New York beckons

View from the Plaza

Oh! For a Muse of Fire!

7

  In March 1950 after deftly maneuvering through three acts as Charles Condomine in opening night of Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” Ralph Freud visits me in my dressing room. “You were good,” he says, then becomes silent, studying me. Unfortunately I’ve always felt intimidated by this man who off and on has been part of my theatrical life since July 1943, and would re-enter it again in 1954. Let’s face it, I didn’t know what to say, how to draw him out. I’d had a good review in The Daily Bruin which should have bolstered my confidence:

  “. . . as Charles Condomine, Dana delivers his lines with a flawless exhibition of control, like martinis, without spilling a drop . . .”

  And now the founder of ’s Theatre Department is in my dressing room for the first time, offering kudos, and all I can do is smile like an idiot. He wants to say more, I’m sure. Our teacher-student relationship has ended. Looking back I think he subtly wished to invite me to become one of his “top ten most likely to succeed.” Was I prepared to meet the demands of making it big on Broadway, to cast aside all comfort and peace of mind to claw my way to the top? I hesitate a moment too long. I should’ve at least called him Ralph. I never would—“Mr. Freud” (pronounced ”Frood”), always.

  After a performance in “Blithe Spirit,” Malvina Fox, casting head at Twentieth Century Fox, enthusiastically takes me by the hand, no doubt wondering, Who is this forty year old sophisticated English gentleman? Have we discovered a new Noel Coward, or Clifton Webb? Foolish me, I should’ve greeted her as forty-ish Charles Condomine with British accent, although close up, age make up couldn’t disguise my 23 years, nor the face of a bubbling American juvenal.

  But did I really want Hollywood? When I leave school in the summer of 1950 to appear in the Pilgrimage Play and get my Actors Equity card, New York beckons. The desire to flee to the great white way infected many of us in the Pilgrimage Play that summer, and here’s a chance to mention Bill Boyett who played the Roman Centurion, doubling as the shaggy blind man.

  Bill (William) Boyett, a dreamy, handsome guy, always seemed to be in the throws of one disastrous romantic entanglement or another. Nothing was going to stop him from venturing to Broadway. I’ll starve if I have to! and he almost did. In New York I was to save him from that fate with a nick-of-time twenty dollar loan, he assuring me payback as he shoved an Equity touring company contract for “Mr. Roberts” across the counter of my teller’s cage. He did pay me back and would enjoy a long and successful career.

  Playing a sailor in the “Mr. Roberts” tour must’ve come easily to  Bill. He had been in the Navy during the war. Married in 1956, further nurturing his life with a gal named Joan; they had two children. From 1955 to 1959 he would play Sgt. Ken Williams, Broderick Crawford’s side-kick on the TV series, “Highway Patrol.”

  Dean Hoffmann graduated from UCLA in 1949. Just as well he never saw me play Charles Condomine in “Blithe Spirit.” He didn’t think much of my “Coward.” He’d seen me in 3G1 in the first act of “Private Lives” directed by Robert Horton. (It was this performance which decided the often indecisive Wally Boyle to cast me as Charles in “Blithe Spirit.”)

  On Dean’s final day on campus we walked down to the bus stop below the Administration Building—a long time since I’d tread the same ground with Anne O’Neill after the first reading of “The White Steed.”

  “We should get together—soon.”

  “Sorry,” he said, “but I’m cutting the umbilical chord with everyone at ”

  We did keep in touch, however, and corresponded often when he moved to New York. When I wrote I was on my way, he answered. “You’ll love it here. New York is the cruisiest town in the U.S.A. Let me know your arrival, when and where, and Ill meet you at the airport or bus terminal, or maybe Grand Central Station! I’ll show you all the wonders of this fabulous city!”

  The 1950 Pilgrimage Play season reaches its final “lights fade to organ music”—always too soon, as usual. We were cursed with overly cautious accountants; we’d had full houses so why not run a few more weeks?

  I move out of the apartment on Highland Avenue, in walking distance to the Pilgrimage Play bowl, rented for the summer, and it’s back to Joy Street and the room at the side of the garage where I spend inordinate hours listening to the Gordon Jenkins 1946 Decca recording, “Manhattan Towers.” Cause when you leave New York, you don’t go anywhere!

  No argument from Mother this time. She’s off to Redding in northern California to marry a man she’s corresponded with who placed a “looking for companion” add in some woman’s magazine. Step father Joe Geers has flown the nest a couple of years ago, and Mother has divorced him. Rumor is he’s taken up with a woman he’d known in old Hollywood days, now living with her in a run-down hotel on skid row the other side of Main Street in downtown L.A.

  I’m on my way to Burbank Airport, duffel bag stuffed with all my possessions—books and records, mostly. Mother, the Joy Street house rented, is out the door with sister Jane and kid brother Robert, hardly taking time to say goodbye.

  Mark Buchoz, Don Olsen, and Mickey Feay will see me off to soaring Manhattan penthouses where I will certainly be invited to scintillate at parties with “short happy people, fat happy people, and a wonderful water named Noah.”

  And the search for a Muse of Fire will continue.

Next – “I’ll Take Manhattan" / "Kitty O’Brien and a Rite of Passage”