NEW YORK -- Polly Bergen gave an open, candid interview to Charles Gibson recently on his Sunday morning television program. She told me she would like that interview to run as her obituary.
"I told it all," she said. "Just all the highs and lows of my life."
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Polly Bergen (left) with choreographer Kathleen Marshall backstage at Radio City Music Hall. (Martha Rial, Post-Gazette) |
Now she was telling it to me, after a performance of "Follies" at the Belasco Theater on 44th Street. I had called her and arranged the interview and, without blinking, I was on a plane for a hectic couple of days in the Big Apple.
Polly has never really been away, if you allow for selling skin cream on Home Shopping Network as a most recent gig, but now she is back where she belongs, and I marvel at her stamina.
She hasn't been in a significant film since "The Winds of War" (1983) and "War and Remembrance" (1989), two television miniseries in which she played the wife of the late Robert Mitchum, who was also a good friend.
Was the return in "Follies" traumatic? Was there panic or the slightest fear she couldn't remember her lines or hit that note?
When I went backstage after the show, the ever-gracious actress hugged me and introduced me to actress Jane White, who was sharing the dressing room. Jane plays a saucy former chorus girl, Solange, in the Stephen Sondheim musical.
Her arm around my shoulder, Polly said to Jane, "Do you know how far back we go?"
We do go back, to the early '70s.
She was then married to the powerful agent Freddie Fields. She entertained fashion writers at her Beverly Hills home and also at the disco called The Factory, where Fred Astaire, Sonny and Cher and every high-profile client of Fields showed up. I was star-struck.
In later years, we talked many times: when she put Oil of the Turtle cosmetics on the map, when she wrote a book, when she designed footwear, and when Mitchum passed away.
I did a story on the Park Avenue apartment she shared with third husband Jeff Endervelt. In 1987, when the stock market went bonkers, the millions she had entrusted to him went with it, and the beautiful apartment had to be sold. (They divorced in 1990.) However, Polly is a survivor, proof being how radiant she looked after stopping the show in "Follies."
What is inspirational about this singing comeback is that it was possible at all. She was a chain smoker for 50 years.
"I was asked maybe 30 years ago which I wanted -- to be able to do another chorus of 'Night and Day' or to keep smoking," she said candidly. "I chose smoking."
And she shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, how dumb was that? She has suffered from emphysema and pneumonia as a result.
While she stopped singing for a number of years (remember her signature sign-off song, "The Party's Over," on her TV show?), Polly charged ahead with acting and then that successful burst of energy in the cosmetics market.
Her children were grown when she married Endervelt. When she lost everything financially, she could have folded. She didn't.
Humming along one day as she watched a tape of the old "Hollywood Palace" TV show, she realized that the voice was still there, although she is now described as "a good ballad singer whom the years have turned into a ferocious interpreter."
She found a voice coach and began to accept some bookings, including an engagement at Michael Feinstein's at The Regency, where The New York Times reviewer said she was, in a word, "great."
Still, only by contacting Sondheim personally did she get an audition for "Follies."
"They wouldn't return phone calls," she said. "I didn't care which role. I just wanted to be heard."
The role she won, Carlotta Campion, is not a lead, but you don't forget her. Her performance in this show, which will close July 14, made me tingle. I had a tear or two.
We sat in her dressing room as a rainstorm pounded the roof. She was wearing black pants and a white tunic top. Thinking ahead, she had ordered a car to take us to Orso, a favorite after-theater place for me and, as it turns out, for her. We even ordered the same thing, a Margherita pizza and a drink.
We talked about theater and her comeback. I told her my hands were still stinging from applause for her "I'm Still Here" number, as well as the curtain call with Blythe Danner, Betty Garrett and Marge Champion, among other "seniors" who lit up the stage for three hours.
It wasn't the return to acting that frightened Polly when she took the role of Carlotta in "Follies."
"I was afraid of my voice, even though I had found I could still sing and I was working with a teacher.
"My big number is tough because of the lyric being just different enough to throw you."
Little more than a minute after doing an energetic dance number -- choreographed by Pittsburgh's Kathleen Marshall -- she does "I'm Still Here," the musical's anthem of triumph for a group of aging former chorus girls.
It suits her. It is an eight-minute song, and it describes her own life to a T.
She must also climb steep steps many times each performance, and she does it in 4-inch heels.
"That might not seem spectacular unless you know I was told I might spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair not too long ago."
She suffered near-crippling arterial blockages in her legs. She had surgery on both legs at the same time -- which her surgeon didn't really recommend, but she had places to be, things to do. That's Polly Bergen.
"The heels weren't for height," she said, enjoying her pizza as much as I was. "They gave me a swagger on stage. I felt Carlotta would walk with a swagger."
As to my original question: Does she get scared before a performance? She says no.
"As soon as my foot is in the light onstage, I am home. It is what I love to do. It is what I have always loved to do."
I should add, because I know you are wondering: Although Billy Crystal says it better, Polly looks "maahvelous."
She will be 71 on July 14 -- the day "Follies" closes.
I want Marvin Hamlisch to bring her here when Michael Feinstein appears with the Pittsburgh Symphony Pops next spring. I am her undeclared agent.
I think she would bring Pittsburgh audiences to their feet. And I would have a tear or two.
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