I Blame Dennis Hopper

by Illeana Douglas

  I was backstage avoiding the audience during Rudy Vallée’s opening night, and he thought I was someone important, so he handed me his raccoon coat to hold while he did his quick change. I assumed this task with authority, never letting him know that I really had no skills in that department, either. But it went well. I held his coat while he went and got his ukulele. I gave him back the coat and he went onstage—to great success. Rudy Vallée was pretty old at the time, so his act was simple. It consisted of telling a few corny jokes about being a ladies’ man. He was—in 1920. Rudy Vallée invented a style of singing called crooning, which Bing Crosby later popularized. So Rudy would croon his many hits—again from the 1920s and early 1930s. “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” He even played a little on his saxophone. It was impressive. He ended the evening by strumming a ukulele while wearing that raccoon coat. The coat was a nod to his days at Yale as a Connecticut Yankee. Then, in a spotlight, he sang “I’m Just a Vagabond Lover,” and people cheered. The cumulative effect of the show paid off in the simplicity of the ending. It was mesmerizing.

  The next night, I made sure to be stationed in the same place backstage, but I caught his eye before the show. “I’ll be ready with your coat, sir,” I volunteered, and he smiled at me. This became a nightly routine that I never tired of. Rudy Vallée would hand me his coat, and while he got his ukulele and was getting ready for “I’m Just a Vagabond Lover,” I would say something stupid, such as “It’s going great. They really love you.”

  The crowd—most of them women in their sixties—really did love him. I loved him. And he loved being loved. He had been in show business for more than sixty years. He was the only act at the Camelot that made you feel as if you were at the opening night of a Broadway show. He gave it all he had. Each night he got better, and that’s what I told him every night when he left the stage: “Sir, that was amazing!”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Think so? I know so!” And he would laugh and head back to his dressing room to freshen up and get ready to sign autographs for the adoring elderly women in the front of the house.

  He was only there for a week, and on his last night, he handed me his raccoon coat for the final time. He went out and, as usual, knocked ’em dead. My only interaction with him had been to hand him his coat and tell him how great I thought he was, but I seemed to make an impression on him. I told him that I was really going to miss him, and I meant it.

  That night, after his last performance, he invited me back to his dressing room. I didn’t know what to expect. I had certainly heard stories from my grandfather of older men making passes at young girls. I knocked on the door and went in. He told me to take a seat on a nearby couch. He was alone, sitting at his dressing table drenched in sweat. Now, out of the stage lights, his heavy pancake makeup and overly rouged cheeks made him look macabre, like a marionette. It was like a scene from that movie Limelight with Charlie Chaplin. I got a little nervous all of a sudden. Was Rudy Vallée–Vagabond Lover going to pounce on me?

  Finally he turned around and smiled at me. “I want you to listen to something,” he said. “I think you’ll appreciate this.”

  He took out a small, cheap GE cassette tape recorder and pressed PLAY. We both sat there in his dressing room listening to the tape, which played a whooshing sound, then was quiet, then whooshed again. I had no idea what I was listening to, but he seemed to be enjoying it. He leaned back and smiled. Full of pride. “Do you know what that is?” he asked.

  I listened again very hard but all I heard was a rushing, whooshing sound. I finally said, “Is it the ocean?”

  He spun around from the mirror and raised his hand in the air with a flourish.

  “It’s my applause,” he said.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Yes, now I hear it.”

  Rudy Vallée smiled at me with complete satisfaction. “I tape it every night,” he said. “I knew you would appreciate that.”

  And I did. It is one of my most touching and vivid memories of show business. Rudy was a real trouper. A trouper who went out there night after night to give the performance of his life. Drenched in sweat, in the middle of the boondocks. It didn’t matter. A show is a show is a show. All that was left of it were the echoes of the applause. If you could somehow keep that sound, that joy, to remind you of why you were put on the planet. To entertain people. To make them happy just for a little while. I listened to Rudy Vallée’s applause and then quietly excused myself.

  Not long after that, we showed up for work and Phil and Rosie had skipped town. The office was cleaned out. The safe was empty. There was helpless panic felt by the staff, which quickly turned to anger. I felt betrayed. How could they do this to the Camelot? Audience members began showing up for that night’s performance of Mame and refused to be turned away. We explained to them that there would be no show, but they wouldn’t believe it. I watched people sitting in their seats, waiting for a show to start. As if the lights would go up through their sheer will. In the back, waiters and cooks were loading their cars with steaks and booze—they hadn’t been paid for weeks. Actors were making calls about their next gigs.

  There was no show that night. There was never a show again. There was never a theater in that location again. Six glorious months and Rudy Vallée. It was over.

  The Camelot closed, and the building was abandoned. All that was left from the magic of the Camelot were ghostly echoes of the applause.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In the Key of Liza

  This is what happens when a child sees Cabaret too many times.

  After the Camelot Dinner Theatre closed, I was pretty down. Even though I never got paid to act, I thought of myself as a professional actor. I knew that if I had continued to work at the Camelot, eventually I would have been in one of the shows if not starring in my own one-woman production! Incidentally, that’s the kind of delusion you need when you’re starting out. After all the excitement of hanging out with real actors at the Camelot, the prospect of simply returning to school and acting as if I wanted to learn anything but a time step was unbearable. I filled the void with movies. There was a small TV studio in my high school, so I proposed doing my own movie-review show. And—God help everyone else—the TV instructor agreed. It became a great way of forcing my mom to take me to the movies: I now had “reviews” to deliver.

  There was one problem. We never had a newspaper in our house. Something pretty important had better be happening if my mom was going to break down and spend fifty cents on a newspaper. We were poor, and she considered it a needless expense.

  “Who needs a paper? The news isn’t going to change a week later.”

  My mother actually said that.

  The problem was, I needed the movie section to see what was playing so I could write my reviews and, more important, so I could stay on television. In what became a kind of crazy ritual, I would ride my bike to our neighbors’ house to get their old paper. I’d ride up to their house, and they would throw the paper at me. Then I’d ride away, paper in hand, like a paperboy in reverse. I was recycling, and I didn’t even know it! I’d get back to my house, grab the movie section, and take it up to my room while my mom read the rest so she could find out what the hell happened last week.

  Let me tell you about my room: By this time I was obsessed with movies. I was reading about movies, thinking about movies, making lists of my favorite movies. I was trying to live in a movie. Our Colonial house was very old, and I persuaded my mom to let me paint my room entirely black and white and silver, which I felt was a correct depiction of cinema. Everything had to be black and white. The bed was black and white. I had black shelves lined with silver wallpaper, and black and white pictures on the wall. My grandfather had given me this wonderful book by Arlene Croce, The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book, and I used it as a manual for turning my room into an Art Deco set.

  So I was nuts about movies, and every week I’d look in the newspaper to find out which on
e I’d become obsessed with next. Once I had the movie picked out, I had a bigger problem: persuading my mother to drive me, because again, “gas costs money” and “we are poor,” and all the theaters were at least ten to twenty miles away. Unless the film had Alan Bates in it. If Alan Bates was in the movie, it could have been forty miles away and my mom would swoon and just start driving. Hey, I saw some great movies that way. An Unmarried Woman, The Rose, Far From the Madding Crowd, Whistle Down the Wind—I could do the entire Alan Bates film canon, but I will spare you a detailed retelling of the wrestling scene from Women in Love.

  My mom took advantage of this by devising a clever “chores for movies” exchange. Every day I would have to wash dishes, vacuum, or clean the basement while she would consider taking me to a movie. Then, on Saturday morning, she would make her final decision. If there was one misstep—if I was sullen (constantly), if I argued with her (always), if I fought with my brothers (let’s not go there)—it was off, and I would not get to do my movie reviews. I would be further disappointed because—although I would never have admitted this to my mom—I liked going to the movies with her, and I think she liked seeing a wide array of movies with me, too.

  One Saturday morning everything was going great. The house was freshly cleaned, it was painted, and I had just finished reshingling the roof! I had my movie picked out from the paper, and then … disaster.

  My parents were divorced, and we did not see a lot of my father, so when he showed up there was always a lot of … let’s call it tension.

  I heard the arguing begin. Slowly, as it always did, then gradually, one remark would build upon another until a full-blown fight had broken out. The movie started at two, and I was trying to interrupt to get my mother’s attention. One o’clock hit, then half past. By 1:45, I was pleading, “I’m going to miss the movie!” but no one was listening.

  It was now past two o’clock. The movie had started. That sick feeling came over me. I’ve missed the movie. These people have made me miss the movie. Somewhere other people are watching the movie, and I’m not there. As if it would never play again. As if nothing would ever be right again. I felt completely betrayed by my parents, who were in their own world, just as I was in my own world. I trudged back up to my black-and-white room and threw myself onto my bed. I think all movie lovers have some sort of void or sadness in them that movies fill. When I was deprived of a movie, I felt heartsick. My parents were still fighting, and to block them out, and also to stop myself from obsessing about what might be happening in the movie I was currently missing, I picked up the newspaper and began to skim through it. Something interesting caught my eye, and I’m not sure what would have happened to me acting-wise if I hadn’t stumbled upon that random newspaper article that one morning. That single article in the week-old discarded paper started my career for real.

  The story was about the Hartford Stage Company. It was holding auditions for a new program called the Hartford Stage Youth Theatre. It was looking for exceptional youth, ages fourteen to eighteen, with some theater and acting skills. Those accepted would receive $100 a week, receive training in all aspects of theater, and perform on the main stage in a musical at the end of the summer.

  My heart raced. Somehow I knew that this program and the training it offered were going to be my ticket out of the rut I had found myself in post-Camelot. But there was a catch. The whole enterprise was being underwritten by a large insurance company in Hartford to help “underprivileged youths from high-risk backgrounds who live in the inner city.” I read the story again trying to figure out how I could become an underprivileged youth from a high-risk background who lived in the inner city. And I needed to do it quickly because they were accepting applications and this paper was already a week old.

  I thought of myself as an actor, so I started my act. The first thing was that even to be considered I had to pretend that I lived in the inner city. I called a family friend who was living in Hartford and asked her if I could use her family’s house as my mailing address because it seemed inner-city-ish. Somehow she agreed. I filled out the application, careful to mail it back from her address. The questions were pretty standard: What plays have you done? What kind of singer are you? Then it got tougher: Please describe your ethnicity—“Caucasian” was the last one listed—and your high-risk background. Hmmm … moral dilemma? Can I say I’m black? After all, some Italians are descendants of the Moors. No, couldn’t get away with it. Although I didn’t technically live in Hartford, I did feel certain that I belonged in this theater group. I came from a high-risk background, and we were poor. So, I justified what I was doing. Small little lies for a bigger cause: my musical comedy career! My application came back, and my mother handed me the phone. My “parents,” Mr. and Mrs. Murray, told me that I had been accepted and that my audition would be in a few weeks. I was to be prepared to dance and have one song that showed off my voice.

  I had no formal training—well, that’s not exactly true. I had stood in front of the television and watched Fred Astaire dance … a lot. I also loved Ruby Keeler … a lot. And … there was Liza Minnelli. I did my best to sound like Liza Minnelli, who was my favorite performer. If someone had asked me at age fifteen who I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said, “I want to be Liza Minnelli.” She could sing; she could dance; she was sexy in an offbeat way. I wanted to be Liza Minnelli in Cabaret—putting the plot of the movie aside—wearing the bowler hat and the stockings and belting “Maybe This Time,” just as she had. My love affair with Liza was solidified when my grandfather took me to see her onstage in Chicago. She replaced Gwen Verdon, and I was lucky enough to see her in her prime in that great show. I also wanted to be her in New York, New York, which, putting the plot aside again, is like an old MGM musical—with domestic abuse—but I loved it. So I not only admired Liza Minnelli; I thought I could do a good enough impression of her to actually get myself into the Hartford Stage Company’s inner-city youth group.

  The audition was approaching, and I couldn’t decide between two songs. Liza Minnelli’s version of “The Man I Love,” which I learned off of the New York, New York soundtrack album, which was completely inappropriate, or “Maybe This Time,” which I had learned off the Cabaret album, which was also completely inappropriate—but I thought I could “act” it. I decided on “Maybe This Time,” because I felt it depicted both my desire and my desperation to be a performer. Stop reading and play the song right now. You’ll see what I mean. I was fifteen and delusional and living in a bedroom that was a movie set … so there’s also that.

  I’m not sure what would have happened if there had been a power outage in our house, or if the needle had broken on the record player. For weeks I practiced, again and again. I had mastered every nuance of Liza Minnelli’s singing “Maybe This Time.” I would put the record on, and there in my black-and-white-and-silver room, I would belt out the lyrics with such sincerity that I would actually reduce myself to tears. The song had that much meaning for me. It was my anthem: “It’s got to happen / Happen sometime /Maybe this time I’ll win.”

  I could actually see the folks at the Hartford Stage Company as I sang. They would stand up and cheer. Then, while I collected myself, I would imagine how humble I would be when they told me, “You have the part … you have any part … you can have all the parts you want! We have never seen anything like you, kid. You’re the next Liza Minnelli!” The only thing that ruined it was my mother’s yelling up, “Dinner is ready; have you fed the dog yet? And could you please stop playing that record?”

  The day of the audition came, and Liza—I mean I—was very nervous. I listened to the record one last time. My mom was getting the car keys, and then … disaster. As we were getting ready to go, my father showed up. His girlfriend had dropped him off at our house to pick up some antique plates that he and my mom had been fighting over. So, now, for reasons that are still unclear to me, my mother agreed to give him the plates, and then give him a ride back to his girlfriend’s house with the
plates, before my big audition.

  I couldn’t believe this was happening. My mother was in the kitchen stacking plates for my father and his new girlfriend, and I was going to miss the audition. And the consequences were a little larger than just missing a movie. I suggested that my father stay behind with his plates and that maybe his girlfriend could come pick him up, but those thoughts—which I articulated very clearly—were ignored, and the three of us got into the car. My mother, trying to keep the peace or just gain mileage on her car, decided it would be easier to drive me forty-five minutes to the audition, then drive my father back thirty minutes to his girlfriend’s house, then turn around and drive back the forty-five minutes to pick me up when I was finished.

  I don’t want to ruin the surprise, but no sooner had we got into the car than the arguing began. “It’s your fault … No it’s your fault!” It’s always been very important in our family to assign blame. Once we straighten out whose fault something is, we can move on. The fight escalated to pretty bad pretty quickly. The drive to the audition was like a moving Edward Albee play, my parents hurling insults at each other like a “best of” from every terrible fight they had ever had. I was in the backseat just trying to block them out, by silently singing, “Maybe this time…”

  I kept on going.

  “Everybody loves a winner, so nobody loved me / ‘Lady Peaceful,’ ‘Lady Happy,’ that’s what I long to be…” I did this for forty-five minutes. It was not easy, but it kept me from screaming “What is the matter with you people? Your daughter is trying to do something with her life. Can we stop talking about plates?”

  People ask me about movie acting. It’s all concentration. Concentration in the midst of chaos. Maybe that’s where I learned it—with my eyes closed, trying to keep a tune and lyrics in my head when it seemed that everything in the universe was pitted against me. All I heard in my mind was, I know this song; I love singing this song; I know this is going to be great. We pulled up in front of the theater, and I felt as if I had emerged from a blackout. I got out of the backseat, and my father cheerfully said, “Good luck,” as if we had been on a nice family drive in the country. The way he said it made me think he wanted me to fail. And all of a sudden I felt like I was going to fail. I quickly started to hum to myself, “Maybe this time…”