• 13 •

The End of an Affair

The penthouse across the hall from mine on South Spalding Drive was occupied by Dominic (Nick) Dunne, recently divorced and the father of three children, who was in the depths of a midlife crisis. Our apartments were cojoined only by our upstairs decks that extended from the master bedrooms. We did share the staircase leading to our front doors and the hallway that separated the apartments. I have always made it a point to be casually friendly but not make friends with neighbors, as I work at home and writing is a consuming occupation that can easily be thrown offtrack by a neighbor who wants to borrow something or simply exchange gossip or pleasantries. I never answer the telephone when I am writing, but a doorbell, especially if I am alone, is another matter. Somehow, its ring is like a call to arms.

On this particular Sunday afternoon, in the fall of 1967, I was by myself, Cathy with friends, and Jay and Lucy on their day off, when the doorbell signaled me to rise from my bed. I was perched on top of the covers working in longhand on some pages for my new novel, research books on the floor a hurdle for me to get to the door of the room. Then there was the apartment’s interior staircase to navigate safely in my robe, which was, since I was barefoot, an inch or more too long. I thought it might be Cathy, who occasionally forgot her keys. It rang again, this time more urgently. “Maybe it’s Rod,” I thought, and ran my hands through my hair to neaten it a bit.

I opened the door. There stood my penthouse neighbor, Nick Dunne, obviously in a state of great agitation. Whenever we had met before (always in the hallway), he had been dressed elegantly and groomed impeccably—whether in tennis garb or evening clothes. Now, his shirt was buttoned unevenly and hung loosely over a pair of capri pants. His feet were bare in a pair of well-worn slippers. Most notably, his thick, dark brown hair had been hand combed in an absentminded manner. Only once had we spoken more than a brief greeting and that had been a somewhat uncomfortable conversation held in the hallway, wherein I suggested it was not a good idea, considering we both had children (his three—two boys and a girl—lived with their mother, but came on Sundays to visit), for the recognizable odor of marijuana to suffuse the hallway and couldn’t he smoke it in the farther reaches of his apartment? Which, from that time, he apparently had done . . . for a while, anyway. Now he asked, “Can I come in?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” I replied, recognizing by his state that this was not just a neighborly visit.

Once inside, he asked, “Can I sit down?”

“Please . . . I’m sorry. . . .”

Upon entering the living room, he collapsed into the nearest chair. “This is crazy,” he said. “I shouldn’t have rung your doorbell.”

“Obviously you are distressed about something. Are you ill?”

“I thought I was going to kill myself,” he said, seeming to crumble into the back cushions of the chair. “I was afraid that if I was alone a moment longer, I would do so.”

A chill gripped me and I went immediately into reflex action. Just a few weeks earlier Joyce Jameson, a childhood friend of mine, now a fine comedic actress, had telephoned me late one night to announce that she had swallowed the contents of a bottle of sleeping pills. Her ex-husband, composer Billy Barnes, rang on my second line, which I also picked up while trying to calm Joyce. She had alerted him as well. I said, “Call 911!” Billy thought it better not to do so. She had just taken the pills—we had time. He whizzed over to me and we drove at a wicked speed over the hills to her house and spent several hours holding her under the shower, walking her in the pool, back and forth on the deck, emptying pots of black coffee into her until she finally came out of the stupor we had found her in when we had first arrived. Was there something in the sunshine in LA that drove people to such extreme solutions to their problems?

“Have you taken any sleeping pills?” I demanded of Nick, this time deciding I would dial 911 if he answered yes.

“No . . . no.”

“Shots? Heroin? Cocaine?” He looked disoriented enough for that to have been the case.

“No . . . no. Everything just seemed so hopeless. I’ve been struggling against . . . suicide.” His mouth quivered when he said the word. “I’m Catholic,” he uttered as an explanation, leaning farther back into the chair and closing his eyes for a moment.

“You sure you haven’t taken anything?”

“Yes . . . I mean no . . . no I haven’t.”

“There’s coffee left over from breakfast. I’ll reheat it, come with me.” I helped him to his feet. He was a well-built, short man, not too sure of his footing. He took my arm and we walked slowly into the kitchen where I sat him down at the corner nook. Our apartments were not reverse images, he commented with some surprise. “Yours is larger,” he said and took the mug with the hot, black coffee that I brought to him.

“Look, if you want to talk, fine. I’ll listen. Then I’ll forget everything you say. Okay?”

This brought a faint smile to his very Irish face. There was a line across the bridge of his nose from the glasses he generally wore for his shortsightedness and which he had not put on in his trip of desperation across the hall to my apartment. Things probably looked blurry to him, which did not help in his confused and troubled condition.

His wife, “Lenny,” after a long marriage, had divorced him. She had been the linchpin in his life. She was an heiress with large sums of money at her disposal. He had dreams of becoming a top Hollywood producer and being accepted into a society that had scorned him in his youth in Hartford, where Irish Catholics were excluded from such circles. Lenny had been a grand-style party giver. She invited the most glamorous and famous guests that she could, and reports of their parties were leads in the social columns in New York and Hollywood, where they moved for Nick to fulfill his ambition. He had not been able to make his mark despite Lenny’s loaded Hollywood celebrity guest lists to their extravagant parties and he did not think he could manage his life without her. Recently, he had been arrested for possession of marijuana. “Put into handcuffs!” he said emotionally. He got off with a hefty fine (paid for by Lenny). He was having a hard time just making the rent, was spiraling downhill and he knew it. And—there was more—he feared he might be homosexual (and he was Catholic).

Although more cohesive, he was shaking and still in a bad state. I got up, fetched a bottle of scotch or rye—I forget which—and poured him a strong drink.

He pushed it aside. “No . . . no! I think I’m becoming an alcoholic as well!”

“Have you eaten anything today?”

“I can’t remember.”

I got up and went to the refrigerator and pulled out some makings for a sandwich and ground some beans for a fresh pot of coffee.

“Lenny is the real thing,” he was saying. “I was not,” he said. “Our friends turned out to be her friends. Once we separated, I no longer got callbacks from them. They were supposed to be the right people who could help me get where I wanted to be—where Lenny wanted me to be.”

“The right people?” I queried. “Who the hell are the ‘right’ people?” He looked visibly shaken at my bluntness and I switched the conversation to his kids (this was the day they were to visit but he had canceled), and when that was met with a great sigh followed by a clamping of his lips, I moved on to what kind of movies he liked—or wanted someday to produce.

“Something of worth,” he replied.

Over an hour had passed and I was still sitting across from him at the kitchen table in my bare feet and robe. Soon Cathy would be home, perhaps with friends. A house full of young people was not what Nick needed. Yet, I did not think he should be left by himself.

“Look,” I said, “think of someone you can call. You don’t have to discuss the things we have just talked about. You just need to be distracted.”

“I don’t think I really would have done it,” he said.

“I’m sure that’s true. And you aren’t going to do anything drastic. So who can you call? I’ll make a deal with you. Whoever it is, the two of you come here later for dinner. Okay?” There was a telephone on the ledge of the nook and I handed it to him. “I can get you a directory, if you need it,” I offered.

“I’ll call Mart Crowley.”

“He’s a good friend?”

“Yes.” Nick added that Crowley had been supportive since his and Lenny’s divorce. Crowley had then been Natalie Wood’s secretary and a hopeful playwright. His play, The Boys in the Band, recently had been given an acclaimed off-Broadway production while making theater history in its bold treatment of homosexuality. Crowley had returned to Los Angeles and had been helpful to Nick during his growing state of depression.

I left the room and went back upstairs to put on some slacks, a T-shirt, and slippers. When I returned, Nick was standing by the chair in the living room where he had first been seated and in which my smaller poodle, Biba, sat on her haunches, ears pointed, alerted to defend her territory, my large poodle, Sandy, guarding her right. “Mart is coming over,” Nick said.

I scooted the dogs out of the way and we sat down, Nick in the chair, me on the couch facing him, the front door left open so that we could hear his friend when he came up the stairs to our hallway. That was about a half hour later and by then Nick had regained his composure, although a hangdog look haunted his large dark brown eyes.

The next morning there was a note under my door which read: “Dear Anne—I never knew a neighbor could also be such a good friend. Thank you, Nick.”

My life was filled with its own confusion. Rod was still very much a presence, the flame still bright. There is a sense of renewal in a fresh relationship, the chance to start over once again. Down deep it is difficult to believe this, for there is always too much back baggage to carry with you. Rod and I each had personal issues to work out and neither of us pressed the other for a quick resolution. My relationship to Rod—now defined in my head as “the other woman”—was previously unknown to me, and one to which I was not adapting well. I had always been so moralistic about such alliances, had taken a strong feminist stand. There was nothing equal about being the other woman—the word “other” trumped it. Nor was it for his betrayed wife, who I was sure knew nothing about us. I did not believe that Rod had actually lied to me in the beginning, just twisted the truth. He and Carol were obviously having some difficulties. He had said they were separated. And neither of us at that time realized we were spiraling on fast track into an affair. Sex played its part. But the danger was our natural compatibility, how comfortable we were with each other, our shared understanding of the creative process. I believed that, against my better judgment, I was in love with him. He conveyed the same message to me.

On days when both of us were fairly free, he would collect me in Excalibur and we would head for the ocean. We knew every small restaurant on the patch of the Pacific Coast Highway from Santa Monica to a few miles past Malibu. Sometimes, but not always, we would spend an afternoon or an evening at the house in Malibu. I called it the mystery house. Rod (under oath, he stressed) never revealed to me who owned it, only that the owner, a single friend and colleague, was in Europe making films and pending final divorce dictates was leaving it empty. It was furnished in what I call “beach style”—lots of bamboo and white upholstery. The front windows where the living room and master bedroom were situated had floor-to-ceiling windows looking out to a deck and sand and sea. A housekeeper came in once a week but almost all personal belongings had been removed. I say “almost” because on the bedroom bureau was a photograph in a silver frame of a lovely little girl of nine or ten. The owner’s daughter. That picture haunted me. Why had he left it? Where was that child? The story mind in me could not let it go.

I never saw evidence of anyone else using the house, and the housekeeper did keep small edibles and drinks for us in the refrigerator. We inhabited it when we were there. Moved freely through it. Spent afternoons or evenings on the deck looking out at the vast sea to the horizon. When the weather was good, night was the most beautiful. Just us and the stars and the sound of the water rising and falling onto the sand and then ebbing into silence. We spoke two or three times a day when we did not have a meeting planned. What we never discussed was the elephant in the room. This could not last forever. Either an end or a resolution had to come. We were both married with children, although in my case my children were grown and Leon’s distance and my insistence that we were definitely to view this as a separation, was less inhibiting. Considering my long absence, I did not expect Leon to remain celibate. I am not sure what his expectations were of me. But I knew I could not publicly flaunt an affair, nor be dishonest to him. There was no way I wanted him to find out through an outside source who might have seen Rod and me together. I wrote him that I was seeing someone but did not say who it was. I added that it was a caring relationship but that I was not sure it would ever go any further, which was the truth. He did not acknowledge the information, ignored it completely, but his letters immediately changed from sarcastic missiles to ones of hope for our reconciliation. (“Don’t forget the good times we have shared, the help we have been to each other,” he wrote in May ’68, “the reawakening to a sexual unity.”)

Rod’s status was a different matter. Away from LA, in Chicago and New York, we had just been two people fresh with love, learning what we could about each other. We still were infatuated with each other. But, once we returned to Los Angeles, our relationship had taken on a clandestine aura. If we did meet in the city, a member of Rod’s staff was present and his attitude was friendly and yet detached. The first time this occurred I informed Rod that this was not my style and found it demeaning. Why meet anywhere that we could not be ourselves? I understood his need not to bring undue pain to Carol, especially if he was unsure of where we were heading. He was apologetic, the gentle touch, a kiss on my eyelids. “Look, you owe me nothing but honesty,” I told him. “I should think that you owe Carol that as well.”

“I can’t leave Carol right now,” he replied.

“And I never have, nor never shall, ask you to do so. I did believe, mistakenly, it seems, that you had made a decision otherwise before we met.” I suggested we stop seeing each other for a time. The next day he called to arrange a private evening in Malibu.

There was no doubt now in my mind that Rod, although strongly attracted to me, still loved Carol. It is possible that someone can love two people at the same time, but when there is a history and children involved, the outcome is loaded. I had appeared in his life at a time when he had experienced great changes. Although critically successful in his pre-Hollywood years when he was gaining a reputation as a writer of fine television dramas, he had not earned a great sum of money. Then Hollywood called, and in the past few years he was transformed by his own unique talent into one of the very few celebrity writer-producers, recognized in public, lauded by his peers, and rich beyond anything he might have imagined for himself. Carol had shared those earlier, tougher years with him even before his good fortune in New York and he was fully conscious of her contribution as a mother and as a helpmate to him in his career. Indeed, I admired and respected him for this. Yet, here I was in a situation that I had vowed I would never enter into, that I believed was demeaning, for me, for any woman. However, I did not want to make a decision or usher him into one that either of us might regret, for in many ways we were good for each other both creatively and in supplying what was apparently currently missing from both our lives.

What saw us through this period were the demands of our current projects, his more multiple and complicated than mine, but no less engaging. The book I was writing—a political thriller set in Paris during the recent student riots—had been contracted as the first novel of a three-book deal for Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, my new publishers (a switch made, because Thomas Wallace, who had bought The Survivors for Holt, Rinehart and Winston, had taken over as editor in chief for C, M & G). My protagonist was a famous Russian ballet dancer whose defection in Paris coincides with the protests. The character was loosely based on Rudolf Nureyev who, in 1961, had defected at Le Bourget Airport in Paris with the help of the French police and then gone on to dance with a Parisian ballet company. The story’s background required mounds (and months) of research to ensure as much accuracy as possible. I also had to brush up on my French, which had never been good and would never get better! All in all—not an easy load. Jay was a godsend. He seemed to know when to be available and when to get so involved that I didn’t know he was in the apartment. He was a terrific sounding board, and—as I had a homosexual character in my story—he was able to tell me when I had it right and when I had it wrong.

For the first time in my life, money was not an issue, which helped because Cathy would be entering university in a year’s time. Michael had been on a full scholarship at Berkeley but was about to start a career, he hoped, in some facet of the political arena. His eyes were set on becoming a member of senator Robert F. Kennedy’s staff. Kennedy was presently campaigning to win the Democratic nomination for president. Earlier, when Lyndon Johnson made his stunning announcement that he would not run for another term, vice president Hubert Humphrey had entered the race along with senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. Senator Kennedy had not declared his candidacy until mid-March. As the brother of the country’s assassinated past president, John F. Kennedy, he had national sympathy in his favor. But his political objectives were not viewed kindly by Wall Street and the business world as he stood on a ticket of both racial and economic justice, nonaggression in foreign policy, and decentralization of power and social equality. Only forty-two, his youth, debating skills, and passion had quickly won him the popular support of young voters. His speeches were lively and laced with a brash candor. Michael (still not old enough to vote) believed strongly in Kennedy’s ideals, and he and his peers and cobelievers were, after all, the future. I could not help but feel that Kennedy’s nomination and election were essential to our country—most especially because it looked as if Richard Nixon would be the Republican candidate. I respected the two other Democratic candidates, but I did not think either of those men had the ability or smarts to win against Richard Nixon, who was bound to use every dirty trick in the book to overcome his opponent.

I had a vivid memory of Nixon on the campaign trail in 1952 when he was Dwight Eisenhower’s vice presidential running mate, for this was the last election I had voted in before leaving home for my unexpected long residency in England. I also recalled his disingenuous televised “Checkers” speech to rebut charges that he had taken payoffs from California businessmen during his term in office. Checkers was the name of a cute cocker spaniel (who shared the camera with him) presented to the Nixons for their daughters: the message being that gifts given to him by men seeking his patronage had nothing to do with graft but were extended in true friendship. Sure! Going further back—there had been his disgraceful vicious denigration of Helen Gahagan Douglas when she ran against him for a Senate seat.

The Republicans had the long, costly war in Vietnam, for which they blamed Lyndon Johnson, as a weapon. But Robert Kennedy had become connected to his countryman’s pain—blacks, Latinos, returning veterans, the farmworkers who were vastly underpaid, and young people who needed financial help to gain a college education. Among liberals, a great fear had lodged itself. Robert Kennedy represented a last hope for the nation they so loved. His momentum was in high gear when he arrived in Los Angeles in early June having just won the California Democratic Primary, a crucial defeat for his closest Democratic contender, Eugene McCarthy. It looked like nothing could stop his bid for the nomination.

In the early dawn of June 5, the sun not yet fully up, my bedside telephone rang. It was Michael to tell me, in a voice near to breaking, that Robert Kennedy was dead. Around midnight of the previous evening he had been shot in the head at close range as he made his way from the Ambassador Hotel Ballroom (where he had addressed many hundreds of his supporters), through a crowded passageway with employees and what was assumed to be a pack of devoted fans, to the hotel kitchens to greet the serving staff. Upon being hit, he had fallen immediately to the floor, blood streaming from his wound, and had been taken by ambulance to the hospital. A short time later Robert Kennedy was pronounced dead. The assassin was a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, who might or might not have shot him due to his support of Israel, or was just a crazy person.

The country was once again in mourning for a man who offered great ideals, who died too early to see his dreams become reality. (“Let the dream not die,” Robert Kennedy’s one surviving brother, Ted Kennedy, said at his funeral.) Michael had lost his hopeful leader but was asked to be the aide to former New York congressman Charles Goodell, chosen by that state’s Republican governor, Nelson A. Rockefeller, to fill Robert Kennedy’s Senate seat. Michael was not sure how good a fit this was, for Goodell was a Republican, although he had been considered pretty much a liberal and he was a strong advocate in a withdrawal from Vietnam. (As a senator, while Michael worked for him, Goodell’s liberal views came to the fore. After serving out Kennedy’s unfinished term, he would gain the nomination of both the Liberal and the Republican Parties in the next senatorial election, a first in Washington politics.)

I had given Michael money as a graduation gift to buy a car. He purchased a shiny red two-passenger British MG coupe sports car, in which he crammed his belongings into the small space behind the seats and in the minuscule trunk, and took off by himself to drive cross-country—king of the road—to his new life in Washington, DC. That car would prove to be a bonding agent for Michael and the senator—for Goodell did not drive, and he and Michael zoomed about DC and over highways together in his little two-seater for several years while Michael honed up his skills as a speechwriter and campaign manager.

One morning Jay came up from his office to my bedroom-cum-office.

“You said no interruptions or phone calls but . . .”

“But what?”

“There is a man calling from Florida. It’s about your father. . . .”

“He’s had an accident?”

“The man is a jeweler. I think you better speak to him.”

Jay left and I picked up my line. It turned out that my father was buying a $2,000 diamond engagement ring and had informed the store owner that I would pay the bill, as I was in charge of his finances. This was difficult for me to process. An engagement ring? Two thousand dollars! And I was in charge of my father’s finances? Well, I did, indeed, send my father a monthly amount to help cover his expenses, for he was not well enough to go back on the road (or ever would be). He also had a monthly Social Security check and a small stipend from the Veterans. That was the extent of his income. Although my father and I seldom spoke, I thought I might have heard from my aunt Bea (who seemed to know more than I did) if he had a serious lady friend. At first I thought it was a scam and said so. The jeweler was indignant and put my father on the line.

There was that bravado in his voice. “How are you, darling! [no pause as he continued] Yes, I have met a wonderful woman and we want to get engaged and to do it properly. She is a very fine lady,” he assured me.

“If you want to get married, I certainly will not stand in your way,” I replied. “But I will in no way pay for a diamond engagement ring when you could not even pay for my mother’s funeral! The answer is no!” I was immediately sorry I had mentioned the last, but anger and resentment were building inside me.

He kept talking, repeating what a fine lady she was and how he knew I would be pleased to welcome her into the family.

“The answer is no,” I repeated and hung up.

A half hour later, the “fine lady” was on the telephone. She hardly had finished a greeting when she began berating me. How could I treat my father this way? A man who had taken such good care of me throughout my life and who had trusted me with his sizeable fortune for me to invest for him, and now would not let him have access to it! She had a high-pitched Boston accent. “You, dear lady, have been lied to,” I finally managed when she took a breath. “I know my father can be charming and convincing, but he has zilch. He has certainly not supported me throughout my life. He has been a compulsive gambler. Probably, he still is. We don’t talk much.” I then told her the amount I sent him every month and said if she still wanted to marry him, I would not stop the payments, but unless he was ill and needed special care I could not be counted on for a penny more. “I am sure that you are the liar—and a bitch!” she shouted into the phone, and then the fine lady hung up.

The short end of it was that they never got engaged or married and my father, when he called or wrote, never mentioned the incident to me again.

Returning to Los Angeles after so many years had taken some acclimation and compromise on my part. I adjusted well to the physical changes (as one had to do with any major city in the world after an absence of nearly twenty years)—the luxury tower apartment houses stretching along Wilshire Boulevard to Santa Monica, the citification of Westwood Village, which was still just a college conclave when I departed, and the massive glass-and-mirrored corporate buildings standing butt to butt that had replaced the once vast back lots of MGM and 20th Century-Fox studios, the area newly christened Century City. The era of the giant movie lots with their replicas of ghost towns, Paris streets, London’s creepy alleyways, and other fantasy-inspired foreign lands had vanished as films were now shot largely on location, audiences able with the huge growth in travel to have seen the real McCoy so that mock-up imitations cheapened the appearance of the film. Movie stars no longer reigned supreme, their big-screen allure diminished with the advent of television. The city had been unwrapped of its earlier glamour.

Still, the sun shone down benevolently on its worshipers as it always had. The Hollywood sign had not been pried from its position on the Hollywood Hills, and Beverly Hills and the surrounding upscale area seemed almost untouched, certainly unaware of the battlefield east Los Angeles—only twenty miles away—had become with gang clashes between Latinos, blacks, and the lawmen who seemed to beat and shoot before full knowledge of a crime was known.

I had lived in gentrified Beverly Hills for most of my youth, my small life centering on a corner that was now occupied by the modern, much-expanded Chasen’s. There had been a family “scandal” in the mid-1940s that had altered the close relationships between my uncle Dave and his siblings. Not that familial love was gone. It was aplenty. But he had a new home which no one came to. Here is the reason told to me by Marion, who had been told firsthand by my aunt Theo, neither of whom were given to exaggeration.

One afternoon when the kitchen workers in Chasen’s were preparing for the dinner guests and the restaurant was closed, my aunt Theo decided she wanted to talk to her husband about something and crossed from the small bungalow behind where I had lived with them as a child and which was still their home, and entered by the rear kitchen restaurant door.

“Where is Mr. Chasen?” she inquired of the kitchen staff.

Silence prevailed. Finally, someone said, “In his office.”

Theo headed for the back stairs. “Dave,” she called out.

“I’ll be right down,” he answered.

There followed a shuffling sound, and Theo started up the stairs, then paused—startled to see a nude blonde woman apparently dragging her clothes and scooting across the hallway to the linen closet that was positioned opposite Uncle Dave’s office. He stepped out into the hallway as the linen closet door slammed shut. His appearance was somewhat in disarray. Theo kept on coming, pushed him aside, and opened the linen closet door. An attractive woman stood huddled against the shelves, her clothes held close to her body to cover her nudity.

The woman was Maude King Martin, a beautiful blonde divorcee with a teenage daughter. She was the receptionist/manager at the new beauty salon in Saks Fifth Avenue where, on the same floor, Uncle Dave and a partner had recently opened an elegant lunchroom. Uncle Dave closed the door to the linen room again as Theo fled in tears and fury downstairs, out the rear door where she had entered, across the back area to that sweet little bungalow we all had called home, and packed her bags and moved to her close friend Ruby Keeler’s house, where Uncle Dave finally went to soothe her and apparently ask for forgiveness. Man being man, blonde beauties being blonde beauties, he had made a fatal error in judgment and according to the family hotline, had apologized. “How could you!” Theo claimed to have shouted. “And in a restaurant with workers right on the premises and me practically next door!” She could not be placated.

They had been married over twenty years and she had struggled with him in his early days of vaudeville (where she supported them on her dancer’s salary) and had been by his side helping with their first effort, Chasen’s Southern Pit, built in the bean field facing Beverly Boulevard and behind their home. They cooked in a tiny kitchen (my mother helping as well—creating recipes—giving Theo a hand in the preparation and serving). Theo was adored by all our family to whom she always opened her home and her heart. The humiliation seemed too much for her to endure, and within three weeks she had filed suit for divorce.

Theo did not drive. So, on the day she was to appear in the downtown courtroom to ask for a divorce, she took a taxi and met her lawyer in the courtroom. The whole procedure took less than an hour. Uncle Dave agreed to all of her demands—which were few, for she asked only for support and gave up all claim to the restaurant, the house, and property, which had all become places of great sadness to her. Moments after she had gotten into a taxi to ride back to the apartment she had rented in Westwood, the vehicle was sideswiped by a small truck and the driver lost control of the wheel, careening into a telephone pole. Theo was thrown out onto the road. Seriously injured, she was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, both legs broken in several places. She was never able to recover fully, as pneumonia set in, and she died. It was a tragic and unfortunate sequence of circumstances. Our family was bereft, Uncle Dave filled with grief and guilt. He eventually married Maude, who let it be known that no member of the family was welcome to their new home in Bel Air. That was eased in later years but for the most part, family members met Uncle Dave elsewhere, most times at the restaurant where he kept fairly long hours. Everyone in the family, including Marion, blamed Maude for what had happened. No one seemed to take into consideration the fact that Uncle Dave was hardly the innocent party and that my beloved aunt Theo had acted too rashly.

I was in my early teens when Uncle Dave married Maude. My mother had joined my father in Dallas, Texas—the location of the company he was then working for. I had stubbornly refused to join them. Marion was torn. But I was in my mid-high-school years and had a life of my own that I was not willing to desert, being active in young creative circles, knowing now that writing for theater or films was what I wanted. Inez Russin, a first cousin of my mother’s, lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Beverly Hills and worked as a secretary at MGM. It was decided that I could stay with her, a wonderful compromise as she was a fantastic lady of whom I was very fond (and who had, in fact, once lived with us).

My uncle Dave, with his crinkly red hair and wide, endearing smile, had been a surrogate father to me when my own was not around. He was the light in my difficult early years: funny when I needed to laugh, loving when I needed a hug, and someone to say, “Things will be all right.” A great mime, he would pass his hand over his face, when I might be sad, changing his expression from tortured grief to wild joy. It was at the house on Rosewood that Ruby Keeler had taught me to tap-dance on the linoleum floor of the small kitchen, W. C. Fields (whom I called Uncle Claude) brought me bouquets of dandelions and let me beat him at Ping-Pong on the table that was set up on the back lawn, and that fine comic and character actor, jolly, foxy Guy Kibbee, would come to my defense when Marion would declare, “Anne Louise, time for bed!” and he would plead, “Ah, come on! Give her one more hour.” My childhood “friends” were some of the most famous and most talented actors of the 1930s, although I was not aware of their notoriety at the time. Theo and Dave had no children of their own and, I suspect, I filled the cavity they might have felt. They were there for me from the age of four to ten, at which time my mother and I moved out and she and my father reunited. Still, even (or maybe especially so) after Aunt Theo’s exit and demise, Uncle Dave remained a major presence in my life.

After he and Maude were married, we had a standing date one day a week. He usually ate his dinner at the restaurant at five p.m. before the doors were opened for the evening trade. Cracked crab on ice was a favorite of mine and although it was not always on the menu, there would be a beautifully prepared plate of it waiting for me. He would ask me about school, my friends, any problems I had that I would like to talk about. He was my confidant. He gave me my first wedding reception—a dinner for fifty guests held in the banquet room upstairs in the restaurant. “Anne Louise,” he had said, “Jimmy Stewart is to be married soon and is having his dinner here—and it will be the same menu as you are having.” Although invited, Maude had not attended either the wedding ceremony at the Rossens’ Westwood home or the dinner reception at the restaurant. The standoff with the family remained. Maude was resentful, and who could blame her? What occurred was far distant and it was certainly not her fault that Theo met with such a tragic and early end. Still, she remained distant from her husband’s family and had not been won over even by the time I had returned to Los Angeles; Uncle Dave was now in his seventies and not too well, having undergone recent surgery for a slipped disk in his spine. I called him frequently and saw him whenever it was possible. Not long after the engagement ring incident we spoke and he said to me, “Come to the restaurant at five p.m. We’ll have dinner.”

There was cracked crab on ice. We sat alone in one of the red leather booths in the empty front room, which would soon be alive with the sound of happy voices and redolent scents. His hand shook slightly, and he walked with some difficulty. He had aged considerably, was frail and smaller than he had been. His red hair was brushed with gray, his shoulders rounded, but when he smiled an aura of brightness lighted the dimly lit, ghostlike room where framed photographs of the Hollywood players who had been his friends and companions through the years lined the walls.

“Your father could have climbed the highest mountain,” he told me. “Don’t blame him. Blame the crazy world he grew up in. He was never prepared for life and still doesn’t know how to handle it. He’s like a lost kid in a forest where it’s always night.”

He took me into the kitchen later and had a helper wrap up some bones for me to bring home to the two poodles. When we parted, he held my face between his hands. “Marion was always proud of you,” he said, “as I am now.” He kissed me on the forehead and escorted me out front where a staff member in a car waited to drive me home.

He died in 1975. Shortly after, Maude called, warm and conciliatory, to inform me that Uncle Dave’s will, which was written a number of years before my mother’s death, included a provision for a small income to be provided for Marion. She said I must come to the restaurant when I was next in LA and she added, “It was all so long ago.”

The one disturbing element about returning to Los Angeles was that, despite the memories it evoked, the relationships and friendships it vivified, it did not feel like home. This was curious, because most of the American writers in self-exile that I knew always talked about one day “going home,” and considered themselves living as outsiders in their host countries. There were good reasons for this. Before the blacklist the greater percentage had settled into what they thought was their earned lifestyle. They owned homes with swimming pools, had nannies to care for their children, joined clubs, and were looking forward to the rewards they had reaped for their future. Once in Europe, having lost their status, their homes, their identities, they set their goals for recovery, a return in some triumph. They thought of themselves as patriots and remained mostly in the company of their compatriots. They were all movie folk, after all, and in the movies the good guys won and the bad guys came to a bad end. Joe McCarthy would be brought down in months, then next year, then—some year—and they would get their comeuppance. A growing fatigue set in, fenced by resentment, often bitter. Exile was a punishment, even if self-imposed. So they all clung together, drawing comfort from the mutuality of their experience and feelings. I, too, had been visited at times by these same emotions. The difference was that nothing in my life had been settled before I left for Europe. It had, in fact, been in utter disarray. I was, therefore, open to finding a place for myself and my children wherever fate might take us. Now I was not sure if it was Europe that I missed or the group therapy provided there by my circle of compeers.

We were never immigrants. We held fast to our American identities and to our citizenship. Voting was a pledge of honor—and allegiance. The only member of our coterie known to me who had rescinded his American citizenship was Leon. Given his history, one could rationalize his decision—at least I tried to do so. Born in Canada, he was first a citizen of that country. Shipped to the United States as a young boy, he yearned to be a part of the family and the land in which he then lived. After Pearl Harbor he applied for and received American citizenship and joined the armed forces. However, Canada, unlike the United States, allows dual citizenship. So, when he was named before HUAC and blacklisted, his career in the States suddenly ended, he reactivated his Canadian citizenship, thus forfeiting his American citizenship and any chance of ever reclaiming it. This act did enable him to find work immediately in Great Britain. Canada was bound to Great Britain as a dominion, “equal in status, in no way subordinate to each other.” It is a sovereign nation as is Australia, with a prime minister and a governor general but one that also pays allegiance to the British Crown (which for over fifty years has been Queen Elizabeth II).

The matter of Leon’s relinquishment of his American citizenship had always disturbed me. It was all part of the enigma that was Leon. He had reaped the harvest of the best—and the worst—that the United States had to offer, and he had retained the essence of the country’s beliefs. He still, after all these years, considered it home despite the fact that he could not, by American law, once having forfeited it, reclaim his citizenship. This had a strong bearing on our relationship, for it meant the greater portion of our lives, if we did not divorce, would be spent in Europe. He did have the option of living in Canada, or any other one of Britain’s dominions. But, at that time, there were only two major arenas for moviemakers—the United States or Europe.

While I was working on my current book in Beverly Hills and trying to make decisions regarding my relationship with Rod, Leon was hopping back and forth from London to Madrid, preparing the latter as a location for a film, A Talent for Loving, that he was coproducing with Walter Shenson. He had never given up trying to get me to return, and during the late summer of 1968, he went into full gear. Every week there were wrenching telephone calls, cables, and letters. There is no denying that I was moved by them. We had been separated for over a year. A lot had happened in my life in that time. There was Rod. But I knew by now that whatever we had together was not to be a lifetime relationship. There was a kind of desperation in Leon’s actions, and I was feeling a heavy guilt that I could not just end everything. Aside from my ambivalence over my situation with Rod, the question remained if I really wanted to return to Europe to live. That was a major hurdle for a reconciliation with Leon as he could not live or work in the United States. I spoke and wrote to him about this. In a letter he replied,

I agree with most of what you say regarding “roots,” involvement, etc. Again these are vast areas for discussion and exploration. There is one point you raised that I think you should be clear about. The question of my reverting to Canadian nationality. I did not want to do this. It was not my choice. After all, for all practical purposes I was and still am, an American. I believe this was the most serious conflict I ever had with Kathryn. It would have created a break if I hadn’t compromised. And since I felt (you will probably not believe it, but it is so) that our relationship was more important than anything else . . . and since it became almost an obsession with her and created all sorts of emotional upset, I compromised. I wanted to fight the thing through from wherever I could. I knew this could only be an erratic incident in the history of the country, if only from the knowledge of the histories of other countries. But she was so nervous and fearful, what with the hounding by the office in London [referring to the need for a working permit and a permanent visa], etc., that I gave in. And I honestly feel that this was a factor in the subsequent tragedy [Kathryn’s affair with Carl and her suicide] arising from guilt regarding the incident??? [The three question marks are Leon’s.]

Our relationship was caught up in a war between our incompatibility on one side and our shared experience with the HUAC years and having to start anew in a foreign country—granted, one whose language was English—on the other. Leon was well known in Britain’s movie colony as an expert in many areas, production and technical, especially with music, sound, or language; he was seldom out of work. His pay was not on a par with the “big guys”—the directors and producers who were able to package their own projects—and as he kept his financial matters highly exclusive from me (I would say secretive), and as I now had my own resources (which I did not do likewise), I did not take this situation further. It troubled me that he had few close friends among the expats. I brought them into our lives and he could not avoid their presence. He never enjoyed social home gatherings, which I encouraged. He had, more or less, parted ways (at least on a personal basis) with Carl, and his mentions of him in letters had become almost vitriolic. In many ways I thought that the more distance he placed (or Carl did) between the two of them, the better they both were for it. This same bitterness had entered into his frequent telephone calls to me. After one emotionally searing exchange, I asked him not to call me again.

A few days later I received an express letter: “A relationship to be anything,” he wrote, “cannot be one sided. And that is why I said to you, yesterday on the phone, that I would stop annoying you with phone calls and cables. I’m sure there’s nothing more annoying and irritating to anyone than an attempt at communication without a synchronous receiver. I do not beg, nor am I a supplicant. If you are sincerely convinced that you no longer feel for me and that our future together is nil, then say so and I will stop bothering you. My concern for you and the kids I cannot obviate and eradicate . . . this will always be. Either you feel it or you don’t. End of paragraph.”

Then, in the very next paragraph he writes: “I have a home in Madrid waiting for you [where he was preparing the film for shooting]. This is a lovely, three-bedroomed, three-bathroomed apartment with a modern kitchen (even including a garbage-disposal unit) . . . immaculate, completely equipped . . . on the fifth floor of a brand-new apartment building with a lift and a swimming pool on the roof. I have a woman, Aurora, who cleans and cooks dinner. . . . Again, as I told you on the phone, if you can and feel like coming, I will send you the ticket or the money, whichever. I got this large a place with your coming in mind . . . it is waiting and I am waiting . . . the final decision is yours. Nothing would make me happier than to meet you at the Madrid airport. But you must do what is best for you, in terms of both your health and your emotions. Take care and God bless. You still have all my love. L.”

Well, of course, the “home” he had waiting was a temporary place to hang our hats, and perhaps our hearts. It would only be ours for the length of the shooting of the film. Then where would we be? Back to square one.

All of this was transpiring while Rod and I were having our own issues to deal with. I was hesitant to discuss Leon with Rod and he, in turn, could not talk about his own situation. We were slowly withdrawing from the intimacy we had. The affair was coming to an end and both of us knew it.

The last time we met was in early May, a time that can be—and was that day—spectacular in Malibu where our affair, a little more than twelve months young, had begun. The ocean was splashed with sunlight, soft waves undulated toward the beach. We both knew we were meeting to say good-bye. We talked about inconsequential matters. I was perched on the couch and he was seated across from me in this glass-fronted, modern living room that looked out on a glorious blue sky and white-frosted, rolling waves. Suddenly, the sun shifted and a sharp beam of light came through the windows and lay between us like a bar to a gate being lowered. He got up and helped me to my feet and held me in a bear hug for a long time.

We rode mostly in silence back to my apartment in that crazy red car of his. At one point he pulled off the road. “Do you forgive me?” he asked.

“Why?”

“I took a piece of your life,” he replied in a dramatic manner.

These were words exchanged by the lovers in Brief Encounter, the film we had seen together in New York. We both caught what we had done and broke out laughing. When we finally reached Spalding Drive, we sat quietly in the front seat of Excalibur a few moments while he held my hand. Finally, he broke the silence. “We’ll always have New York,” he said with a small smirk on his face. He was referring to the early rush of love between us, the seeming innocence of it all then. I told him not to get out of the car to see me to the door as it was still light. As soon as I stepped onto the sidewalk, he called out to me, “Hey, Red?” I turned.

He waved, and I waved back and then made my way as quickly as I could across the front courtyard to the door to the penthouses. Once inside my apartment, I went over to the lanai windows that looked out onto the street. Excalibur was still there. I stood for several minutes watching until finally, in a sudden grinding and whooshing, it bolted forward with a roar of its powerful motor and was immediately out of sight—if not sound.