Born with Teeth: A Memoir (13 page)

When I walked into the bar of the Drake Hotel, I was astounded to find both my mother and my father sitting at a table, sipping Manhattans and smiling conspiratorially. It was one of the rare times in my life that I actually saw them out together, alone, and openly enjoying themselves. Clearly, my father had risen to the occasion and, having learned of my dilemma, had gallantly offered my mother a lift to Chicago. It was, after all, the city responsible for bringing them together
(after Mass, on a cold Sunday morning, my father had approached my mother and asked her to dinner, to which she famously responded, “I don’t date short men”). I was delighted to see them in such a companionable state, and I promptly launched into the saga of my Italian love affair.

An hour later, after many drinks had been consumed, my father excused himself and walked over to the piano, which he considered happier territory, saying as he rose, “Do whatever you want, Kitten. You and your mother are responsible for this one. I’m staying the hell out of it.”

Mother looked at me when he’d gone and said, “A veritable pit of compassion, your father.” We smiled, shrugged, and then Mother went on, “I think you should ask Roberto to come here, to meet you in Chicago, and tell him you’ll be under the protection of your parents. Then we’ll find out what he’s made of. But he needs to hop to it because your father, as only he knows, has a very full schedule.”

I had to admire the decisiveness with which Roberto responded to my call. He was on the next available flight to Chicago, and the following evening he walked into the bar at the Drake Hotel, kissed my mother’s hand, introduced himself to my father, and then knelt at my feet and said, “Katerina, I am begging you to come back to me.
Amore,
please, don’t be foolish. I love you too much, we are meant to be together. Please. Look at me,
amore.
” I did. He took my hand, kissed it, and placed it over his heart.

At this point, never before in his life having witnessed such an extravagant display of romantic passion, my father shook his head, held up his hands, and said, “I’m out.”

As my father made his way to the bar, stopping on his way to chat with the piano player, my mother looked at Roberto and said, “You have to remember, kid, Kitten Kat is an
American
citizen. American women are emancipated. And this one,”
she continued, patting me on the head, “is not only emancipated, but she is a member of the American workforce. Very important not to fool around with that. I think the two of you should consider spending more time in this, a free and democratic, country. Now, Roberto, be a good guy and get some drinks. I think we should have
lots
of drinks tonight, don’t you?”

This was the full extent of my parents’ intervention, and from their point of view, it was not only sufficient but generous. It was never wise to overdo anything, according to their philosophy, and always best to leave on a high note. Roberto could not have agreed more, and so it was that the four of us had a liquid and loquacious dinner at the Drake Hotel. The next day, Mother and Dad drove back to Dubuque, and Roberto and I returned to Florence.

The seed had been planted, however, and before our plane touched down in Pisa, Roberto had conceded that it might be best, after all, to take an apartment in New York.

We were in a hurry to forget, Roberto and I, and we were good at forgetting. He never named the demons that plagued him, but he knew of my affliction and did everything in his power to dismiss it. There was to be no residual sadness about a baby I had willingly renounced. It was pointless, and in poor taste. Instead, we flew the Concorde from Paris to New York, which was very chic. Before boarding, we were invited to consume spoonfuls of beluga caviar from a deep silver urn on a linen-covered round table, accompanied, of course, by many flutes of champagne. Once seated, we were each served an ice-cold glass
of ouzo, which was constantly refilled by a very attractive flight attendant who, at supersonic speed, appeared to be slightly drunk herself. In three hours, we landed at Kennedy Airport and staggered off the sleek jet looking, and behaving, very much like the Italians I had come to despise, which is to say we were loud, inebriated, and demanding. Barely acknowledging the driver, we would fall into the backseat of a waiting sedan and pass out, not to be awakened until we reached our new home, at 122 West Seventy-Sixth Street.

While living with Roberto in Italy, I had instructed my lawyer to sell 80 Central Park West. The blond-brick high-rise condo had never suited me, and, in the end, the memories it stirred up proved to be overwhelming. But this was charming, this classic brownstone apartment, and it was mine to do with as I wished. I chose the furniture, the paintings, and all of the linens with great care and made sure that Roberto’s stamp was felt only in the back room, which I converted into a studio for him. That studio opened into an L-shaped garden and provided an illusion of pastoral charm for the many diversions we enjoyed there. Roberto was a master at throwing parties, although he never seemed to actively participate in the conviviality and would loop from room to room, glass in hand, searching for something he could never find, some missing piece of himself he thought might pop up at the bar or over the canapés or in the eyes of the gypsy fortune-teller he’d hired for the evening. When he ran into me at these parties, he would smile winsomely, as if to suggest that the mysterious missing component, the part that would make him whole, had eluded him once again.

I usually waited until the parties were over, and the cleaning up had begun, to begin my downward spiral. It was then, when the wine had dissolved my natural defenses, that feelings about the baby would ambush me. Carrying glasses into the kitchen,
emptying ashtrays, folding cheeses in plastic wrap, were all very effective ways of concealing anguish. No one, least of all an Italian male accustomed to a privileged way of life, will interfere with a woman as she goes about the business of tidying up after a party. The detritus, the silence, the anticlimax, all served to place him squarely in the garden, where he could be seen through the window, smoking a cigarette and nursing a tall drink. It was then, with the water running and the stereo still blasting, that I would indulge my dark side and pull my finger from the dam, opening the floodgates, as each glass was meticulously washed and dried, every corner of the counter scoured and sparkling. In the time it took to put the place to rights, immaculate and shining, I had reassembled my heart sufficiently so that, to a stranger’s eye, to Roberto’s eye, it appeared almost normal.

Mercifully, Roberto was often in Florence, and I was left to my solitude, a state I welcomed with almost pathological gratitude. As soon as Roberto was out the door, I collapsed with relief and would putter around the apartment for hours, lost in blissful reclamation of myself. He was gone, and I was free. It would seem that work would threaten this state of release, but, in fact, it did the opposite, just as Stella had prophesied. The work lifted me up. A good thing, too, because the movie I was involved in was a study in psychopathy on every level.

A Stranger Is Watching,
based on the book by Mary Higgins Clark, was a thriller involving the kidnapping of a woman and her fiancé’s eleven-year-old daughter. The two are held captive in a bunker below Grand Central Station and desperately plot their escape while the police try to track the kidnapper/killer, who leaves his hostages alone during the day but returns at night to terrorize them.

If there was one actor in the world expert at terrorizing, it was Rip Torn. He had only to stand still and look at you, hands
thrust in pockets, dirty Irish flat cap pulled low over his eyes, to fill you with an unspeakable anxiety, the kind that blooms into horror when he opens his mouth and mutters the first of many threats, always delivered with a smirk. This was the Artie Taggart that Rip Torn created and whose skin he slipped into from the moment we walked onto the set in the morning until the moment the assistant director called out,
That’s a wrap,
at the end of the day.

Most of the movie was filmed in the catacombs of Grand Central Station, a haunting netherworld I had no idea existed. Whole communities lived beneath the vast train station, and I was stunned when one night I watched as an entire family—father, mother, and two children—scurried through the tunnel and, not once looking back, disappeared down a dark passageway. The station’s massive steam generators created an atmosphere of surrealism, a nightmare quality of being buried alive. Rip adjusted to this bizarre lost world with surprising equanimity, whereas I, playing the damsel in distress, did my best to conceal a very genuine discomfort while underground. I was always relieved as soon as the day’s work was over and I was led through the labyrinthine pathways to my trailer, parked on Forty-Third Street.

One afternoon, when the lunch break was called, Rip asked me if I’d like to join him at the Oyster Bar. He was meeting Gerry Page there, he told me, and thought I might enjoy making her acquaintance. It was a known fact that, although they were still married, Rip and Geraldine no longer lived together. What I could not have anticipated was the understated but very real affection they displayed for each other. Rip stood when Geraldine came through the door of the Oyster Bar and, spotting us, slowly made her way to our table. The famous actress of stage and screen did not create so much as a ripple as she crossed the room draped in a long raccoon coat, her waist-length
graying hair hanging in loose coils. Clad in faded denim jeans and Birkenstock sandals, completely unadorned, she looked like an aging flower child. When she reached across the table to take my hand, her coat opened for a moment and I glimpsed her breasts, also unadorned. The eccentricity of genius, I thought, observing the two of them.

Rip’s intensity flashed hot and cold, as did Roberto’s, so it was a real roll of the dice when Roberto visited me on the set one night and I introduced the two men. In the role of Sharon Martin, the brave and long-suffering heroine, I had been shackled to a food cage in a defunct deep freezer by an enraged Artie Taggart. When I spotted Roberto, I was forced to call out the formalities while restrained. Rip, sitting near me on an apple box, was casually polishing an ice pick when I said, “Rip, that’s my fiancé, Roberto Meucci. Roberto, this is Rip Torn!”

Roberto shouted back, “How do you do, Mr. Tear?”

“Torn!” I corrected him.

“Tear, torn, who gives a shit?” Roberto responded.

Rip leaned forward on his apple box and, turning the ice pick in his hand, whispered to me, “I don’t give a shit, as a matter of fact, but maybe
you
should.”

Rip planted this red flag squarely in my field of vision, and still I could not see it. The blindness peculiar to my affliction prevented me from distinguishing the good from the chaotic and created a kind of helplessness in which I found myself swimming with the current rather than risk being dragged under. Sooner or later, I speculated, circumstances would spit me out on dry land.

Those circumstances unfolded one night at the Essex House Hotel, where Roberto and I were to be married in a civil ceremony. He had been pressing me to marry him from the beginning, but it was clear that the more I worked, the more he felt compelled to legalize our union. My career was a source of
agitation to him, and he wanted to bring it, and me, under his full control. Any misgivings I had about his character I put down to my own insecurity. I was clinging to an old notion of self and needed to move on, I told myself, to a new way of life. Two weeks earlier, after another heated argument about our living situation, I sat up in bed and said, “All right, then, let’s do it. Let’s get married. And the sooner the better.”

Champagne glass in one hand and cigarette in the other, I stood in a corner of the hotel suite, which, although pleasant enough, nonetheless felt suddenly clinical and forbidding, as if I’d stepped into someone else’s bad dream. I had been in the middle of a conversation with the woman who had been taking care of my finances since I was twenty years old, someone I had always pretended to like very much but who now struck me, with instant and startling clarity, as nothing more than a paid acquaintance, someone I wouldn’t go out of my way to greet if she stopped paying my utility bill. The entire room, in fact, was full of people I not only didn’t love but (and this I realized with the abruptness of a slap in the face) didn’t like very much, either. They were appendages, business acquaintances, sycophants, and servants. The only face in the crowd I recognized with love belonged to my old friend Claire, and when I caught her eye she looked both perplexed and slightly frightened, as if the party had gotten out of hand and she couldn’t find the exit. With the swiftness and sureness of fingers lifting a latch, I suddenly knew what had to be done.

I sidled up to Roberto and, taking his arm, drew him into the corridor, where I looked him directly in the eye and said, “This doesn’t feel right to me, Roberto, so please tell me how it can feel right to you. My parents aren’t here, Beth isn’t here, none of my siblings are here. It’s absurd. What are we doing? What’s the mad rush? Let’s wait until we can do this the way it needs to be done. Please,
amore,
I’m begging you.”

Roberto did not seem alarmed, or even saddened. Instead, he looked irritated: he’d gone to the effort and expense of throwing a lavish party that wasn’t going to end with a bang, after all, but something more like a whimper, and whimpers were an insult to his Italian joie de vivre.

He studied me for a moment and then, using his hands in a classic Italian gesture of surrender, proceeded to reenter the suite and announce to all present that the wedding was temporarily postponed in deference to the bride’s wish to have her family present but that the party had just begun, the champagne would continue to flow, and, in the tradition of bighearted Italians everywhere, it would be a night to remember!

The party, as promised, lasted long into the morning, and when Roberto and I finally stumbled out of our clothes and into bed, I felt as if I had been caught in an undertow that had somehow, mercifully, released me and that I had been given a second chance. I knew I had narrowly escaped another punishment, a punishment masquerading as happiness. Roberto, resigned to the fact that we would have to put off the wedding until it could be properly organized, returned to Florence.

While he was away, I had lunch with my agent. Stark loved to dine in a small, dark Italian restaurant on West Fifty-Seventh Street, close to his office. Impeccably dressed, as always, he greeted me with a kiss and looked me over. “Well, how are you liking the life of a jet-setter?” He studied the menu and, gesturing for the waiter, said, “I think we’ll have wine today. Don’t you think a glass of wine would be appropriate, Kate?”

“I think a glass of wine is always appropriate, Stark, but you’re obviously on the verge of celebrating something. What is it?”

Stark pushed his menu aside, waited until we had glasses in hand, and then lifted his, saying, “If it’s not terribly beneath
you, how would you like to get out of Italy for a while and go west? The Seattle Rep is doing a production of
Another Part of the Forest
with Kim Hunter and Keith Carradine, and they want you for the role of Regina Hubbard. You know the play, of course. Lillian Hellman at the top of her game. Commitment is two months, ten, tops, with an extension, and then you’re back in the arms of your inamorato. What do you think?”

I clinked his glass. “When I’m with you, Stark, I don’t think, I just sign. Sounds like manna from heaven. When do rehearsals start?”

Stark laughed. “In three weeks. They’ll be thrilled, didn’t think you’d bite.”

“I’m absolutely delighted,” I said, “not to mention suddenly ravenous. I’ll start dieting tomorrow—we can’t have Regina waddling onto that stage.”

“Certainly not, my dear.” Stark chuckled. “Svelte and smooth as silk. Never had a bowl of
pastasciutta
in her life.”

That night, I told Roberto how I had always longed to play the part of Regina Hubbard, and what a cast! A golden opportunity! After the initial, and by now predictable, show of resistance, Roberto acquiesced, but on one condition: when the play was over, we would get married and begin to think of our future in Italy.

“You need to become a proper mother now,” Roberto announced. “It’s time. Enough of this nonsense. But go and get it out of your system,
amore.
” There was a pause, and then he added, “One last time.”