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

the dishes, mow the lawn, set the dinner table, empty the garbage, and paint the porch. I thought we’d just go on living there as carelessly as we always had. I wanted to hang on to the past, wanted the house to stay the same with its cramped little bedrooms upstairs under the rafters, it’s mattress-ticking sofa, rickety lamps, and posters tacked to the unfinished homasote walls. What Hugh wanted was to destroy the past, remake it in his own image.
    Phyllis came up with Hugh every weekend, and while he started renovating, I was slowly preempted by her in the kitchen and the garden. When I complained to him, he agreed to have her up every other weekend and I’d have my friends up on alternate ones, but on those weekends he refused to speak to me. His silence was devastating. He and Phyllis didn’t try to hide their active distaste for my friends. Eventually I let him buy me out.
    Hugh got his revenge on our father by ultimately transforming his little clapboard cottage into Mad King Ludwig’s hunting lodge. The living room ceiling was removed and the little cramped bedrooms upstairs became balconies, and the Homasote walls were covered with wood varnished a deep golden, every inch hand-done by him; carved columns, cornices, niches, and finials, gold-leafed words up the side of the stairs: “I cannot know how far I can go until I go as far as I can.” The exposed beams were hung with tassels, flags, and velvet draperies. He was a discerning flea market shopper, and assorted animal skulls, putti, plaster busts, and death masks encrusted the walls. It took him years, but he completely effaced the place I loved.
    We eventually agreed to split the property in half: he got the lower part with the house, and I got the wooded lot in back, on which I eventually built a house.

Oklahoma!
Tour
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HAT SUMMER OF 1964 I WAS TOURING IN A SUMMER STOCK PRODUCTION of
Oklahoma!
starring John Raitt as Curley. I played Ado Annie. Most of the leads had made careers of their roles. The Laurey had played her part so many times she was a blank-eyed automaton in rehearsals, boasting of the twenty meat loaves she had made and frozen for her family back home. Aunt Eller also displayed a plastic heartiness, and the Hakim character was a dentist who took summers off every year to play the part with all the skill of a dentist. This shocked me. I was fresh off my first Broadway show. What was I doing here? On top of this, the guy playing Will Parker opposite me took an instant dislike to me. In rehearsals he would refuse to work with me on the grounds that I was upstaging him, which was impossible because we were playing in the round. On the other hand, I probably was playing all by myself. I didn’t give a hoot about his lasso tricks.
    Alfred Cibelli, “Chibbie” had played Judd in all of Raitt’s tours over the years, but his lack of freshness was less obvious because he wasn’t obliged to be cheery. Later on I discovered he was incapable of cheery. He really was as morose as Judd. Possibly more.
    We were playing the Melody Fair tent in North Tonawanda, New York. The motel where we were put up was in the middle of an abysmal wasteland of stubbly fields and abandoned factories. There was no place to hang out besides the restaurant, the swimming pool, and—for laughs—the gift shop, which sold plastic Indians, canoes, and toilet ashtrays.
    I was very lonely. Chibbie also seemed to be alone, sunning himself by the swimming pool day after day. He was exotically handsome, dark-skinned with burning blue eyes and a Quixote beard. He looked like an El Greco—not at all my type. But we had both gotten bad reviews in the North Tonawanda paper: his Judd was too mean and my Ado Annie was too nymphomaniacal. I approached him with this bit of shared fate. He was passively available. I just grabbed hold and held on.

1964: Bad Times
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HIBBIE AND I HAD A DATE TO MEET AT MY APARTMENT AFTER WE got back to New York. When he didn’t show up I fell apart. I