ELAINE STRITCH (or STRITCHIE as Noel Coward called her)

Stritch so identified with (Mame) that she for a time lived on Beekman Place, where Mame was said to live. Like Mame, she was a dramatic, somewhat distant aunt, demanding to be called “Tante” when she swooped in to Detroit for visits with her nieces and nephews. The plot of “Mame” involves the protagonist writing her autobiography; so, too, had Stritch been trying to put together a memoir since the 1950s, titled variously “Poor Little Stritch Girl” or “Shut Up and Drink Your Champagne.” Eventually, after a stint as Vera, Mame’s tipsy sidekick — cursing the difficult dance steps all the way — she got a brief crack at the starring role, at the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis, Mass, in 1969. “The biggest mistake of my life,” Stritch realized. “Vera is better than Mame.” And she would reach full flower as another sozzled sidekick soon after as Joanne in Sondheim’s “Company.”

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Stritch remembered the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, a crucial architect of the new, spectacular mega-musicals, talking to her about a narration role. “If I’m involved in it the way you’re explaining it to me, Andrew, I would want to be a cat,” she said. “And the last I heard of it was that,” she recalled later, “and then you hear ‘Cats’ and everybody’s a cat.”

Prepared to be regretful, Stritch went to see a preview of the show. “I just hated every minute of it,” she said. “The first act, I was all dressed up, and the cats came out through the audience. They were mussing people’s hair and — You, now, touching me! One of them came near me — I remember looking at it and saying, ‘Don’t touch me.’ That’s how much I hated that show. I didn’t want anything to do with it.” She walked out at intermission.
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Stritch entered a room of black suits (to audition for The Golden Girls). “I hope you all don’t mind that I’ve rewritten some of these lines to fit me,” she told them. “I’m Catholic, so I don’t want to say, ‘oh God.’ I can’t stand that.” She tried a curse instead. The suits stared back at her, aghast.

“I’m just glad I got out of there alive,” Stritch said years later. “I hate that show. Who’d be crazy enough to live in Florida with two other women and their mother?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/theater/elaine-stritch-broadway-roles.html

boy, she must have gotten weary of bumping into Angela Lansbury at auditions.

I saw Stritch's last 3 Broadway appearances: A Delicate Balance, At Liberty (the one-woman show), A Little Night Music (where she replaced...Angela Lansbury)