• 5 •

Gentlemen Don’t Always Prefer Blondes

It was no accident that Los Angeles was often referred to as “movietown.” Movies, and everything to do with them, were at the heart of the city. Fantasy was manufactured there, and celluloid, rather than flesh-and-blood people, formed the basis of its culture. Oh, there were multiple subcultures—black folk in a seething slum section known as Watts; legal and illegal Latino immigrants struggling to make enough to just put food on the table. Fantasy from the dream factories supplied little nutrition. However, in areas like Beverly Hills, where I had spent so many years of my life, for its rich and famous film colony (not fully representative of the incorporated city’s twenty thousand or so residents), dream and fantasy had overtaken reality. The current movie that looked like a blockbuster was the “must see” on most people’s agenda. If you wanted to attend new plays with their original casts, you had to go to New York City—a journey only a privileged few could afford—or wait for a successful show to be dehumanized for the screen. I was as much a dreamer as anyone. Still, I grew up with vaudeville in my genes and always felt starved for the electricity of live performances.

There had been (and remained) a dearth of theaters devoted to stage works in the Los Angeles area. Touring companies occupied a few venues from time to time. Young hopefuls studied the craft and appeared in tried-and-true vehicles at the Pasadena Playhouse with the dream of being discovered by a studio and placed under contract. On the other hand, London theater was a magnificent feast with no taste excepted. There were over one hundred venues where Shakespeare, drawing-room comedy, music hall, pantomimes (great for the children and young at heart during Christmas holidays), straight drama, musicals, and burlesque (where actors dressed in drag and seasoned their acts with salty humor) were available. I loved every form and would quite often attend by myself. With so many stages, it seemed a new playwright would have more of a chance to secure a production in London than anywhere in the States, including New York City. I was hopeful (make that “giddy”) with the prospect of possibly getting a play produced.

My approach to Sally Sunday was influenced to a large extent by what was currently happening in British theater, specifically at the Royal Court on Sloane Square. The premises had a long significant history, first opening as a theater in 1870 where several of William S. Gilbert’s early plays had been staged (before his collaboration on comic operas with Arthur S. Sullivan). In that era there had also been a stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and of Arthur Pinero’s The Magistrate. The building was demolished in 1887, rebuilt a year later, and christened the New Court Theatre, becoming a leading venue for works by George Bernard Shaw. Badly damaged during the Blitz in World War II, it reopened entirely refurbished in 1952 once again as the Royal Court, bringing with its rise the rebirth of a great theater history and reputation under the artistic directorship of George Devine, who was determined it would be a “writers’ theater,” a place where new authors could produce serious, contemporary works. He formed the English Stage Company and was constantly on the prowl for new writers with fresh ways of saying things.

The Royal Court was an easy walk from Markham Street but located a distance from London’s heavily populated and thriving theater district, set apart not only by its position but by the plays it elected to produce. The Mulberry Bush by Angus Wilson, which premiered in April 1956, was the impetus for the new wave that soon overtook much of Britain’s mid-twentieth-century theater. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger followed one month later and created a storm of outcries among most critics and theater stalwarts but was a clarion wake-up call of what they could expect would follow. (Only the acerbic, young critic Kenneth Tynan thought it a worthy play and I agreed, returning several times to see it.)

Look Back in Anger was a social drama, real down to its dilapidated kitchen set, a bucket to catch leaks from the roof center stage while the beleaguered female lead ironed away on a rickety board for a good part of the action. This new play style was swiftly named the “Kitchen Sink School,” and presented its audiences with an image of abject poverty not previously showcased in the twentieth century. Audiences took note. Osborne’s play did for English theater what Tennessee Williams’s and Arthur Miller’s works had done for the American drama. Major numbers of theater audiences were now exposed to a present-day world most often alien and very far from their own.

Doris rang me a few days after I had left Sally Sunday with her concierge. Although it needed work, she liked it. Would I have tea with her? Of course, I agreed. Doris thought the play would be better set in Miami Beach where such ambition for a doctor was perhaps more understandable than England—a country that had converted to a national health plan. I did not entirely agree with this as I had met during my medical sojourns some very ambitious English doctors who also had private practices. Still, after serious consideration, I went along with this idea. She optioned it for her company, Albion Productions, and I went back to revise what I had written. Doris always sounded on the edge of some major emotional collision. The need to succeed, to prove herself a real theater person, was palpable. Her New England family was moneyed, and everything in her youth had pointed to a marriage to some rich, Jewish scion. She wanted to be an actress, went to New York, and was unable to get past first auditions, but worked hard at any theater-related experience and ended up on the production staff of a black musical called Blue Holiday. She met Gerald Abrahams (both rich and Jewish) when he was in Manhattan on a business trip and shortly thereafter followed him to London where they were married. After the birth of two daughters, she joined London producer Oscar Lewenstein’s company raising money for many of his productions, while furthering her career as a producer.

With an agreeable husband, generous with his support, a luxurious flat ideal for large social parties, and the money to throw them, Doris’s festive gatherings usually included local and visiting celebrities, wealthy potential theater backers, and a hungry young playwright or two. Her parties were often the starting place for a deal to be struck and a play to be born.

I liked Doris. She was honest and straightforward as well as intelligent and feeling. I know she financially helped many young playwrights during their lean days. It took a long time for her to gain the respect of her peers, partly I suspect because she was a woman—and a rich one, at that. However, she possessed a strong sense of what good theater could be and the ability to recognize untested talent as promising. She mounted a regional theater production of one of Tom Stoppard’s early plays, Enter a Free Man. Young playwrights were her shining prizes, the theater—her life’s spark. At times her wound-up personality could be trying. She had a nervous laugh and a speaking voice that was often grating. Besides its high register, she had trained it into an eccentric accent that was a cocktail mix of Boston nasal and Knightsbridge head cold sieved through a mesh strainer. In all fairness, Doris Cole Abrahams was not the only American living in England who had adapted a form of spoken English that they considered tony. It was an affectation I did not admire. Despite the dark period of McCarthyism at home, I felt proud of my nationality and determined to hang on to my American speech. I found this equally true of most of my compatriots in the expat society, mainly, perhaps, because they clung together and did not mix often with the Brits on a social level. Twenty years later, taxi drivers would assume I was a tourist! It always amused me. I understood that Doris needed to belong, while many expats, including myself, were mainly fighting to survive. I also realized that her part in our friendship was driven somewhat—curious though it seemed—by envy. She would often remind me that she could not be as free as I was. Lack of a specific talent or position and a moneyed husband held her back.

“In what way?” I once asked her.

“Well, you create. I have to wait for a writer to do that for me. You don’t have to answer to anyone, nor are you always reminded that you have a name or position to uphold.” The last was a reference to my being able to have an open affair if I so wished, for Doris was more than once strongly attracted to the young male playwrights she sponsored.

I cannot count the times I had either read the book or seen the various film adaptations of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. My favorite movie version was British and starred the veteran English actor Alastair Sim (he of the most unique physiognomy) as a memorable Scrooge. In all versions, snow fell upon the streets and rooftops of London Town and goose was served for Christmas dinner. Dickens seemed to have taken literary license regarding the arrival of a white Christmas. Mostly, during the early days of my residency, it had rained, skies were grumpy gray, and the houses in which I dwelled (and visited) damp despite wood-burning fires and multiple electric heaters. The dampness in London during the winter months penetrates to, and through, one’s bones and is the reason those with some resources, however slight, holiday abroad during that season. Others of us who could not go off to sunnier climes for whatever reason, pulled an extra sweater over our heads and drank a lot of hot tea. For Christmas 1959, flakes—if not a full snowstorm—had been forecast and I decided to prepare for the holiday in Dickensian fashion.

As my family never celebrated Christmas, this would be my first and I wanted it to be something special: one that would erase all the public Christmas images during my previous life in Southern California where the sun was guaranteed to shine, snow was something unheard of, and street Santas at Yuletide wore sunglasses. The fashion in Beverly Hills for years had been to spray a magnificent evergreen, cut down for a holiday tree, blue, pink, white, or silver, the scent of pine overcome by the lacquer in the paint. These freak specimens—frequently towering and adorning front lawns—were then decorated in a fantasia of ornaments that carried out a theme—often of a current movie. There were Mickey Mouse trees, cowboy trees, bow-bedecked trees, and butterfly trees. Houses had huge lighted displays: Santa and his reindeer riding a sleigh over the red-tiled roof of an adobe bungalow; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs guarding a painted white tree covered with apples; Peter Pan and Tinker Bell topped another that I remember.

Holiday gifts had been a big deal in the Hollywood that I had left—those for the A list, B list, C list, and so on. In the movie colony, what you received for Christmas often defined where you stood socially and the successful work you had done the previous year. Before my onset of polio, I had been the story editor for a television anthology program called Schlitz Playhouse of the Stars. One Christmas, I received a huge record player, set in a handsome, tall mahogany chest, that not only played the records, it turned them over. The next Christmas, spent in the hospital, I received a letter of kind apology from the producers stating that my services were no longer required. With the forecast of snow glistening like sugar icing on the white streets of London, I planned my first real Christmas dinner. When I was a child this had been a nonholiday in our house. My religious training had been scant—actually overlooked. My mother was born into a Jewish family but became a devout Christian Scientist when a severe, lingering illness struck her directly after my birth (cured by her belief in Christian Science, she declared). Still, she could not bring herself to honor Jesus on that occasion. My father was also of Jewish heritage. However, his family had immigrated to Sweden from Spain during the Inquisition and there had been about four centuries of intermarriage. I don’t recall that my paternal grandfather, Big Charlie, followed any religion. However, he was never united with us on any holiday. My ex-husband’s grandparents (on the Rossen side), although not strictly orthodox, considered the celebration of Christmas a corruption of Jewish belief and I had respected their belief. Now I thought we three should free ourselves of the persuasions of others. In doing so, I was determined to go with Mr. Dickens.

A Christmas tree lot had been set up near the old soldiers’ home that backed on King’s Road just a few streets from our house. I purchased a huge one, branches outstretched like a lover’s open arms and a tip that reached at least seven feet. Two ruddy-cheeked teenage boys working there delivered it and had a terrible struggle getting it through our door. Finally, after they hacked off about a foot, it stood erect and commanding in a corner of the sitting room. I gave each of them a pound and whatever change I had, much to the annoyance of Mrs. Barnes who deemed it far too generous. I organized Michael and Cathy to string cranberries and popcorn (that we made and ate gobs of as we worked), which we draped over the tree’s limbs along with silver tinsel and red and silver balls purchased from Peter Jones along with some cotton batting to cover the base. At the top was a beautiful angel with golden hair and flecks of silver on her wings that glistened in the ceiling light when it was turned on. We three stood back and viewed our work. It was, we agreed, the most beautiful Christmas tree we had ever seen.

Then came plans for Christmas dinner. I invited five of my English friends who were familyless—making us eight in all. In Mr. Dickens’s Christmas story, dinner was a roast goose. Now, I had never eaten or cooked a goose (I don’t believe they were easily available in the States where I had lived). But how difficult could it be? They were fowl like chicken, turkey, and duck and I had roasted my share of them. I marched over to Harrods’ giant food halls (a terrific extravagance—but this was to be we three’s first real Christmas dinner).

Harrods’ food halls were a wonderland, vast and filled with individual stalls devoted to voluptuous displays of every variety of food—cheese (the strong aroma announced its presence), fruits, vegetables, pastries (sweet and savory—always looking much more appetizing than they tasted), smoked fish (kippers, salmon, herrings, and eel), meats (cured and fresh, butchers standing at the ready with an array of gleaming knives and hatchets), dozens of fresh-caught fish (small eyes, big eyes, eyes glassy in death, yet staring—I zipped past this stall as quickly as I could), seafood (cockles, whelks, periwinkles, prawns, and limpets), game (during hunting season a colorful mélange of feathers and fur), and of course every creature with wings, most still feathered, from the tiniest bird to the larger species, many I had never seen before—and certainly had never consumed. This is the stall at which I stopped. A ruddy-faced man in a huge white apron, slightly blood splattered, came forward and asked if he could serve me. I told him I wanted a goose large enough for eight people and some leftovers. He stepped back behind the marble counter and then disappeared through a rear door, returning with two dead feathered creatures that I assumed were geese, each clutched in a hand by their spindly yellow feet. He suggested I might prefer the larger one if I was thinking as well of lunch on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas and a national holiday). I asked to have its head and feet cut off.

“The feet, madam?” he inquired disapprovingly.

“Yes, also plucked clean and delivered.” I did not know what the British cook did with the feet of a fowl, but I knew seeing them on a serving plate would turn me off.

The only cookbook I owned was an American volume. No recipe for roast goose was included. So I ambled over to our neighborhood bookstore and bought an English cookery book that contained not one, but several, methods to roast a goose. Christmas morning, after we three had opened our presents, I went down to the kitchen and started my dinner preparations. Mrs. Barnes was off for the two-day holiday. I was on my own. I baked two pies and many side dishes with proud results. Then, carefully following the recipe that seemed the simplest in the volume I had purchased, prepared the goose, placed it in a roasting pan, and shoved it into the oven.

Nose-tickling aromas floated up to the ground floor where I was setting a festive table while my goose roasted. The BBC program on the radio issued forth cheerful Yuletide music. The children were upstairs in their rooms involved with their new gifts. I was a most happy woman.

When I took the goose out of the oven at the appointed time, I knew something was decidedly wrong. A probe with a fork released a gusher of fat and had been a struggle to pierce through the skin. I stepped back with a touch of horror. Surely this could not be the same bird I had placed in the oven. It now swam in a sea of fat and had shrunken horridly, reminding me of the scene in the film Lost Horizon where the ever-youthful Margo, having dared to leave the land of never aging, morphed into a shriveled hag of a century-old lady. Whatever was I to do?

I remembered holidays past (not Christmases) when my mother made a Thanksgiving turkey and in removing it from its roasting pan, had let it slip out of her grasp—turkey and gravy splattering all about on the floor. The door to the kitchen had been open and the scene visible to the expectant diners. But Marion did not lose her cool. She had thrown some dish towels on the floor, so as not to slip, then taken pot holders and lifted the turkey onto the counter, placed it on the tray she had already prepared (with sliced oranges and parsley for decoration), pressed the severed joints of the bird where they anatomically belonged, and then with the help of some of us carried the tray into the dining room and went on with slicing what she could and serving it. No one had said a word. (However unhygienic, the turkey was—to my memory—delicious.)

Then there was the time that Sue Rossen’s cook made a huge standing rib roast for my family engagement party (I believe there were twelve of us) and let it rest in the pan on the opened door of the oven while she and an aide went into the dining room to remove the dishes from our first course. There was a mighty crash that came from the kitchen and the sudden appearance of Leo, the Rossens’ massive, bearlike dog (part St. Bernard I believe, and generally the gentlest of God’s creatures), the huge roast clasped between his large jaws as he dragged it across the dining room and into a corner where he dropped it and squatted down, contemplating his kidnapped meal. Bob had risen from the table and ordered us out into cars where we continued our celebration at a local restaurant.

Although equally disconcerting, my situation was not comparable. I could not afford to take us all out to dinner—and most probably could not find a restaurant to accommodate eight walk-in guests on Christmas Day. I had the choice of disposing of the goose and serving a vegetarian meal from the side dishes I had made, or adapting my mother’s attitude and just get on with it. So I lifted the goose from its lake of viscous yellow melted fat, patted it as dry as I could with a clean towel, and placed it on a silver platter. The monogram HRH had intrigued me when I bought the tray, even though I knew it could not stand for His or Her Royal Highness. More likely it had belonged to someone with a name like Horace Rippington Hugglesmith. I garnished the platter with holly and crab apples, made a quick white gravy of flour, milk, and butter, spiced it up a bit (the pan drippings were just too loathsome to use), filled a silver gravy boat (with still another monogram), and with some assist carried it upstairs and set it down on the table to a burst of applause from my guests. There was very little flesh on the bird and what there was proved to be so tough that it was almost impossible to carve. I was somewhat saved by the tastiness of the rest of the food and the good manners of my guests (or perhaps the English liked their goose tough and greasy!). To my puzzlement, they left on their plates no remnants except the bare bones of their scanty servings.

Doris rang to tell me that she was entertaining the following Sunday night (theaters were almost all closed on Sunday) and wanted to be sure I would attend. She was having some theater people from the States as well as those who were local, and the American actress Donna Reed and her husband, the agent, Tony Owen, who she knew were friends of mine. Donna had won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in From Here to Eternity (but probably was best remembered for her role as Jimmy Stewart’s wife in It’s a Wonderful Life). We had met in Hollywood when I was story editor for Schlitz Playhouse of the Stars. Her career had not been going too well of late. She had recently arrived in London to film Beyond Mombasa (years later she would regain stardom on American television with The Donna Reed Show).

“It’s Sunday,” Doris added. “Not too dressy. Black cocktail dress, something like that. Come in a taxi, but our chauffeur will drive you home.”

The little black dress was almost a uniform in London and New York in the fifties, brought to popularity I believe by Coco Chanel. Unfortunately I did not own one. I had taken to wearing silk evening pants with an attractive, and a bit dressy, blouse which I could alternate to make a new outfit when needed. Despite Katharine Hepburn’s and Marlene Dietrich’s penchant for them, pants were an avant-garde fashion and seldom (if ever) worn at the time in the salons of London. I felt extremely comfortable in them and they looked good on me so I had included them in my limited wardrobe. I was the only woman in pants that evening—deep purple ones with a cyclamen-pink blouse that was sashed around my waist. Doris wore a midcalf, black taffeta Dior with one blazing diamond pin. She had hired a pianist and he was playing a set of Cole Porter songs, which no one in the crowded room appeared to be listening to as they chattered and laughed and mingled while a uniformed maid and a butler in tails walked among them with drinks and cocktail bits on silver trays with DCA’s very own monogram.

Suddenly, I felt a man’s arm around my waist. I turned. “Jule Styne,” he announced.

“Anne Edwards,” I replied.

“Do you belong to someone here?”

I laughed. “I don’t belong to anyone,” I emphasized.

“Why are you here?”

“I’m a writer. Our hostess, Doris Cole Abrahams, has an option on a play I’ve just written.”

“I’d like to read it.”

“Why?”

“Well, you are obviously an American who has written a play optioned for English production. That interests me. You interest me. You are the only woman in the room in trousers, purple at that.”

I laughed again.

“And I like your laugh.”

I recognized the name Jule Styne, popular Hollywood songwriter and Broadway composer (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), who probably had composed as many standards as any of his contemporaries. He was in his early fifties, short but well built, dark hair, and winning smile. In no manner an imposing presence, but definitely vital. He was in London to see about a possible British production of one of his more recent shows and, he proudly told me, he was also producing. He was asked to play a song or two of his own composition and he refused. “They hired a pianist,” he said to me. “It’s his piano tonight, not mine.”

Donna and Tony entered, and I excused myself and went over to greet them but soon found Jule once again by my side.

“Let’s get something to eat,” he said.

I looked around nervously.

“Come on. They’ll never notice we’ve gone.”

We went to Iso’s. He liked deli-style food. His office in New York was over a Broadway theater, and Lindy’s Restaurant was around the corner. He ate lunch there every day—or had them send over sandwiches—corned beef or pastrami with sauerkraut. He was born in London, Jewish, working-class East End. His family immigrated to the States when he was eight. They settled in Chicago. He always loved the piano and was good at it—naturally. He was a child prodigy, did some concerts when he was still a kid, nine or ten. The classics. That pleased his mother but not him. He liked the popular music he heard and started composing his own. He just had never stopped. “Hardly a day goes by,” he laughed. His real first name was Julius (like John Garfield, I thought). He asked me a host of questions about myself, and I answered as squarely and honestly as I could.

“Your uncle is Dave Chasen!” he exclaimed at one point. “That seals it. I always eat at Chasen’s when I’m in Hollywood. Dave’s a great guy.”

He was in London for about three weeks, and we saw each other almost daily. I fixed dinner for him and he met the kids. A divorce from his now ex-wife had been bitter. She had the custody of his two sons and they lived in California. More recently he had broken off relations with a French woman, an heiress. “Two worlds,” he explained. “It didn’t work.”

Two days before he was to leave for New York he asked me to meet him at Iso’s for lunch. He talked about his production of the musical version of Peter Pan that had starred Mary Martin. Some of the lyrics had been written by Carolyn Leigh, a young woman he thought was very talented. He went on to say that he had optioned a book by James Thurber, The Wonderful O, which he planned to turn into a musical. His idea was that Carolyn Leigh could write the lyrics and I could write the libretto.

“How about it?” He had brought along a copy of the book, a very slim volume I noted, and handed it to me.

“You want to produce the show here, in London?” I asked.

“No, in the States. I’ll take care of everything if you’ll agree to come to New York and give it a try. So far there’s no official blacklist in the Broadway theater,” he added. Jule knew a lot about many things, music, Broadway, baseball—but he was not politically inclined—or knowledgeable. I wasn’t sure he was right, but it did seem that Broadway had not been hit in the way the movie industry had. Playwright Arthur Miller had been caught in the crossfire. However, had he not been so famous and therefore useful for propaganda, I was not sure that would have been the case. And there were those like the great tragicomic actor Zero Mostel who were still in limbo, along with my good friend Jack Gilford (who had been a regular at Uncle Dave’s home table when he was a young, struggling performer), who had been singled out. There was no guarantee that theaterites would not be brought before HUAC if it was to strike again.

There was also my commitment on Sally Sunday to be considered. I had just finished a rough draft of the new version before my meeting with Jule. However, Doris was presently deeply involved with a play about to be mounted and Sally was not prime on her agenda. Jule said he would fly me back to London if meetings should be required. He was so earnest, so persuasive in his attempt to convince me to join him in New York, that I found myself being swayed. The blacklist remained but the media mania had quieted some. Still, the chance existed that I might have my passport confiscated, and I was wary of being cut off from what I had achieved in England. That was so, I argued with myself, but it might not be a bad idea for we three to return stateside for a time to test the waters and for us to see my mother, who remained separated from my father and was living with my grandmother in Hartford, Connecticut. Marion was the one person I sorely missed and our weekly exchange of letters and occasional overseas telephone conversations (never lasting more than three or four minutes, due to the cost), had not filled the hole our being at such a distance created. Marion had never interfered with my personal life or my choices and her pride in whatever I did always bolstered my spirits. Also, she was a unique and quite wonderful woman despite her weakness where my father was concerned. More importantly, I loved her very much.

“I have to think about it,” I hedged.

He put his smallish hand—small for a pianist, I thought—over mine, grasping it tightly.

“One other thing you have to know,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“I’m crazy about you.”

This was the summer of 1960 and the children were on a school break. Within six weeks we three flew to New York. I was in a nervous state (well concealed, I prayed) until we successfully passed through passport control, with it neatly stamped and returned to me. Jule met our plane at Idlewild Airport and took us to a building on East Eighty-Second Street, near the corner of Fifth Avenue, where he had secured an apartment for we three, owned by playwright Samuel Taylor (author of Sabrina Fair—the “Fair” deleted for the title of the two subsequent film adaptations). Taylor was somewhere in Maine or Vermont or New Hampshire—Jule could not recall exactly where—working on a new play. We were guaranteed the premises for the next six months. There were enough flowers in the flat to have pleased a diva on opening night. Jule’s secretary, Dorothy, had seen to the practical things—food in the fridge, information about the nearest school, and anything else we needed, we were to just call her.

He kissed me lightly as he left (the children were close at hand) and with a light step, flashed a wide smile before heading down the corridor to the elevator. We had been intimate on several occasions during our time together in London and had meshed well. It seemed our bodies had known each other for a long time. Jule was a man with a great deal of love to offer, and I was well aware and accepting of the knowledge that my coming to New York at his request meant we were at the start of an affair. For me this would be newly explored territory as I had not had a sustained sexual relationship for a long time. I felt well loved and most beholden to this talented, spirited, warmhearted man who had given me back my feeling of once again being a complete woman.

We were not living together. Jule had a garden apartment a short distance down and off Fifth Avenue. Mine had only one bedroom (which Jule had not realized as Taylor had assured him it was “plenty big enough for a dame and two small kids”). The rooms were spacious, and it had a bath and a half and a terrific eat-in kitchen. The living room contained a couch that pulled out into a bed. I took the sofa bed and gave the kids the bedroom, which had twin beds. When I opened the closet door in the bedroom the first time, there hung a ranch mink coat—almost full length. On the hanger was attached the note:

“To keep you warm when I can’t. Jule.”

The added bonus to the apartment was that it was situated directly across the street on Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum. Michael immediately became obsessed with the armor room and the mummies. Our building was also around the corner from 1010 Fifth Avenue, where—by exceptional coincidence—the Rossens now owned an apartment, having permanently departed California.

Late one night, just after we had settled in, children asleep and I just beginning to doze off on the sofa bed, I heard the turning of a key in the lock of the front door, then someone swearing and pounding as I had put the chain in place and it was holding. I grabbed a robe, shut the door that led to the bedroom, and picked up a poker that stood by the fireplace. “Who is it?” I called out, firmly grasping my weapon and edging close to the telephone to call for help if needed.

“Who’re you?” came an alcohol-blurred voice through the narrow opening. “Thish is my apartment.”

“You must be wrong. I’m calling the police.” I started to dial the operator.

“My apartment! I’m Sham Taylor,” the intruder slurred.

I cautiously approached the door, phone in one hand, poker in the other.

“Sam-u-el Taylor, the playwright?”

“Yeshhhh, fur God’s shake!”

I put down the phone but held on to the poker as I undid the chain. The man reeled in, almost landing flat on the floor. “Omigod! I almosh furgot! Jule’s girl!” He stumbled over to the sofa and collapsed.

“I am nobody’s ‘girl,’” I protested, “and you are a sorry sight for a landlord!”

He refused to get up and certainly was not considering departing. “I furgot,” he kept mumbling. “Shurry, I furgot. . . .” Then he went off to sleep—soundly with a snore and a snort. I searched in his jacket pocket for his wallet. He was, indeed, Samuel Taylor. There was little I could do at this late hour about his invasion, so I went into the children’s room, jammed a chair in front of the closed door, and crawled into bed with Cathy. My intoxicated landlord was apologetic the next morning, explaining that he had planned to drive north late in the afternoon of the previous day. Then he had stopped to have a drink, then another, and obviously too many more to count. By then, he was too inebriated to consider driving for three hours up the East Coast. He claimed he had forgotten all about renting the premises to Jule—“Chrisssakes, don’t tell him about it!” he insisted.

I gave him some coffee and scrambled eggs, which he ate along with the children, who were simply told “this gentleman is a good friend of Mr. Styne’s.” He left directly after breakfast. I never saw Sam Taylor again, but I did tell Jule what had happened. He was furious. I’m not sure that Jule confronted him, but Dorothy called and assured me nothing like that would ever happen again.

Jule and I soon fell into a routine. I hired a part-time maid-sitter. Several nights a week after dinner, the theater, or an evening with friends we would go back to the garden apartment. The place was quite attractive. I called it “the hideaway” as we never had others in for drinks or dinner. It was always just the two of us . . . and a piano in the front room where he would play songs that he was working on for his new show.

Adapting The Wonderful O into a musical was not easy. The story was more of a cautionary fable, something the brothers Grimm might have relished if they had come back to life. The story was simple: A pirate has committed (by accident) matricide by pushing his mother out of a porthole window in his ship (the porthole thus representing the O in the title). He is overwhelmed with grief and remorse. He captures an island and rules ruthlessly over its people—making them take the letter O out of every word—ah! But when they bring up the word “freedom” they realize they must revolt—and do. Freedom triumphs over dictatorship in the end. I told Jule it really was the Hitler legend—I believe Thurber agreed with that theory. We decided the story had to be lightened and I made more of a satire of it. Cy Coleman was composing the songs, Carolyn writing the lyrics, and Jule acting as producer. One day he came up with what he thought was a terrific idea. As the story progressed, each musical instrument in the orchestra that contained an O (like violin, oboe, piano, saxophone) would be removed. I hated it and Cy was adamant and refused to do it, and that was that.

Carolyn Leigh was an exceptionally gifted lyricist. She was also going through some form of emotional distress that was making working with her almost impossible. A pretty woman in her mid to late twenties, she was borderline obese and a compulsive eater. She insisted that at least once a week, Cy and I work with her at her house in Long Island, a two-hour train journey from the city. Her husband was a successful lawyer and seldom around (I saw him briefly only once as he was leaving). But he had been a great help in boosting her career. As Cy and I traveled by train to and from her home (quite a charming place) we had to leave at a certain time to make the last one that would get us back into town at a decent hour. Carolyn would insist she needed us there just one more hour, then another, and finally we would have to stay overnight. So when we traveled out to the island, I left the kids with Sue. Carole, the Rossens’ older daughter, was now a teenager. Ellen, their youngest, was just a year older than Michael, and Stevie—their only son—in the middle. In many ways it was nice for my kids to have cousins—for their father had totally opted out of any contact before we three had left for England and had not been in touch since.

The nights we remained on the island, neither Cy nor I, occupying the two upstairs guests bedrooms, found it possible to sleep. Carolyn haunted the hallway and staircase—back and forth by our doors, up and back—back and down the staircase. She seemed never to sleep and she carried food with her each time she returned to her bedroom. (Later, when we were left alone in the house for a time, Cy went on a hunt for what she did with all that food—for it seemed impossible that she could have consumed such quantities as we had seen her with. He found a cache of it under her bed: a whole salami, a bottle of pickles, boxes of cookies, pretzels, and heaven knows what else.)

One night my phone rang about three in the morning. Carolyn was calling from the road (or at least that’s where she said she was). She was sobbing, hysterical. I had a hard time calming her down so that I could follow what she was saying. Since she could not sleep, she explained, she had decided to drive into the city. An officer in a police car had pulled her over to the side of the road. He made her get out of the car and walk a line to make sure she was not intoxicated (all this was told through sobs). Then when she was ready to return to her car, he had thrown her down in the grass by the roadside and raped her. It did not sound plausible. But then, such horror stories about good-cop-bad-cop did hit the papers from time to time.

“Where are you calling from?” I asked. She told me she had walked up the road to a gas station, which was not open but had a pay phone. I did not hear any clicking for more change but I accepted what she said on the slight chance that she was telling the truth. I told her I would call the police.

“No! No!” she shouted. “They’re all in cahoots.”

“Where’s your husband?”

“In San Francisco.”

“Did you call Cy?”

“He’s not home.” She made some rude remark about “that aging former movie star, Veronica Lake,” who had been having severe drinking and money problems and who he had befriended.

I told her to stay where she was and somehow I would get help to her. So where exactly was she? At that point we were disconnected. I called the help line and gave them what little information I had. There was nothing more I could think of doing. A few moments later, I decided to call her house and see if her maid knew how to reach Carolyn’s husband. Carolyn answered the telephone and I hung up.

It was obvious that the project was not going well and would never find its way onto a stage. It never did, although Carolyn and Cy did write one marvelous song for the stillborn show, “Witchcraft,” that would later become a popular standard.

My relationship with Jule was fulfilling. He had taken to the children. I’m reminded of the line in a song in Gypsy (for which he would compose the music) that goes “I’m a man who likes children.” Jule did. One night he took Cathy with us to Sardi’s after we had been to the theater. Ethel Merman stopped at our table on the way to her own and made a big fuss over Cathy. “Would you like me to send you an autographed picture?” she asked in her inimitable to-the-back-row voice as Merman and her party were moving on.

“I don’t collect autographs,” my seven-year-old daughter replied to one of Broadway’s greatest musical stars.

It wasn’t long after this, however, that both Jule and I found ourselves in a stressful situation. On my side, I was not really comfortable in the city. I had never spent any time there and the tempo and the people—especially Jule’s friends—seemed more foreign to me than my life abroad. The Rossens were having serious marital problems, which was upsetting. I was totally detached from the liberal political scene and members of the movie industry. The children were attending PS 6, walking distance from our apartment, and one of the best public grammar schools in New York. But my life was so tentative and I was plagued with questions as to how that would affect them. Also, there were the strange working conditions on The Wonderful O. Carolyn’s bizarre behavior continued. Cy pulled back and detached himself. No more working days in Long Island. We met at Jule’s offices on East Fifty-First Street where there was little privacy or quiet space. I could only see failure for the project. Then what would I do?

Although our relationship had not cooled, and Jule was most attentive, he had his own pressures with the writing of his next show and the plays he had taken on to coproduce. We saw each other at least three nights a week ending up back at his apartment. It was an arrangement that made me feel as though I was living a divided life. Then, when we were together, he began receiving late-night telephone calls of a threatening nature. He would hang up the receiver, having turned pale and looking terrified. He kept telling me not to worry. I wanted to help him but he refused to discuss the subject of the calls with me. One night, after receiving such a call, he sank down in a chair, his face ashen. “I think these guys are serious,” he said. He now explained that he owed some gamblers a very large sum of money that he did not have and they had threatened to break every finger on both his hands if he did not pay up.

Jule was an addicted gambler (the horses, baseball games—you name it). I could not understand why I had not seen the signs, having had a father and a husband who had both been addicted gamblers. I was at a loss at what I could do to help him and so I did nothing. Our relationship took a dark turn. Shadows of the past. I knew I could not relive the trauma I had gone through with my children’s father, nor could I place Jule’s problem and how to solve it above the safety and well-being of my children. A week went by, then another, and another. The situation grew more tense. He had managed a down payment on what I now knew was an astronomical debt. The threatening calls continued. Jule was sure gangsters were going to take control of the royalties from his music. It was hard for me to be as empathetic as either of us would have wished. How could he have allowed himself to get this far into debt with people who were obviously dangerous? I didn’t understand gambling or men, I was told. Oh? Didn’t I?

We had our first real fight and it was a lulu. It would be our last. He needed my sympathy and support; I could not rein in my anger that he had not let me know early on how involved he was in gambling (or, perhaps at myself for not recognizing, and dealing with, the situation earlier). The children had a school break coming up soon. They were doing well, but I knew life in New York as a single mother and a writer was not for me. I could not return to Hollywood as I remained unemployable there, at least as far as movies or television were concerned. And as there was no other reason (or person) to go back to, I made arrangements for us to fly to London.

“If you do this, there’s no way back,” Jule furiously warned me.

Two weeks later, after a warm and emotional weekend in Connecticut to see my mother (my father, she told me, was still somewhere in Texas), I packed up our belongings and bought our return tickets to London. I took the mink coat with me—but I left an envelope at Jule’s office with Dorothy. It contained a diamond bracelet Jule had given me for Christmas. Maybe it would end up on another woman’s wrist—but it could also be returned or sold and perhaps help him in some small way (it being somewhat more conservative than bracelets worn by the eponymous blonde in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes).

I felt a huge sense of guilt at leaving Jule with such hard feelings on his part and at a time when he needed support. I told myself that I was fighting for my children’s and my own survival. Yet, I knew deep down, that maybe—just maybe—I had not loved him enough.