Still Here: The Madcap Nervy Singular Life of Elaine Stritch Read online

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  In memory of Peter W. Kaplan, and my father

  “I have come for my courage,” announced the Lion, entering the room.

  “Very well,” answered the little man; “I will get it for you.”

  He went to a cupboard and reaching up to a high shelf took down a square green bottle, the contents of which he poured into a green-gold dish, beautifully carved. Placing this before the Cowardly Lion, who sniffed at it as if he did not like it, the Wizard said:

  “Drink.”

  “What is it?” asked the Lion.

  “Well,” answered Oz, “if it were inside of you, it would be courage. You know, of course, that courage is always inside one; so that this really cannot be called courage until you have swallowed it. Therefore I advise you to drink it as soon as possible.”

  The Lion hesitated no longer, but drank till the dish was empty.

  “How do you feel now?” asked Oz.

  “Full of courage,” replied the Lion, who went joyfully back to his friends to tell them of his good fortune.

  —L. FRANK BAUM, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

  “This time for me! For me! For me! For me! For me! For me! For me!”

  —STEPHEN SONDHEIM, Gypsy

  PROLOGUE

  On the afternoon of November 17, 2014, hundreds of people made their way through a dark rain toward the Al Hirschfeld Theater on West Forty-Fifth Street in New York City. Settling with a certain expectant jollity into its plush red seats were actors famous and obscure, executives, playwrights, press agents, journalists, out-of-towners, a bronzed billionaire fashion designer who’d pulled up in a limousine, and ordinary civilians arriving on foot with their busted umbrellas.

  They had arrived not for a matinee—for this was a Monday, when Broadway stages are by long custom dark—but to pay homage to Elaine Stritch, the indefatigable-seeming entertainer who at eighty-nine had died of stomach cancer four months earlier in Birmingham, Michigan, a leafy suburb northwest of Detroit. Not for Stritch the mealymouthed “passed away”; her preferred euphemism was “left the building.” It indicated her fundamentally citified view of life.

  Plenty of her contemporaries were present, including Hal Prince, the director and producer whose compactly commanding stance and twenty-one Tonys gave him a Napoleonic air, and Liz Smith, the platinum-haired gossip columnist known as the “grande dame of dish.” Some in the audience were puzzled, though, by the absence of Stephen Sondheim, the composer and lyricist whose virtuosic work Stritch was devoted to above all others, whose approval she craved more than anyone else’s. (He had a respiratory infection that day, he said later. But he had also refused an earlier invitation to speak, writing simply that he didn’t know the honoree well enough, and sending organizers into frenzied analysis of what exactly that might mean.)

  There were also others much younger, many of whom had discovered Stritch only after seeing her 2001 one-woman show At Liberty: the artful summation of her marathon career conducted with the sole prop of a barstool. Written with John Lahr, then The New Yorker’s chief theater critic, its success had led to the recognition she had longed for since arriving in New York almost sixty years before. She was deemed a Living Landmark and joyously heralded by strangers in her regular and often untrousered patrols from the Carlyle on Madison Avenue, the last in a series of venerable hotels she had chosen to call home. So far as that went. “I don’t know if I really have any home,” she said once. “I don’t know how I feel about home. I don’t know where home is.”

  To the end she was both restless and routinized, selfish and generous, straightforward and elliptical. “How do you solve a problem like Elaine Stritch?” asked one of the many celebrities in attendance, the actor Nathan Lane. He was standing at a podium under a Hirschfeld line drawing of the honoree clutching, characteristically, a brandy snifter, made to publicize the 1996 revival of Edward Albee’s play A Delicate Balance. “How do you hold a fucking moonbeam in your hand?”

  The crowd laughed knowingly at the profanity, which Stritch had deployed decades before it was common in polite society. This was one of several ways she had been ahead of her time or even somewhat out of time. She had chosen to live alone when the average woman of her Midwestern, Catholic, upper-middle-class background had become a Mrs. and a mother before age thirty. She had defied stereotypes of gender and age, projecting both feminine and masculine and refusing the slow fade accorded most in her profession (along with plastic surgery). She insisted on being seen and heard, felt and dealt with. She skirted high culture, low culture, and everything in between.

  Though it was variously suggested Stritch’s voice was infused with gravel, whiskey, or brass—a writer for People magazine once compared it to “a car shifting gears without the clutch”—her admirers from the music world had grown to include the longtime director of the Metropolitan Opera, James Levine; the indie rocker Morrissey; and the pop idol Elton John, who had sent half a dozen huge orchid plants to her small private funeral in Chicago with a card reading: “You were a shining star.”

  Onstage at the Hirschfeld, Stritch’s colleagues sang the numbers she’d made her own. Bernadette Peters shrugged and mugged through the goofy and dated “Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo),” about a jungle native underwhelmed by Western society and its technological advancements. Laura Benanti and Michael Feinstein did the contrapuntal duet “You’re Just in Love” from Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam, alternately plaintive and twinkling. Betty Buckley got the wistful ballad “I Never Know When (to Say When),” perhaps the sole keepsake from a largely forgotten 1958 musical called Goldilocks.

  But by far the most affecting performance came toward the event’s end, when the lights dimmed and an image of Stritch herself materialized on a big screen, like a glamorous ghost, in what might have been called her prime had she not so forcefully redefined that term. Wearing an ensemble of white blouse and black tights cribbed from Judy Garland’s famous “Get Happy” sequence but carried off even more effectively with her long, slim legs, she began the Sondheim song “The Ladies Who Lunch,” from the landmark 1970 musical Company, which was for so many years her signature anthem.

  The Stritch-specter inhabited the dark world of the lyrics completely: cocking her silvery blonde head at the camera, enunciating, clasping her manicured hands as if in prayer, raising and furrowing professionally arched eyebrows, grinning, winking, nodding, jabbing, giving the okay sign, beckoning, pumping a fist, clawing, and throwing both hands up in a V shape that seemed to signify equally victory and defeat.

  So here’s to the girls on the go—

  Everybody tries

  Look into their eyes,

  And you’ll see what they know

  Everybody dies.

  “Eve
rybody dies,” Prince had quoted at the podium, and paused. “I’m not so sure about Elaine.”

  Indeed, Stritch had been charged with such restless energy, one could be forgiven for believing she might yet emerge for one last encore from behind the Hirschfeld’s corrugated curtain. Zelig-like, she had witnessed the Ziegfeld Follies and MTV videos; known the era of blackface and performed for the country’s first African American president; and had her saucy one-liners (“another brilliant zinger,” per the Sondheim song) committed both to piles of yellowing telegrams and the online echo chamber of Twitter. For decades she had kicked up her heels; for decades more she had made a Sisyphean trudge through the twelve steps of recovery.

  Partly because of a consuming love affair with alcohol, partly because she in general found Hollywood “phony” and “a shuck,” she had had only middling success in feature films and television. A firmer grasp on those twin brass rings of the entertainment carousel might have afforded her the financial security she was almost pathologically unable to feel, even after her bank account swelled to millions.

  But long before the advent of so-called reality TV, the reporter’s tape recorder and documentarian’s camera had oscillated eagerly toward Stritch, alert to the quality of what is now called “authenticity.” This was someone who, it was said often, was incapable of not telling the truth. This didn’t mean she didn’t sometimes embellish a story or make one up entirely; some whispered that her avowed twenty-four-year commitment to sobriety, openly relaxed in her waning months, was fictitious. But she had an emotional clarity and immediacy, a get-to-the-pointness that eludes most people.

  What had propelled this straight-arrow girl from the squarest part of Detroit to the center of Sondheim’s urbane artistic circle—or at least to gesticulating insistently on the perimeter? Had she truly beaten her alcohol addiction or merely nudged it to the curb? Was she an undercredited figure in the history of American show business or an adult version of Eloise at the Plaza, tweaking the elevator men and shirking her bills?

  The answers would begin there at the Hirschfeld, in the hushed chatter of those gazing up in remembrance and rue, as John Updike put it in “Perfection Wasted,” his poem about death, choosing a theater metaphor: “those loved ones nearest / the lips of the stage, their soft faces blanched / in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears / their tears confused with their diamond earrings.” And in the speeches of those onstage.

  She had expressly forbidden a memorial, but “we all know that she would want this,” said Hunter Ryan Herdlicka, a young actor who’d appeared with and befriended Stritch during her final appearance on Broadway, as the sardonic, wheelchair-couched Madame Armfeldt in Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. “She lived to be the life of the party and the center of attention.”

  But Stritch yearned to be not just acknowledged, but understood. She learned after long trial to live in the moment, and to face the future, yet she could not help compulsively examining her past, parsing why a girl from a family who put the convent in conventional had chosen what Oscar Hammerstein II called in Show Boat “life upon the wicked stage”: the darkened wings, the traveling spotlight, the bouquets, the kissed cheeks and whispered congratulations, and the buckets of champagne chilling in the dressing room.

  For his fiftieth birthday, Nathan Lane told the assembled, she’d given him “a beautiful baby picture. Of her.” This too got a knowing laugh.

  But upon reflection it was a rather poignant anecdote. To share a photograph of oneself as a baby is to ask to be regarded at one’s most vulnerable: naked and unspoiled. It is a plea for love.

  1.

  “THANKS FOR EVERYTHING”

  She wasn’t exactly born with a silver flask in her fist, but when Marion Elaine Stritch made her first entrance on February 2, 1925, at Harper Hospital in Detroit, at the uncharacteristically early hour of 6:30 a.m., it was into a climate of bustling prosperity.

  Considering her later struggles, the date would come to seem apt. It was Groundhog Day, which—because of the hit 1993 movie about a weatherman caught in a time loop, later made into a Tony-nominated musical—would become shorthand for living the same events over and over again, an allegory for addiction. It was also the very thick of national Prohibition, of which it was joked that Punxsutawney Phil, the clairvoyant groundhog of Pennsylvania, was threatening sixty weeks of winter rather than the usual six if he didn’t get a drink.

  In Michigan the liquor trade had been forbidden since 1917, and the state’s proximity to Canada had quickly encouraged bootleggers, some swooshing across Lake St. Clair on ice skates, their bounty behind them on sleds. That was the year Marion’s mother, Mildred Isabel Jobe (changed from her father’s oft mispronounced “Job”), married her favorite of many beaux, George Stritch. He had acquired a promising new position as a clerk at B.F. Goodrich, in Akron, the Ohio city that had come to be known as the “rubber capital of the world” following the convergence there of Goodyear, Firestone, and the brand-new General Tire. Perhaps Goodrich’s most prestigious commission was supplying tires, gas masks, and other equipment used in the Great War, which the United States had just joined.

  The young couple had met growing up in Springfield, where George, gray eyed and gangly—“he was all legs,” said his eldest granddaughter, Sally Hanley—was raised in humble circumstances. Born on April 7, 1892, according to the marriage certificate, he would eventually become the middle child of five. His father, Henry, was a tailor who’d emigrated from Ireland to Louisville, Kentucky, a decade or so after Garrett Stritch, father to the future cardinal Samuel Stritch, followed the same trajectory. Henry told his offspring that he and Samuel were cousins.

  It was the seminal gossip columnist Walter Winchell who first trumpeted in 1947 that Cardinal Samuel Stritch of Chicago was Elaine’s uncle, an irresistible piece of publicity repeated by journalists and colleagues throughout her life, though she tried intermittently to correct the record. Eventually she stopped trying. “When you have a lot of relations you don’t call anybody cousins anymore—you call them uncle,” she said on one occasion. “Or at least they did in that family.” After another columnist, Earl Wilson, reported Elaine was the cardinal’s daughter, she went to meet the holy man in person. Ushered in by a nun, she sat down on a red-backed seat with a stool under it.

  “Elaine, that’s my chair,” he told her.

  “Oh! Sorry.”

  She then described her problems in the “mad gay life of powder and paint,” quoting Noël Coward, and asked what she should do.

  “Pray to Our Lady,” the cardinal suggested.

  * * *

  George’s youngest sister died of tuberculosis in early childhood, and throughout his life he would cry when speaking of her. The remaining children all got jobs as soon as they could: the elder son as a bookkeeper, the two other daughters as stenographers. George worked for a textile mill, for the American Seeding Company, and for the Hunkin-Conkey Construction Company. “I don’t think he ever got out of fourth grade,” said Frank Moran, Jr., his eldest grandson.

  A childhood friend of George, Bobby Clark, had escaped such prosaic labors by developing a tumbling and clowning routine at the local YMCA with an older boy named Paul McCullough. The two of them left town with a minstrel show, graduating to circus, vaudeville, burlesque, musical revues, and—after they were discovered and promoted by the songwriter Irving Berlin—riotous RKO film shorts with titles like Odor in the Court. Clark, known for his painted-on glasses, got most of the pratfalls and punch lines (“I rest my case … and my feet!”). McCullough was the quieter “straight man,” with a toothbrush mustache, a style that did not yet look ominous. Their trademark pantomime was structured around trying and failing to put a chair on a table. (Yes, these were more innocent times.)

  George shared Clark and McCullough’s sense of humor and their ambition, but also was deeply practical. He needed all these qualities to woo the more cosmopolitan Mildred Jobe. Born on August 13, 1893, or so she told the count
y court, Mildred was distinctly pretty, buxom, and around five feet tall (the name Pettit was in her mother’s lineage), with a long trail of prosperous suitors. “She was a pedestal girl, for sure,” Sally Hanley said.

  “The way they did dating then, she had a date every night of the week, and the guy that got Sunday night was number one,” said another granddaughter, Midge Moran. “And my grandfather moved up from seven to one. So she wanted to marry him and her parents thought she was crazy, because they wanted her to marry the banker. But she didn’t. She loved my grandfather.”

  Mildred never tired of calling attention to her more rarefied breeding and George’s good fortune. “She picked him over the rest of them, and she reminded him of that all their lives,” said Elaine’s youngest niece, Elaine Kelly.

  Mildred’s father, Louis S. Job, known as L. S., was from Monmouthshire, Wales. He owned racehorses and a number of businesses, among them a bakery and an eponymous tavern on South Fountain Avenue in downtown Springfield, not far from where his family lived, a classy one where roast beef sandwiches were served, there was “a private room for ladies,” and men had to stand up at the bar to drink alcohol. The preferred toast over foamy beer tops—“Here’s how we lost the farm!”—would become one of Elaine’s favorites.

  “He was a gentleman’s gentleman,” Frank Moran, Jr., said, albeit one who would have not been out of place in an Edward Hopper painting. “He’d sit up till the last customer went home, then he’d lock up and go over to the railroad station and chew the rag with the night clerk until the sun came up and the early morning express roared through Springfield,” Elaine wrote in 1955, in a guest column for another of Winchell’s competitors, Dorothy Kilgallen, by way of accounting for her own pronounced nocturnal tendencies.