Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [41]
Nothing was working, and time was running out, so they pulled a classic Hollywood maneuver: They wrote into the script that Tai Li had a Persian mother.
So with a cockamamie accent and not too oval eyes, I played the part of a Chinese mail-order bride (with a Persian mother) who turned out not to be the supplicant bride Hoss had hoped for, but, instead, a feisty revolutionary girl who was trying to unionize the Ponderosa.
Just as my character was becoming successful with her mission, Hoss was to pick me up angrily and throw me into a water trough. Dan Blocker weighed close to 300 pounds. He was huge. So when he threw my 98-pound body into that tiny, half-filled trough, I hit it with a thud. Tears poured down my face, but on film the splashing water hid them. So, thankfully, I didn’t have to do the scene again.
I took away three things from that experience: (1) a bad back, (2) the realization that I was not a stuntwoman, and (3) the lesson that you should always politely ask the director to try not to kill you.
Funny about my eyes. When I was a little girl, my grandma, the Lebanese one, would take me to the grocery store with her. The man behind the counter would always give her a piece of candy for “your granddaughter with the big brown eyes.” My grandmother would then spit on my head three times to shoo away the bad spirits who might have overheard him and be jealous.
When my agent sent me to meet the casting director for the detective series 77 Sunset Strip, the first thing she told me when I arrived was how beautiful my big, brown eyes were. I was, of course, pleased. Then the
director came in.
“Look at her eyes!” the casting woman said. “Aren’t they great?” The director heartily agreed, so now I was really pleased. Boy, I thought, my eyes are really going to do it for me.
I was given a part and I was ecstatic—I didn’t even have to read for them. The scene would take place in an operating room. The man lying on the table had a time-bomb planted in his stomach that was about to go off—it needed to be removed and defused in just seconds. I played the O.R. nurse and wore a surgical mask, so all you could see were my eyes. I was told to look from the patient to the clock at several intervals during the scene. Back and forth, forth and back, back and forth. The idea was that the ticking clock and my darting eyes would dramatically build the tension of the scene.
No wonder I didn’t have to read for them. They only needed a pair of big brown eyes. Had I known, I would have spit on my head, turned around three times and headed for the door.
But I had lots of little jobs like that in the early days. No one was really paying any attention to me at the factory-like William Morris Agency, except for my childhood pal Barry Diller. Barry had been a close friend of Terre’s since they were little kids, and was always at our house. He was family. So when he became the assistant to Marty Dubow, a big TV agent at William Morris, he also became my secret agent. Typically, assistants were only supposed to answer the phone. But Barry would sneak a peek at the casting breakdowns on his boss’s desk and get me an audition for whatever small roles were available on TV. I’d land a part, get paid $400, and you’d have thought we’d robbed a bank. We were like Mickey and Judy, putting on a show in the barn.
Shortly after that, I was sent out on a call to read for Elizabeth Ashley’s New York replacement in Neil Simon’s comedy hit Barefoot in the Park. A chance to work on Broadway! I was so excited—and I was ready. The role of Corie Bratter was just the kind of part I had been playing for