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

fantasizes, whether it’s the thrill of getting a role in a play, or the pain of a pet or person dying.
    One time a student was supposed to enter in a scene, but she was taking a very long time. Sandy called to her; she said she was supposed to enter screaming but was having trouble calling up the proper emotion. He said, “Go out, shut the door, and just come in screaming.”
    He reminded me of the forties’ comedian Jack Benny. He stood in front of us, contained and dapper with his hands folded in front of him, and when a student rudely asked, “What do you do in a real play when the other actor won’t work with you?” he turned his head to one side, rolled his blue eyes to the ceiling, and gave a huge shrug. Sandy had no interest in the current theater world. In fact he despised it. The only people he praised were the famous lieder singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and the actress Kim Stanley in
Séance on a Wet Afternoon
. I believed he liked me, and saw something in me. When I left class to go to Cincinnati to play Lady Would-be in Ben Jonson’s
Volpone,
he did not approve. He was right—I probably would have learned more if I had stayed with him.
    I never wanted to be in the center of the spotlight. Too much expectation. I saw my niche as Best Friend to the Star; the Sidekick. The Über Sidekick was film actress Eve Arden, sitting on the sofa arm, clutching a foot-long patent leather purse, and making wisecracks out of the corner of her mouth while Joan Crawford chewed the scenery. And on stage there was Alice Ghostley, Jane Connell, Nancy Walker, and Bea Arthur. They weren’t the stars, they were “the best things in it.” I liked that idea.
    The problem is that the show business you dreamt of is never the one you end up in.

Queen Mary’s hats looked as though they could be taken off and used as something—to dust the house.
    —D.V.

1964: Sherman, Connecticut
    S
HERMAN , C ONNECTICUT, WHERE WE SPENT OUR CHILDHOOD summers, was Eden. My father had built a cottage with plans from a Sears and Roebuck kit up the hill behind his parents’ farmhouse, and we summered there on and off from the time I was born until the sixties. There were birthday parties and picnics and swimming and fireworks. The sight of watermelons cooling in the brook filled me with excitement: soon I’ll get what I’m missing, soon I’ll be happy! For years afterwards, it remained a time and place I longed to be.
    Later in our twenties when we went there, my mother and brother would become locked in combat over house chores, mowing, raking, painting, etc. One night in the living room, all of us drunk, Mummy on the sofa sounding off for the fiftieth time about how she was going to “sell this house.” Hugh grabbed me in the kitchen and snarled, “Remember King Lear!”
    When he and I were living in New York we came up on weekends with assorted friends. Hugh was Captain of the Games. For birthdays and holiday celebrations, he blew up the balloons and chose the music and broke out the costume trunk. We put on all the hats and cloaks and Mardi Gras ball gowns and gaudy finger rings from Woolworth’s. Sometimes we spent so much energy getting into costumes and crowns and rings and things that, once completed, there was nothing left to do but sit there. It was exhausting. Hugh made films with my father’s 16mm camera starring Philip, Phyllis, me, and himself. “Frenzy in Old Rome” was one. It was set to the music of Prokofiev’s “Symphonie Fantastique” and we caromed around the local cemetery in bedsheets. The film was about seven minutes long.
    Hugh was attached to the house, I thought probably for the same reason I was: the promise of something he never got. In 1964, our parents sold it to us for a dollar and we took out a mortgage on it and gave them the money to retire to Santa Fe. The first thing Hugh did was throw all of Mummy’s pots and pans out of the kitchen window. We were free at last from her constant demands to wash