I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (11 page)

T
he main thing about
A Hole in the Head
was that the Un-American Committee finally caught up with me. I’d been avoiding strange official-looking men, or pairs of men showing up in rehearsal halls, outside stage doors, even when I was pushing a baby carriage; now I was finally caught, served with a subpoena, and a date was set for me to go to Washington to appear before the Committee. Bob Whitehead was the producer, a gentleman from handsome head to polished boot. I told him I had to speak to him. We met in his office. I told him Leonard Boudin was representing me, I was taking the Fifth, and that I understood that he might need to replace me—to protect his show, his investment. Anyone who refused to answer questions in front of the committee was absolutely considered to be a Communist, a threat, and in the wider community, persona non grata. I certainly didn’t want to endanger the show or have American Legion groups harassing our actors because of me.

Bob said, and my throat closes as I write this, “You do whatever you have to do. When you come back, your part will be here waiting for you.”

My visit to Washington was like a visit to the dentist’s office.
Is it gonna hurt? Are they gonna drill?
I saw myself squirming in the dentist’s chair, mouth wide open, black like a cartoon.

“Ow! Ow! OOOOW! Stop!”

Pulling teeth, blood, spit, drilling, loud—all the crazy dentists shoving for a chance at my mouth.

•   •   •

I
actually wasn’t sure whether I was a member of the Communist Party or not. As far as my husband was concerned I was a hapless bourgeois, unschooled in Marx, Lenin, or Hegel. He was a writer, an intellectual; I had my own ideas, and to him they were simplistic, unideological.

One afternoon, Arnie passed me in the foyer of our apartment.

“I think it would be a good idea for you to join the Party. It would make some of our friends more secure around you.”

I understood the truth of his logic.

“Okay,” I said on my way to the kitchen. By the time I turned on the faucet, I was a member of the Party, since Arnie to me was God, his suggestion a reality.

We went on our respective ways. I doubt my name was added to an official list. I was never given a card saying I was a member of the Communist Party. But I crossed an invisible line somewhere between the foyer and the kitchen. I was one of them. I liked it.

So I was surprised when I met with Leonard Boudin to find out that more steps had to be taken to become an actual Communist Party member, and I wasn’t one, he said.

I was being readied and prepared for the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the Fifth Amendment was my defense, Leonard told me.

My intellect was challenged. My emotions were my ally, part of my equipment as an actor, but Leonard told me feelings must be put away in a secret drawer and forgotten. They would only get me in trouble.

Leonard impressed on me strongly that if I answered any questions that involved the past, I could open myself up to answering questions about the beliefs of other people, my friends, my husband.

Leonard said, “Don’t engage in conversation; you’re not smart enough to sense a trap. They are professionals. That’s why I’m there. If you’re not sure, ask me. I’ll be sitting right next to you.”

I understood that if I made a mistake, had a slip of the tongue, got angry or silly, I could jeopardize myself, my family, even go to jail, as the Hollywood Ten had.

I still don’t understand the Fifth Amendment. “I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me.” It worked, when someone invoked it, but it made no sense. This was Wonderland and the penalty was: YOU CANNOT WORK FOREVER IN FILM OR TV.

But I was already not working forever.

All of us blacklisted actors understood that this was for the rest of our lives. This was what forever looked like in the fifties.

Change was inconceivable; that the fifties would eventually become the wild sixties nobody in their right mind would have ever believed.

I wasn’t scared, I was curious; I would see the monster in its lair. With Leonard Boudin to protect me and a hit Broadway play,
A
Hole in the Head
, to return to.

•   •   •

G
oing to the committee was like being taken to the zoo by my dad when I was a little girl. I’d hide behind his legs when the lion roared, when the gorilla shook its cage.

Leonard was my dad. Instead of the real lion’s roar, these men reminded me of Mr. Forster, my fourth-grade history teacher, who sweated too much and kept touching the back of my neck.

They asked nothing about American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, where we were organized and at war.

The committee was incredibly, laughably ignorant about everything show business—television, theater, agents, and especially Communism.

Interestingly, looking back now, there was a similarity between the mind-set most Communist functionaries have and that of the Soviets and the HUAC. People who are accustomed to taking orders, whose minds are so closed, thinking restricted, limited. The writers deported to prison camps by Stalin, the fear of free thought, the preening and arrogance of the former KGB. Shocking, really, that these men investigating enemy activity in the entertainment industry, the infiltration of foreign spies, should not know anything about the shows on TV, that actors have agents who sell them in these shows. That they didn’t even know I was in a play on Broadway or the name of it. Who appointed these men who set the rules for the whole country?

“Talk! Talk!” they yelled. “Do you know a person by the name of Morris Carnovsky?” “You know a person by the name of Alan Manson? Lou Pollan? John Randolph?” “Name someone! Anyone!”

Well, my dear, I recommend the Fifth Amendment, and my attractive and mysterious lawyer, Leonard Boudin, who is no longer with us. I entered the chamber—why do I remember a kind of three-tiered stand?—and a fiftyish-year-old man sitting on the top tier said to me, “What’s a nice little girl like you doing in a place like this?”

Pleasantly I replied, “What are you doing in a place like this?”

I was seated behind a table with Leonard Boudin at my side. About eighteen men asked questions, but mostly one man. To most
questions, Leonard said, “Take the Fifth. Say ‘I refuse to answer on the grounds of my Fifth Amendment rights.’”

This was curiouser and curiouser. My body could rise like a balloon over the proceedings. And what did they know? Nothing. It made my head shake from side to side in amazement.

TRANSCRIPT FROM THE COMMITTEE HEARING

Mr. Arens: Have you been engaged in the last few years in a play called
Danger
?

Miss Grant: It is a television show.

Mr. Arens: Was your employment in the production
Danger
procured for you by any person who, at any time, was known to you to have been a Communist?

(The idea was so funny, I laughed. Leonard nudged me.)

Mr. Boudin: The answer with respect to that, and generally, would have been the same, namely, that Miss Grant got the job through the routine way and is not prepared to say who were and were not members of the Communist Party.

Mr. Arens: Do you know a person by the name of Sidney Lumet?

Miss Grant: Yes.

Mr. Arens: Did he have anything to do with your appearances on
Danger
?

Miss Grant: I refuse to answer that question on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment.

Mr. Arens: Do you know whether or not Sidney Lumet has ever been a member of the Communist Party?

Miss Grant: I refuse to answer that question on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment.

Mr. Arens: Are you presently under Communist Party discipline?

Miss Grant: I am not a member of the Communist Party.

Mr. Arens: Are you presently under Communist Party discipline?

Miss Grant: I am not.

The Committee was so out of touch and awash in ignorance that I was thinking,
Get a good director. This wouldn’t pass for a dangerous committee on TV. They’re really bad actors, not the least in touch with reality.

I left the chamber. The senator who thought I was a nice girl didn’t look at me. I now had the stamp of disapproval. Officially OUT. I went back to the play. Not a ripple; every day was the same as it had been.

D
inah. My Dinah. Arnie wanted a girl so badly. He hung pink and blue cords from the ceiling light in the maid’s room, which was to be the baby’s room. He’d turn the tassels to see which would end up toward him, the pink or the blue. When pink, he was excited; when blue, sad. Yes, children, in those days doctors couldn’t tell the baby’s sex in advance.

I didn’t get a small round belly. I had a yard-long belly stretched out way in front of me. I wore my old camel-hair coat all winter; the button on the coat was pulled so far that the frayed thread stretched across my stomach. From the back one could see nothing; from the side I was formidable. I went to the unemployment insurance office one morning with my belly and coat. There was a Hispanic man who sent the people in line who arrived at his post even two minutes before the time printed on their cards back to the end of the line. It was a cold, gray winter day. Maybe five hundred people were lined up, maybe fifteen lines with fifty or so people shuffling forward. Everybody switched with the person behind them as they approached the counter so they wouldn’t be sent to the back of the line again and wait another hour. I reached the man a couple of minutes early, but I
needed to get home. I had been carrying my belly in line for forty-five minutes, and yes, he told me to go to the back of the line. Suddenly I became La Pasionaria. My voice boomed: “I’m sick of being treated like shit! Who the fuck do you think you are? I’m not going to the end of any line. I’m pregnant, damn it. You take care of me right now. What’s your name? I’m reporting you for cruelty.” Rah rah rah.

Suddenly I had a revolution on my hands, and I was leading it. The place was in an uproar. People were crowding out of lines. Screaming at the guy: “Yeah! Yeah!”

“Petty power,” I yelled at him. “Petty power, that’s what you are!”

I had an army behind me. All the civil servants were scared. I was trying to think where to go with this when a warm arm came around my shoulder and a kind voice said, in a very “there, there” tone of voice, “I’m the supervisor. What’s the problem, dear?” He sounded like my childhood doctor, Dr. Berkowitz.

I pointed at my enemy. “He’s sending people . . .” My voice cracked, hot tears poured down my face. La Pasionaria shrank back into a pregnant, sobbing lady.

“Yes, yes,” the supervisor said as he led me to a cot in one of the offices. “Lie down. You can rest. I’ll take care of everything.”

I didn’t want to rest, but I had to. I was so ashamed of my blubbering, I couldn’t face my followers. Finally I crept out.

A month later, January 25, Arnie took me to Mount Sinai, sat around for a while, then left. I didn’t blame him. It was such a kind of boring anticlimax to wait, wait in white rooms. The day before, the newspapers had printed the Pope’s opinion on childbirth. “It’s a cinch,” he said in Italian. “Women drop babies in the field; it’s the most natural act in the world.” An hour later I was lying one leg hither, one leg thither, begging for anesthesia, screaming, “Fuck the Pope, put me out, fuck the Pope.” When I came out of it, they brought my baby to me. Red-faced, dark-haired, her head came to a point, her
mouth stretched from ear to ear. She looked like Edward G. Robinson. I’d been going to call her Darya after my Grandmother Dora, but it was too fancy a name for that little face. “Dinah, I’ll call you,” and Dinah it was.

Tommy and Mikey sent cards across Central Park to Mount Sinai. Sweet little-boy cards. Eva slept over. Everybody wanted a baby in the house. The baby was big, I was small, so for months I carried around an inflatable ring cushion to sit on. My mother and father were exploding with joy. Arnie let them visit once a week. Early on Arnie had agreed to one feeding of Dinah when she woke up screaming at one or two in the morning. I wasn’t breast-feeding, so it was all formula, heating bottles from the fridge and putting the nipple into her greedy mouth. When Dinah wailed, it was a cartoon wail. A big black hole, with a surprisingly loud noise coming out of her little red face. On one of those two a.m. feedings, the wails didn’t stop. I made my way from the bedroom to the baby’s room. Dinah was red with rage. So was Arnie. They were both screaming. I took her from him quietly. We didn’t exchange a word. He went to bed. From then on, I took all the feedings.

Nothing, nothing could get between Dinah and me. She was a strong, funny baby. Even when I could feel myself sinking in my marriage to Arnie, she delighted me. She made me laugh. Fra Heflin had her little girl Mady at the same time I had Dinah, so Fra and I had each other, and the two babies visited in the building and in Central Park.

Dinah screamed her way out of her room into a crib in my room. She screamed out of her crib into her carriage, with me rocking her all night, then out of her carriage onto my bed, and finally from lying next to me to lying on top of my chest. When I couldn’t breathe anymore, I put her back in her crib, next to my bed, and shut the door to my bedroom. In the hall, encouraging me to stay outside and let her
cry it out, were my three stepchildren. It was a hot night; the sweat was pouring down. As the hours passed and Dinah’s screams grew hoarse, the boys and Eva kept me from turning the knob on my bedroom door and picking up my furious baby. So hoarseness turned into laryngitis. I entered the bedroom. Dinah was still standing, red-faced, tear-strewn, indomitable, wide-open mouth still going
Wha!
But soundlessly. I lay her down in her crib, patted her back, sang to her, and she crashed. She slept in her crib in my room from then on.

As the tension between Arnie and me continued, Dinah was a great fun outlet for Tommy and Mikey; they had a funny baby sister to play with. Eva was conflicted. Dinah was yet another reason why her father wasn’t paying any attention to her. Eva would cry at night. I would sit on her bed. She wanted her daddy, not me. Arnie didn’t like tears, needy tears; he’d had enough of them. Eva was fifteen, a difficult age, and she was slightly overweight. Three strikes.