by Janet Groth
When I could have visitors, my pal Lizzie came around with a book and a magazine I had requested and asked, “What in the hell are you doing here?”
My office mate Betts was too polite to say the same, but I could see that she was just as mystified.
Later that week, a second evaluation resulted in my release from Bellevue, though there was good reason to suppose I was still in deep trouble. On the slender excuse that I knew no one else with a car, I called Evan and asked him to pick me up. What was I thinking? He agreed. He always knew good eating places, and it being noonish, he took us to a fifties diner on First Avenue that still had jukeboxes. Over tuna sandwiches he let me choose and I chose the song with the lyric “You must remember this,” and Evan said, “Yes, there is such comfort in cheap music, isn’t there?” That, finally, did it. I was still too sick in the head to muster anger at his miserable behavior toward me, but Evan’s misquote of Noel Coward put an end once and for all to my sleeping with him. How could I ever go to bed with someone who not only misquoted Coward but could dis the song Ingrid was humming just before she said, “Play it, Sam”?
As for the rest of Evan Simm’s story, it was so full of madness, sickness, and death as to evoke pity even in me. He used the imminent arrival of his child to order a lot of custom cabinetry to be installed in his two-bedroom flat on Ninth Street. Custom cabinetry is expensive, and Evan exerted a lot of pressure on Jim Geraghty to give him a drawing account and office space at the magazine. This would have to be on the eighteenth floor (my floor), an area mainly given over to writers, two departments (fashion and Talk), the mail room, and the library. Only six other cartoonists had offices there: Charles Addams, Frank Modell, James Stevenson, Ed Koren, Bob Weber, and Warren Miller. Perhaps detecting a look of desperation in Evan’s eye, Geraghty gave in. The move did not, however, result in more purchases of Simm cartoons. As his drawing account grew, Evan’s troubles grew, too. The baby arrived. When the little girl was no more than two, Marta was hospitalized for what may have been bipolar disorder. Evan sent for his mother to look after the child. A little woman, uncertain on her pins, she made a dazed trip or two through the eighteenth floor to her son’s office, perhaps in search of an emergency set of keys, or cab fare.
Hardly a faithful husband, and now with no wife at home to be faithful to, Evan’s pattern of too many girls, too much drinking, too much nightlife, and too many unpaid bills went into high gear. He grew a beard, which somewhat improved his jug chin by hiding its outline but emphasized his nose in an unfortunate way. The drinking was giving it the telltale flush of pink that comes of tiny burst blood vessels and has been seen in drinkers’ noses ever since W. C. Fields—maybe ever since Bacchus.
I was forced to see him slouching past my desk daily. I did my best to ignore him or, failing that, gave him censorious looks. When he got to the office before me, he took to leaving me message-pad drawings designed to soften the unsoftenable. Day after day I would come in and there would be another variation on the theme of the punning soup series. The constant was a shallow bowl of soup with a spoon resting beside the full-to-the-brim, steaming vessel. Some of the variations: A turtle’s head would emerge from the center of the bowl, looking sick and holding a partially smoked cigar. A caption on the back would read, “Green turtle.” A ropy, hairy appendage with longer black hairs at the end would droop bowlside and be labeled “Oxtail.” The head of a wattled, becombed chicken would occupy center bowl and be dubbed “Chicken noodle.” On and on it went, going through ever more groan-inducing puns until a blond nude lifted her saucy torso from the midst of a number called “Wanton.”
It all seemed too little and too late to me, a mere Band-Aid applied to a broken heart that didn’t begin to salve my wounds. But what did I know? Hadn’t someone named Norman Lear or Norman Jewison—anyway, Norman something —written a book that year about how watching Groucho Marx movies had cured him of cancer? So for all I knew, these stupid cartoons were playing their part in healing me. At any rate, Evan’s amusing drawings did me no harm, and I now think they came from his hands as a rather touchingly inhibited stab at an apology, a mea culpa in cartoons.
Meanwhile, the slide of Evan’s career at the magazine continued. I could see how completely it was in eclipse by the look of amused disgust with which Ivy told of his having “practically ordered” her to have drinks with him—“twice!” Her tales of nightmarish scenes of too many martinis, weavings into and out of cabs, and narrow escapes from his clutches, at the Algonquin and afterward, made it only too apparent.
Finally, when the strain Evan put on his drawing account burst even The New Yorker’s generous bounds, he was asked to vacate the premises. For several tipsy days he continued, defiantly, to come in, but under a court order, he ceased doing even that. A moving company packed his belongings and shipped them to him. Painters came in with fresh white paint, and within a week, it was as if Evan Simm had never been. His career at the magazine over, a large part of his life must have ended with it. He labored on, one doesn’t know how, until 2004, when Cornell announced his name on its annual list of alumni deaths.
I now see that my conviction, during my affair with Evan, that I was in a preengagement phase of a relationship that was leading inevitably to marriage, children, and a station wagon in Connecticut was an illusion. Nor am I so deluded as to imagine I ever truly loved Evan. What caused searing pains to shoot from my chest through my head and made me come home nights and fall, scotch bottle in hand, into a butterfly chair dyed a revolting shade of bright terra-cotta was the sense that I had become part of a dumb blond cliché. Phrases like fallen woman, seduced and abandoned, damaged goods, no respect in the morning, all the tired claptrap of the worst scenarios of the cheapest novels and grade-B Hollywood pictures, tormented me. Had I been privy to just a little more perspective, I would have recognized it as the stuff of much better literature and music as well: of Les liaisons dangereuses, Tess of the Durbervilles, fully half of the best blues songs ever written, many a grand opera, and many a fine play (including a couple by William Shakespeare, though he usually fixed his up with a wedding in act 5). Even so, if I had realized sooner that what was injured in me by Evan’s treachery was not my heart but a totally immature girl’s vanity, it might have stung a good deal less, and I would have been much less likely to spin myself into the spiral of promiscuity that followed.
PARTY GIRL
BEGINNING WITH MY DISCOVERY of Evan’s betrayal in November 1959 and lasting well beyond Easter into May 1960, my love life became a disaster area. This only exacerbated my self-hatred, which reached new heights—no, depths—after Evan. What does the disintegrating self look like? In my case, it looked a lot like fun. If only the self-condemnation could have been severed from the deed.
A degrading pattern emerged: a round of partying, always ending in the same way, a drink too far, a one-night stand. Then, dismaying me further, a growing list of my onetime sex partners came back for more, going so far as to precede mattress acrobatics with dinner and a show. In other words, they liked me better than I thought they should.
No longer able to consider myself a credible ingenue (is that polite stagespeak for virgin?), or at any rate an inexperienced naïf, I began acting out the role of the party girl/woman of the world. One of the props I added was the short amber cigarette holder I acquired in Europe, using it as a filter between me and the unfiltered Pall Malls I favored—the very prop Professor Morgan Blum accused me of writing with when he read my first attempt at a novel. I kept the Pall Malls in an Italian leather case and lit them with a silver propane lighter acquired in Europe, too, courtesy of my sophisticator in chief, Frank Cucci.
I met Frank before my discovery of Evan’s treachery, even before I moved up to the art department, but in my new world-weary guise, I was able to draw on much that I learned under his tutelage. A more finely featured version of Frankie Avalon, with a brand-new Harvard degree in comparative lit, Frank was whiling away the time as he waited for his mandat
ory two years in the service to begin—he’d asked for an army posting to either Germany or the Far East. So he took a menial job in the mail room at The New Yorker, an amusing item, he figured, on the jacket copy of his first novel. Presently he was dancing circles around the aged Mr. O’Leary and Gus from Queens, the doddering and highly inefficient pair who made up the core of the mail room “force.” Finishing his chores betimes, Frank spent quarter hour after quarter hour AWOL from the mail room and in the back reaches of the eighteenth floor.
There, I hung out at the world’s least busy reception desk, across the way from Betty Guyer, the fashion department assistant, who also had long lag times between the big shows, spring and fall, and the Christmas shopping column. We played games of B for Botticelli that went on for days. It finally took some devious twists of the truth for Frank to fox me on the composer of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He insisted it was Puccini and brought me a score from Madama Butterfly to prove it. Outfoxed!
Frank was fun and I was crazy about him, but puzzled over his clear signaling that ours was to be a brother-sister relationship. I decided he was self-conscious about his height, though he seemed fine with our going out together, me rising ever so slightly over him in my heels. Frank was determined on “wising me up” to the delights of the Big Apple. He said he got a kick out of showing the Iowa girl the bright lights of the city. Our blowout the night before he left for Germany was a doozy. His posting had come through, for West Berlin, over which he was ecstatic. An opera fan, he knew he’d be going to a town crawling with concert halls and three opera companies, not to mention Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble.
That evening began with straight-up martinis at the bar of the Charles French Café in the Village, followed by veal piccata at Marta’s. Then a taxi up to the old Met and a pair of aisle seats to Maria Callas’s second-ever Met Tosca, from row B of the orchestra. We wound up the evening—the early morning, actually—with Bobby Short and Mabel Mercer at the Blue Note.
What an evening! What a hangover!
But Frank did not stop at educating me into culture in New York only. He corresponded faithfully from his new spot in Berlin, heard all about my romance with Evan, insisted on booking my hotel in the Berlin portion of my grand tour and handling all the tickets for our three operas and one recital during my four days there. (The Brecht theater, alas, would be dark on the dates I would be there.)
I last saw Frank Cucci walking on the Brooklyn Promenade one windy day in the March following our Berlin escapade. Catching the merest flick of a glance, which could have been Frank seeing me out of the corner of his eye, I flashed on how I would smile in delight, how he would introduce me to his companion, how the elegant man would bend slightly toward me as if he were going to raise my hand to kiss it or simply brush it lightly with his lips. Frank would ask me to lunch with him the following week . . .
But none of it happened. They were abreast of me for a moment, only yards away, but they walked on, never slowing by a hairbreadth.
The scene persisted in my mind long after it had faded from my vision. Something about the way they had walked together, seeming to share a secret, made me realize the truth. Frank, I saw now, played for the other team, as we put it back then. I lost so many simpatico beaux that way. Made me, on occasion, feel and behave like a sore loser.
After the Promenade incident I was not surprised never to hear from him again.
I’d had a letter of stinging rebuke Frank sent when he heard I’d swallowed my pride and gone back to dating Evan again, even after his deception was exposed. I’d also hinted at the turn I was taking as slut of the year in the wake of it. Is this what all his careful mentoring had come to? he wrote. He was furious, he was let down. He was through.
But most broken relationships have codas, and ours was no exception. In 1983 I nearly jumped out of my chair as I watched the credits of a much-hyped made-for-tv movie called Svengali. It was adapted from the du Maurier novel Trilby and written, I discovered, by Frank Cucci. Peter O’Toole played Svengali, and his young protégée was played by a plump Jodie Foster, just out of Yale and still recovering from the trauma of John Hinckley Jr. Neither actor was up to form, and the whole enterprise seemed weighted down by a ponderous and pretentious script.
I felt bad for Frank then, and again when I looked him up on the Web recently and learned that he had two or three other screen and television credits, each effort dominated by big-name stars doing flop turns. His date of death was given as July 1989. He would have been fifty-four years old. Just barely.
Meanwhile, back in 1959, Gotham’s newest party girl put lemon in the rinse to lighten the blond in her hair, added a touch of shadow to the lids of vaguely Egyptian-looking mascara-outlined eyes. My long ponytail was looped winsomely over one shoulder, and my earlobes were adorned with gold or silver hoops or chunky clasp earrings of the kind favored by Eve Arden and Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce. My partying mates (whose names have been changed) were a high-caliber assortment—they made, I thought, for a nice variety. There was Maury, the Village Democratic activist, a well-brought-up, ambitious Jewish boy, an Ed Koch with testosterone, who was so proud of his erection that he lit a candle to it and posed it above his upright organ as he marched into my bedroom for more. There was Bob M., an up-and-coming editor at Random House, very popular with other guys and with women, too—he was small and wiry, sort of a Steve McQueen without the cool. We never made it in bed, however, his amorous intent undone by his heavy drinking. The others drank also, but not to the point of incapacitation—which may have been Bob’s unconscious design.
There was the friend of my friend Gloria, another Jewish lad—these boys were notably more aggressive lovers than their Gentile counterparts, and good at it, too—whom I shall call Saul, who liked to go out for cream cheese and lox after intercourse. There was the best-looking Ivy Leaguer in my stable, a Jack Kennedy look-alike from the architecture school at Yale who took me to a party in Princeton. All momentum, either for our tryst or for the party, was spoiled by an endless train ride. In a hot railcar that spent a great deal of time on a siding, my date began to assess all the ways in which my costume, haircut, makeup, and midwestern manners fell short of the Ivy League hottie he would have liked to be bringing to the party. It was, once we got there, not a success. Nor, when we got back to my apartment late that night, was it the long-lasting romp usual to the men of my acquaintance or—why deny it—to me?
In late February I went to a party in the staff lounge at one of the large hospitals in the city, given to celebrate the engagement of a male intern to a female resident. There I met an Anglo-Italian doctor. Marco, handsome and otherwise extremely fit, had lost one leg below the knee. He had been a paratrooper, and his plane was shot down on the eastern front as he prepared to make a routine jump, the final one of hundreds he’d made in World War II. I got drunk, and we wound up in bed in one of the private patient suites. Marco was not connected any longer to the New York hospital whose hospitality we were enjoying, his career having taken him, some months before, to a position as staff surgeon at a hospital in another Middle Atlantic state.
He came up to New York for our dates on a weekly basis. In a sublime act of insouciance he would unstrap his prosthesis and hop into bed, where the loss of his lower limb impeded his lovemaking not a whit. Marco was frank about his hedonism, as about everything else. Uncircumcised, and proud of it—he thought the intact foreskin intensified his pleasure—he never used a condom, said it was like making love through a sock. He convinced me that it was not necessary to practice contraception, since as a physician he was well enough versed in the physical signs of ovulation not to impregnate me.
We dined out a good deal and, after the first two weekends or so, took to choosing ever larger and noisier restaurants as it became convenient to let other people hold the conversation for us. Our own conversation had disappointed each of us in different ways. I complained that he told me too many times how he had interned in Paris and fixed up Erro
l Flynn so he could go on swashbuckling his way through Europe and Hollywood without incurring further paternity suits. He said I told him too many times how much I liked reading Henry James. We got on together not at all well. One cold night in March, after a weekend in a hotel, spent chiefly quarreling over why we were there, he discovered I had missed a period, examined me briefly, and determined that I was indeed pregnant. Not to worry. He was a physician, wasn’t he?
After that, he went away for a spell and wrote me a long letter confessing that he could not make “an honest woman” of me because he was already married. His letter explained that in fact his knocked-up wife’s posse of brothers had all but waved shotguns in his face to ensure that he made one of her. I did not doubt it had been her advanced stage of pregnancy that had quickened his interest in our rendezvousing in New York. Now that this avenue of release was becoming complicated, he refused to become either contrite or falsely seductive. He wrote that he was prepared to administer a perfectly safe medication that would induce a miscarriage and that he intended to do so the next time he could get a weekend off.
Several more weeks went by. A letter from Marco announced that his wife had delivered a healthy baby, a daughter. Late in the first week of the next month, a “medical emergency” presented him the opportunity for a trip to New York, and on May 6 he arrived and the medication was administered. Upon his advising me to seek diversion while it “worked,” we went to see The Man with the Green Carnation, the Oscar Wilde movie with Peter Finch, then playing at the Plaza. I got home just in time to hemorrhage. Marco offered to come back up if there were complications, but there were none.
Soon, there was Barry, the (to me) really attractive type of older man, gray at the temples, in well-cut tweeds. Barry got more of an ego boost than he should have from his famous dad. His father, a Broadway lyricist, had once written a hit song with Yip Harburg. Barry took me to the theater and dinner at El Morocco, which was handy because his rather elegantly furnished bachelor pad with the mirror over the fireplace was just upstairs. He had shared it until earlier that year with his now ex-wife, a TV anchorwoman. A man in mourning really, Barry was sterile, though far from impotent. His unreachable sadness over this was a revelation to me: it turned out that men, as well as most women, yearned for offspring. Myself, that spring, not so much.