A Complicated Marriage

by Janice Van Horne

  A smallish space, with windows along the side and the ubiquitous platform at the far end. In the center of the front row was the one comfortable chair, Lee Strasberg’s throne. Behind him, every seat was filled; there must have been almost a hundred of us, or so it seemed. Until I figured out the drill, I sat toward the back, among the hunky louts who flocked to those classes. The other generic group were the frails: wilting, pale, young women who wept, onstage and off, more fluently than they spoke. Lee’s attention hovered over these two groups. It didn’t take me long to realize I fit into neither, which probably wouldn’t serve me well.

  There was a dominatrix monitor who signed you up to do the basic sensory exercises—taste, smell, heat, cold, touch—in a prescribed progression. There would be a group of actors seated across the stage, each working on whatever exercise they had worked up to. To advance from one to the next meant passing through Lee’s needle eye of approval. Other exercises, such as taking on the attributes of an animal or singing a song one extended syllable at a time, or the more advanced exercises, such as “private moments” or “affective memory,” were usually done alone. The exercises culminated in improvisation and scene work.

  During all the work, whether exercises or scenes, Lee would keep up a steady stream of criticism directed at this one or that, probing, demanding a reality that he didn’t see, sometimes softly, sometimes heavy as a fist, usually the fist. He would walk up and down the platform, in and around the chairs, lifting an arm here, a leg there, testing for complete relaxation, which was at the heart of all the work. During scenes, Lee’s procedure was the same; he would critique and walk in and out of the scenes at will. Always, tears signaled breakthroughs, as long as they didn’t stop the flow of the work. Authentic, real, were his criteria, and not just in regard to inner experience—he had to be able to see it.

  I could smell the damn orange until I salivated, but it was never enough for him. If I moved, it wasn’t real. If I didn’t, he couldn’t see what I was sensing. Lose-lose. I became resistant, angry. He pigeonholed me as an uptight girl determined to keep her vulnerability under a slab and he never changed his original take. For my part, I found him off-putting from the moment I introduced myself. Small, a thin mouth, he seemed to be all head, probably because of his eyes, unblinking, sharp as knives, chillingly cold. He could summon a surface charm, but I never bought it. The result: a massive chip on my shoulder that made it impossible for me to yield. Mutual misfits.

  Nonetheless, I stayed for almost two years and kept signing up for the work, as slow as my progress was. Because I was receiving self-satisfaction and approbation from the plays I was doing, the experience was marginally sustainable. But the real draw was, the sessions were compelling. At HB I had explored the nuts and bolts of my so-called “emotional and physical instrument” and had absorbed the basic tools I needed to work on scenes and characters. But in Lee’s room the air was emotionally charged; he was a loose cannon. With the others, I squirmed and agonized through the gamut of my sensory life. As much as I instinctively balked at Lee’s tactics, in my head I acknowledged that his Method, via Stanislavski, worked. After all, it had broken through the prancing and prating of most actors prior to the forties. I wanted to please him, I wanted to defy him. A father to all—to some a good father, to many a tyrant. The only aspect of Lee I enjoyed was when he turned raconteur and wove stories of great performances, from Duse to Bernhardt to Arthur Rubinstein to Laurette Taylor.

  I shared his excitement. I wanted to tell him—as if I ever would or could—about election night in 1956, after Clem and I had left a party at the fancy townhouse of the Tom Hesses. As Eisenhower rolled over on Stevenson, we strolled the deserted Upper East Side streets. Lured by the lights of the Versailles, we headed in for a drink. The club was nearly empty, a piano thrumming aimlessly. Then, no fanfare, on a dark stage, in a small pool of light, a woman began to sing. She didn’t move. A white face, black hair, clothes, everything black except for the fire. I couldn’t breathe, a chill went through me, I moved inside her voice, her pain, her passion. As tremulous as a leaf, as mighty as a pillar of steel, Edith Piaf seared herself into my memory. Such a brief moment, such a diminutive woman, yet she was one of those rare creatures who could transport. I, who wasn’t in awe of much, was in awe of that.

  Being around Strasberg, I often thought about star power. How could I not, with the auras of Brando, Newman, Clift, Dean still in the air? There was a quality that allowed a rare few, by virtue of their very presence, to own the spotlight while others fell into shadow. Reflecting on my experience with Piaf, I wondered if it was their innate gift of transparency that allowed us to see into them and project ourselves onto them. It couldn’t be taught.

  And right there in Lee’s classroom was another harbinger of the past, Anna Sten. Not that she was a Duse or a Piaf, but she had been touched with a smidgeon of that elusive stardust. She had been a brief candle in the Hollywood firmament of the 1930s, after being imported from Sweden by Samuel Goldwyn and dubbed the New Garbo. She fizzled, but thirty years later, every Wednesday in the Carnegie Building, she glittered again as she sat on the right hand of God in the center of the front row, with her tiny, porcelain perfection, sausaged into tight bright colors, breasts thrusting up and out, skirts shorter than mini, towering stilettos strapped onto teensy feet. Buffed and polished and made up to the nth degree, a cloud of platinum topped her off as she fondled her beribboned toy poodle. A Technicolor baby doll amid the rest of us, dressed down in the manner of the day, I because it felt safer in the city I traveled alone in night and day.

  It made me wonder how that delectable Anna morsel got two feet down the street without being gobbled up, poodle and all. One day I followed her for a few blocks just to see. Everyone gawked; the guys nudged each other and hooted. She was infectious. Parading down Seventh Avenue, she radiated good cheer. Accessible and untouchable at the same time. I imagined that Marilyn Monroe exuded that same self-delight. But on the screen Anna lacked Marilyn’s ability to turn herself inside out, an ability that would make Marilyn a legend rather than a dim memory. It always seemed to me that in the process Marilyn had given herself away until the cupboard was bare, a fear that no doubt was at the heart of my own self-protectiveness. Anna may not have amounted to much as an actress, but, along with the rest of us, she was in those classes doing her damnedest to break through, break out of her shell. For that, she deserved her seat at the right hand of God.

  And then came the transformative day when Peggy Feury substituted for Lee. I had the good fortune to be scheduled to continue work on a boy-girl bit—one did only small bits for Lee—from the scene on top of the Empire State Building from The Moon Is Blue. This was my third stab at it; I had already suffered through Lee’s slashing commentary and midscene demands for sensory work and even an on-the-spot private moment. I had frozen, but hell, at least that was “real.” Now, after we finished our scene, Peggy critiqued our work and then, to me, added, “Be who you are. Let the beauty of your self and your talent come forward.” She saw through me and had called on me to come out and play, assuring me that everything would be fine and it was safe to do that. I realized that I was a fearful person in a profession filled with fearful people who, in order to succeed, had to again and again take that leap of faith.

  In the month she taught us, I watched Peggy unlock more doors in actors’ creativity than I had seen in all my time with Lee. She mined the gold of the Method and then, with her keen insight, helped actors take that leap. Over the years, it never surprised me when, at award podiums, I would hear our finest actors thank Peggy Feury for their success.

  As invariably happened, I had started hanging out with a new gang of people I met in the classes. Thanks to Lee’s homophobia, most of the actors spinning in his orbit were straight, which added a bit of spice. The bar of choice was Jimmy Ray’s, on Eighth Avenue and Forty-sixth Street. Low-end, with beat-up booths, cadaverous lighting, and cheap booze, it reminded me of my nights at the Cedar
Bar, except at Jimmy Ray’s the seediness felt like velvet and you could get a decent hamburger and fries. But mostly it was about drinking and gossip and talking shop. Oh, there were other places, like Downey’s, a few blocks down the street, high-end, catering to the older theater crowd, with its expensive food and special booths for special people, signed photos on the walls, and an amazingly long bar where we would sometimes stand, beer in hand, when we felt like a change. And there was the upstart, Joe Allen, which started out low-key but soon took a turn toward classy with reservations and guys in suits. No, Jimmy Ray’s was home, where everyone talked to everyone and the only status seating was that the old-time dedicated drinkers claimed the end of the bar nearest the door, with the up-and-comers in the middle, and the big booths jammed with nobodies like me. I remember everyone getting pissed when David Mamet staked out a booth up front as his personal turf. He should have gone around the corner to Joe Allen.

  Each place had a defining moment. At Downey’s there was a tête-à-tête drink in a booth with a sexy actress who had gone from friend to ex-friend when she had seduced a young actor I was seeing. She was desperate to renew our friendship and explained that she had done it only because she was madly in love with me. I can’t imagine how I responded to that, but, as soon as possible, I left her there unrequited. She dumped the guy. Well, so did I, and that was that.

  At Joe Allen, a sexual encounter of a different sort. This time, lunch with a man who was a big shot in the Shubert organization. He had seen me in something and said he was interested in having me do a play reading. Both of us plied with martinis, he asked if I had ever been in an empty Broadway house. Dim-witted as a kid from Kansas, probably dimmer, I went with him to the Booth Theater, where he tried to get it on with me in one of the boxes. I started laughing, because all I could think of was my grandmother Betty and the plays she had taken me to at the Booth, the only theater she patronized. “Pretty as a jewel,” she would say, gazing through her lorgnette. And she would sit only in box seats: “So much cozier,” she would say, meaning she didn’t have to hobnob with the hoi polloi.

  And Jimmy Ray’s? There were many moments, but one stands out. Late one night, on the way to the bathroom, I saw Colleen Dewhurst drinking and eating alone at one of the small tables in the back, where no one ever sat. There she was, icon to us all, slumped over, looking so ordinary and old. Why was she there? And why alone? Where the hell was hubby George C. Scott? I wanted to see her big square smile and hear her big he-man laugh that could fill Madison Square Garden. But she just sat there, on and on, drinking after the food was gone.

  I never did audition for the Actors Studio. Good sense and fear prevailed. Nonetheless, I did sneak through its hallowed doors, thanks to a director I had worked with who was a new member of the directors’ unit. I did Alma in the last scene of Summer and Smoke, a disastrous choice for our mutual debut. The chutzpah: the director taking on Tennessee Williams, me taking on Geraldine Page. There I was in the vast performance space, decked out in a costume with Barbara Baxley’s name tag that I had purloined from the changing room. Imposter, trespasser, oozed out of every pore.

  During the critique, facing Lee and the inquisition, we got hammered. Where Lee led, the minions followed. Until one lone voice dissented. He begged to disagree, he threw me bouquets, until Lee shut him down with a snide remark about his being on the prowl for his next conquest, thus getting the desired snicker out of the crowd. Me, a femme fatale? I was thrilled. Afterward, the actor-director, Allen Garfield, introduced himself and asked me to be in an original scene he was directing. And so again, one thing led to another, and despite Lee’s persistent heavy fist, I did several scenes for Allen and even landed a negligible bit in a large period piece staged at the Studio as a fund-raiser.

  After a while, I was allowed to audit sessions in the acting unit, but the sameness soon palled, despite the luster of an occasional star turn. I think my finale was the afternoon Elaine Stritch, slurry and plastered, attempted a scene, failed to remember a word of it, and cursed and staggered until she collapsed. What sickened me was Lee’s coddling and encouragement of her self-indulgence, and the roars of delight from her fellow actors. Oh, she needed help, all right, but not that kind of help. I knew I had had my fill of Lee’s frails and hunks.

  Sometime during those heady years of self-discovery and fulfillment, perhaps 1968, I realized that I had nothing to say to my mother. Conversation, like a reservoir in a drought, had slowly dried up. The supply had never been rich or abundant, but now the last drop had been drained. I don’t remember the date when I cut her out of my life. It took only a moment, though it had taken, no doubt, a lifetime to bring about.

  Phone calls. Often. Not daily, but too often. Sweetness and light as she valiantly filled the air with tidbits of daily life. The latest outrageous high jinks of her sister, Elfrida; she always chose to forget that I had been banished by my anti-Semitic aunt and had had no contact with her for years. Next, the latest atrocity of her beagle, Beau, a snarling creature who had no use for humanity and who turned vicious around men. I think my mother was pleased by this, having never been able to vent her own resentments against the male species. Her desultory conversation would bottom out with her account of the latest shocker from her soap opera; she always referred to As the World Turns as “my soap opera.”

  Afraid of contamination, I would hold the phone at some distance. And then into the vacuum, the dread, “And what are you . . . and Clem . . . and Sarah . . . doing tonight?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “How is your acting going?” (I heard “your hobby.”) “Any exciting parties?”

  “Just the usual.”

  Twelve years old, I would wall up, douse my inner lights, and wait for her to say good-bye.

  Those conversations became more and more unmanageable. Each time we labored through the same tired routine. Each time I hated the adolescent in me who was so quick to surface and so difficult to put back into her box. Most of all, I hated the dead, withholding part of myself that made me crawl with shame and guilt. Oh, that As the World Turns, a potent guilt trigger, ever reminding me that my mother’s world was turning slower as mine accelerated. Each time, between picking up the phone and clicking off, I would careen between the past and the present. I still remembered all too well what it was like to live between two realities. As an adolescent I had my world, and then there was “home,” no world at all. I was sick of that. I had my own home and family. I wanted one reality. The one I was creating day by day.

  When my analyst, Sy—I hadn’t cut the cord yet—suggested that I had a choice, I listened. Our explorations went way beyond the phone calls, obviously only the proverbial last straw. From my teen years on, I hadn’t felt safe in my mother’s hands. Odd, because I had always felt loved. But it wasn’t her way to acknowledge problems, and therefore she was incapable of solving them. For years my wounds had bled over in my sessions with Sy. I don’t recall how long the process took, only that the day came when he broached the ultimate action: Separate from your mother. I remember where I sat, where he sat, that morning. No longer in the gloomy brownstone, we were in a sterile room bleached with light. No hiding there. Incredulous, I voiced protests that turned slowly from “I could never . . . ” to “How would I ever . . . ?”

  My mother has come to visit, and now she is leaving. The when could I possibly . . . ? is at hand. I have put it off until the last minute, knowing that any discussion or negotiation would be more than I could handle. I am unsure of my ground. Worse, I am jumping off a cliff. That morning the front elevator is out of order, and she and I stand crushed together in the small vestibule of the service entrance, filled with my neighbor’s and our garbage cans. I am afraid of hedging and ultimately being misunderstood. My words spill out, clumsy, flat out, and brutal. In that moment I paint myself into a black-and-white corner. The rickety elevator takes forever. She is in shock, uncomprehending. In my mind, she pleads: What do you mean? What have I done? And I hammer
back: This is what I need. You have done nothing. Until the elevator finally comes and she falls silent in deference to the man who picks up her suitcase. Is she crying? I don’t dare look. Do I say good-bye? Probably. I am in shock, too.

  There was a lot of back-and-forth. Not between us, but between her and Clem. She called him often. He liked my mother and objected to the way I had gone about it. But when it came to my need to separate from her, Clem, who years before had cut himself off from most of his family, stepped back. He was kind and reassuring with my mother. She also called Sy. I don’t know how she fared there.

  I felt relief. I also felt remorse, much more than that word can convey. Some days I felt that I had murdered her. Some days I felt that I had put down a burden. When I explained the overall situation to Sarah, making it clear that this would in no way change her and her father’s time with Grandma, my all-knowing girl, said, “How would you feel if I did that to you?” My heart broke. The guilt spilled out.

  Clem and Sarah continued to enjoy their visits to the Cape, where my mother catered to their every whim. Clem would sit on the porch at his typewriter, my mother hovering, waiting on him, each doing what they did best: shopping sprees with Sarah, restaurants, family swims in the afternoons. My mother had always liked the idea that she was only seven years older than Clem. He once told me that in her later years she would sometimes pass through the upstairs hall in her nightgown, just as he would be coming up to bed. My mother never did change her flirty ways.

  In time, the distance between us eased. We occasionally talked on the phone; she visited New York on her annual drives with a friend to Florida. But we were both tentative, guarded. She, that she might overstep. I, that I might open the door too wide. Neither of us could take anything for granted anymore. We touched, we kissed self-consciously. Following a pattern established a lifetime ago, we didn’t know how to “have it out.” And therefore didn’t know how to rebuild the bridge. In time, my relief and remorse folded themselves into my thoughts and dreams of my mother. And I held Clem and Sarah closer to me and I immersed myself even more in the work I loved.