Film by Gillian Farrell, Girl Detective

Last week I went to Woodstock to visit my friend Gillian Farrell for a couple of days, to shake things up, try to get a new perspective on "Bitch!", and to shoot a short film of me as Lady Lawford, directed by Gillian.

She was a young actress in Geraldine Page's class with me all those years ago--lovely, slim, blonde, smart, talented--I wonder we ever became friends at all, but Gillian had the knack of making people--even someone as self-conscious as I was--feel comfortable.

It didn't help that my best male friends from class, John Outlaw and Edward Blanchard, REALLY liked her. The three of them were way cooler than I was. Both guys did scenes with her, and with me, too, but Gillian and I never worked together, probably because I was too intimidated. She was the kind of girl I always wanted to be.

She wore groovy vintage clothes, knew celebrities, had wicker furniture, and lived on the upper West side in a great apartment building owned by a wacky former vaudevillian--just like all those old movies that made me want to move to New York--and her day job was fabulous. She was a detective.

When Gillian's detective agency needed to hire another actress/detective, she recommended me. Five nights a week we'd don blue maid's uniforms and head to a mid-town office building to spy on crooked yuppies who apparently had been ripping off their employers, an investment banking firm, returning after-hours to do whatever it was that warranted hiring two actresses to spy on them. I never did know for sure. We carried photos of the crooks in our uniform pockets, with cans of Pledge and dirty rags as a cover, and pretended to be Yugoslavian cleaning women. Our real cover was a duo of actual Yugoslavian cleaning women who had ratted on the yuppie crooks in the first place. Intrepid, they kept the other maids from reporting us to the Maids Union, or worse, speaking to us in Croatian (neither of us knew a word). It was clear we didn't belong there. But it was a fun job, very Lucy and Ethel.

By day, between auditions, I served subpoenas. Gillian's other assignments as an "op" were more challenging and dangerous, and--well, she was better at it than I was. Braving dicey neighborhoods to hand legal documents to scary people proved too much for me. I was relieved to land a job in a Charles Busch play by night, and an upper East side real estate office by day. My brief stint as a lady detective became just another anecdote: What I Did For Money.

But Gillian's gumshoes really took her places. She met a sexy writer who was working on a detective novel, married him, had children, wrote some detective novels herself, and moved to Woodstock after living abroad, directing, and of course, acting. Now her husband is a respected, well-known writer, her kids are gorgeous, and she looks just the same only better--still acts, writes, does charity and political work, and has become a film-maker.

So twenty-two years later, the actress/detectives once again played dress-up and catch-up, and worked together, alone.

Sadly, our dear friends John and Edward are both gone--John died in 1993 and Edward last September. Gillian and I are unexpected survivors. We have finally created something together, however small, after all these years. I'm looking forward to collaborating with her again before another twenty-odd years pass by. And I hope that John and Edward are smiling.

(Watch the film! It's short and sweet--)