100 New Yorkers of the 1970s Part 25

During her years of TV stardom Betsy was doing plenty of serious acting -- everything from Shakespeare to Peter Pan to Ibsen. She has made five Hollywood films and performed the lead in numerous Broadway shows, including _South Pacific_, _Cactus Flower_ and Tennessee Williams'

_Eccentricities of a Nightingale_. Few of her roles, however, have been as demanding as Doris in _Same Time, Next Year_.

To begin with, she and her co-star, Monte Markham, are the only characters in the play. Second, the play's action takes place over a period of 25 years, in which Doris goes through momentous changes. In doing this transformation smoothly, Betsy creates a character so believable and lovable that the audience forgives her for cheating on her husband, which she does one weekend a year in order to meet her lover George.

"Doing the play takes all my energy.I'm a single woman now, and have been for three years. But if I were involved with somebody now, it would take up a lot of my energies. So it doesn't bother me; when the time comes for me to be involved, I will be. Right now, I'm really quite satisfied to come here six days a week and have a fantasy life. It has all the good things in it and none of the bad things. ... It gives you such a rainbow of colors to express yourself within, that I find it terribly rewarding and gratifying. I am never bored with the show."

George, like Doris, is married and has three children, and he too goes through drastic changes of att.i.tude during the time period from 1951 to 1976. But while George wins the audience's respect and sympathy, Doris steals their hearts.

"I get out there and I feel such love. All of a sudden they begin to adore her. They're watching her spread her wings and finally fly. ... The adultery is done with such taste. You see two people who really love their respective mates, and their children."

In her cozy backstage room at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, which is decorated with Christmas lights, Betsy demonstrates an overbubbling friendliness and an extremely fluent style of speech. An interview with her is both a pleasure and a challenge, for she talks about each subject with an enthusiasm that makes it hard for anyone to interrupt and go on to the next question.

Her memories of those panel shows? "You know, we used to do _Secret_ right in this theatre. We must have done it here five, six, seven years easily. There are a lot of guys here now, on the backstage crew, who were here with _Secret_. It's nice to be working with them again. ... But I'm not interested in the past. The past is an illusion, as is the future."

Betsy has been an off-and-on Westside resident ever since she first came to New York in 1951. When doing _Same Time, Next Year_ she is subletting a friend's apartment on Riverside Drive. Her 16-year-old daughter frequently comes down from Connecticut to spend time with her on the West Side.

"I've lived on the East Side but my preference is the West Side. Let's face it, Broadway's on the West Side. Where Broadway is is where my heart is." Flowers by Edith (69th and B'way) is one of Betsy's best-loved Westside establishments. "I've become very good friends with her. I've gone to her house to parties."

In response to an obvious question, Betsy scolds gently: "Never ask an actress what she's going to do next. Opera stars say, 'You know, I've got this opera lined up, then this one, then this,' but an actress doesn't usually know. ... I just hope that the next play I'm able to do will have a lot of humanity in it, like this one. It's not enough to get a bunch of laughs.

You've got to be touched inside."

WESTSIDER JAN PEERCE The man with the golden voice

3-22-80

In December 1979, in a benefit concert at the Alvin Theatre, about a dozen Broadway stars of the past and present strode to the microphone to sing some of the songs they made famous. John Raitt, Alan Jones, Jack Gilford, Michael Moriarty, Delores Wilson and others received waves of enthusiastic applause from the packed house. But when a short, stocky, barrel-chested man with thick eyegla.s.ses and a nose like Jimmy Durante's shuffled to center stage, the audience didn't merely cheer: it erupted. And when 75-year-old Jan Peerce finished his two arias, he was prevailed upon to give the only encore of the evening. Appropriately enough, his choice was "If I Were a Rich Man" from _Fiddler on the Roof_, the show in which he made his Broadway debut at the age of 67.

Although Peerce has been one of America's most beloved singers for almost half a century, it was not for sentimental reasons alone that he was treated with such acclaim that evening. He still has one of the clearest, strongest, sweetest tenor voices in the business, and his repertoire is enormous. Besides arias and showtunes, he performs ballads, German lieder, French contemporary songs, cantorial and oratory music with equal facility. In order to keep his voice in top form, he now limits his concerts to about 50 a year, but last summer, on a tour of Australia, he did 17 concerts in 21 days.

"I vocalize every day of my life, I keep observing the laws of decent living, and I face every booking as it was my first," he says in a recent telephone interview, contacted at his Westside apartment. "I believe in the adage that the show must go on, but you must not go out at the expense of your health, or impair the quality of your voice by singing against nature."

This fall will find him doing a one-man show at Carnegie Hall. In addition to his regular schedule of cross-country concerts, he makes cruises of the Caribbean several times each year aboard the SS Rotterdam.

His parents were Orthodox Jews who had immigrated from Russia, and they were able to afford violin lessons for him by taking in lodgers at the Lower East Side apartment where he grew up. Born under the name Jacob Pincus Perelmuth, he began his career working primarily as a violinist and bandleader in the Catskills. In 1929 he married his childhood sweetheart, Alice Kalmanowitz, and three years later was discovered by the great showman Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel, who hired him as a featured singer at the new Radio City Music Hall.

"People on Broadway said I belonged in opera," recalls Peerce, "and opera people said I belonged on Broadway. But when Roxy gave me my break, things began to happen. And then came Toscanini. He hired me to sing with his NBC Symphony of the Air. And when he accepted me, that sort of clinched things. People said, "If he's good enough for Toscanini, this guy must be good.'"

For 15 years, Arturo Toscanini preferred Peerce to all other tenors in the world. Meanwhile, in 1941, Peerce had joined the Metropolitan Opera.

There he sang the major tenor roles up until 1968, when, after losing the sight in one eye, he retired from the Met and began to concentrate on recitals. In 1976 he published his memoirs, _The Bluebird of Happiness_, named after his recording that has sold 1.5 million copies. Peerce has made dozens of other recordings, including many complete operas.

A deeply religious man, long noted for his humanitarian efforts, Peerce is particularly supportive of Bonds for Israel. "My wife Alice is the only woman on the board of governors. She's the chairperson," he says proudly. "It's to help Israel build and keep building, and develop to the point where she belongs. She's growing beautifully, and she will grow even more."

The Peerces, who have two daughters and a son, maintain a house in New Roch.e.l.le as well as the Westside apartment that they have had for the past 15 years. Although Jan Peerce stopped playing the violin long ago, he is still a dues-paying member of the local violinists' union. "One day I asked them if they could give me an honorary members.h.i.+p," he chuckles, revealing his famous offbeat humor. "They said they were very sorry, they couldn't do it. I said why not, and they said, 'All our honorary members are dead.'"

Another time, when he was the guest of honor at a dinner party, the hostess, seated next to him, chatted with such energy that Peerce had trouble getting in a single word. He got his chance when the waiter brought around a tray of a.s.sorted salad dressings. The gabby woman asked, "Mr. Peerce, how do you usually eat your salad?"

"In complete silence, madame," he replied.

Of the dozens of conductors he has worked with, Peerce is quick to name Toscanini his favorite. "First of all, he was a great man, and second of all, he was a genius musically. He had no tricks, except that he had a certain vision about the music. He made everybody sing or play as the composer meant it to be. And that was the secret of his success. He was an inspiration to anybody who worked with him or under him."

EASTSIDER GEORGE PLIMPTON Author, editor and adventurer

2-2-79

It was an unusual statement to come from a man who has made a career out of fearing nothing. "I'm scared to death every time I sit down at a typewriter," confessed George Plimpton, who, in his 20 years as America's foremost "partic.i.p.atory journalist," has played football with the Detroit Lions, fought the light heavyweight champion of the world, pitched to major league baseball players, raced cars internationally, and performed with the New York Philharmonic as a percussionist.

"Sometimes you can do it, and sometimes it's not there," continued Plimpton, leaning back in the desk chair at his Eastside apartment. "It's very hard to work alone. There's the television set, and all these books, and your son and daughter in the next room. Sometimes I have to get away. So I go to bars and I sit in a corner and write. You're trapped in there. There's nothing else to do but write."

As we sat talking, the telephone rang frequently, and Plimpton, apologizing for the interruption, spoke to the callers with widely varying degrees of enthusiasm, but was consistently polite, urbane and witty. I noticed a hint of an English accent in his voice -- the result of his early education at St. Bernard's School on the Upper East Side, followed much later by four years of study in England. It is easy to imagine him stepping into a boxing ring like an English gentleman, calmly lacing on his gloves for a friendly bout.

Which is precisely what he did in 1959 when, for the purpose of one of his countless stories for _Sports Ill.u.s.trated_, he took on Archie Moore, then king of the light heavyweight division, for a three-round exhibition match in New York. Since that time, Plimpton has never lost his interest in boxing. A close friend of Muhammad Ali's who has followed the champion around the world, he made Ali the chief character of his book _Shadow Box_, which came out in paperback this month from Berkley.

As with most of Plimpton's works, the story is told with an abundance of humor.

Currently at work on three new books, Plimpton emphasized that he writes on many subjects outside of sports. A lifelong friend of the Kennedy family, he has co-auth.o.r.ed an oral history volume t.i.tled _American Journey: The Times of Robert F. Kennedy_. He is an a.s.sociate editor of _Harper's_ magazine and a regular contributor to the _International Food & Wine Review_. His first love, in fact, seems to be not sports at all, but the _Paris Review_, a magazine for up-and-coming serious writers that he has edited since its creation in 1953. One of the most important literary magazines in the English-speaking world, the _Paris Review_ is published four times a year as a 175-page journal devoted almost exclusively to fiction and poetry.

His hair is mostly silver now, and there are creases starting to appear on his ruggedly handsome face, but Plimpton, at 52, is still the same larger than-life, charismatic figure he has been since he came to national attention in 1961 with the publication of _Out of My League_, a book about his foray into major league baseball. _Paper Lion_ (1966), which told of his brief career as a quarterback with the Detroit Lions, cemented his reputation as the nation's most realistic sportswriter. His other books include _The Bogey Man_, _One More July_, and _Mad Ducks and Bears_. As a lecturer, he is in demand all over the country. He and his wife Freddy have been married for 11 years.

Born in New York City, he grew up around 98th Street and 5th Avenue, attended Harvard University (where he edited the _Harvard Lampoon_), and spent three years in the Army before heading for England to study at King's College, Cambridge. During an Easter vacation there, he joined some friends in Paris to discuss the launching of the literary magazine he has guided ever since.

In 1979, said Plimpton with a grin, "I'm supposed to manage the New York Yankees for a day, and go through the whole procedure of being fired by George Steinbrenner. I hope it's followed by a beer commercial with Billy Martin."

Asked about his attachment to the East Side, Plimpton stressed his fondness for the city as a whole. "In the last couple of years, there's been an enormous rebirth of excitement about living in the city. ... I think Mayor [Ed] Koch has a lot to do with pulling it up. He seems to fit everywhere. If I saw him twirling up a pancake dough in a pizza shop on Broadway, or driving a 5th Avenue bus, or carrying a briefcase into 20 Exchange Place, I wouldn't be surprised. He's a quintessential New Yorker."

When my visit with Plimpton was about to end, I couldn't resist testing him with my favorite sports question: "Who was the only man to play for the Boston Red Sox, the Boston Patriots and the Boston Bruins?" He couldn't guess. The answer, I told him, was a guy named John Kiley, who played the national anthem on the organ.

But Plimpton got the last word in.

"Who was the only man to play for the Boston Bruins and the Boston Celtics?" he asked. I said I didn't know. He smiled and replied: "George Plimpton."

EASTSIDER OTTO PREMINGER Rebel filmmaker returns with _The Human Factor_

1-26-80

On the cover of his 1977 autobiography _Preminger_, he is described as "Hollywood's most tempestuous director" and "the screen's stormiest rebel." But today, at 73, the years appear to have caught up with Otto Preminger, the Austrian-born director and actor who came to the U.S. in 1935 and met success after success, both in movies and on Broadway.

He became the first producer/director to make major motion pictures independently of the giant studios, and with such films as _Forever Amber_, _The Moon is Blue_ and _The Man with the Golden Arm_, won precedent-settling battles with censors.h.i.+p boards that established new artistic freedom for filmmakers.

Between 1959 and 1963 he produced and directed, in succession, _Porgy and Bess_, _Anatomy of a Murder_, _Exodus_, _Advice and Consent_, and _The Cardinal_. After that his career took a dip, and since 1971 he has released but a single movie, _Rosebud_ (1975), which marked the screenwriting debut of his son _Erik Lee Preminger_ and the acting debut of a New Yorker named John Lindsay, the city's former mayor.

In February, Preminger's 33rd film, _The Human Factor_, is scheduled to open in New York and across the country. Based on a best-selling novel by Graham Greene, _The Human Factor_ is the suspenseful story of a black South African woman (played by fas.h.i.+on model Iman) who marries a white secret agent (Nicol Williamson). Filmed mainly in the English countryside, the movie deals with the agent's allegiance to the man who helps his wife to escape from South Africa. Persuaded to become a double agent, he ends up in Moscow, separated from the one person he loves. The novel's t.i.tle underlines the fact that bureaucracy can never be all-powerful: there is always the human factor.

Preminger, seated at his huge palette-shaped desk of white marble in the lavishly furnished projection room on the uppermost floor of his Eastside town house, admits that he sank over $2 million of his own money into the picture when his signed backers failed to come through. "Everybody in Europe lies about money," says Preminger in his deep, German accented voice. "I originally wanted to sue them, but suing doesn't make sense unless you are sure they have money. So I inquired from my Swiss lawyer, and they didn't have money in Switzerland. You see, in Switzerland, the advantage of the Swiss law is that is you sue somebody, all his a.s.sets are frozen immediately. ... Luckily enough, I had two houses that I wanted to sell in the south of France. ... At least I own the whole film. The question is now only: Will the picture be a big success as I hope, or not? That is always the main thing."