The Theater: The Trouper

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When she was a little girl in Philadelphia, Shirley Booth invented a game called "Talking Balkan" that she played on streetcars. Shirley would jump on ahead of her mother and race to the front of the car. When her mother took a seat, Shirley would come dashing back, babbling ecstatically in a homemade, foreign-sounding tongue. The game had everything a fledgling actress could want. There was a captive audience of nice, admiring old ladies ("What an enchanting child!"). There was a touch of mystery ("What language is she speaking?"), a touch of pathos ("Look how sweet she is to her poor, dear mother") and—Shirley fervently hoped—a big helping of romance ("Maybe she's a princess in exile!").

In playing her game, Shirley was also practicing the two rules that still guide her career: 1) "Actors should be overheard, not listened to," and 2) "The audience is 50% of the performance." Shirley Booth without an audience is as improbable as an Easter Parade without hats. She prefers to do her stuff before rapt thousands, but will give just as intense a performance for an audience of one. Her first husband, Radio Comedian Ed Gardner, says that Shirley is always acting, on stage and off: "She sincerely believes in her self-cast roles. One day she would be a grande dame nobly giving me my freedom; the next, a contented little housewife singing in her kitchen."

Dead in Syracuse. Her very passion for audiences ("They tell me what to do") may have kept her so long from the spectacular success recently thrust upon her. If a play she was in closed on Broadway, Shirley was too restless to stay in town furthering her career by haunting producers' offices or being seen at smart cafes. Instead, she would hop a train, join the cast of one or another stock company. While less talented actresses might rocket overnight' to Broadway fame, Shirley was knocking them dead in Louisville or Syracuse. She was starred in the sticks, but her Broadway roles became a long succession of supporting parts. The critics were invariably kind (never in her life has Shirley had a bad review), yet she seemed to be going nowhere. She twice left the stage to become a homemaker; she deserted it for radio. No one, least of all Shirley, ever expected to see her name alone in lights.

Then in 1950, co-starring with Sidney Blackmer, Shirley arrived unheralded on Broadway in Come Back, Little Sheba. One of the last plays of that season, Sheba was written by an unknown playwright, William Inge, and staged by an unknown director, Daniel Mann. As Lola, the slatternly housewife who drives her reformed alcoholic husband back to the bottle, Shirley won her usual raves from the critics: "Splendidly played" . . . "One of the true acting achievements of the season" . . .