Leaving Home

by Anne Edwards

  The tragedy of John F. Kennedy’s death was a deep, deep wound to our country and country folk. I don’t think any of us old enough at the time to comprehend what had happened will ever forget that day and those of national mourning that followed. The scenes of the assassination, the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson and the funeral procession with little John, a child of three, saluting as his father’s hearse and riderless horse passed by, were played over and over on television—so that those images became branded on one’s heart and mind. Never before had I so profoundly felt my sense of being an American. John F. Kennedy had symbolized hope, a new prospect for our country.1

  This was the first time since I had gone abroad that I considered the idea of remaining in the States, no matter the circumstances. Finally, I decided against it for a market basket of reasons—my work, finances, and my unsettled relationship with Leon. When my parents returned to Hartford, taking a small apartment of their own, my mother now in the comfortable role of nurse Marion, we three flew back to London and continued our lives. I found not only the American community but the British mourning Kennedy’s death. He had been greatly admired throughout Great Britain, especially in Ireland, the homeland of his ancestors.

  I was spending more and more time with Leon and his friends, largely the more recently arrived members of the film colony. The expats were now spreading their wings a bit—moving to the South of France, or able to work again and so returning to the States. The new American embassy, which now dominated Grosvenor Square, had recently opened. Designed by noted architect Eero Saarinen, it had been loudly decried by the British (especially Londoners) who found the building “an impressive but decidedly embarrassing building,” due in a great part to the large golden eagle, standing eight to nine feet on the top, its thirty-five-foot wingspan displayed against an open sky. Also, because Saarinen’s precedent for the outside of the building had been the Renaissance Doge’s Palace in Venice, the context of the Georgian and pseudo-Georgian character of this, one of the grandest squares in London, seemed heresy. I had to agree. Still, there was something comforting to an American to enter the square and look up to that overwhelming symbol of our country. Despite controversy (“the Americans have taken over Grosvenor Square!”), or maybe because of it, the American embassy became a favorite visitor site, and there were always groups of people standing about in the square staring at it.

  Cathy had passed her eleven-plus exams with honors. In England this means that the student must matriculate to an upper school (like middle school or junior high school in the States). Cathy wished to attend a Swiss boarding school (as Salka’s granddaughter was presently doing). I was not immediately in favor of this for both financial and personal reasons. We investigated schools in London without much enthusiasm. They were mostly elite and class structured and not inexpensive, either. Cathy and I went to Klosters, from where we trained about to various nearby schools. The one she favored was Professor Buser’s Voralpines Tochter-Institute in Teufen, near St. Gallen by way of Zurich and a little over a two-hour train journey from Klosters.

  The school was located in a bucolic setting—fields of wildflowers—the magnificent Swiss Alps as a backdrop. There was a barn with cows that supplied the school with its dairy products. There was something very “Heidi-ish” about Buser’s, but it also boasted a high scholastic standing. The staff was most accommodating and the students we met, friendly. “But it is German speaking,” I complained to Cathy. “Lessons are taught in German, which you don’t know. I can’t imagine how that would work for you.” She was determined, as only Cathy can be. “I can learn it,” she insisted. I could only think that there was something about those cows’ melting brown eyes that had gotten to her. I finally agreed and rented a house in Klosters—Chalet Insidina—so that I could spend large blocks of time near enough for her to come home for weekends. It helped that Salka was also in Klosters. I brought down our new family member, a large, three-year-old apricot poodle we renamed Sandy, who had been given to me unexpectedly as a gift by the producer of the film in which the dog had appeared. I had been a visitor on the set and, always a dog lover, was smitten by him. He was, I was told, to be retired as his handler was in poor health. Trained for movie work, he did a multitude of clever tricks on cue: go to sleep, pick up and carry items, jump over bushes and hedges, limp, cry, howl, and many more that I never did learn the commands for him to respond to. There was something eerily human about Sandy. He sensed when either I or Cathy was sad and he had an uncanny ability to tell the time. Cathy always came home on the same train every Saturday. Five minutes beforehand he would stop whatever he was doing to stand staring out the front window. Just moments before she appeared, he would race through the house to greet her at the door. I remained puzzled at how he knew it was Saturday, as well as the arrival time of her train and his instinct (or whatever it can be called) that timed her approach.

  The first month new students at Buser’s were not allowed to leave the premises of the school. Cathy shared a large room with three German girls who spoke no English. The reason for this, I was told, was for her to become totally immersed in the language. “It will work, you will see. She is a smart girl,” the headmistress assured me. After I deposited her in her room (which was in charming, Swiss-cottage decor) I took her aside and told her that if after the first week she was unhappy, she should come home anyway and we would look for another school. “But that would mean you have to pay for this one as well, doesn’t it?” she came back.

  “Whatever it is,” I replied, “I’ll work it out.”

  She called me after the first week, sounding truly miserable. “I’ll come get you,” I insisted.

  “No! I won’t quit!” and she hung up.

  The second week, she sounded no happier but still refused to give up. By the third week she said the girls in her room were not friendly to her. “Please! I’ll come get you!” I pressed.

  The answer was another loud, “No!”

  My daughter was not a quitter and never would be. She learned German—and some French as well—in record time, came to like the girls in her room and the others in her classes very much, and remained entranced by the cows. I was flying back and forth between London and Switzerland and beginning to love the beauty of the country, the food, the people, and the orderliness of all things Swiss. Cathy once told Salka, “Everything works in Switzerland, even Mommy.” This was true. My writing went well in the peaceful ambiance of Klosters and I was able to further develop my work on The Survivors by living in one of the main settings.

  Leon and I were now a couple. I had come to care deeply for him. Yet there were many signals of problems ahead in our relationship that gave me pause. For one thing, Leon had a great melancholy within himself. I understood the causes—the sense of abandonment and betrayal he had endured and how this had diminished his sense of self-worth. What I found puzzling was his refusal to seek help. And I was uncomfortable with his friendship with Carl—apart from their business relationship. Carl, after all, had been his wife’s lover and from what I gathered had ended the affair in an abrupt manner that was somewhat responsible for her final action. I was unsure if this unorthodox friendship was not wantonly self-destructive of Leon.

  On Sundays, when I was not in Klosters, we would go to Carl’s weekend cottage, a humble one-story abode on the Thames, river scent and dampness pervading. He would scramble eggs with onions and smoked salmon, turning the dish into a fishy jumble with a fulsome, unpleasant aroma. It was a ritual missed only when Carl and Leon were on location with a film. The conversation at the kitchen table where we ate would start off casual and end up with a intense discussion pertaining to their current work. Carl possessed a talented ability to switch moods, almost like an actor who must do so in a scene. He would squint up his eyes behind his large-framed glasses, his chin set resolutely, his voice taking on a measured tone. Fun time was over. I resented this intrusion in the one day of the week that Leon and I had together when in London, as Leon al
ways worked on Saturdays. It did not help that I had a strong aversion to the implacable menu. A year later, Carl fell in love with Leon’s secretary, Eve, whom he married. Sunday brunches continued until after the birth of their first child, Jonathon, but gratefully the menu improved.

  Our most divisive problem was Leon’s apartment in Lennox Gardens. We were sleeping in the same room, on the same bed where Kathryn had taken her life. When I moved in, her clothes—shades of Rebecca—still hung in the closets and were stored on shelves. I packed them up and had Oxfam (a charity organization) collect them. I bought a new mattress and springs and placed some of my favorite things about. I discussed this with my therapist and am sure that I was not jealous of Leon’s lost love. Rather, I could not get past the thought of what those last hours had been for her—walking up and down the long hall that connected the two wings of the flat—finally closing herself in the bedroom. I felt I was sharing our home with a restless spirit. Also, I could not help but wonder how Leon, after a marriage of twenty years, had not sensed the seriousness of Kathryn’s despair and tried in some way to help. He had been on location in Greece with The Guns of Navarone when she committed suicide, returning the morning after to find her body and the note. Her desperation and unhappiness had to have started long, long before then. How was it, I wondered disheartened, that neither Leon nor Carl had been aware of her pain and acted with attribution? Had they both simply ignored the signs of her acute distress? Or had they been so involved in their own worlds that they saw nothing beyond them? I would never have an answer, because Kathryn’s plight was not to be introduced into any of our conversations at penalty of Leon withdrawing into a silent, melancholy funk.

  We were happiest in Switzerland or when I accompanied him on location, at separate times to Poland and Yugoslavia (later to Copenhagen and Madrid). The change in him whenever we were abroad was amazing. We laughed a lot, shared our impressions, and made passionate love. He loved the idea that I was comfortable with the crews and casts of the productions he worked on. On our return to Lennox Gardens from these junkets, the old Leon would emerge, the glumness seep slowly back. He asked me to marry him sometime during the summer of 1964. I thought it over carefully and earnestly believed we could have a happy life together on one condition: we move out of the apartment into one that we both liked. I brought up my feelings about living in the same rooms where Kathryn had taken her life and, although quite a separate issue, the difficulties I had with the long climb up and down the stairs (even delivery people would leave packages on either the first or second landing for us to trudge down to collect). Leon finally agreed after taking a good part of a day thinking about it. We first set November 22 as the date for our wedding. Cathy was out on school break, so we two went on an expedition looking for flats.

  I found a lovely ground floor and garden apartment in a section of London near St. John’s Wood, called Venice due to the canal that trickled through it. Property values were not as inflated in this area as they were around Lennox Gardens which was in Knightsbridge, and so one got much more for one’s money. The flat was newly renovated, fresh and bright with a lovely, small garden. There was a bedroom and bath on the lower level (you entered on the ground floor) that Leon could use for his home office and sound equipment, and three more bedrooms on the main floor plus a bright living room, generous dining room, breakfast room (which could serve as my office and had steps leading down to the garden), and a remodeled kitchen. The building was Belle Epoch, the street lined with well-tended greenery, and the rates (fees that occupants on leases paid each year) less than on Lennox Gardens. After he looked at the flat and met with the real estate people, Leon signed the lease. We were to take possession in thirty days. I then turned my attention to our wedding plans.

  We both wanted a nonreligious ceremony with a few close friends—thirty at most. The ceremony took place on November 27, a Sunday afternoon, in a small, elegant reception room on the mezzanine floor of the Carlton Towers Hotel, off Sloane Square. Betty Graf was my maid of honor, Stanley Mann (who was a mutual friend of Leon’s and mine) was best man. After the ceremony there was a reception with champagne and a bountiful early supper-buffet table. Sidney came up from Cannes along with his brother Harold and Harold’s wife, Ruth. Carl, Walter Shenson and his wife, Bill Graf, Sol and Frances Heflin Kaplan, Lester, the Adlers, and the director William Wyler and his wife Talli (Margaret Tallichet) were present along with others.

  Leon and Willie Wyler had a long history together—having made five movies in Hollywood before the blacklist took Leon to London: Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Life, The Heiress, Detective Story, and Carrie, and unofficially on several others. The Wylers, in London for a short stay, took us for dinner the night before the wedding. I loved both of them. Talli had come to Hollywood from Texas in the late 1930s as a Scarlett O’Hara hopeful. She had not found a career but a husband and such a wonderful man. Willie had a hearing problem quite early in his life. Born in Alsace, he had been a Swiss citizen before coming to Hollywood in 1921 at the age of nineteen, and was employed in low-level jobs in silent pictures. Within four years he had worked his way up to becoming a director. He developed hearing problems during those years, but as this was during the silent era, it had not created a serious block to his success. I believe one of the things that had drawn Willie and Leon so close was Leon’s brilliance as a sound director. Hearing aids were not technically developed by the early thirties when talkies replaced the silent film. Willie, with great seriousness, once told me that Leon had been his ears.

  After the wedding we spent four joyous weeks in Klosters. Leon did not ski, but Klosters was alive in December, filled with people we knew. We did a lot of socializing with Salka, Irwin Shaw and his wife, as well as author Elaine Dundy, separated from her husband, the critic Kenneth Tynan, and spending the holidays at the Chesa Grischuna on her own. There were also warm, intimate evenings by the fireplace at Chalet Insidina, and more family-oriented times when Cathy joined us. Leon was relaxed and in high spirits. Not until we returned to London did he tell me that he had changed his mind about the move from Lennox Gardens and was going to renege on the signed lease. He tried to assure me that he was not being obstinate. He heard what I said about my reasons for the move. And, yes, the Venice apartment was attractive and had some added advantages over Lennox Gardens. But he felt comfortable where we were, hated change, and had decided that in the long run Lennox Gardens was a more valuable investment. In England, one generally buys a leasehold on a flat for a number of years. You actually do not own the premises although you are responsible for its upkeep. Yearly rates are paid and when the time on your lease—which can run many decades—has elapsed, the property returns to the owner. One could, with their approval, sell the existing number of years left on your lease. Lennox Gardens had twenty-five remaining years, the Venice flat only eleven, which could greatly deflate a future resale price.

  We forfeited our binder fee on the Venice flat (I believe it was about five hundred pounds). Some difficult weeks passed between us. I considered his action grossly unresponsive to my concerns. I seldom allow myself to get pushed to a wall. But when it happens, I can be a fierce contender. I threatened to leave and was prepared to do so, even going so far as to search out a suitable accommodation for myself. Leon was in a state of despair. Still, he declared his decision to keep Lennox Gardens was unassailable. Finally, I came to a compromise. I would spend more time in Switzerland and he would join me there whenever he could. Our primary residence (for tax and business reasons, he claimed) would still be Lennox Gardens—which I was free to redecorate in any way I chose. Obviously, our marriage had made its first step on slippery ground.

  Night had not left the sky when the telephone next to the bed in Lennox Gardens rang ominously. The room was in total darkness. Leon stirred. The telephone rang again. I turned on a light. It was about four a.m. I picked up the receiver. It was my father, sounding in a panic. “Your mother is seriously ill. It’s cancer. She
’s in the hospital,” he managed. He began to sob. “It’s that damned Christian Science,” he cried. “She’s been in pain for months and refused to go to a doctor.”

  Due to the time differential, I was on a plane by noon and in Hartford at my grandmother’s house late that same evening. By morning I was at the hospital. I had been asked by my mother’s sister not to let my grandmother, who was ninety-four and failing, know the gravity of her condition.

  When I reached the visitor’s desk on the hospital floor where my mother was, I was requested by a nurse to wait a few minutes. It seemed Marion, when told I was on my way, had insisted on coming from her room to see me. The nurse leaned in close to add, “Your mother wants to look her best and for your meeting to be in a more congenial place than her room, which she is sharing with another patient.” This did not seem strange behavior for Marion—always the impeccably dressed, gracious hostess. But for God’s sake! She was a dying woman in a hospital!

  The nurse led me partway down a corridor at the end of which was a turn and on the wall, at an angle, one of those circular mirrors for the staff to monitor any undue activity by ambulatory patients. Then, there she was, painfully thin, dressed in a wine-red, velvet hostess gown, the kind that zips all the way up the front, coming around that turn, a nurse on either side of her, practically lifting her off the ground as they guided her. Her hair was a soft gray cloud as she drifted closer to that mirror. There was a blush of red on her lips and cheeks, noticeable because her skin was so pale. She came to a halt at the mirror, the nurses forced to do so with her, and cocked her head. “I never was photo-gee-nic,” she said in that inimitable Hartford twang of hers. Then she started up the hallway to me. “Anne Louise, can it be truly you?” There was a catch in her voice.