Kelly Bishop.
Photo: Andrew Eccles/Disney/Getty
Did anyone really think a memoir by Emily Gilmore would be anything but classy? Kelly Bishop’s new book, The Third Gilmore Girl, is an engaging read. It’s pleasant — a warm, ivory-colored pashmina you can wrap around your brain as you listen to “There She Goes,” by the La’s. It is not, however, juicy.
Bishop delivers 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 Chorus Line, meeting the love of her life, and then queening out on multiple Amy Sherman-Palladino projects.
That’s not to say The Third Gilmore Girl is boring. It’s not, it’s just wholesome. Bishop has led a charmed life, and one she’s gracious enough to share with readers. Every moment that could be a heart-rending tragedy becomes a darling little farce in her hands. From a frenemyship with certified genius Michael Bennett, to a well-thought-out abortion, to the private jokes she shared with her Gilmore Girls husband, here’s every non-scandal in Kelly Bishop’s drama-free tell-all.
Maybe the closest Bishop gets to speaking out of school is in her love-hate relationship with Michael Bennett, Svengali of A Chorus Line. She says that, although they liked each other before the workshop of A Chorus Line had started, she’d already clocked him as “a master manipulator, someone who could instinctively spot and play on people’s vulnerabilities and get them to do whatever he wanted.”
The process for writing and casting A Chorus Line was intense. It came primarily from one consciousness-raising session where dancers shared their life stories. The whole thing was recorded, and from that came the personalities who vie for a spot in the titular chorus line. Bishop’s childhood bears a remarkable resemblance to her character’s song “At the Ballet.” While Bishop remembers her mother telling her that rather than be pretty when she grew up, she’d have “a lot of flair,” that line winds up going to a different character, Bebe, played by Nancy Lane.
Bishop says she was grateful her words were put in someone else’s mouth, especially in a song. “I hadn’t lost my beautiful monologue after all,” she writes. “It had simply evolved into something far more beautiful and far more memorable.” That way, when her mother saw the show, there was some plausible deniability for the following line: “I hated her.”
Throughout the book, Bishop depicts her relationship with Bennett as one between someone who can assert boundaries and someone who is very much used to walking all over them. Yet there is a mutual respect for each other’s talents, and she says his AIDS-related death in 1986 hit her the hardest in that season of unending death in the arts: “Michael and I went through a lot of highs, lows, and drama over the years, on- and offstage. In the end, though, trying to imagine how my life might have gone if it hadn’t been for the genius of Michael Bennett is an impossibility.”
Throughout the memoir, Bishop speaks kindly of basically every person mentioned, with the exception of an ex-boyfriend she had when she won the Tony in 1976. Because Bishop remains a class act, even when spewing a certain amount of vitriol, this man goes unidentified. She calls him Kevin, “because it bears no resemblance to his real name.” All we know about “Kevin” is that he was a schmoozer extraordinaire, he was kinda blah, and he wanted to be an actor. He did wind up “playing bit parts in movies starring those big name actors he’d worked so hard to latch on to,” she says. This hanger-on dates her, impregnates her, then bores her to tears. Bishop “tried making a list of pros and cons about carrying the child to term” and “couldn’t come up with a single pro.”
“I was very grateful that abortions were legal when my need for one came along in 1978, but to be perfectly honest, I’m sure I would have found an illegal way to terminate this pregnancy if it had come to that, since as far as I was concerned, it was my only responsible option,” she writes.
Bishop invited Amy Sherman-Palladino to a pro-choice rally in Washington 25 years later, and the Gilmore Girls creator immediately booked them rooms at the Four Seasons in D.C. Bishop vividly recalls walking into lobby, “in my protest-wear of jeans, a T-shirt, and my large sticker that read ‘Women’s rights are human rights.’”
Bishop got the part of Baby’s mom in Dirty Dancing in a roundabout way. Originally, she was supposed to play Vivian Pressman, the cougar going after Johnny. But the original Mrs. Houseman, Lynne Lipton, got sick early in filming. Bishop already had her tickets booked, so she got upgraded to a more substantial (if less juicy) part.
However, Bishop did not meet her onscreen husband, Jerry Orbach, on the set of Dirty Dancing. They’d actually been on Broadway together before — in Promises, Promises. “He’d also been a gambling buddy of my first husband,” she writes. Orbach and Bishop had most of their scenes together, so when they had time off, they’d fly back to New York to see their partners. They were both … whatever the ungendered version of a wife guy is? Spouse folks, maybe? So they would carpool to the airport together, then split a cab to their respective better halves. One day, Bishop made a joke in the production office that people probably assumed they were having an affair. She says she was “greeted with sheepish stares and dead silence — in other words, apparently that’s exactly what they thought.” But there was no hanky-panky, and in fact the two couples had dinner together every week for two years after Dirty Dancing wrapped.
In a very “water is wet” fashion, youngest Gimore Girls cast member Alexis Bledel was also newest to the industry. “She’d given one good audition and one not-so-good audition,” Bishop writes, “and they were having trouble making up their minds about her.” The Sherman-Palladinos did eventually make their minds up about Bledel, and she was cast as the teen messiah of Stars Hollow.
The chemistry between all the Gilmore women was phenomenal from the jump, even if Bledel was a little green. Bishop recounts that some of the closeness we see in the Gilmore Girls pilot actually comes from Lauren Graham sheepdogging Bledel around set. “Lauren/Lorelai was always touching Alexis/Rory in their scenes together,” she writes. “It fit in perfectly with the sweet mother/daughter connection between the two characters, but it was also Lauren’s subtle way of reassuring Alexis and gently guiding her to her marks on the set.”
Every dinner scene at the Gilmore mansion started with a battle for dominance, a negging of the TV actors by the Broadway heads on the show. “We’d all be called to the set, and he and I would promptly take our places at opposite ends of the table,” she writes. Then they’d wait and wait for the other actors to take their places in the scene. It was a little joke, a little flex, and a low-key way to bully people into getting the job done. One day, it took an especially long time for everyone else to come to set, and Bishop leaned forward and asked Herrmann if they were assholes. “We’re theater people,” he responded. By which he meant they came from a discipline where the show starts when the curtain goes up, whether you’re there or not. Bishop says the little in-joke between Emily and Richard Gilmore always made them laugh, “either at our leisurely castmates or at ourselves, we were never sure which.”
