“We were living in New Rochelle, New York, and my parents took me and my brother to a matinee of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, with Robert Morris, Michele Lee, and Rudy Vallée. We stayed overnight in a hotel, which was very special, and that night, I kind of locked myself in the bathroom and sang back the score. I was maybe 11, maybe 12, and something just stirred inside me so that I gravitated toward theater programs in high school and in college. But many, many years later, there was a revival of How to Succeed with Rudy Vallée and Robert Morris, and I got to understudy the lead, Rosemary, and be in that and meet him. And it was kind of like a full-circle moment.
My parents played show tune albums when we were growing up, and we moved a lot, so for me, the theater was a constant. It was a place where a curtain goes up and you have this family that lives there, and they don’t move, and they start their story and they end their story, and they get to do it over and over again. For a shaky career choice, it had more stability than life seemed to have at that time.”
On first embedding in New York’s art scene
“It was a great finishing school. I felt a bit like a hick because my then-husband’s mother, they had lived in France after the war. They knew about art. They had art. One of the sisters had paintings that she had to sell when she needed to sell them, and the other had paintings that she could donate to museums all over the world.
My exposure to the art world and my exposure to the circle in which they ran—there was Hal Prince, since my then-husband had grown up a little bit with Judy Prince; and there was [Leonard] Bernstein, and we had dinner with him at Elaine’s—I went, whoa, whoa. I am just a hayseed from California. I’ve got to pay attention, because the vibe is fast and smart and sophisticated. It’s about exposure, so I took advantage of that, and I started to go to museums, and I started to go to art shows, and I hung around these galleries that were owned by friends of my husband’s, and I liked what I saw.”
On the first painting she ever bought
“When I first moved to New York, I was doing I Love My Wife and was making, I think, $700 a week, maybe $750. I had an apartment I was renting for $250 a week. Now, you know times have changed, but I was walking up Madison Avenue and saw in the window of a poster and art print shop a framed painting by Erica Morley of two kids playing in a yard, with a forest behind them, a red barn, a red main house, a garden, and some animals running around. Something in me just said, ‘This is where I want to live.’ I had never lived anywhere remotely like it. I bought it for $125, and I still have it today, 48 years later.
