The Theater: The Trouper

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When she was a little girl in Philadelphia, Shirley Booth invented a game called “Talking Balkan” that she played on streetcars. Shirley would jump on ahead of her mother and race to the front of the car. When her mother took a seat, Shirley would come dashing back, babbling ecstatically in a homemade, foreign-sounding tongue. The game had everything a fledgling actress could want. There was a captive audience of nice, admiring old ladies (“What an enchanting child!”). There was a touch of mystery (“What language is she speaking?”), a touch of pathos (“Look how sweet she is to her poor, dear mother”) and—Shirley fervently hoped—a big helping of romance (“Maybe she’s a princess in exile!”).

In playing her game, Shirley was also practicing the two rules that still guide her career: 1) “Actors should be overheard, not listened to,” and 2) “The audience is 50% of the performance.” Shirley Booth without an audience is as improbable as an Easter Parade without hats. She prefers to do her stuff before rapt thousands, but will give just as intense a performance for an audience of one. Her first husband, Radio Comedian Ed Gardner, says that Shirley is always acting, on stage and off: “She sincerely believes in her self-cast roles. One day she would be a grande dame nobly giving me my freedom; the next, a contented little housewife singing in her kitchen.”

Dead in Syracuse. Her very passion for audiences (“They tell me what to do”) may have kept her so long from the spectacular success recently thrust upon her. If a play she was in closed on Broadway, Shirley was too restless to stay in town furthering her career by haunting producers’ offices or being seen at smart cafes. Instead, she would hop a train, join the cast of one or another stock company. While less talented actresses might rocket overnight’ to Broadway fame, Shirley was knocking them dead in Louisville or Syracuse. She was starred in the sticks, but her Broadway roles became a long succession of supporting parts. The critics were invariably kind (never in her life has Shirley had a bad review), yet she seemed to be going nowhere. She twice left the stage to become a homemaker; she deserted it for radio. No one, least of all Shirley, ever expected to see her name alone in lights.

Then in 1950, co-starring with Sidney Blackmer, Shirley arrived unheralded on Broadway in Come Back, Little Sheba. One of the last plays of that season, Sheba was written by an unknown playwright, William Inge, and staged by an unknown director, Daniel Mann. As Lola, the slatternly housewife who drives her reformed alcoholic husband back to the bottle, Shirley won her usual raves from the critics: “Splendidly played” . . . “One of the true acting achievements of the season” . . .

“Pitiless and overwhelming . . .” Yet, as a play, Sheba was not a success. It ran only 90 performances, far below par in a year containing such hit, such hits as The Happy Time, Guys and Dolls, Call Me Madam, The Member of the Wedding and The Cocktail Party. But Shirley’s Lola had a haunting effect on playgoers that lasted beyond the fall of the final curtain. Shirley captured every acting award in sight (New York Drama Critics’ Circle, Antoinette Perry, Newspaper Guild, Donaldson, Barter). In the movie version of Sheba, she broke all precedents by winning the coveted Academy Award Oscar on her very first Hollywood try. The judges at this year’s Cannes International Film Festival wrapped it up neatly by simply calling Shirley “the world’s best actress.”

Highest in History. This week on an 8,560-ft. mountainside in Colorado, Shirley is spinning the same theatrical magic that has made her beloved in the canyons of Manhattan. Drama-minded Coloradans and vacationers from every part of the U.S. are crowding the 75-year-old Central City Opera House to applaud Shirley Booth in her most recent Broadway hit, Arthur Laurents’ The Time of the Cuckoo, the story of a virginal business girl named Leona Samish, who trips over her own moral standards on an Italian vacation.

The advance sale for the play was the biggest in Central City’s history, topping even such box-office attractions as Helen Hayes. Mae West and Katharine Cornell. Shirley’s 12½% of the gross equals the highest salary ever paid a star in the “summer theater capital of the U.S.” This fall she goes to Hollywood to make her second movie. Viña Delmar’s About Mrs. Leslie, the story of an amiable boardinghouse landlady. Then she will rush back to Broadway for rehearsals of a new musical, By the Beautiful Sea, which is being written to order for her by Herbert and Dorothy (Annie Get Your Gun) Fields. After more than a quarter-century as a second-stringer in the theater, Shirley Booth is now the hottest thing in show business. She is suddenly the first lady of the American stage and screen.

Why did it take so long? Theater people say it has been an open secret for years that Shirley is loaded with talent. Radio Agent Bill McCaffrey calls her “an actor’s actress. What she does looks simple to the public. Only actors know how difficult it is? She’s been through the crucible. This is the end result.”

Rubens Without Sex. There is another theory: that Shirley has never been pretty enough to compete with the cuties. Playwright Laurents says that she was late in clicking because “she hasn’t any glamour. She has no sex, because she thinks she has no sex. Yet sometimes she is actually beautiful. If you want to go wild, you can see her as a Rubens. But Shirley doesn’t think she has it.”

Shirley’s mobile face has been shaped by hard work, heartbreak and humor, as well as by grease paint. She has orange hair and eyebrows, a warm smile, a steady, brown-eyed glance. Speaking of her own appearance, she likes to quote a British reviewer who once said thoughtfully that she had a face like a cabbage. She is small and plump (5 ft. 3½ in., 127 Ibs.), has beautiful, fair skin and attractive legs. Her slender fingers are never still. At table, she is a silverware-feeler; on stage, a furniture-clutcher. When she has nothing else to do with her hands, she lights, holds and stubs out cigarettes. When she opened in The Time of the Cuckoo, her first leading role on Broadway, Shirley was given a star’s customary ovation when she first appeared on stage. Later, she appealed desperately to Director Harold Clurman: “What am I supposed to do with myself while they applaud?”

Childless in two marriages. Shirley has” filled her life with pets, naming most of them after roles and phrases from her plays. Currently, she has a pale blue parakeet called Cookie and an apricot-colored, miniature poodle called Pretty Prego. One friend contends that “she’s really fonder of animals than people.”

Shelled In. For the most part, people are kept at arm’s length. “I’m a friendly person.” Shirley says, “and yet when you get to a certain place the curtain comes down.” She patterns her behavior largely on what she thinks are the motives of other people: “If someone comes up to me and says cattily, T love your hair—how do you dye it that curious color?’, I might snap back that my hair has always been this color. But if someone says, ‘I love your hair—I wish mine were like it,’ I gush: ‘But it can be—just go see Natasha on Madison Avenue.’ ” On the rare occasions when she is really angry, Shirley stands sideways to whoever has made her mad and talks rapidly and loudly without looking at her adversary.

But mostly, she has a Garbo-like desire to be let alone. Agent McCaffrey laments: “When you ask her for dinner, you know that she’d be happier off by herself at a drugstore having an orangeade with maybe an egg in it.” Shirley concurs: “I save my exuberance for the stage. I’m really a quiet person. I sort of shell in.” Director George Abbott sees in this trait further evidence of her genius: “Duse was a very lone creature, so was Maude Adams. Shirley’s another of the lonely ones.”

Shirley’s retort is: “I’m never lonely when I’m alone.” She spends most of her time in her snug, chintzy, four-room apartment on Manhattan’s West 54th Street, overlooking the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. Unlike the slovenly Lola she portrayed in Sheba, she is a fastidious housekeeper whose happiest hours are spent moving furniture, cleaning closets, retrimming hats, and watering and rewatering the dozen tubs of plants on her flagstone terrace. “Do you like this chair here?” she will ask her maid, June Smith, who came to work for her 15 years ago along with an apartment sublet from Playwright Marc Connelly. “What difference does it make?” June will answer. “It won’t be there tomorrow.”

Shirley keeps half a dozen pairs of identical spectacles so that she can be sure to find one pair when she needs it. She is a great food sneaker, and loves breads, rich desserts, ice cream and candy. She does her heaviest eating when she’s upset. As a child, Shirley stopped spending her allowance on candy once she discovered that a 10¢ can of condensed milk, eaten with a spoon, is the sweetest thing there is. Asked this summer to name the foods she would most like to have on a desert island. Shirley said: “Fudge, brownies, chocolate ice cream and orange juice.” She loves television, often eats her meals from a tray before her 17-inch screen, and races home from the theater to watch late-at-night TV movies, particularly British ones. She keeps a sketching pad handy, for doodling during the commercials. A stack of drugstore novels on her bed table serves as insurance against insomnia. She has relatively little interest in politics or world affairs, but remembers that she once struck a vague blow for social justice by picketing a shoestore (“A friend asked me to do it. Somebody was doing something unfair to somebody”).

Though she loves sitting at home alone, Shirley is sufficiently feminine and inconsistent to love going to parties: “When someone asks me to go any place, my first instinct is no; then I go, and I’m the last one to leave.”

Dirty Hands. Shirley believes that “my childhood made me a peculiar person.” Born in 1907 on Manhattan’s middle-class Morningside Heights in the shadow of Columbia University, she was christened Thelma Booth Ford. Her father, Albert J. Ford, was a serious-minded salesman for International Business Machines Corp., who lived by such venerable homilies as “Children should be seen and not heard.” Shirley says: “He was the sort of man you’d run up to breathless and happy and he’d say, ‘Your hands are dirty.’ ”

Her mother, Virginia Wright Ford, early won and never lost the passionate attachment of her daughter. To Shirley she was “an emotional and gentle person. My father completely crushed her.” Shirley’s parents were separated when she was in her teens, and her mother died in 1933. Today, at 46, Shirley is still stubbornly fighting what she imagines to be her mother’s battle. Her father has since remarried and lives in Brooklyn, but Shirley has not spoken to him in more than 20 years because “when, anyone does anything to someone I love it’s as if it was done to me.”

There is a certain ambivalence to the struggle. Shirley concedes that her father “taught me to waltz without hopping,” and remembers him as a handsome man who looked like William Powell. Relatives have tried, without success, to bring Shirley and her father together. Her younger sister Jean, who sees their father infrequently, says: “My father is stiff and proud, and will never give in. Shirley will never give in either.” Shirley’s stepmother. Rita Ford, cries despairingly: “If they could only understand how much alike they are! They both have the same dispositions ; they’re both a bundle of nerves. I’m sure that each of them is dying to have the other make the first move.” Of the feud, Shirley says frankly: “It’s quite an insight into my character.”

Now You Know. Her father’s business kept the Fords on the move—from Manhattan to Brooklyn to Philadelphia to Hartford—and Shirley daydreamed her way through schools in ,three cities. Her formal education ended in the second year at Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High School. When she was twelve, and already a passionate movie-and theatergoer, Shirley wangled a small part in a Hartford stock company production of Mother Carey’s Chickens. She played through a season and then, over the protests of her father (“He retracted into an iceberg”), set off for Manhattan to live with family friends and begin her conquest of Broadway. Because her father had forbidden the use of his name on the stage, Thelma Ford became Shirley Booth. She made Broadway for the first time in 1925 as the ingenue opposite a young juvenile named Humphrey Bogart in Hell’s Bells.

The next ten years were packed with varied experience on the road and on Broadway. As a stock actress, Shirley was able to try her hand at everything from Pirandello to Ibsen. Her favorite role is still Sadie Thompson in Rain. In 1929 Shirley met and married Ed Gardner (real name: Eddie Poggenburg), a piano salesman with theatrical ambitions. Marriage to Gardner, a bumpy course of tempestuous separations and tender reconciliations, was anything but dull.

Getting Laughs. Ed and Shirley were hungry together. As the Depression closed in, Ed switched from selling pianos to selling miniature golf courses, to being a director in the WPA Federal Theater Project. Shirley clung tenaciously to the lifeline of stock. In 1935 George Abbott, who had seen and remembered her playing a Dorothy Parker character in an off-Broadway play, was casting Three Men on a Horse. He signed Shirley for the role of Mabel, a dimwit ex-chorus girl with a horribly “refined” Brooklyn accent. Shirley was to play an extension of the same character for years on radio—as Miss Duffy of Duffy’s Tavern, Dottie Mahoney on the Kate Smith Show, and in Hogan’s Daughter. Meanwhile, Gardner was doing well enough as a radio idea man to suggest that Shirley retire from the stage and accompany him to California, where he was to direct radio’s Believe It or Not. Shirley’s arrival in Hollywood caused not a ripple of interest among the moviemakers, and she plunged into housekeeping.

Domesticity lasted a year, and then Gardner hustled back to Manhattan to peddle the idea of Duffy’s Tavern to networks and sponsors. Shirley joined the cast of The Philadelphia Story, starring Katharine Hepburn, took another comedy part in the equally successful My Sister Eileen, and then turned down a third comedy part to try out for the serious anti-Nazi drama Tomorrow the World. Producer Theron Bamberger worriedly told her: “The public is used to thinking you’re funny. You might get laughs in our play in spite of yourself.” Shirley replied with the wisdom of a trouper’s long experience:

“Don’t worry. Getting laughs isn’t quite that easy.”

In 1943, while Shirley was co-starring with Ralph Bellamy in Tomorrow the World, Ed Gardner came to her dressing room and asked for a divorce. Says her friend, Bill McCaffrey: “This thing came from left field and it floored her. Gardner had another dame.” Shirley kept on giving excellent performances, but for months she wandered in a backstage daze. To quiet her nerves, the stage manager sent her to a chiropractor who dabbled in amateur psychoanalysis. Each day, Shirley would get into a one-piece bathing suit, lie on his operating table, and talk. She explains: “His idea was that he could tell a lot about your mental tensions by watching your body movements while you talked. And, sure enough, I’d find my arms writhing like snakes when I’d get onto certain subjects. After three months I stopped going to him because I was feeling so much better and I didn’t want to be dependent on him or anybody.”

Shirley and Gardner are now good friends (“He comes to all my plays and cries like mad”), and she has met his two sons by his second wife. But when Gardner asked if he could bring his wife backstage to meet Shirley, Shirley said no.

Off the Book. A young investment broker named William Baker helped ease the blow of Shirley’s divorce. He had met the Gardners during a Nantucket vacation, and when he heard of the divorce, began calling on Shirley. Within four months they were married, although Baker was no longer a broker but a corporal in the U.S. Army. When Tomorrow the World closed, Shirley camp-followed her husband through the South until 1945, then returned to Manhattan for her first musical, Hollywood Pinafore, in which she played the part of a gossip columnist called Louhedda Hopsons. During the war years, Shirley, who is an expert dancer, cut many a rug at the Stage Door Canteen.

At war’s end, she once more retired briefly from the theater. Her husband had bought a Bucks County farm stocked with Holsteins and Guernseys. While he managed the 64 acres, ,she happily rearranged furniture in the farmhouse. It was a serene time. Baker was a shy, modest fellow, who painted and wrote in his spare time. When he suffered a heart attack, they reluctantly left the farm.

The Theatre Guild persuaded Shirley to take a part in Come Back, Little Sheba, which was scheduled for a one-week tryout at the Westport, Conn. Country Playhouse. After three days of rehearsals, Playwright Inge and Director Mann were desperate. They had concluded that Shirley simply could not handle the role. They were chiefly upset by her stock-company approach to rehearsals: she merely walked through the part, mumbling her lines. Tearing their hair, Inge and Mann begged the Theatre Guild to get rid of Shirley and hire Joan Blondell in her place. Then, on the fourth day, Shirley was suddenly “off the book.” She began playing with such intensity and finesse that Inge and Mann hastily changed their minds. In Westport, Sheba was a hit. Theater people poured up from Manhattan to shout bravos at the leading lady. Shirley confessed: “I didn’t want to do Sheba until I saw how much the audience liked it.”

After the final curtain on the Broadway opening night, she made the traditional visit to Sardi’s Restaurant. It was crowded with first-nighters who had just seen her show. In an unparalleled tribute, they rose as one and gave her an ovation. Shirley—this time not acting—turned around curiously to see who was being applauded. After Sheba, following a favorite dictum (“An actress should make you forget everything she has done before”), she took a secondary role in the musical A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

One morning during rehearsals, the telephone rang in her husband’s bedroom. Shirley called out: “Why don’t you answer it, Bill?” Alarmed at his silence, she hurried in and found him dead of a heart attack. Shirley stayed away from rehearsals for several days and then, in the best tradition of the stage, went back to work. When Tree opened, she stopped the show with a raffish number called Love Is the Reason, and was showered by the critics with a new set of rave reviews.

A Nugget, a Diamond. Paramount had bought Come Back, Little Sheba, and it now made—for Hollywood—the daring decision to let Shirley, who was unknown to moviegoers, play in the movie the same role that she had already played to perfection on Broadway. She flew to the West Coast, shot the movie in a single month, and scored a complete and effortless conquest of the movie colony.

Bringing all the precision and adaptability of an old trouper to the set, Shirley found the job of acting in movies remarkably easy: “I didn’t have to project. It was like telling someone about it confidentially. It all seemed so much more intimate, as, of course, it was, with the camera practically in your navel.” Her fellow actors were entranced. Burt Lancaster says reverently that Shirley is “a nugget, a diamond, a pot of gold. She’s Babe Ruth. She’s Mickey Mantle. It’s a nice note for this town that a woman like Shirley can come in and by sheer personality bowl the place over.” Starlet Terry Moore was breathlessly thrilled: “Shirley is so lovable you want to throw your arms about her like an old shoe!”

When Shirley was given the Academy Award as the best film actress of the year, there was scarcely a dissenting voice. She went to Manhattan’s International Theater wearing a blush-pink Valentina dress, specially cut so there would be no danger of her tripping on the steps to the stage. With millions watching on television, Shirley tripped anyway. But she managed to make it look likably human.

Lady Macbeth? How great an actress is Shirley Booth? What are her limits and capabilities? Audiences are usually so completely taken in by the character she is playing that they are unconscious of Shirley as a skilled performer. But they are likely to remember the character for days or for years to come. Radio listeners who have only known her as Miss Duffy would swear that she is a hilariously funny bit of fuzz-brained fluff. Moviegoers who have seen her only as Lola in Come Back, Little Sheba have difficulty imagining her as anything but an aging frump in a kimono. But lucky theatergoers have been persuaded, at one time or another, that she was an intense, good-looking young schoolteacher, a tippling grass widow, and a well-girdled, wisecracking career girl.

The experts differ about her range. Arthur Laurents would limit her to playing “middleclass women. She’ll never be able to play a lady with airs, and, somehow, she’s not quite right for mothers.” But Critic John Mason Brown sees “something lyrical about her which shines through the drabbest or most disillusioned of her characterizations.” And Jose Ferrer claims that “she could handle anything. She would make a positively bloodcurdling Lady Macbeth.” Helen Hayes pays her probably the highest professional tribute of all: “She has perfect timing and perfect reading, and always has complete control of herself, her part and her audience. I have often gone back to watch her a second and a third time, trying to figure out how she does it, because the first time she has made it seem so effortless that I have forgotten I’m watching an actress.”

Every Role Is Sympathetic. Shirley herself pins most of her faith on her audiences: “They’re a fetish with me, because I know they can tell when anything is synthetic.” Would she play an unsympathetic role? “To play a bitch would be working against my own personality. But to play a woman who occasionally makes mistakes and is not always noble, that would be close to what I am myself. There’s really no such thing as an unsympathetic role. People are handed traits—the actor’s job is to make an audience understand why they have these traits.”

Shirley treats her new-found success as warily as if it were a time bomb: “I feel any minute now somebody’s going to poke me and say it’s time to get up … I feel a little like a movie star, but a movie star would look like one and I never have.”

She has no plans beyond the new movie and the Broadway musical already scheduled for fall. She would like to make her first trip to Europe soon, but does not want to go alone. She is thinking vaguely of buying a summer house on Cape Cod. Most likely, she’ll stay in her comfortable apartment eleven floors above Manhattan, tending her parakeet and poodle, rearranging furniture, watering her plants, watching late-at-night movies on television. There is still only one thing of primary importance: her audience. Says Shirley: “I’ll act as long as they’ll have me.”