of very heated discussions,” Barrie said. “She knew exactly what she had to bring to the show, which we didn’t, because we were all less experienced than she.”

Though Stritch confronted the creators as an equal, she seemed to prefer socializing with the greenest small-town actors, with whom she could assume the role of rollicking auntie or seasoned advisor. Pamela Myers played the young, modern girlfriend Marta and was given a sparkling solo of her own, “Another Hundred People,” which described the classic excitement of arriving “off of the train / and the plane / and the bus” to Manhattan. She was a true ingénue—fresh from the Methodist church choir in Cleves, Ohio, excited to secure a Listerine commercial—and Stritch made “a huge impression,” she said.

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