Early on the first day, he started whistling “Tea for Two.” Not a classic “pucker up and blow” kind of whistle, but a thin sizzy whistle from between his teeth. And not the whole song, mind you, just the first two bars.
“Tea for two, two for tea, me for you, you for me…”
Between his teeth, you see. Over and over and over about nine jillion times.
“Do you know any other songs?” I tactfully inquired, nails digging into my palms.
“Nah, just that one,” he said, and smiled.
“Well, I’ll teach you another one!”
I whistled a few other short ditties, but he couldn’t repeat them. He had no sense of pitch, and by the end of the trip, I had no sense whatsoever, having been rendered brain-dead long before we got back to L.A. At that point, he could have whistled Mozart’s Magic Flute in its entirety, for all I cared. I just wanted to get the hell out of that car and shake loose of Mr. Bucolic.
But he was not so easy to shake loose. He kept calling from time to time but finally got the message, and I never saw him after that.
In May, the nine-month lease on The Hen House was up. Linda bought a place in the Hollywood Hills—a gorgeous four-story house that Lette dubbed “The Castle.” Linda asked Lette to move in as her tenant, but she didn’t invite me, Mark, and the menagerie. And we would have politely declined if she had. I loved them both to bits, but—grow up, kids!—The Golden Girls is a fantasy. Three grown women and a teenage boy are not likely to make good housemates for more than nine tempestuous months. Mark and I happily moved a few blocks up the street to sublet an adorable two-bedroom cottage. It was perfect for us and our little zoo, and Mark stayed with me for the summer, studying “on the street,” as he puts it, with an advanced guitarist friend and jamming with musician pals out in the patio laundry room.
One August day at dusk, I got up from a nap to take the garbage out. The laundry room had a wide sliding glass door that opened onto the patio, and on my way back in, I noticed the light on over the clothes dryer and thought, Oh, that kid. He left the light on in the laundry room. And what’s more, didn’t close the door. Good grief! and headed full steam across the brick patio, stepping down onto the short cement walk, meaning to stride headlong into the laundry room, but instead plunging headlong through the closed glass door in an earsplitting burst of shattering glass, and as I was falling, I thought, Oh, my God, I’ve gone and killed myself!
I landed facedown with one foot impaled on the protruding shards at the bottom of the door and smaller fragments sticking out of me here and there. I felt blood pouring down my face from my forehead. Gingerly feeling around up there, I found a large V-shaped flap of skin hanging down to my eyebrows. I pushed the skin back up to my hairline and held it in place as best I could, carefully pulled my foot upward from the jagged scythe at the bottom of the door, extracted pieces from my hand, elbow, and knee, then limped across the patio, crying out, “Mark! Mark! Call the paramedics!”
Trailing blood, I hobbled to the kitchen, grabbed dish towels, and made tourniquets for my right ankle and instep. Blood was pouring from the severed toes on my right foot. Sickened and faint, I pressed a cold wet rag to my forehead and called Norman Lear.
Now, I just heard several of you say, “What? You’re sitting there practically bleeding to death, and you called Norman Lear?” Well, hell, yes, I called Norman Lear! More than a boss, the man was a friend and father figure to his cast and crew. And he was the only person I knew with the big-time Hollywood clout to get me the finest arthroscopic surgeon in L.A. Which he did.
Fading fast, I told him, “I’ll meet you at Santa Monica Hospital in about half an hour.”
I sat down outside on a chaise lounge so as not to mess up the kitchen any worse. The paramedics arrived, took one look at me, and ordered me to lie down.
“I’m afraid I’ll faint,” I said.
“You will faint if you don’t lie back! You’ve already lost a third of your blood.”
They hooked me up to a blood transfuser and began treating my wounds. Then I was popped into the ambulance. At Santa Monica hospital, we found the emergency room busy with a little boy who had been badly burned, so I had to wait, but Mark was with me, and soon Norman Lear arrived. I was still receiving blood transfusions, but surprisingly, not in a lot of pain. Everywhere I’d been cut was still mostly numb. The surgeon finally rushed in. First, he stitched up my forehead and hand and elbow and knee—ouch—then started on the tendons on my little toes, all of which had been cut clear through and had to be sewn back together. OUCH! I was waxing quite nostalgic for that good ol’ numbness by the time he put my right leg in a cast.
“You’ll need crutches for six weeks,” he told me. “And physical therapy for about a year. I’ll give you some exercises to do on your own, to get some flexibility back into your toes.”
Believe it or not, I was back on the set one week later. The show must go on, kids. Writers explained the leg cast and crutches by saying my husband, Arthur, had backed over my foot with the car. The next four or five shows, I played on crutches, then started the weird experience of shedding the cast, which felt like walking on big plumpy marshmallows. (The hardest part with the crutches was climbing the forty steps up to The Castle for Lette and Linda’s dinner parties.)
Turns out, the laundry room door had been installed without a permit, using substandard glass. The kind that shatters and can slash people to ribbons. Lette had a lawyer friend, Tom Cronin, who filed a lawsuit on a contingency basis, and after the best part of three years, the case got to court. The owners’ lawyer was a big man with a forceful manner. Tom was a little milquetoast fellow, soft-spoken, stumbling over his presentation. I thought, Oh, brother…But Tom won hands-down, and I was awarded $30,000 in damages, which didn’t seem like a whole lot when I sadly realized I’d never dance Les Sylphides again. I applied myself rigorously to getting my foot to work as normally as possible, but that poor little tootsie—the same one that had never quite recovered from the cocktail waitress job at the Largo—requires a half-size larger shoe than my pretty little left foot. As for the forehead scar, the surgeon did a great job; it doesn’t even show anymore. Besides, I usually wear those adorable bangs.
By November, I was walking normally again, performing in Maude with gusto. It’s not easy to get through life without injuries—internal or external—and I’ve acquired my quota, but they’re just battle scars, mostly attributable to my own dumb mistakes. If I hadn’t been pissed off at Mark for leaving the dryer light on, I wouldn’t have charged hell-bent-for-leather into that glass door with such energy.
Mea culpa, all you saints. Now lay off.
There was a prop guy on the Maude crew—Luis from Rio—with whom I’d exchanged pleasantries from time to time. In his midthirties, tall, lean, and muscular, he had dark, snapping eyes and a teasing smile. He had a nice manner, full of fun. Sometimes he would stop by where I was watching rehearsals and we’d have a laugh together.
One day, Bea observed our exchange, and after Luis walked away, she turned to me, and said, “Really, Rue!”
“Oh, really yourself, Bea!” I laughed. “I like him. Even if he is just a prop man. He’s still fun to flirt with. And he has an interesting story.”
Born into a wealthy Rio family, Luis had been sent by his father to Hollywood to learn the film business and had brought with him his fiancée, also from Rio. They shared a nice little two-bedroom apartment, but she was a lot younger than he, and after a few months in Hollywood, she broke off the engagement. This threw her family into an uproar, but Luis pacified everyone by promising to continue to look after her, pay her bills, and be her guardian. They slept in separate bedrooms, and she was dating other people when Luis and I met.
He was quite smart and ambitious, aiming to become a producer. And also quite funny. But nobody I’d want to hook up with, except for fun and games. Luis taught me a little Portuguese and a fabulous Thanksgiving turkey recipe he’d gotten from his family’s cook. He w
as as talented in the kitchen as he was in the bedroom. The first night we slept together, he sat up on his knees in bed, gazed down at me, and pronounced, “Now you are my voman!”
I swear to God he did. But I didn’t laugh. He was completely serious. This was one macho Brazilian. I wasn’t his voman, but we kept dating off and on, and I made his turkey recipe for a Thanksgiving party at my house.
Mark went to Oklahoma for Christmas, while I still had one last episode of Maude to complete before the holidays. As we gathered around the table for final notes one afternoon, our producer, Rod Parker, remarked casually, “Oh, Rue, I ran into someone who knows your ex-husband, Tom Lloyd. She said he was in a terrible accident and almost burned to death.”
That slammed me against the wall. First the name, and then the news.
“Tom Lloyd? Are you sure? What kind of accident?”
“A car fire or something. Would you like his number?”
“Yes…yes, I would,” I said, thinking, A car fire. Oh, God.
I tried to focus on notes, but all I could see when I closed my eyes was that gorgeous face. A face I still loved. After all, I saw it every day on my son. The thought of Tom being burned was heart-sickening. I called him the minute I got home, barely breathing when he answered.
That voice.
“Well, hello,” he said. “What a pleasant surprise. After all these years.”
He said that, yes, he’d been in a car fire about a year ago. Driving from a lady friend’s place in Pasadena to his apartment in Hollywood, disgruntled over the relationship and thinking of ending it, he smelled smoke. The driver’s seat suddenly burst into flames that engulfed him. He pulled over and ran out—on fire—trying to climb the fence at the side of the freeway, out of his mind with terror and agony. A passing motorist stopped and wrapped him in a blanket to put the fire out. He regained consciousness in the hospital, both ears burned off, extensive burns on his face and torso, his right arm so damaged it never completely recovered. He’d spent most of the year in the hospital, undergoing treatments and surgeries, with more skin grafts to go.
“I’d like to take you to dinner tomorrow evening,” he said, adding, “Don’t be surprised at how I look.”
The next night, I was shaking as I opened the door. Oh, my God, people. Violins swelled. Mark’s father. Still gorgeous. Noticeably older, but still handsome as hell. He’d grown a brown and gray mustache and beard to disguise the scars, but his eyes were the same brooding hazel eyes I’d fallen in love with, minus the long lashes.
“You look wonderful,” I said, embracing him carefully. “I wish Mark was here. He’s in Ardmore for Christmas.”
“Well, I’d like to see him when he gets back,” said Tom. “Ready to go?”
We went to dinner, and I disgraced myself, weeping at the table. I couldn’t help it. My heart was so full.
“Rue. My God,” Tom said in annoyance. “You’re ruining our dinner.”
God knows—and I knew!—I was behaving like a ninny, and I was excruciatingly embarrassed, but my emotions were simply on cruise control.
“Rue, I’m enrolling in this seminar called EST,” he told me. “Maybe you should take it, too. It’s like a Zen-influenced workshop that takes you from personal weakness to powerful ‘beingness.’ They say it can transform your life.”
It sounded like something I’d find interesting, so I went with him to the EST seminar the following week. It covered, as I recall, one long weekend for about twelve hours a day. Or maybe it was only ten hours and seemed like twelve. In his book Fear and Loathing in America, Hunter S. Thompson harshly described it thusly: “Erhard Seminars Training (EST), a pricey, psychobabbling series of long and demeaning behavior-modification sessions that preached the virtue of selfishness.”
The leader also put us through exercises I’d done years before in acting classes, such as imagining a huge flower, with me the size of a bee, exploring it. Much of the material had been taken from Eastern philosophies and reworded in contemporary English, so it was new to many in the huge class of maybe two hundred people, who asked incessant questions and argued nonstop with the leader, annoying me no end. Tedious. Boring. We weren’t allowed to have a drink of water or go to the bathroom for—oh, God, hours on end.
The first night was over very late, so Tom and I went home with friends of his who lived nearby, since we had to return to the next morning’s meeting very early. We shared a small sofa bed. I’d entertained a stray thought or two, but he turned on his side, away from me, and I got the message: no touchy, no feely. The second day, the leader took us through a “Truth Process” to the “Danger Place.” Many in the class went flat to pieces. One man threw himself down in the aisle near me in a screaming fit and had to be carried out, and I was half tempted to follow suit.
Finally, everyone had to report to a counselor to be asked, “Did you get it?”
That was the big EST secret, “Did you GET it?”
I said, “Oh, yeah. I got it.”
There were smaller one-night seminars, and I signed up for two: “Be Here Now,” which I actually found very helpful, the idea being that we should live in the here and now, which is all we really have. And “Sex,” which included childbirth—with a film. For me, this was excruciating. I could barely sit through it. My childbirth experience had been so painful, both physically and emotionally, and the man who was responsible for it was right there in the same room. It brought it all back. I was shaken. On the way home, he was all smiles, in fine spirits, unable to comprehend my being so undone, and I was ashamed—yes, ashamed—to tell him why. That I still loved him, that I longed for him to love Mark, that his rejection of both of us never stopped aching. I couldn’t explain it. I was struggling to understand it myself. Maybe it’s like the way a baby duck “imprints” upon hatching, latching onto whomever he sees first. If it’s the mama duck, fine, but if the baby duck’s first sight is the farmer’s wife, he follows her around until he’s grown up. But even a baby duck grows up. When would I? (Quack?)
Tom didn’t come by to see Mark after the holidays, but I went to the hospital while Tom was having more skin grafts, taking him home-baked goodies. He seemed glad to see me and was an obvious favorite of the nurses, joking and laughing. He was always good company for anyone not in love with him. For my birthday in February, he brought me a big box of twelve wineglasses, and I again burst into tears, which made him impatient. He didn’t understand what it meant to me—he’d given me something.
“Baby Rue,” said Lette, shaking her head over the whole thing. “I want you to see my therapist. She’s about to retire, but you can get in twice a week for the next few months. She’s phenomenal.”
Lette was right. This woman was phenomenal, calling a spade a spade, more on-the-mark than any human being I’d ever met. Whereas I could always find an excuse for the people who behaved badly, she would come straight out and call them shits. No ifs, ands, or buts. I stayed with her until she retired, and I did begin to see things more clearly. Oh, there would be a few more hair-raising experiences with men, to be sure, but she planted the seed of good judgment that, over time, would blossom into a healthier and healthier plant.
See how versatile I am? From baby duck to budding flower in just three paragraphs.
As the winter drew to a close, good old Luis and I took a trip to Lake Tahoe to spend three days learning to ski. Actually, we learned how not to ski, thanks to Fritz, the bunny hill Nazi. (Hals und Bein brechen, Fritz!) Luis went home with a wrenched shoulder, I with a twisted knee. Later that spring, Luis actually proposed marriage, and though I thoroughly enjoyed his company, I was never really serious about the relationship. I broke off with him, although we remained friendly, and I have to give my Latin lover an A. Oh, yeah, a big Brazilian A for Mr. “Now you are my voman!” Which still makes me smile.
Also that spring, I got to re-create the delectable Fay Precious—that role I loved when I did Who’s Happy Now? Off Broadway years earlier. PBS did a divine film of the pla
y, starring John Ritter, Betty Garrett, and Albert Salmi, along with Alice Ghostly and some other wonderful character actors. We shot it in a forgotten, dusty little town up in the Mojave Desert that was ideal for Sunray, Texas. It was a glorious experience, took about two weeks, done on various locations—not sets, but real houses. You should see it. I’m telling you, it’s edible.
At the end of my second season on Maude, I was making $2,500 a show. (What is that? $60,000 a year?) A nice step up from the first season. I’d hired Jean Stapleton’s agent, because Jean was a big star and one of the nicest people I’d ever met, so I figured she’d have a nice agent. Not that a “nice” agent is necessarily a good agent, but apparently this guy had just the right amount of pit bull in him. He negotiated my third-season contract to jump to $4,000 a show, and I knew Maude was going to run a few more years, with automatic raises every year. So it finally made sense on paper to drop anchor in California and buy a house.
PHOTO INSERT 2
First toe shoes, 1947. (Mother made the tutu.)
With big John Hayes in the yard of our North Hollywood rental house, 1961. He’s trying to look stern.
The Italian, me, Mark, and Sandy, Christmas, 1969. Fort Lee, New Jersey.
With Dustin Hoffman during Jimmy Shine, Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 1969.
Lette as Billie Dawn, me as The Blue Fairy, and Linda as Carmen Miranda at Linda’s birthday party. I borrowed the Miranda drag from the Maude costumer!
With Dabney Coleman and Jack Gilford in Apple Pie, 1978.
My First Five Husbands Page 21