The ceremony, held in the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, was brief and melancholy. Daddy’s oldest friend, Peter Cusick, gave the eulogy. He spoke of Daddy’s brave political stands, his kindness and generosity. “He always had a talent for hope.”
In the middle of the Mass I was surprised to feel an explosion of happiness course through my body as well as a surge of relief. I would always love my father and I would always admire him. But the hideous struggle to save him was over, and I didn’t have to relive any of it again. I confided this to Mel when we were by ourselves. He applauded me. “Yes, you will still grieve, but you can go on with your life.”
After the funeral I phoned my grandmother Mo and told her that the body would be shipped out to California. We agreed that Daddy should be buried in the family plot next to Bart. She expressed disappointment that I wouldn’t be accompanying the coffin. I told her that it was honestly too much for me. I’m not sure she understood.
After I hung up the phone, I felt guilty all over again. I still had not visited the cemetery where Bart, and now Daddy, would be interred. At that moment I vowed that someday I would pray over their graves.
FORTUNATELY I WAS diverted by a visit from my beloved cousin, Elena Bosworth (we’d spent so much time together at Aptos that we were as close as sisters). Now she’d arrived in New York on the eve of her marriage to Howard Eaton. Blonder and more irrepressible than ever, she was staying at the duplex with Mama. Mama, in fact, was organizing the wedding reception and I was to be maid of honor. We were both very happy for Elena because Howard was a Yale graduate and head of the TV department at the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather. More important, he was turning out to be one of the kindest, most decent men I’d ever known.
At the reception champagne flowed. The guests were in a mellow mood. Then, as the cake was being cut, I heard Mama whispering to someone that she wished I could find a man “worthy” of me.
I felt awful. Mama would not accept Mel; she’d even refused to allow him to come to the reception, although Howard and Elena had wanted him to be there. When I could, I slipped away and called Mel on a pay phone. I made no mention of Mama’s cruel remark. I told him I hadn’t had a good time because he wasn’t with me.
“So come over to my place and we’ll celebrate by ourselves.” Mel laughed.
“Celebrate what?” I asked.
“That we found each other, sweetheart.”
THE FIRST THING Mama did after we paid off some of her creditors was to move to a less expensive studio apartment. The next thing she did was almost empty her bank account to pay a plastic surgeon to wipe all the experience from her face and transform her once-strong nose into a button. I visited her in the hospital and cried when I left; she was so sure she looked young and desirable again. She had just turned sixty.
As the weeks went by, I noticed she no longer displayed Daddy’s photographs. She started going out on dates and for a while she had a younger lover.
I, meanwhile, continued to mourn for my father. I sought out his friends: left-wing speechwriters, California politicos, Holocaust survivors he’d met when he was working for the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in Palestine. I discovered nobody knew Daddy very well. Some didn’t realize he was married or had a daughter, although they knew he had a boy who’d died. He’d received a lot of attention for the speeches he gave around the country for Israel, but he’d seemed very lonely, a rabbi said, “and somewhat of a stranger to himself.”
Sometimes I felt that way about myself too. My reaction to Daddy’s suicide was even more physically extreme than when I’d grieved over my brother’s violent death. I dragged myself around the city. My body ached; my legs cramped; I couldn’t sleep. I finally went to Rado in an attempt to understand the intensity of my suffering. Would I end up diminished? I asked him. “I feel immobilized, stuck in my tracks.”
He explained that my emotions were, in essence, frozen. “It’s a survival mechanism. Be glad you are protecting yourself from feeling.”
“You compared my emotions to an iceberg when my brother killed himself.”
Rado smiled thinly. “Think two icebergs. Your emotions may take even longer to melt now.”
“What else can I look forward to?” My tone sounded so sarcastic that we both laughed.
“You will continue to be driven. You will go on being a workaholic, but you will still feel worthless; you will get little pleasure from your successes, but you will still endure.”
“Great.”
“But this is a good thing. You are a suicide survivor. Don’t you realize that? You are very strong.”
RADO MAY HAVE been right. My actions had proven I could be strong. I hid my true feelings of confusion and fear behind a shit-eating grin. I kept quiet about the suicides for a long time. When I did mention them to people, conversation would stop; there would be sympathetic clucking, followed usually by some embarrassment.
I noticed that the term “suicide survivor” was alluring—scary, even. I wondered whether there was a kind of honor in being a survivor. If there was, I believed I’d won my so-called strength under false pretenses.
I’d try to explain my bewilderment and sadness to Mel and he’d listen, somber, gentle, devoted. He’d hold me tight. We were both enveloped by clouds of smoke because, after comforting me, he’d have to light up again—inhaling, exhaling, coughing, inhaling, stubbing out cigarette after cigarette and lighting up again, just like Daddy.
Chapter Twenty-Three
THE SINGLE HIGH point for me in 1960 was campaigning for John F. Kennedy in his run for the presidency. For two weeks I sat in an office above Madison Avenue and made and answered calls from the ever-ringing banks of phones, talking with voters, convincing them to cast their ballot for this amazing man with the movie-star smile. By early fall, most of America was enthralled by Kennedy’s boundless enthusiasm and mesmerizing media presence. He had charm and fire and eloquence, and most intriguing of all to me, he was married to Jacqueline Bouvier, a young woman of notable beauty and style.
After the phone campaign I immediately went into rehearsal for Anouilh’s Romeo and Jeannette, directed by Harold Clurman and starring Harold’s then-wife Juleen Compton. It had a brief run on Forty-Second Street. At breaks, Harold impressed us with his knowledge of French theatre and his reminiscences of his time at the Group Theatre, immortalized in his book The Fervent Years. Right after that I appeared in Molly Kazan’s Rosemary and the Alligators, with Jo Van Fleet and Piper Laurie; I learned how to tap-dance for that show.
But Off-Broadway didn’t pay much, and I wasn’t being sent out on enough auditions. I needed money, so Esquire editor Clay Felker, who’d worked with my father on the Star, found me a temporary job assisting his friend, the blustery hotshot journalist Peter Maas. Peter would ultimately make a fortune writing about the gangster informer Joe Valachi and renegade cop Frank Serpico. While I was working for him, he was finishing up an exposé of Igor Cassini, aka Cholly Knickerbocker, a gossip columnist for the Hearst press. Peter had evidence that Cassini was an unregistered agent for the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic and he’d been using his column to promote clients for his own PR firm.
Peter lived and worked in an apartment on West Eleventh Street. Whenever I arrived in the morning he’d greet me, often hungover and scowling, in his pajamas. He mellowed in later years, but at the time he was a thoroughly disagreeable man with a hair-trigger temper, his mouth twisted as the result of a barroom brawl. He was usually cold and businesslike in his dealings with me, but every so often he would throw me a hot look, as if to say, “I will come on with you if you come on with me.” I didn’t give him any encouragement.
For six weeks I knocked myself out making Peter coffee, going to the deli or to the post office to mail letters or send presents to people he was sucking up to—like Robert Kennedy, then attorney general of the United States. Mainly I typed draft after draft of the Cassini piece while Peter swaggered around his office puffing on a cigar, yelling in
to his phone, browbeating the last of his sources to “level” with him. As soon as he hung up, he’d spring over to my desk to look at how I was retyping his latest draft. I wasn’t an expert typist, so I’d often make mistakes and he’d start shouting at me, “Do it over again, you idiot. You can’t take this over to The Saturday Evening Post until it’s clean copy!”
Then the phone would ring, interrupting his harangue. I would answer while Peter tensed up; he was always waiting for important calls. Often it would be Mel, needy and depressed—he’d received another rejection of his novel. I’d whisper, “I’ll get back to you, hon,” while Peter glared. As soon as I hung up he’d demand, “Who the fuck was that?” I’d say, “My boyfriend,” and Peter would shout, “Tell your friggin’ boyfriend your boss needs his phone to be free.”
I would do as I was told and then would go back to work; I’d stay late as he labored over rewrites. Whenever he got a new quote—another detail—he’d dictate the material to me and I’d type the insert into the copy. I enjoyed the process; it was fun gathering information about a person. Being with Peter gave me the idea that I might be able to write nonfiction; it seemed less lonely than writing fiction, where you are always alone in a room with just your imagination.
EVERY SO OFTEN Peter would invite me to tag along with him and Clay Felker when they went to one of George Plimpton’s parties. Plimpton was the legendary editor of The Paris Review, and he entertained frequently in his apartment overlooking the East River. The minute I walked into the long, low room I was reminded of the sexually charged atmosphere that rippled through the Actors Studio—spirited, horny macho males joyfully throwing their weight around as women waited, lovely but docile; most of the writers at Plimpton’s were horny too, but they seemed either too bored or too drunk to act on their impulses.
I wandered around, recognizing William Styron lounging truly soused on a sofa. Nearby Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, and Bruce Jay Friedman were exchanging caustic remarks. I said hello to Lillian Hellman, the only well-known woman writer there. In those days literary female role models were rare. She was holding court with a bantering Truman Capote.
But the center of attention was Plimpton, very tall, very skinny, and quite noble-looking. He was invariably surrounded by at least four ravishingly beautiful young women. Whom would he end up with? It was always a matter of who could outlast the others. Meanwhile, George seemed blithely above it all as he drank himself into oblivion.
I would soon revere him as the creator of the masterful Writers at Work series, to which I would eventually contribute. He would become known for his participatory journalism—playing the piano at the Apollo, competing with tennis champ Bobby Riggs, conducting a symphony at the Philharmonic—and then he would write about how these experiences felt. (“It took tremendous self-confidence and talent to do that,” Cal Trillin once told me.)
By midnight, the party was dying down. I left and trudged back to Mel’s cold-water flat, which was only two blocks away. I was keyed up from hearing about Mailer’s latest book, Advertisements for Myself, an inventive collection of short stories, essays, and polemics—and from meeting Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist who drew the bitterly hilarious Sick, Sick, Sick for the Village Voice, which I read religiously. Jules’s cartoons and Mailer’s writing were part of the general cultural revolt of the 1960s against 1950s conformity and restraint.
The prospect of sharing pizza with Mel in his grim tenement apartment began to depress me. We had many arguments about the way he was spending his time.
“I need to be alone,” he explained quietly. “It’s the only way I can accomplish what I want to accomplish.” He wasn’t impressed that I’d been introduced to Jules Feiffer. “So what? You should take life more seriously.”
I said I did take life seriously, but I wanted to enjoy myself too. I needed a break now and then; I enjoyed being with artists who were doing things—“the movers and shakers.”
“They won’t help you. You’ve got a novel to finish. You should quit working for Peter Maas. He’s putting the wrong ideas into your head.”
But I was learning about journalism, I said. In fact, I might even become a journalist.
Mel took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
I decided we should stop seeing each other for a while. We separated for a week and I felt better for it. Then we made up in bed.
MEL MET PETER only once when he came to pick me up after our reconciliation. We were planning to celebrate it by going to our favorite Italian restaurant, the Grand Ticino in the Village.
Peter was already pouring himself his first drink of the evening, but he didn’t offer one to Mel. Instead they had a kind of staring contest, sizing each other up. Mel was taller and bigger than Peter. A deathly silence. I stepped between them. “Peter, I’d like you to meet Mel Arrighi.”
“Arrreeegee—what kinda name is that?”
“Northern Italian.”
“Oh yeah—what do ya do?”
“I’m a novelist and a playwright.”
“Well, good for you.” Peter’s tone was sarcastic. “I gotta meeting uptown. See you tomorrow, Patti! Be on time!” He ushered us out the door. When we reached the street, Mel was shaking his head.
“What an unpleasant guy. Wish you didn’t have to work for him.”
“I need the money.”
He nodded. “Let’s hope it won’t last much longer.”
IT DIDN’T. A couple of nights later I finished typing the final draft of the Cassini piece. It was word perfect. After reading it Peter gave me a big wet kiss.
“Hey,” I murmured.
“Hey yourself,” he answered back. “I liked that. Did you?”
He didn’t wait for an answer; he put his arms around me and moved me in the direction of his bedroom. I balked. I assumed he wanted to have sex with me simply because I was there and I was not about to comply; I was no longer the willing, eager-to-please chickie who hopped in the sack with whoever.
Peter watched me as I gathered up my purse and coat; he was breathing hard, a sure sign he was miffed. “What’s-His-Name Arreegee—he’s a nobody,” he taunted. “Does he have any dough?”
“Enough.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake! He’s the proverbial artist starving in the garret for his art, and you are his handmaiden.”
I didn’t answer. I was getting angry, but I couldn’t let it out.
“I’m a man who has money and I am going places,” he bragged.
“What a cliché,” I murmured.
“You sure as hell enjoyed the places I took you to.”
“Yes, I enjoyed them and thank you very much and I’m going home now.” I slipped out the door. Reaching the subway, I breathed a sigh of relief.
I wasn’t surprised when I arrived at work the next morning to find a check on my desk and Peter lounging in his pajamas, saying genially, “You’re fired, little one.”
“I know.” I noticed he was smoking a cigar. “Isn’t it a bit early for that?” I said as I put the check in my purse. That’s when I heard someone moving around in the bedroom and it became clear to me.
“I am on to other things,” Peter crowed. “Now get the hell out of here!” He practically shoved me into the hall.
I DIDN’T TELL Mel any of this. Luckily not long after Peter fired me, Roger Stevens asked me to go into one of his biggest hits on Broadway, the comedy Mary, Mary by Jean Kerr. My job: double understudy to the star of the show, Barbara Bel Geddes, as well as to the ingenue Betsy von Furstenberg, who played Tiffany.
The pay was good, $200 a week. I said yes. I expected Mary, Mary would be temporary. I had no idea I’d remain a double understudy for close to four years.
My routine was simple. I had to be in my dressing room from 7:30 to 11:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday and matinees. I’d rehearse twice a week, two complete run-throughs. In the first months I’d stand at the back of the house listening to the dialogue until the lines were part of my bloodstream. Laughs came from the audie
nce with the speed of machine-gun bullets. Jean Kerr had a gift for writing crisp, witty speeches that were both funny and shrewdly observant. The character of Mary was hilarious, and as Barbara Bel Geddes played her, she was also very touching. The plot revolves around Mary’s coming to see her ex-husband supposedly to clarify certain tax returns. In reality she hopes for a reconciliation, but then she finds he’s engaged to party girl Tiffany.
As Mary, Barbara never missed a trick. I loved watching her. She was a beguiling actress with a husky voice and mischievous eyes. She must have been close to forty, but there was still something very girlish about her. She once told me bitterly that she couldn’t seem to outgrow ingenue parts, even though she’d created the fiery role of Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She longed to be given another chance to explore the angry sexual side of herself. I too had been imprisoned by my angelic blondness. When I told Barbara that, she nodded. “Your looks can really fuck you up.”
OFFSTAGE BARBARA LOVED her liquor, which is why I went on for her one night. She called in with the worst hangover of her life. It happened on my twenty-eighth birthday. I’d been with the show six months. Jack Devereaux, the stage manager, had agreed to let me go out to dinner with Mel at Dinty Moore’s next door to the theatre. I’d just downed an entire goblet of red wine when the maître d’ hustled me over to a phone.
“Patti,” I heard Jack’s crisp voice say, “get over here fast. Barbara can’t make it. You are going on as Mary.”
Oh my God, I thought. Yes, I’d been rehearsed well, and yes, I was in the habit of mumbling my lines like prayers, but I’d no time to psych myself up or rehearse with lights and cues, let alone with the rest of the actual cast. I dashed to the Helen Hayes past crowds moving into the theatre proper. Barbara’s maid rushed me to the star dressing room, which was right onstage, since Barbara had so many changes. I was helped off with my clothes and started trying on Barbara’s costumes. They hadn’t gotten around to making understudy costumes yet. Barbara was heavier than I was, so I was pinned into the first outfit, a trim snappy suit. I was able to get my makeup on and then Barbara’s hairdresser popped in to give me a comb-out.
The Men in My Life Page 29