Alan Alda’s reluctance to talk about Diana Sands, his co-star in The Owl and the Pussycat for a year on Broadway, has frustrated Steve and I, but now it doesn’t.
Alda has been, to the best of our knowledge, deafeningly silent on the subject of DS for years. Interviewed by Michael Schulman in The New Yorker in 2022 became almost the first time he’s ever discussed working with her; he says they were competitive on Broadway. “We got a lot of praise for ‘ensemble acting,’ when what we were doing was the opposite.” And yet, from the front that’s exactly what it probably registered as.
The fact that he didn’t go to London with her when she transferred the play there in 1966 says something.
But I don’t think it started that way, not when they were colleagues with The Compass on Cape Cod in 1962, nor–as producer Philip Rose details in his memoir You Can’t Do That on Broadway!–when Owl and the Pussycat was being read privately for backers early in 1964.
Last January I talked to Rose Gregorio, who was Diana’s understudy in the play, who died last August. She had pertinent things to say. I finally feel that Steve and I can do justice to The Owl and the Pussycat.
Biography is arduous but rewarding! Sleuthing, recovering something from the partly-retrievable past that you hope does conform in large measure to the empirical truth, as well as the subjective truths that also must be acknowledged.