Audition (36 page)

Even on weeknights Lee often had to visit one theater or another, and I couldn’t go with him then either. He would get home long after midnight. I would be getting up four or five hours later. Our schedules began to resemble that of my mother and father when he owned the Latin Quarter and she saw him perhaps one night a week.

There was another similarity to my father that troubled me. Lee wasn’t satisfied just producing revivals in suburban theaters. He was ambitious and wanted to produce on Broadway. That was his goal, and during our marriage he produced three shows on Broadway.

One was relatively early in our marriage. It was called
Catch Me If You Can
and featured a movie star named Dan Dailey and Tom Bosley, the actor who would later play the father in the television hit
Happy Days. Catch Me If You Can
was sort of a comedy and sort of a mystery but not enough of either to please the critics. It opened in March 1965 to lukewarm reviews and closed in less than three months.

If Lee was discouraged, he didn’t show it. Instead he started looking for a new property to produce. That made me anxious. Producing on Broadway meant that he was often asking friends for money to invest in his productions. He said this was par for the course and the way things were done. And of course it was. Lots of so-called Broadway angels wanted to invest in shows, not just because they thought they would make a profit if the show was successful, but because they liked the glamour of being involved in show business.

There is a saying that people have two businesses, their own and show business. I, of course, knew how unglamorous most of show business was, and wisely Lee never asked me to contribute to his productions. His shows just brought back old memories of my father’s failed productions. I dreaded reading the reviews and was demoralized when a play closed. Lee just took a deep breath and tried again.

Lee’s greatest challenge and greatest disappointment was with a musical version of a wonderful George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart comedy called
The Man Who Came to Dinner.
It had originally run on Broadway in 1939 and had starred Monty Woolley as an irascible, egocentric lecturer and critic who comes to a small town to speak, visits a local home, breaks his leg, and stays on and on, driving everyone crazy with his outlandish demands. The play was a huge success and in 1942 was made into a movie, again starring Woolley. His long-suffering secretary was played by no less a star than Bette Davis.

Lee felt, with good reason, that it would make a terrific musical. Toward this end he asked, begged, cajoled, and charmed George S. Kaufman’s daughter, Anne, and Moss Hart’s widow, the divine Kitty Carlisle Hart, to let him acquire the rights. After weeks of negotiating they agreed, in part because Lee had a brilliant idea as to who should play the central character: the acerbic British actor George Sanders.

Sanders, acclaimed for his caustic roles in
The Moon and Sixpence
and
All About Eve
, seemed just right for the part. He was said to be able to sing and dance. The book and lyrics were written by James Lipton, who later became the distinguished host of
Inside the Actors Studio
, conducting interviews with actors on the cable channel Bravo.

Lee’s production of
Sherry!
, as the musical adaptation of the play was called, was scheduled to debut in 1967. In addition to Sanders, the Bette Davis part was played by a woman well known to Broadway, Dolores Gray. She was tall, blond, and sexy, with a big voice and a stage mother who had groomed her since she was a young child to get in front of the lights and belt it out. Belt it she did, and as a result Dolores had starred in quite a few successful musicals. All in all it seemed like magical casting.

I was very involved in this production, more than in any of Lee’s other shows. I knew how important this one was to him. I attended as many rehearsals as I could, wrote notes, and tried to be supportive while disaster seemed to hit almost every day.

Sanders, it turned out, was not
playing
an irascible grouch; he really
was
an irascible grouch. He was testy, argumentative, and sadly distracted by the serious illness of his wife, actress Benita Hume (he had previously been married to Zsa Zsa Gabor). He was late for rehearsals, if he showed up at all. He couldn’t sing, had trouble memorizing his lines, and surprisingly his acting was dreadful. But everybody was still trying to make a go of it when the show arrived for its Boston tryout. Then his wife died, and Sanders walked out of the show. You couldn’t really blame him, but it was a major blow.

Lee valiantly tried to keep the production going. He replaced Sanders with a very talented actor named Clive Revill, who was actually much better in the part than Sanders but was relatively unknown to the audience.
Sherry!
opened on Broadway in March 1967 and ran for only seventy-two performances. It was devastating.

Lee had had such high hopes for this musical, his most adventurous production. When the show closed, it took a lot out of him and a lot out of me. I felt that Lee needed me more than ever, but I had less time than ever to give. By then I was appearing on
Today
five times a week.

But Lee, the optimist (like my father), jumped right back into the world of Broadway. Three years after
Sherry!
flopped, he produced a more ambitious and far darker play,
Inquest
, a dramatization of the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. It was a sympathetic portrayal of the couple who were ultimately executed for spying. (It infuriated Roy Cohn, who had helped to bring about those executions. I saw Roy very rarely by then, and his reaction neither surprised nor disturbed me.) But this drama, too, in spite of a fine cast that included Anne Jackson and George Grizzard, opened to poor reviews and lasted for only twenty-eight days. Lee was heartbroken. And so was I. But for different reasons.

Lee’s involvement in the theater was driving me further and further away from him. It wasn’t entirely his fault. It was the culmination of all the years with my father’s grandiose schemes—the Broadway flops, the failed nightclubs, the aquacade that never got off the ground. I couldn’t bear to pretend to be upbeat time and again while Lee read another bad review. I’d lived through enough openings and sad closings for a lifetime.

But there was our little daughter.

Jackie, barely out of her toddler years, had just started nursery school. Zelle would take her to the small school in the morning and I would try, as often as I could, to pick her up when her morning session ended at noon. Then we would go someplace for lunch. Schrafft’s was a favorite. It was a popular place for the grown-up ladies who lunched, but it also had great ice cream sodas and sundaes.

Lee, too, loved being with his little girl. His older children, Carol and Zev, were off at college, and Jackie, for him, was a new beginning. He carried her on his shoulders, roughhoused with her, which she loved, and often took her to rehearsals of his shows, just as my own father had taken my sister and me when we were children.

So there we were. A family—caring, but in distress. A family growing further and further apart, doing more and more things separately, not knowing how to come together again. Our disparate hours also affected our sex life. We practically had to schedule appointments to make love, and one or the other of us was usually exhausted.

Both Lee and I were still watching our money. We continued to live in our rent-controlled apartment in midtown New York. Jackie’s room was actually a maid’s room; Zelle’s room was the second maid’s room. (The apartment building had been built before World War II when several live-in maids served one family.) I was making very good money by then, but I was also still supporting my mother, father, and sister in Miami. Lee was feeling constrained because he had lost so much of his own money investing in his Broadway shows. But neither of us was a spendthrift. We rented a house only for a month in the summer, took few vacations, and cared little about possessions. Money was not the problem. Time was. But we never talked about that, or any of our problems for that matter. The conversations were unsaid. The problems were unresolved.

I began to write good-bye letters to Lee, and then I would tear them up. How could I leave a man who had done me no harm? When our biggest mistake was that we had no life in common anymore? I didn’t feel I wanted to reduce my workload. In fact I had increased it by taking on
Not for Women Only.
Lee couldn’t change his lifestyle or ambitions either. I decided once again that I was no good at marriage and that basically the failures were my fault. Perhaps, like my mother, I was looking at the seams. I felt awful, but I didn’t know how to make things better.

Then, in July 1971, the newspapers announced to everyone’s total surprise that Henry Kissinger had made a secret trip to China, which had been closed to America since the Communists had taken over in 1949. President Nixon, the headlines said, was himself going to visit China. Unimaginable.

Nixon’s historic trip was scheduled to take place in February 1972. A small group of reporters was going to go with him. To my utter joy NBC selected me to be one of them.

I decided then that before I went off on this faraway adventure, Lee and I finally had to face our disintegrating marriage. Over a long and teary dinner we decided to separate. At first Lee wanted us to continue to try, but then he admitted that he was no happier than I. We decided that when I left for China, in a month, he would move out of the apartment and find a new place to live. I would keep the apartment, as it was home to Jackie.

I was ending my second marriage. What was worse was that I was taking away from Jackie the daddy she loved. She was only four years old, and even though she would continue to see her father, it would never be the same. She had never met her biological father. Would she now feel in some part of her little being that her second father was leaving her too?

But it was too late to change things. I began to pack for China, and added another notch to my belt of guilt.

Historic Journey: China with Nixon

P
RESIDENT
N
IXON
said that the trip to Communist China, a week that changed the course of history, was like going to the moon. He was right. But though it was the trip of a lifetime, like Chinese food it was both sweet and sour. And like the man in the moon I have never felt so lonely.

First the sweet. The fact that I was there at all for NBC was to me a minor miracle. Because of the historic nature of the trip, the television networks sent their heavyweight, politically experienced superstars: Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and Eric Sevareid from CBS; Tom Jarriel, Ted Koppel, and Harry Reasoner from ABC. NBC was represented by its number one anchor, John Chancellor, along with two other very experienced correspondents, Herb Kaplow and John Rich, and me.

Why me? One, because NBC didn’t want what might look like competition between Chancellor and McGee, had he been chosen to go. Two, which I didn’t find out until much later, because all the journalists from every network vying for the assignment were middle-aged white males, Dick Wald, the executive vice president of NBC News, felt that I might bring something different to the coverage. If nothing else I would stand out to the viewing audience in contrast to all the male correspondents. And three, the time difference.

Thirteen hours separate New York and Peking, as Beijing was then called. Nighttime in China is morning in the United States, when the
Today
show would be on, the same time slot when I would be reporting from China on the night’s big banquets, speeches, important toasts, and cultural events. The viewers of
Today
expected to see me in the morning. And there I’d be, reporting live by satellite, albeit from the other side of the world.

My inclusion in what was really a very small group of journalists ruffled a lot of feathers at NBC. For every reporter who got to go, ten or more didn’t. Even John Chancellor, I found out later, was against my assignment. I was relatively inexperienced, for starters, and a woman in a sea of experienced men. John would have been more comfortable with another male correspondent, but Dick Wald was determined to take the gamble, though he confessed to me recently he had fairly low expectations of what I would bring to the the NBC team. Dick put my name on the NBC News proposed list, and the White House took it from there. The president’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, said he personally selected the traveling press corps out of hundreds of applications.

I was terrified. Even the list of print journalists was intimidating, including William Buckley for the
Washington Star;
Theodore White, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the series The Making of the President, for Time/Life and Public Broadcasting; the prolific, Pulitzer Prize–winning author James Michener, for the
Reader’s Digest.
Giants, all.

There were very few women on the trip. One, in the president’s entourage, was a very pretty, young blond with whom I would have a nodding acquaintance but no real contact. She was the assistant to Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary, and her name was Diane Sawyer.

There were only two other women journalists in the whole China group, the venerable and fearless UPI correspondent Helen Thomas, and another very experienced journalist, Fay Wells, from Storer Broadcasting. Helen was writing for newspapers. Fay was reporting primarily on radio. I would be the only woman broadcaster. And with Frank McGee’s backhanded blessing. “Get Barbara out of the studio for a week?” I learned later he’d said to Dick Wald when he heard of my assignment. “China’s not far enough!”

It certainly felt far enough away for me when we arrived on our own press plane a day ahead of the president and his entourage. We were met by a small group of Chinese officials from the Department of Information who all looked exactly alike. Both men and women were dressed identically in navy blue pants and Mao jackets, also navy blue—mandarin collars, shapeless and unadorned except for a round red pin with a silver likeness of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party and founder of the People’s Republic of China.