NEW YORK- Terrible-tempered Tammy Grimes has been known to hit or bite her fellow actors even though it's not in the script...to bark unexpectedly at them...and she confesses that she constantly dreams of telling some inattentive audience to leave immediately and go to a movie. Tammy takes her acting seriously and wants everybody else to do the same.
"Perhaps the first three rows have heard me rant because I do talk a lot," Tammy said the other afternoon, sitting in a white nightgown in bed in her dressing room a the Winter Garden where she's given 400 performances of 'The Unsinkable Molly Brown.' "One gentlemen in the cast had a hard time one night trying to keep his eyes open," she said. "Now he has nothing to say in the play and it could be a bit of a bore. Still, I don't think it would be nice of him to go to sleep. I said to him 'Just don't you go to sleep! DON"T YOU GO TO SLEEP!' He was pretty surprised.
"Then there's a woman in the cast who has no lines and one night she gave herself a line. She said, 'What are you doin' honey?' I said 'WHAT DID YOU SAY?' She went bloomph.
Tammy has made up in her own mind in great detail the speech she would like to make to an occasional Friday night audience. "Ladies and gentlemen," she can hear herself saying, "just because you paid $11.10 for your seats, the fact is I didn't invite you here. You came on your own. No actor has ever done anything for money and it doesn't matter wheter you paid $11 or $500. The fact is you're a bad audience. Just do everybody a favor and leave. Go and see 'Spartacus'- it's a good movie. Wait, I'm going with you."
Tammy claims there's a precedent for this sort of thing- that Frederic March once objected to a man in the third row snoring and called an usher to remove the snorer. And that actor Robert Newton and a fellow performer once went to a pub between acts, in their disgust at the audience, and came on stage reeling later. When the audience started throwing things at Newton, he hiccuped at them, "Wait'll you see my colleague!"
"Yet," Tammy said, "you as the actor are greatly responsible for that audience's behavior and you listen to it as much as you listen to the other actors. You are aware of that great mass out there that you can't really see but you can feel. They are like one enormous person. Sometimes it isn't as much the laughs, but the quiet! If there's that stillness, you know they are listening and that they care."
Tammy says that one reason she never makes the Angry Young Woman speech, "Because you remember there are always two or three or four in that great black mass who have waited for months, who are listening to every word, who are intent on seeing this show..."