Give Raggedy Ann a smear of mascara and a flying wedge of a nose, plus an accent that sound like pure Druid, and you have a faint approximation of Tammy Grimes. At times, the eyelashes are about as thick as the accent and, one supspects, about as genuine. As a personality, she is part Morgan le Fay, part Ichabod Crane. Her slang is mid-early-19th-century Cockney, and when pleased, she jumps up and down and up, emitting unintelligible squeals. Convincingly, if calculatingly, she conveys the idea that she is not of this world.
This sprite was born, not a Stonehenge, but in Massachusetts, and went to school in Missouri. She always wanted to be a comedienne. But she has turned out to be much more than just another funny dame. In the great Carole Lombard-Kay Kendall tradition, Tammy Grimes is that uniquity, a sexy clown, a comic in a Chanel gown. Noel Coward, a smuch as anyone else, discovered her. After playing small roles in everything from Shakespeare to Jean Anouilh, she was singing in a small New York club in 1959 when Coward heard her and put her, furbelowed all the way to her eyebrown-tangling bangs, in his musical Look After Lulu. Her big Broadway bash came 3 1/2 years ago as The Unsinkable Molly Brown, in which she strutted, stomped and glistered onstage for all but eight minutes of the Meridith Wilson musical. Molly Brown wasn't great, but Tammy Grimes was. Noel Coward scooped her up again for his new venture, High Spirits, due on Broadway this spring. It is the musical version of his delectabe 1941 hit, Blithe Spirit. Miss Grimes role? A kookie spook.
Every actress who likes to make an entrance (and that means every female thespian extant) will turn pale pistachio with envy over Tammy Grimes. She makes her entrance in High Spirits at the very top of the stage, about 20 feet up in the air. Then, according to the stage direction, "she flies in and slowly circles," eventually settling on the roof of the house she is coming to haunt. This airy locomotion comes about because Miss Grimes plays a ghost named Elvira Condomine, dead these seven years. (Actually, "it's considered vulgar to say 'dead' where I come from," she explains. The correct term is "passed over." Conjured up by a happy medium named Madame Arcati (Beatrice Lillie), Elvira comes back to haunt her former husband, Charles (Edward Woodward), and his current wife, Ruth (Louise Troy), and spends two acts proving that earth hath no fury like a spook scorned.
Elvira, it seems, had "passed over," via a heart attack caused by laughing too heartily at a BBC production of Parsifal. Not one to let go without a struggle, she tries to get Charles to pass over too. She monkeys with his car and succeeds only in killing his current wife. But all ends well, as ghost gets boy, and they all die happily ever after. With Coward's staging, and score and book by Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray, the result is one of the airiest, most haunting shows Broadway has seen in a long, long time.
"I was born bored," said Tammy Grimes, as she slithered down onto the coral-velvet couch in her drawing room, cradling her burgundy in a wine taster. She was wearing an ankle-lenght black-velvet Chanel gown, and an uncombed wig sat on her head. Strewn about, in her new Manhattan town house, were stacks of unhung pictures, mostly of Miss Grimes or by Miss Grimes or her daughter Amanda Michael. "Taxi drivers never say that they're bored," she added. "It's a luxury, luv. I'ts a marvelous state of being above it all. Life never moves quite fast enough. "Responsibility is a kinky word. It's like someone taking a ruler and tapping you with it. 'Right or wrong,' 'fair or unfair'--these are children's words. They don't make sense." Under lowred lids, she fixed eyes on herself in the mirror opposite. "I prefer to live externally. I am disorganized on the surface, but I am organized within." Then she started ruminating about her career. "I don't have a legitimate singing voice. I have an illegitimate voice. I don't think about the theater, any more than I think about how many fingers I have. It's fun and games. And luv-- just think of running away with all that money at the end of every week!" END

The article is accompanied by these black and white photos: 1. Two thirds page of Tammy in a large wicker chair wearing monkey fur and Maribou, holding a cigarette in her extended left hand, while her right hand gestures downwardly.- Maribou, monkey fur and Victorian are Grimes accoutrements at home. "Bloodygrand" is the actress's word for it all. 2. Quarter page of Tammy in multiple images in her role as Elvira, soaring and posing- Leotards, a harness covered by a nightgown, and high leather boots help Tammy Grimes get the felling of flying, ghost-style, during rehearsal. A doughty stagehand (who has two stand-ins) manipulates the rope that controls the wires that send her careening across the stage. 3. Quarter page of Tammy with back to camera, facing the director and a few other people in the front row of the theater- "No conventional flying poses, please, darling," Coward, center, beseeches. 4. Eighth page of High Spirits cast and producer- Stars Edward Woodward, Beatrice Lillie and Grimes heed Cowardly dicta. 5. Full page+ of Tammy with one arm on her knee, holding a cigarette, the other hand under her chin, grinning and talking to Noel Coward and producer Lester Osterman- "You use your body so beautifully," says director Noel Coward, right, as producer Lester Osterman looks on. "Lovely, darling. Absolutely ripping." 6. Half page vertical picture of Tammy holding daughter Amanda who has her hands over her face, under a full length portrait of Tammy- Under large sample of Grimesiana- a portrait by Rene Bouche'--the actress cuddles her child. 7. Sixteenth page of Tammy kissing her daughter's mouth, whose face is covered by her hair- Daughter Amanda is six and the product of Miss Grimes brief marriage to Canadian actor Christopher Plummer. 8. Quarter page of Amanda touching Tammy's nose, who is laughing. (see below)- Lesson time can also be fooling-around time. Here, "Manders" goes at mum, who finds that white mink makes a homey robe.