That 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.
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.
• • •
Arnie’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.
• • •
The 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.
• • •
Rehearsal 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.
• • •
The 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.
He would be the teacher. I was the bad pupil, ultimately disappointing and failing him, as we all did.
The dark space, I’m thinking these days, may not have been in my power to reach. Was there a connection between it and his sister’s mental illness? She spent years in hospitals. Both Tommy and Mikey have coped with depression, both needing much more than we could have dreamed of in those days.
Long before, when we had just moved into 444, I remember asking Arnie some innocuous question as I crossed the foyer, and he said, “How do I know? I’m not God.” I stopped in my tracks in the foyer. You’re not? I thought. Then who is?
Now God was beaming on me again. God wanted me again. I was valuable. He was shy, tentative, and tender. God really wanted me. Gladys pulled one side of me, Arnie the other. I went up to my apartment to move my makeup case to Gladys’s. I sat down on the couch with Arnie. The more he wooed me, the more I thought, This man wants to kill me. I won’t get away so easily next time. I took my makeup case and went to the door. I think I said, “I can’t come back.”
He turned on me with the rage I feared, with the ferocity of Rumpelstiltskin.
“Go! Go! Get out!” he spewed. “Get out of my house.” His arms were around his sons’ shoulders—one over Tommy, the other over Mikey. He was armored with his boys. They were never to be mine again. They held him up as he screamed, red-faced, weak-kneed, an endless stream of hatred for me. I was so stunned that I felt nothing. I was the observer, watching me watching him. Feeling relief it was over. I went down to Gladys’s apartment with the last thing I had left in my own house. I was safe.
• • •
The first time I saw Gladys Schwartz was at a fund-raising event at someone’s apartment. There were many money-raising events, since no one was working. I was auctioning my Cannes International Film Festival award for Best Actress for the third time. The kind benefactors who bid for it had always given it back. It was a guaranteed little money-raiser. I hadn’t a clue to the high honor of the Cannes award; neither did the nomination for the Oscar really impact me. It was in Hollywood, California, a site as foreign as Paris to a born-and-bred New Yorker. I looked around the room and there was an interestingly beautiful woman. She was wearing a black off-the-shoulder dress. Her shoulders, neck, and heart-shaped face were white surrounded by black curls, eyes cornflower blue, with thick black lashes and a curling, smiling, endearing red mouth. She was married to Herschel Bernardi at the time, a good actor who was to make a name for himself replacing Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof. She was small, built like a boy, and generous. Lorraine Hansberry, the young, elegant playwright of A Raisin in the Sun, was a close friend, and a number of well-known artists whose names I didn’t know at the time hung around. Gladys painted big canvases. One is on my wall now—extras sitting around the set for The Day of the Locust, the screenplay that Waldo Salt would write years later.
Gladys painted compulsively, inexhaustibly. Her apartment smelled of turpentine and wood frames and oil paint. She had planted an avocado pit that grew into a huge avocado tree that stood in her living room. She was a little red Commie to her toes. Both her parents were Garment District workers, and she was raised at union meetings, sitting on her father’s shoulders. Gladys and Hersh split the year after I met them, and we became joined at the hip. I don’t know how she made money. Her paintings weren’t in demand. It was a tough time.
I must have borrowed from my parents again after Captains and Kings closed. I managed to salvage my last couple of paychecks. I had to find a place to stay. I knew Gladys needed the space for her students.
Someone told me there was a summer ad for an apartment in the front of the building. Two young gay guys were going to Costa Rica for two months. Yes!
Vi, my housekeeper, and Dinah and I visited the apartment. I gave them two months’ rent. Vi and I prepared to clean on Monday.
The apartment was a spacious two-bedroom, overlooking Central Park. I had it for June and July, plenty of time to look for a permanent home.
Vi and I made the beds, brought Dinah’s clothes and toys over, and started on the kitchen. I opened the utensil drawer. It seemed to be moving. Brown feelers between the forks and knives. We opened more drawers. They were all crawling with roaches. I sat in the living room while Vi ran to Arnie’s apartment on the other side of the building to get roach spray. I told Vi to go back up to Gladys’s with Dinah. I positioned myself at the door of the kitchen with two cans of spray and covered my face like an outlaw. As I sprayed I could hear the splats of roach bodies hitting the linoleum floor from the tops of the cupboards near the ceiling. The living room and the bedrooms were behind me. I wasn’t going to let one roach past me through the kitchen door. My repulsion mixed with my sweat. Into the night I emptied the cans—the smell suffocating, the dead and dying roaches revolting. I cursed those fucking guys who’d dared to hand over this filth. The next day Dinah and I moved in.
Two months later I heard a key in the lock. One of my landlords entered the apartment. From the foyer a stream of insults left my lips; words I didn’t even know I knew were hurled straight at him. Pale, his arms stretched against the door, he was caught. “Dyke!” he screamed. “You dyke!” A moment of incomprehension—then I fell to the floor laughing. Our whole exchange was so hilarious to me. Our exchange helped me to extend our stay for the couple of weeks I needed before we moved to the most wonderful apartment in the world, on the seventh floor on West End Avenue and 83rd Street.