Big Lou: The Life and Career of Actor Louis Edmonds

By Craig Hamrick

Louis Edmonds was well known for his TV soap opera roles as Dark Shadows Roger Collins and ,All My Children's Langley Wallingford, but his career was not limited to these characters.

Working with such performers as Charlton Heston, Kaye Ballard, Joan Bennett, and Carol Burnett, he was a pioneer actor on live television in the 1950s and played numerous critically acclaimed roles on and off Broadway and on TV for five decades. Throughout his life, the gay actor battled?and conquered?depression, alcoholism, and cancer.

Author Craig Hamrick chronicles the life and career of this remarkable man in the revealing biography, Big Lou: The Life and Career of Actor Louis Edmonds.

"Craig Hamrick is a wonderful, gifted young writer with a heart-breaking story to tell. Big Lou is an insightful look at the theater world, crafted with warmth, humor and just the right dash of cynicism."- Craig Lucas

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 4, 2004
• ISBN: 9780595752102

Craig Hamrick

Craig Hamrick wrote about television for <>TV Guide, Soap Opera Weekly and a variety of other publications, including his book Big Lou and the website www.darkshadowsonline.com. R.J. Jamison is a writer in New York and wrote Grayson Hall: A Hard Act to Follow, published in 2006.

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgements

Overture

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Curtain

Afterword

Who’s Who

Photo Gallery

Appendix

About the Author

For Louis.

He was a Tennessee Williams character, in the flesh.

-David Henesy, on his on-screen father, Louis Edmonds

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank the following people for talking with me about Louis Edmonds:

Conrad Bain, Kaye Ballard, Nancy Barrett, Carol Burnett, Gordon Connell, Jane Connell, Greg Cowman, Janet Ferrara, Jonathan Frid, Alma Edmonds Fritchie, David Henesy, Eileen Herlie, Alexandra Moltke Isles, Bella Jarrett, Michael Lipton, Paul Miliken, Diana Millay, Ben Morris, Rosa Nevin, Denise Nickerson, Lara Parker, Jim Pierson, John Remsen, David Selby, Sada Thompson, David Nahmod, Marie Wallace, and Ruth Warrick.

Additional research was done at:

The Museum of Radio and Television in New York; The New York City Public Library for the Performing Arts; Longwood Plantation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and the Rookery (Louis Edmonds’ personal scrapbook), as well as various Web sites including the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com), the Internet Broadway Database (www.ibdb.com), Dark Shadows Dot Com (www.darkshadows.com) and Dark Shadows Online (www.darkshadowson-line.com).

Other resources:

The Dark Shadows Almanac, The Dark Shadows Collectibles Book, The Dark Shadows Companion, Dark Shadows Memories, The Dark Shadows Movie Book, and Shadows on the Wall—all published by Pomegranate Press, 1990 to present The Bennett Playbill, by Joan Bennett and Lois Kibbe, Holt Rinehart Winston, 1970

Broadway Bound: A Guide to Shows That Died Aborning, by William Torbert Leonard, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1983

Soap World, by Robert LaGuardia, Arbor House Publishing Company, 1983 The Confessions of Phoebe Tyler, by Ruth Warrick with Don Preston, Berkley Books, 1980

Secrets of a New Orleans Chef: Recipes from Tom Cowman’s Cookbook, by Greg Cowman, University Press of Mississippi, 1999

The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows 1946-Present, by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, Ballantine Books, 1999

Special Thanks to:

David Martin, Michael Karol, and Joe Salvatore for editing Big Lou; and to Craig Lucas for providing a peaceful place to compose my thoughts.

Overture

November 1,1994

New York City

It was my first time on the Upper East Side, and I felt like I was on the set of a movie. I’d moved to New York only a month earlier, and this was quite a distance from my tiny new apartment, which was in a dicey part of Brooklyn. I’d taken the number 5 train all the way up to Eighty-sixth Street and walked the few blocks from the subway stop to 17 East 84th Street, a slim, limestone building that looked like a miniature castle squeezed between brownstones.

Manhattan’s Upper East Side wasn’t anything like my new neighborhood, which was a noisy jumble of delis, take-out restaurants, and furniture stores, all covered with spray-paint graffiti. Instead, East Eighty-fourth looked exactly as I’d expected New York would, from watching movies as a kid back in Kansas. In the Midland Theater, in a little town called Coffeyville, I watched films like Tootsie and Chapter Two, with characters who walked around on sun-drenched streets dotted with townhouses, doormen, glamorous boutiques, and pretzel vendors. Sitting in that darkened, rundown movie theater, I’d dreamed of someday living in the big city, and that dream had finally come true. I’d also fantasized that if I lived in New York I’d meet TV and movie stars, and I was about to start fulfilling that dream, too.

I stood nervously in the cobblestone-floored foyer. On a gleaming silver pad of buzzer buttons, I picked out one labeled EDMONDS. I pressed it, and a moment later a familiar, clipped accent crackled over the intercom. Yes?

I’m Craig Hamrick. I— Before I could finish, I was drowned out by a loud buzz. I moved quickly to open the door next to me before the noise stopped; I was still getting used to how those things worked. I went through, and another door to my immediate left swung open.

Louis Edmonds stood in the doorway. He was taller than I’d expected, thin and frail, with wispy, white hair, balding on top. His sparkling blue eyes regarded me curiously from behind gold-rimmed glasses. He wore a simple white dress shirt and khaki slacks. He looked much older than the last time I’d seen him on television, playing Langley Wallingford on the soap opera All My Children.

Welcome to the Red Pussy! he said, bowing slightly, and gesturing broadly with his right arm.

As I entered the studio apartment, I saw why he called it the Red Pussy. The color scheme was, well, red. In the living room, the walls and the window treatments were blood red, and I could see the kitchen, which had red-and-white-checked wallpaper. A crystal chandelier glowed above us, and there was a beautiful, antique wooden sleigh-bed turned sideways against one wall, with pillows and a forest green covering that turned it into a couch. Although the apartment had a certain elegance, it also sort of reminded me of a French bordello.

Louis hung up my coat in a closet by the front door, then turned toward me. He noticed that I was looking at a watercolor painting on the wall facing the closet. It was obviously a fairly recent portrait of him; he appeared quite thin. That, he said with a proud flourish, "was painted by not just one but two artists.. .a man and his wife."

The wall was filled with about a dozen paintings and framed prints of various sizes. He pointed out a few others. One was a small oil painting of a compact, two-story, old-fashioned blue house surrounded by trees and colorful shrubbery. He told me it was his other home, on Long Island. It’s called the Rookery and I’ve lived there almost 30 years, he said. "You must come out and see it." I was excited at the prospect of getting to know this famous man even better.

He pointed at a simple line drawing of a much smaller house. And this is the house I was born in, in Louisiana.

As Louis went into the kitchen to fetch us some hot tea, I glanced around the studio apartment. One wall was dominated by a cabinet that housed a big TV and a collection of scripts and other books.

On another wall was a mirror in an ornately carved, gold-leafed frame. It hung over a round antique table scattered with framed photographs—mostly snapshots of young, handsome men, which were obviously taken over a long period of years. Some were faded and black-and-white, with men in short-cropped 1950s hairstyles. One was a saturated Polaroid shot of a nicely built man in a bathing suit with a ‘70s shag haircut. Other photos appeared to be much more recent.

Again Louis caught me looking at these glimpses of his life. He put the teapot (red, of course) and cups on the beveled glass coffee table and stood beside me in front of the mirror. He picked up the colorful picture from the ‘70s. He told me it was his friend Bryce, who had been a model.

Nice looking fellow, I said with a smile.

He returned that picture to its spot and picked up one of an older, heavy-set man in a white suit with black-framed glasses and a walrus mustache. It was another friend—a man named Tom, who had died recently.

He put down Tom’s picture next to another, of himself in a kilt, standing next to a glamorously dressed woman with big dark hair and even bigger dark sunglasses. They were both laughing. I recognized the woman with her head thrown back. It was Ruth Warrick, who played Langley’s wife, Phoebe. He said it was taken at an All My Children Christmas party.

We settled in the living room, me on the couch, and Louis in a chair across the coffee table from me. I suppose you want me to tell you story of my life, he said slowly, with mock exhaustion, as if he’d been hounded with that request a million times. He knew that was why I was there. We’d spoken on the phone a few days earlier, when I told him I wanted to write a magazine article about his life and career.

Yes, I said. I’d like that very much. I pulled a small tape recorder out of my backpack and placed it next to the teapot.

He leaned forward and squinted at the recorder. How much tape have you got?

Plenty, I said.

He raised his eyebrows playfully and settled back into his chair. "Well, I can’t tell you everything... That’d be downright scandalous.."

Act One

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One

Spring 1939

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Louis pauses outside the closed door to his mother’s bedroom. He glances into a wood-framed mirror on the way and quickly rakes his left hand through the unruly mop of blond hair on his head, trying to press down the curls. In his other hand he clutches a bouquet of colorful flowers he cut from the garden moments ago.

The tall young man takes a deep breath and reaches for the doorknob. Before he can turn it, he’s distracted by a shriek from the opposite end of the house. He drops the flowers and moves swiftly toward the sound. When he reaches the living room, he finds his younger sister, Alma, and their giggling little brother, Raymond Jr., fighting over a toy.

Louis! the young girl cries, tossing her long, dark hair. Raymie won’t give me my.

You two, hush right now! Louis silences the children with his stern voice. Mama’s resting. Y’all get outside and play.

Alma and Raymie sullenly make their way outdoors and are soon lost again in their games. Their older brother knows they won’t stray from the yard into the bustling city streets, but he’ll keep a watchful eye on them until they come back inside.

With a pang of envy, Louis gazes out a window at the youngsters. They don’t understand. They have no idea what’s happening to their mother. At 15, he is facing the grown-up task of watching the lovely southern belle wither in a losing battle with cancer and helping tend to her needs.

He moves softly across the polished wooden floor, pausing again outside Kathleen’s room. He bends to gather the dropped flowers, then stands and raps gently on the door. A tired voice answers and he enters.

Louis tries to hide his sadness as he looks at his dying mother. The doctors are treating her with morphine, but her body has grown resistant to the drug, and she is now almost constantly plagued with pain. Kathleen’s once-lustrous mane of golden hair is thin and dull; her blue eyes, which Louis’ resemble, have lost their sparkle as well.

Louis recalls earlier, happier times. Kathleen often proudly took her three children through the streets of Baton Rouge, shopping for the ingredients of delicious dinners she would prepare for the family. Their father, Ray, worked long hours as an oil company executive, and dinnertime was cherished. Louis admired the way his mother had moved through the stores with grace and style, smiling at her fellow customers, and calling the grocer and shop workers by name.

But in recent months, there have been no shopping trips for the family. Kathleen is confined to bed, and Louis has taken on a role of caretaker. With a forced smile, he moves across the room and places the freshly cut flowers in a crystal vase. He busies himself fashioning them into a pleasing arrangement, but after a few moments he knows he can no longer delay what he has been planning. Louis pulls a wooden chair close to Kathleen’s bed and reaches for her hand.

Mama? he says softly. Mama, there’s something I have to ask you.

Kathleen pulls herself up slightly and manages a gentle smile. What is it, Louis? It sounds important.

It is.. .Mama.. .you know how I love the picture shows?

This is hardly a surprise. Louis has spent countless hours in a movie palace just a few blocks from their home.

Of course, his mother says wearily.

Well.that’s what I want to do, he struggles for the right words. I.I want to make people laugh.. .and cry.. .and...

What are you saying, Louis? Kathleen asks

I want to be an actor, he nearly whispers. Is that all right?

Kathleen sighs and thinks for moment. Finally, she speaks. "Well, Louis.I can’t say ‘no,’ because I don’t know what I’d be saying no to..."

missing image file

Acting was an uncommon profession in Baton Rouge in the 1930s, so when Louis Edmonds told his young mother he wanted to be an actor, she had no experience to call on, no knowledge of what sort of future would lay ahead for her son if he chose that path.

In fact, the teenager had no idea himself. As an acolyte in a local Episcopal church, he had fallen in love with the ornate garments he wore—and with being the center of attention. Years later he told a newspaper reporter, The ceremony of the church was very appealing to me. Everything was translatable into theater. The congregation was the audience, and I held a great, brass crucifix and led the choir in. We wore costumes. Everything was theatrical.

But it was in the Paramount Theater on Third Street, just two blocks from the church, watching images of stars like Joan Crawford and Joel McCrea flickering in the dark, that young Louis began dreaming of Hollywood and Broadway.

I had aspirations to be an actor since I was a teenager, and I used to mimic the actors I saw [in movies] on the way home, he said. "I would copy everything, from the way they walked to how they talked. I walked home, trying to move like Bette Davis. I’m sure everyone looked at me and wondered, ‘What’s that boy up to?’ As far back as I can remember, I was always dancing on my toes and showing off like something out of Midsummer Night’s Dream"

When Louis was about 10 years old, he performed for the first time on stage. In a talent show at that same Paramount Theater, he and a young girl sang a duet of The Isle of Capri. When they finished, Louis’ partner didn’t have enough stage sense to leave before the applause died down. Louis, who already understood the importance of timing, let the little girl know it. I kicked her in the butt, he said. That got her off the stage.

Just a few months after Louis and his mother had their discussion about his career choice, Kathleen lost her battle with cancer. Absorbed in grief, Louis’ father, Raymond, made little comment about Louis’ career choice.

He stood quietly by, Louis said. He was at a loss for what to say. But he got used to it as time went by.

Louis’ father grew up on a farm in upstate New York. While attending Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge on an athletic scholarship, Ray met local beauty Kathleen Stirling at a party, where another young woman had recently kissed him.

The family legend goes that they met at a fraternity dance, Louis said. My father had lipstick all over his face and my mother said, ‘Mr. Edmonds, your lips are on crooked tonight.’ And that started it all.

The doctor’s daughter and farmer’s son fell in love. After graduating from LSU, Ray remained in Baton Rouge and married Kathleen. They settled in a small, one-story house and began a family. Louis was born September 24, 1923. Alma was next, in 1928, followed by Raymond Jr. (Raymie) in 1930.

Because he was five years older than his nearest sibling, Louis developed his own friendships and interests. And before his mother’s illness took hold and he was needed as a caregiver, he spent summers working at his paternal grandfather’s farm in upstate New York.

My parents would put me on a train and I’d very excitedly ride all the way to New York, Louis said. "There, my love of gardening was born. My grandfather felt the same way. It skipped my father—he was an athlete instead—but I had great fun working the soil and watching things grow.

I had a cousin who was a year younger than I, and who was there with me. I adored him. We had good times and worked well together. We did work picking cherries and got a little salary.

Even when he was home, Louis was a bit distant from his younger siblings.

He was so much older, he almost seemed to be in a different world than us, Alma said years later. I remember Louis as a disciplinarian. We didn’t know Mama was sick. We knew she was in bed a lot, but it really didn’t register. Words like ‘cancer’ were never discussed. Life was supposed to be beautiful. I didn’t even know that’s what Mama died of until much, much later.

When Kathleen died, Ray had to figure out how to juggle the responsibilities of fatherhood and his work. With no mother in the house, he felt that his daughter should go away to school.

Daddy felt that it wasn’t proper to leave me in the care of the cook, so he sent me to St. Mary of the Pines, which is a little convent in Mississippi, Alma said. I was just heartbroken about the whole thing, and leaving home seemed so hard, but I wasn’t there two months before I was perfectly content and happy with the whole thing. It was a good move.

Southern propriety allowed that the boys, Louis and Raymie, could remain at home.

Louis earned his high school diploma at 16, which was not an unusual age at which to graduate at the time. He enrolled at LSU, his father’s alma mater, and began attending classes in 1940.

But first, that summer, he made his debut in an on-campus production of Stage Door. The attention he received encouraged him.

"Stage Door was about a bunch of girls in a boarding house in New York City trying to get jobs on the stage, he said. I was just a guy who came in for a date. But I got laughs from the audience, and that was the beginning of it for me. That laughter from the audience was just pure gold."

Later that summer, Louis played Alexander Mill in George Bernard Shaw’s Candida. It was staged by the Louisiana Players Guild at LSU’s University Theatre on July 26,1940.

When the semester started, Louis did attend classes, but boring lectures took a backseat to the offers he soon received as a result of his successful summer appearances.

I got into every play that they offered me, he said. I was just a freshman, and it was a feather in my cap to be offered leading parts. How could I turn down something like that? Unfortunately that meant my grades suffered.

Midway through that first semester at LSU, the dean summoned Louis to his office to discuss the young thespian’s grades.

The dean called me in and said, ‘You’re in trouble. You’ve cut classes. You’re going to fail, and you’ll be blacklisted from getting into other universities, so you’d better resign while you’re ahead,’ which is what I did, he said.

For the first several months of 1941, Louis tried to figure out which direction his life should take.

I fooled around Baton Rouge and New Orleans, unsure of myself and uncertain which course to follow, he said.

But the decision wasn’t difficult. He was in love with acting. He worked as a messenger at a U.S. Army airport in Baton Rouge, saving money so he could join a summer stock company in Mississippi. This experience was summed up in a press release about Louis years later: [Louis] entered the theatre world.when he invested all of his childhood savings in a theatre in Biloxi, Mississippi. The ill-fated theatre promptly failed and Louis Edmonds lost his investment, but he had firmly and finally decided to make a career of acting.

Two

In the fall of 1941, Louis returned to college—this time going to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the suggestion of one of the actresses he had worked with in Biloxi. (The college was later renamed Carnegie Melon.)

The Drama Department at Carnegie Tech had a reputation as a tremendous training ground for actors. While Louis was there, his classmates included a roster of future stage and TV stars, including Jack Klugman, Carl Betz, and Nancy Marchand. (See Who’s Who at the back of this book, for information about the careers of Louis’ costars and friends.)

During his first semester at Carnegie Tech, as a freshman Louis didn’t get the same attention he had received at LSU.

"They