Still Talking (14 page)

Aching with sorrow and guilt, I went directly from the airport to the Beverly Hills Hotel and settled into a cottage there with Melissa and her governess.

The first night my friend Tommy Corcoran, who cared about both Edgar and me, took me out to every sleazy bar in Los Angeles, showed me in one night the underbelly life of a single woman-“See So-and-so? He’ll never marry her. He’s got a wife. See So-and-so? She’s with a paid escort. See those six women together there? They’ve left their husbands.”

This move of mine was, of course, a tremendous shock to Edgar, a reality shock because he had blinded himself to my unhappiness-and now he was adrift alone in a foreign land. He chose, however, to treat the whole event as a joke, a game-“Oh, that silly Joan. She’s such a child”as though I would presently come to my senses. Which, in fact, I did.

The ties between us ran so deep, this separation never became more than a breather. Once the pressure lifted, the friendship resurfaced. We did not have other trusted friends, and the bond between us was very strong. Every day Edgar was in and out of the cottage, going over the mail, discussing business things, dropping Melissa off from school. We continued our life, but in separate spaces.

After a week of this I heard a prying noise at the back

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door of the cottage late one night. I was terrified. Somebody was trying to break in. My reflex, without another thought, was to telephone Edgar. He was there in ten minutes. The next day he took us home.

I felt tremendous guilt over the emotional upset I had caused-but also relieved. I had brought our problems to a head, and now maybe we could find a resolution. And making the decision to return had forced me back in touch with the foundation of our marriage. The trust, the mutual honesty, the certainty.

But I also had to acknowledge a dangerous syndrome: When Edgar passed a certain anxiety threshold, he would check out with denial and a sleeping pill. I, in turn, would lose myself in my daughter and a whirl of feverish activity. I did not want Melissa to have a broken home. I thought then that I could live with this pattern. I did not see it as a fatal failing.

I don’t believe two people can build a life on wild, romantic feelings.

That is a big reason marriages break up. These feelings are so ephemeral.

Peter Passionate will not necessarily be there in the morning or nine months later when you are throwing up and need somebody to take you to the hospital-or when you are away working eighteen hours a day. I did a needlepoint pillow that says, LOVERS COME, LOVERS GO. FRIENDS REMAIN. It sits in a prominent place on the sofa in my library.

I wanted to be married-especially in predatory Hollywood. I didn’t want to sleep around, didn’t want to be a star all dressed up and going home for a TV dinner by herself. I admired long, nurturing relationships that must have had their rocky times-marriages like Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy’s. I still believe that in the long run, what wins out is the closeness, the relaxation that comes with marriage, the intimacy without fear of humiliation.

In the last analysis, Edgar needed me and I needed him-and Melissa needed both of us.

I do not know how Edgar came to terms with his failure to function on his own in Hollywood. This may sound

odd, but for our separate reasons-mine was guilt-we both buried our agonies and never discussed the issues forming in our relationship. This unspoken accommodation worked very well for a long time-until, of course, it didn’t.

When Edgar described his role, he often said, “We run a factory, and Joan is the product. ” His pride was temporarily satisfied by exercising power from behind the throne. He adopted a persona, the brilliant intellectual who had created a star. He came to like being “Edgar,” a character in my act, but a shadow man unrecognized by the public. That gave him a mystique, a feeling of celebrity.

Finally we both came to emotionally accept Edgar’s role as the star’s husband. It was built into our life. We could not escape it-any more than other couples like AnnMargaret and Roger Smith, Lynn Redgrave and John Clark, or Jackie Collins and Oscar Lerman. Stars’ husbands really protect their wives. They know the side that nobody else sees, the vulnerable you, so frightened, insecure, the terrors of childhood repeating in adulthood.

The husbands fight in a way no agent or manager ever will-like a mother protecting a child. Today, when I see a star’s husband backstage doing battle with the stage manager or the orchestra conductor, I may roll my eyes, but I understand completely.

Once when Suzanne Somers opened for me at Caesars Palace, there was a major argument when Alan Hamil insisted on a huge set that required I work in front of the curtain on three feet of stage. He was crazed like a bull-dog-you can be sure that while he was playing the son of a bitch, Suzanne was standing in the dressing room saying, “I’ve got to have the set.” We gave in. When I saw her act, I realized she was right. She needed the set.

Being right does not prevent a lot of garbage from being piled on the husband. People were saying, “Joan’s wonderful, Edgar’s terrible.” There was one producer, a woman, who said, “I will work only with Joan; I will never work with Edgar.” I thought, Is she that stupid? What does she think?

That I just go home and write jokes

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and go to sleep? That we don’t go to bed together, that we don’t know what the other is doing?

The husband is on duty twenty-four hours a day, so the emergencies fall to him. My contract stipulated that there be nobody under sixteen in the front row. This is because I cannot say, for instance, to a woman, “Are you good in bed?” with her child sitting there wearing Mickey Mouse ears. I would come offstage at 1:00 A.M. screaming, “There was a kid in the front row!”

and Edgar would be the one on the phone to the headwaiter saying, “It’s in the contract. Any children up front and she doesn’t go on!” Who was the real S.O.B.?

I was being unfair, letting Edgar be the lightning rod for the hostility that floats around town. I, who preach honesty, was being dishonest. But that is built into the star/husband equation. That is the point, really. I was able to keep the image of the easy-going sweetheart, smiling and joking-who later told Edgar what I really thought. Even my managers-who always want to come on to people as the good guys-would say to the maitre d’, “He’s the trouble. If it was up to me, a kid or two …”

In my business the only place I can be honest is onstage. If you are honest in real life, you make so many enemies, you will never get back on that stage again. And we performers all want to be adored. I longed to be loved like Carol Burnett and bask in people saying, “My gosh, she’s the warmest … ” So I let my husband take the heat.

7

0NE week as a single girl made me realize how much I needed structure in my life, a framework for my feelings, an environment that defined my identity.

That is particularly true, I think, for anybody who is successful in show business.

The more I was in demand in Las Vegas and the more money I commanded, the deeper was the chasm that yawned behind me. Only a dozen stars manage to stay at the top, and I had been around long enough to watch Trini Lopez, Frank Gorshin, Bobby Vinton, and Lola Falana begin to slip. Helen Reddy was a major headliner when I was her opening act. Today she is happy to sing in Michael’s Pub in New York. You can have the money and the accoutrements, the house and the cars, the clothes, the servants-but you have it all at somebody else’s whim.

For our sanity, we performers must have stability in our private life, some form of law and order. I think that structure comes in big ways-for me it was my marriage-and in little but important ways-like my perfectly organized drawers and closets. The separation impressed on me just how much my home and possessions had become the reassuring definition of myself-and how much living in that rented house with somebody else’s furniture and decoration, somebody else’s organization, made me feel at sea. I needed my things around me, needed a permanent place that said, “This is where I will be and who I am.” If I was going to survive in show business, I would have to sink roots to stabilize my soul. I wanted to buy a house.

Edgar had come to the same decision independently. He 98

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began looking not at what I thought we could afford but at Hollywood estates like Jack Warner’s former home. The financial caution of New York was gone: Southern California does that to you. Anthony Quinn’s house was for sale at $600,000, which would be millions now. The real estate agent, who had checked us out, refused even to show it to Edgar. “Clearly you cannot afford it,” she said.

He shot back, “Well, obviously, if it’s for sale, neither can Tony Quinn.”

I did not like anything I saw. All the Hollywood houses looked the same-new, impersonal, as though they were furnished in one day. Cher sold her house completeeverything in it untouched-to Eddie Murphy. Nobody in that world seems to have a beloved house to pass on to their children. When people do well, they get a bigger house. When they do even better, they get an even bigger one. Hollywood is constantly transitional, of the moment.

Nobody has anything that the past has touched, no wonderful treasures from a grandmother. When Joan Crawford’s house was sold, the new owner ripped out an unbelievable thirties movie-star bathroom-all marble and columns-and put in all glass.

After we’d been looking for about three months, in January of 1974 Sandy Gallin called up and said, “I found your house”-a twelve-room bastard colonial home on Ambazac Way in Bel Air, a micro-Tara designed by Paul Williams, a major black architect in California. He designed a wing of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and later, when he wanted to stay there, they would not let him in.

We went to see it with Gail Parent, who is now the coexecutive producer of The Golden Girls. The real estate agent was showing it to another woman, and took us along as a favor. The minute I walked into the two-story entrance hall with its balustrade curving up to the mezzanine, my heart leaped. Here was a set for an MGM movie. Off the foyer was a double powder room, and off the dining room was a small glassed-in atrium luxuriant with greenery. The library was paneled in English oak. The master bedroom had its own little sitting room at its far end with a fireplace-and it connected to what would

be Melissa’s room so I could get to her fast if she needed me. Sometimes it happens that you walk into a house and you know you belong there. I felt that way about the house on Ambazac Way.

The other client had first call on the house, and I was hysterical that she might buy it. We followed her and her husband from room to room. “Oooh, this is terrible,” I said to Gail. “Look at the window in the bathroom.

You’d have to do so muuuch.” Gail, in her nasal voice, said, “Who would want a round breakfast room? Ooooh, it’s so aaawful.” We ripped that house to shreds. Finally the woman said to her husband, “This is not for us,” and they left. I turned to the agent and said, “I’ll take it.”

We bought it in a day for $325,000, which then was like $5 million. I was terrified we could not afford it, but Edgar insisted, and he was right.

However, we were in over our heads. I was constantly worrying about money.

We needed a washer and dryer, and in exchange for the machines I appeared on Truth or Consequences. Pushing balloons across the floor with a toothpick, I said to myself, “Ten minutes on my knees, ten years of clean clothes.” When people promised, “I’m going to send you flowers,” I would say, “No, send me a rosebush.” Pretty soon I had the most beautiful classic English rose garden in California. From May to December I never had to buy flowers for the house.

The house, which we referred to as Ambazac, was tremendously important to me. I let the house be my romantic fantasy. My bathroom overlooked the rose garden, which was lit at night, and when I bathed in the dark, I felt I was bathing among the roses-while over me washed the scent of the night-blooming jasmine.

Truthfully, if I had all the money in the world and one day to spend it, I would rent Versailles, live there as if I’ve always lived there, and bring my friends as my guests. No question about it, I would take over Versailles.

The furnishings in the main rooms were French, not country French, city French. I called Ambazac “my Versailles with contact paper”-the way Marie Antoinette

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would have lived if she had made it to America. A very formal house. Once a woman came into the living room and looked at the damask-skirted tables, the antique screen, the Chinese porcelains, and asked, “Who died hPYP?” Rrloar ca;rl T ahnnld hn,,P ane~.raraA ‘IT n c the —.._.,. ~.ŻbŻa ..Ż.Ż .,..~…

.aŻ… Żaa~ţ,vavu, i.vuao ua~. Sixteenth. “

Edgar’s office was in a large alcove at the top of the front stairs. I did not have an office and kept my things on a windowsill outside the living room. Later we converted a downstairs guest room into an office for Edgar-with a pretty love seat for me by the telephone.

But Ambazac dramatized what happens in the entertainment world when your standard of living shoots up along with your career. We now had a huge mortgage, major taxes, a bill of twentysix thousand 1974 dollars for ren-ovations, plus a new roof. A house like that requires a pool man, a gardener, and two in help in the house. As my career accelerated, in addition to the governess, I eventually needed two secretaries, a full-time accountant, and a public-relations man.

Safety also became a worry and expense. I had begun to receive threatening crank letters, and every public person knows these cannot be ignored. It takes only one nut to put a bullet through your head. Edgar and I bought pistols and learned to use them on a range in Las Vegas, and to this day when I go out, my gun is with me. At Ambazac we put up electric gates, outside beams, and indoor beams.

Within three months of moving into the house, our expenses were eight thousand dollars a week-and growing. My only regular income was Hollywood Squares at $750 a week and an occasional guest-hosting on Carson at $1,000