Word: seesaws
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...beginning to pall in other ways, too. "The studios wanted to give me the Monroe-type sex buildup," she says. "I wanted to develop my acting, not my body." When TV Actor Richard Basehart recommended Anne to Producer Fred Coe as an ideal Gittel for Two for the Seesaw, Anne was only too anxious to try. She was going East for a sister's wedding anyway; she read the play and decided that she would impress Coe, not by acting, but by being Gittel. "I made sure he found me with one shoe off, scratching my foot," she recalls...
GITTEL LIVES, wired Coe to Director Arthur Penn in Hollywood. Next day Playwright William Gibson was equally convinced. Anne was Gittel for him too. "So how was the Coast?" she greeted him. "Lousy, huh?" The Seesaw team, which had already signed Henry Fonda for the male lead, had found its real star...
...first," recalls Director Penn of the Seesaw rehearsal, "she could hardly find the stage. She couldn't stand. She couldn't turn. She'd play with her back to the audience. She was too broad and too vulgar. Even the lawyers and agents connected with the show said, 'She's no good; dump her.' " But Penn had already recognized something Anne's critics had not: she took direction admirably. "I even had to tell her where the jokes were, but once was enough." On the road Gibson would "write a funny line...
Silent Humor. Anne had known that she would be tapped for the part of Annie Sullivan ever since Gibson started working on the new play while Seesaw was still on the road. In the meantime, Anne became engaged, this time to Mario Ferrari-Ferreira, distantly related to the Italian auto family. But by the time Seesaw began its tryout in Washington, Annie was again fed up with the idea of marriage. "The play had become vitally important to me," she says matter-of-factly. "There was no time or energy for anything else." There was also another complication: her Catholicism...
Perhaps more revealing than this sort of couch talk are some lines that Playwright William Gibson wrote into Seesaw while the show was trying out on the road. The middleaged, Midwestern lawyer tells Gittel: "I said [you are] a beautiful girl; I didn't mean skin-deep-there you're a delight. Anyone can see. And underneath is a street brawler. That some can see. But under the street brawler is something as fresh and crazy and timid as a colt." And that, right now, is probably as good a description of Anna Maria Italiano...