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My First Five Husbands

Page 22

by Rue McClanahan


  John Wayne with Conrad Bain and me on Maude, 1977.

  One of our early publicity shots for The Golden Girls, 1985. Me, Bea Arthur, Betty White, and Estelle Getty (Blanche, Dorothy, Rose, and Sophia).

  “But you’ll be in the book!” Emmy acceptance speech, 1987.

  Me with “the fifth golden girl,” our marvelous director Terry Hughes.

  Betty and I dressed for our roles in CATS in a Golden Girls segment. Wish I still had that costume!

  Bill and Marie, taken above my back forty acres in Encino.

  With Buster Big Balls in my Encino living room, 1992. Some cat, huh?

  School let out for the summer, Mark went to Oklahoma, and I started house hunting for something comfy and cozy with a good music studio for Mark. The perfect place popped up on Doheny Drive in Hollywood, just above Sunset Strip. My dad came out, remodeled Mark’s studio and bedroom, and built a beautiful wooden fireplace façade—his own design—in the living room. He also started replacing all the plastic water pipes under the house with copper pipes, but we had some planks stacked outside the garage, and some inspector came by, asking, “Can I see your permit?”

  Oops.

  Bill had no permit, and to make matters worse, that section of town didn’t allow copper pipes, only plastic, and we also had to change the garage door back to its original form, even though it had been altered by a previous owner. Mad as all hell at the dumb California laws, Bill finished the work and returned to Oklahoma, where things made sense.

  At the garden nursery to buy plants for our swell new house, I saw a workman about to heave a half-grown kitten into the alley and called out, “Stop! I’ll take that cat!” A black-and-white longhair with a black Charlie Chaplin mustache, Celestine was pure sweetness. Sadly, dear Grover had recently died during surgery for an old injury. Dammit. But he had three good years with us, finally knowing that he was loved, the big round-eyed sweetie.

  Before Lette met Jack, she had had a brief fling with a charming Greek realtor. Early forties, six foot two, big head of thick, dark hair, brown eyes, well-built. A mite weak in the chin, but he camouflaged it with a nicely manicured beard. Some people thought he looked like Dean Martin, but I thought he was more of a poor man’s Perry Como. Being in residential real estate, he dressed like a high roller, and I must say, he did look mighty good in suits. The Greek remained on the Castle dinner party guest list, and as you may have guessed, one thing led to another, as one thing is inclined to do. Especially when that one thing is little ol’ me.

  So buckle up, folks. We’re about to go for a rather jolting ride.

  The first time The Greek squired me to dinner, late in the summer of 1975, he took charge in a glad-handing sort of way. He knew the place, and they knew him. I was impressed with how he handled himself. It’s nice when someone is genuinely proud and happy to have you on his arm. The conversation was not especially scintillating. He wasn’t witty, but he was high-spirited, so we laughed a lot. We started going to Lette’s soirees together, though he always got sleepy and wanted to leave before I was ready. He also went home from work every afternoon for a nap. For a grown-up, he sure needed a lot of sleep.

  One afternoon, he came over to my house and totally missed his nap.

  The Greek was masterful in bed—not tender or especially original, but he got the job done, performing with gusto. One afternoon, we had sex five times in a row. Five! We were both amazed at ourselves. The man obviously loved sex, which gave us something in common, though he had one move that always reminded me of those mechanical oil drills that seesaw relentlessly on the Oklahoma fields. Nonetheless, I’ll give the man a B for bumptious enthusiasm.

  We had a good time folk-dancing in downtown L.A. He knew all the Greek dances, and I picked them up quickly. (Folk-dancing can be a blast, although the Greek dances always featured the men, the women confined to waving around decorously while the guys jump and stomp.) He also took me to visit his hometown in West Virginia, an economically deprived place where his relatives lived simply with their big families. He and I got along fine and there was a spark there, but I didn’t find him smart or interesting enough to ignite much fire, dammit. But he was the only bull in the pasture at the moment, and I figured, hey—you don’t have to go completely gaga over every guy you date, do you? (No, Rue, but you sure as hell don’t have to marry them, either!)

  As we got to know each other, I began to get intimations that he was much more politically conservative than I, voting not for the common good or the big picture but for the best immediate advantage to his business, which surprised me, because he came from a poor immigrant family who ran a little grocery. He’d gone to college on a basketball scholarship, then joined the Marines, and from there moved to Hollywood with the goal of becoming an actor, but he had no natural talent. Ambition, yes—but the bells, he did not ring.

  “My father passed away when I was in high school,” he said with tears in his eyes. “My mother didn’t speak English, and I remember watching her carry heavy boxes of beer, working in that store until she died.”

  Relating this story always made him cry. I should have realized then that he was scared of being poor and was determined to have money, because I had the same fear and the same goal. I had started Mark’s college fund when he was four and always saved whatever money I could, not wanting ever to be old and poor and dependent. Being young and poor is okay, being old with money is okay, but being old and poor? Not okay. The difference between me and the Greek, as it turned out, was that I planned to earn my money, not marry it.

  In the spring of 1976, while Mark was finishing his senior year and I was spending my Maude hiatus in Ohio doing a play, a taxi pulled up in front of the house and a guy called out to Mark, “Is this 1201 Doheny Drive?”

  “Yes,” Mark shouted back.

  The guy crowed, “FAR OUT!” and ran to get his bags.

  It was my Levi’s-dropping pal, Brad “Isn’t it a lovely day?” Davis. He’d just finished shooting Sybil, in which he played the boyfriend of at least a few of Sally Field’s several personalities. Mark put him in the front bedroom, and they stayed fast friends for the next sixteen years.

  An amateur theatre group in Hollywood was doing a meticulous six-month rehearsal of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, which came off very well for a non-union play, and The Greek performed relatively well in it. He played the self-made neighbor of the cherry orchard’s financially depleted owners. His character makes repeated offers to buy the property, both to save these dreamers from ruin and to cut down the old orchard for commercial development. The family is finally forced to sell, and the play ends, you may recall, with the sound of heavy axes felling the grief-stricken family’s beloved orchard. I could have taken it as an omen. (I know, I said I don’t believe in omens, but this one was the exception.)

  “We need to get married,” The Greek abruptly announced in September. “If we don’t get married now, we’re going to drift apart.”

  I stood there with the phone to my ear, feeling cornered. The old panic loomed. Drift apart? What’s that supposed to mean? He was going to dump me? I would be alone? But wait, wait! I thought I was over that “I must have a man or I’ll die!” neurosis.

  “I’m just…I don’t think…I’m not ready for marriage,” I finally said.

  “I need a commitment from you, Rue,” he said. “Now.”

  Oh, dear. C’mon, Rue, baby…say the words…Let me think it over. You can do it!

  “I need to think it over!” I blurted out, and hung up the phone.

  Hurray! Therapy über alles! For the moment.

  I couldn’t think. Frozen with panic, I paced the room. What to do? What to do? Tom doesn’t love me. I am alone. Now this man will drift away, and I’ll be even more alone. I felt myself getting stampeded over the cliff again. Why didn’t I call a therapist? Why didn’t I call Lette, who would have given me a good swift kick? Nothing entered my mind except ending the unbearable panic, so I called The Greek back.

 
; “Okay. Yes. I’ll marry you,” I said. And the panic evaporated on the spot.

  I wasn’t happy, but I was enormously relieved. Anything was better than that quagmire of abandonment and desperation. Heck, it won’t be so bad, I told myself. He has a lot of nice qualities, I can make it work, blah blah blah. Cleopatra, Queen of Denial.

  The Greek found a pretty house at the end of a cul-de-sac in Studio City: three bedrooms downstairs, a master suite upstairs, large pool, spacious fenced yard for all our animals, including his Irish setter. There was a large roofed back patio where Mark’s groups could get together to jam. Not as suitable as the soundproof studio my dad had built him, of course, and Mark was not pleased to leave Doheny Drive, but once again, had I consulted him? Not that I recall.

  Throughout all those years, Mark had no notion of my panic problem. He probably figured I wanted to marry The Greek. Mark was funny and intelligent, into music and art, while The Greek was into football games and real estate, so they had zilch in common. For that matter, The Greek and I had about as much in common as a blowfish and a baby’s butt.

  I sold my house to make my half of the down payment on the new place while The Greek used his real estate savvy to avoid spending any of his own cash. I arranged for the personal portion of my income from Maude to go into our joint account, putting the larger portion into my pension plan in the loan-out corporation I’d formed in 1975, when I was finally starting to pull down some real money. The Greek had acted as witness to the signing of those papers, in fact, just weeks before he called with the ultimatum about getting married!

  With only six weeks to plan the wedding, we had a gazebo built in the backyard. I wrote a folk song called “I Gave My Love” for Lette to sing with Jack on keyboard and a beautiful ceremony to be read by Bea, Adrienne, Bill, Conrad, Hermione Baddeley, Norman Lear, Mark, Brad, The Greek, and me. He invited every relative and friend he had in the continental United States, from West Virginia to Chicago—about three hundred people—and I invited another hundred. Andrew Greenhut flew out from New York. Bill drove out from Ardmore, bringing Marie, the black widow from Mother’s beauty salon. (Yippee.)

  The day of the wedding, his relatives brought over suitcases of Greek food for the reception (though I’d ordered quite enough from the caterers, along with shmancy table settings). I wore a Grecian gown designed by Rita Riggs, the Maude costumer—a soft lavender silk confection with a circular headdress and veil. (I still have it, though I’ve yet to find the right occasion to trot it out again. Maybe some Halloween.) The Greek was in a tux, looking oh so suave. Mark bought his first tux, a light blue one (hey, the seventies, right?), setting off his shoulder-length wavy blond locks. Even Brad was in a tux, with long, tousled hair, and I can still see the two of them, heads together, whispering and laughing.

  Yep, this shindig was some kind of spectacular. A gorgeous wedding, in contrast with the marriage to follow. It was like one of those opulent display cakes that are actually just tons of sugar frosting and a plastic bride and groom stuck on top of a stack of empty hat boxes. The Greek had a pal of his video the whole affair, which went on until well after dark. Champagne flowed. Norman Lear joined in the Greek circle dance. Bea Arthur, somewhat looped, regaled everyone with an impromptu solo. The Greek’s relatives began smashing the expensive rented plates on the patio until someone stopped them. Some little weekly paper printed a large article, with oodles of pictures, and The Greek, having snagged a minor celebrity, bought forty copies. (And he watched that star-studded wedding video incessantly until, to my secret glee, he accidentally taped over it with an episode of Starsky and Hutch or some such thing.)

  A week later, the Greek relatives finally went home and we left for our honeymoon in Carmel, a lovely community up the coast, one of the most desirable places in California. I remember our first evening there, walking with him at sunset on the idyllic beach, thinking, Oh, Lord God in Heaven…I don’t love this man.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Turn him loose, Edna, that mule’s gonna buck.”

  —PERCY KILBRIDE

  I’m not much of a cook. Sort of hit-and-miss. Without an Italian around to keep me on my toes, it’s up for grabs. Once I took a Chinese cooking class with The Greek and Bea Arthur (“The Greek and Bea Arthur”—there’s a song title for you) and learned all sorts of complicated and time-consuming dishes, each of which required unending chopping and mincing. Shortly afterward, the Greek and I threw a dinner party for twelve, featuring six of the dishes we’d learned. The day of the party, while he was at the office, I started chopping, mincing, slicing, and generally hacking up the mountain of ingredients. By late afternoon when he came home to help, I was feverish, my fingers were sore, I had cut myself twice, and I had learned to swear in Chinese: “Dam fok hung cheet!” I felt as if I’d been dragged full tilt behind a sampan through rough water. That was the first and last Chinese dinner party I ever gave. Or ever intend to.

  Living with The Greek came about as easily as the chop chop Chinese cooking.

  Deeply enamored of Barbra Streisand, he came home every afternoon and put on one of her albums, lowering the living room lights, stretching out soulfully on the sofa, the house filling and overflowing with her mellifluous rendition of “People”—his top favorite, which he played incessantly. I had liked Streisand up till then. But having her in my house day after day, week after week—darlings, had it been Beethoven or Bach, okay, but even people who need people don’t need to hear about it every damn day! I walked around the house with my hair hurting.

  Before long, I began to feel that The Greek was using my celebrity to impress people. He insisted I go with him to real estate functions, and I felt like he wanted me there solely as a jewel in his cap. I tried to tell him nicely at first, “Honey, I’m a fish out of water at those things. I’m sorry, but I just don’t enjoy it.”

  But he was adamant, his brown orbs turning into cow’s eyes. “Rue, I need you to do this for me.”

  “I don’t like being shown off like a mounted marlin,” I told him on the days I had a little more backbone. “It’s embarrassing.”

  I rebelled, demanding my privacy, which of course made him very angry. There was no shouting. He simply receded into stony silence for days at a stretch, refusing to speak to me or even acknowledge my existence.

  When Hollywood Squares invited several stars and their spouses to Jamaica for eight days after Christmas, all expenses paid, The Greek jumped at the chance. We spent New Year’s Eve at the Playboy Club, which I found abhorrent, but I did get a kick out of my fellow celebrities. Paul Lynde in his signature dashikis; Rita Moreno, peppy and friendly; George Gobel, funny and sweet; and most delightful of all, Jonathan Winters, brimming with outrageous fun, so original, so full of nutty ideas, I fell out laughing whenever he was around. The New Year’s Eve bash was overflowing with too many people, too much noise, too much gratuitous hilarity. I climbed up on a chair to get above the crowd, feeling trapped and claustrophobic.

  I’ve always hated New Year’s Eve parties, with their ridiculous festivities based on some dopey idea that this is a great thing to celebrate. We all know it’s just a drummed-up notion of when the “new year” starts—according to Julius Caesar. But we’re all supposed to go mad with paper hats and razzy whistles. I always stay at home on New Year’s Eve, usually going to bed before midnight, so for me, that night was miserable. The Greek, on the other hand, had a ball in that crowded, noisy room full of famous people. I left moments after midnight and went to bed, spending the next day walking alone on the beach, picking up shells and rocks, while most everyone else was back at the hotel nursing a hangover.

  The Equal Rights Amendment reads, in its entirety: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

  I was doing what I could to help get the ERA passed, which, of course, it wasn’t. Perhaps we’ll have to try again later with less violent language. Anyway, The Greek and I went to a
big ERA fund-raiser in Bel-Air at which Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem spoke. (Oddly, Jane was serious; Gloria was funny.) We arrived at the event and joined a few other people in a limo to be taken a few blocks down the street. Chevy Chase was in the backseat, and he leaned forward, extended his hand to The Greek, and said, “Hello, I’m Fernblock Diddleberg.”

  The Greek shook his hand and said, “Nice to meet you.” Not a clue.

  Still, he managed to be a great hit with both Bea Arthur and Hermione Baddeley, who now played Maude’s housekeeper. He was always a good man to have at a party: handsome, cheerful, skilled at working the room. He flattered and charmed the britches off Bea and Hermione, and they both ate it up. On his forty-fifth birthday, I had given him an elaborate surprise party at a restaurant he often frequented with his cronies, and he was appropriately surprised and delighted. On my forty-third birthday the following February, The Greek arranged a birthday party for me after the taping of Maude in one of the rooms below the soundstage. He’d come to Hollywood full of big dreams, and it thrilled him to be part of that world. But we were all tired after the taping. I remember thinking, How inappropriate. These people don’t want to be here, they want to go home. But everyone strove valiantly to get their spirits up for the party, which was a blessedly short one.

  That spring, Norman Hartweg arrived in Los Angeles. The icy Michigan winters had become too much for him in the wheelchair, so he headed for the land of sunshine, driving himself cross-country entirely by hand. I was delighted to see my dear old friend.

  “You’ll stay at our house until you find a place,” I insisted. “We have plenty of room, and Mark will be so happy to see you.”

 

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