Sam Baralone, as told to Sybil Baker
In the spring of 1952, 18-year-old Pete Darling lands his first professional acting job on a TV show done live and starring elegant matinee idol Gerald Manley, still going strong at 61.
Actually, the star gives a wan and lifeless performance, while his wife, Cass, 21, a gorgeous model, shows what a model wife she is by flirting with every male in sight.
Pete steals the show as a comical office boy. That night, too excited to sleep, he savors his success. He has never thought of himself as leading man material. But now—why not? Hamlet. Henry the Fifth. Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar. Nah, he tells himself. Too short, too nutsy looking.
He shivers. Ambition vaults over common sense, and doubt shrivels into dust. Maybe the reality, the real reality, is that he has boundless talent in a world of boundless possibilities.
Too true. The next morning, he becomes a murder suspect. After watching a kinescope of the show, the detectives agree that Pete’s performance was taut, luminous and compelling. The kid will go far—maybe even to the chair.
Enter reporter Ster Brewster of the rowdy New York Daily Express. Ster is one well-dressed man about town, with his fedora brushed till it purrs. Mid-forties and divorced, but about as lonely as a porch light on a summer night. He covers the case with glee; almost every day presents him with a different angle, another Page One story.
The Tea Scene Was Murder, as told by a retired reporter who says he prefers being inspired to being expired, is by turns humorous, poignant and suspenseful. As the case unfolds, Pete and Ster face multiple challenges—particularly when each of them falls for Cass and her seductive ways.
An actress in her youth, Sybil Baker played “Audrey” and understudied Katharine Hepburn as “Rosalind” in a national tour of As You Like It, and appeared in the featured role of Sylvia Sidney’s pregnant daughter in the national tour of Black Chiffon. She was also “Mrs. Cherry” in Idiots’ Delight at the New York City Center with Ruth Chatterton and Lee Tracy; appeared in Off-Broadway plays with James Dean, Patricia Neal, Eli Wallach and other well-known actors, and on such television shows as Studio One, Philco Playhouse, Suspense, The Web, Lux Video Theater, and Big Story.
Then the excitement really started: she became a wife and mother. Eventually she went back to work as a journalist: at the Danbury (Conn.) News-Times; the Niagara Falls Gazette, the New York Daily News—where each reporter’s daily goal was to enjoy as many laughs as possible while batting out as many stories as possible—and most recently, the Los Angeles Times.
Baker won a year’s Professional Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., through the now-defunct National Endowment for the Humanities; regularly sold mystery stories (including two cover stories) to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine; and placed first in a scriptwriting contest sponsored by Women in Animation, L.A. Chapter, with a spec Rugrats script, Tommy the Sorter. She is a member of the Actors Studio, where one of her plays, Funny Papers, starred Robert Morse. Her first novel, Circles, was published by Cobbossee Press in 2005.
Now the grandmother of four, Baker lives in Hallowell, Maine.
