A millionaire trucking company owner, Joe Strick, decided to direct Jean Genet’s The Balcony as an independent film. It had played for two seasons off-Broadway. An original take on our society by comparing it to a well-run house of prostitution.
Shelley Winters and Peter Falk were the leads of the film, Peter the chief of police, Shelley the madam. I was head prostitute and her special favorite. In essence the house of prostitution mirrors the world outside its doors; eventually the illusions that take place, the presidents and popes and police chiefs, pour into the streets and take over society.
I flew from New York to Los Angeles. Joe Strick introduced himself to me at the airport and insisted we go to his new studio office to view what he’d filmed so far. He was a tall, fiftyish, regular guy, eager, making the crossover from millionaire truck impresario to director of an esoteric film.
“Joe, can I see it tomorrow? It’s been a long flight.”
“No, no, I need you to see this at the studio.”
I was told to look into a small screen when he turned a switch. The film he’d shot came on; I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. The room was dark, and suddenly my foot felt wet. I looked down, and Joe Strick was on his hands and knees licking my toes. I was wearing tan flat sandals. I was shocked. I pulled my feet under my chair. “Stop it! Stop it!” I ordered Joe, still on his knees.
“I just want you to experience, blah, blah.”
As a brand-new director, sincere and earnest, Joe had carried his version of the Method too far. He was an innocent. Experimenting. Excited.
The next day I joined his family for lunch at his beach house in Malibu. His nice wife and two small boys were there, and some of the actors. The table on the patio faced the sand and the ocean.
I don’t remember what word I used—bitch, bastard. Joe sharply stopped me. “There are children present,” he said. “Please watch your language!” The other lunchers stopped eating and looked at me. I apologized. And meant it.
Ten minutes later, one of the eight-year-old boys pointed to the beach excitedly. In front of Joe’s house in the sand, one big dog had mounted another medium-sized dog.
“Are the dogs fucking, Dad? Is that what they’re doing?”
The younger boy chimed in, “Dad, Dad,” his tan little hand pulling Joe’s shirt. “The dogs are fucking, Dad, aren’t they? Dad? Dad?”
We all, maybe seven of us at the lunch, looked straight ahead, begging silently for the dogs to run, to move, to finish. “Dad, Dad—aren’t they?”
Like a fifties dad with a pipe: “Yes, son,” Joe said calmly, “the dogs are fucking.”
I felt a little cross. My word had been so tame. We watched the dogs for the next long minutes, and I thought, This is the movie! The ham sandwiches lay on our plates as nature danced before us. A huge red doggie thingy seeking its target, missing, seeking, till Joe Strick finally jumped up and chased the dogs down toward the ocean and away.
The next day we would begin a movie about simulated sex, very French, very political. No dogs.
• • •
Shelley was a serious actress. And I was to find out in The Balcony that Shelley was a serious bully.
The scene between Peter and Shelley was coming up. The chief of police and the madam. It was Peter’s scene. He was enacting all of his master needs to Shelley’s willing madam.
We were working on a huge soundstage in Hollywood. All our trailers were within it, tucked to the sides.
Shelley Winters, in a long glittering dress hugging her voluptuous body, pushing out round full breasts, was lying on a chaise longue on the set, her bedroom, where she was about to entertain her best customer, the chief of police, played by her costar, Peter Falk.
The bedroom set was in the middle of the soundstage, about twelve tennis courts long, wide, empty, with its silent black floors and high, high beamed ceiling. A camera crew stood by the bedroom set along with Peter in his police chief uniform and cap, ready to do the scene. Simple, seductive scene, madam and patron.
“Quiet!” Shelley yelled to the crew who were setting up the shot, the crew quietly working on lighting. “I’m preparing. Nobody move!”
The set froze. Shelley had a small record player on a table next to the chaise. She moved the needle arm to the record. A scratchy “Lili Marlene” sung by Marlene Dietrich could be heard, thinly. The small crew stood like statues next to the set.
A group of extras walked by outside. “Close that door!” Shelley had suddenly turned into the Red Queen from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Door closed. “I saw you with the white sneakers, stand still.” The crew guy with the white sneakers stopped in the middle of the set, frozen.
Suddenly: “Stop combing your hair!” I jumped, deep in my trailer in front of the mirror. She saw through walls.
“Lili Marlene” ended and began, ended and began; the crew was still, as was the boy in the white sneakers in the middle of nowhere. The doors closed. I could hear myself breathe.
Peter, sitting in his canvas chair with the camera crew, quietly stood to look into the camera, focused on Shelley. On tiptoe.
I heard screaming, shouting, then a man’s voice. I went to the door of my trailer. Shelley, sitting up in the chaise longue now, was screaming at Peter something like, “I’ve got money in this movie, I can hire you and I can fire you, blah, blah . . . !” Peter’s neck turned red and he leapt at her from behind the camera. Joe Strick jumped between them and threw his script up in the air to distract them. The pages, swept up by the air-conditioning, were floating all over the studio, everyone scrambling like kids at a party to pick up or catch the festive pages falling and flying through the air.
• • •
I now hated Shelley, and we had a love scene between us coming up.
“Action!”
Shelley smiled. Both provocative and motherly as she grabbed the back of my head and pulled me to her for our kiss. “Don’t touch my hair,” I hissed.
I had so much nervous hair spray on my short dark hair that it would dent if you touched it. Hard as nails.
“Did ya hear that?” Shelley turned to the assembled crew. “‘Don’t touch my hair,’ supposed to be a Method actress, what kind of actress is that? ‘Don’t touch my hair,’ blah, blah . . .”
I was unfazed; I had her in my rifle sights. I looked in her eyes, waiting for the camera to roll. “You can put your hands anywhere you want, just not in my hair!”
Did I glimpse a little fear?
We filmed the scene. We kissed. She wasn’t a bad kisser.
My loathing of Shelley became my character’s secret loathing of the madam. Good. Something to work with. I found my objective that morning: to throw over the madam and run the house myself one day.
In a photo shoot at the end of filming, Joe placed me slightly in front of Shelley. She blew up. “Who’s the star here, anyway?”
Shelley had been the dictator of the set, telling everyone what to do, how to do it, we were cowed by her, all of us, the director and the actors.
Fade out. Fade in. The leads in the cast assembled at the Playboy Club in New York. We’d been asked by Hugh Hefner to celebrate the breakout hit movie of the summer. Audiences thronged to drive-ins to see this indie film, The Balcony, which was kind of a dirty movie, but not.
We were sitting in this little pen at the bottom of many flights of wide steps with aluminum railings and black marble floors, waiting to be introduced at the Playboy Club. Shelley entered with her assistant and began to sit. She caught my eye—startled, she began to run from me up the steps. Suddenly my body was chasing her. I was a loose cannon. Shelley took the brunt of all my resentment and hatred, all the unsaid stuff. Something in me broke open and I was screaming at this unexpected moving target. “Cunt,” a word I’d never used, burst from my throat as I raced up the steps of the Playboy Club, closing in on a terrified Shelley.
The Playboy bouncers stopped me at the landing, not unlike a boxing ring. Shelley, scared, holding on to the aluminum railing. I’d burst through something in myself, at the wrong target but it felt great.
I left and went home. Content. To 83rd Street and West End Avenue.
• • •
It was 1962. Everybody knew the Committee was dead. They had no public image anymore. Joe McCarthy himself had been beautifully and publicly shamed and disposed of on television by Joseph Welch and Ed Murrow years before. My agents at William Morris contacted the Blacklist office at CBS. Yes, the office in charge of keeping dangerous actors from working on TV.
“Come in, come in,” a nice man said, “let’s clear Lee and get her back to work!”
They agreed with my agents that I seemed to be no threat. We met at CBS one morning so that they, with my agents and me present, might talk to the head of the Un-American Committee by phone, to clear me and get me back to work.
It all looked extremely positive. If the office in charge of blacklisting was on my side, I was in. The voice on the other end of the phone said, “Not until she names her husband, Arnold Manoff.” The CBS person said, “But a wife isn’t allowed to testify against her husband.” They were defending me! Amazing. Once more the committee person said, “Not until she names her husband, Arnold Manoff.” The head of blacklisting at CBS hung up. He could barely look at me. I almost felt sorry for him. My agent took me home.
It’s interesting that the committee never called Arnie to testify, though he had been named by one of the Hollywood Ten who had been jailed and later reversed his stand. They only wanted me to name him. How American is that? So their job was to get vulnerable people to rat on one another. Some did with the other’s consent—“I’ll name you and you can name me”—in order that they both could work.
If we all named one another, this would have been a comedy, but my friends were sick at the very idea. And to me it was like killing a friend. Putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger. But why didn’t they ever ask Arnie to testify? Why me?
I called the lawyer Leonard Weinglass. He was a strong and clear voice for all the things and people I cared about.
He said, “Lee, you need a powerful voice in Washington, a moderate voice. Not anyone who’s associated with the left. Someone connected in Washington. Someone inside the system.”
“Who?”
“Let me think about it.”
That’s how I came to know Max Kampelman.