Up Till Now: The Autobiography

would become furious. It’s the kind of emotion an experienced actor might have used in her performance, but she just got angry. I don’t quite remember how Josh Logan had crossed her, but after that she refused to speak to him. Not only wouldn’t she talk to him, she said if Logan even came into the theater and stood in the rear she would stop talking. The audacity of that—this little girl had ordered the king of Broadway out of the theater! Although truthfully, I suspect Logan was thrilled. Saving this show was beyond even his prodigious talent. I, however, had a two-year contract. I had to be onstage with her every night.
    One night shortly after we opened I spoke my line and waited for her response. There is a very old tradition in the theater: when the playwright has gone to all the trouble of writing a line, the actor is supposed to say it. It’s not optional. She was sitting in a chair, staring at the audience—absolutely silent. She wouldn’t speak. Apparently, in the dimly lit theater she thought she saw Logan standing in the back. After a few seconds I ad-libbed something, well, what I really meant to say was... and again I waited. Once again, she didn’t say a word. I made up something else. For an actor this was considerably worse than forgetting your own lines, at least in that situation there’s hope that someone will feed them to you. But this...In that situation you do whatever you have to do to survive. You take a deep breath and start talking. At one point I wandered offstage and asked the stage manager what to do. The stage manager, who was supervising the play in Josh Logan’s absence, shrugged his shoulders. I wandered back onstage and kept talking. Finally, mercifully, the curtain came down, ending the act.
    “Are you out of your mind?” is what I should have said. Instead I asked her what was wrong.
    The bear looked at me and said in a broken, nasty French accent, “I saw Logan.”
    It got worse every night. Meanwhile, she had fallen desperately in love with Marlon Brando and wanted to get out of the show. The producers refused to release her from her contract, so she decided that she would catch pneumonia. At intermission one performance she went outside and stood in the rain, then came back onstage absolutely soaking wet, as if she had been in the shower.
    From performance to performance I never knew what she was going to do. Sometimes she would simply walk off the stage and not return. Other times she would refuse to speak. I didn’t know which way the bear was going to turn. I was onstage for the entire play, so I began to prepare monologues for myself in case she decided not to come back onstage.
    Something happened between us. Perhaps it was that cigar that I inhaled deeply and exhaled in her face, but she stopped talking to me too. Most of the cast was young and Asian and as inexperienced as she was and they all stopped talking to me too. So I was the lead in a Broadway show, my name above the title, Mr. Broadway, my town, and nobody in the cast was speaking to me except for a couple of white-skinned actors. Thank goodness, I thought, at least I have someone to talk to; of course that was before the brawl.
    One of these actors was an Australian who had been an Olympic swimming champion, and unfortunately he felt he should receive better billing. Merrick refused to give it to him, so he was angry too. He had one big scene in the show with me in which he was supposed to get a big laugh. Now, normally, at the end of the final dress rehearsal a show is frozen, meaning that’s the way it is supposed to be performed every night. What generally happens is a show slips, the timing changes slightly, and over a period of time that slight variance in timing has become gigantic. Every play slips and usually the director comes in every few weeks and redirects it. But Logan wasn’t permitted in the theater so he never came back. Instead the stage manager redirected the play and it began to go lopsided. It fell apart.
    After this Australian actor said his laugh line he put his hand on my shoulder. After a few weeks I noticed that if he got his laugh he laid a nice firm hand on my shoulder—but if he didn’t get that laughthis Olympic swimmer who was built like an Australian Olympic swimmer pounded on my shoulder. Finally I appealed to the stage manager, “I’m living in dread of this moment. If he doesn’t get his laugh he whacks me on the shoulder. Could you ask him nicely,