In her candle-scented dressing room at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway, Tammy Grimes is dabbing at ther actress's palette: spidery false lashes and powder, tiny pots of eye goo and lip gloss. As a coiffeur twists her hair into pin curls before burying it beneath a stagy gold wig, she sucks in her cheeks for a last-minute face check. Outside, the corridors echo with the tapping of heels as lacquered chorus girls line up for their cue. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," booms the backstage intercom. "Places please for Act One." Abruptly, Tammy crushes out a cigarette and jams both hands into her mouth, grappling with a wad of recalcitrant chewing gum. "Gawd," she groans, "wait!: Instantly recovering, she appraises her profile. "I'm going to work," she tells herself in a whisper.
Tammy's place of employment this season is the David Merrick musical 42nd Street, Broadway's brassiest hit. But ever since 1960, when she starred in The Unsinkable Molly Brown, walked off with her first Tony and secured her reputation as a gifted comedienne, she has never strayed far from the footlights. If her face is not instantly recognizable on TV, her foggy contralto is- hawking Revlon Moon Drops, Wamsutta sheets and the cards you shouldn't leave home without. Like a Lewis Carrol sampler, she is equal parts whimsical Alice, grinning Cheshire Cat and the maddest of hatters. "When you walk down the street with Tammy," says the 42nd Street cast colleague Joseph Bova, "she has a tendency to wander off and leave you in the middle of a construction." Agrees another member of the company, Carole Cook: "She's just a wee bit off the wall."
Undeniably, though, there is a shrewdness to the lady as well. Off stage, she is a carefully calibrated maelstrom of sweeping gestures, studied vagueness and theatrically mannered speech a la Bankhead. Beneath the veneer lurks a sophisticated woman who has worked steadily for 25 years in a fickle, brutalizing profession. She has survived two marriages- to actors Christopher Plummer and Jeremy Slate- and played over a plethora of professional mishaps. Nonetheless, Tammy observes, "To an actor, the safest place to be is onstage. People have to pay attention to you. But you have to be able to live without it," she adds, "to know who you are inside. You must never ask an audience for love. If you demand too much from them, you will be disappointed."
In a sense, her own career has come almost full circle. She is now back in the Winter Garden dressing room where she first really made it two decades ago in Molly Brown. "When I sit and look out the same window, I know I'm different now," she muses. "I'm enjoying this time in my life more than when I was a kid because I'm no longer frightened that people are expecting more than I have to give." But it, at 46, she is wiser and more secure as an actress, she has also lost some of her innocence. "I thought I was ready for success then because I had talent," she says, "I thought it would make me feel complete and keep me from getting hurt. It took me a long time to learn that success is not such a fabulous goal. It's like air- you can't get ahold of it."
Growing up, of course, Tammy never doubted that she was destined for stardom. One of three children of a Massachusetts hotel manager and his wife, she was raised in genteel Chestnut Hill, outside Boston, and recalls writing effusive letters to her idol, Gene Tierney. "I rebelled against the conformity of insulated WASP society," she says. "There was a sense of tradition, good manners and financial security, but there were few surprises. Part of me is drawn to that, and part of me finds it ultimately stifling."
Summering with her family at their New Hampshire farm, Tammy was the consummate performer, dressing up in discards she found in the attic and charging neighbors a dime to watch her jump from a hayloft. "She was definitely a ham," her father, Luther, remembers. "She's always announced that she was the star." After making her stage debut at Beaver Country Day School as a lady-in-waiting in Victoria Regina, she studied drama at Stephens College in Missouri, spent a summer apprenticing at the Westport (Conn.) Country Playhouse and arrived in Manhattan barely out of her teens. "I arrogantly thought I could be great, but time seemed to move so slowly."
Living on a $90 monthly allowance, Tammy studied with Sanford Meisner and made her New York debut in 1955 in Bus Stop. That same year she encountered Christopher Plummer, the Richard Burton of Canada. "He was starring in The Dark is Light Enough," she says. "I decided before the curtain came down that he was the man I would marry." "Before that could happen, she had to brazen her way backstage. She did, and the attraction was mutual. "It was very romantic," she ways. "We were swept away. He was like some Svengali." They lived together for more than a year, then were married in 1956. When Tammy became pregnant, she kept on working, touring in The Lark, with Julie Harris. "I played a mistress dressed in this very Empire gown, and as the months rolled by I became heavily endowed with bosom," she recalls. "When we opened in San Francisco I started a soliloquy in my one big scene and the audience started laughing. Well, I pressed on, growing absolutely furious. When I left the stage, the manager was doubled over. I said, 'What the hell is going on?' He looked straight at my bosom, and one of them had popped out. I left shortly after."
Tammy's only child, Amanda Plummer, was born in 1957 and named after one of the lead characters in Noel Coward's Private Lives- the same role, coincidentally, for which her mother later won her second Tony. "Manders was the nicest thing that ever happened to me, but I didn't spend enough time with her," reflects Tammy, who habituallly left her daughter with nannies. "I remember Mum often coming in late," says Amanda, now 23 and an actress in herself. "She wasn't like conventional mothers, but whenever I was with her I knew she loved me. Once I dressed up in one of her gold sequin dresses and spied on my mother and father kissing. That is my only memory of them together." Though Tammy's relationship with her daughter was strained during Amanda's adolescence, the two have grown closer and last year starred together in an off-Broadway production of Turgenev's A Month in the Country.
The Plummer marriage dissolved several months before Molly Brown. She reportedly alerted him to her divorce plans by moving his clothes out of their New York apartment and checking him into a suite at the Algonquin Hotel. She also sent flowers. "We were too young," says Tammy now, "both ambitious and impatient. Chris enjoyed being out late, and I wanted to stay home more." She ponders a moment, then breaks into a grin. "Now he's home a great deal, and I'm out a lot." Plummer lives with his third wife in Connecticut; Tammy is single and living alone in Manhattan.
After the separation, Tammy poured herself into her work. "I was called a kook," she remembers, "which I hated but probably deserved. I wore enormous sunglasses over heavily made-up eyes, clown-white makeup, platinum hair, tight sheath dresses and spiked heels. I looked like a Toulouse-Lautrec whore." Preparing for Molly Brown, she persuaded her friend Laurence Olivier to work on her looks for the role. "We sat for hours painting all kinds of faces," she remembers. "I put on the makeup, and Larry said, 'You have to decide. Do you want to be a character actress or just another pretty face?' I looked at him and said, 'Just another face.' I thought being beautiful was the most important thing in the world."
Following her success in Molly Brown, tammy was cast in Noel Coward's High Spirits. "It was the first time I'd been onstage when I didn't want to be there," she says. "I was 30. All the dreams I'd grown up with had come true, and still I wasn't happy. So I went to California to get away from the theater." In Los Angeles she met Jeremy Slate while shooting a pilot for The Tammy Grimes Show, an ABC sitcom later described as the $10 million dollar disaster." Her marriage to Slate was less costly but no more successful. "Jeremy was very American and sensual, but our relationship was a fiasco," says Tammy. "Neither of us really wanted to be married, but I was probably tired of being single. Afterward I kept looking around and seeing people enjoying their lives and I said, 'I want to do that too.'" Says Slate, who remembers her fondly: "Tammy is bright, headstrong and demanding. She knows exactly what she wants and how to deliver it. That makes her a fine performer and a difficult and very private person."
Returning to New York after a year, Tammy promptly went to work on a nightclub act and did her best not to look back. "The one good thing about being in a disaster," she reflects, "is that you get to the bottom very quickly. Then there is only one way to go- up." Over the years, she says, she had learned how to be independent. "I got into a lot of trouble after I left home because I was looking for someone to protect me," she says. "I found that nobody is going to come along and make life perfect." Still, she hasn't given up looking. "My life will be incomplete until I share it with one man," she admits, "I still enjoy a man who is tall, dark and beautifully proportioned, and actors are so appealing it's easy to fall in love with one. But I don't think that will happen again."
In the absence of a full-time beau, Tammy spends her days conversing with her cats, Teegy and the Peach, or planning intimate suppers for friends like Myrna Loy and the Jerry Orbachs in her East Side brownstone. Having exorcised her Toulouse-Lautrec tastes, she now posseses a cool eye for quality. Among her preferences: fresh flowers and crystal, Saint Laurent dresses, Cartier bracelets, Victorian antiques and impressionistic paintings. "Tammy marches to the beat of a different drummer," says author Winston (Better Times Than These) Groom. "She is constantly curious, not one of those bored socialites whose only expertise in life is ballroom dancing."
Still, her heart is in acting- forever. "I don't think I crave an audience," says Tammy, "but if I stopped, I would miss my work very, very much. It's a joy to walk down the street and have someone stick his head out of a cab and shout, 'Hey Tam, you're great.'" After each show she receives her admirers backstage, basking in the attention and compliments. Then she's off to a party, to Elaine's or to a midnight supper with Amanda. "The wonderful thing about being a stage actress is that there are no chronicles," says Tammy. "You only live in the memory of your audiences, and memories always get better and better." KRISTIN MCMURRAN

The article is accompanied by a full page black and white photo of Tammy seated at a makeup table with a glass of wine at her lips; Tenth page black and white photo of Tammy in a scene from 42nd Street- "Watching her is an adventure," marvels 42nd street hoofer Lee Roy Reams (above). "I get this shivering feeling before I go on," says Tammy (in the wings at right), who plays a fading actress desparate for a comeback. "It's like being a race horse before it springs from the gate."; Ninth page black and white photo of Tammy holding baby Amanda while Christopher Plummer smiles at her- Grimes doesn't regret marrying Christopher Plummer "because I have this marvelous creature called Amanda."'; Ninth page black and white photo of Tammy and Rex Harrison- Twenty years ago Tammy considered wedding Rex Harrison (below), "but I was ambitious and afraid to lose my freedom."; Ninth page black and white photo of Jeremy Slate and Tammy being married- Tammy's 1966 marriage to Jeremy Slate was short-lived. He blames its collapse on pressures connected with her TV series, aborted aftere four weeks.; Fifth page black and white 1980 photo of Amanda and Tammy seated on a bed, while Amanda looks intently at Tammy- "Beneath the glamor, there is a child that is yearning. She is such an innocent," says Amanda of "Mum."; Half page black and white photo of Tammy in her apartment surronded by her artwork and antiques, with a cat laying on a luxurious rug- "Acting is like a cloak," observes Grimes at home with Teegy and her Rene Bouche' portrait. "The work keeps you warm."