When I first moved with Dinah and Vi to 83rd Street, Tommy and Mikey would come over and visit. They hurt. I had been a mom to them. I’d loved them and they had loved me. Not like they loved their mother, but we’d been together since they were four and five and they were now adolescents. All our hearts were heavy.
One day Tommy said to me, “We have to choose sides. He’s my father. I have to choose my father.”
“Does that mean you’re not coming to see me anymore?” My heart was sinking. Does this mean you don’t love me anymore? What about listening to your music? What about talking at bedtime, telling you about sex with Mike falling off the bed in laughter, what about bringing down your fevers with alcohol and water washcloths under your arms and knees, what about dinner every night of your life, what about me?
“I don’t think so,” Tommy said.
Mikey kept coming. Mikey was the baby; he needed me more. He was the neediest. From the first time he sat on my lap on Riverside Drive, when he was only three or four, and we looked out at the river together, I knew we were a couple. Sweet little arms around me, sweet little V-shaped smile.
I was making the bed in my bedroom on 83rd Street when a heavy object fell onto the floor under my bed. I reached into the darkness underneath. The mattress seemed to be slashed. Something had fallen from it. When Mikey next came to my apartment, I showed it to him. “Did you put a tape recorder in my mattress?” He looked down. I waited. He nodded. I gave it to him.
“Here,” I said. He left.
Eva came into her own when I left Arnie. She mobilized her forces to protect her father. She was his general; she was jubilant. At last he wanted her; at last he needed her.
I don’t know if the tape recorder was Arnie’s idea or Eva’s. If Arnie caught me in bed making love, was he thinking he could win custody of Dinah? Within a few weeks, Arnie would have a new live-in girlfriend. Dinah said she was nice. I was no longer a mother to anyone but her.
• • •
My last few weeks at 444 Central Park West, while I was waiting for the occupants of the apartment on 83rd Street to leave, the phone rang. “Lee, this is Alan Foshko. I’m having a party for Marilyn Maxwell.” “Who?” Who indeed. Foshko was calling from a different world. Handsome Alan, as he preferred to be called, was a high-flying young publicity maven. He gave parties to end all parties. He took over a New York City subway; he rented Coney Island. He had an office and apartment on 52nd Street and Eighth Avenue. The same building my parents had moved us to when we left Riverside Drive. We shared a knowledge of Nameless Fear together. I was living on the edge and so was Foshko in his own way. Fear pervaded us as we jumped into the unknown. He in business, me in life. Nameless Fear he called it, so real that “nameless” became a real character in our lives. Handsome Alan would telephone. “Is Nameless there today?”
“Sitting on the end of my bed. Do you want to say hi?”
“Nah,” he’d say, “get rid of him.”
“I’m trying, I’m trying,” and I was trying each day.
Handsome Alan had a friend who was also called Alan. A tough, cute cookie who sounded like Gene Kelly. He seduced me in no time flat. On the bed, the couch, the floor, simple straight sex. It was a revelation. I was hooked. Then I noticed that he was attracted to any interesting girl who walked by. At the diner his eyes were constantly moving from my body parts to someone else’s. Finally at a party he crowded under a coffee table we were all sitting around with a pretty girl, and the coffee table was glass so there was no escaping that they were making out right in front of me.
I was hurt. I was insecure. I called Carol Matthau. She said, in her whisper, “Lee, you can have any man you want. So, be very sure you want him, because you can have him.” I thought, How do those women manage it? To accept living with someone who always has eyes for someone else? I’ve just gotten away from a man who didn’t want me, who didn’t like me, much less love me. Carol said, “Be very sure you want him, because you can have him.” We made love one more time. It was great. He was a talented man. It was over.
Carol lived across the street from me on West End Avenue. She was the great white pussycat, wise, practical, mythical, and unpredictable. She had beautiful skin, white as cream. She and Gloria Vanderbilt, best friends at the time, put white, white makeup on their faces. Carol’s was sweet and rosy under the makeup. When I sat in her bedroom listening to advice, she held a mirror up to her face. Her brown-black eyes never left the mirror. She was almost satisfied with what she saw in the mirror then; much later her need for perfection almost destroyed her face.
I loved her dining room, her eye for charm. She had green vines on white paper on her walls, Woodson wallpaper, and a lemon-colored floor. I imitated her. I made my home charming, too.
Ever practical, Carol set me up with the legendary theater producer Billy Rose. “He’s got lots and lots of money, Lee,” she whispered. First Billy had me sing for him, alone, on the stage of—what else?—the Billy Rose Theatre. He sat up in the sound booth. I sang my heart out to a totally empty house. I had been taking lessons that year from David Craig, a brilliant teacher, great friend, and husband to the born-onstage Nancy Walker. I would try to knock ’em dead, anywhere, anytime.
When I finished Billy stomped down the aisle toward me. “Kid,” he said, “you’re built like a brick shithouse!” and invited me to a weekend at his island. I asked who else he had invited. He said, “Senator Jacob Javits and his wife, Marion, are coming, good friends of mine.” Over his strong objections I insisted on taking Dinah, then five or so, and a nanny. “I don’t feel comfortable coming alone,” I said. “I won’t come alone. I can’t.”
He called later and said he wanted to come and see where I lived. “Come on up,” I said. I was living across the street from his friends the Matthaus. He wandered around the house, stopping to look at my paintings. I had some lined up on bookcases on either side of the fireplace. “None of these are any good,” he said, waving his hand at most of my work. Then he picked up the old watercolor of me at a table in the middle of the room, with the door and the windows too high to reach. “This is good,” he said. “This has something.”
We met at the wharf Saturday morning, the Javitses, Dinah and me, and Norma, friend and nanny, and took Billy’s big yacht to Billy’s big island. A red flag with his name and a rose flew over both. The five grown-ups had lunch at a small table. Marion and I were forced to exchange small talk, because all of Billy’s attack conversation was directed to Senator Javits, and it was all about money and numbers. The two men disappeared; Marion and I played three games of Scrabble. She was a tough, clever player and beat me easily.
I wandered around looking for Dinah. She and Norma were playing pool happily. I joined them. Suddenly Billy was at the door of the game house. “Take that pool stick away from her!” he barked. “She could rip the felt.” We three looked at him. “The stick. The stick—take it away.” Norma took the cue from Dinah. Billy disappeared. We wandered down to the water until dinner. I was so grateful Dinah and Norma were with me; this was boring. We ate late, and the Javitses retired early. Then there was just Billy and me.
He brought over a gold box and opened it. Inside were chocolates wrapped in foil. Billy sat down close to me. “Life,” he said, “is like a box of bonbons. Some dark with chocolate filling; some with cherries. But you never know till you open the silver wrapper what life holds for you.” He held my hand and squeezed it. I squeezed back. I knew this was some kind of mantra for him, the opening of his moves on the lady of the evening, which was me, I realized. He said, “Come,” and started up the steps, still philosophizing about life and chocolate and bonbons. I was racking my brain how to get out of this without hurt feelings or rancor. I was in his house on his island. I had to spend the night in his guest bedroom. Billy suddenly pushed me against the wall hard and pressed his mouth to mine. His mouthwash was so strong and recent that my own mouth sizzled unpleasantly from high-dosage Listerine.
I heard myself babbling all kinds of nonsense, I was so uncomfortable. I didn’t know how to get this little Chihuahua, this intense little animal off me. Billy may have been in his sixties then, shorter than I was, and I’m five feet four. Somehow we were sitting on my bed in his guest room, and he was trying to get me down. I bounced up. “I would, Billy, I really would, but I have my period—I had no idea, awfully sorry.” Suddenly his hand was at the back of my neck. Trying to bob it toward his zippered fly. “Dinah’s in the next room, Billy, I couldn’t do that with Dinah in the next room.” Bob head, bob head. I didn’t even get it at first.
“Wouldn’t you like to live in my princess room?” said Billy. “Be a good girl, you can move into the princess room.” Billy had taken me on a tour of his Manhattan mansion after I sang for him. He showed me his own room. An ascetic chamber for a monk, with a single narrow bed, like a cot, which he said had belonged to Napoléon, and then showed me my future room—if I was a good girl. A large, tasteful beige girl’s room, with a big four-poster curtained bed. This was the bonbon I was refusing as he tried to push my mouth to his fly. Finally he figured it just wasn’t worth the time and effort and he left. I stepped into Dinah’s room and climbed into bed with her and slept and felt safe. The next morning the Javitses and Billy were back on the boat, the Rose flag flying, Billy a lonely little figure sitting in the middle of the boat holding his tiny dog with a red coat.
Several months later Carol called. Billy was marrying a well-known society matron. Billy told Carol, “She comes with her own money.”
“You could have had him, Lee,” she whispered.
One of the great understandings that came out of those two years alone was that I never wanted to live in anybody else’s house again. I never wanted to take my place in somebody else’s life. No matter how wonderful or beautiful. I wanted only people who fit into my life, whatever it was. I felt suffocated at the very thought of fitting in. To someone else’s home. To someone else’s career. To someone else’s hours. To someone else’s children. I wanted my life. My child. Me.