(My Travels with) Agnes Moorehead – The Lavender Lady by Quint Benedetti Read Free Book Online Page B

school. “Think on your feet. You cannot get involved.” I thought to myself, “So many of her students won’t appreciate this. They’ll wonder when will she tell us how to read words, how to walk from one side of the stage to another, how to interact with another actor, but what she’s talking about are really the basics.” I loved it. I appreciated it. She was really slamming the method actor because that’s all emotion and she said, “No. The audience gets involved but the actor never gets involved. If you become involved on the stage, you’re a mad man. What would you do if someone fell dead here on stage and during the play a man dies in your arms? What would you do? That happened to me once, you know.” Now everyone sat up and took notice. We wondered. It was like a detective story. What would you do? “But since I was involved in a play, I was able to cope. I began turning the play around, ad-libbing, writing a new story, holding the dead man. ‘What’s happened to Agnes?’ the stage manager thought” We felt him thinking it as she frowned, distraught. “This is a tragedy.” Something softer crept into her voice holding us spellbound. “Then someone looked through the wings and saw that the man was dead and rang down the curtain. Then came the slap of reality. You never hurt your audience, she preached. “Know what you are about.” What she said lasted forever with me and I know so many others also. And now I never see a movie or a play that I don’t think of Agnes. Many of the actors get involved and lose their character. Everything she said was right on and she was an example of all the things she preached.
    “Bewitched” was her greatest triumph. She didn’t like it. It wasn’t enough of a challenge for her. It’s sad that the series that made her the most money should not have fulfilled her promotional needs. But how many marvelous movies she did and that she was certainly appreciated.
    She related stories, laughed with us, had exchanges. What a show it was. She should have charged us admission just to watch her and listen to her. Never mind the learning how to be an actor. There was the learning of how to go through life. There was a certain closeness in that school, some lowered walls, but there always remained between herself and us the glamour of Agnes Moorehead, the mystique of the great performer. She had a million nuances and gestures for each separate story that made her always an exciting performer. She never got so involved in her stories or philosophies that she forgot that the purpose of her performance was to teach us something. The moral always came through at the end and that was the thing that impressed me and some of the others, and I started to see what she was all about and I thought, “God, she really knows what she’s doing.”
    “Know what you are about. You have to know the purpose of every scene you’re doing. This is the polish of an actor. If you have one page of dialogue in the play, read the whole play. You have to know what every character in that play is about. I always read a play five times straight, all the way through, so I know the whole psychology of the play and where everyone comes in. Then you start working on your own lines because you have to know what went on before and is coming next so your attitude can be right for that scene, or else it does not work. And don’t let them tell you that it does, you’re just repeating lines. Even the smallest walk—on part of a play is important. You carry a sword on. Do it with dignity like a sword bearer because that is very important or they wouldn’t have written it in the script. You have to be disciplined. You must work. Drudge! And she went on again about drudge. I was writing drudge in my notes months later. People who had been to her school for four years were still taking the same notes: drudge, drudge.
    “Know what you are about. You must know what you are about down to your hands and feet.