My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir by Mary Louise Wilson
Authors: Mary Louise Wilson
Ads: Link
you backward. I was peering over my knees to see the audience. The strain nearly killed me. Our audience turned out to be mostly friends and well-wishers, in spite of the huge mailing we sent out.
André Bishop
T
HE READING TOOK PLACE ON THE SAME DAY THAT A NDRÉ B ISHOP , then head of Playwrights, was leaving to take over as Artistic Director of Lincoln Center Theater. On top of this, during the reading I developed a massive toothache in a back molar, which was extracted the next morning. I already had a dental history with André: I was in
Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You
at Playwrights, and then
Baby With the Bathwater,
and I told him I had to leave
Bathwater
because my front tooth was falling out. I have a memory of this gentle, soft-spoken man peering solicitously into my mouth. I was too embarrassed to mention that my dentist, a coke addict recommended to me by my friend Pamela Reed, had stuck my temporaries in with Crazy Glue and that it wasn’t working.
I don’t know if André saw the reading, but we got a call a few days later inviting us to meet with him in his Lincoln Center office. He told us he didn’t know how much general interest there was in the world of fashion, but he offered to introduce us to a friend of his who belonged to the Cosmopolitan Club, a prestigious women’s organization. Former members included Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen Hayes.
Television Commercials
A
FTER
F LORA THE R ED M ENACE ,
I WASN ’ T GOING DOWN, BUT I wasn’t going up either. I was going on commercial auditions.
For the better part of the sixties and seventies, I traipsed up and down Madison Avenue. I told myself that it was underwriting my stage career, but it felt like my main occupation. I went on an average of fifteen auditions for every commercial I got. Some actors were getting very rich from them. Sitting in the waiting rooms, I heard about the number of spots they had made that were “in the can.” They chatted away about their farms in Bucks County, their children’s enrollment at L’Ecole Française, and their private planes.
One big irritation was the clothes. I thought one of the best things about being in the theatre, besides not having to take the subway during rush hour, was that I wouldn’t ever have to wear office clothes again. I could wear jeans and sneakers in real life, and don gowns, cocktail hats, boas, and farthingales on stage, playing countesses, spies, and madwomen. The trouble was that the characters on commercials were “real” people. I had to put my office outfits back on again. And of course to get to an audition, I had to ride the subway at rush hour because the calls were invariably at nine Monday morning or five Friday afternoon.
Brigitte Bardot’s lips made Mick Jagger’s possible.
—D.V.
T
HEN THERE WAS THE BUSINESS OF MAKEUP AND HAIR . U NTIL the sixties, the only makeup respectable women wore was lipstick. Lipstick was mandatory; you couldn’t leave the house without lipstick, along with the cone bra that didn’t show your nipples and the girdle that made a board of your bum. Men would actually become indignant if they noticed your lipstick had worn off, which is probably why lipstick back then was the texture of road tar. You could use face powder, because God forbid you should have a shiny nose, but that was all. Even Mrs. Vreeland wore only lipstick in those days. Then the sixties exploded, and suddenly the fashion was Cleopatra eye makeup and false eyelashes. I put on makeup for the show at night, but street makeup hadn’t been perfected yet, and applying No. 6 Max Factor base and rouge to go to auditions in the light of day made me look like a fifty-year-old prostitute.
In the seventies it got so you couldn’t go to the corner grocery without your false eyelashes. My struggles with gluing the goddamned things on usually reduced me to a sobbing wreck. By the time I finally had it down, they were out of fashion.
In the 1970s, the cry from casting
André Bishop
T
HE READING TOOK PLACE ON THE SAME DAY THAT A NDRÉ B ISHOP , then head of Playwrights, was leaving to take over as Artistic Director of Lincoln Center Theater. On top of this, during the reading I developed a massive toothache in a back molar, which was extracted the next morning. I already had a dental history with André: I was in
Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You
at Playwrights, and then
Baby With the Bathwater,
and I told him I had to leave
Bathwater
because my front tooth was falling out. I have a memory of this gentle, soft-spoken man peering solicitously into my mouth. I was too embarrassed to mention that my dentist, a coke addict recommended to me by my friend Pamela Reed, had stuck my temporaries in with Crazy Glue and that it wasn’t working.
I don’t know if André saw the reading, but we got a call a few days later inviting us to meet with him in his Lincoln Center office. He told us he didn’t know how much general interest there was in the world of fashion, but he offered to introduce us to a friend of his who belonged to the Cosmopolitan Club, a prestigious women’s organization. Former members included Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen Hayes.
Television Commercials
A
FTER
F LORA THE R ED M ENACE ,
I WASN ’ T GOING DOWN, BUT I wasn’t going up either. I was going on commercial auditions.
For the better part of the sixties and seventies, I traipsed up and down Madison Avenue. I told myself that it was underwriting my stage career, but it felt like my main occupation. I went on an average of fifteen auditions for every commercial I got. Some actors were getting very rich from them. Sitting in the waiting rooms, I heard about the number of spots they had made that were “in the can.” They chatted away about their farms in Bucks County, their children’s enrollment at L’Ecole Française, and their private planes.
One big irritation was the clothes. I thought one of the best things about being in the theatre, besides not having to take the subway during rush hour, was that I wouldn’t ever have to wear office clothes again. I could wear jeans and sneakers in real life, and don gowns, cocktail hats, boas, and farthingales on stage, playing countesses, spies, and madwomen. The trouble was that the characters on commercials were “real” people. I had to put my office outfits back on again. And of course to get to an audition, I had to ride the subway at rush hour because the calls were invariably at nine Monday morning or five Friday afternoon.
Brigitte Bardot’s lips made Mick Jagger’s possible.
—D.V.
T
HEN THERE WAS THE BUSINESS OF MAKEUP AND HAIR . U NTIL the sixties, the only makeup respectable women wore was lipstick. Lipstick was mandatory; you couldn’t leave the house without lipstick, along with the cone bra that didn’t show your nipples and the girdle that made a board of your bum. Men would actually become indignant if they noticed your lipstick had worn off, which is probably why lipstick back then was the texture of road tar. You could use face powder, because God forbid you should have a shiny nose, but that was all. Even Mrs. Vreeland wore only lipstick in those days. Then the sixties exploded, and suddenly the fashion was Cleopatra eye makeup and false eyelashes. I put on makeup for the show at night, but street makeup hadn’t been perfected yet, and applying No. 6 Max Factor base and rouge to go to auditions in the light of day made me look like a fifty-year-old prostitute.
In the seventies it got so you couldn’t go to the corner grocery without your false eyelashes. My struggles with gluing the goddamned things on usually reduced me to a sobbing wreck. By the time I finally had it down, they were out of fashion.
In the 1970s, the cry from casting
Similar Books
