What does Kelly Bishop say in “The Third Gilmore Girl”?

Did anyone really think Emily Gilmore’s diary would be anything but classy? Kelly Bishop’s new book, The third Gilmore Girl, is an engrossing read. It’s comfortable—a warm, ivory pashmina you can wrap around your brain while listening to “There She Goes” by the La’s. But it’s not juicy.

Bishop discusses her early life: her days as a dancer at Radio City when she wasn’t in the Rockettes, her nights in Vegas taking diet pills as a showgirl, her Tony Award-winning career Choral line, meeting the love of his life and then participating in numerous Amy Sherman-Palladino projects.

This does not mean that The Third Gilmore Girl is boring. It’s not, it’s just wholesome. Bishop has led a charmed life, which she’s kind enough to share with her readers. Every moment that could have been a heartbreaking tragedy becomes, in her hands, a charming little farce. From her friendship with certified genius Michael Bennett, to her deliberate abortion, to the private jokes she shared with her Gilmore Girls Husband, here’s the whole truth about scandals in Kelly Bishop’s drama-free story.

Perhaps the closest Bishop comes to speaking outside of school is her love-hate relationship with Michael Bennett, Svengali Choral line. He says that even though they liked each other before the workshop, Choral line she began, she had already noticed in him “a master manipulator, someone who instinctively senses and exploits people’s weaknesses, making them do what he wants.”

The Writing and Casting Process Choral line was intense. It came mostly from a single consciousness-raising session, where dancers shared their life stories. The whole thing was taped, and out of it came the personalities who compete for a spot in the titular choir. Bishop’s childhood is remarkably similar to her character’s song “At the Ballet.” While Bishop remembers her mother telling her that instead of being pretty when she grew up, she would have “a lot of charm,” that line ends with another character, Bebe, played by Nancy Lane.

Bishop says she was grateful to have her words put in someone else’s mouth, especially in song. “I didn’t lose my beautiful monologue,” she writes. “It just developed into something much more beautiful and much more memorable.” That way, when her mother saw the performance, there was some plausible deniability: “I hated her.”

Throughout the book, Bishop describes her relationship with Bennett as that of someone who knows how to set boundaries and someone who is used to having them trampled. Yet there is a mutual respect for each other’s talents, and she says his AIDS-related death in 1986 hit her hardest in this season of endless death in the arts: “Michael and I have had our share of ups and downs and dramas over the years, onstage and off. But ultimately, trying to imagine what my life might have been like without the genius of Michael Bennett is impossible.”

Throughout the memoir, Bishop speaks kindly of virtually every person mentioned, except for the ex-boyfriend she had when she won the Tony in 1976. Because Bishop remains a class apart, even when she spouts her fair share of venom, the man remains unidentified. She calls him Kevin, “because it has nothing to do with his real name.” All we know about “Kevin” is that he was an incredible talker, a bit boring, and wanted to be an actor. He ended up “doing bit parts in movies with these famous actors he was trying so hard to attract,” she says. This parasite dates her, impregnates her, and then bores her to death. Bishop “tried to make a list of the pros and cons of carrying a pregnancy to term” and “couldn’t think of a single pro.”

“I was very grateful that abortion was legal when I needed it in 1978, but honestly, I am certain that if it had come down to it, I would have found an illegal way to terminate the pregnancy because, from my perspective, it was the only responsible option,” she writes.

25 years later, Bishop invited Amy Sherman-Palladino to a pro-abortion rally in Washington, D.C., and Gilmore Girls The creator immediately booked them rooms at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C. Bishop vividly recalls walking into the lobby “dressed in protest gear: jeans, a T-shirt, and a big sticker that said, ‘Women’s Rights Are Human Rights.’”

The bishop was cast as Baba’s mother in Dirty dancing in a roundabout way. She was originally cast as Vivian Pressman, a mountain lion who hunts Johnny. But the original Mrs. Houseman, Lynne Lipton, fell ill early in filming. Bishop had already booked her tickets, so she was promoted to a more substantial (if less juicy) role.

However, Bishop did not meet her on-screen husband, Jerry Orbach, on the set. Dirty dancing. In fact, they had performed together on Broadway before – in Promises, promises. “He was also my first husband’s gambling buddy,” she writes. Orbach and Bishop did most of their scenes together, so when they had time off, they would go back to New York to see their partners. They were both…whatever a guy is, no gender? Maybe married? So they would go to the airport together, then share a cab to get to their better halves. Bishop joked in the production office one day that people probably assumed they were having an affair. She says she was “greeted with embarrassed looks and dead silence—in other words, that’s what they clearly thought.” But there was no dalliance, and in fact the couples had dinner together every week for two years after they got married. Dirty dancing wrapped.

In a very “water is wet” way, the youngest Girls from Gimore cast member Alexis Bledel was also new to the industry. “She gave one good audition and one not-so-good audition,” Bishop writes, “and they had trouble making a decision on her.” The Sherman-Palladinos ultimately made the decision on Bledel, and she was cast as Stars Hollow’s teen messiah.

The chemistry between all the Gilmore women was phenomenal from the get-go, even if Bledel was a bit inexperienced. Bishop says that some of the closeness we see in Gilmore Girls pilot actually came from Lauren Graham, who was showing Bledel around the set. “Lauren/Lorelai was always touching Alexis/Rory in their scenes together,” she writes. “It fit perfectly with the sweet mother-daughter relationship between the two characters, but it was also Lauren’s subtle way of calming Alexis and gently guiding her to her spots on the set.”

Every dinner scene at the Gilmore mansion began with a tug-of-war for dominance, the Broadway stars squaring off against the TV actors in the play. “We’d all be called to the set, and he and I would immediately take our seats on opposite sides of the table,” she writes. Then they’d wait and wait for the other actors to take their seats in the scene. It was a little joke, a bit of showmanship, and a subtle way of intimidating people into doing their jobs. One day, it took a particularly long time for everyone else to arrive on set, and Bishop leaned forward and asked Herrmann if they were assholes. “We’re theater people,” he replied. He meant that we came from a discipline in which the show starts when the curtain goes up, whether you’re there or not. Bishop says that the little joke between Emily and Richard Gilmore always made them laugh, “either at our lazy castmates or at each other, we were never sure which one.”