professional instruction, and such lessons were not available in upstate New York. For those, Lucille would have to go to Manhattan, geographically six hundred miles and emotionally light-years away from the small-town life in Chautauqua County.
At the time, the Robert Minton–John Murray Anderson School of Drama on East Fifty-eighth Street in Manhattan was the most prominent institution of its kind, and one of the most demanding, financially as well as psychologically; in 1926 the tuition was $180 per five-month term for a playwriting course, $270 for scenic and costume design, $350 for drama lessons, $390 for musical comedy, and $500 for motion picture acting, a fee that included a screen test. The faculty and advisers included such luminaries as choreographer Martha Graham, composer Jerome Kern, actor Otis Skinner, writers Christopher Morley and Don Marquis—as well as the founders themselves. Anderson was a longtime producer of the hugely successful
Greenwich Village Follies,
and Minton had directed a number of breakthrough symbolic pieces, including the afterlife drama
Outward Bound
and the Russian allegory
He Who Gets Slapped.
DeDe cobbled together enough money for the first semester and persuaded some friends in Manhattan to board her daughter. This seemed too rare an opportunity to pass up. Lucille was to characterize herself at that time as “struck by the lightning of show business”—a flash that Johnny could not hope to outshine. He was philosophical about it; he drove his young inamorata to the station in Buffalo and saw her off on the train to New York. She carried a small valise full of clothing deemed proper for the city, $50 sewn into her underwear, and a passage she had copied from a Julius Tannen routine. The monologist had inspired her in upstate New York, and now he brought her luck in Manhattan. The other girls auditioned with stilted deliveries of Shakespearean verse. With her vaudeville turn, the fifteen-year-old from Jamestown gave the impression of originality and freshness. Alas, from that moment everything went downhill.
“Ridicule,” Lucille was to recall acrimoniously, “seemed to be part of the curriculum.” In an elocution class, Minton mocked his student for what he called her “midwestern” pronunciations of “wawter” and “hawrses.” She retreated into silence. Lucille hoped for a better time in dancing class, where she could let her legs do the talking. The pupil was promptly informed that she had “two left feet.” In another period the school might have carried her for a second term, until she acquired some polish and timing. But it was Lucille’s misfortune to be there at the same moment another young actress was making her mark. Bette Davis arrived as a powerhouse with more gifts than the rest of the pupils combined. Anderson questioned Lucille’s instructors, received negative reports from all of them, and sent a letter to DeDe informing her that she was only wasting her money. Little comfort came from the knowledge that her daughter was not alone: of an entering class of seventy, only twelve survived the first term. Lucille never forgave her teachers. “All I learned in drama school,” she claimed later, “was how to be frightened.”
Back in Jamestown Lucille tried to put a good face on her failure by dismissing the New York City experience as a waste of time, resuming the romance with Johnny, and throwing herself back into high school activities with a will. She became a football cheerleader, played center on the girls’ basketball team, ice-skated in the winter, and rode horseback in the spring. Most of her classmates were unaware of her humiliation in drama school; they knew only that Lucille had dared to skip town on her own. Years afterward, when Lucille had become a global celebrity, she was topic A for her former high school classmates. They vied with each other for the clearest memory of the young, hyperkinetic adolescent who seemed in perpetual
Stephen Graham Jones, Robert Marasco