Leaving Home
Page 8
Not only did I love to cook, it seemed a good way for me to get into the social swing. Restaurant food had not yet improved to any recognizable degree, even as supplies became more plentiful. Rationing had ended, but the English home cook or chef remained entrenched in their old methods. Meat was either roasted or potted (unfortunately the customers most often were not), well done, and heavily sauced; vegetables—generally of the gaseous sort—were overcooked, puddings soggy or drenched in treacle. The Grill at the Savoy Hotel was excellent (meat grilled, pink and tender), but terribly pricey. Ethnic restaurants were the best alternative for dining out—Chinese, Indian, Hungarian. Iso’s catered to Jewish staples (as did a few places in Golders’ Green)—salt beef, chicken soup and matzo balls, and a savory brisket with onion gravy.
The most elegant restaurant was French (or claimed to be). I have forgotten its name, but it was outrageously expensive and pretentious to the extreme. One evening Jules and Bea Dassin (a talented cellist) hosted a dinner for six there—very extravagant for the usually conservative Jules. He was both a writer and director who had just found his stride with the slice-of-life drama The Naked City (1948) when he was blacklisted and with his family left hurriedly for Europe, settling in Paris (as he spoke French) where, after a difficult four-year dry patch, he had finally signed a contract with a French company for a film to be called Rififi. He was ebullient and the trip to London and the dinner was a celebration (I recall that Sidney Buchman and Carl and Estelle Foreman were the other guests). When it came time for the main course, a battery of six waiters approached our table, one standing to the side of each chair. A plate covered with an ornate dome was set before each of us. With the precision of a Rockefeller Rockette, the waiters lifted the domes and whisked them away. We were served French-style food, overcooked by an English chef. Jules, spouting excitedly in French, made a terrible fuss. The chef (who seemed untutored in the French language) came out and shouted back in cockney English. I don’t believe either one of them knew, or cared, what the other was saying and I thought for a few moments that fists would fly, for Jules, a rather slight and not very tall man, had pushed himself up and away from the table with energetic force and had taken a stance that was surprisingly threatening. Nothing was done about the food. However, as soon as the fracas cooled, our table was presented with a chilled bottle of champagne. Jules glanced at the label and sent it back.
Clancy Sigal, a former Hollywood agent (and Beverly Hills neighbor, and coworker of my ex-husband) was now a published writer living in London. I thought he had enjoyed the glitzy experience of being an agent, lunching with pretty starlets and all that. But, at heart, Clancy was a far more serious sort with strong roots in social activism and a driving ambition to become a critically acclaimed author. He had won a contest for new writers sponsored by an American publisher and with the money departed California and the States to start a new life abroad, settling in London.
The first time he showed up on my doorstep on Markham Street, I hardly recognized him. He had shed weight and traded his sharp Hollywood wardrobe for weathered, well-worn garments, layered sweatshirts, and sweaters. His hair was no longer barber trimmed. Round granny glasses had replaced his former large airman’s tinted ones. He had fought with his lady friend and landlady, the writer Doris Lessing, and needed a bed for the night. This happened periodically and as Markham Street had an extra bedroom (the one below stairs), it was fine with me. He shared some of his current problems—the writing was tough but he was determined to turn out a work of literary and social significance (although he did not use those exact words, that was the implication I got). Doris Lessing was an amazing and talented woman. “Older, you know,” and—after viewing me dressed to go out for the evening—“rather stout,” which made buying clothes difficult. She had a son who Clancy very much liked. He took to Michael, as well, and I believe enjoyed the idea of paternal relationships. Earl’s Court, the area of London where he and Doris lived, was a more working-class neighborhood than Chelsea, a bit scruffy in places and for now I assumed Clancy liked that along with the local pubs and the Bohemian lot who filled his lodging with impassioned debate. He made it clear that he did not think much of my current “guy” (it turned out I would shortly agree with him). “A bit too much of a toff, don’t you think?” and then added—“Why are you wasting your time writing for television?” I reminded him that I had a family to support.
Although an intellectual dreamer, Clancy was also a realist when it came to the plight of the working man and the poor. He was, even in those green days, an exceptionally gifted writer as his early books, Weekend in Dinlock (about coal miners) and Going Away (a more autobiographical book), proved and his social commentaries in England’s left-wing press solidified. I invited him to a few of my small dinners. He declined, I assumed because he wanted to experience what the working-class English experienced. He hinted that Doris was the jealous type. If so, she had no reason to be jealous of me as Clancy was a good friend, nothing more. However, she might have wrongheadedly feared that he would discard her world for mine if exposed to more of it.
Certainly I had not given up sex; my libido was too strong for that. I was also now more of a whole woman, the sticks kept at the back of my closet, my plumbing problem seen to and corrected by a fine British doctor. I had not shed all the side effects of my long illness, but I felt almost newborn. In truth, Mr. Right had not yet knocked at my door. I turned my bottled energy into my writing. Though I had not discussed it with Clancy, I did not want to write for television forever. Not that I believed it was in any way demeaning. I loved the medium for what it was. However, like the short story, I felt that thirty-minute segments were not long enough for me to develop the characters as I would have wished. To write so concentrated a story and characters takes a certain talent, one that I did not fully have confidence I possessed. The strengths I had sharpened through the years were the ability to visualize a story, capture voices, write dialogue and scenes of confrontation—all prime in working in film. I had studied theater with the great Margo Jones (Tennessee Williams’s muse) during my two years at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas (when I was married to my ex-husband). Now, as I struggled with my attempts at a first novel (still set in the English seaside), I regretted not spending more time studying the contemporary novel. After my third attempt at a novel failed to come together, I turned my attention to the play form, attending the great theater being presented at the Royal Court, walking distance from our house, and usually easy to pick up one seat. A play finally emerged from this. Titled Sally Sunday, it was set in a seaside town and centered on a young Englishwoman’s one-night-weekly affair with a doctor who would not allow himself to become emotionally involved. Then, Sally attempts suicide in his flat and the doctor is crushingly unable to deal with this sudden appearance of reality in his life.
I knew only one person in the British theater, Doris Cole Abrahams. Doris was still in the embryonic years of her long career as a theater producer, known primarily at this time for her considerable help to new playwrights (including Tom Stoppard). I wrote her a note and asked if she would read Sally Sunday. She rang back (that metallic, high-pitched, mid-Atlantic voice—so memorable and irritating). “Send it right over,” she ordered.
I traveled by bus across town to the block of flats where she lived—the palatial Bryanston Court, where Wallis Simpson had once served up dinners and herself to an ever-hungry King Edward VIII—and left it with the concierge. I felt so good about it that I splurged on a taxi home, not that I had any great hopes that a production might be in the stars for Sally Sunday. It was simply that I had made a move that could mark a change in my life, provide a new avenue for me to follow (while I held on as tightly as I could to my current means of support—writing for the small screen and breaking down books for possible adaptation for the large screen). I had not given up my dream of eventually writing a publishable novel. That time, I told myself rather convincingly, would, must come.
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Gentlemen Don’t Always Prefer Blondes
It was no accident that Los Angeles was often referred to as “movietown.” Movies, and everything to do with them, were at the heart of the city. Fantasy was manufactured there, and celluloid, rather than flesh-and-blood people, formed the basis of its culture. Oh, there were multiple subcultures—black folk in a seething slum section known as Watts; legal and illegal Latino immigrants struggling to make enough to just put food on the table. Fantasy from the dream factories supplied little nutrition. However, in areas like Beverly Hills, where I had spent so many years of my life, for its rich and famous film colony (not fully representative of the incorporated city’s twenty thousand or so residents), dream and fantasy had overtaken reality. The current movie that looked like a blockbuster was the “must see” on most people’s agenda. If you wanted to attend new plays with their original casts, you had to go to New York City—a journey only a privileged few could afford—or wait for a successful show to be dehumanized for the screen. I was as much a dreamer as anyone. Still, I grew up with vaudeville in my genes and always felt starved for the electricity of live performances.
There had been (and remained) a dearth of theaters devoted to stage works in the Los Angeles area. Touring companies occupied a few venues from time to time. Young hopefuls studied the craft and appeared in tried-and-true vehicles at the Pasadena Playhouse with the dream of being discovered by a studio and placed under contract. On the other hand, London theater was a magnificent feast with no taste excepted. There were over one hundred venues where Shakespeare, drawing-room comedy, music hall, pantomimes (great for the children and young at heart during Christmas holidays), straight drama, musicals, and burlesque (where actors dressed in drag and seasoned their acts with salty humor) were available. I loved every form and would quite often attend by myself. With so many stages, it seemed a new playwright would have more of a chance to secure a production in London than anywhere in the States, including New York City. I was hopeful (make that “giddy”) with the prospect of possibly getting a play produced.
My approach to Sally Sunday was influenced to a large extent by what was currently happening in British theater, specifically at the Royal Court on Sloane Square. The premises had a long significant history, first opening as a theater in 1870 where several of William S. Gilbert’s early plays had been staged (before his collaboration on comic operas with Arthur S. Sullivan). In that era there had also been a stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and of Arthur Pinero’s The Magistrate. The building was demolished in 1887, rebuilt a year later, and christened the New Court Theatre, becoming a leading venue for works by George Bernard Shaw. Badly damaged during the Blitz in World War II, it reopened entirely refurbished in 1952 once again as the Royal Court, bringing with its rise the rebirth of a great theater history and reputation under the artistic directorship of George Devine, who was determined it would be a “writers’ theater,” a place where new authors could produce serious, contemporary works. He formed the English Stage Company and was constantly on the prowl for new writers with fresh ways of saying things.
The Royal Court was an easy walk from Markham Street but located a distance from London’s heavily populated and thriving theater district, set apart not only by its position but by the plays it elected to produce. The Mulberry Bush by Angus Wilson, which premiered in April 1956, was the impetus for the new wave that soon overtook much of Britain’s mid-twentieth-century theater. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger followed one month later and created a storm of outcries among most critics and theater stalwarts but was a clarion wake-up call of what they could expect would follow. (Only the acerbic, young critic Kenneth Tynan thought it a worthy play and I agreed, returning several times to see it.)
Look Back in Anger was a social drama, real down to its dilapidated kitchen set, a bucket to catch leaks from the roof center stage while the beleaguered female lead ironed away on a rickety board for a good part of the action. This new play style was swiftly named the “Kitchen Sink School,” and presented its audiences with an image of abject poverty not previously showcased in the twentieth century. Audiences took note. Osborne’s play did for English theater what Tennessee Williams’s and Arthur Miller’s works had done for the American drama. Major numbers of theater audiences were now exposed to a present-day world most often alien and very far from their own.
Doris rang me a few days after I had left Sally Sunday with her concierge. Although it needed work, she liked it. Would I have tea with her? Of course, I agreed. Doris thought the play would be better set in Miami Beach where such ambition for a doctor was perhaps more understandable than England—a country that had converted to a national health plan. I did not entirely agree with this as I had met during my medical sojourns some very ambitious English doctors who also had private practices. Still, after serious consideration, I went along with this idea. She optioned it for her company, Albion Productions, and I went back to revise what I had written. Doris always sounded on the edge of some major emotional collision. The need to succeed, to prove herself a real theater person, was palpable. Her New England family was moneyed, and everything in her youth had pointed to a marriage to some rich, Jewish scion. She wanted to be an actress, went to New York, and was unable to get past first auditions, but worked hard at any theater-related experience and ended up on the production staff of a black musical called Blue Holiday. She met Gerald Abrahams (both rich and Jewish) when he was in Manhattan on a business trip and shortly thereafter followed him to London where they were married. After the birth of two daughters, she joined London producer Oscar Lewenstein’s company raising money for many of his productions, while furthering her career as a producer.
With an agreeable husband, generous with his support, a luxurious flat ideal for large social parties, and the money to throw them, Doris’s festive gatherings usually included local and visiting celebrities, wealthy potential theater backers, and a hungry young playwright or two. Her parties were often the starting place for a deal to be struck and a play to be born.
I liked Doris. She was honest and straightforward as well as intelligent and feeling. I know she financially helped many young playwrights during their lean days. It took a long time for her to gain the respect of her peers, partly I suspect because she was a woman—and a rich one, at that. However, she possessed a strong sense of what good theater could be and the ability to recognize untested talent as promising. She mounted a regional theater production of one of Tom Stoppard’s early plays, Enter a Free Man. Young playwrights were her shining prizes, the theater—her life’s spark. At times her wound-up personality could be trying. She had a nervous laugh and a speaking voice that was often grating. Besides its high register, she had trained it into an eccentric accent that was a cocktail mix of Boston nasal and Knightsbridge head cold sieved through a mesh strainer. In all fairness, Doris Cole Abrahams was not the only American living in England who had adapted a form of spoken English that they considered tony. It was an affectation I did not admire. Despite the dark period of McCarthyism at home, I felt proud of my nationality and determined to hang on to my American speech. I found this equally true of most of my compatriots in the expat society, mainly, perhaps, because they clung together and did not mix often with the Brits on a social level. Twenty years later, taxi drivers would assume I was a tourist! It always amused me. I understood that Doris needed to belong, while many expats, including myself, were mainly fighting to survive. I also realized that her part in our friendship was driven somewhat—curious though it seemed—by envy. She would often remind me that she could not be as free as I was. Lack of a specific talent or position and a moneyed husband held her back.
“In what way?” I once asked her.
“Well, you create. I have to wait for a writer to do that for me. You don’t have to answer to anyone, nor are you always reminded that you have a name or position to uphold.” The last was a reference to my being able to have an ope
n affair if I so wished, for Doris was more than once strongly attracted to the young male playwrights she sponsored.
I cannot count the times I had either read the book or seen the various film adaptations of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. My favorite movie version was British and starred the veteran English actor Alastair Sim (he of the most unique physiognomy) as a memorable Scrooge. In all versions, snow fell upon the streets and rooftops of London Town and goose was served for Christmas dinner. Dickens seemed to have taken literary license regarding the arrival of a white Christmas. Mostly, during the early days of my residency, it had rained, skies were grumpy gray, and the houses in which I dwelled (and visited) damp despite wood-burning fires and multiple electric heaters. The dampness in London during the winter months penetrates to, and through, one’s bones and is the reason those with some resources, however slight, holiday abroad during that season. Others of us who could not go off to sunnier climes for whatever reason, pulled an extra sweater over our heads and drank a lot of hot tea. For Christmas 1959, flakes—if not a full snowstorm—had been forecast and I decided to prepare for the holiday in Dickensian fashion.
As my family never celebrated Christmas, this would be my first and I wanted it to be something special: one that would erase all the public Christmas images during my previous life in Southern California where the sun was guaranteed to shine, snow was something unheard of, and street Santas at Yuletide wore sunglasses. The fashion in Beverly Hills for years had been to spray a magnificent evergreen, cut down for a holiday tree, blue, pink, white, or silver, the scent of pine overcome by the lacquer in the paint. These freak specimens—frequently towering and adorning front lawns—were then decorated in a fantasia of ornaments that carried out a theme—often of a current movie. There were Mickey Mouse trees, cowboy trees, bow-bedecked trees, and butterfly trees. Houses had huge lighted displays: Santa and his reindeer riding a sleigh over the red-tiled roof of an adobe bungalow; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs guarding a painted white tree covered with apples; Peter Pan and Tinker Bell topped another that I remember.