The Far Reaching Arms of the Show Business Family

An interesting thing happened to me this week. In my Yahoo inbox was an email from a total stranger who gently enquired if I would be willing to share my impressions of a mutual friend for an article he was writing. Within 24 hours it seemed I had time-travelled back to the mid 1960’s, and shared stories, memories, and bittersweet reflections with this well-known writer about our friend. More of this experience shortly.

This led me to all sorts of musings. With the 315 million people who live in the United States and the 35 million who live in my former country of Canada, it astounds me how often paths of certain people cross, nearly cross, and re-cross, mostly within the theater, film, and show-business community. The entertainment business is truly a family, an extended dysfunctional family at worst, a close family at best. Sooner or later we all meet each other! The cliche “small world isn't’ it?” might be apt, but hardly explains the remarkable and unexpected connections we often discover by chance.

A couple of years ago I was visiting with fellow Costume Designer Albert Wolsky and we were talking about his early career when he was assisting famed designer Ann Roth. We realized he had outfitted ME for my role as Gwendolyn PIgeon in the National Company of The Odd Couple many years ago. We did not remember each other.

My sense of family has always come from the work I do, the performing companies and film communities I have been part of.  I grew up in England with virtually no cousins and no family other than parents near by. My English grandmother died before I was born. My Canadian grandparents were an ocean away, and I did not meet them until I was six. 

Dancers, in particular, have a strong bond. We all know how hard it is to train to become really good at what we do, and how short our careers will most likely be. Dancers of any age speak a common language, a language of sore muscles, intense and disciplined training, and the pure joy of artistic expression through dance.

A few years ago I was in the fitting room of my costume department at CBS Radford Studios with actress Leigh Taylor-Young, ready to fit her for her costume in the NBC daytime drama Passions. She looked at me strangely and said “were you ever a dancer at the National Ballet School in Toronto?” I was, in fact, at about age 14 and Leigh, a younger dance student, remembered me! How extraordinary! And I thought I was so dull and invisible at that age.

My closest friend as an adult was a dancer I met at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival when we were both still teenagers. We went on to perform together, room together, and go to each other’s weddings. I am still in touch with two other dancers from my earliest days of professional dancing in My Fair Lady. One is now a licensed family therapist living in Pasadena, another is retired and living in North Carolina, but we still email and check on each other frequently, some 50 years later.

Dancers Over 40 is a group in New York, formed to provide a community to support the needs of “mature” dancers and choreographers. I know board member Harvey Evans from when we were both performers on the road in Chicago in the 60’s.  In Los Angeles I am a member of the Professional Dancers Society which keeps us, haha, on our toes!  

Some companies, like the aforementioned My Fair Lady, form strong “families”. Others not so much. Ann-Margret to this day surrounds herself with her dancers and friends from her days of performing live; many still walk together on Saturdays for exercise. The soap opera Passions has a core group that still stays in touch, and Facebook has certainly facilitated that. I used to suffer terribly at the end of a show, as I was constantly losing my families and having to find new ones. We are all scattered and have to go on to other cities and other shows, hopefully to still feel part of a larger community.

Another interesting story (which I have written about before) concerns a young girl who lived in Belarus when Santa Barbara was the first US show to be shown on Russian television. It was an enormous hit, and the bright colors and somewhat unrealistic rich lifestyle was very appealing to those still barely out from the grayness of communism. This young lady, Antonina Grib, reached out to me via email and I responded. After getting a scholarship to study costumes in the US, she eventually came to intern with me on Passions and has since gone on to a very successful career in costuming, working on major TV and film projects. For all the negative things that are written about the internet, without it Antonina and I might never have connected, let alone formed a deep friendship and mentorship.

So back to my new journalist friend: it turns out that as a 17 year old he was a ticket-taker at the National Theater in Washington DC, his home town, and was “introduced not only to the backstage magic but to a real-life cast of charismatic and eccentric players who would become his mentors and friends”.  Though I can’t claim to have been either,  since we did not know each other, our paths crossed a number of times over the years. He saw me at the National Theater in My Fair Lady, later in the out of town try-out of the Broadway musical Hot Spot, and later at the Blackstone Theater in Chicago where we shared, unbeknownst to us, a friendship with a wonderful man, Clayton Coots, who was a mentor to young Frank, and a dear friend to me.  So Clayton was the catalyst, the internet the instrument of Frank finding me, and the telephone made possible our sharing so many of our stories about so many mutual friends.

Here is the link to Frank Rich’s touching article in The New York Magazine

http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/gay-history-2013-6/

WOMEN IN FILM AND LIFE: SOME THOUGHTS

The other night I was one of four judges at the UNLV produced film festival called “Spring Flicks”. At the end of the three day event, awards were handed out for best film, best director, best editing, best cinematography, and so forth. And then, to my total and utter surprise, I was awarded a special “CInefemme of the Year” award for my support and encouragement of a group of young and mostly female film-makers during the year. I was touched beyond words, and still think I really didn’t do enough to really deserve this honor.

Cinefemmes was also awarding a screenwriter, either male or female, an award for the best female protagonist.  Yet here we are in 2013, and to my surprise and disappointment, even these energetic and creative young film-makers were still making films about females as strippers, hookers, victims, or nags! And this all got me to thinking about the continuing role of women in film, in life, and the world in general.

I have been lucky in my life for a couple of reasons, one being that I chose careers that are largely female driven, first ballet, and later costume design, which is pretty evenly divided between male and female. But secondly, I was born into a family where I had many strong women as role models. My paternal step-grandmother (my real grandmother died before I was born) was a judge, a mayor, received the MBE for her services to the community, and was in general a no nonsense kind of woman. My great aunt was an obstetrician, one of the first females to graduate in early 1900’s with a medical degree. There was also a distant cousin who  was an Arctic explorer in the early 1900’s!  So it never occurred to me that I couldn’t do whatever I wanted because I was a woman. It just never entered my mind.

In high school, most of my classmates were going on to be either nurses or teachers. It seemed a pretty limited selection to me, but I already knew I was going to be a dancer, so what did I care? Even in college it was a fairly common “joke” that women who went to college were not after a BA or MA, but a MRS! But me, I was headed to Broadway and a husband was the last thing on my mind.

By the early 1970’s I was living in Los Angeles, and it’s not to say that there weren’t obstacles to overcome as a woman. It was difficult at that time, if not downright impossible, for a woman to buy a house without a father or husband to co-sign. Can you imagine! Remember Edith Bunker trying to get a loan at the bank?  The 1970’s were a tumultuous time with all sorts of reexamination of women’s rights going on, and women such as Jane Fonda, Gertrude Stein, and Erica Jong and Germaine Greer drawing attention. And of course the demand for equal rights and the sexual revolution changed so much in how we could lead our lives. It was an intoxicating period, with promise of greater freedom and power!

And as I started my transition to my career in costume design, there were times I strived to be given my due worth. On one TV pilot, the DP kept referring to me as “the wardrobe girl” whereas in fact I was the Costume Designer. He seemed surprised when I called him on it. I told him if he didn’t stop, I would from here on in refer to him as “the lighting boy.” Of course he thought me uppity! But luckily, many of the top TV designers were women, and gradually we were recognized properly.  My very first producer who took a chance on me, hiring me for The Facts of Life, was a woman, and a darned wonderful woman and producer at that. Many of the producers (and a few directors) I worked with in television subsequently were women, including Penny Marshall, Yvette Lee Bowser,  Irma Kalish, and Lisa De Cazotte.

So are things any better? Oh yes, and oh no. Women still earn less on the dollar than men for the equivalent or same job, though in union work, salaries for the same work are equal. There are more females in Congress than there used to be, but not enough, and more females at the top of the corporate ladder, but not enough. Perhaps we finally might have a female president?

And in film, I always sit through the entire credits at the end of the film, and see more and more credits for female editors, production designers, directors, and so forth. So when I hear the young film-makers complain how rough a job they have completing for jobs in a man’s world, part of me wants to say “you have NO idea of how bad it used to be”! 

I still believe that it’s important not to feel that you are coming from behind, but that you are starting from the same start line, and that excellence in what you do is the thing that will propel you forward. Not nepotism, not cronyism, not anything but commitment and talent and passion. Call me naive or an optimist, but I’d like to think even men wouldn’t be dumb enough to ignore someone who is really really really good at what they do!