Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life

17. Triumph

193 Facing page: Patricia Neal in Breakfast At Tiffany’s, 1961. From the author’s collection. 17 Triumph [Acting is] everything! They’ll tell you it isn’t—your fancy friends—but it’s a lie! And they know it’s a lie! They’d give their ears to be in your place! Don’t make any mistake about that! —Fanny, The Royal Family (1927) Roald Dahl submitted a total of seven stories to the New Yorker between February 1957 and March 1959. All were rejected. Wrote Jeremy Treglown, “Dahl was being pressed by Alfred Knopf to put together a new collection [of short stories] but told the publisher that he found ideas harder and harder to come by and was beginning to fear that they would run out altogether.”1 The salary Patricia had earned for her role in A Face in the Crowd would only go so far, especially now that the Dahls’ lifestyle was so expensive to maintain. Patricia had to work. Much of her acting was in television, and much of it was done in California, so she spent a fair amount of time flying between New York and Hollywood. In the fall of 1957, she flew to California for a role in the excellent television anthology Playhouse 90. In an episode entitled “The Playroom,” Patricia played Margaret Flood, an Oscar-winning actress, who, along with her brothers, Kenneth (Tony Randall) and George Rutherford (Charles Drake), returns to her childhood home, where her mother (Mildred Dunnock) is receiving a Mother of the Year award from a national magazine. In their former playroom, the three siblings confront issues that have haunted them since their youth. Margaret and her mother have issues that are irreparable. “You’re so perfect I could strangle you,” Margaret tells her mother. Kenneth, the youngest and the most obviously spoiled of the three, has ruined his successful criminal law career by having an affair with a notorious woman. After Shearer฀book.indb฀฀฀193 3/16/2006฀฀฀12:16:22฀PM 194 Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life a confrontation with his mother, Kenneth runs off with the woman, and the two are killed in a car wreck. Margaret must deliver the news right before the award ceremony at the house, where the press has already gathered. The mother, knowing that she is not worthy of the award, must accept it just the same. The episode was directed by Franklin Schaffner and produced by Martin Margulis. The teleplay, specially written for the broadcast, was by Tad Mosel, whose Broadway play All The Way Home won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The episode, which aired October 10, was recorded live, a practice not without its hazards. During the first part of the performance, the three children all refer to Mildred Dunnock’s character as “Mother.” Perhaps because of their close friendship, in one particularly tense scene between the two women, Patricia turns to Dunnock and calls her “Millie.” The other actors quickly picked up on what appears to have been a mistake, and throughout the rest of the play, they all call Dunnock’s character “Millie,” as if it were very normal to address their mother by her first name. In 2003 Tony Randall remembered Patricia as “a big, bouncy girl, absolutely full of fun. She was much given to play and laughter—just full of laughter and fun and mischief.”2 Returning to New York in mid-October, Patricia busied herself with the day-today lives of her children and her husband, who was now writing for television. Soon after the holidays, Patricia flew back to the West Coast to guest star in “Someone Is After Me” on the short-lived drama series Suspicion, broadcast from the NBC Studios in Hollywood. In “Someone Is After Me,” written by Robert Soderberg and directed by David Greene, Patricia played Paula Elgin , a housewife who starts receiving anonymous telephone calls threatening her life. These calls only happen when she is alone. She then begins to believe that they are from either her family, including her husband Guy Elgin (Lee Bowman), or her neighbors. Also in the cast was Joanne Linville as Lois. The episode aired on Monday, January 6, 1958. Just one week after returning home, Patricia was back in Hollywood for her second Playhouse 90 episode, “The Gentleman from Seventh Avenue,” directed by Alan Reisner. Successful dress manufacturer Mr. Golden (Walter Slezak) finds his attractive designer, Rena Menken (Neal), in tears. She has...