His Best Girl

There is no way that a man can speak honestly of his mother, except in terms of a debt unpaid. Along with the debt that comes with birth, nurturance and forgiveness, that much more is owed when the mother’s gift to her son is magic.

My mother was a housewife who swept and washed and waited for her husband and sons to come home to a dinner she’d prepared. After that, she went off to a different life and another day of labor. For the better part of 30 years, my mother worked as a wardrobe attendant in the theaters of Los Angeles, helping actors dissolve reality for the patrons of the Pantages or the Ivar or the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. She never thought of it as glamorous work. To her, it was picking up the underwear of famous people, a line she often used to put off questions. But it was always much more than that.

Wardrobe of course, is about clothing, and my mother was foremost a seamstress. She could turn a size-40 jacket into a 36-short between a matinee and the evening show, and back again for the next night’s performance. She could also quick-change an actor from overalls to evening clothes in less time than it takes to say “Alas, poor Yorick,” and do it in the dead darkness of backstage.

She knew her business and did it well, at the theater and often at home, washing loads of stage laundry. I used to watch her iron huge piles of shirts for chorus boys, two a minute, each one creased and perfect. She learned her trade the old-fashioned way, by sewing from the time she was a young girl. She is of a generation that found no shame in hard work and takes great pride in doing things right. The stage world’s motto is “The Show Must Go On,” but it might have been my mother’s from birth. My father’s schoolteacher salary paid slim wages for nine months of the year and a pittance for summer school’s few weeks. The few extra things we had, and often some of the necessities, came from my mother’s pay. She worked not only for our birthday gifts but also for school shoes--and to add some meat to the potatoes.

When she would leave our house in Hawthorne for the theater, she was already tired, and she came home after midnight barely awake enough to share coffee with my father and talk with him about the evening’s show. Half-dreaming, I heard the sounds of the stage through the doorway of my bedroom: a Gilbert and Sullivan duet; the thud of a ballet corps upon the boards; the laughter of a stagehands poker game. And there were other things: Fonteyn bickering with Nureyev in the Green Room at the Shrine Auditorium, a big star muffing his lines, Oscar winners blowing kisses as the losers slipped away into the night. My mother told of a theater without makeup, its belts and gears squeaking behind a painted sky. It all seemed wondrous to me, fading into sleep miles from the limelight. In the morning, my mother was a housewife again, our kitchen theater dark until the next evening’s show.

I was always what might be called an active child. By the time I was 10, my activity had reached the point where my mother feared I would kill myself or destroy the house. It was true that I’d set fire to my room once, but my homemade dynamite was nowhere near as strong as the neighbors claimed. Most of the time, I just wanted to be left alone to shoot at things with a slingshot from our roof. Nevertheless, my mother took it upon herself to ensure that I had safe diversion on those evenings when father was at school board meetings. Thus began my life as a cultured man.

Over the next few years, my mother regularly smuggled me into the theaters of Los Angeles. I saw plenty, from good and bad house seats, through backstage TV monitors, even from up in the lights. I saw everything from Burt Lancaster dancing on a peg leg to George Hearn wielding a bloody razor. I experienced “Macbeth” one week and a tired-businessman musical the next. I heard Angela Lansbury sing in “Mame” enough times to fall in love with her, and I got a terrible crush on Peggy Fleming as a result of my mother’s long stint working wardrobe for ice shows. Once, when I had to stay home to recuperate from an operation, my mother propped me up in the Shrine Auditorium’s nosebleed section to watch the same opera, “The Bartered Bride,” twice a day for a solid week. After that ordeal she said to me, “Now you know why I cringe sometimes at the first note of an overture.”

My mother always took me backstage before and after the show. It was heady stuff for a kid raised on black-and-white television. Of all the things I saw in the theater, I was most fascinated by the actors’ transformation into characters and back into ordinary people again, night after night. Through a gap in a dressing room door, I saw Joel Grey turn himself into George M. Cohan before heading out into the spotlight to tap and sing his way through two furious hours of Cohan’s show tunes; afterward, he threw on an old coat, walked out a side door into the crowd, hailed a cab and disappeared. Not a soul on the street connected the little man in a hurry with the comet they’d just seen onstage. If that isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.

After shows at the Music Center, my mother would give me a couple of bucks to take her next door to the Curtain Call restaurant for ice cream. These were the first dates of my life, and certainly the sweetest. We would talk about the sets and the actors and the wardrobe--me in my only pair of good pants and my mother still in her smock with its sash of threaded needles. My mother would keep the bill within my allowance by sticking to coffee, though she usually pinched me for the change.

My father died when I was 16, leaving my mother to support two kids on her wages alone. She worked as many hours as she could manage--and far too much, overall. Soon, my brother left home, and I went into the Navy, leaving my mother to come home to an empty house. She sent voice tapes to me overseas, but there was a sadness in her tone, and I could tell her heart wasn’t into talking theater to a machine.

I came back from the Navy, was accepted to college and got married, but the marriage soured within months, and I found myself on my own. My mother asked me to come back home, and I did, watching her head out to the theater to work in the evenings. Except that she seemed more tired, it was just like the old days, with me taking my father’s place, waiting up for her with coffee and an ear for the sounds of the theater.

Late one night, she told me that her favorite show was the musical “Mame.” She said that it had been a first-rate production, with wonderful songs and a great cast--especially Lansbury. It was the only musical whose soundtrack she’d ever bought, and she never tired of hearing it. “It was a great show,” she said. “Every actor was a real professional, especially Angela. The music was so good you didn’t get tired of it. And it was a happy show. That’s what the theater is about: making people happy.”

As the years went on, she gradually eased away from the harder jobs, putting in fewer hours on a handful of shows. Three years ago she injured her legs and hasn’t been to the theater since. She was 75 last October and will never work again. She keeps her theatrical union membership card (No. 3) in her purse, its dues stamps paid through the date of her last show.

Not long ago, I visited her at the house she lives in with my brother. Somehow, we got to talking about the theater, and I saw the light in her eyes again. We laughed about the old days and looked at some show posters and programs--except for her memories and a small retirement, all that she has left from her years of work.

She wouldn’t want me to tell you this, but we share a favorite song, from my mother’s favorite musical: a duet that Mame sang with her nephew Patrick. If I could say one thing to my mother by way of thanks, for her sacrifice, for all the magic, it would be a line from that song:

You’re my best girl,

and nothing you do is wrong.

You’ll always belong to me.