One-Woman Operetta : Actress Regales Her Audiences With the Story of Her ‘Rotten Life’

After every performance of Susan Tyrrell’s loony, hallucinogenic “My Rotten Life” (tellingly subtitled “a bitter operetta”), Jim Reva’s decadent, fin de siecle set has to be broken down. That’s because, for the moment at least, the solo piece is on the microscopic stage of The Pink and once Tyrrell is off, the place resumes its identity as a brick-walled nightclub in the middle of Santa Monica’s Ocean Park district.

It’s Tyrrell’s operetta, though, and she’s not about to let the show end there. She just brings it with her, wherever she goes.

When she whips through the doors of a restaurant in her Venice neighborhood, for example, she’s carrying in her arms “Mr. Sister,” a stuffed replica of her own poodle and the dead canine companion of “My Rotten Life’s” equally dead actress who regales us with her miserable past as she waits to pass through the portals of hell.

Then, we notice the rest of Tyrrell. There are the Cinemascope sunglasses. There are the mean-looking high tops that are coordinated with a fire-engine red leather jacket festooned with a button showing the African continent. Above it all, there’s a gold cardboard crown resting on Tyrrell’s blond mane. Welcome to the show, the off-stage version.

It turns out that this edition might be called “My Not-So-Rotten Life.” She appears happy--giddy, even--certainly much more youthful than she did playing often frazzled women in her 1970s movies (“Fat City,” “Andy Warhol’s Bad”), and blissfully dazed by the strong response her show has been receiving. “The show’s a dead riot,” writes the L.A. Weekly’s Steven Mikulan, “and Tyrrell is electric . . . (and) takes us down that dark, dark abyss of failure that bears a Hollywood ZIP code.”

Only a couple of weeks into the run, and there’s talk of touring “My Rotten Life” (“New Orleans, maybe, and a woman in Berlin is interested”). She’ll wait and see: There are still the memories of an earlier, aborted production of “Rotten” at an Amsterdam opera house that she’d rather not discuss.

Deeper yet are the memories--”not so much bitter,” as she says in the show, “as morbidly toxic.” They feed her shamelessly autobiographical, artfully confessional monologue/aria that, she says, “was at the baby stage two weeks ago, and now it’s in the teen phase.” It’s growing that fast? “That’s what I’m told.”

Tyrrell talks of being in a dream state while performing, how “I can hardly recall the story myself, and I wrote the damn thing.” Which connects with her actress’s tale, framed as “a Hollywood dream,” taking her from childhood in Connecticut, how she was “raised to be a bitch by a bitch who was raised by a bitch,” and on to absurd Hollywood casting calls in which she tries out for the role of a hunchback.

The trail is pockmarked with sex of all kinds, including an encounter with a “grandfather,” a veiled reference to her “Fat City” director John Huston (who gets a sarcastic dedication in the production program). “I’m giving it back to him the way he gave it to me,” she says, still clearly feeling wounded by what she suggests (but won’t go into details) was degradation on Huston’s part during filming. A bitter memory, but also bittersweet, since Tyrrell was nominated for a supporting actress Oscar for her performance.

She hasn’t experienced anything like that fame since. Racking up an impressive series of New York stage credits, including Tennessee Williams’ “Camino Real” at Lincoln Center with Al Pacino, and ‘70s films including “Zandy’s Bride,” “The Killer Inside Me” and “Islands in the Stream,” Tyrrell looked to be the successor to the Bette Davis mantle of women descending from a state of grace into hellish inner turmoil.

Then Tyrrell seemed to fall from her own state of grace. “My career,” she willingly admits in a throaty voice she could trademark, “is a mirror of my lack of respect for movies. They’re not putting care into real things, only little Styrofoam fantasies. Other than my work in ‘Bad’ and ‘Killer Inside Me,’ most of the stuff I worked in has been crap. So I put nothing into it. If I love the director, I come with my heart on a plate and my guts in a bucket.”

Tyrrell nearly fell all the way. Roles dried up, she hit the actress’s danger age of 40 (she doesn’t fix her age in conversation, and biographical sketches disagree on her birth date), and “I became obsessed with how to get rid of myself.”

Suicidal tendencies clashed head-on with what she calls “a horniness for life. I first thought it was that I didn’t have the nerve to kill myself, but then I saw that I wanted life more than I realized.”

Her father, an agent for William Morris in the 1950s, felt so sure that she was a natural actress that he managed to get his teen-age daughter into a summer stock production of “Time Out for Ginger,” starring Art Carney. At the agency, though, her father “saw some terrible things and tried to fill me with dread about Hollywood.” This reached a macabre climax when, despondent and aware of his allergy to bees, he deliberately ran into a bee hive and was stung to death. Already at odds with her mother, Tyrrell endured an emotional breakdown that sent her to a Harlem hospital.

It probably explains why, once she sat down to write what became “My Rotten Life,” she found that her own life was a much better source than any published Hollywood accounts. Even John Guare’s play, “Landscape of the Body,” in which she played a seemingly dead diva at the Court Theater in 1987, had no influence because “I never thought of myself as dead in it. I thought I could steal from Kenneth Anger’s ‘Hollywood Babylon,’ but, reading it again, it was very thin and empty. Just go into my own past, baby,” she says, petting her stuffed friend.

From what she says over wine and water, occasionally interrupted by friends dropping by to congratulate her, a lot of great bits from that past haven’t made it into “My Rotten Life.” Her testy meetings with Tennessee Williams, for instance, during “Camino Real” rehearsals: “He just didn’t like me. I mean, it was personal . He would tell me, ‘My favorite actors are 50% male and 50% female. You, my dear, are neither.’ But then, at this same time I was rooming with Andy Warhol’s favorite transvestite, Candy Darling, who was like a real mother to me. She would tell me, ‘Su, Su’--she always called me that--’don’t let men make you mean.’ ”

Her writing may have been cathartic, but according to Tyrrell, who’s resisted going to a psychiatrist as completely as she’s resisted soap opera offers, the real release on the emotional pressure cooker has been her painting. “Heaven is in my garage, where I do paint lots of big-breasted black women. They’re my favorite, though I’ve just sold my sculpture of Mike Tyson as a satyr. I call them very sweet pornography, like a young girl might do.”

Although “My Rotten Life” might also be called “My Sweet Revenge,” what comes across isn’t a tone of bitchy spite, but the unsettling contrast of Tyrrell’s scatological humor and jet-black comedy with director Rocky Schenck’s beautiful scenography, Gregory Poe’s drop-dead costumes and Frederick Myrow’s and Michael Andreas’ lush music. Explaining how she was able to bring together--with lots of aid from producers Janet Pett and Michael Luther--so many skilled collaborators, Tyrrell says, “Gregory and Frederick have been friends for years. I wanted the show to look beautiful, which is why I went to Rocky, who’s a marvelous photographer and video maker.”

Tyrrell’s voice might not strike everyone as quite as beautiful; but then, should a dead actress sound terrific? “My neighbor heard me practicing and told me that I sounded like a wounded lawn mower. But Joni Mitchell saw the show last week and told me that it sounded as if I had ghosts in my throat. That’s the idea. What I’m more worried about is offending a lot of people. It’s a little raw and crude right now, but I want this to be ‘My Rotten Life’ as a dessert, not as a liver pill.”