by Anne Edwards
There was a terrible joy in our reunion. He had a smallish suite. The door was open to the bedroom which featured a large bed covered in a patterned spread with a matching fabric headboard. A dark, striated marble fireplace dominated one wall of the living room. A lovely crystal chandelier glistened in the reflected lights of the city that shone through the expansive window along the outside wall. He had made a reservation in one of the noted restaurants in the hotel, but suggested (strongly) that it might be nice just to have dinner served to us here. I agreed. He ordered up a bottle of champagne—I assumed because it seemed romantic and celebratory, for when it arrived neither one of us consumed more than one glass.
I had wanted us to approach our rendezvous in a slower, evolving manner. By meeting me in Chicago, Rod had stepped over the line from a romantic liaison to an affair—adulterous for both of us. Seeing his glowing face with that whimsical half smile (half insinuating, half sheer happiness) weakened any objectivity I might have had. For a long time there had been a cloud of gloom whenever Leon and I were alone together. I had felt it strongly. Leon could laugh and he could love, but he was never able to forgive himself for having done so. After we had sex (and Leon was a generous lover if not in the more material aspects of his life), I would find myself feeling disturbingly uncomforted. There was something very Russian, very Dostoyevsky, about Leon. At times this could be intriguing. In all our years together I had not been able to penetrate the many veils that his true self hid. This had seemed a challenge to which I was committed—find the real Leon, release him from his self-imposed bondage. With Leon in Europe, I felt free to be me. Rod was all boyish enthusiasm. He saw the glass half-full, not half-empty. We made love with unrestrained passion and arose from it filled with laughter (we could, it seemed, find humor in even small things) and a robust appetite.
The cover on the bed had long been displaced when we finally ordered dinner delivered to the suite and ate it dressed in the white terry robes supplied by the hotel management (with a subtle note slipped into a pocket that explained politely that the robe could be purchased before departure if the guest chose to acquire it). We talked until midnight. I agreed quite willingly to stay the night with him. Rod asked the operator for a six a.m. wake-up call. I was to be collected by my driver at seven a.m. for a morning television show. After that I had a radio interview and a stop at one of the city’s largest bookstores for a book signing. I then returned to the hotel to freshen up before speaking at a book-and-author luncheon to be held in a ballroom on the main floor. When I had left in the morning, Rod had gone back to sleep. On my return I found a note. “I’ll be in the audience to cheer you on.” I think this was one of the first times in my life that I had a measure of stage fright. This was quickly dissipated when I located him seated at a table toward the back with two men. They were, it turned out, two members of his LA staff, whom he had flown in for a meeting (as a “beard” I suspected, a message to my brain I should, perhaps, not have shoved aside). I noticed that some women stopped by his table for an autograph and he smilingly obliged.
I was to be one of two speakers. The other was director Elia Kazan, the embodiment of the auteur, whose films were famous for their sexual and social realism. Kazan had recently published a novel, The Arrangement. I knew from my schedule that I would be sharing the bill with Kazan and had discussed it with Rod. There was always a sense of apprehension when an expat was placed in a social situation with an informer—and there was no more famous informer than Elia Kazan, or one viewed with more contempt by the expats and left-wingers in general. I had met Kazan only once, in the early spring of 1947 on a Sunday afternoon at the Rossens’ when they lived on Warner Drive in Westwood, a lovely section of Los Angeles that surrounded the UCLA campus. He was with his wife Molly and they were on the coast, as I recall, as Kazan was filming Gentleman’s Agreement. Jule and Robbie Garfield were also guests. The conversation centered emotionally on the subpoenas to appear before HUAC that had arrived or were currently making their way to friends and coworkers and the fear their imminent receipt was stirring. Bob was demonstrably resolute in his position of never betraying a colleague and in his contempt for those who had done so. Kazan shared these beliefs with equal vehemence.
Something in the American credo ranks informing high among the dark list of activities—murder, incest, treason—that incense their moral values often to the point of vengeance. To inform on a friend, was to many, an even greater crime than to inform on your country. In the old Warner Bros. hard-core gangster pictures (Bob’s and Jule Garfield’s home studio), the stoolie always got his just deserts. The three men foreswore their silence. No names. No betrayals. Fuck the Committee bastards! Time would see Bob and Kazan buckle once things got truly tough.
I was sure that Kazan did not remember me from that brief Sunday afternoon encounter. I was just a young woman engaged to marry his host’s nephew and until this encounter, our paths had not crossed. I believed I had rid myself of the bitterness to which so many of my fellow expats held fast. My agenda was to be as casual as our current situation demanded. Still, I admit, I had a heavy feeling inside me. Kazan had caused more harm in his naming of names than almost any other informer. Because of his fame, of the kind of deeply moving message films and stage plays he had directed, his betrayal was the most shocking of all. Also, he did not look at all like the vital middle-aged man I had seen at the Rossens’ two decades earlier. He was smaller in all ways—shorter, thinner, his mass of dark, kinky hair now receding. He had been nicknamed Gadget (and called “Gadge”) because he had been constantly in motion, energized like some kind of lifetime battery. He now had the look of an unhappy man. The leanness of his face had made his large nose more prominent than I remembered, and his dark eyes had retreated further into his anatomy.
We sat at a long table on a raised dais facing the room. The president of the organization that was sponsoring the event and another woman who was to do the introductions sat between us. At either end were two people who were to be presented with an award of some kind. We had been notified that each of us (Kazan and I) would have twenty-five minutes at the very most. We would hear a little rap on the table when our time was almost up. Kazan was the first speaker. He discussed his book, which was about a Madison Avenue advertising man who self-destructs, thus bringing down all those close to him. I could not help but see an autobiographical analogy in this. But then he went on and on and on. There was a rap on the table. A second one. Then a third. His talk was now fifteen minutes overlong. Finally, our host got to her feet when he momentarily paused, thanked him, and then announced that Mr. Kazan had to leave for another engagement and so he could not personally sign books after the speeches and awards, but that he had presigned a large stack that would be on a table outside the ballroom that would be available for purchase. Although he must have arranged his early departure, Kazan was momentarily startled. He quickly regained his composure, smiled as though posing for a camera, waved his hand to the audience, turned, and with applause following him, walked out through the partings of the two curtains at the rear.
The host leaned in close to me and whispered to me to please keep my speech to twenty minutes maximum or there would not be much time for book signing. I did the best I could. Rod left with his companions at the end of my speech. I was handed a note when I sat down to sign books. (“You were terrific,” it read. “Rap three times when you get back to the hotel.”)
That evening I would be seeing Kazan again, as we were both on a television panel discussion show that included four men with various political views and was hosted by Chicago’s well-loved television host, Irv Kupcinet. Only Kazan and I had books we were promoting. The seven of us sat around three sides of a huge dark-wood table with individual microphones set up before us. Kazan was on an end seat. I was in the center. Kazan and I were told that we should place our books on the table in front of where we were seated and when we spoke the camera would zoom in to the covers when there was a logical time for doin
g so. The show ran an hour with commercials. On most talk shows, guests are wired to a microphone. But we had unattached stationary mikes—so we could move during these interruptions. I got up to stretch my legs during the last break (fifteen minutes to go) and did not realize—until it was too late—that Kazan’s book had been placed over mine. I turned to get his attention. He gave me a broad smile. I was not amused. When I knew the camera was not on me, I reached down as inconspicuously as I could and slid his book off and aside. It nearly knocked over a coffee mug and caused a minor moment of confusion. But when I next spoke, the camera was spot on the front cover of The Survivors.
I stood talking to our host for a few moments after the show. Kazan was about to leave the studio as I made my way back to the Green Room. We came face-to-face. “Mr. Kazan,” I said, “I outgrew one-upmanship games a long time ago. But I hope I never grow too old to combat rudeness.” He just smiled and shrugged his shoulders. I stood aside and let him pass and then watched him scurry down the hallway.
On April 4, three weeks before I was to leave for the tour (prior to my meeting Rod), I had attended a gala dinner party of about sixty people, given by Harold Cohen, a producer. It was held under a tent on a grand estate that he had rented in Beverly Hills, having recently come out to the coast from New York to inaugurate his new film company. My former agent, Blossom Kahn, was now working for him, and I attended the affair with her. Sometime between courses, a rising buzz saw of voices cut through the enclosure. Then someone ran into the tent and screamed, “Martin Luther King has been shot by a white man in Memphis!” A chill went through me. “Oh my God!” I thought. “Just like John Kennedy! Why always do they target the good men?” When we had been seated, I had made no note of it, but suddenly I realized that there was not one black face among the guests and not one white one among the dozens of the serving staff. There was pandemonium. People were sobbing. No radio or TV had been set up in the tent. Guests ran into the house or to their cars to find out what had happened. The black staff completely deserted their posts. Cries of deep anguish echoed. Blossom, a small woman, grabbed my arm. She was trembling, fearful, she confessed, of some of the staff turning on the guests.
Just two days later, and three weeks before I was to arrive, Chicago had been under siege for twenty-four hours by rioters. Arson fires flared. There was mass looting. Ten people died before the governor sent in five thousand state troops to try to control the mayhem. My publisher had wanted to omit Chicago from the tour. Several days passed before the city appeared to have come to a peaceful resolve and, as they had obtained some prime publicity outlets for me there, a decision was made (with my approval) that Chicago would be included. The reality of the riots did not hit me until I was driven through the streets where burned-out buildings were grim reminders of the fierce confrontation between the fired-up, anti-Vietnam protesters and the gun-toting troops.
I had returned home from so many years abroad, to see my country shedding the blood of its own people. We were a land in turmoil and even now, one hundred years after the Civil War, equal civil rights for blacks had not been won. Hope rested in men like Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And now the man who so hoped for “peace in his time” was dead. And we were still sending our young men to be wounded and to die in a foreign place facing an enemy that had not invaded the United States.
“What has happened to my country?” I thought. I felt a terrible sadness, a sickening in the pit of my stomach. Now, here in Chicago, as I viewed the burned-out wreckage of the riots, that sickness returned.
These were issues that Rod shared with me. He was not a “joiner”—that is, to political organizations. He had found, much as I once had in writing westerns, that he could get a message across against intolerance, bigotry, racism, and the futility of war in the form of stories set in outer space or “another dimension.” After the Kazan confrontation we discussed the blacklist and how everyone who was concerned, Kazan included, were victims. He was passionate in all his views and beliefs, revealing a vigorous anger against the injustice of the blacklist. I did not look at him as a cynic, for he was equally vehement in his certainty that good could in the end overcome evil.
He accompanied me in the limo to the airport. We were both flying to New York for a much-anticipated weekend together at the Plaza Hotel. He had one carry-on bag to my mountain of suitcases, packed with outfits for all occasions. I had nineteen more stops in several climates, formal and informal appearances to make, and no time to have clothes cleaned or pressed.
“Sure you don’t want to change your mind?” I asked, just before we got into my waiting limo.
“Not on your life,” he replied.
My original intention in spending two days in New York before continuing with my tour (instead of remaining in Chicago over the weekend) was to give me an opportunity to see some of my dear friends with whom there had been no time before I had flown to Chicago. Now, as Rod and I entered the Plaza together, I knew my agenda had changed. This was to be a very private time of coming to know each other better. I was getting in deeper and I was not sure that was the right thing for us to do, but it seemed we could not help ourselves. There had been this need to cleave together.
My publisher had taken care of my reservation. Rod again had his own room on the same floor. We both had families to consider, children who might need to reach one of us. This time the hotel had upgraded my reservation to a small suite. Rod had a standard room, so he remained with me and checked his messages frequently. We had perfect spring weather. The Plaza was across from Central Park and we had lunch, supplied by a street vendor, as we sat on a park bench. We walked—not too far from the hotel as Rod had a trick knee (a piece of shrapnel was in it, a leftover from service in World War II) and it was not behaving too well. We could not get over the fact that we both had same-leg problems (“How often does that happen?” he laughed), and we made love—now in a more familiar way. Ideas, opinions, remembrances from the times of our lives were told as though they had happened yesterday.
He came from a Jewish home (his father had been a hardworking butcher) and grew up in the small town of Binghamton, New York. He had loved his life there, his parents, his older brother, the high school he attended. He felt deeply, small-town American. Life changed for him with his youthful wartime service, which interrupted his college education. He was with the paratroopers and had been given a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. He did not go into how these were won. But he did tell me once about seeing a close buddy of his crushed to death. (This resonated strongly with me as I recalled my father having witnessed the death of two comrades killed by a grenade.) Rod’s wartime experience had badly scarred him. He still woke up at night from nightmares, haunting images of what he saw, how scared he had been at times, how close to losing a leg, his life, and witnessing the horrifying deaths of both friends and foes. Twenty-five years had passed and he still could not forget. After the war, he returned to college, which is when and where he met Carol. His parents had been upset about the fact that she was not Jewish, but he was very much in love with her; they married, and later he converted to the Unitarian religion, which he explained was based on ideals and not idols.
I did not press him on his current feelings toward Carol and he, only once that I recall, brought up my situation with Leon. I was clear that we were separated, an ocean between us and divorce not yet a settled matter. “Do you want to go back to Europe?” he asked (perhaps meaning to Leon). I had to answer honestly that I wasn’t sure what my future held.
“And your writing?”
“Next to my kids, the most important thing in my life.”
“Tough for a husband to accept that.”
“Or a lover?”
“No. Not this one, at least.”
What do I remember most about that weekend? Well, we never once turned on the television. We held each other all night, both nights. We talked and talked and talked—serious talk, nonsense talk. We went to see an old film, Brief Encount
er, adapted by Noël Coward from his play Still Life, at the small revival movie house near the hotel and when the lights came up, both of us had tear-streaked faces. The story and performances were moving, but we had not expected how close Coward’s fictional tale of an adulterous affair of two married people would resonate our own. It had an unhappy ending—but maybe the right one for them. Neither of us said it, but we both knew our affair might very well end in the same manner. Instead of returning to the Plaza, we got into one of the horse-drawn carriages that parked alongside the hotel and had the driver take us through Central Park. It was crazy. It was pure corn for tourists. It was romantic. What we did not do was hide out. We held hands when we walked through the Plaza lobby. Rod’s arm went around my waist when we crossed a street. Terms of endearment were exchanged, a close intimacy established. We made no commitments and accepted the small world we had made for ourselves.
Our flights left at approximately the same time but from different gates, so we rode to the airport together in the limo and clung together as we kissed good-bye in the terminal for anybody to see. No one seemed to have taken notice—or recognized Rod. When we disengaged ourselves, I broke away to follow the porter wheeling my suitcases to the check-in point.
“Hey, Red!” A shout uttered in Rod’s inimitable voice (a reference to my hair, not my politics).
I turned and he waved. Then he was gone—but certainly not from my thoughts.
As my itinerary was arranged to accommodate the time of special venues, it did not follow a logical progression. It took me south, back up to the East Coast, down to Florida, to Texas, the Southwest, Midwest, east again and over the border to Toronto, then to St. Louis, halfway across the country and over the border again to Vancouver, down the Pacific Coast through Washington, Oregon, California—San Francisco to San Diego—and finally, after three weeks in the skies and on the road, I was back to Los Angeles. Along the way I reconsidered what being an American meant. We were a much-varied society. I was amazed at how both alike and unalike the people of each state I visited were. It was more than their regional accents—which were many, their political views—which were right or left, seldom both in one state, and the marvelous diversity of ethnicity and color.