This was the time, 1964–1965, when Joe Papp succeeded in his vision. The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park was now a reality. Joe Papp. Papirofsky. Joe. Diminutive in size. Handsome. So handsome. Brown hair falling over one eye. Dynamite. He had asked some actors to meet him at Mayor Wagner’s office at City Hall. I was walking down the hall to the last office when I heard Joe’s voice—loud. He was yelling at Mayor Wagner, jumping up and down. He was demanding a theater and a cultural park for the people of New York, and he was literally throwing his weight around, jumping, stomping, punching his fist on the desk, to force the mayor to give it to him. And Joe got it.
In 1964 I finally got to work with him. He would open the season with Hamlet; he asked me to read for the following play, Electra. I got the part. Joe set me up with a breathing and speech teacher.
Electra is for a woman what Hamlet is for a man. She has lost her father, hates her mother, and longs for her soldier brother to return. It is, of course, Greek tragedy and to me the key to the tragedies of my own life. My training was there for me to use, fully. There wasn’t one line that I had as Electra that I hadn’t written an equivalent of for myself, that took me deep and deeper into Electra and into myself. We were, in that period, a perfect fit.
I had so much bitterness, rage, and anguish bottled up inside me, from my marriage to Arnie and my loss of the boys to my long battle with the government, the FBI, and other groups I had fought and abhorred for twelve years. Electra was the first part that allowed me to release everything I’d held inside for so long.
The series debut, Hamlet, had been televised and sent out to millions of American homes. It was a disaster; it ruined the career of a very good actor, Alfred Ryder, who had a very bad night. (Alfred’s sister, Olive Deering, was famous in those years for her sentiments during her filming of the endless DeMille epic The Ten Commandments: “Who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?”)
Electra was supposed to be televised but wasn’t because of Alfred’s disaster. I was relieved. I knew that the work I did would have compromised me; for me, the camera was an intruder.
In those days, we performed seven days a week. I was exhausted, and the doctor from the first floor on 83rd Street was giving me B12 shots. I was literally crawling onstage. The designer had built a ramp from the lake in the park to the twenty-foot-high grotto I pushed through to make my entrance. In my mind it was the dungeon of my past Electra was kept in, crawling out to open the gates. “Thou holy light, thou sky that art earth’s canopy” was my Electra, yearning for freedom from the dark, the past, and her bottled-up need to take revenge on those who had submerged her and kept their heels on her neck for so long. Electra was not a charmer; she was primal, that animal part of me bursting to get out.
Once during Electra, it was still light at eight at night—or it could have been a matinee in those days—and it started to pour. I wore a heavy, blood-colored dress designed by Theoni Aldredge, and the bottom was soaked through. With the cold rain pouring down, I splashed around the wet stage, dragged my soaked skirt with my hands. Olympia Dukakis, who played my sister, came on. She stood facing the audience, declaring her lines, while I stood with my back to them, hissing, “Get me off this fucking stage. Tell them to stop the show. It’s raining too hard to move.”
Her eyes widened in alarm, but her lines went on.
“Tell them,” I hissed.
I turned to face the audience. No one had moved, but a sea of newspapers floated over their heads. Troupers. A little thing like the rain wasn’t going to stop Joe’s audience, Joe’s people. I learned my lesson from him and from them.
• • •
I’d reached my apex as an actor in Electra. My Method training, the breath and speech work, and my own life collided and exploded. It was as close to my best work and passion as I would ever reach in the theater.
It was also the only time I took the challenge of carrying the play.
Everything depended on me.
Many times since I was offered great roles, real challenges.
I was afraid.
Resistant.
Electra was the only true risk. If I’d stayed with Joe Papp, I think my talent would have grown and grown. I had no fear with him leading us.
• • •
There’s a life-string that began the next season at the Public and has taken me to the present, today. It was the summer after Electra. I was rehearsing another play for Shakespeare in the Park. It was a wonderful, hot New York day. I was standing onstage, facing Central Park West. I’d become one of the Joe Papp actors. It was a good time. Dinah was in third grade in a public school a block from our building on West End Avenue. She walked to school. Phyllis Raab called me at rehearsal. She was hysterical.
“I’ve taken a job for you. I’ve signed the contract. Don’t you dare say no. You have a child to support and no money.” Her voice continued to rise. “And don’t you yell at me. You’re leaving for L.A. next week.”
“I can’t. I’m opening As You Like It in a week.”
• • •
I left for L.A. The job was Peyton Place, the most-watched show in America. I completely fucked over the man I was most grateful to.
Joe Papp didn’t speak to me for years, but I had to go.
Phyllis knew I had no money. I was thirty-four. I felt I had only till forty, six more years, to work in television and film before my age and looks caught up with me. In theater I was accepted. But the theater could never pay the bills. Hollywood was where I had been barred. It was where the blacklist began for my artist friends. I was off the blacklist. Whatever success I might have, there would also be a kind of revenge. For me, for all of us. Actors. Writers. When my character, Stella Chernak, was introduced, Peyton Place was on television three nights a week. Three new stories a week. Mia Farrow, Ryan O’Neal, Barbara Parkins, Dorothy Malone. They were gods and goddesses and members of the audience’s family.
Phyllis was right. She grabbed it, grabbed me, and threw me right into the big world, big exposure, and for me, big, steady money. Getting back at the blacklist. Showing them took over my life.
• • •
I don’t know what good angel led me to the great Pool House I rented in the Malibu Colony. The Colony was a gated, exclusive community, separated from the Pacific Coast Highway by a wall. A Bank of America was just over the Colony wall, its sign reflected in my pool. That first day I threw myself, clothes and all, into the watery Bank of America, splashed the B, kicked the A, lay back on the whole damn thing and looked up at the blue, blue California sky. Dinah and I were not only safe; this was fun, freedom—a new world.
The New York Times printed a letter from Robert Brustein, who at the time was the dean of the Yale Drama School. I’d been asked to do a piece in the Entertainment section about transitioning to L.A. I’d written what I’ve written here about Malibu. The dean called me a sellout; he was in a fury against those of us whom he accused of abandoning the theater. It was so gloves-off academia, so far from the reality of an actor’s life that it made me smile. Ah, yes—a sellout at last!
Three TV shows in New York, one in London. An independent movie filmed in my apartment, summer in Central Park doing Electra with Joe Papp, and then suddenly a magic ride that spun out of control and landed me on Peyton Place. There must be some mistake. The heavy past I’d been carrying seemed to be slipping away. Now, hand in hand with twenty-five-year-old Joey, I was the youngest midthirties woman in Malibu. Old paranoia, caution, disbelief, clutched me—was I really getting away with this? But it dissolved into sheer, blind bliss. I was safe.
I ran on the beach, arms out, and ran and ran until I ran myself out. Hands on knees, panting, my feet in the ocean—this was a miracle.
• • •
My first time on the set of Peyton Place was a night shoot. It was with Don Quine, the actor who played my troublemaker brother, Joe. The scene went fast—everything went fast, they had a half-hour show to film. They had built a new set on the Twentieth Century lot. A waterfront—with water. The Chernak family’s home base, on the wrong side of town.
When I watched the show, my name wasn’t listed in the credits. I called my agent at William Morris and asked for an appointment with Paul Monash, the show producer.
I went into Paul’s office by myself. Just the two of us. He was a good guy or he wouldn’t have hired me. I knew that. I asked him why my name wasn’t listed with the rest of the cast at the end of the show. Paul said he was going to ease it in; he was waiting to see if there was a reaction to casting me after the blacklist.
I told him, “If my name’s not listed with the other actors, I won’t work. Replace me. I’ve fought too hard to use my name. I want to be listed with the other actors. Be brave and take a chance. Audiences don’t look at credits, anyway.”
He understood. From then on, my name was there with the other actors’.
The other thing I needed to raise with him was how I looked on-screen. This was an issue that would both free me and cripple me as an actress in the years to come. I looked terrible in the waterfront scene. I knew I wouldn’t work in Hollywood if I didn’t look good, and I was up against great natural young beauties like Mia Farrow and Barbara Parkins.
“The waterfront set was lit,” I told Paul, “but not me, certainly not with the care that’s taken with the other women on the show.”
Dorothy Malone, who was older, was not easy to light, but great care was taken. He understood this was a practical question. I had a new career to protect, and looking beautiful was a simple employment issue. Nobody on TV or watching TV cared about your quality as an actress or your talent. Talent was my secret weapon. But to survive in Hollywood, I had to physically fit the town’s requirements for a young woman. I had to be pretty, and I had to be cute and funny on set. No trouble at all. I understood that. I was fortunate. Ted Post, from my Actors Studio days, was one of three directors, and I worked with a DP who surpassed all dreams I might have had. He knew about lights I’d never even heard of. A master.
I loved, loved my job. I was the only bad-girl character, so I reaped the cream of the drama three days a week. My character’s father was sick and dying, my brother was in trouble all the time; now he was fighting with Ryan O’Neal. I was having a secret on-screen romance with the doctor, Ed Nelson. Omigod! I was having such a good time and got to cry on camera at least once a week.
• • •
While I was on Peyton Place, Oscar Levant started calling me. Joey handed me the phone one afternoon. “It’s Oscar Levant,” he hissed.
“Really?”
So began a long-term phone affair between Oscar and Stella Chernak from Peyton Place. Oscar would interrupt himself in the middle of his monologue, hearing his wife’s footsteps. “Uh-oh, June’s coming,” he’d rasp, and quickly hang up.
“I want to meet June,” I interrupted on one of those calls, though I knew the fun of it for him was cheating with Stella.
I loved his calls.
“Listen to this, listen to this,” and he’d tell me hoarsely about bad reviews of plays that opened on Broadway a half a century ago, like Judith Anderson’s terrible reviews for Hamlet and Sarah Bernhardt’s reviews as a one-legged man—all about women playing men. He’d chuckle over each bad review as if the plays had opened on Broadway the night before.
I felt privileged sitting on the floor of the sun-drenched living room. Hidden behind a big yellow plaid armchair, I would sink to the thick carpet and listen to bits and pieces of whatever was on his curious mind. I would listen sometimes for an hour before Oscar hurriedly hung up as he heard his wife’s footsteps.
After we’d moved to the Red House I insisted that Oscar visit with June. So the wife and the faux mistress hugged as co-conspirators. Oscar’s phone affair ended, and June invited Joey and me to dinner at their house in Beverly Hills.
To me, Oscar was a real celebrity—he was George Gershwin’s best friend, for God’s sake. I heard him play “Rhapsody in Blue” in an open-air amphitheater one warm New York summer when I was thirteen, my freshman year at Music & Art. There are pieces of music that dig into your soul when you’re a teenager. “Rhapsody” was music to faint by—romance, loss, spring rain on pavement, longing. And here now was the artist who awakened all that in me. Oscar Levant, my new friend.
We were introduced to Oscar’s longtime friend Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia Records, and his beautiful wife, the ballerina Vera Zorina.
Someone, Vera Zorina maybe, said, “Play for us, Oscar.”
“No, no,” he said. “The piano isn’t tuned,” mumble, mumble. “The Steinway people spy on me.”
“Oh please, Oscar,” I pleaded, “please, please play Chopin, play Chopin for us.” Right out of some bad MGM movie. I was his muse, Hepburn-like, leading the fading artist back to his glory.
We all moved to the music room. The others sat around while I, center stage, stood by the piano, encouraging him with my smile.
Oscar plunged into Chopin fiercely, attacking the piano, his face flushed with music and focus. His hand hit dead keys.
Half of the keys didn’t work.
Goddard moved forward in his chair, puzzled and concerned.
The finale’s powerful chords were punctuated by farts escaping with each effort; with each passionate chord Oscar rose from the piano bench accompanied by farts, whilst I, the muse, stood by him at the piano, my smile frozen on my face.
Everyone was quiet as I stole to a chair and sat.
“For God’s sake, Oscar,” Goddard said, “get the piano fixed. You can’t play that.”
“No, no,” Oscar said, “the Steinway people will take it from me, they gave me the piano, and I haven’t done a concert in years.”
“Get it tuned.”
“No, the tuner is a spy for Steinway.”
Not long afterward, Oscar went into an upscale mental facility for treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He called from there often with gossip about his fellow patients.
• • •
The houses on the beach side of the Colony opened right onto the white sand and the blue ocean. Lana Turner lived there, Jimmy Dunn from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Lots of big film people: Hal Ashby, my friend Susan Strasberg, Lee’s daughter, and Susan’s daughter, Jenny, by that wild actor Christopher Jones. Jenny, born with a defective heart. Ryan O’Neal lived on the beach and still does. Dorothy Malone lived on the beach side of the Colony, too. She had cast parties there all the time. Dorothy was a really nice, good lady. She had a long, mostly B-picture career and was a sun worshipper from the era when tall, blond, and tan won the guys.
Barbara Parkins was a nice girl and a nice actress. She had small features and dark hair that somehow blended into great beauty in front of the camera, like a miracle. Her close-ups literally took your breath away.
“Who is that?” I’d say.
“It’s that nice Barbara Parkins.”
Mia was a puzzle. She looked like Alice in Wonderland when I came on the show—an odd, lovely waif, there and not there at the same time.
“Was I good?” she asked once after a scene.
“How do I know?” I answered. “I was in the scene, not watching you.”
She was curious. Her agent kept telling her how great she was, and she wanted to know if he was right, if other people agreed. She brought her big deaf white cat to the makeup trailer. It was stifling inside because she insisted that the doors be closed so that the cat wouldn’t escape. But she also insisted that the cat not be on a leash or in a cage. Cats should be free, so the humans having their makeup and hair done with sweat streaming down their backs had to adjust. Soon after, Mia cut off all that lovely Alice in Wonderland hair. She showed up in the makeup trailer, like a beautiful haunted boy/girl, backing away into the corners because she’d made the front page.
“Allison cuts her hair off.”
This was the hot topic in every American household. And what did Frank think? Mia was engaged to Frank Sinatra at the time. Peyton Place not only survived the hair-cutting but made out on it. Pictures of the pale, shorn Mia with her fragile neck standing next to Frank Sinatra on his yacht appeared in every tabloid.
Mia, as I later came to find out, had polio when she was a child, in the years when it was regarded as “the plague.” All her siblings fled the house in Beverly Hills; her father, a well-known director, left. She was very sick, isolated in her home with her mother for almost a year. Mia’s adoption of multiple children, some blind or crippled, and her loving them into independent, kind adolescents came out of that period of isolation.
Her ambition had been to become a doctor. She went into acting to help support her family after her father died. The impulse to cut her hair off, like Jo in Little Women, came from that core need to be herself, independent and strong, and break the image of Mia as Allison, the gentle romantic little girl from Peyton Place. And she did.
After my first season on Peyton Place, I was nominated for an Emmy. Entering the banquet hall, I was terrified a hand from the FBI would touch my shoulder, turn me in.
False identification, posing as a what? I remember walking across my first red carpet, wearing my first formal dress since high school, heart pounding with fear of being exposed: “This woman is an imposter; the real Lee Grant is un-American, blah, blah, blah.”
As I was standing backstage shaking, Frank Sinatra walked over to me. He was there with Mia. His eyes were a steady blue. He took my ice-cold hand in his warm one. He knew. Everything. And was on my side, and was saying Cool it without a word.
I’m so astonished these moments are still inside of me.
And I won. I won. From three nights a week Peyton Place could have gone to five. The line between the audience and the characters on the show was so fine. My character’s father died on a Friday. Saturday afternoon I drove into Santa Monica to buy shoes. I was trying them on when the clerk who was waiting on a lady nearby crept over to me.
“Excuse me,” he said. “That lady wants to know, isn’t today your father’s funeral?”
“Tell her,” I said, “that’s why I’m buying the shoes. I’m going to the cemetery right after I leave here.”
The lady, the clerk, and I nodded conspiratorially at one another and I left.
All those smart Hollywood people who knew all about me never spoke about it, but opened up homes, hearts, work, till Shampoo pushed me over the top. After three Oscar nominations I took home the gold and another nomination to follow. Twelve good years, following the twelve bad ones.
Even so, I was becoming my own worst enemy as an actor, traumatized onstage and fixated on staying young so I could keep working in film.
A woman of a certain age does not play in movies or TV; we’re kicked to the side or out. And I was a woman of a certain age, terrified I’d be found out and unemployed again. Not by HUAC, but by plain old Hollywood standards for women on-screen. Plain old reality, too old.
Driving my Bentley down the Pacific Coast Highway, I heard on the radio: “. . . and today is the birthday of blah, blah, and Lee Grant.” I pulled over, breathing hard. They could find out my age! I drove home and told Joey. As a birthday gift that year, Joey called my publicist, Dale Olsen, and arranged to have my name and birth date removed from the celebrity birthday roster.