NIGHTCLUBS: Grimy Tams

Under the spotlight, her thin, sharp face had the moody glower of an unsuccessful manicurist. Her lank, hemp-colored hair splashed in uncombed confusion above her black velvet sheath. But weird as she looked, slack-mouthed, hazel-eyed Singer Tammy Grimes sounded wonderful—no mean accomplishment in the cramped quarters of Julius Monk’s Downstairs at the Upstairs, a crowded Manhattan nightclub where the man who moves may catch his neighbor’s elbow in his ear or his companion’s highball in his lap.

On the very first night that she appeared Downstairs this month, one of Tammy’s fancier fans followed her cautiously into her dank basement dressing room and asked modestly, “Would you mind reading a script of mine?” The wraith maintained her poise in the face of Noel Coward, managed to say: “I’d like to.” A couple of days later, after a ten-minute reading, the cleft-chinned Lorelei of the West Fifties was signed for the lead in Coward’s new comedy, Look After Lulu, due to open in late February.

Bang, Bang, Bang. Tammy Grimes—because of her disheveled appearance sometimes known as Grimy Tams—insists that “nightclub singing is the hardest thing in the world to do.” She makes it sound like the easiest, as she concocts a wistful chant out of Oscar Levant’s Blame It on my Youth, throbs through Limehouse Blues, races with a fine, light lilt through The Springtime Cometh, a take-off an old English madrigal (“Gaily skippeth, nylon rippeth, zipper zippeth, whoop-de-do, which is to say, the springtime cometh”). For Cole Porter’s urbane lyrics, her precise, finishing-school inflection provides just the right sophistication.

At 17, Boston-bred Tammy came out at the Brookline (Mass.) Country Club. “All those other debs look exactly alike,” says she. “And all of them knit.” It seems a shame to Tammy that people can no longer live like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s flappers, bang, bang, bang, without worrying how it will all come out.” The trouble is, she complains, that “people are so wriggly about things. I don’t say I was naughty, but I’ve been in swimming pools that didn’t have any water in them.”

Really Faithful. Out of the swimming pools, Tammy went to New York, studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and spent two years playing in somber epics, including Mourning Becomes Electra. TV and a few other acting bits kept Tammy going until 1954, when she met and later married Canada-born Actor Christopher Plummer, now starring in Archibald MacLeish’s play J.B. At the time, Tammy was working in the box office at the Westport (Conn.) Playhouse. “They fired me,” she says, “because I lost them $500 giving away free passes.” (The habit still afflicts her. At the Downstairs she is apt to answer the telephone outside her dressing room with a cheery “Yes, of course. Six for New Year’s Eve. And remember, there’s no minimum.”)

When Julius Monk hired Tammy this winter, her stage career had hit one more roadblock: she had just been turned down as understudy to Rosemary Harris, the Zelda Fitzgerald of the jazz age saga The Disenchanted (TIME, Dec. 15). If she could not get close to a part that had seemed made to order, what could she do but sing? Now she has the answer. “Noel’s play is about a marvelous girl who absolutely loves men,” says Tammy. “She really is faithful, you know. I mean she thinks they’re all marvelous. She’s romantic, but she’s terribly shrewd. She thinks men should never see the wheels clicking —which is fine. Because that’s always been my attitude: don’t try to top the men intellectually.”