The seeds of hurt were planted young in Piper Laurie. It began with a birthday party in The Bronx when she was only six. Piper- Rosetta Jacobs then- arrived with her present, ate her cake and ice cream, and then joined in a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Blindfolded, clutching the paper tail, she began to walk toward the wall. She stopped, held out her arm and aimed. At that moment a little girl with a raucous little voice shouted, "Oh look at Rosetta. She thinks she's so pretty with that red hair of hers. She thinks she's going to be an actress. But look at how dumb she is. She's pinning the tail right on the donkey's nose. Heeeee. Heeeeeeee."
And the laughter of the other children brought huge tears to Rosetta Jacobs' eyes. "....I was painfully shy as a child." Piper Laurie recalls. "I was always pretty much of an outsider. My red hair used to embarrass me- most other kids were blondes or brunettes. I wore braces on my teeth and I was plump. I wanted more than anything to get away someday, to live in another world. A pretty world. A world of make-believe. Of acting."
Piper got the opportunity when, at 16, she arrived in Hollywood. She'd been screen-tested in New York, rejected by one studio- Warner's, accepted by another- Universal-Internatiional. She was far away from the Bronx and braces and jeers and dresses that didn't fit because she was plump. Almost immediately they put her in a picture- Louisa. The script was weak, but the cast was excellent. There was Ronald Reagan and Ruth Hussey. Charles Coburn, Spring Byington and Edmund Gwenn. They shot a dinner scene one day. The script called for Mr. Gwenn to toss a salad and midway through the tossing- as if by whim- to reach into a vase for a marigold and toss that, too, into the salad. A press agent, who happened to be on the set that day, noticed that when Piper tood a taste of the salad, she giggled. The press agent- a thinking type- got out his pencil and pad and made note of this.
"Two days later I picked up one of the trade papers and saw an article- nearly a column long- listing all the different types of wild and crazy edible flowers. The article ended with the notation that 'Piper Laurie, new U-I starlet, eats 'em all and loves em.' I stared at that last sentense. She does? I thought."
And so it began. The press-agentry-bit that started out so cute- you rarely saw a picture of Piper where she wasn't nibbling at some king of posey- and that ended only when Piper called a halt to the whole publicity garden business. She'd had it, wanted no more of it.
Louisa, weak-plotted or not, made money. And over the next few years there were more movies for Piper- lots more. Technicolored Ali Baba-type movies, one after the other. And so Pipere Laurie grew- in a way.
"I'll be honest with you. I treasure compliments. Of course, we always remember the insults- there are more of them, I suppose. But the compliments are important. I remember one day, back in the earlier days, when a gentlemen in the business came up to me on the set and said something constructive and nice about my work. That compliment, plus the fact that I knew at this time I was important- commercially, at least- to the studio, gave me an articulation I hadn't previously possessed. So from time to time now I'd complain to the bosses. 'Why,' I'd ask, 'do you continue to give the few important female roles to outside actresses when you've got me right here on the lot? I'm capable. I'm anxious to try for something better.' Of course they were all businessmen, and they had their reasons, their answers. All of which I heard; some of which I understood. But time was flying. Oh, time passes very quickly, even when you're in your teens. One day- in fact, the day after my contract was renewed and I was given a substantial raise- I walked into that front office one last time and I said that I was quitting the studio. "'Reconsider, or you may be sorry,' they said. I said 'No,' and that was that." That easily her years of playing empty, mindless heroines came to an end.
"I remember that night sitting alone in the living room with its magnificent view of the ocean. Everything was so lovely, and plush- and lazy. I remember wondering if somehow the laziness of it all wasn't rubbing off on me, too. Perhaps I wasn't trying hard enough. Maybe Hollywood wasn't even the place to try. Suddenly I thought of New York. There was the theater there, and live television. I knew it wouldn't be easy getting into either field, but I thought if there was anything to be salvaged of Rosetta Jacobs, the kid who wanted to be an actress, Piper Laurie would have to risk something. That night I decided to come to New York.
And it was tough. "Piper Laurie? God knows what would happen if we put her in live TV!" "Piper Laurie? Oh, wouldn't that look just grand on a Broadway marquee!"
But the rejections only made her try harder. After a while Piper got an offer to do a TV show- live- and she proved that at least she could remember lines and follow direction. And more. There were a few more TV shows, then one more picture, Until They Sail, in Hollywood- this time for MGM.
And Piper figured that now she was ready to try the theater. "I thought it would be so easy now. But I was really terrified at first. I remember standing in the middle of an empty stage..." Somewhere in the darkened theater sat the two producers of the play Maiden Voyage. She look down at the script she was holding, and began to read. "Louder, Miss Laurie." She smiled at the darkness, then looked down at her script again and tried to raise her voice. "Miss Laurie. We can't hear you." The script fell from her hands, and she turned and ran off the stage. "But I braced myself," Piper smiled. "And I studied. Studied hard. I kept on trying." Several months later Piper read for a second play. And this time they'd heard her. They'd been impressed, impressed enough to tell her that the part was practically hers. The playwright would have the final say, and they were sure he'd give his okay. She went back the next day, and read for the playwright. Later, over coffee, he told her he was sorry, but he didn't think she'd do. "Please tell me shy," Piper pleaded. "All right," he said finally. "I'm proud of this play. I think it's going to win a Pulitzer Prize for me, but I don't think it stands any chance of winning a prize with a name like Piper Laurie in it." "I see," she said, very softly.
There was a third play. "And I was perfect for it. And I made research trips to Mexico for it. For almost six months I thought of nothing else, dreamed of nothing else. I came to New York and we started rehearsing , and on the third day my agent called and said I'd been fired. I thought it was a gag, a trick. In those three days I knew that I worked as well as I had ever worked. But it was no gag. But something good did come out of all this. When he heard that I'd been fired, my leading man in the play talked to a television director he knew who was looking for a girl to play the lead in his play. 'Why don't you try Piper?' my actor friend suggested. The director tried me, and I was hired. The name of the play was The Days of Wine and Roses." And the reviews the next morning were ecstatic.
"After that I had a few pretty ood offers from Hollywood, 'Come hoe,' they kind of said to me. But I liked New York too much by this time. Besides, there was a little play writted by Molly Kazan called Rosemary- which I wanted to do. It was to be done off-Broadway, and I was honored when Mrs. Kazan said she wanted me in it." And for the girl who chose to remain in New York and become a Hollywood has-been, this play was the great opportunity that would change her life0 and lead to her first Oscar nomination.
One night, a few minutes before a performance of Rosemary, Piper's agane went backstage to tell her that producer-director Robert Rossen, would be out front that night. "I hear," the agent told her, "he's about to start a movie called The Hustler. Paul Newman's already signed for the male lead. They're looking for a girl." Following the performance, Mr. Rossen went to Piper's dressing room He told her that he was sending her a movie script to read the next morning. "Let me know if you'd like to do it," he'd said. "I read the script and I knew immediately that I wanted to do it," she told me.
A few months after the picture was completed, before her nomination, a young reporter from the New York Herald Tribune dropped by her apartment for an interview. That night, after he'd finished his story, Morgenstern told a fiend about the interview that day. "You know," he said, "some day maybe I'll give her a call and see if she wants to go walking through the park with me."
Early one evening a few weeks later, on an impulse Joe Morgenstern phoned Piper, asked her if she'd like to take a walk and then go somewhere for some dinner. The date turned out to be great fun. Soon, they were in love. And one night Joe Morgenstern asked Piper to marry him. The wedding took place in Los Angeles at the home of Piper's sister, Sherrye, last January 21, the day before her 30th birthday.
"Our honeymoon was lovely. We went to Europe and North Africa. It was all thrilling except for that day in Marrakesh. A fabled city, but one of such poverty and disease. Joe and I were standing in the middle of one of the squares. And we found ourselves giving money to a native. Before we knew it we were being mobbed from all sides. So many people- children, old people- holding out their hands for money, too. Joe and I were separated by this push. It was terrifying. I thought we were going to be killed. But suddenly I knew what to do. And even though I couldn't speak their language I shouted out something that brought them to a stop. Just the sound of my voice made them stop. I tell you this because before, when we talked about my early days in Hollywood, I was wondering if there was anything really good I can say about it. I must have gotten something good out of it all. Then I remembered Marrakesh, and what had happened. I thought how I had known what to do because I had been trained with crowds by my old studio when I was sent out on public relation tours.
"I guess the old saying is true, that there is some good even in bad....Those old days. I seem to talk about them a lot. But the truth is that they are past, and that the present is important. My marriage is the most important thing in my life today. Of course, my career is still important. I was very happy to be nominated for an Academy Award, though I didn't think it would change my life or my work. After my nomination I got a letter from my sister. She said" 'We don't care if you win or lose. The nomination is just as good as an Oscar.' And it is. A year ago I might have felt differently about this. Maybe even a little desperate to win, but today my sense of values has changed. I waited all my life for a man like Joe to come along- now he and my marriage are most important to me. And everything around it, I find by comparison, is now slightly dwarfed....
--BY ED DE BLASIO

The article is accompanied by a page and a half b&w photo of PL in a long white sweater, standing in building rubble- Hollywood mistreated her. Broadway laughed at her. Still Piper Laurie went on to win an Oscar nomination; A sixth page b&w closeup photo of PL leaning her head on the trunk of a tree- The Piper of today is a long way from the little girl who cried when friends made fun of her; A quarter page b&w photo of PL standing behind a dressmaker's dummy; A six page b&w photo of Joe Morgenstern rowing a boat with PL besides him- Piper loves everything about living in New York. And it's such fun to go boating in Central Park with hubby, Joe Morgenstern.