CHAPTER
Thirty-Eight
OPENING THE DOOR TO HIS EMPTY APARTMENT ON West Seventy-seventh, Roth was struck by the sight of sunlight gleaming on his highly polished parquet floor—so like the parlor floor of his childhood apartment on Summit Avenue. “You’re gonna be all right,” he thought. An hour or so later, he was back in his studio working on Sabbath’s Theater.
He also wrote an encouraging note to his wife. He was glad to know, he said, that she’d had a nice long chat with Dr. Bloch the morning after their contretemps: “He really is the person to listen to. I am living proof!” After her night at Silver Hill, Bloom took a room at the Cosmopolitan Club, and in gratitude Roth asked her to join him for dinner, with the caveat that he tired easily and would have to leave early. The meeting, for Bloom, was “strained and miserable.” Roth brought Conarroe along as a buffer, and made a point of directing most of his conversation to him. Still, when bemoaning her fate to friends, Bloom would generally insist it was Roth’s welfare that foremost concerned her. “Please keep telling me he’s all right!” she said to Alfred Kazin’s wife, Judith Dunford, who endeavored to reassure her. “How dare you constantly stress to me how happy he is!” Bloom reproached the woman.
Meanwhile she was pointedly magnanimous in her notes to Roth; after taking a room at the Wyndham, she assured him that it didn’t matter where she lived, but rather whom she loved. Again with Conarroe in tow, Roth attended her program (“Women in Love”) of the Shakespeare speeches they’d rehearsed together that summer, and shared a cab with Bloom after the three had endured a “reasonably pleasant” dinner. “Never better,” said Roth, when Bloom asked him how he felt; watching him cross the street to his apartment building, she reflected that he’d chosen the life of “a bitter, lonely, aging ascetic with no human ties.” Roth—who liked to say “Art is life too”—responded coldly to this observation: “As for my ‘human ties,’ I will not list them but merely say that Bloom’s description of me, here as everywhere, is drawn from an imagination distorted by melodramatic hyperbole, not to mention psychological cliché, and hardly from one whose investigation is grounded in any serious fidelity to observed reality.”
Roth sent Bloom a bouquet of tulips after her Shakespeare show, followed a day later by a brief agreement drawn up by his new matrimonial lawyer, William Beslow, that confirmed the basic terms of their temporary separation—mainly that Bloom must obtain Roth’s consent to visit their apartment and collect personal items, whereas Roth in turn was obliged to pay Bloom five thousand dollars on the first day of each month. In Doll’s House Bloom described the legal papers as a “body blow,” to which she responded with an angry message on Roth’s answering machine. Roth listened to the message, took notes, then called back and affected to be puzzled. The fact was, Beslow had warned him that he might render the prenup null and void if he paid Bloom a monthly allowance, unless she agreed in writing beforehand that her acceptance of the money did not alter the terms of their agreement. Roth tried to explain this in so many words, but was interrupted by his furious wife: “I am not signing any agreement! How dare you. . . .” In the background Roth heard familiar voices—Anna and her friend Felicity, he surmised. “That’s how I understood that Bloom was at once out of control and showing off for the girls how very tough she could be with me.” When he tried a second time to explain, she resumed berating him, and he hung up on her.*
Vexed, Roth went directly to his lawyer and explained what had happened. “This isn’t working,” said Beslow: Bloom could not have her five-thousand-dollar allowance if she refused to sign, simple as that, so he advised Roth to go ahead and serve her with divorce papers—that is, in New York; while Roth could get a no-fault divorce in Connecticut without Bloom’s assent, the prenup was more likely to be overturned there. Meanwhile Bloom was consulting her own lawyer, Sidney Liebowitz, who looked over the temporary separation agreement and saw nothing amiss; he advised her to sign it so she could start collecting her money. When she inquired whether she should just divorce Roth, the man sagely replied that that was precisely what Roth wanted, as it would preclude any hope of a settlement under the terms of the prenup.
Instead of divorcing him, then, Bloom wrote him a testy but mollifying letter. Naturally she’d been “shocked and dismayed” to receive legal papers “out of the blue,” she wrote, since Roth had mentioned nothing of the sort over dinner the other night. Be that as it may, there was no chance of her violating an oral agreement “made in the best of faith,” and moreover (as he well knew) she was soon to leave for London and thence to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for three months (to appear in a production of The Cherry Orchard), and had arranged to rent her own small Manhattan apartment for the sixth and final month of their separation, March. A few days later she phoned Roth to reiterate her willingness to sign; he “listened and politely hung up,” as he recalled. Soon after, the Wyndham concierge rang Bloom in her room and said that a man named Frederick was waiting downstairs with a message he could deliver only in person—i.e., divorce papers, charging her with “the cruel and inhuman treatment” of her husband, Philip Roth.
IN DOLL’S HOUSE, Bloom suggested that Inga Larsen’s decision to divorce her husband of twenty-five years was due to her total commitment to her “new relationship” with Roth (an affair of some eighteen years’ duration). In truth, Roth was perfectly happy with things as they were, though he certainly encouraged Inga to follow her own inclination, now that her children were grown, to release herself from a moribund marriage. “You can do it, Fallika,” he liked to say,† and later Inga wrote to thank him—even after their decidedly acrimonious breakup—for helping her change her life for the better.
“I moved out and Erda [Inga] moved in,” Bloom wrote in Doll’s House—with less than perfect accuracy, or so Roth claimed. He acknowledged that Inga had stayed in the back bedroom of his Connecticut studio for “two weeks, if that long,” during the summer of 1994, amid leaving her husband and furnishing her new condo in a nearby town (Roth had given her $20,000 toward the down payment). However, Roth’s cleaning woman and friend, Kathy Meetz, remembered that Inga had actually stayed in “Heartbreak Hotel” (as they called Roth’s studio, since Ross Miller had also camped there after his recent divorce) the entire summer; Meetz had seen the two eating breakfast together, but suspected nothing since she considered them simply old friends and neighbors. According to Roth, the couple had mutually decided to keep things secret awhile: “There would be time enough later for us to go about in public together, without our having precipitously revealed that we had been lovers all along.” Whatever their relative furtiveness in the meantime, Inga insisted she moved into Roth’s studio as early as spring 1994, and moved out only when her condo was ready in late August; after that, she said, “We lived like a couple and I cooked dinner every night” at her place. Finally, once her divorce went through in October, she tended to spend weekends with Roth at his apartment in New York.
Even then he was busily incorporating aspects of Inga’s personality into characters such as Sabbath’s alcoholic second wife, Roseanna, and especially his immortal mistress, Drenka Balich. “Every book has a million sources,” said Roth, “but Drenka had only one.” For Inga’s benefit he frankly described his heroine as an all but exact portrait, calling the novel “a love poem” to her. And Sabbath, too, was a fairly exact version of his real-life model, or at least certain salient traits—“the nearest I’ve come in all my fiction to drawing a realistic self-portrait,” as Roth freely admitted. Sabbath and Drenka build their “church” on “the rock of sexual excess,” and Drenka lovingly calls Sabbath her “secret American boyfriend,” which was Inga’s way of greeting Roth during a sylvan rendezvous. In matters of sex, she was his “sidekicker”—one of her many malapropisms that delighted Roth, who gave them to Drenka as well.
Roseanna was a more dubious tribute, to put it mildly. “ ‘You’re as sick as your secrets,’ ” she parrots to Sabbath. “It was not the first time that he was hearing this pointless, shallow, idiotic maxim. ‘Wrong,’ he told her . . . ‘you’re as adventurous as your secrets, as abhorrent as your secrets, as lonely as your secrets, as alluring as your secrets, as courageous as your secrets, as vacuous as your secrets, as lost as your secrets.’ ” The “deadliest” side to Inga’s sobriety, as Roth would have it, was her tendency to impart AA wisdom and to examine her own feelings a mite too conspicuously. Inga herself was aware of these aversions, but her impulse to be supportive tended to override any misgivings. “As you said: we create our own reality,” she reminded him. “Of course I have learned this from AA but it really has helped me so I am sharing it with you, even risking your cynisism [sic].” Roth’s other great AA friend, Joanna Clark, was likewise apt to recite her favorite recovery slogans for Roth—“Yesterday’s history, tomorrow’s a mystery”; “No pain, no gain”—because she liked to make him laugh, not because she expected him to find them enlightening (“Do they all have to rhyme, Joanna?”). To his gratification she declared Roseanna, his consummate AA bore, “hilarious.”
Ted Solotaroff, however, dismissed the character as little more than “a sitting duck for Sabbath’s caricaturing disgust,” a pitfall Roth had meant to skirt with evidence of Roseanna’s poignant inner life in the form of diary entries and letters from her incestuous father. The latter (including a suicide note) were reproduced almost verbatim from letters written by Inga’s own father. She’d given Roth permission to cull these materials as he saw fit, but in bitter retrospect decided “he was ruthlessly using [her] vulnerability.” She might have found it galling, too, that Sabbath mocks his wife’s sorrow just as readily as he mocks her more comic foibles. After reading her mournful diary, for instance, Sabbath composes a satirical reply in the voice of her dead father (without attempting to disguise his own handwriting): “Dear little Roseanna! / Of course you are in a mental hospital. I warned you again and again about separating yourself from me. . . . But why don’t you judge me for a change by my pain, by my holy feelings? How you cling to your grievance! As though in a world of persecution you alone have a grievance.”
Roth himself, of course, was hardly a slouch when it came to clinging to a grievance—the one against Francine du Plessix Gray, for instance, which would fester until the end. As far as Gray herself knew, everything had been fine between them until his breach with Bloom. When he first entered Silver Hill, Gray had written him a loving note wishing him a “speedy and serene” recovery, and even pleaded with Bloom (at Inga’s and Thurman’s urging) to agree to Roth’s request for a six-month separation lest he end up killing himself. All this despite blatant signals from Roth that he found her, Gray, distasteful. When she was elected to the Academy of Arts and Letters, in 1992, she’d complained to him about the simultaneous election of a notable (but inferior in Gray’s eyes) short story writer. Irritated that one of his least favorite writers (Gray) had gotten into the Academy, and moreover was already complaining (“she hadn’t had time to take a crap”) about a fellow inductee, Roth phoned the Academy’s director and mentioned that he’d be attending that year’s ceremonial luncheon, as Douglas Hobbie’s chaperone, and wanted to be seated next to the story writer who’d offended Gray. His wish was granted.
The first sign that Gray returned his animus, and then some, came that Yom Kippur day when he departed Silver Hill for good. Before heading to New York, Roth had stopped for lunch at Inga’s house—an occasion interrupted by a phone call from Gray: “We’re organizing a support group for Claire,” she said, inviting Inga to her pool that afternoon. That such a group, or at least its leader, was apt to have an anti-Roth agenda soon became manifest. Writing on October 19 to decline Bloom’s invitation to her one-woman show in Litchfield, Roth explained that he wished to avoid the Grays: “They have been outspokenly malicious in slandering me since the first day I came out of the hospital, and I don’t believe that I could control my contempt for them in their presence.” By then he had a hunch about the identity of the “friend” who’d let slip to gossip columnist Charlotte Hays of the New York Daily News—for an October 15 item in “Charlotte’s Web” (“For Roth, it’s goodbye, Claire”)—that he’d recently left his wife homeless.
These were minor matters next to a scurrilous, anonymous note Roth received around Thanksgiving 1993; on a single sheet of paper, the author had printed in red ballpoint pen: “EVERYBODY KNOWS / YOU’RE SEEING / JUDITH THURMAN.” The European 7s on the envelope put him immediately in mind of Gray; he imagined she’d written and mailed the note in a fury, à la The Human Stain’s Delphine Roux, who rashly accuses Coleman Silk as follows: “Everyone knows you’re / sexually exploiting an / abused, illiterate / woman half your / age.” In both cases the charge was essentially false: Roth and Thurman had had no sexual contact for many years; indeed she was then engaged to another man, whom she married a few months later. Roth asked Inga to send him samples of Gray’s handwriting from her files—Gray had been a patient—and Inga obliged. “Some ten days ago,” Roth’s old friend Marty Garbus wrote Gray on December 1, “you sent an anonymous letter to Mr. Roth that is not only offensive, harassing and denigrating to Mr. Roth, but also deeply embarrassing to Ms. Thurman.” Garbus threatened a lawsuit, and Gray lost no time enlisting a lawyer friend of her own, James Goodale, to deny the accusation and threaten a countersuit.
Roth let four and a half years pass, until he won the 1998 Pulitzer for American Pastoral and received a congratulatory note from an old high school classmate, Nona Fried, who happened to be a professional handwriting analyst. Roth promptly sent her samples of Gray’s handwriting and, in his cover note, insisted she charge her usual fee: “Dear Porfiry Petrovich”—the magistrate who pursues Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment—“Do your stuff.” Three days later Fried mailed her report: “Based on the documents submitted, it is my professional opinion that the hand that penned all the known standards as Francine du Plessix Gray is one and the same hand that penned the questioned anonymous note and envelope.”
ROTH CLAIMED THAT Bloom had asked him whether she could “at least” have his studio on West Seventy-ninth, but he refused; already he was thinking about selling his main apartment and moving to Connecticut more or less full-time, keeping his studio (which had doubled in value) as a pied-à-terre. Bloom complained to their mutual friend Aaron Asher, who phoned Roth and implored him not to be so “selfish”; Roth angrily replied that Bloom had a perfectly nice place in London, where she preferred to live anyway, and besides it was none of Asher’s business. The two didn’t speak again for almost six years.
The prenuptial agreement, said Bloom’s lawyer, was “unconscionable”—or so she quoted him in Doll’s House, though her lawyer in 1990 had suggested only minor changes, which Roth had readily approved; still, Bloom claimed penury to friends and demanded a settlement outside the terms of the prenup. Roth, furious, wanted to take her to court, but his lawyer advised against it. Two of the three New York judges, he said, were “feminists”; if Roth got one of the latter, they’d charge him ten thousand bucks a week in support and endlessly delay his case, while the tabloids had a field day. The lawyer therefore suggested they offer Bloom a settlement of $100,000 plus legal fees ($17,000); Roth subsequently consulted his regular lawyer, Helene Kaplan, who assured him he was getting off easy.
Bloom accepted the sum “against [her] lawyer’s strong advice,” though it was hardly enough to cover a “dank little apartment” (as their friend Dick Stern described it) on East Ninety-fourth and Third Avenue. Eager to get on with her life, and still hoping she and Roth could be friends (or even a couple again, once he came to his senses), she told him she was ready to set up her new apartment and wondered when she might expect the belongings—“furniture, china, and linens”—she’d left behind on West Seventy-seventh and exhaustively listed. Roth responded by faxing her a list of his own, demanding she return the Bulgari snake ring, the $28,500 per annum provided by his twelve-year Clifford Trust, other lavish cash gifts, plus $150 per hour for the “five or six hundred hours” he’d spent rehearsing with her. On it went. Finally Roth proposed to fine her sixty-two billion dollars—a billion for every year of her life—for failing to honor their prenup. At first the mockery of the exercise was “entirely lost” on Bloom and her daughter, but after the ninth or tenth page they saw the joke and commenced laughing.
“She’s behaved abominably about money and I’ve had to pay her off to get rid of her,” Roth wrote his old friend Charlotte Maurer. “She’s hysterical, irrational, deceitful, and, above and beyond everything else, A BLAMELESS VICTIM RESPONSIBLE FOR NOTHING. The last finally got me down.” Roth wrote this on March 20, 1994, three days after shelling out the “distributive award” of $100,000 plus legal fees, on the condition that Bloom sign a new separation agreement relinquishing all further claims “from the beginning of the world to the date of this Agreement.” In May, Roth composed the following directive: “To my executors and those planning my burial: It is my strong wish that Claire Bloom be barred from my funeral and from any memorial services arranged for me. All possible measures should be taken to enforce this.”
EARLIER THAT YEAR Roth had begun dating a thirty-one-year-old psychiatrist, Julia Golier, who taught at Mount Sinai Hospital on the Upper East Side and treated Vietnam veterans for PTSD at the VA hospital in the Bronx. Golier was tall and pretty, and moreover Roth was attracted to her “calm, rational” manner (“in that way very like Barbara and Ann, very unlike Claire and Maggie”). She also had a penchant for drollery, and over the years would send Roth clippings that fell under the rubric “As Joke Goes Awry”—like the one about the man who swallowed his friend’s tropical fish and choked to death. That March of 1994, Francine du Plessix Gray published Rage and Fire, a biography of Louise Colet that advanced the novel thesis that Colet was a genius and Flaubert a chauvinist pig who crushed her spirit.‡ In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani found the book shrill and ludicrous, whereas Golier made a copy of the “EVERYBODY KNOWS” letter and crossed out all but the first two words, emending it to read “EVERYBODY KNOWS YOU WROTE ‘RAGE AND FIRE’ ”—which she then mailed to Gray from the Bronx.
As was his wont with much younger girlfriends, Roth couldn’t resist playing Pygmalion—a benevolent role, for the most part. In the early days of their courtship he took Golier to see Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy at Lincoln Plaza on the Upper West Side, and for the rest of his life he and Golier referred to each other as Apu. He was also a little appalled by her sketchy apartment on First Avenue, which he would later give to the all-but-destitute Amy Bellette in Exit Ghost; when Golier decided to move, a year or so after they met, he successfully urged her to pick a place on Ninety-first and Park, then accompanied her on a furniture shopping expedition.
Roth’s own living arrangements were in flux. He’d decided “there were too many traces of Claire” in his otherwise beloved house in Connecticut, and hired a local architect to design a smaller one-story that he planned to build on a ten-acre parcel of his property (which included his swimming pool, the one thing he couldn’t bear parting with) just south of his old house. Roth had already planted several dozen white pines and built a split-rail fence for privacy, and the excavator was due to cut a new road through the woods, when Golier spent her first weekend in the country as Roth’s guest. “But why are you doing this?” she sensibly inquired. “Your house is so beautiful.” He saw her point. In the end the new house never materialized except in miniature, as an architect’s model, which Roth kept as a kind of centerpiece in his attic (where he also stored the vast foreign editions of his work).
By then his long affair with Inga had spectacularly imploded. As their mutual friend Thurman pointed out, the couple had thrived on transgression and subterfuge, but in a more conventional arrangement their basic incompatibilities came to the fore—or, as Roth put it, “She’s a great adulteress, but not a great mate.” The same was arguably true of Roth. “No more women,” he promised a friend, post-Bloom. “Been at it for 45 years. Enough’s enough. . . . Solitude is best.” By this he meant, of course, that he’d never again permit any one woman to lay claim to him, which was somewhat at odds with Inga’s own program. “I became a needy and helpless child pathologically bound to you,” she wrote him after their final rupture. “That woman full of vigor and joy of life and fearless[ness] that you loved just evaporated.”
Things blew up at Inga’s breakfast table on New Year’s Day, 1995. For a long time the couple had been planning a summer trip to Norway (coinciding with the publication of Sabbath’s Theater, so Roth could avoid the reviews), where she looked forward to showing him her childhood haunts. Meanwhile, though, she’d become increasingly uncomfortable with Roth’s insistence that they keep their affair a secret; she wanted to inform her children, at least, as to whom she was traveling with. Rattled by the prospect of more gossip, Roth told her he wouldn’t go if she told her children, whereupon she became “wild with rage,” as he recalled: “ ‘I want to tell my children! I want them to know where I am! I want them to know who I’m with!’ ” Roth sat there for “ten or fifteen minutes,” he said, then excused himself and left, while she followed him outside screaming. Inga told it differently. According to her, Roth was in an irritable mood that morning; while eating in fraught silence he suddenly announced, “Inga, why don’t you put the caps on the toothpaste?!” After a few more crabby remarks in that vein, he did his exercises in her bedroom and finally stomped off with a farewell threat to cancel their plans for Norway.
“Inga, we should cool it,” Roth said, when she phoned him ten days later to find out where they stood. It was then—her marriage and love affair both in ruins—that Inga suffered a breakdown, and on January 13 a psychiatrist diagnosed her as suicidal and referred her to the Institute of Living in Hartford. Only allowed to receive incoming calls, she asked her AA sponsor to get in touch with Judith Thurman, to inform Roth of her hospitalization and ask him to call her. For five days she remained “glued to the pay phone” waiting for his twice-daily calls, morning and night, until the eve of her departure, when two therapists explained that her attachment to Roth was dangerously self-destructive. “I hardly had time to say hello,” Roth said of his final phone call to Hartford the next day, “before she was furiously and not entirely coherently berating me for having destroyed her life and telling me that I should never try to be in touch with her again or she would tell the world about me.”
On January 22, Roth sent his cleaning woman, Kathy Meetz—who worked for both of them—over to Inga’s condo with her belongings, neatly packed (each individual lipstick in bubble wrap), with a polite note to “Mrs. Larsen” explaining that she’d left them behind in his “attic,” when in fact they’d mostly come from his New York apartment. Three days later, he received an angry fax: “Mr. Misogynist! / May you rot in hell! It gives me pleasure to know that one day indeed you will . . . when your depression returns. . . . You are the most ruthless man on this planet.” She considered the matter further, then faxed him two days later on January 27:
In my desperate attempt to rescue you I have deeply hurt my family and myself, a wound I may never be able to heal.
You are pathetic in you [sic] rapid aging and decline, full of chronic pain and physically revolting with a double chin and pot belly and almost impotent.
STAY AWAY FROM ME!!!!!! I MIGHT TALK WHEN YOUR BOOK IS PUBLISHED!!!!
Roth waited a month for the considerable smoke to clear, then wrote Inga that he hoped they could eventually be friends again. She replied on March 11, from Madrid, that she agreed and “harbor[ed] no ill-will,” albeit admitting she sometimes wondered whether he’d wanted her to die like Drenka in the book: “This letter is for you, my once lover and American boy friend,” she concluded. “Not the novelist Philip Roth! I hope you respect that. Be well maybe we can meet in the summer.” It was still spring, though, when she paid him a final visit. As Roth remembered, she appeared at his studio “wearing over her seductive form the tightest jeans and lowest-cut blouse she owned . . . and when her attempts at seduction were, perhaps for the first time in her life, rebuffed, that most certainly was the end of everything.” But nothing in the letter she wrote him afterward (dated April 9) suggested a thwarted seduction; rather she wistfully acknowledged the end of their affair, and chided Roth (“I feel so bored”) for having boasted about “other women” in his life: “Do you need to flatter your ego in front of me? . . . you might surely find another woman in your life again but none like me.”
ROTH’S LONG AND HAPPY friendship with Mia Farrow went back to a near encounter at a party chez Styron, in Roxbury, during the summer of 1992, around the time the Woody Allen scandal broke. When Farrow arrived, Roth remembered, all the women in the room rushed to console her “like they were sucked down a tube.” Bloom, who’d met Farrow briefly on the set of Crimes and Misdemeanors (Bloom had played Martin Landau’s wife), insisted they have her over for dinner sometime, and Roth agreed. He was all the more sympathetic given that he’d despised Woody Allen even before the man was accused of sexual assault; in Operation Shylock, Pipik describes the director as a “little dork asshole”—an insult that a libel lawyer, vetting the novel, found gratuitous: “Has the author an axe to grind concerning Woody Allen? On what does he premise this language?” At the time it was mostly an aesthetic grievance. Updike had written Roth a polite note about the movie (because Bloom was in it), especially commending a scene, near the end, where a blind rabbi poignantly dances with his daughter at her wedding. Roth replied:
You have to be Jewish to hate Crimes and Misdemeanors openly, I guess. It is really the bottom of Jewish kitsch and the desecration of the memory of Primo Levi has sent me into a fury that won’t quite subside.§ When the rabbi came out dancing at the end, I shouted aloud in the theater, “Blind isn’t enough!” . . . Claire learned to loathe Allen during the making of the film, not because she had nothing to do, but because he bore so little resemblance to a human being. The man, if that is the word, is a fake from top to bottom. Can you imagine, John?—he has even ruined shiksas for me.
The dinner with Farrow finally transpired a few months later, coinciding with a rare visit to Connecticut from Bloom’s daughter. Farrow was also a Litchfield County resident, and on the snowy night in question she rendezvoused with Roth at a liquor store in Warren and followed him back to his house. “The dynamics were strange,” she remembered of Roth’s ménage. Anna Steiger was dour as ever, while Bloom dashed about nervously from kitchen to dining room; Roth, whose back was killing him, retired to a couch in the living room. At one point Steiger followed her mother into the kitchen, and Roth and their guest were left alone. They looked at each other and smiled. At length the evening ended, and Farrow followed Roth back to the liquor store, where he was sorely tempted to ditch his car and run away with her.
They were both cheerfully single two and a half years later, when they met again at another Styron party—this time for the visiting Czech president, Václav Havel. “That little smile that passed between us erupted like a baby atomic bomb,” said Roth. The former ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Bill Luers, was also at the party with his wife, Wendy, who wanted to talk about NATO; Roth and Farrow excused themselves from that conversation and flirted. Roth grabbed a big cross around her neck and led her over to Havel: “Mr. President, do I have to put up with this?” Finally they disappeared awhile, and when Farrow returned, alone, Luers asked if Roth was okay. “He seemed fine as soon as he got his tongue out of my throat,” she breezily replied.¶ The couple’s canoodling, in Roth’s car, had been inhibited somewhat by the ubiquity of Czech secret police and Connecticut state troopers, and the two made a date to see each other later.
The ensuing affair, such as it was, largely consisted of hilarious walks along the Housatonic, and lingered as a friendship that would strengthen in later years. As Farrow endeavored to describe it, “There were bursts of romance here or there, through the years, but the way good friends would have a friendship that has sexuality as a component.” “Was I ever married to you?” the brain-cancer-stricken Amy Bellette asks Zuckerman in Exit Ghost—a remark derived from a bantering routine between Roth and Farrow: “Wasn’t I once married to you,” Roth would begin, “between Sinatra and Andre Previn?”
Banter was always a trickier business with Roth’s actual spouse, and so it went during a meeting in March 1995, shortly before their divorce was finalized. As she noted in Doll’s House, Bloom had often frustrated her lawyer by balking at his advice to take a more aggressive approach, lest she jeopardize her “valued friendship” with the man whose “subterfuge, treachery, and darkness”—as she otherwise characterized him—she would only just survive. But then, he was still capable of magnanimity despite his outrage over her refusal to abide by the prenup; while working on The Cherry Orchard the previous spring, Bloom had entreated him to send her the sheaf of notes he’d made during rehearsals of the same play at the Chichester Festival in 1981. “I had every good reason to tell her to go fuck herself,” Roth said in 2013. “But I didn’t want her (still! Still! Fucking idiot that I am!) to give anything less than her best performance so I sent them to her in Cambridge.”
And finally Roth rewarded Bloom’s patient hope that his “illness” (as she considered it) would pass—or so it seemed, when he wrote her on March 7, 1995, asking if they could still be friends. Bloom replied that she’d like nothing better, and Roth proposed meeting for coffee later that month at a restaurant, Sarabeth’s, near her apartment on East Ninety-fourth. Meanwhile he’d consulted his psychiatrist, Bill Frosch, about how best to handle things. Frosch’s advice was twofold: meet her in a public place, where she was less likely to get emotional, and let her know in advance that he had a subsequent appointment so there was no chance of morbid lingering (thus he scheduled Bloom at four, followed hard upon by dinner with a friend, Alice Gordon, at five fifteen). Bloom treated herself to a facial and a manicure, and wore a particularly nice outfit for the occasion—only to be stymied by a barrage of “completely impersonal” shtick from Roth (his own way of dealing with nerves). “Oh, perversion,” he replied, smiling, when she pensively inquired why he wanted to be friends. “Let down and deeply disappointed,” Bloom concluded, “I left the restaurant; I swore I would never again go through such an ordeal.”
Roth was bewildered by her account of this meeting. “Both of us lighthearted,” he wrote in his diary the next day. “Warm. The damage we did each other! She seems perky, game—intelligent, pretty. The nervous energy but not mad. A first day [date?]. Part after hour and a quarter. Kiss goodbye. Sad—but okay. What it took!” He couldn’t help wondering, in 2011, whether he’d deceived himself—but no: he found Bloom’s warm reply to the note he’d sent her afterward, which seemed to confirm that she’d found the Sarabeth’s meeting as “wonderful” as he, and certainly her vivacity at the time bore this out. As he later speculated, “Maybe it was the irrepressible joy of knowing she was about to stiff me”—i.e., by writing Leaving a Doll’s House.
As it happened, her hopes for the meeting were perhaps unreasonably high. As she later confessed to Charlie Rose, she’d continued to believe that the time would come when “he’s going to wake up and say ‘Oh my god, what have I done?’ . . . Didn’t happen.” Certainly she was a little stung by Roth’s glibness, not to say his careful scheduling; several weeks later, on May 10, she proposed to Roth that they meet again, pointing out that a true friendship, going forward, would entail “honesty on both sides”; she also noted her preference for having an evening drink versus an afternoon “tea” (this because of regular working hours on her “wretched ‘Soap,’ ” she explained#). Roth promptly replied that he looked forward to “coffee-hour [n.b.] number two” when he returned to New York in the fall, adding “I hope you regain your equilibrium quickly” (she’d complained of feeling blue because of their imminent divorce) “and by the time we next meet I hope to find you once again as charmingly spirited as you were at Sarabeth’s earlier this spring.” Bloom, in turn, wished him a “relatively carefree” summer—a wish that apparently came true. Writing Andrew Wylie, Roth mentioned bumping into a Litchfield acquaintance who’d given him a long stare and remarked “You look different. You look good. Did you get a face-lift?” “No,” Roth replied, “I got a divorce.”
Their autumn coffee klatch never materialized, but meanwhile the two serendipitously met again on June 5—four days before their divorce was final—and Bloom could hardly have been sweeter. Roth had arrived late to Alfred Kazin’s eightieth birthday celebration at the CUNY Graduate Center auditorium, and Kazin’s wife, Judith, had beckoned him over to the only available seat: beside herself and Bloom. At the reception afterward, a smiling Bloom told her estranged husband that she needed advice (he thought she’d said “advice about money,” but wasn’t entirely sure), and Roth apologetically demurred. “She didn’t dispute me in any way,” he recalled, “but continued to be kittenishly cordial.” “He granted me an hour’s audience,” Bloom had grimly reported to Dick Stern about their previous meeting at Sarabeth’s. “No, we’re not friends.”
Roth would soon learn just how dangerous an enemy he’d made. Bloom explained to friends that his niggardly settlement had left her in desperate straits—and then, too, she just felt in need of “catharsis”—and hence proposed to write a “kiss-and-dis” (in the words of People magazine) memoir, which she promptly sold to Little, Brown along with lucrative serial rights to Vanity Fair. One factor that might have helped settle the matter was Roth’s unflattering portrayal of Sabbath’s “fragile, volatile” first wife, the actress Nikki Kantarakis, “whose pervasive sense of crisis he’d mistaken for a deep spirit and whom he had Chekhovianly nicknamed ‘A-Crisis-a-Day.’ ” What seems to have made the deepest impression was Roth’s exhaustive transcription of the events allegedly surrounding Alice Bloom’s death: “I remember thinking by the third day,” Sabbath reflects of the way his first wife had continued to caress and chat with her mother’s corpse, “ ‘If this goes on any longer, I’ll never fuck this woman again—I won’t be able to lie with her in the same bed.’ ”
“He found me repellent,” Bloom told Stern the following spring (1996). “My mother’s death was the coup de grâce.” When Stern wondered why she was writing a second autobiography “as if the other book didn’t exist,” she explained that nobody had read Limelight and After; she was more sanguine about this one. And when journalists asked, later, why she’d written such a “brutally candid” book, Bloom liked to quote Roth’s own words: “Philip always said,” she told People, “ ‘Be private in your life and shameless in your work.’ ”