I winced. Bellevue Hospital is a nasty place and I wished Emma were not there. She deserved to be here and it would do her some good, I supposed, but still, this is a last stop on the line for people—Emma had cracked it before turning thirty, and that takes dedication, you gotta give credit where it’s due. Dina, relishing her role as bad-news bringer, manager of the crisis, had deliciously told me the news over the phone, something like … Emma had trashed the city hospital on the Lower East Side, had to be sent to Bellevue—something along these lines. Okay, I broke down and decided to come see her for the first time in nine months.
“Sorry about the clitorectomy story, that’s depressing,” Emma said, straightening herself up in bed. “We were having such a fun visit. What are you thinking about?”
Wishing you weren’t here.
“Yeah, I thought that at first, but this is going to do wonders for my literary standing if I ever get big. Some of America’s best and brightest have entered these portals. I mean, drugs are my excuse. It looked like I was doing myself in Sylvia Plath-like, but no, it was an accident. The way I fear death? ME, a suicide? You didn’t think I actually…”
No, I heard all sorts of things but I knew you didn’t try to kill yourself. But maybe Emma should now tell me how all this—
“No, no, no, not yet,” she said, waving a hand to delay me. “I want you to see how positive I am. I am so positive lately. I am never going to be depressed again. You smile but it’s true.”
I wasn’t smiling.
“No, you’re afraid to smile, afraid I’m really crazy and belong in Bellevue and you’re treating me carefully. People have been treating me carefully for some time now. Like when Lisa came.”
How is Lisa these days? I ask (changing the subject).
“Oh. Not so good. She came and talked about her problems with Jim nonstop. They’re going to separate for a while, she with the kid. She kept going on about not wanting to be a single mother, how hard it was to be a single mother. I said reconcile with Jim, she said no way, not for a while. I told her, Hey if you don’t want to be a single mother, let me adopt your daughter—I’ll be a single mother. I’m gonna kidnap that little girl. But I’m sounding crazy again, huh?”
That’s not good news about Lisa.
“She treated me like I was going to cry or break or something weird. Only the kid was great. She crawled in bed with me and we played with the bed-control and went up and down and up and down … She is so goddam cute now.”
Yes, last time I saw her, she was cute. As kids go.
“Yeah, I looked at Lisa and Child, the complete love and dependence and unconditional caring and all. The kid just needs and loves the mother so thoroughly—I mean, I was taken aback. I thought to myself: I’m gonna get one of those. Just me and it, though. No husband, no marital duties, no sex. I bet they won’t let me adopt, though.”
A kid.
“Yeah a kid. It would stabilize me, give me someone to matter to, someone to behave for. When my life drifted out of control I could say, Hey Emma, bimbo, get it back on track, your little girl is in need of a sane mother, you’re all she has in the world, so get right with god, fly straight.”
It seemed an odd idea for having a kid. No weirder, I guess, than any other one, though. I hated kid-and-marriage talk so I started poking through Emma’s writing satchel and she didn’t seem to mind.
“That, what you’re holding,” she said, pointing to a stack of notebook-paper leaves attached by a big paper clip, “is my new, my first, my debut book of poems.”
I’m very proud of you, Emma. Congrats.
“Hey, I told you: the new positive Emma. You know how Janet always said the Women’s Consortium Press could publish a volume of poetry if I’d go through the motions of calling this woman Naomi who knew Adrienne Rich and went to parties with Denise Levertov? Well, I called her from the pay phone at Bellevue—I mean, that clinched it. I must be a first-rate womanpoet. Crazy with the stress of living in the phallogocentric world.”
Phall … phallogocentric?
“Like that one? Phallus, logos, centric—male-dominated words and language that hinder us, constrict us, persecute us women poets.”
Hmmmm.
Emma laughed. “Don’t worry, they have some nonlooney stuff they do and if you publish with them all these other women go out and buy the shit and you get reviewed in the women’s press and Janet said she’d freelance the review and PRAISE me to the hilt. Ah, the corrupt literary world. Village Voice will review me, I hope. I can then take my new book and maybe get a real contract with Grove or Faber or someone, work my way up.”
I hope so.
“Looks like we’re both in the old papers, huh? I’ll get reviewed just like you.”
Saw my notices, did you?
“Lisa brought me the clip—what was it? ‘Up-and-coming star, Gilbert Freeman.’ I mean you’re BIG-TIME now—the Daily News doesn’t go on like that about everyone.”
Wellll …
“Weren’t you gonna tell me?”
(More modesty:) Welllll …
“You were gonna sit there and not tell your old buddy Emma about your new success—your monstrous, GIANT Broadway success?”
No, actually, I’d brought the same clip and I pulled it out and gave her an extra. (Two people panned me so, really, No Big Deal.)
“Must be a great feeling to be up on the Big Stage with the stars now, huh?”
I could not tell Emma the whole of my dissatisfaction with this production, this great production of my dreams, My Big Break. I had spent, I think, eight years waiting for someone to look across at me and say gee it must be nice to be up onstage with the stars and get your name in the Times/News/Post/ magazines and be working in the Theater. And as a younger man (even as late as last year, I think) I had rehearsed answers in my sleep, practiced them before mirrors, but now shrugging and acting nonchalant or any kind of phoneyness put me in the same league as Rosemary Campbell and I had this dread of doing anything that got close to that. I wanted to say: Emma, in all honesty I liked doing two-bit avant-garde theater where five people came better than this. This is the desk job of acting. I’m not fulfilled, I’m disillusioned and what did it was Mother’s Day starring Rosemary Campbell, legend, Rosemary Campbell, the peak of the business.
Mother’s Day by Cecil Praed. I play one of the four children. I get $650 a week, by god. And this will run for AT LEAST six months, as long as the old girl wants to do it. Summer season just began and no New Yorkers were coming to theater anymore, it was all Ma and Pa from Nebraska, into the city on their two-week vacations or package tours of family outings or conventions, and they all want to see someone famous like Rosemary Campbell in her vehicle and Katharine Hepburn down the street in her vehicle and Lauren Bacall across the way in her vehicle. Serious vehicular congestion on Broadway this summer. Mother’s Day was pap, completely predictable, just an obstacle course: Rosemary laughs, Rosemary shows that ageless grace and brittleness still apparent through the years (and makeup), Rosemary lets her lip tremble, Rosemary wrenches her soul, Rosemary Rosemary Rosemary.
The last act is a throwaway for me and Martin who play her two sons. We sit offstage and listen to Rosemary out there having it out with her thankless daughters—yelling, screaming, emoting. Martin is almost as cynical as I am about this production.
“Listen, here it is, listen for the catch in her voice,” says Martin, craning forward.
Rosemary out onstage: “Grow up, for god’s sake. You can’t be a child forever—when are you going to stand on your own feet…”
“Get ready for it,” Martin would say, “here it is—”
Rosemary out onstage: “Oooooh Stephanie dahrling dahrling girl…”
Martin would make wretching motions, contortions. “Every night the same friggin’ way. ‘Ooooooooooh Steffahnay dahhhhrling…’ Pickled and cured in her own juices, this one.”
Our stage manager, standing to the side, allows a dry smile as he exhales, “Surely you c
an’t be talking about the First Lady of the American Theater, Queen of the Footlights … THESPIA herself.”
Rosemary, it was beginning to occur to me, was a creation of a lifetime in Show Biz. She did the worst thing you could do in the entertainment world: She bought her own act. It wasn’t just being a prima donna or full of herself or egotistical because she deserved to be all those things, one expected that; it was that she didn’t have anything behind the persona, she was a shell, wasn’t all there. She didn’t know our real names and called us by our character names. She told us the same glorious memoir stories repeatedly, within twenty-four hours of the last time she’d told them—every word the same, every smile, nuance, arch of an eyebrow identical. She worked off a script she didn’t know was a script.
“What would happen if a bomb went off in the audience?” Martin asked. “Or if we gave her a line like ‘Mother, you old bag, you look one hundred years old.’ I wonder if she can ad-lib. She’s on automatic pilot.”
Like some kind of Oriental princess who never was allowed to touch the ground with her own foot, Rosemary lived in a sheltered world. Her agent and manager/husband, a rich banker, delivered her by limo to the theater at the right time, her makeup boy, her costume advisor, her hairdresser and press person (three solicitous mincing queens—“Rosie, you’re DIVINE, you hear me? You’re AGELESS, do you hear me?”—and one icy WASP bitch respectively) all in tow. They told her all she had to know of the world, all that should concern her. If there was a good clipping or mention of her in the paper (the world loved her, this twice Oscar-winning Hollywood Great now treading the boards), the boys took turns reading it to her while she considered it: “Ah yes, we will write him a thank-you letter and I shall sign it. The difference between stars now and stars of my day—”
“This is still your day, Rosie, and don’t you think otherwise,” says Hairdresser.
“—is that stars of my day cared so about their fans. Harry Cohn once told me…” The hand delicately rises to rest lightly on the lower neck, her smile, her legendary smile warmly begins to glow, the eyes widen as Memoir 6783 comes to the surface: “… Harry Cohn said Rosemary, darling, for every letter you write that’s a hundred more people who will stay loyal to you forever. Write a letter to a fan in a small town and America will love you forever…”
“And they have loved you forever,” says Makeup Boy. “From all over the country they’ve come to see you, Miz Campbell. They remember you, they love you…”
Rosemary exuded a state of grace, you saw the scene in Life Turns Round (1943): “I have been so favored in this life … I have been, you know, my friends, so very very lucky…”
“You’ve deserved every minute of it, Miz Campbell.”
And now the modesty a la her Oscar acceptance speech: “Do you … do you really think that, dear? Are you not just telling an old woman” —the voice softens, the eyes have that distant noble look—“an old woman what she would so like to hear?”
I always wondered if Rosemary knew who the president was, or what year it was, or if World War II was over. Her world had no connection to fact or modern life or normalness or strife and conflict of any kind. One could fantasize about her limo getting hijacked to the South Bronx and her getting turned out somewhere along Southern Boulevard to walk back to the East Side (although with her charmed life she might well have walked back without incident). Scary thing, this kind of insularity that happens with American presidents so they don’t even know what’s happening and what everyone is thinking, and American pop stars in their own little fantasy worlds—god, the cossetings, the emoluments, the unsparing and unceasing effort not to contradict the SUCCESS, these crazy Howard Hughes worlds of yes men and twenty personal bodyguard-staffpeople scurrying about to make sure you never have to soil your hand with opening a door or taking a cap off a pen. I guess you live in that nonsense long enough and you too can be Rosemary Campbell with all the dimension and scope of a touched-up airbrush ’30s movie still.
Mayor Koch declared June 10 Rosemary Campbell Day, as it marked her fortieth anniversary in Show Business. When just nineteen (yeah right—this old girl was in her late sixties if she was a day) she starred in Glory of the Dawn (1942) released on June 10. (The mayor’s office must have slaved overtime to unearth that little fact—any excuse for a photo opportunity and to promote another Broadway vehicle that brought in the tourist trade.) So there was to be a special performance, black tie, limos for miles outside the theater, a theater party of champagne and caviar and inedible pretentious pates on cardboard grain-meal crackers like the kind you feed the giraffes at the Bronx Zoo.
The Construction Crew (as we called the Hairdresser, Makeup Boy, Press Lady and Costumer) were there working for all they were worth to restore the sheen and polish on Rosemary. She talked glibly and confidently about her second Oscar and the press and when you get up in front of millions of people there was no reason to be nervous about an affair like this, no reason at all, laughter, light girlish laughter, ah how she’d seen so much in these forty years, had she ever mentioned the time Cary Grant and Fredric March took her dancing at the Savoy, the moon above them and the stars and BLAH BLAH BLAH.
“You realize,” said Martin, “that she’s going to be even worse than ever tonight. Not a piece of scenery left unchewed. She’ll be all over our lines, playing with the props.” Right you were, Martin.
Mother’s Day was written by Cecil Praed, who had conjured up Rosemary’s last two vehicles (A Dream of Cambridge, about a Corn is Green-like schoolteacher coaching her poor student into Harvard against ignorant parents, etc.; and So Many Pretty Flowers, about an invalid wife fighting for her man against his philandering), and Cecil knew that you had to send the others of the cast out there and warm up the audience with lines like “You know Mother,” and “Mother is crazy, but we love her,” and “There’s no stopping Mother when she gets something in her head” so the audience was well ready to see this LEGEND come out and whirl about the stage. And so it went, Martin and myself and Gertrude (Daughter No. 1) as we worked the crowd up for the Great Entrance. Finally, the cue—Martin: “Quiet, let’s not let her know we know. I hear her in the drive…”
The door opened and in came Rosemary in an ensemble devised just for this evening, this zillion-dollar society-woman ball-gown (a little much for the role, but if you started picking at details on this play there’d be nothing left), and the place exploded into a prolonged ovation for Rosemary who made a slight eye-acknowledgment of the applause … no, no, she seemed to say, don’t prolong this, don’t make me break character, don’t stand, oh you mustn’t, but now that you are all right I will step out of character and yes absolve you with a recognition of your worship (yes, her face COULD say all that). So soon she is bowing a grand opera bow as the audience, tuxedo-and evening-gown-clad, is standing and cheering and honoring and adoring.
Every act started with this nonsense and then GOOD GOD the orgy of endless encores and curtain calls at the end of the play, the once-glamorous face registering: Oh me? Again? No you are too kind … And of course a speech was demanded as she stood there, fourth curtain call, holding a bouquet of roses, the stage strewn with flowers and petals.
“Thank you ever so much,” said her voice, trembling slightly in imitation of some long-lost, remembered genuine emotion. “I have always felt the Theater to be my first home—”
Martin to me backstage: “Ha, her first play here was 1978.”
“—and New York is and has always been where my heart belongs. It is my home now and always. And the Theater is where I meet with YOU my friends…” The hands extended to include everyone. “I feel such LOVE here, LOVE flowing out, LOVE flowing in, from the stage to you, from the audience to the stage, we are together in a LOVE of the MAGIC…” (A slight pause as if the word magic just occurred to her.) “… the MAGIC that is the Theater. Without LOVE there can be no MAGIC…”
This went on.
And then there was the party.
And duri
ng the party I watched Rosemary accept more kudos and scrapings-and-bowings and people were saying things to her like “Oh Miss Campbell, my husband’s and my favorite film was Monday’s Child and we’ve seen it fifty times and even saw it on our honeymoon,” and “Oh Miss Campbell you’re my all-time favorite actress, could you please sign this,” and then the person held out one of those $75 glossy books of movie stills devoted to Rosemary Campbell, and “Oh Ms. Campbell I get tears in my eyes every time I see Let Me Live Another Day and your words at the end, when you say goodbye to your daughter, well when my own daughter this spring passed away I took her hand and I said the exact same things and—”
HOLD IT. I should go up and go: Oh Ms. Campbell, you old overrated bag, explain to me how these fellow human beings are debasing themselves before you like some goddess when 50,000 amateur-housewife-actresses in local little theater productions around the country have more sincerity, more talent at this point than you. What sociological phenomenon do you represent?
And this is THE TOP, this is success, this is ALL THE WAY HOME, this is presumably the fame and fortune I had always dreamed of. Now tell me, I wanted to demand of the entire party, why is this repelling me? Why is this whole sham of the theater seeming more like a medicine-show faith-healing act than anything else? All right, I tell myself, having another champagne, it’s obvious you are having a Crisis of Confidence right here and it’s best to keep it to yourself, Gil. In fact, only one person ever appreciated this kind of crisis or at least made you laugh about it and that was Emma.
And (back to Bellevue) when she asked me, “Must be a great feeling to be up on the Big Stage with the stars now, huh?” I should have attempted to go into some of that.
Emma Who Saved My Life Page 43