The publicity didn’t hurt Don either as Barry Nadler parlayed Don’s ricochet notoriety into an assignment at CBS. Don would direct a Studio One drama. My good fortune was rubbing off on my friends, which I thought was just dandy. So how come I wasn’t happy?
I wasn’t happy because the Good Lord never intended me to be without a fella. It didn’t have to be Ben Webber—those days were over—but it did have to be someone and soon. I was pushing twenty and crowding loneliness. Right there in the middle of New York, fame and fortune in my pocket, my face and figure without peer, I was, as Barry had put it, “as lonely as an Arab in the Cats-kills,” and I was reading more books than Clifton Fadiman would have if locked in the British Museum.
I was all sixes and sevens—as at odds with the world as I had been the day I landed at Grand Central having run away from Connecticut. And being known as the dumbest girl on television wasn’t exactly helping to round out my life. So I decided to take some of that time I had on my hands and find out whether or not I could act.
I asked Barry who he knew who could help me. He knew Helga Nathan. Would she see me? Yes, but she might not notice me. With that as the only ground rule, I went to see Helga Nathan.
Her studio was just over a funeral parlor, which is why she was never noted for comedy. It was a big room, bare and poorly lit with thin overhead lighting. For a minute I thought I might be on the wrong floor. I looked around to pay my respects to the family of the deceased when I realized that the people in the room were alive, and one of them was Helga Nathan. “Selma,” she said, to a mouse of a secretary, “would you bring me some tea?”
Helga Nathan was about sixty. She was formidable both in physicality and in bearing. Buxom and matriarchal, she was also queenlike and serene, sitting in a carved wooden chair that was covered with worn red velvet and hugged her like a throne. All the other chairs were wooden, the kind you see at a church function—foldable, stackable, and uncomfortable. The stage was two steps off the floor and had one bulb hanging on a thin strand of wire. The light looked like a fat spider that had fallen asleep while trying to spin an electrical cord.
Helga Nathan continually ran her hands through her hair, like rakes. She took long pauses when she spoke and fiddled with the buttons on her blouse, minutes sometimes going by before she would actually say anything, even though her mouth was moving all the while, shaping words but making no sounds. Suddenly, while she played with her buttons, her breast popped right out of her blouse, like a cuckoo out of its clock looking around as if to ask, “Hey, what time is it?” I must have been staring at it because Helga Nathan looked at me and then at it, and, stuffing it back into its housing, she gently admonished me, “It’s a tit, darling. You have them, too, don’t you?”
I nodded at the truth of it and she went on to ask me what I did to survive. I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell her that I was a comedienne on a late-night talk show. I didn’t have to tell her—she knew.
“Why did you do that, Virginia?”
“Well, I have to earn a living.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Steal, darling. Burglarize. Pick pockets. Do anything you have to do to keep the bulk of your time your own.”
“Oh.”
“Then, once you have it, give it. Every moment of it. Give it to acting. Can you do that, child?”
“Yes.”
“Devote yourself to words not of your own creation, but words so shining that to speak them is to flatter your larynx beyond all human cackle. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Here is a play. Eugene O’Neill. Long Day’s Journey into Night, yes?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Page eighty-eight. Mary’s speech. Are you familiar with it?”
“Yes. No.”
“The middle of the page. Where she says, ‘It’s a lie. I did want him.’”
“Yes.”
“Read it violently, Virginia. Violently.”
“Yes.” And I read it violently, storming about the stage, suddenly as emotionally Russian as the czar and as raging as the Volga. I couldn’t believe it: as she was watching me, her tit popped out again, as if to listen. And again she was unaware of it. But I couldn’t continue, not with the damned boob staring me in the face.
“Is there something wrong child? Why did you stop?”
“Well—”
“Is it my tit again?”
“Well—yes.”
“But why are you watching me?”
“Well—”
“Very well. So my tit is out. Someone in your audience has popped; her tit and is playing with it and it’s very distracting. Virginia, audiences play with many things during a performance. Why else do men wear hats? When it happens what do you do?”
“Well—” I knew she wanted me to say that I would ignore the tit and go on with my reading. But that was not my instinct. I also knew that she wanted me to be honest, and that’s why she was popping her tit in the first place, to see if I was up to continuing.
“Virginia, what would you do?”
“Me? What would I do?”
“Yes.”
“I’d go into my timestep.” And that’s what I did. And Helga Nathan just loved it. And she applauded and yelled for more, and stamped her feet. So I finished with trenches and went cake-walking off into the wings while waving an imaginary hat. And I stayed there, hidden, waiting for the world to end.
“Virginia?”
I peeked out at her. “Yes, Miss Nathan?”
“Please come back.”
“Yes, Miss Nathan.” I walked back onstage, still holding onto the script. It was wet and warped from my body heat. Also, it was tired from my big dance because it had also been my imaginary hat.
“That was very good.”
“Really?”
“Oh my, yes.”
“You think I’m an actress?”
“No. I think you’re a madwoman.”
“But not an actress.”
“No. But it’s a prerequisite to being an actress. To be an actress you must first be mad.”
“Oh. Then—may I study with you?”
“No. But I’d like you to teach me how to do that—what you just did.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Syllogisms. All actors are mad. But all mad people are not actors. Some are dancers.”
“No talent, huh?”
“Much worse. A sense of humor. Very destructive onstage. Quite necessary offstage, but destructive onstage. You would laugh at anything. At the lunacy of what you were doing. You would realize how absurd it was to be onstage while people were watching you, and you would laugh. You would laugh through King Lear, would you not?”
“I don’t know, but—yes. I think it’s better than leering through ‘King Laugh.’” What the hell, I thought, might as well be hung for a Bob Hope as for a Henny Youngman.
She was smiling—maternally but with the smugness that comes from the knowledge of being correct. “Making people laugh is much more difficult than making them cry, don’t you think?”
I stamped my foot in petulance. She was right, God damn her. “But I don’t want to make people laugh!”
“Then why do you do it?”
“I don’t know!”
“My darling, you do it to keep yourself from crying, which is the essence of comedy. Come back to me when you’re not so sad. Right now you are too sad and you will make everyone laugh. And I teach drama. Did I offer you any tea? Oh, Selma? May we have another tea for Virginia, please? Thank you, darling.”
Helga Nathan had me cold. She knew me inside out. She knew, just as I had always known, that whenever I was funny it was because I was sad. As funny as I was as Ginger on The Stan Arlen Show, that’s how sad I was as Ginnie in The Ginnie Maitland Show. Egads, Yorick—and I thought I knew her well.
I went back to the apartment totally devastated. Yet, when I went on The Stan Arlen Show that night, I was the funniest I’d ever been. Some
where along the way I had turned into Pagliacci, only prettier, better paid, and with better legs. But I couldn’t sing, was not allowed to act, and was unable to cry at the end of my aria; so the applause was hollow and the fulfillment lean, and handsome tenors never wanted to sing with me.
Don was in rehearsal at CBS on his first show, and I could tell from his attitude at dinner every night that he was in total command of it all. Candy could see it, too, and the pair of them were so happily confident that it often made me ill. Also, they then had money coming in and no longer had to depend on my generosity for food and expenses. They started going out on their own, asking me along, of course, but I preferred to stay home and be miserable—and then go on as Ginger and be hilarious and break up America—and then come home and cry. A-ha-ha-ha-ha (that’s Pagliacci).
Don’s show was on a Monday night, the usual Studio One time, and it was quite good. The script had been good from the outset and Don’s direction only made it better. CBS was pleased, and Westinghouse, the sponsor, just loved it. They all came at Don with offers of more. He was one of the bright young directors. He had earned it and he enjoyed it.
Don would have loved to have done a Ben Webber script, but Ben Webber was in Hollywood—doing what, we really didn’t know. He had been big in New York, a vital and highly touted young writer. But out there, in California, he ran the risk of being just another body in the pool. Barry defended Ben, saying that he did what he had to do. Also, it seems that Ben had given Barry five thousand dollars to get out of a contract that never existed in the first place, at least not on paper. The truth was, none of us could knock Ben, least of all myself, who, though duped by Richie, should still have known better and might have granted the poor sinner an audience before consigning him to Purgatory. It might have changed both our lives had I done that. No, it would have.
Arnie Felsen came around a lot, his script under his arm. He had worked it and reworked it into about ten different versions. And every time he came in he looked like he was delivering the Sunday Times. He asked Don to look at it and Don, as busy as he was, did take time out to work with Arnie on it.
Singly, I continued my duality, sad by day, locking myself away from my adoring public, then appearing on the tube at night, five nights a week, to help make the nation a better place to laugh in. Often, though, upon getting home at two or three in the morning, I’d upchuck out of sheer misery, telling Candy that it was the flu or athlete’s foot or false pregnancy. But she knew otherwise.
Then, one day, when I was deep into my daily noontime despair, I got a phone call from Johnny Farrar. Chicago Johnny Farrar, calling from his suite at the Delmonico. He was in town, on his way to Paris, and had gotten my number from Barry who had happily broken my edict of giving my number to no one. It was Saturday; could we have dinner that night? “Shit, yes!” I thought, though what I said was, “Johnny who?”
He picked me up at eight and was as beautiful as I had remembered him. And courteous and thoughtful, and as fly-by-night as a bat. He was leaving at midnight, Paris or bust, and timidly he asked me if I’d consider going with him. If so, he’d see to it that I’d be back in New York in time for Monday night’s show. Also, as promised, he was divorced.
We had dinner. His car picked us up at the restaurant, and we drove directly to Idlewild. We flew first class to Paris and checked in at the Ritz, which is where he always stayed when in Paris. I had no idea what time it was, or the day, or the year, or the eon. Paris was a tonic and Johnny Farrar the sommelier who poured it. Nor did I have any clothes, only what I wore to dinner in the previous century. It was my usual trick—running off with the parade and never looking back. I was a gypsy, heart and soul, tambourine and golden earrings.
We made love on silk sheets, madly yet gently (yes, it’s possible) and we did it a number of times, with time out for dinners and for waltzes along the Champs-Elysées. And I stocked up on fashions in Parisian shoppes that Johnny had somehow gotten to open even though it was Sunday.
And I was on the Monday plane back to New York, in time to do the show and feeling so marvelous that I just wasn’t all that funny. But no one was really funny on Mondays so nobody noticed or cared.
I did a week of shows, getting unfunnier each time. And, following Friday night’s show, I was back on the Paris express. Johnny lived regally, money at every turn, electronics—whatever that was—apparently being a good thing to be plugged into. If he worked hard throughout the week, that’s how hard we played on weekends, and my twentieth birthday was celebrated as if I were a dying child given one last Christmas a few months early.
I was building an entire Paris wardrobe, stashing it at the Ritz. My American wardrobe was in my apartment in New York. I had clothes on both sides of the Atlantic—so many that I could have been all of the Gabors. As a result of two such well-stocked closets, I was able to fly light, back and forth, a crazy kid in jeans and dark glasses, flying first class, you bet your ass. I looked carefully at the stewardesses, wondering if any of them had ever stayed at the apartment. But the girls were French and had such cute accents and asses that if they stayed at anyone’s apartment it could only have been Howard Hughes’.
Johnny did the continent during the week but would always be in Paris for our weekends. We did the environs, the Wine District, the three-star restaurants. I tried to learn French but frankly couldn’t handle it. I would do a phrase and then laugh, and the natives didn’t care for it. One weekend I met him in Rome where we bought more clothes and stayed at the Hassler. Then we did Venice, then Vienna, then London, all of those wardrobes being sent back to my apartment in New York, where Don and Candy had to wonder if I was opening my own shop—“Ginnie’s of Europe—y’all come.”
It was crazy and endless and unreal and passionate. I knew it had to end yet refused to give the thought an ant’s width in my mind. If Europe be the food of love, then play on, oh Columbus, and never leave Genoa. That Ferdinand and Isabella had sent you can only mean they were having too much fun to go themselves.
In New York Stan Arlen took me out for a drink and the conversation went something like this:
“Ginnie, you’re not as funny as you used to be.”
“I know.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m happy.”
“I see. And when you’re happy, you’re not funny, right?”
“Right.”
“You’re only funny when you’re sad.”
“Right.”
“Okay—you’re fired. Does that make you sad?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Hang onto that sadness. We’ve got a show to do in an hour.”
“In an hour I’ll be happy again.”
“Wears off that fast?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“You’re in love.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I know, but it’s happy.”
“Very unprofessional for a clown to be happy. Ruins your timing.”
“I know. That’s what Helga Nathan told me.”
“That’s funny.”
“What should I do?”
“Take a couple weeks off. Go out and have yourself a terrible time and get all that happiness out of your system. Don’t come back to work until you’re pale, sickly, depressed—and funny. I don’t care if you have to get terminally ill. All I want is a few laughs.”
I took a two-week vacation from The Stan Arlen Show, and I never went back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ben
1953
I flew to Hollywood with lots of money already in my kick. Aside from what I still had left of my TV earnings, I had $25,000 as half payment for a novella I’d be adapting for Warner Brothers. The other $25,000 I’d be getting in various stages through rewrites and up to commencement of principal photography. Less ten percent commission to the Morris office and I would have, within eight weeks, something like $48,000 in hard cash.
I was flying out a
lone, all my belongings crammed into two bags and my typewriter stowed under my seat. Someone named Steiner would be meeting me at Los Angeles International Airport and I would be in his hands from then on. The flight was almost eight hours, and I passed the time with Scotch and soda and thoughts of where I’d been and where I’d be going.
From Pittsburgh to New York to Los Angeles—it had all happened relatively fast. Four years in all, including a wasted year and a half in the Army. Not bad. From selling greeting cards to writing screenplays—not bad at all. Odd jobs, pretty girls, a few knocks, a few kicks—and at twenty-four, moments away from becoming twenty-five, I was flying high. And, thanks to the Scotch, higher even than the plane.
Though I had yet to read it or even learn the title, the novella that Warners had asked me to adapt was, as I understood it, well-plotted but rife with stick-figure characters. Since I was a playwright, it was assumed that I would know how to make those people more compelling and less static. Because of the success of my TV plays, I was considered a good dialogist. All I had to do then was to apply my so-called expertise and—voilà—it would all pull together like steel shavings to a magnet, and a movie would emerge.
I knew, however, not to be overly confident—not to be the cliché hotshot young writer with nothing but contempt for the old pros. After all, film was a medium that called for a technical comprehension as well as a sense of scene and a nose for action, and I was aware of it—even reading a few books on the subject before flying out. I felt additionally secure in the hands of Vernon Stacey who was already in LA, having left a day ahead of me to attend to other matters first.
Hollywood being the stuff of dreams, I had a few dreams of my own that I wanted to script, shoot, edit, and release—and then stand back and enjoy as the world acclaimed them to be the greatest dreams ever dreamed and me the greatest dreamer, and the nicest person, and the best athlete, and class president, and most popular, and best loved, and most revered, and the second coming, and the first in the hearts of his countrymen. That’s how drunk I was by the time the pilot circled the Grand Canyon so that us yokels could get a look and realize how fucking insignificant we were after all.
There Should Have Been Castles Page 44