A Complicated Marriage

by Janice Van Horne

  During the fall of 1969, I mulled over possible scenarios for the project. The pictures in my mind excited me, as the plans shifted incrementally in the direction of a permanent workspace, rather than a rehearsal hall, and from there they took the leap to a space where Sarah and I could also live. I was startled by the audacity of the idea. I never envisioned it as an exchange, one place for another. I saw the space as being an adjunct to 275. Clem and I would be together, but separate. Was such a notion feasible? How would it work?

  As energized as I was by thoughts of a new venture, I was also fearful. I could be putting fifteen years with Clem on the line. As much as I tried to see the step as an expansion that would reconfigure our marriage—as our sexual openness had—I feared that it could just as easily damage, even nullify, our connection. As I talked with friends about my scenarios, I painted them with bright colors and free brushstrokes, and they bought it. But much would depend on Clem, and I knew better than to try to predict his reactions. As a teenager I had never learned how to discuss and negotiate; in those days, when I encountered an obstacle, I would shrug and walk away from what I wanted as if I didn’t care. No, discussing with Clem a plan in its early stages was not my way.

  And so I weighed my plan, and the more I did, I understood that it was not as precipitous as it had felt originally, that it was the result of a sequence of events that had started nine years earlier, with the death of our baby and the years of analysis that followed, and that had slowly awakened me to the possibilities of a life beyond Clem. Even as my interest shifted toward the theater and we both became romantically involved with others, Clem and I remained emotionally and sexually close as we brushed against each other day to day. And always, we were doubly bonded through Sarah. Clem was my touchstone, and I had always believed that it was our bond that enabled me to move forward and take chances. Now, I was about to take a step toward independence that would stretch that bond. No, my leave-taking was not impulsive or precipitate, nor was it inevitable or unavoidable. It was a choice, made with my fingers crossed.

  And, my fingers still crossed, I talked to Clem. I called the plan “an experiment” involving a project and a place to do it in. Downplaying the possibility of living there, I compared it to an artist’s renting a loft. I would cap the cost at $150 a month. If money ran low, we could always hand off another painting to an art dealer to sell—by that time, that was beginning to be our way of life.

  As I write about this, I want to take my decision back, to say, “I came close to leaving, but at the last minute I couldn’t do it.” I want to write about the different life that would have played out if I had stayed. But there my imagination falters; I see only obstacles and walls without doors. I exaggerate. More realistically, I envision a rather frivolous continuation of careers, each less committed to than the last, a rather frivolous succession of lovers, until the intricate dance steps of romance no longer seemed worth the effort, and a succession of analysts, until I despaired of hearing anything new. I see my steps through life as becoming increasingly small and tentative, my spirit doggedly resigned to maintaining a status quo.

  As I play with the past, it is only my past. Clem’s path was a through-line unaffected by my choice. It fulfilled the promise of the career line in his palm that was so deep and long and unbroken, that line that so clearly proclaimed a life devoted to the steadfast pursuit of learning and the achievement of his goals. I had not been so blessed. I always felt unformed, had always searched for answers. Goals, even fantasies, evaded me. But Woodstock had demonstrated to me a simple truth: I needed, wanted, to use myself completely. For the first time, I had touched my own power. No wonder I wanted to open the door and see what was around the next corner. And no wonder I still wanted to cry out, Stay! You can discover all that at home. Stay where your life will be so much easier.

  THE SEVENTIES

  WHEN I TIPTOED OUt of the Central Park West apartment, the door didn’t click behind me. It wasn’t even ajar. It was more like a revolving door. I took nothing at first. Then, over the next weeks and months, I took some clothes, books, records, which I threw into the back of the car. All the chattels passed down through the matriarchies of my family, all the things Clem and I had accumulated over time, most of my clothes and “stuff,” all that stayed in situ, where it belonged.

  No drama, no fanfare. I moved out so slowly and quietly that Clem never noticed I had gone. So I would tell the story for years, usually getting a fond chuckle over Clem’s obliviousness. But fact is, it was true, and it wasn’t funny. I still tremble at my brashness. One of those people who seem to have all the answers once said to me, “Only if you shut a door completely can you open the next.” How tidy. Tidy as I always was in the way of washing dishes and making my bed, I never could shut doors. I saw my life as a long, drafty corridor, lengthening as I moved from room to room, the doors behind me creaking to and fro in the breeze. A habit no doubt etched on the slate of me when my parents slammed their doors on each other with a ferocity that must have awakened me with a cry from my innocence. No, my doors with Clem would always be open.

  Through a painter friend, I had found a loft at 500 Broadway, between Spring and Prince Streets, for $150 a month. Originally industrial space, the nineteenth-century cast-iron building was now mostly vacant. The top floor, four thousand square feet of raw space with a small living area enclosed at the far end, was like a football field, with banks of windows at both ends. Big enough to stage an opera, big enough for Sarah to ride her bike, learn to roller-skate, and shoot hoops, and big enough to share. With us were my friend Mark and Robert Liebowitz, who had been costumer/actor/general factotum at Woodstock. They brought the fun and spirit of the summer with them and, in return for a place to live, would help put the loft into shape.

  They built two more bedrooms, spray-painted the place white, and sanded and stained the floors. On the Lower East Side, for next to nothing, I picked up some beautiful old oak furniture and an artist crafted a red lacquered bunk bed for Sarah, red being her color of the moment. My bed, more mundane, was from Bloomingdale’s, and, thanks to André Emmerich’s designer discount, I bought two Eames chairs, caramel colored, not white like the Kootzes’. In the open space, we put the old upright piano an actor friend had given us, strung up a big hammock, and installed a stereo and enough speakers to fill up the emptiness with Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane. Within a few months, everything as ready as it would ever be, Sarah and I took up residence in our virtual playground.

  Our new area—one couldn’t call it a neighborhood—was best described as “below Houston.” There were artists sprinkled here and there, with more creeping in all the time, but mostly it was still home to small industry. Our loft may have been a playground, but nothing came easily—no garbage pickup, an elevator that worked when it felt like it, and no market, drugstore, or restaurants for tens of blocks in any direction. After six o’clock, the streets emptied out, dark and desolate. It was then that I knew we were living on the edge.

  My new routine was framed by driving Sarah to her school on Ninety-sixth Street and Fifth and fetching her at the end of the day. While I continued singing lessons with Graham Bernard, I no longer went to the Actors Studio. I missed working with a group, yet didn’t search out a new one. All my focus and energy went into planning my own project.

  I picked Strindberg’s Dream Plays to work on because of its amorphous structure, which lent itself to interpretation and adaptation by a large ensemble. Casting was difficult because, unlike the usual month of rehearsals and flexible hours, I was asking for at least two months and long hours. Add to that no money and no more than three weekends of showcases at the end.

  The biggest stumbling block for many I auditioned was the sound and movement group work. I certainly understood actors liked parts, preferably large parts, and scenes they could get their teeth into. Ensemble work was a hard sell. It defeated the whole point of doing a workshop you could invite a potential agent to. The final group, after th
e usual first-week dropouts, came to ten. Not bad, except that none had worked in ensembles before, much less were familiar with Grotowski’s method, and three of them were non-actors. Not to mention that this was my first time out as a director. But I plotted the exercises, and we dove in. What went right was the willingness of the actors to open themselves to each other and to the exploration of themselves emotionally and physically. I had counted on that, knowing that was what actors love to do. Fortunately, the group gelled and we all learned as we went forward.

  The problem, from first to last, was the play. It was too abstract, too highfalutin, too earnest and heavy-handed, and more and more I let the text go and encouraged the group to personalize it.

  And then we were ready. Mark and Robert did the lights and marked out the space. There were no costumes, per se, but we went wild with hair and makeup. Though I had originally thought blankets and people sitting on the floor would be good, I finally caved in to renting chairs. To cover all our asses, I presented it as a work in progress. After each performance, everyone, audience and actors, partied hard. I have no idea what people thought, but I’m sure most dismissed it as just one more “happening” sort of exercise. I knew Clem was disappointed; he couldn’t find the play he had come to see. For me, the success was in the personal journeys the actors took. I had watched their faces and bodies change in those months as they shed their facades. I had taken that trip when I was with Tony’s group and knew the bravery and power of it. Yes, the choice of play was wrong. My leadership wavered—sometimes too strong, sometimes too hesitant. But what disappointed me most was that my experiment had failed; I had been unable to adapt Grotowski’s method to a standard text in a restricted amount of time. I accepted it and would never attempt it again. His work was part of me; that would have to be enough.

  After Dream Plays, I continued to perform in a few plays with Albert and also started to audition more earnestly for mainstream productions. There, I ran headlong into rejection for the first time. I could understand when the part wasn’t right or the chemistry was off or I had screwed up the audition. More difficult to deal with was when I would be called back repeatedly, only to lose out in the end.

  I also started auditioning for musicals and was thrilled when I was offered the part of Sarah in a revival of Guys and Dolls. I still soar at the memory of the “I’ll Know” duet. But the thrill was as short lived as the funding, which dwindled away. A particular heartbreaker was when I sang “Why Was I Born?” for Al Carmine, the theatrical guru of Judson Church, for a new musical he was staging. I could feel the heat in my body as I sang full out, opening myself to the breadth and joy of the sound. We talked a bit, but then he said, no, he had nothing for me. To give my all, the best that I could give, and not have it be enough, how wounding that was. And the idea of putting my whole self on the line again? Fuck it! And for a while, I pretty much did.

  But there were good times in the loft. I learned that I could be casual, that I could live in a place where the door was always open. Friends, new people, there was always someone around. Thank God, because when the place was empty, it gave me the shivers. As for Mark and me, we were certainly an odd couple. But we genuinely liked each other, and I was drawn to his spontaneity and readiness to have fun, and of course I adored that he adored me. And I loved that he was great pals with Sarah, sometimes surprising me with how intuitive and protective he could be with her. I knew that people assumed our relationship was based on fantastic, older woman–hippie boy-toy sex, or some such. Fact was, the sex was terrible and I put an end to it early on. So, in that sense, I guess we were an odder couple than people even imagined. Our ties were simple: casual, yet close and caring. No surprise, “our song” was Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May.”

  Besides friends and gatherings, it was important to me that the space was used for theater, and several groups rehearsed there. The high point was when Charles Ludlam—the farouche impresario of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, the Orson Welles of high camp—virtually moved in to rehearse his extravaganza Eunuchs of the Forbidden City. Charles, simultaneously profound and fey, so slight, so huge eyed, so astonishingly imaginative, so vastly knowledgeable—to know him was to adore him. For the months he and his company were there, life was a circus. To Sarah’s delight, they built their costumes there—oh, the kimonos and headdresses and wigs. And the group, all of them so damn nice: Charles, a vegetarian, giving me recipes in hopes I would clean up my nutritional act; the guys doing magic and acrobatics for us. And I still see the divine Black-Eyed Susan guiding Sarah as she tried to walk in Susan’s foot-high platform shoes. And the immensely zaftig Lola Pashalinski dressing up the cats.

  Yes, we now had two cats. Dick, an abandoned kitten who had adopted Sarah while we had been in West Shokan, New York, the previous summer. And Berry, an all-black Himalayan that Mark, an animal maven, found for us to keep Dick company. Sarah adored them, and they would reward her by living until they were nineteen.

  Over the next few years, Charles and I stayed in touch, meeting for brown rice and tofu at his vegetarian hangouts in the East Village. His company flourished; he would become a legend. So much achieved in so little time. Only forty-four, he would die of AIDS in 1987.

  Soon it was Sarah’s turn to join the theatrics when Albert directed Troilus and Cressida as a Super Bowl face-off. I was Cressida, head cheerleader, Troilus was a clearly gay quarterback, Helen was homecoming queen . . . and Sarah was a mini-cheerleader who opened and closed the play as Pandarus’s page, a part Albert created for her. Leave it to Albert, at the height of the Vietnam frenzy, to turn a tragic war play into an antic farce. The audience, not to mention the actors, were bewildered.

  There were marvelous trips to Coney Island with Sarah and Mark, where I discovered that my six-year-old was actually a daredevil in disguise. Only the scariest, most topsy-turvy, fastest rides would satisfy her, while I cowered below. I, who had grown up with Rye’s Playland in my backyard, threw up after being bullied onto the mildest of the roller coasters. Coney Island, so deliciously scuzzy and redolent of past glories. Just my thing. I would often seek out the grand Victorian beach hotels of my childhood that smelled of the mildew and must of the sea, where I could still hear the accordion’s refrain of “Goodnight, Ladies” wafting through the corridors at night. And, too, the rococo movie palaces of the thirties, the vestiges of their gilt and frescoes marking time until the wrecking ball. Such was the decaying charm of Coney Island for me.

  There was a brief affair with Buddhism and with the come-hither actor who I met in Chekov’s Platanov. The Buddhism lasted longer than the man, but not by much. And there was a strange encounter with two waifs and a sick dog. Kids in their late teens, a boy and a girl, filthy, destitute strangers to the city. Mark had befriended them in Times Square and brought them to the loft. We washed them, disinfected them, fed them—all three of them—and put them to bed in Robert’s room. He was away, and Sarah was with Clem. I washed their clothes and dug up new ones for them. Disillusioned flower children abandoning the promise of Haight-Ashbury—now bearing the more prosaic label of “vagrants”—they were now hitching around the country, searching for the next Eden. Question was, what to do for them?

  The next day, they answered the question themselves. We all got in the car to take the dog to a clinic. On the way, they became hostile, called us capitalist pigs, doling out charity, who the fuck did we think we were . . . At the next light they got out, and I drove off before they could change their minds. I understood the backlash—maybe I would have felt the same—but I wasn’t about to take them on. We felt bad about the dog, though.

  During the slow times, I took on a new project: researching early American drama. Bypassing melodrama and musical revues, I worked in libraries to ferret out the roots of homegrown realism. I had to believe American drama hadn’t begun with Eugene O’Neill. Then I hit on the groundbreaker James A. Herne, a heralded playwright/actor/company manager who in 1892 wrote a simple play, Shore Acres, about a li
ghthouse keeper. Eschewing artifice throughout, the play ends as the old man, alone onstage, prepares for the night. The scene is long, silent, and intensely private. He goes about his mundane tasks, then extinguishes the gas lamps, until, the room illuminated only by the glow of the wood stove, he slowly exits.

  Audiences must have been startled by these first steps into such naturalism: minimal footlights, no declaiming; instead, they became voyeurs into the life of an old man. Perhaps too startled, because the play was never as successful as Herne’s melodramatic productions. I like to think of Shore Acres as the first American drama. Fact was, though, it wouldn’t be until the 1930s that tastemakers acknowledged that an American could write an important play. Light entertainment and musicals, yes. But not drama.

  The scenario was certainly familiar to me. After all, until the 1950s, it had been inconceivable that America could produce great art, much less become the center of the art world. I continued to explore the theater’s past, but as fascinated as I was by the material and its history, the solitude made me restless. I didn’t want to read about theater—I wanted to do theater.

  And, yes, there were drugs. Everyone I knew smoked grass and hash. Many dropped acid now and then. The heavier stuff was too expensive and harder to come by; it hadn’t become mainstream yet. I was considered a dinosaur because, when pressed, I would admit that I preferred vodka. To much laughter. Although I joined in around the hookah or passing the joint, I never really took to it. Except for the acid. I don’t know how many trips I took with friends, but there were quite a few during those loft years, and they were all good. For the first time I really heard music, saw color, saw a tree, and felt a lightness of being.