Profile: Elaine Stritch, she's still here

NEW YORK, Nov. 15 (UPI) -- Actress Elaine Stritch is playing the juiciest role of her six-decades career. She's playing herself.

The 76-year-old veteran of the American and British stage is performing a one-woman show at the Joseph Papp Public Theater that gives audiences her own take on how she evolved into the theater's quintessential raspy-voiced dame, a title Queen Elizabeth II probably would have made official by now if Stritch had been British-born.

She was born and reared, however, in suburban Detroit, which her Roman Catholic parents allowed her to leave to study acting. She went to New York while still in her teens because she could live at the Convent of the Sacred Heart and be chaperoned by the nuns.

And there her story begins, a serendipitous tale that takes two hours and 45 minutes for her to tell.

It's a bumpy ride, alternating between triumph and disaster for a variety of reasons, not the least being the taste Stritch acquired for liquor at 13 when her parents began letting her have half a drink at cocktail time. She never went on stage without help from a bottle until she gave up alcohol 14 years ago after a near-fatal diabetic attack.

"It was my friend," she says simply. "It gave me courage." It also explains why Stritch was prone to caustic put-downs of her associates and self-sabotage, as when she declared war on a road company of "The Women," including Gloria Swanson, and missed out on being cast in TV's "Golden Girls" by suggesting she might ad lib a four-letter word from time to time if she got the role.

Another of Stritch's problems was that she never looked young, or as she puts it, "When I was 20, I looked 40." She was tall, with legs that seem to go on forever, pretty, and had a glorious smile, and still does. But she was no romantic leading lady and leading roles eluded her until mid-career.

She faces up to these problems and a basic fear of men (she claims to have been a virgin until she was 30) in a show titled "Elaine Stritch at Liberty" that is a no-holds-barred self-examination that few actresses would subject themselves to. She had a little help along the way from New Yorker drama critic John Lahr, who organized a mix of reminiscences and music that really work, and director George C. Wolfe, the Public Theater's producer.

"I'd been thinking about doing this sort of thing for a long time," she said in an interview. "I mentioned it to Barbara Cook and she told me I could get it together in a couple of weeks. But this has taken me two years. I wanted people to understand what really is in the mix of a funny girl, and that sometimes it's a tragedy."

Stritch wears black tights under a full white shirt, with a single strand of pearls as her only adornment. She works on a bare stage, although Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer's lighting works miracles in its changing illumination of the bare brick fire wall, and her only prop is a long-legged director's chair.

She has band accompaniment with orchestrations by the incomparable Jonathan Tunick. She can belt or wheedle the best out of a song, and the best of her songs are all here -- "Zip," the stripper's number from "Pal Joey" which ribbed Gypsy Rose Lee, "Broadway Baby" from "Follies," "The Ladies Who Lunch" from "Company," and "I'm Still Here," Stephen Sondheim's anthem for survivors that suits her to a T.

Stritch has survived in the theater longer than most of her peers, even though she never won a Tony Award. Her last Broadway play was the recent revival of Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance," in which she played a difficult relative, and just prior to that she played Parthy, Cap'n Andy's difficult wife, in a revival of "Show Boat."

Difficult characters haven't always been her lot. At the peak of her career, in London, she was given the role of the tour director in Noel Coward's "Sail Away," and was rewarded by having that role melded into the role of the leading lady. The highlight of her one-woman show is a reprise of the musical's hit song, "Why Do All the Wrong People Travel?"

Coward was one of her best friends and called her "Stritchy." She tells of a diary entry he made in 1962 telling of a visit from her that prompted Coward to tell his secretary, Cole Lesley, to give her "a list of five words which must never again cross her hips -- guilt, problem, scared, frightened and insecurity." He had recognized all her weaknesses.

Stritch relishes telling how she finally overcame her fear of men and relates her relationships with actors Marlon Brando, Rock Hudson, Gig Young and John Bay, her much loved husband whom she met during the years she worked in England but lost after 10 years to cancer. She describes him as her soul mate, the man she had been waiting for all her life.

She gives her audience a taste of comic delivery she perfected at a very young age for her Broadway debut in a 1947 revue titled "Angel in the Wings," to which her only contribution was inane song which went, "Bongo, bongo, bongo, I don't want to leave the Congo."

The most hilarious anecdote in the show deals with how she took on a job in "Pal Joey" at its New Haven, Conn., tryout, while keeping her job as the notoriously healthy Ethel Merman's understudy in "Call Me Madam" on Broadway, made possible by a tight nightly commute that became a nightmare when a blizzard hit the area. It would have exhausted a lesser soul than Stritch, but she always arrived on time in New Haven for her opening cue.

Stritch made plenty of movies including three for Woody Allen, starred in "Two's Company," a BBC television series, and won awards for her TV work in the United States, notably an Emmy for her recurring role on "Law and Order."

She doesn't get into all that in "Elaine Stritch at Liberty," otherwise the show would have run at least four hours and not left her enough material for a sequel.