Cloris. Cloris Leachman
look.
They gave me a lot of presents and asked me what I was going to do on Friday at the Miss Chicago contest. Huh? Say what? Miss Chicago? I found out this WGN contest was a preliminary to the Miss Chicago Pageant. There were twenty of these preliminaries around the city, and the twenty winners were the candidates to be Miss Chicago.
On the appointed day, I went to the theater where the Miss Chicago Pageant was being held. All the contestants were immediately given some training: we were shown how to stand, pose, and walk the figure eight. Later, when everybody went to an early dinner, I stayed behind and walked the figure eight about a hundred and fifty times. When they returned from dinner, the contest recommenced. Our walks and poses and figure eights were judged, and the roster was whittled down to three finalists. I was one of them.
“Would each of you say a little something?” one of the judges asked.
The first girl got up and was so tongue-tied, she couldn’t put words in a sentence. The next girl got up, and she had a whopper of a lisp.
I got up and said, “My grandmother always told me, ‘Cloris, you get out there and bring home the bacon!’”
A few moments then the voice said, “Miss Leachman, you’re the winner!”
That’s how I became Miss Chicago! Can you imagine! When Bob Singer took me to dinner the next night, I wore a darling suit and my crown, which I’d reshaped, with the help of fifteen baby orchids, into a little hat. The men around us were making fifty-dollar bets on whether the orchids were real or not.
As Miss Chicago, I was automatically a contestant in the Miss America Pageant. I was spinning from the way things were happening so I called my mother and said this is getting pretty serious, you’d better come. She flew first to Chicago and then on to Atlantic City with me. Today contestants have all kinds of people to assist them in the Miss America contest, but there was no one there to aid or guide us.
In the formal part of the contest, I wore the one evening gown I had from college. Right before I went out, Mama said, “Sparkle, Cloris!” She’d said it once before, when I was a little girl. In every part of the competition, I did my best to follow Mama’s counsel. I sparkled.
When all the segments of the pageant were completed, I was third runner-up. That was fine with me. I didn’t care about being Miss America. I much preferred winning the prize of one thousand dollars and having no further responsibilities. In all, it was a wonderful experience. My father came to Atlantic City in time to attend a lovely afternoon tea with people from all over the country. We contestants mingled with these guests, and each of us came away with a list of contacts.
The next day Daddy gave me sixty dollars to go to New York for a three-day visit. Imagine, you could stay in New York for three days and spend less than sixty dollars. It’s just a tad different from today.
I said good-bye to my parents and got on the train to New York. I remember it all so well—how I looked, what I wore, and how I felt as the train pulled into Grand Central Station. When I stepped off the train, the first thing that greeted me was the heat. In August New York has some of the hottest weather anywhere. You don’t know if you can get a breath.
In the station, I got out my contact list and called everyone on it. The only one who answered was Joe Russell, a publicity agent. He said, “Come on up to my office. I think I can get you a job.”
In the baking heat, I walked from Grand Central Station on the East Side to Forty-sixth Street and Broadway on the West Side in my beautiful little dress, straw hat, and high heels. It was quiet as death on the streets; no one was out walking, because it was so hot. Just before I got to Joe Russell’s building, I noticed an open door. It was dark inside but from the sawdust on the floor and the smell of beer, I could tell it was a saloon. There were a couple of drunks leaning on the bar and a woman standing on it, with a microphone, singing in a nonmusical voice, “I love ya soooo much, it hoits me!” This was New York.
I walked on to Joe Russell’s building, which, I found out later, had been bought by a group of press agents, so each of them had an apartment there. I went in, met Joe in his office, and right away he sent me over to where a picture titled Carnegie Hall was being filmed. The person Joe knew hired me as an extra, and I worked for three days, at thirty dollars a day. There was an irony attached to this, my first job in New York. One of the stars of Carnegie Hall was William Prince. I didn’t meet Mr. Prince while I was working on the set as an extra, but two and a half years later, in 1950, I was playing opposite him—and Katharine Hepburn—on Broadway, in As You Like It.
A few days later Joe Russell decided to go home to visit his mother, and he offered to let me stay in his apartment while he was gone. I did, for a week. He came back, and I moved to the Park Central Hotel. It was right after the war, and you could stay only five days in one particular hotel, so I was like a Plains Indian, dragging my belongings to a different hotel every five days. I remember staying at the Jefferson, where if I sat on the bed, my feet didn’t touch the floor if I wasn’t wearing shoes.
Joe and his buddies took care of me like I was Snow White, always making sure I had a place to stay and something to eat. I managed to get small jobs on TV shows, nothing important, but I earned enough to keep myself in New York.
Three months after I’d arrived in New York, I met Irving Hoffman, an executive with the Hollywood Reporter. He invited me to the opening night of a play, Mr. Peebles and Mr. Hooker. I have only a hazy memory of the play, but during the intermission, Irving introduced me to William Liebling, a prominent theatrical agent. Mr. Liebling and I chatted briefly, and then he said he thought I might be right for the lead in a new play, John Loves Mary, which was being produced on Broadway by the Theater Guild, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Irving Berlin. They were looking for someone just like me, a sincere, average American girl type. He asked if I was interested, and when I said yes, he told me that tomorrow morning I should be at the Broadhurst Theater for the first tryouts.
I showed up promptly and was the second girl to read. The producers were in the front row. I thought I did pretty well, but hadn’t done something that would cinch the part. When the next girl started to read, I sneaked up to the second balcony and watched more than twenty other girls read. I noted what I thought were their mistakes and stored what I’d learned.
Liebling and I then went to lunch at Sardi’s, the “theater people” restaurant, which is right near the Broadhurst Theater. During our lunch a lady from the production came to our table and said I was wanted back for another reading. I gobbled down two more bites, and Liebling and I returned to the Broadhurst, where I read again. I felt this third reading was not as good as my first but as I was about to leave the stage, I heard a voice from the front row say, “Leachman, stick around.”
I had the part.
And what I’d thought would be a three-day visit to New York turned out to be the beginning of a wonderful life there. Getting that role was not only a high moment in my life, but it was the commencement of my long relationship with Liebling and Wood. Bill Liebling and his wife, Audrey Wood, had one of the classiest agencies in the city. Liebling represented actors; Audrey represented authors, most particularly Tennessee Williams.
The funny part was that when I met Liebling, I didn’t know what an agent was or did. I certainly had no idea I needed one. I was totally naive. Bill and Audrey not only handled the business part of my career, they looked out for me in other departments of life as well. Liebling represented me till I moved to California.
Rehearsals of John Loves Mary were not going to start for two weeks, so I took the opportunity to go home and visit the family. My first night home we went to dinner at Babe’s, an upstairs restaurant that had a dance floor. That night Daddy asked me to dance. It was the first time he’d done so. It was sheer delight. I love to dance (don’t miss the last chapter, which tells of my experience on Dancing with the Stars), and I was an excellent dancer then. Here I was at last, dancing with my father.
While we were out on the floor, he said, “I’m glad I never broke your spirit. God knows, I tried.” I didn’t know what he meant, and I didn’t ask. We kept on dancing. I’ve never been certain what he did mean,