“What’s a pretty girl like you doing wandering around, lost?” he asked.
I told him my sad story, and he walked me into Bill Orr’s office. Bill was head of Warner’s television department and married to Joy Page, studio head Jack Warner’s stepdaughter. All of a sudden I was cast in an episode of Surfside 6, starring Troy Donahue. Jerry, Bill, and I became fast friends. Then one day Bill called me at home with a proposition.
“There’s a man I know,” he began, “who would like to get you an apartment . . .” That sounded great.
“He would make sure you always worked,” Bill went on. That’s when what he meant dawned on me.
“How could you think I was that kind of girl?!” I sobbed.
Bill felt terrible. “Alright, alright. It’s okay. I’m sorry, don’t worry.”
Now, if somebody called with the same offer today. . . . Just kidding.
I MAY STILL HAVE BEEN NAIVE, YES, BUT AT LEAST I’D LOST MY virginity. It was the 1960s: free love and no AIDS. Someone once told me, “If you’re still a virgin by the time you’re twenty-two, you’ll be frigid.” So I went right out at twenty-one-and-a-half to find someone who liked me better than I liked him and who wouldn’t tell anyone.
I don’t remember even the name of the man who took my “snowflake,” as Morgan would say. He was very nice, but I felt sick to my stomach just thinking about the whole episode. I still feel bad that I never returned any of his calls. The experience was short lived and didn’t exactly produce fireworks. Even so, after I lost my snowflake, my buddy Bob Sampson and I made love once a year, whether we needed it or not. Good old Bob.
Then, along came Bill Duffy.
“If there’s anybody in the world I want to look like, it’s Bill Duffy,” Jack used to say about his friend Bill, also an actor. Bill was handsome, that’s for sure. I had been spending a lot of time with Jack and Bill and the wonderful actor Dick Bradford, who was in movies like The Legend of Billy Jean and More American Graffiti. He was also a painter. The three of them shared a house. Some nights Bill’s cousin Kenny would come over and play guitar or bass, and I’d sit in the middle of the floor and practice singing in front of them. Kenny even helped me make demos, which ended up getting stuffed in a drawer, waiting for the day when I was ready to do something with them. Then Jack and I would argue about serious matters of the day, like who had the best Mexican food, El Cholo or El Coyote.
Bill and I soon began an affair. One evening while we were sitting in a car, he asked me if I wanted to be his girlfriend. There was something so cute and romantic about the way he asked that I had to say yes.
We had an amazing sexual connection. I finally got what making love was all about, and we went at it like rabbits, nonstop, wherever and whenever we could. With Bill I discovered orgasms. After making love all night, we’d go to Norm’s and have spaghetti for breakfast to refuel before getting started up again.
Then, as often happens when you’re a naive, generally inexperienced woman in her early twenties with no sex education, I got pregnant.
The only people who knew were Luana, Morgan, Jack, Bob Sampson, and my sister Diana and her husband, Ian. I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do. At first I thought I would keep the child. I started learning to cook and got in touch with my inner homemaker by recovering a couch in orange burlap. “You’ll only want the baby when it laughs,” my therapist said. “You won’t want him when he cries.”
Bill wanted to get married. I wasn’t really in love with him. Where would we live? With Jack? So Bill and I had a big fight. I was working on Surfside 6 at the time and was invited to spend the weekend on the beach in Venice with some of the cast and crew. When I returned home Sunday evening, sunburned and pregnant, I saw Jack and Dick going up the steps to my apartment.
Uh-oh, I thought. Bill.
When I entered the apartment, he was lying on my couch, drunk. “Hi, honey,” I said.
“Fuck you, honey,” he replied, jumping up from the couch and smashing over his knee a painting Jack had given me. Glass flew. Bleeding now, Bill was staggering around, saying that he would go to the police if I got an abortion. While Jack and Dick chased Bill out of the house, I huddled in a corner. Bill’s bloody handprints covered the railing along the stairs leading down to the street. Tired, weepy, and nauseated, I began to clean up.
A few minutes later the phone rang. It was Jack.
“Sal, I don’t mean to be an alarmist,” he said, “but you need to get out of there for awhile. I think Bill’s coming.”
I hung up the phone and panicked. What should I do? Where could I go? The phone rang again.
“Jack?”
No. It was George Peppard, whom I’d met through my friend Suzanne Pleshette.
“I’m in town,” he announced. “I’m at the Chateau Marmont. Why don’t you come over?”
I thought for a second. I was swollen and sunburned, and I needed a place to stay. I drove over to the Chateau Marmont.
George tried to hit on me. I couldn’t tell him that I was pregnant or why I’d come over, if not to sleep with him. So it was a seamy and weird night. Not his fault. The next day he sent me flowers.
I had to make a decision. The truth was that I wasn’t prepared to have a baby. I could barely take care of myself. I was struggling to pay the rent, even with two roommates. My therapist told me he “knew a guy” over in Glendale who could take care of me. Bill offered some money when he sobered up. I told him he could keep it. Bob Sampson offered to marry me, which was sweet but, as we both knew, not a smart option. He loaned me the money I needed to get the procedure.
Jack and Morgan drove me to Glendale and stayed with me. When we arrived at the house—it wasn’t an office at all—the doctor wasn’t there. I was taken into one of the bedrooms and given something to “help me relax.” When I woke up, the procedure was over.
Jack and Morgan took me to Du-Par’s for breakfast and then back to my apartment. Diana and Ian stopped by with a homemade brown betty. I appreciated that so much—both the cake and Diana’s support. We were all struggling in our own ways to break free of the restrictions of the 1950s and find our way in a rapidly changing world where the rules governing women’s behavior were changing. . .but not that much. Diana didn’t judge me. There was no criticism, only caring.
Within a few days I began to experience an excruciating pain in my leg. I went to see my mom. Several years earlier, when I was around eighteen, was the first time I convinced my mother to take me to the doctor. That time it was for diet pills, dexamyl spansules, which made me feel like Felix the Cat on the inside. They burnt out my nervous system and eventually became a popular street drug. That experience had not sold my Christian Scientist mother on the wonders of Western medicine. But this time around she could tell something was really wrong, so she brought me to a doctor, who me rushed to the hospital. My fallopian tubes were dangerously inflamed; I spent ten days in the hospital hooked up to an IV. Serious infections like mine were what happened back then to women without options. That’s why I become so enraged today when people continue to try to keep young women uneducated and leave them with nowhere safe to turn.
Once I landed in the hospital, there was no hiding what had happened from my parents. They both knew what I had done. My mom told me that my dad cried when she told him about the abortion, sobbing, “Why didn’t she know she could come to us? Didn’t she know we would have helped?” What a difference from the angry, stern father I had come to expect, the one who hated my braless outfits and torn jeans and rebellious nature. He was heartbroken.
Now I realize that I probably could have gone to them for help. My parents, bless them, no matter how they felt about my choice of career, saw just about everything I ever did. Set dressing as a dead body? They were there. One line in a play at the Pico Playhouse? They got tickets. And who can forget my riveting delivery of the words, “You may go right in,” on the live television program Playhouse 90? Not only did my parents tune in; they also told all thei
r friends to do the same. I was mortified. What a jerk I could be, not appreciating how my parents supported me. So they wanted a lady. So my dad didn’t want a crybaby. Who could blame him? And despite his stern nature, he was encouraging, even if I couldn’t hear it. That above all is clear in this letter he later sent me, which I came across while writing this book.
January 8, 1963
Darling,
The enclosed check does not give me the right to offer advice, but being your father I just naturally use my dictatorial powers and suggest that:
1. You think positive.
2. See people in your profession.
3. To talk [to people in your profession].
4. Practice acting by yourself if necessary, before the mirror.
5. Ditto #4.
6. Ditto #4.
7. Realize the truth—that you are a fine actress.
8. Have faith and trust in God.
9. And—Help yourself by asking for work! Don’t be afraid to ask. You have ability to offer and the world needs entertainment more than ever, what with all the discontent around the globe.
10. Above all—don’t worry, you always have mother and me.
Dad left out one of his favorite lines: Did you tell them that you get all your talent from me, Sal?
I was blown away when I found this letter. I didn’t remember ever receiving it. I’d been too self-centered to realize that despite my dad’s quick temper and my mom’s picky ways, they not only cared about me but also wanted for me what I wanted for myself.
In the early 1960s my father worked in downtown Los Angeles as the vice president of a small crude oil company. He knew that neighborhood was one of my hangouts and would often ask me to go to lunch with him and meet the people in his office. But I never did. I was sure he would hate what I was wearing, so I always begged off and made excuses. I’m so sorry, Dad—and grateful.
AFTER THE WHOLE ORDEAL BILL AND I MADE LOVE ONE LAST time, as a goodbye. In the wake of the abortion and our breakup, I was depressed. I resumed my sad-sack routine of lying around, going to the unemployment office and acting class, waiting tables, and eating Oreos.
Thank God for David Bennett, Bob Sampson, and Roy Thinnes, who got me out of bed and off to auditions. David and I were spending so much time together that I had begun to call him my cousin. We had met at Jeff Corey’s, and at first I thought he was the most obnoxious guy on earth. He would say things like, “You’re going to be a star,” which I hated because I was sure if he said it out loud, no one would believe him and it would never happen. One of the first times we went to the movies together David showed up at the Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard wearing a white Bombay suit and a bad toupee. I couldn’t bear those white suits and hairpieces, but I couldn’t imagine life without David, either. My father loved him because he looked after me so well. Later, when David moved to New York City, I remember my dad saying, “That’s great,” but asking him, “Who will take care of Sally?”
One day, early in 1962, David and Roy tried to get me to audition for The Marriage-Go-Round at the Pasadena Playhouse with Don Porter and Marsha Hunt.
“Get in the car,” they insisted.
“I’m not sexy. I’m not going,” I wailed.
But off I went. A week or so later, while I was lying in bed, the phone rang.
“I’m sorry,” the voice said, “but you didn’t get the part.”
Figures, I thought, and rolled back over to go back to sleep. Then the phone rang again.
“I was wrong. You’ve got the part.”
I can only assume that their first choice had passed.
After the run in Pasadena I got to perform with Ozzie and Harriet Nelson in the Kenley Players presentation of The Marriage-Go-Round in Columbus, Ohio. But that meant I had to pull out of a play called Camino Real, which was being done at Company of Angels with Leonard Nimoy directing. Leonard and Dick Chamberlain and Vic Morrow helped start the now-famous theater as a place where actors could work and rehearse without the pressure of commercial success. It was founded in 1959 in a parking lot at Vine and Waring, behind a restaurant. I hammered in maybe two nails and would sometimes work as an usher at Angels if a friend was doing a play there. Today it is the oldest repertory theater in Los Angeles.
When I got back from Ohio, they were still rehearsing and trying to get the play off the ground, struggling with annoying bureaucracy and things like permits. Leonard was the one who really made the Angels fly. I remember him taking me aside one night after I’d shown up late for rehearsal—again.
As we stood in the parking lot, I could see that Leonard was frustrated.
“Why is it that you talented people are always coming late?” he asked.
Talented?
I missed the part about being late. I was just thrilled that he said I was talented!
Camino Real didn’t get off the ground, but in 1962 Michael Shurtleff’s Call Me by My Rightful Name did. I was cast in it opposite my lovely Bob Sampson and directed by my good friend Tom Selden. There’s nothing like a play. Throughout my career I have tried to do them as often as I could, just to humiliate myself. This one, though I least expected it to, launched my career.
At the time I was still waiting tables at the Chez. Joe Stefano, who had written Hitchcock’s Psycho and was producing and writing The Outer Limits for television, had seen me in Enemy of the People. Luckily for me, he bothered to see me again in Call Me by My Rightful Name.
“I can’t believe the growth!” Joe said to me after the show, as I was standing in the parking lot with Bob. “I may be doing a TV series, and if I do, I’m going to find a part for you.”
As he drove away, I turned to Bob Sampson and said, “I’ll be in the restaurant for the rest of my life.”
Six months later a script showed up at my apartment with a note: The part is Ingrid, the magic is yours.
Now, thanks to Joe, after eight years of studying and waitressing and doing gigs like playing a Swedish blind date wearing big, tall antlers, on The Fred MacMurray Show, I finally had a real part: Ingrid, the nurse in an episode of the TV series The Outer Limits called, “The Human Factor.”
“There is nothing wrong with your television set . . .” the oscilloscope voice announced at the beginning of every Outer Limits. It was so otherworldly and creepy and fun.
On the first day of shooting Joe was there, paying close attention. He turned to the director and said, “Does she understand her motivation?” The director said yes. He then turned to Conrad Hall and William Fraker, two incredibly talented cinematographers—both handsome, both bearded—and told them, “Make her look like a movie star!” That was Joe Stefano—a product of Old Hollywood. Connie and Bill handed me a muskrat collar and a cigarette, lit me, and that was it. A star was born.
I felt great until I saw a rough cut of that episode. Then I jumped in my car, hit the gas, and drove one hundred miles per hour to the television set of Combat, which Vic Morrow was filming. We went to his trailer and I sobbed, “I’m not just ugly, I’m untalented!” Vic was a darling. He comforted me and sent me on my way.
To highlight that first episode, Joe took out an ad in Variety. It included a note to me for all to see: Your shining moments in “The Human Factor” reveal your own very special glamour—the kind we think of when we think of a classic “movie star”—and will, we believe, create an exciting and new image in the minds of all those who already know you to be a skilled and genuine actress.
At the time Jerry Bick, my agent and friend, had already dumped me as a client. I begged him just to keep me on his roster so if someone did happen to call, I’d get the message. The day the Outer Limits episode aired, Jerry was on the Universal lot. One of his colleagues walked up and said, “Hey, Jerry, I saw your client on TV last night. Guess she’ll be moving to William Morris today.”
And that’s just what happened. I’ve never stopped working from that day forth. Joe Stefano started my career in television, and I’ll never be able to thank
him fully.
Joe not only cast me again, but he also wrote an episode of Outer Limits, “The Bellero Shield,” with me in mind. Martin Landau was cast as my husband, and Broadway legend Chita Rivera played my barefoot housekeeper. This time I was a conniving and ambitious housewife in a housecoat with a mink collar. I killed the most adorable alien you’ve ever seen and then ended up trapped in a big glass bubble. Chita taught me how to scream. At the end of that episode the bubble—my barrier to freedom—was removed, but I didn’t believe it. I had created my own bubble, my own prison. I stood there, trapped, in a prison of my own creation.
ONCE I SIGNED AT WILLIAM MORRIS, I DECIDED TO AUDITION for the Actor’s Studio. It had been around since the late 1940s and was notoriously difficult to get into. But I needed to keep studying, and I wanted to raise my game. I had been working on a scene with my dear friend Elizabeth Hush for about two months. In the scene we were both supposed to be drunk, though neither of us really drank. But the night of the audition Liz (I’ve decided to blame this on Liz) said, “Hey, why don’t we have a drink?” And so we did. We got into the Actor’s Studio under false pretenses—we were actually drunk, not just playing drunks. In fact, I’ve have never been so sick in all my life. I weaved home in the car and spent the next two hours throwing up in the bathroom. But hey, we got in!
I worked at the Actor’s Studio, feeling so fat that I wore muumuus and tried anything to lose weight. Hollywood was—is—very unforgiving when it comes to appearances, and there’s nothing like being on stage or on screen to really bring out your insecurities. (Most of all, I was unforgiving. People of all sizes work in Hollywood—I just wanted to be one of the thin ones.) So everyone was getting into amphetamines, food combining—whatever they heard would work. I took some sort of shots that contained apples. I went on fruit fasts. You couldn’t just eat figs—they had to be Kadota figs from the Third Street Farmer’s Market. I went with Roy Thinnes (on whom I still had a terrible crush at the time) to get some sort of magical shots—I had no idea what was in them—that were supposed to allow me to eat whatever I wanted. I injected pregnant women’s urine. People now ask if I was ever anorexic. The answer is no—I wasn’t that disciplined.
Read My Lips Page 7
