Father and son began cautiously. Bart would later say to me excitedly, “I couldn’t believe I was playing chess with Daddy!” It was one of the few times they were connected and working in harmony. Such concentration—they seemed to know the game was all about control and vulnerability; wasn’t that part of their complicated relationship?
The game had gone on for hours. It was tedious (Bart told me later he was sure that “Daddy was assessing me, his opponent—trying to figure out if I prefer knights to bishops. That was my bluff . . .”). I tried to write about the intricacies of their game—bishops, kings, rooks, with a key breakthrough for Bart when his three rooks seemed unstoppable; all the while Daddy was chain-smoking and sipping his bourbon on ice.
My story ended with Bart winning the game and Daddy congratulating him. He put his arm around his son’s skinny shoulders, and Bart was beaming.
Ken McCormick, a senior editor from Doubleday, sat in on Gerald’s class the afternoon I read that story, and afterward he came over to me and said he was going to arrange for me to receive a Columbia Doubleday fellowship. This meant my writing course would be paid for, and he added that he’d like to see my book when I finished it. He gave me his card.
Gerald explained that this was great encouragement. I returned to the theatre feeling hopeful about myself for the first time in a long time.
Chapter Twenty-Five
ALTHOUGH I TRIED to ignore her, Mama was still on my case phoning me, writing me, bemoaning the way I lived and loved, wondering why when I’d “started off like a bright comet in the theatre” I’d “fizzled and died.” Oh, Mama could be tough and Mama could be cruel, but her remarks no longer hurt. I was so used to them that they barely registered, and what’s more, ever since I’d become responsible for her financial survival, our positions had reversed. I was more the parent than the child.
The one subject that we could always return to without friction was Bart. We met on his birthday and on the anniversary of his death. Mama would recall where she’d heard about Bart’s suicide. She’d been at Bloomingdale’s Gourmet Shop lecturing to customers on how her celebrity chef, Rudy Stanish, prepared his omelets. Neither one of us could ever eat an omelet again.
We were both consumed with keeping Bart alive in photographs. Between us we’d been adding to various scrapbooks for years. One afternoon Mama came over to my apartment with an envelope of rediscovered snapshots of us as children. She threw them down on my coffee table.
There was four-year-old Bart, solemn and pudgy, standing in shadow next to me in the garden at Berkeley. I seemed to be lording over him in the sunlight. There was Bart cuddling our cocker puppies, grinning from ear to ear. In some images my brother seemed wistful, timid; in others he seemed exultant, as when he caught his first fish at Tahoe. His expression changed as he grew older; he was no longer smiling and appeared wary and watchful by the time he turned eleven or twelve. And then there were the final pictures with me the summer after the tragedy at Deerfield. He seemed both despairing and angry, gazing balefully into the camera. Then there was his passport photo, so incredibly bleak. After that summer he’d refused to pose at all.
“Where are the pictures with Arthur Mehija?” I asked. I remembered taking them with my Brownie camera. The boys had posed side by side with their tennis rackets, Arthur gazing longingly at Bart. They were both about thirteen, both about to go off to Deerfield. I remembered Bart’s expression. He seemed aloof, as if he didn’t notice Arthur’s show of affection.
I thought of a conversation I’d had with Arthur long after the tragedy at Deerfield, and I tried to reconstruct it for Mama. Arthur admitted he was gay and that he had been in love with Bart. But he hadn’t told him; he was too uptight. So it had been love from afar. They were both so naive and innocent; sex was a mystery, and of course sex was taboo. At that time sex with another boy was criminal, but yes, they’d fooled around a couple of times in the privacy of their rooms because it was a natural impulse. They just couldn’t help themselves.
Arthur didn’t know when Bart and Clark found each other. It was a meeting of the minds; they both were exceptionally bright, and Clark had a wonderful sense of humor. Clark was Bart’s first and only love, Arthur concluded. Their feelings for each other were so intense you couldn’t intrude. It all happened so fast, and then they were discovered in the gym.
Mama looked very sad. “Do you think he was a homosexual?” she asked. She’d never asked that question before.
I told her I wasn’t sure, that Bart might not have known yet.
Mama began pacing. She admitted trying time and time again to bring up the subject with Daddy, but he would not deal with it. He was a homophobe, she told me. He was a homophobe because he was afraid he might be gay himself.
“Oh, Mama!”
“Don’t ‘oh, Mama’ me. There were too many instances. He’d had a crush on his boss, John Neylan, when he worked for Hearst. Then there was Willkie . . . Of course that was unrequited . . . but so many men had a thing for your father,” she went on. “The terrible part is, if he hadn’t been so confused about his own sexuality, he might have been able to help. Maybe then your brother wouldn’t have killed himself.”
“Have you finally come around to accepting the fact that Bart committed suicide?”
Mama bowed her head. “It’s difficult for me, but now I accept his suicide as a fact, yes.” She turned back to the pictures and briskly changed the subject. “It’s been a good idea to organize the snapshots. Makes me feel better somehow when I study the images of you when you were young, when we were all young . . . You were such beautiful, gentle creatures.”
Mama left me alone with the pile of photographs; I would soon paste them into yet another album.
Afterward I thought about what she’d said about my father and his sexuality. I thought of Kal Nulman, a lawyer now long dead. I saw him a lot right after my father died. Kal was a balding, kindly man who was Daddy’s drinking buddy. They drank almost every afternoon at the St. Regis bar. Kal lived by himself on Park Avenue and practiced law in New York City and on Long Island. He called himself my father’s best friend. He kept a picture of himself and Daddy in his office, taken at a party; they are both wearing funny hats and laughing uproariously. They had met in Washington during World War II and were in constant touch. Kal was devoted to him. Daddy had phoned Kal the day my brother shot himself.
“I said, ‘What do you want me to do, Bart? I’ll come out to be with you right away.’ And he said, ‘No, Kal—just talk to me.’ He was very broken up and there was nothing I could say—could ever say.”
Kal maintained my father’s reach exceeded his grasp of things. “He wanted to do so many things he wasn’t able to. He was a decent, good man. Terrible things happened to him and they shouldn’t have. He was an innocent.”
Kal maintained he knew nothing about my father’s addiction to liquor or pills. He even brought him a bottle of bourbon when he visited Silver Hill, “because he asked me to.”
Once when we were having lunch, Kal confided, “Your mother thought your father and I were lovers. But we weren’t.” And then he added, “But I loved your father more than I ever loved anyone in my entire life.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
MID-NOVEMBER 1963 AND I was still in Mary, Mary. By now the original cast had left the show. Barbara had been replaced by Diana Lynn, who’d been replaced by Nancy Olson, and there were numerous Tiffanys after Betsy von Furstenberg, including the ubiquitous Carrie Nye, who kept an iguana in her dressing room and ultimately married Dick Cavett.
But the understudy job wasn’t leading anywhere and I knew it. I went on in both roles at one time or another, and every so often as I was being rushed into the star dressing room it reminded me that I’d grown up in a climate of expectation and dread my entire life. It was Daddy’s fault. Oh, I didn’t blame him—I loved him too much to ever blame him for the atmosphere he created around us—but things had never been calm at home. We’d lived in a heightened kind
of reality. I’d grown used to it; it was a habit, a need almost. Maybe that was why I’d resisted Mel’s slower, contemplative, quiet way of existence at first. But as I spent long hours alone in my dressing room, I realized that I enjoyed being by myself more and more.
Between the matinee and evening shows I would wander around Times Square, ending up at the familiar “bow tie,” the area between Forty-Second Street and Forty-Seventh where Broadway and Seventh Avenue intersect. Crowds of tourists moved along with me; we were flanked by cheap hotels and garish movie palaces. I would always meet somebody I knew—Liz Ashley on her way to go on in Barefoot in the Park or Bobby Morse, the gap-toothed star of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
This particular night it was Bobby; he was practically jumping up and down with excitement. “Jackie and the president are coming to see the show tonight,” he exclaimed. “At the curtain call I’m gonna sing to them directly.” He stopped. “Your show ends before mine. Come backstage and you can see me perform for the Kennedys.” He darted off.
I could hardly wait. As soon as the curtain came down, I dashed from the Helen Hayes to the Forty-Sixth Street Theatre, just beyond Dinty Moore’s. I was able to slip into the wings just as Bobby begain belting out “I Believe in You,” the signature number. I peeked through the curtains; the houselights were up and everyone in the audience was gazing at Jack and Jackie. They positively glowed. The president had a tan; his white teeth flashed. Jackie was in pastels, her handsome face surrounded by dark upswept hair.
When Bobby finished singing, the president and First Lady stood up and basked in the cheers and huzzahs that shook the very foundations of the theatre.
THREE DAYS LATER Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. I heard the news on a radio that was playing in a Greek restaurant on Eighth Avenue and Forty-Fourth Street. I’d been having lunch with Brenda Vaccaro and Marty Fried after a session at the Actors Studio. We stared at each other in disbelief.
We paid the bill and wandered off on our separate ways. All I could think of was Jackie. I passed the Martin Beck Theatre, where Ballad of a Sad Café was playing, and the actor Lou Antonio, who was in the play, burst out from a dressing room; he had the dwarf Michael Dunn on his back, and the two went galloping down the street with Michael raging and shaking his tiny fist. I assumed they had heard the terrible news.
Then I walked over to Times Square. It was eerily quiet even though cars, buses, and taxis were progressing down Broadway and Seventh, but at a snail’s pace. Crowds milled on the sidewalk; many had gathered underneath the gigantic Bond Clothes billboard. Everybody seemed to be looking up at the Times Tower, where the revolving electric news bulletin sign kept moving around and around, repeating the same horrific bulletin: PRESIDENT JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY DIED AT PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL IN DALLAS, TEXAS, AT 12:30 PM EASTERN TIME.
On an impulse I phoned Danny Massey, who was in the musical She Loves Me. His wife, Adrienne Corri, was in The Rehearsal. Danny told me, “The producers want us to play tonight. We don’t want to.”
Late that afternoon there was a meeting between Actors Equity and the Broadway League. It was decided that the theatres would stay open, although every cast in every show on Broadway wanted to mourn. But we all went on that night. (I was subbing in as Tiffany.) Every performer, whether in a musical or a straight play, wore a black armband.
After my show I ran over to see Bobby in How to Succeed. I caught him just in time to see him singing “I Believe in You,” but this time he had tears streaming down his face.
WHEN I GOT home, the first thing I did was turn on the TV. Bobby Kennedy was meeting Jackie at Andrews Air Force Base; together they watched JFK’s coffin pushed off of Air Force One.
Just then the phone rang. It was Mel.
“Are you okay, sweetheart?” he was asking, trying not to stutter. “I know how you feel about the Kennedys.”
I heard his familiar voice, but my concentration was focused on Bobby and Jackie walking hand in hand behind the coffin.
“It’s terrible—I can’t stop watching TV.” I began to sob. “I’m so glad you called.”
“You sound the same. Are you the same?”
“Not the same without you.”
There was a pause and then Mel told me he was calling me from a pay phone at the airport and he was about to take the red-eye back to New York. “I’ll see you soon.”
I sank down on the couch. He’s coming back, I told myself. I can’t believe it. He’s coming back to me.
TEN HOURS LATER Mel was standing in my apartment, out of breath and unshaven. He had his Olivetti in one hand, his battered suitcase in the other. We didn’t embrace. He joined me on the couch and we watched TV like zombies. We didn’t speak until after Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby.
Then Mel turned off the TV set. “Jesus,” he said.
We began to discuss the assassination. Mel guessed it would probably be the most traumatic event in our lifetime. It was difficult to bring the subject back to ourselves.
We sat quietly for a while and then Mel said, “We could have a future together if we’d stop screwing around.” He went on to say, “I know what I want and I want you and need you. But if we get married we have to strike a balance of power between us, and the balance should be based on an understanding about what’s most important to each of us. For me it’s work—even second to creating a family.” He looked very serious when he said that.
There was a long pause and then he added, “I know you hated loaning me that money.”
I stared at him.
“I’m not stupid.” His tone was impatient now. “The bottom line is that all artists have money problems. Sometimes the wife does make more money than the husband, and then the situation reverses and the husband brings in the dough. But financial insecurity is something we have to face and accept. It’s always going to be part of our life.”
When I didn’t answer, he prodded me, “Aw, c’mon! Now what?”
I told him that I hadn’t been ready to commit myself to one man for the rest of my life.
“It sounds like a prison sentence. You’re a free woman, free to do as you please—within reason.”
“What would you do if I slept with another man?”
“I’d kill him.”
“Would you leave me?”
“Depends on the circumstances. But no, I don’t think so. But I’d be very disappointed.”
AFTER MEL LEFT to go back to his apartment, I fell back on my bed and rolled over to study my favorite photograph of Bart. It was a close-up taken of him when he was around eight or nine—he’s drinking a glass of Coca-Cola and is looking over the rim of the glass. He has just come from swimming, so his hair is wet and close to his beautifully shaped head. His eyes are enormous, as if he can see the entire world ahead of him.
“So,” I murmured in our private language.
So, he answered.
“I’m back with Mel. He loves me and I love him, and I feel committed; I don’t feel ambivalent. For the first time in my life, I don’t feel ambivalent.”
Because you know you are making a rational decision. You know you love him. You know you will be spending your life with an honorable man.
“Will I be happy?”
Is the Pope happy?
“Okay, stupid question. But will it work?”
Again, stupid question.
“Let’s change the subject.”
Good idea.
MEL AND I started planning. We decided we’d get married the following spring. Howard and Elena offered to give us a reception in their apartment in the Dakota. When I spoke to my brother, I asked if I should tell our mother.
Not yet, he cautioned. Wait till the last minute. Otherwise she’ll bug the bejesus out of you.
I took his advice.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I HAD ONE LAST big audition as an actress, reading for Ophelia in Richard Burton’s Hamlet. It was the most anticipated show of the 1963–64 season, so I prepared a
ssiduously, working long hours, even hiring Peggy Feury to coach me. The result: I created a truly frazzled Ophelia, crazy about Hamlet even though she knows he doesn’t love her, guilty that she’s let him take her virginity.
I started getting excited all over again about being in theatre because I realized this could be a career-changing role, and part of me wanted it desperately. After almost ten years in the business, hadn’t I paid my dues? I’d always dreamed of appearing in a distinguished production. Then I could leave the business, having made my mark, and devote myself to writing.
I read four times over many weeks for the director, Sir John Gielgud, and for Burton as well. It came down to me and another actress. I was sure I would get the part. But I was rejected and it devastated me. I could not understand why I’d failed.
(Decades later I was interviewing Richard Burton for the Times just before he returned to Broadway in Equus. I couldn’t resist. I had to ask him why I hadn’t been cast as Ophelia.
Burton maintained he’d wanted me. I wanted to believe he meant it. “You were wonderful in those readings, luv,” he insisted in his Welsh-accented voice. “But Sir John wanted to go with a brunette.”
A brunette? Was that enough of a reason? I could have dyed my hair.)
I’d had enough of auditions, of the frustrations, the craziness, the feeling that no matter how good I believed I’d been, I’d somehow failed. I hated the lack of control. I didn’t want to go through it anymore. That’s when I made up my mind: I would leave acting.
I’d also taken my first baby steps into journalism. I’d been interviewing theatre friends for a collage of Broadway circa 1964. I spoke to legendary press agent Sam Friedman and the angular dark-haired Marian Seldes, who was appearing nearby in Death Trap (“What was it like to remain in a show over a thousand performances?”). I even managed to spend an afternoon with Gore Vidal, whose most recent play, The Best Man, had capitalized on the drama of an old-fashioned presidential election. I ultimately showed my attempts to Clay Felker, who was beginning to reshape journalism in New York, his lively Sunday magazine for the Herald Tribune. It was a virtual showcase for young, ambitious writers. Clay took a couple of my jumbled, disorganized pieces and said he would try to pull them together.
The Men in My Life Page 31