Lee Meriwether opens a new window

Lee Meriwether brings her vivacious good humor to the role of the eccentric Auntie Mame --- and some personal history too -- when the television actress and former Miss America takes the title part in the musical Mame at the Reagle Theater through July 25.

Currently appearing in the recurring role of the family matriarch Ruth Martin on the daytime soap All My Children, Meriwether has starred or had featured roles in no less than nine different series, most notably the detective show that ran for eight years, Barnaby Jones, as Betty, the daughter-in-law of Buddy Ebsen character.

She also has the distinction of being one of three actresses who played Catwoman in the 1960s version of Batman, along with Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt. Her performance was not in the series itself, rather the 1966 film version. Three decades later, when she appeared as herself on an episode of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, she said, "For my money, Eartha [Kitt] was the best Catwoman."

In a recent phone conversation with EDGE, the conversation diverged a bit from talk of Mame when the subject of the new Lena Horne bio, Stormy Weather, came up. In the book writer James Gavin paints the diva as a rather prickly individual. "Oh, no!" effused Meriwether, "I found her to be warm and fun loving!" She then reminisced about meeting Lena Horne when both of them were doing a benefit in the 1980s. At first she was startled when Horne dashed over to her. "'Why should she know me?' she wondered. At that point Horne called out to members of her band: "Look who's here! It's Betty!" As it turns out every morning of the tour they were on Horne and members of her band gathered in a hotel room for breakfast and to watch re-runs of Barnaby Jones.

The Method

While Meriwether is best known for her work on TV, it was as Miss America 1955 where she first caught the attention of the nation. She was attending City College of San Francisco as a Radio and TV/Theater Arts major when she entered the pageant. Upon retiring from that role, she chose to pursue a career in the theater, his first love. After stints on the Today Show, Meriwether used her pageant scholarship to study acting in New York with Lee Strasburg at Actors Studio among others. "The Method has stood me in good stead," says Meriwether.

She says that she discovered by chance what Strasburg really meant by his famed Method training. Enrolled in a class of some 40 students, she managed to get to the studio above the Capitol Theater one day during a fierce snowstorm when only a few classmates showed up. "We couldn't do the scenes we normally did," she recalled, "and so Mr. Strasburg spent the hour talking to us about what he hoped we would accomplish because of his teaching."

He wasn't trying to get them to emulate Marlon Brando or Geraldine Page (famed for using The Method in developing their complex and often moody characterizations). "He said, 'I'm trying to have you build a foundation that will give you a method of your own. It will be yours. You will not be copying anyone else because of your unique self. In the future should you get bogged down, you'll be able to return to it to find your way of doing a part.'

"I have needed to go back to the Method, especially in film, where you may have to pull an emotion out of the blue. I can go back to an exercise I did, and within five minutes, the way to do the scene is there," she said. As a result, Meriwether is fine when it comes to any acting assignment.

"It's the singing and dancing where I'm in trouble," she admits.

"Who knew 20, 30, 40 years ago I'd be singing in a musical! I can carry a tune, but I remember doing a song in a show in junior high school when I was 13, 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.' Nobody complimented me afterwards."

Follies to Mame

Her first venture in the musical theater was a daunting one: as the icy Phyllis in a production of Stephen Sondheim's Follies in Birmingham, Alabama. What distinguished this production - and made it one for the books - was that someone had the idea of casting it with ex-Miss Americas (with the younger "ghost" figures various winners of the Miss Alabama crown).

"I thought, good grief! Do they know what they're doing?" recalled Meriwether. "Thank heavens I had taken some dance classes with Betty Garrett at Theater West, a professional actors' workshop in Hollywood (where she had regularly worked over the years.) Studies in New York had taught be about singing that vocals are an extension of the emotional moment you're having in a scene, and that has helped."

Set in a crumbling Broadway theater scheduled for demolition, during a reunion of all the past members of a musical review based on the Ziegfeld Follies, which had played in that theater between the two World Wars, Follies requires strong performances. along with considerable singing and dancing. Meriwether had two solos in the show: the sarcastic Could I Leave You, and the dance turn, The Story of Lucy and Jessie, both of which were written (fortunately) for Alexis Smith, who was, like Meriwether, more an actress than a singer.

Recalling the production, she has fond memories of her co-stars, who included: Marian Bergeron, (Miss America, 1933-1934): "she could sing; she'd sung with Rudy Vallee." Jean Bartel, (1943), who'd entered the Miss America contest in hopes it was an entr?e to Broadway, which it was. Barbara Jo Walker Hummel (1947): "she was an opera singer," said Meriwether.

"The three non singers were Evelyn Ay (1954), Marian McKnight (1957) and I. All of us struggled with the dancing."

She weathered the experience, and went on to numerous other musicals since, including Hello Dolly, The King and I (with George Chakiris), I Do, I Do, and The Pirates of Penzance.

Born in L.A. (her family moved to Arizona, before settling in San Francisco), Meriwether's memories of childhood are happy. She is designing her Mame character in part on her mother, "who was fiercely protective of her children (there is a younger brother Don)."

Meriwether said her mother had a life philosophy similar to Mame's: "investigate, look around you, don't waste a minute. That was my mother. A great gal. Very seldom does a day go by that I don't miss her. She could have been a wonderful actress but she didn't like to have her picture taken."

As many shows as Meriwether has been in, and only into the first days of rehearsals at Reagle, she easily remembers every cast member's name - and their understudies! - as she relates what fun it is to work with them. "Wonderful, wonderful cast; perceptive director," she said.

She's impressed with the children in the cast. "I'm really so lucky to have these youngsters (Troy Costa, Andre Purdy, and Jeffrey Sewell). They're immediately lovable. They can act. They can sing. They can dance. Hello! The tango we do together, I have to apologize to Troy for being so slow to pick it up. You're so good, I told him. Well, he said, I'm a dancer," said Meriwether chuckling.

Looking fabulous

Meriwether, now 72, looks fabulous. Another entertainer who's kept his looks, Johnny Mathis, was in her class in junior high. "It's the genes, I think," says Meriwether, who noted that she once saw Mathis's dad and he looked very, very young, and her mother, who'd had children rather late in life looked like the other mothers among her young friends.

Meriwether said she went to a funeral recently and a friend overheard someone say, "she must have had a lot of work," which the friend correctly denied.

The only plastic surgery I've had, said Meriwether, "was when I was 13.

"I had Dumbo ears. My mother who made all my clothes would make hair bands to match, which covered my ears up, but at night when I went to bed I had to turn them forward to get to sleep. About the time of junior high, we went to see the movie 'The Robe.' Jean Simmons wore her hair in a kind of ponytail. That became the fashion at my school.

"My mother had a full length mirror in her bedroom. I stood in front of it and pulled my hair back into a pony tail. My ears.! I broke down and cried.

"My mother comforted me by saying it was a silly hair style but my dad, who was a pretty good amateur golfer came up with a solution. He happened to make a foursome at a golf game that included a plastic surgeon, who was a bit arrogant. My dad thought, well, there's a good mark. So he suggested they bet on the game. He bet that if he won, the plastic surgeon would do my ears for free (we didn't have the money to afford the operation). I can remember being in the surgeon's office for the procedure. They were standing around talking about golf as he did my ears. I would hear them saying, that was a good slice! (happily a golf term not about the operation); it made for a good story afterwards.

Meriwether has made it a point to be active with a number of humanitarian endeavors and charities, among them the Crippled Children's society that provides reconstructive surgery for needy children, the American Cancer Society, and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. She has long been associated with animal rights groups and is deeply involved with "Actors and Others for Animals."

She feels she gets as much out of the work as she puts in. "One always hopes that the effort helps," she said. "I've been given a gift and I believe it's important to continually try to give back. Be appreciative. My mother did it by example.

"I've been fortunate. I've not had one horror of an experience. Oh, yes, an actor walked on stage in a performance, slightly intoxicated. Another time, an actor began wandering around the stage touching things, during a Shakespeare play no less, when you couldn't make up dialogue to cover for him. These are the only two times in my work that I've had a problem and the intoxicated actor now makes a good story. Also it taught me, that you've got to be so in the play, knowing everybody's lines and actions, that you can help if anything goes wrong," she said.

As to the charity work in particular, she said, "I love being able to help. That's part of my nature and it makes me feel good. I think that in life you should do what makes you feel good, as long as it doesn't hurt others. The Golden Rule."

Mame with Lee Meriwether continues through July 25 at the Reagle Players, at Robinson Theatre, 617 Lexington Street,
Waltham, MA. For performance times and ticket intormation, visit the Reagle Players website.