On a Different Path in ‘Broadway Bound’

Carole Shelley turns into a Jewish housewife from the Bronx every night--but not without a little tsoris.

“It’s a very difficult part,” admitted the British-born, British-trained classical actress who’s playing the mother, Kate, in Neil Simon’s autobiographical “Broadway Bound” (at the Ahmanson to July 3). “Everything is internal. So I have to play her very carefully. I have to let the audience know that this is a woman who doesn’1948279666who holds her love inside. I’m playing a lot of history. But I can’t tell the audience; I just have to know it. It’s also a very painful play. You cannot walk through it.”

Shelley smiled and stubbed out a cigarette in the West Hollywood apartment she’s leased for the run here. Trim, smartly coiffed and self-assured, she bears little resemblance to her character. “I think Kate set her cap for Jack and got him--and as far as she was concerned, it was a happy marriage for a long time,” she noted. “She was a wife and mother, a domestic woman who gave her career to raising a family. She didn’t know that it wasn’t enough for him.”

Shelley stresses that the characterization is not based on her own childhood: “My aunts sat at home and cooked and crocheted and cleaned the house, but my mother was a career woman (an opera singer). I’m Jewish, but I didn’t grow up in Brooklyn. I don’t think it makes any difference. People come backstage and say, ‘You’re my mother, and I’m Greek, or Irish, or Italian.’ It’s that kind of mother.”

Although Kate is conceivably in her late 40s (“Let’s just say that I’m of a proper age to play Kate,” Shelley said), the actress is definitely playing older.

“I think that at 30, Kate was 50,” she said briskly. “There are some women who just settle into being old.” Her own transformation begins with a wig, which she puts on herself: “It takes about 40 minutes to prepare my head. It’s also a time for me to be alone, to focus--get rid of the day. When I come on stage looking like a shlump , people who know my work say, ‘Carole Shelley . .. ? ‘ I like that.”

She came to the United States 24 years ago when Neil Simon chose her to play Gwendolyn Pigeon, one of Felix and Oscar’s chirpy neighbors in “The Odd Couple.” She did the play, the film and the TV series.

“I’ve done a lot of television,” she said, “but still people remember me from that show--and I only did six episodes. Of course, I’d like to do more movies. But I really love the theater best, because I have control over what I do. If I don’t get something right one night, I can fix it the next. As long as I get wonderful plays, no complaints.”

Is there enough work in New York? “There’s never enough,” she said dryly. “So I’ve always left town to work with a director or a company or a play I wanted to do.”

Such was the case with this play.

“I saw Linda Lavin do it (on Broadway),” she said. “She was definitive, brilliant. But I was given a license to discover my own Kate. Linda and I are different women; we have to search i1847616617places--but it comes out differently.”

Yet Shelley initially turned down the role: “I didn’t think I’d be able to maintain it for 2 1/2 hours. Maybe a five-minute joke, but not a whole play. The syntax is totally different; there are some words that just didn’t come. I still have to think every time I say ‘chocolate.’ ”

There are other downsides to the tour. “I’m a nesty person,” Shelley said. “I like to be in my garden, growing bulbs. It’s a small house (outside the city in New York) with a huge mortgage--which got a little lower during this tour. But I also like being part of the theater community in New York. It’s a business, and it’s an attitude. It’s being around it and going to parties and going to openings. Of course, you can also see the phony side of it. Sometimes you think, ‘Get me away from all this ridiculousness!’ But I also like the ridiculousness.”

She’s also quite comfortable with her single status. “I was married, my husband died,” the actress said simply. “I had an invalid mother living with me. The time I should have had children, I was looking after her. Then my clock ran out.”

She shrugged. “What am I going to do--beat myself for the rest of my life? I have my cats and my hot water bottle. You know, you can have fun without having a family. I have close friends; I mother people. I do not feel unfulfilled. Of course, something has to suffer, and if I hadn’t been as lucky and successful as I’ve been, I could have been a very miserable person. But wonderful things have happened to me--like winning a Tony (for “The Elephant Man,” in 1979)--that a lot of actors will never experience.”

Shelley originally studied for a career in dance.

“Luckily, I broke my foot when I was 17, or I’d be a retired dancer,” she smiled. “When I broke my foot, it just meant I took another path.” Without regrets, she worked on her voice (after an early Walter Kerr review called for “Applause and voice lessons--in that order”) and studied the classics. “The only trouble with this business is that there are few places where you’re allowed honorable failure,” she said. “So you go into a smaller repertory group, out of the eye of the hurricane, where you can take a gamble, walk without a net--and either get to the other side or fall. But it’s not the end of your career.”

Does she worry about that? The actress laughed. “ ‘Round about July (after the tour ends), I’m going to start calling my agent, saying ‘ So? So? What’s happening?’ I scream that I need a month’s rest, then five days into the month I’m saying, ‘Have you had any calls?’ ”

For the moment, though, she’s busy just loving this stage role--and the fact that, after 24 years, it should be in another Neil Simon vehicle. “Yes,” Shelley deadpanned, “you could safely say that I really like Neil.”