I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (17 page)

W
e arranged to meet on a bench in Central Park. I was wearing a chiffon flowered dress. It was romantic but appropriate, the kind of dress that was so distracting to the husband in the Irwin Shaw story “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” Shadows cut through the sunlight, smoky and shifting on the graveled pavement. I sat alone and waited for Max Kampelman.

Max was cautious. Caution served him well. He declared himself a conscientious objector in World War II, worked as lawyer and advisor to Senator Hubert Humphrey, and would later be appointed ambassador and head of the United States delegation to the negotiations with the Soviet Union on nuclear and space arms. But on this spring day in 1962, he was risking his good name to meet with me on a park bench. He was drawn to my case. And to me.

I’ve found that there are two times in a woman’s life when she is irresistible to men. First in adolescence, between girlhood and womanhood, ages twelve to nineteen. Young men catch the scent of possibility and will follow a young woman anywhere. But men are also attracted to a woman when she’s sincerely crazy, vulnerable, and in trouble. But still young. And pretty.

I was desperate, and Max Kampelman, a big connected lawyer in Washington, seemed like my last hope.

Max showed up. I saw him walking toward me from the east side of Central Park, blending in at first with the children on tricycles and couples holding hands in the fresh spring air, everyone dappled with leaf shade. Max, a forty-something, solid man in a gray suit, the businessman cutting through the children and romantic strollers.

I stood up. He stopped. We looked at each other for a short couple seconds. There was an electricity, not quite attraction, but something momentous. We sat, knee to knee. I asked him, did he fly in that day? Where was he staying?

I was auditioning for my life.

Central Park was sunny and breezy. People walked by us clutching kids or lovers or balloons, but Max and I were in a bubble. He asked all the questions that a smart, well-connected lawyer would. I answered as truthfully as possible. I understood that a good part of my future depended on this stranger.

I told him that I spoke at Joe Bromberg’s memorial service in 1951 and accused the House Un-American Activities Committee—HUAC—of driving him to his death; that I was listed in
Red Channels
as a suspected Communist one week later; that I hadn’t been allowed to work in film or TV for the last ten years; and that I myself had been called to Washington to testify and had taken the Fifth in front of HUAC. I told him that I wasn’t a Communist. That the blacklist seemed to be over for everyone but me. That I needed to work, that I couldn’t pay rent, and that I had a six-year-old daughter at home to support.

He understood, I could see that.

Kennedy was president, for God’s sake. Bob Dylan debuted his first album, Andy Warhol premiered his
Campbell’s Soup Cans
, the world was moving, art and expression were alive, and everybody knew
that the HUAC was next to dead. At this point, McCarthy himself had been dead for five years, but the committee trudged on. So the Blacklist still controlled my fate, and I was still a hostage. I had spent the last ten years fighting the Blacklist, the blacklisters, and the Committee. Through Max, I was hoping to get action.

The day was breezy, and the skirt of my chiffon dress moved against my legs. I told Max that my agents had fought for me, about the meeting with CBS and the phone call to try to clear me. And some five hours after I met him in Central Park, by the time the air turned chilly, I knew he was a principled, serious man. I realized I had an important, influential ally.

I think he left first. I’m certain I walked home alone in the chill of late afternoon, hopeful. Breathing deeply the scent of earth and cut grass.

How could I know then that years would pass before I would reclaim my life, before I could reinvent myself to compete for my role on
Peyton Place,
for my Emmy, for
Valley of the Dolls
, for
In the Heat of the Night
, for my Golden Globe nomination, for
The Landlord
, for my Oscar nomination, for Hal Ashby’s
Shampoo
, for my first Oscar?

How could I know then how much had yet to change?

W
hile I was still blacklisted in 1964, I was hanging out with a journalist who took me to see Lenny Bruce. Of course everyone in the audience laughed, but they were laughing at the kind of stuff I’d never heard before. I was stunned by his truths—original, dangerous truths. After Lenny’s show the cops came out of the wings and arrested him. We just happened to be there the night the Irish-Catholic cop mafia ended Lenny’s career. Not only his career; the man he was. We became friends, hung out at his place in the Village. My reporter friend, Gary Gates, and I loved listening to Lenny. The stuff coming out of him so unexpected, exposed.

He showed up at my door once. Out of it. Slept on the couch. Crashed when his head hit the pillow, mouth open. I covered him like a child. A brilliant, out of control, sick boy. In the morning, gone.

I attended one of his days in court. Even Dorothy Kilgallen, the tight-assed columnist for Hearst’s
Journal-American
, testified for him. Marty Garbus was his lefty lawyer.

Garbus:
Miss Kilgallen, in the transcripts the words
motherfucker
,
cocksucker
,
fuck
,
shit
,
ass
are found, isn’t that correct?

Kilgallen:
Yes.

Garbus:
Is there an artistic purpose in the use of language as set forth in these transcripts in evidence?

Kilgallen:
In my opinion there is.

Garbus:
In what way?

Kilgallen:
Well, I think that Lenny Bruce, as a nightclub performer, employs these words the way James Baldwin or Tennessee Williams or playwrights employ them on the Broadway stage—for emphasis or because that is the way that people in a given situation would talk. They would use those words.

Lenny stood up before this Irish-Catholic judge and abased himself. He lost his soul right there and then. “Please, Judge,” he said, “just let me do a piece of my act for you. It’s not what you think!” He was practically crying.

Slam, slam,
went the gavel. “Will you please sit down, Mr. Bruce, and behave yourself? No, we are not listening to your act.”

“Please, Judge, please, Judge.” I left.

•   •   •

T
here’s a postscript to our short friendship, Lenny’s and mine. After the trial, Lenny went into the hospital. He was very sick with a lung infection. After a few weeks, a friend of his called and said he wanted visitors. The next day I took a subway down to some big New York City hospital, found Lenny’s room, and walked in. He was in a white room sitting up in bed, as white as his white sheets.

There was a young couple sitting by his bed, heads bent, taking turns reading an entire page of
The New York Times
, the contents of which Lenny was absorbed in. He nodded to me, his concentration on the young woman stumbling though the words.

I sat against the wall for about twenty minutes until she finished. They said their good-byes, worshipfully, and left.

Me: How are you?

Lenny: Getting there.

Me: Good.

Lenny: Read this page for me.
(Pointing to the page in the
Times
the young couple had just read to him.)

Me: Read that page to you?

Lenny: Yes.

Our eyes locked. I felt suddenly in a battle of wills. The test was, would I read a page of
The New York Times
?

Me: No.

Lenny: If you don’t, I don’t want to see you again.

I was still sitting against the wall, my coat in my lap. We looked at each other silently. Then I nodded, rose, and walked out the door. I’d known other brilliant men who tested me.

Been there. Done that.

Lenny wasn’t attracted to me. In his act he riffed on how turned on he was as a boy by the burlesque girls he hung around with backstage—the legs, the Max Factor #32 sponged onto their bodies, the strippers. He’d been married to one, whom he’d loved madly. Had a daughter with.

And I wasn’t attracted to Lenny. I recognized a genius when I saw one, heard one, but the pasty face, the sweat, the whiff of strange inner sickness, was not something I wanted to be close to, intimate with.

But I loved him. His blacklisting was fatal. His voice was stopped along with the
fuck
s and
shit
s and whatever key words he used to open his brain. He worked little clubs where people paid to see him, hear him. His livelihood was taken away, along with his originality and brilliance.

His manager said, “Lenny sinned against his own talent” with all
the drugs he had used and died from, too soon. But Lenny was sinned against first, and most sinned against.

Never, never will I need the enemy’s approval. And by “the enemy” I’m talking about people like the judge. He, as a moral compass of what is right and what is wrong!

“Fuck the Pope!” I screamed in childbirth. And fuck the Taliban who behead their women for baring their heads, and fuck the crazy Orthodox Jews taking land away from a people so like themselves and for teaching nothing but myths. Fuck them for making proud Lenny crawl. Fuck them all!

In August 1966, Lenny died of a morphine overdose in California. After his death, one of his New York prosecutors, Assistant District Attorney Vincent Cuccia, was quoted as saying, “I feel terrible about Bruce. We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him. I watched him gradually fall apart. It’s the only thing I did in [District Attorney Frank] Hogan’s office that I’m really ashamed of. We all knew what we were doing. We used the law to kill him.”

In 2003, thirty-seven years later, Governor Pataki pardoned Lenny Bruce. It was the first posthumous pardon granted in the state’s history. Governor Pataki described the pardon as “a declaration of New York’s commitment to upholding the First Amendment.”

So?

Joe McCarthy had been the poster child of the period. I picture Roy Cohn, legal advisor to the McCarthy committee, blowing up this flat balloon every morning till it swelled to about ten feet around. The head bobs, the mouth roars: “Communists, Communists, all around us—the teachers, TV, the newspapers, the government, the Army.”

For ten years this ranting alcoholic terrified thinking men and women into complete submission, all the while manipulated by the slimy, revolting Roy Cohn. Then one day, right there on our own television sets, we saw a slight, balding gentleman, who was defending a
lieutenant in the Army, rise from his seat and walk across our black-and-white TV screens. He shook his index finger at McCarthy. “Have you no shame?” he asked. “At long last, have you no shame?” His name was Joe Welch. He told the millions of people watching, their mouths hanging open, that the king was naked; he had no clothes on. Like David, Joe Welch brought down our Goliath with a slingshot and a little stone. The king was not only naked, he was stupid.

On March 9, 1954, Edward R. Murrow addressed an audience of millions on a special edition of his show,
See It Now
, and tore down the rest of Joseph McCarthy. A political attitude that had come to be known as McCarthyism began to lose steam.

T
his was the second summer that I was on the Guber, Ford, Gross circuit. I was playing the lead in
Silk Stockings
, the musical stage version of the great Garbo comedy
Ninotchka
. It was a tent circuit—many more could fill a tent than a theater—and the audiences were huge. Dinah was five and traveling with me. Norma, her babysitter, rounded out our family. It was perfect. I had started teaching private classes in the winter in addition to classes at Uta and Herbert’s studio. I was touring all summer and I was able to pay for everything.

“I shoulda stayed a plumber.”

“What?”

“I shoulda stayed a plumber.”

Something in me perked up. A plumber. Interesting, really interesting. Much more so than a dancer. Nothing is as sexless to me as a male dancer. I know, I know, Baryshnikov, but I was raised in dance, so plumbing was infinitely more interesting and provocative.

Joey Fioretti was standing onstage, trying to catch his breath after a hard rehearsal, in black tights and a white underwear shirt, and he was real. As real as a tomato.

When I was in the supermarket shopping for my sizable family while I was with Arnie, I would take so much comfort in just looking at the fruits and vegetables. They were so down-to-earth, so real, so cheerful, so simple. I would pick up a tomato. Its skin was tight and smooth, but it had weight in my hand. The color was simply red, with a green belly button. There was no subtlety, no shading, no hidden prickliness. The tomato was what it was. It wasn’t proud of what it was, it just was. I wanted very much for my life to be like that. As simple as a tomato. I now saw that tomato standing before me.

•   •   •

I
was painting in my living room on 83rd and West End Avenue. It was a self-portrait. I was painting over one of the desperate, unhappy self-portraits I’d painted earlier. I was painting over the image of who I once was, not realizing at the time that underneath it was a much truer reflection than the superficial makeup application that transformed the painting into a perfect flawless image that was pure wish-fulfillment.

“Dillinger’s balls are in the Smithsonian Institution,” Joey said.

“What?”

Joey was constantly interrupting my painting—my life, actually.He hung around, bugged me, bothered me, and watched my apartment from the phone booth across the street all night. Asked my dates for a light for his cigarette as they left my apartment building at two a.m.

Joey and I had become friends the summer before, when I was doing
Silk Stockings
on the summer circuit. He had his dad’s car and offered to drive Dinah, her nanny, and me to the many theaters we performed in over the course of the summer season. It was not only convenient. It was fun. It was easy. Joey worshipped me. And Joey was, at that time, the tomato. Uncomplicated, uneducated, unsophisticated. The plumber-dancer of my dreams. Ten years younger than
me, a boy. We had no future together. He was a great friend and a great pain in the ass. Did I mention that I easily submitted to him, at the Baywood Motel in Maryland? He wore me down.

And he protected me. I had to take a train into the city at some point. He went with me. We were the only passengers on a train of railroad cars that must have been retrieved from the train graveyard. The old green cloth seats exhaled clouds of tan dust when you sat down. The windows were clouded with filmy brown stuff. It felt weird and claustrophobic. Suddenly an energetic young conductor walked through. I signaled him.

“Am I on the right train? This one is so dusty, it looks like it hasn’t been in use for years.”

“If you don’t like it, get off,” he said.

I sat back. He walked through the train toward the next car. Suddenly there was a flash of movement, so fast it was a blur. Joey was pushing the conductor toward the opposite wall. The conductor’s eyes looked frightened, his mouth a black O. Joey’s arm was under his chin.

“Don’t you ever talk to her like that!”

It took a minute for me to grasp what had happened, Joey had moved so fast. The conductor apologized. Joey let him go, came back up the aisle, and sat down. But something happened in that instant. I was impressed. By his passion, by his reflexes, by his basic instinct to guard me. All of that washed over me in an instant. I felt safe.

So Joey said, “Dillinger’s cock and balls are preserved in the Smithsonian Institution.”

“Are you crazy?” I yelled. “Why would a reputable institution like the Smithsonian show Dillinger’s cock and balls?”

I was constantly screaming at him. He was constantly shocking me with how his mind worked and what he believed.

“Call them,” I ordered.

“What?”

“Call the Smithsonian in Washington and find out if Dillinger’s balls are there!”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind.” Enraged, I reached for the phone, dialed information, and got the Smithsonian’s number in Washington, D.C.

“You’re going to ask them,” I hissed, “not me. I’m not going to ask them that question.”

“Good afternoon, Smithsonian Institute.”

“Hello, sir,” I said, ignoring my last command. “I know this is a strange question, but my friend and I have a bet. It was rumored that John Dillinger, the gangster . . . that his private parts—this is not a joke—were preserved in some way and are stored at the Smithsonian.”

There was a pause and an extended silence at the other end of the line. Finally, a kindly, avuncular voice answered.

“No. There is nothing of that kind here.” Pause. “I did hear rumors of that kind of thing traveling with one of those tent shows, though.”

“Sir, sir, I know this is an intrusion, but would you please repeat that to my friend?”

I handed the telephone to Joey and watched his face.

“See! See!” I hissed.

He hung up smiling. “Well, they have them in a tent show. I was right about that!”

“No you were not!” I screamed.

Joey smiled more and relaxed.

He felt more at home when I screamed. In his Italian working-class home in Little Italy, Wilmington, Delaware, everyone yelled. Nobody talked. They yelled over recipes, over incidents, over what time it was! Joey said things that were so outrageous to me, I was constantly reacting with unbridled fury.

“I think Mussolini did a good job.”

“Huh?”

“The trains ran on time.”

“Get out!”

“What did I say?”

“Just get out!”

“When can I come back?”

“Never, learn your history!”

“All right. Tell me what I said wrong?”

And I would tell him and we would yell some more.

I had never yelled before in my life. I never remember my parents raising their voices. I had discovered my endless rage in an exercise at the Neighborhood Playhouse at sixteen or seventeen. In acting I had plenty of anger. In life it was dangerous, up to that point, to express anger and not hurt someone’s feelings deeply, like my parents’. I certainly couldn’t show anger to Arnie. Actually, I never felt anger toward Arnie. I was completely cowed and confused, but never allowed myself to feel angry. I was angry at my country, and had found a way to express it, in a way. With Joey it was like kindergarten anger. It was real, but not bitter. It was fun. It was kind of normal. We were good enough friends for me to yell at him. And it was for his own good. For us to be friends, he’d better bone up on Mussolini, and on everything I’d lived through. I couldn’t abide the ignorance.

But this was a very comfortable relationship for me. It could never go anywhere permanent, but it was a new kind of being together that felt interesting at the time. I was the older one. I had a child who came before anyone else. I had a career that came before anyone else. I had to make money, to be independent of any man.