Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [40]
“Isn’t she good?!” I said to Dad.
My opening night in a summer stock production of Gigi. Dad didn’t want me to be an actress. But he was there.
He stood there, his arms crossed, his unlit black cigar in his mouth.
“She’s very good,” he said. “But she’ll never make it. She’s not angry like you were.”
We’d never know. Six months later, like Mom, Terre left singing behind, followed her heart and went home to raise a family.
Chapter 20
My Big Brown Eyes
I guess it was inevitable that I’d go into the family business. I started by doing plays in little theatres in and around Los Angeles—Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theatre, the playhouses at Laguna, Ojai, San Diego. Getting laughs from an audience clicked right into my DNA. The sound, the rhythm of the comedy, came out of me like a song that had been playing in my mind all my life. And I was never happier than when I got to sing it.
The one thing I wasn’t ready for was that every review and interview compared me to my famous father. Would I be as good as Danny Thomas? As funny? Last as long? God, it was scary. Would I ever be able to get out from under his giant shadow? And be judged on my own? Would I ever be seen just for myself? I felt I had no place to hide, no place where I could fail unnoticed. And how do you learn if you can’t fail?
But I just kept going, mostly in comedies—Gigi, Two for the Seesaw, I Am a Camera, Blithe Spirit, Under the Yum Yum Tree—and some not comedies—Our Town, Glass Menagerie, View from the Bridge. I had gone to USC for four years to become an English teacher, but I had studied for this all of my life.
One summer, I was doing a light comedy called Sunday in New York with John Aniston, Jennifer’s father, at the Civic Playhouse in L.A., when David Dortort, the producer of the hit TV western Bonanza, knocked on my dressing room door. He asked me if I could do a Chinese accent. Silly question to ask an actress.
“Of course, I can do a Chinese accent!” I said.
“Great,” he said. “I’ve got a wonderful part for you.”
He needed to fill a guest role on the show that had been written especially for the actress Pat Suzuki, who had just scored a big success on Broadway in Flower Drum Song. The episode was to shoot the following week, but Pat had the flu and wouldn’t be able to fly in from New York. David had been searching for another Asian actress with the same kind of “spitfire,” as he called it, but was having no luck. That’s when he got the bright idea that I could do it. All I needed was a little eye makeup and a decent accent (which I said I had) and he’d have his perfect Tai Li, a Chinese mail-order bride for the character of Hoss, played by Dan Blocker.
Once he left my room, I anxiously called Sandy Meisner, the great acting teacher, to find out how I could learn a Chinese accent in three days. I had studied with Sandy for a year in Los Angeles, when he took a hiatus from the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York to help 20th Century Fox build a new stable of stars from young hopefuls. It was a great idea for the studio, and a terrific opportunity for budding actors to study with a master—for free. I was one of the kids Sandy chose. It was an exciting year, and even though Fox didn’t pick up the option on any of us, I had made a friend in Sandy.
When I reached him, he told me to go to Ah Fong’s, a Chinese restaurant on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills, and hire one of the waitresses to come to my apartment to work with me. By spending time talking with her, Sandy said, and having her read my part on tape, I would easily pick up her accent.
Yup, that’s me—as a Chinese mail-order bride
on the TV western Bonanza.
So I went to Ah Fong’s, ordered dinner (Peking duck, always) and tried to figure out how to propose this idea to the waitress without sounding like I was offering a different kind of proposition. But she was as young as I was and happy to make the extra money. So we did what Sandy suggested.
The