 |
| Grandma |
Lauren Bacall died. She was famous in movies with husband Humphrey Bogart and for saying: "Put your lips together and blow." When Bogie died from the throat cancer, she married actor Jason Robards, a shmendrick and shikker who drank himself to death.
Her I saw in the show "Applause" before it hit Broadway. Sid and I went to Boston to visit his cousin Bernie, who owned a dry cleaner that was burned to the ground by the Chinese Mafia -- the Yahtzees, or whatever they were calling themselves, but nobody could prove a thing. The show, based on the movie, "All About Eve," was having its previews.
Lauren Bacall was playing the Bette Davis part and a pisherkeh was playing Eve. This new kid was a regular little mazik: singing, dancing and "Yett-tet-tet, yett-tet-tetting," like a Proctor Silex percolator -- even more annoying than Betsy Drake, who was married to Cary Grant until she fed him LSD and he divorced her. So perky was the gal playing Eve that Sid said at intermission he wanted to go home, write "Goodbye, Cruel World" with refrigerator magnets and stick his head in the oven. Of course, he was joking because we were staying at Bernie and Elaine's and I didn't see any magnets. Maybe they hid them.
Anyway, this new girl stole the show. So good she was that Bacall had them give her the kibosh before the show went to Broadway. It didn't matter though, because later she made it big as the star of her own TV show called "One Damn Thing After Another," or something like that ("One Day at a Time".) And that girl was Bonnie Franklin.
A couple years ago, she helped me in the ladies room when I couldn't figure out how to work the farchadat toilet. She was a real mensh, but cross-eyed. I should have told her then how much I enjoyed her in "Applause," despite her disability and all, but I didn't think of it, and now she's dead too.
I've said enough already.
No comments:
Post a Comment