Trust Me, Lady, Nobody is Hiring a 79-Year-Old Woman to be a Broadway Chorus Girl

A thrilling war story from the days they paid me to write.

Actress Faith Dane, decades before I meet her.

Late at night, when the whiskey is flowing and decent people are asleep in their over-appointed beds, veteran reporters gather in saloons of dubious repute and exchange war stories: Nuclear plant meltdowns; hostage standoffs; wars with actual bullets whizzing past their over-caffeinated heads.  Not me, I made it a point in my forty years as a newspaper reporter to avoid danger, but there were moments I had to step up and do my part.  One such moment came, some years ago, in the wake of a great and fabled Broadway musical.

Do you wish to take a moment to get a fortifying drink?

I cannot recommend it too strongly, for this is a tale that will include press agents, a famous director, and a Broadway icon. And that ferocious creature: the embittered actor.

So, it’s 2003 and I am working for The New York Times, writing a show-biz column called Boldface Names. I’m the worst person to do this column because I have no idea that Snoop Dogg is a culturally significant figure or why I must be forever cognizant of the whereabouts of Paris Hilton.  I am on solid ground on this particular story, however, because it involves something I know well: Classic Broadway, in this case, a revival of the 1959 musical “Gypsy.”

Bernadette Peters is in the starring role as the domineering stage mother.  Sam Mendes is directing. The show’s publicists are offering up an original cast member, 79-year-old Faith Dane, who played a stripper called Mazeppa.  Remember the song, ‘You Gotta Have a Gimmick’ in which a bugle-playing Mazeppa sings, “If you gotta bump it, bump it with a trumpet”? That’s our girl. But what makes this interesting is that Faith Dane had actually been a stripper.

I cannot tell you, as a feature writer, how important the word “stripper” has been in my career. I am also indebted to “con artist”,  “blond”, “tiger-tamer”, “tiger-lady” (she kept twenty-six grown tigers in her backyard in New Jersey), “self-proclaimed”, “singing dog”, “hair-hang act”, “circus”, “bigamist”, “mobster”,   “hundred-year-old woman”, and “pigeon”. You put “pigeon” in just about any story and it pulls them in. Why, I can’t tell you, I find them disgusting myself. 

My friend Herb, whom I meet at my first newspaper job, the then leftist tabloid, The New York Post, had also been a feature writer. Like Shane, he had a rep even before he arrived.

“They say that he comes from Newsday and he can make tapioca fascinating,” I hear a reporter say, as we’re hanging around the I’m Ok, But They Found a Body in the Playground Corral.  

Herb is, however, somewhat perverse. Sent to interview his 100-year-old woman on her birthday he refuses to mention her age in the story because it’s a cliché.

By the time the story I’m about to tell you rolls around, Herb is happily gone from newspapers. Colorful characters, while they make for easy copy, have a way of sucking the oxygen out of the room and leaving the most experienced reporter on the ground, gasping for air, wondering why they didn’t go to law school. I, having been raised by an extraordinarily colorful character, who I called Mom, simply had a greater tolerance than most.  

Herb does, however, love classic musicals as much as I do, so he is delighted to come with me to a preview performance of “Gypsy”, where I am to meet Faith. She is easy to spot, as she is wearing a gold Theda Bara style 20s headpiece. She is also wearing, beneath her trench coat, a fishnet tunic over a skin-toned bodysuit, which she flashes as soon as I introduce myself.

“Ms. Dane? Hello, I’m Joyce Wadler from The New York –”

Flash! Gasp! Holy crap, close that thing before we’re arrested, lady!

Faith has a decent bod; slim, fit, but it is very much a 79-year-old bod, which, now that I’m four years shy of having one, I look back upon with greater understanding. Skinny legs, the inevitable podge of lard at the midriff, none of the pneumatic abundance and largesse your classic 22-year-old Broadway showgirl brings to the party. She is with her husband, who is thirty years her junior and who I first think is her assistant. He is carrying Faith’s trumpet. Faith herself is mightily aggrieved. She had created the Mazeppa number, she tells me; the song-writing team incorporated it into the show and attention has never been paid.

''I worked on it three and a half years, in strip joints you wouldn't want to stick your foot into,” Faith says. “It was flawless. My number is that show, and I made less than the animals.''

Faith is also, I will be stunned, but journalistically delighted to learn, pissed that she has not been cast as Mazeppa in this production. She has been trying to get through to Mendes, the director, she tells me, but all she has been hearing is “too old, too old.”  The hell with that, Faith says.  She made that role.

I told you earlier that I happen to know classic Broadway musicals. Let me amend that: I revere the Broadway composers and songwriters of the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. I believe Lorenz Hart and Cole Porter were two of the finest writers that ever lived. When I go to an old show, I do not open my mouth after the curtain rises out of respect for the performers and the work. The lyricist for “Gypsy” was the young Stephen Sondheim. If I were Catholic, I’d be lighting a candle.

Faith, who I’m sitting next to, has no such constraints. She’s bitching about the producers as the curtains go up.

''They don't even appreciate what I gave to their show,'' she says. ''The second act laid there like a lox. Like two-month-old nova.”

She is also not happy about this production, in which the strippers are slovenly and their costumes seedy. The actress who’s playing Mazeppa – excuse me, the actress in Faith’s role -- has a little belly that hangs over the top of her fishnet tights.

''Come on, my stomach doesn't stick out like that,'' Faith says, loudly enough that the people in our sections turn their heads. “My body was flawless. As it is now. My tits don't even drop.''

She grabs my hand and presses it against her stomach.

''Here, feel these abs,'' she says.

I don’t know how familiar you are with Broadway fanatics, but the sort who come out to see Bernadette Peters in a beloved, classic musical are ready to lynch you if you unwrap a cough drop.  Shushing breaks out all around us; audience members, including the normally mild-mannered Herb, who is sitting on the other side of me, are glaring.

“Shut her the fuck up,” Herb says.

I get where he’s coming from and I’d like to say that like the war photographers who must decide whether to save an injured child or keep shooting, I am, at this moment, deeply and terribly conflicted. But let’s be real. This old stripper (sacred be the word) is giving me gold. I say nothing and keep taking notes.  

Herb takes off as soon as the curtain is down. He’s had to listen to these self-absorbed crackpots all his life, he mutters to me, he’s done.

I follow Faith backstage, where she is surrounded by actresses delighted to be meeting an actress who starred in the original. I see Sam Mendes arrive to give his cast notes, freeze like a deer in the car lights as Faith hollers his name, and beat it like hell out of there.

“SAM MENDES!” Faith bellows, ''I’VE BEEN CHASING YOUR ASS AROUND THE WORLD A WHOLE YEAR!”

Then Faith, her trumpet-schlepping husband, and I go to Sardis, where Faith can have at me at length why she should have the role. The coat comes off, the skinny-legged body in the transparent bodysuit does an extended turn about the tables, but the dining room is empty and there’s nobody to take in the show.

“Faith,” I say, “You’ve got a great body, but it’s a 79-year-old body. This is a role for a woman in her 20s or 30s. And the ship has sailed. The show is in previews. It’s cast.”

This does not, as far as I can tell, make a dent. An oxygen mask drops down from the ceiling, I pick it up, inhale deeply for a few minutes, then head home.

It’s good, I think, looking back on my career, that the term ‘narcissist’ did not have the starring spot in the psycho-babble firmament it has now. The word is so cold and clinical. It would have taken so much away from the self-proclaimed, self-styled animal experts who kept twenty-six tigers in the yard, were not con artists, and would have been better working in a circus, developing a hair hang act.

It is why, even now, I resist characterizing Faith Dane, who died a few years ago, at 96, as a narcissistic loon. How could I? She gave me more than a great story. She made it fun.