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

lecture, then disappear again. Then I began to realize that what was “important,” what kept her away was an invitation to go somewhere with actor friends or make a personal appearance somewhere. Or opening a big shoe store with Debbie Reynolds (whose husband, Harry Karl, owned the Karl’s Shoe Stores). It was something for herself. In other words, she really was selfish. She would come to school if it were convenient or if she were in town and had nothing better to do.
    Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s the way I felt at the time and I have a lot of actions to back it up.
    Then when she did teach a class, sometimes she arrived all elegant and coiffed; sometimes, she came in looking as common as a house frau, instead of a glamorous movie star. I found out later that she’d get her hair oranged on Saturdays and she arranged her presence at school accordingly.
    You are now getting the impression, aren’t you, that on her list of those things important, school was way down. She usually had her appointment in the morning. So she’d do her shopping and go to hairdresser at the Beverly-Hilton in Beverly Hills and would come sashaying into class at ten-ish or eleven-ish. She rarely turned up on time. And if she couldn’t get a morning hair appointment for some reason, she’d show up for class looking more or less disheveled and leaving early. In that sense, it was a very strange school. Believe me, I had no idea that it would be like that.
    Well, I had done one pantomime and I was dying to get up there and do a scene now. I felt I had accomplished one step of the way, I needed the next. But I procrastinated. This was a true test. First of all, I don’t care how good a scene it was, it could be the greatest thing since sliced bread and she’d pick the hell out of it and be very picayune. I knew it and dreaded it. Other students would do their scenes and I would think, Oh—it’s marvelous! They’re so believable! But she wouldn’t say one good thing about it. You can see why I dreaded to do mine. I really thought she was cruel—but, then again, maybe that was her method to bring out the best. She reminded me of those damned nuns. You could he good, yes—but that wasn’t Christian perfection. You had to be perfect!
    In September we were promised jelly beans by the nuns if we were good (the Ronald Reagan Syndrome) and at the end of the semester in June, we never quite deserved those jelly beans. And that was Agnes. Of course I didn’t understand it—who could? But I rationalized. Agnes would tell us, “No one can teach acting. It has to be something inside you. I give you a basis in technique, things you should know how to do as an entertainer.” That’s usually true of all art and the things she picked at were technique things, so I would accept her explanation. I suppose that she had a reason for doing things the way she did and it wasn’t for us to question.
    “I never tell a student that he’s a failure as an actor, because,” she said, “I don’t know that someday he won’t find the guts and the wits to succeed. I never encourage your daydreams, but I can teach you enough that if you ever do get a role, you’ll know what to do with it.” It made sense. It was all true, of course, but knowing what I do now about acting, I realize that she could have been much more encouraging, much more inventive.
    “Well, that was very interesting. But if you do a little more of this or work it like this and try that. Let’s try it again, with this in mind and without such and such.”
    In fact, she told us how Orson Welles in “The Magnificent Ambersons” had her do a scene once as a child, once as a woman, once as this, once as that. She ran through it twenty-eight times or thereabouts and she wondered what he wanted. For the final version, he said, “Now, do it the way you originally did.” And her performance contained her original intuitive spark as well as elements of all the other ways she had done it and