Born with Teeth: A Memoir (10 page)

“To what end?” she asked, gray eyes unblinking.

“For comfort, and for edification,” I replied. “It’s my right as a mother.”

The nun folded her hands in front of her and, shifting her voice to a lower octave, said, “But you gave up that right when you relinquished your baby, didn’t you? All of that, I’m sure, has been carefully explained to you. Now, here’s my card if you need anything of a practical nature,” she said, sliding a thin white card across the table. She tapped it with her finger, twice. “But you should know that the archbishop is a very busy man and seldom here.”

Over drinks in his apartment, Richard Cushing ranted and raved about the injustices so generously served up by the Catholic Church.

“Not the Church proper,” I corrected him. “Just a faction of the Church.”

“Bullshit!” he shouted, his enormous blue eyes bulging with fury. “It is the mandate of the Catholic Church, and it’s outrageous! Barbaric! When I hear unspeakable crap like this, it makes me proud to be a Jew.”

I had to smile at him, and said, “Jesus was a Jew.”

Cushing stopped in midstride and turned to look at me. “That’s right,” he declared, “and His Father was a wrathful God!”

This righteous train of thought extended itself all the way to Sag Harbor, where Beth was living with her lover, an unorthodox bohemian artist and a confirmed bachelor who had type 2 diabetes, which he treated with chronic disdain. Richard had suggested we make a weekend of it, but he was in no way prepared for the lifestyle that greeted us when, after many complicated attempts to find the house where they were living, we turned into a gravel drive and came upon a dwelling that looked for all the world as if it was missing only the county edict:
THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED
.

Inside, however, Beth had converted the space into something charming and whimsical. Candlelight illuminated her lover’s paintings, which hung on every wall, broken bits of colorful crockery had been assembled on makeshift shelves, a bowl of red apples sat on a Shaker table in the kitchen. Beth led the way upstairs, leaving the gentlemen to get acquainted over mismatched cups of herbal tea. We entered the master bedroom and closed the door behind us. I meant to tell her so many things. I meant to laugh. But when we sat on the bed together and she took my hand, I looked at her and said, “I don’t think I can bear this, Beth. I made a mistake.”

I pressed one hand to my mouth to stifle the sobs. Beth put her arm around my shoulder and held me very tightly. We sat there, like that, until the worst of it was over, then I composed myself, and we rejoined our men, who had already tired of each other’s company and were eager to get on with the evening.

An emptiness and a terrible longing dogged me, and I knew there was only one person on earth who could fully understand. When I called David, I immediately sensed a wariness. It had been six months since I’d last seen him, shortly after the birth of the baby. He had taken me for an ice cream on the East Side and, as we sat rigidly on stools staring at our root-beer floats, it was appallingly clear that we had nothing to say to each other. He loved me, I knew that, and I loved him, but the baby had made anything else between us impossible. Nothing was salvageable.

And yet a few nights later, I walked slowly up Central Park West until I came to the corner of Eighty-Sixth Street. The snow was falling lightly, and there, sitting on the wooden bench that had once been our meeting place, was the father of my child. He didn’t acknowledge me, barely moved when I sat down next to him. The collar of his black peacoat was drawn up around his face, in sharp contrast to his pale skin. That silky
hair, wet with snow. The beautiful mouth, set. The length of him, wound tight. He looked into the distance, never once at me, and waited until he was sure I had felt the silence.

Quietly but not unkindly, David Bernstein said, “I wish I’d never met you.” Then he rose, buried his hands in his pockets, and walked away.

The snowflakes danced under the streetlamp. I sat until I felt the bench growing cold beneath me and then stood, brushed myself off, and headed in the opposite direction.

Many people are of the opinion that Nature bestowed her favors on Los Angeles. I’ve always regarded those immutable blue skies and that fixed bright sun as a vast, thin varnish spread over a city that is not a city at all but a string of rootless villages. Some of the villages matter, but most don’t. The more enduring villages bear names signifying their importance, such as Culver City, Beverly Hills, and Studio City. You knew where you were going when you entered Studio City and, almost always, you knew why you were going there. You were, of course, going to the studio itself, because that is where you worked.

In my case, entering the gates of Universal Studios at four
thirty in the morning was a powerful and mysterious rite of passage. The studio guard sitting inside a glass-enclosed booth would stand up as my car approached and lean out to greet my driver, Frank, who would smile at him and say, “Morning, Bill, another early call.” Frank worked because I worked, and Bill worked because Frank worked, and the studio worked because Lew Wasserman was a genius and understood that a studio was like a Swiss watch: beautifully constructed, perfectly calibrated, and very expensive.

Frank was tall and lean and for many years had served in the military. He took his job seriously and was always punctual, respectful, and kind. On my first day, he presented me with a white coffee cup embossed, in black letters, with my name. I have it to this day. I’ve lost countless silver boxes and gold pendants, but that coffee cup has stayed with me through thick and thin, and I always think of Frank when I drink from it. Mostly, I think of the expression on Frank’s face when he arrived to pick me up at four o’clock in the morning. A slightly sheepish grin, a short shake of the head, and Frank would say, “Time to roll.”

And roll we did. Past the gates and through the studio alleys, some brightly lit, some still in shadow, until we arrived at my bungalow, which was situated at the rear of the studio. The lights would be on and the front door open, figures within bustling about. My makeup and hair team, Gloria and Jose, would have arrived an hour earlier and, having already set up, were waiting for me. Jose greeted me with a cup of coffee, and Gloria, with a wry grin, would ask, “Ice mask?” I tried, always, to be considerate to these two people because I recognized them as belonging to that underrated but noble Hollywood breed of severely sleep-deprived, modestly paid, and remarkably devoted craftsmen.

After hair and makeup were completed, Frank drove me to
the soundstage, where most of the day’s work would take place. Stage 24 was a capacious piece of real estate containing Mrs. Columbo’s kitchen, her living room, her bedroom, her daughter’s bedroom, her study, the newspaper office where she worked, and a doghouse wherein lay her trusted canine, a giant bloodhound afflicted with bad breath and clinical depression.

In the beginning, I worked seven days a week. This was an unexpected development, but under the circumstances I felt I needed to comply. As a result, I was never late, I was never unprepared, and I never complained. I was going to show these Hollywood veterans what I was made of, we were all going to have a rollicking good time, and, with any luck, we were going to hand Fred Silverman a hit on a silver platter.

But young girls, they do get weary. In the fourth month of seven-day workweeks, my nerves began to show. I lived on a diet of coffee and cigarettes and the occasional cheeseburger, which was covertly frowned upon by the producers, who felt that Mrs. Columbo should be as trim and attractive as possible. I slept on set pieces and spent my entire lunch break (which never exceeded more than thirty minutes) in my trailer, sacked out on the couch. I began to negotiate with my makeup and hair team, begging them for an additional ten minutes of rest in exchange for which I would sleep sitting up, a towel draped over my costume, my hair wrapped in curlers. I negotiated, too, with my personal assistant, whose name was Lisa, but I called her Twink, which was, I thought, the most appropriate nickname I could bestow on someone who approached her job as she would the bar at Trader Vic’s.

“Twink,” I’d say, closing the trailer door and locking it behind me, “do
not
let anyone come in and do
not
wake me up if the PA knocks. I do
not
need to run lines with the guest star, I do not need a touch-up, I need
ten more minutes of sleep.
You will be rewarded, trust me.”

The Swiss watch, unbendable and unbreakable, was beginning to feel unbearable. Frank took me to lovely places, but I couldn’t enjoy them. There was never enough time. No time to sit on the patio of my sweet house nestled in the hills of Benedict Canyon, no time to zip down Sunset Boulevard in my own little Nissan convertible 280ZX, no time to spend an afternoon at the beach, or go to the movies, or eat in a restaurant other than the Universal commissary. No time for old friends, no time for new friends, and certainly no time for boyfriends. Richard Cushing came for a weekend and we brawled. He’d read my diary while I was working and, rigid with fury, shouted, “Are you seeing someone else? Are you? Tell me, goddammit!”

And I, too tired to argue, simply said, “You should be ashamed of yourself. I’m going to bed.”

I was seeing someone else, of course, because weariness is by its very nature compromising. It wasn’t a normal relationship at all, just a small piece that fit well into the Swiss watch and didn’t disturb its rhythm. My private life was of little concern to anyone on the
Mrs. Columbo
set, and, in fact, I often wondered if the pursuit of the illicit was not tacitly encouraged among those in charge, devoted, as they all were, to profit. I could have been carrying on with a psychopathic serial murderer, and no one would have blinked an eye as long as I knew my lines and hit my mark with efficiency and a modicum of verve.

These and other sentiments were shared with my costars, in the brief moments we had between setups, and often it was the actor playing the murderer who would reduce me to helpless laughter. Who knew that Armand Assante and Fred Forrest were ruthlessly funny raconteurs? Or that Bob Dishy, famous for his wit, had a heart of gold? My friend René Auberjonois showed up and, twirling a fake mustache, created the character of Mrs. Columbo’s French teacher, never missing a beat as he
chewed every conceivable piece of scenery on that set. Donald Pleasence was the master, however, and during a five-minute scene consumed no less than eight cream puffs in quick and perfect succession while delivering an alibi so exquisitely funny that it brought the crew to its knees.

One night, we wrapped early so that I could attend a ball in honor of Lew Wasserman, a Hollywood mogul of the highest order, the man responsible for merging MCA with Universal Studios. I don’t know quite how I plucked up the nerve, but I crossed the vast ballroom to the Wasserman table and, after introducing myself to Edie Wasserman, asked Lew if he would do me the honor of a spin. He rose, offered his arm, and gallantly escorted me onto the dance floor. We didn’t say much, the music was dauntingly loud, but it gave me an opportunity to study this man who had begun with so little and had accomplished so much. His eyes were nearly hidden behind his signature thick-lensed, black-framed glasses, but there was a lightness to his step and a gentleness to his touch that evoked in me a respect for what this son of Russian-Jewish immigrants had overcome and the heights to which he had soared. When the music stopped, he very lightly kissed my hand and said, “Thank you, Miss Mulgrew, for your considerable talents, one of which, I now know, is dancing.”

As we approached the end of the first thirteen episodes, I laughed when it dawned on me that the set decorator had managed to place either a sofa, a chaise, or a bed in nearly every interior scene, thereby serving as an accomplice to my stolen moments of repose. It’s a curious truth (and one I’ve noted with regularity in the four decades that I’ve been acting) that when an actor is present on the set, she is somehow acquitting herself in a professional manner, whether rigidly awake or fast asleep. My crew on
Mrs. Columbo
subscribed to this peculiar philosophy, and while I was not encouraged to fall into a dead sleep
in the middle of a working set, I was nonetheless conveniently ignored when I slipped into a coma on the very sofa Mrs. Columbo had just used as a confessional.

One night, while the company was on location in the hills just outside of Universal and had taken no fewer than three meal penalties, I curled up in an armchair between scenes and fell into a profound sleep. Evidently, this was the endgame for my subconscious, because despite every attempt, no one could wake me up. I was bundled into my car, and Frank drove me back to the lot, in the middle of which sat the studio clinic. Supported by Frank, I was led into a small examining room, whereupon a middle-aged nurse (herself a study in functional narcolepsy) came in, pulled up my skirt, and gave me a shot of B
₁₂
so potent that within seconds I was calling for Frank to grab my script and start the car. On the way out, I happened to glance into an adjoining room, and there, pants down around his ankles, chin in hand as he leaned against the examining table, was John Belushi, also receiving a “midnight constitutional.” He caught my eye, and we exchanged weary smiles.

Well intentioned but misguided,
Mrs. Columbo
could not survive its many incarnations. Its evolution was evident in its ever-changing titles: from
Mrs. Columbo
to
Kate Columbo
to
Kate the Detective
to, finally and most baffling,
Kate Loves a Mystery.
I suppose the producers were hoping that if they planted the wilting flower in an altogether new garden, the audience might suddenly regard it as exotic.

My producers possessed many skills, but, alas, horticulture was not among them. The plug was pulled in the middle of a scene on a cold winter’s night in the Hollywood Hills. I shook the hand of every member of the crew, embraced Gloria and Jose, and, jumping in the car, instructed Frank to take me to the airport. “I’m going home,” I said to him, unable to resist a smile.

As a postscript, I gave the contents of my Benedict Canyon
house to my older brother, Tom, who had dropped in to visit me for a few days on his way to greener pastures in San Francisco.

“What about the booze?” Tom asked.

“Drink it.”

“And the Jacuzzi?”

“Jump in.”

When he asked me what he should do with the key, I told him to leave it under the mat for the next actress who, I felt sure, would be along shortly.

“So maybe I should leave a light on,” Tom suggested.

“Wouldn’t want her to stumble,” I replied.

My older brother, not one to put off a cool drink in a hot tub, chuckled and said, “Roger that.”