by Anne Edwards
Holiday gifts had been a big deal in the Hollywood that I had left—those for the A list, B list, C list, and so on. In the movie colony, what you received for Christmas often defined where you stood socially and the successful work you had done the previous year. Before my onset of polio, I had been the story editor for a television anthology program called Schlitz Playhouse of the Stars. One Christmas, I received a huge record player, set in a handsome, tall mahogany chest, that not only played the records, it turned them over. The next Christmas, spent in the hospital, I received a letter of kind apology from the producers stating that my services were no longer required. With the forecast of snow glistening like sugar icing on the white streets of London, I planned my first real Christmas dinner. When I was a child this had been a nonholiday in our house. My religious training had been scant—actually overlooked. My mother was born into a Jewish family but became a devout Christian Scientist when a severe, lingering illness struck her directly after my birth (cured by her belief in Christian Science, she declared). Still, she could not bring herself to honor Jesus on that occasion. My father was also of Jewish heritage. However, his family had immigrated to Sweden from Spain during the Inquisition and there had been about four centuries of intermarriage. I don’t recall that my paternal grandfather, Big Charlie, followed any religion. However, he was never united with us on any holiday. My ex-husband’s grandparents (on the Rossen side), although not strictly orthodox, considered the celebration of Christmas a corruption of Jewish belief and I had respected their belief. Now I thought we three should free ourselves of the persuasions of others. In doing so, I was determined to go with Mr. Dickens.
A Christmas tree lot had been set up near the old soldiers’ home that backed on King’s Road just a few streets from our house. I purchased a huge one, branches outstretched like a lover’s open arms and a tip that reached at least seven feet. Two ruddy-cheeked teenage boys working there delivered it and had a terrible struggle getting it through our door. Finally, after they hacked off about a foot, it stood erect and commanding in a corner of the sitting room. I gave each of them a pound and whatever change I had, much to the annoyance of Mrs. Barnes who deemed it far too generous. I organized Michael and Cathy to string cranberries and popcorn (that we made and ate gobs of as we worked), which we draped over the tree’s limbs along with silver tinsel and red and silver balls purchased from Peter Jones along with some cotton batting to cover the base. At the top was a beautiful angel with golden hair and flecks of silver on her wings that glistened in the ceiling light when it was turned on. We three stood back and viewed our work. It was, we agreed, the most beautiful Christmas tree we had ever seen.
Then came plans for Christmas dinner. I invited five of my English friends who were familyless—making us eight in all. In Mr. Dickens’s Christmas story, dinner was a roast goose. Now, I had never eaten or cooked a goose (I don’t believe they were easily available in the States where I had lived). But how difficult could it be? They were fowl like chicken, turkey, and duck and I had roasted my share of them. I marched over to Harrods’ giant food halls (a terrific extravagance—but this was to be we three’s first real Christmas dinner).
Harrods’ food halls were a wonderland, vast and filled with individual stalls devoted to voluptuous displays of every variety of food—cheese (the strong aroma announced its presence), fruits, vegetables, pastries (sweet and savory—always looking much more appetizing than they tasted), smoked fish (kippers, salmon, herrings, and eel), meats (cured and fresh, butchers standing at the ready with an array of gleaming knives and hatchets), dozens of fresh-caught fish (small eyes, big eyes, eyes glassy in death, yet staring—I zipped past this stall as quickly as I could), seafood (cockles, whelks, periwinkles, prawns, and limpets), game (during hunting season a colorful mélange of feathers and fur), and of course every creature with wings, most still feathered, from the tiniest bird to the larger species, many I had never seen before—and certainly had never consumed. This is the stall at which I stopped. A ruddy-faced man in a huge white apron, slightly blood splattered, came forward and asked if he could serve me. I told him I wanted a goose large enough for eight people and some leftovers. He stepped back behind the marble counter and then disappeared through a rear door, returning with two dead feathered creatures that I assumed were geese, each clutched in a hand by their spindly yellow feet. He suggested I might prefer the larger one if I was thinking as well of lunch on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas and a national holiday). I asked to have its head and feet cut off.
“The feet, madam?” he inquired disapprovingly.
“Yes, also plucked clean and delivered.” I did not know what the British cook did with the feet of a fowl, but I knew seeing them on a serving plate would turn me off.
The only cookbook I owned was an American volume. No recipe for roast goose was included. So I ambled over to our neighborhood bookstore and bought an English cookery book that contained not one, but several, methods to roast a goose. Christmas morning, after we three had opened our presents, I went down to the kitchen and started my dinner preparations. Mrs. Barnes was off for the two-day holiday. I was on my own. I baked two pies and many side dishes with proud results. Then, carefully following the recipe that seemed the simplest in the volume I had purchased, prepared the goose, placed it in a roasting pan, and shoved it into the oven.
Nose-tickling aromas floated up to the ground floor where I was setting a festive table while my goose roasted. The BBC program on the radio issued forth cheerful Yuletide music. The children were upstairs in their rooms involved with their new gifts. I was a most happy woman.
When I took the goose out of the oven at the appointed time, I knew something was decidedly wrong. A probe with a fork released a gusher of fat and had been a struggle to pierce through the skin. I stepped back with a touch of horror. Surely this could not be the same bird I had placed in the oven. It now swam in a sea of fat and had shrunken horridly, reminding me of the scene in the film Lost Horizon where the ever-youthful Margo, having dared to leave the land of never aging, morphed into a shriveled hag of a century-old lady. Whatever was I to do?
I remembered holidays past (not Christmases) when my mother made a Thanksgiving turkey and in removing it from its roasting pan, had let it slip out of her grasp—turkey and gravy splattering all about on the floor. The door to the kitchen had been open and the scene visible to the expectant diners. But Marion did not lose her cool. She had thrown some dish towels on the floor, so as not to slip, then taken pot holders and lifted the turkey onto the counter, placed it on the tray she had already prepared (with sliced oranges and parsley for decoration), pressed the severed joints of the bird where they anatomically belonged, and then with the help of some of us carried the tray into the dining room and went on with slicing what she could and serving it. No one had said a word. (However unhygienic, the turkey was—to my memory—delicious.)
Then there was the time that Sue Rossen’s cook made a huge standing rib roast for my family engagement party (I believe there were twelve of us) and let it rest in the pan on the opened door of the oven while she and an aide went into the dining room to remove the dishes from our first course. There was a mighty crash that came from the kitchen and the sudden appearance of Leo, the Rossens’ massive, bearlike dog (part St. Bernard I believe, and generally the gentlest of God’s creatures), the huge roast clasped between his large jaws as he dragged it across the dining room and into a corner where he dropped it and squatted down, contemplating his kidnapped meal. Bob had risen from the table and ordered us out into cars where we continued our celebration at a local restaurant.
Although equally disconcerting, my situation was not comparable. I could not afford to take us all out to dinner—and most probably could not find a restaurant to accommodate eight walk-in guests on Christmas Day. I had the choice of disposing of the goose and serving a vegetarian meal from the side dishes I had made, or adapting my mother’s attitude and just get on with it. So I lifted th
e goose from its lake of viscous yellow melted fat, patted it as dry as I could with a clean towel, and placed it on a silver platter. The monogram HRH had intrigued me when I bought the tray, even though I knew it could not stand for His or Her Royal Highness. More likely it had belonged to someone with a name like Horace Rippington Hugglesmith. I garnished the platter with holly and crab apples, made a quick white gravy of flour, milk, and butter, spiced it up a bit (the pan drippings were just too loathsome to use), filled a silver gravy boat (with still another monogram), and with some assist carried it upstairs and set it down on the table to a burst of applause from my guests. There was very little flesh on the bird and what there was proved to be so tough that it was almost impossible to carve. I was somewhat saved by the tastiness of the rest of the food and the good manners of my guests (or perhaps the English liked their goose tough and greasy!). To my puzzlement, they left on their plates no remnants except the bare bones of their scanty servings.
Doris rang to tell me that she was entertaining the following Sunday night (theaters were almost all closed on Sunday) and wanted to be sure I would attend. She was having some theater people from the States as well as those who were local, and the American actress Donna Reed and her husband, the agent, Tony Owen, who she knew were friends of mine. Donna had won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in From Here to Eternity (but probably was best remembered for her role as Jimmy Stewart’s wife in It’s a Wonderful Life). We had met in Hollywood when I was story editor for Schlitz Playhouse of the Stars. Her career had not been going too well of late. She had recently arrived in London to film Beyond Mombasa (years later she would regain stardom on American television with The Donna Reed Show).
“It’s Sunday,” Doris added. “Not too dressy. Black cocktail dress, something like that. Come in a taxi, but our chauffeur will drive you home.”
The little black dress was almost a uniform in London and New York in the fifties, brought to popularity I believe by Coco Chanel. Unfortunately I did not own one. I had taken to wearing silk evening pants with an attractive, and a bit dressy, blouse which I could alternate to make a new outfit when needed. Despite Katharine Hepburn’s and Marlene Dietrich’s penchant for them, pants were an avant-garde fashion and seldom (if ever) worn at the time in the salons of London. I felt extremely comfortable in them and they looked good on me so I had included them in my limited wardrobe. I was the only woman in pants that evening—deep purple ones with a cyclamen-pink blouse that was sashed around my waist. Doris wore a midcalf, black taffeta Dior with one blazing diamond pin. She had hired a pianist and he was playing a set of Cole Porter songs, which no one in the crowded room appeared to be listening to as they chattered and laughed and mingled while a uniformed maid and a butler in tails walked among them with drinks and cocktail bits on silver trays with DCA’s very own monogram.
Suddenly, I felt a man’s arm around my waist. I turned. “Jule Styne,” he announced.
“Anne Edwards,” I replied.
“Do you belong to someone here?”
I laughed. “I don’t belong to anyone,” I emphasized.
“Why are you here?”
“I’m a writer. Our hostess, Doris Cole Abrahams, has an option on a play I’ve just written.”
“I’d like to read it.”
“Why?”
“Well, you are obviously an American who has written a play optioned for English production. That interests me. You interest me. You are the only woman in the room in trousers, purple at that.”
I laughed again.
“And I like your laugh.”
I recognized the name Jule Styne, popular Hollywood songwriter and Broadway composer (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), who probably had composed as many standards as any of his contemporaries. He was in his early fifties, short but well built, dark hair, and winning smile. In no manner an imposing presence, but definitely vital. He was in London to see about a possible British production of one of his more recent shows and, he proudly told me, he was also producing. He was asked to play a song or two of his own composition and he refused. “They hired a pianist,” he said to me. “It’s his piano tonight, not mine.”
Donna and Tony entered, and I excused myself and went over to greet them but soon found Jule once again by my side.
“Let’s get something to eat,” he said.
I looked around nervously.
“Come on. They’ll never notice we’ve gone.”
We went to Iso’s. He liked deli-style food. His office in New York was over a Broadway theater, and Lindy’s Restaurant was around the corner. He ate lunch there every day—or had them send over sandwiches—corned beef or pastrami with sauerkraut. He was born in London, Jewish, working-class East End. His family immigrated to the States when he was eight. They settled in Chicago. He always loved the piano and was good at it—naturally. He was a child prodigy, did some concerts when he was still a kid, nine or ten. The classics. That pleased his mother but not him. He liked the popular music he heard and started composing his own. He just had never stopped. “Hardly a day goes by,” he laughed. His real first name was Julius (like John Garfield, I thought). He asked me a host of questions about myself, and I answered as squarely and honestly as I could.
“Your uncle is Dave Chasen!” he exclaimed at one point. “That seals it. I always eat at Chasen’s when I’m in Hollywood. Dave’s a great guy.”
He was in London for about three weeks, and we saw each other almost daily. I fixed dinner for him and he met the kids. A divorce from his now ex-wife had been bitter. She had the custody of his two sons and they lived in California. More recently he had broken off relations with a French woman, an heiress. “Two worlds,” he explained. “It didn’t work.”
Two days before he was to leave for New York he asked me to meet him at Iso’s for lunch. He talked about his production of the musical version of Peter Pan that had starred Mary Martin. Some of the lyrics had been written by Carolyn Leigh, a young woman he thought was very talented. He went on to say that he had optioned a book by James Thurber, The Wonderful O, which he planned to turn into a musical. His idea was that Carolyn Leigh could write the lyrics and I could write the libretto.
“How about it?” He had brought along a copy of the book, a very slim volume I noted, and handed it to me.
“You want to produce the show here, in London?” I asked.
“No, in the States. I’ll take care of everything if you’ll agree to come to New York and give it a try. So far there’s no official blacklist in the Broadway theater,” he added. Jule knew a lot about many things, music, Broadway, baseball—but he was not politically inclined—or knowledgeable. I wasn’t sure he was right, but it did seem that Broadway had not been hit in the way the movie industry had. Playwright Arthur Miller had been caught in the crossfire. However, had he not been so famous and therefore useful for propaganda, I was not sure that would have been the case. And there were those like the great tragicomic actor Zero Mostel who were still in limbo, along with my good friend Jack Gilford (who had been a regular at Uncle Dave’s home table when he was a young, struggling performer), who had been singled out. There was no guarantee that theaterites would not be brought before HUAC if it was to strike again.
There was also my commitment on Sally Sunday to be considered. I had just finished a rough draft of the new version before my meeting with Jule. However, Doris was presently deeply involved with a play about to be mounted and Sally was not prime on her agenda. Jule said he would fly me back to London if meetings should be required. He was so earnest, so persuasive in his attempt to convince me to join him in New York, that I found myself being swayed. The blacklist remained but the media mania had quieted some. Still, the chance existed that I might have my passport confiscated, and I was wary of being cut off from what I had achieved in England. That was so, I argued with myself, but it might not be a bad idea for we three to return stateside for a time to test the waters and for us to see my mother, who remained separated from my fat
her and was living with my grandmother in Hartford, Connecticut. Marion was the one person I sorely missed and our weekly exchange of letters and occasional overseas telephone conversations (never lasting more than three or four minutes, due to the cost), had not filled the hole our being at such a distance created. Marion had never interfered with my personal life or my choices and her pride in whatever I did always bolstered my spirits. Also, she was a unique and quite wonderful woman despite her weakness where my father was concerned. More importantly, I loved her very much.
“I have to think about it,” I hedged.
He put his smallish hand—small for a pianist, I thought—over mine, grasping it tightly.
“One other thing you have to know,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“I’m crazy about you.”
This was the summer of 1960 and the children were on a school break. Within six weeks we three flew to New York. I was in a nervous state (well concealed, I prayed) until we successfully passed through passport control, with it neatly stamped and returned to me. Jule met our plane at Idlewild Airport and took us to a building on East Eighty-Second Street, near the corner of Fifth Avenue, where he had secured an apartment for we three, owned by playwright Samuel Taylor (author of Sabrina Fair—the “Fair” deleted for the title of the two subsequent film adaptations). Taylor was somewhere in Maine or Vermont or New Hampshire—Jule could not recall exactly where—working on a new play. We were guaranteed the premises for the next six months. There were enough flowers in the flat to have pleased a diva on opening night. Jule’s secretary, Dorothy, had seen to the practical things—food in the fridge, information about the nearest school, and anything else we needed, we were to just call her.
