The Men in My Life

by Patricia Bosworth

  I’d forgotten how lonely I was. At the Studio I’d been surrounded by people, but the minute I left the place I felt so solitary, so alone. Often after a session I’d wander the streets of the city aimlessly. Arthur Storch, a wonderful Studio actor who later became a gifted director, told me he’d developed a crush on me but was too shy to ask me out. Instead he stalked me as I wandered around Manhattan. He said I spent a great deal of time looking at myself in department store windows.

  BOB AND I performed Night Music twice. We were not very good. As the courageous society girl Fay, I couldn’t project; my voice seemed lodged in my throat. And Bob playing Steve, the rash, uncontrollable Greek American, was all over the place onstage. Lee was surprisingly gentle. He suggested we try something “closer to your own life experience.”

  As we walked up the aisle I recognized Kazan in the audience. He’d created the role of Steve in the original production of Night Music on Broadway. I ran out of the Studio confused, my body aching with tension. I was stumbling up West Forty-Fourth Street when a figure came up behind me and put his arm around me. It was Kazan.

  “Aw, kid,” he said, his voice sounding sympathetic. We walked up toward Ninth Avenue.

  “You weren’t so bad,” he went on. “You were sure as hell human as far as I was concerned. I believed you were fucking scared. You were vulnerable, but you were tentative about it. Know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  “If you’d experienced being scared, if you’d ‘used’ it—you woulda been home free.”

  I nodded again. I was beginning to understand, I thought.

  We continued to walk. “I was in Night Music when I was in the Group,” Kazan said. “Last play I did.” He paused. “But you knew that, didn’t you? You knew I’d come because I’d be curious.” He chuckled briefly.

  I admitted that my partner Bob Heller and I both thought it had been a good idea. “We did hope you might want to see it again.”

  “And I did.”

  I waited, expecting he’d say something about our performances, but instead he confided, “I wasn’t a very good actor. I was too angry all the time—except in Waiting for Lefty, the anger worked for that part.” He stopped. “Gotta go to a meeting.”

  He darted away but called out, “Keep at it. Just keep working. That is the secret to everything. Keep working at it.”

  I HAD FEW encounters with Kazan after that; he was at the peak of his career and exceedingly busy, but every so often we would bump into each other at the Studio. He somehow sensed that I needed support and encouragement and would give it to me in the form of a brusque word of advice, or he might suggest a book to read or a piece of music to listen to.

  Our conversations lasted only a couple of minutes, but I treasured every one of them. They invariably took place on West Forty-Fourth Street—both of us either coming or going to the Studio. Once we walked an entire block together from Eighth to Ninth Avenue, his arm around my shoulders. “Someday you’ll run sessions at the Studio, Pat,” he said to me. And eventually I did.

  I found myself fascinated by Kazan’s Jekyll and Hyde qualities. He seemed so generous and kind to me and many other Studio members, but he was a notorious philanderer. Everyone seemed to accept that about him.

  “Fuck him and you may get cast in one of his shows. It’s not a guarantee, but it usually works,” a hard-bitten actress advised me.

  Had it worked for her? I wondered.

  “What do you think?” she retorted.

  I had the feeling it hadn’t.

  But then I was tested myself. Kazan’s office called me to audition for the part of Heavenly in Sweet Bird of Youth. It was the kind of part I was usually up for, the pure virginal type. I wanted desperately to work for Kazan, so I was thrilled to be called and I read four times, once with Paul Newman, who would be playing the male lead.

  When I finished the fourth reading, Kazan sprinted up to the footlights. “Nice,” he told me. “Very nice. Pat—it’s Pat, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  He looked hard into my face. “Tell me something,” he murmured. “Why are you so sad?”

  The question startled me. Yes, I am sad, I said inside myself, but I won’t tell you why. “This is the way I am.”

  Kazan was continuing to study me. “Just wondered,” he said, and he turned away. “Guy!” He called to his assistant, Guy Thomajan, a rather sinister man with bent shoulders and swarthy skin who was hovering nearby, holding a clipboard. He darted close and Kazan spoke to him so softly I couldn’t hear.

  I assumed I’d been dismissed, so I called out good-bye and walked into the backstage area to pick up my jacket and tote bag. Straight ahead I noticed a row of actresses waiting nervously to audition. A few smiled weakly at me as if to say, “You got through it.”

  I was almost out of the theatre when I heard Guy calling after me. “Wait up, Bosworth. Kazan will see you for dinner tonight at Downey’s. Seven p.m. sharp.”

  I turned to face him. I was well aware of what that meant. Dinner and a quick roll in the hay.

  “I’m busy,” I countered, and then I added lamely, “I have a boyfriend.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Guy demanded.

  “Nothing, I suppose.”

  “Don’t you want this part?” Guy asked.

  I thought for a moment. “Not that much.”

  “Okay, okay, that’ll be all,” Guy retorted, dismissing me with a wave of his hand, and then he turned on his heel and called out to the next actress waiting in the wings.

  I WALKED PARTWAY through Shubert Alley and then stopped and gazed back at the Morosco Theatre, where Kazan was auditioning. I almost cried out to Guy, “I changed my mind—I’ll meet Mr. Kazan at seven on the dot!” but I didn’t. Instead I dashed through ongoing traffic onto the opposite curb, pausing in front of Sardi’s, but I didn’t go in. I stood looking at my reflection in the restaurant window.

  What was the matter with me? For the past three years I’d been screwing around indiscriminately, mostly with a bunch of mediocrities, and yet when confronted with going to bed with a genius—Elia Kazan—I was suddenly a paragon of virtue, a Goody-Two-Shoes holding on to my dignity and my body as if they were treasures. Something in me was starting to change. Was I beginning to wake up and take myself seriously? Perhaps. I did know I didn’t want to have a one-night stand with Elia Kazan. In my journal I’d described him as “probably an animal—a charismatic animal—crude, surly, secretive, sly, bold, self-involved, and virtually unattainable, which makes him more desirable to moi.” But what I really wanted from this complicated, brilliant man was to be his friend and colleague. I wanted him to affirm me as an artist. I knew it would probably take a long time, and it did. The affirmation took thirty years.

  IT HAPPENED IN 1978. By then I’d become a biographer. I’d written a book about Montgomery Clift and had interviewed Kazan for it; now I wanted his imprimatur. I remember going to his house on West Sixty-Ninth Street carrying the manuscript, heart in my mouth, and ringing the doorbell.

  Kazan answered it himself. He had the same angry eyes, the same bristling energy. He knew why I was there. He took the envelope, snapping, “If I don’t like it, I’m gonna tell you, Pat.” Then he shut the door.

  A couple of weeks later he phoned me. “It’s good,” he told me. “It’s very good.”

  It was the beginning of our friendship.

  A couple of years later I rented a cheap office in Times Square, which happened to be on the same floor as Kazan’s space. By then he was in the process of writing his mammoth autobiography, which would encompass his remarkable career in theatre and film, as well as his tempestuous private life and, last but not least, his decision to cooperate with HUAC and name names. Coincidentally I was in the process of writing about my father’s informing; the FBI had forced him to prove his patriotism by betraying his colleagues and I felt ashamed.

  I remember confessing all this to Kazan as I stood in the doorway of his office while h
e sprawled on a battered couch, smoking a cigar. “Your father’s decision to name names has nothing to do with your feelings,” he said. “Or whether or not you thought it was right or wrong.” He paused a moment and went on to say, “Betrayal is ugly. Unforgivable. It haunts you forever. You have to learn to live with a terrible no-win decision and go on. I say you write about it,” he ordered, “and then you go on and stop mooning about it.”

  He added he was discovering in writing his autobiography that “we all live on three levels at once. The future is part of the present and the past, and our past always affects our present and future. By juggling all three, you find the tension in the story.”

  I DIDN’T KNOW it, but I was living that way while I was a young actress at the Studio, existing in the high-pressure present tense of that place. Then I’d attempt to do a sense-memory exercise from my past with an imaginary object—in my case, the little soot-blackened china horse statue saved from the fire in the nursery. It was one of my most treasured objects, and it proved to be my most successful sense memory. All I had to do was close my eyes, clutching the imaginary china horse, and I’d see my father’s pale naked form disappearing into the crackling flames; I’d hear his frantic calls of “The baby! The baby!” meaning my baby brother, who was in danger of being burned alive. I could watch the smoke billowing toward me, its acrid smell mingling with the pungent scent of the eucalyptus trees nearby.

  Lee praised my work, saying it was a good example of using my concentration and imagination. Emboldened, I decided to test myself and perform in a scene where I had to undress.

  But I just couldn’t. I was too self-conscious—I couldn’t go along with it—so instead I faked it, the worst thing you could do at the Studio, where behavior had to be authentic. After it was over, Lee said irritably, “The scene didn’t work at all because you didn’t do what you were supposed to do.”

  I nodded. He went on to order me sternly to “take off your clothes, darling.”

  The entire Studio membership seemed all eyes as I unbuttoned my blouse and flung it over a chair and then I stepped out of my skirt, shook off my ballet slippers, and stood barefoot in my bra and panties in front of Lee. I was trembling with embarrassment. Had I shaved my legs recently? I wondered dumbly.

  Lee stared at me, and I stared back, thinking, You are a voyeur, goddamn it! But I kept quiet and then he commented, “You’re not enjoying yourself, are you?”

  “No,” I mumbled, my cheeks flaming red. I was exposing my half-naked body to a bunch of virtual strangers. How could I enjoy myself? What I was doing went against everything Mama had taught me about being modest and private, and yet I could hop in the sack with nameless lovers. Who was I?

  Lee was continuing to stare at me. Was I supposed to say something? Finally I exclaimed, “I’ve been married!”

  Lee snorted. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I don’t know. Now can I please put on my clothes?”

  “Go ahead.” As I dressed, he continued to lecture me. “You should remember this experience. How do you feel?”

  “Awful. I want to crawl into a hole.”

  “Good, and it’s okay to feel that way when you take off your clothes again. I asked you to undress for a reason. To make you aware of your responses. You were uncomfortable. Your skin probably prickled. Your heart was beating very fast . . .” (Good God, he was correct on all counts!)

  He went on, “Everything you were feeling then and are feeling now, you can use for this scene. Do you realize that?”

  “Do you think I’m a complete idiot?” I shot back. “I know it’s about behavior!”

  There was a murmuring from the members. Nobody talked back to Lee. And with that, Lee turned away from me and rose to his feet. The session was over; he was done with me.

  I was surprised. I thought we’d finally connected. I tried to follow him and say something to that effect, but he turned coldly away from me, ignoring my stammered “Lee, thank you for . . .”

  It was as if I didn’t exist. Trailing behind him as he left the theatre were Shelley Winters, Jane Fonda, and Marilyn Monroe. Part of his inner circle, they would accompany him to his table at Sardi’s and listen to him pontificate about theatre and show business. Part of me wanted to crash that hallowed circle, but I had this instinctual urge to protect myself. I’d heard about the actresses who were held hostage by Lee emotionally. Although I was still numbed by my brother’s suicide, I wasn’t sure I wanted Lee to be the person to release me.

  “He controls some of the most neurotic and talented members of the Studio,” Marty would tell me. “Kim Stanley won’t make a move without him. He coached her when she played the tomboy in Picnic; he had her doing stuff that was dazzling but personally excruciating. Lee also coached her for Bus Stop. Kim thought he was a god because he could mobilize such deep painful feelings inside her through the sense-memory exercises he’d worked out so methodically. ‘Do this and you will feel something.’ And that’s very powerful, especially for those who are not in touch with how they feel. Because of this, some actors make transferences to him the way they do to a therapist.”

  Marty took me to a couple of Lee’s Sunday-night suppers, where Chinese food was served and the greats of Hollywood and Broadway showed up. I’d try to be helpful by picking up the dirty plates and carrying them to the kitchen, where Marilyn Monroe was stacking them in the sink. One time Lee came by to see how Marilyn was doing. He oohed and aahed about her talent for drying glasses. I stood there; he didn’t give me the time of day.

  Once I met Susan Strasberg, his bewitching, beautiful, complicated daughter, I stopped wanting to be a part of Lee’s circle and just wanted to be Susie’s friend. She was seventeen and was triumphing in The Diary of Anne Frank. She had never taken an acting lesson, and she had never studied with her father.

  Nobody knew Susie was supporting her parents (Lee’s salary at the Studio was small) or that she had bought a house for them on Fire Island with her movie money (she had done two films). She paid for the lavish spreads at the parties on Sundays—aside from Chinese food, there was champagne and caviar and rich cakes—and nobody knew that she endured her father’s obsession with Marilyn. Susie often gave up her room in the apartment when Marilyn was having problems with Arthur Miller and had to spend the night. One time Marilyn was so bugged she cried in Lee’s arms, and Susan heard him sing Marilyn a lullaby he’d sung to her when she was a little girl. “That really upset me,” she said.

  Susie and I spent many afternoons together. She was bright and funny and generous and tender. We’d go shopping at Jax and buy gingham blouses and slacks, and a couple of times we’d accompanied Jane Fonda to an exclusive spa on the East Side, where we’d had our faces slapped. It hurt, but the routine was supposed to give you hollow cheeks. I think we went there at least half a dozen times before we confided to each other it wasn’t working. “All we have now are very red faces,” Susie announced.

  Marty picked Susie up every night from the Cort Theatre in his cab, and sometimes I’d hitch a ride and we’d go backstage. Before the curtain came down I’d stand in the wings listening to Susie give that famous speech of Anne Frank’s: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart . . .” The spotlight would linger on her beautiful little face and then black out.

  I WAS STILL living at home and not paying rent, but Daddy didn’t give me extra money to live on, so I took odd jobs to make ends meet. For a while I worked as a waitress in a popular restaurant on the East Side called the Right Bank. I was fired for adding up checks incorrectly. Then I obtained temporary work as a demonstrator at Macy’s, where I attempted to show customers how to work a combination nutcracker, coffee grinder, and juice-squeezing apparatus. It was an impossible feat and I was fired from that job too. I had better luck as a hat-check girl at the Stork Club. That job lasted three months; it was the graveyard shift. But I lost out on that one too when I refused to date the owner of the club, cigar-smoking Sherman
Billingsley.

  Chapter Fourteen

  NEAR THE END of autumn that year I made a new friend, Lily Lodge, another new member of the Studio. The daughter of John Lodge, governor of Connecticut (and niece of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who would run for vice president with Nixon), Lily was to the manor born. A tall, statuesque woman with masses of brown hair and a gracious demeanor honed from years of living in embassies around the world, she had trained at the Royal Academy in London. Her mentor was Helen Hayes, the First Lady of the American theatre. She had been on State Department tours with Helen in The Skin of Our Teeth and in other plays too. Lily was virtually her surrogate daughter; Helen’s real daughter, Mary MacArthur, had died tragically of polio in 1949.

  Lils and I bonded immediately. Whenever she was between apartments Lils lived with my parents and me on East Fortieth Street. We became lifelong friends.

  Sometime in November we decided to do a scene together at the Studio and chose Sophocles’s Antigone—the intense dramatic scene between Antigone and her sister Ismene, when Antigone is fighting to get her brother a proper burial service. She must go to King Creon to get permission. I was playing Antigone. It didn’t occur to me that it might be difficult to play this scene until we started to rehearse and I burst into tears, remembering Bart—remembering that I hadn’t gone to his funeral and I still hadn’t been to his gravesite in Sacramento. We stopped rehearsal. I calmed down and then we talked late into the night in the brick-walled theatre at the Studio. I poured out my heart to Lils and she was very compassionate. I had told no one about my brother’s suicide. It was a relief to release some of my pain.

  Not long after we met, Lils came to me with an idea. Helen Hayes was about to star as Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie at the Palm Beach Playhouse. The part of Amanda’s fragile crippled daughter Laura had not yet been cast. Would I like to be considered?

  What a silly question. Of course I would.

  The very next afternoon Lils drove me to Nyack, where Helen lived in a white-shuttered Victorian mansion high on a hill overlooking the Hudson River. She was waiting for us in the double living room when we arrived, a small round woman with amazingly bright eyes. She didn’t stop talking as she showed us around: “Here’s Duse’s handkerchief, which I’m about to give to Julie Harris . . .” I noticed that her voice was bright and chirpy; it grated faintly in my ears. We walked through many rooms, the place decorated with chandeliers and Renoir paintings, not to mention numerous Tony Awards and the Oscar she’d won for her first major film, The Sin of Madelon Claudet.