“But this is my last attempt,” Norm made it clear. “No more getting jerked around. If it doesn’t work this time, that’s it.”
I quit the Largo job and went home to soak my feet, then to Ardmore to get Mark. Norm left his “wrecked-up” crawl space and, just before New Year’s 1962, he moved in and John moved out. Our friend J. Martene Pettypool was still renting the unheated spare room out back. Mark and I had a fine time racing around with Tiki, his curly-haired puppy, taking him on excursions to the nearby park, away from the heavy traffic that flowed through the San Fernando Valley, and to a larger park in Beverly Hills, where we flew kites. Or tried to. One day as I was running along in shorts, trying to get the kite to catch the air, a passing male motorist who was watching me appreciatively cruised headlong into a tree.
Norm didn’t take part in these trips to the parks. He slept every day until after four, when the sun was going down behind the mountains of Beverly Glen. For the first few weeks, he had a job in a Westwood bookstore, but he overslept so many times, he was fired. His father, Kibe, wrote to him, saying that just as fathers in the old days gave their firstborn sons farms when they got married, he was sending Norm a hundred dollars a month until he got on his feet. It was a big help, but not enough to pay rent, utilities and phone, gasoline, and buy groceries. Norm halfheartedly looked for work, but sleeping past four limited his success.
It was lonely for me having no adult to talk to all day. Mark was a great kid, but he was just past three and I grew very hungry for adult conversation. Evenings, on the other hand, were great fun, with Mark and Norman drawing, and J. and I playing double solitaire, a lightning-fast game at which J. was a whiz. Sometimes we all played “I Doubt It”—a card game in which each player proclaims the winning cards he’s holding. If the other players think he’s lying, they say, “I Doubt It!”
But Norm—ever the man of integrity—always lost. Every time he tried to lie, he unconsciously brushed his hair back with his hand.
I liked that about him.
CHAPTER TEN
“Those who didn’t care to wait would tend to drift off, stoned or otherwise, and the Test would settle down to the pudding.”
—TOM WOLFE, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Mark astonished me with his vocabulary, his perception, his beauty, his…everything. I was happy beyond belief to have him with me again and did my best to keep up with his unbridled energy. The fence around our backyard was made of redwood planks, spaced just right for his small feet to climb up. I warned him repeatedly not to go too high and came running from the kitchen a few times to grab him just before he toppled over. I wasn’t big on discipline or “tough love,” but one day I saw him going up and thought, I’ll let him learn from experience. Sure enough, he went ass over teakettle and started howling. I went around to the sidewalk and rescued him, scared but unhurt.
“Li’l Mama,” he said to me, “dat wan’t fun.” And he never did it again.
Life and gravity have a way of teaching us what we need to know, and in those years, I scaled a few forbidden fences and took a few hard falls myself. And it wan’t fun.
Mervyn Nelson was directing The Crawling Arnold Revue—Jules Pfeiffer’s one-act, followed by a musical revue—at a large Hollywood theatre, and I asked if I could try out. He had no inkling I could sing or dance but reluctantly agreed to let me come make a fool of myself. Well, I blew his ears off, if I do say so, and he cast me as Miss Sympathy, a social worker hired by snooty parents to cure their maladjusted son, Arnold, who comes home from work every day, puts down his briefcase, falls to all fours, and starts crawling. Miss Sympathy opts to crawl along with him, and of course, love blossoms. The second half of the show featured songs and sketches from the famous New York club Upstairs at the Downstairs, several numbers by the very clever Portia Nelson. A great show with two extra perks: I got to join the stage actors union, Actors’ Equity Association, which was a big deal, and I lost seven pounds just from dancing! The costumer put Miss Sympathy in a beautiful blue silk frock—size six! I was so small, my head looked like a pumpkin on a stalk. But stunning! On the downside, both I and Jered Barclay, who was playing Arnold, got water on the knee from crawling and had to wear knee pads.
Many days I took Mark to rehearsal because Norm was still sleeping. Mark sat in the wings on a high stool, watching the proceedings, until our lunch break, when I’d take him home to Norm, who would watch him until I came home at six. I was earning enough to keep the household functioning and having more fun than I’d had in years. We opened with high hopes for the show. The next morning, a review in the L.A. Times began: “Intimations of disaster played like summer lightning around last night’s opening of The Crawling Arnold Review, as the curtain was delayed twenty, then thirty, then almost forty minutes.”
Alas, I’ve forgotten why we were so late with the curtain. Some last-minute trouble. And Hollywood wasn’t ready for such an offbeat evening. A short play followed by a revue? What was this? Neither fish nor fowl. We ran only a few weeks and then I was out of a job again. But hey, I was a size six! For a while. My next job was another waitressing gig at Wil Wright’s Ice Cream Parlor. Forty flavors. Twenty toppings. Two little macaroons with each order. One dollar an hour plus tips and all the ice cream I could eat. I sampled every variation of sundae possible, my favorite being black walnut with raspberry topping. After two weeks, I advanced from a size six red-and-white-striped Wil Wright’s pinafore to a size eight. Then to a size ten. Then a twelve. I was heading for a size thirteen when I quit. The tips weren’t good enough and the ice cream was too good. One night, I was the only waitress serving a private birthday party with twenty mothers and their children that lasted over two hours. The bill was over two hundred dollars, and they didn’t leave a tip. Not a red cent! Now, that can hurt a hardworking waitress’s feelings. Make her feel bad. Make her cry. Make her want to dump them in the cream vat.
I played the mother of the drowned boy in The Bad Seed, for which I received a glowing review saying I had a range that “covered a gamut of emotions from pleading to crowing” or something edifying like that. Then I played a tipsy wife in another John Hayes and Paul Lewis film, The Grass Eater, and then I played Poochie, a deranged girl who lives in a junkyard, prostituted by the yard’s owner, who sends men to her little wreck of a trailer.
“Why not?” she says when asked to service them. “It only takes five minutes.”
At last, I was no longer playing a waitress. I was playing a crazy whore! Hurrah!
John cast Norman as a lost soul who also lives in the wrecking yard, and he had several difficult, excellently acted scenes. This strange independent film is now called Five Minutes to Love, and Walk the Angry Beach is now called Hollywood after Dark. They can both be found on Netflix.com and in Hollywood at Sinister Cinema, along with Angel’s Flight—the film noir performance I’m most proud of—which is often included in those wonderfully gritty film noir retrospectives.
And speaking of things getting gritty…
Norman had altogether stopped bathing, brushing his teeth, and shampooing his hair. I was baffled by this. He’d always been a slob, but this was way beyond normal slovenliness. We’d had sex exactly twice since getting back together, and now I couldn’t stand to be in the same bed with him. He slept in the living room, leaving a brown smudge on the arm of the sofa. That man went eight months without bathing, shampooing, or brushing his teeth! J. Martene Pettypool moved out, unable to deal with the inescapable odor. An actor I was working with at Theatre East dropped out of our scene when he learned I was married to “Pig Pen.”
“Norm, why are you doing this?” I asked. “Why would you go out of your way to make yourself so physically repulsive?”
“I want to find out who values me for my inner self,” he said, “no matter what my exterior is like.”
Well, I valued him for his inner self, but who could get close to it, for God’s sake?
“What is it you want?” I asked. “Do you need to
go off by yourself for a while?”
“I don’t know,” he told me, his eyes dull and bleak. “I can’t think straight.”
Now, there’s a news flash. Clearly, he was suffering some sort of breakdown and our marriage was circling the drain again. It broke my heart to see him with Mark, who accepted him inside and out. During those difficult months, Norman created a marvelous cartoon painting on a huge piece of hardboard, an extravaganza of nursery-rhyme characters, and Mark adored it. I wish I could say I still have it, but it was lost in one of my innumerable moves.
John Hayes and I had been scrupulous about keeping our relationship on the set strictly professional, but desperate for help, I asked him to have dinner at our house one night. Norm was fidgety and sullen through the meal, then left the table and disappeared somewhere in the house. I put Mark to bed and sat at the table with John, feeling completely despondent.
“I’ve missed you,” he said, and it took my breath away to hear it.
“I’ve missed you, too, John.”
“Honey,” he said, “this situation is sick. I want you and Mark to come back with me.”
“And Mark?”
“Yes. And soon. Will you?”
“Yes.” I nodded, but it tore my heart in two to think about telling Norman.
When I did tell Norman, he tightly said, “I knew it was only a matter of time. Do what you want, but I’m through. You’ll never suck me in again.”
I mentioned getting a divorce, but Norman didn’t see any reason for that.
“Why bother?” he said. “I’m not going to get married again.”
But I wasn’t comfortable leaving it like that. I contacted Judge Caldwell again, and because Norman and I had actually gotten married a month before my divorce from Tom was final, he was able to make it an annulment. As Norman carried a box down the stone walk, moving out, John was coming up the walk, on his way in. They exchanged a curt nod.
“Good luck!” Norm muttered bitterly.
Norman made his exit from my life for a while, but you can pick up his story in Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He joined up with Ken Kesey and the chemically adventurous Merry Pranksters. In fact, Norman drew that beautiful, iconic “Can you pass the Acid Test?” poster (though he seldom receives credit for having created it), which is still seen in college dorm rooms, head shops, and tattoo parlors.
“Norman, zonked, sitting on the floor, is half frightened, half ecstatic…,” wrote Wolf. “The Prankster band started the strange Chinese cacophony of its own, with Gretch wailing on the new electric organ. Norman got up and danced, it being that time.”
Wait a minute…Norman? Got up and danced?
When I next saw Norm, years later, he told me he went on fifty LSD trips—forty-nine delicious and one really horrific, after which he quit. But for him, it was apparently a trip worth taking. He’d become patient and tranquil. And clean. He’d learned to value himself, inside and out.
“Keep your eyes on the highway!” John shouted. “Just in case we have to make a crash landing!”
He had taken flying lessons at Van Nuys Airport, gotten his license, and bought a little Cessna, but he was not a very confident pilot. The same dynamic held true for our relationship, as it turned out. To him, “back with me” meant Mark and I living a block away in a little unfurnished apartment at the rear of a two-story house. This felt like a double-cross to me. I slept on a mattress in the living room and put Mark in the bedroom in an actual bed, with a phonograph beside it, so he could play his favorite record, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, while falling asleep. I went back to Wil Wright’s, shuffling babysitters. The tips were still spare, but I ix-nayed the ice cream and got down to a size ten. Then the people in the front house offered me a waitress job at their coffee shop on Hollywood Boulevard. Whenever I returned from a day off, Fran, the short-order cook, would remark, “Oh, kid, you shoulda been here yesterday. We were busier’n catshit!”
Oh, baby, I was prancin’ in high cotton!
I kept that job a few months, until Mark came down with chicken pox, and the doctor quarantined us for a week. The couple fired me! Astonished, I scrambled for another job, which was several desperate weeks in materializing. (And would you believe it? Six years later, when I was on Broadway in a play with Dustin Hoffman, this couple came backstage to see me, sweet as pie, and like a dope I was nice to them, but I was thinking, A pox on thee, you putzes!)
I found a position setting type for a small newspaper, putting together articles claiming that the rabble-rousing Abraham Lincoln was part Negro and General Grant was a Jew who’d ruined the South. Desperate as I was, I refused to aid and abet these reactionary fools, so I answered an ad from Upjohn Pharmaceuticals looking for a “Private Secretary to the Regional Manager. Must type and take shorthand.” Well, I’d never studied shorthand, but I convinced the boss I could write longhand really fast. And boy, did I learn to write fast. I kept that job eleven months, earning $95 a week but barely escaping being bored into stupefaction.
The afternoon of November 22, 1963. The boss burst in and announced, “President Kennedy has been assassinated in Dallas!” The entire company gave a joyous cheer. I sat stunned, noticing one dear older woman also sitting there in shock. I went to her desk and we touched hands as the others danced around the room, whistling exuberantly. Having witnessed the civil rights conflict since childhood, I knew that not everyone wanted to believe that all people are created equal. I was aware that not everyone was as inspired and filled with hope as I was when charismatic Kennedy beat out Nixon for the White House, but I would have expected this bigoted response from rednecks, not these Californians with whom I’d had lunch and played cards on breaks. For the first time, I realized what they really were.
A few weeks later, I got cast as the heroine’s sidekick in a television drama called I Make a Circle, You Make a Circle—a sizable part requiring a week’s work. Like most aspiring actors, I’d kept my showbiz ambitions a deep, dark secret from Upjohn, strictly under wraps, certain they would fire me if they knew about it. So I “got the flu” for a week, shot the TV show, then returned to typing out weekly reports and eating lunch with the hatemongers.
I was delighted when John and his cousin, Jay, invited me to share the rent on a big house in Studio City. Mark and I had a large, lovely bedroom, a small bedroom, and a bathroom to ourselves. Jay was very smart, and he and I played word games to our hearts’ content. I enrolled Mark in a little preschool, where the cost was figured according to one’s income. It wasn’t a very good curriculum and he was bored to tears, but for two dollars a day I couldn’t do any better.
“Mother,” Mark asked me one day later that summer, “do I have a father?”
“Of course, sweetheart, everyone has a father,” I replied.
He asked, “Where’s mine?”
The question broke my heart. He hadn’t seen Tom since that day in Pasadena when he was seventeen months old, so of course he didn’t remember. Did I owe it to Mark to try again? Might Tom have softened in the intervening years? I was terribly nervous about calling, but a mother lion will go to any lengths for her cub, and my cub needed me to do this.
“Hello, Tom. How are you?”
“Oh. Hi, babe.” Tom replied nonchalantly.
“Mark has been wanting to enroll in a five-day swimming class at the YMCA,” I forged ahead. “But the class is at nine, and I have to be at work at eight. I was thinking if you took him and then dropped him off at preschool…well, the class is only an hour, and he really wants to learn to swim.”
“Okay,” he said, to my relief, but then added, “As long as it’s only five days.”
So for five days I dropped Mark at Tom’s apartment before eight, and Tom took him to swim class at nine, then dropped him at the little preschool. Surely, Tom would quickly come to love this remarkable child, I thought. After the week was over, Mark could swim, but there was no follow-up from Tom. Mark never asked about his daddy again. He seemed
mollified. Not me. In fact, I was angry.
“Maybe you could just help out with the cost of a better preschool,” I suggested.
“Sure, babe,” he said. “I’d like to. But I know I won’t unless you enforce it legally.”
“I could do that through a process server,” I said.
“Great,” he said. “Do that.” Then he deftly avoided the process server all three times required by law, and that was the end of that.
John had begun going out alone, all but ignoring me, so one night I stopped him at the door and asked, “What’s going on?”
“I’ve been thinking we should loosen the reins,” he said.
Keep your eyes on the highway, kids, in case of a crash landing.
John was shooting another picture—without me—and one night Jay offered to watch Mark so I could visit the set, just to be with people for a while. There was a smart, funny fellow from Chicago, Marty Schlar, also visiting the set, and we started chatting. He invited me to his apartment to have a bite to eat, and I accepted. No hanky-panky, we agreed. And we meant it. In his big one-room studio, we were sitting on the daybed enjoying food and conversation when we heard an odd scrambling on the roof. We looked up and saw a large figure spread-eagled on the skylight, spying down on us. John Patrick Hayes had followed me and managed to climb onto the roof. He was shouting something, but his words were garbled through the glass.
“John! Climb down and come in for something to eat,” Marty called to him, amused.
Moments later, in charged John, full of righteous Irish wrath.
“Rue! Come home. Now!” he demanded, and I followed him home, laughing all the way.
So let’s see…
I was rotting at Upjohn. Tom didn’t give a fig about Mark. John wanted me to loosen the reins, while keeping me haltered. A change was definitely in order, and like an angel from heaven, Mervyn Nelson came out from New York City to visit Theatre East.
My First Five Husbands Page 11