Read (My Travels with) Agnes Moorehead – The Lavender Lady for Free Online Page A

my trade, including how to ride English, Western and sidesaddle. Next season, incidentally, “she added, “horseback riding will be added to our curriculum.”
    The students were enraptured by her. They popped questions. There were interchanges. They asked, she answered quickly, back and forth. She went on, “When I was with the Mercury Players, we did thousands and thousands of radio plays, sometimes six a day. When we weren’t doing radio, we were doing stage and when we weren’t doing stage, we were doing radio.” She informed us in cadence, ‘But we were always working. I lecture in schools around the country now and they sometimes ask who discovered me.” Scorn saturated her voice. “No one discovered me, “she snarled. And I believed her. “I was never discovered. I just climbed and climbed and climbed until I made it and that’s true for anyone in this great country of ours. If you have the talent and you want it badly enough, you can make it if you work. That is if you work. Remember, drudge, drudge.”
    Oh how she relished talking about herself and her work. I’m sure she would have run the school free of charge if she could have. I loved every moment of it. It was my mother again. All my mother ever knew was work. I’ve a therapist now who’s working on the mother aspect of myself, so I tied into the “drudge” right away and I just loved it because my mother just said, basically, “Do it or I’ll knock you on your ass.” But Agnes was giving explanations and they made sense. “There’s no time for social life in this business and what time you have you must rest to keep up your energy and your health.” Her arm rose in the proclamation and an accusation. “Acting takes the energy of an Amazon and yet you must be willing and able to do this and not fall by the wayside.” Her arm fell and her voice turned more matter-of-fact though that simple, riveting intensity was lightning as always beneath her every word. “There were 350 students in my class at the Academy of Dramatic Arts, “she related. “Only two of us are still in the business, myself and Rosalind Russell. The rest fell by the wayside.” She paused for effect. Then a sentence between her pause, “They wouldn’t starve.”
    A rumbling growl shook her throat. She’d tend to get a little heavy-handed. I couldn’t take my eyes off her and, believe me; every student in the room had their eyes fixed on her. “It’s a terribly discouraging business, a sorrowful business, a critical business,” she went on, more mellow. “You’re up there and the people can take the skin off you bit by bit and enjoy it. If you get anywhere in it, there’s a strange kind of human tendency to tear you down. I don’t know what it is. I really don’t know what it is. Pictures,” she reflected, “pictures. I’ve been at least thirty-five years on the road. If they get four pictures, they print the worst. Tell me, why do they do that?” Sometimes I thought she was talking more to herself than to the class. “I don’t know what the psychology of it is. I think I’m going to ask an analyst.’ She didn’t believe in analysis which I found out later to my pain. “If they take pictures of the President, the ones they use make him look like an ogre.” She distorted her mouth ogre-ishly. Everyone laughed. She laughed with us. It was wonderful. It was like watching a great show that was worth anything for the price of admission.
    The only way to fight it is to keep on developing and maturing and being sincere in your work and just go right on whether audiences or critics are taking your scalp or not. We live in a cruel world and you must have the courage of a colonel on a firing line and the hide of an alligator. My father taught me to have courage and a fighting spirit and I am grateful to him for that.”
    This strong, staunch spirit of Agnes Moorehead was very attractive to men and women despite the fact that she was no beauty and her figure