Leaving Home

by Anne Edwards

  I told him to get me a taxi, took out what money I had to cover the bill, and with his help and that of the waiter (Norman only showed a slight sign of awareness) got him out of the restaurant, onto the street, and finally into the backseat of the cab, a feat—since Norman was a man of some girth—not an easy task. It dawned on me at that moment that I did not know where he lived. Also, I had given the restaurant all the cash I had. We could not return to the Adams. No way could Norman remain in my room for the night. I reached inside his jacket and found his wallet (shades of Samuel Taylor!). Inside was his driver’s license with an address in Brooklyn, which was a long ride from Eighty-Sixth Street. I retrieved two twenties from it, handed them to the driver, and told him to take Norman to that address and to see him to the door and make sure someone took him in. “If there is any problem, call me,” I added. I gave him the number of the hotel. Then I slid the wallet back in Norman’s jacket pocket.

  After the taxi disappeared, I felt acute apprehension. I had no idea what I would do if no one was at the address the driver had been given. And what if the man did not take Norman to Brooklyn? There had been quite a large sum in his wallet. I was up the entire night with visions of Norman being thrown unconscious out of the vehicle into a ditch off some dark road. I had not taken the taxi’s license plate number. I did not know any of Norman’s friends, or how to reach Adele. There was no one I could call (I supposed Sue as a last resort). My phone remained silent throughout the night. That could be good—or it could be bad. Midafternoon, Norman rang.

  “Do you know where you sent me last night?” he shouted into my ear.

  “No. Where?” I replied weakly.

  “To my mother’s house.” Then he burst into raucous laughter. It seemed that he and Adele had been in California and Mexico for an extended period before his attack on her and the breakup of their marriage and, when he returned to New York, his driver’s license had expired. Not yet having a permanent address, he used his mother’s. Fanny Mailer had given him a tongue-lashing for appearing on her doorstep in such a drunken state. I later learned the control Fanny had over Norman. His father had been powerless in family affairs. Fanny had run the house and made the decisions for Norman and his sister Barbara. Her only son was everything to Fanny. She fought like a tigress for him during his youth, defended him to the world once he was an adult and a celebrity. Privately, Fanny Mailer was, at least at that time, the one person in Norman’s life to whom he felt he had to answer to.

  He appeared at my hotel an hour or so later, intending to collect his car. By this time, however, the traffic police had towed it away. No explanations for what had occurred the previous evening were offered, none requested, no apologies rendered (he did, however, insist on repaying me for the uneaten dinners). I never had the courage to revisit the Captain’s Table. But I did see Norman quite often while I worked on my assignments. One night we went to an Italian restaurant in Spanish Harlem where he apparently was a frequent customer. Norman’s choices for dining, companions, or entertainment were unusual. He invited me to a boxing match and I refused. We went to some off-off-Broadway shows. We had a few peppery exchanges. I accused him of being antifeminist. “The hell I am!” he shouted back. “No one loves women more than I do!”

  “Only in the bedroom!” I countered. Actually, Norman liked women and subscribed to Momism. But he could become venomous toward women who he felt were militant or defiant of men. Following the contentious discussion we had previously had about Deer Park, I did not mention his writing again—although we extensively discussed the work of other writers.

  Norman was a great fan of Ernest Hemingway. I don’t think he deliberately tried to emulate him—either in his writing or his creature habits. From the back history of his life that he revealed to me (and it was difficult, as he was a consummate storyteller, to know what was real, embroidered, or borderline lies), I gathered that he had possessed a combative nature since early youth. There were two Normans, really. One was the short, feisty son of a dominating Jewish mother, who more than anything courted her approval. The other saw himself as a younger Hemingway: adventure loving, shock provoker, new-world writer. Hemingway was his unique idea of the macho, intellectual man. He was also obsessed with the idea of the writer as celebrity.

  Hemingway’s shotgun suicide in July 1961 and the media follow-up in years to come, which asserted that he was bisexual, was a major jolt to Norman, for he had considered him to be the symbol of masculinity with an almost mythological fixation. After all, the man was a big game hunter and was mixed in the intrigue of foreign wars. He was hard drinking and endured embattled marriages. That fatal shot left an impact on Norman. Still, as long as I knew him (and we would remain friends for many years) he never let go of his need to be considered Hemingway’s literary descendent.

  Norman was a person of great warmth and sensitivity. He could also be light and fun. I much enjoyed his company during those short months in New York. He loved to hear Hollywood stories (and to tell them) and was deeply interested about life among the London expats and, most curiously, pressed me for what I knew (that the world might not), related to members of the royal family.

  When I had finished my work in New York (and collected my check) I flew down to Miami and made immediate plans for we three to return to London. We arrived in time for me to cast my ballot for Kennedy in the presidential election. Letters to and from Norman hen-pecked their way across the Atlantic for a time. He considered himself a soldier in the “New Left,” an ecumenical, political, and ethical mixture that avoided narrow ideological labels, and complained that other New Leftists refused to see him as “a comrade in arms.” He sent me copies of articles he had written for the Village Voice, which was not obtainable in London. In one letter he joked that I would not believe “how respectable” he was getting. He sent along an open letter to the president that the Voice published in which he addressed him as “Dear Jack,” and then chided him in seeking advice about Cuba from the CIA when he would have been better served by artists like himself.

  [Flash forward: In the early ’70s, after I had published several novels, I wrote a profile of Norman for the Atlantic. He read it, of course, and wrote back to compliment me on “the best writing you have done.”]

  A year or so after my return to London, Norman married Lady Jeanne Campbell, daughter of the Duke of Argyll, granddaughter of the powerful British newspaper magnet, Lord Beaverbrook, and quite a formidable woman. They had a daughter, Kate (Norman’s fourth child), and then divorced. We remained friends through the years and he never tired of telling the story of the night I sent him home drunk in a taxi to his mother.

  It is strange about England. One can be away for long periods and when you return nothing seems to have changed. By 1961, most of the bomb sites had been replaced with new-era buildings (of questionable architectural value). Still, the queue mentality remained. The obsession with the royal family was just as fervent. There was always a royal celebration to look forward to—the spectacle of the Queen’s arrival for the State Opening of Parliament, her birthday celebration (held in June and not on her birth date), the family’s seasonal peregrinations from Buckingham Palace to Sandringham to Windsor and on to Balmoral in Scotland—all covered by the press. Rain was a frequent and accepted inconvenience. The Chelsea Flower Show was the bright spot each spring as it had been since 1862 (time out for wars). There was a monotony to the sameness along with the sense of continuity. Yet, something seemed afoot, an inkling of a new period. Jet planes flew the Atlantic in seven hours. Heathrow Airport had expanded and there were moving sidewalks to take passengers from high-numbered gates into the distant terminal to collect their baggage. The British theater was alive with left-wing plays. British musicals were competing with Broadway, and Anglo-American films were a thriving industry.

  Until we located we three stayed at the American Hilton Hotel, a twenty-eight-story, towering eyesore on Park Lane (the hotel advertised “509 beautifully decorated rooms all with A
merican-style comforts,” apparently meaning central heating, constant hot water, and a small drinks cabinet in each room). The children were delighted with the hotel’s three disparate restaurants—a Swedish open-sandwich cafe, Trader Vic’s Polynesian-style restaurant serving pupu platters, and mysteriously, on Sunday mornings, bagels and smoked salmon—and the elegant rooftop dining room featuring expansive windows that gave diners a view that included the Queen’s private gardens and the windows of Her Majesty’s own apartments at Buckingham Palace. The latter remained a controversy and scandal (“those gauche Americans!”) for the year it took for the palace to relandscape the gardens so as to block the intrusion. The incident did not help Anglo-American relations. I don’t think the name of the hotel was actually the American Hilton, but that is how it was always described in the tabloid press, obviously a bit of a slur.

  Behind the hotel was Shepherd’s Market, a warren of narrow streets with a jumble of unusual, small shops. Michael was allowed to take Cathy there. His favorite stores sold lead soldiers as he collected whole, miniature regimental military bands. He played the trumpet amazingly well and fortissimo and could not wait until we settled someplace so that he could blow as loud and bluesy as he wished. I was impatient to find us a home. London’s rumble of change ahead had awakened me. For too many years my career had been ruled by financial need. I had gone down the path of quick and easy. Now I was determined to concentrate on what I wanted to achieve, not only in my career but in my personal life.

  • 9 •

  Love and Other Emotions

  Aside from Kit Adler and Doris Cole Abrahams, I had few close women friends in London. I attribute this, correctly I believe, to the fact that I was a working single mother, earning our keep in a pretty much male-dominated industry and that the majority of wives in the expat American film colony were a good deal older than me. With scant exceptions, preblacklist and back in the States, they had been housewives, dedicated to social functions and to their families. Only a small number had been as political as their mates and now, their children (in most cases, at least a decade older than mine) fairly independent. They sought to find activities to fill their free time that involved lunches with other women in similar circumstances, and shopping. We met at largish social gatherings or film showings. I attended dinner parties at their homes—but an extra woman was not as convenient as an extra man. I, perhaps, was not as sociable as I might have been, as I had to scrounge for any small bit of free time. I did not find their activities objectionable. Our priorities just happened to be at odds.

  I would like to think that none of those women saw me as a threat. Being a considerably younger single woman might have rung bells. I was always careful to keep my friendships with married men with whom I worked on a strictly business basis, a decision made long before when I had chosen films as a career, well aware that it was a male-dominated industry. Actresses and secretaries often became involved with Hollywood’s married men—creative and executive. I wanted no part of such arrangements. Morality had some part of it. However, I was too self-motivated, too prideful, to place myself in such a compromising and demeaning situation. I viewed myself as a businesswoman and always did my best to transmit this message to the men I worked with—many of whom did become good friends, but that was all.

  It is said that men almost always have sex on their mind when in the presence of women and that most women dress to be sexually attractive to men. I cannot claim I know what is at any time in the mind of a man. I can attest to the fact that in my business dealings with men, I never made an effort to be considered sexually attractive. I dressed to be comfortable and in the best taste I could afford. I had only two unpleasant experiences of sexual harassment in my long career, and they had been in my early days in Hollywood. When I was nineteen, one producer—who was interviewing me as a prospective writer for television, chased me around his desk and then attempted to block my leaving his office. As I was near the door, I threatened to scream loudly so that everyone in the building could hear. “Come, come, dear,” he cajoled and advanced closer to me. I let out a deafening scream (as a child, I had, after all, not required a microphone to be heard up in the far reaches of the balcony), which brought instant pounding on the door. He scurried back to his desk. Several employees were standing on the ready when I stepped out into the hallway.

  “What happened?” someone asked.

  “I saw a rat!” I replied and rushed past them to the elevators in the building.

  The second incident also occurred in those early Hollywood years. A well-known actor at the time, Scott Brady, whom I knew from the television show that I worked for as story editor, had volunteered to drive me to an industry meeting, which he said he planned to attend as well. He headed into the Hollywood Hills where he lived instead. When he parked the car (after a lively argument), legs agape, he grabbed hold of my shoulders and started to pull me to him. I still had hold of my pocketbook and slammed it smack center, hard on his rising manhood, got out of the car, and walked all the way down the mountain to Sunset Boulevard, a mighty hike, where I could get a bus.

  He did not follow me.

  When the occasion presented itself, I had friends, couples and singles, over for dinner. I remember small gatherings with William and Betty Graf (new arrivals, he would produce the Academy Award–winning A Man for All Seasons), the Adlers, Lester Cole, the blacklisted film composer Sol Kaplan and his wife, the actress Frances Heflin (sister of actor Van Heflin), Frances and Ring Lardner Jr., Sidney Buchman, whenever he was in London, and of course, whatever friend was over for a visit from the States. At least once a week, the harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler, blacklisted and recently divorced, would, uninvited, ring my front doorbell at about seven p.m., just as we three were settling down to dinner. I called him America’s guest as I could hardly avoid extending an invitation for him to join us. He never refused. We three were happily ensconced in a well-appointed Victorian row house on Hasker Street, which bordered Chelsea yet was also near Brompton Road and Harrods, Coopers’ supermarket, and a huge Boots pharmacy that carried everything one needed for bath, beauty, and beyond. There were also new, intriguing specialty and antique shops around the corner from us on Walton Street. Somewhat larger than our former home on Markham Street, we enjoyed a modern, remodeled kitchen, adequate dining room—with room for eight chairs, if a bit crowded, and a bright living room. There was a service area under stairs but I turned it into more of a family room as it backed the garden. The master bedroom was on the first floor, two additional bedrooms above.

  Michael was attending Central High School in Bushey Park, situated on an American army base in Hertfordshire. Despite it being a fifteen-mile daily commute back and forth by bus and tube, the selection of the school, after some objections on my part, had been agreed. Due to his advancements, Michael would in two years be going off to college. He was very clear in his decision to obtain his degree in the States. The University of California, Berkeley, appealed to him—most certainly due to its current wave of much-publicized student political action. As certain subjects not in the British curriculum—American history and civics, mainly—would be required for him to pursue his chosen major, political science, an American school was necessary. Nothing I could say re the inconvenience of the distance (and my own concern of him traveling back and forth alone—sometimes in bad weather and dark days) deterred him. Michael was mentally mature for his age. I often said that he was born with a fully developed brain. By now, he knew exactly what he wanted and had well-honed skills in reasoning and debating. My pride in him was enormous.

  Cathy’s current school, Glendower, on Queen’s Gate, was a ten-minute bus ride from home. To attend she was obliged to wear the school uniform, the purchase of which was a yearly ritual in Great Britain where a large percentage of young people from middle- and upper-class families were entered in private schools, perversely called “public schools.” (I don’t know if they offered scholarships to low-income students. I hope that was t
he case. But I have to admit that I did not pursue the matter as I might well have done back home.) Each school uniform had a unique color combination and style that set them apart. Department stores of size had school uniform sections. With Cathy in hand we made our way to Peter Jones. About half of one floor was entirely devoted to school uniforms, girls’ and boys’ in separate departments. That day it was bustling with mothers and children, ages six to twelve; uniforms for upper-grade students were sold on another floor. Racks jammed with jackets, skirts, and trousers, short and long, lined the walls divided by a card that had a school’s name on it. Tables were covered with socks, mitties, shirts, ties, hats (for the girls), and caps (for the boys). To be a part of this rite was to understand a great deal about Great Britain’s class system. Children at free, government schools (except for orphanages) wore no uniforms and therefore were looked upon as being from families of lesser means. School colors created a further classification. Schools were not always considered socially equal. I had no idea how Glendower rated on England’s social scale. We chose it as 1) it was close to home, 2) it had a high scholastic standing, and 3) Cathy had a friend who also attended. The Glendower uniform was striking: deep-plum-and-mauve-crested jacket, gray skirt, and a perky gray hat with a plum ribbon. My daughter loved clothes (I recall most vividly a particular yellow dress she desperately wanted for her fourth birthday), so the attractiveness of her uniform augured well for our choice of a school for her. Michael, being at a school on an American army base, wore whatever he wanted. He was, however, a meticulous dresser—and remains so to this day (clothes color coordinated in his closet, shirts hangered and smoothly ironed). He loved music (as did Cathy), was sports oriented (which Cathy was not)—but being slight in build chose relay racing, and was a top performer in the school’s wrestling team–welter division—and was keen about his work on the debating team. We three all missed Sidney Buchman, who was entrenched for the time being in his home in Cannes working on the troubled screenplay for Cleopatra, to star Elizabeth Taylor. Sidney was always energized by Michael’s living room debates with him on various topics. I remember a spirited one on China (Michael was all of twelve) and its position in the world’s current power scheme that lasted well over an hour and only broke up when I called a halt for dinner.