Zachary Scott: Hollywood's Sophisticated Cad

Early Death

192 CHAPTER 8 In the summer of 1964 Zach enjoyed his last hurrah in the theater when he undertook a fourteen-week tour of the Alan Jay Lerner–Frederick Loewe musical My Fair Lady. In preparation for the challenging show, based on Shaw’s Pygmalion, the actor intensified his voice lessons, studying with Howard Ross and Keith Davis, and searched for ways to make the role of Professor Henry Higgins, the play’s self-absorbed central character, his own. Scott earned $1,600 a week for heading the production, and the company played the Camden County Music Fair in Haddonfield, New Jersey, the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island, and five other theaters in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Massachusetts. Zach tried to get as many of the Broadway bigwigs as possible to see the show by writing letters of invitation to such notables as Hal Prince, Gower Champion, Joshua Logan, Elia Kazan, and Cole Porter. The encouragement he received was gratifying . “You are a lovely actor,” producer Philip Langer wrote Scott after seeing his performance, “and virile stars are impossible to find.” Excited about a characterization that he knew was good, Zach sent his mother a program for the My Fair Lady production with the inscription, “To my darling mother—with all my love and kisses, too,” and he signed it “‘Bubba’ Higgins.” Box office grosses during the tour were consistently high, and the star told interviewers that he’d always preferred working in the theater to doing movies and television. Zach curtailed his drinking while Early Death appearing in the musical so that he would be at his best, and Ruth wrote him a note on their twelfth wedding anniversary declaring, “You have started a way of life now that will make my joy and love burst its seams!” Zach had caught the fever of doing musicals when he appeared in the revival of The King and I for the New York City Center. He had also starred in a production of Tenderloin at the Meadowbrook Dinner Theater in New Jersey during the winter before accepting the role in My Fair Lady, and the experience at Meadowbrook had convinced him to increase his singing lessons to one every day. “Having warmed up with Tenderloin,” he wrote director Vincent Donehue on August 5, 1964, “I am now seriously bidding for a Broadway musical by doing an extended engagement this summer of My Fair Lady.” Joan Copeland, who played Eliza Doolittle opposite Scott in the Lerner and Loewe show, found her costar a marvel. “I never saw anyone like him,” Copeland told a reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun. “Before each performance Zach goes around to everyone in the cast and talks to them and soothes their arguments and hurts. And he does it without being a father figure.” The actor’s reviews for My Fair Lady were so enthusiastic that he extended the show’s run into the fall at dinner theaters. “Zachary Scott brings fresh appeal to the colorful musical,” a critic for the Newark News Dispatch wrote when the production opened at Meadowbrook. “His portrayal of the egotistical, self-righteous professor of speech rings true from his first expression of utter horror at Eliza’s slanderous rendering of the English language to his final demeaning, ‘Damn it, where are my slippers, Eliza?’ at the close.” The reviewer for the Newark Evening News agreed that the actor did much with the role and added that Scott “has a good voice to boot.” Professionally Zach felt exhilarated, eager to find a Broadway musical appropriate for his talent and settle into a long engagement. Waverly, on the other hand, was in the throes of new marital problems. After divorcing Frank Skinner she had married William Crawford of Brooklyn Heights, New York, but she had begun to fear that her second husband was on the verge of suing her for custody of their children. She also had the impression EARLY DEATH 193 that the Steinbecks were in alliance with him. The emotional strain had become so great that Waverly had finally started seeing a psychiatrist twice a week. “What I would really like to do is go back to work,” she wrote in an emotional letter to her grandmother in Austin. Mrs. Scott in turn sent the letter, which she considered “rather hysterical,” to Zach, urging him to dissuade his daughter from continuing with the psychiatrist by reminding...