My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir by Mary Louise Wilson Page A

offices heard ’round the world was, “What about her hair?” The requisite hairdo had become the bouffant. Or the bubble. Around this time, Vreeland began to be more visible to the outside world. She had worn her hair pulled back in a little snood until she, along with Jackie Kennedy, went to Paris and had their hair bouffant-ed by the famous hairdresser, Alexandre de Paris. Immediately everybody had to have the bouffant. There could be no wrinkles or dips in your hair, no strays, it had to be a lacquered dome. Like the hood of a car. Women with naturally kinky hair were having it ironed. When I wasn’t sleeping with anybody, I went to bed with toilet paper wrapped around my head.
    Mrs. Vreeland stuck with this look forever after, even exaggerating the slight mound, the little hill at the top of the crown that was part of the bouffant. She had it regularly dyed black, so black it looked navy blue.
    I attempted the bouffant at home by rolling my hair up on empty frozen orange-juice containers. In my struggle to pin it up, all the blood would rush out of my arms and I would have a breakdown. Even with an entire can of hairspray, your coif could be completely undone by the wind of an oncoming A train.
    Things got surreal in the mid seventies, when the hippie revolution finally reached Madison Avenue. Ad executives were wearing jeans, beads, and long hair and the receptionist with her tie-dye and flowing locks looked like La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The waiting room was designed like a “pad,” and instead of sofas there were low poufs on which we actors in our Republican getups attempted to maintain a purchase.
    Some auditions called for you to make a headache face. Or to burble like a coffee percolater. At one audition I was asked to laugh. Laugh at what? Nothing, just laugh. Make a big fool of yourself.
    When I did get a job, the first thing was a call from the wardrobe department asking if I could bring in a housedress. Never mind that at this point housewives all over America were wearing jeans. A housedress? I was a New Yorker, for God’s sake! Everything in my closet was black!
    The call was for 6 a.m. I came into a space the size of an airplane hangar and a crew guy sitting on a wooden box sipping coffee said, “You Talent? See Makeup, then Hair.” Makeup, an anorexic gentleman with dyed black hair and a buzz saw voice was smoking and coughing and yakking and cackling with Hair, a plump, surly woman wearing what looked like an orange fright wig. Without ceasing to yak, smoke, cackle, and cough his lungs up, Makeup motioned me to a chair, threw a plastic sheet over me, and started to jab and punch at my face with a sponge. He held my head in an arm grip as he applied mascara. My eyes kept watering. “Keep your lid up!” he yelled. “I can’t!” I yelled back. He sniffed, sniggered to Hair, “Get a load of this one.” At last he said, “Ok, you’re done.”
    I looked in the mirror, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was a nice-looking woman when I came in, now my eyebrows looked like Groucho’s and my mouth was nowhere near the lipstick. I said, “Would you mind if I re-do my lips?”
    “Can you believe this?” he shouted. “Can you believe the balls on this one?” His voice followed me down the hall. “She’s got some balls on her, that one.”
    Actors were getting ill from having to eat Sara Lee cheesecake or drinking Vicks cough syrup over and over, thus the introduction of the “spit bucket.” Heights of tables and chairs were adjusted for camera angles, which meant sometimes I was obliged to squat for great lengths of time next to a washing machine, looking perky and delivering lines. Lines were spoken while moving the product, say a bottle of Listerine, to invisible marks in space, and walking to various tape marks on the floor without looking down. In between takes, people rushed in to stir up soap suds, squirt glycerin on spaghetti or spray a wayward hair on my stiff head. On the