On a gloomy Manhattan afternoon, Betty Buckley races to keep pace with her obligations as Broadway's reigning diva. But as windshield wipers of a chauffeured sedan work on a light mist, her thoughts are a world away from fame and floodlights. She speaks instead of a golden moment 36 years ago in the cramped auditorium of Monnig Junior High School in Fort Worth.
The performer's name that night was Betty Lynn Buckley, a short, frail, painfully shy girl who stood alone, quivering before the assembled audience in her black derby, black suit and white gloves. Only a few months before, she and her mother, Betty Bob, had attended a production called "The Pajama Game" at the new Fort Worth theater, Casa Manana, and a young girl's dream was born. Now, at the annual Monnig Follies, Betty Lynn would somehow summon the audacity to perform "Steam Heat" from that play, a theatrical song-and-dance number in the finest Bob Fosse tradition.From the opening note, hers was a voice that filled the room and struck to the heart, one unlike the Monnig parents had ever heard.
"I finished singing and for a moment there was this stunned silence," Betty Buckley remembers now in the back seat, whisking through Manhattan. "Then the whole place went crazy. That was it. That was the beginning."
Last Sunday night in Fort Worth, in a concert at Casa Manana benefiting the theater's Children's Playhouse and Theater School, Buckley's career came full circle. She returned to the place where nearly four decades ago she found her voice and an eerily prescient vision of a Broadway future.
It was a dream first pursued on the Casa stage, or in grueling playhouses of Six Flags Over Texas, or in campus productions at Texas Christian University. Intervening years brought television stardom as Abby, the hip stepmom in "Eight is Enough"; prominent movie roles (the compassionate gym teacher in "Carrie," the country singer in "Tender Mercies"), and a 1983 Tony Award for her role as Grizabella in "Cats."
All of which was a prelude to the moment last July, when, amid a New York media frenzy, Buckley replaced Glenn Close as Norma Desmond, the tragic silent-screen star in Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Sunset Boulevard." The show's producers held their collective breaths at the time. But 10 months later, "Sunset" still plays to sold-out audiences at the Minskoff Theater.
"Glenn who? Fans go wild for Betty," gushed a July headline in the New York Post.
"Buckley's is a performance of phenomenal intensity, intelligence and beauty - and did I mention how great her singing is?" wrote a critic for TheaterWeek.
Today, her own relief is still palpable. To her, Norma Desmond is the equivalent of playing quarterback in the Super Bowl. Her performance as Norma helped earn her a solo performance on June 10 at Carnegie Hall.
"Everything's come together," she says in the back seat of a limousine after her performance on a recent Monday night. "Norma's a part that really lets me run the big race. I've had these skills for a long time. There have been flashes here and flashes there. But now I can run the big race."
For years, she and her therapist have worked through old psychic wounds resulting from a father who was adamantly opposed to Buckley's life as a performer. Now the therapist also helps Buckley brace for the day in August when her run as Norma will be finished.
"It will be a huge loss," she says. She is surrounded in the limo by her three furry Shih Tzus. Her normally raspy speaking voice is even more soft and wistful. "This is like the completely crystallized dream of a Broadway baby's musical wish."
- A HINT OF DEFIANCE: Betty Buckley bursts through the door, late for her weekly appointment with a Manhattan osteopath who will poke and prod to help relieve the physical stress of 40-pound costumes and a dozen trips up and down the Desmond mansion staircase, eight performances a week.
There is a girlish quality about Buckley, and she punctuates many sentences with "cool." But she is dressed like an adult in a suit of gray pin stripes, and her tousled, flaxen hair is shot through with gray. In a profession that worships youth, Buckley, who will be 49 on July 3, wears her age like a badge of honor.
There has always been that hint of defiance about her, she says, ever since the days at home in Fort Worth when her father, Ernest, a Victorian-like World War II hero, engineer and college professor, repeatedly proclaimed to his young daughter "that to be an actress was to be a whore, and over his dead body would I become an actress."
Buckley's mother, once a singer and dancer herself, instead snuck Betty Lynn to her voice and dancing lessons.
Later, as her career progressed, Buckley said she earned a reputation in the entertainment industry for speaking out against material that perpetuated ageist and sexist stereotypes.
"I knew when I was in my 20s that I would be a late bloomer," says Buckley, who cringes today at the memory of her 1966 Miss Fort Worth title because of its sexist connotations. "I thought, `I bet I really grow into myself in my 40s,' and that's been true. And I'm relieved that I knew that, because in this culture if you don't become a super, super, super star in your mid-20s, you think it's over, which is bull."
A day earlier, Buckley bolts into PopCowboy, a Manhattan cowboy boot store where "Sunset" cast member Rosemary Loar is celebrating the release of a CD. Buckley, who does not eat meat, smoke or drink, grabs a nonalcoholic beverage, eats two large strawberries, and congratulates Loar, who is clearly pleased that the star has made an appearance. Buckley is not recognizable from her stage character, and when party-goers are introduced, faces light up in recognition.
"I've seen your show 10 times, probably, and you're phenomenal," a short, squat man says after approaching her.
Buckley smiles and shakes his hand, then sets off to her waiting car, and a short trip to the Minskoff. The stage door leads to an elevator, then to a labyrinth of yellow-walled hallways decorated with flowers. Buckley's dressing room is at the end.
The cramped space inside is taken up with sofas and chairs. Peach-colored walls are dotted with art and photographs, and an honorary doctorate recently bestowed by Marymount College. Before the mirror of her dressing table lie piles of cosmetics, brushes, assorted knickknacks and several gold-framed photographs of Buckley's teachers in the practice of Eastern meditation.
"You guys want a tour?" she asks, and leads a contingent back out into the hall, up some stairs, and into the parlor of Norma Desmond, a massive, Gothic set with a bust of Buckley/Desmond, guarding 26 stairs. Buckley jokes with members of a stage crew who linger an hour before the performance. She insists that guests climb up the winding staircase, to the balcony overlooking the still-empty seats.
"I come out here and pretend like I'm going to kill myself," Buckley says. "Cool."
Back in the dressing room, visitors sign a guest book punctuated with names from Texas, several more Texans appearing every week. Running late again, Buckley finally sits and hurries to apply layers of makeup. Minutes before her appearance at the top of theDesmond staircase before another packed house, she is left alone to meditate and dedicate the coming performance to God. It is prayer and meditation, she says, that allow her to cry real tears as Norma, night after night.
- VISIONS OF SUCCESS: Between sips of decaf cappuccinos in a cafe near her apartment, she begins to cry, remembering the visit of a man who came backstage during her three-year run with "Cats" in the 1980s.
The man told Buckley that he had gone to college with her father, and flown during the war with Ernest Buckley, a bombardier. During one of their missions, the man said, they dropped bombs on a Red Cross hospital in Europe, which haunted Buckley's father afterward.
"After the war, my father and this guy would sit together, and my father was really fierce about saying the world was falling apart and he was going to have the perfect family," Betty Buckley says in the cafe. "I cry when I think about it. He was, like, obsessed with this concept. I wished I had known this growing up."
For his daughter, the war story humanized Ernest Buckley, who died of cancer in 1989. Part of that perfect family, Betty Buckley realizes today, was raising a daughter who would grow up to be a wife and mother, and then, if possible, find her own profession, but only in that order. Nothing could have been further removed from his conception than a life onstage.
Betty Bob Buckley idolized her husband but encouraged her daughter and her three boys to chase their dreams, wherever they led.
"Do I sound like a fan?" Betty Bob, who still lives in Fort Worth, says during a recent recitation of her daughter's long career, chuckling over the telephone. She has seen her daughter in "Sunset Boulevard" 12 times.
The conflict over Betty Lynn's career, the mother acknowledges, "was a difficult thing." But it was Betty Bob who, in effect, became her daughter's accomplice, whisking her covertly off to an aunt's dance studio, or to Casa performances, including the one that changed Betty Lynn's life. During the "Steam Heat" number of "Pajama Game," Betty Lynn Buckley had what she would describe years later as an out-of-body experience.
"It was like my adult consciousness was looking down at me, saying, `This is what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life,' " she says.
Ernest Buckley never came to see his daughter in "Cats." He did not attend the Tony Awards in 1983 during which his daughter was honored. A few years before his death, he finally agreed to take in her debut concert at Carnegie Hall.
"He came backstage and he was always very gruff with me," Buckley remembers in the cafe. "I said, `Well, what did you think?' And he said, `World class, Betty Lynn. World class.' "
But the old wounds linger.
- FINDING ACCEPTANCE: Buckley had played Norma Desmond to critical acclaim and packed houses for a year in London. But there were no guarantees that success would follow her across the Atlantic last July, when Close's "Sunset" contract expired.
Buckley would be replacing a better-known actor, whose campy version of Norma had earned Close a Tony Award. Buckley's portrayal of the same character, developed in England, was far subtler, presenting a more vulnerable Norma Desmond as she spiraled to insanity. The succession of Close, Buckley says, was among the most stressful periods of her life.
"It was crazy," she says. "Every woman doing it is unique in the part. But it's not easy to deal with as a person. It was very tortuous to deal with. I was praying that I would get a degree of acceptance because it meant so much to me."
Buckley's performance was immediately panned by The New York Times. But an ovation greeted her the moment she appeared onstage as Norma Desmond, and before opening night was done, the audience had stood three times. The Times critic, was virtually alone in his opinion of Buckley's performance.
"The energy was so dense, I came off the stage between acts and I couldn't even breathe," Buckley says. "And the love that came from that audience I'll never forget as long as I live."
She pulls up to the Minskoff and Broadway's reigning diva steps from her car, posing for pictures beneath the marquee.
"Is that really her?" an elderly man in a tattered cap and green jacket asks as he saunters by.
That's really her, he is assured. He nods, grins, and walks slowly off down the street.