The Men in My Life

by Patricia Bosworth

  If Jason was in a good mood, he would let me trace my finger around his face, which was square and conventionally handsome: even-featured, thick black brows over his blue eyes, heavy blond pompadour haircut, which he groomed incessantly. He kept a comb by our bed and would get frantic if it was misplaced.

  But he believed his nose—perfectly formed, absurdly small—was his best feature. He told me his mother had massaged it daily with expensive creams when he was a baby. “She was afraid I’d get a big schnoz like Dad’s. All the Beans have big noses except me.”

  HE KNEW FEW details of his father’s life. “His name was Luther Bean,” my sister-in-law Faith told me. “He was in the insurance business and he disappeared when the boys were very young. Wally says he was a handsome devil and had a great many women.”

  “Dad used to take me to the racetrack when he’d bet on horses,” Jason added. “He always had some babe with him. He had a terrible temper—he beat me when he found out I’d stolen stuff from the five-and-dime. He was very restless and had black moods. I take after him. Just before he disappeared, he beat me terrible. Beat me for no reason.”

  Jason talked about Judith Bean, his mother, only once. There was a single photograph, a snapshot propped on our dresser. Taken when she was very young, a tiny sweet-faced woman with strange eyes and a slightly twisted grin. After she and Luther separated, she’d worked for a time as a nurse for the terminally ill. Then “something happened,” and she was now in a state hospital for the criminally insane. As far as Jason knew, she was still there. He and Wally were placed in foster homes. Then Grandma had moved Jason in with her and, shortly after that, Wally, “because she felt sorry for him,” Jason said. Jason and his brother didn’t get along. “That’s because I’m Grandma’s favorite and he knows I’m getting her money.”

  Until Jason told me about his parents, I hadn’t realized his childhood was that dark. Did that explain his mood swings? His rages kept increasing day by day, but I was never prepared for them. They seemed to come out of the blue. I kept asking him, “What’s the matter?”

  He could get upset by the smallest detail: The top sheet on our bed wasn’t pulled tightly enough, or when was I going to learn how to iron his shirts the way the Chinaman did in Bronxville?

  One afternoon, about a month into the marriage, I forgot to feed the fish and he fell into a depression. He’d been smoking too many Camels, so the bedroom was thick with smoke. He was frowning, pouting. “What’s the matter?” I asked, and when he refused to answer, I asked again, and that’s when he slapped me across the face. It was the first time I’d ever been hit in my life. My eyes filled with tears. Almost immediately he folded me in his arms and apologized. “Oh baby, baby,” he crooned. “I just don’t like to talk about myself.”

  DADDY HAD SLIPPED me a hundred-dollar bill that day in Harold Taylor’s office. After it was gone, I asked Jason what we should do. He had walking-around money from Grandma, but it wasn’t enough for both of us.

  “Ask your father for an allowance,” he suggested. He seemed annoyed when I reminded him Daddy had refused to bankroll us.

  “That’s too bad,” my husband drawled. “I told you I wouldn’t get a job because I want to spend my free time painting. Guess you’ll have to go to work.”

  “Doing what?”

  “You’ll think of something.” He ruffled my hair affectionately. That was that. Subject closed. I didn’t put up any objections.

  In retrospect, I realize I was guileless and naive to a fault. And of course Jason used me. But at the time I didn’t look at it that way. As far as I was concerned, he had liberated me from conventional wifehood. He was encouraging me to be an artist.

  I could be a rule-breaker, I thought; I could dress the way I wanted, in leotards and sandals (no more white gloves). I wouldn’t have to create a traditional home, and I could wait to start a family. I would no longer have to attend all those boring cocktail parties Mama wanted me to go to in order to meet “eligible men.” By choosing someone my parents disapproved of, I found myself released from all traditional expectations. Although I didn’t realize it then, I was part of the first generation to rebel against our mothers and the rules they lived by.

  Chapter Five

  UNTIL I FIGURED out what I could do to bring in decent money, I waitressed at a local soda fountain in the Bronxville drugstore. It didn’t bother me; it was as if I were acting a part. I liked wearing a frilly white apron and tiny hat on my head. I enjoyed reciting the menu to customers: “You can have a terrific hamburger or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich . . . Yes, we have Lipton’s tea.” I most enjoyed making hot fudge sundaes—they became my specialty. I was also able to indulge my sweet tooth and often gorged (when my boss wasn’t looking) on spoonfuls of caramel sauce.

  I even coaxed my brother up from New York one afternoon and served him his favorite bacon and cheese sandwich plus a thick chocolate milk shake. He ate without seeming to enjoy it. We hardly spoke.

  He was still very depressed. Nothing excited him. About to graduate from Stockbridge, he was already accepted at MIT, but he didn’t seem that happy about it.

  I waited on another customer, and as I did, I could feel Bart’s eyes on me. “You aren’t going to make enough money to take off for Europe or Mexico,” he told me when I returned to him.

  After I got off my shift we walked over to my new home, past the bank and the gas station and the shops, and we stood outside the Tudor-style buildings that made up Alger Court. Bart took in the dying elm trees, the brownish lawn, and the car park that surrounded it. A train roared by and then another. We were just a step away from the station.

  “Wouldn’t you like to go inside and see my place?”

  He shook his head. “Another time.”

  Another train roared past us, and then another.

  “Must keep you awake at night,” he murmured.

  “Oh, I am so exhausted I fall right to sleep,” I lied. “Don’t you want to meet the Beans and my sister-in-law?”

  “No.”

  “Jason said he’d like to paint you.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it.” He grinned briefly. “Gotta get back to New York.”

  I followed him to the train tracks. “What will you do?”

  “Listen to my new Bach albums. Maybe play some chess with Daddy. If Daddy ever comes home.”

  “How is he?”

  My brother shrugged. “‘Everything is terrific, everything is marvelous,’” he answered, mimicking what our father said to us when things were especially bad.

  “And Mama—will she ever forgive me?”

  My brother stared at me. “For what?”

  “For marrying Jason.”

  “She wanted you to marry a prince. Or at the very least a decent man.”

  “You don’t know Jason.”

  “I don’t want to know Jason.”

  “But if you knew him—”

  “If I knew him any better, I still would not want to spend time with him.”

  “Why can’t you give him a chance?”

  “Why do you lie to yourself so?”

  “I’m not lying,” I lied.

  My brother turned away. We could hear the train approaching.

  “Shall we go to a movie soon?” I moved toward him. I didn’t want him to leave. All the things we used to do together came back to me in a rush—the endless bike trips we took together in California, the days at the beach throwing ourselves into the waves, then coming back and lying in the sand . . . Bart would turn beautifully brown as a nut while I freckled and burned. Once he spent an eternity rubbing my shoulders and arms with suntan oil.

  “Stay till the next train,” I pleaded. “They come every twenty minutes.”

  Bart shook his head. “Have to go home now.” He paused. “Oh, I’m taking driving lessons. I should get my license soon. Mama is going to let me use the station wagon.”

  “That’s great! She never wanted me to learn—said I was too scattere
d.”

  “You aren’t, you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You could amount to something if you’d just stop kidding yourself. If you’d stop and think about what you are doing to yourself.”

  The train was approaching, roaring into the station. Passengers were running past us.

  Bart turned. “Bye, Attepe.” He darted away before I could embrace him and hopped onto the train. I waved, but he didn’t wave back.

  IT WAS JASON who suggested I try my luck at modeling. “You’re pretty and you’re sexy,” he insisted, “and it would pay more than waitressing.” He took me to the beach on weekends and snapped close-up pictures of me.

  So in between my classes—my history seminar, my psych class, and theatre and dance workshops—I started making the rounds of photographers’ studios and model agencies. My parents knew Eleanor Lambert and her husband, Seymour Berkson, general manager of International News Service. Eleanor was the first big fashion publicist, promoting American sportswear designers like Claire McCardell and Anne Klein.

  Eleanor got me an appointment with Eileen Ford, who with her husband Jerry ran the hottest modeling agency of that time out of their apartment on First Avenue. Eileen was a tough-talking lady with dimples and a poodle haircut; she took one look at my snapshots and threw them down on her desk dismissively. “You gotta get some decent pictures, kid. But I’m afraid you’re too short to be a model. Besides, you don’t look like a model.”

  I’d read enough copies of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar to know she was right, that I was living in the era of the high fashion model—chic, inaccessible, elegant beauties with high cheekbones who never smiled. Beauties I simply could not compete with.

  Luckily, John Robert Powers disagreed with Eileen. He thought I was “fresh-faced” and signed me up. Powers ran the biggest, oldest modeling agency in the country, which specialized in the all-American cover girl, willowy blondes and redheads with white teeth and lithe bodies. Powers bragged he’d discovered Lucille Ball. Her portrait hung in his spacious Park Avenue office. “Lucille made me laugh so much my sides hurt,” he told me.

  Powers arranged to have me photographed by Ray Solowinski, a young photographer who had a studio on the top of Carnegie Hall. I was very nervous when I walked in. I’d never posed for a professional before. Maybe that’s why Ray decided I should wear my own clothes and not the Powers Girl’s uniform of a waist cincher, falsies, a crinoline petticoat, and a shirtwaist dress. Instead I kept on the hooded duffel coat I’d arrived in, and Ray photographed me in that. I felt relaxed and clowned around, even performing part of a dance routine I was choreographing at Sarah Lawrence. The results were some funny, lively images along with a few fashionable ones, since Ray also photographed me looking very snooty in a checked suit and hat.

  Powers helped me choose the best ones for my composites, which were then mailed out to hundreds of his clients. I soon began getting jobs.

  BY SPRING OF 1952 I was earning quite a bit of money as a model—was it $50 an hour? And I was enjoying it. I’d hang out at “480 Lex,” a lively, graceful building officially known as Grand Central Palace. It occupied the block bounded by Park and Lexington from Forty-Sixth to Forty-Seventh Streets. For years it was the city’s principal exhibition hall, showing everything from flowers to boats. But by the fifties, 480 Lex belonged to the photographers.

  Almost every floor was crammed with them: catalogue photographers, still life photographers, True Confessions photographers all clicking away. I did my share of True Confessions spreads, once playing a blind girl. I also tried out for the Miss Rheingold beer campaign and “tested” for photographer Paul Hesse.

  The Powers Agency was in the adjoining building connected by both an arcade on the main floor and a ramp on the sixth (where Powers was located, so I could walk across the ramp and spend an entire day dropping off my composites). Occasionally I’d stand in the vaulted lobby trying to count the celebrities—Truman Capote, Cecil Beaton, Claudette Colbert—or the great models, such as the ravishing brunette Dovima. They would be going to the eighth floor to be photographed by Irving Penn or Frances McLaughlin-Gill. I never got a booking there. But I dreamt about it.

  When I wasn’t working I’d drop by 480’s noisy coffee shop, sharing gossip with the models I knew, some of whom existed on raw hamburger and codeine to keep thin. These women were older and wiser than me. They were often single mothers or divorced; one was a lesbian. They all loved being independent and having careers, but none of them especially enjoyed modeling. “It’s just a way to earn big bucks,” one of them told me.

  One afternoon I was given a “go-see” slip to take my portfolio to a photographer in a building I’d never heard of. Zeeman or something like that (he had just one name). I marched right over and rang the bell. Nobody answered, so I pushed the door open and walked in.

  The studio was filthy, without heat and not much light. There was no secretary, no assistant. I was about to leave when a soft, hoarse voice commanded me to stop. I turned to face an enormous man—over six feet, all bulging muscle and potbelly. He wore a derby hat and baggy khakis, and seemed surprised to see me. “What ya doin’ here, girlie?” he demanded. I gave him the go-see slip that the Powers Agency had given me.

  “Gimme your portfolio.”

  I handed it to him. Then, while he glanced at it, I took a look around. There were cameras everywhere—big ones—lights, drop cloths, and piles and piles of newspapers and magazines, packing boxes, clothes on a rack. Junk. Garbage overflowing from a can. Flies buzzing over containers of half-eaten food.

  Zeeman explained his specialty was photographing for the “girlie magazines,” and did I know that? I shook my head. Then he said he thought he should take some “test shots” of me for a catalogue house he’d started working for. “I’ll be photographing lingerie—bras, underpanties—so you have to undress for me.”

  I told him I didn’t have to.

  He said it was essential. “Have to see your boobs and ass.”

  I took my portfolio and backed away from him, tripping on a pile of newspapers.

  He followed me. “Don’t you want the job, sweetheart?” I didn’t answer. I was moving toward the door, but he grabbed me with his paw-like hand, fondling my arm and then sliding his fingers across my breast.

  With a swift motion he tore my blouse from shoulder to waist, ripped off my bra and began pinching my nipple, twisting it between dirty fingers. The next thing I knew, he was on top of me, grinding his huge weight onto me. He smelled horrific, like old shit mixed with pee.

  I will wake up from this nightmare, I told myself. I will wake up . . . (When I eventually reported back to the agency, I would discover that I’d been given the wrong go-see slip.)

  Finally I screamed, “I have my period!”

  “Oh, fuck,” he groaned, and released me. I stumbled out of his studio and ran for the elevator, buttoning my raincoat around me to hide my torn blouse. When I reached Park Avenue, I hailed a cab. I was late for an uptown booking on Seventy-Second Street. I think I cried all the way there.

  DIANE AND ALLAN Arbus’s studio was in a building off Second Avenue in the East Seventies. They were taking photographs for Seventeen and Mademoiselle magazines at the time, and they had booked me a lot. I even had dinner with them once in their studio, which they also lived in and which had a flowering tree in the center of the living room.

  They were strange, elfin creatures, but they were kind and gracious too, and they asked me questions about my life. Diane in particular took an interest in me; she called me “the child bride.” She sympathized with my confusion and self-consciousness about being a wife at such a tender age. She’d married as a teenager too.

  That afternoon I stumbled into the Arbus studio out of breath, disheveled, and crying just as a barefoot Diane was emerging from the darkroom. As usual she was wearing the same shirtwaist dress she’d been wearing for weeks. She always wore clothes till they fell apart—“I don’t like to t
hink about what I put on,” she’d say.

  Within minutes I’d babbled everything to her about the fat photographer. She listened, shaking her head.

  “Awful, awful . . . sorry you had to go through that. He’s a monster and a woman-hater. Thank God you fought back.”

  With that, she guided me into the dressing room and began helping me with my makeup and expertly twirled my hair into a French twist. I was modeling a line of Judy Bond blouses for her (the photographs would appear in Charm magazine). In the distance I could hear Allan setting up the lights and cameras. Diane kept talking.

  “You mustn’t ever tolerate that sort of behavior, ever. Remember to value your life.”

  Those words kept resounding in my ears long after I left the Arbus studio and hopped the subway to Grand Central Station.

  Value my life. But what exactly was my life? I felt discombobulated. On the one hand, I was a working wife in an era of “housewife heroines,” to quote the Ladies’ Home Journal. I was out in the world earning my living and I enjoyed it. Before I returned to Bronxville I’d usually sit in Chock Full o’ Nuts drinking coffee and totaling what I’d earned that day, figuring out whether, after giving Jason cash for some new brushes, I could deposit something into my just-opened savings account.

  Then I would take the train and arrive at Alger Court with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I’d turn into another self, a passive self. I was secretly embarrassed about having a career, afraid I might lose my femininity, so I worked doubly hard as Mrs. Jason Bean to compensate. As soon as I walked in the door I would start performing various housewifely duties: doing the laundry, ironing, or shopping at the A&P if Faith hadn’t already done that. Jason and I would feed the miserable birds and clean their cages. And if that was not bad enough, we’d alternate the unpleasant task of emptying Grandma’s bedpan.

  I’d try to be as quick as possible when it was my turn so I wouldn’t have to speak to Grandma, let alone gaze into her wrinkled, wizened, ninety-six-year-old face. I was not her favorite person. She might have responded to me differently if Mama hadn’t sneaked up to Alger Court right after Jason and I eloped and tried to persuade her to kick us out of the apartment so Jason would be forced to get a job. I couldn’t believe my own mother would suggest such a thing, but when I checked with Daddy, he admitted it was true. He stayed out of it. To my knowledge he never even bothered to meet my in-laws.