Show Business: The Perils of Irene

She served enough coffee to keep Rip van Winkle awake and nervous till the end of time. Working Riker’s, Cord’s and other short-order, all-night stands in Manhattan, she was a competent waitress, but often she served people with her face turned aside. Once when a group of actors came in, she fled to the basement, hid and wept—for Irene Dailey really considered herself an actress.

Last week, Broadway actors in and out of employment were remembering Irene, whose scarred and overscarred acting career, after more than 30 futile years, had finally burst into flame in a foreign city. Giving a memorable performance in a new London play called Tomorrow—With Pictures, she is identified as a “queen bitch,” an American woman who wants to conquer a British newspaper empire. Much of the battle is won on the playing sheets of Kensington. But in the end, she loses the spoils and has nothing.

“Every plummy-voiced English rose of an imitation actress should be dragged by the hair to see Miss Dailey,” wrote Critic Bernard Levin in the Daily Express. “She sweats love, breathes hate, weeps desire.” The Times catalogued her as “a fully-fledged, Swinburnian femme fatale.” Wrote the Daily Mail’s Robert Muller: “The performance will wipe the smirk off the faces of those who scoff at the school of psychological interpretation known as the Method. It is theatrical magic.”

Vaudeville & Lampshades. Her voice today sounds like gravel dripping onto a kettledrum; her teeth have been capped four times; her tall, big-boned frame suggests the rambling form of her older brother, Dan Dailey. Their late father, manager of Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hotel, had some objections to Irene’s theatrical ambitions, but neither he nor anyone else could have checked them. At eight, she was dancing in vaudeville, and at 18 she was launched in summer stock.

When Irene was 22, Mike Todd hired her for Star and Garter, fired her before the show was six weeks old. After that, says Irene, “I kinda had a nervous breakdown for five years.”

With consistent bad luck, she kept winning parts in some of Broadway’s ghastliest gobblers. Retreating, she ran a lampshade shop for four years, but was so desperate for the stage that she briefly took a job as the receiving end of a vaudeville comedy routine, in which the comedian drew his laughs mainly by bumping repeatedly into her bosom. Between waitress jobs, Irene kept making the Broadway rounds, scored minor successes on TV, was encouraged enough to begin, at 29, the formal study of her profession as a belated Method convert.

Raisins & Technique. Under Herbert Berghof and his wife Uta Hagen—whose school is less publicized than Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio, but equally esteemed by many—Irene practiced with awesome intensity. Often she phoned fellow actors and routed them out of bed to practice scenes with her at 6 a.m. She was so oblivious to everything but acting that when one fellow student brought her a bunch of white grapes, she set them on a table in her apartment, next noticed them eight months later when the friend returned and exclaimed:

“Irene, we have raisins.”

Between more parts in ambitious Broadway flops (Miss Lonelyhearts, Summer of the 17th Doll), she turned away from the Berghof school’s advanced classes, went into the basic-technique courses and joined the beginners. Eventually, Berghof hired her to teach the technique courses herself to twelve classes a week and more than 200 students. Last spring, after 47 others had either tried for or turned down the part, she was chosen for Tomorrow in London. Said Irene Dailey last week: “I shall be 40 in September. I have nothing, really nothing. I’m not married. I have no children. I’ve been going to a psychiatrist for three years. All I really care about is the theater, but now. for the first time, I know in my stomach that my work is good.”