He didn’t.
“Oh, my God, Norm,” I blurted out, “we’ve just gotten me pregnant!”
I had no doubt whatsoever. And God help us, I was right.
CHAPTER NINE
“The variation of light is remarkable.”
—HENRIETTA LEAVITT, MEASURER OF CEPHEID VARIABLE STARS
The female characters in film noir are of two types: the dutiful, chaste, and devoted good girl, or the gorgeous but dangerous dame, who lures men to rack and ruin. The twisting story lines are full of morally ambiguous choices and tragic consequences. Terse dialogue is growled over foreboding background music. The sets are mean streets slick with rain, abandoned warehouses, seedy rooms with neon lights flashing beyond the battered window blinds. Soap opera is like Film Noir Lite, with plots involving lost loves, amnesia, sexual peccadilloes, babies born out of wedlock, double-crossings. Pure-hearted heroines are duped by scoundrels, and vamps stir up romance-based conflicts. I created the soap in my own opera by being dumb as a damn booby and careless as a well-meaning twit.
I tried hard to be a good wife to Norm and a devoted mother for twenty-month-old Mark, cooking, cleaning, washing, and keeping an eye on Mark from the kitchen as he played outdoors. Norm’s mother sent Mark a memory game, and the two of them played it every night, laying out the picture cards facedown in a grid on the living room floor. The trick was to turn up two cards that matched, so you had to remember where you’d put down the first one when you turned up its mate. I still have that game, timeworn but intact. Mark was as good as I was, Norm even better. But Norm was staggeringly brilliant, a walking encyclopedia, a gifted writer and artist. He sang and played guitar. Watching him with Mark, I felt such appreciation and joy. If all had been well, I would have eagerly had his baby. But Norm and I were never really husband and wife. No matter how hard I tried to feel that kind of love for him, it just wasn’t there.
We were like that matching game. If you turn up a card and it doesn’t match—well, damn it, it doesn’t match! I quickly realized it had been wholly unrealistic for me to turn Norm up again, thinking we’d be better suited this time. And having a baby come along just then was unthinkable carelessness. Norm, who was emotionally repressed in the best of circumstances, wouldn’t discuss it. We bantered about music, culture, and art for hours but didn’t have heart-to-heart talks about our feelings or our future. Being a natural slob, adhering to Army regulations was a terrible strain on him, and the route our marriage had traveled thus far added to his tension-filled life. He tried to quit smoking but was always patting one foot or tapping his fingers, and finally he just exploded one night, shouting at me, the veins bulging on his forehead.
“To hell with it,” he said after the eruption. “I’m smoking.”
God knows, we tried to make this marriage work, with our meager emotional resources, but we were both terribly unhappy and scared with this unwanted pregnancy to cope with. I was terrified I’d end up on my own with two babies and didn’t feel remotely capable of handling that. Abortion was illegal at that time, but as our desperation grew, I called a girl I’d met at the Playhouse—we’ll call her Toula—who had confided in me that she’d had several abortions.
“I can take you to the doctor in Tijuana,” she said. “It’ll cost five hundred in cash.”
Dear God! Tijuana? Horrible. Unthinkable. Even if we could come up with the money, I would be risking my life! But in those days, there was no place, no way for me to get a safe abortion. I was past two months pregnant, gripped by morning sickness. Time was of the essence. Then I got a call from a Hollywood agent who’d seen me at the Pasadena Playhouse.
“I’ve got an independent film you’d be ideal for,” she told me.
Principal photography was to start in a week. In Hollywood. A three-hour drive from Tijuana. I called Toula. Her Tijuana doctor said he couldn’t possibly fit me in for another month.
“But I’ll be over three months along by then!” But he wouldn’t take me any sooner.
“I’ll get the money,” Norm said grimly.
I took Mark and Grice to Ardmore on my way to L.A., where I moved in with Toula and her roommate, two gorgeously dangerous dames living in a flat in Westwood Village.
The movie’s producer, Paul Lewis, introduced me to writer/director John Patrick Hayes, a big, handsome Irish guy from New York City. His short film The Kiss had been nominated for an Oscar the year before. John loved my reading of the role—an aspiring actress earning money as a stripper. It was a dark story, full of drama, titled Walk the Angry Beach. There would be no pay. It was non-union, being financed on a shoestring. I had to provide my own costumes, including one for the striptease sequence. With Rit dye and trimmings, I concocted a bikini brief and bra getup with dangling beads that swung furiously as I gyrated. Humiliated at having to strip for a living, the aspiring actress dances more and more frantically and rips off her bra. (Calm down, the camera was behind me, and my breasts were covered with duct tape.) We see in close-up that tears are streaming down her face. John cleared the crew out, all but the cameraman and sound crew and a couple of grips. I had to cry twice in that film. All I had to do was think about Mark, far away in Ardmore, and the tears flowed.
Workdays sometimes went on for eighteen or even a full twenty-four hours. Someone asked John if we ever fell asleep on our feet, and he replied, “No, but we do faint a lot.” Actually, the cameraman did fall asleep once, with his eye against the eyepiece of the camera. After two grueling weeks, we shot a long tracking shot of me walking along Santa Monica Beach in a skimpy turquoise bikini and full-body makeup. I was three months pregnant and horribly insecure, but John was happy with the scene. The next day, however, we learned that the film had come out black. John was using “short ends”—cheap film strips he bought from a guy named Fouat Said. We had to shoot the whole bikini scene over again, and this time it was a cold, miserable day in Santa Monica. As I stood shivering on the clammy sand, I looked up to a bridge over the beach and there stood Norman. He came down and presented me with five hundred dollars he’d borrowed from friends.
“Grice was diagnosed with rabies,” he told me. “We had to put him to sleep.”
“Oh, my God!” I cried. “What about Mark?”
“He has to have rabies shots to be safe. In his stomach. Twice a day for two weeks.”
“Oh, God, my poor baby,” I anguished. “And that poor little kitten. Mark loved him so.”
Norm returned to Denver, and I had three desperately needed days off before shooting the major love scene. Toula gave a party one of those evenings, and while she was serving drinks, she called over her shoulder, “Rue, be a dear and turn on the oven.”
Opening the oven door, I struck a match. Before I could blink, I was blown back several feet against the wall. That vapid little idiot had turned on the gas without lighting it! My face and hands were scorched, my eyebrows almost gone, my lashes sparse and spiky. In shock and searing pain, I waited two hours in the ER while the medics dealt with a little boy who had fallen through a glass door. They treated my first-and second-degree burns, trimmed away the loose skin, and sent me home with painkillers and ointment—and an intimate love scene to shoot in three days. A sexy scene in which my character gets tipsy, dances with the leading man, and ends up in a clench with him on the sofa.
Shooting the scene took most of the night. We covered my peeling red face with makeup, and John arranged to shoot me from angles that masked the damage. When it was over, I told John, “I need a few days off to attend to personal business.”
Then Toula, her roommate, and I drove down to Tijuana.
“You’re past three months,” the doctor said. “You’ll need two procedures. One tonight. Then come back tomorrow morning.”
As he muzzled my face with the anesthetic mask, a whole new dimension of panic separated me from everything I knew. I felt myself shooting far away from earth, spinning out into the cosmos, farther and farther into unending blackness. After what seemed an eter
nity, the doctor woke me and I trudged in incredible pain back to the hotel to lie down. Toula and her roommate went out on the town, and I lay on the bed next to an open window overlooking downtown Tijuana. Outside, a lone, loud trumpet played the same song over and over: “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”
Even in my tossing agony, I appreciated the irony.
The next morning, I returned for another horrifying trip into outer space, then we drove back to Westwood, where I rested for a day and tried to set the whole nightmare aside.
I have deeply regretted having that abortion. But at the time, I felt I had no choice. Occasionally, I add up the years, figuring how old he or she would be. I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself. It’s the one true tragedy in my life. I still mourn that lost child.
Norman’s child.
With only a few more scenes to shoot, I found myself a one-room place in Hollywood. John Hayes and I had been growing increasingly warm under the collar for each other. He was easygoing, blond, blue-eyed, funny, and talented both as a writer and director. I think he liked that I was such a trouper. I went to his apartment to discuss upcoming scenes after work one night, and we talked for hours about the movie, my role, our backgrounds and aspirations. As he saw me to the door, I said, “You know, John, I didn’t really come over tonight to talk about work.”
He smiled and said, “Why did you come over?”
I said, “To see you.”
He closed the door. And opened the door on a serious involvement that would last four years. We had a bit of an engineering problem to overcome. John was six-four and built accordingly, and I’m a petite five-four, but with patience and goodwill—and we had both in abundance—with love, in fact, our spark of desire set off truckloads of Roman candles. We did something I’d never done before. It’s a little embarrassing to relate, but…we sucked each other’s toes. And it was damn sexy. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.
One night, after making love, John got up to leave and panic welled up in me, and for only the second time in my life, I found the courage to confess the dusk panic I’d felt for years.
“Why are you scared?” he asked.
“Because,” I told him, “I just need to know that you’re here.”
And he asked a very insightful question: “Do you need to know I’m here, or do you need me to know that you’re here?”
I realized at once that he was right. That really was my problem and always had been. My father passing me on the porch, Bill Bennett dumping me for being a “dreamer,” Tom abandoning me for whatever reason—as if my existence hinged on their wanting me.
“I’ll be with you tomorrow, Rue,” John told me. “Good night, sweet face.”
And somehow it was all right. I wasn’t scared. A small miracle.
In November, John was offered a job directing a kids’ movie in Tulsa. He cast me in the small role of the mother. No pay, but he could get me fifty bucks a week as script supervisor if I learned to work a stopwatch and make proper script girl notes. We would finish the movie in mid-December, and—joy to the world!—I could spend Christmas with Mark in Ardmore!
We arrived in Tulsa, and John came into my room the next day.
“They fired me,” he said. “I have to go back to L.A.”
“Wh-what?” Shaken and dismayed, I stood there gaping at him.
Then he laughed. “I was only joking, Rue!”
I slapped him. The one and only time I ever slapped anyone. It just flew out of me.
“That. Was not. Funny,” I told him, and he quickly apologized. I consider myself to have a pretty darn good sense of humor, but after the wringer I’d been put through in the last year?
I was in no mood.
Mark had grown by leaps and bounds and was now talking a blue streak. We had a wonderful Christmas together. Another New Year. Now it was 1961, and I was still too woefully short of funds to rent my own place and pay a full-time sitter. John spent Christmas in New York, then dropped by Ardmore with his mother, Kate—a jolly, outgoing Hell’s Kitchen character with a thick New York Irish accent.
John had persuaded Kate to come with him to California, and they offered to share a house with me. But not with Mark. That was my big problem with John. He had two little girls who lived with their mother, and when they visited him, he wasn’t very fatherly. He had a lot of issues from his childhood. Kate had farmed him out to his uncle and grandmother when he was a kid, and at seventeen he’d joined the Navy. When he returned, Kate pointed out a place across the street from her apartment and said, “Why don’t you go see what they’re doing? They seem to be having fun.” It was Irwin Piscator’s acting workshop. John checked it out and hooked up with Ben Gazzara, Tony Franciosa, Shelley Winters, Harry Guardino, and that bunch. He played Cheech on the road in A Hat Full of Rain, then a small role of a cop in the Broadway production of West Side Story, during which time backstage he wrote his movie The Kiss.
I loved John but couldn’t commit to any kind of future with him. If he didn’t want Mark, he couldn’t have me. But I wasn’t financially able to get to New York with Mark, and I sure as hell wasn’t staying in Ardmore. So what to do? After much soul-wringing, I decided to go where I could most likely get work, leaving Mark with Mother.
John, Kate, and I set up housekeeping in a large ranch house in North Hollywood, and I hooked up the latest of my multitudinous waitress jobs. But Kate hated California. She missed her home in Hell’s Kitchen, with the loo in the hallway and boisterous neighbors to gossip with. After four months of too much sunshine, she gave me her recipe for eggplant lasagna and fled back to Manhattan. John and I finished the six-month lease without her, then moved to a little cottage in Beverly Glen Canyon. There was an unheated bedroom built on out back, which we rented for $25 a month to my dear college friend, J. Martene Pettypool. Remember the guy who lost his shoe at Così fan tutte? He was now an escrow real estate officer in Los Angeles. (Where else would you find a one-shoed, piano-playing escrow real estate officer?)
That year I waitressed at four different places, and I don’t know which I hated the most. I hated them all the most. One was a busy restaurant in North Hollywood from which I got fired after working one lunch. “Lack of experience,” the man said. I felt like a fool in that uniform and hairnet, anyway, and I looked like Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun. Next I worked at Chez Paulette, a coffeehouse on Sunset Strip. Max, the owner, played recorded Israeli folk music and hired only actresses to wait tables. The girl I replaced—Sally Keller-man, as I recall—had just gotten a movie role. Everyone in the place was very cool. Hollywood cool. Movieland cool. Max combed his hair like Napoleon and strode around with one hand tucked inside his vest—I swear to God! His mother, Paulette, a volatile Hungarian, was the chef. Once she dropped a fish entrée on the floor, picked it up, angrily slapped it back on the plate, and handed it to me to serve.
While waiting tables at Chez Paulette, I met Mervyn Nelson, a bright, funny New Yorker who had put together revues in the Big Apple and founded Theatre East, an actors’ workshop, in Hollywood. He invited me to join, which I eagerly did. We presented scenes for other members to critique—strictly for our growth and experience as actors, no public audience allowed. It was a great place to keep my acting chops up, and Mervyn and I quickly became fast friends.
One night, J. Martene Pettypool came into Chez Paulette with a friend and stayed to closing. During the course of the evening, they ordered about twelve beers but he whispered to me to charge him only for nine, and I nervously did. Max fired me the next day, which I felt only appropriate. I was embarrassed for cheating but didn’t mind losing the job. Paulette’s patrons were so terribly cool they followed through with minuscule tips. I looked for a bigger, busier place and was hired at the Largo, a huge, popular strip joint on Sunset.
Down, boys—I was hired as a cocktail waitress.
We all had to wear fishnet stockings, dangling earrings, and a strapless leotard with a plunging neckline—as if I had m
uch to plunge for. After four months of racing between the dining room and kitchen in high-heeled stiletto pumps on concrete floors, my feet felt like a six-toed cat with hangnails. I never really learned the difference between a Manhattan and a pink lady, and I loathed the butt-pinching, whiskey sour–swilling atmosphere of the strip house. The patrons weren’t supposed to fondle us cocktail waitresses, but it was an unending battle.
All the while, I ached for Mark and for a family life. John and I were together most of the time, but he never said he loved me. He kept himself conveniently unavailable, blaming his estranged wife for refusing to begin divorce proceedings. Whenever I saw how distant he was with his little girls, I was sad for them. And not a little heartsick for myself.
Having been honorably discharged from the army, Norm was now living beneath a club on Sunset Boulevard. And I mean, beneath it. In a crawl space about five feet high, with a mattress to sleep on, books stacked harum-scarum all over the dirt floor. Once when Mark was visiting, I took him there and they were thrilled to see each other.
“Would you like to live with Norman again?” I asked Mark on the way home.
He said, “Oh, no, Little Mama. His place is too wrecked up.”
Norm wanted us to get back together. We were still married, after all, and he was great with Mark.
“Quit that job at the Largo,” he said to me. “I can’t stand to see you demeaning yourself.”
Boy, no need to preach to this choir!
I boomeranged between sexy, masculine John and intellectual, loving Norm—back and forth like a loony bird. But the deciding factor was all too clear. John said that if I brought Mark to live with me, he’d move out. So be it. Mark needed me, and I needed him. And I couldn’t do it alone. John was out. Norm was in.
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