(My Travels with) Agnes Moorehead – The Lavender Lady by Quint Benedetti

working closely with Agnes the next year, she wanted to contact him and had me writing him letters in Rome and London. I finally found out he was in Los Angeles, filming “The Dean Martin Show.” I called him on the set. He couldn’t come to the phone, so I left word that Agnes wanted to reach him. He never called her back. Does that tell you something?
    “He might visit us,” she now informed us, “if you work hard.” Orson Wells lecturing!
    Part of Agnes’s spell power lay in the promises she’d cast. Typically feminine, but more so even with Agnes. A lot of actors would come to her thinking that she was going to do something for them, but she never did anything. “If you’re good, if you work, if you’ll get screen tests at the semester,” etc., etc. We never got the tests. “We’re going to have a show at the end of the season for all the big producers and studio heads.” We never had the showing. Maybe she believed all of this and that’s why she was able to say it.
    But knowing Agnes, she felt it was unimportant. Little innocent lies and promises like that. She wanted us to get “Red Pepper” a charming English musical. We were going to do it for Tony Charinoli, the famous choreographer. She had already somebody, some name she was dropping. Something that was going to happen.
    Tony Charinoli, showings, screen test, Orson Wells, Marcel Marceau. She built us all to the sky with namedropping. They were promises that kept us going, but they never transpired. Agnes would get us all fired up like the nuns. “You’re going to get jelly beans, if you’re good.” We’d never get the jelly beans. We were never good enough to get the jelly beans. That’s the way it was with Agnes. She painted beautiful pictures, but they were just colored smoke in the sky.
    And yet, she was irresistible. Especially to me. A promise in herself, whose colors and brilliance made some of the students follow her blindly, like I was doing, as far as acting was concerned. I’d go around expounding to all my friends about these things that Agnes was saying in class. Everything that came out of my mouth was from Agnes. I even sounded like her. What an impression she made on me. I mimicked her to the nuance. I quoted her. And all my friends said, “My God! Who do you think Agnes Moorehead is?” They were more realistic, practical and earthy than I was.
    Most of my actor friends were going to these method schools, where they would be an apple or a cucumber or whatever. And Agnes would say that was “all hogwash.” And I would say it was “all hogwash” Some of these people knew that I was going to Agnes’s school and some didn’t know. Those who didn’t know thought I was some sort of creature who had landed from Mars or something. They thought I was a real nut or a snob and I probably was. But Agnes was very strong and I was very impressionable. She would utter a dynamic, enlightened, “Ah-h-h.” And I would utter a dynamic, enlightened, “Ah-h-h-h,” and I would almost have an orgasm. What an impression she made on me.
    What motivation she gave to the already motivation I had. Those first few months, especially, when I was so paralyzed, my desire for her recognition was becoming an obsession. I was having dreams of Agnes and discussing all of them with Dr. Stone, my psychologist. We discussed my mother. I was still on that “mother thing,” but it finally spurred the intimidating things about the class more into the background and after about four months in school, I decided I just had to do a scene for Agnes. I searched and searched until I found exactly the right thing. I was always so careful, so meticulous about that. I found a scene from “The Moon Is Blue” and I selected a partner, one of the girls, and we rehearsed for weeks. We worked hard and I was proud. Agnes was going to critique a scene of mine and I fantasized about it a great deal. The big moment was just about due.
    The day of the performance, I