Leaving Home

by Anne Edwards

  It took several months before the cast came off. During that time those same two paramedics came twice a week to take me to St. George’s for x-rays and therapy, carrying me up and down the stairs. Once the cast was removed and I was on crutches, they picked me up and delivered me with the same gentle care.

  The children were so wonderful. I know there cannot be better kids anywhere in the world. I hired a lady to come in for a few hours a day during the week, but Michael and Cathy insisted on doing the cooking and serving of meals. The first efforts were rather disastrous. I remember a charred-almost-to-cinders stew that Michael (now twelve and quite a young man) cooked (he would not let Cathy touch the stove), toast for breakfast that made the burnt toast at the Basil Street Hotel pale by comparison, and eggs that were like small curds. Nonetheless, every meal was served to me on a tray with a pretty doily and a flower in a glass.

  By mid-May, I knew I was not well and must make some sort of plan to get myself back on my feet—literally—for my leg was healing slowly and I was seriously anemic. Summer break was coming up, which meant no school. My parents had reunited (at least they were living together part-time) in Miami Beach, Florida, where they had a small house near the beach. Decision made. We three would fly to Miami and stay with them for the summer. With Marion in charge, I knew we would all be well taken care of. I made all the arrangements, bought our flight tickets, contracted the movers to pack up our things to be returned to storage in Hammersmith, and gave notice to my landlord of the date we would be departing. We would simply have to relocate on our return in September. Finding a flat in London was never difficult and this time I wanted a place with either no stairs or a proper lift.

  Two days before our departure, Cathy ran a high fever. The morning we were to leave she was covered with red spots. She had the measles. That was a harrowing morning; I did not want Michael to catch them so it seemed the sensible thing was to have him take the flight as planned, and as soon as Cathy was better (the pediatrician said that in ten days she would be fit for travel) we would follow. I changed the tickets, called my mother, and then asked Doris Cole Abrahams to take Michael to the airport and see him off (which she seemed pleased to do and as she had a chauffeur it was no problem). My landlord, a terrible prig, was another matter. The flat had been let, the lease to begin the weekend following our originally planned departure. He had a contract and could not change it. Desperate (and not high on funds) I offered to double the rent for that week’s extension and he finally agreed.

  All did not go great. Michael’s plane hit severely bad weather and had to turn back and land in Shannon, Ireland, where he was put up in the airport hotel for the night, quite an adventure for a twelve-year-old. More telephone calls back and forth to the States and to Michael, with long-distance calling steep in those days.

  Came the day that Cathy and I were scheduled to leave and she was still covered with red dots—slightly faded, but quite visible. What to do? Even though the doctor had assured me she could no longer pass on the disease, I doubted that the airline would let her board if they thought she had a communicable disease, and I just could not figure out how we would manage another delay. So I sat her down at the dressing table (which I had used as my desk), got out my makeup bag which contained my old faithful Max Factor pan(chromatic) makeup that I had used since I was a child performer. It was a staple for most performers as it covered up any blemish that might suddenly develop. A singular blemish was one thing. Cathy must have had twenty or thirty marks on her face and neck. I carefully applied a thick covering of Max Factor on each one. Then I took regular makeup and smoothed it over her face and neck, and lastly powdered them. She looked extremely odd for a child her age. But the spots were hidden. I pulled some colored stockings of mine over her legs and held them in place with rubber bands so that no spots on her legs would be visible. The intrigue of it had gotten to Cathy, and she was quite enjoying herself.

  We received some strange looks as we boarded the plane but I was certain no British Airways employee would dare such a comment as, “Madam, your child looks odd.” Indeed, we made it past passport inspection and onto the plane. Now I had to worry about our landing. It was the law then that a health inspector would come on board an overseas plane’s arrival and go up and down the aisles. It had always seemed ridiculous to me before. Now, I understood. I took Cathy into the toilet and once again went to work reapplying my Max Factor. We made it through inspection and customs. We were home free.

  Within a few days all of Cathy’s measles spots had vanished and both children were enjoying the beach. On the other hand, I took an immediate dislike to my environment. Miami Beach was as unreal as those recreated towns on the back lot of MGM with facades and nothing behind them. I adored my mother and was relieved that my father was not around all that often as his presence always changed the atmosphere into one of stored-up hostility. There was no work for me until I gained back my strength. London and the close community of friends I had left behind were always on my mind. Still, I was not at all well and was most grateful for Marion’s tender, life-restoring care, and was especially forbearing in listening to her Christian Science homilies.

  • 8 •

  A Time for Dreams—and Norman Mailer

  I had arrived in Miami Beach at a time of great chaos. Relations between the United States and Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba had hit an impasse. As one of the last acts of his administration, President Eisenhower had closed the American embassy in Havana and severed diplomatic relations between the two countries. Cuba was a small island republic, about the size of Virginia, and just ninety miles south of Key West, Florida. Castro had formalized his alliance with the Soviet Union. Thousands of Cuban exiles fled their homeland, many in rickety boats, and made it to Florida, which already had a sizeable Cuban population.

  Non-Cuban residents of Miami remained fairly detached, a feat that truly amazed me. Life simply went on as usual for non-Cuban elderly retirees, the divorcees scouting for husbands, the very rich building beach estates, and the tourists who blew in from winter sodden states up North to loll in the sun, tanning to toast perfection on the beaches, and pumping up their stomachs from the sumptuous buffets served in the splendiferous hotels on Miami’s golden shores. Current entertainment stars appeared in their glittering club rooms and lounges. The single missing indulgence were gambling houses which, before Castro’s takeover of Cuba, were unneeded as all one had to do was board an inexpensive tour boat over to Havana where hotel rates were low, alcohol cheap, and gambling open—as was prostitution.

  My mother was not oblivious to the plight of the Cuban population or their families stranded in their homeland. She would sigh or whisper something of an empathetic nature when she read the newspaper reports or watched the news on television. But Marion had always been otherworldly. She lived in the past—the faraway romantic and historic past. I believe that is how she survived and also it was a part of her charm. Born into a large, upwardly mobile, Jewish family in Hartford, she had been “the beautiful sister” (there were three). Never a part of her postwar, jazz generation, she had graduated from college with a degree to teach English and had married my father, Milton Josephson, instead.

  Most people called my father Merk, short for Mercury, as he had been a football hero at New York University where his swiftness down the field to score for his team was almost legendary. He had a dynamic, seemingly invulnerable presence: broad shouldered; strong chin; dark, smoldering eyes; and a hearty baritone voice. Despite his dark, good looks, his parents were Swedish and both looked very much of that stock, as did his blond, blue-eyed older sister, Beatrice. However, the family’s Jewish ancestors had escaped the Spanish Inquisition in the fifteenth century and made their way north, finally settling in Sweden. There had been a great deal of intermarriage during the passing centuries, and my father had seemed to have singularly carried the Sephardic gene.

  His mother had died, age twenty-one, in childbirth (his lifelong claim for sympathy)
leaving his twenty-three-year-old father with two infants under the age of two. But Big Charlie Josephson, an inventor, was a millionaire by then, holding the patent for the first plasticized cloth and for the snap fastener (hooks and eyes had been previously used). Milton was raised by nurses until he was six, when he was sent away to an elite boarding school. After university, he joined the marines and was shipped overseas in the last months of World War I. On return, emotional problems, which lasted throughout his life, plagued him. He never spoke about the war to me, but my mother once told me that he had been only a short distance behind two buddies when they were blown to pieces by a grenade.

  Movie-star handsome and very rich, he had a cold, distant father who by then had remarried for the third time, a beautiful war widow younger than his son, and had six children, two from each marriage. With an abundant trust fund, Merk did not have to work for his living, and chose not to. Manhattan in the 1920s was a playground of pleasures for a rich young bachelor. Merk had a noted affair with a stage actress and was engaged for a short time to a scrap-metal heiress. Money slipped like fool’s gold through his fingers. Big Charlie came down hard on him with an ultimatum: if he did not settle down within a year, his trust fund would be revoked. An aunt suggested he visit her in Hartford, where she knew just the right young woman for him to meet. Marion was beautiful, bright, and receptive to the idea of such an introduction.

  Merk was twenty-eight when he married my mother, thirty-two when, with the advent of the crash, his world collapsed. His trust fund was wiped out, his father’s fortune almost entirely swept away. (Big Charlie, strong immigrant survivor that he was despite the Depression, took himself and his young family across the country to Portland, Oregon—a new frontier—and made his way back up in the business world.) Merk had a wife who had taken ill, and a small child of two—me. He had never worked a day in his life and had no clue as to how one earned a living. He was angry and he would remain angry until death did they part.

  Marion—who took “till death do we part” seriously—remained a strikingly handsome woman, tall and willowy, with a slender face, flawless complexion, cameo profile, deep-set, dark brown eyes, and remarkable auburn hair that prematurely turned a lustrous, whitish gray by the age of thirty and seemed to enhance rather than detract from her beauty. Yes, she was vain (I often caught her looking at herself in a hanging mirror as she passed it—“Just as always,” she would say in a proud manner). It was amazing how little makeup she used. Most often, just a light pencil to her finely arched brows and a carefully applied rose red to her lips. Occasionally, if dressed to go somewhere special, she would powder her face and add a blush of rouge. Lack of funds for a wardrobe (after my father lost all of his money) was never an obstacle for her to look stylish. Added to her small collection of sample dresses—my father contributed from whatever line he was representing on the road at the time—were purchases from the store Mode O’Day, where few items cost more than $2.95. She wore them proudly, a simple, coordinated silk scarf tossed over one shoulder, her posture always aristocratic (“Shoulders back, Anne Louise. Chin up,” she would instruct me). Walking through a room, she seemed to float, the verbena scent she always wore trailing faintly behind her. Her vocabulary was curious, studded with the least common words to express herself in a voice that was a bit Brahmin—broad As—prevalent among her peers in West Hartford where her family had lived in her youth (across the street from Dr. Hepburn, his wife, and four children, Katharine among them), before they moved into Hartford proper. A dedicated reader, there was always a book by the side of her bed (wrapped in brown paper if she thought it might be too “mature” for me), fiction mostly, French and English classics quite frequently, and slim volumes of poetry—which she herself wrote and kept in a folder with “POEMS BY MARION” boldly written on the cover.

  It was not uncommon for an acquaintance of my mother’s to say to me, “Oh! You’re Marion’s daughter! Your mother is so beautiful!” I felt pride in her beauty, not envy, for Marion was as full of love and warmth and pride in me as my father was in anger and disappointment that I was a girl and, like my mother, not a fit companion for a man who preferred football games and boxing matches to concert halls and books.

  To say my parents were mismatched is a monumental understatement. Still, they had managed to remain married all those years (albeit with long separations!). I did not understand it during my youth and really have never done so. Maybe their marriage was good sexually. When together, they always slept in the same bed with the door closed. My father seemed to be a prim man, his bathrobe tightly belted, jacket and tie always worn when he stepped outside. The few times he took me to swim at Santa Monica Beach, a white undershirt covered his chest (although, to be honest, this was somewhat the style in those times). I had little doubt that he much resented the fact that his only child was a girl and one, at that, who showed no athletic inclinations. Once, when I was four or five, he carried me over the hot sand down to the sea’s frothy edge, wading in with me until the water reached his waist. Then he pushed me hard from him and shouted, “Swim! Kick your legs! Move your arms!” I can still feel my terror when my head went under and I gagged on the salt water I had swallowed. He pulled me out and held on to me under his arm like some errant domestic animal. Marion came quickly to me. I recall that he said something like, “Even puppies by nature are able to swim!”

  My mother spoke lovingly to him and of him, defending him at every turn. Yet I never saw them exchange a kiss or hold hands. He brought home gifts for me from his trips—a small Brownie camera and a tin bank painted like a log cabin. Otherwise he evidenced little affection for me. He was always able to ooze charm to outsiders and to make friends: broad smile, hand in his pocket ready to pay any check that might be placed on a restaurant table. There was a distinct duality in his persona. The man at home was not the same as the public saw. I attributed his paternal coldness to his Swedish heritage, as Big Charlie was so cool to his children and grandchildren. I have considered that he might have been bipolar. Certainly, his wartime experience had a dramatic effect on him as had his motherless childhood and the loss of his money and status. Some time after we had gone to California he had begun to earn a living as a traveling salesman. He never said a good word about any job he ever held. I had the impression that he disliked what he was doing and thought it far below him. Away a good part of the time, when he was living with us there was always a packed suitcase in the corner of some room and his car shined to mirror perfection, ready for a speedy takeoff. I have no idea what he did on his extended absences. In later years I wondered if he might have had a second family stashed away somewhere.

  His presence in the house was like waiting for a bomb to ignite. I never knew him to be physically violent, but he was verbally abusive, his booming voice rising like the yowl of thunder. Marion would rush around the room they were in, closing windows as she called out, “Milton! Modulate your tones! The neighbors!” He would then slam doors, finally leaving with his packed suitcase.

  He had collected Michael from the airport upon his arrival in Florida then departed two days before Cathy and I arrived. “Your father had to go back on the road,” my mother explained. “A man has to work.” She sighed and then shifted quickly into a welcoming, celebratory mood.

  Marion was a joy to be with. She loved the radio, listened to the soap operas, and sang along in a modestly trained high, coloratura voice with the music programs. She was a fabulous cook, and the small house we were in was tantalizingly redolent of the spices she used. Each plate she served was a work of art. She did most of her cooking without the help of a cookbook, a feat I considered quite amazing as she tended toward complicated dishes, cakes, and pastries made from scratch. Within a week, I began to gain a few pounds and also to relax. Mother would read to me from Mary Baker Eddy’s book on Christian Science. She was as devout as ever. “I know you don’t believe as I do,” she told me. “But just do me a minikin favor and listen to this passage.” “Minikin” w
as one of her favorite words. It meant minimal or a little bit and was archaic. “Just eat a minikin for my sake,” she would plead when my appetite wasn’t up to where she thought it should be.

  Michael was a happy kid. The house was across Collins Avenue and one of Miami’s smaller hotels, the Beachcomber. He went there every morning, and finally the owner asked if he would like to earn a few dollars (and tips) at the pool by fetching lounge cushions for guests. I was not in favor of the idea. Still, he put up a convincing argument. He thought he might not be able to continue going there if he did not take the offer, and he liked the people and being able to swim in the pool. He was an extremely strong-willed boy. He was also rather short for his age and picked up the nickname “Stretch” as he managed those lounge pillows which were about six feet long.

  Cathy was a vivacious, very pretty child, not fond of swimming, or enthusiastic about anything too athletic. Extremely social, she made young friends easily and won over adults. She was thriving beautifully with the attention she now had from both me and her grandmother. I did not know how it would all work out once my father returned from the road. Also, Marion was managing on next to nothing and my abortion, the move from the apartment, and our airfares had eaten up most of my reserve. A month into our stay in Miami, my health considerably better, I answered an ad for a model/salesperson for H & J Blitz, a jewelry store in the Americana Hotel. Model for jewelry? The idea was intriguing. I was hired. It was surreal. Every two hours, the elderly Mr. Blitz, a delightful Dutch gentleman, would drape me with jewelry—bracelets, necklaces, broaches, and rings on my fingers. I would then walk around the pool area, stopping at the cabanas and poolside lounges, a security guard a few steps behind me. I was paid a smallish wage, but if any of the merchandise I wore sold, I got a hefty commission. I did surprisingly well. This would be the only job I would have in my life that was outside the world of entertainment and publishing.