My First Five Husbands (31 page)

With only six weeks to plan the wedding, we had a gazebo built in the backyard. I wrote a folk song called “I Gave My Love” for Lette to sing with Jack on keyboard and a beautiful ceremony to be read by Bea, Adrienne, Bill, Conrad, Hermione Baddeley, Norman Lear, Mark, Brad, The Greek, and me. He invited every relative and friend he had in the continental United States, from West Virginia to Chicago—about three hundred people—and I invited another hundred. Andrew Greenhut flew out from New York. Bill drove out from Ardmore, bringing Marie, the black widow from Mother’s beauty salon. (Yippee.)

The day of the wedding, his relatives brought over suitcases of Greek food for the reception (though I’d ordered quite enough from the caterers, along with shmancy table settings). I wore a Grecian gown designed by Rita Riggs, the
Maude
costumer—a soft lavender silk confection with a circular headdress and veil. (I still have it, though I’ve yet to find the right occasion to trot it out again. Maybe some Halloween.) The Greek was in a tux, looking oh so suave. Mark bought his first tux, a light blue one (hey, the seventies, right?), setting off his shoulder-length wavy blond locks. Even Brad was in a tux, with long, tousled hair, and I can still see the two of them, heads together, whispering and laughing.

Yep, this shindig was some kind of spectacular. A gorgeous wedding, in contrast with the marriage to follow. It was like one of those opulent display cakes that are actually just tons of sugar frosting and a plastic bride and groom stuck on top of a stack of empty hat boxes. The Greek had a pal of his video the whole affair, which went on until well after dark. Champagne flowed. Norman Lear joined in the Greek circle dance. Bea Arthur, somewhat looped, regaled everyone with an impromptu solo. The Greek’s relatives began smashing the expensive rented plates on the patio until someone stopped them. Some little weekly paper printed a large article, with oodles of pictures, and The Greek, having snagged a minor celebrity, bought forty copies. (And he watched that star-studded wedding video incessantly until, to my secret glee, he accidentally taped over it with an episode of
Starsky and Hutch
or some such thing.)

A week later, the Greek relatives finally went home and we left for our honeymoon in Carmel, a lovely community up the coast, one of the most desirable places in California. I remember our first evening there, walking with him at sunset on the idyllic beach, thinking,
Oh, Lord God in Heaven…I don’t love this man.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I
’m not much of a cook. Sort of hit-and-miss. Without an Italian around to keep me on my toes, it’s up for grabs. Once I took a Chinese cooking class with The Greek and Bea Arthur (“The Greek and Bea Arthur”—there’s a song title for you) and learned all sorts of complicated and time-consuming dishes, each of which required unending chopping and mincing. Shortly afterward, the Greek and I threw a dinner party for twelve, featuring six of the dishes we’d learned. The day of the party, while he was at the office, I started chopping, mincing, slicing, and generally hacking up the mountain of ingredients. By late afternoon when he came home to help, I was feverish, my fingers were sore, I had cut myself twice, and I had learned to swear in Chinese: “Dam fok hung cheet!” I felt as if I’d been dragged full tilt behind a sampan through rough water. That was the first and last Chinese dinner party I ever gave. Or ever intend to.

Living with The Greek came about as easily as the
chop chop
Chinese cooking.

Deeply enamored of Barbra Streisand, he came home every afternoon and put on one of her albums, lowering the living room lights, stretching out soulfully on the sofa, the house filling and overflowing with her mellifluous rendition of “People”—his top favorite, which he played incessantly. I had liked Streisand up till then. But having her in my house day after day, week after week—darlings, had it been Beethoven or Bach, okay, but even people who need people don’t need to hear about it every damn day! I walked around the house with my hair hurting.

Before long, I began to feel that The Greek was using my celebrity to impress people. He insisted I go with him to real estate functions, and I felt like he wanted me there solely as a jewel in his cap. I tried to tell him nicely at first, “Honey, I’m a fish out of water at those things. I’m sorry, but I just don’t enjoy it.”

But he was adamant, his brown orbs turning into cow’s eyes. “Rue, I need you to do this for me.”

“I don’t like being shown off like a mounted marlin,” I told him on the days I had a little more backbone. “It’s embarrassing.”

I rebelled, demanding my privacy, which of course made him very angry. There was no shouting. He simply receded into stony silence for days at a stretch, refusing to speak to me or even acknowledge my existence.

When
Hollywood Squares
invited several stars and their spouses to Jamaica for eight days after Christmas, all expenses paid, The Greek jumped at the chance. We spent New Year’s Eve at the Playboy Club, which I found abhorrent, but I did get a kick out of my fellow celebrities. Paul Lynde in his signature dashikis; Rita Moreno, peppy and friendly; George Gobel, funny and sweet; and most delightful of all, Jonathan Winters, brimming with outrageous fun, so original, so full of nutty ideas, I fell out laughing whenever he was around. The New Year’s Eve bash was overflowing with too many people, too much noise, too much gratuitous hilarity. I climbed up on a chair to get above the crowd, feeling trapped and claustrophobic.

I’ve always hated New Year’s Eve parties, with their ridiculous festivities based on some dopey idea that this is a great thing to celebrate. We all know it’s just a drummed-up notion of when the “new year” starts—according to Julius Caesar. But we’re all supposed to go mad with paper hats and razzy whistles. I always stay at home on New Year’s Eve, usually going to bed before midnight, so for me, that night was miserable. The Greek, on the other hand, had a ball in that crowded, noisy room full of famous people. I left moments after midnight and went to bed, spending the next day walking alone on the beach, picking up shells and rocks, while most everyone else was back at the hotel nursing a hangover.

T
he Equal Rights Amendment reads, in its entirety: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

I was doing what I could to help get the ERA passed, which, of course, it wasn’t. Perhaps we’ll have to try again later with less violent language. Anyway, The Greek and I went to a big ERA fund-raiser in Bel-Air at which Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem spoke. (Oddly, Jane was serious; Gloria was funny.) We arrived at the event and joined a few other people in a limo to be taken a few blocks down the street. Chevy Chase was in the backseat, and he leaned forward, extended his hand to The Greek, and said, “Hello, I’m Fernblock Diddleberg.”

The Greek shook his hand and said, “Nice to meet you.” Not a clue.

Still, he managed to be a great hit with both Bea Arthur and Hermione Baddeley, who now played Maude’s housekeeper. He was always a good man to have at a party: handsome, cheerful, skilled at working the room. He flattered and charmed the britches off Bea and Hermione, and they both ate it up. On his forty-fifth birthday, I had given him an elaborate surprise party at a restaurant he often frequented with his cronies, and he was appropriately surprised and delighted. On my forty-third birthday the following February, The Greek arranged a birthday party for me after the taping of
Maude
in one of the rooms below the soundstage. He’d come to Hollywood full of big dreams, and it thrilled him to be part of that world. But we were all tired after the taping. I remember thinking,
How inappropriate. These people don’t want to be here, they want to go home
. But everyone strove valiantly to get their spirits up for the party, which was a blessedly short one.

T
hat spring, Norman Hartweg arrived in Los Angeles. The icy Michigan winters had become too much for him in the wheelchair, so he headed for the land of sunshine, driving himself cross-country entirely by hand. I was delighted to see my dear old friend.

“You’ll stay at our house until you find a place,” I insisted. “We have plenty of room, and Mark will be so happy to see you.”

To my mind, this was a perfectly natural thing to do, but The Greek didn’t see it that way.

“Rue, he’s your ex-husband, for Christ’s sake!”

“He’s one of my dearest friends!” I shot back. “And the man is in a wheelchair. He needs a little help right now, and God knows, he’s helped me more than once.”

Norm had a tube attached to his bladder that drained into a bag he had to empty several times a day, and sometimes during the night it leaked onto the mattress. He was with us for six weeks, and when he moved, I washed the mattress and put it out to air, which didn’t bother me a bit. He’d have done the same for me. But The Greek was furious and spent the next several days treating me like the amazing invisible woman.

I was trying to keep this Edsel on the road, though, so I quickly agreed when he came to me and said, “I’d like to stop working and go to commercial real estate school for eight months. Could you handle the mortgage and the bills by yourself? It would be maybe a year before I could expect to start earning money again.”

“Of course,” I said. “If that’s what you want, you should do it. I’ll handle the bills.”

But when Mark graduated from high school in June, he said he’d like to take a year off before deciding exactly what he wanted to do, and The Greek thought this was a terrible idea.

“He should be doing something useful with his life,” he said. “Something that will help him get ahead.”

Like what?
I wondered.
Marrying a celebrity?

It made me heartsick when I thought of what Mother might have thought about the way I’d been sucked in again.

By the end of 1977, I couldn’t take any more of The Greek’s bloody
don’t rain on my people who need misty watercolor memories
Streisand ad infinitum—in short, I could no longer stand
him
. In December, I told him I wanted a separation and, without much argument, he moved into one of the suites at the Magic Castle Motel in Hollywood. Ah, but my dad came out to visit us for Christmas with Marie, with whom he’d become quite tight, and finding his football buddy banished from the house, scolded me repeatedly, “Oh, Eddi-Rue, he’s a good man. Get him back home. It’s Christmas!”

I could barely stand the thought. But I drove to the Magic Castle Motel and asked The Greek to come home for the holidays. I didn’t love The Greek, but I
did
love Bill. There was nothing Bill wouldn’t do for me, and this was one of the rare occasions he was asking me to do something for him. We all spent Christmas together, Bill and The Greek happy as clams, watching four jillion football games.

But after Bill and Marie left, The Greek stayed on.

T
here are sea-change moments in a sitcom when cast members move on, writers move on, child actors grow up, or an older actor dies. The little snow-globe world that was so carefully created over the years is suddenly shaken up. The trick is knowing when to persevere through the ensuing blizzard and when to call it quits. In March of 1978, at just that sort of crossroad, Norman Lear proposed moving Maude to Washington to become a member of Congress, but Bea Arthur chose to decline. You know what they say: A lady knows when to make her exit. As we wrapped the series and said fond good-byes, Norman proposed a new series starring none other than yours truly.

Yes,
me
! In my own series! Yippee! Hooray! (Do you sense that I was a tad excited?)

Set in Kansas City during the Depression,
Apple Pie
was based on a little New York play that Norman was having rewritten. A terrific story. I would be playing Ginger Nell Hollyhock, who finds herself alone in a big old Kansas City house during the Depression and advertises in the newspaper for members of a family. Having found a blind grandfather (played perfectly by Jack Gilford) and two sons and a daughter, the pilot opens with Ginger Nell interviewing men to be the father—her mate. Norman called me in to help audition male leads, and I read scenes with several guys, our two top choices being film veteran Tony Curtis and Dabney Coleman, who’d been hilarious in Norman’s offbeat series
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
. We debated their relative merits, considering the qualities of the character—Fast Eddie Murdock, a charming con man on the run. After much discussion, we made the tough decision to cast Dabney Coleman, and I listened while Norman called Tony Curtis to tell him, marveling at Norman’s finesse.