In early September I packed up, said hasta la vista to Yuba City, made the eight-hour drive down Hwy 99 through California’s Central Valley, and with the help of my parents moved into the women’s dormitory at the Pasadena Playhouse.
My first stint on a school stage was for an audition scene in which I was assigned a role in the ancient Greek play, Lysistrata (which I thought was a tragedy; later I learned it’s a comedy). I knew nothing about Greek theater; the only acting I’d ever seen was on TV and in movies; it was people like Danny Kaye cavorting for the camera or Cyd Charisse looking cool and amazing. It was TV shows like Spin and Marty with kids who looked and sounded like me and my friends, where people used a normal speaking voice, along with gestures and body language that felt natural and familiar. Not so with the Greeks apparently. There I was on stage in a breezy toga shouting lines that meant nothing to me (I might as well have been doing it in the original language) and making what I thought were the requisite stiff, stage-y, statue-like gestures.
Afterwards, a teacher, Ruth Lane, took me aside and said gently but with alarming conviction, “I don’t think this is for you.”
“This” did not mean “this scene” or “this role” or “or this toga” or “this particular audition.”
“This” meant “acting.”
I don’t think acting is for you.
You know that thing around which you have based your entire future? Well — you don’t have it.
Her words were the piano that falls on an unsuspecting cartoon character. I was crushed under their weight. Here I was in my first weeks at a school for acting being told I didn’t have the basic tools. I didn’t have any clay they could mold something into. What was I going to do? The idea of returning to Yuba City having learned a lesson in aiming too high was not going to happen.
I lay in bed that night feeling alone, inadequate, stupid, and desperate; there came wave after wave of the thought ‘I’m not good enough.’ I cried and railed about the unfairness of it all — as kids do. I was furious and humiliated. More than anything I was in a panic; I had no alternatives, nothing to fall back on.
As it happens, having no Plan B can be very motivating.
By morning I had a strategy: I would refuse to go. My parents had already paid for the first semester, I reasoned, and the school surely wouldn’t throw me to the sidewalk. Would they?
We’d find out.
As though nothing had happened, I kept attending classes, learning and absorbing as much as I could, throwing myself into life at the Playhouse and a month later I had another audition scene, this time for a play called Street Scene. In contrast to Lysistrata, this was a modern play in which I read the part of a girl my age. She sounded like me; she felt things I felt. I knew how to wear her clothes, I knew how flirt like she did, how to react with anger, to cry, and to fall in love. And guess what? I didn’t suck.
This time no one spoke of my leaving the program. In fact at an assembly a few days afterward I was announced as the student who had shown “Most Improvement.” I could have viewed this as a back-handed compliment, I suppose, but I was just so filled with relief, I could only see it as the lifting of a dark cloud.
The Pasadena Playhouse became a place I truly and completely loved. Looking back I feel so fortunate to have been part of this legendary place where some of the best actors, dancers, models, directors, and other entertainment business people emerged in this era. If you love TV and film from the 1970s and 1980s, this is where a lot of it came from. Rue McClanahan, who would later be known for her role on The Golden Girls, was a year ahead of me. Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman had just left prior to my arrival to pursue their careers. I became lifelong friends with scads of classmates including Stuart Margolin, who later played Angel on The Rockford Files and has more than 100 credits acting in TV and film roles and more than 50 credits behind the camera as a director. There’s Bill McKinney, a nice southern boy who drank hot sauce like Pepsi and who one day became widely known as the most psychotic redneck in film history in Deliverance. Bill also appeared in a lot of Clint Eastwood’s films. Another friend, and one of Bill’s roommates, was a guy who eventually went by just one name, Mako, and won an Academy Award for his role in The Sand Pebbles. Sid Haig was part of this group. If you love horror movies you’ve seen Sid in The Devil’s Rejects, Halloween, one of the Night of the Living Dead movies and lots of TV appearances. And there’s Josh Bryant, whose list of acting credits is as long as a phone book including several appearances on Little House on the Prairie that are close to my heart.
The alumni includes world-class talent such as Leonard Nimoy, Nick Nolte, Sally Struthers, Charles Bronson and Raymond Burr. In my second year I also befriended a guy named David Banks, who realized that acting wasn’t his thing but went on be the tour manager for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the pop group The Manhattan Transfer, and so on. He started dating my roommate, Lydia, and shows up later in this book. (Tuck that name away.)
Because of the rich pool of talent at the school (willing to work for next to nothing), entertainment companies would come to the Playhouse with all kinds of job offers. In the fall of that first year, a gentleman from Disneyland showed up to hire students to play characters in the park — Minnie and Mickey Mouse, Pluto, Chip and Dale and, most exciting of all to me, Alice in Wonderland. This was an idea they were trying out for the first time — having live walk-around film characters who would interact with park visitors.
I lobbied him for the part of Alice in Wonderland, following him around the school, not leaving him alone. Not only was I a former Mickey Mouse Club fan who had dreamed of going to Disneyland since the day it opened, I knew what made Alice special — she was one of the few female bad-asses in the world of Disney. She was a girl who made her way through a wild, dangerous adventure — went on her own, made her own mistakes, solved her own problems, and wasn’t rescued by anybody. I wanted this part!
The problem with my playing Alice, as the man from Disney patiently pointed out, was that I had a short blond shag that looked nothing like the character. No problem. I swore I’d get a hairpiece and make it work. Finally, he relented. I had the job of Alice and needed to report to the Anaheim headquarters on December 20 for a two-week holiday stint along with several other students playing the other roles.
Most of the characters were to wear the Ice Capades costumes, except for me. I would dress in the Alice uniform already made for the staffers on the new Alice in Wonderland ride.
But first, I needed hair. A trip to Woolworths in Pasadena provided an almost matching ponytail that would do by pinning my very short hair back and hiding the pins with a large black bow.
Off to Anaheim.
We arrived at an employee parking lot on the appointed day and found our way into a building that housed wardrobe, employee lockers, lounges and so forth. Once I was in my Alice pinafore I got the full details of the job.
As a walk-around character of the fairytale variety my strict instructions were to stay within the boundaries of Fantasyland, which kept me near things like the recently unveiled Alice in Wonderland ride (naturally), Dumbo Flying Elephant, and Midget Autopia, as it was then known. What a dream gig — greeting visitors from all over the world, making friendly conversation, waving, and posing for pictures with many, many children. By the end of the first day my face ached from smiling. I spent the ride back to Pasadena massaging my lips and cheeks along with facial muscles I didn’t know existed. Second day the same thing; however, I began to realize it all came with the added bonus that I was allowed to go on all the rides and could take whomever I wanted along with me. This may not sound like much of a superpower today, but in the late 1950s it was like being a fairy godmother. Disneyland charged an admission fee of $1.50 per person and then you bought a booklet with A, B, C, and D tickets, which allowed you onto various rides and attractions. Once you’d used your tickets — especially the D ticket, which was the hot one — your options were A) buy more tickets or B) wander around th
e park looking sad wishing you could. I learned by that second day to recognize the forlorn expression of children whose parents couldn’t afford more tickets. I would see a family gazing wistfully at, say the Mad Hatters Tea Cups and I would scoop up the kids and take them with me. Man, Alice was a hero.
(For you die-heard Disneyland fans I should mention that the D-ticket was indeed the hot one until the legendary E-ticket made its debut in 1959.)
This went on day after day. I loved it. Occasionally after my shift was over, I changed back into my street clothes and walked over to Main Street to check out the bakery for goodies to take home to my roommates. Forgetting I was “out of uniform” I would continue to wave and smile at visitors — as I had all day as Alice — and of course people would look at me as if I were bonkers.
Once during my shift I took a smoke break with my Playhouse friends and other employees behind the firehouse, the front of which faces Main Street. There were strict rules about smoking for employees, designed to keep it well away from the eyes of guests. As I stood there making small talk, up drove a black limousine, and out of the back stepped the man himself Walt Disney. He was smoking too and gave us a smile, heading inside. I learned that he had an apartment inside the firehouse and stayed there often as he liked to personally keep an eye on things. In fact, word was that at night after the park closed Walt Disney would walk around and enjoy the place all to himself. I pictured him in his pajamas wandering through Fantasyland like an overgrown kid turning on the carousel and taking a ride caught up in the fun of his personal magical kingdom. I think the fact that he took personal pleasure in the park is what made Disneyland Disneyland. It wasn’t a corporate product. It was the dream-come-true of one man who chose to share it with the world.
Every December, Walt Disney hosted the fabulous Christmas Parade live on national television. I traveled through the park with the parade arm in arm with “The White Rabbit” (played by another Pasadena Playhouse friend) and as we waved to the TV cameras — and thus my first appearance in front of millions of home viewers — my carefully pinned Woolworths ponytail fell to the street. I artfully scooped it up and danced away reattaching it as best I could. “Nice move,” muttered the rabbit.
Just before New Year’s, the Iowa Hawkeyes football team was in Pasadena for the Rose Bowl game. I was asked to escort a few players, including the star running back Ray Jauch, around Fantasyland, which I happily did and, daringly, took them on the Jungle Ride, which, being Adventureland, was totally off limits to the animated characters. And not satisfied with breaking just one rule, and feeling like a show-off, once the ride starting chugging away, I decided it was perfect time for a smoke. I kicked up my Alice shoes and lit up a Winston as we steamed past the elephants.
I realized the gravity of my mistake when I saw a child staring with big, bewildered eyes at Alice puffing away like a Teamster.
Afterward I had New Year’s Eve off and was invited to a big Hollywood party by a student who was a year ahead of me. Malcolm Cassel was already a “working actor,” having appeared as one of the children in Cheaper by the Dozen, the Clifton Webb classic. I was dolled up in high heels, a borrowed cocktail dress, and dripping with rhinestones.
We stopped on the way at DuPars Café to grab a bite before the party and as I made my way across the restaurant I heard a voice call out, “ALICIA!” There sat a family who had seen and remembered me from Disneyland a week previous. I had taken the children on a Fantasyland ride a few days before. The father took my hand and in broken English said, “You made Christmas for my family.” I felt tears starting to loosen my false eyelashes.
Wow. So, I’d traumatized one kid on the Jungle Ride and had brought Christmas joy to others. Hopefully it all balanced out.
It was a wonderful two weeks as Disneyland’s first walk-around Alice. At a big $1.75 an hour I’d earned my Social Security card and was moving up in the world of entertainment!
Not long after Disneyland, I was contacted by the people running the Miss USA organization, as they needed a “Miss Yuba City” to take part in the Miss California portion of the competition. We were all just going to pretend that I had somehow earned the title, obviously a much vied-for position of prominence.
Even though I’d been asked to participate, it came with a catch — I still had to be “sponsored,” ideally by the city my face and figure would be representing. My parents went to the Yuba City Council to secure the $150 sponsorship and were turned down flat. I learned years later that my dad finally just wrote the check himself.
To pull off this charade I would need an intensive course in “charm,” learning how to sit, stand, and speak — it’s as much like dog training as it sounds. I signed up for a fast-track session at a Hollywood charm school and quickly learned the finer points of how to walk down stairs in high heels without looking (scary) and how to pose on stage with shoulders sideways, hips turned, left shoe pointed just so.
To make it all look legitimate I had to drive to the Burbank airport for my arrival photo — the official narrative being that girls from all over the state were just landing for the big event. The jet was parked and the stairway to the tarmac was in place. I had to dash up the stairs into the plane and then turn back around and be photographed “arriving” in Los Angeles fresh from Yuba City for the competition, hat box in hand.
Next I had to move into a dormitory where the 50 contestants were staying — and could be protected from scandal — until the night of the official competition on June 27, 1959 in Burbank’s Starlight Bowl.
Even though the whole set-up was as phony as a padded bra, I took it seriously, parading about in my modest, low-hipped bathing suit and then striking poses in the evening gown competition, cheered on by my boys from the Playhouse. I was actually really proud to make it to the semi-finals — not bad for a girl who’d never even been to a beauty pageant in her whole life.
All in all it was a bit like the Alice role in that I wore a costume and did lots of smiling and waving. Ultimately, while I was more than happy to play the role of Yuba City’s most alluring beauty, it wasn’t quite what I had in mind for my career.
The day after the competition, I took one look at my over-sprayed, horribly teased and combed hair and had it all chopped off, ending up with a smart, little Pixie cut. Meanwhile I’d gotten a call from Maxine Anderson, a casting director specializing in advertising; she’d seen me at the Miss California event and wanted to discuss some possible work. When I walked into her office she took one look and said, “What did you do to your hair?” She shook her head and said come back in a year — which I did. Maxine was as good as her word and set me up for a photo shoot for Toni Home Permanent, to appear in a booklet that came with the product’s packaging featuring a number of trendy hairstyles. Not only did I make it into the book, but without my knowing, the book was used in a TV commercial where it was opened to the page that bore my photo. As a result one day I picked up my mail and found a residual check — my first ever — and I had no idea what it was for.
It felt as though I was inching toward my dream of being a working actor — dancing at the outer edges of the entertainment universe. At school I was always checking notices for work opportunities and finally read about an audition for a female lead in a low-budget film called Damaged Goods, about teenagers and the danger of venereal disease. I cast my Miss Yuba City tiara aside and went for it.
If sexually transmitted disease was my way into Hollywood, so be it.
Chapter 2
Damaged Goods
The audition for the role of Judy Jackson was in a motel room in West Hollywood, where producer Sid Davis had set up an office. I went in, read the lines and got the part. Sid told me that I needed to secure an agent and could likely get one just a couple of doors down. I took his suggestion and indeed found a small talent agency, where they also signed me up on the spot. In a single day I had landed a film role and an agent. I thought I’d explode with excitement.
The three weeks I spent
making Damaged Goods (also released under the charming name “VD”) was a huge learning curve. At the Pasadena Playhouse our on-camera training was in front of a single, stationary television camera, like the ones used at that time on a broadcast of the evening news. Shooting in a small studio with a stationary camera is completely different than shooting on, say, a rollercoaster — which we did — or in a speeding car or at a high school track. I had to simultaneously remember lines, hit my mark, not bump into things, keep in mind where the camera was, and know where my light was, all at the same time. Oh, and act.
The opening scene in the film has my character and her boyfriend, played by Mory Schoolhouse, blazing around Los Angeles in a cream-colored 1958 Triumph convertible. The camera shoots behind us, beside us, in front, and we’re even chased by the police because we’re teenagers and obviously a menace to civilized society. Finally we’re parked at a lover’s lane, making out — acting can be such fun. (Spoiler alert: I’m not the one who gets venereal disease.) I had a tremendous crush on Mory during filming. I’d flirt with him, sit beside him during lighting set-ups, and try to coax him down a conversational path that would lead to him inviting me over to his place. But I was 18 and he was about 22 or 23. In real life he was all motorcycles, leather jackets, drugs and alcohol. He finally said, “You need to stay away from me, I’ll only get you in trouble.” Well, trouble is exactly what I was looking for but Mory refused to help. Looking back it was fortunate that he was adamant about keeping me at arm’s length. A few years later I heard that he’d died of an overdose.
Filming Damaged Goods was also my introduction to something that would happen many times afterward. You work on a film like this together for three weeks — three intense weeks — the actors, director, producers and crew. The days are long; the work can be difficult, especially if things are going wrong with lights or equipment. It’s that phenomenon of having a shared mission, a common purpose; it’s that small band of pirates against all the forces that would kill this project off. It’s one for all and all for one. You bond, friendships are formed, romances spark — and then the film wraps and everyone moves on to their next project and you lose touch.
Little House in the Hollywood Hills Page 3
