(My Travels with) Agnes Moorehead – The Lavender Lady by Quint Benedetti Page A

brought out my trusty tape recorder and got all dressed up. I’m going to sit up at the front of the class and she will see me and call on me and then, I thought, she will finally see me do something. This was to be my big moment. I went to class and sat up in front. When she said, “Scene.” All right, I want to see a scene,” my heart was crashing against my ribs and I flagged her with my hand, waving at her wildly, enthusiastically, eagerly. Behind me, the omodom snarled. He was doing a scene and she took him. I was crushed. After his scene, she talked and talked. He was the only one to do a scene that day. From that time on, I left the school psychologically.
    I did eventually do the scene, but not for her. I never did a scene for her. That’s sad, isn’t it? She was gone a lot and I didn’t care. I did some scenes for Leon Charles, just the things I liked. I said, “Screw it!” Of course, in those days, I wasn’t “screwing it” or using any other impassioned words, but I was just let down.
    I still liked being around Agnes, but not as much. Again, like my mother, I’d go to her for strokes and just receive coldness. You know what that does to one? It destroys you. And so, with Agnes, I had that old paranoid feeling. Self-pity. No one really cares what I do.
    Then the musical comedy class was cancelled. I was dancing now as well as singing. I was really “grooving” in that class. It was the one thing I could do and I excelled in it, and they cut it out because no one could sing. And because Varcazzi got temperamental and said he couldn’t do it, or they couldn’t find a piano player. I don’t know. It could have been anything. Anyway, it was just too good to last, I thought, sinking further in—gloom. But things could get worse.
    We left Sutro’s somewhere at Christmas time. They needed it for other things, or the rent went up, or something. I don’t know. Anyway, after the holiday vacation, we had to go to an awful repertory workshop theatre over on Wilshire, across the street from the park of the La Brea Tar Pits and next door to The Egg and I, restaurant—art shop. The theatre was a depressing, ramshackle thing on the outside and inside there were black curtained backdrops and black walls, with no windows. It was the most depressive thing you can imagine. It was stuffy and smelly, particularly in summer. When you opened the door for air, you were bombarded with the sound of Wilshire Boulevard traffic roaring past. On top of that, the people who owned the theatre were building sets or something behind the curtain and they were always hammering, almost as if in defiance of us. As if Agnes’s school was an intrusion on their tacky little theatre, with its folding chairs and black walls and backdrops, and so on. They were hammering us into the ground. They started hammering at the end of Christmas, when we moved in, and they were hammering when the school ended in the spring.
    Agnes would periodically throw her hands to her temples, exclaiming, “I must get another theatre!” She shouted it. She groaned it. She screamed it. She mumbled it. She was almost ashamed, but she said she just couldn’t get anything better and added, “Well, this is a theatre and we must go on.” And they kept banging. Really, I think they were trying to drive us out, but we stayed. I stayed, because I wanted, despite everything, to be around the great Agnes and because my dedication to the theatre was very strong—because, exactly like Agnes, I was not then and never will be a quitter. So I stayed to the very last day of school.
    On that day, at the end of the session, Agnes told the class, “I don’t know where the school will be when we open in the fall.” That’s the first time I saw her at a loss, as if in a daze, without an answer to something. “We’ll have to let you know. Kathy will let you know.”
    She didn’t know what was going to happen, but just couldn’t come back to this theatre: “But you