Queen of Mean

She was the Queen of Mean and I was the hotel maid she berated. I had a uniform and a name tag: I was Erica. And she was Leona Helmsley, as played by Suzanne Pleshette in the biopic Leona Helmsley: Queen of Mean.

Pleshette is perhaps best remembered as Bob Newhart's wife in his TV series The Bob Newhart Show. She was funny and enchanting in that role, a reliable foil and expert match for his comedic turns. Before that regular gig, she'd guested on a lot of other TV series. Among her movies, her most memorable is perhaps Hitchcock's The Birds.

In real life, I am not a maid named Erica and she was not mean. In fact, she was the opposite, at least for the time I "knew" her. Striding into holding one day, her eyes fastened on a book lying on the table next to me: On Acting by Sanford Meisner.

In her inimitable whiskey voice, she asked: “Who’s reading Meisner?”

In my small, orange pekoe voice, I answered, “Me.” I think I raised my hand like I was in grade four.

The room went quiet as I sensed a plethora of ears honing in on our conversation, led by Suzanne with her sultry voice, a timbre much in demand for voiceover work. That's her you hear as Zira in The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride and she did the English voice for the characters of Yubaba and her twin sister, Zeniba in Spirited Away.

With a roomful of eavesdroppers tuned in, she told me that Sandy Meisner had been her teacher and that they’d appeared in a play together on Broadway in 1958. She said: "He was a great teacher but a lousy actor."

That play was The Cold Wind and the Warm, written by S.N. Behrman and directed by Harold Clurman. Suzanne is in Sandy's book but I hadn’t got to that part yet, so I had no idea. And she had no idea who I was, so it seemed remarkable to me that she then launched into a story that very much echoed my then circumstances.

It was about a friend of hers, "a gifted actress", who’d taken time away from her acting career to have a couple of kids but was now trying to get back on the boards. Her comeback was proving difficult, practically impossible.

This story was an omen for me. I had two little kids at home and no help nor money to get myself back into showbiz. It was a constant struggle. I know others have done it, but it was too much for me - trying to remember lines or moves while worrying about a kid who’d had a fever that morning.

I also recall being secretly astounded that an actress could have a friend like Ms. Pleshette yet not be able to get a foothold in a business she'd already demonstrated giftedness in. So much for “it’s not what you know but who you know”. I was learning that both the "what" and the "who" could mean nothing, just as the "when" and the "where" could prove too difficult.

And so, I stopped trying to be a professional actor. In whatever spare time I could carve out, I started writing. Being a writer is no less difficult than being an actor but at least I could stay home to do it.

I saw The Birds again recently and was delighted by the apparent ease with which Pleshette played her scenes. Playing second banana to the cool blonde lead (as almost all female non-blondes in Hitch’s oeuvre were destined to do), she shone as schoolteacher and jilted lover, Annie Hayworth.

Meisner may have taught her a thing or two about acting but I’m sure it was all in aid of discovering and sharpening her natural born talent.

Thanks for reading!