CHAPTER ONE
Who the Hell Is Stevie Phillips?
Okay, here's the obligatory where-I-was-born segment. It might give you an idea about how a person could ever grow up to become a talent agent who deals with megalomaniacs and addicts.
Was my showbiz career preordained? Here are some freaky facts. I was born on August 9, 1936, in a hospital in the middle of the Broadway theater district. Even though my parents lived in Hoboken, New Jersey, where there were plenty of hospitals. But they picked this inconvenient place on West Fiftieth Street because it was cheap and they could afford having me if I made my debut there. Alas, the broken-down Polyclinic outlived its usefulness, and the eyesore met the wrecking ball decades ago. But while it existed it was the go-to place for ailing show folk. My birthing doctor, whose name was Phillips-same as mine-was simultaneously in the room next door, giving life support to a comedian named Joe Howard who'd had a heart attack. It's a comedy sketch: Dr. Phillips running between rooms yelling "Push!" in one room and "Don't push!" in the other. All he needed was a red fright wig. Joe Howard must have been one helluva guy. I discovered he was not only a comedian but also a Broadway producer-which I now know (having been one) is ridiculously hard-and yet Howard additionally managed to be a director, writer, composer, and lyricist. He wrote a famous song, "Goodbye, My Lady Love." The title of Howard's famous song also strikes me as a little scary. I think it all means something-maybe.
My very first childhood memory comes from the summer of 1939 when I was taken to the World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. I am sitting on Edgar Bergen's knee talking to Charlie McCarthy. I can see myself there; I remember what I was wearing and what Charlie wore.
A year later we moved into an apartment on the top floor of a small building in Washington Heights a few blocks from the George Washington Bridge. Our apartment had bare wood floors that announced my father, whose footfalls I came to dread. He was a vain, vile-tempered man who once, in a rage, threw all my clothes out our sixth-floor window onto the street below because I hadn't hung them up. Somehow that translated into not respecting him or the money he made selling children's wear. What my father called "a good spanking" would now be called something else entirely. He is also the reason there are no pictures from my childhood, no picture of Charlie and me.
Selling children's wear was hardly comparable to designing strategies for world peace, but it took all my parents' time and energy. They were never home. I was alone and lonely except when I was in my friends' happier homes. I saw their parents much more than I did my own.
At seven thirty every weekday morning a housekeeper named Evelyn arrived. Do not think "warm family retainer." Evelyn never came close. She was black in mood as well as in color, and always gave the impression that she was not happy being there. She put the same cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwich with a banana into my lunch box every day for years. In all the time she was with us, I don't recall so much as a hug from her. Evelyn didn't know or care what I did or where I went as long as I showed up on time for dinner. She was discharging her obligation. That's all I ever was to her, an obligation. Salvation for me lay in escape from home.
The most wonderful escape was going to the movies. On Saturdays twenty-five cents gave me a wonderland to live in for an entire day. Loew's 175th Street with its starlit Casbah etched in bas-relief on the walls and ceilings was where I looked up, closed my eyes, and entered a different future. I yearned for a Technicolor world replete with riches, song, dance, and excitement of all kinds. I would be at the box office, my quarter in hand, as soon as the doors opened, and there I would remain until dinnertime. I loved the serials and the newsreels, but most of all I loved the musicals. Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis was the girl I longed to be, with long straight hair and soft curls and a house next door to the handsomest boy on the block.
Nothing at home was anything like Judy's house in St. Louis. Apartment 6H was filled with drama and dysfunction and lots of the ugly behavior that characterized my parents' marriage. Nowadays I assume my parents' screaming matches were part of a dynamic they depended upon because they both participated so enthusiastically. The screaming was about money, about the retail business, about family-my mother's, mostly-but it really wasn't about any of those things.
Finally I understand that arguing is never what the anger is about. My father was carrying baggage that came from another place: the loveless home of his own childhood. My grandfather, I discovered, was a world-class philanderer, a stage-door Johnny who lusted after Ziegfeld chorines and bedded more than a few. When I was the tender age of ten, my father took me to a memorabilia-packed walk-up in Hell's Kitchen to visit my grandfather for the very first time as he lay dying in the arms of a former Follies star whose faded beauty was a reminder of the knockout she must have been when she was young. I thought it strange, even at ten, that my father had brought me along to witness his father's death, but it turned out to be the most intimate moment I ever shared with my dad. My grandfather had been the role model for my father, an excellent student.
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There you have it. I'm part of a family in which not one single member had any interest or practical involvement in showbiz, and yet my early life was coincidentally touched by it time and again. As I grew older, the coincidences became a mainstream of events, until it was clear to me that showbiz was indeed where I belonged. A cliché I know, but here goes: It was all in the stars.
CHAPTER TWO
What Do You Do with a Jewish Princess?
I knew that after college I'd try making a career in entertainment, so I replaced education studies (my mother thought I should be prepared to teach in case I "had to" go to work) with comparative literature: "From all your great literature will come nothing but starvation!" There were plenty of women who worked-my mother was one of them, and a role model for me-but most of them held jobs out of their need for a paycheck, and many of them were looking for husbands so that they could stop working. They were not, in the main, remotely interested in career building. They wanted out. I wanted in. My enormous ambition has been one of the few personality disorders I haven't wanted to change. My mother was aware of this, and she decided she'd better find me a husband and put all my nonsense to rest.
She and her best friend, her older sister, Julie, convened to figure out my future in a very organized fashion, and husband hunting morphed from merely an idea into an intense pursuit. The starting point of this organized search was the synagogue. Who in the congregation did they know had a son the right age, preferably a doctor or a lawyer? My mother remembered a German family living in the Fourth Reich, so called because of the many German-Jewish refugees who settled there. They had a son who would be just about the right age and she phoned them. Chutzpah? (Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines the word as "gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible 'guts'; presumption plus arrogance such as no other word, and no other language, can do justice to.")
I told my mother what she was doing was embarrassing, but she was determined to find out the son's marital status, and there was no other way but head-on. In the conversation with this family of German refugees, she hit pay dirt. "He's an attorney from a good family. Now I remember the parents," she said. "We used to say hello in the shul." (At that point she had not attended services for more than a dozen years.) "You'll be a mother with a baby in a carriage. You won't need to work hard all your life like me."
So off we went to observe the Sabbath (which I never did, nor did she really) in a temple where we were no longer part of the congregation. I sat on a bench five rows ahead of my mother's pick, turning every now and then in order to steal a glance without being seen. Caught in the act. He smiled at me.
I agreed to go out with him. He was considerate and attentive, and best of all he owned an old Pontiac convertible. We drove to City Island for lobsters, to Brooklyn for dinner with his friends, to the beach for the day. We shared our love of movies and theater. No bells rang, but being with him felt good. I never for a moment thought I was in love, and no-just in case you're wondering-we never slept together before we married. In 1957 "nice" Jewish girls didn't do that. I expected him to ask me to marry him, and he did it charmingly on bended knee while putting a perfect two-carat diamond ring on my finger.
Finally, one sunny April afternoon, on the day Greeks celebrate their independence, we got married at the Plaza Hotel in the "Gold and White Suite" on the second floor, overlooking the very corner where the Greek marching bands turned from Fifth Avenue into Central Park South. Given that I was also celebrating my independence, marching bands seemed entirely appropriate, even though the martial music of the parade drowned out the entire ceremony. I couldn't hear a word the rabbi said.
The irony in all this is that my mother pushed me into marriage with a man who was even more starstruck than I. It was an accident to be sure, but then again, maybe no accident at all. Had it not been written somewhere in the stars that I should be in show business, my new husband might have discouraged me from a theatrical pursuit; but this kind and honest man adored every aspect of entertainment. All he ever wanted in life was to be an actor, but instead he passed the bar to satisfy his parents-just as I was trying to satisfy mine by marrying.
He quickly decided he was going to live his dream vicariously through me. I had his full support to delve into the world of showbiz, and that was all I needed. I felt capable of finding my own way, starting at the bottom of the ladder. The rest was determination, something I owned in abundance. I would make it. I just had to. I would finally realize the dream I had dreamed all those Saturdays in the uptown movie palace.
Copyright © 2015 by Stevie Phillips
