(6 of 10)
Discharged from the service in 1949, Scott enrolled in the University of Missouri as a journalism student. He had been writing since he was eight years old, and by the time he went into the Marines, his father says, he had "enough rejection slips from the Saturday Evening Post to paper the bathroom wall." That much writing on the wall convinced even Scott. Then, one day, he spotted a notice on the college bulletin board announcing auditions for The Winslow Boy. He bought a copy of the play, memorized every line of it, and won the lead.
"It was like tumblers falling in a lock," he recalls. "I knew what a good safecracker felt like. From then on I never doubted my ability for a moment. So many actors say, 'Well, I'll give it a chance for a couple of years.' But you can't give acting a chance. It gives you a chance." Scott took every one he got. After graduation he went to work at Stephens, a women's college in Columbia, Mo., teaching a course called Mastery of Western Literature just so he could get to act in school plays. The class was a farce. Scott was too busy learning his craft to read the required books, so he spent class time "chatting it up with the young ladies about Les Miserables." One of his students at the time was Tammy Grimes, who remembers him as being "very handsome, strange and moody, like a Heathcliff. He was in practically every play we ever did, and we used to do one every three weeks."
Along with all the experience in stagecraft, Scott, then 24, also acquired his first wife, Carolyn Hughes, a Stephens student; they had a daughter named Victoria. He landed a job in a Detroit stock company, where, along with some good roles, he appeared in such asthmatic fare as Come Out of the Kitchen and Broken Dishes. His income was as puny as the repertoire, and after four years of fill-in jobs that included carpentry and cement pouring, Scott returned in desperation to Stephens hoping to teach again. By that time he was the leading campus undesirable. Not only had he been divorced; it was public knowledge that he had fathered an illegitimate child by another Stephens student. He flew to Washington, D.C., and spent his last dime on a call to his sister Helen. She gave him a place to stay, and her husband gave him a job with his construction firm doing manual labor. Scott managed to stay away from the theater for almost a year.
Making the Rounds