I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (21 page)

L
.A. at the time was flooded with talent, and Lee Strasberg, who loved talent, and especially stars with talent, was going to spend three months at a new branch of the Actors Studio on the West Coast. I was assigned to win over Mayor Sam Yorty so he would give us a home in L.A. We had two dinner dates and my mission was accomplished. The Actors Studio was given a home in perpetuity in West Hollywood, rent-free, on De Longpre Avenue, a gift that exists to this day. A more personal gift to me from the mayor was having him use his influence to take five years off my age on my driver’s license.

“Please correct a terrible mistake on my driver’s license.”

“Sure.”

I breathed, relieved.
If I can only get ten years off my official birth date, I’ll be safe. I can work ten more years.

I went to the newly formed Actors Studio production of
The Threepenny Opera
, playing at a small theater, under a hundred seats. The work was embarrassing. Actors sitting behind me—non–Actors Studio actors—were making nasty comments all through the play.
“This is supposed to be good acting? This is the Studio?” And they were right. The play hadn’t officially opened yet.

I marched onto the stage, told everyone they were terrible, and offered a day and night of free labor if they would let me fix it. Then the director, who was there, could take over again.

I felt the reputation of the newly established L.A. Actors Studio was at stake. I could save it.

The first thing that happened was my beloved Burgess Meredith quit. He had been playing his non-gay character gay and goosing the other players. Another favorite actress of mine was playing with herself while singing “Pirate Jenny,” the great song Lotte Lenya made famous in Berlin. One actress couldn’t carry a tune, so I had her talk the song instead. The orchestra was put back onstage where it traditionally belonged. Midafternoon of my first day rescuing the play, Lee Strasberg stopped me outside the theater. He was snorting, a clear sign he was very angry. “What do you know about Brecht?” he yelled. “What do you know about German theater? What do you know about Germany in that period? The history? The music? What do you know?” He was furious and indignant.

“I don’t know anything about Brecht,” I yelled back. “I only know what works!” Suddenly, he smiled. He laughed at me and nodded. I nodded back and went to the theater. The sad end of the story has a “Beware what you wish for” moral. The rescue worked so well that when Jimmy Doolittle saw it, he decided to bring the show to his big L.A. theater.

I had reworked the show for a day and night in a comfy, small space. Suddenly I was facing a responsibility I knew I was totally unprepared and unequipped for. The original director had fled. I asked everyone I knew to take over the direction. I begged Lee, who said no; Burgess, no. There was no money for sets. I knew nothing about
lighting. And I was suddenly faced with snarling actors demanding that they not be replaced for the move to the Doolittle, that they get their “big chance.” The actor who replaced Burgess walked back and forth in the theater. “I know things about people in this organization that I won’t hesitate to use if you try to put someone in my part . . .” Ugly, ugly, ugly.

Camaraderie disappeared. The whole atmosphere changed.
The Threepenny Opera
is a famous musical. The only real singing pros in
Threepenny
were Lesley Ann Warren and Pat Carroll. Opening at a small off-Broadway theater was one thing. But the Doolittle was the Broadway equivalent in L.A. I was stuck and I was sick.

I wandered up and down the Red House in Malibu, praying for the original director to return. He didn’t. We were waiting for word whether it would be a go. I was praying for a no. Then Jon Peters, the hairdresser/producer who was going with or was married to Lesley Ann at the time, said, “I don’t want the little girl to be sitting on the curb wearing her toe shoes. I’m putting some money in for her.”

When I got the call that Jon had financed the play, I leaned over to pick up my travel bag and couldn’t get up. I ended up directing at the Doolittle from an electric wheelchair. It buzzed up and down the aisles. We had a week, maybe two weeks to adjust to a Broadway-size space. “Speak up, sing out,” I shouted from my wheelchair. The stage was bare. Opening night, the curtain parted. Someone had decided to dress the stage with a tall piece of wood, a phallic wooden sculpture that stretched from the stage to the top lights. A senseless symbol of the whole project. Lesley Ann had the quality of Snow White in this gritty musical. It was a motley crew—brave, but motley. My wheelchair protected me from the hard critique I richly deserved. Lee Strasberg was there. At intermission our eyes connected. He smiled and nodded.

Allen Garfield, a very passionate actor, placed himself on the
steps in the theater lobby during intermission and screamed, “This is not Actors Studio work. This work is not the work of the Actors Studio! This does not represent us.” He got star billing in one of the reviews. Actually, the reviews were tolerant and kind compared to what we would have gotten in New York. Some of the reviewers from
Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter
were friends. I’d done so many interviews with them over the years. But by the time we opened, I was in love with the show, which is what always happens. We need to fool ourselves. I was crippled and delusional.

I
got a call to meet with Norman Jewison about
In the Heat of the Night
. When I read the script, I knew why he’d sent for me. It was about a businessman who is murdered while on a short trip to the deep South. You never meet the businessman, but the wife, me, is given the news of his death. Sidney Poitier is a Philadelphia detective, held as a suspect because he is black and a Northerner. Rod Steiger is the Southern sheriff.

In his office, I sat across from Norman, who introduced me to Hal Ashby, his longtime friend and the editor on the film. At that point Hal had not directed anything, and he still had a wife in Idaho. We looked at each other across the desk and connected in a hundred ways without exchanging a word. I knew about losing a husband, which was what the role was about, and I let myself go there, sitting across from them. By the time I left, they knew everything they needed to know about me and had found what they were looking for.

That was the beginning of a long friendship with both men, but especially with Hal. While Norman was on location shooting, he assigned Hal the job of overseeing my wardrobe. There were no fashion
consultants or overseers, just Hal and me shopping for a week in L.A. department stores, talking and getting to be really relaxed with each other. Hal had this laid-back, long-haired hippie persona to begin with. I never saw him ruffled or upset till many years later, long after he had directed me in
The Landlord
and
Shampoo
.

A day before I left for the Midwest, where
Heat
was filming, I’d done a day’s work in Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin’s
Divorce American Style
. I went from fun and silly to deep and dark as I entered the set.

I had pretty much cocooned myself preparing for the part, had done a lot of remembering and breaking down behind locked bathroom doors. All I wanted was to keep myself in that wounded place through the filming. Rod and Sidney were both my friends, and they went out of their way to greet and hug me, but I needed to keep my concentration internal and in character to play that part.

When Sidney’s character finally gave me the news of my husband’s death, I reacted the way I had in life. I thought if I didn’t hear it, I could turn back the clock and it wouldn’t have happened. My throat closes with pain still as I write.

I kept saying “No, no, no” to block out the reality. Sidney’s sensitivity in that scene was true and unscripted, and he was there for me every step of the way. Sidney’s eyes, concerned, sensitive, his body—I can’t see him as an actor, he was that good. He was so talented, I forgot he was acting. Norman Jewison encouraged this fresh exploration to happen and take its course. Haskell Wexler, the director of photography, was doing handheld, and wherever we went as actors he followed with his camera.

I don’t think there is a better film about race in America than
In the
Heat of the Night
. Rod Steiger’s journey as the Southern sheriff reluctantly brought to enlightenment is so remarkable, and Sidney is so damned beautiful and strong inside and out.

We were still at the Pool House when the script of
In the Heat of the Night
came in. I realize as I write that I was the only blacklisted female actor to have reclaimed the visibility and height of her previous career before it was yanked away. The actor John Randolph did a lot of films and had a good career in character parts. Ossie Davis, too, but I seemed to have been discovered anew—as if my other life had never existed. As if that old Lee Grant, the blacklisted one, was still teaching at HB Studio in New York, and this new Lee Grant, the new hot girl in town, was a completely different person. The fact that I’d joined the fight in my early twenties had a lot to do with it. I was just starting out in New York, with only one big picture behind me, while most of the actors, writers, and directors who were blacklisted were in their thirties, forties, and fifties, already successful and prominent in their fields when they were hit—artistically and financially broken, deprived of their right to earn a living and speak their minds.

Rod Steiger once described success for him like being a fighter in the ring. You go the rounds, you’re beaten up and bleeding, then suddenly you score a knockout, the referee counts the other fighter out and holds up your arm. The winner! Then suddenly the bell goes off again. The fighting never stops, the slugging it out, no matter how many times you win. This after he’d won the Oscar for
In the Heat of the Night
.

Twenty-four when I was blacklisted, thirty-six when it ended.

My ingenue years gone, and my leading lady years almost over.

Facing forty, I was beginning again, having to hide everything. The heaviness of the past. The producer wants a hot, funny, schmoozy, flirty young actress who can get along with everyone and be there on time. I knew this. I would be this.

The other fear, starting over at thirty-six: Someone could find out my age and I would lose all the parts for twenty-six-year-olds that the agents and casting people were looking for. The beginning of a career
in Hollywood, not the end. The fear that my age would be disclosed became the neurotic focus of my life.

Today, with the Internet, I’d be finished. In the sixties and seventies, I could easily lie and maneuver and get away with it. And no one connected the fresh-faced young woman/girl with the eight-year-old daughter and cute Italian boyfriend with the dark political world of the fifties.

The face-lift I’d demanded, rushed into, pure intuition, turned out to be a solid practical necessity—and with this fresh face erasing the downward pull around my mouth, my eyes, I believe it saved my career. My earning power. Even my love life, I guess.

I could look thirty.

When I went out on the road with
The Captains and the Kings
, the play I took when I left Arnie, I had a little romance with a handsome young actor. A flirtation really.

“How old are you?” he asked over cocktails in a San Francisco bar.

I said, “Thirty.”

“Oh,” he said, crestfallen. “I thought you were twenty-six!”

He was attracted to a twenty-something, not a thirty-something. On this, my first venture away from Arnie, out in the world, I was learning. What to show. What to hide.

In this next venture I was to make through Hollywood, I had both the excitement and the fear of the imposter. I had been a citizen of the New York fifties, the land of my birth and education in life, marriage, motherhood, and politics. I presented myself in L.A. as a girl with no past. I landed here because I was offered a job. That’s when life began.

Nobody knew.

Nobody would.

In the Heat of the Night
was the breakthrough film of its time; Sidney Poitier was irresistible, and I was in it.

B
renda Vaccaro and I both created houses that everyone gravitated to. Mine was the Red House, which Joan Didion wrote about in
The
Year of Magical Thinking
, and Brenda’s house was in Benedict Canyon. My house was across from Zuma Beach. It had been built by a well-known California architect for two older sisters—twin houses, each a long barnlike floor-through that we joined together to make one long, charming house. One side faced the Pacific Ocean, the other a big grassy lawn surrounded by woods. When Joey and I drove up the winding road and saw the houses for the first time, the earth in front of us was moving. The place had become a rabbit habitat, every square inch of grass covered by quivering bunny bodies. It was ten minutes up the Pacific Coast Highway from the Colony.

I had no images where men were concerned. All I knew was, I was driving the bus in our life. Earning a living for all of us was my main concern, and it had to be Joey’s main concern, too. There was no discussion or disagreement. Joey was madly in love; all he wanted to do was to please me, help me, be family. We were meeting all our new
friends together, in a new place. Every job brought new friends; opening the Actors Studio in L.A. brought friends for life.

I never thought we’d be together forever. I didn’t think about it at all. There was too much to do. I was cooking, working, acting, teaching, entertaining, mommying. Every weekend, the Red House was mobbed with friends. I’d make sautéed chicken or leg of lamb, or buy Stouffer’s frozen lobster over rice, a flank steak with soy sauce and brown sugar, bake a huge custard, then sit around and talk and talk through the afternoon and early evening since everyone had to be up early the next day to work or go up for a job.

I was now living without tension, or fear, or a sense of inadequacy. Joey thought I could do anything, and I could. Because we expected nothing of each other, we were free of expectations. The only condition I ever put to him was that he had to earn a living or leave. So he received a terrible rejection as a gas station attendant and made it as a big commercial producer. I felt this relationship was new, open territory, and I was taking it a week at a time. The only careers Joey had had before were installing plumbing in new buildings, like his father, and as a classically trained ballet dancer, and he was still a kid. I was watching him grow and unfold, even as I was in a new life myself.

He acted in a scene with Ron Rifkin and was accepted into the Actors Studio. I’m sure his being my guy influenced the decision, but it was Lee Strasberg himself who praised his work. With Joey I was living with my best friend, my protector, the most fun person I wanted to be with, in bed and out, and at the same time we were both growing. I’m avoiding the word
love
, because
love
is too trite, too catchall, and too vast.

I had said early on, as he began to travel with the commercials he was filming, “Have your flings. If you’re in a strange city and you’re
attracted to someone, do what you want. Fuck her, have a good time, but don’t tell me about it. Keep your secrets, and I’ll keep mine.” I’d seen how couples tortured each other with their conquests. What I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me. What Joey didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.