(5 of 9)
Mamma Was Boss. So much of Anne Bancroft seems never to have left home that one friend still describes her as "a Girl Scout of The Bronx, leading Brownies through Palisades Park." Anne likes to disagree. "I get so tired of saying I was born in The Bronx," says she. But the continuing search for herself keeps taking her back to the series of low-rent apartments in the neighborhood of St. Peter's Avenue. "We were a typical Italian family," says Anne, "very lower middle class." Mamma was the boss. It was Mamma, working as a telephone operator at Macy's, who ordained that of her three daughters chubby Anna Maria would become an actress. "I sometimes wonder if it was worth putting her through all this," says Mrs. Italiano today.
But Mamma knows that she only ordained the obvious. Her Anna Maria was born to entertain. "I was the personality kid," Anne remembers. "When I wasn't sick, I was singing. Even at school they took me from classroom to classroom; I could really put over a song. I put everything into it. I shook my shoulders, rolled my eyes and twitched. I was just a repulsive kid, I guess. I used to break up the class."
By the time she entered high school, Anne was a slick, style-conscious teen-ager —far more "sophisticated" than she is today—with a great interest in the boys. But always Mamma was there to keep her in check. "Once," says Anne, "my mother caught my older sister having sneak dates and beat hell out of her. I didn't want a licking, so I didn't do too much of that." And another time, when Annie smoked a cigarette onstage in an amateur production of Night Must Fall, her Aunt Kate yelled terrifyingly from the back of the hall: "I'm going to tell your mother!" Sometimes, Annie revolted against such domination; once she grabbed her mother's modest jewelry and sold it for pennies to the first comers in the street.
With hypercritical hindsight, Anne has now decided that "I was very phony in high school. I was terribly shy, and I got aggressive to cover up that awful shyness." But what bothers her most about those years is the memory of someone else winning the school drama medal. The teacher's explanation—that the winner of her choice needed encouragement more than Anne—still rings false. The grown woman seethes with rage and searches for understanding of her girlhood slight.