Maria Mocerino

Four days with Barbara Harris

6493 words

In a back room in Brooklyn, I watched Barbara Harris perform at the first televised Tony Award ceremony in history in 1967. In a muumuu, she, as the adorable soot-nosed chimney sweep Passionella sang expertly off-key her one heartbreaking wish: to be a beautiful, radiant, ravishing moooooovie star…rar…rar rar rar…

And here she was, pulling up in a beat-up-but-won’t-give-up Honda Civic to Donny Osmond’s clap-your-hands pop anthem “Solider of Love” at a mall-as-desert-oasis at Happy Hour, palm trees reaching into the sky wrapped in Christmas lights. Shop attendants meandered around a giant, empty Sur La Table.

“SHOT IN THE DARK, I’M SOLDIER OF LOVE.”

People today might not remember Barbara Harris, but Donny Osmond probably does, whose voice set the tone for this theatrical experience known as “Hanging Out with Barbara Harris,” which seemed to be the mystique around her, a noticeable presence. I mean, everybody in Hollywood knows, who Barbara Harris is: a legend.

I, however, didn’t, until an enigmatic stranger across a room in Brooklyn called her one of the best actresses that ever lived, a crazy genius, too. He listed some of her credits: one of the original members of The Second City, so the dawn of American improv. The inspiration behind the utterly beautiful and unique On a Clear Day You Can See Forever who won a Tony Award for The Apple Tree and played the mother in the original Freaky Friday opposite Jodie Foster. It struck me that I hadn’t heard of her.

No one remembers Barbara Harris, he said, due to our “cultural amnesia,” citing Jean Baudrillard’s semi-psychedelic pursuit of “Astral America,” so prophetic, even, America. “She was trying to disappear in 1962,” though, Austin Pendleton said in his dressing room as he was starring in Choir Boy, the nicest man, a veteran of an actor who welcomed me so warmly, spoke so eloquently of her, and communicated feeling so well that it sparked vivid snapshots in my mind…of a door opening to a rehearsal room… for Arthur Kopit’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You Up in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad, which catapulted both their careers, also starring Jo Van Fleet.

“And there she was…”

In truly large cataract sunglasses, rouged lips in a pinch, her dyed hair long and stick-straight flowing in the breeze along with her lime-green pants, a departure from the short, spunky style she sported for most of her career. In her eyes was a sparkle or sheen —at a magic hour peach and orange—and range. Sand sparkling out the exit. We were in the middle of the desert. She was older now, about eight-three, it was about five months before she died.

Headlights tipping up and down over a speed bump, she hadn’t eaten, had just come from the doctor, she didn’t want to talk about that. “She had eaten so many fruits!” Churning them up…she fell over. Her hunger was immediate. I pulled her gingerly away from the car. We were just talking, she said.

Honestly, I think I might be one of the most trustworthy people on Planet Earth because I was in a terrible scandal when I was four, I was manipulated, etc. I came from an unusual background, my parents were mentally ill, part of the reason why I was interested in her profile. When it comes to “mentally ill,” I believe I could tone that dial down on her behalf and speak from the perspective of having had to work out family problems. Even my father, he was older than Barbara, sixty years my senior, born in 1926, thus I had a direct connection to her generation.

As a budding interviewer, which, to her would be funny very soon, I made a series of choices, speaking of a question I received from those who knew her: how did you get her to talk to you? Well, she was at the end of her life. I dropped agenda, also, consciously, more than once. And I opened my mouth for the first time in fifteen years to sing as I learned it was the most vulnerable act one could do, which was her gift, so I led with vulnerability to be able to broach the subject of what courage is.

“Getting to know you… getting to know all about you…” we’d just be bright and breezy. She lit up, “you have to sing!” For the first time in my life, I admitted something. “I never could,” I had a hard time there. She understood completely.

 “I told Lerner I couldn’t sing,” as in Alan Jay Lerner, the composer of My Fair Lady. He came to watch her perform one night in the smash downtown hit Oh Dad because Richard Rodgers had seen her in The Second City premier on Broadway in 1961 that garnered her a Tony Award nomination for “dishing out mad characters faster than Christmas cookies.”

“We should write our first musical collaboration together,” Rodgers thought, “around her.” He left that partnership due to a clash of working styles, but Barbara Harris inspired On a Clear Day You Can See Forever in the mid-sixties, regardless, a musical about a psychic who regresses to a past self under hypnosis, and it made sense to everyone. In the end, “What is the self?” Her transformation from the bumbling, quirky Daisy Gamble, who makes flowers grow with her voice, to the 19th-century refined British Melinda was nothing short of “astonishing.” She even astonished Scottsdale, Arizona, where we lay our scene, in her sixties. “She became sixteen,” Jeffrey Sweet told me, seriously, when she and Ed Asner revisited a scene from The Tempest in which they starred pre-Second City.

 “This isn’t Daniel Day-Lewis,” Arthur Kopit said. “This is Barbara Harris. She’s not becoming the role; she’s becoming someone else.” An astonishing statement.

So she transformed. She’s a character actress, and she’s not Jim Carrey. He becomes the mask. First picture: The Mask. That’s the title. That’s not what’s happening here. She’s becoming someone else, the thing itself. What do you even do with that? Like Jim Carrey, she’s a physical comedian with exquisite range, but there was a subtly in her expression, even if she could be bold, that struck me as part of what imbued her with her other signature attribute: mystery. And I look at Jim Carrey, in a sense, going, what do you think about these statements?

“Sort of haunted…haunting…yeah,” Austin Pendleton said.

In her first screen appearance, Hitchcock Presents in 1961, a frat kickback goes very, very wrong, hilarious posters on the walls like STOP at every turn. The valedictorian passes out and ends up dead because his so-called friends play a prank on him. As a physical comedian, she’s hard to pin down as if she’s “in the thing,” so she, in a white party dress might not be drunk but a little loose because that’s the scene, a touch off-kilter, too, to then inhabit the horror: range.

On Naked City in 1963, the SUV of the era, she plays a girl with a deranged father who never left the war. He dresses her up and pimps her out so he can beat up boys as he’s seeking revenge for an incident that occurred between her and a group of guys. But she gets into it, the make-up and suggestive clothes, so he grabs her arm, finally, and she rips it away above her head, sort of suggestive, but subtle enough where you can’t quite place it, though the sexual undertone is already there. You didn’t know with her…if it was her or something that happened to her. “Some daemon,” in the classic sense, “must be expressed,” a journalist concluded. But then, she had a comedic zaniness, a fresh kooky vibe, a really talented actress, but she didn’t like that word, “I’m not a kook.” Then don’t call her that, I don’t know what to tell you.

The degree to which she was visibly mentally ill, I don’t know, as people spoke so highly of her. Not to say one can’t be revered and mentally ill, but it was that apparent. She had boyfriends, friends, she could get even a touch “fairy godmother.” But more like “haunting, haunted, yeah,” to a smiling Austin Pendleton. A guide, even. Pink was her color, according to the statuesque director of The Graduate Mike Nichols. So she could be in The Addams Family as “the pink one,” as I had so much fun bringing her into contemporary contexts. She might have even got nominated for an Academy Award for The Addams Family, you see what I mean? This is Barbara Harris. Funny. A true original.

It poured that day in Playa del Rey, the first time I spoke to Harris. I studied a little clowning, I told her, an archetype that followed her, but I didn’t want to put that on her.

"Muddleheadedness is her forte,” a journalist noted in an article about On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, “but Barbara Harris can be spotted in a crowd of female clowns for a more disarming quality still. Both in Clear Day and her forthcoming movies, A Thousand Clowns and Oh Dad, a poignancy like a pale rain cloud hangs over everything she does. She is funny, but it hurts to laugh."

Watching puddles, though. Lerner, it seems, heard that, or the journalist came to this conclusion when he said, “you care about her.” As if all that stuff just meant that.

She could relate to that. Clown. What did that mean to her? “Misunderstood.” She didn’t want to be interviewed. “Maybe you can write about my relatives,” she laughed. “Sure,” I shrugged. “What happened?” On my porch, watching the rain, I wondered why it hurt to laugh…as she spurted phrases that curved and veered as our conversation did in the Honda Civic driving down a road cutting through the desert, the sun setting over a most sensual scene.

Her parents’ families settled on farmland in their respective states before they had a name. The Densmoors, her maternal line, traces back to 1600s Ireland and England; they might have come over on the Mayflower, even. She didn’t know. They became a name in what would become Wisconsin because her great-grandfather, James Densmoor, became an industrious businessman. He brought in the railroad from Brandon to Markesan and owned businesses such as the Utley quarry that supplied the stones to build the lakeshore of Lake Michigan. The Densmoors even landed on a typewriter. He had a farm in the town of Green Lake, the coldest in the state now an affluent niche where Harris would spend her summers swimming. Her grandmother made very hard and spicy ginger snaps that no one wanted to eat; her mother’s side infamously could not cook, humorously, in that they played with that quirk. In any case, James Densmoor was the largest landowner in the vicinity at the time of his death in 1905.

Her father’s side with German roots —Harris—settled in Texas on Bison, Buffalo, and horse country “near Native American land,” which might have originally been Native American land. Her grandfather was a newspaperman who rode horses into town to pick up his stock. “There was nothing but hornets and flies,” she said. “It was hot and weird. They had a house in the middle of nowhere.” Her father studied to be a tree surgeon and arborist, and one summer, he headed up to Wisconsin with one of his professors to work in a canning factory—peas, corn, and string beans—owned by her mother’s family. They met and married in a town of two hundred people. Oscar wanted to work in nature. Nathalie wanted her children to be raised with the opportunities that the big city could afford them. In short, Barbara Harris was “a pioneer of improvisational comedy” but also descended from the first settlers, for better and for worse.

Barbara Harris was born on July 25, 1935, in Chicago, Illinois during the Great Depression. She was the youngest of four children living on the ground floor of a brick apartment building in Hyde Park. A baby grand in the living room, Harris’ mother went to Oberland to study music. She fiddled on the guitar and ukulele, too. Nathalie’s father and mother lived with them, though they came from money, so I didn’t understand what happened there. They might have lost it, unclear. One bathroom for a family of eight people though.

Keep that in mind as the subject of “boundaries” is going to float over these lines.

The family trekked back and forth between Texas and Wisconsin. All they had to eat was apple sauce and bread sometimes because that came from the country. They slept in the car on some of these trips. As the youngest child, Harris was babied by their mother, according to her last remaining relative, her niece. On the telephone, Harris received special treatment. Keep that in mind as well. Their mother would put her underwear on the radiator so it would be nice and warm for her when she got dressed. Her brother was killed in WWII, sending her mother into the bedroom for a few years, so she became the youngest of “the three sisters.” Her older sisters skipped a little faster out of the door, whereas Barbara stayed closer to their mother until later on. Paul Sand, her former The Second City colleague who worked with Carol Burnett, informed me that her mother was always the villain…he didn’t really know why.

She struggled with mental health issues her whole life from what I gathered…from everybody. “You cannot really talk about her without mentioning it,” her last remaining relative said. Everybody did. More than mention it. I didn’t interview anyone until after she passed, but I had already gotten the picture from the press clippings, so I figured we’d give her a break on that end. I almost didn’t conduct interviews, but I decided to move forward when Robert De Niro said she was his favorite actress. I didn’t bring up her “struggles” or her “mental problems” as a couple of friends phrased it, on purpose. I wasn’t that interested, except, it became more than clear that the interaction between genius and illness in her case couldn’t be glazed over, and why? Why would I? Barbara Harris becomes more relevant because of it. On top of it, she was probably on very early SSRIs, or psychiatric drugs, which makes her significant in a whole new light, which is funny; that’s Barbara Harris. “It was a traumatic childhood,” her relative relayed but recounted the wild, fun, good times though she didn’t speak to Barbara anymore.

Dinners were out of control; the eldest tried to make Barbara laugh so hard that she would fall out of her chair, flinging peas and mashed potatoes across the table. When the only son was killed in the battle at Nancy, France, during World War II, however, it devastated the family. Harris’ mother didn’t come out of her room for three years, so the eldest took care of the family, that’s all her daughter knows. The father ran short-order restaurants in bowling alleys. He played cards. He got involved in the literary scene via gambling. He hunted. They ate deer on Christmas. Natalie played piano in the Chicago Park Service, so the girls had free dance lessons. They were all creative: artists and craftsmen and I believe mentally ill, though Barbara seemed to have the most pronounced expression of it? According to her relative. Barbara’s life was in the theater though she couldn’t open her mouth for many years.

“I had to move!”

Harris fell over on the edge of an oceanic parking lot as the sky turned periwinkle. She parked in two spaces, not one. “My sister were smart, my brother—they were all so smart.” So was she, another reason why I was here. She was a genius, no? I wondered if she might have been a prodigy since she exhibited “problems” when she was young, and today, even, people talk about a “mysterious section of mental health.” She occupied that space. I could have made her nervous, also, but it’s rare for someone to think about the effect they might be having on a person. Anyway, it was, truly speaking, the most perfect oblique angle I had ever seen. Her parking job was math. I said it the next day.

“And then I came along,” with something a little piquant in her eye.

“I wanted ballet lessons, swimming, ice skating. I was really psychotic. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I did ballet for years…” She couldn’t keep coming to class in her school clothes, though, the studio said, but she had so many ideas that she gave up that her mother wanted to make sure. I trust that’s true, I don’t know.

Into Houston’s Steakhouse, Barbara dashed to the bathroom to comb her hair. 

"I gotta, my hair…is such a mess.”

I brushed across the scene. Tuesday night in Scottsdale, Arizona. Green velvet booths. Dark wood. Fake blond hair totally or in highlights. The same black purse. Couples that had a kid or closing in on the deal. A guy at the bar who cashed in big at a good age with a martini flashing pearly whites in my direction. A peppering of afterworks of pretty much a pale color. Snowbirds–Barbara called them. I never found out why they were snowbirds, why they flew to the desert, but maybe they flew for the winter? It was May. An hour's wait for a table. I stood by the stand but jerked when I remembered who I was with.

In a Second City Review, Barbara Harris played a scene with Severn Darden and Paul Sand. In the bit, Barbara Harris excuses herself so Sand can come out to his father first. Harris normally reenters to conclude the scene as his mother. One night, however, she exited the stage with enough time to smoke a cigarette. The show across the street featuring her friend Zora Zampert had just broken for intermission. Delighted she could catch the second act, she put out her cigarette and crossed the street. Meanwhile, Sand and Darden remained on stage, improving to a breaking point. Darden invented some excuse to get off-stage. She was nowhere to be found. He reappeared. 

“Mom’s dead.” 

Blackout.

Barbara Harris positioned herself behind and between two women of equal height and measure with blond highlights primping and washing their hands at two sinks. Combing her hair in reverse, I was relieved that she hadn’t left, so it was going all right, I guess, but then, what did I know about what she did and what she didn’t? I say that more because, the unknown is the state of change in thinking about her personally. But I spoke to one of the most prominent playwrights of his generation: Craig Lucas. He came rushing outta the gate for her— her eccentricity was known, all the same. She could disappear, not show up. I just wonder if anyone ever spoke to her directly…

“There’s a vanity mirror…if you wanna get a better look Barbara…”

“Oh, I don’t want to do that.”

“Well, it’s an hour wait.”

“WHAT? An hour? They must be joking…”

“I don’t know if they’re prone to joking…”

“So they’re serious?”

“Seemed pretty serious…”

“Are you sure?”

“Good point. I think you better try.”

She stepped out the bathroom and stopped.

“M” on the door in front of her, she turned around. “W.”

“M and W…what happens if you’re dyslexic? How do you know?”

“You know, that’s really interesting,” I said.

“I thought that dyslexia was a horizontal thing but this is a vertical…”

“There are many tyyyyyypes of dyslexia…”

“Really Barbara, that’s pretty good.” That blew my mind. It was the “types of dyslexia” that really made me lose it, later, when I pulled out this time, again, to consider it, also wondering, suddenly, do I have a touch of dyslexia? The hostess confirmed the wait time. We maneuvered around Scottsdale, Arizona.

Out the door, she suggested the place with the “small lamb chops, appetizer, that are so nice…”

We stood on the edge of black, at the precipice of an oceanic parking lot under the first stars in a midnight blue sky, inky.

“Let’s try it!” I was enthused.

“Let’s try it.” She wondered. “Should we walk?”

“I don’t know…where is it?”

“These places are all over...hard to know... “

I didn’t say anything.

 “Across the parking lot…I think.”

I stood there.

“How long was your plane ride?”

“An hour…”

Funny enough, our exchange didn’t seem to end after she passed away to the point that I might call myself a believer, I just don’t know what that means, so I won’t pretend to. Once I started playing around with these artful four days, I deleted “an hour” because who cares about me? “Don’t do that,” I heard. “Okay,” at this point, I paused.

“Why?”

Oh! It took us an hour to cross the parking lot! Hey! That’s funny. So what DID Barbara Harris know, and what didn’t she know? A real question with her. When she landed the best gig in town, Lerner and Rodgers buzzing about her, the press had no idea what was going on. “Can she sing?” She didn’t even know. I even learned something from this experience because this was a script, there you go, with sensational imagery to match. No one was surprised. In her style, shrugging, “okay.” She set me up to be funny, and I won’t attach to that idea, but it wouldn’t be the last time, and it’s a storytelling point that someone can play and interpret. Step one. I learned something.

She had a talent or an intuitive ability in this way. I reached for the car handle three times, and she revealed something about her health, and in the end, those three moments told a story. “I’m on anti-depressants look at the stars!” to “I have cancer everywhere,” my hand hovering there. I opened the door, aware. Coincidence, in this case, reached the realm of brilliance, and you see, people spoke about her like this, so where’s the line?

In another gargantuan parking lot, dry as a bone, she freaked out about making it to the dentist on time (after a photo shoot). A garbage truck pulled up behind her right before she snapped. BEEP BEEP, these two men, slowing down with garbage bags, witnessed, the sun at its peak splitting over their shoulders, Barbara Harris flailing and flipping out across the expanse in a cinematic sweep. I trailed behind her. PETE! GREEK! I snagged the piece of carpet from the arm of a maître-d cactus (our photo shoot). I waddled behind her, up the steps, because she was eighty-three.

“P…” I might as well.

“MELLAS!”

“P…”

“GREEK!”

There was just no way we were going to be late. But this would be “the scene” full of humor, emotion, and mystery in broad daylight, as I turn on her porch tower to clock these two garbage men one last time, still confused, bemused, funny detail. We’re about to find out how sick she is. Into her house, classical music washed over me as she dashed like a sprite —to the bathroom. Putting rouge on her face, hurried, how do I describe it? Delighted, energetic, perky, anticipatory. Haunting but pink. She knew who she was. I stood at the door, “don’t lose your slut,” she said, “or else?” I asked. “You’ll just be another nut.” She launched back into action— the mad dash to get to the dentist. She suddenly appeared a little too far away to make sense, in her kitchen, perfectly still, standing there, with an iced coffee with berries in it.

“You made me something?” I was touched.

Shrugging, “yeah, you’ll starve!”

Back in— the rush, the dentist, she threw a word out there about The Apple Tree halting at her front door a moment in a golden light at high noon, even holy. Her figure covered in sunspots, I sat down to put on my shoes with an iced coffee in my hand, and she set me up to be funny again. I can’t prove that, but in the next scene, in the car, she believed in me, she said, which I didn’t understand, she wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to hear it, you know, so in thinking about vulnerability being her “stunning” quality, I’m naked there. All these years later, looking back, her figure covered in sunspots through her black gate, this pause, this moment, we were in a universe. 

“How did you do that?” I asked. Since she brought it up.

“The voice, I even tried it, in The Apple Tree?”

Shrugging, she just put on a funny voice, you try.

“Did you write that monologue?” I asked. I don’t know why. In Harry Kellerman? No, she said, but she did, I found out later. I’m not surprised. Barbara Harris is a woman who intuits Academy Award-nominated monologues in the middle of the night. This is what I mean about her mysterious genius, but then, that’s improv, it gets the player past that mental mind to a space where all information is available, so the idea that Harris might have been naturally attuned like that probably wouldn’t be refuted by the field as “woo woo” since I read about an improver that convinced a doctor that he had studied medicine when he didn’t. A fascinating space to begin with: consciousness or information.

In a burst, her figure hot white in the sun, I ran down the steps behind her in the dress she insisted that I get, with an iced coffee with wilting berries in it, and into the shallow end of an immense parking lot as dry as a bone across the way from the cultural center and an Andaz spa hotel. We got into her baking hot Honda Civic, taking up two parking spots. She told me about her hilarious date with Marlon Brando, they invented tea kettles that don’t drip. “Was that an interesting convo?” I asked sincerely. And to that, she admitted, “well, it was the best that he could do, the best I could do,” and I have to double-check what she said, how she said it, because it’s Barbara Harris. A particular cadence and sentence structure, one of these artists to capture exactly, sort of strange to begin with, I would imagine for her, a real original in the moment that people tried to imitate back in the day. Mary Martin as in Peter Pan, elegantly thrilled, had never seen anything like Harris. She had an uncanny ability to make it seem like she was making up the lines that she had rehearsed. And it was so true, I didn’t even realize it, she made me forget that she had been to AJs before, the supermarket which became a magnum opus on Day Two. She would ring a bell like a lingering legacy still there: her comedic style, but she, without a doubt, was her own entity. “A unique blend of qualities.”

Turning into a parking lot fifteen minutes later, she drove over the divider and into an adjacent field. We turned in circles. I had to get Barbara Harris to the dentist. There. Where. There. Right there. THERE. There’s a space. Did she know what we were about to find out?

At 11 PM, the night before, she had called me. Something was wrong with her tooth, but she wasn’t in pain. She had a feeling. And it was how she suddenly burst back into the waiting room, “I have a mass in my jaw.” It made me laugh, a knee-jerk reaction, shaking that away, “What?” Standing up. “Yeah,” she bopped around. I high-tailed it to the receptionist. “Excuse me?” In a bumbling reveal, out the door, I got the number of a specialist, like seriously? I reached for the handle a third time, and she revealed that she was sick everywhere.

Into her house, I grabbed the phone, the number the dentist provided didn’t even work, so I called her medical group, waiting elevator music, thirty minutes, to make an appointment with a specialist. Barbara Harris tried to divert me three times. First, with a book of swimsuits from the 30s, flipping pages. “I’m making this appointment,” “shoot,” she flurried off…to appear, suddenly, over there.

“What about your haikus?”

“My haikus?”

She set up a spot in the corner so I could “write my haikus…”

Confused a moment like, could I write haikus?

“I do not write haikus. I’m making this appointment.”

It was hard not to laugh. Haikus. She wasn’t joking, you see.

I hardly knew her, pulling into the parking lot to come full circle to Houston’s. The only parking spot available was the straightest tightest smallest sliver between a Maserati and a diplomat’s car. No room for obliques in another coincidence of perfect timing, now the joke, I guess, is flipped on me, but it wasn’t a joke, also, on my end, it was geometry. That’s what an oblique is. Looking at her, though, Barbara Harris, over the steering wheel, she was going for it. I was nervous.

“I wanna hit the Maserati.”

“Hit the diplomat’s car. Easier to replace.”

At that very moment, they appeared with doggy bags. This is what I mean; coincidence becomes something you can’t make up, and in her case, it seems that everybody would nod, “Yeah,” if not “Yup.” If we got there, eventually, I might have asked her if she felt in tune in a particular way, not even intending to share that, publically. What “this” would be, I didn’t know. Maybe I would have written a play, Waiting for Godot, you know? At AJs Supermarket, an interactive theater piece, all the rage: interaction. This was a complete story, nuanced, rich, stargazing on her porch every evening. No words, very little, so she could feel me out. I thought this was step one in an idea. No agenda. I would have burned the pages, I almost did, you know, delete everything I had, you see.

Back to night one, we crossed the same parking lot on the edge of night drifting very far to the right— to the restaurant farthest away from the one with the lamb chops. Swerving back around, we stopped at an Italian restaurant with a canopy of Christmas lights glowing, the tiniest thing in all infinity. No lamb chops at the establishment, the server said.

“Well, that’s ok. We’ll be right back for a second dinner…” 

I could tell she ping-ponged. Was Barbara Harris serious? It is you who are serious, I thought. Along the edge of an abyss, life and death, even, we inched towards an unknown destination in a manmade glow in a paved parking lot in the middle of the universe. Barbara Harris sighed. We investigated the contents of store after store. She noticed what she believed to be a strange tagline for a t-shirt.

“Spiritual gangster…”

I nodded.

“That’s what they’re wearing now?”

“What do you think about that?” I really wanted to know.

“Hm...I regret that they are not telling the truth. Every time I come by here though, it’s changed. There’s always something new.” 

“Things aren’t built to last here…"

“Yes… that’s new, that’s new…it’s all new…”

As if spotting the first sign of land, I pointed.

“Is that it?”

Into a sports bar blasting music on a night relatively sparse with clientele, the hostess confirmed the existence of the lamb chop appetizer. The televisions fell in a line on mute, the limbs of the players flashing above beers on tap. Barbara bopped towards a back table.

“What is that she has?”

Mike Nichols reflected on what her gift was.

“I suppose it’s an ear for what’s happening: she is a person who really hears…They just know what other people are thinking. They hear.”

It couldn’t have been louder, the kitchen behind us, the music pounding as if modern life were designed to make it impossible to hear. Jean Baudrillard even wrote that Americans are afraid of the lights going out, so we might be terrified of silence, too.

I knew she was going to see through me, and she did. I was expecting it, I don’t know why, I don’t know how to describe that, but I wasn’t going to hide on some nonverbal level. I didn’t know what the story was…but that worked, I thought, in this case, but I wanted to make my intention clear because I didn’t want to bullshit her. But I would not ask her a single question from this point forward unless she took a step. I didn’t need to do anything but take another. You know, getting to know you.

“Everybody’s in the know but me,” I sang.

Barbara Harris turned with eyes wide and bright as if I were a magician who pulled the lyric out of my water glass, literally. “How do you know that song?!” Her head tipped back and forth as she pulled the words off a dusty shelf in her memory bank. She called me “the natural archivist.” “I sang that song for Richard Rodgers. He said it was the worst song he ever heard! He hated me!”

“No he didn’t…”

“Yes he did!”

“No way…”

I don’t know what that is. I mean, maybe he did, say that. She still got the job. On the spot. Maybe he did hate her, who knows? It’s just a funny response.

With a ditty sweet and tender as a lullaby Barbara opened the first The Second City show on a blisteringly cold winter night in Chicago in 1959. I imagined that the voice that delivered it, as was my experience, must have warmed the hearts of everyone in the room that evening, seemed to be one of her effects. In the UCLA media archives, tucked away in the recesses of the library basement, I had watched a recording of it from a Second City show a few years later. No other song more aptly described her modus operandi. I felt the same way.

“If you don’t like this world, the next one will be better…”

I genuinely loved the songs, what can I say, to begin honestly.

“You need to sing!”

Since this was an introduction, I admitted once again that I was always shy about it. I did it on purpose. It was true. It opened up a world, and we could take it from there. She could tell I had done my homework. I didn’t just roll up to talk to Barbara Harris. I spent about a year watching and reading before I decided to engage because she’s a person and a big deal. I didn’t like fame. I’m not a fan, even the energy around her was a real thing, you see. It’s not to say it’s not merited, but I had to get comfortable with it sensationally, even how my discomfort would be received, you see, especially since I would have to grow to be able to meet her.

But, on that note, fame, two women on the periphery would say to me over the course of these four days, perfectly timed, once again. “She used to be a big star.” That made me angry. I started this “project” of sorts by asking people if they knew Barbara Harris, tossing out some bait, seeing what it would trigger.

“Innocent to her own talent?”

“I don’t buy it.” Angry, even.

“Didn’t want to be famous?”

“I don’t buy it.”

A stuffed baby singing elephant before us at AJs Supermarket, a three-hour magnum opus unfolding, we would investigate all that one could buy, does buy, I suppose. At the cafe, I transparently projected a LA LA LA cocoon around her when she called her bank to make sure she had money, generally speaking. I tested that out on a friend later wondering if, this would be one of the choices I made that would surprise people.

“Why didn’t you listen in…to how much money she had?”

Exactly.

As I said, I made a series of choices. It’s not my business. She’s mentally ill, on top of it, and as someone who swung, I didn’t want her to freak out later, of course, since boundaries — even from the public’s standpoint — can be crossed. But they’re famous, so it doesn’t matter. “You’d think, wouldn’t you?” Elaine Stritch said. “Are you alright?” Hello? Isn’t that the question? “You have money?” She did. That’s all I cared about on the edge of check-out. Remember the question, “is there nothing real anymore?” BEEP BEEP, BEEP…BEEPBEEP. It’s rare that someone considers your boundaries, I suppose. Get the gossip. She paused, considering. I tuned into the beep beepbeepbeep…

“Well,” she said, “I guess we better do the shopping now…”

I, admittedly, imploded. Beep beep.

“The shopping?”

I thought she just wanted to take a tour, discuss the outrageous (!) Home and Body section, contemplate a singing stuffed baby elephant, pick up some sushi in a Beckett meets Altman meets Saturday Night Live, and leave.

I appreciated her artistry, her point of view over the lamb pops. Even a supermarket became culturally revealing and meaningful since The Second City drew its inspiration from real life. You’d think, what’s interesting about a supermarket? Parking lots? And yet, something poetic happened in “a paved paradise, they put up a parking lot” that became the universe, a couple of cicadas chit-chatting in the night. The kidney pool glowing, it was the perfect place to contemplate what she told me at the restaurant that first night, which I genuinely wanted to know.

“How did she do it?”

Since I was admitting something for the first time, subtly. How did she get over her blocks? She famously couldn’t open her mouth when she first arrived at what would become The Second City.

“What gave you the confidence to do it?”

“Confidence comes from belonging.”

The thesis statement of her life.

I pointed to it, handwritten on a note tacked on her bulletin board the night we ate sushi and Chobani and watched SUV on a sleeping bag on her bed. A schizophrenic on trial for murder. A play inside a TV show. She was known in The Second City for developing “people scenes,” not haha funny, necessarily, but work more focused on character development, he humor born from the characters revealing themselves. Life might just be like that, but after AJs, the impossible task of getting Barbara to the pharmacist, she couldn’t “hide” her problems, in a sense, and I couldn’t hide how puzzling that statement was to me, and then the Law and Order change of scene sucked us in—to an episode about a mentally ill person, thinking about this depiction on TV.

“What’s schizophrenia again?” She asked.

“Well, a common misconception is that it involves multiple personalities,” as in, who even knows if she was correctly diagnosed? She said, honestly, “sounds like me.”

“What multiple personalities?”

“Yeah,” Chobani going in.  

She said earlier on a green used couch for sale as she suddenly sat down… to talk about fame, even, for about an hour, a price tag behind her, “Lerner was weird,” he had to wear gloves because of it. “We’re all just a bunch of weirdos, so,” shrugging, “what’s the problem?”

(LAW AND ORDER CHANGE OF SCENE)