|
CHAPTER 3 St. Petersburg – Florida, not
Russia. When it came to the final selection, I was called forward to stand in line and found myself between two other boy dancers, both taller than me. This is where they will say “thank you” and let me go, I thought. As I always did in such situations, I managed to grow a half an inch by imperceptibly raising my heels. It never worked before but why not give it a try. Suddenly I was being offered a contract along with the two other boys and three girls. What made this an extra important audition for me was that it was for a union company. That meant I would become a member of Actor’s Equity, much sought after by hopeful dancers. It meant I would no longer be a theatrical innocent but would be regarded as a fully fledged professional and be admitted to any audition I wanted to take, not just allowed into open calls along with hundreds of others as before. It was at last a foot in the door to the professional theater – a definite breakthrough. What on earth happened that I was having this sudden stroke of luck?
Photo: Jamie Jamison I was sent immediately to Actor’s Equity office to join, then to Eave’s costume house for fittings. They stored all the costumes from Broadway shows that were up for rental. I wondered, could it be that my act of introducing myself to Jamison and shaking his hand at the beginning had made an impression? Ordinarily I would have stayed in the background, hoping I would be noticed. Had I finally learned that my innate shyness and reticence had no place in the dance profession? My girlfriend Joan also auditioned - I think I wanted to impress her as being aggressive. I ran to the drug store on Times Square that had a makeup kit displayed in its window. I had so often stood and gazed at that kit of theatrical greasepaint, longing to own it and be in a position to put it to use. Now it could be mine. I had been to St. Petersburg once before for a short time, working long hours dishing food in a cafeteria and as a bus boy at a beach hotel. I lived then in a tiny tool shed that was in a kind lady’s garden! Now it would be a different story. We started rehearsing immediately for our opening musical, “Carousel”. “Kiss Me Kate”. “Annie Get Your Gun” and others followed. There was a steady stream of principals arriving from New York to take the leads. Charles Nelson Riley, later to gain fame as a comic on TV was a member of our chorus.
When the season was over and spring was just beginning, I returned to New York. After the exotic Florida climate, New York seemed bitterly cold.
Back in class, I was singled out for a job at the Pratt Institute in
Brooklyn - to pose for art students. I’ve often thought there must be
thousands of portraits of me floating around, painted by students at
Pratt as well as from my earlier posing days in Boston. Oddly,
during my ten-minute breaks from posing I never once glanced at any
of these paintings to see what they looked like. I didn’t want to
appear interested. Being an artist’s model is a tedious job at best.
For a dancer, holding difficult dance poses all day long can be
exhausting. A dancer’s nature is to move, not to be immobile. The choreographer was a fellow named Roland Wingfield. Since very few dancers were willing to take a non-salaried job, I turned out to be the only one auditioning. In fact, Wingfield seemed relieved that anyone showed up at all and accepted me on the spot. When I arrived in Kennebunkport, I found only one
other male dancer. Surprisingly, he happened to be David Beagleman,
a classmate at Chaffee’s studio. David was just as surprised to see
me. He had changed his name to David Villon, after the French poet
and thief, Francois Villon. Clever, I thought, he was already making
career moves. Not so, as David didn’t stay a dancer very long.
Several years later I ran into him in New York. He had become a
psychiatrist and had married a flamenco dancer. The small opera company, called Arundel Opera Theater, was run by a tenor, Wesley Boynton, and his partner, Morse Haithwaite. Both were probably in their early fifties. Morse acted as conductor, pianist, vocal coach, stage director and general administrator. Wesley, as far as I could tell, concentrated mainly on his own singing. They lived in a large house called Endcliffe, where I assumed Wesley had grown up. His mother was still there. The female singers and dancers also shared this house while the rest of us were scattered in two other buildings on the compound. One was called “The Studio” which had a miniature rehearsal space and upstairs sleeping quarters. Over a hill was another structure called “Windfall” which housed the technical shops and had living space for fourteen. There were perhaps a dozen or so singers to perform the summer offerings: “Merry Widow”, “Pagliacci” “Chocolate Soldier”, Marriage Of Figaro”, “Vagabond King”, “Carmen”, “Gypsy Baron”, the typical summer stock fare but an ambitious repertory for such a small outfit. With one or two exceptions – because some of them may have been paid - I suspected they were there either for theatrical experience or to enjoy a free summer getaway. We performed a different opera every weekend on the Kennebunk Town Hall stage, a half hour drive away. We were transported back and forth in a dilapidated 1926 vintage bus, always driven by Morse. It was like a family. That summer they had begun plans to build their own theater. Consequently, after every meal in the main house where we all ate together, Morse would tinkle his glass for attention and then gleefully announce how much closer they were to getting the necessary funds to build it. There were sizable audiences for every performance so there seemed to be a pressing need for a larger theater. I, on the other hand was completely penniless. I could never join the others as they went every evening down to the seaside village to indulge in lobster sandwiches, a Maine delicacy. I always begged off, claiming I wasn’t hungry, but Morse saw through my deceit. In sympathy with my plight, he asked me to create hats for the Mikado production, which supplied me with a few dollars. I wrote an article and sent it off to The Christian Science Monitor in Boston. Surprisingly they published it straightaway and paid me. This in fact was my very first piece of published writing and it was done out of desperation, yet it turned out to be the modest beginnings of my writing career. All the leading male roles were taken by Wesley himself with accompaniment provided by Morse at the piano. During one performance of “The Mikado”, Wesley missed his cue and was nowhere to be found. We were all searching frantically for him while Morse covered as best he could, saying Wesley’s lines from his seat at the piano in the pit and providing extra music. Finally Wesley bounded on stage. There was a big quarrel between them that night! Jackson Wiley was the choral director. Oddly enough, well I suppose it’s not odd at all as the theatrical world is a small one, years later he happened to turn up again as the orchestra conductor at Butler University in Indianapolis while I was a professor there. At some point during the summer we were invited to perform ‘The Merry Widow” on board a battleship anchored a mile off Cape Arundel. It was ridiculous trying to dance on a deck rocked by giant ocean waves, and amazingly, none of us fell overboard while the crew of sailors laughed at us teetering on the edge of the ship. Another unusual event was on Independence Day when the entire opera company was asked to march in the town parade. Urged on by myself, we dancers decided not to merely march along like everybody else but to dance along instead. It was a foolish choice. While dancing full out along the paved streets of Kennebunk, I looked down and suddenly realized I was wearing my one and only pair of already worn out shoes! As I lacked a warm winter coat, I wondered how I was going to survive during the coming winter in New York City, now shoeless as well. In August, close to my birthday, it was suggested we all take a day off trip to Portland and then a boat out to one of the islands off coast. Each of us had to contribute ten dollars for this adventure. Rather than admit to being destitute of any cash, I pretended that I preferred to stay behind. Raymond Keast, the company’s leading baritone from New York City Opera, saw through my subterfuge. Being a kindly and generous man he felt sorry for me, a penniless young dancer, and secretly supplied my fee. The choreographer, Wingfield, thought of himself as something of a modern dance pioneer and was constantly filling notebooks with exercises in what he called “The Wingfield Technique”. Coming as I did from the highly professional classes of Nijinska, Vilzak, Schollar and Valentina Pereaslavic from whom I learned the Vaganova technique, I thought his exercises seemed grotesque and silly, and I absolutely hated doing them. In fact, I hated them so much that one morning during company class I refused to do them any longer and took the nearest chair, angrily hurled it across the studio floor and walked out. This was of course a foolish and childish thing for me to do and naturally infuriated Wingfield, who promptly complained of my behavior to Morse. Conversely, Morse was delighted by the theatrics of it all, particularly as the incident happened in front of some wealthy local ladies who took morning class with us. He felt this show of artistic temperament added a touch of theatrical glamour to our troupe. Apart from being impoverished, I really enjoyed that summer. Swimming in the icy waters of Kennebunkport beach and the clean ocean air combined with the wholesome food, made me look and feel healthy and robust. The summer ended and I bravely headed back to New York, determined as ever to find a place for myself on stage. Exactly 40 years later, during the summer of 1993, while visiting my sister in Scituate, Massachusettss. I drove up to Kennebunkport on a nostalgia trip, to see if I could find any of these places of long ago. I, who always had an accurate memory and sense of direction, spent an entire afternoon trying to find the compound, but with no luck. It was like the musical “Brigadoon” where two Americans on a trip to Scotland become lost and encounter a small village called Brigadoon, not on any map, in which people behave as if they were living two hundred years in the past.. I talked to some old folks. One or two remembered the Arundel Opera and Morse and Wesley. It was not until a year later that I received unexpectedly in the mail a package of programs and pictures, kindly sent by the town museum keeper. It included an obituary of Wesley’s death at the age of 90! He had lived a long life. Back in New York I got a job with a publishing firm, Abelard Press. All I had to do was write out rejections slips and send the manuscripts to the mail room for return to the writers. Then, after a couple of months, Abelard merged with Shulman. As usual with any merger, it caused a clean sweep and I was again out of work, and just as I had finished paying off the employment agency that got me the job! |
Photo:
