Blunt, brash, unfiltered, even profane and vulgar. A constant need to be the center of attention. A New York City celebrity and minor TV star. Insecure, difficult and bullying. Impossible to work with.
Elaine Stritch, a Broadway legend who died on July 17, 2014, was all that and more. A woman once compared to “a Tasmanian devil in a box,” she was an incomparable presence on the stage, an alcoholic and a Catholic. About almost everything, she was outspoken, yet she remains, like most people, a bit of a mystery and a combination of contradictions. Her life is also an interesting illustration of the interplay of human frailty, personal aspirations and religion.
An often-told story is of the time, after a couple of beers, she auditioned for the television series “The Golden Girls.”
According to her biographer, Alexandra Jacobs, the audition went like this: “Stritch entered a room of black suits. ‘I hope you all don’t mind that I’ve rewritten some of these lines to fit me,’ she told them. ‘I’m Catholic, so I don’t want to say, “oh God.” I can’t stand that.’ She tried a curse instead. The suits stared back at her, aghast.”
With her commanding presence, long legs and magnificent, husky voice, she was a natural on the stage, appearing in serious works by Edward Albee and Samuel Beckett but mostly musicals. Yet she probably became most widely known, in her 80s, through a recurring role on the NBC comedy “30 Rock.”
Stritch was a practicing Catholic her whole life, but with her constant swearing and incessant craving for attention, she was not what most people consider a model of holiness. She was a woman who, a niece recalled, would sleep late on a Sunday morning, throw a mink coat over her nightgown and take a cab to Mass.
The producer Hal Prince, in the documentary “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me,” said Stritch had “the guts of a jailbird.” But, he added, “the convent girl is still there, always.”
One of Stritch’s last performances was a one-woman show filled with songs and reminisces at the Café Carlyle in New York City in 2013. The New Yorker magazine reported her telling the audience, “Being a Catholic, I always give myself a problem. Sacred Heart Convent girls always give up something. Their prime time is Lent. The harder your life is, oh boy, you’re really making it.”
She added, “There’s something about it that makes sense, Lent. You give something up and everything’s more joyful.”
Even with the help of Alcohol Anonymous, Stritch had a hard time completely giving up alcohol, which she used to calm stage nerves. She once noted that she got through a performance early in her career with her Rosary and a double brandy. Later in her career, she would walk through Midtown with a martini in a paper coffee cup; in retirement she filled Fuji water bottles with cosmopolitans.
When Bridget, her long-haired dachshund, was snatched off a bar and held for $200 ransom (yes, really), she prayed desperately to Saint Anthony and promised never to drink again if only her beloved pet would be returned — a vow she broke the minute the dog was back in her arms.
The theater critic Ben Brantley once wrote, “Ms. Stritch is, on some level, a frightened, confused neurotic child. What great theater performer is not? But she has always been able to feed these traits into a stylistic blaze that warms everyone near her.”
One can easily think of others who share her faults, but whose talents begin and end with self-promotion, bullying and ridicule. They have followers who they embolden, but do not warm.
For all the ego and flamboyance associated with the theater, Stritch’s ambition was somewhat modest. It was simply to be the best stage performer she could be — and she knew the limitations of that stage. “There’s certainly nothing lasting and definite about the theater,” she once told a journalist. “But you know the show at Saint Pat’s (Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York) won’t close for a long time.”
Saint John Paul II, who knew how to command a crowd and had a theater background himself, might have appreciated — and possibly even have seen a hint of the church’s influence — in what Stritch said in one of her last interviews: “Quite frankly I don’t know how to be happy. I have not a clue. I only serve — and I don’t say that with any grandeur. I just serve others through entertaining.”
Carl Peters is the managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.
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