TO KATHRYN GRAYSON, LIFE’S A JOY

“Noises Off,” playing at the East County Performing Arts Center through Sunday, is a play about a play where everything goes wrong. Ask its star, Kathryn Grayson--who has acted and sung professionally from Hollywood to Broadway for nearly 50 years--if she has ever been in a real situation like that, and she says, “No, thank God.”

Has she ever known anyone who has ever been in a play like this? Again, sweetly. “No, not as wacky as this.” Almost as wacky? A little wacky? Over the phone, one can almost hear her purse her lips. “No.”

It’s not that she hasn’t had hard times. “Everybody has heartbreak,” she said. But there is no way you’re going to get her to dwell on that. “It’s been a wonderful life. It is a wonderful life. It is continuing to be a wonderful life.”

Kathryn Grayson was a star during the days when it meant something to be a star. Remember the sweet, heart-faced heroine with the strong coloratura in “Showboat”? “Kiss Me Kate”? “Anchors Aweigh”? “Ziegfield Follies”? Grayson made 20 pictures for MGM in 15 years. After the first few, she was the star, but even from the beginning, she says, she was treated well.

“Everybody said I was the most spoiled person in the lot as a youngster. The drivers would drive me anywhere I was going. . . . I remember that Garbo was left in the rain when her driver said (to me), ‘You can’t be out in the rain with that voice.’ Little did he know that I loved walking in the rain.”

Only reluctantly does she allow regret to shade that carefully modulated voice. It happens when she talks about her two divorces, the deaths of her mother, her father, her sister and her brothers--her entire immediate family--the striking weight gain that came after those losses and then, of course, the film industry.

On most of these subjects she maintains a cheerful outlook. “I stayed friendly with both my exes and all their wives,” she says. Her first husband, John Shelton, was married eight times before he died; Johnny Johnston, with whom she had her only child, a daughter, is now on his sixth wife. There is no bright side to losing her family, but the weight, she promises, is finally coming off.

It is harder to say nice things about the film industry. She has seen a lot of changes, she acknowledges: “Some for the good. Most not for the good.

“I liked the way films were made. I liked the star system. They had the senior writers . . . (and) junior writers . . . great directors and junior directors. They were learning their craft as they worked. . . . The young people (actors) were introduced in an Andy Hardy film. And if the public accepted them, then they would go on.

“Today, they don’t have time to really build a star. The stars today don’t know what stardom is. They are wonderfully talented people, but they don’t have that charisma. There was some magic in those days.”

As she tells it, she did not even want to be in the movies. She wanted to do opera.

“I thought they were wasting their time and money.” She said that to Louis Mayer, the head of MGM, and he told her he knew “a lot more than a 16-year-old girl who is and who isn’t good material for pictures.” He made a deal with her. He said she should do a screen test “and if the studio liked the test, I would shut up forever and if not, I would go.”

“It was the longest test in motion picture history. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on that test. It was almost a two-reeler. I did everything--opera, popular songs, drama, comedy. . . . The studio liked it. And I didn’t. I told Mr. Mayer I didn’t like it. He went home with a heart attack.”

At least he said he did. Grayson was worried. Later she learned that Mayer always said he was going home with a heart attack when he was aggravated.

“I apologized. I said I would behave myself.” And she did. When she was offered a debut in “Lucia” at the Metropolitan Opera the next year, she turned it down. She made an Andy Hardy film instead.

She says she has no regrets, just gratitude for Mayer, not only for her career, but for the friendships she still maintains from her days on the lot. “Mr. Mayer wanted to create a family, and I don’t think he realized how well he succeeded.”

To this day, Grayson says, her best friends are those from the MGM lot--Ann Miller, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Howard Keel. When she received good reviews for “Noises Off” in Los Angeles two weeks ago, Nancy Walker wrote to congratulate her. Last year, when the Academy Awards show had a segment on movie legends, including Grayson, Miller, Debbie Reynolds, Ava Gardner, Jane Powell, Leslie Caron, Esther Williams, Marge Champion and Cyd Charisse, it was like “old home week” for Grayson.

“We all shared the same drama coaches, dancing teachers, singing teachers. It was like we all went to school together. We had so much fun swapping stories.”

This year the group also will be together on the night of the Academy Awards--at Grayson’s house, having dinner and watching the broadcast. Only Charisse is “iffy”--she might be doing a show in London.

Grayson made her last film, “The Vagabond King,” in 1956. In 1960, she finally had her opera debut--in “Madama Butterfly”--for New England’s Sara Caldwell Company. In 1963, she did “Camelot” on Broadway. She has done nightclubs and shows on tour.

“You can get up every day and it’s a challenge,” she says at one point. At another--”I like challenges.” In March, about a month after the conclusion of “Noises Off,” Grayson is going to take her own show on the road. It will be the story of her life with film clips and songs, questions and answers, similar to the show Cary Grant used to do.

When she passes through Utah, she is going to sing with the Mormon Youth Choir. “I’m looking forward to that--all the young people. I get so much mail from young people. It really does my heart good. Sometimes, they think I’m that young (as in her movies), and they ask for pinup pictures.”

And does she send them pinup pictures?

“I send them recent pictures and a little note.”