“They play games on levels you can’t see,” Ron Klopfanstein recaps Nolly, episode 3
For my review, cultural analysis, and recap of episodes 1 and 2 of Nolly go to UticaPhoenix.net/TV
“I can’t…I can’t. I don’t think I can do it…I can’t do it. This part is a monster; she is a legend, she is a major piece of work, and I’m not good enough.” Episode 3 of Nolly finds Noele Gordon sweating through rehearsals for Gypsy. She is over 60 years old, a smoker, and finds the physical demands of playing a stage role to a live audience of 1000 people that requires singing and dancing far more onerous than playing the lead on a half-hour soap opera where the limitations of the sound stage constrain characters’ range of motion.
“I shouldn’t smoke,” she says, lighting up a cigarette, “I can’t do it, Tony. I can see it in their faces ‘that woman from TV.’”
Another thing bothering Nolly is her fellow Gypsy cast members’ endless conversation over their characters’ motivations, how they say their lines, and – most annoying to her-their gossip about her firing from Crossroads and her personal life.
“Why were you sacked?” she is asked this question repeatedly wherever she goes. At this point in the story, she knows no more than members of the public about why she was let go from her daytime drama.
“Every sodding day I get asked the same question,” she exclaims.
“You’ve had things taken away from you, Nolly; you’ve been robbed of opportunities don’t you think?” her cast members ask.
“I think it’s all in the script,” Nolly replies.
They point out that Gypsy is set in 1933, and she was in the business in 1933.
You were there, Nolly, on the stage in 1933. You’ve actually survived it. I’m just asking you how.” They pester her.
“Everything we need is on the page. Shall we just get on with it?” She responds crisply
Tony, friend and professional, that he tells her to “Do your job and f*cking act!”
Adding to the pressure, the director is pressuring Nolly to perform her character’s big “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” musical number, “Rose’s Turn,” further downstage than she is comfortable with.
“I just find that a bit exposing,” she says.
Finally, she opens up to her new colleagues about her life.
“Did you know I was the first woman on color television?” she asks. Then she recounts her long-term relationship with married ATV executive Val Parnell and explains how he left her and his wife for a younger woman before dying in 1972.
“When you are a woman with no husband, no partner, no children, society doesn’t know who you are,” she sighs. “There’s no place for us, this silent army of women with no name.”
Helena Bonham Carter, who was just nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for her performance as Noele “Nolly” Gordon, launches into a masterfully performed monologue that captures the sadness and liberation of an older woman reflecting on her life and the limitations and obstacles she faced as a woman in television in the middle of the twentieth century.
“I can see you girls all thinking, ‘Oh, I’d never let a man do that to me,’” she says. “They’re clever. They’re cleverer than you’ll ever know, and they play games on levels you can’t even see. You don’t believe me now because you’re young and you’re tough and you’re brilliant, but I promise you, you will turn around at 40 or 60 or 80, and you’ll say, ‘Oh my God, he got me. I thought all of this was me. Turns out it was all him.’ Things I could have become were taken by him all my life was him, and you ask me why I was sacked. Every single person asks me why I was sacked every single day. Every single person asks me why I was sacked, and that is the reason. They know the herd, the pack, the instinct. They can smell the victim. I was sacked because I was sackable. Those men just did what they always do; they singled me out, bared their teeth, and brought me down. Then, they raised a glass of champagne and moved on to the next.”
Nolly’s triumphant return to the stage with the Crossroads cast in the audience leads to more bad news. The show cannot open on London’s West End because a revival is being mounted in the United States with the intention of going to Broadway, and the company that licenses the play will not extend the contract for a competing production, though they are 3,000 miles away.
Her agent tells her there is one offer. It is to tour internationally with the play The Boy Friend, but it is “dinner theater.”
“God knows everyone’s staring at me,” Nolly says with resignation. “Maybe I need to go somewhere I can’t be seen.”
The second act of the episode ends in Abu Dhabi, where she suddenly winces with abdominal pain.
While on tour in Bangkok, Nolly and her fellow cast members are busted at a strip bar. This leads to a meeting with Hanza, a former ATV executive who is now working for the British Embassy.
“I know exactly why you were sacked,” she tells Nolly.
Back in England, Nolly confronts producer/director Jack Barton, who was antagonistic towards her on the Crossroads set.
“I found out something by chance, someone,” she tells him as she carefully unfolds a paper on which she has written everything Hanza has told her. “I was sacked because I’m a bully, because I’m a prima donna, because I’m delusional, I make people go through hell. I’m a fly in the ointment. It appears I was sacked because I’m a ‘difficult asset.’”
She tells Jack the comments were said by Charles Denton, an ATV executive who has never seen onset at Crossroads.
“How did he know anything about me?” she asks, knowing the answer. “I mean, he was never in the studio. He would never see rehearsals. I don’t imagine he’s watched a single episode of Crossroads in his entire life, so where did his information come from?”
Jack confesses to saying those things about Nolly but insists he never thought his network bosses would take him seriously, much less act on his complaints.
“Would you have done that to a man?” she asks. “Let me tell you the answer is no.”
“It never really worked Crossroads,” Jack says, “Coronation Street is about the working class. Emmerdale Farm is about a farm; Crossroads is about a motel. We don’t have motels. People don’t know what a motel is. They think it’s a typo. The whole thing is based on a mistake, but we couldn’t stop. The one thing that machine can never do is stop.”
@ronklopfanstein “The one thing that machine can never do is stop,” Nolly, ep. 3 For my review, recap, and analysis go to UticaPhoenix.net/TV
The meeting between Jack and Nolly concludes with him asking her to return to the show. At first, she declines, but when he tells her they will shoot her return in Venice. She decides to come back, but another bad bout of stomach pain tempers her joy. The cause, we learn, is terminal cancer.
Noele Gordon’s comeback in Crossroads episode #3833, which aired on October 25, 1983, glorious as it was (and you can see the whole episode at Archive.org), was short-lived. Though the show was trying to lure her back to reverse the ratings slide caused by her departure, Gordon died a little over a year later at age 65.
“I feel she was sacked in her prime,” Bonham Carter said in her interview with the Daily Mail. “She was 61, she couldn’t have been better at what she was doing…she was sacked because people felt threatened by her. They resented her power and the fact she was right most of the time.”
Ron Klopfanstein is a multimedia investigative journalist, news and features editor, and creative content producer for the Utica Phoenix digital platform and 95.5 FM “The Heat” broadcast and streaming. He has been a lifelong fan of soap operas and has watched General Hospital for over 50 years.
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