moirafinnie wrote: How did she feel about new approaches to acting? I have often wondered how she coped with younger performers as she continued working. Were there any young actors with whom she formed a rapport?
Good question! Mary took the nature of acting very seriously. To her, it was a craft to be learned and honed and respected. She had little patience for performers who weren't ready to work hard on a production, which sometimes surfaced in touring stage shows with younger performers who saw the company as simply a springboard to something greater. Forgive me if I insert a passage directly from the book here, but the director Jack O'Brien, one of the most articulate people I've ever interviewed, just says it so well:
“She was a self-styled repository of a certain kind of humor and
a style of comedic acting. She felt she had something to give a company
like [ACT]. She wanted that clean, acerbic, almost mechanized style of
comedy that George S. Kaufman did so brilliantly. She wanted it sustained
and honored, and she was eager to be a communicator of it. She
was so quintessential, so true to herself. She knew her gifts, she knew
her timing. She worshipped—literally worshipped—George S. Kaufman.
When he said, ‘Turn, count three and say it,’ she turned, counted three
and said it. Her skill and technique confirmed by it, but not from an intellectual
point of view. She was an intuitive actress,” O’Brien says. “She
didn’t leave anything to chance. She wanted everything very clearly
worked out for her. She was just a consummate, kind of tunnel-vision
professional. She was used to being in an ensemble and used to doing
what she was told. And she was not wildly secure: She worried a lot
when she rehearsed—she wanted to make absolutely certain that that
would be there and she would be standing over here, not over there. They
were not unreasonable requests, but they were very specific. She was
not a breezy person and she wasn’t a ray of sunlight in those rehearsals.
She worried, she ferreted, she rumbled a lot."
In general, Mary had very little interest in young people. It's no coincidence that Mary probably played the greatest number of childless women in performing arts history -- casting directors saw very little maternal instinct in Mary, and they were usually right. One exception was Johnny Whitaker, the child star of
Family Affair with Brian Keith. Mary befriended him while they worked together on the Saturday morning show,
Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, and took him under her wing. He was enormously grateful -- and admiring -- and she even attended his wedding some years later.