Leaving Home

by Anne Edwards

  He kissed me lightly as he left (the children were close at hand) and with a light step, flashed a wide smile before heading down the corridor to the elevator. We had been intimate on several occasions during our time together in London and had meshed well. It seemed our bodies had known each other for a long time. Jule was a man with a great deal of love to offer, and I was well aware and accepting of the knowledge that my coming to New York at his request meant we were at the start of an affair. For me this would be newly explored territory as I had not had a sustained sexual relationship for a long time. I felt well loved and most beholden to this talented, spirited, warmhearted man who had given me back my feeling of once again being a complete woman.

  We were not living together. Jule had a garden apartment a short distance down and off Fifth Avenue. Mine had only one bedroom (which Jule had not realized as Taylor had assured him it was “plenty big enough for a dame and two small kids”). The rooms were spacious, and it had a bath and a half and a terrific eat-in kitchen. The living room contained a couch that pulled out into a bed. I took the sofa bed and gave the kids the bedroom, which had twin beds. When I opened the closet door in the bedroom the first time, there hung a ranch mink coat—almost full length. On the hanger was attached the note:

  “To keep you warm when I can’t. Jule.”

  The added bonus to the apartment was that it was situated directly across the street on Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum. Michael immediately became obsessed with the armor room and the mummies. Our building was also around the corner from 1010 Fifth Avenue, where—by exceptional coincidence—the Rossens now owned an apartment, having permanently departed California.

  Late one night, just after we had settled in, children asleep and I just beginning to doze off on the sofa bed, I heard the turning of a key in the lock of the front door, then someone swearing and pounding as I had put the chain in place and it was holding. I grabbed a robe, shut the door that led to the bedroom, and picked up a poker that stood by the fireplace. “Who is it?” I called out, firmly grasping my weapon and edging close to the telephone to call for help if needed.

  “Who’re you?” came an alcohol-blurred voice through the narrow opening. “Thish is my apartment.”

  “You must be wrong. I’m calling the police.” I started to dial the operator.

  “My apartment! I’m Sham Taylor,” the intruder slurred.

  I cautiously approached the door, phone in one hand, poker in the other.

  “Sam-u-el Taylor, the playwright?”

  “Yeshhhh, fur God’s shake!”

  I put down the phone but held on to the poker as I undid the chain. The man reeled in, almost landing flat on the floor. “Omigod! I almosh furgot! Jule’s girl!” He stumbled over to the sofa and collapsed.

  “I am nobody’s ‘girl,’” I protested, “and you are a sorry sight for a landlord!”

  He refused to get up and certainly was not considering departing. “I furgot,” he kept mumbling. “Shurry, I furgot. . . .” Then he went off to sleep—soundly with a snore and a snort. I searched in his jacket pocket for his wallet. He was, indeed, Samuel Taylor. There was little I could do at this late hour about his invasion, so I went into the children’s room, jammed a chair in front of the closed door, and crawled into bed with Cathy. My intoxicated landlord was apologetic the next morning, explaining that he had planned to drive north late in the afternoon of the previous day. Then he had stopped to have a drink, then another, and obviously too many more to count. By then, he was too inebriated to consider driving for three hours up the East Coast. He claimed he had forgotten all about renting the premises to Jule—“Chrisssakes, don’t tell him about it!” he insisted.

  I gave him some coffee and scrambled eggs, which he ate along with the children, who were simply told “this gentleman is a good friend of Mr. Styne’s.” He left directly after breakfast. I never saw Sam Taylor again, but I did tell Jule what had happened. He was furious. I’m not sure that Jule confronted him, but Dorothy called and assured me nothing like that would ever happen again.

  Jule and I soon fell into a routine. I hired a part-time maid-sitter. Several nights a week after dinner, the theater, or an evening with friends we would go back to the garden apartment. The place was quite attractive. I called it “the hideaway” as we never had others in for drinks or dinner. It was always just the two of us . . . and a piano in the front room where he would play songs that he was working on for his new show.

  Adapting The Wonderful O into a musical was not easy. The story was more of a cautionary fable, something the brothers Grimm might have relished if they had come back to life. The story was simple: A pirate has committed (by accident) matricide by pushing his mother out of a porthole window in his ship (the porthole thus representing the O in the title). He is overwhelmed with grief and remorse. He captures an island and rules ruthlessly over its people—making them take the letter O out of every word—ah! But when they bring up the word “freedom” they realize they must revolt—and do. Freedom triumphs over dictatorship in the end. I told Jule it really was the Hitler legend—I believe Thurber agreed with that theory. We decided the story had to be lightened and I made more of a satire of it. Cy Coleman was composing the songs, Carolyn writing the lyrics, and Jule acting as producer. One day he came up with what he thought was a terrific idea. As the story progressed, each musical instrument in the orchestra that contained an O (like violin, oboe, piano, saxophone) would be removed. I hated it and Cy was adamant and refused to do it, and that was that.

  Carolyn Leigh was an exceptionally gifted lyricist. She was also going through some form of emotional distress that was making working with her almost impossible. A pretty woman in her mid to late twenties, she was borderline obese and a compulsive eater. She insisted that at least once a week, Cy and I work with her at her house in Long Island, a two-hour train journey from the city. Her husband was a successful lawyer and seldom around (I saw him briefly only once as he was leaving). But he had been a great help in boosting her career. As Cy and I traveled by train to and from her home (quite a charming place) we had to leave at a certain time to make the last one that would get us back into town at a decent hour. Carolyn would insist she needed us there just one more hour, then another, and finally we would have to stay overnight. So when we traveled out to the island, I left the kids with Sue. Carole, the Rossens’ older daughter, was now a teenager. Ellen, their youngest, was just a year older than Michael, and Stevie—their only son—in the middle. In many ways it was nice for my kids to have cousins—for their father had totally opted out of any contact before we three had left for England and had not been in touch since.

  The nights we remained on the island, neither Cy nor I, occupying the two upstairs guests bedrooms, found it possible to sleep. Carolyn haunted the hallway and staircase—back and forth by our doors, up and back—back and down the staircase. She seemed never to sleep and she carried food with her each time she returned to her bedroom. (Later, when we were left alone in the house for a time, Cy went on a hunt for what she did with all that food—for it seemed impossible that she could have consumed such quantities as we had seen her with. He found a cache of it under her bed: a whole salami, a bottle of pickles, boxes of cookies, pretzels, and heaven knows what else.)

  One night my phone rang about three in the morning. Carolyn was calling from the road (or at least that’s where she said she was). She was sobbing, hysterical. I had a hard time calming her down so that I could follow what she was saying. Since she could not sleep, she explained, she had decided to drive into the city. An officer in a police car had pulled her over to the side of the road. He made her get out of the car and walk a line to make sure she was not intoxicated (all this was told through sobs). Then when she was ready to return to her car, he had thrown her down in the grass by the roadside and raped her. It did not sound plausible. But then, such horror stories about good-cop-bad-cop did hit the papers from time to time.

  “Where are you ca
lling from?” I asked. She told me she had walked up the road to a gas station, which was not open but had a pay phone. I did not hear any clicking for more change but I accepted what she said on the slight chance that she was telling the truth. I told her I would call the police.

  “No! No!” she shouted. “They’re all in cahoots.”

  “Where’s your husband?”

  “In San Francisco.”

  “Did you call Cy?”

  “He’s not home.” She made some rude remark about “that aging former movie star, Veronica Lake,” who had been having severe drinking and money problems and who he had befriended.

  I told her to stay where she was and somehow I would get help to her. So where exactly was she? At that point we were disconnected. I called the help line and gave them what little information I had. There was nothing more I could think of doing. A few moments later, I decided to call her house and see if her maid knew how to reach Carolyn’s husband. Carolyn answered the telephone and I hung up.

  It was obvious that the project was not going well and would never find its way onto a stage. It never did, although Carolyn and Cy did write one marvelous song for the stillborn show, “Witchcraft,” that would later become a popular standard.

  My relationship with Jule was fulfilling. He had taken to the children. I’m reminded of the line in a song in Gypsy (for which he would compose the music) that goes “I’m a man who likes children.” Jule did. One night he took Cathy with us to Sardi’s after we had been to the theater. Ethel Merman stopped at our table on the way to her own and made a big fuss over Cathy. “Would you like me to send you an autographed picture?” she asked in her inimitable to-the-back-row voice as Merman and her party were moving on.

  “I don’t collect autographs,” my seven-year-old daughter replied to one of Broadway’s greatest musical stars.

  It wasn’t long after this, however, that both Jule and I found ourselves in a stressful situation. On my side, I was not really comfortable in the city. I had never spent any time there and the tempo and the people—especially Jule’s friends—seemed more foreign to me than my life abroad. The Rossens were having serious marital problems, which was upsetting. I was totally detached from the liberal political scene and members of the movie industry. The children were attending PS 6, walking distance from our apartment, and one of the best public grammar schools in New York. But my life was so tentative and I was plagued with questions as to how that would affect them. Also, there were the strange working conditions on The Wonderful O. Carolyn’s bizarre behavior continued. Cy pulled back and detached himself. No more working days in Long Island. We met at Jule’s offices on East Fifty-First Street where there was little privacy or quiet space. I could only see failure for the project. Then what would I do?

  Although our relationship had not cooled, and Jule was most attentive, he had his own pressures with the writing of his next show and the plays he had taken on to coproduce. We saw each other at least three nights a week ending up back at his apartment. It was an arrangement that made me feel as though I was living a divided life. Then, when we were together, he began receiving late-night telephone calls of a threatening nature. He would hang up the receiver, having turned pale and looking terrified. He kept telling me not to worry. I wanted to help him but he refused to discuss the subject of the calls with me. One night, after receiving such a call, he sank down in a chair, his face ashen. “I think these guys are serious,” he said. He now explained that he owed some gamblers a very large sum of money that he did not have and they had threatened to break every finger on both his hands if he did not pay up.

  Jule was an addicted gambler (the horses, baseball games—you name it). I could not understand why I had not seen the signs, having had a father and a husband who had both been addicted gamblers. I was at a loss at what I could do to help him and so I did nothing. Our relationship took a dark turn. Shadows of the past. I knew I could not relive the trauma I had gone through with my children’s father, nor could I place Jule’s problem and how to solve it above the safety and well-being of my children. A week went by, then another, and another. The situation grew more tense. He had managed a down payment on what I now knew was an astronomical debt. The threatening calls continued. Jule was sure gangsters were going to take control of the royalties from his music. It was hard for me to be as empathetic as either of us would have wished. How could he have allowed himself to get this far into debt with people who were obviously dangerous? I didn’t understand gambling or men, I was told. Oh? Didn’t I?

  We had our first real fight and it was a lulu. It would be our last. He needed my sympathy and support; I could not rein in my anger that he had not let me know early on how involved he was in gambling (or, perhaps at myself for not recognizing, and dealing with, the situation earlier). The children had a school break coming up soon. They were doing well, but I knew life in New York as a single mother and a writer was not for me. I could not return to Hollywood as I remained unemployable there, at least as far as movies or television were concerned. And as there was no other reason (or person) to go back to, I made arrangements for us to fly to London.

  “If you do this, there’s no way back,” Jule furiously warned me.

  Two weeks later, after a warm and emotional weekend in Connecticut to see my mother (my father, she told me, was still somewhere in Texas), I packed up our belongings and bought our return tickets to London. I took the mink coat with me—but I left an envelope at Jule’s office with Dorothy. It contained a diamond bracelet Jule had given me for Christmas. Maybe it would end up on another woman’s wrist—but it could also be returned or sold and perhaps help him in some small way (it being somewhat more conservative than bracelets worn by the eponymous blonde in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes).

  I felt a huge sense of guilt at leaving Jule with such hard feelings on his part and at a time when he needed support. I told myself that I was fighting for my children’s and my own survival. Yet, I knew deep down, that maybe—just maybe—I had not loved him enough.

  • 6 •

  My Kid Seems to Like Your Kid

  How was it, I pondered, that in New York I had felt like an alien and as our plane set down in London, I was overwhelmed with an emotion of homecoming? Part of the reason could well be that in London I belonged to a community—and a large one at that. I never counted how many of our American expats currently lived in England. We had arrived like sheep, one following the other bringing our American customs, dreams, and resentments with us. Being survivors had bonded us. There were degrees of separation, but they mattered little. Some of our group had been famous and secure before HUAC; some too embryonic to have made our names and fortunes yet; and some had neither garnered fame nor fortune, but a livelihood that kept the wolf away from the pantry and their dreams intact. All of us were, however, like-minded in our liberal viewpoints and none, that I recall, were Republicans.

  Resentment ran high. Companies hired blacklisted writers for payment far, far below Hollywood standards and their names did not appear in the credits, except in the form of a pseudonym. Anger festered over their Hollywood colleagues who had recanted their former position and had given names. These things distressed me as well. But, I was convinced that the only way to survive was to concentrate on present needs and not on past abuses.

  In Great Britain a seriously ailing Sir Winston Churchill had stepped down as prime minister in favor of the elegant Conservative, Sir Anthony Eden, his former secretary of war. Eden had ordered British forces to occupy the Suez Canal Zone ahead of the invading Israeli army, and Great Britain was in the grip of a bitter controversy caused by his action, which had been condemned by the United Nations. The prolonged dispute was so acrimonious that Eden resigned the premiership in January 1957, to be succeeded by Harold Macmillan, a Conservative and scion of the publishing firm, Macmillan. Although English politics were complicated, we expats could not help but get involved, at least in the hard issues that were current. Nonetheless, what was happ
ening in the States remained our top concern.

  General Dwight D. Eisenhower had been reelected president for a second term in November 1956, defeating yet again the intellectual liberal Democrat Adlai Stevenson. The whole colony of us had voted at the American embassy, giving Stevenson the largest percentage of votes in any “precinct.” For one of us not to vote was considered a cardinal sin. We gave Eisenhower points for sending federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the integration of black students. Still, it seemed incredible that the nation could not see the damage that Senator Joseph McCarthy had done to our Constitution, nor how cowed during his first term Eisenhower had been by McCarthy’s growing power in the early 1950s over the Senate. The more recent Army Investigations Hearings when McCarthy had gone over the line and abused and threatened Senate members finally spelled the end of McCarthy’s grasp on the government. Censored, ridiculed, and robbed of power, he died in 1957 of diseases caused by alcoholism. But for those whose careers had been mined and their rights to free speech trampled upon, the blacklist outlasted McCarthy’s life and would remain in existence for many more years.

  Before my departure from New York, I had been brought sharply up to date by Ted Ashley, a major agent, as to my chances of finding work in television. He advised me that I would do better to distance myself in England and continue to write under an assumed name. With children to support, I had to have a reliable income to cover our living expenses. Hannah Weinstein was producing a new adventure series so I sent off a letter to her. She would see what she could do, she replied. In the same post was a letter from my dear friend (and elder statesman) Sidney Buchman, written in his minuscule handwriting (Sidney could get on one piece of thin, blue airmail paper what others needed three sheets to accommodate). There was a project he wanted to talk to me about. Sidney had championed my career in my early years in Hollywood when he had been second man to Columbia Studios’ mogul Harry Cohn. Mitchell Gertz had sent him my screenplay, Riot Down Main Street (that Gertz later sold to 20th Century-Fox). Sidney was all for buying it, but Cohn turned it down. Sidney had been one of the first expats I had contacted in London as he was working on a project, coincidentally being produced by Raymond Stross.