The Men in My Life

by Patricia Bosworth

  I didn’t want to hear any more. It was too awful. Tobias was looking at me very hard.

  “Did you know he loved Salinger?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “I introduced him to Salinger,” Tobias said smugly. “As soon as he read Catcher in the Rye, he started feeling better. He had found a kindred spirit. Salinger didn’t like phonies. Bart couldn’t tolerate them either. He thought your husband was a phony. He was glad you divorced him.”

  I put money down on the table. “I’ve heard enough.” I was close to tears.

  Tobias put his hand on mine. It was icy cold. “I was just getting started.”

  I pulled my hand away.

  “I created an entire Holden Caulfield day for Bart and me. We did everything Holden did—went skating in Rockefeller Center, toured the porn shops on Times Square. He tried to pay for a prostitute, but the girl thought Bart was too young.”

  I wanted to scream. What a vile person Tobias was, and Bart had spent his last months almost exclusively in his company.

  He didn’t fight me when I paid the check. I rose to go, feeling ill.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know how our Holden Caulfield day ended?” Tobias insisted.

  I shook my head, but he continued in his lisping voice. “Bart had been very depressed that day. Very depressed. I thought I could shock him out of his depression by taking him to a freak show. Hubert’s Museum—the midgets, the bearded lady, the man who trained seals, the half-man half-woman. ‘They all look so bored,’ your brother said. We ended up at Grant’s and we ate clams and french fries and two swishy men tried to pick us up, to no avail.”

  “Bart remained depressed, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Tobias answered. “I couldn’t figure out why.”

  AFTER I SPOKE to Tobias I couldn’t shake my own depression or my grief. Now I knew my brother had not only seen his friend hanging from a tree on the Deerfield campus but tried unsuccessfully to cut him down. I could only imagine what it must have been like for him when hours before they’d had their arms tight around each other. Bart had been grieving for so long he’d decided life was worthless.

  I returned to college and was living on campus in a tiny room. One night, very late, Jason phoned me. When I heard his deep, rich voice, my heart started beating so fast I couldn’t catch my breath.

  “Baby? I am so sorry about your brother.” He sounded as if he meant it.

  I couldn’t answer.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  I managed to get out the words “Yes. I’m okay.”

  “Okay, then . . . g’bye.” He hung up and I never heard from him again. But his call unnerved me. I hadn’t thought about him in a while. Just hearing his voice unloosed memories of the birds, the cramped space where we’d made love over and over. Was he still living in Alger Court? Did he have a new girlfriend? How was his painting going? I didn’t dwell on the ugly stuff and I felt no anger, just sadness. But I had a hard time sleeping.

  SO FROM THEN on, throughout that spring, I’d stay awake half the night staring at the ceiling. Sometimes I crashed in other dorms. I’d curl up on a couch and fall into a doze, and then I’d jerk awake and start talking to my brother.

  “Why did you do it?” I’d whisper into the dark.

  No answer.

  Long pause, and then I’d add, “It must have been hideously painful.”

  Just for a second and then relief.

  “Relief from what?”

  Despair.

  “What happened at Deerfield?”

  A lot. Meaning, can’t explain attraction. Can’t explain a need.

  “Do you understand what you’ve done to me?”

  It always comes back to you.

  “And Mama.”

  She lives in a dream world. Who would want to murder me except me?

  “Daddy is devastated.”

  Daddy is Daddy, but I forgive him.

  “Do you forgive me?”

  For what?

  I had started to cry. “For not being there, for not being able to help you.”

  Nothing would have helped.

  “Oh God! How can I go on?”

  You’ll be fine. Hide behind your facade.

  WHICH IS WHAT I’d do. In the morning the students would wander into the living room from various bedrooms on the first and second floors; some would be in their pajamas. They’d move past me to fetch coffee in the kitchen and I’d sit up and exclaim, “Hi!” They’d nod politely, but few of them spoke to me. None of them were my friends, although by now everyone on campus knew my brother had killed himself. But no one mentioned it, so I think whenever I crashed in a dorm, I was the object of some discomfort, because I was a reminder that something terrible had happened, which no one could deal with. I felt very isolated by this kind of generalized dismissal, but then I didn’t want to talk about Bart either.

  After a while I’d jump up and run to the library. I’d sit in the stacks, comforted by the walls of books, and just stare into space. Then I’d run to the ladies’ room, splash some cold water on my face, yank my hair into a neater ponytail and sprint up the hill.

  I escaped into work. Between classes I got my first professional acting job playing a teenager on a fifteen-minute TV soap opera called Concerning Miss Marlowe, which was telecast out of a tiny NBC studio atop Grand Central Station. I’d switched my major from dance to writing, so now between everything else I was doing I was also pouring energy into notes for a novel I called Four Flights Up. I also sketched out a story about Jason and the bird, and I started a special notebook, filling it with questions I was asking myself about art, politics, and my chaotic ambitions. I couldn’t figure out why I was in such a frenzy of activity. I would sometimes be so tired I would be overcome with dizziness. Every so often I would vomit and then collapse into bed and sleep for hours.

  I would subsequently discover that most suicide survivors are workaholics, insomniacs, alcoholics, druggies, driven restless super-achievers brimming over with guilt and sadness. For a long time I spoke to no one about my brother, holding the memory of his death inside, where it festered. As I grew older, I discovered that two of my closest friends were also suicide survivors. Tony Lukas, the brilliant prizewinning author of Common Ground, whose mother had taken her life when he was a small boy, and Judy Collins, the legendary folk singer, whose son locked himself in his car and asphyxiated himself, leaving a tape for his mother to play. Sharing my agony with them helped. “You never get over it,” Tony told me. “You just get used to it.” But Tony didn’t. He ultimately killed himself too.

  Back in 1954 I was so filled with anger and melancholy I could hardly contain myself. My writing teacher, the poet Jane Cooper, had given me Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” to read; she thought it might comfort me and some of the lines did. Grief, according to Tennyson, can be passionate: “The blood creeps, and the nerves prick / And tingle; and the heart is sick.”

  The tumultuous politics of the time, particularly the Army/McCarthy hearings, helped take my mind off my troubles. And once a week I visited Dr. Rado to pour out my woes. He told me restlessness was part of grief. “Grieving is necessary. Mourning is necessary too.”

  I told him I felt as if I’d been struck dumb. I walked around like a zombie. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t, and I had a hard time articulating my thoughts.

  Rado nodded and explained that my emotions—my pain—were buried inside me as if inside an iceberg. “It may take a lifetime to unmelt.” Then he said very gently, “Don’t be too hard on yourself.” He went on to give me Freud’s opinion of suicide. “We have no adequate means of approaching the problem of suicide.” Rado felt it was an almost impossible subject to begin with. “It’s all about how much you value life.” Then he retreated into silence and lit another cigarette and I lay on the couch wishing I could tell him everything I was experiencing—the vomiting and dizziness, the huge anger. But in those days when extreme privacy was the norm, I found it almost impossible to
speak intimately even to a therapist.

  IN JANUARY 1955 Mama decided to move from the Sixty-Eighth Street brownstone. “Too many memories of Bart,” she said. She decided to rent a double duplex in a house on East Fortieth Street off Lexington in the Murray Hill district. “There are two bedrooms in the back duplex for you and Marcia [who was living with us at the time], and one bedroom for me and your father in the front one.” (Daddy ultimately slept on a pullout couch in the living room, but he seemed to like that.)

  After we moved, Marcia and I took turns helping Mama unpack the vast collections of books and china and silver, the piles of pale linen tablecloths and napkins, the candelabra, the jade elephant from Gump’s. The one box I didn’t want to open was the one marked “Bart Crum—Possessions from Reed,” so Mama did. The contents revealed the ivory chess set Granddad had given him, a dog-eared paperback of Catcher in the Rye, empty notebooks, pencils, and his .22 rifle hidden inside the ragged blue blanket he’d had since he was a baby.

  Mama unwrapped the gun slowly, almost lovingly.

  “You’re not going to keep that thing, are you?” I murmured.

  “Of course I am!” she exclaimed and cradled the gun to her bosom. “It was the last thing he touched—if he touched it at all. I don’t believe he killed himself. I believe he was murdered or it was a grotesque accident.”

  Marcia and I didn’t argue with her. What was the point? She’d refused to read the FBI reports.

  Mama kept Bart’s .22 rifle in her closet until she died. Then I threw it in the trash.

  Chapter Eleven

  DURING MY SENIOR year at Sarah Lawrence I had a big class load, but I spent most of my free time trying to get jobs in the theatre. The 1955–1956 Broadway season would be rich in quality and quantity, so much so there was a jam-up of out-of-town tryouts in New Haven and Boston. Musicals like Pipe Dream, Most Happy Fella, Silk Stockings; Edward G. Robinson in Middle of the Night; Julie Harris in The Lark; Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden; Bert Lahr in Beckett’s ruthless cartoon Waiting for Godot. The list was dizzying, made more so because my parents—especially my father—were making sure I saw every one of those shows.

  I now had an agent named Bret Adams, a genial young man who liked to wear bow ties and whose office was in a West Side brownstone. Bret had seen me in a Prell shampoo TV commercial, washing one side of my hair with an inferior shampoo, then singing the praises of Prell as I lathered the other side with—you guessed it—Prell.

  “You were so convincing and cute!” he enthused. He began sending me up for TV shows and Broadway plays, but I didn’t get anything. Bret blamed the way I dressed. “You look like a bum,” he’d say whenever I’d show up at his office, wearing my uniform of skirt over leotards and the ragged duffel coat I’d bought when I was in Geneva. Later he would call me a beatnik.

  One day at a TV soap audition I sat next to a platinum blonde wrapped in a black cape. She was bragging to anyone who’d listen that she’d just been accepted as a member of the Actors Studio, having auditioned five times. She had written the audition piece and, she added proudly, her partner had been none other than James Dean. I’d just seen East of Eden and was struck by the way Dean’s body language flowed into the turbulent life of his character as he sits on top of a hurtling train, hunched over in adolescent agony. I would never forget that image of him.

  “Jimmy’s going to be a big star,” the actress continued. She went on to say that they’d rehearsed their audition material in Central Park. “We’d stop total strangers and ask them to watch our scene. We rewrote and rehearsed our lines in bars and in taxis.”

  “What’s the Actors Studio?” I asked. She was about to answer when the casting director called out her name and she darted away, sweeping her cape about her.

  I SOON LEARNED that the Actors Studio, described as “a workshop for professional actors,” had been founded in 1947 by Group Theatre members Elia Kazan, Bobby Lewis, and Cheryl Crawford. Their overall purpose: to smash theatrical traditions and to challenge “acting that looked like acting.” Kazan in particular had envisioned a private place where he could nurture a generation of actors in such a way that they would be able to create complicated inner lives for their characters. Young actors needed a radically different performance style to dig out the hidden meanings in the emotionally charged plays that were being written by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Kazan had already been testing his approach of “turning psychology into behavior” on Marlon Brando when he directed him in A Streetcar Named Desire. The result, Camille Paglia wrote, was that “Marlon Brando mumbling and muttering and flashing with bolts of barbaric energy, freed theatrical emotion from its enslavement by words.”

  By the mid-fifties the Studio had created a revolution in performance; it resulted in a distinctive acting style that stood for a kind of hyperintense American realism.

  Hundreds of actors auditioned to get into the Studio every year. Few were accepted. I spoke to one actor who’d auditioned seventeen times before he got in; he also said auditioning for the Studio was the most terrifying experience of his life. Maybe it was because there was so much at stake. Anyone who made it to the finals would be judged by master teacher Lee Strasberg, Broadway producer Crawford, and of course Kazan. This genius director had discovered not only Brando but also James Dean. With their quicksilver intensity and eroticism, these two actors were heralding a revolution in American acting; they would soon become supreme icons of American culture. They were both members of the Actors Studio.

  IN LATE MARCH 1955 I noted in my journal, “I’ve decided to audition for the Actors Studio. Very scary move. I will probably fail. But why not try?” The very next time I came to New York I went directly from bustling Times Square to a battered white former Greek Revival church on West Forty-Fourth Street in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen; the building faced the Hudson River and was surrounded by dilapidated brownstones and tenements on all sides.

  A bespectacled young director, John Stix, who was also Kazan’s assistant, happened to be in the Studio’s shabby back office. He told me what to expect. There were few rules. Anyone over eighteen could audition. No monologues—you have to have a partner. Don’t do Shakespeare or the classics, and no scene longer than five minutes. If you pass your preliminary audition, you will be in the finals. He gave me a look. “You should try something very simple like Ah, Wilderness! or maybe a piece of a Salinger short story.” He went on to say that the Studio was looking for a unique special energy, and he added, “Yes, a certain commercial viability—but you don’t have to be that accomplished. We are looking for actors who have something original about them—something different.” I signed up and thanked him for his suggestions. “I’ll be watching out for you,” he said. “I happen to be one of the judges for the preliminary auditions, so I’ll be holding the clock.”

  My partner for the Studio auditions was a polite, good-looking young actor named Richard (Rick) Morse. He and his brother Bobby, also an actor, lived in a shabby, chilly walk-up on West Fifty-Seventh Street, which they shared with an old Russian ballet coach. That’s where we rehearsed night and day. Every so often Bobby, who was then working at a car wash, would come home in dirty white coveralls and flop down on the couch to watch us. (Bobby went on to become a big Broadway star in musicals like How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. More recently, he appeared in the TV show Mad Men. I’ll never forget his beguiling, gap-toothed smile.)

  I had no idea how to act, but that didn’t bother Rick. He taught me some basic rules such as “You have to connect to me, talk to me, really talk to me when you act.” After we read a couple of plays together, he gave me a few questions to ask myself about the character I was playing: Who am I? Where am I? What do I want? What’s in my way? And what do I do when I get what I want? (These were also questions I should have been asking myself!)

  Rick spent hours teaching me how to listen and respond. “Don’t act it! Don’t act it!” he’d exclaim when I’d fake an emotion. He showed
me how to make an entrance and where to put my hands. (“At your sides or gently clasped. A sure sign of an actor who doesn’t know what he’s doing is how he uses his hands.”) It was a crash course in acting, and I’ll forever be grateful to dear Rick, whom I developed a crush on but he would have none of it. “Never get romantically involved with the actor you’re working with,” he warned me. “It is inevitably disaster.” How I wish I’d listened to him.

  We passed our preliminary audition on the first try, but we were asked to bring in different material for the final. We returned three separate times with different scenes; nobody liked our selections. Then John Stix suggested we do the soda fountain scene from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. It’s about two teenagers, Emily and George, who are in love but unable to come out and say it as they sip soft drinks at the corner drugstore. We brought in the scene and the judges pronounced it “perfect for you.”

  For the next three months we rehearsed and rehearsed, and in between rehearsals I’d take the train back to Sarah Lawrence and attend classes. I managed to squeeze in some modeling and I also had a small part in a low-budget movie called Four Boys and a Gun with James Franciscus; I played his befuddled, very pregnant wife.

  I never seemed to stop. My friends on campus marveled at my energy and my cheerfulness. When I look at photographs of myself during this period, I am usually smiling. What an act I was perfecting. I’d learned to hide my grief and my feelings of profound loss behind an inane grin.

  So I was smiling when I graduated from Sarah Lawrence, and smiling when my parents took me, along with Marcia and Gene, to celebrate with a lavish dinner at 21. We drank a great deal of wine, and then I couldn’t go to sleep.

  The next night, the night of my final audition, I stopped smiling. I was quaking with fear. Perspiration streamed from my armpits as I dressed in my “costume,” a simple gingham dress, my hair in a ponytail. Rick made me drink hot tea with milk to settle my stomach, and he held my hand all the way to West Forty-Fourth Street. We arrived at the Studio at 8:45 on the dot. We’d been told to be on time.