Read My Lips (10 page)

I still saw Morgan Ames, of course. We often hung out in after-hours jazz clubs. If my poor mother only knew. I also spent time with Greta Chi, the tall, beautiful Eurasian actress who was my new roommate. I don’t remember how Greta and I found each other, but we had a wonderful apartment on Sweetzer in a Spanish-style building. It was a two bedroom with its own balcony, which we shared with another darling woman, an actress named Diana Spencer.

I saw my parents as well, sometimes going over for a meal. My sister Diana was back in Los Angeles now after working in both Washington, DC, and Paris. She was living near the beach with her husband, Ian Graham, whom she’d met while working at the Rand Corporation. Ian was quiet and older than Diana but seemed kind and shared her love of travel. They went to Europe; they played paddle tennis.

Diana’s marriage was a bit of a surprise, not because her husband was older but because she had confided something she was struggling with: her attraction to and affairs with other women. I was so touched she thought to share something so personal with me. I don’t know whether she had told my mother. If she had, Mom never said a word.

It is hard enough being gay in
this
day and age, but in the 1950s and 1960s there was little or no tolerance of homosexuality. Back then people viewed it, at best, as a mental illness or, worse, as a dangerous perversion. Sodomy laws in most states made homosexuals subject to harassment and arrest. No one entertained
the possibility that someone could be born gay, which is what I believe.

So most gay people did what Diana did: married members of the opposite sex and tried to live “normal” lives, all the while pushing their feelings deep down inside, as far as they could, in the hope they would simply disappear.

Diana and I had grown closer over the years. She had written me a letter once, while she was working overseas, apologizing for not being more supportive when I went to her wondering if I should have my first sexual experience with Eddie Byrnes. She didn’t have to do that, so I wonder now if her own struggles were surfacing then. We had grown closer still since her wedding. I remember that when I visited her and Ian’s apartment, she would ask me things like how to walk in heels and how to move around in dresses. She wanted things to work out with Ian, and I wanted to support whatever choice she was making. We had come a long way as sisters, “Dinky and Stinky,” and as friends.

W
ORK IMPROVED IN FITS AND STARTS.
A
COUPLE YEARS EARLIER
I’d made my stage debut in Henrik Ibsen’s
Enemy of the People.
(Not to put down my first film role in
Reform School Girl,
in which I’d acted alongside my darling Luana and my first boyfriend, Eddie Byrnes—well, maybe not alongside, as I had two lines, whereas Luana was one of the leads. I was big and butch, and when I came on screen, everyone laughed.) I believed then—and still do—that plays are critical for helping an actress grow. The film’s director, John Marley, hired me for
Enemy
right out of Chez Paulette. That, and the fact I’d been studying acting for years and now felt ready, had emboldened me to try to get an agent.

Today so many of the kids coming to LA get an agent immediately and then see what work they can land. But back then it was different—learning to act was your first priority. Only if you worked and studied and got proficient at the craft would you have
a long career. Not that you can’t get lucky and land a reality show these days, but chances are that won’t sustain you in the long run.

Luana advised me to lie when I starting talking to agents, telling them that I had done summer stock. So I went to the Paul Kohner Agency for a meeting and coolly mentioned that I had done “summer stock.” Naturally, the agent I was meeting with asked me which summer stock I had done. Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought about what summer stock I was going to be lying about. Luckily for me, he got an important phone call and ended the meeting abruptly. Needless to say, I didn’t sign with Paul Kohner.

Enemy,
which we performed at the Civic Playhouse on La Cienega, had won me my first real review:
Although her fresh beauty was a delight to the eyes, her wooden portrayal left so much to be desired that she should get out of the business.

Fantastic. This, of course, was the opposite of what I’d always thought: that I was talented but unattractive. Yet somehow this review—and not my imaginary summer stock experience—finally landed me an agent. Progress!

That didn’t mean I got any better at auditions. In an effort to land a bit part on some television series looking for a “sexy” girl, I went to an audition on the Warner Brothers lot with a head full of teased hair and a bra stuffed full of toilet paper. Standing around, waiting for my turn to go in, I was tucking and poking at my tissue boobs. Yeah, baby, sexy!

The director took one look at me and said, “Not only are you not sexy, but you’re like a cowering little mouse, and I can see your toilet paper.”

Totally deflated, I left. On my way out I ran into writer and producer Jerry Davis, who worked on shows like
Bewitched
and
The Odd Couple.

“What’s a pretty girl like you doing wandering around, lost?” he asked.

I told him my sad story, and he walked me into Bill Orr’s office. Bill was head of Warner’s television department and married to Joy Page, studio head Jack Warner’s stepdaughter. All of a sudden
I was cast in an episode of
Surfside 6
, starring Troy Donahue. Jerry, Bill, and I became fast friends. Then one day Bill called me at home with a proposition.

“There’s a man I know,” he began, “who would like to get you an apartment . . .” That sounded great.

“He would make sure you always worked,” Bill went on. That’s when what he meant dawned on me.

“How could you think I was that kind of girl?!” I sobbed.

Bill felt terrible. “Alright, alright. It’s okay. I’m sorry, don’t worry.”

Now, if somebody called with the same offer today. . . . Just kidding.

I
MAY STILL HAVE BEEN NAIVE, YES, BUT AT LEAST
I
’D LOST MY
virginity. It was the 1960s: free love and no AIDS. Someone once told me, “If you’re still a virgin by the time you’re twenty-two, you’ll be frigid.” So I went right out at twenty-one-and-a-half to find someone who liked me better than I liked him and who wouldn’t tell anyone.

I don’t remember even the name of the man who took my “snowflake,” as Morgan would say. He was very nice, but I felt sick to my stomach just thinking about the whole episode. I still feel bad that I never returned any of his calls. The experience was short lived and didn’t exactly produce fireworks. Even so, after I lost my snowflake, my buddy Bob Sampson and I made love once a year, whether we needed it or not. Good old Bob.

Then, along came Bill Duffy.

“If there’s anybody in the world I want to look like, it’s Bill Duffy,” Jack used to say about his friend Bill, also an actor. Bill was handsome, that’s for sure. I had been spending a lot of time with Jack and Bill and the wonderful actor Dick Bradford, who was in movies like
The Legend of Billy Jean
and
More American Graffiti.
He was also a painter. The three of them shared a house. Some nights Bill’s cousin Kenny would come over and play guitar
or bass, and I’d sit in the middle of the floor and practice singing in front of them. Kenny even helped me make demos, which ended up getting stuffed in a drawer, waiting for the day when I was ready to do something with them. Then Jack and I would argue about serious matters of the day, like who had the best Mexican food, El Cholo or El Coyote.

Bill and I soon began an affair. One evening while we were sitting in a car, he asked me if I wanted to be his girlfriend. There was something so cute and romantic about the way he asked that I had to say yes.

We had an amazing sexual connection. I finally got what making love was all about, and we went at it like rabbits, nonstop, wherever and whenever we could. With Bill I discovered orgasms. After making love all night, we’d go to Norm’s and have spaghetti for breakfast to refuel before getting started up again.

Then, as often happens when you’re a naive, generally inexperienced woman in her early twenties with no sex education, I got pregnant.

The only people who knew were Luana, Morgan, Jack, Bob Sampson, and my sister Diana and her husband, Ian. I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do. At first I thought I would keep the child. I started learning to cook and got in touch with my inner homemaker by recovering a couch in orange burlap. “You’ll only want the baby when it laughs,” my therapist said. “You won’t want him when he cries.”

Bill wanted to get married. I wasn’t really in love with him. Where would we live? With Jack? So Bill and I had a big fight. I was working on
Surfside 6
at the time and was invited to spend the weekend on the beach in Venice with some of the cast and crew. When I returned home Sunday evening, sunburned and pregnant, I saw Jack and Dick going up the steps to my apartment.

Uh-oh,
I thought.
Bill.

When I entered the apartment, he was lying on my couch, drunk. “Hi, honey,” I said.

“Fuck you, honey,” he replied, jumping up from the couch and
smashing over his knee a painting Jack had given me. Glass flew. Bleeding now, Bill was staggering around, saying that he would go to the police if I got an abortion. While Jack and Dick chased Bill out of the house, I huddled in a corner. Bill’s bloody handprints covered the railing along the stairs leading down to the street. Tired, weepy, and nauseated, I began to clean up.

A few minutes later the phone rang. It was Jack.

“Sal, I don’t mean to be an alarmist,” he said, “but you need to get out of there for awhile. I think Bill’s coming.”

I hung up the phone and panicked. What should I do? Where could I go? The phone rang again.

“Jack?”

No. It was George Peppard, whom I’d met through my friend Suzanne Pleshette.

“I’m in town,” he announced. “I’m at the Chateau Marmont. Why don’t you come over?”

I thought for a second. I was swollen and sunburned, and I needed a place to stay. I drove over to the Chateau Marmont.

George tried to hit on me. I couldn’t tell him that I was pregnant or why I’d come over, if not to sleep with him. So it was a seamy and weird night. Not his fault. The next day he sent me flowers.

I had to make a decision. The truth was that I wasn’t prepared to have a baby. I could barely take care of myself. I was struggling to pay the rent, even with two roommates. My therapist told me he “knew a guy” over in Glendale who could take care of me. Bill offered some money when he sobered up. I told him he could keep it. Bob Sampson offered to marry me, which was sweet but, as we both knew, not a smart option. He loaned me the money I needed to get the procedure.

Jack and Morgan drove me to Glendale and stayed with me. When we arrived at the house—it wasn’t an office at all—the doctor wasn’t there. I was taken into one of the bedrooms and given something to “help me relax.” When I woke up, the procedure was over.

Jack and Morgan took me to Du-Par’s for breakfast and then
back to my apartment. Diana and Ian stopped by with a homemade brown betty. I appreciated that so much—both the cake and Diana’s support. We were all struggling in our own ways to break free of the restrictions of the 1950s and find our way in a rapidly changing world where the rules governing women’s behavior were changing. . .but not
that
much. Diana didn’t judge me. There was no criticism, only caring.

Within a few days I began to experience an excruciating pain in my leg. I went to see my mom. Several years earlier, when I was around eighteen, was the first time I convinced my mother to take me to the doctor. That time it was for diet pills, dexamyl spansules, which made me feel like Felix the Cat on the inside. They burnt out my nervous system and eventually became a popular street drug. That experience had not sold my Christian Scientist mother on the wonders of Western medicine. But this time around she could tell something was really wrong, so she brought me to a doctor, who me rushed to the hospital. My fallopian tubes were dangerously inflamed; I spent ten days in the hospital hooked up to an IV. Serious infections like mine were what happened back then to women without options. That’s why I become so enraged today when people continue to try to keep young women uneducated and leave them with nowhere safe to turn.