I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (10 page)

Some years later she would learn that Charlie also had a wife in the Midwest with whom he split his time. Fremo and Charlie were at my parents’ apartment when she found out. She grabbed my father’s long black umbrella and hit Charlie over the head with it all the way down 52nd Street, screaming at him and crying at the same time. I think it was the only time I ever saw her break down.

Anyway, at that time she was happily married and I was happy to have a place to stay, with an aunt who was peculiar, and loved me, and left me alone. I was very hurt. I didn’t want to see Arnie, and I missed the little boys terribly. I missed being a mommy, cooking and playing with them. I felt totally isolated. I sat in the apartment. I walked in the park. I didn’t visit anyone. No one visited me.

At a certain point I decided to get my own apartment. I had money saved, thanks to my parents. My mother and I found a great one-bedroom on the first floor of an old brownstone in Chelsea, with a balcony, long doors and windows looking to the street, twenty-foot ceilings, and a fireplace. I had it painted eggplant with a white trim. My first apartment. My mother and I started to go to auctions to look
for furniture. She was fun and the smartest shopper in the world; our apartments had always been furnished from her auctions. I was beginning to breathe.

Arnie started to call. I hung up. Over the next few weeks he called incessantly. I wouldn’t, couldn’t talk to him. Fremo told him I wasn’t home. He sent an emissary. Who, I don’t remember. Would I meet him at the apartment on Third Avenue? He just wanted to apologize—that’s all.

I remember sitting on the ugly, furry, dark-green bedspread, sullen, confused, crying at last over my hurt and humiliation at Arnie’s hands. He kept talking, apologizing, apologizing, thanking me for helping him to change, to alter his character flaws. Never before had he understood his weakness, harshness, wrongness, ill-advisedness. I felt nothing. Heavy. Sodden. The room was smaller than I remembered it. I was ashamed I had made that awful green bedspread. I didn’t trust him. I wanted to go back to Fremo’s. I told him I was moving to my eggplant-painted apartment. I told him I didn’t feel anything for him. I was not so much in love as I was in awe of Arnie.

•   •   •

A
month later, more or less, we were married in Hoboken. Ruth and Arthur and my friend Mary Carver were witnesses. I wore a gray skirt and huge stripy jacket of Fremo’s with big shoulder pads that I had to belt in. Arnie had a near fistfight with the judge who married us in his office. Arnie felt the judge overcharged him. Arthur calmed him down. Afterward, Arnie took me to Moskowitz and Lupowitz to celebrate. A theatrical middle-aged woman at the next table suddenly stood up and burst into song in Russian. The gentleman with her extended his arm toward her as if he were introducing her. He stayed like that all through her performance. My Russian roots were watered.

Arnie now rented a large dark apartment on the ground floor on
82nd between West End and Riverside Drive. The only room with light was the living room. Its windows looked out onto 82nd Street. The boys were with us, of course. Margie had them most weekends. She was married now to a man named Artie.

•   •   •

K
ermit Bloomgarden was a huge producer on Broadway. Any play of real value, he’d produced. He had a new play,
Wedding Breakfast
, that he wanted me to do. Four characters, two men, two women, a comedy. Herman Shumlin was directing. Terry Hayden, whom I knew from the Actors Studio, was Herman’s assistant. I wanted to play the funny girl part opposite Harvey Lembeck. No, they said. I was to play the leading lady part opposite Tony Franciosa, who had been waiting tables at Schrafft’s when they hired him.

There was a gentleman’s agreement between Actors’ Equity and the League of New York Theatres and Producers. The theater would not permit a blacklist on Broadway. A tribute to a very brave board of principled actors and a great group of men and women, the producers who fought against the McCarthy tide.

I had convinced them to let me do the funny girl when they came up to see me in stock. I was playing the part Julie Harris had originated on Broadway in
I Am a Camera
. The part Liza Minnelli went on to film in
Cabaret
. From that performance they determined I was their leading lady. I fought, I left, I came back. Kermit said it was that part or none. You’ve seen those fifties movies: stuffy career girl, dressing gowns, love scenes (on proscenium in front of curtains, ugh)—boring. But Tony wasn’t boring. Tony was as dynamic and talented as he was beautiful. He was grabbed and seduced by Hollywood when he belonged in the theater.

Our stage for
Wedding Breakfast
was divided into two
apartments: My apartment was at stage level, the men’s apartment four feet higher. Opening night, Tony and Harvey were doing their scene; the lights were on in their apartment. Tony had a long monologue. In the middle of it, he accidentally dropped his keys into my apartment (which was dark). Without missing a beat, he jumped down into my apartment, picked up the keys, and jumped four feet back up to his lit apartment. Without missing a beat or a word. Harvey watched him with his mouth open the whole time. Needless to say, the whole audience applauded him, and when the reviews came out Tony was a Broadway star.

But our director, Herman Shumlin, was a wreck. He was an old-fashioned director. He’d done great work with the drama
Watch on the Rhine
, working with seasoned Broadway actors. Our kind of Method exploration made him sick. His neck vertebrae dislodged, his head tilted to one side. He was in tremendous pain, especially from our proscenium love scene. Tony and I were supposedly in the park. We admitted our love and had many long kisses. This was an uncomfortable scene. We were two feet from the audience, unable to build that fourth wall, and the scene was gushy-romantic. On top of that, it was Herman’s favorite scene, and he would conduct it like an orchestra for the level of passion he wanted. During the week while Herman was away recovering, Tony and I became comfortable with the scene and with each other in it. It was not high passion, but it was exploratory and really charming. When Herman saw it, he beat his fists on my dressing room door. “Betrayed,” he boomed. “Betrayed. Betrayed.” I locked my dressing room door.

Tony Franciosa was married at the time. Beatrice, I think, was her name. She adored him and was insecure about her looks.

Shelley Winters is bigger than life—was. It came through on-screen, an energy, a charge too big to contain. In life she could be a
huge ballsy monster, running over anything in her tracks, or a funny, smart Brooklyn kid.

Shelley showed up on opening night, made a beeline for Tony’s dressing room, and introduced herself. By the end of the run, Tony’s marriage was over and he was set to star in another play. Mike Gazzo’s
A Hatful of Rain
, in which he played a drug addict. Good play. Terrific performance by Shelley and Tony to great reviews. Love, lust, marriage, divorce.

I’d been blacklisted for about four years when Tony and I did
Wedding Breakfast
. It would be another seven before I saw Shelley again. About a year before I got off the Blacklist, around 1962 or 1963. We were like fire and dynamite together in an independent film.

•   •   •

I
felt I was caught in a Red Queen world, the Cheshire cat zooming at me from the trees. I was falling, falling, into a strange, bizarre world where Joe McCarthy was the Red Queen, screaming, “Off with their heads, off with their heads!”

The sane people were the elegant couples I was coming to know: Ring Lardner, his wife, Frances (who had first been married to Ring’s brother, who had died young in the Spanish Civil War); Zero Mostel and Kate of course; Fra and Sol Kaplan; Waldo and Mary Salt, Zelma and Michael Wilson, who wrote
Bridge on the River Kwai
; Jules Dassin; John Berry, who’d moved to Paris; Dalton Trumbo, who would write for Kirk Douglas, and who finally broke the blacklist; Walter Bernstein and Abe Polonsky, who with Arnie asked a non-blacklisted friend to front for them in television. Abe, Arnie, and Walter wrote for
You Are There
and for many brave producers in TV who worked with great blacklisted writers through a front man. The “front man” was a hero in the business. It was a sly game for Arnie, Walter, and Abe to
maneuver, and a delicious way to outsmart the enemy. Walter later wrote the movie
The Front
, based on himself, Arnie, and Abe, with Woody Allen playing the go-between. It was a great comedy and absolutely true. The three writers were good friends, stimulated one another, and had some very loyal, remarkable friends in the industry, producers who made it possible for them to earn a living and support their families undercover.
The Front
also told the story of Phil Loeb, a veteran actor who played Molly’s husband on a popular television series called
The Goldbergs
for many years. Loeb was fired from
The Goldbergs
, and a few years later, suffering from severe depression, he took his own life in a New York hotel room.

•   •   •

W
hile I was on the Blacklist, I continued to drop in at the Actors Studio. I was staggered by the worship given to Lee Strasberg. The tape recorders were taking down his every word, and Lee could talk and talk and talk. If there was no exercise or scene that day, he would stand in the acting area and expound on who really represented the Method, the right Method. Guess who? Not Sandy Meisner or Bobby Lewis; not Vakhtangov, not the Russians who started it, not the Group members who discovered and shared it, and particularly not Stella Adler, who studied with Stanislavski in Paris. Stanislavski wrote
An Actor Prepares
, the Method actors’ bible.

All the actors were poised in a breathless, lean-forward position. The worship bothered me and turned me off. I couldn’t breathe. One morning I left the studio in the middle of Strasberg’s drone and came on the sight of General Charles de Gaulle, being pulled on a platform of some kind to a parade on the East Side. Voilà! General de Gaulle himself, on 44th Street between Eighth and Ninth. History was passing by. I thought about running back inside the studio and telling
everyone, “Come, come, history is passing by!” But the platform was moving too fast. I ran up to two adolescent girls deep in chatter. “Look, look,” I said, “that’s General de Gaulle—history is passing by!”

“Who?” they asked, looking around.

“History, history!”

They continued on, talking their way up the street.

A
lot of Arnie’s friends were living at 444 Central Park West at 104th Street: Waldo Salt and his wife, Mary, with their daughters, Jennifer and Debbie, and Ethel and Buddy Tyne. (Ethel’s daughter Judy later married Hal Prince.) On the first floor were Tanya and David Chasman with two children, and Gladys Schwartz, my future best friend.

Sol Kaplan, a brilliant composer, lived two floors above us with his wife, Frances Heflin (Van Heflin’s sister), and their kids, Jonathan and Nora. Fra was a working actress. She had a role in the great William Inge play
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
on Broadway. Fra was my other significant girlfriend at 444 Central Park West.

Sol had a musician’s hot temper. Jonathan, their son, either inherited it or, as the only other man in the house, competed with his father from the time he could talk. Fra tried to keep the peace, throwing herself between her son and her husband.

Sometimes I’d hear my front door open. Fra would quietly come into the bedroom, put her head on my shoulder, and sob. When she had cried it all out, she’d go back upstairs to her tempestuous husband and son.

Our apartment was on the eleventh floor, overlooking the park, with a small terrace. The dining room had glass doors; we curtained them to make a big bedroom for the boys. In addition there were two bedrooms and a maid’s room. The larger bedroom became “our” bedroom, the smaller one Arnie’s room, where he wrote at his desk and slept on a brown flat couch. I had the bigger bedroom to myself, unhappily.

Some nights Arnie would stumble from his room next door to mine, lean with his arms high on my open door, wearing saggy white underwear, and say with disdain for himself, “I need to be satisfied.” Arnie’s approach to sex was not intimate. The need for sex put him in a humiliating position. The need for it gnawed at him, until the only way to deal with it was to get it out of the way, and he came to my door with the inner weakness of a priest. Each time I welcomed him with open arms, as if he were a poor sick child with a fever.

“Yes,” I’d say, “come here.”

I was proud he wanted me. Sometimes pleasure would come, sometimes not. There was no conversation. There was no touching, no kissing. I longed for him to touch me, to kiss me, to let me kiss his mouth. I longed to talk, to whisper, to touch him, to have him put his hands on me, hold me, hug me, kiss my head. Love me. He fucked for release. Quietly, the sounds of the bed linen shushing, bedsprings, car sounds from the street. Afterward he would lie spent beside me before returning to his room.

I wanted to say, “I love you.” I’d look at his wonderful tanned face, at his closed eyes with thick black eyelashes.
I love you,
I’d say silently, practicing to myself. But I felt he’d think I was corny. So I never said it. I never heard it. Afterward, I’d watch his resting face. Distant. The disappointed mouth. The closed lids hiding his world from me. I was too much of a coward to cross the heavy silence. I lay quietly, watching him breathe, till his eyes opened, black-brown.

“Thank you,” he would say, and stumble out of bed into his own room.

I was grateful, like a Mormon wife, to be visited by the household god. Grateful the way Geraldine Fitzgerald was grateful to be with Heathcliff, even if she would never be his Cathy.

So began a nine-year residence at 444 Central Park West. The boys grew to fourteen and fifteen; Eva, Arnie’s daughter, became a young bride. Dinah, my daughter, our daughter, would be born there. And from that foyer I would leave forever.

•   •   •

W
hen I was out of work, I called Herbert and Uta and asked if I could teach a class there. I’d never taught before, but there were no questions or hesitation. “Yes, of course.” My name joined their list of teachers, and students began to sign up for the class. I had an income, I had an outlet, a passionate outlet, talented people to work with, a door to unemployment insurance, a legitimate reason to leave the house for hours once or twice a week—and most important of all, money to pay Vi, our housekeeper.

I still get excited when I talk about this period. In my first class at HB Studio were Sandy Dennis, straight out of college, little Mike Pollard, whom you saw later in
Bonnie and Clyde
, a passionate and talented young woman named Rosemary Torre and her husband, Mike, a great Irish guy, and about eight others.

Every play is a situation—a situation you have encountered before or a situation you are entering for the first time. The job of an actor is to make the imaginary circumstance given to them as real as anything in their lives. That and, if you’re onstage, to stimulate yourself in fresh ways to reproduce this reality night after night after matinee.

But in my HB class, by the end of our first year together, I was giving my students improvisation situations that took each actor into
dangerous inner places. I gave Sandy Dennis a date with Mike, Rosemary’s husband. His need: to get into her bed. Her need: to steer the relationship into friendship, not sex, or end it. Well, Sandy was such a sensual being, with such powerful yearnings rushing through her, that after his first kiss she was gone, gone—on the bed, pulling him to her, Mike looking back at me helplessly till I stopped the scene. I gave Mike and Rosemary a situation: She was cheating on him. He was to confront her; she was to deny it. That night after class in their own home, Mike had a heart attack. This terrible lesson for me as a young teacher changed me, changed us all, forever.

I was horrified. I was responsible. Rosemary kept calling me and came to see me. She told me that Mike had an existing heart condition. He’d had an attack before, but he didn’t want it known because he loved the work so much. It could have killed him, the work he loved and the places it took him. The places every actor has to go to experience each new situation, each new life, was for him, for his fragile heart, like swallowing dynamite. A year later Mike died. Beautiful Mike. I became a very careful teacher. In those days my students were my age or older. We both learned. I have been teaching to this day. My students are friends and family; we give back. Not long ago, preparing to act in a film, I went to an ex-student of mine and asked her to coach me. She was brilliant. I can only hope to give others what she gave me.

I did
A Hole in the Head
the year before Dinah was born. Garson Kanin directed it. Paul Douglas starred. My friend for life Joyce Van Patton was in it, and Kay Medford. The script was a drama, but the way Garson cast it, we came into New York a comedy. I think the playwright was in shock. It was his own family he had written about, but one didn’t argue with success.
A Hole in the Head
was a hit. Garson never gave a direction, except to suggest where to move. On the train when we left for Boston to try it out, I asked him for some sort of discussion about my character. He said he never discussed; everything
was in the casting. If he cast correctly, his actors would know how to play their parts. My part was that of a lonely lady in blue who comes to meet Paul Douglas at his hotel, hoping for romance. It was a twenty-minute scene, the only one I had in the play. But it was a lovely character. I loved doing it.

One night after the show I was in my dressing room on the fifth floor, taking off my makeup, when a British gent burst through the door, threw himself at my feet, literally, introduced himself as Ken Tynan, an English critic, and proclaimed that my performance was the best he’d seen in years. Please, please come downstairs and meet the lady who had accompanied him to the theater. She, too, was dying to meet me.

We clanged down the backstage steps. There on stage level was a pale blonde with a wispy voice. It was Carol Saroyan, later Carol Matthau, who was to be the best whispering advice giver a girl could ask for. The next day, she and Ken Tynan ran off from their respective spouses to Spain for a romantic interlude. When he returned to London, he wrote a lovely piece about me, which he sent.