by Anne Edwards
“Where is Mr. Chasen?” she inquired of the kitchen staff.
Silence prevailed. Finally, someone said, “In his office.”
Theo headed for the back stairs. “Dave,” she called out.
“I’ll be right down,” he answered.
There followed a shuffling sound, and Theo started up the stairs, then paused—startled to see a nude blonde woman apparently dragging her clothes and scooting across the hallway to the linen closet that was positioned opposite Uncle Dave’s office. He stepped out into the hallway as the linen closet door slammed shut. His appearance was somewhat in disarray. Theo kept on coming, pushed him aside, and opened the linen closet door. An attractive woman stood huddled against the shelves, her clothes held close to her body to cover her nudity.
The woman was Maude King Martin, a beautiful blonde divorcee with a teenage daughter. She was the receptionist/manager at the new beauty salon in Saks Fifth Avenue where, on the same floor, Uncle Dave and a partner had recently opened an elegant lunchroom. Uncle Dave closed the door to the linen room again as Theo fled in tears and fury downstairs, out the rear door where she had entered, across the back area to that sweet little bungalow we all had called home, and packed her bags and moved to her close friend Ruby Keeler’s house, where Uncle Dave finally went to soothe her and apparently ask for forgiveness. Man being man, blonde beauties being blonde beauties, he had made a fatal error in judgment and according to the family hotline, had apologized. “How could you!” Theo claimed to have shouted. “And in a restaurant with workers right on the premises and me practically next door!” She could not be placated.
They had been married over twenty years and she had struggled with him in his early days of vaudeville (where she supported them on her dancer’s salary) and had been by his side helping with their first effort, Chasen’s Southern Pit, built in the bean field facing Beverly Boulevard and behind their home. They cooked in a tiny kitchen (my mother helping as well—creating recipes—giving Theo a hand in the preparation and serving). Theo was adored by all our family to whom she always opened her home and her heart. The humiliation seemed too much for her to endure, and within three weeks she had filed suit for divorce.
Theo did not drive. So, on the day she was to appear in the downtown courtroom to ask for a divorce, she took a taxi and met her lawyer in the courtroom. The whole procedure took less than an hour. Uncle Dave agreed to all of her demands—which were few, for she asked only for support and gave up all claim to the restaurant, the house, and property, which had all become places of great sadness to her. Moments after she had gotten into a taxi to ride back to the apartment she had rented in Westwood, the vehicle was sideswiped by a small truck and the driver lost control of the wheel, careening into a telephone pole. Theo was thrown out onto the road. Seriously injured, she was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, both legs broken in several places. She was never able to recover fully, as pneumonia set in, and she died. It was a tragic and unfortunate sequence of circumstances. Our family was bereft, Uncle Dave filled with grief and guilt. He eventually married Maude, who let it be known that no member of the family was welcome to their new home in Bel Air. That was eased in later years but for the most part, family members met Uncle Dave elsewhere, most times at the restaurant where he kept fairly long hours. Everyone in the family, including Marion, blamed Maude for what had happened. No one seemed to take into consideration the fact that Uncle Dave was hardly the innocent party and that my beloved aunt Theo had acted too rashly.
I was in my early teens when Uncle Dave married Maude. My mother had joined my father in Dallas, Texas—the location of the company he was then working for. I had stubbornly refused to join them. Marion was torn. But I was in my mid-high-school years and had a life of my own that I was not willing to desert, being active in young creative circles, knowing now that writing for theater or films was what I wanted. Inez Russin, a first cousin of my mother’s, lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Beverly Hills and worked as a secretary at MGM. It was decided that I could stay with her, a wonderful compromise as she was a fantastic lady of whom I was very fond (and who had, in fact, once lived with us).
My uncle Dave, with his crinkly red hair and wide, endearing smile, had been a surrogate father to me when my own was not around. He was the light in my difficult early years: funny when I needed to laugh, loving when I needed a hug, and someone to say, “Things will be all right.” A great mime, he would pass his hand over his face, when I might be sad, changing his expression from tortured grief to wild joy. It was at the house on Rosewood that Ruby Keeler had taught me to tap-dance on the linoleum floor of the small kitchen, W. C. Fields (whom I called Uncle Claude) brought me bouquets of dandelions and let me beat him at Ping-Pong on the table that was set up on the back lawn, and that fine comic and character actor, jolly, foxy Guy Kibbee, would come to my defense when Marion would declare, “Anne Louise, time for bed!” and he would plead, “Ah, come on! Give her one more hour.” My childhood “friends” were some of the most famous and most talented actors of the 1930s, although I was not aware of their notoriety at the time. Theo and Dave had no children of their own and, I suspect, I filled the cavity they might have felt. They were there for me from the age of four to ten, at which time my mother and I moved out and she and my father reunited. Still, even (or maybe especially so) after Aunt Theo’s exit and demise, Uncle Dave remained a major presence in my life.
After he and Maude were married, we had a standing date one day a week. He usually ate his dinner at the restaurant at five p.m. before the doors were opened for the evening trade. Cracked crab on ice was a favorite of mine and although it was not always on the menu, there would be a beautifully prepared plate of it waiting for me. He would ask me about school, my friends, any problems I had that I would like to talk about. He was my confidant. He gave me my first wedding reception—a dinner for fifty guests held in the banquet room upstairs in the restaurant. “Anne Louise,” he had said, “Jimmy Stewart is to be married soon and is having his dinner here—and it will be the same menu as you are having.” Although invited, Maude had not attended either the wedding ceremony at the Rossens’ Westwood home or the dinner reception at the restaurant. The standoff with the family remained. Maude was resentful, and who could blame her? What occurred was far distant and it was certainly not her fault that Theo met with such a tragic and early end. Still, she remained distant from her husband’s family and had not been won over even by the time I had returned to Los Angeles; Uncle Dave was now in his seventies and not too well, having undergone recent surgery for a slipped disk in his spine. I called him frequently and saw him whenever it was possible. Not long after the engagement ring incident we spoke and he said to me, “Come to the restaurant at five p.m. We’ll have dinner.”
There was cracked crab on ice. We sat alone in one of the red leather booths in the empty front room, which would soon be alive with the sound of happy voices and redolent scents. His hand shook slightly, and he walked with some difficulty. He had aged considerably, was frail and smaller than he had been. His red hair was brushed with gray, his shoulders rounded, but when he smiled an aura of brightness lighted the dimly lit, ghostlike room where framed photographs of the Hollywood players who had been his friends and companions through the years lined the walls.
“Your father could have climbed the highest mountain,” he told me. “Don’t blame him. Blame the crazy world he grew up in. He was never prepared for life and still doesn’t know how to handle it. He’s like a lost kid in a forest where it’s always night.”
He took me into the kitchen later and had a helper wrap up some bones for me to bring home to the two poodles. When we parted, he held my face between his hands. “Marion was always proud of you,” he said, “as I am now.” He kissed me on the forehead and escorted me out front where a staff member in a car waited to drive me home.
He died in 1975. Shortly after, Maude called, warm and conciliatory, to inform me that Uncle Dave’s will, which was wr
itten a number of years before my mother’s death, included a provision for a small income to be provided for Marion. She said I must come to the restaurant when I was next in LA and she added, “It was all so long ago.”
The one disturbing element about returning to Los Angeles was that, despite the memories it evoked, the relationships and friendships it vivified, it did not feel like home. This was curious, because most of the American writers in self-exile that I knew always talked about one day “going home,” and considered themselves living as outsiders in their host countries. There were good reasons for this. Before the blacklist the greater percentage had settled into what they thought was their earned lifestyle. They owned homes with swimming pools, had nannies to care for their children, joined clubs, and were looking forward to the rewards they had reaped for their future. Once in Europe, having lost their status, their homes, their identities, they set their goals for recovery, a return in some triumph. They thought of themselves as patriots and remained mostly in the company of their compatriots. They were all movie folk, after all, and in the movies the good guys won and the bad guys came to a bad end. Joe McCarthy would be brought down in months, then next year, then—some year—and they would get their comeuppance. A growing fatigue set in, fenced by resentment, often bitter. Exile was a punishment, even if self-imposed. So they all clung together, drawing comfort from the mutuality of their experience and feelings. I, too, had been visited at times by these same emotions. The difference was that nothing in my life had been settled before I left for Europe. It had, in fact, been in utter disarray. I was, therefore, open to finding a place for myself and my children wherever fate might take us. Now I was not sure if it was Europe that I missed or the group therapy provided there by my circle of compeers.
We were never immigrants. We held fast to our American identities and to our citizenship. Voting was a pledge of honor—and allegiance. The only member of our coterie known to me who had rescinded his American citizenship was Leon. Given his history, one could rationalize his decision—at least I tried to do so. Born in Canada, he was first a citizen of that country. Shipped to the United States as a young boy, he yearned to be a part of the family and the land in which he then lived. After Pearl Harbor he applied for and received American citizenship and joined the armed forces. However, Canada, unlike the United States, allows dual citizenship. So, when he was named before HUAC and blacklisted, his career in the States suddenly ended, he reactivated his Canadian citizenship, thus forfeiting his American citizenship and any chance of ever reclaiming it. This act did enable him to find work immediately in Great Britain. Canada was bound to Great Britain as a dominion, “equal in status, in no way subordinate to each other.” It is a sovereign nation as is Australia, with a prime minister and a governor general but one that also pays allegiance to the British Crown (which for over fifty years has been Queen Elizabeth II).
The matter of Leon’s relinquishment of his American citizenship had always disturbed me. It was all part of the enigma that was Leon. He had reaped the harvest of the best—and the worst—that the United States had to offer, and he had retained the essence of the country’s beliefs. He still, after all these years, considered it home despite the fact that he could not, by American law, once having forfeited it, reclaim his citizenship. This had a strong bearing on our relationship, for it meant the greater portion of our lives, if we did not divorce, would be spent in Europe. He did have the option of living in Canada, or any other one of Britain’s dominions. But, at that time, there were only two major arenas for moviemakers—the United States or Europe.
While I was working on my current book in Beverly Hills and trying to make decisions regarding my relationship with Rod, Leon was hopping back and forth from London to Madrid, preparing the latter as a location for a film, A Talent for Loving, that he was coproducing with Walter Shenson. He had never given up trying to get me to return, and during the late summer of 1968, he went into full gear. Every week there were wrenching telephone calls, cables, and letters. There is no denying that I was moved by them. We had been separated for over a year. A lot had happened in my life in that time. There was Rod. But I knew by now that whatever we had together was not to be a lifetime relationship. There was a kind of desperation in Leon’s actions, and I was feeling a heavy guilt that I could not just end everything. Aside from my ambivalence over my situation with Rod, the question remained if I really wanted to return to Europe to live. That was a major hurdle for a reconciliation with Leon as he could not live or work in the United States. I spoke and wrote to him about this. In a letter he replied,
I agree with most of what you say regarding “roots,” involvement, etc. Again these are vast areas for discussion and exploration. There is one point you raised that I think you should be clear about. The question of my reverting to Canadian nationality. I did not want to do this. It was not my choice. After all, for all practical purposes I was and still am, an American. I believe this was the most serious conflict I ever had with Kathryn. It would have created a break if I hadn’t compromised. And since I felt (you will probably not believe it, but it is so) that our relationship was more important than anything else . . . and since it became almost an obsession with her and created all sorts of emotional upset, I compromised. I wanted to fight the thing through from wherever I could. I knew this could only be an erratic incident in the history of the country, if only from the knowledge of the histories of other countries. But she was so nervous and fearful, what with the hounding by the office in London [referring to the need for a working permit and a permanent visa], etc., that I gave in. And I honestly feel that this was a factor in the subsequent tragedy [Kathryn’s affair with Carl and her suicide] arising from guilt regarding the incident??? [The three question marks are Leon’s.]
Our relationship was caught up in a war between our incompatibility on one side and our shared experience with the HUAC years and having to start anew in a foreign country—granted, one whose language was English—on the other. Leon was well known in Britain’s movie colony as an expert in many areas, production and technical, especially with music, sound, or language; he was seldom out of work. His pay was not on a par with the “big guys”—the directors and producers who were able to package their own projects—and as he kept his financial matters highly exclusive from me (I would say secretive), and as I now had my own resources (which I did not do likewise), I did not take this situation further. It troubled me that he had few close friends among the expats. I brought them into our lives and he could not avoid their presence. He never enjoyed social home gatherings, which I encouraged. He had, more or less, parted ways (at least on a personal basis) with Carl, and his mentions of him in letters had become almost vitriolic. In many ways I thought that the more distance he placed (or Carl did) between the two of them, the better they both were for it. This same bitterness had entered into his frequent telephone calls to me. After one emotionally searing exchange, I asked him not to call me again.
A few days later I received an express letter: “A relationship to be anything,” he wrote, “cannot be one sided. And that is why I said to you, yesterday on the phone, that I would stop annoying you with phone calls and cables. I’m sure there’s nothing more annoying and irritating to anyone than an attempt at communication without a synchronous receiver. I do not beg, nor am I a supplicant. If you are sincerely convinced that you no longer feel for me and that our future together is nil, then say so and I will stop bothering you. My concern for you and the kids I cannot obviate and eradicate . . . this will always be. Either you feel it or you don’t. End of paragraph.”
Then, in the very next paragraph he writes: “I have a home in Madrid waiting for you [where he was preparing the film for shooting]. This is a lovely, three-bedroomed, three-bathroomed apartment with a modern kitchen (even including a garbage-disposal unit) . . . immaculate, completely equipped . . . on the fifth floor of a brand-new apartment building with a lift and a swimming pool on the roof. I have a woman,
Aurora, who cleans and cooks dinner. . . . Again, as I told you on the phone, if you can and feel like coming, I will send you the ticket or the money, whichever. I got this large a place with your coming in mind . . . it is waiting and I am waiting . . . the final decision is yours. Nothing would make me happier than to meet you at the Madrid airport. But you must do what is best for you, in terms of both your health and your emotions. Take care and God bless. You still have all my love. L.”
Well, of course, the “home” he had waiting was a temporary place to hang our hats, and perhaps our hearts. It would only be ours for the length of the shooting of the film. Then where would we be? Back to square one.
All of this was transpiring while Rod and I were having our own issues to deal with. I was hesitant to discuss Leon with Rod and he, in turn, could not talk about his own situation. We were slowly withdrawing from the intimacy we had. The affair was coming to an end and both of us knew it.
The last time we met was in early May, a time that can be—and was that day—spectacular in Malibu where our affair, a little more than twelve months young, had begun. The ocean was splashed with sunlight, soft waves undulated toward the beach. We both knew we were meeting to say good-bye. We talked about inconsequential matters. I was perched on the couch and he was seated across from me in this glass-fronted, modern living room that looked out on a glorious blue sky and white-frosted, rolling waves. Suddenly, the sun shifted and a sharp beam of light came through the windows and lay between us like a bar to a gate being lowered. He got up and helped me to my feet and held me in a bear hug for a long time.
We rode mostly in silence back to my apartment in that crazy red car of his. At one point he pulled off the road. “Do you forgive me?” he asked.
