I met Elaine Stritch only once. She was holding court in a reception hall at the Paley Center, on West Fifty-Second Street, wearing her trademark round spectacles and a huge brown mink slung over her lower half for warmth (even at eighty-nine, she kept her slender legs on display at most times). She looked exhausted. She had been barely humoring supplicants all night, as they paid tribute following the première of “Shoot Me,” a documentary about her life. After glad-handing the likes of Ellen Burstyn, Alec Baldwin, Tovah Feldshuh, and other show folk, her patience for the swooning general public must have been razor thin. But I had to thank her. After spotting an opening, I walked up to her chair and managed to say, stammering over the words, “Thank you, Elaine, for everything, really. It’s meant so much…” Even small, feeble, and seated, Stritch was formidable, near glowering, certainly annoyed. She looked me up and down, and then, right before waving me away for another admirer, she spoke in the dry, croaky tone that made her career: “You kids make me feel like I’m at my own funeral.”
At the time, I blushed and slunk away, ashamed to have bothered her. But that dismissal meant more than a warmer interaction would have. I had been thanking Stritch for a lifetime of saying exactly what was on her mind, at any given moment: a little sadness, a little bile, a little humor to take the edge off. A consummate show person and a legendary New Yorker, Stritch—as one of my friends put it, after seeing her perform live at the Carlyle—“wore no pants and gave no fucks.” The epitaphs and retrospectives began rolling in a year ago, when Stritch left her beloved city to spend her last months in Michigan; an era of some kind was ending, and we knew it. But even after a year of reading farewells and final thoughts, her death, last week, felt like a blow.
Stritch was the kind of performer who one hopes will live forever, because she gave the impression that she just might. She threatened her audiences and her collaborators (who have alternatively lamented and celebrated working with her), with her own immortality as a gag: You just might have to deal with me forever. And we will, through the lasting performances she left behind on vinyl and celluloid. But, as in the theatre itself, something unrepeatable is inevitably gone once the curtain closes on a life. This is true for every life, of course, but it feels especially so for Stritch’s. Her life was devoted entirely to performance—to forging, for one night only, that intimate and ephemeral connection between an actress and the people in the velvet seats.
“I’m angry,” she said, in her retrospective performance, “Elaine Stritch at Liberty.” “I’ll get over it, but I’m angry. I’m sore as hell that I had to go through what I had to go through to get through what I had to get through.… It’s scary up here, O.K.? O.K., so you’re scared, you drink, you’re not scared.” She cast herself as a kind of joyful martyr for show business, swallowed up by its monstrous demands but unwilling (and, to her mind, unable) to do anything else. Few people have been so honest about what it takes to be on a stage, or so direct about how much some people desire the spotlight, drink it in, and live off of it.
Many of our contemporary female stars are coy about celebrity; they give shy interviews over Cobb salads and insist that they are just like us. Elaine Stritch knew from an early age that she wasn’t like us, and she relished it. She demanded excellence from herself and from those around her, because she truly believed that she was excellent. She didn’t have the looks of a star or the voice of an ingenue, but she knew she had something special, and she worshipped it in herself. The biggest holes are often left behind by those who knew their own potential.
I saw “Elaine Stritch at Liberty” on DVD, in 2003, at a dark carrel in my college library, as I was secretly deciding to move to New York the day I graduated. Seeing her performance cemented my decision. She trilled the words to Noël Coward’s “I’ve Been to a Marvelous Party,” and she made it seem as if that’s what the city was—a clinking cocktail hour, where some were entertained and some were entertainers, and it was perfectly acceptable to want to be the latter. She made New York City a place where you’re allowed to expect things. She permitted vanity, striving, charm, and “maquillage” on the way to the top, but not dullness or stupidity. She didn’t romanticize the experience or effort of becoming successful; for her the ride came with alcoholism, and moments of severe lonesomeness between the adrenaline rushes of the spotlight.
The novelist Dawn Powell (another essential New Yorker) wrote in her diary, in 1942, that an artist’s work should be “delicate and cutting—nothing will cut New York but a diamond. It should be crystal in quality, sharp as the skyline and relentlessly true.” Stritch’s voice was brassy enough to blare through the mezzanine, but often quiet and frail—a delicate glottal rasp in the back of the throat, the sound that comes right before tears. Stritch allowed those tears to come out in her performances, but only for a moment. Then it was back to a quip, a sardonic smile, an aside about feeling like she was at her own funeral. It was a pattern unique to her but as classic as vaudeville: cry, laugh, express true joy.
At the end of “Liberty,” Stritch tells the story of a six-year-old actor she once worked with, who got so worked up and excited when the stage manager called “Places!” that he would run through the halls yelling, “It’s time! It’s time!” He was her kindred spirit. Few performers have expressed such unbridled ecstasy about getting to be in front of people their whole lives. Too many are timid about why they are up there, what they need from it, what they are getting back and what they are giving. I’m grateful that she taught me a bit about how to cut New York like a diamond. If nothing else, she was relentlessly true.
