I spent only a couple of minutes out there, not telling them about the body they weren’t seeing, only that the show was cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances beyond the control of the management and they would get their money back if they would make a line at the box office, and during the second minute there was a lot of rustling, as some of them yakked together and others of them got up and started out, to be first on line. As I was finishing, I heard the sirens coming out from town. They sounded to me exactly like fire engine sirens, even though I knew it was the police. I expected the audience any second to figure fire engines too, and get trampled in a rush or something, but they didn’t. Nobody really believes in real life drama, and thank God for small favors.
When I got off, I went through the wings and into the green room and collapsed in a wooden folding chair. I wiped my face with my show handkerchief, and Edna Stanton brought me a paper cup full of Mountain Valley water, from the cooler in the corner. She asked me if I had any idea who did it, and I told her I couldn’t begin to guess, which is the same thing I told a man named Detective Einstein ten minutes later, in the office upstairs over the lobby where the people were getting their money back and trying to figure what was going on. So I had to stay, and two by two the patrons left the Red Barn Theater and drove their cars back to Clinton, three miles down the pike.
That isn’t a very original name for a repertory summer stock theater, the Red Barn, but what are you going to do? We happened to be operating in a red barn, just like a lot of other summer stock outfits, and of course we had the same gag as them — the Red Ink Theater — because, same as them, we never made any money.
Face it, it’s impossible to run a repertory theater with less than twenty-five people, including actors and stagehands and business manager and set designer and director and stage manager and a lot of other people. So we did it with nineteen, and we lost money. That is, Sterling McCall lost money. That is, the local business types who backed Sterling McCall lost money. Except they ran free ads in the program, and the theater being there did attract vacationers to stick around overnight or a couple of days, so the local business types maybe didn’t lose money, either. On paper, everybody lost money.
But even so, this year we had a star. Heather Sanderson. By summer stock standards, she was a star. There are two kinds of people who are stars by summer stock standards. The first is the kind of person who never made it really big, but almost did, who once was second lead in an Alan Ladd movie or once was ingenue in a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical on Broadway, the kind you may have heard of but you can’t remember their name. The second is the kind who made it very big, but lately they’ve been on the wane, and haven’t been doing very much on Broadway or television or in the movies in the last few years, the kind about whom you say, “What ever happened to Heather Sanderson?”
Nothing, that’s the trouble. Until now. Now, she had her throat cut.
Anyway, Heather Sanderson was this second kind of summer stock star. Back in New York, Ling knew a guy who knew a guy, or something like that, and dickering was arranged, and over her agent’s dying body Miss Heather Sanderson signed for the smaller chunk of a forty-sixty profit split. The agent was right; there weren’t going to be any profits.
Actually, the set-up we’ve got is pretty good, and we figure sooner or later it’s going to get itself a reputation like Eaglesmere or the Music Tent or the Dark Horse Players, and then we should make some loot out of it. In the meantime, it’s a good way to get a tan and three square during the summer, and a credit for the resume besides.
So we’ve got this farm. The land itself is turning back into woods and weeds, and we’ve got just the two buildings, which these local businessmen formed a committee and bought and lease to us for a dollar a year. There’s the farmhouse, where we all live, and the barn, which we converted into our theater. The seats are folding chairs and most of the stage lights are made out of tin cans and aluminum foil and the flies are jerrybuilt and never work right, but it’s a theater just the same, and we put on shows in it. Nineteen of us.
There’s Sterling McCall, who’s the producer and the business manager both, which is even more dangerous than it sounds, though I don’t suppose he steals as much as he could, which is something. And there’s me, Andy Pelliteri, publicity man and prop hustler and stagehand and occasional bit-parter. And Edna Stanton, who already mentioned, who’s secretary and ticket-taker and costume maker, the only local citizen in the crow, saddled simultaneously with the acting bug and a perpetually ailing widowed mother, and they’re the only reasons I don’t ask her to marry me, but either one of them would do. And hairy-chested Russ Barlow, light man and sound man and general technician. And non-chested Charlie Wilbe, set designer and set painter and carpenter. And Archer Marshall, phony director. And thirteen actors which, now that I think of it, is an unlucky number. Anyway, these thirteen actors spend their evenings performing this week’s play and their afternoons rehearsing next week’s play and their mornings swimming and sun-tanning at Berger’s Kill. Kill is a word in Dutch that mean creek. It is also, as we were dramatically reminded, a word in English.
I was the one found her. No, that’s wrong, I was the one noticed she was dead. She was a lush, you see. Maybe because she’d been on Mount Olympus and was now back in the valley with us mortals. Anyway, she was still conscientious, and she never missed a performance. She managed that by racking out on the set every afternoon, stewed to the nostrils, usually around three o’clock. At eight, half an hour before curtain, I would wake her. She’d totter away to the star’s dressing room — an eight by eight plywood partition, just like the other three — and put on her face and costume.
So she was there. The curtain was closed, and she was there on the sofa, and out front the rest of them had pushed the chairs out of the way and were rehearsing Love Among The Falling Stars, which was the play for next week. Edna Stanton, who was assistant director and carried the book, read Heather’s lines. At six, the rehearsal broke, and they put the chairs back in place and went oft for supper.
At eight, they were all in their dressing rooms, getting ready. The early arriving patrons were parking their cars on the pounded turf between the barn and the house. I left the green room and went through the wings and out on-stage — my steps muffled by the rug over the drop cloth — and went over to the sofa and shook Heather’s shoulder and said, “Eight o’clock, honey chile. Time for the trouper to shise and rine.”
Sometimes she was hard to wake up. This was one of the times. She was lying on her side, face pressed into the sofa back, knees bent, shoes off. I shook her again, yakking some more, and pulled her shoulder a bit, and saw the new red mouth in her neck.
When I hollered, Russ Barlow looked over from his light-board, where he was doing something or other, and he told me later that I was on my knees in front of the sofa, with a face like Hamlet’s father’s ghost. White, in other words. I don’t remember being on my knees, but I believe it. I believe I didn’t have the strength in my legs to stand up for a minute or two.
How long do you suppose fifteen minutes is? Sit in front of a clock and watch the second hand go around fifteen times, and it takes forever. Sit in front of a man with a gun, who promises to blow your head off in exactly fifteen minutes, and you barely have time to take a deep breath. All I know is it was fifteen minutes before we called the cops. In the meantime, everybody ran around and jabbered.