I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (7 page)

Herbert was always fascinating. A lit cigarette never left his mouth. His students watched, hypnotized, as the ash got longer and longer, before collapsing onto his chest and joining the rest of his ashes.

After graduating from the Playhouse, I was hired for the summer at Green Mansions, a wonderful little theater in the Adirondacks, a great job for a young actor. Idling in a rowboat on the lake after rehearsals, I fantasized about Herbert. Lying back in the rowboat under the summer blue sky, the clear cold water under my fingertips, I would romanticize our relationship.

“Herbert,” I would breathe. “Heathcliff.”

We had a few days off unexpectedly, and I was given a ride to the city. In the little mirrored phone alcove in our apartment on Riverside Drive, I called Herbert. He was glad to hear from me, his voice warm and provocative.

“What are you doing tonight?” Did I ask it or did he?

He said, “Do you want to come down to the Village?”

“Sure.”

Then Herbert said, “Come to my apartment, but if you don’t want to go to bed with me, don’t come.”

Silence.

“Lee, do you hear me? Don’t come here if you’re not going to go to bed with me.”

“All right.”

“All right, what?”

“All right I’ll come down.”

His apartment was small and grim. We sat across from each other in the living room. He was a jovial host, but who was this man?

“Have you had dinner?”

“I’m not hungry.”

I wanted to leave, but I remembered that I’d promised not to come down unless I went to bed with him. A promise was a promise. There was absolutely no air in the balloon, no attraction, no romance, nothing. He opened the door to the bedroom. There was a large satin-covered bed in a small room. I guess we both undressed. I remember clearly, with my eyes closed, visualizing a Roman landscape, steps leading to pillars, the vertical lines on the pillars, a sunset backdrop behind them, and figures in Roman togas moving around on the steps.

I felt nothing. My concentration was focused on the images in my head. All I could think of was,
Is it over yet?

When he was done, he was concerned. “Are you all right?”

“Fine, really.”

It was stifling in his apartment. I had to get out to breathe.

•   •   •

A
ll my one-night stands through the years would be a replica of that experience in one way or another: the anticipation—breathless and really hot, scorching to the touch. The actuality—the underwear coming off, the white body, the sheets, the strangeness. A total turnoff. Except for one, much later. No, two.

Within seven years I would call Herbert again. He had met, married, and opened an acting school with Uta Hagen, a remarkable actress and human being. My own life had undergone a radical change. Herbert and Uta opened their doors to me; their school gave me a home away from home.

R
ight after I graduated from the Neighborhood Playhouse, Richard Rodgers of musical fame cast me in a play. I was eighteen. Since the play wasn’t to be produced for another six months, he offered me the interim job of understudying Ado Annie in the road company of
Oklahoma!

I took the train to St. Louis to join the company by myself. I wore a skunk coat and a red beret. The chorus people told me later that they all made fun of my snobby ways after they asked, “Are you a singer?”

“No.”

“A dancer?”

“No.” Pause, then, in the new lower voice I had acquired in speech class at the Playhouse: “I’m an actress!”

As it happened, Dorothea McFarland, whom I’d gone to understudy, broke her arm the day I arrived. I was desperate to go on in her place. I’d had no rehearsal with the cast, no rehearsal of the songs with the orchestra, but I had insane eagerness. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed and the lovely girl who was the understudy I was sent to replace went on that night. I was never to perform Ado Annie. (Dorothea made sure of that.)

The company was spending two weeks in St. Louis. I’d been there just a few days when I came down with influenza. We were staying at some famous old hotel. For three days I was out of commission, sleeping most of the time, with a high fever. The doctor visited. Hotel maids moved in and out of my room. Waiters with tea and lemon. I slept.

Days later, there was a knock on the door. A man’s head looked in.

“I brought you some soup.”

He pulled up a chair and fed me chicken soup, blowing on each tablespoon to cool it off. He felt my forehead. Was he the doctor?

“You still have a fever.”

“I know,” I said, slipping back to sleep.

Later, I asked the maid if she knew who he was.

“Oh, they live in the suite next door.”

Two men, nice men, tough guys, took turns feeding me. I felt very taken care of on my first foray to this strange new town, this strange new country outside New York City.

The real hotel doctor checked on me. I was more awake. He let me wash my hair. I was sitting up in my big bed now, but I had company. The men next door were friends now. They were my new family. Like uncles. And they were giving me a going-away party in their suite the night before the company went to San Francisco. These men fussed over me as if I were Beth, the poor dying sister in
Little Women
. They set me up in a big comfortable chair in their living room and introduced me, to my surprise, to a very handsome and self-assured boy, about my age, whose father, they said, owned the biggest factory in the state.

“Very rich,” they said in front of him.

He nodded. I had a feeling
marriage
was the unsaid word here. Then, my two uncles put on a record with hot music that filled the room.

“I can’t dance,” I protested. “I’m still weak.”

A girl younger than I, sixteen or so, pale, with a sloping chin and bent shoulders, stepped out from the foyer and started to strip to the music.

“What’s this?” I asked.

The girl continued to take her clothes off, gracelessly.

“It’s your going-away present,” one of my uncles said.

I jumped up from the place of honor. “No! No, please! Don’t!” I took the girl’s arm and dragged her back into the foyer. “Don’t do this.” I was urgent and alarmed. “Please, you don’t have to do this.”

“They paid me.”

“How much? I’ll pay you.”

“I want to,” she said.

I looked at her. I went back to my chair in the living room and looked at the floor till the girl was naked. The uncles picked up her discarded clothes and told her to put them back on. They saw me back to my room two doors down.

“Sure, sure,” they said when I told them I was still sick. “Sure, sure, you take care of yourself, take care now.” Their big fingers patted my head, stroked my hair.

Later I learned there was a big mob presence in St. Louis.

•   •   •

W
hen we arrived in San Francisco, I bought a pair of dangly rhinestone earings, one of which I still have. I went to the theater every night and sat with the chorus, makeup on, just in case Dorothea should slip and fall again. I learned how to bead my lashes with black wax and use thick #3 theater makeup. I begged to be permitted to stand on the porch with the rest of the cast for the finale of “The Farmer and the Cowman,” and for a week had a wonderful time preparing, piling makeup on for my entrance on the porch. Apparently
the makeup was so distracting that several audience members complained and I was sent back to the dressing room.

I had a one-night, or should I say a half-an-hour affair with my third lover, in San Francisco. First there’d been Buster, then my night with Herbert Berghof, and now the tenor from
Oklahoma!
We both lay half-dressed across the bottom of the hotel bed with its squeaky springs.

Within a few minutes his breaths were rapid and heavy, and suddenly “Mama” erupted from his mouth like a song. “Ma-maaaaa!” He was Italian.

When the company traveled to Los Angeles, my mother and father joined me at our hotel downtown. Two extraordinary things happened. I saw John Garfield in
Awake and Sing!
with other Group Theatre actors—he was stunning in it—and he drove me back to the hotel in his convertible. He talked about his wife, Robbie, and put his hand on my breast.

The other big event was about God. I was sunbathing on the roof of the hotel with my parents and maybe thirty residents in various stages of undress. The smell of suntan oil filled the air along with music from someone’s radio. I was the only one sitting up.

I saw a girl a little older than myself with loose dark hair open the door to the roof. I had noticed her earlier in the day, arguing with a boy on one of the staircases near the elevator.

Standing by the roof door, she took off her skirt, her blouse, and her shoes, and hung her coral necklace on the doorknob. In just her white bra and panties she moved to the edge of the roof, climbed onto the edge, and jumped. Her beads were still swinging on the doorknob.

I went to the edge of the roof and looked down. There on the black tar of the parking lot, ten floors below, she was spread like a
four-pointed star. I looked around the roof. People were talking quietly, tanning themselves, or dozing in the sun, Perry Como on the radio; a woman laughed. Had I dreamed this? No. Her clothes were by the door, the beads still swinging. The white star in the upside-down black night catapulted me out of all childhood certainty, introducing me to the unknown, Chance. The appointment in Samarra.

The casualness of the girl’s death shook me out of a prolonged childhood. I ran down five flights of stairs to my hotel room. My father, sitting on my bed, tried to comfort me. I asked him about God. He said God was a force for good in the world.

For me, God had always been a kind of Christmas Santa. At night, I prayed, “Dear God, let me pass this test.” “Dear God, make my legs thin. Make Stanley fall in love with me.” He was a personal deity, there for me in all my important quests.

Now, God as I knew him left, and plain superstition crowded in to take his place. I couldn’t go onstage without something to protect me. Knocking wood, a penny in my left shoe, someone saying “Good luck” three times, wearing a red string around my wrist. When my children fly, I light a candle. The fear of senseless chance disaster never leaves me.

•   •   •

A
fter
Oklahoma!
I did a play in summer stock. The stock company was in Sayville, Long Island. I was still living at home. Also performing in Sayville that summer were John Randolph, his wife, the actress Sally Cunningham, and Warren Stevens, a young leading man who would play the juvenile lead on Broadway in
Detective Story
.

They asked me to go out with them one night. The journey in the car was a revelation. Warren Stevens drove, Sally and John sat in back, and I was in the front passenger seat. They were so passionate about something they read in the newspaper that day that I kept looking at
them to see if they were putting me on. They were connected to something totally foreign to me at that point, a political passion I didn’t understand until I was blacklisted. I admired their connectedness, their young fire, and I loved John and Sally. John, the recruiter, never stopped trying to make a Communist out of me.

“Say you have two shirts, Lee. Wouldn’t you want to give one to someone who doesn’t have a shirt?” Completely earnest.

“John, leave me alone. I don’t care about shirts. Take them both. It means nothing to me!”

John led me up two flights of stairs to a crowded room where young people were arguing. Stalin felt the music written by Shostakovich wasn’t geared to the people. It was too elitist, or something. “Who is Stalin to tell a great musician how or what to write!” I turned around and walked back down the stairs.

John sent me a book to read. It was about conditions in the United States for working people, particularly women. I read it the week I had a bad cold, and it touched something in me. That was the day poor beat-up Mabel came to clean the apartment. I lectured her straight from the book, all the while blowing my nose into a clean hankie, not moving from my bed.

“Mabel.” The sound of vacuuming in the hall outside my bedroom. “Mabel,” I called, louder. The vacuum stopped. I was impatient. What I’d read was so amazingly appropriate. Young Mabel, not much older than I, opened the door. She was small, black, with one almost-closed puffy black eye. I read her a section from the book about the lack of living wages for working people and looked up to see her reaction. Blank.

Underneath, spoiled Lyova felt helpless. I couldn’t say, “Don’t go back to the guy who’s been beating you up. Save yourself.” I felt as helpless as I had been watching a man stalk a woman on Broadway, or when Mrs. Cherry hit Foster’s open palms with her ruler.

•   •   •

F
remo had not one wrinkle on her face. She took my mother’s dictum, “Don’t frown, you’ll get wrinkles,” as an instruction to eliminate any movement of her face. Her limpid blue eyes were merry but wide, always. Her scarlet lips made a V for a smile, but never widened into a grin, so wrinkles never formed around her eyes or mouth. Her irrepressible laugh shot through the top of her head in a loud shriek—“Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!”

Try to laugh without moving your mouth; you’ll see what I mean.

My mother and aunt were merry together, walking with their long legs, pushing me in front of them to instruct me to walk like they did, one foot in front of the other, or gossiping at the dinner table, my mother with expulsions of laughter, pink-faced and moist-eyed, Fremo hooting, genteelly, both squealing at times, so overcome by this and that.

They would be overcome with laughter at my taste in gifts for them, purchased at some specialty store on Broadway. “Darling, that’s hideous!” holding up a blouse I’d given them, as if
hideous
meant
gorgeous
. “Lovey,” they’d twinkle, holding the garment up to them, “this is hideous!” Peals of laughter, sisters as close as twins.

For all I was learning I was still my mother’s daughter and Fremo’s niece. Fremo had her ice skates slung over her shoulders. It was a warm June day, but she had taken up ice-skating. She was humming the Vienna Waltz as we waited for the elevator with my mother. From the seventh floor down she chirped out the Vienna Waltz to herself, unmindful of the five other occupants of the elevator. She didn’t care.

On the subway we sat together, I between my aunt and my mother. Suddenly the train stopped between stations. There was that eerie quiet that follows when the brakes stop squeaking. A man standing over us hung on to a strap.

“Witia,” Fremo said in her high, loud, rich-lady voice. “Doesn’t that man look just like Hitler?”

The man reddened; people opposite craned their necks to look at him.

“Yes, yes he does,” my mother called out calmly, like a loud, well-bred bird. “He certainly looks a lot like Hitler.”

The man at the center of all the attention, now thoroughly traumatized, looked for a way to get away. When the train started up again, he moved as fast as he could away from my mother and Fremo.

•   •   •

I
n 1949, I was hired as understudy to the ingenue lead in an Irish play. My daytime rehearsals and nighttime check-in were all geared to the Theater District, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, Shubert Alley. Gene Lyons and I understudied the leads. We delighted in each other. Love lite. He was elegant, charming, funny and, yes, Irish.

I wanted to move in with him, so my parents promptly left our wonderful spacious apartment on Riverside Drive, where I grew up, and moved the family to a small apartment on 52nd and Eighth Avenue near the Theater District, so I would have no excuse and not have to travel uptown to 148th Street. They would not let me get an apartment of my own. They would rather move to a grungy building. Above us, Betty Bruce, a singing star on Broadway, lived with her mother. Her two ratty little dogs would skitter down one flight, pee on our doormat, and skitter back up the stairs, their satin ribbons flapping in their eyes. On Riverside Drive my bedroom was on the seventh floor, high above the backyards of neighboring brownstones, including my grandmother’s, and quiet. On 52nd and Eighth, the traffic beneath my little bedroom was incessant. Motors, buses, brakes, horns, the sound of wet splashing tires, were all magnified. It felt as if there were no wall separating me from the street. My mother tried to
muffle the sound with thickly lined gray-green drapes. I lay in the crack between my bed and the wall, pulling the blankets over my head. I couldn’t sleep. The doctor came and sat by the bed. I cried, I was so tired. He prescribed Nembutal and Seconal. I slept. I was nineteen. From that night until this I have never gone to sleep without a sleeping pill. Never.

Desperate for some independence, I spent a week at my friend Connie Sawyer’s house. My mother checked in with Connie every day. I returned home. When I pushed the door open at two in the morning, the door would hit my mother, praying on her knees for me to come home safely. There were lots of lectures from my exhausted father, kept awake by his weeping, panicked wife.