“You know I was just joking around, don’t you?” he whispered.
“Of course! Are you kidding?”
I wish I had acted in Much Ado About Nothing as well as I did for the dancer.
When Corinne was twenty, she went to act at the Reginald Goode Summer Theater near Poughkeepsie, New York. You had to pay ninety dollars a week for food and lodgings. In return, you got the privilege of acting with the famous sixty-eight-year-old Australian actor, Reginald Goode, in front of a real summer stock audience, six nights a week.
A call came to our home in Milwaukee. Mr. Goode suddenly discovered that he was one man short for his acting company. (I assume that some guy didn’t want to pay the ninety dollars.) Corinne told Mr. Goode that her brother was an actor, and he told her to get me to Poughkeepsie immediately. I had just turned sixteen.
I was thrilled, of course, but my father wasn’t – unless they waived the ninety-dollars-a-week fee they charged for the privilege of acting with Mr. Goode. After a lot of bluster, Mr. Goode agreed. I was on the train the next day.
The playhouse was a beautiful old barn converted into a theater. It held about five or six hundred people. All of the actors, except me, slept and ate in Reginald Goode’s private house, across the huge lawn that separated the house from the theater. I was assigned to a unique bedroom inside the theater, just off stage left. The bedroom was about as big as a walk-in closet.
When I went to bed that first night, it was a little frightening. It was so dark when I shut off the one lightbulb and there were strange sounds all through the night. The old wooden barn was dancing with the wind. As I lay in bed, trying to fall asleep, I saw a name carved into the wall beside me, just above my head: “KT Stevens.” I knew that name; I had read about her. She was a famous actress from fifteen or twenty years ago, and she must have slept in this same bedroom, probably in this same bed, and carved her name into the wall next to me, so that years later other actors would remember her. I ran my fingers over her carved name and whispered, “Good night, K. T.,” then turned off my lightbulb and fell asleep.
The first play I acted in at the playhouse was The Late Christopher Bean, by Sidney Howard. I think I got more laughs than Mr. Goode had expected. When the two of us were alone onstage and the audience started laughing at something I did or said, he would lean down and whisper, “Wait for it…. Wait for it.”
The play was so successful that he held it over for another week (or else he had to hold it over because he didn’t have the next show ready, which was probably more likely).
The next play was The Cat and the Canary. Henry Hull had played the lead on Broadway; Bob Hope played it in the movie. Now I was playing the same part, but no one told me that “old” Mr. Goode was married to this gorgeous twenty-three-year-old red-haired actress who was going to play my romantic interest. Her name was Rita. She explained to me, privately, that when we had our kissing scene, it shouldn’t be a “real” kiss – which might throw both of us off – it should just look like a real kiss, by putting our lips on the side of the other person’s mouth, just close enough so that it looked real. I thought, Well – that must be how real actors do it.
Mr. Goode worked in a bizarre way. After the evening performances we all made sandwiches from a big roast ham that was set out each evening on the kitchen table. We drank milk or soda (no alcohol), and then we rehearsed most of the night, until just before the sun came up. That’s the way Mr. Goode wanted it. I loved it. For me it was very romantic. For Rita, too. Forget that “on the side of the mouth” business – by the fourth day of rehearsal, she started kissing for real.
Remember Seema Clark? The young Rita Hayworth with the fake angora sweater, who made me feel like a disgrace to God and my mother for trying to touch about half an inch of her breast? Because of her I still hadn’t tried to touch a girl’s breast. Kiss a lot, yes, but breasts were too dangerous. Of course, if Seema Clark had liked what I was doing and made some lovely sounds of encouragement … who knows?
We rehearsed The Cat and the Canary for five nights, and then, on the sixth night, before dress rehearsal and after strong signals from Rita, she and I drifted off towards the riverbank. We knew there would be a long break while they were changing the sets, so we lay down on the grass, near a little brook, and kissed and kissed. No breasts. No penis. While we were lying there, she said,
“Take me!”
“Take you where?” I answered.
I knew very well what she meant – I wasn’t that dumb – but I wasn’t prepared for the big time yet. I think that if Rita had been more aggressive on that particular night, my life would have taken a very different path. But she was careful where she touched me.
Later, after rehearsing till 5:00 A.M., I had just gotten into bed when I heard a knock at my door.
“It’s me,” Rita whispered.
I opened the door, and there she was, in her nightgown, looking as beautiful as a fantasy. She got into bed with me, and we started kissing. After about four minutes she said, “What do you think would happen if I touched you … here?” pointing to the bulge underneath my pajamas. Before I could answer, we both heard Reginald Goode calling out from somewhere on the lawn, near my bedroom door.
“Rita …”
He wasn’t hollering, and he wasn’t whispering. It sounded more like a father calling out to his daughter who had stayed out too late one night, but now it was time for her to come home. I felt that he didn’t know for sure if she was actually with me but that he assumed she was. Rita got under the covers and wiggled down towards the bottom of the bed, so that if Mr. Goode did burst in, he wouldn’t see her. I was scared to death. I do mean death – I imagined a shotgun.
“Rita?” he called again.
But he didn’t knock on my door, which I was terrified he was going to do. He listened for another minute or ninety seconds. While I held my breath, I could hear him breathing – he was that close. And then he walked away. After three or four minutes Rita jumped out of bed, took a quick peek outside, and then ran across the lawn to the big house, just as the sun was coming up. Mr. Goode never brought up this incident to me.
Margie interrupted. (She rarely did, but we were now in our second year together, and I was used to it.)
“Now wait a minute, Mister Wilder …” (She started using that little twist on Mister to emphasize whatever comic irony she was about to “epiphanize” me with.)
“… Did you fondle her breasts?”
“No.”
“Did she ever suck you?”
“No.”