I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (8 page)

My father lost the job he’d had for thirty years as director of the YM and YWHA. He’d never been out of work. Where does a boss apply for a job? He was shaken, his pride broken. He withdrew inside himself. This was a new alien home, new alien streets for both my parents. A sacrifice they had made for me, or that my mother forced on my father.

There was no other YM or YMHA to be director of. He’d been lured away by the siren song of the ladies of Hadassah. Said good-bye to all who’d known him as a young man fresh out of Columbia. He had waved good-bye with much fanfare, and then the Hadassah ladies fired him. He’d disagreed with them about policy. They didn’t like it. Nobody had disagreed with my father at the Y or at camp. He didn’t know how to handle the ladies.

He sold Pocono Camp Club. He sold his summers, his joy, his boss-ness, his way of life.

F
resh out of the Neighborhood Playhouse and with a recommendation from Hank Fonda, whom I didn’t know but who had seen me in a performance showcase, I auditioned for my first Broadway play, Sidney Kingsley’s
Detective Story
. There were two life-changing plays running that year, Tennessee Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire
and Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman
, both directed by Elia Kazan. Offered the part of the ingenue lead in
Detective Story
, I turned down that part and asked if I could read for the part of the old lady shoplifter instead. (I was twenty; the shoplifter was described as fortyish.) The shoplifter was an unfortunate girl, a
meeskite
from the Bronx who wandered into Saks Fifth Avenue, took a bag, and was caught stealing and hustled off to the police station. The multi-action at this police station unfolding onstage excited the audience to cheers each night.

I was discovered that season and invited to join the Actors Studio. I became part of the pantheon of extraordinary, brilliant talents who poured out of their dressing rooms into great little late-night bars after the curtains came down on Broadway. My actor beau, Gene Lyons, and I were out at the bars every night after the show. The
atmosphere was arty, raucous, and sexy. The handsome sons of Lee J. Cobb in
Death of a Salesman
were looking for action after the theater let out. The air in those theater bars crackled.

I was flirted with, recognized as a new big talent.

The play was a hit, and I was the surprise discovery of the 1950 theater season. Picture in
Vogue
, newspaper articles, the whole megillah. I had hit it out of the park with my first play.

•   •   •

A
bout a year into the
Detective Story
run, I read
All You Need Is One Good Break
while going somewhere on a train. I loved the grittiness of the writing and the premise of the play.

Something in it called to me. My part only had one scene—it opened the second act—but I identified with her. Whoever had written it had lived that scene, and liked that girl, and valued her. I wanted to meet him. I wanted to play her. When I was asked if I wanted the part, I told my agents yes.

All You Need
is about a struggling Jewish working-class family. The director and star was a charismatic street guy, John Berry. I was fascinated by him, as girls that age are by bad boys. John Berry was the baddest, worse even than Marlon Brando.

Marlon had asked me out the year before. Picked me up on his motorcycle—thrilling—and took me to a nightclub in the Fifties on Eighth Avenue. We sat on a long leather settee, had drinks at a small black table, and silently watched a naked woman on a small black stage do artistic and lewd things with a giant cobra.

Not a word exchanged. What can you say?

Back on the motorcycle, holding on to his back, to my front door. I had my key out, no kiss, thanked him, opened and closed the door. Out of love.

When I told Marlon, who had just had a triumph in
Streetcar
, what a fascinating actor John was, he challenged him to a boxing match at the gym. John showed his contempt by not showing up at the gym.

The leading character in
All You
Need Is One Good Break
is a street guy, a gambler who has fallen for the American Dream, who lives dangerously and ends up its victim. My one scene with John opened the second act. For some reason we were on a blind date. I was babysitting at a friend’s house, trying to amuse him by blowing up balloons and twisting them into animal shapes. John wanted to get laid.

It was a lovely scene, and I decided to leave
Detective Story
to do
All You Need Is One Good Break
. Sidney Kingsley, my director, and the other cast members were shocked. Horace McMahon warned me, “Hits like this happen once or twice in a lifetime—don’t be foolish,” and he was right. I thanked Sidney, my mentor, I thanked everyone in the large cast, which after a year had become family, and I bolted the nest. I had no idea what I was getting into, or that my acting career was about to go into a nosedive. I listened to no one, a course I have followed my entire life, and I paid for it. I also kicked open a door inside myself, a route to the questions I needed answers for in order to create a larger life.

•   •   •

J
ohn Berry’s best friend was the guy who had written
All You Need Is One Good Break
, Arnie Manoff. Arnie’s nickname was “the Silver Fox.” His hair was white, his face tan, his eyes huge and brown-black. He had the long black lashes girls should have. His manner was deceptively soft and gentle. He said he was thirty-six. My girlfriends and I laughed at that in the ladies’ room. He was fifty-six if he was a day. Why would a man need to lie about his age?

Arnie really was thirty-six. He’d been married three times; he had
a nine-year-old daughter, Eva, with his second wife, Ruth. He was still married to Margie, the mother of their two boys, Tommy and Mikey, who were three and four at the time.

It was a heady time for everyone. We got great reviews out of town, in Philadelphia. I spent a lot of time hanging out with Arnie in the hope that proximity would do the trick with John, that his whirlwind personality would alight long enough to notice me. Nothing happened with John, but as Arnie and I talked and talked and talked, I became aware that he was falling for me. In thinking about it now, I know he must have relished the
Pygmalion
aspect of our relationship. He thought of me as a Broadway alley cat—which I guess I was—and thought he was going to make a revolutionary out of me, the raw material that had fallen into his path. In a way he did, but never in the mold that he wanted. I’ll never know if that was the turn-on for him, or whether Margie, his wife, had been a radical when he met her, or a good-natured and good-hearted shiksa from Texas or someplace like that, equally ripe for conversion to Communism. By the time we left Philly, Arnie and I were an item.

•   •   •

O
pening night in New York of
All You Need Is One Good Break
was a disaster, literally. The turntable that carried John Berry from scene to scene and from set to set broke at the beginning of the show. Stagehands scrambled to turn the set around in plain sight of the audience. John overcompensated for the disaster, railing at the audience instead of charming them. The reviews were scathing. One paper picked me out as “Best Actress in a Bad Play.”

Every night for the rest of our short run, the entire cast—which included J. Edward Bromberg, a great character actor and a charter member of the Group Theatre—had to stand onstage after curtain
calls while John begged the enthusiastic lefty audience to tell their friends to come so we could stay open. We all took pay cuts, but after four nights we closed.

It was about then that William Wyler asked me to play the shoplifter in the film version of
Detective Story
. Kirk Douglas was starring, with William Bendix and Eleanor Parker. I spent four or five weeks in an actor’s hotel in Hollywood called the Montecito, a run-down five-story building. It was cheap and fun. My room had a Murphy bed. At Paramount I went through the huge costume floor and found a size-eighteen brown jumper once worn by Sara Allgood. Her name was still on it. An Irish character actress, Allgood had played the mother in
How Green Was My Valley
. I loved the idea of wearing something she had acted in and had the dress altered to fit the little shoplifter, as if I could absorb Sara’s acting genes through the fabric.

I loved everyone in the cast and Mr. Wyler, whom I liked to make smile or laugh. Kirk Douglas was dazzling, both personally and in the part. The girl who played the ingenue, Cathy O’Donnell, was married to Wyler’s brother and had the kind of sweetness the part called for and lines so gushy that when Sidney Kingsley had first offered the part to me I knew I couldn’t say them without laughing.

Detective:
(typing)
What color are your eyes?

Leading man:
Brown.

Ingenue:
Brown and green flecked with gold.

•   •   •

A
rnie came to L.A. toward the end of filming and invited a group of his friends to a party to introduce me. It was at the home of Ruth and Arthur Birnkrant, who were to become friends for life, particularly Ruth. The rest of Arnie’s friends held me at a distance. I
don’t know how many of them knew Margie or were friends of hers. There were about twelve people, and they all seemed very glamorous and sophisticated, very grown-up, to me. One took her husband with her into the bathroom, laughing. I didn’t know if they were laughing at me, or the situation, or making love.

When the film was finished, Arnie bought a two-tone Packard convertible and decided we would drive back to New York together. He had been teaching me how to drive on empty roads, and when we hit the desert he handed the big car over to me, then slid over to the passenger side to rest. I was too short to see over the steering wheel, so I kept looking down over the driver’s-side window for the white line that separated the two-lane highway. I suddenly felt the wheel being grabbed away from me and looked up to see a shocked driver in an oncoming car, his mouth and eyes forming three O’s, like Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
, as Arnie yanked us out of the wrong side of the road and stopped the car. He was breathing hard, so frightened and angry he couldn’t talk. I know these unthinking acts of mine provoked the distrust he always had for me.

What neither of us knew was how unprepared for adult life I was. I was still living with my parents. I had never cooked a meal or washed a dish. I wasn’t allowed to. I’d never made a bed, except a cot at camp. I’d never done laundry, washed, or ironed. Or cleaned my room, much less a house. My mother had deliberately chosen not to teach me any of the practical skills that might have ended my dependence on her or her maids. My earnings were tended and protected by my parents for my own good. I’d never been inside a bank. I did not know how to write a check. I had no checks. Arnie had absolutely no concept of who I was or how I’d been raised. He had no idea how wrong for him I was at that tough, crucial time in his life. Miss Wrong meets Mr. Wronger.

Childish, reckless acts appealed to me, and the consequences rarely crossed my mind. As a protected child growing up on Riverside
Drive and 148th Street, I used to climb the steep hill up to Broadway wearing my roller skates, then fly straight down to the bottom of the block, speeding past the row of brownstones, with nothing to stop me but the moving cars at the bottom of the hill on Riverside Drive. Acting is filled with risk. You throw yourself into the part to see where it leads you. You jump without a net.

But driving the Packard, I had risked both our lives and I knew it. I was ashamed and badly frightened. I was twenty-one going on twenty-two.

•   •   •

I
was on Broadway in
Detective Story
when Elia Kazan asked me to join his project. He was directing Tennessee Williams’s new play
Camino Real
, rehearsing at the Actors Studio. He asked me to explore a very different character from the shoplifter in
Detective Story
, the gypsy girl, a seductive child/woman who was used to entrap soldiers and sailors and their paychecks. I was working on
Detective Story
nights and matinees and rehearsing with Kazan in between shows. At that time Kazan was the greatest theater director in the world. He’d yet to transform the film world with
Streetcar
and the many great films to follow. I don’t use the word
great
loosely. He was that talented, that gifted a director.

Kazan would whisper directions in my ear. His way of directing me threw me off balance.

Sandy had taught me how to structure a character, personalize everything till I became one with the character. Kazan would whisper suggestions. I’d follow them, like the ballet dancer in
The Red Shoes
; her feet had a life of their own. Kazan loved my responses, and it was exciting and fun, but when I’d try to work on the character at home, I had no base. I hadn’t a clue what I’d done. I began to feel very insecure. If this were film, the suggestions would be filmed immediately,
but onstage, Kazan wouldn’t be there every night and Saturday afternoon to whisper in my ear. I quit. He called and called. He was too great a director for me to admit to him I couldn’t work his way. I felt unmoored.

This was a small beginning of future conflict between us. In a few years Kazan would give the names of his fellow actors and writers to the Un-American Activities Committee. We didn’t speak after that for twenty years.

I
was offered Shaw’s
Arms and the Man
. I was the beautiful princess Raina opposite Sam Wanamaker and the charming movie star Francis Lederer. My friend and Neighborhood Playhouse alumna Anne Jackson was in it, as was Will Kuluva, another friend.

We were opening in the first theater-in-the-round in New York City, in the Edison Hotel. The seats were so close surrounding us that if I sat on one of the boxes onstage, my hand could touch an audience member or a critic.

Many full-length pictures of me appeared in the newspapers. “From shoplifter to princess” exclaimed an insert of the scruffy shoplifter appearing next to elegant Raina.

The opening scene of
Arms and the Man
finds Raina in bed in her blue nightgown covered by a thick black furry blanket. The Chocolate Cream Soldier, played by Lederer, climbs into her bedroom through a window and the scene ensues. She, shocked by the intruder; he, needing a place to hide.

Opening night as I lay under the furry blanket in the dark, before the lights came up, I could feel bubbles of liquid between my legs, so sudden and so wet, my thighs slid on each other. It flashed through
my mind—I could be making theatrical history: “Actress gets period at opening of new intimate theater.” I pulled the blanket around my body, played the scene, and exited, yelling for help to get cleaned up for the next scene. Sure enough, I was bleeding all down my nightgown to my lurid footprints. The reviews said I was “not Lynn Fontanne yet,” but “on my way.” They could have said, “Career over.”