At a press conference in the Senate Building, Ted Kennedy, Mike Gravel and Dr. Robert Lifton of Yale spoke, and I was asked to read the Redress portion of the Constitution. We then walked to the doors of the Senate chambers where George Plimpton—sheepishly explaining he couldn’t stay for the arrest because he had to be back in New York to accept a Good Citizenship Award—read the petition. We promptly lay down—one hundred and fifty well-heeled, wall-to-wall citizens carpeting the Senate corridor—and waited to be arrested.
Several Senators stepped angrily over and on us on their way to work. (It was hard enough making Senate sessions on time but some days made you wonder if the job was really worth it.) Barry Goldwater, gingerly picking his way over us, tripped on my leg. Gee, it was the first time I’d seen him since, as Miss University, my freshman year in college, I’d escorted him around the campus. And here he was again, larger than life, stepping over me on his way to work. It truly is a global village.
We lay there quietly waiting for the police. A woman near us began to cry; Robin took her hand and stroked it. Some of us were scared, most of us were nervous; the excitement of the morning had grown anxious as we lay on the cool marble floor, holding hands, waiting silently, politely. This group had manners.
A half-hour elapsed, and then we heard them coming, rounding the corner at the end of the hall—a line of police, each one taking one of our group by the arm and leading them out of the building to waiting paddy wagons.
The paddy wagons were segregated, men and women in separate ones—about eight people in each. I looked around me at these pleasant-faced women, most in their forties and fifties, many of them housewives—well-meaning, well educated, sincere in their caring, firm in their position against the war, committed to taking a stand. They were Betty Crocker, Julia Child—mothers, doctors, lawyers, writers; one took snapshots of her new friends in the paddy wagon with her Instamatic and later sent us all souvenir prints.
Inside the police station, we were fingerprinted and lined up for mug shots. Just like in the movies. The police pocketed extras of mine and quietly asked me to sign them. We were put in a holding tank, six to a cell, then taken to tough-jawed policewomen who booked us and took information for our records.
Even under rarefied conditions—a few short hours, a frozen baloney sandwich—we all wanted out of that jail. Glad that we’d had a glimpse of one, guilty that it was on our own terms, we were released late that afternoon, free to return to the comforts of privilege and position. As if we’d ever left them.
The next morning there were headlines around the country and, while you could hardly call us marked men, there were one hundred and fifty new names on the nation’s police records …“arrested for obstructing a corridor by lying down.”
My parents were horrified by my arrest—but then, horror was almost a constant when they contemplated my life these days. Our political battles had only gotten worse over the years: while I kept company (more than my parents knew) with the likes of Huey Newton and Abbie Hoffman, my father was, as always, a staunch member of L.A.’s renowned Republican set, many of whom would later become part of the Reagan Kitchen Cabinet.
I campaigned cross-country for McGovern while my father took to the stump for Nixon. He saw my support of McGovern as senseless and self-destructive. How could I back a man whose programs were so socialistic? A 50 percent inheritance tax! Didn’t I see that I was only spiting myself in the end? Did I just want to throw away my inheritance? Cast it to the liberal wind?
My politics were now indivisible, in my parents’ eyes, from my relationship with Robin. They could not appreciate my arguments on his behalf. My mother swore, the one time he came for dinner at their house, that he spent the whole of it gazing at his reflection in the mirror opposite him. And when, on the phone, he called her “Frannie” and urged her to “go with the flow,” she cast her vote as an emphatic “No.”
My father, never much good at names at the best of times, blocked Robin’s completely. “That producer fellow” was the closest he ever came. They were enemies in each other’s eyes, and where I was concerned, either side was the losing side. If I sided with one, I lost the other. And I felt torn between the two.
In the two years I lived with Robin, I never announced my change of residence to my father. My mother knew and disapproved but, as in the past, protected me. Not only did I not tell my father; I implied otherwise, inviting my parents to dinners at the Aviary, where I rarely went now, to indicate that in spite of my relationship I had not strayed but had stayed close to home. That, no matter what, my heart belonged to Daddy.
Robin wasted no time in nailing me on it. “Why do you have to play such childish games? You’re being dishonest. This is where you live; have them to dinner here.” Which, in order not to incur increasing disapproval, I reluctantly did, frantically straddling both sides of the filial fence.
Robin’s attitude toward my father, his pressure on me to come clean, were sometimes unbearable, but at other times productive. One night, as I was saying goodbye to my father on the phone, nicely but stiffly, Robin called out casually from across the room, “Tell him you love him.” The suggestion was so startling that, without thinking, I suddenly stammered, “I love you, Dad.”
After a short but stunned silence, my father said quickly, “Well, that’s nice, Monstro, I love you too”; and, pleased but embarrassed, we hurriedly hung up. It was a milestone for me and I was ecstatic, amazed at what I had done. It was the first time either of us had ever said “I love you” to the other—even if it was on the phone. We could never have managed it in person.
When he turned forty, Robin dissolved his company, decided to devote himself to radical politics and set about making his life an extension of those beliefs. A mid-life shake-up, some might call it, but he preferred to think of it as yet another step in the process of nonattachment, the endless expedition of Living in the Now.
“Monogamy is a bourgeois concept, a middle-class constraint,” was a line I heard a lot. “I think I’d be happiest living in a commune, in a collective of all my friends. Everybody living, being, together. I’d like to try that someday.”
“Living in a commune?”
“Um-humh.”
“When, exactly, were you thinking of trying it?”
“I don’t know. Soon. The idea seems so natural, so loving, so whole. It really appeals to me.”
Clearing of throat. “I kind of like the two-person commune myself. I don’t want to live with anyone else, in fact, I’d hate it. I hardly like when people come for dinner.”
“Look, Bergen, we’re very different animals. You’re basically a very guarded, closed person who enjoys her time alone. I prefer being with people. Being alone is painful to me. I need that human connection.”
“So?”
“So, if you want to go away to work on a story or a film, you have to realize I’m going to be seeing other women. Living in a more communal structure, with friends, would obviate that need. But for now, if, say, you leave for any period of time—for your own needs, which are fine—just accept my needs for company during that time.”
“But work is different from …”
“Bergen, we each have our own needs, our own pain.”
But I … but you … but wait… isn’t this what they call blackmail? Just my luck to creep out from under the rainbow to slam slap into the Commander Perry of relationships, exploring the frozen tundra of sexual freedom.
He was impatient to explore and experiment with life on all levels. And he wanted to do this with me. Because I appeared to be the kind of partner he was looking for. Because I was an explorer myself. Except now, because of him, what I wanted to explore was all the things he wanted to break with.
His case was so convincing—based on total honesty, sharing, greater intimacy, trust and conquering old conditioning of possessiveness, jealousy and fear—that I couldn’t, beyond wild-eyed and incoherent weeping, come up with one of my own.
His needs fo
r “human connection” seemed a high price to pay for my needs to travel and work; but when he showed signs of carrying through his policy, I did the only sensible thing—I never left. After all, I had my principles; I just didn’t know how to hang onto them. I may have been twenty-six, but I wasn’t grown-up enough to hold onto myself.
I got an offer for a film. With Paul Newman. In Malta. For twelve weeks. Twelve weeks is three months. Three months is ninety days. Ninety days away, leaving the Love Object alone. For ninety nights.
My agent was waiting for an answer. “Uh, Sue? I think I’ll pass. Yeah, I know I haven’t worked in a year. Sure, I know it’s Paul Newman. Right, you told me John Huston was directing. I agree it’s good money. Well, it’s not something I can put my finger on exactly. I just think … the material is too risky.”
When it came to choosing me or the relationship, there was no question. Already, there was little enough left of me; soon, there would be nothing left of the relationship.
In 1973, in the afterglow of Nixon’s first trips behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains, a New York newspaper called The Guardian announced that it was going to sponsor a group of twenty people on a tour of the People’s Republic of China. Robin had been approached about joining the group and suggested me as well. The only credentials required were participation in some area loosely defined as “the arts” and evidence of liberal political leanings and activities.
It was one of the first American groups to go to China since Nixon’s meetings with Mao. The trip would be unofficial and we would travel without State Department approval or protection. “Red China,” as it was still called then by all but the liberal cognoscenti: mysterious as Mars; Gang of Four, Red Guards, Long March, Great Wall—800,000,000 people marching around in Mao jackets with no makeup. It was not the American Way.
The Guardian’s intention was to assemble a representative group from different racial, geographical and financial backgrounds. The final group was twenty-one: nine men, twelve women; sixteen whites, four blacks, and one Chicano; or five hard-core Marxist-Leninists, three soft-core, six old-line radicals, two young radicals, one black Muslim, one feminist, two committed vegetarians and one McGovern Democrat (guess who).
The Guardian advised specificity in the visa application. If you’d made films, for example, list titles. Give examples of political activity, etc. It was implied that my political credentials might be substandard. So I synopsized some of the films I’d been in: The Sand Pebbles, a story of American imperialism in China; Getting Straight, about the student revolution in America; Soldier Blue, the white man’s genocide of the American Indian; Carnal Knowledge, which dealt with the oppression of women in America. I left out The Adventurers. It read like the most radical catalogue of films ever to hit the screen. It made Jane Fonda look like Sandra Dee. I got in.
When we were sent our itinerary, it was addressed “Dear Cultural Worker: You will be visiting the following cities in China: Canton, Changsha, Shao-hsing, Peking, Soochow and Shanghai.” What in God’s name was a Cultural Worker? I was the only one in the group who had to ask. A Cultural Worker, in Marxist terminology, is someone in the arts. For the next month, I was to be one.
I wanted to see China as a tourist, not as an architect of the Revolution, and in a group whose Marxist commitment ran high, it was clear I was just along for the ride. I sat in the back of the bus taking notes for an article I was writing on the trip for Playboy (not a Marxist publication) called “Can a Cultural Worker from Beverly Hills Find Happiness in the People’s Republic of China?”
In our traveling collective, day after day the dialectical debates grew more heated; ideologies were argued, cries of “counterrevolutionary,” accusations of “revisionist” could be heard. The Marxist leaders complained about the level of commitment to the Movement.
With a guide, we discussed sexual morality in China. Premarital sex, we were told, does not exist in the People’s Republic. Yeah, but… There are no buts; buts also do not exist. Still, I persisted, “What if a boy and girl want to …?” “They don’t,” I was told firmly. After three weeks in China, I believed her. There was a total absence of sexual energy. I felt as though I had been neutered. The very idea of sex was redolent of bourgeois self-indulgence. In China, marriage is called “class friendship.” We asked what qualities people looked for in a “class friend.” “Political ideology,” was the reply. Well, I knew that story.
Robin and I were engaged in a class struggle of our own through most of China. Still as impatient with my incessant insecurity as I was aggravated by his dogmatic self-assurance, he hammered at me to see myself—the light side and the dark—and to try to change the parts in me that held me back. Certain dialogues were doggedly constant with us, the subtext steadfast: “interior space,” “ego needs,” “feel my pain,” “overcommunicating,” his “frontal attacks,” my “sneak assaults,” my self-doubts, his inordinate rage, my manic evasion of his compulsive confrontations, my neurotic need for “positive feedback,” his manipulation of my fears, my refusal to accept responsibility for my behavior. On and on and on—red-eyed and tight-lipped—the Red Guard and the Revisionist … see them cut a swath across the People’s Republic in a tale of Revolutionary Romanticism.
Our last day in China was May 9, my twenty-seventh birthday. I felt much older. Three weeks after we had left, we returned to Hong Kong, where we left the group to check into a suite at the Peninsula Hotel and the next day fly home—first class.
There was a party the night we got home from China, given by some of my friends, not Robin’s. Nice people, old friends I liked, and over the last two years had missed seeing. After three solid weeks of dialectics, I wanted conversations without class struggles. A little capitalist companionship, light-hearted laughter, yes, even frivolity. And, like Marco Polo, I had wondrous tales of the Orient.
Robin refused to go. Finally, I went alone, promising to stay only a short time and to be home by eleven.
Time, as you know, flies. It was a fine party, and when the hostess called me to the phone, I looked at my watch with dread. It was one-thirty. I was in for it.
“Get home immediately.” The voice was trembling, tight with rage. And then the fear ball, when you can’t find your stomach: you seem to have dropped it somewhere and suddenly you are four years old and really scared, and you edge stiffly out the door, knowing you’re going to get it.
He was sitting on the bed, shaking with anger; his speech was slurred but deliberate. There was a tape recorder in front of him. He pushed the red “record” button, explaining, so slowly, that he was going to tape the dialogue of this argument for my benefit so that, at a later date, I could replay it and possibly understand my behavior in these situations. This was going to be a big one.
And then—for two hours—he proceeded to talk, clenching and unclenching his fists, about how this was yet another example of the ways in which I tried to undercut him, tried to destroy the relationship. Of my constant subconscious manipulation designed to keep control.
I was silent, weary, watching. Yes, I said I’d be home by eleven. Of course, I should have called. You’re right, it probably is indicative of something larger on my part and I will try and confront my anger. Head hung, humbled, penitent before my confessor and his Sony. God, he was good. In countless little ways, I always asked for it, but the overkill could drive you crazy.
It was 4 A.M., he was still going; when was I going to get in touch with my behavior? Why couldn’t I stay conscious? I was irresponsible and cruel. I was a killer. He was screaming now while I shook with the traditional defensive sobbing. Suddenly, he picked up the television at the foot of the bed and hurled it into the next room, where it shattered on the brick floor. I was terrified and also awed: it was our most significant breakage so far, and on some level fairly impressive.
After that, our fights remained at fever pitch; the arguments grew increasingly violent, until I felt like a stewardess, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. The house was o
ften scattered with our debris the day after a fight. Bewildered gardeners would find the pool furniture—appropriately—at the bottom of the pool, where we had flung it the night before; metal gates were wrenched off their hinges, doors hung askew, assorted windows were cracked or broken. I was glad these fights took place at Robin’s house instead of my own. Appearances would have indicated that its tenant was The Incredible Hulk. One of us usually nursed a cut from all the glass we broke, flashing Band-Aids like seals of long-suffering. I would drive violently. He would drive violently. Clutches were replaced routinely and carpenters came and went on a monthly basis. It was a wonder either of us was alive to complain about the other.
A Los Angeles day: relentlessly sunny, a toasty 78 degrees, the city lightly browned by smog, and I am alone, lying outside by the pool in a state of semi-coma that is now familiar and fairly common. I am also crying. Of course.
What a fine figure of a woman I present—slumped, with the spine of a souffle. Sniveling, I look over, through tiny red eyes, at my house: bright yellow awnings flapping gaily in the breeze, bougainvillea tumbling down the wall, sun searing through the stained-glass windows. I love my house. I miss it.
In the beginning, I was so reluctant about it all—leaving my house, moving in, sharing a life. Reluctant to lower my defenses, but finally thrilled to give in. And when I gave in, I somehow gave up, misplaced myself. I seemed to have disappeared.
Knock Wood Page 22