Jason was going into rehearsal with A Thousand Clowns by an untried author, Herb Gardner. That should help to straighten him out, I thought. We’d talked about his drinking up to a point. He recognized that it was a problem, but he would not go for help. He loved me – loved Sam – all the children. ‘It will all work out.’ So I held on to hope, ecstatic when he didn’t drink, nervous when he drank a little, frantic and miserable when it took over. And resentful – often Jady, Sarah, and David would come for a weekend, and no Jason. I’d be left with the six children. I decided I would not lie to them – if they asked where he was, I’d answer, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Will he be home for dinner?’ ‘I don’t know.’ I was angry, and it was years before I dealt with the truth of it. It was not malice or cruelty on Jason’s part – drinking was, and had been, a part of his way of life for too long, and he had neither the will nor the strength to do a complete about-face.
It all came to a head in the summer of 1963. He’d had a two-day siege and come home feeling very sick. I had made up my mind by then that he would have to do something positive. Life was becoming unbearable. Success didn’t help – reassurance – love – the children. Nothing did. And I was turning into someone I didn’t like. I’d continually lie to Mother – try to keep her from coming over without telling her why. I’d gathered our friends at home for a surprise party for Jason’s fortieth birthday, telling him only that a couple of people were coming by for a drink after his show. I had a cake all ready. When the clock struck two, it was clear he had made other plans – and who knew when he’d show up? A few stalwarts stayed, the others left. When he finally did walk in, loaded, I was in such a state that I grabbed a bottle of vodka, turned it upside down, and smashed it into the cake. ‘Here’s your goddamn cake!’ When I realized that what I wanted to do was slam it over his head, that I was capable of violence, it frightened me so that I knew I would finally have to act.
Fortunately, the next day he was so sick he acknowledged that he needed help. I must try to get him a doctor. That was the first break in my black sky. He finally did find a psychiatrist willing to take him on and life became brighter – certainly more helpful.
Then in the spring Jason’s father died – the one member of his family he really loved and had rapport with. That week was filled with sadness – the pathetic funeral that we tried to make a little better. Jason’s mother and her husband came up from the desert. Jason hadn’t been close to her for years, but would become more so from then on. He paid for everything out there. He was the provider; the one with talent, with quality.
And only a few weeks later, in June, my firstborn, Steve, graduated from Buckley School. It was very moving to see my almost adolescent son about to enter his young-manhood phase. Next step, Milton Academy. Four years of living away from home, which we felt would be a healthy, happy experience for him. Watching him graduate, though, brought pictures of fourteen years before flashing to mind, and all the hopes and dreams that went with them. What a lot of terrible things had happened since to cloud those hopes, those dreams.
Jason signed up with the new Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre at a great financial sacrifice – Robert Whitehead, Elia Kazan, and Arthur Miller were starting it, a major repertory company in New York. It was something Jason believed in, and only with a star of Jason’s stature involved could it prevail. The first play was to be Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, directed by Elia Kazan. They were to open at the Washington Square Theatre, which would remain their home until the new theatre was built in Lincoln Center. Jason and I had discussed it – he would be bringing home little money, but we felt money was not to be considered in this instance. Neither Miller nor Kazan would be making any money either. Rehearsals would start October 1, so he’d have the summer to rest. We rented a house in Malibu.
It was time for me to pick up my career. The only thing producers seemed interested in me for was a television series, which I refused to do. The picture business made me feel like two cents – unwanted, unworthy. Very depressing. Well, I’d turned my back on it all four years before – I’d have to eat a little crow. But I couldn’t beg for work – ‘Look at me, I still look good, I can act. I’m not Bogie’s wife or widow, I’m an actress.’ I made a guest appearance on a Dr Kildare segment, a very popular show starring Richard Chamberlain, everyone’s hero that year – including Leslie’s.
I lowered my professional sights totally to start working in pictures again, and agreed to be in a truly tacky movie, Shock Treatment, whose only saving grace was that my friend Roddy McDowell would be in it and we could suffer together. The theory was that once I worked out there, they’d see that I seriously wanted to work and other offers would come.
Jason and I for the most part had a good summer. A few bad days, but he continued talking to the doctor on the phone. He was trying. And Sam was growing. He was beautiful, and he was funny. He made me laugh from the very beginning. His reactions were funny, he had true humor (not all children do). And my mother worshipped him. Actually, it was mutual – they were incredibly close.
Steve and Leslie went back to school in mid-September and Jason to rehearsals of After the Fall at the end of the month. I returned to California mid-November for another film, Sex and the Single Girl. A very good cast – Natalie Wood, Hank Fonda, Tony Curtis – but not a very good film. At that time it seemed we might move West, as I had been successful in finding work there. It was my only Christmas away from Stephen and Leslie and Sam, and I was feeling very sorry for myself, but there was no way to go East for one day with work on either side of it. I did make it back for the opening of After the Fall. Adlai was to take me. The day of the opening he explained that Mrs Johnson, the First Lady, had asked him to escort her – did I mind? He’d have to take us both. Wonderful – how could I mind!
The opening was a theatrical event. Jason’s work was supreme – brilliant. And on January 26 of that year Jason and I were presented with the American Academy’s award for achievement, with Adlai as the presenter – the Academy where I had had my precious year of training more than twenty years before. 1964 started very well, but the Lincoln Center people did not live up to their promise of no commercialism. Miller sold serial rights to the play to a magazine, the television rights too – movies too, I think – making a fortune. Here was Jason working his tail off, getting practically no money for an ideal that was being crashed to the ground. Sam Behrman had a new play, But for Whom Charlie, that was put into the repertory. It wasn’t very well received, so there were more and more performances of After the Fall. The theatre was being run like Broadway. Very disillusioning. Jason kept on until his year was up, but he left feeling that he’d been had.
There was a Eugene O’Neill play, a one-acter called Hughie, that Jason had always wanted to act. I dreaded that, although he was the greatest interpreter of O’Neill in anyone’s memory. Alas, he had more than a tendency to take on the personality of the character he was playing. It was a bad time for us, what with Jason’s disenchantment with Lincoln Center, and Eugene O’Neill. He became erratic with the doctor – drink took over more and more with Hughie – I became more of a shrew. There were always odd children problems cropping up and I would have the responsibility of six thrust upon me suddenly. And there were money problems – never the fault of Jason. He never stopped working. He’d do television specials to supplement his theatre work – he earned a fortune – but alimony ate it up. He resented there never being enough for us, but there was nothing he could do about it.
My fortieth birthday came and went – traumatic for me – and I went to Phyllis and Adolph Green that night. No Jason.
Hughie only played five weeks. In February, Jason was to take it to California. We booked into the Bel-Air Hotel. I was more rundown than I knew – almost on arrival I began to fade. I felt nauseated, could hardly sit up. Jason drove me to my doctor’s office. The diagnosis was that I needed a lot of rest and fluids – my blood pressure was fluctuating badly, I was overwrought, I had to get into
bed and stay there. Jason would be at the theatre nightly. He hated to be around illness, wanted no part of it. Sam had a cold and had to stay in bed also. Too much responsibility at once for Jason – he drank and stayed away.
Katie came over one afternoon, took one look at me, and pronounced me a damn fool. ‘You’re too thin – a wreck – you should be on the beach. The marriage is no good for you – get out, forget it, think of yourself again. You’ve forgotten about living.’ She was dead right. I realized I’d been trying to beat the drink problem by talking logically, or by threatening to leave. Spence told me, ‘No one ever stops drinking because someone asks them to. You can’t make him stop – he will, but only when he wants to, only when he has no choice. I know.’
They were only telling me what I knew but had refused to face. I knew I would have to leave Jason eventually. I’d forgotten to notice the sky, the trees, flowers, grass – to just enjoy a beautiful day. I’d forgotten how to laugh, to relax, to have any sane social exchange. I had no peace. My only pleasure was my children. My reasons for staying with Jason, for keeping us together, had been them – and perhaps another reason was that I couldn’t face defeat. I loved Jason when he was the Jason I knew he could be, but the other Jason took over too often. No life could be built on that. My physical breakdown had forced me to face it all as it was. No more pipe dreams.
By the time Steve and Leslie came out to California I was able to go out for a few hours a day. I talked to them one afternoon while we were driving somewhere – asked them how they would feel if Jason and I separated. They wanted to know why. I told them that we had problems, that he drank too much, that it wasn’t working out. They hadn’t seen him drinking often – hardly at all. His daytime sleeping had been presented to them as necessary due to theatre hours. If he came home on a Sunday afternoon, they never asked him where he’d been, they were just glad to see him. I didn’t want to paint a black picture for them, didn’t want to dramatize the depressing turn my life was taking, I just wanted to feel them out. And I was able to say it out loud for the first time.
I rented a house in Trancas until the end of the summer. Sam loved the beach, so did Jason, but I was thinking mostly of myself, of my health. A new addition to our family was Nanny, a young Danish nurse who was to devote eleven years of her life to our Sam. I was besotted with my small son – he gave such pleasure – I had to keep myself in shape for him, for all my children. I made no quick irreversible decisions, but I knew I had turned a corner. I had come back to reality and my priorities were clear. I was fed up with the life I led. And in the next months two deaths brought things ever more into focus – Quent Reynolds in March, David Selznick in June. Two men I loved and admired, two widows I felt great love and sympathy for. Each death brought me closer to those left and reminded me never to stop paying attention, never be careless, who knows who won’t be here tomorrow? They also made it clearer and clearer that I would never go back to the early dark life with Jason. I had lost sight of the preciousness of time – had been living from midnight to dawn, sacrificing my own health, both physical and mental. I finally had to face some facts: that I had value as a human being – that alcoholism destroyed families, was not to be lived with – that I would not be destroyed, nor would I allow my children to be. I would have no patience with anyone who threw his life away. And not for a second would I allow anyone to throw mine away. The values came back – life’s standards. Out of every disaster some lessons learned.
I would have to keep my career going. I was offered a part in Harper with Paul Newman – a kind of suspense film patterned after The Big Sleep, but without the same kind of part for me. Paul was the detective. I knew him, liked him personally and as an actor, and was more than pleased to have an opportunity to work with him. That would take up a month in the summer.
Joe Hyams was writing a book about Bogie. He wanted my blessing – wanted me to write an introduction. Knowing of Joe’s attachment to Bogie, I agreed. The Bogie cult had begun in Harvard’s Brattle Theatre early that year. They still have Bogart festivals, and the collegians of the day pack the house to see their hero. It was extraordinary that Bogie transcended generations, that the young could identify with him, recognize something in him that they admired and wanted to emulate.
I began to be asked my opinion of it. I had mixed emotions – I was very proud, thought it quite incredible that Bogie had been singled out above other movie stars as a folk hero for students. He wouldn’t have believed it. But I felt awkward because of Jason. To be constantly talking of a Bogie who had been reborn made his presence loom large again. So I would try to bring Jason into the conversation, referring to his brilliance as an actor, making an effort not to deny Bogie but to put Jason in a different high place. It wasn’t easy and I never quite achieved it, but I tried.
Jason had enough problems of his own – and we had enough together – not to need this extra added attraction. Yet there were Steve and Leslie, and I wanted them to feel pride in Bogie, to see young men and women, their seniors by not too many years, adore and admire their father. I, of course, didn’t realize at once how tough it was to be Steve – to be Bogart’s son. ‘Was he really your father? What was he like? Did he really talk the way he did on the screen? Did he have a gun?’ Steve felt isolated in a way – what kid wouldn’t? – singled out for reasons of his parentage, self-conscious. I’m sure that more than once he wanted to change his name to Smith or Jones.
Peter Witt called from New York. David Merrick had a play he wanted to send me, to go into rehearsal in October. Jason was going to do The Devils with Anne Bancroft, starting in September, and I’d have a month alone at the beach with my baby. I read the play – Cactus Flower, a French comedy with Abe Burrows adapting and directing – and agreed to do it. It had been over five years since Goodbye Charlie, time to try the stage again. I wanted to sign for a year, Merrick wanted two. John Frankenheimer told me to keep myself free to do his next film – he had a good part for me in it – so I agreed to two years in the play, in return for which Merrick agreed to give me time out for the movie. I was still a believer.
On July 14th, early in the afternoon while I was heading home along the Pacific Coast Highway, sun blazing, the radio blaring, an announcement suddenly came over the air – Adlai Stevenson had dropped dead on a London street. I slammed on the brakes, almost hitting a few cars, took a deep breath, and pulled over to the side. Oh, no, not Adlai. Tears rushed to my eyes as I sat trying to absorb the news. Poor Adlai – never fulfilled, not appreciated enough, so much frustration, so much he wanted to do. Only sixty-five – yet it was quick, thank God for that. He’d been walking in Grosvenor Square with Marietta Tree – poor Marietta, what a terrible thing to witness. He was being flown home for a Washington funeral. A little late, I thought, to pay that kind of homage to him. I wanted to go to Washington. I felt a great emptiness again – not to have him to look forward to, a funny postcard, those eyes, that wit. That friendship. Too many losses – too many irreplaceables. No one I ever loved, it seemed, had had his full share of life.
I called Art Buchwald in Washington to ask him for details. Did he know where Arthur Schlesinger was? I received a wire from Bill Blair, I think, asking me to come. Arthur called, inviting me to stay the night at his house. Jason understood the state I was in. When I got to Arthur’s house in Washington late at night, I found a note from him directing me to a room. Marietta and Jane Gunther were also there. Funny – three women who loved Adlai, who each had her own special relationship with him, all there. He had an uncanny knack for keeping all of us, and more, dangling – happy for anything he threw our way. None of us had ever discussed our places in his life. Next morning we all hugged each other. We shared grief, the same grief. We sat around the table having coffee, talking of isolated experiences we’d had with Adlai – quoting conversations – each trying to reinforce her own importance. I thought to myself, ‘I know things they don’t know – I’ve been places with him they haven’t been, shared times th
ey haven’t. I was more special than they know.’ And they were clearly thinking those same thoughts. Women are a joke! (To say nothing of men!)
All I knew as I sat in the Capitol with the guard of honor surrounding his casket – as I looked at Buffie, who had lost the most treasured person in her life; as I looked at young Adlai, at Borden, at John Fell, at President and Mrs Johnson, Vice President and Mrs Humphrey, the Senate and the House – was that I had lost the last of three men who had changed my life. Bogie, Charlie, and Adlai – the three men who had contributed most to my growth. There would be no others like them to love, no others to bring about radical change in what and how I felt, saw, and thought. But each had left me with such richness! I would refer to them – each of them – for the rest of my life.
Jason was in rehearsal when we got back to New York. Steve returned to Milton, having spent his first working summer in the Trancas market; Leslie went back to the Lycée, and Sam to Central Park. Abe Burrows and I started to meet on Cactus Flower – casting, wardrobe. The first day of rehearsal came. The company was good. We had a new actor, Joe Campanella, who hadn’t played a lead on Broadway before – no comedy as far as I knew. It was Merrick’s theory that casting Joe would either work marvelously or not at all; that was the only chance he was taking with the play. A new girl named Brenda Vaccaro played the second part; Burt Brinckerhoff, the second man; Robert Moore in a supporting role. All good actors. I was my usual spastic self, but was relishing it. I felt I had value for the play and was wanted by the producer and director, not as though they were doing me a favor the way I always felt in pictures. The play took over my life as plays always do – learning lines, wardrobe fittings (I’d talked Norman Norell into doing my clothes, his first in theatre – I’d come a long way since Loehmann’s). I managed to catch occasional glimpses of Leslie and Sam – it’s really impossible to be anything but an actress when in rehearsal, but I wouldn’t stop trying. I was used to that torn feeling. Our first out-of-town stop was to be Washington, D.C., then Philadelphia for two weeks. Not too bad and not too far away.
By Myself and Then Some Page 47