The Men in My Life by Patricia Bosworth

Author:Patricia Bosworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-12-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

I RETURNED TO NEW YORK with a sheaf of good reviews, and for a couple of days I existed on a high. But then the bad winter weather arrived, and the snow, sleet, and freezing cold temperatures as I slogged to and from auditions left me depressed and feeling like a failure.

I hadn’t yet developed the thick skin I needed to survive the onslaught of rejections as I went to cattle calls, lining up on a stage with dozens of other hopefuls, only to be eliminated time and time again because I was too short or too tall or too young or too blond (I’d been bleaching my hair). Once I was even informed I was the wrong astrological sign. Then there were the cold readings, where a script would be thrust in my hands and I was expected to give it my all immediately.

Marty advised me, “Learn to wing it,” and then he’d add, “Go for an objective, like play you have asthma [I became an expert sneezer] or you are late for another appointment—that’ll give the reading urgency, anything to make you seem alive and in the moment.”

There was one agonizing series of auditions for the female lead in a Broadway comedy called Fair Game. I read the same scene over and over and over for weeks. Finally it was down to me and another actress, a very determined brunette with the professional name Ellen McRae. She got the part and changed her name to Ellen Burstyn. After my agent, Bret Adams, quietly informed me, “You lost out, honey,” I slunk home and shut myself up in my narrow bedroom overlooking the back garden. I’d stay in my room until it was time to come down for cocktails. I hated living at home. I was worried about my career. Nothing was happening.

Marty said, “Feast or famine. You gotta adjust to it.” But I couldn’t. By March I thought I might be heading for some kind of nervous collapse.

UNBEKNOWNST TO ME, Daddy was very aware of what I was going through and he’d phoned his left-wing buddy, the Broadway director Herman Shumlin, and asked if he could help. It turned out Shumlin needed a new understudy for Bethel Leslie, who was playing the female lead in Shumlin’s latest Broadway hit, Inherit the Wind, starring Paul Muni. The play was a fictionalized version of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial,” and Muni was playing Henry Drummond, a flamboyant crusading lawyer (a character based on Clarence Darrow) who represents a teacher on trial for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in a Bible Belt school in Tennessee.

I auditioned for Shumlin, a bald husky man whose deep angry voice made me tremble even though he hired me straightaway. Not only would I understudy Bethel, he informed me curtly, I would appear in all the crowd scenes. I would be a spectator in the courtroom. I would be listed in the Playbill program as “the town hairdresser.” He then ordered me to start memorizing

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