A Complicated Marriage

by Janice Van Horne

  One night we were invited to one of Mary Lasker’s parties in her all-white house, this time a dinner party, and I was seated next to Truman Capote. Why I had been singled out for that honor, I’d never know. My admiration runneth over. He had just published In Cold Blood. What to say, what to say? Somehow we soon stumbled onto common ground—diet pills. I had decided to be very, very thin. Not that I was fat to begin with, but this was the time of miniskirts and bikinis; emaciation was in. There was a doctor on Fifth Avenue, known as The Rainbow Doctor, who was all the rage. For several months I and the entire female population of Upper Manhattan, and evidently Truman, had been beelining it to his office to get a compartmentalized pillbox filled with our multicolored fix for the week. Of course, I never dreamed of asking what was in them, but they had to have been primarily speed, along with diuretics, laxatives, and God knows what.

  The Rainbow guy had determined that my goal should be 125 pounds. I was gung-ho; at five-foot-eleven, I would put Twiggy to shame. The weight poured off. Why not? Food never passed my lips. That night, Capote and I, twittering maniacally and building sand castles out of our food and telling each other every other minute how divine we looked, had a high old time. But the next week, as the scale sank to 126, my dance with speed came to an almost heart-stopping end. Breathless, with palpitations, my body and brain froze in the middle of Third Avenue. I couldn’t speak, think, or move. Fortunately, I was with Jimmy, who got me into a taxi and took me home. The rainbow disappeared, as they do. And so did the doctor, who was arrested to much fanfare and hauled off to jail. It must have been one hell of a body-altering fix I’d been dosed with, because most of the weight never did come back.

  The off-off-Broadway momentum was shifting more and more to ensemble productions. That was where the new heat, the action, was. And the high priest of it all was a director from Poland who had never been to the United States: Jerzy Grotowski. The bible, supplanting Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares, was his book, Towards a Poor Theatre. Peter Brook was his leading disciple, joined in this country by proselytes Joe Chaikin, Richard Schechner, and every other ensemble director of the day. The key to Grotowski’s work was the word poor, as in minimal, divested of external artifice or reference. For the actor it meant the sacrifice of self; it meant becoming a pure vessel, a conduit of unobstructed sound and movement. For the text, it meant paring it down to a core concept that would be revealed to the audience. For the audience, it meant stripping away preconceptions and becoming participants. For ten years Grotowski had worked with a dedicated group of actors on several pieces. By the time he and his Polish Laboratory Theatre arrived with their first production, Akropolis, plus two others, New York was champing at the bit to see what all the brouhaha was about.

  The event, in Washington Square Church, was a hot ticket. How could it not have been? Grotowski had limited the audience to one hundred per performance. As we entered, we were handed a small strip of paper that welcomed the PLT “out of a passionate conviction that religion and art must take risks in the pursuit of truth. Let this meeting . . . be another bridge spanning the gulf separating man and man, actor and audience, nation and nation.” We were jammed into benches on four sides of a small raised acting space, as if we were in a pit. What an audience we were, from Jackie Kennedy and her sister, Princess Lee Radziwell, to Barbra Streisand to me, all cheek to jowl, appropriately humbled. The actors wore covering of some sort but, in effect, were naked.

  The Polish text, in process for six years in a town not far from Auschwitz, followed a group of concentration camp inmates who enacted Bible stories as they built a wall of a crematorium. From the moment I walked into that “poor” theater, I became one with the actors; I was inside them, moving as they moved, feeling as they felt, their language my language. I had never merged so profoundly with a theatrical experience.

  Like his predecessors Stanislavski and Brecht, so much a product of their times, Grotowski was in step with the politics and revolution of his place and time. No matter how bountiful the reverence paid to him by the theater community, his extreme work process precluded replication. Nonetheless, his techniques and productions set off reverberations that would affect all theater, small or mainstream. The most memorable examples: Marat/Sade, Oh, Calcutta, and Hair. Years later, in 1974, I was front and center at a performance of the patently commercial Peter Shaffer play Equus. At the climactic moment when the naked, bone-thin young man, played by Peter Firth, came downstage for his monologue, the sounds he made were coming from the darkest and most ecstatic depths of him. My eyes were drawn to his vibrating feet and, as I watched, I saw the raw sound of him emanating from them. A pure Grotowski moment. As it is with most things, theater absorbed what it could use of Grotowski and forgot the rest. Soon, his influence was there, but not so you would notice, unless you looked hard. And by the eighties, his name had dropped off the theatrical road map.

  Hot on the heels of Akropolis had come Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s Living Theatre event Paradise Now—one a searingly disciplined piece of theater, the other an anarchistic tornado of an experience. Kissing cousins at best, but still cousins. Paradise was the product of an ensemble commune, created in Europe by the Beck-Malina team and committed to political, sexual, and individual liberation—a call to arms. In ’68, their mythology having preceded them, they were back in New York. Another jam-packed event, this time in the huge relic, the Academy of Music, on East Fourteenth Street, this time without the uptown voyeurs. This was street theater.

  Thirty or so hands-on performers provoked the audience to rise against the oppression of the establishment. A be-in where everyone there was high, the air thick with the sweet clouds of grass buoyed by the chi of LSD, and lord knows what. Revolution. The climax reached, the ensemble, by now naked, formed an entwined pyramid as the audience joined in, until the stage was a primal sea of bodies undulating in the harmony of paradise. Slowly the groundswell of the divine power of om raised the roof, the ultimate union. I, too, joined in and swayed and cried with that fervent family of revolution and peace.

  So it was that by 1968 I was ready to immerse myself in ensemble theater. I leaped into the first group that came my way, a fledgling company led by a dark, quiveringly intense man named Tony Serpio who, in his hubris, usurped Grotowski’s name and dubbed his ensemble the Poor Theater. We worked in the annex of a church on Twenty-seventh Street and Ninth Avenue. Barren and echoing, it throbbed with our screams of agony and ecstasy, mostly agony, as Tony pummeled us through the rigors of Grotowski’s method. The goal: to create a parable that would be a play within a play, chronicling the actors as they journeyed through hell on earth in search of . . . All par for the course for OOB in those days.

  After a month, drained by the relentless excursions into agony, I pleaded the case for joy. Tony, burning with the zeal and scar tissue of a Catholic boyhood, sneered at the notion: “Joy is in the pain.” Feeling shallow and pathetically Presbyterian, I resumed the exercises of self-flagellation while chanting “Kyrie Eleison.” So much for “paradise now”; I had stumbled into the dark side, and with blind trust bought the line that through pain would come redemption, maybe.

  In any event, I wouldn’t be staying around long enough for the redemption part. After I had been with the group a few months, things went sour while we were doing a “trust” exercise. I stood on a high table from which I was to fall backward into the group’s arms. I couldn’t. They cajoled, they taunted, they spat on me, and finally they disowned me. The shunning continued for the rest of the evening. When I got home, I was disoriented and disconnected from my “self.” Instinctively, I went into Sarah’s room and lay next to the healing power of my sleeping girl.

  It was at this juncture that I ran afoul of the Machiavellian underbelly of Tony. My dear Jimmy—who I had been seeing for two years—had recently returned from a three-month theater tour, and I made the mistake of bringing him into the group. I thought that his presence would shield me in this place where I now felt so un
safe. I should mention an odd bit of serendipity. From the onset, one of the members had looked disconcertingly familiar. Turned out she was Iris, the twin sister of Ruth Kligman, the “other woman” in the drama of Jackson’s final days. I also discovered that, besides her appearance, Iris shared her twin’s flair for the dramatic. Jimmy hadn’t been with the group long when Iris cornered me and, honeyed with concern for my well-being, told me that I should dump him because he wasn’t good enough for me.

  As it turned out, the feeding frenzy over Jimmy, which included Iris, had already begun. I stood by helplessly as Tony manipulated the situation from the sidelines. It didn’t take long for him to suck Jimmy into the group’s seductive communal vortex. I knew that power all too well and soon left. The pain ran deep; I had lost my dear friend, my playmate, my astonishing lover, the only man other than Clem who I had ever truly loved. As for the group, it was as close an encounter with a brainwashing cult as I would ever have.

  I was wearing pale peach toweling fabric, a meager shift, midthigh, meticulously frayed and fretted by the costumer for me, Eve. My hair, tawny and very long, flowed down my back. I was still bone skinny from the Rainbow Doctor. I was radiant, soaring on the power of knowing I was beautiful and that I was about to sing for the first time to a large audience. I launched into “Here in Eden,” the opening song from the Jerry Bock/Sheldon Harnick musical The Apple Tree. When I hit the line “. . . I was meant to rejoice in the round vibrant sound of my own voice,” like Peter Firth in Equus, my toes twitched, the hair on the back of my neck tingled. With the final note I sent myself beyond the walls of the Woodstock Playhouse.

  It was the summer of 1969 and I was in Woodstock, Vermont, the posh horse-country town where I was coproducing a season of summer stock. Once again, a friend had opened the door to an irresistible opportunity. Carol Rosenfeld, from my HB Studio days, had introduced me to Lynn Guerra, a producer-director, who was already committed to the project, contingent on finding someone to share the work and financing, estimated at a total of $5,000. My enthusiasm crumpled. But Clem’s response was, as usual, “If we can we afford it,” which in effect meant, Go for it!

  Woodstock would be a potent antidote to the soul-dredging Poor Theater. Crassly commercial entertainment to lure the tourist trade was our goal when we chose our plays and two musicals: The Star-Spangled Girl, The Apple Tree, You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running, Pal Joey, and Two for the Seesaw. Albert Takazauckas and Lynn cast the company and hired the technical staff. A local theater enthusiast gave us the use of a furnished farmhouse big enough for all, and for $200 I picked up a dilapidated van and station wagon for transportation to the theater.

  From day one, Lynn dropped the ball as coproducer and I found myself hurdling obstacles minute by minute. One such was the eleventh-hour defection of our cook, miraculously remedied by my histrionic appeal on an early-morning radio show, which netted us a Mother Earth/Julia Child clone who proved to be the glue of us all. The June death of Judy Garland, which so rocked the sanity of our set designer/costumer that he showed up teary and wan two weeks late, though he managed to pull rabbits out of hats financially and artistically the rest of the season. A misanthropic lighting designer who, though addicted to comic books, somehow bestirred himself to re-engineer the archaic light board and, with a paltry number of kliegs, created magic. A stage manager whose charm and swagger got him the gig but who turned out to be a novice who needed help at every turn. (I still cringe when I hear, “No problem,” a sure signal for disaster.) The threatened defection of the company who wanted to attend that milestone of the sixties in the other Woodstock, which was averted in the last minute by my rallying appeal to their show-must-go-on conscience. (I’m sure that, like me, they’re still kicking themselves for missing the “party of the century.”) The outrage of the media and denunciation from the pulpit against Can’t Hear You for “offensive material”—perhaps its mention of premarital sex or birth control. Our box office soared.

  Further testament to the conservative white-bread politics of the community presented itself when I approached David Rockefeller—what he didn’t own in the town, he controlled—for advice and help in getting the season off to a good start. He brushed me off with down-home smarm that thinly masked his condescension and disapproval of our rag-tag intrusion on his pristine turf; his agenda to turn back the clock and freeze-frame Woodstock as the quintessential New England town had already begun. The redneck fringes, so endemic to bastions of conservatism, regularly threatened our own hippie fringes with beatings and haircuts. All topped off with the unforgettable visit, disconcertingly soon after my visit with Rockefeller, from Sheriff Goode (this was a Dickensian town where names and occupations were ironically or literally wedded—Mr. Blood ran the funeral parlor, Mr. Flower, the nursery . . . ), who walked into my bedroom at 3:00 AM and, with a torchlight in my face, hissed a warning that there had been complaints about drug use and that I should pass the word or there would be consequences.

  It was a frightening hit of the us-versus-them abuse of power that was part of the Nixon years. The years of violence and national upheaval following the Kennedys’ and King’s assassinations had numbed me. Life in New York had numbed me. But I had not expected to encounter it firsthand in this sleepy, picture-book town where even the cows posed prettily in the fields.

  Of course there were drugs at the farmhouse, but I had a penchant for not seeing what I didn’t want, or need, to see. Although it wasn’t my thing yet, in the theater world I took drug use for granted, like drinking. But I did pass the word. I suggested the company lay off the stuff, especially around the theater, lock the doors at night, and stick together if they hung out in town. And “Whoever is getting it on with the police sergeant’s daughter, you might want to think twice.” We laughed about it, we were angry about it. Nothing made sense. While I had been singing Eve’s song, “. . . and I am more than simply worried that things are getting out of hand,” Apollo 11 landed and we strolled on the moon. But we couldn’t walk comfortably down the streets of Woodstock, Vermont.

  Notwithstanding the obstacles, those three months were the happiest, most fulfilling time I had ever known. I awoke every day at dawn, ready to leap at the day. From public relations to overseeing the front of the house to keeping the company on track, to performing at night while rehearsing the next show most of the day, the more I did, the more I could do. I learned there were no limits to what I could achieve. That summer I blew my mother’s “economy” credo to bits. She who had never filled a day with bliss, or anything much at all, who had never run if she could walk. I had even found time to take up with Mark Turnbull, our hapless but adorable nineteen-year-old stage manager.

  Toward the end of the season, we were all outside fooling around, laughing after our usual early dinner. My body, my feelings, were strung so tight I thought I would burst. I had to have distance. I walked to the top of the hill behind the house, wondering if I was losing my mind, or maybe just burning out. I looked back at the people below and realized, no, it was just that such happiness, such pleasure in using myself to the utmost, were utterly foreign to me. And more than that, the months in the farmhouse, in the theater, all the wonderful work we had done, all the friendships that had formed, I had made all those things possible, not just for myself but for everyone. On that soft end-of-summer evening, I was not just soaring—I was proud.

  That summer was also the cause of my deepest regret. Sarah was six, and there was no way I could have undertaken what lay ahead if she had come with me. I don’t remember what Clem’s plans were that had precluded her being with him, but I decided the only solution was to enroll her in a nearby summer camp. After seeing a film of the camp and meeting with the woman in charge, Sarah warmed to the idea. I had hoped for the best, but it was a terrible mistake. She was the youngest camper. Notwithstanding assurances from the counselors that she was adjusting and doing okay, I knew it was wrong. I visited twice, Clem also, and we talked often on the phone, but
nothing would make it right. Though I cried when she cried, I let it happen. My stalwart Sarah, she managed, but she never forgot nor forgave. Nor would I forgive myself. It was the first, and I vowed it would be the last, misstep that would mar our togetherness.

  Reentry into my New York routine was jolting. I missed having Sy to help smooth the transition as I picked up my home life with Sarah and Clem. I did a few plays, but without classes to attend, my days felt bland. Juggling our social life with my work, once so invigorating, now became arduous, and the effort diminished both. Often, anxious about thoughts of the future, I felt as if a clock were ticking. If my momentum stopped, would the summer’s high evaporate? Had my ability to use myself fully been linked to being on my own for the first time, away from the security of Clem and home? Had the years of schizoid shifting between Clem’s world and mine kept me from making a full-out commitment to work and to myself, kept me from taking risks?

  These questions were too big, too ominous, and I backed off, looking instead for a more immediate solution to my unease. And I found it, filed in my mind under “unfinished business.” Perhaps as a backlash after my romp into the mainstream commerce of Woodstock, I was drawn back to the possibilities inherent in Grotowski’s work. I had often wondered if it would be possible to apply his methods to a given text, rather than to an ensemble-created piece. Also whether his stringent techniques could be adapted to suit the work process of New York theater. Maybe this was the challenge I was looking for. I would have to find a suitable play. I would need a workspace and actors. I had never directed before . . .