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  This was in the glory days of Radio City, back when it was a premier movie palace. Following a movie, there was a complete stage show including a full orchestra, a dog act, a magician, an acrobat, singers, the world-famous Radio City Music Hall organ, and us, the thirty-six dancers known as “Ballet Girls” who comprised the Corps de Ballet. The stars of this extravaganza were the much lauded Rockettes. At one show, these poor girls had to do their precision kicking with some perverted fool in the front row watching them through binoculars. Four of these shows were staged per day, which meant a lot of performances. Every time the movie changed, so did the stage show, and we had to learn entirely new numbers.

  Backstage was like an actual city. It would have been possible to live there without ever leaving the building. The rehearsal halls were enormous, with a dormitory that had assigned beds where you could sleep between shows, as well as a massive cafeteria and a huge dressing room with many showers. There was a screening room to watch movies between the stage performances. And you could stay there all day, or you could go out and return in time for your performance.

  On the first day of rehearsal, I was terribly sick to my stomach, but I was so excited to be working that I made it through the day. I had to work hard to keep up with the strong, seasoned professional dancers who made up the thirty-six members of the Corps de Ballet. The numbers tended to be sweeping, colorful, and dynamic to fill the gigantic stage. In a number set in a gold mine, we rose from beneath the stage on a huge elevator, shimmering gold nuggets in toe shoes. In another number we were spring flowers twirling parasols and waltzing to Gershwin.

  It was grueling work, but what could be better? I was a working performer (on my toes!)—dancing, no less, in one of the most legendary theaters in New York City, where my parents had taken me when I was little. There I was, sixteen years old with working papers in hand. (A young person’s profession, indeed.) I was now a member of AGVA (American Guild of Variety Artists), the union that covered Radio City Music Hall, nightclubs, and, I think, the circus (handy, should I ever decide to reprise my tricycle balancing act). Now that I had my first real taste of the business they call show, I couldn’t get enough of it. I was ready for more.

  chapter

  TWO

  When my six-week run in the Corps de Ballet at Radio City ended, life went back to normal. I resumed high school at Quintano’s and took a full load of dance classes, both ballet and jazz. I kept my ears open for auditions. I scoured Backstage and Show Business for possible opportunities and finagled my way into as many nonunion casting calls as I could. As of yet, I was not a member of Actors’ Equity.

  Barbara Monte and I would hang out at the Colony coffee shop on Fifty-third and Broadway, where a lot of dancers, singers, and actors congregated. Elliott Gould, a very tall, curly-haired dancer, was a regular. He was one of the few straight dancers! We’d share information about what shows and movies were being cast while eating hamburgers and laughing ourselves silly.

  During my third year of high school, work was scattershot. I did a few goofy modeling jobs for magazines like True Romance, posing on the back of a motorcycle, clinging to a tough-looking guy in a black leather jacket. Eventually, Barbara and I got wind of a movie in Brooklyn called Rock, Rock, Rock that was looking for dancers. We took the subway out to Brighton Beach and were cast as extras. Our classmate Tuesday Weld was the star opposite a really great-looking singer named Teddy Randazzo. The film featured performances by Chuck Berry, LaVern Baker, Little Richard, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Flamingos, and the Moonglows and was presided over by DJ Alan Freed. Barbara and I played teenagers in a prom scene, dancing the Lindy Hop like crazy. It was so great—we had the best time shooting it! The job lasted for three days, we made money (albeit very little), and we got to be rock and rollers in a movie. Best of all, I now had a film credit on my résumé.

  During my last year at the Clara de Hirsch Home, I began spending a lot of time with my father’s secretary, Angela Posillico. She was a delightful, dyed-in-the-wool Italian-American from East Harlem. My father’s office was on the seventieth floor, and I often stopped by to see him or to have lunch with Angela. She even helped me rehearse a scene from Shakespeare for an acting class.

  Dad often took us out for dinner, and it was delightful to see him so happy. When I pressed him on getting serious about Angela, he would demur, “No, I’m much too old for her. And she has a boyfriend—Diddy, from the neighborhood.” At some point Diddy was dropped, and Dad and Angela started dating. I enlisted Leah and Don to exert pressure from the West Coast, since they also loved Angela. It’s the oldest cliché in the book to marry your secretary, but in Dad and Angela’s case, it was a perfect fit.

  In 1958 they were married at a beautiful, formal ceremony at the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Since Mom and Dad had taken so many years to separate and finally divorce, Mom was fine with my father remarrying. She told me she rarely thought about him except when her kids brought him up. To my mother’s credit, she never demanded that I dislike Angela. And to Angela’s credit, she never said a bad word about my mom. Over time she grew to be one of the most important and influential people in my life.

  When I graduated from Quintano’s, the ceremony was held at Lüchow’s, a glorious landmark German restaurant on Fourteenth Street—a typically unconventional setting for an atypical school. Mom was sorry that she couldn’t come in from Oregon, but she had taken me to lunch there before, and the event wasn’t exactly going to be “Pomp and Circumstance.” There were no caps and gowns or valedictorian speeches, only Mr. Quintano standing at the head of a table, handing out diplomas, while waiters served schnitzel and Sacher torte. Dad was very proud and wanted to buy me champagne, which was silly, because I don’t drink and neither does he. So we toasted my achievement with large, ornate glasses of pink lemonade.

  After graduation I moved home to New Jersey with Angela and Dad. I still had dreams of being a ballet dancer, but there were more opportunities in show business and theater. I had to face the fact that I might not be ballerina material. I auditioned for dance choruses in summer stock productions, but to my great disappointment, I didn’t get cast. I guess I wasn’t musical comedy material either! I’d gotten good grades in high school, and throughout the summer I debated whether or not I should go to college. But when fall rolled around, I found myself commuting to New York to audition, and college was forgotten. I also had several “civilian” jobs during the late 1950 and early 1960s. I clerked at the Adam for Eve gift shop in Macy’s one Christmas; checked coats (mostly chinchillas) at the exclusive French restaurant Lutèce; did some phone canvassing (yes, I was one of those horribly annoying people!); and had myself hooked up to monitoring devices in a sleep study for a research project about dreams. What can I say, it helped pay the bills.

  I used to go to open dance auditions that both union and nonunion dancers could attend—these were indelicately known as “cattle calls.” Sometimes hundreds of girls would show up at a rehearsal studio or Broadway theater, hoping to get hired. We signed in at the door and were given a number. We learned the dance steps in a large group and then were summoned in groups of ten to dance for the choreographer. After we danced, we were either eliminated with a curt thank-you or held over for another chance to perform. This process went on until the choreographer had found the number of girls he or she was looking for; sometimes just a single dancer was being cast.

  When I was sixteen, I was eliminated in the second round of auditions for Jerome Robbins’s West Side Story. Every dancer in town wanted to get into that show, and only the cream of the crop made it. When I was eighteen, I went to a casting call for Li’l Abner, a Michael Kidd musical that had been running on Broadway for two years. One of the dancers was leaving, and the show needed to find a replacement. My parents had taken me to see Li’l Abner for my sixteenth birthday—the first Broadway musical I had ever seen. (Incidentally, the first Broadway play my parents took me to was The Bad Seed, about a psychotic, murderous l
ittle girl . . . coincidentally named Rhoda. It never would have occurred to me, as I sat there on my birthday watching the amazing, fast-paced choreography, that in two years I would be given the opportunity to audition for Li’l Abner.

  Almost a hundred girls showed up at the St. James Theatre to land the job. The odds weren’t in my favor, but I was peppy and enthusiastic, as usual. I wore all black, with a red bow in my short braid. While we were all being assigned our numbers, one particular girl caught my eye. She was stunning, tall and elegant, with exquisite pale skin and a thick reddish-gold braid down her back. Standing there in her turquoise-and-black–striped T-shirt rolled up into a midriff top, she had such attitude and poise, and a unique beauty that I found captivating. When she registered for her number, I learned her name: Iva March.

  I immediately ran over to her. “Iva! My mother’s name is Iva. I’ve never met anybody else by that name.” I had momentarily forgotten that the point of the audition was to get the job, not to make a friend.

  “So?” Iva said. “My mother’s name is Jewel.” She wanted to end the chitchat and learn the dance combination.

  “Jewel! That’s the name of my father’s lighting company, Jewel Electric.” I couldn’t help but celebrate this fantastic coincidence.

  Iva politely laughed but told me later on that she’d said to herself, “Well, this one is just going to keep coming at me, so I might as well be her friend.”

  Michael Kidd wasn’t there, so his two dance captains, the glamorous married couple Dee Dee Wood and Marc Breaux, both great dancers with parts in the show, ran the audition. Michael Kidd’s production, Li’l Abner, was filled with hoedown style, athletic dance routines that involved difficult lifts, and innovative footwork requiring high energy and a lot of strength.

  If I’d stuck to traditional ballet training, I never would have made the cut. But my years of jazz with Luigi had given me the strength and athleticism I needed for the choreography. Out of more than a hundred girls, I got the job. Unbelievable! My perkiness, which was right in line with Li’l Abner’s hillbilly aesthetic, served me well. I couldn’t quite believe that I was joining a Michael Kidd show. After all, it was Michael Kidd’s performance in Interplay that had inspired me to become a dancer when I was only six years old. I continue to be amazed at the way life unfolds!

  Rehearsal meant working with the dance captains during the day to learn the choreography and attending the performances at night. Standing at the back of the house, watching the moves of a dancer whom I was about to replace, was thrilling. Yes, I was nervous and scared, but I was also deliriously happy.

  The backstage atmosphere at Li’l Abner was welcoming, without a hint of the supposed competitive backstabbing from the other girls in the dressing room. Another myth debunked! Daddy and Angela watched proudly as I got through my first performance without falling off the stage. To my delight, after two months in Abner, Iva came into the show to replace another departing dancer. Soon Iva, who was also a Jersey girl living with her parents, and I became fast friends. After work in the city, we would dash to the Port Authority Bus Terminal to catch our respective buses, hers to Short Hills, mine to Jersey City.

  Although I was fully enjoying being in a Broadway show, I clung to my childhood dream of getting into a ballet company. Still, here I was, finally getting paid to dance. I was making seventy-six dollars for eight shows a week on Abner. As exciting as this was, I found myself thinking that it was simply a diversion until I could return to my original calling. Childhood dreams have a way of sticking with you—although I suppose there’d be a lot more princesses and astronauts out there if everyone stuck by their childhood dreams!

  But this showbiz was fun! Each performance I was invigorated by Gene de Paul and Johnny Mercer’s terrific score and by hearing the laughter rolling from the audience. I felt that my performance was improving. I began to wonder if this was where I belonged, not in the ballet but in the theater.

  After I’d been in the show for six months, Abner closed on Broadway; the show was traveling to Las Vegas for an eight-week run. It was an exciting prospect. The only bad part was that Iva couldn’t make the trip because she’d gotten into the chorus of My Fair Lady. Abner would be the first Broadway musical ever to play Vegas. The producers had to shorten the show so they could run two performances each night. They cut down the acting scenes, which meant that we dancers had much less time to catch our breath between musical numbers. Young and strong as we were, it was still a killer.

  The company met in the main concourse of Grand Central Station underneath the constellations painted on the vaulted blue ceiling. We boarded a transcontinental train for Nevada, complete with dining and sleeper cars. I turned nineteen on our journey west. The entire time I couldn’t shake the feeling that my life had become the movies. And I loved it.

  We opened in Vegas at the beautiful Riviera Hotel. In 1958 Vegas was sparsely populated and the Strip far less dense than it is today. The Sands, the Flamingo, the Sahara, and the Riviera each stood alone, with large swatches of desert between them. After the second performance of the night, the cast of Abner lived a vibrant nightlife. If there wasn’t a company party, we’d go on a midnight horseback ride or hayride that always ended with a barbecue. My roommate, a tiny redhead named Betty Jenkins, and I would go see Louis Prima and Keely Smith do their lounge show. We even saw Sinatra! Some of the casinos had a policy barring African-American performers from entering through the front door, even if they were coming to do a show. One night at a major hotel-casino, the divine Miss Eartha Kitt ignored the rule and marched in through the front entrance, openly defying all that horrible and ridiculous nonsense. Way to go, Eartha.

  Our show ran in Las Vegas for two delightful months: I slept late, spent time by the pool, and then went to the theater—not a bad way to live. I went out with Betty’s handsome visiting cousin a few times. Despite the sinful charms of the desert city, it was quite a chaste relationship, as was my style. When I was in my Vegas getup—a Day-Glo bikini and full makeup with fake lashes—who would have believed that I was a virgin?

  When I returned to New York, I was asked to join the cast of Michael Kidd’s new show Destry Rides Again, a musical based on an old Gary Cooper movie of the same name. The show starred Andy Griffith and Dolores Gray. I was excited to be working with Michael again. I had become that rarefied creature: a Michael Kidd dancer!

  Despite the rigorous routines in Abner, I struggled with my weight. I wasn’t one of those dancers who looked as if they might break in a strong gust of wind. Nor was I voluptuous—just average and healthy-looking. But oh, how I loved to eat! I’ve always been impulsive about food. And I got very good at rationalizing my binges. I used to try to convince myself that whatever cake or cookies I ate, I would burn off in dance class. As if I might be able to burn off a quart of ice cream.

  I wanted to shed a few pounds after Las Vegas so I would be slender when Destry rehearsals began. I carried around the ideal of the tiny, wispy ballerina in my head—whittled waist and willow limbs. So I began getting diet shots, which worked like magic. They pumped me full of energy, and the weight melted off. Already, at nineteen, I had slipped into the cyclical pattern of gaining and reducing that unfortunately I would repeat way into adulthood.

  I was in rehearsals for Destry only a week when I began to feel fatigued. But since I was dancing rigorous Michael Kidd choreography all day long, that was to be expected. When the whites of my eyes turned a little yellow, Angela dispatched me to the doctor. I was distraught to learn that I’d contracted hepatitis from the needles used for my diet shots. (These were the days before disposable needles.) Although I didn’t feel very sick, I had to drop out of Destry. What a heartbreak! It was my first show as an original cast member. When I told Michael through my tears that I had to leave, he kindly assured me that we’d work together again.

  I spent a week in the hospital. Then I was released to Angela’s care. My recovery entailed two things, eating and rest, which couldn’t ha
ve delighted Angela more. A nurturing woman, she relished having someone to feed. And I was her willing charge. I lay in bed as she brought me an endless banquet of healthy food, but also pizza and pasta, cannoli and cookies. I gorged. We both loved movies and would watch one after the other while stuffing our faces. I remember the two of us polishing off an entire pound cake watching The Late Late Show.

  My convalescence helped forge a close bond between Angela and me that would last a lifetime. In addition to preparing wonderful food, she was a great storyteller who loved to laugh. Her childhood sounded like something out of The Godfather. I loved listening to her tales of growing up on a Mob-protected block on East 116th Street around guys named Joey Blue Eyes and Bobby the Greek.

  After two months in Angela’s care and due to my ridiculous indulgence, my weight had gone up to 160 pounds, not exactly ideal for my five-six frame. That was when I got a call to be in the movie of Li’l Abner. And so the cycle began again. I was determined to drop weight in time for filming, so I went on a stringent diet and worked out in our living room. I also tried some rather foolish techniques for weight reduction. I remember trying to create my own steam room in our bathtub by wrapping myself in several plastic shower curtains and running the hot water. (I also ate a lot of prunes.)

  The Abner film was shooting in Hollywood, so I arranged to live with Beth Howland, another dancer in the movie, who went on to play Vera in the television series Alice. We spent our first night in Los Angeles in a slightly dingy hotel. The next day we learned that some dancers in the touring company of West Side Story were staying at the Elaine Apartments near Hollywood and Vine, a famous address. The Elaine was perfect—a cool Hollywood place with white stucco duplexes, a little patio area dotted with palm trees, and an aquamarine pool. Directly across from the Elaine on Vine Street was the delightfully seedy Hollywood Ranch Market, which was open twenty-four hours. It was heaven.