Free Maggie Smith: A Biography by Michael Coveney

dancing, down the stairs, out of the building and into the car park, while Richardson was reduced to a state of white-knuckled fury on the balcony. As he recounts the incident, Geidt has a memory flash of bright eyes, smiles, irreverence and high spirits: ‘Magical moments, like a diamond shining, giggles while strap-hanging on the underground.’ But, he added, this same Margaret Smith was ‘incredibly self-anchored; she had what the Georgians called “bottom”. She knew who she was, and she had this absolutely fearless quality.’ The wide world beckoned.
    Equity, the actors’ union, had informed her that there was already a Margaret Smith on their books and would she mind changing her name. In September 1955, the programme for her second New Watergate revue,
Oxford Eight
, reveals that she was now Maggie Smith. Peter Dunlop’s partner, Jimmy Fraser, who handled the film side of the business, went along one evening with Leonard Sillman, the New York producer, who was planning a Broadway presentation of
New Faces
. Maggie’s reviews were good: she was described as ‘a rich comic talent’ and ‘a comedienne of some versatility’. Sillman was impressed and invited her to meet him in his hotel suite. Her initial reaction was sceptical. She had no intention of falling for that old trick, the one where a slick American producer with a suite at the Savoy fancies a girl in the revue and asks her over to challenge her defences. She stood him up. The next day a colleague told her she was mad, did she not realise that this man presented new talent on Broadway? She agreed, reluctantly, to go and see him. She had very nearly blown her big chance. Leonard Sillman assembled his cast for
New Faces 1956
with an opening date of 14 June at the Ethel Barrymore on Broadway, and one of the unknowns he engaged was Maggie Smith.

– 4 –
New Revue and Old Vic
    Maggie Smith, the new comedienne of Broadway, was twenty-one years old, five feet and five inches tall, with blue eyes, red hair and a bright, occasional smile. She lived in Greenwich Village and she was paid $350 a week by Leonard Sillman, of which 10 per cent went to her agent, Milton Goldman, who acted in New York for Fraser and Dunlop. She was not happy. She sent Meg a magazine cutting in which she was photographed wearing a silk evening gown and a forlorn expression. Across the bottom she wrote: ‘I look very sad! Mummy, I’m not as sad as I look.’ Working for Leonard Sillman, a pushy hoofer from Detroit who had once employed Tyrone Power as his chauffeur, was not a barrel of laughs. Maggie was required to play several old ladies when
New Faces 1956
opened in Boston, but she put her foot down and had them deleted before New York. Sillman was a devious and unpleasant character by all accounts, but he did have a nose for talent. Typically, he thought great acting was to do with being stingy. There is, however, something in his theory of the hoarding of gifts, holding back, teasing an audience. ‘The young English actress, Maggie Smith, who appeared in the last
New Faces
, has it,’ he observed in his 1959 autobiography, ‘and it will make her a star.’
    The title ‘New Faces’ had been suggested to Sillman by the financier Otto Kahn, as a contrast to Ziegfeld’s expensive
Follies
. The first show was in 1934. Henry Fonda sang, and Imogene Coca did a striptease. Tallulah Bankhead, according to Sillman, smoked like a furnace throughout the opening night’s performance. In 1936, Gypsy Rose Lee nearly appeared alongside Van Johnson but withdrew at the last minute. Sonny Tufts was in the 1938 version, but 1943 was a non-vintage year. Sillman’s reputation took a dive. After the war, Maxwell House Coffee (with whom, ironically, Maggie was to make her only television advertisement, during the run of
Lettice and Lovage
) sponsored
New Faces
on the radio, and CBS TV gave their new revue show not to Sillman but to Ed Sullivan.
    But in 1952 Sillman had bounced back with his