The Legs Are the Last to Go Read Online Free PDF Page A

extravagantly, with twenty pieces of luggage and an entourage. In my midforties, I was beginning to make contact with the feeling that my life had changed, and that I might not be able to maintain the level of success that had come so easily in the past. Should I really be driving a Rolls, particularly one in need of a few repairs? My outspoken agent, Roy Gerber, didn’t think so. He told me that someone had cringed seeing me pull up to the Beverly Wilshire for lunch.
    â€œMy friend saw you get out of your car and he called me immediately,” Roy told me. “He said you should stop driving it because it’s a perfect example of someone having financial problems.” I finally got it repaired, and I kept trading up for new ones, just as my father had done with his Chryslers all mychildhood. And now, fifteen years later, here I was after a disastrous audition, standing in a theater parking lot about to get into my Rolls, and worrying about how to pay for my life. I didn’t just want to play Norma Desmond in the national production of Sunset Boulevard in Toronto. I had to.
    I unlocked the door to the car and got in.
    â€œI just can’t believe this is really your car,” the pianist said. “Well, I promised myself years ago that I would drive a Rolls all my life,” I told him. “It’s very important to me that I only have the best for myself and my child.”
    He nodded respectfully, and then shook his head.
    â€œWell, I wish those people inside that theater could see you now, because quite clearly you are Norma Desmond,” he said. “You have the perfect voice, looks, and car.”
    I thanked him and drove away, angry that the revered creator of the show could feel it was his right to tease me and try to provoke me into singing saloon songs. And I was upset that I was not the kind of person who could joke around with him and go with the flow. My whole life I’ve been careful and formal. The only time I wasn’t was when I ran in for my second audition for House of Flowers with a crazy, chopped-off hairstyle, so exhausted that without even thinking, I sat down on the edge of the stage, kicked off my shoes, and sang to Harold Arlen, Truman Capote, and all the producers in the dark. But I was a girl then, barely twenty years old. Now I was very much an adult.
    â€œWell, that’s that,” I said as I drove home. So much for Sunset Boulevard .
    Not long after that, my agent got another call, and I was sent some music to prepare and asked to fly to Toronto. After another audition, without Sir Andrew around, I was granted my proper time with a rehearsal pianist and sang well. The producer, Garth Drabinksy, told me he had wanted me all along. No, Sir Andrew was not totally happy about the choice. I don’t think he wanted me at all, and claimed that I couldn’t sing in the key in which the songs were written. But the final decision about me was the producer’s, not the creator’s. And I was offered the job that very day, and like any woman in her sixties, I was terribly delighted to be wanted again.
    But it didn’t take long to realize that I was back in the theater, and that meant I would be locked away day in and day out in my own little gilded cage. I always took my work so seriously, too seriously. For an entire year, I would be committed to eight shows a week, worrying about my throat, with humidifiers all around me. But I desperately needed to prove I could play the role. I was the oldest woman to play Norma Desmond, and certainly the darkest. My leading man, Rex Smith, was very charming and extremely talented. And there was something so rewarding about not having to worry for two years about what kind of jobs I might be offered.
    The revolving set for the show was incredibly ornate and so were the costumes. Sweeping around in capes as heavy as velvet drapes and walking up and down three hundred steps eight performances weekly in heels and a