Audition (11 page)

I did take other courses. I was told that I should consider a science course, so I took something called Psychology of Art, in which I learned that the color red attracts more people than does blue. (That, at least, was helpful later on in deciding what to wear for interviews.) I also took a superb literature course and, in one spring semester alone, read Tolstoy, Thurber, Dewey, and Freud. I took a class taught by Joseph Campbell on the importance of mythology, and I took writing courses because I thought if I didn’t make it as an actress I might be a writer. I remember writing a very somber paper on death.

I guess I was trying to explore some of the mysteries of being alive, because in addition to writing about death, I also wrote a term paper on love: Is romantic love a genuine emotion…is it something chemical…is it an invention of Western society? I still haven’t a clue. But now one reads that a possible source of romantic love is chemical and the result of a particular scent. So perhaps love is about taking the right nose drops. Who knew?

Sarah Lawrence was a wonderful environment in which to learn. The classes were very small, anywhere from six to twelve. We didn’t sit in orderly rows but around tables. What we did was talk. And discuss. And talk some more. I learned to ask questions and to listen. I learned never to be afraid of speaking up. Every student’s point of view was taken seriously, and no one ever said, “That’s stupid” or “That’s irrelevant.”

Our dons oversaw all of our courses, addressed any personal or academic problems we might have, and in general kept us on the right track. We were also expected to write very lengthy reports on an area of our particular course that most interested us. (I didn’t know how to type in those days, and my handwriting is small and cramped. How any of my professors waded through my reports is a miracle to me.) Once written, these reports were dissected and discussed with each of us. All this required a great deal of original thought, research, and organization, which I am certain has helped me with my work, even to deciding which stories I chose to do.

I lived in a dormitory called Titsworth, named after an early benefactor of the school, Julia Titsworth. You can imagine the jokes, but I loved the name. We even had a song I can sing to this day. It goes: “My girl’s from Titsworth. She’s really down to earth. I get my money’s worth…from progressive education.”

We all lived in suites—two bedrooms with a bathroom in between. I was very fortunate, my first year, to have a brilliant roommate named Myra Cohn, who later became a poet and an author of children’s stories. Myra was a senior who had asked for a freshman to be her suite mate, and the college picked me. Myra was the sort of person who wrote impassioned political letters to the school newspaper but also, incongruously, played the tuba. Why? To develop her lower lip, she said.

My four years in Titsworth spawned other enduring friendships. One was with Marcia Barnett, who called me Bobbie, a nickname that stuck for four years. In turn I called her Mike. Another was with a tall, awkward, funny lady named Anita Coleman, to whom I remained close until the day she died of cancer. Her daughter, Liane, is my godchild. Then there was—and is—Joan Rosen, whose father was a judge in Maine. Joan went on to marry Dr. Paul Marks, the longtime president and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Joan decided in our junior year that our little group at Titsworth wasn’t serious enough, so she moved to another dorm. That same year I was elected president of Titsworth, an office that came with a seat on the college student council. I had no interest whatsoever in the student council but I loved “getting” Joan because I, the unserious one, served on the student council for two years and she did not. Nonetheless Joan and I have been friends for life. She is a very special and accomplished woman who for twenty-six years directed the graduate program in human genetics at Sarah Lawrence (which many universities used as a model) and founded and directed the first graduate program in health advocacy, also at Sarah Lawrence. Both graduate programs bear her name.

Sarah Lawrence was particularly conducive to forging relationships. None of us needed a psychiatrist because we lived in group therapy every day. There were no secrets among us, no privacy. There was one payphone per floor, and when it rang whoever answered it would scream the girl’s name—as well as her caller’s.

For almost two years I mostly dated doctors. Usually they were young residents. Through one, I would meet another. Marcia Barnett, aka Mike, was going out with someone at Yale Law School, so eventually I switched from doctors to lawyers. I spent a lot of time at Yale. I hated the football games I had to attend, but I definitely enjoyed the stirrings of my sexuality.

One law student boyfriend would take me back to my hotel room after the evening’s major activity, which was usually drinking rum and Coke from paper cups. There was no question of his spending the night—those were very innocent days—but I remember pretending to fall asleep so that he could touch my breasts under my sweater. Though kissing was okay, God forbid you should act as if you enjoyed what we called “petting.” By feigning sleep, I reasoned, he wouldn’t think I enjoyed it. But I did.

Sarah Lawrence was only half an hour from the city, and I went to New York on most weekends. So that you don’t think that sex was the only thing on my mind, I sometimes went to Greenwich Village to listen to the lectures given by one of my professors, William Phillips. Phillips, the cofounder of the
Partisan Review
, was an intellectual of the highest order, and I was all puffed up when he took a liking to me. The college’s proximity to New York also lured people who otherwise might not have wanted to teach at a far-off campus. One was the noted British poet Stephen Spender. I loved listening to his voice and the way he used language so easily and melodiously.

It was easy to go home for the weekends, but the situation there was still depressing. My father was hardly ever there. Not only was he moving back and forth between Miami Beach and New York, he was also traveling extensively through Europe in search of new acts and talent. That left my mother and Jackie on their own. Almost every single night, my mother took Jackie to the movies. When they ran out of new American movies to see, they went to French or Spanish films, even though Jackie had difficulty reading subtitles—
anything
just to pass the evening hours. Then, a miracle! I passed along a suggestion from Bobbie Altman, a friend at Sarah Lawrence, that my parents buy a television set for Jackie. Television, relatively new, had been a lifeline for Bobbie’s sister, who had cerebral palsy. And so a bulky black-and-white Du Mont television set became the center of my sister’s life. Television was particularly entertaining for her because she knew so many of the popular performers, like Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason, both of whom had worked for my father. There were several variety shows on the air at the time, and most of them featured the same jugglers, plate spinners, and singers who had appeared at one Latin Quarter or the other. Television provided great entertainment for Jackie, but I don’t think any of us realized the impact it would have on our lives. I don’t mean just on my own future. It wasn’t only Jackie who loved to stay at home to be entertained. Soon it would be the rest of America, which meant that people would not be going out to see showgirls, no matter how extravagantly they were dressed or undressed. The rise of television was the beginning of the end of my father’s success.

I
T WAS ALWAYS
with a sense of relief that I returned to my new life at Sarah Lawrence. President Harold Taylor and his rather haughty wife, Grace, often invited teachers and students to their off-campus house for meetings, lectures, and stimulating conversations. We’d sit on the floor in their house with their big sheepdog, Ben, talking, talking, and talking.

Much of the talk at the Taylors’ was political. The country was in the midst of the tense period with the Communist Soviet Union following World War II. The cold war had spawned such paranoia that Congress was investigating anyone suspected of having even the slightest connection to the Communist Party. The House Un-American Activities Committee was targeting the motion picture industry at the time, blacklisting any actor, writer, producer, or director who wouldn’t cooperate or name names. A Senate subcommittee was investigating subversive activities among college faculties, and progressive Sarah Lawrence was a prime target. The American Legion had pointed the finger at the college, specifically at Harold Taylor for harboring suspected Communists on the faculty. Soon after I graduated, some faculty members were called to testify before the Senate subcommittee.

I must admit I hadn’t felt terribly involved until this took place. Then the witch hunt hit home. Those faculty members were people I knew and respected. This was not something happening in someone else’s world. It was happening in mine. But all this occurred after I left college. In the meantime, like most of the rest of the country, I was a bystander.

On and off campus, we watched with fascination the Commie-baiting tactics of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, who was busily accusing members of the State Department and, later, even the army, of being Communists. Along with my friends, I was appalled at the obsessive destruction of people’s lives by the small, powerful cadre of accusers. One of them was Roy M. Cohn. He burst into the Sarah Lawrence consciousness in 1951 as the relentless twenty-four-year-old assistant district attorney in New York who was successfully prosecuting a couple named Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for allegedly conspiring to pass secrets about the atom bomb to the Russians. It was primarily Cohn’s cross-examination of Ethel’s brother that cemented the Rosenbergs’ guilt. Not content with obtaining a prison term, Cohn pressed the court for the death sentence—and got it. The Rosenbergs were sentenced to die in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison, a maximum security facility not far from Sarah Lawrence.

I can’t begin to tell readers who are too young to have lived through the Rosenberg trial what firestorms it set off. Tens of thousands of people around the world protested the death sentence. The papers were full of pictures of the Rosenbergs’ about-to-be-orphaned young sons, then six and ten. Arguments raged as to whether the Rosenbergs were framed or whether they really were traitors. And Roy Cohn was at the epicenter. He quickly became public enemy number one on the Sarah Lawrence campus as he relentlessly pursued supposed Communists. He had already become a key player in the successful conviction of one suspected Communist, a former member of the Commerce Department, for perjury, and had zealously prosecuted eleven members of the Communist Party for sedition. But the death sentence in the Rosenberg case made Cohn a living Satan.

It was the talk of the campus, the country, the world. Yet I don’t remember having a single conversation about the Rosenberg case, Roy Cohn, or Senator McCarthy with my mother or father. Politics were just not a part of their life.

As for me, I was becoming more and more absorbed in my desire to be an actress. I began to doubt that college was the right place for me, and in my junior year I came close to dropping out of Sarah Lawrence altogether. I had been sick that fall with mononucleosis and had missed quite a lot of school, so perhaps my bonds to the college had been weakened. I had loved my leading role in
Juno and the Paycock
and, later, playing the major part in George Bernard Shaw’s
Candida.
This was a wonderful role for a woman, although she should have been played by someone more mature than I. The play’s director had his problems with me because I was very shy about onstage physical contact with the actor I was supposed to be married to. My character, the wife of a preacher, was having a love affair with a young poet. In the meantime her husband was beseeching her to stay with him. “You’re supposed to have some signs of a sexual relationship with your husband,” the director said in frustration. “Stroke his arm. Put your hand on his knee.” But I was so uncomfortable at the prospect that I could barely touch him. I think I still had to pretend to be asleep to have any physical contact. But I did well enough so that I received, if not a standing ovation, at least healthy applause at my curtain call.

I was now certain that greatness lay ahead of me on the stage. So I went to see Esther Raushenbush, the dean of the college, and told her I was thinking about leaving Sarah Lawrence to pursue my acting career. To my surprise she was supportive. “College isn’t for everybody,” she said. “If you’re really serious about this, then you should try.” I had expected her to say, “How can you possibly think of leaving? This school can’t get along without you.” But she didn’t. So I took her advice and I tried.

My father, who knew every producer and theatrical agent in town, arranged some auditions for me. Most of the agents said I needed more experience, but one of them, a very well-known agent named Audrey Wood, set up an audition for me to read for a part in an upcoming production of Tennessee Williams’s
Summer and Smoke.
I was incredibly excited. Debuting on Broadway in a Tennessee Williams play was a sure ticket to stardom.

But then, two days before the audition, I panicked. What if I didn’t make it? What if I failed? I knew I would take it personally if I didn’t get the part, and I couldn’t face the rejection. It was just like being back in high school with the same fear I had of being turned down by a sorority or by the popular girls who didn’t want me in their group. I knew then, in my heart, that I didn’t have the courage or the confidence to face being rejected, perhaps over and over. I was forced to face the fact that I wasn’t going to be a great dramatic actress. I had the pull because of my father’s prominence in show business, but I didn’t have the push. I never went to the audition. Instead, relieved, I went back to Sarah Lawrence for my last year and graduated. I was even chosen to speak for my classmates at the final class dinner for them and their parents.

I realize now that Esther Raushenbush was very wise. If she’d said to me, “Oh no, you can’t drop out. You must stay here,” I would always have thought she’d prevented me from following my calling. By supporting my youthful yearnings, she’d allowed me to find out for myself that I didn’t have what it takes. One of my professors already knew that. “Bobbie came a long way in developing her talent as an actress this term,” she wrote. “But she must learn to evaluate criticism.” She obviously knew more about me than I knew about myself.