Come to the Edge: A Memoir (18 page)

It was to be a grand tour, a trip to end all trips. “We’ve spent weeks sweltering in DC,” he said. “We deserve it!” First, Aspen and white-water rafting on the Colorado River. Then five days in Cora, Wyoming, at his friend John Barlow’s ranch. He had worked there the summer he was seventeen and was anxious for me to see it. And after that—Venice. He’d asked his mother where he should take me. Well, she’d replied, Venice is the most romantic city. Marta, who’d lived there, concurred. We would stay a few days at the Gritti Palace, then a week at the Cipriani.

There’s an old adage in theater: Plan a vacation, get a job. (In the years since, I’ve found it’s best also to buy the tickets.) And so it was that when we got back to New York a week before the trip, I was cast as Ophelia at Baltimore Centerstage—a great theater, a part I’d longed to play, and Boyd Gaines, a few years shy of the first of his four Tony Awards, as Hamlet. I paused, imagining the Grand Canal, but it was impossible to turn the part down.

When I called John to tell him, he was disappointed about our trip but excited for me. “I’m proud of you. Come over—we’ll celebrate,” he said. But when I got to his apartment, the lights were out.

I found him in the back on the small terrace off the bedroom. It was August, but the night was cool. He was smoking a cigarette in one of the metal deck chairs, and his feet were bare. He didn’t look at me. His eyes were fixed straight ahead, on the bricked backs of the brownstones. Slowly, I knelt beside him. I saw it was not the trip.

“You will always be leaving me,” he said at last. And I said some things, trying to break the spell. The part—how I wanted it. A month less than Washington. Two train stops closer. Over before you know it.

His voice didn’t change. “You don’t understand. This is how it will be. You’ll always be leaving me.” I wanted to cajole him from the darkness, lift him from his mood, but I knew it was an old sorrow, one nameless to him, and whatever I said or did would be powerless against it. But I said it anyway. “I’m not leaving you.” And it was then that he looked at me, saw me, and lowered his head to mine.

In the morning, it was over. We went to the Greek coffee shop on Eighty-sixth Street, where he ate two breakfasts. “I’ll get used to it,” he promised over Belgian waffles and a big plate of scrambled eggs.

I left the next week, and we fell into the back-and-forth and the drill of the trains. He saw the play twice, the one about the prince who mourns his father; and he liked my mad scene. After the curtain, we kicked around the bars and fish restaurants near Fell’s Point. On an October night, we went to hear an Irish band at the Cat’s Eye. He sang along to “The Black Velvet Band” and “The Skye Boat Song.” His nanny Maud Shaw had taught him when he was little, and he remembered all the words.

Speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing
Onward, the sailors cry
Carry the lad that’s born to be king
Over the sea to Skye
.

Though the waves leap, soft shall ye sleep,
Ocean’s a royal bed.
Rocked in the deep, Flora will keep
Watch by your weary head
.

On the late-night streets, we walked back to the actors’ housing near North Calvert, and he taught me the songs. By the courthouse steps, deserted and grand, he asked if I would come to Los Angeles with him after his second year of law school. He’d been offered a summer associate position at a firm there. “You don’t have to tell me now, but think about it,” he said, hunched on a step. “And if you won’t come, I’ll stick with one of the firms in the city. I’ve thought about it, and I don’t want us to be apart.”

A few weeks later, I decided. My agents had an office in L.A., and by spring I was cast in a play at the Tiffany Theater on Sunset Boulevard. That’s one thing about being an actor—you may spoil vacations, but you can also pick up and go.

Before, in Washington, living together had just happened. This time he asked me, and he had me pick the house. It was by the beach, a clapboard cottage on Thornton Court, with roses in the garden and a low picket fence. I’d finally gotten my driver’s license, and he bought me an old powder blue Buick Skylark Custom with a black interior.

Santa Monica Airport was close, and that summer he took up flying again. He went up with an instructor most Saturdays and always came back happy. When he was ready to do a solo landing on Catalina Island, he pressed me to come along. A tricky descent, he said, excited—downdrafts and a slim, pitted runway on top of a 1,602-foot mesa.

“Don’t worry, Puppy,” he said. “The instructor will be there.”

It was a cloudless LA morning, and he buzzed us around the basin—John in the pilot’s seat, the instructor next to him. They talked over the headphones, pointing to the colored lights on the instrument panel. I was in the back, peering down at the tight squares of neighborhoods snaked through with gray highway. He turned the plane, and soon we were over water. Near a sheer cliff with the runway in sight, the plane began to shake. He was afraid of stalling, but when the instructor reminded him of something, John leveled the wings and the landing was easy.

Before we flew back, we wandered across the tarmac to the Airport in the Sky Café and celebrated with buffalo burgers. The instructor was pleased, John was elated, and even I, who knew nothing about planes, could tell how well he had done.

I
t was in this way I knew he was jealous.

He was never controlling in the tethering way some men can be, but there’d be a gibe or a tease if I flirted too long at a party or if the calls from a particular matinee idol or ex-flame were too frequent. He didn’t like my screen kisses, no matter how chaste they were, and he’d scold, “Do you have to kiss
everyone
?” Plays were a different story, perhaps because he knew that world, and the space between audience and proscenium made it palatable.

There was one exception—an especially torrid clinch in a Naked Angels production of
Chelsea Walls
, where the theater was tiny, I was in a slip, and the bad-boy actor in question, clad only in boxers, threw me on the bed with Method gusto. Later that night, John refused to speak to me and insisted on walking around the block alone. To cool off, he said. But he never forbade me to do anything. He gave me freedom, and I believed it was because he trusted me.

In November, after I’d returned to New York from playing Ophelia in Baltimore, we went to a dinner his aunt Jean gave at her town house for Roger Stevens, the veteran theater producer and founding chairman of the Kennedy Center. I was seated next to Jane Alexander, an actress I had always admired. Over the toasts, we spoke of her long-cherished project, a film about Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, which she would both produce and star in. Maximilian Schell, newly signed to play the famed photographer, would direct. And, she added, with palpable excitement, he was flying in next week from Munich. I hadn’t seen his Academy Award–winning performance in
Judgment at Nuremberg
, but I knew his film
Marlene
and thought it was genius. After dessert, she handed me her card and said that I bore an uncanny resemblance to Dorothy Norman, Stieglitz’s much younger, married lover and protégée of almost twenty years.

Five days later, I was on my way to meet Jane, the screenwriter, and Maximilian Schell in his rented suite at the Warwick Hotel. I’d been out of drama school a year, and although I’d come close on film and television roles, I had been doing plays since I’d graduated. The script was unfinished, my agents said, so over the weekend I rushed down to the Gotham Book Mart to find a copy of
Encounters
, Dorothy Norman’s newly published memoir, in an effort to glean what I could.

At fifty-six, the Viennese-born actor was still handsome—his eyes bright, his thick hair peppered with silver—and the nubby black scarf thrown about his neck gave him the air of an old-time impresario. As I entered the room, he appeared to smolder, impatient perhaps with the long day of meeting young actresses who, he would later confide, were “too American.” I sat in the chair opposite him, and after the initial chitchat and a perfunctory glance at my résumé, he leaned forward.

“Are you Jewish?” he said, searching my face.

“No,” I answered, then quickly remembered that Norman was. “But I am a New Yorker. And my friends say I was Jewish in a past life.”

He frowned. “My friends say I was Peter the Great in a past life, but I’m
not
. Still … there is
something
Jewish about you.”

Instinctively, I knew not to appear cowed by him and began to assume what I imagined were Norman’s qualities: passion and an alluring, penetrating smarts. He loosened up and so did I, and soon he had us laughing with his stories. He didn’t look like Stieglitz, but when he spoke, I could picture the legendary black cape over his shoulders. Finally, Jane rose. It was late, and she had to beat the traffic to her house upstate. “Why don’t you stay,” she suggested, placing a soft hand on my shoulder, and the screenwriter followed her out the door.

Hours had passed, and I was still there. It was dark by the time she called. There was only the light from the street and the glow from the table lamp between the two couches. Though by no means an assurance of getting the part, a heavy whiff of flirtation wasn’t uncommon in auditions, but this was beyond anything I’d experienced. Perhaps it was European, I told myself, and when he offered me a glass of wine, I moved closer, to the empty couch nearby. Tossing my head back, I sat with my feet curled under me, and although I could see a wedge of bed through the half-opened door to the next room, I didn’t leave.

“Are you all right?” Jane asked when he handed me the phone. “You can go now, you know.”

We had talked about everything, about painting and philosophy, our childhoods and religion, and certainly the theater. He had played Hamlet and I had played Ophelia, and we’d both been in Pinter’s
Old Times
. We talked of plays as if they were real worlds, but when I asked what he would see while he was in New York, he said, “Why watch when you can do.” His gaze was intense, and at one point I moved to the window, touching my wineglass absently. “Does the tension make you nervous?” he asked, adding that for him it was a rare thing. “No,” I replied. But I had dropped mentions of a boyfriend and how I was meeting him later. He smiled, cat-like, but scoffed when I used the word
boyfriend
again. It was, he said, so American.

Then we began to talk about the film—how he would shoot it and what did I think of this or that idea, and if I had the role, how would I respond, how would I wear my hair, how would I move. Together we conspired over the story, sliding easily into the roles of acolyte and mentor. It was, after all, the point of our meeting, to test the thread of chemistry, and when I stood to leave, he stood as well, offering to get me a cab. Once in the lobby, he wanted to show me a mural in the Time-Life Building a few blocks south. He knew the painter, Josef Albers, and collected his work, as well as the paintings of Klee, Rothko, and Dubuffet.

I was eager to learn, and I went with him.

After the murals, we kept walking. To show my daring, I took him not up Columbus, but through the park, until finally we stood under a streetlamp outside John’s apartment building on West Ninety-first Street.

“Farewell,” I said.

“Adieu,” he corrected. “I will see you again.” With that, he kissed my hand and backed off into the cold night.

Upstairs, the apartment was empty. I sat at the dining table savoring the moment. I was giddy, seduced not so much by the still-chiseled movie-star profile or the quality of attentiveness an older man can give to a much younger woman—although I was flattered by the fact that he’d followed me thirty-odd blocks in the cold—but by the spark I’d felt. The talk of Art and artists. The ebullient sense of what it would be like to work with him. This was what was powerful to me, and though relieved to have escaped, I wanted the part and thought, as I waited for John to come up the stairs, that this might be the break I’d been waiting for, the role that would change everything.

I heard the key in the door. John wheeled his bike in, dropped it by the bench, and, grinning, turned on the hall light. “How’d it go?” he said, whipping off his headphones. He had been as excited as I had about the meeting. I began to tell him everything—the walk through the park, the murals, the questions. Then, with my eyes fixed on the middle distance, I sighed and said, “He’s the most powerful man I’ve ever met.”

His smile dropped. As soon as I said it, I wanted to take it back. Speechless at first, he began to berate me. I was foolish, naïve, and, more than that, silly. How could I not see that? “I can’t
believe
you!” he bellowed. “He’s playing you.” When I protested, he waved me off. There’d be a lull and he’d go off into another room, but soon he’d stomp around the apartment and it would start again. He carried on so much that night that I began to doubt what had happened. Until the next morning, when my agents called. He’s smitten, they said.
Nice work
.

To my embarrassment, John began to tell the story every chance he got. I didn’t like it, but when I heard him act it out for Anthony, I had to admit he had me down pat.

At his mother’s holiday party two weeks later, we were greeted at the door by a smiling Maurice. When John left with our coats, Maurice lowered his voice and shook his head, concerned. “My dear, I heard about Maximilian Schell.” Ed’s reaction was similar, only more dismissive, and by the time I reached his mother at the center of the gallery, I was prepared to take my lumps. But she surprised me. She beamed.

“Oh,” she said, kissing my cheek. “It’s so exciting about Maximilian Schell! John told us all about it at Thanksgiving dinner. He seemed to be making fun, but you just knew he was
so
jealous.” The thing was, until that moment, I hadn’t known. I smiled, grateful she’d let the secret slip. That he was jealous seemed in some way to delight her. She wanted to know more. After all, though she was his mother, she was also a woman who knew and appreciated power in men and, without question, valued her effect on them.

Not long after that, I had a second meeting in the suite at the Warwick. This time I was more confident, buoyed in part by Mrs. Onassis’s enthusiasm, and before I was out the door, he offered me the part. I did end up playing Dorothy Norman, but it was years later and with a different actor, in a different time altogether. Due to a writers’ strike, Maximilian Schell was no longer attached to the project.

When I saw Max again, it was at an opera opening in Los Angeles in 2005. By then, I’d long abandoned the thought that a role might change my life—the sanguine belief that all actors hold close. He was seventy-five. His eyes were still bright, and tossed around his neck was what appeared to be the same black scarf. When we spoke, his face lit up, and I knew he remembered everything.

On that night years before, as we’d walked past his hotel to John’s apartment, he’d turned to me with an abrupt tenderness and said, “Whatever happens with the film, whether we work together or not, when you pass by the Warwick, I hope you will think of me and this night.” Strange thing is, I do.