In the spring of 1962, while touring the United States and Canada with the road company of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Tammy Grimes kept a diary. One entry, a recollection of her experience set forth under the rubric, "What To Take on the Road," reads as follows: At the Beginning: Eight new Chanel suits, gold jewelry, plain black dresses, 20 pairs of shoes, large cashmere sweaters. Be humble, naive, friendly, shy, smiling....Middle of Tour: Change shy smile to broad grin and laugh at practically anything. Buy Italian slacks, two mink coats, lots of pearls. Charge everything. Evade lawyers. Think spring....Almost End of Tour: Don't smile at all. Cary a Colt .44 and shoot at anyone. Buy 10 bikinis; arrange for blood transfusions, oxygen tanks, wigs, fast cars to make fast getaways, a leading man who can charter planes and fly in blizzards. Assume Garbo-type privacy. Look worn out but brave. Think seriously of becoming the last of the big-time spenders.
Now safely returned from the road, her nerves restored and her wardrobe considerably enlarged. Miss grimes reappears this week on Broadway in High Spirits, a musical adaption of Noel Coward's comedy, Blithe Spirit. She plays the part of Elvira, a whimsical ghost who drifts through drawing-room windows and unsettles the lives of suburban people accustomed to orderly flower arrangements and five-o'clock tea. Her arrival onstage, by means of a wire trapeze, moves the appalled leading man to inquire, in a thin and strangled voice, "You are here, aren't you? You are not an illusion?" To which Elvira replies, "I may be an illusion, but I am most definitely here."
As the random observations in her diary suggest, that answer may be a partial key to the elusive Miss Grimes. Her friends and colleagues, all baffled by her attitudes, agree only on words, like "unique," "contradictory." "original." her house on East 51st Street in New York reveals a distaste for anything somber or dull. The front door is painted pea green, in loud contrast to the lackluster doors of the other houses on the block. The wide and high-ceilinged room that occupies the entire second floor glitters with mirrors and old chandeliers. A pumpkin-colored sofa backs against a wall decorated with a painting of blue parakeets twittering in a tropical forest. The polished floors are covered with white fur rugs- "sheep or goat or something." Miss Grimes said, "it was all explained to me once." On the mantlepiece stand photographs in gilded or velvet frames, of Christopher Plummer, her ex-husband; Noel Coward, who launched her on Broadway; and her daughter Amanda, who is six and paints pictures of green flowers.
In this room, over a recent period of three weeks, usually after nine P.M. and always with music playing on the phonograph, Miss Grimes talked of her life and times. Her voice, which a trembling critic one compared to the sound of a key hurrying in a boudoir lock, is low and breathy, but with a hardness that prevents it from seeming childish. She speaks with exaggerated gestures, in an accent of her own creation that is part Scots, part Cockney English and part New York finishing school. Her clothes, like her conversation, incline toward elegance. One evening she wore a peignoir of white silk, an emerald ring and wool athletic socks. On other occasions she appeared in an old sweater over a Pucci dress, a Chanel suit and something made mostly of marabou. Her offers of food and drink, equally miscellaneous, included caviar sandwiches, a butterscotch sundae, champagne, pastrami on rye, oysters, hot milk, dry toast, and beef boullion.
Listening one night to a record of a mournful cowboy singing a tune called Abilene, she pointed her cigarette holder at the loudspeaker in the bookcase while her other hand strayed through her blond hair. "Every man ought to be like that," she said. "He ought to have a song and a guitar, and he ought to be very romantic and philosophical." But then, after a brief pause, speaking in a lower register and with a sly look in her green eyes, she said, "He also ought to have a million dollars." A mercurial young woman, given to sudden changes of mood, Miss Grimes sometimes seemed frail and wistful, like a little girl lost in the park. "I spend a lot of time looking at beautiful things", she said "especially at the faces of old men or young faces running out of school; they both have a secret; they know something I don't know." At other times she could be sardonic. "You can be a star," she said, "and you can go out in a white mink coat, and your entrance can still be a bomb." Most often, however, she was gay. In the midst of a long soliloquay on the color blue, she remarked, "Life is far too fleeting a thing to be too serious for too long."
She knew she was an actress by the time she was 12, the year her classmates voted her, "the most picturesque young lady ever to enroll" at the Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, Mass. Already her face was slightly too narrow, her chin too long, her voice too low. When she appeared on the school stage as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria in Victoria Regina, the audience laughed. "If you're born an overstatement," she said, "and the world sees you as one you might as well play it that way...I've always seen myself through other people's eyes, a mirror for the audience."
She was the second of three children born to Luther Grimes of Lynn, Mass. Her father managed The Country Club at Brookline. Her older sister, Nancy, now married and living in Marblehead, Mass., said that even as child "Tammy never looked like anybody else, never talked like anybody else, never thought like anybody else." After boarding school Miss Grimes went ot Stephens Junior College in Columbia, Mo., a college known for its reperatory theater. She acted in a new play every three weeks and learned the rudiments of her profession. She next played summer stock. Once while serving as an apprentice in the box office at the Westport Playhouse in Connecticut, she gave away tickets worth $500 and was forthwith assigned to paint scenery. In 1955 she came to the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. She first rented an apartment on East 61st Street, in a brownstone house adjoining the house in which Roddy McDowall then lived. If Miss Grimes baked gingerbread, as she occasionally did on Sunday afternoon, she would pass half of it across to McDowall, lifting it between their windows on the end of a broom. McDowall, who addresses her as "Tam Pot" or "Grimes". says "She live on the tilt, half on the earh and half somewhere between the earth and the sky." Not wishing to leave the impression that Miss Grimes is a vague sort of person, however, McDowall added, "She can be very practical- I mean, nobody takes advantage of her.: .
He remembered that once in the company of other actors at a restaurant, Miss Grimes, in an exuberant mood, tossed a glass over her shoulder. A man sitting at the next table took it upon himself to admonish her. "You actresses," he siad, "always think you can do what you please, carrying on like riffraff." Miss Grimes apologized. On his way out of the restaurant, the man came over again and started to repeat his lecture. Miss Grimes stood up and slapped him in the face.
Among the other people that Miss Grimes met that first year in New York were the Burtons, Richard and Sybil. Richard was impressed by her talent. "There was--and is--no one like her," he said. "I long to act with her." Sybil was struck by Miss Grimes's childlike admiration for people who could do something well. "Tammy worships talent," she said, "almost like a teen-age girl eating an ice-cream sandwich and listening to her favorite records."
One of the talents Tammy idolized was Marlon Brando--as an impressionable girl, she sat through Brando's Viva Zapato 13 times during a weekend in Missouri. Like all serious young actresses in the middle 1950's, Miss Grimes went out with Brando. On a Wednesday afternoon in March, 1955, Brando, who had been driving her around town on the back of his motorcylce, dropper her off at a Broadway theater to see a play called The Dark Is Light Enough. By the end of the first act she had fallen in love with one of the performers, Christopher Plummer. Miss Grimes married him the following summer and divorced him four years later. After the first few months of marraige they hardly spoke, nodding politely to each other if they happened to pass on the stairs of their apartments in Greenwich Village. "An F. Scott Fitzgerald sort of thing." Miss Grimes now says.
She ended the marriage with a telephone call late one night to the studio where Plummer was filming a TV play. She instructed the stage manager to inform her husband that his clothes had been forwarded to the Algonquin Hotel, where she had reserved a suite for him, complete with flowers and champagne.
Her own rise to fame began shortly thereafter. She acted in off-broadway plays, appeared in several TV shows and played the part of Moll in the late Marc Blitzsteins operas, The Cradle Will Rock. Eventually Noel Coward found her singing in a cabaret and thought her a "naughty girl...with such a wicked face." He offered her the lead in his adaption of a French farce called Look After Lulu. She welcomed the chance to escape from nightclubs. "It's like standing naked in a group of strangers," she said. "You can see them in a club, see them light a cigarette or take a drink. But on stage, you're safe, because of the distance. The proscenium arch is like a great downy quilt in the cold."
Although Look After Lulu closed within five weeks, Miss Grimes had arrived on Broadway. Her subsequent performance in the musical The UnSinkable Molly Brown established her as a star. The drama critics called her "enchanting" and "irrestible" "Success" said Miss Grimes "is like air, like something you breathe, like champagne, like a compliment from someone you don't know very well." Dory Schary, the producer of Molly Brown, called--and still calls--Miss Grimes schmatah, a Yiddish word meaning rag. "You know", he said, "like a mop." Although he was awed by her talent, he remembers that he was horrified by her extravagance. "She used to come to rehearsal," he said, "wearing some little suit that you suddenly found out cost $900."
Which is also characteristic of Miss Grimes. She likes to buy things. On dreary afternoons, in hopes of improving her mood, she drives to shops in a hired limousine, ordering paintings, picture frames, velvet pillows, white damask chairs, crystal glasses and, most particularly, clothes. As yet she has managed to resist her temptation toward a sable coat. "If I buy a sable coat," she points out, "then what could I look forward to? The only thing left would be to buy another sable coat."
When department stores cease to divert her, and if she finds herself unoccupied with a play or a television show, she travels. When she is out of town, she sends postcards signed with any name that comes into her head; for example, "honey bunch," "antique"- she was feeling old one day in Rome, or "Paul Revere." From Paris, having seen the new collections of clothes, she dispatched the following bulletin to her press agent: "There is a lot of marabou."
Whenever possible Miss Grimes travels with her daughter. Last summer she and Amanda went to Disneyland and then to the beach at Malibu for two months. Amanda collected seashells, and her mother tried to paint a landscape of the sand, sea and sky. "I wanted to get the feeling of primary colors," she said, "but it turned out like an Australian flag."
But despite the seeming disorder of her affairs, despite her irregular hours and unorthodox point of view, Miss Grimes life remains wonderfully uncomplicated. Her purpose is clear: The theater and her own ambition take precedence over anything else. Although that is the stuff that fine actresses are made of, even blithe spirits give way to occasional doubts. In a mood of vague melancholy, at about two o'clock one cold morning, Miss Grimes, looking small and fragile said, "People say to me, 'You are like my first Christmas tree,' which is nice, but maybe not enough.
"You can be a star, somebody that everybody adores, but maybe only for a moment and not to live with. It gets a bit lonely at times, and perhaps all you have left in the end is a scrapbook filled with old newspaper clippings." but then, with that sly look again coming into her green eyes, and with a raspy music in her voice like pan pipes in an old play, she added, "All anybody has is once around the track, and if things get too bad, well, there are always far-off cities and cowboys with guitars, new clothes, music boxes and large funds of traveler's checks." THE END