I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (14 page)

•   •   •

S
ome interesting grace notes—John Henry talked Kim Hunter into telling her own story, her encounter with Hartnett, to the jury. She testified that after
A Streetcar Named Desire
and her Oscar for acting in the film, she was finding it puzzlingly difficult to find work as an actor. Someone suggested she contact Hartnett.

She testified that he asked for and received two hundred dollars from her to clear her name, and he demanded that she appear at that AFTRA meeting and speak in support of AWARE, Inc. When she refused, he demanded she send in a telegram in support of AWARE, Inc. She agreed. She was blackmailed for work, pure and simple.

Louis Nizer put into the record my speech at that meeting when I accused the AFTRA board of collusion with AWARE, Inc., and Hartnett.

John Henry never climbed back to where he was when he was taken down. Austin loved him, and he was surrounded by supporters and family. Friends like Molly Ivins, Studs Terkel, and Governor Ann Richards. He was their good old boy, but it was never the same. His confidence in himself was badly shaken. Was it his talent that was
gone, or had the Blacklist affected him? The most evil aspect of attacking an actor’s confidence in himself is that we’re so fragile. John Henry lost confidence in himself. That was the tragedy. Nearly twenty years later, in 1975, CBS would broadcast
Fear on Trial
, a movie based on the book John Henry wrote about this defining chapter of his life.

A
rnie had been offered a job in Paris through John Berry, who had become a great colorful fixture there. Arnie had been gone about ten days when he called and said to come. I was thrilled. My time in Paris when I was a small girl had been full of sun and gardens and adventure, and now I could give Dinah the same. She was about four then. When our plane hit bad weather, we landed in Ireland and stayed until it cleared, drinking Irish tea with milk in the airport before we set off for Paris later in the evening.

I saw Arnie’s truly concerned face as we got off the plane and received a genuinely relieved hug. He carried Dinah to the car on his shoulders. Friends of his drove us to a café. Dinah ate so much French spaghetti that she threw up her whole dinner a block away. It happened to be at a tree right in front of General de Gaulle’s official residence. Armed guards ordered us to move on—“
Vite, vite!”
—while one of Arnie’s friends argued with them in French, pointing to my poor baby, who had had a rocky long flight and night.
“Elle est malade, malade!”

We finally reached our apartment. It was very large, everything
very white, and a little tacky. Dinah’s bed was a large oval wicker basket with a straw mattress—sweet-smelling straw covered with white muslin. I have no memory of our bedroom or our bed, or of sleeping with or without Arnie.

I have a memory of the bathroom because that is where I spent all of my time. There was a step-up toilet with a seat made of brown wood and a flush chain with a brown wooden handle. I spent most of my daytime hours sitting there reading
The Story of O
.

We enrolled Dinah in nursery school, so I saw her off in the mornings and welcomed her back late in the afternoons. Arnie was away all day writing. Paris at that time of year was the opposite of my childhood memories of the sunny Luxembourg Gardens, puppet shows, children running rolling hoops, and exploring with Fremo. Close to thirty years later, it was gray winter, a cold that entered your bones, and a gray sky that never let the blue break through. I was not so much starved for sun as for a break in the gray, gray pall that covered the city. I couldn’t take a deep enough breath.

I don’t remember cooking. I remember going to the little neighborhood grocery, carrying the red mesh bag to put milk and fruit in, but I was so self-conscious about my French that I didn’t get that neighborhood rapport.

My first night in Paris, I’d called the hotel operator. An old friend of mine, Ellie Pine, had moved to Paris and married a Frenchman. I said the number two,
deux
, in my best high school French accent.
“Pas Dieu! Deux!”
the operator screamed at me.
“Deux, deux!”
I hung up quietly, completely intimidated, and put my high school French away in a secret drawer.

About a week later, Ellie came to our apartment to pick me up for lunch. Ellie had been the open, eager young actress who played John Berry’s sister in
All You Need Is One Good Break
. Now she was
Madame. She picked me up in a tiny red car. She was pressed for time, but was charming and very elegant. We squeezed her little car into a parking space and somehow offended a huge Parisian, who screamed at us and grabbed the top of the car, shaking it easily from side to side. Ellie and I gripped our car seats like two Helen Hokinson cartoon ladies in
The New Yorker
.

Afterward, she took me to her big, sprawling flat. Her husband was just leaving. He was handsome, aristocratic, and impatient. He was a wealthy manufacturer who voted straight Communist—apparently not that strange or uncommon in France.

They had a woman servant, imported from Spain or Portugal for a pittance. She would return to her country after a year, and they would hire another young woman. Ellie dropped me off and I said good-bye to a true
femme du monde
, off on her errands.

The next evening, Arnie arranged for a sitter for Dinah, and we went out to dinner. John and two other friends picked us up and drove to a street off the boulevard. We walked a block or two in high spirits, passed a little Russian restaurant, and decided to go in.

The room was small, maybe three or four tables for small groups of people. The waiters wore the high-necked red silk blouses, belted at the waist, that were the uniform for Russian male dancers. My grandmother had once made one for me. There’s an oil portrait of a young Fremo wearing the same Russian blouse.

The three waiters all seemed to converge on us at once. They suggested the beef on skewers. They brought red wine and drinks. Arnie and John and their friends became happy and comfortable. Their stories piled one on top of the other. Arnie and John had outsmarted some bastard; they broke each other up. Their friends were drinking and laughing. So was I; they were such fascinating guys.

Suddenly we heard crowd sounds. We looked around. We were
still the only ones in the little restaurant. The waiters were coming in with the skewers of meat, making low
blah, blah, blah
sounds in their throats, like someone had hired them to be the crowd in a movie. You know the sound Arab women make when they are celebrating or protesting? Like that, but low. Then one would say,
“Le baron,”
which was picked up.
“Le baron.” “Le baron.”

The baron was coming, and the waiters were creating a buzz of excitement and a crowd to welcome him. The refrain was sustained, and we became very excited about the baron coming ourselves. We all watched the door in anticipation. The waiters were proud, all three of them facing the door. Suddenly, the door opened and a small gentleman stood framed in it. The waiters now broke into proud announcements, calling out,
“Le baron, le baron est ici!”

The noise continued as the little baron nodded, accepting their adoration, and permitted them to show him and his companion, a young blonde wearing much makeup, to their seats at the table next to ours. The hubbub died down, but not the admiration.

So here we were at two tables in a white Russian restaurant. At one table the American Communists; next to us a relic of the czar’s reign. After ordering and exchanging a few words with his companion, the baron turned to us. He looked exactly like the actor who played Topper in the black-and-white comedy. Roland Young, was it? The raised eyebrows, the thinning brown hair, the clipped mustache. Mildly he introduced himself and asked about us.

“What do you do?” he asked.

“Writer.” “Writer.” “Writer.” Then me, “Actor.” He nodded sweetly.

“What do you do?” we asked.

“Moi, je souffre.”
Me, I suffer, he said, smiling.

The next night I saw the woman who triumphed over suffering, Édith Piaf. It was her comeback performance at the Olympia Theatre.
Before Piaf emerged from the wings, there was a kind of throaty acoustic furor. People yelled things. Shouted sounds. The orchestra played “Allez-Vous-En,” the introduction to “M’sieu” over and over, the big red velvet curtain was lit, and then suddenly she appeared from the wings, facing front, looking out at us, half smiling. She wore black, with laced-up old-lady shoes, her ankles so swollen she could hardly stand. Still facing us, she took small side steps, her hands stretched out on each side, clutching the curtain for support. The audience roared, giving her strength until she finally stepped from the curtain to the microphone, and then—my God, that little woman filled all of us, all of Paris.

•   •   •

A
rnie had no problem with my leaving early for New York. I stepped out of the plane holding Dinah. “Look up, look up,” I said, and she did. The New York sky was never so blue, never so warm and familiar as it was at that moment. We bathed in the blue.

Arnie followed us home soon after. He had only been back from Paris a month or two when the newspapers carried Khrushchev’s revelations about the regime under Stalin. Not only had Stalin held power over every Soviet citizen, every man, woman, and child, but his treatment of artists, poets, writers, was devastating. Millions condemned to gulags, to prison forever, or to be shot, all on Stalin’s orders.

Arnie shut the door to his room. He stayed there for hours; the principles he’d lived by, his faith, his religion if you will, had been destroyed by one of his heroes. Stalin destroyed Arnie’s world. When he came out of his room, he didn’t discuss it. I don’t know who he talked to. Walter Bernstein, one of his closest friends, told me they never talked about it. But the shock and the pain had to have been awful. Other friends said that up till then they never believed
anything printed in the newspapers because the news was so biased, so controlled by the anti-Communist climate in Washington, and that was true. But this was Khrushchev, the new head of the Soviet Union, who was giving names, and the name he gave was Stalin. The hero of World War II; the hero of 444 Central Park West.

•   •   •

I
’d become one of “the wives of” the Communist men of 444 Central Park West. The men were the ones with real identities; the wives were in the shadows politically, standing behind their husbands.

As Karen Morley once whispered to me, “We’re pillow Reds”—women who happened to fall in love with a guy who happened to be a Communist. The girls were hooked by attraction, not politics.

I wasn’t aware I’d become one of the wives, pathetically searching my husband’s face for approval, alienating him in the process.

I don’t think the word
love
applies.

I wanted him. I yearned for his approval. Very much. Too much. Boringly, I’m sure. He gave me a failing mark in everything but being a satisfactory mother. In almost everything else he gritted his teeth and went behind his eyes.

And I was dwindling. I had lost my luster, gotten shabby in a kind of land of the formerly wanted, now forgotten, sinking into married quicksand. I had no tools to reach him and slowly fell inside myself. Not when I taught, not when I fought. Normalcy returned, need returned, and passion.

In the apartment, I moved in slow motion.

I had married my mysterious Heathcliff, but I was isolated on the moors of the apartment; it was grim. I was the miserable Geraldine Fitzgerald whom Heathcliff now despised.

Outside was life and breath. In acting, in teaching, in learning to
fight the enemy. There, I found my passion and family. In every theater I found family. Actors are always there for each other, and my students, and my ragtag fighting friends in Equity and AFTRA.

But at home someone was winding the key in my back and I went through my days and nights on automatic. Watching myself, floating over myself.

I didn’t feel.

We live with our mirrors. The more I lost my originality, my funny, comedic, outrageous side, the more I tried to fit into my idea of what Arnie wanted, the more I lost him—and the more I lost myself. This isn’t something I knew; it’s what I’m discovering as I write.

Arnie became my mirror. I became totally dependent on his vision of me. Once, he’d been attracted to me—the me that was foreign to him, that was sexy, mysterious.

The me that became one of the wives of 444 Central Park West didn’t interest him. I annoyed him. The Pleaser is always boring and annoying.

Voices weren’t raised in our house. No one yelled. No one got anything out of his or her system. Doors were slammed. Cheek muscles clenched. Eyes averted. Breath was uneven. It was all sucked inside, like poison.

Once, just once, Arnie was so angry, he threw an open container of cottage cheese at me, which landed facedown on the awful, thick, rose-colored carpeting in the living room. Cottage cheese curds found their way down the long, two-inch-thick rose threads and settled there. I stood there nonplussed, my mind screaming,
You pick it up! You threw it!
My mouth said nothing.

Finally, with a pail of soapy water, pillowed resentfully on the carpet, I began the task of removing hundreds of curds nestled at the root of the wool strands. I shrank into the curds in the carpet. But I
was not charming Alice shrinking into Wonderland. I was bulky, clumsy Lee, who sweated over the squishy, elusive cheese curds. I was disappearing.

Little Lyova Haskell Rosenthal, the pride and joy of 706 Riverside Drive, her mother’s dream of glory and riches and fame, got her comeuppance.

T
hat summer Arnie drove us—the boys, Dinah, and myself—to Lake Mohegan. He stayed a few restless days and left to return to the city. The bungalow we rented each summer had few amenities. The week before I’d packed carton after carton with bed stuff, linens, toys, pots, and pans in a stifling apartment. We filled the trunk of the Packard.

It was Dinah’s third summer there. I’d been pregnant with her on the beach in Lake Mohegan; she’d stretched my belly in my ugly green bathing suit. The boys were returning to Camp Mohegan with their old friends (they loved it). I was painting on the porch when the telephone rang. Dinah was dipping graham crackers in milk at the kitchen table. Joe Anthony was on the line. Charming, talented director. Kind.

“I have a play for you,” he said.

My heart dropped. I sat at the kitchen table, Dinah’s spilled milk dripping on my thighs.

Me: When do you start?

Joe: We rehearse in San Francisco end of August, work our way across the country, open in New York early November.

Me: Sounds great.

Joe: You’re available?

Me: Send the script.

I didn’t care what it was. I lived in the land of the forgotten. Lost my luster. Shabby.

I put Dinah down for a nap and sang her to sleep, my mind and heart racing close to her warm little body.

•   •   •

A
rnie’s voice sounded trembly.

“If you go through with this, I’m driving up to get the kids. You understand me? If you take this job, we’re through.”

He was sitting on his anger, his rage. I don’t know what script he was working on in the city, but the idea that I would leave home and do this play was an outrage. It was unacceptable.

I could hear his breath angry on the phone. Click. I sat like a slug, the blood pounding in my ears. I spun my chair around. I was wearing dark blue shorts and a light blue shirt. It was so hot, they were sticking to me. I looked outside the screened-in porch. Everything looked the same—the bungalow across the way, the swing set, the high, parched summer grass. Nothing moved. There was no breeze. The sweat trickled down the side of my nose to my upper lip.

Arnie was in the city, writing, going to the races and, I heard, having an affair with Lulla Adler. (I loved Lulla. I once saw Lulla and Pearlie Adler sunbathing by a lake. Against the dark ground, her skin shimmered like the belly of a fish.) I was here in our summer house, alone, with the children. That said something.

I was painting on a big piece of dark gray cardboard and had almost finished a full-length portrait of myself on a swivel chair. I looked into an old full-length mirror, flecked with gray undercoat,
which I used for shadows on my face and body, thick dabs of light blue shirt, dark blue shorts, flesh with dabs of white and pink, orange-brown my face and arms and legs.

The heat and sweat made its way onto the cardboard. The high dry grass was still, the swing set creaked a little, the bungalow opposite had an open door like a yawn.

Inside on an old brown corduroy couch, my stepsons, Tommy and Mikey, were singing along with Pete Seeger and the Weavers, “Goodnight, Irene.” Dinah was taking her afternoon nap in our bedroom, Arnie’s and mine.

I was painting, waiting for him, for Arnie, to call me back.

I called our friend Walter Bernstein. Walter was a fellow writer and close to Arnie. I explained I’d been offered a play, rehearsing in San Francisco and coming to Broadway. I asked him to intervene.

“Please, Walter, please, please . . .”

He called back and said, “Arnie will absolutely not back down. If you take the play, he’ll take the children and he’s finished.”

“Walter, listen. This is the first offer I’ve had in two years. I’m gone, forgotten. This is the only way I know to earn a living.”

I had no money of my own. I had that certain knowledge that I had become expendable. This was the first summer Arnie hadn’t come to Lake Mohegan. I was alone with our children, sweating on the porch of our summer home. Drowning on the porch of our summer home.

Lake Mohegan was a mecca for lefties like us. Fifteen minutes from Peekskill—where Paul Robeson had been run out of town—two hours from our apartment in the city, 444 Central Park West, referred to by us and the FBI as “the Kremlin.” That’s where Arnie would be in sole charge of Tommy and Mikey, his twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys from his previous marriage, and Dinah, his four-year-old daughter with me, the love of my life. Dinah.

My heart was thumping in my ears. I stared at the self-portrait of a hopeless, sweaty, blank-faced girl wearing the same blue shirt and shorts, sticking to the same chair I was sitting on. I took the job.

•   •   •

T
he Captains and the Kings
was about Eddie Rickenbacker and nuclear submarines, and it starred Dana Andrews. It had an all-male cast, except for me, playing a spunky secretary.

I’d accepted a play in which I was to be the ingenue—a cute secretary in her twenties. To bring sex and romance to the austere all-male cast.

I had one talent. Only one.

I’d played “the pretty girl actress,” the female lead in everything I’d acted in on Broadway, in stock, on television. A wanted talent, even through the blacklist. A respected talent. Even an honored one.

I was in two independent movies through the blacklist. One gave us enough money to have our daughter; the other,
Middle of the Night
, gave me a sense of doom. I played Kim Novak’s best friend and confidante in her romance with an older man, played by Fredric March. Maybe because Kim was Cover Girl–beautiful, maybe because I just looked like hell, but I suddenly saw myself for the first time cast as the “friend,” “comic friend,” “understanding friend” of the leading lady, the Nancy Walker part, the Thelma Ritter part.

When the director, Joe Anthony, called with a description of the ingenue lead, I was no longer an ingenue. He hadn’t seen me. I was thirty-one. I had been blacklisted by my industry and rejected by my husband. I looked sad and bad.

I threw myself into remaking myself into a commercial entity. My outside was what producers would buy. The talent was inside; I just had to look the part—young. I’m not vain. I’m not.

As soon as I returned to the city I went to see Dr. Blumenthal, the
plastic surgeon my mother had found when I’d wanted to straighten the bump on my nose ten years earlier, when I was still living at home; the year I met Arnie. I threw myself into the doctor’s office.

“Change me. Save me. I need the part!”

I asked Dr. Blumenthal to stop my face from sagging down, because when I looked in the mirror, all I could see was sad. Nothing was up anymore. I wanted up. Because I was only thirty-one, he insisted I bring him a letter of approval from my psychiatrist.

Dr. Austin was worried about me. He told Arnie he was concerned; I was floating, disassociating from life. I saw myself crouched inside a big pink balloon floating listlessly above my life, unmoored, uninvolved. In his office his desk lamp moved toward me and then back again. It scared me. Dr. Austin, who was more or less head of psychiatry at Mount Sinai, napped in his chair through most of my sessions, but he knew I had been sinking into myself more and more, and his office visits had been totally unhelpful. I couldn’t find a way to climb out of myself.

He called Dr. Blumenthal, the plastic surgeon. Together, they approved the operation.

Arnie went up to Lake Mohegan to stay with the kids. I borrowed money from my parents on my condition it would be paid back out of my earnings. The earnings were crucial. Any money I brought in went straight into Arnie’s bank account, since he paid for everything: the apartment, the food, the children. Now I was desperate for my own money. I needed to get an apartment for myself and Dinah. I told my agents at William Morris to have my checks sent to their office, to be held for me until I came back to New York.

Dr. Blumenthal gave me a face-lift. I spent August in our empty apartment with a swollen face, bandaged at first. Then, as the swelling subsided, another face emerged. The face of ten years earlier; a girl again. This new girl did not have the downward pull of rejection and
atrophy. I had repainted the self-portrait of the sweaty girl on our porch.

Arnie called. He said he was going to call the newspapers. That everyone would know that I’d had plastic surgery.

No one in the 1950s had their faces altered, in particular no young women with reputations as serious actresses. No women were getting face-lifts unless they were scarred, beaten, burned. If newspapers printed, “Blacklisted actress gets face-lift at thirty,” I’d never work again. Particularly because of the Cannes award and the Oscar nomination I’d won for
Detective Story
. It was not the act of a serious actress. Nor of a particularly sane woman.

I ran to Walter Bernstein’s apartment, crying so hard, I couldn’t talk.

“No,” Walter said. “No, Arnie wouldn’t tell the newspapers.”

I was sitting on the edge of his bathtub with the bathroom door closed so no one could hear me.

I know I was driven to have my face done—driven. There was no thinking, no analyzing. I felt I was starting over again. Beginning again. Twenty-one again. What instinct made me so determined, at that time, in that year? I wanted to save my own life, to remove what the blacklist and ten years with a man who didn’t like me put there. And I was panic-stricken, worrying that it wouldn’t work.

•   •   •

R
ehearsal for
The Captains and the Kings
started in San Francisco a few weeks later. On the first day of rehearsal it was a new girl who walked into the room.

I don’t know how I got to San Francisco. I must have flown. I do remember lying on the bed of my hotel room having taken two Seconals, holding on to the sides of the tilting bed, then running in a full panic attack to Joe Sullivan’s room. Joe was an actor I liked and
trusted, and I asked if I could sit on a chair in his room for the night. I was afraid to be alone. I still hear his kind voice making me quiet, his kind eyes. I’m starting to cry as I write this, more than fifty years later. His kindness was so crucial for me that night.

For two months we played theaters on the way back to New York. From Philadelphia, our last stop before New York, I had arranged for Arnie to meet me at Grand Central Terminal with Dinah so I could spend the night with her. I had left my little girl with her father. I had good reason to fear he would keep her. Arnie could take Dinah; he had the power. Through all the panic and fear, the fierceness of my protectiveness and yearning for Dinah was the most powerful force of my life. I could do anything, would do anything to be with her and make a home for us. It was animal and it made me strong and fierce.

I waited at the station, and I waited. I telephoned. Arnie picked up. Dinah was sleeping. I don’t know how I got to our apartment. I was on fire with rage and need for my child. I rang the bell. He opened the door. I pushed him.

“Where is she?” I screamed.

I steamed through the house. Arnie had never seen this side of me. He opened our bedroom door.

“She’s sleeping.”

I looked. She was asleep in my big bed. I picked her up.

“I’m taking her.”

“She’s sleeping,” he repeated.

Dinah was now rubbing her eyes in my arms. I couldn’t run with her to a hotel room. It was stupid.

“Don’t you dare try to keep her from me,” I said.

Arnie smiled, hands palms-up in a
Who’s trying?
gesture. I left.

Arnie didn’t have a problem in the world taking the boys from Margie. It was his right, his boys. Their mother was inadequate. Even I, their new young mother, could see that. I was competitive with
Margie. It never entered my mind in those days, those years, that she might have yearned for them. I knew Tommy and Mikey were very protective of her. Did they yearn for her? They must have. When I look back now, my marriage was based on raising and caring for the children. It was the one area where I was given plenty of approval from Arnie. It was the one area we could have fun, joy, together.

The biggest part of saving my own life was Dinah. Without her I was in a vacuum, without motivation, no raison d’être. I was hers. She was mine. Love is not a word that describes it.

•   •   •

T
he next day I called William Morris. I told my agent I was coming down to get my paychecks.

“Oh,” he said. “Don’t you have them? They were sent to your apartment.”

“What? I told you to keep all my checks. I was living on per diem.”

“Your husband told us to send them to the house.”

I hung up, the blood drained out of me. I couldn’t breathe. I knew Arnie kept the money. And I was broke. I confronted him. I lost. I was his wife. He had expenses. I hated him for the first time. I had wanted him, wanted him to want me, love me, approve of me, think I was smart. He never could. I’d escaped with my life. But to take every penny I’d worked for these last months was despicable. Arnie had absolutely no problem justifying it—the rent, the children, the bills.

He was even attracted to me again. He pushed me up against the wall, his lips on my neck. When we sat on the couch, his fingers played on my shoulders. He was in love again, like nothing had happened.

The show opened and the show closed quickly. I had no money. I moved in with my friend Gladys four floors below. I slept on her couch. During the day I would bring Dinah and the boys down to her
apartment. Gladys begged me not to reenter the relationship with Arnie, who was now barraging me with notes and phone calls, wooing me.

There was a dark space that Arnie inhabited. An inky-black, smoky space that he looked out from. He would leave it and join us for dinner, for games, for guests, then retreat, as easily as closing the door to his room.

I feel so damned sorry for him. Under the charm, the camaraderie with fellow writers, Walter Bernstein, Abe Polonsky, with his deep friend John Berry, he carried so much heavy, dark, irreversible stuff. His stuff. He never chose women who could fill that space or cope with it. He chose innocents like me, like Margie, or Eva’s mother, Ruth. I don’t know anything about his first brief marriage.