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| Grayson Hall Born on September 18, possibly in the year 1926 (in her later years she was vague and even deliberately misleading about her age), Shirley Grossman was the daughter of Philadelphia businessman Joseph Grossman and his wife, Eleanor Witkin. (Briefly an actress with the noted American Yiddish theatre family, the Adlers, Miss Witkin was an immigrant from South Africa. Grayson apparently took after her in looks and I've wondered whether there might have been some kinship with Janet Suzman, also from a South African Jewish background; the remarkable British thespian does have curly red hair and aristocratic cheekbones in common with Grayson.) Grayson's parents separated in the mid 1930s, although thirty years later her mother was still listed in the phonebook as Mrs. Joseph Grossman. Around age 11, little Shirley was asked what she wanted to be at a family party. "I want to go on the stage," she asserted, to laughter and general amusement. Whereupon she silenced the room with an ear-splitting shriek. Even at that age, she was NOT to be trifled with.
At some point around 1951-52 she was at Yale University appearing in a revival of Our Betters, where she met young playwright Sam Hall. Although she walked out on their first date, they did eventually find that they had firmer grounds for a relationship than had at first seemed to be the case. They certainly shared a similar way of looking at the world, and an acerbic appreciation for the absurd chaos of human nature. It was Sam who began calling her Grayson, "like an old army buddy." In later years those who attempted to address her as Shirley would receive a grimace and a sharp reprimand: "Don't CALL me that!" On Jan. 12, 1953, Grayson and Sam were married. A month later, on Feb. 20, Grayson had her official New York City stage debut in an Equity Library Theatre production of George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman. In the "emphatic" role of Ann Whitefield, Grayson displayed many of the qualities that were to distinguish her stage presence in her subsequent career-strength, vital spirits, and a rare wit, perfect for a Shaw heroine. The next four years represented a struggle for Grayson and Sam. In November 1953 she seemed fated to follow in her mother's footsteps with her supporting role in George Baxt's Make Momma Happy (working title: Alex in Wonderland). This was a vehicle for Molly Picon, comic doyenne of the Yiddish stage. But the play, which opened in Philadephia's distinguished Walnut Theatre after a late summer stock tryout, closed before it even played Broadway. In 1954 she understudied such noted actresses as Uta Hagen, Celeste Holm, and Rosemary Williams in lead roles in Broadway plays. In 1955 she won the role of the Actress (and her picture in the New York Times review of the play) in Jose Quintero's controversial revival of Arthur Schnitzler's sex farce, La Ronde, at Greenwich Village's Circle in the Square theatre (which was practically to be Grayson's unofficial base for the next few years). Jose Quintero was a great name in the American theatre; later that year, she attracted the attention of an equally eminent figure of the British stage, Tyrone Guthrie, when he cast her in his own adaptation of Six Characters in Search of an Author. Grayson appeared with Natalie Schafer and Kurt Kaznar, veteran New York actors who, like herself, went on to achieve visibility in popular television shows in the 1960's. Grayson's final bow as "Shirley Grayson" occurred, ironically, in a low budget film. Run Across the River was shot over a period of 3 weeks or so in Greenwich Village in the Summer of 1957, using equipment rented from a New York television studio. The film attracted pre-release attention from Variety because of its incredibly low budget, then disappeared, only to premiere in Detroit in 1961, by which time Grayson and everyone else connected with it had probably forgotten it. A few months after the completion of the film, Grayson was at home, pregnant. Matthew Hall was born in August 1958. A photo printed in the Dark Shadows Companion shows an elated Grayson holding her baby son aloft. Grayson and Sam were both only children, and both wanted another child, but this proved not to be possible; on more than one occasion Grayson commented, "DNC ought to be my middle initials." Shortly before Matthew's birth, they moved to a large, seven room apartment on the West Side, less than a ten minute walk from a certain television studio on W. 53rd Street....
The following years continued to be busy ones. In October 1961 she appeared in Kenneth Jupp's The Buskers. It is possible that Grayson drew on the role of Agata in this play as a reference point when she created Magda on DS in 1969, although The Buskers closed after a mere week. (Future DS writer Violet Welles handled the publicity for the show.) Shortly thereafter Grayson had the fortune to fall into another long run with her Broadway debut, in the role of Myra Blake in David Merrick's new musical, Subways are for Sleeping. That show closed in June 1962, and in July of that year she appeared in two episodes of the classic radio anthology series, Suspense. The second of these, "A Weekend at Gleebes," offered her a particularly noteworthy role as a woman caught in a dilemma between the hope for love and the obligations of motherhood. It's the sort of role one would have enjoyed seeing Grayson play on film or television.
In later years, Grayson frequently commented, "I was nominated for an Oscar, and all I got out of it was that Disney film." In fact, 1965 was an exceptionally busy year for her; in addition to her appearance in That Darn Cat, she also made an hour long color television film, "Back to Back," opposite Shelley Winters and Jack Hawkins, broadcast in October 1965 in the Bob Hope Chrysler Theatre series. (In the late Seventies, Grayson nearly did a television pilot with Miss Winters, an actress she clearly admired.) An honor and a great pleasure to Grayson and her family was her participation in the Summer Arts "Festival of the Two Worlds" in Spoleto, Italy, in which she performed in "The Adjustment" by Albert Bermel and "A Slight Ache" by Harold Pinter. The latter play proved so popular that extra performances had to be arranged. (A television special was made about this year's Spoleto Festival and shown on American television, but it is not known whether Grayson appeared in the special or not.) Towards the end of this year, plans for Grayson to appear in two Stanley Mann one-acts opposite Shirley Knight had to be scrapped when she was summoned to Paris to appear in American expatriate William Klein's brilliant satire of French fashion and society, Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (Qui Etes-vous, Polly Maggoo?) As World Fashion Empress Miss Maxwell, closely modeled upon director/screenwriter William Klein's former boss Diana Vreeland (editor of Vogue magazine), Grayson is a fiercely ruling "dragon lady" surrounded by sycophants and fawning acolytes. "He has RECREATED woman!" she bellows in her initial appearance at the beginning of the film, and Grayson's own spectacular clothes and make-up in the role provide a stunningly fantastic recuperation of the most extreme fashions of the era. Perhaps her most iconic moment comes towards the end of the film where, dressed in a cheongsam styled ensemble with an immense jewelled brooch fastened to her bosom, her hair ruthlessly cinched back with three topknot hairpieces attached to the top and sides of her head, and her eyes heightened with lairs of mascara and false eyelashes, she encourages her protegee to take off like a rocket: "Beep-beep!" Grayson must have relished portraying an haute-courture version of the Road Runner in Paris. In 1966 Grayson returned from making Polly Maggoo (ironically banned in America when its expatriate director made a documentary about anti-Vietnam War protests) to something of an impasse in her career. Though she had stated confidently in an interview in the summer of 1965 that there was a "sureness" about her career, if offers were pouring in, they were evidently not to her taste. Fellini had met her while she was in Italy, and spoken of designing an entire film around her face (perhaps the title would have been Grayson of the Spirits?). Instead, the Fall of 1966 found her flying out to Hollywood again, never a town she enjoyed very much, to appear as the evil literary critic and assassin Judith Merle in The Man from UNCLE. The juxtaposition between pop culture and the avant-garde, exemplified by her roles this year as the French Fashion Empress and the dazzlingly chic THRUSH agent, may have represented to critics the fundamental flaw in Grayson's career. Critics could not understand why an Oscar nominee wanted to go slumming in The Man from UNCLE or, subsequently, a trashy daytime drama like Dark Shadows. To the actress herself, the opinions of the press did not count for very much. She remained always very critical of her own work and once commented: "The divine discontent of the artist-let me tell you, it's not so divine." On UNCLE, she had a brilliant script by Harlan Ellison, and an amusing scene with veteran character actor Leo G. Carroll. Difficulties of a more serious kind resulted from the failure of Grayson's other major Fall project, the new play Those That Play the Clowns. The work of Michael Stewart, who had written the books for the successful musicals Bye Bye Birdie and Hello Dolly, Clowns offered a huge roster of talent. Alfred Drake and Joan Greenwood (a distinguished English actress, whose starring role Grayson understudied) were the principle players, and the Shakespearean theme intriguingly foreshadowed Tom Stoppard's hugely successful Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Unfortunately, Clowns flopped bigtime, barely surviving its own opening. The one interesting thing about the production was that it provided the first recorded occasion for Grayson and Thayer David to act opposite one another. As chronicled by Matthew Hall in his memoir "Dark Shadows and Me," (published in The Dark Shadows Companion), 1967 dawned as a year of crisis for the family. Grayson went out to Hollywood again, this time to do an episode of The Girl from UNCLE. Meanwhile, Sam took a trip to his hometown of Carrollton, Ohio, to contemplate the family's diminishing prospects in New York City. A call to Grayson from her agent one hot June afternoon asking whether she was interested in appearing in "a soap about a vampire" ("a soap about a WHAT?") provided an unexpected opportunity. Grayson was offered a 13 week contract, and promised her character would be killed off since she made it quite clear she wanted NO entanglements. She literally ran from her agent's office to a cold reading of her first script to the taping of her very first episode of Dark Shadows. Of course, the rest is history. Grayson's interest in making more of Dr. Julia Hoffman than Malcolm Marmorstein's scripts had on the printed page led to new angles in the Barnabas storyline, Sam's recruitment to write for the show (like Grayson, he never auditioned; he simply visited Dan Curtis in his office and was told to start writing scripts), and lucrative, steady employment for the family into the 1970s.
In 1968, Grayson took a few days off from DS to film four scenes for the movie version of John Barth's End of the Road. By the time the film was released after a year of editing and re-editing, it sported an X rating and had been shorn of the one scene Grayson did the film for. What remains is some amusing banter (and unexpected sexual roughhousing) with costar Stacey Keach, and one extremely beautiful closeup of Grayson filmed in a sort of tawny late-summer light. In 1969, she again took time off to play an aunt of "Mikey" Douglas' in Adam at Six A. M. (released 1970). Though there wasn't much to the role, she did administer one deliciously stinging bit of come-uppance to Michael Douglas, the actor who has come to epitomize the pretensions of masculine angst in freefall. This one scene alone makes the film worth viewing.
"Minos translated it as well. Clearly, he's Greek. After the political situation in Greece ended and after the Junta, he was able to go back, he and Melina Mercouri, and all those people that had been out politically. ... He's now head of the National Theatre in Athens. Brilliant director, and a brilliant man, and the dearest thing he did was--we were in Europe, and in Italy, I guess, four years ago, or so, and Sam had to come back to New York to work, but Matthew and I were free. And so Matthew and I decided we'd go to Greece, from Venice--why not? And, we went, and I cabled Minos. And I said we would arrive at whatever date, at the Grand Bretagne, Athens, which is a lovely hotel, with a view of the Acropolis out of your window, I must say it is just to die... [To a fan at the table:] You've been there? Anyway, we had a terrace and from the terrace you saw ... Well, anyway. "Matt and I arrived. The plane was late, and all kinds of things: we got in at 2 o'clock in the morning instead of 10 o'clock at night and--you know, one of those. And there were 83 messages from Minos, and he said--he called, and left phone numbers where he was going to be and all that sort of thing. ... What Minos did was absolutely fascinating. He was about to start rehearsals for a play--the Giraudoux play--I think it was la Repetition [by Jean Anouilh], I'm not sure--and he postponed rehearsals for three weeks. You could NEVER do that in America. He postponed rehearsals because I arrived--for me. And he became my Guide. And we had the most extraordinary experience, Matthew and I. We went to Epidauros which is--did you go to Epidauros?--it's on the Peloponnese, it's on the west side. It's the place with nineteen thousand seats and the extraordinary--and you can whisper and they can hear you--and they did a play called Peace by Aristophanes--which was absolutely fascinating. Minos sat in the middle and did kind of a UN literal translation. It's really not necessary because there were 19,000 people sitting there, and everybody's laughing at the right times. And, you know, you turn around--I remember right behind us there were about 30 Japanese people and they were sitting there going a-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha [giggles]--absolutely divine! [Laughs] "You know, I'm madly in love with Minos Volanakis. I mean, what an extraordinary thing to do. He took us on a trip--we went around the Peloponnese and we visited people that he knew--we stopped at Ghidrah--and Spezos and--oh, it was just to die. ANYWAY. He was the director of that play [Jean Genet's The Screens]. And the translator. And I wish there was a version of his. I have a copy of the working script somewhere--God knows where. Bernard Frechtman did the translation of The Balcony, which I was in, as well, and it was all right; but Minos' was much better, because Bernard Frechtman is a translator, and Minos is a director, with a whole other thing. As I say, he's probably the best director I've ever worked with. Really brilliant. It [The Screens] is a very complex play, and I used to say to him, "Come and talk to me every night at the half hour" [i. e., half an hour before the start of the play]. And he'd say, "Well, what do you want to talk about?" And I'd say, "Oh just TALK. Just talk about the character, you know ... ANYTHING."
The Screens won rave reviews from the critics, and was widely regarded as the most compelling thing New York theatre had seen in quite some time. Of course it was too unwieldly and uncommercial to last very long.
During the mid to late Seventies, Grayson continued occasionally to see her old acting partners from Dark Shadows. Nancy Barrett and Joan Bennett were among visitors both in town and at Grayson and Sam's charming home in the country. In May and June of 1977 David Selby and Grayson acted together in Larry Ketron's play Rib Cage at the Manhattan Theatre Club. She saw Jonathan Frid at least once at year at parties at Louis Edmonds' home. In 1980 Grayson, Nancy, and Louis surprised David Henesy at his successful restaurant, an impromptu reunion that was enjoyed by all. A surprise onscreen reunion in 1983 featured Grayson, Nancy, and Anthony George in a scene on One Life to Live, reminiscing on camera about how long it had been since they had last seen one another (perhaps on one of the old Dark Shadows sets-some of them were still in use on OLTL.)
In the late Seventies, Grayson and Sam purchased Wildercliff, a small, charming house overlooking the Hudson River in scenic Dutchess County-"America's Loire Valley." They hired rising young decorator Harrison Cultra, who shared Grayson's distinctive coloring (pale complexion, fiery red hair to match his volatile temperament). He created unusual interiors both at Wildercliff and in their New York City apartment, and both treatments were featured in articles in Architectural Digest. Meanwhile, Grayson stepped in at the last moment to replace Madeline Sherwood opposite Derek Jacobi in Nikolai Erdman's black comedy The Suicide, at the ANTA Theatre in the Fall of 1980. It was a superb climax to a decade that had seen some of her finest work, both on stage and before the camera. Grayson continued to be warmly remembered for her work on Dark Shadows; even her Mother insisted that, as Julia Hoffman, she had touched people in a unique way as an actress. After stating repeatedly in interviews that she would never again take a job on one of Sam's soap operas, in 1982 she did just that, creating the role of Euphemia Ralston on One Life to Live. She worked without a contract because, as she pointed out in interviews, she had a "special kind of loyalty" to the show as the wife of the Head Writer. To date, only two scenes from Grayson's work as Euphemia have come to light. We can only hope that in the future more of her episodes from this series will be released, as this would be a treat for her fans everywhere. Given her long association with French modernist theatre, it's perhaps fitting that Grayson's final performance was in a revival of Jean Giraudoux's Madwoman of Chaillot at the Theatre at St. Peter's Church. By February 1985, she had had to withdraw from this production, due to increasing illness. Lung cancer was the diagnosis, and, after a valiant battle to survive, she died on August 7, 1985. Her grave was marked with a slab of dark, diorite-like stone, reminiscent of the tomb of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. Lustrous, brightly shining to the eye, it is rough and mettlesome to the touch-like the lady herself. Flowers grow by her grave, and visitors may recall Christina Rosetti's words, read by Jonathan Frid on the Dark Shadows LP in 1969: "Darkness more clear than
noonday holdeth her: S. R. Shutt
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Shirley attended the Simon
Gratz High School, noted in the Thirties as a
bastion of liberal sentiment, with an excellent
program in theatre and the arts. By a special
arrangement, Gratz students were allowed to take
night classes at Temple University. At some point
(presumably in the early 1940s) Shirley appeared
in Templayers productions at Temple. After high
school she matriculated at Cornell University
where her major was Drama. In later life Grayson
occasionally returned to Cornell to give special
seminars in acting, even though she did not
graduate. Instead, with her father's willing
financial assistance, she moved to New York City
and began acting in regional theatre in the
Northeast as well as working in television, then
a fertile field for fledgling actors. ( In All
About Eve, when Miss Caswell, played by Marilyn
Monroe as "a graduate of the Copacabana
school of dramatic art," asks her sponsor
Addison de Wit whether she will have to audition
for television, he replies, "My dear, that
is all television is-an audition," thus
summing up the industry's role in the acting
profession, circa 1950.) Upon arrival in New
York, she adopted the stage name of Shirley
Grayson (revised from her original choice, the
unpronounceable, unspellable Shirley Graxson). In
the unbearably hot summer of 1950 she was
appearing in William Marchant's Within a Glass
Jar at the Westport Country Playhouse, where she
may have met Noel Coward who was on hand to
assist with the production (presumably thanks to
his influence, it garnered a favorable review in
the New York papers). Her appearance on the
Lights Out! episode of January 1951, "For
Release Today," was typical of the small but
distinctive roles she won in such series as
Curtain Call, Studio One, and Lucky Strike, in
which she appeared during the years 1949-52. In a
later interview, Grayson described herself at
this time as "a skinny harridan, no boobs,
no bottom," who nevertheless longed to
portray ingenues and romantic young ladies.
Despite this rather effacing self-portrayal, she
comes across on camera at this early time as
willowy, elegant and striking, with curly red
hair cut in a soft, stylish bouffant, wide
expressive hazel eyes and a full, sensual mouth.
Her voice already had its characteristically
husky, modulated sonority. In early publicity
photographs, she appears in a variety of
hairstyles and costumes, invariably chic, cool,
self-possessed.
In March 1960, Grayson finally returned
to work, again under the direction of Jose
Quintero, who instructed his assistant to make up
a contract for "Grayson Hall." Her role
in Jean Genet's experimental allegory The Balcony
was her first appearance under this name. Since
"Shirley Grayson" had been out of
circulation for a number of years at this point,
perhaps the new name seemed auspicious for a new
beginning. Whatever the reason, Grayson Hall's
career got moving a lot more rapidly than
"Shirley's" ever did. In The Balcony
she went from playing the minor role of The
Penitent (a character who disappears after Act 1,
Scene 1) for the first 3 months of the play's
run, to taking on the lead role of Madame Irma,
Queen of the titular bordello. She played this
role for a year and it gave her a kind of
exposure in New York she had previously not
achieved. (Sylvia Miles, later to achieve fame
for her cameo role in John Schlesinger's Midnight
Cowboy, was a fellow actress in The Balcony.
Perhaps the oddest moment in the history of the
play's production was when Sylvia and Grayson led
a panel of psychologists and audience members to
discuss the underlying themes of Genet's drama in
December 1960.)
The Summer of 1961
saw Grayson break out of The Balcony (which
continued in repertory at Circle in the Square)
to do a season of classics at the Philadelphia
area's legendary Hedgerow Theatre. A highlight of
the season was her appearance in Jean Cocteau's
classic one-act tragedy, The Human Voice. Grayson
earned raved reviews for her extraordinary
artistry in this one-woman show. Also in this
season, Grayson appeared as Celia, the woman who
meets with an unfortunate demise in T. S. Eliot's
The Cocktail Party. At some point in between her
work in Philadelphia, Grayson returned to New
York to appear in an important role in her second
film, then titled Pattern of Evil. Many of
Grayson's scenes were filmed in a midtown
nightclub, La Martinique. Her costars included
Meg Myles, an entertainer who had made a name for
herself in men's magazines in the Fifties, and
who would go on to soap opera stardom in the
Sixties, and Del Tenney, who shortly graduated to
directing such profitable bargain-basement
drive-in movie features as Horror of Party Beach
and Curse of the Living Corpse. When Pattern of
Evil showed up the following year at a Times
Square premiere with the release title Satan in
High Heels, both Grayson and Meg Myles were
dismayed, and both actresses worked hard to keep
the film off their resumes in their later
careers. Despite Grayson's personal distaste for
the film and its director, one Jerald Intrator,
Satan in High Heels holds up beautifully as a
surprisingly polished bit of early Sixties
coffeehouse noir. In some ways the role of Pepe
provided the springboard for Grayson's most
satisfying film performance. She injected an
enormous amount of emotional subtlety and complex
humor into the role.
Instead, Summer 1963 brought an unusual
opportunity. John Huston was in town, casting the
film version of Tennessee Williams' play, Night
of the Iguana. Almost in spite of herself,
Grayson won the pivotal supporting role of Judith
Fellowes. It's worth noting that although
publicity emphasized the explosive intersection
of Richard Burton and the high-powered trio of
Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr and Sue Lyon, the
trailer for the film featured no less than three
appearances by Grayson (most memorably standing
on the beach and shrieking "You beast!"
at an oblivious Burton). Critics were impressed
and she won an Oscar nomination which in turn led
to still more attention for her within the
industry. A publicity photo snapped the day after
the nominations were announced pretty much sums
up Grayson's own ambivalent attitude to the whole
affair: it shows Grayson, at an antiques fair.
siting down the barrel of a very sturdy-looking
rifle pointed directly at the photographer. The
star shooting the paparazzi. 
The Dark Shadows years (1967-71) were
about more than just steady employment for
Grayson and Sam. For Sam, DS involved some
wonderful working relationships with writers such
as Gordon Russell, Joe Caldwell, and Violet
Welles. Ultimately DS led Sam to One Life to
Live, which proved even more lucrative for the
family, ultimately providing a venue for one of
Matthew's first longrunning professional jobs as
well. From Grayson's point of view, the show
offered both stable employment and a real
artistic challenge to bring a character, a
situation, a script to intense and, it was
presumed, brief life, in the space of a single
afternoon. Nobody ever expected a given episode
to see the light of day again after the initial
broadcast. (Grayson did watch some of her early
episodes again during syndication in the late
Seventies and she pronounced them "pretty
embarrassing.") In some ways, Dark Shadows
was following in the footsteps of some of those
avant-garde one-act plays Grayson and Sam may
have seen in the coffee houses and performance
spaces of Greenwich Village-pioneering venues
such as Caffe Cino and La Mama. Grayson's first
great success was, of course, her near-single
handed creation of Dr. Julia Hoffman, the
strong-willed, highly rational professional who
falls for her patient who just happens to be a
vampire. (In the early Seventies, Grayson liked
to describe her most famous role as
"Physician to the Vampire on Dark
Shadows.") While the creation of Julia
demanded tremendous subtlety and an energetic
integration of emotion, wit, and cool authority,
in subsequent years Dark Shadows gave her many
other kinds of dramatic opportunities. There was
the Countess du Pres, who swept into the drawing
room early in the 1795 storyline declaiming how
"impossible" New York, its food, and
its society was. There was Magda, the gypsy
fortune teller of 1897, who told Quentin Collins
"You have no future!" with a brittle
elan that made the role Grayson's personal
favorite during her time on the series. Then,
there was Julia Hoffman's evil counterpart, the
Collinwood housekeeper in "the strange,
perplexing world of Parallel Time," a
marvelous chance for Grayson to take up where
Judith Anderson left off in the film Rebecca.
Perhaps her most underrated performance on the
series was in the role of Julia Collins, the
bluestocking maiden aunt who was the
self-appointed custodian of family honor in 1841
Parallel Time. Especially in her scenes with John
Karlen's Kendrick Young, Grayson brought
undisclosed depths and intricacies to this role.
Reviewing her work on the series, one
can understand why Grayson repeatedly told
reporters that she loved the challenge and fun of
working on Dark Shadows in the late Sixties.
Critics wanted to know when she was going to do
something that would offer her the level of
artistic integrity her work in Night of the
Iguana had shown. In the late Sixties, soap
operas were not considered a legimate venue for a
serious actress, and nobody in the critical
establishment was watching while the cast and
crew of DS broke nearly every rule of daytime
drama. Unfortunately, the films in which she
appeared during this time repeatedly disappointed
Grayson; by 1971 she had come to regard the
"legitimate" cinema as a waste of her
time and energy.
1970 brought the film version of the
series, House of Dark Shadows. Like the previous
two films she had made in this period, the Dark
Shadows movie was severely cute in
postproduction, and a short scene between
Barnabas and Julia which helped establish their
relationship was left on the cutting-room floor.
By the time Night of Dark Shadows (1971) was
relieved of an hour of its original running time
by Sam and Dan at the express orders of MGM's
executives, Grayson had had enough of
movie-making. In a 1982 interview, she commented
about film as a "director's medium" and
End of the Road in particular: "The director
had been an editor and his wife played the lead.
He spent a year doing the editing and he and his
wife split during the time he did edit it. And he
cut the scene I did the part for. It was a
beautiful scene and he just cut it. And that's
when I really thought, 'Oh, the hell with it.'
There's just no control, that's all. There's more
control on a soap, because you're not going to be
cut and split and all that." 
I think of 1971 as Grayson's Annus
Mirabilis or "year of miracles." It was
one of the busiest years in her career. She spent
the first three months working a heavy schedule
on Dark Shadows. Hardly more than a week after
the completion of the series, she and the other
actors were commuting daily to Lyndhurst,
shooting Night of Dark Shadows. After the film
wrapped, she went with hardly any break at all
into rehearsals for the revival of Saul Bellow's
The Last Analysis (1964), which ran from June 23
until August 1 at her old digs in the Village,
Circle in the Square. Literally the day after
that show closed, she and Sam were on a plane to
start the promotional tour for the second DS
film. This was something of a performance piece
in and of itself; she appeared in full Carlotta
makeup for the press interviews and talk shows on
which she was featured, and seems to have had a
ball portraying that "very actressy
actress," Grayson Hall, to the hilt. In
September she began rehearsals with another
distinguished graduate of the Tennessee Williams
school of American Gothic, Madeline Sherwood, in
a pair of one-acts titled Friends and Relations
that played over one weekend at the Provincetown
Playhouse. Shortly thereafter, she was cast in
what she herself regarded as one of the high
points of her career: the role of Warda, Queen of
the Whores, in the first North American
production of Jean Genet's harrowing allegory of
the French presence in Algeria, The Screens. The
director and translator of this epic production
was Minos Volanakis, who Grayson regarded as the
best director she ever worked with. As Grayson
recalled in 1982:
"It was an ENDLESS play. I had two
hours between scenes. And I couldn't go out
because I had this incredible make-up on, which
was clown-white with purple lips and ... oh God,
it was all bizarre, I have photographs SOMEWHERE.
Actually there's a photograph of me in one of
those year things--the Daniel Blum THEATRE WORLD.
There is a photograph of me which is really quite
fascinating with this WILD make-up on and--I had
styrofoam breasts, and HAT-PINS stuck in
them--and I remember Willa Kim did the costumes,
and she put me in these things and there were
these styrofoam breasts--and then she came AT me
and started putting these hat-pins in and I said,
"God! Nobody's gonna look at me! It doesn't
matter WHAT I say, they'll be STARING at these
HAT-PINS sticking in my styrofoam BREASTS."
And then they said they couldn't use any
photographs of me because it would be--you know,
it would look LEWD in the newspapers. And then
[laughs infectiously] of course it was the
photograph they chose for the Theatre World. Who
can figure ANYTHING?"
The early Seventies were years when
Grayson relaxed and allowed herself to wind down
from the very frenetic pace of the preceding
period in her career. She spoke in interviews of
turning down many projects. She made a few
commercials, which represented good pay for short
stints of work. Among the most memorable of these
was the Playtex Bra commercial which was done
around 1970 and ran on DS commercial breaks. It
featured Grayson as the no-nonsense bra inspector
in a roomful of mannequins, explicating the nuts
and bolts of a really scientific bra. Another
amusing commercial from the early Seventies
featured Grayson as a lady having her house
painted; somehow Sanka coffee was promoted as the
tag of this one. She obviously had enormous fun
playing the alcoholic Mrs. Parks in the TV film
Gargoyles in 1972, and the whole family enjoyed
exploring Carlsbad Caverns on location. Around
this time, she also appeared in an episode of the
adventure series Search, which would be wonderful
to locate, since she presumably had scenes with
Burgess Meredith, a witty and intelligent
American character actor very much in her league.
In April 1973, she portrayed magazine reporter Marge
Grey in
a few episodes of All My Children. In October of
that year, she vividly created the character of
Mrs. Fugelman in the play Secrets of the
Citizens' Correction Committee by Ronald Tavel
who had constructed "screenplays" for
Andy Warhol's films in the Sixties. (In 1977 she
appeared in another of Tavel's challenging plays,
Gazelle Boy, in a brief production in Waterford,
Connecticut.)
1974 brought two interesting television
appearances: the role of Lee J. Cobb's wife in
the TV film The Great Ice Rip-off, which reunited
her with Dan Curtis; and a small role in the
Kojak episode "Hush Now, or You'll
Die!" in which she appeared opposite Telly Savalas. In 1975, another television film saw her
working again with two other DS alumnae, Lela
Swift and Diana Davila, in The Two Deaths of Sean Doolittle, which starred outstanding character
actor George Grizzard. In March of that year she
had the fun of playing an eccentric English
poetess in Edward Bond's The Sea, at the
Manhattan Theatre Club, and then went on to
portray the Comtesse de la Briere in James
Barrie's What Every Woman Knows, which ran
successfully for 71 performances at the
Roundabout Theatre. That Fall, she had a
memorable role in another Broadway flop, Dennis
J. Reardon's The Leaf People, with Joseph Papp as
producer.
The theatrical high point of the late Seventies
was her appearance in Michael Feingold's new
version of Bertolt Brecht's Happy End. Like
everything else in her career, she set herself a
challenge and rose to meet it with all the powers
at her command. In 1964, she had sung briefly
onstage in a summer stock production of No
Strings at the Lambertville Music Circus (in the
Philadelphia area). In an interview the following
year, she had candidly described singing as a
challenge on a par for her with playing Lady Macbeth. Now, in 1977, over a decade later, she
took on the role of The Fly, the lady gang boss
who rules her cabal of smalltime toughs with an
iron fist and ironic cackles of "Merry
Christmas, boys, ho-ho-ho!" Grayson received
star billing along with Christopher Lloyd and
Meryl Streep. The musical was nominated for a
Tony and Grayson's big number, "The Ballad
of the Lily of Hell," stopped the show. The
climax of the number found her raised high above
the shoulders of her henchmen, arms spread in a
gloriously triumphant gesture.