by Nancy Bacon
It was wonderful in Mexico. Alone at night, learning things about each other, looking into those eyes, seeing a man extravagantly larger than life, who, with a can of beer in his hand, could still respond to Bach. Togetherness, secret togetherness, on the set every day. He seemed to be always moving my chair closer. And one day when the company was moving to another location site about a half-mile away, he led me to a horse and got aboard, then reached down and picked me up in those strong arms and sat me behind him and we rode to the new place, across the mesa together. Me with my arms around him, holding tight and wishing it were farther away. I didn’t notice then, but he had a can of beer in his hand and he drank from it more often than he turned to smile at me.
The end of location shooting came to a halt. Gay with the festivities of wrapping-up we all drove to the Mexico City airport where we suddenly became a great deal more public. He signed autographs across the waiting room from me and I watched him as he moved like a movie star does among his fans, cool, a little impersonal, a little phony, and I had a lump of lead in my stomach because we were going back to a place where a secret is very hard to keep.
We boarded the plane and I was seated next to a girl reporter from a West Coast paper. As we fastened our seat belts she looked at me with a mixture of professional interest and naivete.
‘Have you been sleeping with him?’ she asked.
‘Of course not,’ I said, and added something silly like, ‘What a terrible thing to say.’
‘I would,’ she said.
After a while everyone began playing musical chairs. Not literally, but that’s what it seemed like. I sat with Robert Redford for a while, then with producer Paul Monash, then with one of the publicity men, and finally with Paul, and we stayed together the rest of the way home. As the plane drew nearer to Los Angeles I noticed that Paul grew particularly pensive.
We arrived at the Los Angeles International Airport and my lover of the small cave in the dungeons was gone. The man who had put his weight upon me in the darkness of the Mexico nights wasn’t there anymore. A public image, with blue, blue eyes and a sensual mouth drawn tightly now against the invasion of the hordes of fans, moved quickly among them and the studio people and never looked my way. I knew I would never see him again.
Then, just before he grabbed a couple of bags and walked swiftly toward a waiting car outside, he strode toward me, not really looking at me, and muttered, ‘I’ve got your number’ and he left me.
It was a week before he called me. ‘Nancy,’ he said. ‘Newman.’ I said, ‘Hi, there.’ And we talked stiltedly, like people who had known one another somewhere before.
The next time I saw him was at the cast party when they wound up the picture. I was escorted by a friend, but most of the time I sat and looked at Paul across the room as he squinted his eyes with an expression of tremendous interest and self-assurance and seemed absorbed in conversation with people he couldn’t care less about. I noticed, but they didn’t, that his hand trembled and he held himself rigid until he had put down a half-dozen drinks. Then he began to act normally and with confidence—the movie star at the wind-up party. Now and then he would amble over to where I was sitting, and each time (playing it with slightly glazed eyes now) he would appear surprised that I had come.
Later on, they darkened the room and a projector was turned on and they began screening what they called out-takes, scenes from the film that have been cut, in which actors blow up or can’t remember their lines and swear or act silly. (This was the days of actual film, and nothing was digitized.) Everyone laughed as though they had never seen them before. I felt a warm hand on the back of my neck and it moved toward my cheek and caressed me, and I leaned my head back and pressed his hand against my shoulder and didn’t want to let go. He was not uptight there in the darkness and I realized we were still a secret thing. He hadn’t forgotten our nights together in Mexico. He still loved me.
I didn’t quite know what to make of our affair. Was it wrong to be so involved with a married man? Or, I should say, a married screen idol married to another screen idol. I knew if he had been happy with Joanne, happy like they said in the magazines, it wouldn’t have happened between us. With his hand against my cheek I turned and put my lips against his arm and felt the warmth of him against my mouth. I felt a little chill as I smelled the liquor that fortified him against the confrontations at the party and I was uneasy. I remembered that night in Taxco when it had stormed. We lay side by side in his room, passion subsided, and lightning ripped the sky from black to electric blue and thunder rumbled down from the peaks of mountains and Bach blared on his stereo and we didn’t speak.
Paul came to my house often after that. He would telephone and say (in case my answering service picked up) ‘Nancy? This is the Sundance Kid.’ He would giggle about how cleverly evasive he had been, and it was all great fun. He had portrayed the character Butch Cassidy in the film; Robert Redford was the Sundance Kid.
He usually came into my house carrying a beer or a bottle of Scotch or (most often) a drink already mixed and in some crazy container. A couple of times it was an enamel pot that held about a quart of booze-the sort of pot they use to toilet train babies. Sometimes it was a large peanut butter jar. He seldom wore anything but Levi’s and moccasins and he’d sit formally for a while, sipping his Scotch straight from the potty. Then he would come to me and kiss me with a bone-crushing hug.
We talked a great deal at first. About where we were in relation to life and what we wanted, what we needed, and as time went by the chills of doubt came oftener. Love, making love, becomes a heavy-handed thing after a while, as passion, greedy passion, turns to forced lust, and the prettiness wears thin and the bones of the affair are bared. And I looked at Paul more closely during those days as December slipped into January and January into February.
He went away from me often and we seldom spoke about it. He would say, ‘I won’t see you for a week or so. I have to go someplace.’ It was usually New York—or some place called Connecticut. I knew what was in Connecticut. She was there. The lady who lived with him and raised his children.
Once he left her at a party and came to my house. Once he missed a plane he was to catch with her because he was in my bed. Once he told me he loved me—but how many times can you say ‘Once he—’
After the first time he said he loved me, it seemed easier for him to repeat. But I never said it back to him because I was insecure, of course. How can you be secure with a man when you don’t even know his telephone number? I think he really believed that I liked the solitude of my life as his mistress because he told me once that I was lucky to be happy alone.
I think it was late spring when I realized how sordid the thing had become. He asked me to go to Aspen, Colorado, with him and a friend to ski for a few days. ‘It’ll be okay,’ he said, ‘my buddy is bringing his lady of the evening along with him, too,’ Lady of the evening? What the hell did that mean? Why didn’t he call me his girl? His strumpet, his hidden sweetheart? Then I knew why. He was really a square. He was sinning—and he was always drunk. I never saw him fall down, but I seldom saw him for an evening that he didn’t put away a bottle of Scotch-after a lot of beer, of course. I began noticing it more and more, and I wondered why he was doing this thing to himself. Not just the booze. The whole thing. The sex, the arcane meetings, the remorse that started before he made the phone call to see if I was going to be home.
I remember the time I had gone to The Factory and he came in with Joanne and about four of their six children. He danced with his nine-year-old and looked over the top of her head into my eyes. That night he came over after midnight and we made love until dawn and he said tiredly afterwards, ‘Oh, you’re heart attack time, baby.’
‘What do you tell your family when you walk in just as they’re sitting down to the breakfast table?’ I asked that morning as he dressed to leave.
He flashed me the famous Newman grin. ‘I tell them Daddy’s been making movies all night.’
We drifted apart some after that. He was making a movie called Hall of Mirrors (the title was later changed to WUSA) with her. When he came back to Los Angeles he came to see me and he was jolly at first, clowning around and telling his corny jokes like he always did. Then he glowered at me and said, ‘I mustn’t be happy. I’m playing Reinhardt, and Reinhardt is a dark man—a man in a black mood.’ And he played Reinhardt when we made love. Maybe it was habit now. And later I noticed that the red in his eyes dimmed the blue, like in a bad color print. He told me he was looking for contentment, blurry contentment, I suppose. Or maybe in his guilt he was looking for death. He constantly told me I was his secret sanctuary.
The affair was straining at the seams now. He showed up one day in his puny little Volkswagen with the Porsche engine that could jog along at about 150 miles per hour. He had an eight-band stereo in the car that was big enough for Carnegie Hall. And he played it as though that’s where he was. He scrambled into the house carrying his Scotch-filled peanut butter jar and giggling at the fun of it all and he looked at me as if he were about to do something naughty for the first time. He grabbed me, not spilling the booze, and swept me into my bedroom and took me boisterously, like a kid tossing baskets into a backyard hoop. Afterwards, he lay back for a moment and laughed happily, and when I looked into his face I knew if someone had cried ‘Cut!’ he’d have stopped because he really wasn’t having that much fun.
But the scene was not over. He dragged me by the hand out into the driveway. ‘You didn’t hear the real volume of the stereo,’ he said, and he tumbled me into the Volkswagen and turned on the stereo full blast. Lights began coming on all over the neighborhood. ‘Turn it down,’ I said and he shook his head. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I want to show you the new house I’m moving to. Let’s drive there. It’s right off Mulholland.’ Anything to get him out of my driveway with his blasting music.
He placed his drink on the floor and started the motor. ‘Tell me where to go.’ I sat beside him in terror as he whipped the bug around the curves, kissing the edge of the grades that fell into a deep canyon. Me in a negligee—him in Levi’s and no shoes or shirt. I tried to be casual as I directed him but I wasn’t. All the fun elements were gone and I was terrified. Not only of the crash I expected momentarily but of being found at the bottom of the deepest gorge-half-naked with a married movie star.
We finally reached my house and pulled to a stop in front. ‘Do you think you’ll be able to find it again?’ I asked. He looked at me strangely and his voice sounded different as he said softly, ‘I’ll never forget.’
It was fun time again. The dark, brooding Reinhardt had been played out and he was the bright-eyed, corny-joke-telling Paul once more. He burst into the new house, giggly and all male, holding the jar of Scotch. He liked the new house but thought it too large and pretentious for me. He suddenly looked at his watch and jumped to his feet. ‘Gotta go,’ he said. ‘I have a dinner date with my kids. That’s the only appointment I have to keep. Be back later—’ and he was gone.
My roommate, Tove Rosenkilde, shook her head and smiled. She seemed to have a quieting influence on Paul and they got along well together, often getting into deep, intellectual discussions. But even she had to admit that he was becoming a handful.
He came back later and still had the jar in his hand, replenished, I’m sure. I was in the bedroom and Tove was watching television. He took one look at her, let out a whoop, and made a lunge for her. She ran and he chased her all over the house until she burst into my bedroom and asked me to call him off. He seemed determined to find out if Danish girls were the same as American girls. He was almost incoherent and so drunk he staggered against the wall, bumping paintings sideways and stumbling over furniture. It was turn-off time for Nancy. I was going to kick the habit. It wasn’t just that evening that had done it. It was just that every time he came to see me he was drunk and got drunker as the evening wore on. He was not even able to perform successfully in bed and most nights I lay awake beside the gorgeous body and face of superstar Paul Newman, bored and watching television as he snored in a drunken stupor.
He called. Often. And I would let the answering service pick up, then listen in to hear his voice saying, ‘This is Mr. Cassidy.’ I had nothing to say to him. Then a mutual friend told me that he was living apart from his wife and that he had told his kids for the last time that ‘Daddy has been making movies all night—’ So when he called again I spoke with him. He told me how much he missed me and how he wanted to be with me again—like it had been in Mexico. I was almost ready to believe him when a friend showed me a copy of the Los Angeles Times. There was an advertisement, half a page in size, and a rather lonely ad because all the type was clustered in the center of the space. It said: ‘(I) Recognizing the power of the press; (2) Fearing to embarrass an awesome journalist; (3) Terrified to disappoint Miss (Joyce) Haber and her readers, we will try to accommodate her ‘Fascinating Rumors, So Far Unchecked’ by busting up our marriage even though we still like each other. Joanne & Paul Newman.’
I was stunned. He had actually taken out that ad the same day he had called me for a date! He called again the next afternoon asking if we could get together that evening. I told him I was getting married. (I wasn’t really, it just seemed a cleaner way to break off with him.) He didn’t miss a beat. ‘Great,’ he said. ‘Congratulations.’ Then he did miss a beat. ‘Hey could we get together a couple more times before you do it?’
I hung up the phone and lay back against the sofa cushions and thought about the anatomy of an affair and the morality in a sexually permissive society. It’s all right to go to bed. It isn’t even bad if you get caught. But it is immoral to be a part of a deceit. I was a part of that ad. I was the woman Joyce Haber didn’t mention in the item. And while I may be sexually impetuous, I would not be an active part of a public deceit that will make a good man out of a swinger—a doting father out of a rake. Paul’s life-style seemed to me one big deceit and I wanted no further part of it.
The man I had loved and laughed with in Mexico was dead as surely as if I had buried him there. I made a mental note to send flowers.
lightning strikes with rod taylor
A few weeks after that devastating experience, I went to The Factory with my roommate. We were shooting pool in the back room when I fell someone behind me. Turning, I saw this tall, muscular, blond guy who looked very familiar. I mean, not only did he look familiar to me but he was looking at me in a very familiar way! I let him have his look then turned back to the pool table. Maybe it was because he was watching (which made my skin tingle), but I ran five balls before I missed a shot.
‘Hey, that’s pretty good shooting,’ he said, walking right up to me and grinning down at me.
‘Thanks,’ I replied, and went to sit down in a chair. He followed me and leaned casually on the arm of the chair staring into my eyes, and his were almost as blue as Paul Newman’s but with a mischievous twinkle in them that really turned me on. He seemed bigger than life, towering over me, so close I could feel his warm breath on my face. I leaned back a little and he leaned toward me, the grin broadening.
Then some people came over and started making a fuss over him and I realized with something of an electric shock that it was Rod Taylor! I mumbled something about it being my shot, slid under his arm and hurried to the pool table. I kept my back to him as I shot pool but I could feel his eyes on me-and that damn tingly feeling was with me again. Oh no, I thought, not another movie star! But, let’s face it, they look different from plumbers and mailmen. I sneaked a look at him and he was still staring at me even as he joked and talked with the people surrounding him. We both seemed to know in that instant that we would know each other better before the night was over. (I am a lady of snap decisions!)
I finished my pool game and walked to the bar to join a group of friends. He was right there, gazing down at mc with those mischievous eyes that made me blush. I wanted this man.
‘Mind if I join you?’ he aske
d as he sat down close to me and our legs touched. I could feel the heat of his body through his clothes. Then our eyes really met—for a good three minutes and I found myself waiting, as he seemed to be waiting, for the other people to disappear. But they had no intention of leaving and not witnessing this electric play between Rod and me. He solved the problem by taking my hand and saying goodnight to the others. I don’t remember if he asked me if I wanted to leave, but I know that he wrapped my mink coat around my shoulders and hustled me outside, his arm strong and possessive around me.
The moment we stepped out of the club onto the sidewalk, flash bulbs popped all around me and I leaned against him, feeling his strength. He wasn’t rude to the photographers or fans, but he didn’t waste any time with them either. He helped me into his silver Rolls Royce and we sped away.
I didn’t ask him where we were going and he didn’t say. We just drove through the velvet black night, our hands moist and warm, entwined with each other. When we made a sharp turn and climbed a steep hill, I saw a huge, stately white house that gleamed like a castle in the moonlight, and I knew we were home.
He eased the Rolls into the garage and the motor purred to a halt. Then he turned toward me and I eagerly fell into his arms. When his lips touched mine it was like an electric shock—I mean, like something burning. We strained together, unmindful of the steering wheel jabbing into our ribs. We necked like a couple of kids in Daddy’s parked car—and after a long while we drew apart and he ran his hand through his thick, curly hair and grinned at me in that sexy, yet boyish way. ‘I think we’d better get out of this damn car while I still can.’ he said.