Grayson Hall - TV Guide - 01/23/71

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think she was taking anything seriously. And yet, by dress rehearsal somehow it's all there! I don't know how she does it."
      All of which is very well . . . but what is an Academy Award nominee and an "astounding talent" doing, laying Katharine Hepburn low at lunch, clowning around a soap-opera set, and killing off two years of her creative life by feigning passion for a vampire?
      Grayson Hall explains: "I'm no longer ambitious. When you're young. 24, 25. you're committed to a kind of drive. When you get to the point where I am, and have a family . . . well, I just love the work. That's all I care about.
      "I have the best of all possible worlds. I'm a wife, a mother, a housewife. And I work when I want to. So I'm fulfilled on all levels."
      On level one, Grayson, wife, lives with writer Sam Hall in "a big, old funny apartment" in Manhattan, crammed to the gills with heavy conversation-piece antiques. Biedermeier chairs, a porcelain bidet, gigantic 15th-century Corsican cupids and grotesque Ming dogs ornament the dark red living room.

Somewhere in the deeps of the apartment, there are roars of laughter. Grayson leads us to the roars--to the kitchen, where a stout, bald, jovial man sits at a table covered with sheets of paper and scribbles. Husband Sam Hall is a writer of Dark Shadows--which is written, daily, on Grayson's kitchen table--and he's in conference with two other writers. Sam, too, has had an unusually distinguished career. He's written for the Theatre Guild, U.S. Steel Hour, Playhouse 90. Why is he churning out stuff about vampires? "If you want to stay in New York today," he says, "all there is is the soaps. Or move to California."
      We visit the next level and give Grayson, mother, a whirl. We can't see her in action, because her child, Matthew. is not at home. But Grayson is full of funny talk about her precocious "12-year-old hero." Matt, it seems, reprimands Grayson for her incessant comic exaggeration. He recently threatened to "curb her extravagance of language": "You come home from Bloomingdale's and say 'There were 8,000,000 people there.' You know there weren't 8,000,000 people there! You come home from the studio and say 'This was the worst day of my life!' You know it wasn't the worst day of your life."
      We move on to the last "level," that of Grayson, housewife. She's Domesticity Incarnate, it appears: "I'm a committed cook. Basically I'm a French cook. But I've also taken a course in Chinese cooking and in Mexican cooking. Most recently I've taken Yucatan cooking." Grayson labors three days to turn out an exotic meal for a few friends. Then they talk about it for weeks.
      All "levels" have now been displayed and, after a parting flurry of jokes, the brief visit comes to an end.
      Can this be the "best of all possible worlds"? Is this domesticated, wisecracking Academy Award nominee and lampooner of Katharine Hepburn "fulfilled," as she says? Unsurprisingly, many think not:
      One Dark Shadows colleague says: "She's as neurotic as hell. Some kind of anxiety eats at her. She's a compulsive gossip. There's that compulsive need to be 'on'--that constant barrage of jokes, and quips and exaggeration. She's got the talent. She could have had a far greater career. I think she knows she hasn't done with herself what she could have. I think frustration eats at her."
      On the other hand, some believe it is not quite so "black and white" as all that. Director Henry Kaplan says:
      "Actors are very strange people, and Grayson is a strange woman. I certainly think she'd like to be more successful. Even though part of her is fulfilled, she's still reaching out for the part that isn't. But Grayson's family is important and fulfilling to her. It's not a cop-out."