• 9 •

Love and Other Emotions

Aside from Kit Adler and Doris Cole Abrahams, I had few close women friends in London. I attribute this, correctly I believe, to the fact that I was a working single mother, earning our keep in a pretty much male-dominated industry and that the majority of wives in the expat American film colony were a good deal older than me. With scant exceptions, preblacklist and back in the States, they had been housewives, dedicated to social functions and to their families. Only a small number had been as political as their mates and now, their children (in most cases, at least a decade older than mine) fairly independent. They sought to find activities to fill their free time that involved lunches with other women in similar circumstances, and shopping. We met at largish social gatherings or film showings. I attended dinner parties at their homes—but an extra woman was not as convenient as an extra man. I, perhaps, was not as sociable as I might have been, as I had to scrounge for any small bit of free time. I did not find their activities objectionable. Our priorities just happened to be at odds.

I would like to think that none of those women saw me as a threat. Being a considerably younger single woman might have rung bells. I was always careful to keep my friendships with married men with whom I worked on a strictly business basis, a decision made long before when I had chosen films as a career, well aware that it was a male-dominated industry. Actresses and secretaries often became involved with Hollywood’s married men—creative and executive. I wanted no part of such arrangements. Morality had some part of it. However, I was too self-motivated, too prideful, to place myself in such a compromising and demeaning situation. I viewed myself as a businesswoman and always did my best to transmit this message to the men I worked with—many of whom did become good friends, but that was all.

It is said that men almost always have sex on their mind when in the presence of women and that most women dress to be sexually attractive to men. I cannot claim I know what is at any time in the mind of a man. I can attest to the fact that in my business dealings with men, I never made an effort to be considered sexually attractive. I dressed to be comfortable and in the best taste I could afford. I had only two unpleasant experiences of sexual harassment in my long career, and they had been in my early days in Hollywood. When I was nineteen, one producer—who was interviewing me as a prospective writer for television, chased me around his desk and then attempted to block my leaving his office. As I was near the door, I threatened to scream loudly so that everyone in the building could hear. “Come, come, dear,” he cajoled and advanced closer to me. I let out a deafening scream (as a child, I had, after all, not required a microphone to be heard up in the far reaches of the balcony), which brought instant pounding on the door. He scurried back to his desk. Several employees were standing on the ready when I stepped out into the hallway.

“What happened?” someone asked.

“I saw a rat!” I replied and rushed past them to the elevators in the building.

The second incident also occurred in those early Hollywood years. A well-known actor at the time, Scott Brady, whom I knew from the television show that I worked for as story editor, had volunteered to drive me to an industry meeting, which he said he planned to attend as well. He headed into the Hollywood Hills where he lived instead. When he parked the car (after a lively argument), legs agape, he grabbed hold of my shoulders and started to pull me to him. I still had hold of my pocketbook and slammed it smack center, hard on his rising manhood, got out of the car, and walked all the way down the mountain to Sunset Boulevard, a mighty hike, where I could get a bus.

He did not follow me.

When the occasion presented itself, I had friends, couples and singles, over for dinner. I remember small gatherings with William and Betty Graf (new arrivals, he would produce the Academy Award–winning A Man for All Seasons), the Adlers, Lester Cole, the blacklisted film composer Sol Kaplan and his wife, the actress Frances Heflin (sister of actor Van Heflin), Frances and Ring Lardner Jr., Sidney Buchman, whenever he was in London, and of course, whatever friend was over for a visit from the States. At least once a week, the harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler, blacklisted and recently divorced, would, uninvited, ring my front doorbell at about seven p.m., just as we three were settling down to dinner. I called him America’s guest as I could hardly avoid extending an invitation for him to join us. He never refused. We three were happily ensconced in a well-appointed Victorian row house on Hasker Street, which bordered Chelsea yet was also near Brompton Road and Harrods, Coopers’ supermarket, and a huge Boots pharmacy that carried everything one needed for bath, beauty, and beyond. There were also new, intriguing specialty and antique shops around the corner from us on Walton Street. Somewhat larger than our former home on Markham Street, we enjoyed a modern, remodeled kitchen, adequate dining room—with room for eight chairs, if a bit crowded, and a bright living room. There was a service area under stairs but I turned it into more of a family room as it backed the garden. The master bedroom was on the first floor, two additional bedrooms above.

Michael was attending Central High School in Bushey Park, situated on an American army base in Hertfordshire. Despite it being a fifteen-mile daily commute back and forth by bus and tube, the selection of the school, after some objections on my part, had been agreed. Due to his advancements, Michael would in two years be going off to college. He was very clear in his decision to obtain his degree in the States. The University of California, Berkeley, appealed to him—most certainly due to its current wave of much-publicized student political action. As certain subjects not in the British curriculum—American history and civics, mainly—would be required for him to pursue his chosen major, political science, an American school was necessary. Nothing I could say re the inconvenience of the distance (and my own concern of him traveling back and forth alone—sometimes in bad weather and dark days) deterred him. Michael was mentally mature for his age. I often said that he was born with a fully developed brain. By now, he knew exactly what he wanted and had well-honed skills in reasoning and debating. My pride in him was enormous.

Cathy’s current school, Glendower, on Queen’s Gate, was a ten-minute bus ride from home. To attend she was obliged to wear the school uniform, the purchase of which was a yearly ritual in Great Britain where a large percentage of young people from middle- and upper-class families were entered in private schools, perversely called “public schools.” (I don’t know if they offered scholarships to low-income students. I hope that was the case. But I have to admit that I did not pursue the matter as I might well have done back home.) Each school uniform had a unique color combination and style that set them apart. Department stores of size had school uniform sections. With Cathy in hand we made our way to Peter Jones. About half of one floor was entirely devoted to school uniforms, girls’ and boys’ in separate departments. That day it was bustling with mothers and children, ages six to twelve; uniforms for upper-grade students were sold on another floor. Racks jammed with jackets, skirts, and trousers, short and long, lined the walls divided by a card that had a school’s name on it. Tables were covered with socks, mitties, shirts, ties, hats (for the girls), and caps (for the boys). To be a part of this rite was to understand a great deal about Great Britain’s class system. Children at free, government schools (except for orphanages) wore no uniforms and therefore were looked upon as being from families of lesser means. School colors created a further classification. Schools were not always considered socially equal. I had no idea how Glendower rated on England’s social scale. We chose it as 1) it was close to home, 2) it had a high scholastic standing, and 3) Cathy had a friend who also attended. The Glendower uniform was striking: deep-plum-and-mauve-crested jacket, gray skirt, and a perky gray hat with a plum ribbon. My daughter loved clothes (I recall most vividly a particular yellow dress she desperately wanted for her fourth birthday), so the attractiveness of her uniform augured well for our choice of a school for her. Michael, being at a school on an American army base, wore whatever he wanted. He was, however, a meticulous dresser—and remains so to this day (clothes color coordinated in his closet, shirts hangered and smoothly ironed). He loved music (as did Cathy), was sports oriented (which Cathy was not)—but being slight in build chose relay racing, and was a top performer in the school’s wrestling team–welter division—and was keen about his work on the debating team. We three all missed Sidney Buchman, who was entrenched for the time being in his home in Cannes working on the troubled screenplay for Cleopatra, to star Elizabeth Taylor. Sidney was always energized by Michael’s living room debates with him on various topics. I remember a spirited one on China (Michael was all of twelve) and its position in the world’s current power scheme that lasted well over an hour and only broke up when I called a halt for dinner.

Cathy was the social one with many friends, a developing artist, and amazingly sensitive to others—especially to me. I could easily imagine that her friends confided in her and trusted her comments or advice. She also had an unusual grasp of language for one so young. Without a male figure in the house to share her attention, we were perhaps closer than many mothers and daughters. But it was her understanding heart—and her ability to express what she felt—that bound us (and still does).

The American film colony in London now consisted of both expats and recent arrivals—probably in equal numbers. Many of the newcomers were associated with Columbia Pictures. The two groups commingled, and I found new friends and colleagues. Columbia had gained the upper hand in Anglo-American production for two major reasons. In the 1950s, when the rise of television all but mined many Hollywood studios, Columbia embraced it by establishing a major television subsidiary, Screen Gems. The profits from this enterprise were then channeled into the company’s film productions. While MGM, Paramount, and 20th Century-Fox had turned their backs on television, Columbia, who had trailed behind these movie mammoths for years, was now solidly entrenched at the top. Not only was the company making its own films and television series, it was a distribution company for independents.

Relationships were not always amiable between the men working in the film colony. Often one man’s success was a thorn in another’s ambition. Also, for reasons not revealed (or rather, kept secret), some expats had begun receiving credit under their own name and others had not (a disparity that continued for too many years). Sunday baseball games in Hyde Park continued, but hostility prevailed and bitterness bred among the expats who believed that others of their group had made covert deals with the Committee, held behind closed doors, and had named others. There remained a large segment of the expats who were working as writers for “slavery pay” as Lester termed the low salaries of the expats. Also, selling an original screenplay was extremely difficult. The studios owned a library of literary works—plays, short stories, books, and a backlog of old films that could be remade. The same was true about the music, which studios had bought for earlier movies and reused for current productions.

The expat community was not limited to actors, writers, directors, and producers. Some of Hollywood’s finest cameramen, sound engineers, cutters, and composers had been blacklisted and forced to find work and make deals for themselves. For those who had ambitions to be producers, the added pressure was that of putting a deal together. This involved packaging, distribution, promotion, and selling. Carl Foreman, foremost among those artists who had gone beyond their original career choices, writing in his case, to branch out into independent filmmaking, had started Open Road Productions. His first movie under that banner—The Guns of Navarone, from a novel by Alistair MacLean—had been a huge box-office success. Carl was extremely gifted at self-promotion. Whatever movie he was shooting quickly became identified in the media as “Foreman’s film” or a “Carl Foreman production.”

The recent years had found Carl less interested in writing than supervising a script’s development and being engaged with all the other facets of his productions. He had reached out to the expat colony and surrounded himself with an extremely talented and cohesive team to whom he paid below-scale wages. Open Road Productions at the time was a leading independent overseas production company with grand offices on Green Street off Park Lane in fashionable Mayfair. One fine day in May, nearby Hyde Park abloom in golden daffodils and flaming tulips, I made my way to their offices for a meeting with Carl’s associate producer, Leon Becker. Carl had optioned the best-selling book, Born Free, and was considering me as a candidate to “crack the back” of it as a first step to screen adaptation.

Leon was not a man comfortable in conducting a conversation across a desk. The hour was late for lunch and as he had not had his, he asked if I might like to join him. We went around the corner to a small sandwich shop that had a few tables set out on the street. I had read the book and offered up some ideas. He seemed to like my suggestions. Obviously ill at ease, he then set forth what the company would be willing to pay me for my services. It was low even as a sub-rosa fee.

“You might very well get the job of adapting the book,” he added quickly, I suppose as a sweetener.

“I feel like a former headliner being asked to come in to test for a bit role!” I laughed. “I am not interested in auditioning,” I added. “I am working on my own project [meaning the novel that was still in flux] and really am not sure I would want to take the time out for the length of time an adaptation would take. Sooooo . . . you tell Carl that I will be happy to do a twenty-five-page breakdown of Born Free, if he is willing to pay me twice what you have just offered.”

“I’ll give him that message,” he said, averting my glance.

After lunch, he went his way and I went in a different direction.

The concept of a breakdown of a book purchased for films was to find the main thrust of the story and major characters, to cut the chaff from the wheat without compromising the author’s intention. Characters that do not contribute to the continuity of the story have to be cut. The trick was to find others who might be developed in a manner that would be more filmically dramatic. As example, in Margaret Mitchell’s famed book Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara had borne two children before she married Rhett Butler. To make her “more desirable” and amplify the dramatic power of the death of their daughter, Bonnie Blue, Scarlett’s two older children were not acknowledged in the movie although her two earlier marriages were included.

Often, two characters can be combined into one, scenes reset to allow for available and less expensive locations, or camera shots created that will both lower the budget and intensify the impact. Perhaps one of the most memorable examples was the Atlanta railway depot scene in Gone with the Wind where the depot had been turned into a field hospital for thousands of wounded and dying Southern Confederate soldiers just before the Northern Union troops ravage and occupy the city. This scene had been movingly evoked in the novel but would have cost a fortune in extras to film. Cinematographer William Cameron Menzies (who won the Academy Award for his work on the film) had handled this problem by pulling the camera farther and farther back, widening the shot to show up close the terrifying numbers of moaning, writhing, fallen Confederate soldiers as they lay stretched out on the open, parched field, crying for aid that was not there and would never come. The farther the camera pulled back the smaller and more distant the “men” at the far end of that field could be distinctly seen. Dummies designed in various positions were substituted for the extras, and the camera swept high and over their forms. This dramatically cut cost and sped up the action. Menzies then went in with his camera for a close-up of Scarlett, horrified at the carnage she was witnessing, that one shot giving total motivation for the ensuing scenes of her desperation to escape Atlanta before the Yankees had captured the city.

A good breakdown also gave a producer and director a guide as to the necessary locations and the number of characters needed to be cast. It was a starting point for a production. Many producers, directors, and adapters did their own breakdown. Still, having one in hand early in a film’s development was an aid to the production team and could save considerable money in the long run. I had discovered that a unique part of my creative abilities in these early years was to visualize written scenes and to see the narrator as a camera. It had just come to me naturally.

Wishful thinking had combined with the truth when I once had confided to Norman Mailer that I was planning one day to write a novel about the McCarthy period and the expat community in London. For years, I kept journals, notes, character sketches, before I came to the realization in the early 1960s that many (make that most!) of our lives remained in flux and that no one yet, including myself, knew the result and certainly not how history would record the period. Due to that conclusion, I felt the novel would have to wait a time before I could write it. Meanwhile, I was quite happy to do the breakdown of Born Free (once Carl settled on a better deal) to support we three, while in whatever spare time I had I went to work on another novel. The crux of everything I ever wrote had been a story element that stressed a guiding principle, what the French call idee-maitresse. Mine was simple. Survival, a common drive of almost every sane person—and insane ones as well. One variation intrigued me—guilt at surviving an experience that inexplicably killed many others and left you alive.

Joined with this was the horror of the Holocaust. And, lately, a phenomenon of unlikely mass murders, which kept appearing on the front pages of the press. I began to research these. Somewhere during this process, my two major characters for a novel (to be called The Survivors) started to take life. This would be a suspense-love story involving two people who are drawn together by the mutual guilt of being alive when so many others had not escaped extermination. The woman would be the lone survivor of her murdered family; the man, a war correspondent, spectator to the power, greed, and intolerance that led to the cold-blooded massacres of World War II. There would be love and suspicion that brings them together and yet pushes them apart, and a cunning mass murderer to be caught. I wanted the story set in locations I knew intimately. Therefore, Klosters, Switzerland, and London, but which part of that great metropolis? I wondered. London is a city divided not only by sections and the river Thames, but by dozens of dialects and class divisions. Where my heroine lived before the murders would be an important element.

On weekends, I put aside my work for Open Road and, with the children, investigated the various areas of London for my book-to-be. There were shopkeepers to talk to, small cafes for lunch or tea, old homes that were open at certain hours to the public, parks to stroll through, churches to attend. One Saturday afternoon it would be Regent’s Park (too conservative), Mayfair (too upper class), Swiss Cottage (possible), St. John’s Wood (also possible), and then—finally we spent a day in Hampstead. That was it.

I remembered how fond my friend, the American travel writer Kate Simon, was of Hampstead. After my third visit, I understood why. Kate had described Hampstead as having streets “extraordinarily fanciful, yielding houses for Ushers [the family in Edgar Allan Poe’s famous tale of horror] to decay in, for rotting loneliness and people administering slow poisons to their loved ones.” How delicious! How creepy! How apt!

Hampstead wears almost as many disguises as it has corkscrew, eighteenth-century alleys (outdoing all other sections of London, I think). Never good at mazes, I easily got lost as there seemed no specific route to follow to reach a high street (main thoroughfare). There were narrow paved and cobbled roads, jagged with cottages from pre-Victorian days. Go around a turning and you were faced with stately brick and gated homes where Queen Victoria’s son, Edward VII, had visited friends and lovers. The area was a delightful hodgepodge of architectural style and, happily, the modernists had not yet torn down the old shops and replaced them with cement-block buildings.

Hampstead Heath delighted me. The rambling, curving paths of this massive public park were covered in autumn leaves, the gently rising and falling slopes of its hilly grounds in magnificent bloom in spring and summer. Children’s shouts and laughter echoed as they ran through the woody, leafy trails playing games of tag or hide-and-seek. On rainy days, there was the heady scent of wet wood and damp moss and, on sunny ones, the sweet fragrance of new blooms. One could quite easily become lost, or could experience pure communication with nature. My young woman was a dreamy sort, somehow isolated from the outside world, only comfortable before the murders when in her home among family and a small domestic staff. She often would have gone to the Heath to paint or write or just to surround herself with what the ancient poet Milton called “beldame Nature.” Her house would not have been one of the great houses but, more likely, a large Victorian cottage, neatly kept yet badly in need of modernization.

I cannot recall when it was that I realized Leon Becker’s interest in me had become personal.

He was always the gentleman and not prone to discuss his private life. I knew he was a widower, his wife, Kathryn, having died of an overdose of sleeping pills the previous year. He intimated the dosage had been accidental. I was shocked to learn (not from Leon) that she had been having an affair with Carl Foreman and that her death had been recorded as a suicide, a note having been found beside her body. It could well have explained why Estelle Foreman had returned to the States and filed for divorce. I was amazed that their affair had been kept so quiet in a community that loved to share the current gossip. More so, that Leon continued to work side by side with Carl under such devastating circumstances. When I considered the masochistic elements involved, I was truly confused, for Leon did not seem to be a man who hated himself. Nor was he self-effacing.

I was thirty-four, Leon fifty, a stretch, yet no more than the age difference between Jule Styne and myself. Leon was not anything at all like Jule or Sy (or my ex-husband, for that matter), either in appearance or personality. He was on guard, conscientious, yet there was a touch of the poet in his deep brown, expressive eyes and often in his speech. Of Russian heritage, he had been born in Canada and raised in the States and yet seemed a foreigner to both those cultures. Tennis was his game of choice, and he played as often as his schedule allowed. His step was brisk, his energy fully charged at most times. He was also highly intelligent and spoke seven languages—five of them fluently, a great help when Open Road was shooting a movie abroad (Spain, Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece being the locations that film companies mostly used). As time went on, I came to understand the moodiness that shadowed some of our early meetings. As our relationship progressed, his dark attitude decreased. It was as though he had stepped out of the shade and into the sunlight. His sense of humor (especially in the use of wordplay) was exposed. He was warm, loving. A complicated man, he could display a childhood delight in such simple things as a dish of ice cream or the brilliance of late Turner paintings, his favorites at the Tate.

Of many things, Leon was a man of refined tastes and of consummate knowledge, not only of paintings but of music, especially music. Our transition from casual companion and business associate to dating took place after we had attended several operas and concerts together. No romantic overtures were made on his part, so I assumed we were good friends and nothing more ( I also knew that he was seeing Joseph Losey’s ex-wife, Mary, at the time) and I was quite content with the status quo. We shared a deep interest in music—opera, concert, classic, and modern. Our first dates were to see live performances, which I had hitherto not been able to afford for myself, and since most of my friends preferred films, theater, dinners at good restaurants, and gatherings at people’s homes, I had accepted these entertainments as a fair exchange.

I had, in fact, never heard opera live in an opera house, and it was a wondrous world that Leon made possible. Covent Garden, home of the Royal Opera, is a world of its own—and I loved it. From the sixteenth century, the area in the yawning hours of the morning was an open market, which I did on rare occasions venture to, and there might still be a flower lady extending an almost empty tray of violets and asking “’Ows about it, luv? All ’alf the price?” The market porters would be packing up their crates of unsold vegetables and the ground would be strewn with waste. Came evening, everything had been whisked clean, and taxis and elegant cars deposited gowned and tuxedoed patrons at the curb. Umbrellas would snap open as the operagoers ducked beneath them and carefully navigated the slippery steps to the open doors. By the second or third time that Leon accompanied me to the opera, I wore that green gown that I had bought on Sloane Street and felt very grand, for attendees did dress formal for the opera in those days!

I recall hearing Joan Sutherland sing the “Queen of Spades,” and excellent productions of Aida and La Traviata. The most thrilling experience for me—seated in the fifth row center—was the night Leon had tickets for Tosca, sung by Maria Callas. There was no disputing the diva’s brilliance. Callas had more than a superb voice. The opera critic Andrew Porter called it “something else which cannot be defined—it has to do with bearing and gesture and timbre, and phrasing, and utterance of the words, and combined—the mysterious qualities which not only make her Callas, but also make every heroine she portrays distinct and indelible.” For me, that was Tosca, never to be forgotten. (Years later, the occasion still vivid to me, I would use the quote from his review in my biography of Maria Callas.)

Leon had an insatiable passion for Russian opera, as well as great piano music and the songs of Handel. One cannot deny Handel’s genius, but he was definitely not one of my favorites. Joan Sutherland always liked to tell the story of being invited to sing at the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham’s home in St. John’s Wood. Asked what she was to sing, she replied, “Handel’s ‘Let the Bright Seraphim.’” Beecham exploded, “Oh! Not Handel!” I felt much the same way.

Leon knew many of the performing artists, so after a concert we would go backstage where he would be greeted warmly. One night, after a Yehudi Menuhin concert at Royal Festival Hall, the world-famous violinist threw his arms around Leon. “He was my earliest accompanist,” he told me. “My good friend. We were children together. Prodigies together.”

That was how I learned that Leon—before his engagement in film—as a young boy and adolescent had a short career as a concert pianist. Rather reticently in the days that followed that meeting, he revealed to me more of his past. His parents were from a small town in Russia where, before his birth, there was pogrom where many Jews had been slaughtered. His father managed to get his pregnant wife out of the country. She found refuge in Germany (this was 1911) and then, taking the name of her protectors, continued on to America, where she was in hopes of her husband joining her. He never was heard from again. The pregnant Mrs. Becker had been put on a boat that docked in Canada, not the United States. She was, by then, nearly nine months with child. A contact found her a place to stay and a job as a domestic with a family in Montreal. She gave birth to Leon with the help of passengers and a porter on the train journey there, in a car named Sagamore (therefore, his middle name—Leon Sagamore Becker).

Very early on, Leon showed extraordinary musical talent. He and his mother lived in her employer’s home, which had a piano. The story goes that he had wandered into the music room when he was about four and sat down and played some Mozart piece that he had heard being executed by a guest of the family the previous afternoon, and did so with surprising adeptness and a good ear. He was given access to the piano and lessons with a local teacher. At age nine, believed to be a prodigy, arrangements were made for him to study with a well-known piano teacher in Los Angeles who was a friend of his mother’s employer, and for him to live with Paramount Studios’ head of production, Benjamin (B. P.) Schulberg and his wife, Adeline, who had a son, Budd, close to Leon’s age. Not until the end of her life would Leon, then in his late thirties, see his birth mother again. During the formative years of life, he became the Schulbergs’ de facto second son.

The Schulbergs were an unusual family. Benjamin was “a political liberal in the reactionary world of [Louis B.] Mayer and [William Randolph] Hearst.” Adeline, however, was the true political activist. She visited the Soviet Union in the late twenties and brought back for Leon scores of Russian operas, which he had kept with him throughout the years. The boys shared a room with bunk beds and read as late at night as they could. Budd was a frail child and as a young man suffered fainting spells. He also had a speech impediment and, as one close member of the family said, “stammered his way from therapist to therapist.” There was a concert Steinway in the living room of their palatial home on which Leon practiced and under which Budd Schulberg claimed he hid “in the darkest corner” to write poetry to give to his mother for “various holidays [including] Mother’s Day.” Although not actually brothers, it would seem that Budd had strong pangs of sibling rivalry that matured with him. Once the boys were grown, and graduated from universities, Adeline became an agent. It was always her goal to push people as far as she could toward fame.

Leon made his first public appearance at the age of eleven, accompanying the nine-year-old Yehudi Menuhin on the piano. Leon soon developed a case of stage fright whenever he had to appear before an audience (although he played magnificently, otherwise). He explained to me that he was terrified of playing a piece entirely by memory as he was expected to do. He needed the music as a prop and was forbidden by his teacher to use it. “If you do not have it in your fingers and in your heart, you will never be a great concert pianist,” he was told. He, therefore, decided at seventeen to attend Caltech and study to be an expert sound technician—badly needed in those early days of all-talking films. When in his twenties, both he and Budd became politically active and joined the Communist Party. This was during the darkest days of the Depression (although they wanted for very little). Both dropped out of the party a few years later.

Leon advanced fast, being placed in charge of the Warner Bros. sound department (he also played the piano on tracks for several films). He was greatly sought after in that capacity and became director William Wyler’s associate on four films. Then came Senator Joseph McCarthy. Budd was called up before the Committee and, turning informer, rattled off a string of names of people he had known who had been in the party with him, Leon among them. Blacklisted, unable to work and still holding Canadian citizenship, Leon was one of the first of Hollywood’s HUAC victims to move, with his wife, to London. A valid Canadian passport was accepted in Great Britain, and he was able to work immediately without restrictions.

We had been dating for a time when, a week or so after my meeting with Yehudi, and after a dinner out, Leon invited me for the first time to come back to his flat at 25 Lennox Gardens (which faced one of London’s charming squares). The four-story house, occupied originally in Edwardian days by a well-to-do family, had been converted into flats, as had most of the other houses on the square. Leon’s apartment was on the top floor. There was no lift. To reach his aerie, one needed to first take the marble steps that led into the building, then walk up three long flights of stairs (ceilings being eleven feet high), to reach his door. When opened, one was faced with still another staircase, steeper and narrower than the others. By this time I had left my breath on the floor below. Mounting this staircase for me was akin to the challenge of climbing to the peak of the Gotschna in the Swiss Alps! But I took it.

When I retrieved my breath, I was quite taken with what I saw, not that the apartment was grand in any way, but it was unique. Before Leon’s occupancy, walls had been removed to make larger rooms than in the original. You entered partway into a long, rather wide hall, the living room visible beyond via two more steps. It contained a marvelous high-arched window overlooking the square that on fair days cast streams of light through multi-panes. A grand piano occupied one entire corner and dominated the room. At the other end of the generous entrance hall was a galley kitchen and to its left, a door to a large master bedroom and bath. Another door, and two steps midway in the hall, led to a second bath and bedroom (used by Leon for an amazing collection of sound equipment and tapes—operas, concerts, film scores).

I asked Leon after we had settled in if he would be kind enough to play something for me. He sat down on the piano bench in the manner of a concert performer. There were several tall, neat stacks of music piled up on the floor beside him. Immediately, without reclaiming a score from the stacks beside him, the most beautiful and full sound filled the room. Leon was not the least bit rusty. What I got was a professional performance, as moving and well played as many that we had attended together. I was confused. He had told me why he had not continued his concert career—but not why he had chosen not to be involved in the music world. Nor did he ever play at people’s homes when we were there for an evening and they were good friends—with a piano just waiting to be brought to life. He gave me private concerts (well received and welcomed) often making for a warm, intimate evening. He practiced diligently and daily. Nonetheless, I always felt he was happy with the work he was doing, involved and giving himself entirely to it. Carl once told me that Leon could hear things on a sound track no one else could, and that he was a true artist when it came to sound and music recording. He seemed to mask any bitterness toward the McCarthy period and the end of his Hollywood career, with one exception: the betrayal of Budd Schulberg.

Although I had a house for we three, I was spending a lot of time at Leon’s flat. Very vivid to me is the time Adeline Schulberg (who Leon called Addie), while visiting London, rang up to ask if she might come over and speak to Leon. I had answered the telephone. He looked more tortured than I had ever seen him when I passed the request on to him. After a long moment of consideration, he agreed. Addie, now a widow, was no longer a young woman and she took the stairs with great difficulty. I sat her down in the hallway, where there was a dining table and chairs, and brought her a glass of water. It must have been about five minutes before Leon came out of the sound room to greet her. She got to her feet and threw her arms around him. When they moved apart they were both crying. He helped her into the living room and I went into the kitchen to make tea. When I returned with a tray, Addie had Leon clasped by his sleeve.

“You must see Budd. Talk to him. He’ll make you understand. You were brothers—are brothers. I raised you both. . . . I . . .” She let go of his arm and sank down into a chair. She was once again suffused in tears. Leon was not. “We will not discuss Budd, is that understood?” he said in a strained voice. She nodded her head. The remaining hour or so she was with us was not easy. Budd’s name was not mentioned again. Leon held on to her arm as he helped her down the staircases onto the street. I watched from the front window as he walked slowly with her up Lennox Gardens. Thank God, he was going to make sure she was safely deposited in a taxi. He returned fifteen minutes later, sat down at the piano, and played for a long while—Rachmaninoff and at a furious tempo. That was the only time I saw Addie Schulberg and the last that Leon ever spoke of either Budd or his mother.