The airplane trip back was the same as the trip over, lots of food and orchids. By that time we knew more of the other passengers, so people stopped by our seats and chatted. Then we landed in Hawaii and the pilot announced that everyone had to get off with all their luggage and go through customs. Customs? We had totally forgotten Hawaii was the United States.
When it was our turn, for whatever reason, they took one look at us and went through our luggage like they were the bomb squad and we were card carrying Weathermen. Norman said the two of us must have looked suspicious, him older and dressed in rumpled khakis, me in tight jeans, a shirt I’d gotten in Manila tied at the waist, which was my style, and my straw hat; I’m sure we did. They lifted out all my clothes and shook them, dirty underwear and all, and practically took Norman’s briefcase apart. Then the man doing the search let out a groan, like he had stuck himself with a sharp object. I looked to see if somehow he had cut himself, but he brought his hand out of a pocket of Norman’s briefcase holding a tiny bit of paper. I had no idea what it was, but it proved to be a marijuana roach. A teeny-weeny one. Too small to smoke.
The man snapped his fingers, and before I knew what was happening, we were hauled off to separate rooms and two big hairy women told me to take off all my clothes. I didn’t really know what was going on, but I was scared and did as I was told, and then one of them told me to spread my legs. I didn’t want to do that for sure, but they didn’t give me an option, and before I had time to cringe, they flashed a light in the place where only my gynecologist had previously shone one, although they didn’t actually touch me, for which I was pathetically grateful, and then they told me to get dressed.
As I was sitting beside the open door waiting to see what would happen next, two little old sportswriters were hustled by, several stern officers behind them, herding them like befuddled sheep. I forget their names now, maybe it was Murray and Al, but they were the cigar-chomping kind of reporters that had names like Murray and Al and spoke in broad Brooklyn accents. One of them yelled out to me, “Barbara! Ya gotta get Norman to tell ’em we’re okay! They think we’re some kind of terrorists or something!”
“Oh, Murray,” I called after him, “you don’t want our help. They think we’re drug runners!”
When the inspector found the roach, everything turned upside down and they began to go through our luggage again with a fury. Linings were ripped out of the suitcases, our cute elephants and all our souvenirs were smashed open to see if we were smuggling drugs inside them. Norman kept saying, “We don’t have drugs! I didn’t even know that roach was in there! It’s been in there for months, years probably! Why would I have left it in there if I had known? I would have thrown it away!” He had been strip-searched, too, which he was most annoyed about, although they hadn’t laid a hand on him, either. I think they just wanted to look at us and assert their power and scare us, which they certainly did. We were humiliated and angry.
While all this was going on, the rest of the passengers didn’t know what was happening, just that there was some delay, so our two friends Murray and Al were worried that they were going to miss the flight. One of them said to the other, “If they don’t hurry this up, we’re going to blow the plane,” which was Brooklynese for “We’re going to miss the plane.” Some official walking by had heard them, and that’s when they were immediately nabbed for strip-searching as well, poor things. It was pandemonium. Finally, after our luggage was in shreds and all our souvenirs had been smashed and they hadn’t found so much as a leaf of pot or anything else, the boss of the airport was called in, and thank God he knew who Norman was.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Mailer, for the inconvenience,” he said, as if we had merely been asked to change our seats or something. “How was the fight?” the man asked. Norman, as jolly as he could be in that situation, gave a blow-by-blow description for the man, and then the boss told the underlings, who were noticeably frustrated that they had failed to find large quantities of drugs, “These people are okay. Let them go.” I think if there had been any more marijuana in his bag, or if we had lipped off to them, or if the boss hadn’t known who Norman was, we would have been thrown in jail. But it was the weekend and everyone wanted to go home. They didn’t want to have to deal with something this trivial. We eventually got back on the plane, shaken but wiser.
Coda: for the next few years, every time we took an overseas trip, our luggage was searched. I think we’d been put on some list, but finally it stopped—until the shoe bomber and that ilk arrived on the scene, and then travel was never the same again for anybody.
Twenty-two
When we got home, Norman went to spend a few days in Stockbridge, which I understood he had to do, but it was getting harder for me than it had been before. I felt connected to him now, and I was so afraid he was going to change his mind and say that he liked the situation as it was and he wasn’t going to leave Carol after all. But I couldn’t let him know that, so I put on a good show of not minding a bit, which I knew he admired, and went with Amy and Milton Greene to their home in Connecticut for the weekend. Milton had agreed to photograph me. I would finally have some good pictures to take to Wilhelmina done by Marilyn Monroe’s own photographer. He also called a photographer friend of his, who agreed to take some more pictures as well, so I was feeling pretty good about modeling.
Their house in Greenwich was light and beautiful, perfect in every detail, just like Amy. Amy was a honey blonde and tiny, probably five feet at her tallest. Once when we were sitting on the couch, I reached out and spanned her foot with my fingers, from thumb to little finger. I could comfortably reach an octave on the piano, and there was her little foot the same length. “Amy, your foot is an octave long!” She loved that. She had such a hard time finding shoes that fit, at least she could have the conceit that she was walking on octaves.
Marilyn Monroe had once stayed with them in that house when she’d come to New York to study with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. I didn’t know then how involved I would later become with the Actors Studio myself, but I didn’t know much of anything then, just that I wanted desperately to be a model and start to make some money so I could bring my son to New York. I’d been away from Matt for nearly a month and missed him terribly; every day we talked on the phone and he kept asking when I was coming home, which broke my heart. But I felt I was getting a step closer to getting a job by Milton taking my pictures. Sleeping in the room where Marilyn had stayed, putting on my makeup at the dressing table she’d once used, I felt like I was on my way to somewhere. It was a mirrored table from the thirties, which Amy later gave to me, and she said Marilyn used to mix her face cream and makeup on its surface. It’s a good trick; it makes the makeup more transparent and dewy. I still do it—only I mix it on my face, first the moisturizer, then the makeup. I hate making messes, especially on my dresser top.
It was a chilly, rainy afternoon and the leaves were putting on a grand show in glorious red and yellow and rust. The light was diffused by raindrops, perfect for pictures. Milton handed me an umbrella and we walked out into the yard, where I sat on a small bench and he took several shots. Then he said, “We got it.” We took a few more shots inside, with me in a great antique hat I’d gotten in a vintage shop in New York for five dollars, a black straw hat with ostrich feathers circa 1914. (The tag on the hat must have been the original price tag, because even in 1975 a vintage hat like that would have been more than five dollars. I asked the salesgirl, just to be sure, if that was the right price, and she said yes, so I gave her my five and left. I’m sure she got reprimanded by the owner, but I could hardly argue with her that it was too cheap.)
Posing for Milton Greene.
My life was spinning so fast that I’d hardly had time to unpack from the Philippines and take a breath, but I was so happy when Norman came back from Stockbridge after the weekend and showed me in no uncertain terms how glad he was to be back with me, and how excited he was to take me to Rome.
Norman had been a
sked to write a movie script for Sergio Leone, the director who had done the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. We’d met him in New York at Nicola’s, our favorite Italian restaurant, with his translator and several business associates. Leone didn’t speak a word of English, but as he had come up with the perfect formula for the American western, he wanted to apply himself to the perfect American gangster epic, and had acquired the rights to a book called The Hoods by Harry Grey. He was going to call it Once Upon a Time in America. I don’t think he had read any of Norman’s work, not in the original English for sure, but he wanted the best American writer to write the script, and someone had told him Norman was the best. Leone was a large, rotund man with an egg-shaped head. He smoked cigars and had rather lazy, bulbous blue eyes he fixed on me until I was uncomfortable. During the dinner, they agreed on a plan, whereupon Norman and I would travel to Rome and spend a month while Norman wrote the script and had conferences along the way with Sergio.
It was now early October, and I still didn’t know for sure what was going to happen. My daily calls to my parents and Matt were getting to be a little charged.
“When are you coming back?” they asked every day.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure what’s happening.”
“When are you getting a job?”
“I don’t know. I can’t really get a job until we get back from Italy.”
“We wish you would come on home and stop living like you are. Everyone is talking about it here.”
“It’s nobody’s business what I do. Just ignore them.” But I knew they couldn’t do that. They had lived all their lives in the glass house of “What will people say?” and they couldn’t change now. Why I kept calling them every day, I’m not sure, except that I was lonesome for them and I felt so guilty about leaving Matt, even though I knew I was going to bring him up to New York as soon as I could get settled and get some kind of job. The ugly rumor that I was putting Matt up for adoption really wounded me more deeply than I’d thought possible, and I wondered if people did believe it. I guess I wasn’t immune from “What will people say?” after all. So it was a relief in some ways to be going to Italy, where I could be with Norman every day and not have to be browbeaten over my behavior.
Partly to appease my parents and partly to show Norman my independence, I found my own apartment before we left for Rome. I would be in the same building as Norman’s mother, Fanny, who got the apartment for me. It was a one-bedroom with a tiny kitchen and a view of the courtyard, for $250 a month, a fortune to me at the time. My mortgage on a three-bedroom house had been only seventy-five dollars a month. I had come to New York with five thousand dollars from selling my house and car and furniture, plus my meager teacher’s retirement, and it was amazing how fast that went. I didn’t want to take money from Norman, although he offered. If I could hold out, I just knew I was going to get work sometime soon.
There was no furniture in the new place, but Fanny knew a man who owned a storage warehouse, and he let me come and pick out some things that his customers had abandoned. I got a gray velvet couch, a nice wooden table and chairs, a bed, a daybed for Matt that I put in the living room, some rugs, and several lamps, plus kitchen stuff, bedding, and so on, all for only a few hundred dollars. The man even threw in a couple of leather shirts I saw and loved. The best were the lamps. One was a standing lamp made of chalk that was in the shape of a king, or maybe it was Jesus. At any rate, it was a guy with a beard who was wearing a gold crown, and it weighed about fifty pounds. The apartment was a sweet, funky little place, and Norman and I stayed there a few nights to christen it, so to speak.
My mother and father sent up some of my artwork, my TV, my sewing machine, and several other things, bless them. They were happy to do it, because at least they could finally tell everyone I had my own place. It was great for Fanny, too, because while Norman was away, we hung out together a lot. Norman had confided that she had said to him I wasn’t much of a cook, so she was teaching me the dishes Norman liked. Other times, we went shopping or just sat and talked on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.
If Fanny was upset that Norman and I were off on another trip together so soon, she didn’t say anything. We got to the airport two hours early as usual, and again hit the skies for another long flight. Leone’s driver picked us up and took us to the outskirts of Rome to a place called Eur, where Leone had his production offices, and installed us in a modern hotel in suburbia, where there were few shops or restaurants. Norman went to Leone’s office every day and worked, and I soon realized there was nothing for me to do in Eur. Finally, tired of sitting around reading, I got up my courage and took a taxi into Rome by myself and explored the streets, looked in shops and galleries, and went to a famous coffee shop that someone told me de Chirico went to every day for coffee at four in the afternoon.
I had done my senior thesis on the surrealists, and de Chirico was one I loved. I knew he was old, but I just wanted to meet him. (I had no painting for him to sign, unfortunately. Probably just as well.) But he wasn’t there. They said he usually came in about that time, though, so I lingered over a cup of cappuccino and one of those pastries that look so much better than they taste. Then, when it was obvious he wasn’t coming that day, I went out and sauntered down a side street, no destination in mind.
The street had no shops, was just a deserted street of apartments, and I was about to turn around and go back when, a block away from where I was standing, a man ran out a door. Then three shots echoed in the narrow, empty street. Pop! Pop! Pop! The man fell, and blood gushed out of him, making a puddle on the sidewalk. No one followed him out of the building, and I saw no one else on the street. The man just lay there, unmoving in the quiet, the blood slowly creeping toward the gutter. I was paralyzed for a minute, adrenaline pumping at a great rate; then I turned and ran to a larger street, where a cab materialized. I jumped in and told the driver to take me to Eur. He couldn’t understand me. I was nervous and just wanted to get out of the neighborhood before someone came after me. I wrote down the name and address of the hotel for the driver, and he still didn’t know where to go. Finally, I was so frantic to get out of there, I practically grabbed him and shook him. He pulled out a map and I was able, somehow, to show him where it was. When I got back some time later, of course I told Norman all about it, and to my dismay, he was skeptical.
“That couldn’t have happened. Maybe you just thought you saw a man being shot. Maybe it was a movie. Maybe he tripped and fell.”
“But I heard shots! I saw blood coming out of him! He didn’t move!”
“It could have been a car backfiring. It could have been sound from a television. Maybe something in his pocket broke. I’m sure if it was a murder we’ll hear about it on TV. You’re letting this Pasolini murder get to you.” Pier Paolo Pasolini, a famous film director, had been killed a few days earlier, on November 2, in a bizarre way. He was run over several times by his own car. Nobody was sure who did it, but there were rumors of a gay lover and maybe that Pasolini had staged it himself, although you’d think a person committing suicide would find an easier way to do it. It was all pretty sordid. It was everywhere in the news, and while I was certainly not unaffected by it, I wasn’t so overcome that I was seeing murders everywhere.
I watched the news for the next few nights, but there was no mention of any murders, no men getting shot in shadowy small side streets in Rome. Norman probably just didn’t want me to be frightened and worried, but I began to think maybe I was crazy and actually hadn’t seen it at all. The whole thing was a scene out of Gaslight. But I had no choice. I had to just let it go. I don’t know to this day what happened. It was just another one of life’s little mysteries.
Norman wasn’t happy in our modern hotel in Eur, either. It was too far from the center of Rome, where Norman’s oldest friend, Mickey Knox, lived. When Norman and Mickey met, The Naked and the Dead had just come out and Norman and his
first wife, Bea, were in Hollywood while Norman tried to write movie scripts. Susan was born while they were out there in 1949. Mickey had been an up-and-coming young actor who’d been blacklisted during the McCarthy era a few years after he and Norman had met, and consequently had moved to Rome. He’d made a good living there ever since, doing dubbing, translating, and acting. He and Norman had even been brothers-in-law at one time, as Mickey had married Joan, the younger sister of Norman’s second wife, Adele. Joanie was a famous fashion model for Oleg Cassini. They’d had two daughters, wild little Italian beauties named Valentina and Melissa. He and Joanie were divorced, but we saw Mickey and his girlfriend Carol, an English teacher, almost every night for dinner.
It was great fun, although Norman became disgruntled with the lack of variety in the food, and once, after we’d been there a couple or three weeks, when Mickey said he was taking us to a great fish place, Norman grumpily said, “Mickey, the Italians don’t know what they’re doing with fish! There’s no such thing as a great fish place.” (I do admit that after a month of wonderful Italian restaurants, I, too, was happy to get back home and have a hamburger.)
Traveling back and forth to the city every night from Eur was a chore, especially if I also wanted to go to the city in the daytime, so Norman asked to be moved and they put us up in the Hotel Splendide at the top of the Spanish Steps on the Via Sistina. Our room had a small balcony that overlooked the city. Outside the door were the Spanish Steps, where artists and young people hung out all day. I had my portrait done on the steps by a sketch artist like I used to be myself in summers at the Ozark Folk Center. I liked the Conté crayon the artist was using and asked him where I could get one. He didn’t understand English, so people kept coming over and trying to help out until quite a crowd had gathered. Finally, someone spoke enough English to tell me where the art shop was, and everyone clapped and cheered. I went there and bought the crayon and a pad and did some drawing myself, back in the room. (I later used that crayon to draw Henry Miller’s portrait which was used on the cover of Genius and Lust.)
A Ticket to the Circus Page 18