Two friends, still in step, get a kick out of the Rockettes

Sheila Sullivan turned 86 this summer, and she was thinking about growing older because she was genuinely curious. What do all those old people you hear about, those poor souls, do with themselves all day? She had no idea.

‘Me too a lot. …” and there was a silence, like in the theater, “whatever-it-is, to be old,’ she once told me.

Sullivan is an actress whose resume begins in the atomic age and follows the history of Hollywood in the late 20th century and follows all its ups and downs like a line on a healthy EKG scan. A few Tuesdays ago, she stepped out in style with Tina Dupuy, a writer and her former neighbor who has been a good friend for ten years. They arrived at Radio City Music Hall to see the Rockettes. Remarkably for Sullivan, who has seen it all, it was her first time.

“I wanted to be one!” she recently recalled. One day in the 1960s, she showed up for Rockette auditions. “I’m about this small,” she said, her hands stacked as if she were describing a long sandwich. “When I wasn’t on the show, I saw no reason to see it.”

For whatever reason, West 50th Street was closed to traffic, so the two friends did a little dance in the middle of the street, Sullivan dressed from head to toe in a leopard-print hat and coat.

“It caused a riot inside,” Dupuy said. “Women just stop her to say she’s beautiful.”

Sullivan loved the show. “I’m not mad that I’m not the star of something,” she said. “A lot of.”

This asterisked modesty follows a life and career adapted here for the space: a Broadway actress who co-starred with Woody Allen and Sammy Davis Jr. worked. A dancer at the Tropicana in Las Vegas. An activist who marched with black celebrities for civil rights in Selma, Alabama in 1965.

The wife of a theater producer, later divorced, and then the wife of television star Robert Culp, later divorced. That was enough. If you stick a fork in a toaster once, it’s an accident. Twice: Maybe you weren’t sure what the hell happened. Three times? You have problems.

And most recently, Sullivan was an Upper West Side renter who was fortunate to have had the right neighbor when trouble came.

Earlier this year she had a fear, one familiar to many New Yorkers, famous or otherwise. A 40-year eviction notice appeared on her apartment door.

That’s when her former neighbor in the building, Dupuy, intervened. The two had become inseparable over the years, flitting in and out of Broadway shows and movies and relaxing at their regular cosmopolitan spot.

I met the women as they untangled the bureaucratic errors behind the deportation order. The problem was soon solved. Five months later, Sullivan can say she is no longer the panicky woman who had nightmares about being thrown out onto the street.

She’s going to get back to doing what she does best. Being Sheila Sullivan.

In November, she and Dupuy were invited to a party for Nat Horne, 93, who, like Sullivan, had appeared in “Golden Boy,” a 1964 musical about a boxer played by Sammy, as everyone knew him. Horne was part of the ensemble, and Sullivan was an understudy called to perform at short notice, months after its start.

Of course, every now and then things happen to ordinary people, including Sullivan. She and Dupuy came down with a terrible cold in November and recovered. Around the same time, Sullivan, who still practices the stretches she learned while dancing, strained a muscle that caused so much pain that she had to be taken to the emergency room.

What happened? the doctor asked.

Evidently: “I did ballet.”

She recovered and resumed her stretching exercises, a little more gently. So maybe there’s something to the whole growing older thing?

Or not.

“I’m old,” she said. “But I am not old.”

The morning after the Rockettes show, the two laughed about their evening and their year together over breakfast at Dupuy’s apartment.

“This woman is extraordinary and I wanted to share her with the world,” Dupuy said. “I thought the only way I could do that was with her obituary.”

Sullivan laughed, “Thanks!”