Kelly Bishop.
Photo: Andrew Eccles/Disney/Getty
Did anyone really believe that Emily Gilmore’s memoirs would be anything but classy? Kelly Bishop’s new book, The third Gilmore Girl, is a fascinating read. It’s comfortable – a warm, ivory pashmina to wrap around your brain while listening to the La’s “There She Goes.” It’s not cheesy, though.
Bishop talks about her early life: days as a non-Rockette dancer at Radio City, diet pill-fueled nights in Vegas as a showgirl, winning a Tony for A choir line, She met the love of her life and was subsequently involved in numerous projects by Amy Sherman-Palladino.
This does not mean The third Gilmore Girl is boring. It’s not, it’s just wholesome. Bishop has lived a charmed life and is kind enough to share it with readers. Every moment that could be a heartbreaking tragedy becomes a sweet little farce in her hands. From a friendship with certified genius Michael Bennett to a well-considered abortion to the private jokes she plays with her “Gilmore Girls” Husband, here is every non-scandal in Kelly Bishop’s drama-free tell-all.
Perhaps the closest Bishop comes to speaking outside of school is when she has a love/hate relationship with Michael Bennett, Svengali of A chorus line. She says that although they liked each other before the workshop, A choir line By the time the relationship began, she had already recognized him as a “master manipulator,” someone who could instinctively identify and exploit people’s vulnerabilities and make them do whatever he wanted.”
The process of writing and casting A choir line was intense. It came primarily from a consciousness-raising session in which dancers told their life stories. The whole thing was recorded, and from that emerged the personalities vying for a spot in the titular chorus group. Bishop’s childhood bears a striking resemblance to her character’s song “At the Ballet.” While Bishop recalls her mother telling her that when she grew up she wouldn’t be pretty but would have “a lot of flair,” that statement ultimately goes to another character, Bebe, played by Nancy Lane.
Bishop says she was grateful to have her words put into someone else’s mouth, especially in a song. “So I hadn’t lost my beautiful monologue after all,” she writes. “It had just evolved into something much more beautiful and much more memorable.” So when her mother saw the show, she was able to somewhat deny the following line, “I hated her.”
Throughout the book, Bishop describes her relationship with Bennett as one between someone who can enforce boundaries and someone who is used to pushing those boundaries. Still, they have a mutual respect for each other’s talents, and she says his AIDS-related death in 1986 hit her hardest during this time of endless death in the arts: “Michael and I have experienced many ups, downs and dramas over the years, on and off the stage. Ultimately, though, it’s impossible to imagine how my life would have turned out if it weren’t for the genius of Michael Bennett.”
In her memoir, Bishop speaks kindly of virtually every person mentioned, except for an ex-boyfriend she had when she won the Tony in 1976. Because Bishop is a classy guy even when she spits a certain amount of venom and bile, that man is not named. She calls him Kevin, “because that bears no resemblance to his real name.” All we know about “Kevin” is that he was a schmoozer extraordinaire, he was kind of boring, and he wanted to be an actor. He eventually ended up “in small roles in movies with the big names he’d worked so hard to get,” she says. This hanger-on dates her, impregnates her, and then bores her to death. Bishop “tried to make a list of pros and cons of carrying the child” and “couldn’t find a single pro.”
“I was very grateful that abortion was legal when I needed one in 1978, but to be completely honest, I am sure that if it had come to that, I would have found an illegal way to terminate the pregnancy because for me it was the only responsible option,” she writes.
25 years later, Bishop invited Amy Sherman-Palladino to a rally for women’s rights in Washington, and the “Gilmore Girls” The Creator immediately booked her rooms at the Four Seasons in DC. Bishop vividly remembers her walking into the lobby “in my protest attire of jeans, a T-shirt, and my big sticker that said ‘Women’s Rights Are Human Rights.'”
Bishop got the role of Baby’s mother in Dirty Dancing in a roundabout way. She was originally set to play Vivian Pressman, the cougar who chases Johnny. But the original Mrs. Houseman, Lynne Lipton, fell ill early in filming. Bishop had already booked her tickets, so she was upgraded to a meatier (if less juicy) role.
However, Bishop did not meet her husband Jerry Orbach on the set of Dirty dancing. They had actually been on Broadway together before – in Promises, promises. “He was also a playmate of my first husband,” she writes. Orbach and Bishop did most of their scenes together, and when they were off, they flew back to New York to see their partners. They were both…whatever the sexless version of a wife type is? Husbands and wives, maybe? So they drove to the airport together, then shared a cab to their respective better halves. One day, Bishop joked in the production office that people probably assumed they were having an affair. She says she was “greeted with awkward looks and dead silence—in other words, apparently that’s what they thought.” But there were no jokes, and in fact the two couples had dinner together every week for two years. Dirty Dancing wrapped.
In a kind of “water is wet” Gimore Girls Cast member Alexis Bledel was also new to the industry. “She had given one good audition and one not so good audition,” Bishop writes, “and they couldn’t decide.” The Sherman-Palladinos ultimately chose Bledel, and she was cast as the teen messiah of Stars Hollow.
The chemistry between all the Gilmore women was phenomenal from the start, even though Bledel was still a little inexperienced. Bishop says that some of the closeness we felt in the “Gilmore Girls” The pilot actually came about when Lauren Graham accompanied Bledel on set as a sheepdog. “Lauren/Lorelai constantly touched Alexis/Rory in their scenes together,” she writes. “It fit perfectly with the sweet mother-daughter connection between the two characters, but it was also Lauren’s subtle way of calming Alexis and gently guiding her to her markings on set.”
Every dinner scene at the Gilmore mansion began with a battle for dominance, a negging of the TV actors by the show’s Broadway heads. “We were all called to the set, and he and I promptly took our seats at opposite ends of the table,” she writes. Then they waited and waited until the other actors had taken their places in the scene. It was a little joke, a little act of showing off, and an understated way of getting people to do the work. One day, everyone else took a particularly long time to get on set, and Bishop leaned over and asked Herrmann if they were assholes. “We’re theater people,” he replied, meaning that they came from a discipline where when the curtain goes up, the show starts, whether you’re there or not. Bishop says the little inside joke between Emily and Richard Gilmore always made them laugh, “either at our leisurely colleagues or at ourselves, we were never sure who.”
