Audition (13 page)

My father was proud of the piece, but he didn’t take television very seriously. By 1953 half of all American homes had at least one television set, and more than seven million new sets would be sold the next year and again the year after that, but he didn’t recognize television as a rival to his nightclubs. When I pointed out to him one night that more people watched the Tex and Jinx TV show
At Home
in a day than came to the Latin Quarter in a year, he acknowledged the numbers, then countered: “But my customers
pay
to see my show.”

I was, of course, still living with my family. Young single women didn’t have their own apartments then. And the penthouse was so huge we certainly weren’t on top of one another. At one point my cousin Selig lived there as well. He, too, was working in television, producing a local cooking show called
Josie’s Kitchen.
One of the segments featured South African lobster tails, which resulted in the South African Lobster Tail Institute, or some such organization, gratefully sending him a huge crate of frozen lobster tails. My parents and Jackie were in Florida, and Selig and I lived on that lobster for weeks. It didn’t matter if either of us was eating alone or was having people for dinner; we ate South African lobster tails. For all I know the people who are currently living in the apartment are still eating South African lobster tails.

I’m not going to say that everything I know about television I learned during my tenure at WNBT, but I certainly learned a lot. One lesson was—and is—not to assume anything, especially on live television. I learned that from a famous society gossip columnist at the time, Igor Cassini, who wrote for the
New York Journal-American
under the pseudonym Cholly Knickerbocker. Ted had given Cassini his own talk show, and I was asked to produce it. My job was to write Cassini’s introduction on a cue card as well as the questions he would ask each guest. But we never got past the introduction. I assumed, fool that I was, that Igor Cassini would know his own name, so I simply wrote his initials on the cue card for the introduction. “Good evening,” he intoned when we went on air. “I am I.C.”

For all the fun I was having working at WNBT (which would become WNBC in 1960), I was increasingly
not
having fun with Ted Cott. I wanted to go out with other men. Ted was jealous and possessive. He repeatedly asked me to marry him, which made me pull away even more. I wasn’t in love with him. I was still waiting for the man of my dreams, but Ted persisted to such an extent that he began to wait outside my apartment building on Central Park West for me to come home on nights he knew I was out.

It came to a head when I started dating Joe Leff, a highly eligible young bachelor whose family owned a successful knitting business and whose cousin and sister had both gone to Sarah Lawrence. I liked Joe a lot, which sent Ted over the edge. One night when Joe brought me home, Ted suddenly emerged from the shadows and challenged him to a fistfight, right there on the street. To my horror they began to struggle and hit each other. Believe me, having two men physically fight over you is not the exciting fantasy some women harbor. Fortunately they had the good sense to stop attacking each other and to walk away. Needless to say the incident ended my relationship with Ted. And my job at WNBT. Ted had become so obsessive and controlling that I had no choice but to quit. And Joe, whom I really liked, evidently didn’t like me all that much. He stopped calling.

Ted must have regained his senses after that because he went on to marry a beautiful woman named Sue. Joe, too, moved on and married a beautiful woman named Joyce, who would later become my best friend. After the sidewalk confrontation on Central Park West, however, I was left high and dry.

Luckily a new job quickly materialized and I went to work at another local New York station, WPIX, on the
Eloise McElhone Show.
I knew Eloise from those parties at Ted’s apartment and liked her a lot. She was a little outrageous, a little overweight, and very, very funny. My official title was executive producer, but in reality I was also associate producer, writer, script girl, guest booker, and coffee maker. Multitasking was the norm in those early days of television when the programs were so understaffed that it never dawned on me to question the workload. We had to fill a half hour every day with anything we could find: interviews, cooking lessons, fashions, exercise demonstrations, pet advice, even a segment called “Answer Your Male,” about relationships. I wrote many of the letters Eloise would supposedly “receive” as well as the answers to those letters, her introduction of her guests, and the questions she would ask them. I also prepared the graphics, chose the music for each segment, and then sat in the control booth when we went on the air and prayed that somehow it would all work out. To the second. That is why my answer to all the young people who ask me how to get into television is: go to your local television stations, take any job that’s offered, and work your fanny off. Volunteer for everything without looking at the time clock. Learn how it all works. Crises happen. Producers don’t show up. Guests don’t show up. Scripts are lost. Be in place.

Make no mistake: television is a demanding business. To be successful in it you have to be somewhat obsessive and, as a result, it is hell on your social and romantic life. Eloise McElhone paid a price back in the fifties when her husband, perhaps wearying of the hours she was spending away from him and their children, upped and left her for another woman. Eloise went through a very sad time, but I have to admit I was relieved when the show went off the air for the summer.

And what a summer it was! I went to Europe with my dear friend from Sarah Lawrence, Anita Coleman. The ostensible reason for our trip was to visit Anita’s boyfriend, Warren Manshel, who was working temporarily in Paris, and get him to propose marriage to her, but what I wanted was adventure. We both got what we wanted.

Paris. The South of France. Italy. Anita and I each had brief flings with two Italians—hers was tall, mine was short. These were sun-filled days and starry nights. It was divine. When Anita got back to Paris, Warren proposed and she accepted. Her parents flew over and there was a fairy-tale wedding on the isle of Capri.

As for me, I was free, free, free! In mid-July I stopped by an American Express office in Rome to see if I had any mail (American Express was the customary mail drop then for travelers) and found a letter from WPIX informing me that the
Eloise McElhone Show
had been canceled and I was no longer needed. I was thrilled. I jumped up and down on the Spanish Steps. I had the rest of the summer to myself. Maybe the fall, too. Maybe my whole life. My parents, always generous, sent me money to stay in Europe.

I went back alone to the South of France, where I had friends, and then moved on to Paris, where I decided to live for a while and try to get a job. I found an inexpensive hotel on the Left Bank, had my hair cut short with bangs like Audrey Hepburn. Young, thin, and American, I got a job modeling for the House of Carven. “Vous avez une bonne taille,” Mme. Carven told me, which meant I was the right size for the petite clothes she was introducing.

Can you imagine? Me! A model in Paris. With Audrey Hepburn hair. There weren’t too many American girls in Paris then, and I was a popular novelty. I had many friends and several boyfriends. I even thought I was in love. Fred, a Frenchman, was funny, charming, and somewhat elusive. It was Paris. We had a little affair. He liked me but he didn’t love me, and he sure didn’t want to marry me. “Tant pis,” as they say in Paris. Too bad. My heart hurt a little, but it wasn’t broken. It’s hard to have a broken heart when you’re having the time of your life.

I remember walking to the flower market one beautiful, early morning and sitting on a bench, surrounded by bouquets of brilliant flowers and thinking, I’m happy. Utterly and completely happy. As a reminder of that moment of perfect contentment, I later bought a small Childe Hassam painting of that same flower market. It hangs in the front hall of my apartment in New York, where I see it every time I come in or go out.

My father, however, finally put an end to my French idyll. “It’s time for you to come home,” he wrote to me in November 1954. “Meet me in London.”

I dutifully went to London, where he was producing a command performance of a Latin Quarter revue. (A command performance was, and is, a stage show put on at the request of a monarch or a head of state.) In London I looked up friends I had made in the South of France and I was gloriously wined and dined, which made it somewhat easier not to miss Fred. What wasn’t easier, however, was when I realized, to my shock and deep fear, that I had missed my period. I was woefully ignorant of birth control and suddenly terrified that I was pregnant.

I remember sneaking off to see a surgeon in London (where they are called “Mister”), but he wasn’t sure whether or not I was pregnant. It was too early to test (and the at-home, early pregnancy tests of today had not yet been developed). I didn’t know what to do. Abortion was illegal. If indeed I was pregnant, how would I go about getting one? What would I tell my mother? I was frantic. It was a wrenching time for me and one that has made me even more supportive of women in similar predicaments and their right to choose their own fate.

Soon after my father left London to return home, I followed, sailing on the ocean liner the SS
United States.
My spirits were decidedly low, my fears high, until suddenly, on the second day at sea, I got my period. I was euphoric during the rest of the voyage, which is probably why I recall so fondly my assigned seatmates at meals—Bob Hope’s mother-in-law, Teresa Kelly DeFina, and a young Greek shipping heir named Alexander.

When I got home I went down to Florida to visit my parents and Jackie. They were staying at the new, very popular Fontainebleau Hotel, with its lush twenty-acre grounds and legendary “lagoon” pool. I know I should have been agitating to get back to New York and find a job, but I was enjoying my lazy tropical life.

I especially enjoyed it when Alexander came to visit me from Palm Beach, where he was staying, but whatever romance there might have been vanished over lunch. My father had a poolside cabana overlooking the ocean, but Alexander, whose taste ran to caviar and champagne, rapidly lost interest in me when he saw the people in the adjacent cabana digging into their corned-beef and pastrami sandwiches. Maybe it wasn’t just the pastrami. Maybe it was also a bit of anti-Semitism. Either way I never saw Alex again.

I did meet two other men during that idyll in Florida, however, who would play pivotal roles in my life. I remained steadfastly loyal to one of them in the face of enormous criticism. The other I married.

Bad Choices

R
OY
C
OHN
and Bob Katz. An improbable pairing. They never met each other, but I met both of them, for better or worse, during that leisurely time in Florida.

My first meeting with Roy was brief, and for me, quite unpleasant. He was evidently a frequent visitor to the Palm Island Latin Quarter, because when I went to the club one night, there he was, sitting with my father. “This is my daughter Barbara,” my father said by way of introduction. “She said she wanted to meet you.” I immediately corrected him. “I
am
your daughter,” I said. “But I
never
said I wanted to meet him.”

Why would I want to meet Roy Cohn? I detested everything he stood for. After the Rosenberg trial in 1951, he had become even more notorious as chief counsel to the Senate subcommittee investigating American Communists, headed by the Communist-obsessed Senator Joseph McCarthy. By 1955, the year I met him, Roy had become a national celebrity of sorts from the Army-McCarthy hearings the year before, the first congressional hearings to be nationally televised.

Twenty-two million people had watched the gavel-to-gavel coverage of those hearings during the thirty-six-day live television marathon in the spring of 1954. Twenty-two million! It was high drama. There was Roy with his distinctive slicked-back hair and dark circles under his eyes—I thought he looked like a lizard—sitting by the side of the glowering, satanic McCarthy, leveling charges at everyone who came into their sights. And then, on June 9, McCarthy went too far.

He was in the midst of impugning a young associate of the army’s chief counsel, Joseph Welch, when Welch uttered the famous words that triggered McCarthy’s downfall—“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness,” he said. “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”—and the gallery in the Senate hearing room burst into applause. So, unseen, did many in the television audience and others wept happy tears. It was an extraordinary moment. It was as if the bully everyone was terrified of were suddenly stripped naked and people realized there was nothing left to fear. McCarthy’s popularity immediately began to plummet, and his reign of ideological terror was over. When the hearings ended inconclusively, Roy resigned but McCarthy was soon censured by the Senate. He would die, three years later, of alcoholism-related hepatitis.

Roy, however, managed to rise from the ashes. He was only twenty-eight when I first met him in Florida, and on his way to becoming one of the most powerful and feared lawyers in New York. He also remained one of the most unpopular men in America. No, I did not want to meet him.

The man I did enjoy meeting in Florida was Bob Katz, an eligible bachelor considered a catch by many eager young women in Miami. I didn’t disagree. I also thought, after my carefree time traipsing around Europe for months, that it was time for me to get married. Bob was ten years older than I, good-looking in a dark, smoldering way, well-mannered, a good athlete, and a good dancer. If he wasn’t powerful, he was certainly an attractive prospect. His father, for whom he worked, was the largest manufacturer of children’s hats. Hardly an exciting business but a very successful one—most children wore hats then and everybody had new Easter bonnets. Unlike show business, it was also a stable business, which appealed to me for obvious reasons. So I started going out with Bob, whom I immediately nicknamed (for my friends) “Katz Hats.”