Elaine Stritch, the wise-cracking and, at times, vodka-soaked Broadway diva who became a beloved TV icon as Alec Baldwin’s mother in “30 Rock,” died Thursday at her home in Birmingham, Mich.
She was 89 — and still quipping.
“Kid,” she said to me when I checked up on her a couple of months ago, “I’ve been thinking. If I were 20 years younger and you were 20 years older, we’d be puttin’ up the jam!”
Stritch’s showbiz career stretched back to the 1940s, when, at 19, she arrived in New York from Detroit to study acting.
She landed some ingenue roles on Broadway, which “should have been against the law because I’m not exactly a looker of note,” she said.
She hit her stride as a character actress in the 1950s, playing a gossip columnist in “Pal Joey” and understudying Ethel Merman in “Call Me Madam.”
From Merman, she learned the key to longevity in the theater.
“Elaine,” Merman told her, “if you want to be a Broadway star, you gotta live like a f–kin’ nun!”
Stritch tried — but, though Catholic, the convent wasn’t for her. She had flings with a number of actors (though she turned down a one-night stand with Marlon Brando), and she began drinking to calm her nerves.
“I put up this facade of being terribly sure of myself,” she once told me. “But underneath I had an enormous fear of going on stage, of losing my talent, of — hell, I was afraid of everything.”
What she drank depended on what play she was in.
“For Tennessee Williams, it was vodka,” she said. “For Neil Simon, scotch. Champagne for Noel Coward. Bourbon for Edward Albee. I guess you could say I was a method drinker.”
By the 1970s, her drinking was taking a toll on her career. “Frieda Fun was getting a reputation,” she said. And then along came Hal Prince, who cast her in Stephen Sondheim’s “Company.” She stopped the show with the boozy “The Ladies Who Lunch,” which became her signature tune.
I put up this facade of being terribly sure of myself. But underneath I had an enormous fear of going on stage, of losing my talent, of — hell, I was afraid of everything.
- Elaine Stritch
“Hal Prince was my saving grace,” she said. “He wasn’t worried about my capabilities and he saw that underneath all the bad girl sh-t I was a disciplined actress.”
Stritch stopped drinking in the 1980s after a diabetic collapse, but at the end of her life she started up again with Cosmopolitans.
She wasn’t shy about her diabetes, and in fact it became part of her act, on stage and off. Once, over dinner, she pulled two vials of insulin out of her purse and put them on the table.
“I’m not sure which one I’m supposed to take,” she told me. “If I take the right one, the conversation continues. If I take the wrong one, you’re taking me to Lenox Hill. You pick.”
I did, she took out a syringe, dropped her pants and gave herself a shot.
“Do your business elsewhere,” she told stunned onlookers.
I picked the right one, and the conversation continued.
Stritch’s career appeared to be winding down by 2000. But she wanted one last hurrah, and in 2001 appeared at the Public Theater in her one-woman show, “Elaine Stritch, At Liberty.”
It was a sensation, moved to Broadway, ran a year and won her a Tony Award.
She parlayed its success into a long-running gig at the Cafe Carlyle at the Carlyle Hotel.
When she left New York, she told me it was because she was tired of showbiz and its phoniness.
Through clenched teeth and in a voice dripping with acid, she said, “I love the theater — and . . . all . . . the . . . charming . . . people . . . in . . . it.”