This was the second summer that I was on the Guber, Ford, Gross circuit. I was playing the lead in Silk Stockings, the musical stage version of the great Garbo comedy Ninotchka. It was a tent circuit—many more could fill a tent than a theater—and the audiences were huge. Dinah was five and traveling with me. Norma, her babysitter, rounded out our family. It was perfect. I had started teaching private classes in the winter in addition to classes at Uta and Herbert’s studio. I was touring all summer and I was able to pay for everything.
“I shoulda stayed a plumber.”
“What?”
“I shoulda stayed a plumber.”
Something in me perked up. A plumber. Interesting, really interesting. Much more so than a dancer. Nothing is as sexless to me as a male dancer. I know, I know, Baryshnikov, but I was raised in dance, so plumbing was infinitely more interesting and provocative.
Joey Fioretti was standing onstage, trying to catch his breath after a hard rehearsal, in black tights and a white underwear shirt, and he was real. As real as a tomato.
When I was in the supermarket shopping for my sizable family while I was with Arnie, I would take so much comfort in just looking at the fruits and vegetables. They were so down-to-earth, so real, so cheerful, so simple. I would pick up a tomato. Its skin was tight and smooth, but it had weight in my hand. The color was simply red, with a green belly button. There was no subtlety, no shading, no hidden prickliness. The tomato was what it was. It wasn’t proud of what it was, it just was. I wanted very much for my life to be like that. As simple as a tomato. I now saw that tomato standing before me.
• • •
I was painting in my living room on 83rd and West End Avenue. It was a self-portrait. I was painting over one of the desperate, unhappy self-portraits I’d painted earlier. I was painting over the image of who I once was, not realizing at the time that underneath it was a much truer reflection than the superficial makeup application that transformed the painting into a perfect flawless image that was pure wish-fulfillment.
“Dillinger’s balls are in the Smithsonian Institution,” Joey said.
“What?”
Joey was constantly interrupting my painting—my life, actually.He hung around, bugged me, bothered me, and watched my apartment from the phone booth across the street all night. Asked my dates for a light for his cigarette as they left my apartment building at two a.m.
Joey and I had become friends the summer before, when I was doing Silk Stockings on the summer circuit. He had his dad’s car and offered to drive Dinah, her nanny, and me to the many theaters we performed in over the course of the summer season. It was not only convenient. It was fun. It was easy. Joey worshipped me. And Joey was, at that time, the tomato. Uncomplicated, uneducated, unsophisticated. The plumber-dancer of my dreams. Ten years younger than me, a boy. We had no future together. He was a great friend and a great pain in the ass. Did I mention that I easily submitted to him, at the Baywood Motel in Maryland? He wore me down.
And he protected me. I had to take a train into the city at some point. He went with me. We were the only passengers on a train of railroad cars that must have been retrieved from the train graveyard. The old green cloth seats exhaled clouds of tan dust when you sat down. The windows were clouded with filmy brown stuff. It felt weird and claustrophobic. Suddenly an energetic young conductor walked through. I signaled him.
“Am I on the right train? This one is so dusty, it looks like it hasn’t been in use for years.”
“If you don’t like it, get off,” he said.
I sat back. He walked through the train toward the next car. Suddenly there was a flash of movement, so fast it was a blur. Joey was pushing the conductor toward the opposite wall. The conductor’s eyes looked frightened, his mouth a black O. Joey’s arm was under his chin.
“Don’t you ever talk to her like that!”
It took a minute for me to grasp what had happened, Joey had moved so fast. The conductor apologized. Joey let him go, came back up the aisle, and sat down. But something happened in that instant. I was impressed. By his passion, by his reflexes, by his basic instinct to guard me. All of that washed over me in an instant. I felt safe.
So Joey said, “Dillinger’s cock and balls are preserved in the Smithsonian Institution.”
“Are you crazy?” I yelled. “Why would a reputable institution like the Smithsonian show Dillinger’s cock and balls?”
I was constantly screaming at him. He was constantly shocking me with how his mind worked and what he believed.
“Call them,” I ordered.
“Call the Smithsonian in Washington and find out if Dillinger’s balls are there!”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind.” Enraged, I reached for the phone, dialed information, and got the Smithsonian’s number in Washington, D.C.
“You’re going to ask them,” I hissed, “not me. I’m not going to ask them that question.”
“Good afternoon, Smithsonian Institute.”
“Hello, sir,” I said, ignoring my last command. “I know this is a strange question, but my friend and I have a bet. It was rumored that John Dillinger, the gangster . . . that his private parts—this is not a joke—were preserved in some way and are stored at the Smithsonian.”
There was a pause and an extended silence at the other end of the line. Finally, a kindly, avuncular voice answered.
“No. There is nothing of that kind here.” Pause. “I did hear rumors of that kind of thing traveling with one of those tent shows, though.”
“Sir, sir, I know this is an intrusion, but would you please repeat that to my friend?”
I handed the telephone to Joey and watched his face.
“See! See!” I hissed.
He hung up smiling. “Well, they have them in a tent show. I was right about that!”
“No you were not!” I screamed.
Joey smiled more and relaxed.
He felt more at home when I screamed. In his Italian working-class home in Little Italy, Wilmington, Delaware, everyone yelled. Nobody talked. They yelled over recipes, over incidents, over what time it was! Joey said things that were so outrageous to me, I was constantly reacting with unbridled fury.
“I think Mussolini did a good job.”
“Huh?”
“The trains ran on time.”
“Get out!”
“What did I say?”
“Just get out!”
“When can I come back?”
“Never, learn your history!”
“All right. Tell me what I said wrong?”
And I would tell him and we would yell some more.
I had never yelled before in my life. I never remember my parents raising their voices. I had discovered my endless rage in an exercise at the Neighborhood Playhouse at sixteen or seventeen. In acting I had plenty of anger. In life it was dangerous, up to that point, to express anger and not hurt someone’s feelings deeply, like my parents’. I certainly couldn’t show anger to Arnie. Actually, I never felt anger toward Arnie. I was completely cowed and confused, but never allowed myself to feel angry. I was angry at my country, and had found a way to express it, in a way. With Joey it was like kindergarten anger. It was real, but not bitter. It was fun. It was kind of normal. We were good enough friends for me to yell at him. And it was for his own good. For us to be friends, he’d better bone up on Mussolini, and on everything I’d lived through. I couldn’t abide the ignorance.
But this was a very comfortable relationship for me. It could never go anywhere permanent, but it was a new kind of being together that felt interesting at the time. I was the older one. I had a child who came before anyone else. I had a career that came before anyone else. I had to make money, to be independent of any man.