• 10 •

Funny Girl

For personal use, overseas telephone calls were expensive (and difficult due to the time differential). Cablegrams were also seen as an extravagance by my penny-saving mother. Therefore, she sent me an express letter to inform me that my father had been diagnosed with rectal cancer and would need an immediate operation if he was to prolong his life. The tone of her letter was infused with fear. This was the summer of 1963 and my parents, still in Miami, had little money. It was obvious from her words that Marion did not feel capable of handling the urgency or the nuances of the situation.

Right or wrong, I was more concerned about my mother than my father. Marion could always be relied upon to dispense loving care, nursing skills, and nourishing meals and to create a degree of harmony in uneasy times. In the advent of a real crisis she went to pieces (and often to her bed). There had been a legion of grave happenings during her marriage to my father, mostly having to do with his comings and goings and the sea of troubles he brought with him and left behind in rough-water waves for her to navigate. Several times during my adolescence I had to go by myself to make a payment to a beyond-the-law creditor who she was too ashamed and fearful to approach. (Boom-Bah! for football heroes!) There was a period when he had written a series of bad checks and was being threatened to be turned over to law enforcement. Marion collapsed. I was twelve years old, yet very adult in many ways. I understood the seriousness of the problem and the consequence if something was not done right away. I had a friend whose father was a top lawyer in Los Angeles and called him. I can no longer remember (or perhaps was never told) how the gracious gentleman mediated this potentially disastrous situation. Charges, however, were not pressed against my father, and my mother’s brothers paid the outstanding debt. That time, it had taken months for Marion, even with her daily readings of Mary Baker Eddy, to recover.

My mother was weak where my father was concerned. Somewhere it is written, “Beware of the weak,” and I believe that to be true. My mother’s first responsibility should have been to herself and to me, a maxim she never adopted. If her gentility and expansive love had not been so seductive, I might have, when younger, seen her inaction as the iniquitous force that it was. I lived with the knowledge that I was the adult in our lives and that I was somehow expected to take the responsibility that she could not bear.

I rang her immediately (damn the cost!). Her voice was imbued with gratitude. I told her I would wire her some money and arrange for two tickets to take them from Miami to Hartford, where she and my father could stay with her mother (my beloved Grandma Pauline, a Hungarian lady of lively temperament, who I knew would welcome them in a time of emergency despite her intense dislike of my father). Dr. Hepburn, who had been the family doctor since Marion was a child, had recently died. I suggested she should call the physician who had taken over his practice and ask him for the name of a colon cancer specialist then make an appointment for my father to see him. I also reminded her that he was a war veteran and that some part of the medical expenses might be absorbed if he went to a veterans’ hospital. Thirty-six hours later my parents were on a plane to Hartford.

After further medical tests, it was decided that my father should be operated on in New York by a specialist. This was early August; the surgery was scheduled two weeks hence. We three flew to New York on “cheap end” tickets. (Airlines like Air India or Pakistani, who stopped in London on flights to New York from their countries, offered cut rates for unsold “end of flight” seats the day of a scheduled flight.) Good friends, who lived in New York, were planning a trip to England and I made a trade—they use Hasker Street while they were in London and I would occupy their apartment on East Seventy-Ninth Street while I was in Manhattan. My position was to stand by my mother and be there to help her with any decisions that might have to be made.

Ever the iron man that he was, he survived the operation and began a course of radiation. On a Friday afternoon on November 22, my father still in hospital, we three and my mother were at the apartment when there was a loud banging on the door and a neighbor burst in, shouting for us to turn on the television. We did and, horrified, watched the vivid coverage of the shooting death of our young president John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas and the swearing in on Air Force One of vice president Lyndon Baines Johnson—the former first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, standing beside him still dressed in the blood-stained clothes she had worn in the motorcade when the assassin’s bullets had killed her husband.

The tragedy of John F. Kennedy’s death was a deep, deep wound to our country and country folk. I don’t think any of us old enough at the time to comprehend what had happened will ever forget that day and those of national mourning that followed. The scenes of the assassination, the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson and the funeral procession with little John, a child of three, saluting as his father’s hearse and riderless horse passed by, were played over and over on television—so that those images became branded on one’s heart and mind. Never before had I so profoundly felt my sense of being an American. John F. Kennedy had symbolized hope, a new prospect for our country.1

This was the first time since I had gone abroad that I considered the idea of remaining in the States, no matter the circumstances. Finally, I decided against it for a market basket of reasons—my work, finances, and my unsettled relationship with Leon. When my parents returned to Hartford, taking a small apartment of their own, my mother now in the comfortable role of nurse Marion, we three flew back to London and continued our lives. I found not only the American community but the British mourning Kennedy’s death. He had been greatly admired throughout Great Britain, especially in Ireland, the homeland of his ancestors.

I was spending more and more time with Leon and his friends, largely the more recently arrived members of the film colony. The expats were now spreading their wings a bit—moving to the South of France, or able to work again and so returning to the States. The new American embassy, which now dominated Grosvenor Square, had recently opened. Designed by noted architect Eero Saarinen, it had been loudly decried by the British (especially Londoners) who found the building “an impressive but decidedly embarrassing building,” due in a great part to the large golden eagle, standing eight to nine feet on the top, its thirty-five-foot wingspan displayed against an open sky. Also, because Saarinen’s precedent for the outside of the building had been the Renaissance Doge’s Palace in Venice, the context of the Georgian and pseudo-Georgian character of this, one of the grandest squares in London, seemed heresy. I had to agree. Still, there was something comforting to an American to enter the square and look up to that overwhelming symbol of our country. Despite controversy (“the Americans have taken over Grosvenor Square!”), or maybe because of it, the American embassy became a favorite visitor site, and there were always groups of people standing about in the square staring at it.

Cathy had passed her eleven-plus exams with honors. In England this means that the student must matriculate to an upper school (like middle school or junior high school in the States). Cathy wished to attend a Swiss boarding school (as Salka’s granddaughter was presently doing). I was not immediately in favor of this for both financial and personal reasons. We investigated schools in London without much enthusiasm. They were mostly elite and class structured and not inexpensive, either. Cathy and I went to Klosters, from where we trained about to various nearby schools. The one she favored was Professor Buser’s Voralpines Tochter-Institute in Teufen, near St. Gallen by way of Zurich and a little over a two-hour train journey from Klosters.

The school was located in a bucolic setting—fields of wildflowers—the magnificent Swiss Alps as a backdrop. There was a barn with cows that supplied the school with its dairy products. There was something very “Heidi-ish” about Buser’s, but it also boasted a high scholastic standing. The staff was most accommodating and the students we met, friendly. “But it is German speaking,” I complained to Cathy. “Lessons are taught in German, which you don’t know. I can’t imagine how that would work for you.” She was determined, as only Cathy can be. “I can learn it,” she insisted. I could only think that there was something about those cows’ melting brown eyes that had gotten to her. I finally agreed and rented a house in Klosters—Chalet Insidina—so that I could spend large blocks of time near enough for her to come home for weekends. It helped that Salka was also in Klosters. I brought down our new family member, a large, three-year-old apricot poodle we renamed Sandy, who had been given to me unexpectedly as a gift by the producer of the film in which the dog had appeared. I had been a visitor on the set and, always a dog lover, was smitten by him. He was, I was told, to be retired as his handler was in poor health. Trained for movie work, he did a multitude of clever tricks on cue: go to sleep, pick up and carry items, jump over bushes and hedges, limp, cry, howl, and many more that I never did learn the commands for him to respond to. There was something eerily human about Sandy. He sensed when either I or Cathy was sad and he had an uncanny ability to tell the time. Cathy always came home on the same train every Saturday. Five minutes beforehand he would stop whatever he was doing to stand staring out the front window. Just moments before she appeared, he would race through the house to greet her at the door. I remained puzzled at how he knew it was Saturday, as well as the arrival time of her train and his instinct (or whatever it can be called) that timed her approach.

The first month new students at Buser’s were not allowed to leave the premises of the school. Cathy shared a large room with three German girls who spoke no English. The reason for this, I was told, was for her to become totally immersed in the language. “It will work, you will see. She is a smart girl,” the headmistress assured me. After I deposited her in her room (which was in charming, Swiss-cottage decor) I took her aside and told her that if after the first week she was unhappy, she should come home anyway and we would look for another school. “But that would mean you have to pay for this one as well, doesn’t it?” she came back.

“Whatever it is,” I replied, “I’ll work it out.”

She called me after the first week, sounding truly miserable. “I’ll come get you,” I insisted.

“No! I won’t quit!” and she hung up.

The second week, she sounded no happier but still refused to give up. By the third week she said the girls in her room were not friendly to her. “Please! I’ll come get you!” I pressed.

The answer was another loud, “No!”

My daughter was not a quitter and never would be. She learned German—and some French as well—in record time, came to like the girls in her room and the others in her classes very much, and remained entranced by the cows. I was flying back and forth between London and Switzerland and beginning to love the beauty of the country, the food, the people, and the orderliness of all things Swiss. Cathy once told Salka, “Everything works in Switzerland, even Mommy.” This was true. My writing went well in the peaceful ambiance of Klosters and I was able to further develop my work on The Survivors by living in one of the main settings.

Leon and I were now a couple. I had come to care deeply for him. Yet there were many signals of problems ahead in our relationship that gave me pause. For one thing, Leon had a great melancholy within himself. I understood the causes—the sense of abandonment and betrayal he had endured and how this had diminished his sense of self-worth. What I found puzzling was his refusal to seek help. And I was uncomfortable with his friendship with Carl—apart from their business relationship. Carl, after all, had been his wife’s lover and from what I gathered had ended the affair in an abrupt manner that was somewhat responsible for her final action. I was unsure if this unorthodox friendship was not wantonly self-destructive of Leon.

On Sundays, when I was not in Klosters, we would go to Carl’s weekend cottage, a humble one-story abode on the Thames, river scent and dampness pervading. He would scramble eggs with onions and smoked salmon, turning the dish into a fishy jumble with a fulsome, unpleasant aroma. It was a ritual missed only when Carl and Leon were on location with a film. The conversation at the kitchen table where we ate would start off casual and end up with a intense discussion pertaining to their current work. Carl possessed a talented ability to switch moods, almost like an actor who must do so in a scene. He would squint up his eyes behind his large-framed glasses, his chin set resolutely, his voice taking on a measured tone. Fun time was over. I resented this intrusion in the one day of the week that Leon and I had together when in London, as Leon always worked on Saturdays. It did not help that I had a strong aversion to the implacable menu. A year later, Carl fell in love with Leon’s secretary, Eve, whom he married. Sunday brunches continued until after the birth of their first child, Jonathon, but gratefully the menu improved.

Our most divisive problem was Leon’s apartment in Lennox Gardens. We were sleeping in the same room, on the same bed where Kathryn had taken her life. When I moved in, her clothes—shades of Rebecca—still hung in the closets and were stored on shelves. I packed them up and had Oxfam (a charity organization) collect them. I bought a new mattress and springs and placed some of my favorite things about. I discussed this with my therapist and am sure that I was not jealous of Leon’s lost love. Rather, I could not get past the thought of what those last hours had been for her—walking up and down the long hall that connected the two wings of the flat—finally closing herself in the bedroom. I felt I was sharing our home with a restless spirit. Also, I could not help but wonder how Leon, after a marriage of twenty years, had not sensed the seriousness of Kathryn’s despair and tried in some way to help. He had been on location in Greece with The Guns of Navarone when she committed suicide, returning the morning after to find her body and the note. Her desperation and unhappiness had to have started long, long before then. How was it, I wondered disheartened, that neither Leon nor Carl had been aware of her pain and acted with attribution? Had they both simply ignored the signs of her acute distress? Or had they been so involved in their own worlds that they saw nothing beyond them? I would never have an answer, because Kathryn’s plight was not to be introduced into any of our conversations at penalty of Leon withdrawing into a silent, melancholy funk.

We were happiest in Switzerland or when I accompanied him on location, at separate times to Poland and Yugoslavia (later to Copenhagen and Madrid). The change in him whenever we were abroad was amazing. We laughed a lot, shared our impressions, and made passionate love. He loved the idea that I was comfortable with the crews and casts of the productions he worked on. On our return to Lennox Gardens from these junkets, the old Leon would emerge, the glumness seep slowly back. He asked me to marry him sometime during the summer of 1964. I thought it over carefully and earnestly believed we could have a happy life together on one condition: we move out of the apartment into one that we both liked. I brought up my feelings about living in the same rooms where Kathryn had taken her life and, although quite a separate issue, the difficulties I had with the long climb up and down the stairs (even delivery people would leave packages on either the first or second landing for us to trudge down to collect). Leon finally agreed after taking a good part of a day thinking about it. We first set November 22 as the date for our wedding. Cathy was out on school break, so we two went on an expedition looking for flats.

I found a lovely ground floor and garden apartment in a section of London near St. John’s Wood, called Venice due to the canal that trickled through it. Property values were not as inflated in this area as they were around Lennox Gardens which was in Knightsbridge, and so one got much more for one’s money. The flat was newly renovated, fresh and bright with a lovely, small garden. There was a bedroom and bath on the lower level (you entered on the ground floor) that Leon could use for his home office and sound equipment, and three more bedrooms on the main floor plus a bright living room, generous dining room, breakfast room (which could serve as my office and had steps leading down to the garden), and a remodeled kitchen. The building was Belle Epoch, the street lined with well-tended greenery, and the rates (fees that occupants on leases paid each year) less than on Lennox Gardens. After he looked at the flat and met with the real estate people, Leon signed the lease. We were to take possession in thirty days. I then turned my attention to our wedding plans.

We both wanted a nonreligious ceremony with a few close friends—thirty at most. The ceremony took place on November 27, a Sunday afternoon, in a small, elegant reception room on the mezzanine floor of the Carlton Towers Hotel, off Sloane Square. Betty Graf was my maid of honor, Stanley Mann (who was a mutual friend of Leon’s and mine) was best man. After the ceremony there was a reception with champagne and a bountiful early supper-buffet table. Sidney came up from Cannes along with his brother Harold and Harold’s wife, Ruth. Carl, Walter Shenson and his wife, Bill Graf, Sol and Frances Heflin Kaplan, Lester, the Adlers, and the director William Wyler and his wife Talli (Margaret Tallichet) were present along with others.

Leon and Willie Wyler had a long history together—having made five movies in Hollywood before the blacklist took Leon to London: Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Life, The Heiress, Detective Story, and Carrie, and unofficially on several others. The Wylers, in London for a short stay, took us for dinner the night before the wedding. I loved both of them. Talli had come to Hollywood from Texas in the late 1930s as a Scarlett O’Hara hopeful. She had not found a career but a husband and such a wonderful man. Willie had a hearing problem quite early in his life. Born in Alsace, he had been a Swiss citizen before coming to Hollywood in 1921 at the age of nineteen, and was employed in low-level jobs in silent pictures. Within four years he had worked his way up to becoming a director. He developed hearing problems during those years, but as this was during the silent era, it had not created a serious block to his success. I believe one of the things that had drawn Willie and Leon so close was Leon’s brilliance as a sound director. Hearing aids were not technically developed by the early thirties when talkies replaced the silent film. Willie, with great seriousness, once told me that Leon had been his ears.

After the wedding we spent four joyous weeks in Klosters. Leon did not ski, but Klosters was alive in December, filled with people we knew. We did a lot of socializing with Salka, Irwin Shaw and his wife, as well as author Elaine Dundy, separated from her husband, the critic Kenneth Tynan, and spending the holidays at the Chesa Grischuna on her own. There were also warm, intimate evenings by the fireplace at Chalet Insidina, and more family-oriented times when Cathy joined us. Leon was relaxed and in high spirits. Not until we returned to London did he tell me that he had changed his mind about the move from Lennox Gardens and was going to renege on the signed lease. He tried to assure me that he was not being obstinate. He heard what I said about my reasons for the move. And, yes, the Venice apartment was attractive and had some added advantages over Lennox Gardens. But he felt comfortable where we were, hated change, and had decided that in the long run Lennox Gardens was a more valuable investment. In England, one generally buys a leasehold on a flat for a number of years. You actually do not own the premises although you are responsible for its upkeep. Yearly rates are paid and when the time on your lease—which can run many decades—has elapsed, the property returns to the owner. One could, with their approval, sell the existing number of years left on your lease. Lennox Gardens had twenty-five remaining years, the Venice flat only eleven, which could greatly deflate a future resale price.

We forfeited our binder fee on the Venice flat (I believe it was about five hundred pounds). Some difficult weeks passed between us. I considered his action grossly unresponsive to my concerns. I seldom allow myself to get pushed to a wall. But when it happens, I can be a fierce contender. I threatened to leave and was prepared to do so, even going so far as to search out a suitable accommodation for myself. Leon was in a state of despair. Still, he declared his decision to keep Lennox Gardens was unassailable. Finally, I came to a compromise. I would spend more time in Switzerland and he would join me there whenever he could. Our primary residence (for tax and business reasons, he claimed) would still be Lennox Gardens—which I was free to redecorate in any way I chose. Obviously, our marriage had made its first step on slippery ground.

Night had not left the sky when the telephone next to the bed in Lennox Gardens rang ominously. The room was in total darkness. Leon stirred. The telephone rang again. I turned on a light. It was about four a.m. I picked up the receiver. It was my father, sounding in a panic. “Your mother is seriously ill. It’s cancer. She’s in the hospital,” he managed. He began to sob. “It’s that damned Christian Science,” he cried. “She’s been in pain for months and refused to go to a doctor.”

Due to the time differential, I was on a plane by noon and in Hartford at my grandmother’s house late that same evening. By morning I was at the hospital. I had been asked by my mother’s sister not to let my grandmother, who was ninety-four and failing, know the gravity of her condition.

When I reached the visitor’s desk on the hospital floor where my mother was, I was requested by a nurse to wait a few minutes. It seemed Marion, when told I was on my way, had insisted on coming from her room to see me. The nurse leaned in close to add, “Your mother wants to look her best and for your meeting to be in a more congenial place than her room, which she is sharing with another patient.” This did not seem strange behavior for Marion—always the impeccably dressed, gracious hostess. But for God’s sake! She was a dying woman in a hospital!

The nurse led me partway down a corridor at the end of which was a turn and on the wall, at an angle, one of those circular mirrors for the staff to monitor any undue activity by ambulatory patients. Then, there she was, painfully thin, dressed in a wine-red, velvet hostess gown, the kind that zips all the way up the front, coming around that turn, a nurse on either side of her, practically lifting her off the ground as they guided her. Her hair was a soft gray cloud as she drifted closer to that mirror. There was a blush of red on her lips and cheeks, noticeable because her skin was so pale. She came to a halt at the mirror, the nurses forced to do so with her, and cocked her head. “I never was photo-gee-nic,” she said in that inimitable Hartford twang of hers. Then she started up the hallway to me. “Anne Louise, can it be truly you?” There was a catch in her voice.

I rushed up to her. She drew one trembling, skeletal hand free from her holders and placed it on my cheek. There it was—the scent of verbena. She insisted we go to the visitor’s room and, when carefully placed in a chair, wanted to know about the children and Leon. “Is he a good man?” she asked. I wasn’t quite sure I knew what she meant by that, but I answered positively. “And the wedding?”

“Lovely. Really lovely. The only thing missing was your presence.”

“Oh, well, sweetheart,” she smiled wanly, “I was at the first.”

We sat there for about five minutes while she held my hand. When she let go, I realized she might be in pain. The nurses suggested she return to her room. I insisted on going with her and remained by her side as the morphine she was administered finally took effect.

For the next two weeks, I spent a good part of every day and evening at the hospital. She had cancer of the spleen, which had spread throughout her stomach and body. She had refused radiation and it had taken several doctors to convince her to have shots of morphine to ease the pain. There was nothing more anyone could do.

“How long?” I asked her oncologist.

“No telling. She seems to be holding on. Six weeks—three months at the most. I’ve ordered that she be moved to a nursing home. She’ll get good care there. The object is to keep her out of pain as much as possible.”

A difficult decision had to be made. Either I sat out the death watch or I returned to London and then came back when things looked imminent. I spoke to Leon, who was in favor of my flying home. “Right now she has your father and her sister,” he reasoned. Then, there was spring break for Cathy coming up in a few weeks.

“It means two trips—double expense,” I said.

“I’ll take care of it. Come home.”

And so I went without any long good-byes to my mother, for by then the morphine kept her pretty much unaware of her surroundings.

Three days after my return, my father called. “Your mother died an hour ago,” he said. “I don’t know what I’ll do.” There were no sobs, but I felt a deep honesty to his words. He had always had Marion to come home to. What now?

There seemed no reason to fly back, for my mother had left instructions that she did not want a religious funeral. She was buried in a small, simple service in the cemetery where Big Charlie had a large family plot. Along with my father, there were seven members of her family present. My grandmother was told that her daughter remained in a nursing home. She passed away less than a year later, never knowing the truth. Or, perhaps, wise woman that she was, did and preferred to accept what was told to her.

The early sixties in England were a time of extremes. At Ascot, the Queen and the racetrack’s elite attendees all wore these extraordinary hats. Skirts were midcalf. The Queen, still a young, pretty woman in her midthirties, dressed in coordinated colors—hat, dress, purse, all matching—as did all the women in her party, although the colors the ladies of the royal family wore could not be replicated by others. If the Queen wore pink, no one else could. That stood for the Queen Mother’s and Princess Margaret’s choice of garment shade as well. The Queen and her mother were ardent horse fans while Margaret enjoyed the side pleasures, for Ascot was the high point of the “social season,” a time that had little effect on the rest of the Queen’s subjects. Prince Philip and the other attending gentlemen wore top hats, their unfurled black umbrellas (with handsome silver, ivory, or gold handles) giving them a three-legged look. If a dribble of rain fell—as often occurred—there would be an orchestrated opening of the umbrellas to cover milady’s plumed and flowered hats (almost a whole garden of flowers it seemed of some).

On the streets of London, in the clubs and chic establishments, designers like Pierre Cardin had shortened women’s skirts to heights that displayed a less-than-discreet section of a thigh. Dresses were designed in tents, triangles, and discordant (or just plain splashy) colors. Hair was so bouffant that it was difficult (except in royal circles!) for a woman to wear a hat. I personally believe that the bouffant hairstyle spelled the beginning of the end for milliners around the world. There was even a madcap fad (very short lived) for paper dresses. The new British musical had come into its own with Anthony Newley’s and Leslie Bricusse’s Stop the World—I Want to Get Off, and their follow-up, The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd, while the previous season’s Oliver!, music and lyrics by Lionel Bart, went on to become a smash Broadway hit. The new international male film star was dashing Scotsman Sean Connery as James Bond, perfect martini in his hand, a sharp-titted beauty at his side, as he prepared to save the world from destruction. Cockney accents and bastard English heroes like Michael Caine’s Alfie were in. Reversing the trend, the very English Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady became Hollywood’s top grossers in the same year.

And the music! Let us not forget the music. Sure, Mozart and Schumann were reliable choices at Royal Festival Hall, and the overforties spun Frank Sinatra on their home phonographs. But the most-played music, the sound that would change popular music, that singularly everyman, pop phenomenon, were the Beatles. Strange bedfellows that they were—Walter Shenson and Leon were part of the producing team that made the Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night, directed by Richard Lester, who was a nonconformist. With A Hard Day’s Night, he broke radically with the established precedent of performance-based musical sequences. The Beatles came alive, popping right off the screen as they tore through the inexplicable action of the film, the songs ofttimes having little to do with the story (which was nominal, at best). They were a force that could not be denied.

At one point, A Hard Day’s Night was about to be dropped from production. The studio could not find a director with substantial credits who wanted to make the movie. Lester, who had directed The Mouse That Roared—also an oddball film, starring a hilarious Peter Sellers—stepped in. Then the original producer backed out. Walter Shenson, the producer of The Mouse That Roared, literally got the movie thrown into his lap. Leon, his associate producer on that film, came along with him. Walter, with little interest in, and almost no knowledge of, music turned to Leon to provide it. I had great respect for Leon, who certainly was one of the first older folks (in his fifties at the time) I knew who saw the brilliance in the Beatles’ music and performance and the potential of its effect on popular music. In music terms, the film was historically significant. It spread a new sound around the world. Without it, the Beatles might not have become as globally popular as they did, certainly not with such shocking rapidity. Leon also went on to produce for British television episodes from an animated Beatles twelve-part series. Lennox Gardens was alive with the sound of the four Liverpudlians, and I liked it.

London, it seemed, had come out of the gloom and glory of the past into this strange new world. It was no longer an isolated island but a lifeline to the future—at least in the arts. Nothing, of course, changed in the manners and customs of the royal family. And when occasions arose for ancient pageantry to be displayed, no country could do better than Great Britain. So there you had it. If you lived in London as I did in those years, you were observing (and were often part of) a schizophrenic culture: the staid traditions of the past and the antitraditional movements of the present.

Early in the spring of 1966, Bob Rossen took seriously ill. He died a few months later from complications due to diabetes and other organic problems. His last film (1964) had been Lilith, an adaptation of a book by J. R. Salamanca about a troubled woman (Jean Seberg) in a mental home who falls in love with a young therapist (Warren Beatty). Earlier, Bob had been interested in adapting John Fowles’s book, The Collector, also about madness and obsession, and lost out in the bidding process. Lilith was its replacement, so to speak. Although artistically interesting, it did not turn out to be one of his great films. The scrappy fighter, so often the protagonist in his work, was supplanted by a moody, indecisive antihero. I would have wished Bob had gone out in more of a blaze of glory.

I was in London when he died in a New York hospital with Sue and his three children by his bedside. I felt great sadness in his passing but never could discuss it with Leon or Sidney. To them, he would always carry the stigma of an informer. I knew and judged him on a personal level. Bob had always been good to me and the children. There was, I had to admit to myself, a definite double standard. Bob had never turned his back on me and so I could never turn mine on him.

In April of that year, I had received a call from Sidney, who was in Cannes. He asked me to work with him to co-adapt for screen the musical Funny Girl. The show had been a success on Broadway, without doubt due to the phenomenal performance of a young woman, Barbra Streisand, as Fanny Brice, former star of the Ziegfeld Follies. It had just opened in London to mixed reviews. “One of the most nonsensical plots in the history of American musicals,” the Times reported. However, Streisand’s personal reviews were extraordinary. “She sings and there are saxophones, trumpets, and violins in her throat,” one newspaper wrote. London, in fact, was en fete with Streisand’s success.

Still, it is hard for one performer to make a film a box-office hit, never mind one who had never before made a movie and did not look like a Hollywood star. It would be doubly difficult when the story was as weak as Funny Girl. New York theatergoers had loved Streisand, and it looked like the same would be true in London. She was Fanny Brice and then some. Casting someone other than her would be a huge gamble.

Sidney was coming up to London and wanted me to see it with him. “I’d like you to work with me on this one,” he said. “I don’t feel I can go it alone.” (This was a reference to the fact that he had been having some recent medical problems.) He told me that his agent—who would act on both of our behalves—thought he could get a substantial offer. Sidney would be the senior writer. Therefore, the projected fee would be split 65 percent for him, 35 percent for me—but he would pay the agent’s fee of 10 percent of the whole. He had not seen the play on Broadway, but he had heard Streisand sing on record. “She’s a powerhouse,” he confirmed of the reviews. “And she is set to star in the movie.” This was a chance for me to gain back my identity on-screen. If he accepted the deal, I agreed to whatever terms he thought fair.

Sidney arrived in London in time for Saturday’s matinee. We returned in the evening to see it again. Sunday was spent poring over the play scripts we had been given, making notes—mainly on trying to get a take on the characters and the thrust of the story and how they could be enhanced on film. The male lead was Fanny Brice’s gambler husband, Nicky Arnstein. In the play his role was underwritten, and not interesting, save for the good looks of the actor (Sydney Chaplin, Charlie’s younger son, in New York) who was cast to portray him. Ray Stark, the executive producer and cofounder of Seven Arts Productions company, was also in London. I am not sure where he was staying, but he took a two-room suite at the Dorchester Hotel for Sidney and me to use as our workplace. One morning, a few days after we had begun, Sidney—always an early riser—picked me up at about eight a.m. We sat downstairs in the Dorchester’s coffee shop for some breakfast before heading up to the suite. Sidney had the key, opened the door, stepped inside, and then put his hand up for me to stay where I was. Beyond him I could see Ray Stark and a young, barely covered woman.

“Close the door!” Stark called out.

I stepped back. Sidney went in, to return moments later to me, idling in the hallway. “Can we work at your place?” he asked.

Leon was on location, but in the city. “Sure,” I assented, as he hustled me down the hallway and into an elevator. We rode down in silence. Once in the backseat of one of England’s commodious black taxis, glass window between us and the driver closed, I asked, “What was that all about?”

“The only thing I can say is that you better keep Cathy away from that lecher,” he said, his mouth becoming tightly drawn.

I would not call Sidney a prude. And certainly he was in the front line fighting for free expression. He had, however, his own code of morals and rules that he lived by. One did not swear in front of a lady. One never drank hard liquor before five p.m. Debts must be paid on time. A certain decorum must be upheld in dress and manner. And—most certainly—a man must never, ever, have sex, or even foreplay, with a woman under the age of consent. He felt strongly that Ray Stark had desecrated the last two and refused to return to the Dorchester. We retreated to Lennox Gardens and so the convenient thing seemed to remain there for the work that we had to do. Leon was extremely good about this and was to prove most helpful. We had acquired reel-to-reel tapes made by Fanny Brice shortly before her death in 1951, with the intent of working with a cowriter on her autobiography. Leon transferred them to more easily accessible tapes playable on a small recorder. Fanny’s honesty about her own missteps in the marriage—and the intonation of her voice—added much to her character and more depth to the story; especially to a better understanding of her love affair and marriage to Nicky Arnstein. Nicky became more human—whereas in the play, he was no more than a plot device or a lead-in to a song.

We hired a secretary named Roxanne (I have forgotten her last name—but it was of Scottish derivation), who set up her “office” in our hallway on the dining room table. Sidney hired her, not just because she was a fast typist and could read both his microscopic and my sprawling handwriting, but that she laughed at all his jokes (which were usually more witty than jokey). She was an attractive young woman (although no beauty) in her midtwenties. A few days after she started work, she asked if she could discuss a matter of some importance with us. Yes, of course. What was it? Well, she was first an actress and then a secretary, and she hoped we would not mind if she received calls on the telephone from her agent. Sure, okay, we agreed. Also—uh-oh! They would be asking for Ruth Bernstein. That startled us somewhat. Why? we asked.

“You know better than anyone how popular—because of Barbra Streisand—Jewish actresses are right now. So I have changed my name—just for the stage, of course.”

She did not leave our employ to go upon the stage—so I don’t know what her career was after she departed our services several months later. However, I never saw the name Ruth Bernstein on a theater marquee.

Summer was upon us. Michael was back from his first year at Berkeley where he had truly found his niche, was doing academically well, and had become involved with campus politics which were of national note at the time. I don’t think he had seriously considered another school, although he had been offered scholarships to numerous ones. Robbie Garfield, now remarried to Sidney Cohen, a theatrical lawyer, had pushed for his going to Brandeis University, where she had donated a large sum of money. She wrote a wonderful letter to the board. When accepted, Michael turned the offer down. President Lyndon Johnson (the connection through my aunt Mary, who was his sister-in-law at the time) extended him an invitation as a presidential scholar. He refused in a letter to the president, citing his views on the president’s continuation of the Vietnam War. Summer holidays in England and Europe do not correspond with those in American schools, so Cathy joined us somewhat later from Buser’s.

It was about this time that Robbie and John Garfield’s son, David—in London to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts—came to stay with us. Lennox Gardens was filled with the youth and the vitality of music other than Leon’s daily practicing. He was not a totally happy camper. Not that I could blame him. Streisand’s recording of the show was played over and over—her unique voice a constant trumpet in our ears. Mixed with Beatles’ music and mania as well as Fanny/Barbra, Nicky Arnstein, and Jule Styne’s marvelous score, the place had suddenly become a set for a revival of a 1930s Frank Capra or Preston Sturges madcap movie.

Ray Stark was married to Fanny Brice’s daughter Frances. This created story problems for us. We were strongly warned that certain true incidents must not appear in the script—or should be fictionalized to gain Frances Stark’s approval. It did not help that Nicky Arnstein was also alive and promoting his interest—mainly financial. This made the time frame difficult as Frances had actually been born before their marriage. The play had in an earlier rendition been a film script written by Isobel Lennart, for which Stark had not been able to make a deal. Lennart then adapted her screenplay for the theater. According to the play’s director, Garson Kanin, he did a considerable amount of uncredited doctoring. We had all versions—but it was those reel-to-reel tapes and Fanny’s own voice that had most inspired us.

We never consulted Isobel, whom both of us had previously known. She had been a lethal informer during HUAC, her testimony severely damaging the lives of many numbers of our close associates. Since then, she had adapted many lighthearted scripts from book or theater to film, mostly with great success (Please Don’t Eat the Daisies and Two for the Seesaw among them). Apparently, her testimony before the Committee had saved her career. Still, informing had cost her dearly. She battled alcoholism and a fractious marriage, and had lost most of her old friends.

Sidney and I had concurred in making Nicky Arnstein’s role much stronger. But, of course, we would keep the story Fanny’s. On the tapes, Fanny had revealed that she knew a great deal about Nicky’s gambling and was not in any way the innocent that she appeared in the stage version. Also, she had made these tapes with a plan to publish an autobiography based on them, so why not incorporate the stories she told as long as Frances’s birth date was protected? Our first script opened with Fanny—already a star and married to Nicky—dressed elegantly, rushing down a prison corridor, stopping at the cell occupied by Nicky. She expects to see him ravaged. Instead, he is impeccably dressed and involved in a card game with his fellow inmates in which he was winning. She departs after a difficult exchange between them and marches out of the prison. We then flashed back to her early days on Henry Street and followed through with the story, obliging Frances Stark’s request for altering time lines. We created the Georgia James character, the Ziegfeld showgirl who befriends Fanny, the relationship allowing us to use integral incidents Fanny described in her tapes to be included in their heart-to-heart discussions.

Just before the Baltimore Railroad scene (“Don’t Rain on My Parade”), we inserted one with the Ziegfeld Follies’ great black star, Bert Williams, pointing up the harsh racism that existed at that time (Williams was not allowed into the same railway car as the rest of the Follies’ cast, although he was one of its major stars). We thought Fanny would be wobbly and funny dancing on roller skates (Jule had a new song that we could use) and that it would emphasize how far she would go to be a funny girl, and replaced one of the show numbers with it. Having the jail scene first seemed to work—as it added the suspense of wondering when “the shoe would drop” and the honeymoon would be over. When this happened, near the end of our version, there were harsh accusations on both sides. Then came the final in-performance scene of Fanny singing the great torch song, “My Man,” that had been her signature song in real life. As the song was composed by Maurice Yvain, not Jule Styne, rights had to be secured, an extra cost Stark was not keen to incur.

Writing of the script extended over a lengthy period with Sidney traveling back and forth from Cannes (and in one instance in my going there for several weeks). When we finished the first draft, Sidney flew alone to New York with it to confer with Ray Stark. Their meetings were rife with differences. Calls from Sidney in the first few days of his meetings became lengthy story conferences. He wrote me two extensive letters, both six pages long and written in minuscule script on onionskin paper. I had to use a magnifying glass to read them. “This is a new one on me,” he wrote, “having story conferences across an ocean. How are you holding up? I’m fighting for what I believe could be a good movie. . . . Never in all my years as a screenwriter have I known a player to have the control that has been given to Mrs. Gould [Streisand]. . . . I can’t even talk about Isobel’s sudden interference. She has become an alcoholic and Johnny, too [Isobel’s husband]. . . . Take my notes that follow and see what you can do about incorporating them into the script.”2

Sidney was back in London a week later, and we worked on the script every day for about a month. A revised draft was completed on November 7 and sent air express to the agent in New York.3 The good news was that William Wyler was being positioned as director. Willie had never made a musical and so Herbert Ross would be brought in to direct the performance scenes. We trusted in Willie’s story integrity. Ray Stark, I’m sure, had chosen him for his other strength. Willie worked wonders with his female stars: Bette Davis in Jezebel and The Little Foxes, Merle Oberon in Wuthering Heights, Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver, Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress, and Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. It seemed that if anyone could handle the willful Streisand in her first movie, Wyler was the man to do it (he was known during standoffs with Davis, a most difficult star, to turn off his hearing aid and wait until her mouth had stop moving before patting her on the shoulder and then turning it back on).

The bad news was that Stark wanted further changes that Sidney felt would compromise the story. He left Cannes and flew to New York. After several contentious sessions with Stark, Frances present at one, Sidney rang me in London.

“It’s impossible! Frances insists on having Fanny [her mother] air-blown into an unblemished heroine with no culpability for the breakup of her marriage. I’m told Streisand hates our script because Nicky Arnstein’s role has been too expanded. She has the power of veto, something I would never have given to one of our tried-and-true stars at Columbia.”

“What do you want to do, Sidney?” I asked.

“If you agree, bow out. Let them hire another writer or writers.”

This was Sidney’s call. I had no choice but to agree.

Isobel was called back in. I have no knowledge of how much she actually contributed to the final rewrite. Willie later told Leon that other writers had been involved but never revealed who they were. In the end, she received sole credit for the adaptation of the screenplay from her play. Sidney said he had accepted these terms as 1) he doubted that much of our original material in our screenplay would be used as Stark was planning to return to the story line of the play script (although some of the characters—Georgia for one—and a few of the scenes we had contributed remained) and 2) Stark was willing to pay us the full price that the agent had originally negotiated (money that I certainly needed). With Funny Girl, Barbra Streisand proved that she was a star and could carry a film. Her performance and her singing were outstanding. Also, although unanticipated, she had a memorable, exotic beauty that shone when the lights and the camera were exactly right. However, the screenplay was no better than the play script, the love story trite, the character of Nicky Arnstein, hollow, more a model for a shirt ad than a brought-to-life portrait of a man. Streisand shared an Oscar for Best Actress with Katharine Hepburn. Her stardom was assured.

Willie Wyler took the brunt of the bad reviews for the script which, one critic wrote, caused the film to be “the nadir of his great career.” Within the industry, his status was not impaired. William Wyler in his long career had won three Oscars for Best Director, and had many more nominations. (In 1976 he would be awarded the Life Achievement Award by the American Film Institute, where he was lauded as having “made films of lasting value with a frequency virtually unmatched by his contemporaries.”)

To William Wyler’s credit, Funny Girl (although more credit might be due to Streisand’s knockout performance) has lasted. Whatever the failings of the screenplay (and I have no way of being assured that ours would have fared better), he directed a young, unlikely woman in a performance that benefited greatly from his experience and artistry and brought to the screen a radiant new star who might well have been a miss, not a hit, under a less talented and less patient man.

As soon as we were off the script, I settled down in Klosters for a lengthy stay. I had a completed my first draft of The Survivors. Now I wanted to go back and do some diligent editing. Within no time my characters began to take over my life. Some days I rose at dawn, so beautiful in any season in Switzerland, the surrounding mountains protecting the small villages, the air always fresh—and went to bed with the moon high and bright in the dark, night sky—without ever bothering to dress or undress. This was a good thing for me, but not for Leon, who was working in London and had little time left over to join me in Klosters. Our telephone calls were not always pleasant. My fault, I fear. I just could not agree to spend more time in the flat on Lennox Gardens at a time when I was writing on my own and would have to be there alone for long periods of time.

Notes

1. As a curious personal addendum to this historical happening, the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, was tangentially related. My mother’s former sister-in-law (my aunt Mary, married first to her youngest brother, Albert) had remarried Lyndon Johnson’s brother Samuel Houston Johnson and so was the sister-in-law to the new president. During my youth and first marriage, I had spent many years in Texas (Alice, San Antonio, and had attended Southern Methodist University). Mary had been a close ally as I went through many vicissitudes. We remained close until her death in 2006. President Johnson made her the American counsel in Geneva at a time when the children and I lived part-time in Switzerland. She was a remarkable woman. At the age of ninety-one she went back to university for a PhD. She sadly passed away a year short of receiving it.

2. Letter from Sidney Buchman to Anne Edwards, Anne Edwards Archives, UCLA Special Collections, Young Research Library.

3. Copies of both of these Sidney Buchman/Anne Edwards drafts of the screenplay of Funny Girl, dated September 26, 1966, and November 7, 1966, are in the William Wyler Archives, UCLA Performing Arts Library and at the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. An additional copy is also in the Anne Edwards Archive, UCLA Special Collections, Young Research Library.