Cloris. Cloris Leachman
a belt with a swastika embossed on the metal buckle. He’d taken it off the body of a German soldier he’d killed.
Those dates were fun, and they were also educational. It was on those dates that I learned what being an American is, what being a patriot means. Those fine young men—they were really still boys—were genuine patriots.
In my senior year at Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, I was awarded the Edgar Bergen Scholarship to Northwestern University. Northwestern frequently sent scouts looking for drama school candidates to Des Moines and other Midwestern cities. The scout had seen three of my high school stage productions. That, plus my success during that summer semester as a radio student at Northwestern, earned me the honor. And an honor it was, because up to that time, Edgar Bergen was Northwestern’s most famous drama school graduate. Bergen was a ventriloquist, and back in those days he and two of his dummies, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, were all international stars. It may be that today Edgar Bergen is best remembered nowadays as the father of Candice Bergen.
From the start at Northwestern, there was a pulse. I met Charlotte Rae and Paul Lynde, both of whom later had glorious careers, and very soon they and I virtually ran the drama department. We didn’t do it by intent; we didn’t take the department over in a coup d’état. The three of us were just so animated together, so full of imaginative ideas, that the rest of the drama students wanted to hang with us, be part of what we were cooking up.
In my sophomore year at Northwestern I joined a sorority, Gamma Phi Beta. I soon found I didn’t want to live there. With all the girls chatting away every night, I wouldn’t get anything done, so I moved to a girls’ dormitory, Holgate House. There I met Jan Steinkirchner, and she became my roommate. We were a matched pair. We had the same kind of humor, and we laughed ourselves silly. Jan had long and very narrow feet. We had a rabbit in our room, and it, too, had long and narrow feet, so I would put Jan’s shoes on the rabbit. It was kind of moronic, but, God, was it funny. Jan has been my lifelong friend. Not long ago, when I was trying out my one-woman show, I stayed with her in her Palm Desert home.
At Northwestern, Jan was already friends with Paul Lynde and Charlotte Rae. She introduced me to them, and from that first moment, the four of us were tied together with a mysterious brand of Velcro. Paul Lynde was naturally funny. He was as funny at Northwestern as he was later in his career. He didn’t have to learn about comedy; it was native to him. Every Saturday at Holgate House, he would come and put on an opera, and we would all sing our parts. That’s how we learned that Charlotte Rae had such a wonderful singing voice. Paul played the piano, and we made up arias. It was madhouse fun and another area of theatrical growth for me. I did a play with Paul at Northwestern, a Molière comedy, The Doctor in Spite of Himself. Molière’s humor is bawdy, perfect for both of us, and I have to say we were both hilarious.
Paul worked at a branch of the Toddle House chain of restaurants, and when we, his coterie, got hungry, we’d go to Toddle House, and he’d make anything we wanted. His specialty was superb little square potatoes. He never charged us for anything, ever. Four months after Paul started working at that Toddle House, it closed. It went bankrupt. I don’t know if Paul gets all the credit for that bankruptcy, but he certainly deserves part of it.
When I’d arrived at Northwestern, I had been real skinny, but I got my weight up to 120 pounds for a part I wanted to play in the most important school production of the year. I don’t remember the title, but I’d read the play and had the definite impression that the leading woman, the role I sought, had to be physically imposing and well developed. When I read for the teacher who was directing the play, the first thing she said was if I wanted to be seriously considered for the part, I would have to lose weight.
I didn’t argue. I didn’t say, “Whatsa matta, you? You read this play. You know this signora gotta have big gonzos.” Nope. I had no dinner that night. Immediately I started back down the weight scale. And I got the part. And as a result, I earned the annual faculty award for best actor of the year. Almost without exception, the award went to a senior. At that point, I was in my sophomore year.
I knew Paul was gay, but he did nothing to call attention to the fact. He didn’t have a companion, I never saw him in an intimate situation with another man. I don’t know if I should use the word gay, because we were at Northwestern long before the word gay supplanted the word homosexual. Paul was gay in every sense of what the word meant then, in those days. He was humorous, he was generous, he was imaginative. He brought lightness and laughter to any gathering; he brought happiness to his friends. We never talked about his homosexuality. I don’t know if it was discussed by others on campus, but it had no importance to us.
Many of my girlfriends at Northwestern were getting engaged, and the custom was you’d come to the engagement party with a five-dollar gift. I had no money, so instead of attending the engagement parties, I’d go over to the speech school and hang out with Paul. We’d improvise and do scenes. It was right around that time that I knew, without fanfare or an epiphany, that I was going to be an actress.
After we left Northwestern, Jan made sure the three of us stayed in touch. At one party we all attended later, Paul and Charlotte had both been drinking, and things turned nasty. Paul started attacking Charlotte, saying awful things about her being Jewish. He used terrible, harsh words. Charlotte got up and fled the party in tears. Jan patiently called and talked to them separately and got the rift mended.
On another occasion—this one is significant because it turned out to be near the end of Paul’s life—Jan and I were at Paul’s house, marveling at his relationship with his dog. The closest thing to Paul in this world was his poodle, and it was simply a joy to see the two of them together. That relationship, between Paul and the dog, was the subject of most of the evening’s talk. Not long after that evening, suddenly, shockingly, Paul died. I grieved for him. I was stunned and heartbroken. We’d shared so many lively, life-giving hours together, some of the most important times of our lives. It seemed so incomprehensibly wrong that his life should end so soon.
Along with my grief about Paul’s death, I couldn’t stop worrying about his dog. A memory had come back to me. At a different gathering, Paul had been drinking, and he was getting very worked up. As his emotions grew darker and his voice grew louder, the dog, who had been watching Paul, walked over and put his paw on Paul’s knee. Paul stopped his tirade and looked down at his poodle. They sat there, this loving look in both their eyes, the dog’s paw on Paul’s knee. It calmed Paul; it completely changed his mood. What I witnessed touched me to the core. I’m an animal lover—I especially love dogs—and that image of them together, the dog’s paw on Paul’s knee, lies in a special sepulchre in my memory.
Every once in a while during the time I was at Northwestern, a man named Bob Singer, who worked for an ad agency in Chicago, would come to the campus to hire one of us to do a photo session for one of their clients’ products. I was often chosen. Without my knowing it, Singer entered me in a contest to be Miss WGN. WGN was one of the big radio stations in Chicago.
Let me go sideways for a second. It was summer, and I had a room in the attic of a private home—no air-conditioning, no fan—for seven dollars a week. Almost nobody today knows what it was like to be in the Midwest in the summer with no air-conditioning. You’d take a shower and step out dripping wet, you’d towel off and still be dripping wet. You’d put on a girdle and silk stockings, still wet, getting everything you touched or that touched you wet. Mama mia, I don’t know how I lived through that.
Anyway, I didn’t know I was a contestant, let alone a finalist, in the Miss WGN contest until a telegram arrived telling me so. When Bob Singer came to the house and said we had to go to the radio station that night, I laughed. The whole thing seemed unreal. I didn’t wash my hair or do anything to make myself pretty; we just took off.
I sat in the studio, with a microphone in front of me, the judges were in the control booth, behind the large glass. They asked what talents I had, and I said I played the piano, sang, and danced, what would they like me to do. After a moment they said, “Would you take your hair down?” It was only pinned up, so I just pulled the pins out, and it fell in a lovely curl. It was really pretty. There was another pause, and then a voice behind the glass said, “Congratulations! You’re Miss WGN.”