atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business by Peggy Pope Page A

dial, dial… “Here, write this down,” or “I’m sending so-and-so over to see you.” Her door was always open. She was a friend of Josh Logan’s from the old days when he, Henry Fonda, and Jimmy Stewart were first starting out and would call on her and sit around her office. She knew everybody and had seen everything. She said to me, “Just remember: There is no loyalty in the theater.” I didn’t know what to make of that, and I never asked her what she meant by it because I thought it would be prying.
    It had been so easy. I’d read five lines for Logan, and he’d said, “Oh, she’s fine. Would you dye your hair blonde?”
    “Yes,” I said, unaware that the experience I was to have would nearly destroy my nervous system.
    I called my mother. “Mom, I got a job!”
    “That’s wonderful. Congratulations! Tell me about it.”
    “It’s in the road company of Mr. Roberts!”
    “Don’t they send road companies out in the fall?”
    “I’m going to replace the actress playing the nurse, the only woman in a cast of thirty-five men.”
    “Why is she leaving?”
    “She’s pregnant.”
    I could hear my mom gasp over the phone “Oh, she’s married,” I said, “to the leading man, and she’s going home to have the baby. It’s all right.”
    “It is?” It was a little hard to hear her.
    So that was it. I would be making $112.50 a week, of which Sara Enright would get $11.25. With this job, I became a member of Actors’ Equity, the union that would protect me from ever being stranded on the road.
    I got on a train that wended its way for two and a half days across this beautiful country I’d never seen. I was fascinated by the space of it. Looking out the window from my berth in the middle of the night, with the moon lighting up the prairies, the forests, the amber waves of grain, was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. I was working!
    When I got to the marble-and-Italian-tile station in LA, the stage manager was waiting for me. He was a stocky guy with curly, dark hair and swarthy, pockmarked skin. He wore thick, black-rimmed glasses that magnified his eyes and a buttoned-up yellow shirt that said “Harrah’s” above the pocket.
    “That’s a nice shirt,” I said.
    “Yeah, I got it in Reno,” he said.
    “What are the hurrahs for?” I accented the second syllable. “Did you win something?”
    “It’s a hotel with a casino. It’s called Harrah’s.” He accented the first syllable. He had bad teeth that separated in the middle of the top row. After a long look at me, he said in a nasal voice with a New York accent, “Well, Peggy Pope, I understand you’ve never done anything. But we’ll keep that between us. We won’t tell anybody, will we?”
    It was a crusher. I didn’t like him immediately, and it turned out nobody else did either. His main focus during the tour was furnishing his apartment back home by sneaking hotel furniture onto the scenery trucks. He collected monogrammed towels and washcloths as well, which he asked the wardrobe mistress to sew together into a bathrobe for him.
    As a stage manager, he was in charge of directing replacements. He told me where the laughs were in the scene and that I probably wouldn’t get them all at first. He also told me about what he remembered hearing during rehearsals in New York, which wasn’t much, and of course, the blocking, which, luckily, he had written down.
    He was happy when we played musical houses because the union required musicians even if they weren’t used. He always ordered twelve bazooka players. A bazooka is a comical horn consisting of two gas pipes and a whiskey funnel that sounds like a kazoo. It didn’t matter where we were. We could be in the middle of Kansas, and the players would show up. Quiet and unassuming, they were very nice guys. They hung out in the alley and came into the theater only when it rained. Then they’d go in under the stage and play poker. I thought it would have been