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134 C H a P t e r e i g H t Cookies and Milk with Mother bill swan met mary in stoCkbridge, massaCHusetts, in tHe summer of 1957, when he was performing in Bus Stop and she was rehearsing The฀Great฀Sebastians. After they both returned to Los Angeles, Mary suggested they get together, so Swan picked her up for a night at the Hollywood Bowl. At the end of the evening, when he drove Mary back to the Voltaire, she invited him in. “If you’d like to come up, we can have some cookies and milk and you can meet Mother. She’ll be waiting up for me,” Mary said. So, at a time when scotch and soda was the typical offering, Swan went upstairs and had milk and homemade cookies with Mary and Isabella around their kitchen table. Mary was forty-seven. This homespun approach to life defined Mary her entire life. She seemed an anachronism to virtually everyone she met, living as she did with the values and tastes and manner and clothes and furniture and habits of someone from a bygone era. The roles she picked, the people she befriended, the ways she spent her time off camera, the expressions she chose—they all spoke of another time. Again and again, when friends are asked to describe her, the word Victorian surfaces quickly. “She didn’t change—I’d say she didn’t even adjust. And that’s what carried her through. She was really one of the most principled persons I have ever known. She had a very special, enormous faith in her God and in her beliefs and, dammit, nobody was going to change them. And nobody did,” says Dolly Reed Wageman. Principled is also one of the first words Mary Grant Price associates with Mary. “She just maintained her own standards. The fact that she was Victorian was a matter of choice, but her essential character was that she was very, very principled. She just had a large feeling about right and wrong and was happy to tell you it.” To Lucie Arnaz, Mary’s old-school nature could be summed up as character: “In the old days, people who had character didn’t change it with every person they met. They didn’t C o o k i e s a n d m i l k w i t H m o t H e r 135 change to fit the style or the clothes or to fit the mood, to be hip or whatever . They were who they were. Mary had her own character. She had it all her life.” Mary’s attachment to propriety extended to the way she referred to herself, always “Miss,” never “Ms.” It affected the way she dressed: almost never in slacks, usually in matronly blouses, blazers, and long, heavy plaid skirts (“like a big Madeline doll,” one friend jokes). Even in the 1990s, she often donned a hat and gloves to visit her agent’s offices . She liked to shop at Talbot’s, known for its conservative women’s clothing. Her fondness for tradition was especially evident in the way she spoke. Mary peppered her conversation with dated expressions like “Glory to Betsy.” If she thought someone was too taken with himself, she frequently cracked, “He’s heady with his own perfume,” an expression Betty Garrett has used herself ever since she first heard it from Mary. If Mary was really impressed with someone, she might offer an enthusiastic, “He’s all wool except the buttons!” Encountering someone who wasn’t very bright, she might say, “He has a glass eye at the key-hole.” Someone was never merely dead; they were always “dead as a mackerel.” “Pushface ” was something Mary often called people, sometimes endearingly and sometimes not. She frequently ended phone calls and letters with an admonishment a schoolmarm might yell at young children: “Mind your manners!” No doubt, this was something Isabella drummed into Mary in childhood. Mary’s phrasing reflected a formality that she simply considered proper. Anne Kaufman Schneider remembers being struck the first time Mary introduced her to Madelyn and Dick Davis at dinner. “She always called him ‘Doctor.’ She would say, ‘Doctor, do you want your tea black or with sugar?’ She never said ‘Dick.’ And they were very close friends.” Mary’s language, as much as anything else, shaped the way others responded to her. “There were surges in Mary of being very...

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