Peggy Pope in her Manattan apartment
ACT! SING! DON’T THINK! … and don’t tell Peggy Pope’s mama
By Jerry Tallmer
The New York Giants of 1951 — the team that perpetrated the Little Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff when Bobby Thompson hit the home run heard around the world — were built around a second baseman named Eddie Stanky, on whom the press pinned the nicknames Mugsy and/or The Brat. Manager Leo Durocher famously said of him: “He can’t hit, he can’t run, he can’t field; all the little son of a bitch can do is beat you,” and Stanky himself, in accepting a Most Valuable Giant award, said: “Thank you for recognizing my intangibles.”
Let us now cut to something somebody wrote about a performance at Don’t Tell Mama, a cabaret on Manhattan’s West 46th Street, in November of 2004:
“Don’t know if you’ve ever heard ‘Moon River’ sung in two different minor keys by the same person at the same time, i.e., simultaneously. Not even Audrey Hepburn could do that.”
Or Eddie Stanky, for that matter.
“Well,” the cabaret critique continued, “Peggy Pope does it, don’t ask me how … ” The same Peggy Pope of whom the same reviewer had written two years earlier, on the occasion of her “First Farewell Appearance” as a cabaret singer (which was also her first appearance of any sort as a cabaret singer): “ … sing she does, with a combination of insouciance and innocence that is very fetching, almost like a little French girl, except that she isn’t French and she isn’t a little girl, that is to say, she’s not a kid, except in spirit.”
All she can do is delight you. In short, I think of Peggy Pope as the Eddie Stanky of show business. Except that she certainly can act, she certainly can be funny, and, yes, she can sing very nicely, thank you, even if she herself still has a hard time believing it.
Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, Broadway, Regional, the Road, the Movies, the Tube, Commercials — Peggy Pope, the living embodiment of Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here,” has seen and done it all, and has an Obie for distinguished performance in John Guare’s 1968 Muzeeka to prove it.
John Guare, playwright, and Peggy Pope, star, of the 1968 Muzeeka; Peggy singing Yves Montand’s “Fumer le cigare.”
“It was on a double-bill at the Provincetown Playhouse with Sam Shepard’s Red Cross,” she says these nearly 40 years later, “and there were Army-type bunks that doubled in both plays. Muzeeka” — which also won an Obie — “was a very talky play. Marcia Jean Kurtz comes on and talks endlessly. I played a Greenwich Village hooker who kept saying: ‘Chinese basket job — you like?’ The set made the meaning clear. There was a kind of hammock over the bunk on which a fellow was lying, and I would lie down on my stomach on the hammock as it turned around over him. I think what was really meant was the woman would sit on the hammock as it goes around” — somehow Ms. Pope puts across the idea of a gap in clothing — “and the guy would lie there and not have to do anything. Of course it was all in his head … ”
What kind of talk is that for a nice properly-brought-up girl from Mont-clair, New Jersey, whose daddy had more than once warned her and her sister: “Never get into a car where some gray-haired old lady has offered you a ride. They’ll kidnap you, stick you with hypodermic needles, and ship you off into the white-slave trade in Morocco.”
Peggy had a grandfather who was on Wall Street. “Before the Depression he was worth $7 million. After the crash he was worth nothing, but my parents were terrified that kidnappers hadn’t kept up with the news and would kidnap us anyway. I was born in 1929, a Depression baby, and was a child when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped. My parents were terrified of everything, especially of gangsters shooting each other everywhere.
“My brother Jim reaffirmed all the scare stories for my benefit when I was 6. My brother Bruce — they’re both gone now — had colitis for six years. There was disaster all around us. My parents, Edward Sutphen Pope and Margaret Muir Pope, were still living in the Victorian era. I’m low Episcopalian. Low Episcopalians do not have Stations of the Cross, whereas High Episcopalians do.
“My father was a doctor. Young women would come to him when they were in trouble. I don’t know what he did. He died when I was 13. Years later, my aunt told me that my father had had a log cabin on the roof of the Hotel Nassau, 34th Street and Lexington, here in the city. She said he had ‘trysts’ there, and that he and the hotel manager made bathtub gin. One day the FBI knocked on the door, and all the bathtub gin went down the drain, but the FBI agents were only looking for counterfeiters, not gin.
“My sister Adeline came home from school one day and asked: ‘Mom, what does fuck mean?’ The next day we were enrolled in the Kimberley Day School for Girls. Then I went to Smith College, which was all girls. I didn’t know what men were all about. I had grown up missing half of the world, I got such a late start on life. Then I got into Mister Roberts, and my world changed.”
That was the 1952 road company of the big Broadway hit that Josh Logan as director and co-playwright had crafted out of the novel by Thomas Heggen about life and tedium aboard a U.S. Navy “bucket,” or cargo ship, in the backwaters of the Pacific in World War II. A bucket has a crew. Sailors. Actors.
“I’d just got out of college, had come straight to New York looking for work, and was now in Los Angeles, which is where I joined the Mr. Roberts company, the only woman in a cast of 35 men. Todd Andrews was Mister Roberts” — the Henry Fonda role on Broadway and in the 1955 movie.
“We came back east by bus through the South, headed for the subway circuit. All those guys on a bus, and me. In one town, they got back on board after being up all night, and one of them, an actor named Leigh Gutteridge, pulled a woman’s sleeve out of his pocket and said: ‘I wonder where that came from?’ ”
Ms. Pope registers early shock.
“I remember another, a Mr. New York weightlifter named Buck Kartalian, who [making mock of the Actors’ Studio] said: ‘Stanislavski? How much can he press?’
“They put gags into the performance. One night Josh Logan came from New York to see how we were doing. In the scene where some of the crew are looking at women through a telescope, one guy pointed to me and said: ‘That’s the one with the birthmark on her ass.’ When Josh Logan came backstage afterward, he said: ‘What a show this is! No matter what you do, you can’t kill it.’ ”
At Smith College (BA in Theater, 1951), Peggy Pope had taken a senior seminar in playwriting under Hallie Flanagan, famed storm-tossed director of the WPA’s Federal Theater Project during the New Deal years 1935-1939.
“There were three of us taking the course. We didn’t know what we were doing. Hallie Flanagan told us about the Living Newspaper” — dramas carved out of current events — “and about doing a play by a Communist named Christopher Marlowe [the Orson Welles production of Doctor Faustus].
“We had to turn in something. Some dialogue we’d written. I’d been bullshitting my way through, and didn’t know what to do. A classmate told me: ‘Go to the library and take out a book of short stories by somebody named Ka-poat. Read a story called “My Side of the Water.” It’ll give you what you need.’
“One of Truman Capote’s early lovers was a teacher at Smith, but nobody there knew who Truman Capote was. That’s why the book was in the library. The story was about a young boy who married a young girl and came back to live with two aunts. He was not a nice guy at all. I took all the dialogue straight out of the story, turned it in, and Hallie Flanagan gave me an A-minus. She said: ‘I’ve got to go to the library and read that story.’ I ran over to the library and took the book out again — the only copy they had — and never brought it back.
“That,” says Peggy Pope, just beginning to adjust to being interviewed in her neat, spare, white-on-white studio apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side — “that’s my criminal background.”
The discovery of the male sex “was mind-boggling.”
In one production on the road she developed a crush on the leading man.
“I got so nervous, my whole body was shaking on stage. I thought I would die. There was nobody to talk to. I went and told a minister in some little town in Kansas. Before I knew it, we were both down on our knees, praying. It was very difficult. I never went on the road again.”
Peggy’s first three Broadway shows, all in the winter of 1959-1960, gave a total, she says, of seven (7) performances: 3 for Moonbirds, 2 for The Long Dream, 2 for Viva Madison Avenue! (The Internet Broadway Data Base says The Long Dream, a Ketti Frings drama about a lynching, ran for 5 performances at the Ambassador — which would make a grand total of 10, not 7, for statistical purists.)
“I got fired from Moonbirds, my first Broadway show. The star was Wally Cox, the producer-director was Leo Kerz. They’d fired six people before me because the play wasn’t working. I went and said: ‘Mr. Kerz, when you fire Jeanie Barr, can I read for her part?’ Bill Hickey [an actor who was also a highly regarded acting teacher] coached me. I read for it and got back in the show.
“In Buddy Hackett’s Viva Madison Avenue! they didn’t have a dress for me. I went and got my own white dress — my best dress. Buddy Hackett said: ‘Why’re you wearing that dumb dress?’ ” Said or snarled. Hackett was not the most cordial of performers, though Peggy Pope would never say that. Just: “How was I to know you’re not supposed to wear white on stage because it stands out?”
A considerably different experience was being in The Rose Tattoo alongside the brilliant Maureen Stapleton as Tennessee Williams’s Serafina Delle Rose.
“I was one of the two women who came to pick up the shirts she’d ironed. Maureen had been very overweight, been to what she called a ‘funny farm,’ had lost a lot of weight, and now came on stage in a shift. She couldn’t get out on stage [because of stage fright] without the stage manager taking her arm and walking with her. She never wanted to fly in an airplane. But when she got out there in front of the footlights, there was nobody else. Nobody who could touch her.
“She gave me one acting lesson. ‘Don’t think!’ she said. ‘Don’t think!’”
And then there was Harvey, the 1970 Broadway revival of the Mary Chase comedy about Elwood P. Dowd and his invisible giant rabbit. The Elwood P. Dowd was James Stewart. Peggy Pope played Betty Chumley, wife of the shrink who was supposed to commit Dowd to a — well, a funny farm — but instead committed Dowd’s evil sister, Vita Louise Simmons, played by none other than Helen Hayes.
“It was Miss Hayes, and Mr. Stewart, and Miss Pope — like English royalty. The dresser, who did not like Helen Hayes, said: ‘She thinks her first name is Miss.’
“Years later at the Guthrie Theater in Minnesota I did the Helen Hayes part, and I heard all her line readings still in my ear. I couldn’t get away from them. They were carved in stone. But every so often, back there on Broadway, when Miss Hayes got caught [and had to improvise for a moment], then she was so real.”
Back there on Broadway something freakish happened one night to somebody else on stage with James Stewart.
“He had to hand me a calling card, with directions of where I had to go. He handed it — and I dropped it. He picked it up, handed it to me again — and I dropped it again. He picked it up, handed it to me again, and I dropped it again. Next day the Times said that scene was particularly good.” [But unlike Elia Kazan, who kept in the final cut of On the Waterfront one of the greatest accidents and greatest moments in movies, when Marlon Brando picks up Eva Marie Saint’s fallen glove and pulls it over his own hand, Harvey director Stephen Porter didn’t keep in the moment(s) of the fallen calling card.]
“I was so nervous, I called John Guare. He said: ‘Well, you should be nervous.’ That I could destroy the whole evening if I didn’t pull myself together. So I did.
“Jimmy Stewart was up in the stratosphere. He came to work in a limousine and went home in a limousine. But I liked him. I’d come downstairs from my dressing room, for my scene, and he’d be hiding behind the curtain and would say: “Boo!” as I came by.”
In the mid-1970s Peggy decided to take a shot at California, the movies, television. “I was only going to go for five years, and I stayed there, doing television, for 15 years.”
Like it?
“Well, I liked two or three of the shows. Barney Miller was wonderful, and Soap, of course. And the Nine to Five movie. The rest of the stuff, well, it’s always exciting to get a job and to work. But I didn’t get enough good roles. You get to a certain level and stay there.”
In her “Second Farewell Appearance” at Don’t Tell Mama she mingled the wistfulness of Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do?” with the dry recall that “I’ve had one or two great loves in my life.” Pause. “One of them kept saying: ‘Peggy, will you marry me? Peggy, will you marry me?’ ” Pause. “He was an actor. Rehearsing, you know.”
Whether that was the same “actor/salesman/dealer in antiques” to whom she had in fact got married in 1954, and with whom she stayed married for five years, Peggy isn’t saying. “I didn’t want to come home every night and have to call my mother to tell her I was in.”
Which isn’t where Don’t Tell Mama got its name — that was borrowed from Fred Ebb’s great lyrics for Cabaret — but it somehow prefigures 1968’s wide-eyed, properly-brought-up “Chinese basket job — you like?” temptress from Montclair, New Jersey.
The temptress who didn’t think she could sing.
“Oh, I did sing. I was Mrs. Peachum in Threepenny Opera at Williamstown, Mass. — in it twice. Was in The Pirate, with its Cole Porter songs, at Long Wharf in Connecticut. You know [lightly, lively, half under her breath]: ‘Most gentlemen don’t like love, they just like to kick it around.’ I was in Mame, with Ann Miller, in Florida. But I was never good with the singing. I was too frightened, but I got away with it.”
It was a new teacher, Sande Campbell, who “taught me how to sing, really. How to breathe. How to have fun and not be scared all the time. I’d been going to her for almost a year when I did the first Don’t Tell Mama show. I think maybe now I can get away with it.”
She sure can. Just listen to her and Stephen Sondheim tell you how “love is just sand, slipping through your fingers,” and you’ll know. Aiding and abetting the First and Second Farewell Appearances of Miss Peggy Pope has been buoyancy of Woody Regan at the piano.
So here she is, back where she belongs, not saying farewell but hello, on the first leg of a new adventure. “I decided that if I’m gonna get old, I’m gonna get old in New York. I said if.” She’s become a world traveler — Russia, Paris, a Danube River tour.
“I have my five pensions and residuals. We go to Paris” — she and Sande Campbell — “to rest up from the airplane. I always put a French song in a show. Those Farewells at Don’t Tell Mama were like a training show. I think I could do a really good audition now.” You betcha, Mugsy.
When Bobby Thompson hit that home run, the Polo Grounds went crazy. As Russ Hodges on the radio was screaming: “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” each and every Giant player swarmed up out of the dugout to engulf Thompson as he touched home plate. All but one. Eddie Stanky raced to third base to jump upon and embrace the third-base coach — manager Leo Durocher — in a joyous, triumphant bear hug.
The intangibles had won.
