Gem Spa, the narrow twenty-four-hour newsstand on St. Mark’s Place, has served as a nerve center for generations of beats, hippies (undeterred by a sign reading, “No Combing of Hair—By Order of Health Dept”), rockers, and punks. The other day, Lily Tomlin, who is seventy-six, stopped by in the hope of getting an egg cream. Encountering a long line of customers waiting to buy magazines and lottery tickets, her personal assistant, Paul (burly, doting), shuffled her out.
“I used to live up the street—this is back in the sixties—on Fifth between Second and Third,” Tomlin said. She wore a navy overcoat, a silk scarf, and sunglasses. “I’d come to Gem Spa on the weekends and I would rail against the rock culture, because it was so misogynistic. I would fight my way in, and I’d shout out from behind the throngs. I’d say, ‘I need a box of business envelopes!’” She smiled the wide smile that introduced America to her gums.
Paul steered Tomlin into a quiet café, where she continued to reminisce. “We used to go down to Ratner’s and you could just get a cup of coffee, but they’d give you those rolls, and sweet, creamery butter. And then I used to walk across Eighth Street to the Village, to the Bon Soir. It was a tiny little, you know, boîte.” One night, she and a friend from Detroit, her home town, dropped in to hear Mabel Mercer. They’d scrounged up only fifteen cents for the coat check. “See, usually you gave a quarter. A quarter would be O.K. but not so great,” Tomlin recalled. “He puts fifteen cents down, and the woman threw it at him! Ha!”
Paul presented her with a slice of cheesecake and an herbal tea with lemon.
“Oh, boy,” she said. Tomlin was in town to promote Season 2 of the Netflix show “Grace and Frankie,” in which she and Jane Fonda play chilly acquaintances whose husbands of forty years announce that they’re gay, and in love with each other. An odd-couple scenario develops—a vodka-chugging Wasp (Fonda) and a bong-toting hippie (Tomlin) become unlikely pals.
For a series about septuagenarians developing a yam-based lube business (potential names include Vagikadabra, Menapplause, and Yam, Bam, Thank You, Ma’am), the first season amassed a large fan base. After Miley Cyrus tweeted, “I found my show! #GraceandFrankie ♥ on a bender! Jane & Lily are so bad a$$!,” Seasons 2 and then 3 were quickly green-lighted.
“Jane Fonda and I are big Ciley Myrus fans,” Tomlin said, slyly.
Tomlin has shoulder-length curly hair. As Frankie Bergstein, she wears a flowing wig that calls to mind a sensual ceramist from Woodstock. Tomlin collects wigs. “That hair just seemed perfect,” she explained. “Frankie’s kind of an Earth Mother. But I feel like I’m lacking in not being more zaftig.” She polished off the cheesecake.
Her “first significant wig,” she said, was for Ernestine, the snorting, power-drunk telephone-operator character (“One ringy-dingy!”) made famous on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.” “I always knew her hairdo was like Loretta Young had worn in certain forties movies. Loretta Young was so beautiful, and Ernestine fancies herself”—Tomlin seemed on the verge of a snort—“that kind of classic beauty.”
A casting director once told Tomlin, “Lily, someday there will be parts for gals like you.” But, she noted, “parts don’t come to me that easily, especially now, at my age. The only serious part I ever really got before ‘Grandma’”—from 2015, in which she plays an Eileen Myles-esque lesbian who helps her granddaughter get an abortion—“was ‘Nashville,’” in 1975. “It was my first film!”
She quoted a line that Jane Wagner, her partner of forty-five years, is fond of—“Well, I think we’ve had the best of it”—and carried her dishes to the counter. She asked if her interlocutor had two dollars, for the Zoltar fortune-telling machine outside Gem Spa.
“Zoltar’s been around a long time,” she said. She fed in the bills, and the machine spat out a yellow ticket.
“Is that it?” Tomlin said, rapping on the glass. “What a rip!”
“For a small fee, Zoltar will give you a wealth of wisdom,” Zoltar said in a booming voice.
The fortune was read aloud: “A happy reunion with a loved one will make life all that you ever wanted it or dreamed it to be. You have a very trusting nature and are easily taken in by so-called friends.”
“My God in Heaven!” Tomlin said.
“Come on, it’s cold,” Paul said.
“Come let Zoltar tell you more,” Zoltar said.
The bottom of the fortune read, “Characters Unlimited, Inc.”♦
