My Days Read online

  Getting a role in that play was, I’m sure, of far greater importance to me than it was to my classmates. For me, it was the beginning of what would become a life as an actress appearing on the stages of the theaters of Broadway. For my classmates, it was just another school-related activity, no different than playing a game or doing an art or science project. In fact, because of the nature of the play, with its costumes and props, many of my fellow “actors” simply saw it as an opportunity to goof around and have fun. That annoyed me—really annoyed me! For me, establishing my character—bringing a depth to my portrayal of Polly—was serious business. For others, it was simply a time to fool around.

  As our rehearsals led to a performance, I just couldn’t bear the fact that we were about to bring our audience a production that was far beneath the standard I had imagined for it. I hated the fact that all the other kids had approached this play in such a cavalier fashion. It truly hurt me, and I became obsessed with the thought that our production was not good enough. I didn’t want any of my family to come and see it, because it wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t good enough, and the whole play just wasn’t good enough! Ultimately, the show did go on, leaving me with a memory of my stage debut as one of profound disappointment. From that moment on, I knew that to make my secret dream a reality, I would have to make a move—to step out of the comfort of my family home and my life in Albert Lea.

  Chapter 4

  My Secret Becomes Known

  As the summer of 1944 approached, I was finishing the tenth grade. I had been devouring Theatre Arts Magazine for years and, with my high school days being half over, had taken a special interest in the advertisements for drama and acting schools in the East, one of which I hoped to attend after graduating.

  Then, one day, while poring over an issue of Theatre Arts Magazine, I came across an ad that riveted my attention to the page. My eyes became affixed to this one ad for the MacPhail School of Music and Dramatic Art. My heart began beating faster as I kept looking at the school’s address over and over to make sure I was seeing it right. The MacPhail School wasn’t in that faraway wonderland of New York. It was just one hundred miles from Albert Lea, in Minneapolis. From that moment on, what had been my closely kept secret for so many years became known to anyone who spent more than a minute in my presence. All I could think and talk about was studying drama in Minneapolis.

  With my secret now exposed, the idea that my dream was soon to become a reality consumed my thoughts. I felt assured of myself in a much stronger way than ever before, and the writing in my diary took on a bolder and more forceful look and attitude. “When I become a great actress—and I will—I will act in theatres [and will] have all the people in the world clamoring to talk to me and gush over me,” I wrote. “I shall be so talented, I’ll be another Noël Coward—but I’ve got to hurry and get started on my career, or it will be too late.”

  Realizing how very serious I was about studying drama and pursuing a career as an actress, my mother was very supportive. We contacted the MacPhail School, received all the information on the various courses they offered, and decided I would enroll in a summer program. We also worked out a plan that would have me work for a family that lived in the affluent Minneapolis suburb of Edina, mostly taking care of their children, in exchange for a small stipend, room and board. And so, fortified by my dogged determination and the ten dollars a month my mother agreed to supplement me with, I left the cocoon of my family, friends and Albert Lea to begin my transformation into the “great actress” I believed I was destined to become.

  Each morning I would take a streetcar from Edina to downtown Minneapolis, where at MacPhail, I studied Shakespeare, poetry and elocution. During this time, I also read every play I could find and started taking some private classes with an elderly lady, who would have me recite poetry and lines from various plays. As that summer came to a close, my feelings were rather mixed. On the one hand, I felt I was moving forward by learning things that would be beneficial to my career, and yet I also felt very lonesome and homesick for my family and friends. While a part of me wanted to return to Albert Lea and resume my life as an eleventh-grade student, another part of me felt that it would be a huge step backward. Back in Albert Lea, I would have the familiarity of my home, family and friends, but I would have no opportunity to continue private drama classes.

  After discussing these things with my mother, who continued to be incredibly supportive, we decided it would be best for me to stay in Minneapolis. The family I was working for was very happy about that decision. With the school year beginning, my help with their children would be needed as much, if not more, than it was during the summer. And so I enrolled in Minneapolis’s Southwest High School, with plans to continue taking private drama lessons.

  As a new student who came into a school in which most of the kids had known their classmates for years, and some even since elementary school, I never felt that I totally fit in. Southwest High had a student body composed of the children of many successful Minneapolitans, and I learned from my very first day that, unlike the kids I had attended school with in Albert Lea, my new classmates were accustomed to what my mother called a “spiffy” lifestyle. That was most evident in the clothing they wore, which was far spiffier than my wardrobe, which consisted mostly of simple, if not downright drab, Peter Pan–collared dresses.

  While I never quite felt that I fit in at Southwest High, it didn’t really bother me. In fact, I sort of privately reveled in being an outsider of sorts. Most of the Southwest High girls, I guess, would have been horrified if their clothing was not up to par with their classmates’ or if, when they weren’t at school, they had to take care of children or do chores in a home other than their own. That wasn’t the case with me. I wasn’t caring for children or attending Southwest High in Minneapolis for any other reason than it was a career stepping-stone. Sure, I knew I couldn’t compete with the spiffy girls, but it wasn’t them I ever cared to impress. My dream, which by that time had become my blind ambition, was to prepare myself for the future spiffi-ness I would be adorned in to impress those I really wanted to impress—theatrical agents, casting directors and producers.

  And so I reveled in what I embraced as my “paying my dues” days—suffering with the loneliness and heartache that come with striving toward one’s art, one’s destiny. During that time, I became even more obsessed with reading plays, especially those by Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, and on my focused drive to become an actress. While my drive was stronger than ever, my understanding of how things worked was still a bit shaky. In fact, it was very shaky. I was aware that the University of Minnesota’s theater department staged plays, and so one day, after giving it some thought, I made my way over to the university campus, found out where the theater department was located, breezed in the door with a flair that said, “Here I am, Minneapolis’s newest actress,” and innocently asked how I would go about auditioning for one of their upcoming plays.

  Today I shudder (and also laugh) when I recall the perplexed looks I got from the two or three people I was passed on to before one confused woman explained, as if the information was being imparted to someone from another planet, that I would have to be a student in the university’s theater program to get cast in a show. I also recall exiting with the same exact flair with which I had entered the theater department, undeterred by the information I had been given and, in a way, happy about it, because the campus, located across the Mississippi River from Minneapolis, was too far of a journey to make regularly, anyway.

  And so, along with my work, school and ravenous consumption of play scripts, I continued to explore what was available in private drama instruction—a business, I came to believe, that was completely dominated by extremely elderly women who were in varying stages of poor health and who lived in rather shabby dwellings. I especially remember one very old woman I studied with who lived in a hotel and whose eyes were clouded by blue cataracts. In order to reach her floor, I had to take a creaky old
cage elevator—something I remember as being a tad bit scary, but also as just another spoke in the wheel of what a suffering artist must do to pay their dues.

  I can still recall sitting with her on the edge of her lumpy bed, reciting poems. She would listen to me for a few lines and then abruptly stop me. “No! No!” she would say in what I felt was a rather contrived and over-the-top dramatic voice. “You can’t speak the way you do!”

  At first I had no idea what she meant, but then she pointed out something that up to that point in my life, I was not at all aware of: I had a Minnesota accent! Oooo yaaa, yooo knooo. I had that classic vowel-extending way of pronouncing words with a hard r and a Scandinavian-cum-Midwestern twist, which, years later, would become fodder for laughs at Garrison Keillor’s radio program A Prairie Home Companion and at the films Fargo and Drop Dead Gorgeous.

  So we dealt with correcting my accent, and when that was taken care of, she would say, “No! No! You can’t breathe like that!” So between the way I talked and breathed, there were times I became so self-conscious around her, I could hardly talk or breathe at all. But her training proved to be very helpful, and I recall my time with her as being charming and magical. She would have me recite poetry, utilizing the breathing and elocution skills she taught.

  What at first seemed a contrived way of speaking became more natural as I practiced lines from Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.” “On either side the river lie. Long fields of barley and of rye,” I would say, paying attention to the way I pronounced each word. And, just as with the first elderly woman I studied with, I would jot down notes and then review them over and over.

  Sadly, I don’t remember the name of either of those women. And yet both of them, especially the one who lived in the hotel, played significant roles in preparing me for what would very soon be a life-changing experience.

  Chapter 5

  My New Life in California

  After experiencing my first taste of independence, living in a big city, and being exposed to those around, if not actually “in,” the theatrical world, I knew it would be difficult to return to my life in Albert Lea. I loved my little hometown and all the wonderful childhood and early teen experiences it had given me, but I knew I would never be able to go back there to resume the life I once had.

  Realizing my return home was imminent, I knew it would be difficult to pick up from where I had left off, and the thought of having to complete my senior year of high school was one that hovered over me like a dark cloud. I just can’t do this! I would think to myself. I have left that little cocoon, spread my newly formed wings, and taken my first steps toward establishing my career. I just can’t take a step backward.

  And then, just as the clouds seemed to be at their darkest, a blaze of sunshine smacked the darkness away. That bright light of hope came in an announcement from my parents: my father’s work as an electrician would be taking our family to San Diego, California!

  My head swirled as I processed that information, and in what seemed to be a rapid blur, I said good-bye to the family I had been working for, returned to Albert Lea to help my family sell everything we owned (perhaps even our Shirley Temple doll, as I have no recollection of her after that time), and boarded a train for the two-thousand-mile journey to our new life.

  While I was excited about moving to California, there was a little part of me that harbored disappointment. As it was, Albert Lea was over a thousand miles from New York’s Theater District, and now living in San Diego would mean that I would be just about as far as you can get from Broadway while still being within the forty-eight contiguous states. Ironically, the one thing I never gave any thought to was the fact that less than two hundred miles north was the destination point for actors from around the world. I know that seems odd—that I wasn’t totally thrilled out of my mind to be living just a few hours from Hollywood—but it just wasn’t the place that held my head, heart and determination. The Hollywood-based film industry was, by all means, a place I was well aware of, but it had never been the destination point for my dream. To me, it was the streets of New York’s Times Square, Broadway and the stages of its theaters that had been indelibly burned into my brain as my destiny. And yet there was an element of excitement bubbling up inside of me as we sped along the railroad tracks that, with every mile, introduced me to yet another part of the country I had never seen.

  That excitement would be short lived.

  If, in fact, I had any preconceived notions about what life in Southern California would be like—swaying palm trees and magnificent mansions on bluffs overlooking the sparkling blue Pacific Ocean—those were a far cry from what I found. My father was working on electrical generators for the military, and as a part of his compensation, we were provided with housing—military housing! Now, it wasn’t like we came from any sort of spiffy lifestyle in Albert Lea, but to be honest, this was a step down that I didn’t expect. I was terribly disappointed to find that our new “home” was in a row of dreary, nondescript cookie-cutter buildings—barracks, really—behind an old decaying theater on Rosecrans Street.

  If my first impressions of our new life were far beneath my expectations (and they were!), they only got worse as time went by. I could hardly bear the way we were living and found myself pining, in much the same way as I had in the basement of our home in Albert Lea, for a better life. Nothing is ever good enough for me in my life, I remember thinking over and over during that time. There just has to be more to life than living in these dreadful barracks!

  While I found our living arrangements maddening, eventually things began looking up a bit. I would go to the nearby movie theater and see films with stars like Ingrid Bergman, whom I so wanted to be like. I would also venture out to places like Point Loma, and when I was home, I continued to read scripts and memorize various Shakespearean monologues.

  As it turned out, it was by memorizing monologues and scenes, especially my favorites, those involving the characters of Viola and Olivia from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, that I garnered the type of attention I craved during my senior year at Point Loma High School. I remember once, in my drama class, reciting a scene in which I played both Viola and Olivia and just dazzling the class. The thing I recall most about that was when I finished, I heard a classmate say, “My God, I’m the star in this class, and now this girl comes in here and takes it away from me!”

  For the first time, I realized that my years of reading plays, learning everything I could about the craft of acting, and working with Minneapolis drama coaches were beginning to pay off. I became extremely aware that I had both an understanding and an ability, both natural and learned, that made me stand out from the others in my drama class. I may not have been thrilled with life in San Diego, but I was exceptionally happy that my plan—the plan I had conceived to make my secret become a reality—was starting to fall into place.

  I was no great student during my senior year of high school, but the confidence I gained in my drama class prompted me to be more “showy” than I had ever been before. And while I also became more emotional and self-absorbed than the “me” of Albert Lea or Minneapolis, that sort of paid off. I was perceived as being dramatic, theatrical, and was always being tapped to make a presentation or speech—even at my graduation.

  In the weeks leading up to my graduation, with my secret to become a famous actress now fully out in the open, and my plan to make that happen coming together, I dreamed grand dreams of continuing my dramatic studies at Stanford University and then going on to New York to begin my life on the stage. There was only one hitch. Two, really. I had no money and, besides drama, had not been a good enough student to qualify for any sort of scholarship. After I rather quickly came to terms with the fact that I would not be further honing my dramatic talents on the campus of northern Santa Clara Valley’s Stanford University, it was decided that I would instead enroll in San Diego State University and study drama.

  The middle years of the 1940s, with World War II and the Great Dep
ression in everyone’s rearview mirror, were a time when a certain feeling of optimism began creeping into the minds and souls of Americans. Things were by no means rosy, what with the shortages of jobs and housing for soldiers returning from the war, but the promise that better times were right around the corner was palpable as a flux of marriages resulted in the beginning of the baby boom.

  The San Diego State University of which I became a student had a total enrollment of around four thousand, a far cry from the forty thousand of today. We were still living in those dreadful barracks, and without a car, the mode of transportation I most often employed to get back and forth between home and school was hitchhiking. While no young woman in her early twenties with an ounce of sense would dare “thumb a ride” in today’s world, back in those more innocent days of yore, hitchhiking was a common and totally acceptable practice, equivalent to catching a trolley that was going your way. I never once had a concern about accepting the kindness of strangers who graciously took me on that eight- or nine-mile ride to school or home. In fact, the only vivid recollection I have of my ride-hitching days is a conversation I had with a man who asked me what I was studying in school and then seemed a bit confused when I told him I was with the theater department, preparing to become an actress.

  “So, you want to be an actress?” I remember him questioning me with seriousness. “Isn’t that a very hard profession to break into?”

  “Yes,” I recall telling him. “Very hard. And I just don’t know what is ever going to happen to the poor others who are trying to make it.”