I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (9 page)

M
y Grandmother Dora was now living with us on 52nd Street. She was ill with high blood pressure, so my mother moved her from the brownstone to care for her. An extra bed was put in my parents’ room. My grandmother rarely spoke. When she did it was in Yiddish or occasionally Russian. She was not as tall as her daughters, but she was taller than I was, and slender. She had a classically beautiful face and light blue eyes. With four highly educated children, I’m sure she was ashamed of her lack of English. Her husband had schlepped off to create a Palestine for the Jews and left her. I never saw her with a friend she could just talk to. Neither Fremo nor my mother spoke Yiddish. It was clear, though, when Fremo came home from her late dates with various men and my grandmother flung
farshtunkena
and other strange words after her as she went up the stairs of the brownstone that she had an effect on her daughters. She was remote out of self-consciousness, but she deeply cared about them.

One bright day, I ran into the apartment after a meeting. A big, young, uniformed policeman was standing in the small hallway that led to the bedrooms. My mother huddled on the living room couch moaning, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. “Mother is in the
bathroom. I can’t. Would you go?” I walked past the policeman and down the small hall. The bathroom door was open. My grandmother was standing on her head in the tub. Dead. Her head at the drain, her legs extended up to the showerhead. Her nightgown had pooled around her head, revealing her naked body to me for the first time. The sight was so cruel and so bizarre that it didn’t seem possible. I pulled her light nightgown down from her head to her legs and called to the policeman. “Could you please carry my grandmother to the bed?” I pointed to the bedroom. I couldn’t watch. I went and sat by my mother in the living room. Her teeth were chattering.

“What happened?” I asked.

“She went to throw up. She felt sick, and she got a stroke that hurled her into the bathtub.” Such indignity. So shocking, so mean.

“She’s on the bed. Do you want to see her?”

“I can’t, I can’t.” I think my mother was in shock. I went to my grandmother. She lay rigidly still. Her blue eyes were open and fixed, like a doll’s.
Old doll’s eyes,
I thought. Only her beautiful wavy hair was still lustrous and alive. I passed my fingers through her hair. I’d never seen it loose and spread out on a pillow before. I studied her features, frozen in midflight, surprised. I kissed her cool cheek and closed her light blue eyes.

I
t was only after
All You Need Is One Good Break
closed, in February of 1950, that I learned that Arnie, John Berry, and J. Edward Bromberg had been named as Communists by former friends in the Party back in Hollywood. They were all being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, known as HUAC, and had moved to New York in hopes of finding work on Broadway to support themselves.

They had a lot at stake and a lot of company. HUAC had been around for almost a decade before it turned its attention to Hollywood in 1947.

The Committee had since judged hundreds of Hollywood people un-American, triggering a mass exodus of the film community to safer ports—New York, Mexico, Paris, London. Well-known writers like Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner, and Michael Wilson went into exile. It was all news to me. I had never heard of HUAC or the Blacklist, knew nothing of this generation of deeply political artists, who were devoted to the labor movement, sympathetic to the Spanish Civil War and the Soviet Union. I had been raised in an apolitical household, where current events were rarely discussed. I knew nothing about politics. I was young, basically uneducated, and really ignorant.

By the summer of 1951, Joe Bromberg and I were working in stock theater together in
They Knew What They Wanted
. He had already been named as a Communist by the publication
Red Channels
, which issued a hit list of 151 members of the movie community in June 1950. A year later, he was called to testify before HUAC. Pleading the Fifth Amendment, he refused to answer the Committee’s questions and was promptly blacklisted. The only work he could get was in the theater, but he was a wreck. He sweated in the wings before every performance, terrified that some right-wing organization would send militants to attack him onstage.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“The American Legion. What if they show up? What if they stop the show?”

They didn’t.

“The Committee wants me to testify again. I can’t take it. My heart can’t take it.”

His fear and agitation frightened me. Onstage he plunged into character, jovial, expansive; offstage, he was consumed with fear.

Joe had a wife, three teenage children, and a heart condition. At the end of the summer, he decided to leave the country and took an acting job in London. He opened there in a play and got great reviews.

•   •   •

A
rnie wanted to meet with me about something important. He said that he and his wife, Margie, were going to try to work things out. The tears streamed down my face, soaking the bandages from my recent nose job. He patted my sniffling head and took me in his arms. I understood this was the adult world and had nothing to do with me, but I was brokenhearted. I felt I was losing someone and something essential to me—the part of me that was missing.

•   •   •

I
was offered the ingenue lead in a new play on Broadway,
Lo and Behold
, a good distraction, directed by Burgess Meredith, whom I had long admired. In the cast was Cloris Leachman, as madly in love with George Englund as I was at the time with Arnie. We spent hours lying around out of town pouring our hearts out to each other.

During the Theatre Guild run, someone called and told me Joe Bromberg had suffered a heart attack and died during the run of his play in London. Would I join the speakers at his memorial? They’d contacted all his associates, but they wanted a new young voice to speak about him as well.

When I heard the news about Joe, I remembered his terror. I was stunned that this kind, gifted man had been basically pushed to his death. The memorial service was held at the Edison Hotel on West 47th Street. Bromberg had been one of the few actors who had started the Group Theatre and he had tremendous cachet in the theater community. The place was packed, with two thousand outraged theater people, many of them standing. A fierce energy, an anger, was alive in the hall.

I was a very visible young actress at the time. I think the organizers wanted someone unknown for anything political to speak, in addition to the many who were well-known, including Clifford Odets, the playwright who reshaped the Group Theatre. The fiery Clifford Odets of
Waiting for Lefty
. Somewhere in the middle of the program I spoke, shakily. I had never spoken in public. I was very nervous, but also moved by Joe’s death. I said, “The Un-American Activities Committee knew Joe had a bad heart and kept calling him to testify anyway. I feel the committee ultimately killed him.”

Victor Navasky, who would later write
Naming Names
about the HUAC period, was there and recalls it as a memorable night. Speaker
after speaker worked up the crowd until, finally, the man everyone was waiting for appeared: Odets. His passion brought the crowd to the boiling point, just like his union organizer in
Waiting for Lefty
. Almost two thousand people crowded into that room cheered him. They would have followed him anywhere.

A week after Clifford Odets spoke at Joe Bromberg’s memorial, he met with the committee and gave names.

I went to a meeting at Actors’ Equity. Leon Janney was sitting in front of me.

“Well, you made the list,” he said.

“What list?”

He was holding the new
Red Channels
, a directory of left-wing actors and “subversives.” My name was in it. I could feel the blood drain from my head. My remarks from the memorial were quoted. From that day forward, for twelve years, I was blacklisted from film and TV. And Arnie left Margie for the last time.

•   •   •

A
few weeks after Arnie and I returned from California in the Packard, he moved into a nice residential hotel near the Theater District. I spent time with him there, but not sleepovers. I still lived with my parents and was careful not to reveal too much about him. It seemed Arnie was trying to figure out his family situation, his relationship with Margie. My friend Anne Jackson, with her woolen hat squishing her red hair, would stop by our apartment and ring the bell. “Can Lee come out to play?” she would call out, and the two kids we really were would escape the adult world and run down the street laughing, holding our stomachs.

Melanie and Darren McGavin had a little apartment above a Chinese restaurant on 52nd Street. They were married, which none of the other young actors were, and they tortured each other with their
flirtations and flaunted their affairs. It made me swear to myself that in any future relationship, I would make a life agreement to tell nothing and ask to hear nothing.

One day, Melanie and I were heading somewhere and saw a big metallic sign in front of a kind of semi-mansion. It said
PLASTIC SURGERY, RHINOPLASTY
. We wrote down the number and called. I had a bump on my nose that I wanted removed. Melanie wanted her nose shorter. The nurse said the operation was done right there in the mansion, in a kind of barber chair. We should come prepared to spend the night, but if the swelling went down we might go right home. We looked at each other—cool! Let’s do it and not tell anybody.

I was in my bedroom on 52nd Street, packing my little overnight bag, hoping to get out of the house before my mother came home, when she opened the door to my room. “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to get my nose done. It’s all arranged. I’ll be home later. Don’t try to talk me out of it, blah, blah.”

She sat on the bed very quiet, very calm. “Darling, you are going to a butcher. This is your face, and if you are determined to do this, let me call our doctor and find a surgeon and a hospital that does this operation.”

“I told Melanie I’d meet her.”

“Call her, stop her,” said my mother.

The cold water hit me. I was frightened by the rashness of what I had been about to do.

Our doctor set me up with the medical group that had operated on the Hiroshima women. He scraped the bone. My face swelled. I spent at least two nights in the hospital.

Melanie McGavin heard my warning call but decided to go through with it anyway. The tip of her nose was cut off, operated on by a charlatan.

M
y parents demanded to meet with Arnie. He agreed, since I wanted very much for them, especially my father, to see what an extraordinary man he was—how lucky I was to have him as a friend, how caring and concerned he was. Arnie came in the door. I don’t think anybody shook hands.

My parents were on the couch. We sat opposite them. It was that time of day when they seemed in silhouette; the windows, hung with thin white curtains, threw a cool light. I don’t remember Arnie’s preamble, possibly something mild: “I really care about your daughter . . .” Trying to warm them, charm them. The arrows came fast.

“Aren’t you a married man? Still married to your wife? Don’t you have children? Are you leaving your wife? Who is supporting your wife and children?”

It went on like that until Arnie grew defensive and angry and walked out.

I confronted my father at the front door, wailing.

“How could you? How could you treat him like that?”

God knows what else I said, for my father slapped me hard across
the face. It was the first time in my life he had ever touched me in anger, and it hurt me and made its impression.

•   •   •

A
fterward, I moved with Arnie into a second-floor walk-up in the Seventies on Third Avenue, above a bakery. To see their child—and at twenty-four, I was still a child to them—leave their home for the first time, with a thirty-six-year-old, white-haired man on his third marriage, not divorced, with three children? A Communist writer who couldn’t earn a living? They could not have dreamt a more tragic scenario, for themselves, for me. For all the advantages given me, the time, the love, yes, the money, the everything. Then this betrayal. This stealing of their child, their star. I was a big success on Broadway, written about, photographed in
Vogue
. My mother’s dream come true turned into a total and unexpected nightmare by my choice to love Arnie. As for Arnie having a clue as to how I was raised? None, and he never asked. At the time, leaving my parents’ apartment and moving in with him, I was still too much a part of my own past, still rebelling against my parents, to have any sense of how differently I was raised, or how absurdly—how spoiled, romanticized, focused on, petted, and worshipped I was. To me, that was normal.

Somewhere along the line, I did sense that I was to make my parents very proud. My father would have been content with a well-to-do, educated, conventional son-in-law and grandchildren who would perpetuate the Rosenthal bloodline. My mother wanted a star. Dance, song, acting, a child who would carry her longings to ultimate fulfillment.

•   •   •

I
loved playing house. I loved being Mommy. Cooking. Laundry. I loved having an instant family.

My parents couldn’t conceive of how wanted this made me feel, how needy an only daughter can be for freedom, to be the girl boss of her own family, with her own money, such as it was.

I felt liberated. All these new responsibilities, these little boys, liberated me. I loved my new life. It all clicked into place.

On weekends Tommy, four, and Mikey, two, would visit. I’d run to our neighbor on the floor below to learn how to cook spaghetti with tomato sauce. I’d run to her to learn where the Laundromat was and how to use it. I bought a sewing machine, yards of fluffy green material, and made a really ugly fitted bedspread. I sweated through the summer; our apartment was above a bakery. The best thing about living there was the divine smell of bread baking in the early morning.

•   •   •

O
ne morning my father appeared at our apartment. His left hand never left his coat pocket. I know he had either a gun or a knife and was there to kill Arnie. His face was as white as paper, his eyes, very pale blue, fixed. He was saying nothing, his eyes never left Arnie, he kept moving in on him wherever Arnie went—we were in the kitchen of the floor-through, we were between the stairs and the stove. I never stopped talking: “Please, please, please, Dad, please, Dad, go, please don’t do anything, please, I’m fine, please, please—”

Arnie just stared him down; his contempt for my father defeated my dad. Arnie shrank him, and he left. I cried for my dad. For his love. For his lifelong principles and manhood that had been dealt such a painful, shattering blow, that he felt he wasn’t man enough to save his child.

Abraham Rosenthal’s child, Witia’s child, Lyova, was now a blacklisted actress, living with a married blacklisted writer with three children from two prior marriages, in a walk-up on Third Avenue in Yorkville. In 1951, when
Detective Story
the film was released, I was
nominated for my first Academy Award. I won Best Actress at the Cannes International Film Festival that year, and I could work nowhere in film or television. I was twenty-four years old.

I would stay blacklisted for twelve years.

•   •   •

M
y mother saved their lives financially when she found the ad for the nursery school in East Rockaway. They moved to East Rockaway. My mother ran the school, as she and Fremo had run the Haskell Nursery School at my grandmother’s when I was a little girl. And she loved it. All those little girls to fuss over and entertain. Pop Abe would descend the steps of the house from their living space and serve the many adoring boys and girls fresh orange juice. They were both loved and respected—for my father, respect was everything.

•   •   •

A
rnie was a mystery to me; I was a mystery to him. Neither of us knew anything about the other’s childhood, youth, schooling, work, how the other was raised, what their parents did. No facts. During our relationship I met his younger sister and her husband one summer. She was warm, vivacious. I didn’t know till years later she spent the rest of her life in and out of mental institutions.

He did tell me that as a boy on the way to school he carried a chain to arm himself against the kids in his neighborhood, in the playgrounds. Nothing, nothing about his mother. His father. I never met them.

When Arnie’s father died, he sat in the backseat of the limo far away from me, against the window. Not sad. Grim, bitter. Never a word. His profile said,
Do not ask. Don’t talk.

His mother was never asked to our house; she never met his children to my knowledge. She was admitted to a hospital once, for a
pelvic complaint, and I saw her on a gurney, but never met her. She was an unadorned, gray-haired older lady; the sheet covering her on the way to the operation slipped aside, and I was struck by the vibrant triangle of thick black hair covering her sex.

•   •   •

I
didn’t know if Arnie was attracted or repulsed by me, or both.

I think he was attracted by the prospect of me as fresh clay, open to being remodeled into his vision of who I should be. His Galatea. My talent was interesting to him, but that was the one area he was denied entry; that was mine alone.

His displeasure, anger, and confusion seemed to come from his inability to change me enough. And a total lack of curiosity as to what and who had formed me. My mother, of course, my Aunt Fremo. I was an uneducated high school graduate. Inspired by literature, art, and theater, reckless and passionate, unaware of boundaries or danger. Spoiled, my heart in the right place, indulged, utterly ignorant of money, housework, cooking, laundry, with an overwhelming passion for acting, and a passion for passion. Uneducated and inadequate in everything else practical, in life.

And as I was to find out in the coming years, I had my father’s sense of justice, too. And my grandfather’s, Lyov Haskelovich, Zionist, radical, martyr, whose blood ran through my veins. But I had to grow up first.

•   •   •

D
arren McGavin had hit it big with a TV series. He and Melanie moved to Park Avenue. I walked from our floor-through on Third to their building on Park. Melanie was thrilled and excited, showing me everything. Park Avenue at that time was indeed a big deal. Only very rich people lived there, celebrated in story and song. But the
apartment itself seemed an exact replica of the beloved one above the Chinese restaurant, with one addition: the maid’s room. Except there wasn’t an actual room for the maid, so inventive Melanie had turned the wide closet facing the front door into a kind of railroad berth. Levered doors opened onto a narrow built-in bed on a board. It had a small shelf with its own electric light. But it was still a clothes closet in size. Maybe five feet long, sixteen inches wide.

“How can you put a person in there to live, Melanie, in the middle of your apartment in a front hallway?”

Melanie protested, “The maid is happy there, she loves her room.”

“It’s a closet,” I said, and walked back to Third Avenue. The class struggle had begun. I didn’t have to be a Communist to feel for the girl in the closet. But my best friend Melanie and I had our first serious rift.

•   •   •

D
uring our months on Third Avenue, Joe Papp wanted me for Sean O’Casey’s one-act plays, to be done off-Broadway. I read them; they were delicious, sharp, and funny. I told Arnie I was excited about them. He said no. I was dumbfounded. Turning down work was something not in my gene pool, and to turn down the chance to act in something of this quality was inconceivable. I didn’t know what to say or do. “Why?” He couldn’t say, but he was angry. Looking back, I realize that he needed me to be there for his children. He and Margie were divorcing; he wanted custody. He never gave her money or paid child support. Margie was a mild person, a party person. She was principled. She wouldn’t, couldn’t ask a blacklisted writer to support her. So I suppose Joe’s offer to me came at the wrong time.

Early on, Arnie would push books on me. Marx, Engels, and Hegel. I tried to read them—not very hard and not very willingly, but I found myself reading the same page over and over again till the print
blurred. My tastes went to the arts and the great Russian novels I loved so much, the ballet, the theater. Arnie’s concentration was on Soviet politics, on teaching me what was essential to him, but a piece of my brain was missing in that area. It frustrated him. How could I understand economics when I had never had my own bank account? How could I understand the masses? Who were they? The working-class people in factories? The exploiters? I’d never been exploited.

But with Arnie my sense of inadequacy grew and grew. Basically, outside of my talent as an actress, he had a kind of contempt for me, and my views on Soviet art and film enraged him. I had been attracted to—no, fallen in love with Russian literature early on. I couldn’t get enough of Tolstoy and Turgenev. I gobbled them up along with apples on the window seat of our living room, overlooking the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge.

That was the summer Arnie rented a big lovely house in the country. Ruth and Arthur Birnkrant were nearby. Was it all summer or for August only? I baked apple pies myself and somehow picked up cooking, because I marketed and had meals on the table every day. I loved that. I was the lady of the house. No one complained. Everyone ate, and I had two sweet little boys whom I was responsible for. I was learning how to be a real woman. There was even a small cornfield in back of the house. We had sweet corn whenever we wanted. I had suddenly embarked on a new, useful life, and I was good at it. And Ruth and Arthur were so brilliant and witty and warm. I had never spent time with people of that quality. I liked it. They liked me. They teased each other. They were fortyish but in love, in love.

Toward the end of the summer, Arnie climbed into my cot. (I don’t know why we didn’t share a bed—the children?) As he climbed in, he said, “I really used to love you.”

I pushed him out of bed to the floor. “You used to love me? You used to love me and now you want to fuck me?”

Somehow summer was over. Arnie got into the big convertible car with the top down. The boys were in the backseat. They waved good-bye, facing me on their knees, as I stood in front of our summer house, sad, too stunned to say good-bye. I have no idea how I got back to New York.

Any thought of going home to my parents was out. I would never spend a night with them again. It was toxic, and to tell you the truth they were much more content without me. Where to go? I’d never lived by myself. I had no furniture or utensils. I had no friends. I couldn’t work. I was cut off from the wild world of theater and actor friends that used to be. I was dangerous for them to associate with, and now I was cut off entirely from the community around Arnie that I yearned to be a part of.

So I moved in with Fremo. I slept on the couch in her small one-bedroom apartment somewhere in the East Fifties. Fremo was the dearest, most generous, different, uniquely crazy woman in the world. When I was growing up on 148th Street, Fremo would beat on the windows of the brownstones up and down the street and take the owners’ cats home to our own, six houses down. I don’t remember anyone coming after their cats; the neighbors were all afraid of her. She had a high, shrill, elegant, thirties-movie-star voice that screamed in indignation when she saw an animal abandoned.

She was an abandoned animal herself. She had turned from the waif I saw in her early photographs to a voluptuous five feet eight, with long beautiful legs with high heels attached to them. Her large breasts jiggled. Her hips swung. Her narrow, ascetic, pale face floated above, a gash of red lipstick, black eyebrow pencil around large sensitive blue eyes, and thin light brown hair in a short straight bob around her face. She worked all week as a social worker on the Bowery with the drunks. After work and on weekends she was at the Art Students League on 57th Street. Painting, painting was the love of her life, her true
obsession. Fremo had no luck with men, certainly not the rich ones who would take her out someplace fancy, fuck her, and not call again. And she was crazy.

At the time I moved in with her she was married to Charlie. He was an odd Midwesterner who had something to do with oil, or building, or plumbing—depending on the day. The story goes, she was at art camp and he had put an ad on the bulletin board.
Lonely Midwestern businessman etc. wants to meet NY artistic type.
She snapped it up. I don’t know where they married, but she adored him. He was a good old boy. She’d flutter around when he was there. “Charlie said I look like the
Venus de Milo
.” Oh God, she loved being married, being a Mrs., finally breaking through to the 1950s Jewish American concept of womanhood.