My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business_ A Memoir - Dick Van Dyke [37]
Maureen, cast as my mother despite being only six months older than I was, was an immensely talented actress who’d won a Tony Award in 1951 for starring in Tennessee Williams’s play The Rose Tattoo. But she was a bigger and more memorable character in real life than any she played onstage or in film. Brash and bawdy, she was quite open about having gotten into the business in the 1940s because of her lust for actor Joel McCrea. She was quite open about many of her urges.
She also had more phobias than any human being I had ever met in my life. She had never been on an airplane. She refused to get in an elevator. And when we left the studio for lunch, I had to hold her hand as we crossed Sunset Boulevard. She was too nervous to cross by herself.
Maureen walked around the set with a little paper sack. A little nip here and there kept her calm, though her calm occasionally turned quite boisterous and bawdy, depending on the amount she nipped. When the movie wrapped, George Sidney hosted a party at his house, a formal mansion in Beverly Hills. A butler greeted guests and servers and staff bustled inside and out. This was the first Hollywood party I had ever been to, and I was impressed. I half expected to run into royalty.
Instead, I ran into Maureen and Paul, who arrived together. They were already sloshed. Paul couldn’t face people unless he’d had a couple of drinks, and Maureen was hanging on to him, wearing a muumuu and pearls. Both looked like they were swaying in a strong wind—except there was nary a breeze. I lost them during the cocktail hour, but dinner starred Paul.
All of us sat at a long table in the dining room. After George Sidney thanked everyone for their contributions to the film, Paul leaned in holding his wineglass as if he were going to say something similar. He didn’t. He held on to the quiet until anticipation built, then he looked at the picture’s star.
“Ann-Margret,” he said, “I just want you to know that I’m the only one at this table who doesn’t want to screw you.”
George Sidney’s elderly and quite proper mother gasped. If this had been a movie, something would’ve popped out of her mouth for comedic effect. It was one of those unbelievably audacious moments that momentarily stops time. But it didn’t stop Paul. He couldn’t have cared less. This was his milieu. You could almost see the sparkle in his one-hundred-proof eyes as the wickedly funny one-liners lined up like cars waiting to go through a tollbooth.
Maureen toasted each one of his off-color remarks until she was quite toasted herself. It was out of control, and it didn’t get any less astonishing when we adjourned to the living room for after-dinner drinks. Maureen was still on her salad, which she carried with her and ate with toothpicks while sitting and sometimes half lying on the floor.
We all tried to act as if there wasn’t an elephant in the room. But that lasted only so long.
“Maureen,” I finally said, “wouldn’t you like to sit in a chair?”
“I’d tell you where I’d like to sit,” she said. “But your wife is here.”
I didn’t know how to respond. But I didn’t have to. A few minutes later, the maid suffered a heart attack. Paramedics arrived and treated her there on the living room floor where we’d been partying. By the time they took her to the hospital, Maureen was stark naked in the swimming pool, flailing around and calling for the rest of us to join her.
On the drive home, Margie and I laughed hysterically as we recounted all of the wild shenanigans. I wondered if all Hollywood parties were like that. Of course, they weren’t, and the movie’s actual premiere in early 1963 paled in comparison. Almost anything would.
For the premiere, though, Margie and I and Janet and her husband, Robert Brandt, hired a car to take us to the screening in Santa Barbara. We wanted to make it a fun night. But after the movie, Janet