In one of my films they had a young bit player who was very pretty, but a terrible actress. However, she was very ambitious and decided that if she got some experience in the theater, it would help her career. Fortunately, she had a wealthy boyfriend who backed a road company of The Diary of Anne Frank just so she could play the leading role — Anne Frank.
Before the opening in Cleveland, Ohio, they had three weeks of intensive rehearsals, and every day was more and more frustrating for the director. The actress was impossible. She couldn’t remember her lines, her delivery was amateurish, and the more she rehearsed, the worse she got. The director was ready to quit the show, but she told him she was a poor rehearser. “Believe me,” she assured him, “when I face that opening-night audience, it’ll all come together.”
She invited me to the opening night, but I was not all that anxious to see her perform, and I had even less desire to be in Cleveland in February. A friend of hers and mine did go, and later he told me what I’d missed.
When the curtain went up she blew her opening lines, and her performance went downhill from then on. By the intermission the audience was totally fed up with her. Then, in the first scene in the second act, when the Nazi soldiers broken into the home, overturning furniture and shouting, “Where is she? Where’s Anne Frank?!” the whole audience yelled back, “She’s in the attic!”