The Men in My Life

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by Patricia Bosworth


  Once I heard my parents discussing me after I’d been kept back a grade and Bart had been pushed ahead. “Patti’s the pretty one,” Mama said. “Bart is smarter.” Daddy argued, “I’m not so sure.” Still, I got it into my head that I must be stupid, even though I didn’t feel stupid. But sometimes I pretended to be.

  AFTER OUR GRANDDAD Bosworth, a gruff imposing figure, heard me recite at parties, he complained to Mama that I was getting too much attention and that Bart, then age nine, was not getting enough. “I’m going to do something about it,” he declared.

  In the summer of 1945, Granddad bought my brother a .22 rifle and they drove to target practice in Marin every Saturday afternoon for months. Bart confided that the noise of bullets exploding upset him at first, but after a while he began to enjoy hitting the bull’s-eye. He refused to shoot at birds, but he became a crack shot.

  Granddad also took Bart to a gym; Bart exercised with weights and a teacher came over to teach him boxing. He would come home from these outings flushed, eyes sparkling, and then he’d beat away at a punching bag in his room. Learning to shoot and box gave him confidence, and he grew very strong.

  So much so that when I tried to wrestle with him, he could pin me to the ground even though he was smaller than I was. I’d keep on struggling and he would laugh; our bodies would press together and this aroused me. Sometimes I’d wrap him onto my back and gallop around with him through the gardens at Aptos.

  I was something of a tomboy then; so was my best friend, Terry Ashe. We exercised polo ponies together in Golden Gate Park and played frenetic volleyball games at the convent. For a while we were two against the world, even when we fought; we knew we’d be friends for life, and we still are. I had first spotted her at chapel and decided she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen—thick, dark curly hair and perfect features. I already knew she was the smartest student—A-plus in Latin and math—and was on scholarship; she was the best Catholic too. Oh, she was so capable, but she was also fun. She visited me at Aptos; she was the only person aside from Bart who I allowed into the hideout. Terry dreamed of becoming an actress too.

  Then when we turned thirteen, we went through all sorts of mood swings. My breasts started swelling and I got my period. Mama didn’t explain; she just handed me a Kotex—she was not about to talk to me about what it was like to live in a female body. Her way of teaching me about sex was giving me Colette to read. The great novelist believed that love and passion were the paramount experiences in a woman’s life, more important than marriage or children. I wondered if Mama felt that way too.

  I remember having incoherent discussions about sex with Terry. We’d read a pamphlet called The Facts of Life about sexual intercourse and where babies came from; the word love wasn’t mentioned. We came away feeling confused. Sex in those days was such a big secret. We imagined that the act itself (although we didn’t know exactly what the act was) could be sublime. Exhausting, crazy-making. This was implied in the movies we were seeing such as Duel in the Sun, a garish Western with Jennifer Jones as the panting half-breed Pearl Chavez, totally hung up on the taunting sexy cowboy Lewt McCanles (played by Gregory Peck).

  Duel in the Sun didn’t give us any answers, so we practiced kissing our pillows. Then in dancing school I flirted with various boys because I fantasized I could be a “sexpot,” but I was also pretending to be a “good girl” because that was how I was expected to behave. Even so, when I’d practice the samba with Clark Smith, who had rosy cheeks and a shock of blond hair, I’d feel a tightness between my legs and I’d wonder if I should go to Confession. The taboos against sex were fierce, and to make matters more serious I was Catholic. The Church said it was a sin to have sex before marriage, and no man would ever marry a woman unless she was a virgin. Clark and I attended swimming parties together in Marin and he gave me a corsage, but we never kissed.

  Then I met Pete when I was fourteen. He wore a leather jacket and had the beginnings of a scruffy beard. Mama disapproved of him (“He’s from the other side of the tracks”), but that didn’t matter to me. On our first date we rolled around in the grass in Golden Gate Park like a couple of puppies. Then we drove up to Twin Peaks in his jalopy and began kissing; Pete kissed me until my mouth grew swollen. He kept saying I was “hot” and he wanted to “go all the way.” Once he tried to pull my panties down and we began tussling in the car. I got scared and tried to wriggle free, and he banged my head against the dashboard. I cried out in pain, stunned by the violence. He said he was sorry over and over again, but I told him quietly to take me home, and I refused to see him again.

  I felt so lost after that experience. I missed the excitement and the tension as much as it overwhelmed me. I began spending more time with Terry again. We’d ride horseback with another friend, Pat Harrison, at her ranch in Marin, but Mama wanted me to stay home and study. By now we’d moved to a big house on Green Street near the Presidio. I’d be in my room, too restless to do schoolwork, so instead I’d wander through the silent, immaculate rooms in the late afternoons talking to myself. My fantasy life blossomed and I created an imaginary character, a “husband” I named Bill, to keep me company. Bill was sympathetic and kind and let me ramble on. Once Bart came upon me yakking to Bill. He told me I was nuts and should concentrate on my homework.

  Except for composition, I wasn’t doing well in school, but Bart was an A student and helped me raise my math grades. I stopped talking to Bill so much and spent more time with my brother.

  Bart allowed me to do so, even though he now had a best friend, Arthur Mehija, a small handsome boy who appreciated his wry humor and taciturn ways. Sometimes I’d watch them play tennis in the park and then we’d go to Blum’s for hot fudge sundaes. Bart talked about his new heroes, Mozart and Albert Einstein. In these men he saw what human beings were capable of.

  “I don’t want to be like you,” he’d say to me, commenting on my ambitions. “I don’t know what I want to be yet, but I don’t want to be like you.”

  We’d still spend long lazy days together at our hideout or we’d race each other down the beach before we stopped to collect shells or watch the sun sink behind the rim of the ocean. We were living in a dreamworld then; our life seemed so idyllic on the surface—and then everything began to change.

  Chapter Two

  IN 1947, AT the start of the Cold War, fear of communism let loose a wave of political oppression in this country that seems almost incomprehensible today. My father became one of the lawyers for the Hollywood Ten, those writers and directors accused of being communists and subpoenaed to appear in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and testify as to their political beliefs. Daddy believed defending them would be “a piece of cake”—the hearings were unconstitutional, he said. It was not against the law to be a communist.

  But a lot of people disagreed with him, especially Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. After Daddy defended the Ten, the FBI began surveying him relentlessly. He lost so many big clients he had to rethink how he was going to support us.

  In the next months we moved to New York and Daddy bought the left-wing newspaper PM, which he renamed the New York Star. He began drinking more and taking pills. Despite his best efforts, the Star folded within eight months.

  THE REAL NIGHTMARE began shortly after that, on a snowy February 9, 1950, not long after my parents’ latest dinner party. We were now living in a rented brownstone on East Fifty-First Street in the heart of Manhattan. My brother and I were upstairs doing our homework. Bart was then at the Collegiate School and at the top of his class. I was at Miss Chapin’s and failing almost everything.

  Around three a.m. my brother and I were both awakened by a thud. It seemed to have come from the kitchen. We rushed into the upstairs hall and clutched at each other. We heard a scuffling of feet, voices raised. Yanking on our robes, we tiptoed down the two flights of stairs to the first-floor landing. We were just in time to see our father lying inertly on a stretcher and being carried
by two attendants out the front door to a waiting ambulance. We couldn’t tell whether he was dead or alive. Mama followed, wrapped in her mink coat and smearing lipstick across her mouth. She climbed into the ambulance after him, and it sped off into the night, sirens wailing.

  We padded down to the kitchen and questioned the servants—Bernice, our cook, and her husband, Robert, who served as butler/chauffeur. At first they didn’t want to tell us anything, but we persisted with anxious questions until finally Bernice admitted that Daddy had taken an overdose of pills. The pills combined with alcohol “could be pretty deadly.” Bernice was quoting my mother now, who had pleaded with my father to stop mixing barbiturates with whiskey.

  The following day we learned that Daddy had survived the overdose and was recovering at Lenox Hill Hospital. We kept asking to see him and Mama kept telling us he couldn’t have visitors. She was trying to protect us from observing anything unpleasant. Only she would watch our father sobbing on the toilet in acute anxiety as he went into withdrawal. He had never experienced such a personal public failure as the closing of the New York Star. “He feels humiliated and utterly defeated,” she told us.

  After two weeks at Lenox Hill, he managed to get more Nembutal through a friend and took another overdose. His stomach was pumped out just in time.

  IT WAS ANOTHER month before Daddy pulled himself together. He returned home pale and shaky, insisting he’d kicked the pills. With the support of colleagues he was invited to join the prestigious firm of Poletti, Diamond, Roosevelt, Friedin & Mackay. That lessened his money worries to some extent, but he knew he had to get some big clients to survive in that firm. The next thing I knew, he reeled one in.

  I came home from Chapin one afternoon planning to sing along with my new South Pacific album, and there was the movie star Montgomery Clift lying on the floor of our living room talking politics with my father.

  “Hey, baby,” Daddy called out, “you remember Monty Clift.”

  How could I forget? We’d just seen him in the western Red River two nights before.

  By now Monty had jumped to his feet and was shaking my hand. I was thinking, He’s as beautiful and mysterious in person as he was on the screen as the cowboy adventurer Matt Garth. We stood facing each other; his large, dark deep-set eyes glittered under thick black brows. I didn’t know how to react, so I bobbed a curtsy. With that Monty bobbed a curtsy back and then let loose with a wild hooting laugh.

  I’d never heard such a laugh, gulping and high-pitched, almost faintly hysterical. I heard it a lot for the next couple of weeks, because Monty was in and out of the brownstone talking in spurts to my father—telling us both that he’d just turned down a movie called Sunset Boulevard. Then he’d fall into a silence or break into that weird mirthless laugh. I couldn’t figure him out, but I couldn’t stop looking at him; he was absolutely drop-dead gorgeous. He’d be watching me too and I’d wonder if he thought I was a complete idiot because I was obviously so smitten with him.

  He left to star opposite Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun, playing the doomed tragic killer who’s sent to the electric chair. Daddy knew the warden at San Quentin, so he arranged for Monty to spend the night in the death house in preparation for his role. When he came back from filming, he visited us again, and I can still see him pacing back and forth around our living room describing what it was like to meet the convicts on Death Row.

  Then he disappeared. He’d chain-smoked every time he was with us; the ashtrays were overflowing. I saved one of his cigarette butts. I still have it somewhere, encased in waxed paper.

  (At the time, I didn’t know that Monty was gay. When I began researching his biography, I discovered he’d always led an agonizingly double life. Those feelings of dislocation, smoldering hostility, and sexual ambiguity are mirrored in all his films, from The Misfits to The Young Lions. These qualities are part of what’s made him a supreme gay icon today. “I dream about him, but I relate to him too,” a gay friend said.)

  MEETING MONTY WAS one of the few happy interludes during that melancholy spring. Mama wouldn’t discuss our father’s state of mind, let alone his addictions. He was supposedly okay—except he wasn’t. He was starting to medicate himself (later I discovered he obtained his pills on the black market). I could tell the minute his speech slurred or his eyelids drooped, and then I’d start looking for the tranquilizers, uppers, and sleeping pills he kept hidden all over the brownstone. Whenever I found a stash behind the bookcase or inside the liquor cabinet, I’d flush them down the toilet.

  Even so, Mama kept telling us, “Everything is all right,” in spite of the fact that Daddy still didn’t have enough clients, there were too many bills to pay, and he just couldn’t stop being dependent on barbiturates, let alone alcohol. But Mama didn’t or couldn’t deal with what was happening with our father. She evaded our questions; occasionally she told downright lies.

  By summer she announced that Bart and I were going to be sent away from home. We guessed she didn’t want us to see Daddy screwing up again. I was enrolled at the coeducational International School of Geneva (nicknamed Ecolint). My brother would be attending Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. He was overjoyed; I protested vehemently. We spent a last melancholy month at Aptos before the place was sold.

  THAT FALL I was put on a plane headed for Switzerland. I managed to control myself during the flight, but as soon as I saw the snowcapped Alps I began crying like a maniac. The headmistress of Ecolint, Mlle. Travelletti, who resembled the Wicked Witch of the West right down to her pointed nose and the hairy mole on her chin, greeted me at the airport and drove me into Geneva. I cried all the way. At first she tried to comfort me, but she spoke little English, so it did no good. She ended up taking me to my room and leaving me there to unpack.

  I looked out the window at the school buildings that surrounded a gloomy cobblestone court, and I continued to cry. I cried off and on for the next twenty-four hours. My tears didn’t cease until Mlle. Travelletti sent me to a hospital. As soon as the nurse left my room I called New York, begging to come home.

  My father said no, emphatically. “This is a great opportunity and you must take advantage of it.”

  I was stunned; I was used to getting what I wanted. I argued weakly, but he wouldn’t change his mind. I took his refusal as a betrayal. I’d said something he didn’t want to hear. I was disagreeing with him; now he was punishing me.

  After I hung up I fell back on the pillows, exhausted from crying. The windows of my hospital room faced Lake Geneva, with its Jet d’Eau fountain shooting geysers of water into the air, which then plunged back into the lake’s shimmering blue surface. But Switzerland’s beauty didn’t comfort me.

  I lay in bed for what seemed like hours feeling lost and abandoned, and then a part of me turned off—a tender, feeling, thinking part of me. I decided I’d never allow myself to be so hurt or in such pain again. And I vowed never to show anyone how I felt about anything. It gave people too much power.

  I didn’t realize at that moment what a big decision this was or how it would affect me. After a while I had a harder and harder time expressing my feelings and became so detached from them that I often didn’t know how I felt. My second husband would remark on my “coldness.” I would assure him “it’s just an act.” He’d shake his head: “It’s too successful.”

  Maybe, but for a long time I thought it helped me survive.

  MEANWHILE, BART WAS happier than he’d ever been in his life. He loved Deerfield. When Mama and Daddy visited him, he’d greeted them with such uncharacteristic exuberance they were surprised. He showed them around, leading them past the classrooms, the lab, and the gym to the seventy-five acres of green playing fields set against the rolling hillsides overlooking the Deerfield River. Once or twice they could hear the sound of a chugging train. The Boston–New Haven railway tracks lay unusually close to the edge of the campus.

  Near the end of their walk they were joined by Arthur Mehija, Bart’s friend from Town School.
Arthur had spent so much time with us that he was almost like a member of our family.

  Bart was more forthcoming than usual that afternoon, describing some of his courses and a teacher he especially admired. But he didn’t mention he had a new friend named Clark Steuer, who was round and jolly and very, very smart. Arthur had introduced them during the first weeks of the fall semester. The instant they met, they had eyes only for each other and became inseparable.

  The friendship between Clark and my brother intensified through the fall and winter. Even so, he and Arthur would always have breakfast together, but as Arthur admitted later, “things weren’t as intimate between Bart and me after he met Clark.”

  One spring afternoon in May, Arthur happened upon the two boys in the locker room of the gym with their arms around each other. They were both naked and had erections. Arthur thought they saw him. He hurried out, shutting the door behind him. “I didn’t want to think about what I’d seen,” he later told me.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING Arthur went down the hall of his dorm to pick Bart up for breakfast. “It was our routine; we always did that,” he said. But Bart wasn’t in his room, so Arthur went into Clark’s room, “and it was as if someone had ransacked the place . . . Everything was in violent disarray—clothes, books thrown everywhere—windows open, letting in a stiff breeze. I remember thinking how cold the room was.”

  Arthur hurried down to the dining room. But neither Clark nor Bart was at their regular table. After breakfast the entire student body was called into the assembly hall and there was a brief announcement that Clark Steuer had killed himself. No explanation, no reason.

  Apparently, early that very morning—at dawn—Clark had walked across the two sweeping green fields near the school, carrying a small stool with him. He was wearing only his underwear. He hung himself by his necktie from a tree right across from the railroad tracks. A train conductor had sighted the body swinging from the branches.

 

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