Around 20 years ago, I
was attending a book appearance and signing by Elaine Steinbeck at Fairleigh Dickinson
University in New Jersey. All was going swimmingly, as the widow of John
Steinbeck, with easy humor rolling from her southern accent, effortlessly
demonstrated why the Nobel laureate had fallen in love with her more than four
decades before.
Then a gentleman from
the audience, remarking on her very active social life, began a question: “As
one of the ladies who lunch…”
I groaned as soon as I
heard that last phrase. He might have meant it innocently. But Ms.
Steinbeck, a longtime theater professional, was, I was sure, intimately
familiar with what the phrase had come to mean after its use as the title of
one of Stephen Sondheim’s songs in his 1970 musical Company: a clique of middle-aged women with plenty of money and
time on their hands with nothing better to do than hurl zingers in between
downing vodka stingers.
Sure enough, Ms.
Steinbeck took umbrage at the thought that she would be a member of such a
group. If her questioner wasn’t properly abashed after her pointed response, he
had no emotional intelligence whatsoever.
Now, if another Elaine—Elaine Stritch, who passed away at age 89 this past Thursday—had
heard the question, the fellow would have been lucky to make it out of the
auditorium alive.
“Stritchie,” as she was nicknamed, had already spent two
decades in the theater when she entered Broadway legend as Joanne in Sondheim’s
epochal show. She poured a lifetime of acid wit and one too many mornings of
hung-over self-loathing into her much-married, seen-it-all, caustic character.
When she commanded, at the end of the song, “Everybody rise,” everybody obeyed—then
stopped the show with thunderous applause.
In the more than 40
years since that performance, countless actresses have played Joanne. But
Stritch had long ago set the prototype for the character.
Stritch was a character
in her own right, an actress who brought her own fire and mordant humor to
every role she played. It’s easy to think that channeling that swagger came
naturally.
Just how much it cost
her was suggested by D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary on the recording of the original-cast album of Company. At the end of a marathon recording session, she
continually, inexplicably muffed her interpretation of the song.
Sondheim,
Stritch, and record producer Thomas Z. Shepard could barely repress their
exhaustion, stress, annoyance and embarrassment until Shepard told the actress
to go home, sleep, and come back when she was rested.
Stritch did so, a day or two later, though not
without stopping for drinks to fortify her. This time, she nailed it.
That scene revealed
everything you could ever want to know about how even a talented, accomplished
theater professional could be so insecure as to verge on total
ineffectuality.
As a teenager, Stritch discovered the magical and dangerous
impact of alcohol on her personality: Nobody need ever know that she was, at
heart, shy and nervous.
As an adult, Stritch
found alcohol a help for coping with anxiety about performing. She quit in the
mid-1970s after the onset of diabetes.
But, as she prepared to retire from the stage
in her late eighties, the old insecurities returned, and for awhile—until health
complications set in again—she permitted herself a glass or two of alcohol.
By that time, of
course, she had become an icon of the stage, particularly in works by Sondheim—not
just Company, but, the mid-1980s Follies in Concert (where, even in an
all-star cast, she brought the house down with “Broadway Baby") and A Little Night Music.
And her
Tony-winning one-woman show, Elaine
Stritch at Liberty (2002), reviewed
the events and personalities in her life, including an improbable convent
education (though not so improbable when one recalls she was the niece of a Roman Catholic cardinal), the men she got (Ben Gazzara, Gig Young, husband John Bay), and the
men who got away (JFK, Marlon Brando, and her closeted Farewell to Arms co-star, Rock Hudson).
The last closings years
of her career spread her fame beyond the bright lights of Broadway, with appearances
over several seasons as Colleen Donaghy, the tough handful of a mother to Alec
Baldwin’s network exec on the sitcom 30
Rock. That was not her first foray into TV work, though.
Before that, she
had appeared in the TV movie version of Steel
Magnolias (as tart-tongued Ouiser Boudreaux, of course), The Ellen Burstyn Show, Two’s Company (a British comedy series
with Stritch as a bestselling American author who deals with a wry butler), and
The Trials of O’Brien (with the
actress playing secretary to Peter’s Falk’s Columbo prototype, a rumpled
defense attorney).
I saw an episode of the latter at New York’s Paley Center
for Media, and on YouTube there’s an entire episode of the early Sixties sitcom adaptation of the old Broadway hit My Sister Eileen, with Stritch as
the appropriately cast witty writer Ruth Sherwood.
“Old age ain’t no place
for sissies,” Bette Davis observed in her declining years. Stritch, a kindred
spirit, would no doubt agree.
Reviews of her last
cabaret shows at the Café Carlyle read like obituaries, trying to pay
appropriate tribute to a New York institution while gingerly acknowledging that
she forgot lyrics, stepped on punchlines, and turned on audience members when
they laughed at times she deemed inappropriate. (See, for instance, this New Yorker blog post from a year ago by Sarah Larson.)
The same reviews
indicate that audiences overlooked those last flawed shows.
Fans
preferred to remember and celebrate the brassy, whiskey-voiced blonde in long
white man’s dress shirt, black vest, and black tights who had made a personal
anthem of survival of another Follies
standard, “I’m Still Here.”
Now—sadly—she isn’t
anymore.
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