It began simply enough. I was laid off from a syndicated television talk show, a blessing disguised as a reorganization. I’d started collecting unemployment and bartending under the table at a cocktail bar near my Hell’s Kitchen apartment when, one afternoon, my former manager called. His colleague represented an actress; would I be interested in assisting her a few days a week?
Days later, my Motorola flip phone rang, displaying an anonymous number. This was 2006, a time when no one questioned picking up the phone. I had been experimenting with mixing cosmos—the namesake of the aforementioned bar—and drinking my mistakes.
“Hello, Sarah?” came the voice on the line. “This is Angela Lansbury.” Then came an exuberant laugh. Angela Lansbury—a woman whose career I scarcely knew beyond my grandmother’s television set on Sunday nights—chatted with me as though this were all perfectly normal. I was an aimless, broke, 24-year-old kid standing in my tiny apartment, admittedly a bit buzzed, holding my ear to the voice of an enchanted teapot.
She planned to come to New York City to star in Deuce, a Terrence McNally play about two retired tennis stars, at the Music Box Theatre and hoped to find someone who could help her with day-to-day odds and ends: setting up her new Manhattan apartment, accompanying her to interviews and appearances, keeping her schedule, basic assistant stuff. This return to the city after several years away was a big deal, not only to her but also to Broadway—and very much to me, as it turned out.
That first phone call became an invitation to afternoon tea. Afternoon tea became a proper job offer. And with that job came a shopping buddy, a lunch date, a gossip, a confidant, a travel companion, and a nearly two-decade friendship.
***
When Angela came into my life, I was, at 24, a kid from Cranston, Rhode Island, living in a city still a bit too big for me. After graduating from college—during which I’d only narrowly escaped the 9/11 attacks, living in a dorm two blocks away from Ground Zero—I’d worked for Maury Povich’s production company and moonlighted as a producer for a stand-up comedy show that paid in cheap gin and sexual harassment. Now, it felt like I was constantly rebuilding my social circle as close friends moved away for quieter lives. Both furious about everything and wildly insecure, I felt an emptiness I didn’t know how to fill and a disillusionment with the life I was creating for myself.
Angela invited me to her Midtown apartment building, a former hotel that has since been converted into condominiums. Hers was a modest pied-à-terre with clean, white walls that displayed gorgeous paintings by her sister-in-law Louise Lansbury; a walnut dining table with the leaves folded down; and a simple, cream-colored couch by a glass door that opened onto the balcony. The space, not being her primary home, was sparse, yet homey and inviting.
While my day-to-day responsibilities were not at all impressive, the sound of the job impressed. Suddenly, I had something exciting happening in my world, even if I was often only strolling the aisles of Gristedes with Auntie Mame.
I often think about the quiet mornings in Angie’s apartment, just before she’d burst out from her bedroom to start our day. It always smelled faintly of her perfume—Jo Malone’s Red Roses—or of the actual red roses she might have brought home from the theater the night before. Always peaceful and clean, bright and welcoming, this was where I spent Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. every week, on and off for years.
My days always began the same way. I’d unlock the door to her apartment, shed my coat and purse on the back of a desk chair upholstered in a red floral tapestry we found at Gracious Home, and she’d shout from the back bedroom, “Push the button, darling!” She usually drank tea, but every day before I arrived, she’d prepare the coffee maker to brew exactly two cups just for me; the machine needed only to be switched on when I walked in.
Hours later, at around three o’clock, she’d say, “Now, how about a cuppa?” One of us would put the kettle on, dropping two bags of Barry’s Gold into the old metal teapot. More often than not, Angie would have some kind of “sweetie” to go with our tea, either a simple McVitie’s chocolate digestive or “something delicious” she’d picked up the day before. “What’ll ya have?” she’d ask, holding a plate of assorted cookies.
We’d then sit and chat, and soon enough, she’d give me the signal to go home. “It’s getting late, my dear. On your horse.” It was never any later than 4 p.m.
As I’d collect my coat and sling my purse over my shoulder, she’d hand me my hat and gloves and sing, “Careful crossing streets, ooh, ooh. Don’t eat sweets, ooh, ooh.” Then, with a gentle hand, she’d send me out the door, her mellifluous voice meandering down the hall.
My time with Angela so rarely felt like work—more like palling around with a theatrical great-aunt. Was I passionate about RSVP’ing to events I’d rarely attend, dropping off dry cleaning, faxing in the grocery-store order, or sifting through fan mail? Well, I loved the fan mail, these gut-wrenching letters in which people poured their hearts out about how she’d inspired them to do this or overcome that. Or the zany letters that I’d read with a furrowed brow, wondering why actor Tom Bosley of Happy Days fame was referenced 47 times before requesting her autograph. I sifted out the true letters from the obvious autograph dealers, and once a week at that dining table, she’d sit down and respond to every single one.
Inside the middle drawer of the credenza lived a stack of 8-by-10-inch headshots, which she’d sign away: “For Neil, Love, Angela Lansbury xx. Happy birthday, Caitlin! Love, Angela Lansbury xx.” Some she felt warranted a lengthier response, a brief paragraph or two on blue Original Crown Mill stationery with her signature printed in the top margin—nothing wordy or excessive, just a quick appreciation for someone’s gift or thoughtfulness.
Most New York transplants spend a few years wrongfully assuming blunt rudeness is the only way to succeed here. From where I sat, kindness was really Angela’s main tenet, whether she was responding to mail; receiving the aspiring theater kid at her dressing-room door; shaking the hand of the Duane Reade cashier who loved Murder, She Wrote; or, in between matinee and evening performances of A Little Night Music, welcoming my mother for tea and cookies in her dressing room to trill on about, well, me. Being in her realm re-parented me from the feral 20-something I’d become without adult supervision in New York into a young woman who sat up straight, wrote timely thank-you notes, and paid more attention to the energy I put out into the world.
I was doing some performing myself when I could, and Angela’s occasional encouragement stopped me in my tracks. In 2012, Access Talent, a New York voiceover agency, added me to their talent roster. I left her apartment early that day for my first-ever audition, a bag of anxiety. “What can I tell you?” she remarked before I set off. “Well? You’re good. So fuck it and just do what you do.” I departed with an extra boost of confidence. If Angie felt that way, then who was I to think otherwise?
***
In my first few months working with Angela, a man named Jon entered my life, and we began round one of a very long relationship. We lasted a few months before I called it quits over a pastry at Le Pain Quotidien, suggesting we might be better as friends. The next morning, searching for tinned sardines at Ernest Klein’s, she asked what was up with her girl.
I felt ridiculous, wiping away tears next to the salad bar in front of my employer. But she took my hand and squeezed it in hers. “Don’t worry, my sweet,” she said. “There’s always something just around the corner.” And she was right: Around the corner, several weeks later, was Jon again.
Before we got married, Jon and I planned a trip to Dublin. “I’ll be in Cork!” Angela told me. “Come to the house!” And that’s just what we did. She picked us up at the bus station and drove us to her home, where, beyond the stretch of her emerald backyard, there was a dramatic drop into the Atlantic Ocean. We took in the expanse as dusk settled around the house like in a fairy tale. Wandering across the lawn, Jon and I mouthed to each other how surreal this little vacation had become.
We spent three nights in her Irish farmhouse, playing ping-pong doubles in the garage with her and the neighbors and sipping afternoon tea with her Irish friends. For our entire visit, she forbade us from lifting a finger at mealtime, cooking us breakfasts of scrambled eggs made in a saucepan with a whisk and a pat of cold butter; grilled tomatoes with salt and pepper; brown-bread toast; and coffee and tea, to be sure. She also made simple salads of lettuce and the foreign-to-me lovage from her garden, with homemade dressing shaken up in a spent bottle of olive oil.
Angie’s was the last stop on our trip, and she insisted we go home with clean clothes. When she called out to Jon as he passed by the doorway to her laundry room, he gasped, worried she had taken a spill. Instead, she was kneeling before the dryer, rubbing spaceship-print fabric between her fingers. “Darling,” she asked, “do these feel dry to you?!” Or as Jon likes to tell it: “There’s Angela effin’ Lansbury holding my boxers.”
Some time later, she’d be invited to perform in a six-month Australian tour of Driving Miss Daisy with the inimitable James Earl Jones and the positively effervescent Boyd Gaines. I’d been married for 18 short months by then, and bringing me to another hemisphere was 100% off the table in her mind. “Darling, I couldn’t possibly take you away from your Jon,” she said. And besides, her wardrobe dresser on Broadway was far more qualified: The woman who slipped Angela into Ann Roth’s costumes eight shows a week was smart and savvy, with contacts for days. Me, I was just a good time.
Still, standing over the sink in the galley kitchen of her apartment one afternoon, I silently mouthed to myself the short speech I’d mentally prepared not two minutes earlier. Clearly identifying the thing I wanted, I did something I’ve never done before nor would have the courage or occasion to do since. I rounded the corner where she sat at the dining table and gathered her hands in mine. “Angie,” I told her, “I want to join you in Australia.” Devastating prose, obviously.
She stared at me for a moment, probably guessing I had months to live, before shouting, “Okay, kid! You’ve got yourself a deal!” And a good time won out.
Leading up to the Australian tour, we did a huge amount of shopping. On a visit to Bloomingdale’s in the spring, we wandered around fingering fabrics until we came upon a rack of Andrew Marc raincoats. She plucked one out in pearl for her daughter, Deirdre, and then suggested I choose one. I went with black, and it fit beautifully. “Lovely!” she said. “Then it shall be yours!”
I thanked her. “This is one of the nicest things I’ve ever had,” I fawned.
“You’re one of the nicest things I’ve ever had,” she said, taking my elbow in hers.
The trip to Australia itself was a dream. Like the stars in a reboot of The Odd Couple, Angie and I spent six months as roommates in lavish hotel suites across Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth. We’d have coffee and eggs or muesli together every morning, and on Sunday evenings after her performance, we’d settle in to watch Downton Abbey, eating Magnum ice cream bars in our pajamas. Then, on Mondays, when the theater was dark, we explored. Landing in each city meant sending out comms to people Angela might know, and in Sydney, we got into contact with her distant cousin Malcolm Turnbull, a man who would later become the Australian prime minister. He and his wife, Lucy Turnbull, former mayor of Sydney, welcomed us to their stunning home on the Sydney harbour for dinner. “We invited Cate, but she’s out of town,” Lucy told us, nonchalantly. Cate, dear reader, was of the Blanchett variety.
Over those six months in 2013, I had the privilege of mostly nonexistent expenses. Between what Angela paid me and my per diem from Gordon Frost Productions, I got my first taste of financial freedom. I had a chance to see a bit of the world—to invite attractive Australians to flirt with me—and the idea of returning home felt boring, because it was. Angie was right to worry about spiriting me away.
***
Eventually, as her career in New York wound down, my need for a steady income and health insurance ramped up. After Australia, I took a series of depressing office jobs that all felt like giving up. I’d spent six months living with a national treasure, and now I was Scotch taping someone’s lunch receipts to printer paper to submit their expense reports. While never in my life plan, I momentarily considered having children with Jon, simply for something more challenging to do.
Angela and I spoke only every few months, a quick call or email. She was mostly in Los Angeles now, while I was finding my way into an advertising career. One fall day, I was preparing for an interview when a call came through from LA. It was my friend Dena, a woman who’d worked with Angela on the West Coast long before I came on the scene. My beloved old friend had died.
It’s strange to grieve a public figure who occupied such an important place in your life. They don’t belong to just you; they belong to anyone who experienced any shred of joy through their work, through their whimsy. That was me too. I think of the way she’d thread her elbow through mine whenever we’d cross busy streets, softly singing “Tale as old as time….” She didn’t quite need my support like that, but our affections made this closeness comfortable, easy.
Years later, I still hear her voice in unexpected places, like when a Scottish tourist on the subway recently told her daughter, “Oh, we have bags of time.” Bags of time was one of Angie’s phrases. And she sure had bags of it—nearly 97 years.
You expect someone like Angela to be around forever. The smile, the laugh, the occasional dirty joke that made your internal record scratch. Our last visit together was in Los Angeles, just before the pandemic. I’m not sure I ever told her how she’d altered my life. How she softened the hard edges, instilling confidence and boundaries and a sense of wonder and kindness in their place. She gently corrected my course, nudging me toward love. “On your horse,” she’d say, sending me off. “On your horse.”