You know her face. Maybe you've seen her on Broadway, in her Tony Award-winning turn as "Big Edie" Beale in "Grey Gardens," or the current hit revival of "On the 20th Century." Maybe you saw "Full Gallop," her award-winning portrait of fashion icon Diana Vreeland, or caught her as Bruce Dern's sister-in-law in "Nebraska." Maybe you recognize her from reruns of the 1970s sit-com "One Day at a Time."
Add one more laurel to Mary Louise Wilson's wreath: author of the sparkling memoir My First Hundred Years in Show Business (Overlook Press, 2015).
Show-business memoirs are not a rare breed. But most are written by stars, imbued with the luster (or taint) of celebrity. What sets Wilson's apart is her unique voice—bone-dry, hilarious, literate—and sharp-eyed gaze at the working life of a character actor. It's all here: The humiliating auditions, group dressing rooms, out-of-town meals, panicked understudy performances, nourishing friendships with fellow travelers, and always, always, the crippling doubt about the next job.
Character actors are the secret backbone of stage and screen; it's no accident that their awards category is Supporting Actor. They're the indispensible pros whose work other actors admire, but who pass nimbly under the radar of our fame-obsessed culture. The highest accolade for a character actor may be the title of the documentary that award-winning writer/producer Ron Nyswaner recently made about Wilson, She's the Best Thing In It. (It's a compliment she plans to take to her grave: It's engraved on a tombstone in her family plot.) The film, which premiered at South by Southwest, is coming to Woodstock this fall.
Wilson lives in Stone Ridge, in a classic white farmhouse with a scarlet front door like a bright slash of lipstick. It's one of those front doors that no one ever uses: A flagstone path leads past a breathtaking perennial garden to a side door off the porch. It seems apt that this consummate character actor always enters her house from the wings.
Wilson appears barefoot, wearing jeans and a T-shirt that says PEP. Her unruly hair is pulled back with a simple headband. At 83, she wears no makeup, her only adornment a chic pair of amber tortoiseshell glasses. She looks great. "Coffee?" she asks as she ushers me into her kitchen.
Full disclosure: I've been here before. I know Wilson through local theater company Actors & Writers, and a long-running writers' group that often gathers at this very table, under the giant Saul Steinberg drawing one of Wilson's designer friends hand-stenciled onto the wall. I've heard her read excerpts from "this memoir thing" for years. Even so, I'm stunned by the finished book.
My First Hundred Years in Show Business begins at a read-through of the Public Theatre's 1989 "Macbeth," at which Wilson, playing the First Witch, finds out the director is giving her biggest speech "to the younger, prettier witch." Times have been lean for the actress: "The past few years, the only parts I was getting called to read for were washroom attendants and bag ladies on television. I was even going up for parts against actual bag ladies. I had gone from featured roles on Broadway to playing parts labeled 'Woman' with lines like 'Hello.' So I was telling myself, Well, at least I'm first witch, and then this director took away the one thing that made me first: the chestnut speech."
It is, in screenwriting jargon, the inciting incident. At the first rehearsal break, Wilson beelines to a pay phone and calls a lawyer about getting rights to a book she and playwright Mark Hampton have dreamed of adapting: Diana Vreeland's D. V. The six-year saga of Wilson and Hampton's attempts to write and stage "Full Gallop," from its first reading at SUNY New Paltz to its triumphant off-Broadway opening, frames the memoir.
"I started out to write a primer for people writing one-person shows. It was a long trip; we were turned down a lot," Wilson explains. "I showed it to several friends, and their eyes glazed. They all said, 'You're not in it.' So I thought, 'Oh, they want more show-business stories.'"
She had plenty of those, all juicy. But going deeper was hard. "I was ashamed of my career and I didn't even realize it. Other people look at me and say, 'You've had all these successes,' but there was about 30 years in the middle where I wasn't doing much. I felt I had to fill in where I was before we started writing "Full Gallop." But it never occurred to me I'd have to write about what it was like to be me all those years."
The issue wasn't writing, but self-revelation. Wilson had already written essays for the New Yorker and the New York Times, plus the seven hilarious short plays in "Theatrical Haiku" (Dramatists Play Service, 2011).
Comic plays, she says, "pop out of your ear full-grown, like what's-her-name, Athena. I'm a great observer of people and behavior, and I just write it down." But writing about herself "was so painful—again, like giving birth, not from the ear." Several times she gave up altogether, but kept going back to the well.
As a child, Wilson "was always writing. I wrote poems for all occasions." She recites one she penned for the Fourth of July: "Bang, bang, bang, / Here comes the gang." She was seven. In later years, "Miss Jenkins the English teacher was always putting huge exclamation points on my papers. I remember one about Jane Eyre: 'She lived in an orphanage until adultery.' But Miss Jenkins thought I had something."
Still, Wilson did not see herself as a writer. "It all had to do with getting attention. I'm a laugh addict."
That was no easy feat in her family. The youngest of three children, Wilson was raised in New Orleans, where, she writes, "I was fascinated by the women my mother invited to our house to play bridge: elegantly dressed ladies with their little hats, their bright red lips and nails, their husky voices and phlegmy smoker's coughs. The way the metal clasps on their purses clicked open and closed importantly, their lipsticked cigarettes smashed in ashtrays."
When her family wasn't chafing under her mother's drinking and chronic despair, they were competing for laughs. Wilson's brother Hugh was her chief rival; sister Taffy generally sniffed from afar. A brilliant scholar, Hugh eventually became a flamboyant but closeted gay man. In the 1950s, his adoring kid sister followed him to the Greenwich Village apartment he dubbed "Fuschia Moon." Wilson writes, "He saw me as his acolyte, I saw him as my savior."
Though she worked in offices, including a stint as architect Marcel Breuer's receptionist, Hugh's witty circle encouraged Wilson to perform. In 1957, she was hired by legendary director Jose Quintero for Thornton Wilder's "Our Town." "The pay was $27 a week. I played Second Dead Lady and Lady in the Audience Who Asks the Stage Manager if There Is Any Culture in Grover's Corners."
After that, she replaced Bea Arthur in "The Threepenny Opera" and, at neighbor George Furth's urging, auditioned for the soigné Julius Monk revue at Upstairs at the Downstairs. To her astonishment, she was hired, joining a club scene where she rubbed elbows with up-and-comers like Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, and Lenny Bruce.
She went on to play Liza Minnelli's best friend in the short-lived "Flora the Red Menace" and Tessie Tura in "Gypsy" with Angela Lansbury, whom she understudied. Playing Ado Annie on an "Oklahoma!" tour with John Raitt, Wilson met and married aging character man Alfred Chibelli. (They weren't especially compatible; at one point she told "Chibbie" the new musical he'd been cast in was a dud, but "Man of La Mancha" lasted "longer than our marriage.")
Wilson is thrilled to be back on Broadway in "On the 20th Century," lavishing praise on the ensemble cast. "I'm not lonely. I'm in a family, a family that loves me. What more could you want?" Still, eight shows a week takes a toll. "I have no life," she says cheerfully. "I sleep for nine hours. Then I make a grocery run, nap. Then there isn't time to cook." She cherishes Mondays off, when she gets to spend time in the garden she calls "my therapy."
Retirement is nowhere in sight. She's appearing this fall in David Lindsay-Abaire's new play "Ripcord," first developed at Vassar's Powerhouse Theatre. And she plans to keep writing, including some fiction and a full-length play. My First Hundred Years in Show Business "made me feel ready to write. I will say that now I feel like a writer."
"Laura Shaine Cunningham gave me some great memoir advice: 'The more it would embarrass you to see it in print, the more likely it is to be published.' That was so helpful," says Wilson. "I didn't ever think I'd be writing about my husband, or my black lover—my younger, black, transvestite lover—but it's good copy. I wrote about some of the most mortifying things, but by writing about it, I got over it." She smiles. "And now that it's done? Oh my god! I'm a happier person. I'm part of the human race."
Appearing Saturday, 7/11 at 6pm, Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, Woodstock, sponsored by Golden Notebook, and Monday, 7/27 at 7pm in conversation with WAMC's Joe Donahue at the Morton Memorial Library, Rhinebeck, sponsored by Oblong Books & Music. Admission $10 (applies to purchase of book).
