Sunset Boulevard: Articles & Reviews
Sanctuaries
You're not a star until you've decorated the star dressing room
By Blake Green
Newsday
September 17, 1995
Think of a generic star's dressing room, and bouquets of fresh flowers spring to mind. And, whatever the theater, the frame of light bulbs around the dressing room mirror looks exactly the same.
After that, things vary wildly, depending on who's in residence. Jeff McCarthy, currently starring in "Beauty and the Beast," recalls he barely recognized a photograph of his old star dressing room at the Shubert Theater in Los Angeles after Glenn Close had unleashed her decorator for "Sunset Boulevard."
Sometimes a fresh coat of white paint is all the gussying up needed. Or, there's the legend that the exact shade of Elizabeth Taylor's baby lavenders was matched when the walls were repainted for Taylor's run on Broadway in "The Little Foxes."
Close's comfortably elegant suite for' "Sunset Boulevard" on this coast had a much-larger-than-life photograph of herself as Norma Desmond as well as gilded-frame portraits of some of her distinguished ancestors. Needless to say, these disappeared after she left the cast-and so did all the furniture. When Betty Buckley's name went up on the door, the rooms were remodeled down to the smallest detail. Well, maybe the light bulbs are the same.
When Jerry Lewis starred in "Damn Yankees," his dressing room was entered via a fiery red door (he played the devil, remember?) and the memorabilia included a framed letter from Frank Sinatra. One legend to another. An important clause in Lauren Bacall's contracts reportedly concerns her star quarters' being decorated to her taste-right down to the toilet seat.
But dressing rooms don't always separate the stars from the chorus. At Lincoln Center, the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater offers its performers two dressing rooms: one for the men, one for the women, chairs and space at the mirror for all. After having the star's dressing room at the Plymouth Theater to herself when she starred in "Passion," Donna Murphy joined the pack for the Newhouse's "Twelve Dreams."
Here's a look inside five star dressing rooms in the current crop of shows in town.
Betty Buckley
Gargoyles and ostentation are part of Betty Buckley's daily surroundings on the set of "Sunset Boulevard." So she warned her decorator not to make her dressing room "too Norma." At the Minskoff, the star's suite has been redone since Buckley's arrival in the Norma Desmond role last summer.
"I wanted it to be serene, warm and comfortable," Buckley says of the peach and sea-green color scheme. Dallas decorator Harriet Adams, Buckley's big sister in their college sorority, "is a very glamorous girl," the actress says by way of explaining the leopard-print stools, the goose-down couches that swallow their occupants and the ornate Russian mirror on her dressing table.
The abundance of toy monkeys is definitely Norma-ish as the character has a real one and the musical-and practicality may have had something to do with the wine-colored rug: Buckley's three Shih Tzus have the run of the place.
If glamor seems the predominant ambience to an outsider, Buckley obviously got what she wanted finding the atmosphere so serene that she often meditates here before a show, in the presence of photographs of "my teachers." There's also a framed drawing of Hindu sandals that was a present Phylicia Rashad brought her from the ashram where they go for retreats.
Hanging in the front room, where Buckley receives guests is a poster from the Broadway show "1776." That was Buckley's first on Broadway in 1969. Her digs, she says, were somewhat modest.