Dressed To Kill

I don’t know what to do with all my “First Night” dresses hanging in the attic. You know, fancy ones for theatre opening nights and awards dos, those kind of dresses. I brought them with me when we moved up here to Suffolk from London 20 years ago and am still trying to figure out where or when I thought I might be wearing any of them again.

Still, hard to get rid of. Especially a long fitted black strappy number with a millions-of-tiny-pleats silk taffeta diagonal flounce at the bottom kind of like a mermaid that came from Dickens & Jones, a nice-ish store once up a time in London. I’d tried it on and loved it, even though it was too long, so I couldn’t walk, but thought I might find a seamstress to re-hem it, so bought it. I then thought I might get a scissors and cut it, because former prop girls like hacking things off almost as much as glueing, but then didn’t, and only remembered it was too long until about 10 minutes before we were due out the door for an opening night, so out came the pinking shears.

Turns out this pleated flounce is about six miles long. Den’s downstairs yelling “Come on! Come on! Let’s go! What are you doing?!” and finally has to come in from the car to find me on the floor in my underwear, cutting and cutting and cutting.

“I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it!” he says, shaking his head, but finally I’m done and in the dress and have a two inch wide strip of black silk taffeta that accordion stretches all the way across the bedroom and down the hall and out to the landing. Now. Help me here.

I know I’m not a dressmaker (did you spot this?) so maybe this is normal, but every time I wore that dress I had to cut more off, in order to walk, so my question is: does silk taffeta grow? I wore the same heels, didn’t get shorter, it didn’t get wet. So what’s the story? Hello Dickens & Jones? Magic Dress department please. Be good if it could have grown sleeves for winter.

I wore the dress, freshly cut, when actor and old friend George Hearn, fresh from Broadway, came over to London to star in La Cage Aux Folles in the West End with another actor and old friend Denis Quilley.

George had invited us to be his guests for opening night and at the party afterwards at the Waldorf. He also invited my mother, Peg, whom he knew, and who was visiting from Massachusetts. We were all excited, even though DK isn’t keen on first nights, unless they’re his own, as it does involve leaving the house. A week before opening, George rings.

“Gee,” he says. “I sorta hate to ask y’all this—and don’t be gettin’ your tail up over your back here (George is from Tennessee) but how would you folks feel about jus’ comin’ to the show?”

“Oh? Problems?” I say. Well, yes. Heck, says George, seems the producers are telling him he can only have two tickets for the After Party and he needs them for his wife and mother, or her mother. Or someone related. Anyhow I don’t understand.

“So tell them you need more tickets.” I know he can get them, I used to get as many as I wanted for God sakes, for Sardi’s, and I was only an assistant prop girl.

“Gee, I kinda hate to do that,” George says. “They’ve been so nice to me an all. They’re sayin’ space is very limited. I sure feel bad about askin’ you guys not to come.”

“George. The Waldorf’s huge.”

“They said they’re real sorry.”

“George, you’re the star! You can get three more tickets, honest!”

The one time I need an actor to act difficult and demanding and what do I get, humble and grateful.

So. Three hundred more phone calls later, with Cinderella here getting more and more ticket obsessed by the hour and DK getting more and more irritated and saying he doesn’t want to go anyway and George getting more and more frantic especially after learning that about 50,000 of his bar buddies from New York are flying over to surprise him on his big night (and me saying “Did they get party tickets?”, just checking, because actors sometimes have trouble with loyalty), George finally says well to heck with the dumb old Waldorf, we’ll just have our own shindig, at some nearby bar he knows (all fifty thousand and three of us) and just as soon as he can get away from the Waldorf, where he really oughta put in an appearance, the producers bein’ so nice an all, he’ll join us at this stupid bar faster’n you can pluck a chicken or a minnow can swim a dipper, and I’m sayin well flip my garter, George, what a dumb idea, I reckon I’d just as soon eat a bug, because once I hears Tennessee talk there’s no stoppin, I takes to it like a hog after persimmons—well THEN, at the eleventh hour, and by this I mean we are just going out the door (one of us in a too-long black silk taffeta number) when George rings to say the producers have pulled through and hurrah hurrah, we all get to go to the ball. Den’s thrilled.

The plan is I’m to go backstage with my mother after the curtain comes down, kiss everyone and tell them how wonderful they are and pick up the tickets to the party from George’s dressing table. Denis, meanwhile, is to walk nine miles to wherever we’re able to park and, if we’re not clamped or towed, meet us at the stage door.

And it all worked fine, except my mother and I took too long drinking champagne and dishing praise in the dressing rooms, so Den was beady when eventually we appeared in relatively high spirits, plus everyone in London had found a car that night and wedged it into Soho and ETA at the Waldorf was looking like next Tuesday. Plus it was raining. Because when isn’t it.

“You’ve got the tickets then,” Den says, gripping the wheel, trying to see.

Tickets. Tickets.

Oh my God.

The tickets.

Plum forgot.

“I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it!”

We inched our way across London, Den seething, my mother and I trying not to giggle because it looked like it might be the wrong moment, and pulled up at the Waldorf about a year later. Peg and I waited while Denis went to park (and to make sure he was coming back) whereupon all three headed for the Palm Court, where there’s two guys in gold braid flanking the doorway, who—and here’s the funnier than chiggers at a hootenanny part—instead of saying “Hold it sister, not so fast! Let’s just see those tickets!”, they smile and nod and say good evening and hold open the doors and we walk straight in and hit the food table.

Didn’t see too much of George, as it turned out, a few million photographers needing a few million shots of him partying, like this is rare, but on one of my re-fill trips to the buffet, Tony Randall, the actor (you know him, The Odd Couple), was coming up the steps as I was coming down.

“That,” he said, stopped in his tracks, is an incredible dress!”

“If you only knew!” I said, beaming, then stepped on the flounce, which had apparently had a growth spurt during the second act, and went flying, knocking over and then flattening Tony Randall and spraying the Palm Court with free buffet food.

You kinda hate to get rid of a dress like that, is my feeling.

Glorious George Singing I Am What I Am from La Cage at the Hollywood Bowl