I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (15 page)

He would be the teacher. I was the bad pupil, ultimately disappointing and failing him, as we all did.

The dark space, I’m thinking these days, may not have been in my power to reach. Was there a connection between it and his sister’s mental illness? She spent years in hospitals. Both Tommy and Mikey have coped with depression, both needing much more than we could have dreamed of in those days.

Long before, when we had just moved into 444, I remember asking Arnie some innocuous question as I crossed the foyer, and he said, “How do I know? I’m not God.” I stopped in my tracks in the foyer.
You’re not?
I thought.
Then who is?

Now God was beaming on me again. God wanted me again. I was valuable. He was shy, tentative, and tender. God really wanted me. Gladys pulled one side of me, Arnie the other. I went up to my apartment to move my makeup case to Gladys’s. I sat down on the couch with Arnie. The more he wooed me, the more I thought,
This man wants to kill me. I won’t get away so easily next time.
I took my makeup case and went to the door. I think I said, “I can’t come back.”

He turned on me with the rage I feared, with the ferocity of Rumpelstiltskin.

“Go! Go! Get out!” he spewed. “Get out of my house.” His arms were around his sons’ shoulders—one over Tommy, the other over Mikey. He was armored with his boys. They were never to be mine again. They held him up as he screamed, red-faced, weak-kneed, an endless stream of hatred for me. I was so stunned that I felt nothing. I was the observer, watching me watching him. Feeling relief it was over. I went down to Gladys’s apartment with the last thing I had left in my own house. I was safe.

•   •   •

T
he first time I saw Gladys Schwartz was at a fund-raising event at someone’s apartment. There were many money-raising events, since no one was working. I was auctioning my Cannes International Film Festival award for Best Actress for the third time. The kind benefactors who bid for it had always given it back. It was a guaranteed little money-raiser. I hadn’t a clue to the high honor of the Cannes award; neither did the nomination for the Oscar really impact me. It was in Hollywood, California, a site as foreign as Paris to a born-and-bred New Yorker. I looked around the room and there was an interestingly beautiful woman. She was wearing a black off-the-shoulder dress. Her shoulders, neck, and heart-shaped face were white surrounded by black curls, eyes cornflower blue, with thick black lashes and a curling, smiling, endearing red mouth. She was married to Herschel Bernardi at the time, a good actor who was to make a name for himself replacing Zero Mostel in
Fiddler on the Roof
. She was small, built like a boy, and generous. Lorraine Hansberry, the young, elegant playwright of
A Raisin in the Sun
, was a close friend, and a number of well-known artists whose names I didn’t know at the time hung around. Gladys painted big canvases. One is on my wall now—extras sitting around
the set for
The Day of the Locust
,
the screenplay that Waldo Salt would write years later.

Gladys painted compulsively, inexhaustibly. Her apartment smelled of turpentine and wood frames and oil paint. She had planted an avocado pit that grew into a huge avocado tree that stood in her living room. She was a little red Commie to her toes. Both her parents were Garment District workers, and she was raised at union meetings, sitting on her father’s shoulders. Gladys and Hersh split the year after I met them, and we became joined at the hip. I don’t know how she made money. Her paintings weren’t in demand. It was a tough time.

I must have borrowed from my parents again after
Captains and Kings
closed. I managed to salvage my last couple of paychecks. I had to find a place to stay. I knew Gladys needed the space for her students.

Someone told me there was a summer ad for an apartment in the front of the building. Two young gay guys were going to Costa Rica for two months. Yes!

Vi, my housekeeper, and Dinah and I visited the apartment. I gave them two months’ rent. Vi and I prepared to clean on Monday.

The apartment was a spacious two-bedroom, overlooking Central Park. I had it for June and July, plenty of time to look for a permanent home.

Vi and I made the beds, brought Dinah’s clothes and toys over, and started on the kitchen. I opened the utensil drawer. It seemed to be moving. Brown feelers between the forks and knives. We opened more drawers. They were all crawling with roaches. I sat in the living room while Vi ran to Arnie’s apartment on the other side of the building to get roach spray. I told Vi to go back up to Gladys’s with Dinah. I positioned myself at the door of the kitchen with two cans of spray and covered my face like an outlaw. As I sprayed I could hear the splats of roach bodies hitting the linoleum floor from the tops of the
cupboards near the ceiling. The living room and the bedrooms were behind me. I wasn’t going to let one roach past me through the kitchen door. My repulsion mixed with my sweat. Into the night I emptied the cans—the smell suffocating, the dead and dying roaches revolting. I cursed those fucking guys who’d dared to hand over this filth. The next day Dinah and I moved in.

Two months later I heard a key in the lock. One of my landlords entered the apartment. From the foyer a stream of insults left my lips; words I didn’t even know I knew were hurled straight at him. Pale, his arms stretched against the door, he was caught. “Dyke!” he screamed. “You dyke!” A moment of incomprehension—then I fell to the floor laughing. Our whole exchange was so hilarious to me. Our exchange helped me to extend our stay for the couple of weeks I needed before we moved to the most wonderful apartment in the world, on the seventh floor on West End Avenue and 83rd Street.

W
hen I first moved with Dinah and Vi to 83rd Street, Tommy and Mikey would come over and visit. They hurt. I had been a mom to them. I’d loved them and they had loved me. Not like they loved their mother, but we’d been together since they were four and five and they were now adolescents. All our hearts were heavy.

One day Tommy said to me, “We have to choose sides. He’s my father. I have to choose my father.”

“Does that mean you’re not coming to see me anymore?” My heart was sinking.
Does this mean you don’t love me anymore? What about listening to your music? What about talking at bedtime, telling you about sex with Mike falling off the bed in laughter, what about bringing down your fevers with alcohol and water washcloths under your arms and knees, what about dinner every night of your life, what about me?

“I don’t think so,” Tommy said.

Mikey kept coming. Mikey was the baby; he needed me more. He was the neediest. From the first time he sat on my lap on Riverside Drive, when he was only three or four, and we looked out at the river
together, I knew we were a couple. Sweet little arms around me, sweet little V-shaped smile.

I was making the bed in my bedroom on 83rd Street when a heavy object fell onto the floor under my bed. I reached into the darkness underneath. The mattress seemed to be slashed. Something had fallen from it. When Mikey next came to my apartment, I showed it to him. “Did you put a tape recorder in my mattress?” He looked down. I waited. He nodded. I gave it to him.

“Here,” I said. He left.

Eva came into her own when I left Arnie. She mobilized her forces to protect her father. She was his general; she was jubilant. At last he wanted her; at last he needed her.

I don’t know if the tape recorder was Arnie’s idea or Eva’s. If Arnie caught me in bed making love, was he thinking he could win custody of Dinah? Within a few weeks, Arnie would have a new live-in girlfriend. Dinah said she was nice. I was no longer a mother to anyone but her.

•   •   •

M
y last few weeks at 444 Central Park West, while I was waiting for the occupants of the apartment on 83rd Street to leave, the phone rang. “Lee, this is Alan Foshko. I’m having a party for Marilyn Maxwell.” “Who?” Who indeed. Foshko was calling from a different world. Handsome Alan, as he preferred to be called, was a high-flying young publicity maven. He gave parties to end all parties. He took over a New York City subway; he rented Coney Island. He had an office and apartment on 52nd Street and Eighth Avenue. The same building my parents had moved us to when we left Riverside Drive. We shared a knowledge of Nameless Fear together. I was living on the edge and so was Foshko in his own way. Fear pervaded us as we jumped into the unknown. He in business, me in life. Nameless Fear he called it, so real
that “nameless” became a real character in our lives. Handsome Alan would telephone. “Is Nameless there today?”

“Sitting on the end of my bed. Do you want to say hi?”

“Nah,” he’d say, “get rid of him.”

“I’m trying, I’m trying,” and I was trying each day.

Handsome Alan had a friend who was also called Alan. A tough, cute cookie who sounded like Gene Kelly. He seduced me in no time flat. On the bed, the couch, the floor, simple straight sex. It was a revelation. I was hooked. Then I noticed that he was attracted to any interesting girl who walked by. At the diner his eyes were constantly moving from my body parts to someone else’s. Finally at a party he crowded under a coffee table we were all sitting around with a pretty girl, and the coffee table was glass so there was no escaping that they were making out right in front of me.

I was hurt. I was insecure. I called Carol Matthau. She said, in her whisper, “Lee, you can have any man you want. So, be very sure you want him, because you can have him.” I thought,
How do those women manage it? To accept living with someone who always has eyes for someone else? I’ve just gotten away from a man who didn’t want me, who didn’t like me, much less love me.
Carol said, “Be very sure you want him, because you can have him.” We made love one more time. It was great. He was a talented man. It was over.

Carol lived across the street from me on West End Avenue. She was the great white pussycat, wise, practical, mythical, and unpredictable. She had beautiful skin, white as cream. She and Gloria Vanderbilt, best friends at the time, put white, white makeup on their faces. Carol’s was sweet and rosy under the makeup. When I sat in her bedroom listening to advice, she held a mirror up to her face. Her brown-black eyes never left the mirror. She was almost satisfied with what she saw in the mirror then; much later her need for perfection almost destroyed her face.

I loved her dining room, her eye for charm. She had green vines on white paper on her walls, Woodson wallpaper, and a lemon-colored floor. I imitated her. I made my home charming, too.

Ever practical, Carol set me up with the legendary theater producer Billy Rose. “He’s got lots and lots of money, Lee,” she whispered. First Billy had me sing for him, alone, on the stage of—what else?—the Billy Rose Theatre. He sat up in the sound booth. I sang my heart out to a totally empty house. I had been taking lessons that year from David Craig, a brilliant teacher, great friend, and husband to the born-onstage Nancy Walker. I would try to knock ’em dead, anywhere, anytime.

When I finished Billy stomped down the aisle toward me. “Kid,” he said, “you’re built like a brick shithouse!” and invited me to a weekend at his island. I asked who else he had invited. He said, “Senator Jacob Javits and his wife, Marion, are coming, good friends of mine.” Over his strong objections I insisted on taking Dinah, then five or so, and a nanny. “I don’t feel comfortable coming alone,” I said. “I won’t come alone. I can’t.”

He called later and said he wanted to come and see where I lived. “Come on up,” I said. I was living across the street from his friends the Matthaus. He wandered around the house, stopping to look at my paintings. I had some lined up on bookcases on either side of the fireplace. “None of these are any good,” he said, waving his hand at most of my work. Then he picked up the old watercolor of me at a table in the middle of the room, with the door and the windows too high to reach. “This is good,” he said. “This has something.”

We met at the wharf Saturday morning, the Javitses, Dinah and me, and Norma, friend and nanny, and took Billy’s big yacht to Billy’s big island. A red flag with his name and a rose flew over both. The five grown-ups had lunch at a small table. Marion and I were forced to exchange small talk, because all of Billy’s attack conversation was
directed to Senator Javits, and it was all about money and numbers. The two men disappeared; Marion and I played three games of Scrabble. She was a tough, clever player and beat me easily.

I wandered around looking for Dinah. She and Norma were playing pool happily. I joined them. Suddenly Billy was at the door of the game house. “Take that pool stick away from her!” he barked. “She could rip the felt.” We three looked at him. “The stick. The stick—take it away.” Norma took the cue from Dinah. Billy disappeared. We wandered down to the water until dinner. I was so grateful Dinah and Norma were with me; this was boring. We ate late, and the Javitses retired early. Then there was just Billy and me.

He brought over a gold box and opened it. Inside were chocolates wrapped in foil. Billy sat down close to me. “Life,” he said, “is like a box of bonbons. Some dark with chocolate filling; some with cherries. But you never know till you open the silver wrapper what life holds for you.” He held my hand and squeezed it. I squeezed back. I knew this was some kind of mantra for him, the opening of his moves on the lady of the evening, which was me, I realized. He said, “Come,” and started up the steps, still philosophizing about life and chocolate and bonbons. I was racking my brain how to get out of this without hurt feelings or rancor. I was in his house on his island. I had to spend the night in his guest bedroom. Billy suddenly pushed me against the wall hard and pressed his mouth to mine. His mouthwash was so strong and recent that my own mouth sizzled unpleasantly from high-dosage Listerine.

I heard myself babbling all kinds of nonsense, I was so uncomfortable. I didn’t know how to get this little Chihuahua, this intense little animal off me. Billy may have been in his sixties then, shorter than I was, and I’m five feet four. Somehow we were sitting on my bed in his guest room, and he was trying to get me down. I bounced up. “I would, Billy, I really would, but I have my period—I had no idea,
awfully sorry.” Suddenly his hand was at the back of my neck. Trying to bob it toward his zippered fly. “Dinah’s in the next room, Billy, I couldn’t do that with Dinah in the next room.” Bob head, bob head. I didn’t even get it at first.

“Wouldn’t you like to live in my princess room?” said Billy. “Be a good girl, you can move into the princess room.” Billy had taken me on a tour of his Manhattan mansion after I sang for him. He showed me his own room. An ascetic chamber for a monk, with a single narrow bed, like a cot, which he said had belonged to Napoléon, and then showed me my future room—if I was a good girl. A large, tasteful beige girl’s room, with a big four-poster curtained bed. This was the bonbon I was refusing as he tried to push my mouth to his fly. Finally he figured it just wasn’t worth the time and effort and he left. I stepped into Dinah’s room and climbed into bed with her and slept and felt safe. The next morning the Javitses and Billy were back on the boat, the Rose flag flying, Billy a lonely little figure sitting in the middle of the boat holding his tiny dog with a red coat.

Several months later Carol called. Billy was marrying a well-known society matron. Billy told Carol, “She comes with her own money.”

“You could have had him, Lee,” she whispered.

One of the great understandings that came out of those two years alone was that I never wanted to live in anybody else’s house again. I never wanted to take my place in somebody else’s life. No matter how wonderful or beautiful. I wanted only people who fit into my life, whatever it was. I felt suffocated at the very thought of fitting in. To someone else’s home. To someone else’s career. To someone else’s hours. To someone else’s children. I wanted my life. My child. Me.