I was offered two independent movies while I was blacklisted. As I buzzed around our new apartment at 444 Central Park West in my uniform skirt and sweater, the phone rang and it was John Frankenheimer, a charismatic, successful young director who offered me the lead opposite Burt Lancaster in The Young Savages. I became dizzy. I had to sit down. I was scared. I didn’t realize how comfortable I’d become in anonymity. To step out of it into a big, blazing, mainstream film was to risk the abyss. I knew that Burt Lancaster had worked with Waldo Salt, that he was one of those progressive good guys, like his good friend Kirk Douglas. Did I meet with John Frankenheimer? I must have. The part, I think, was a social worker raised in a tough neighborhood who had once had a thing with Burt’s character. I could be wrong, but that’s what I remember.
Day of the shoot. A car took me to a street set. One Hundred and Sixteenth Street somewhere, teeming neighborhood, mostly Latino, black. My first scene was to be shot on that street. The neighbors had their chairs out; the kids were running around, screaming. I was packed into the backseat of a limo with John and Burt Lancaster, whom I’d never met, to go over the lines for a scene where we bump into each other on the street for the first time in years. Someone said, “We need to get this shot”; the windows of the car were open to the street. Burt Lancaster, bigger than life, godlike in beauty and power, movie star, was saying his lines, and suddenly I felt all the Method reality I’d worked on leak out of me, never to return. It was all too much, too fast, and too public, and Burt’s presence so big and unreal and startling that I was outside myself watching from the bottom of a well.
They took me to makeup and hair, which was set up in the classroom of a public school, then released me to the street, to the crowds, the lights, and eventually Burt, whom my character hadn’t seen in a long time. He and I exchanged some flirtatious words and exited. It was my shot, long shot, walking up to Burt, his back to the camera that is facing me. Action! I worked on moving my legs. I felt my hips pushing them to move. My heel caught on the concrete. I wanted to die. At the end of the walk stood Zeus, the sun—or was it the lights?—blazing behind his golden head, making me squint as I forced my mouth to say lines I had absolutely no connection with. Later, as they put me in the car to take me home, I knew that it was my first and last day, and I was relieved. Shelley Winters quickly replaced me, and the film went on.
When I was fired from the Burt Lancaster film, Arnie took pity on me. I was so humiliated, I couldn’t stop crying. I was talentless in front of everybody, the whole block, such a pitiful klutz in front of Lancaster. Arnie took me with him to the racetrack. He always went with his friend Norman Shelley. I sat on a wooden bench out of the loop, but happy to be asked, happy to be part of his outside life.
Much later, in another life, I was on The Dick Cavett Show with Richard Rodgers and Burt Lancaster. I said something to Dick Cavett like, “This is the first man who ever hired me”—nodding to Rodgers—“and this is the first man who ever fired me”—nodding to Lancaster. It felt sweet. I was in the catbird seat. Years later, Frankenheimer attacked me in a restaurant, screamed at me, “Why?” It was all a jumble at the time.
I didn’t get it. Now I do. I don’t know what strings they, especially Burt, had to pull to get a studio to hire me, but they did. He had to fire me. I couldn’t step up to the job. I have a lot of people to apologize to in my life. I wish I had done it when I had the chance.