A lot of Arnie’s friends were living at 444 Central Park West at 104th Street: Waldo Salt and his wife, Mary, with their daughters, Jennifer and Debbie, and Ethel and Buddy Tyne. (Ethel’s daughter Judy later married Hal Prince.) On the first floor were Tanya and David Chasman with two children, and Gladys Schwartz, my future best friend.
Sol Kaplan, a brilliant composer, lived two floors above us with his wife, Frances Heflin (Van Heflin’s sister), and their kids, Jonathan and Nora. Fra was a working actress. She had a role in the great William Inge play The Dark at the Top of the Stairs on Broadway. Fra was my other significant girlfriend at 444 Central Park West.
Sol had a musician’s hot temper. Jonathan, their son, either inherited it or, as the only other man in the house, competed with his father from the time he could talk. Fra tried to keep the peace, throwing herself between her son and her husband.
Sometimes I’d hear my front door open. Fra would quietly come into the bedroom, put her head on my shoulder, and sob. When she had cried it all out, she’d go back upstairs to her tempestuous husband and son.
Our apartment was on the eleventh floor, overlooking the park, with a small terrace. The dining room had glass doors; we curtained them to make a big bedroom for the boys. In addition there were two bedrooms and a maid’s room. The larger bedroom became “our” bedroom, the smaller one Arnie’s room, where he wrote at his desk and slept on a brown flat couch. I had the bigger bedroom to myself, unhappily.
Some nights Arnie would stumble from his room next door to mine, lean with his arms high on my open door, wearing saggy white underwear, and say with disdain for himself, “I need to be satisfied.” Arnie’s approach to sex was not intimate. The need for sex put him in a humiliating position. The need for it gnawed at him, until the only way to deal with it was to get it out of the way, and he came to my door with the inner weakness of a priest. Each time I welcomed him with open arms, as if he were a poor sick child with a fever.
“Yes,” I’d say, “come here.”
I was proud he wanted me. Sometimes pleasure would come, sometimes not. There was no conversation. There was no touching, no kissing. I longed for him to touch me, to kiss me, to let me kiss his mouth. I longed to talk, to whisper, to touch him, to have him put his hands on me, hold me, hug me, kiss my head. Love me. He fucked for release. Quietly, the sounds of the bed linen shushing, bedsprings, car sounds from the street. Afterward he would lie spent beside me before returning to his room.
I wanted to say, “I love you.” I’d look at his wonderful tanned face, at his closed eyes with thick black eyelashes. I love you, I’d say silently, practicing to myself. But I felt he’d think I was corny. So I never said it. I never heard it. Afterward, I’d watch his resting face. Distant. The disappointed mouth. The closed lids hiding his world from me. I was too much of a coward to cross the heavy silence. I lay quietly, watching him breathe, till his eyes opened, black-brown.
“Thank you,” he would say, and stumble out of bed into his own room.
I was grateful, like a Mormon wife, to be visited by the household god. Grateful the way Geraldine Fitzgerald was grateful to be with Heathcliff, even if she would never be his Cathy.
So began a nine-year residence at 444 Central Park West. The boys grew to fourteen and fifteen; Eva, Arnie’s daughter, became a young bride. Dinah, my daughter, our daughter, would be born there. And from that foyer I would leave forever.
• • •
When I was out of work, I called Herbert and Uta and asked if I could teach a class there. I’d never taught before, but there were no questions or hesitation. “Yes, of course.” My name joined their list of teachers, and students began to sign up for the class. I had an income, I had an outlet, a passionate outlet, talented people to work with, a door to unemployment insurance, a legitimate reason to leave the house for hours once or twice a week—and most important of all, money to pay Vi, our housekeeper.
I still get excited when I talk about this period. In my first class at HB Studio were Sandy Dennis, straight out of college, little Mike Pollard, whom you saw later in Bonnie and Clyde, a passionate and talented young woman named Rosemary Torre and her husband, Mike, a great Irish guy, and about eight others.
Every play is a situation—a situation you have encountered before or a situation you are entering for the first time. The job of an actor is to make the imaginary circumstance given to them as real as anything in their lives. That and, if you’re onstage, to stimulate yourself in fresh ways to reproduce this reality night after night after matinee.
But in my HB class, by the end of our first year together, I was giving my students improvisation situations that took each actor into dangerous inner places. I gave Sandy Dennis a date with Mike, Rosemary’s husband. His need: to get into her bed. Her need: to steer the relationship into friendship, not sex, or end it. Well, Sandy was such a sensual being, with such powerful yearnings rushing through her, that after his first kiss she was gone, gone—on the bed, pulling him to her, Mike looking back at me helplessly till I stopped the scene. I gave Mike and Rosemary a situation: She was cheating on him. He was to confront her; she was to deny it. That night after class in their own home, Mike had a heart attack. This terrible lesson for me as a young teacher changed me, changed us all, forever.
I was horrified. I was responsible. Rosemary kept calling me and came to see me. She told me that Mike had an existing heart condition. He’d had an attack before, but he didn’t want it known because he loved the work so much. It could have killed him, the work he loved and the places it took him. The places every actor has to go to experience each new situation, each new life, was for him, for his fragile heart, like swallowing dynamite. A year later Mike died. Beautiful Mike. I became a very careful teacher. In those days my students were my age or older. We both learned. I have been teaching to this day. My students are friends and family; we give back. Not long ago, preparing to act in a film, I went to an ex-student of mine and asked her to coach me. She was brilliant. I can only hope to give others what she gave me.
I did A Hole in the Head the year before Dinah was born. Garson Kanin directed it. Paul Douglas starred. My friend for life Joyce Van Patton was in it, and Kay Medford. The script was a drama, but the way Garson cast it, we came into New York a comedy. I think the playwright was in shock. It was his own family he had written about, but one didn’t argue with success. A Hole in the Head was a hit. Garson never gave a direction, except to suggest where to move. On the train when we left for Boston to try it out, I asked him for some sort of discussion about my character. He said he never discussed; everything was in the casting. If he cast correctly, his actors would know how to play their parts. My part was that of a lonely lady in blue who comes to meet Paul Douglas at his hotel, hoping for romance. It was a twenty-minute scene, the only one I had in the play. But it was a lovely character. I loved doing it.
One night after the show I was in my dressing room on the fifth floor, taking off my makeup, when a British gent burst through the door, threw himself at my feet, literally, introduced himself as Ken Tynan, an English critic, and proclaimed that my performance was the best he’d seen in years. Please, please come downstairs and meet the lady who had accompanied him to the theater. She, too, was dying to meet me.
We clanged down the backstage steps. There on stage level was a pale blonde with a wispy voice. It was Carol Saroyan, later Carol Matthau, who was to be the best whispering advice giver a girl could ask for. The next day, she and Ken Tynan ran off from their respective spouses to Spain for a romantic interlude. When he returned to London, he wrote a lovely piece about me, which he sent.