The Men in My Life

by Patricia Bosworth

  Rib’s family had a big home out in Douglaston, Long Island, right on the water. He kept his boat in their dock. We went sailing on it late that summer, all the way up to the Cape. By the time we reached our destination—Wellfleet—I was rosy with sunburn. We visited Gene and Marcia, who were honeymooning in a shack on the dunes. We went swimming in the bay, and then at dusk we roasted lobsters on an open fire, along with fresh corn and potatoes. Endless bottles of white wine were consumed; we sang Russian war songs, vowed eternal friendship, then passed out. I enjoyed myself. Rib was so likable and affectionate. Sometimes he’d pick me up and whirl me around in his arms. He wanted to take care of me. That felt good.

  A week later we sailed back to New York and holed up in Rib’s cramped one-room apartment on East Forty-Ninth Street overlooking Second Avenue. He made gentle love to me over and over, and then he asked me to marry him. But I said no. It was too soon; I wasn’t ready to commit. I wanted to be “free” and didn’t want to be “possessed,” but I didn’t know that being free and unpossessed could tear the heart out of intimacy. I didn’t know that being free meant taking chances with my life. I hadn’t counted on what it would cost. The price was losing someone quite precious.

  Even so, we continued to see each other for the next couple of years, although it wasn’t the same. We also saw other people.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THAT FALL I began attending sessions at the Actors Studio. It took me a while to adjust to the manic energy of the place. Elia Kazan affectionately called the Studio “a zoo.” Open 24/7, it was a place where every member seemed to be working on personal projects and competing for rehearsal space.

  Every Tuesday and Friday at eleven the theatre was crowded with show business luminaries as well as members sitting in on sessions so they could observe performers challenging themselves in front of master teacher Lee Strasberg. In the next decade I would watch Lee coddling, haranguing, and inspiring the most gifted actors in the history of Broadway and film—including Al Pacino, who in his first scene performed a terrific stunt, moving from a monologue in The Iceman Cometh to a soliloquy in Hamlet.

  I was also witness to some high-pitched arguments and equally high-pitched romances. In an era known for repression and loyalty oaths, the Studio’s attitude was decidedly male chauvinist piggish to an alarming degree. “The actresses are here to be fucked; the actors get all the praise and attention,” I was informed bluntly, even though in point of fact the female members who were there when I was, like future Oscar winners Anne Bancroft, Lee Grant, Estelle Parsons, Ellen Burstyn, and Jane Fonda, were as talented if not more so than their male counterparts.

  There was a time early on when I was goosed as soon as I walked in the door and felt a tongue in my ear, then was almost suffocated by bear hugs. The tongue belonged to Harry Guardino, the bear hugs and goosing were courtesy of Tony Franciosa and Ben Gazzara respectively. They were a trio of sexy Italian actors about to open on Broadway in A Hatful of Rain, which had been developed entirely at the Studio through improvisations. Harry, Tony, and Ben were all genial male chauvinist pigs and they expected me to be available to them, as many other young Studio actresses were. But I’d tell them to “Fuck off!” in my newly learned language of the jungle. I was starting to be aware that my body was mine and nobody else’s and I could choose those I fooled around with. Even so, the atmosphere was so alive and seductive I’d succumb to it myself every so often at a late-night rehearsal—usually with actors I didn’t want to be seen with in broad daylight.

  ONE MORNING I came face-to-face with Kazan. At that point he was the hottest director in America, having just won six Oscars for On the Waterfront. He was lounging in the kitchen just before session started, his dark angry eyes zeroing in on everybody like an X-ray; he literally charged the air with his huge positive energy. He was wearing his uniform of khakis, an old work shirt, and scuffed boots. I noticed many of the actors milling around him wore similar outfits; they were in his thrall. Then he saw me and we exchanged looks. His gaze was so riveting I turned away. Did he remember me from my audition? Might he be considering me for a part?

  Marty had already mentioned that Studio members Karl Malden, Mildred Dunnock, Rip Torn, and Eli Wallach were set to play in Tennessee Williams’s black comedy Baby Doll, which Kazan was directing, plus he was in preproduction for A Face in the Crowd, a movie about the evils of television, which Budd Schulberg had written. Patricia Neal and Tony Franciosa had been promised major roles. It was obvious that the actors in that room were hoping Kazan would be choosing some of them for the roles still open. He often didn’t audition you; he just talked to you, took you for coffee, to figure out what made you tick.

  “He psyches you out,” Marty told me. “He likes it if you’re ambitious.”

  “Hey, kid!” Kazan called out to me in his rough voice. “Hey kid, come over here.”

  Conversation ceased as I crossed the kitchen. “Good morning, Mr. Kazan,” I murmured, fighting my urge to curtsy. I was now close enough to see he hadn’t shaved.

  “Mr. Kazan?” He mocked. “Polite.”

  He continued to study me. My heart was pounding so loud I was sure he could hear it. Then after a minute he commented, “You got strong hands.”

  I looked down at them, embarrassed. He had singled out my worst feature. They were big, ungainly, freckled. I waited, hoping he’d say more, but he lapsed into a silence. I would soon learn he didn’t talk that much. He once told me, “If you can’t say what’s on your mind in the time it takes to soft-boil an egg it isn’t worth saying.”

  “You wait,” Marty had predicted. “Before session starts, every actor will be sucking up to Kazan, hoping and praying he will give them a break.” They included Actors Studio members who hated his guts for naming names in front of HUAC in 1952. “He betrayed friends to save his career,” Marty said.

  Kazan maintained he’d given his testimony because he loathed “communist goals,” and the revelations of what the Soviet Union had been doing to its writers. The death camps, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the suppression of so many millions of people, horrified him. But he did admit that “anyone who informs on other people is doing something disturbing; it doesn’t sit well on anyone’s conscience to inform.”

  Only a few sympathized with Kazan. There had even been a tumultuous meeting where there was an almost unanimous demand that the Studio take a public stand against him. Kazan had retaliated by saying he had never asked anyone to state their political beliefs to him. What he’d done was private; everybody’s politics were private. The membership pulled back, but Kazan didn’t show his face at the Studio for over a year until tempers cooled.

  Nobody knew at that time that naming names would become the defining event of his life—for some, the indefensible event. He certainly had no idea his name would forever be associated with the betrayal of friends. He would remain haunted by this one act in spite of his overwhelming success, his gigantic genuine accomplishments as an artist.

  I WOULD DISCOVER that Kazan and Strasberg did not get along, although they never revealed their complicated feelings to the membership. Kazan had been Lee’s student in the early days of the Group Theatre. Then Kazan surpassed Lee in every conceivable way artistically. Some felt that when Kazan stopped running the Studio to concentrate on his flourishing career, he’d handed over the directorship of the place to Lee out of guilt.

  Cold, inscrutable, Lee ruled the Studio with an iron hand. Everybody was afraid of him. Be that as it may, he was a remarkable teacher—he taught me how to depend on my instincts and imagination. He taught me how to dig.

  He believed the actor was noble. He gave us all dignity and he was fascinated by the creative process: writing, directing, and of course acting. Everything he talked about (and he was a rambling, discursive talker)—music, painting, politics, philosophy, theatre, sex, psychology—related to “the human experience” that lay at the heart of the creative one.

  He gave credit to Konstantin Stanislavski for
revolutionizing acting some decades earlier with his work at the Moscow Art Theatre. Lee took Stanislavski’s personal exercises for the actor and developed them into his own Method. Where Stanislavski focused on realistically portraying a scene, Lee urged actors to access their private pain. The aim was to release the emotions and create genuine characters. The most important tenet: relaxation. Everything flowed from that. It was hard for me to ever relax, onstage or off, so I didn’t work in session right away. For a while I’d sit in the back row of the theatre taking notes, jotting down everything I saw—and I saw plenty.

  Such as watching Paul Newman attempt to play Petruchio in Taming of the Shrew as a preening, gum-chewing narcissist. Or trying to figure out what Jane Fonda was doing in her “private moment” pacing around a chair and then squatting over it. Later I figured out that she was confronting her bulimia, since she could often be heard vomiting in the ladies’ john.

  “Behavior, behavior,” Lee would singsong. “You have to learn how to behave truthfully onstage.” Behaving truthfully wasn’t easy. It was easier to fake, but then you could never fool Lee.

  I ALWAYS THOUGHT he was best when suggesting character details to the greatest talents, the most experienced actors at the Studio.

  “Lee knows what you need to open up your instrument,” Geraldine Page told me. She was an amazingly gifted character actress; offstage she frequently resembled a bag lady in soiled, wrinkled dresses, her pockets jangling with keys. But onstage she could be incandescent, as she had been in her first hit, playing the spinster Alma Winemiller in Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke. In that play she’d had a jittery reality, a way of delivering her lines with pauses, and then she’d change her voice from booms to whispers. She constantly fluttered her hands. Her mannerisms got in the way of her acting.

  One morning I watched, fascinated, as Lee guided Gerry in a scene. “He knew what I needed to undo in my acting,” Gerry said.

  She had taken on Jean Giraudoux’s Electra, playing the part of Clytemnestra. Lee told Gerry to perform the monologue in the balcony of the theatre.

  “Do the monologue standing,” he said. And then he had someone tie her arms to a pillar. “So you can’t move, darling. You just speak in a loud clear voice.”

  Gerry proceeded to do just that, and at such an exalted pitch we were all on the edge of our seats. Her mannerisms dropped away; she was getting to the core of the character.

  Kazan was there that day in session. He was so impressed he cast her as the flamboyant fading movie star “Princess” in Sweet Bird of Youth.

  I WAS STILL taking notes when a scene came up that featured twenty-six-year-old Steve McQueen, another new member. I had been watching him for weeks, staring at him, daring him to stare back. He was lithe and tanned and bursting out of his skin with animal magnetism. In T-shirt and jeans he made boyishness magically attractive.

  Steve and his ex-girlfriend Peggy Feury did a scene in bed, rolling around laughing and softly grunting under the covers, that seemed to go on forever and ever. No words were spoken; passionate wet kisses were exchanged, so passionate in fact that Peggy was drooling at one point and Steve gently wiped the drool from her chin.

  Lee finally stopped it. “I can’t see what you are doing,” he told them as they emerged from the sheets. “What were you doing?”

  Peggy, a slender, determined blonde, snapped back, “Preparing. We hadn’t gotten to the dialogue yet,” and then she pulled the sheets around her. It looked as if she was half nude. There was laughter from the audience and Lee’s stone face cracked into a tiny smile. Peggy was a favorite, such a steady relaxed presence onstage that he often used her as an example of someone who knew how to work moment to moment (Peggy would later become a legendary coach to Hollywood stars like Anjelica Huston).

  “So, Steve? What have you got to say?”

  Steve shrugged and then grinned. “I wish you hadn’t stopped us. We were having a great time.”

  More laughter. Lee glared. “We are supposed to be working here.” End of laughter. “Obviously I can’t comment on anything. I ask you to bring in the scene again, but next time do the preparation offstage.”

  Steve ambled over and collapsed on a chair. I began staring at him and he stared back, mocking me, daring me to come over. Already he exuded the casual star-actor quality—assured, cocky; he was going places, about to replace Ben Gazzara in Hatful of Rain.

  We continued to stare at each other.

  “Be the aggressor for once, you idiot,” I said to myself. Most of the time men chose me. I took a deep breath and sauntered over, although I felt like running.

  “You wanna go out with me, don’t you?” he challenged.

  “Yes!!” I found myself almost shouting. Several members who’d overheard our exchange chuckled.

  “Okay, Patsy.”

  “My name is Patricia.”

  “Too formal. Pat, then.” He rose slowly to his feet and gave a yawn and a stretch so that his T-shirt hiked up and I caught a glimpse of his tanned flat belly. “Come on, I’ll take you for a ride on my bike.”

  As we walked down the stairs from the theatre, I watched Steve’s taut muscles bulging, practically undulating, as he moved. He reminded me of a graceful tomcat on the prowl. Members were crowding the shabby front office and flowing into the kitchen; many of the women watched enviously as we moved out onto the street.

  Steve’s motorcycle was parked right on Forty-Fourth Street and Ninth Avenue. He climbed on and revved up the motor. I clambered up and sat behind him, wrapping my arms loosely around his waist.

  “Get a good grip, sweetie, or you’ll fall on your little ass.” I tightened my hold on him and looked down. I was straddling his buttocks; I could feel the muscles tightening in his thighs as he revved up the motor some more. Then we were zooming off into the bright afternoon, careening up Tenth Avenue past crumbling tenements and bars and then around and past Columbus Circle. We ended up in Central Park. Steve parked the cycle on the grass and then vaulted over to a vendor, bringing back two hot dogs and two Cokes. It was a crisp fall afternoon.

  We didn’t say anything; Steve wolfed down the food. “Fuck, I was hungry,” he mumbled, wiping some mustard off his mouth.

  What could I say? I was with a man I’d had a crush on for weeks. It was too good to be true. I remember only fragments of what we talked about. I asked about his life. He was born in Beech Grove, Indiana; his father was a stunt pilot who’d abandoned him and his mother when he was a child. Steve had been in reform school and then the Navy. He’d had all sorts of odd jobs: oil rigger, towel boy in a brothel.

  I think he asked me a couple of questions, but then he got right to the point. “I have to level with you, Pat. I’m in love with someone—Neile Adams. She’s a dancer in Pajama Game. So we can’t do it. I don’t want to screw around . . .”

  “Okay,” I said, although my heart sank. “I understand, but why did you bother taking me for a ride on your bike then?”

  Steve gave a short laugh. “I thought if I didn’t you’d piss in your pants.”

  It was my turn to laugh. “Did I really look that intense?”

  “Yeah. You bugged me. So now you won’t give me the eye anymore, will ya?”

  “I promise.”

  DECADES LATER, WHEN I was a journalist and Steve was number one at the box office, I interviewed him in New Orleans where he was filming a picture called The Reivers. He’d already done Bullitt, The Cincinnati Kid, and The Thomas Crown Affair, and he was the highest-paid star in the world. It was a coup for me since he wasn’t giving interviews. I found him pacing around his hotel suite’s bar when I came in. As soon as he saw me, he ran over and enveloped me in a hug. “How ya doin’?”

  For the next few minutes we got caught up. I filled him in on my life; he asked after mutual friends. He told me he’d been reading some of my articles in the Times and New York magazine.

  “Maybe you shoulda been doin’ this all along.”

  “Maybe.”

&n
bsp; He was smoking one cigarette after another and belting down drinks. He looked trim and in good shape, but when he took off his dark glasses, he seemed tired. I tried to get started on the interview.

  “Oh, okay,” he drawled. He flopped down on the couch and then jumped up again and began pacing. The phone rang continuously, but he refused to answer it, and finally with a volley of cursing, “Shit! Fuck! Fart!” he pulled the phone from the wall. I was startled by the violence of the act. Then I noticed some white powder on the coffee table; he’d been snorting cocaine.

  “Listen,” he said. “Did we ever fuck?”

  “No, we didn’t,” I answered. “Don’t you remember? You told me you were in love with Neile Adams—the woman you married and the mother of your children . . .”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah, sure.” He shook his head. Suddenly he looked old and forlorn. “There have been so many . . .”

  WHEN I AGREED to do my first scene at the Studio from Clifford Odets’s Night Music, it was with another new member, Bob Heller, a rambunctious fellow who’d started off as a stand-up comic in the Catskills. Good-natured and funny, he ended up being another confidant of mine, like Marty Fried. I grew to depend on Bob for advice about everything from my agonizingly short-lived romances to who was the best agent in town.

  Years later I asked Bob, “What was I like as an actress? Tell me the truth.”

  He answered, “You were accessible,” and then he added, “You reminded me of a flower. A lovely bright yellow flower.” He went on to say, “You treated me like a brother.”

  I may have, but I never told him about Bart or his suicide, or my marriage to Jason, for that matter.

  “I knew nothing about you,” Bob said. “Except,” he went on, “you were the loneliest girl I’d ever met.”