My First Hundred Years in Show Business: A Memoir by Mary Louise Wilson Page B
Authors: Mary Louise Wilson
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breaks there was no place to sit. A row of agency “suits,” happy to be out of the office, lounged in all the available chairs. The actor was the prop, the product was the star.
I ingested busloads of words by sheer force of will: “Vicks vaporizing cough syrup is a non-enteronically, alcalizing, fast-acting, germ-eradicating, doctor-tested cold medicine.” I was great at rattling them off, but if it wasn’t “in the can” before lunch, it was impossible for me to retain the words afterwards, and the rest of the afternoon was spent doing take after take after take.
At first only comedy actors did commercials. “Serious actors” wouldn’t lower themselves until they copped to the money. In the end, even Orson Welles was hawking beer and Sir Laurence Olivier, Polaroid. Every time a commercial aired you got a residual check. I didn’t make nearly as many commercials as others, but I still earned enough to install a Vicks VapoRub septic tank, dig a Cheer detergent well, and build an Excedrin deck for my house in Connecticut.
Unemployment
T
HERE WERE MANY TIMES WHEN I WAS CONVINCED MY STAGE career was over and that I needed to find some other kind of work, but there was nothing else I was any good at. In one long fallow period, I decided I would go into the landscaping business. I worked with an insane Frenchman planting ornamental evergreens in the pouring rain and mud. Another time I thought I might teach acting at the local college, SUNY New Paltz, and I went to an interview with the head of the drama department. He effectively prevented me from submitting my résumé by giving me his critiques of current Broadway plays, pelting me with names like Betty Buckley and Patti LuPone while sitting at a desk in a small clearing of a jungle of men’s suits and coats; apparently the men’s costume department.
I spent a year in a writing course at Columbia University. The professor encouraged my writing, but when he announced to the class one day, “You can’t do it alone!” I was daunted. On another seemingly interminable hiatus, in a moment of incipient hysteria I walked into a secretarial hiring office and tried to talk to the lady behind the desk, explaining in low, modest terms that I was an actress, but I had been a secretary before that and now would like to get back into that line of work. The lady didn’t seem to hear me. It was as if I was air. I can’t explain it. I think I must have been whispering. I drifted out the door.
Unemployment Insurance
T
HE LAST TIME I HAD THE TEMERITY TO COLLECT AN UNEMPLOYMENT check was in 1984. I was able to register near my house upstate, I only had to go into the office once, and the rest of the time the checks were mailed to me. As it happened, the one time I had to show up at the office I was in the city the night before. I got up at dawn the next day, put the cat in the car along with a thermos of coffee, and took off. Halfway up the parkway, I started to open the thermos and lost control of the car. We did a U-turn and ended up in the middle of the road facing oncoming traffic. Thank God at that hour there wasn’t any, but I got out with my cat and stood on the curb, hysterical. A surly cop emerged out of nowhere, stood there while I turned the car around, and gave me a $100 ticket. However, this brush with mortality galvanized me to go home and write about actors and unemployment, which eventually turned into an article published in the Arts & Leisure section of
The New York Times
.
The first time I collected unemployment insurance was in 1957, and it was a weekly trip to Dante’s Inferno. The office was a whole floor of a building on Rector Street. We called it “Rectal Street” because when you walked in you were assailed by the odor of diarrhea. The grim-faced staff displayed the attitude that anybody who was unemployed was ipso facto a bum. In the fifties, waves of Puerto Ricans were arriving in the city and looking for work, and the staff had no knowledge
I ingested busloads of words by sheer force of will: “Vicks vaporizing cough syrup is a non-enteronically, alcalizing, fast-acting, germ-eradicating, doctor-tested cold medicine.” I was great at rattling them off, but if it wasn’t “in the can” before lunch, it was impossible for me to retain the words afterwards, and the rest of the afternoon was spent doing take after take after take.
At first only comedy actors did commercials. “Serious actors” wouldn’t lower themselves until they copped to the money. In the end, even Orson Welles was hawking beer and Sir Laurence Olivier, Polaroid. Every time a commercial aired you got a residual check. I didn’t make nearly as many commercials as others, but I still earned enough to install a Vicks VapoRub septic tank, dig a Cheer detergent well, and build an Excedrin deck for my house in Connecticut.
Unemployment
T
HERE WERE MANY TIMES WHEN I WAS CONVINCED MY STAGE career was over and that I needed to find some other kind of work, but there was nothing else I was any good at. In one long fallow period, I decided I would go into the landscaping business. I worked with an insane Frenchman planting ornamental evergreens in the pouring rain and mud. Another time I thought I might teach acting at the local college, SUNY New Paltz, and I went to an interview with the head of the drama department. He effectively prevented me from submitting my résumé by giving me his critiques of current Broadway plays, pelting me with names like Betty Buckley and Patti LuPone while sitting at a desk in a small clearing of a jungle of men’s suits and coats; apparently the men’s costume department.
I spent a year in a writing course at Columbia University. The professor encouraged my writing, but when he announced to the class one day, “You can’t do it alone!” I was daunted. On another seemingly interminable hiatus, in a moment of incipient hysteria I walked into a secretarial hiring office and tried to talk to the lady behind the desk, explaining in low, modest terms that I was an actress, but I had been a secretary before that and now would like to get back into that line of work. The lady didn’t seem to hear me. It was as if I was air. I can’t explain it. I think I must have been whispering. I drifted out the door.
Unemployment Insurance
T
HE LAST TIME I HAD THE TEMERITY TO COLLECT AN UNEMPLOYMENT check was in 1984. I was able to register near my house upstate, I only had to go into the office once, and the rest of the time the checks were mailed to me. As it happened, the one time I had to show up at the office I was in the city the night before. I got up at dawn the next day, put the cat in the car along with a thermos of coffee, and took off. Halfway up the parkway, I started to open the thermos and lost control of the car. We did a U-turn and ended up in the middle of the road facing oncoming traffic. Thank God at that hour there wasn’t any, but I got out with my cat and stood on the curb, hysterical. A surly cop emerged out of nowhere, stood there while I turned the car around, and gave me a $100 ticket. However, this brush with mortality galvanized me to go home and write about actors and unemployment, which eventually turned into an article published in the Arts & Leisure section of
The New York Times
.
The first time I collected unemployment insurance was in 1957, and it was a weekly trip to Dante’s Inferno. The office was a whole floor of a building on Rector Street. We called it “Rectal Street” because when you walked in you were assailed by the odor of diarrhea. The grim-faced staff displayed the attitude that anybody who was unemployed was ipso facto a bum. In the fifties, waves of Puerto Ricans were arriving in the city and looking for work, and the staff had no knowledge
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