The Men in My Life

by Patricia Bosworth

  I couldn’t speak. To me he was the epitome of the genius artist—one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century, along with Eugene O’Neill and Anton Chekhov. Then I noticed an elegant handsome man with a probing gaze standing next to him.

  “Baby, this is Gore Vidal. He liked you too.” Tennessee turned away. “We must congratulate Helen.” The two of them disappeared.

  I saw them briefly at the opening night party, sitting with Helen and her husband Charles MacArthur. I didn’t go over to the table. I spent most of the time dancing with the theatre’s press agent, a bespectacled boy who had a crush on me.

  The following evening, Tennessee and Gore returned to see the show again, and afterward they took me to a seedy bar near the beach and we proceeded to drink the night away. Or rather they proceeded to drink. I could not keep up with them. I sat there in silence nursing a gin and tonic, thrilled to be in their presence as they bantered back and forth.

  They both seemed infinitely worldly; they knew everybody. Between them they could hold forth on almost any subject—politics, the arts. For a while they discussed a new novel called Lolita by a Russian novelist, Vladimir Nabokov.

  I noted that Williams was oddly good-looking. He wore a white linen suit and a white panama hat, and he appeared better groomed than when I’d last seen him at the Actors Studio. When I asked how the Baby Doll project was going, he answered mournfully, “I want Marilyn Monroe to play Baby.”

  “She’s too old,” Gore protested.

  I wondered what Williams would be writing next. He’d been so prolific in the last decade: Streetcar, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Summer and Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . . . Plays poured out of him, works peopled with freaks, eccentrics, monster women, tormented souls—and on subjects seldom written about: aberrant sex, violence, and misfits. He wrote with religious fervor, and even with the sometimes shocking, repelling incidents there would be a kind of shining poetic epiphany that would stun you.

  As the evening wore on, Williams became drunker and drunker, but he answered every question I put to him about the autobiographical aspects of Glass Menagerie. He admitted that his sister, Rose, was the inspiration; he confided he thought about Rose night and day and that he’d left the violence in Rose out of the play. She’d been subject to such uncontrollable fits that she’d been lobotomized at the age of twenty-six. Before her operation she’d been passionate and opinionated, with a terrible temper. Once she’d poked a knife at their father, a brutal indifferent man. Still, Williams felt guilty about not doing more to prevent the lobotomy. “Ah coulda, ah coulda,” he murmured. He began crying when he told me a story about how, as kids, he would pull at Rose’s curls and yell at her, “Dingdong, dingdong!”

  “How could I have been so cruel?” He added that friends had called them the Couple when they were growing up. “We were inseparable . . .” As he spoke of Rose, he would roll his eyes and burst into fits of hysterical laughter. I wanted to tell him their intense relationship reminded me of the one I’d experienced with my brother, but I didn’t.

  Opposite Williams, Gore—slender and quite beautiful, with such tawny hair—seemed to be cold sober. He listened to Williams’s ramblings and then made a few caustic comments about Helen’s performance as Amanda. “It was officious; it was ‘cute.’ She’s too conventional and not spontaneous at all.”

  Williams disagreed. “Helen is virtuosic. No, she can’t hold a candle to Laurette, who was incandescent, but an actress like Laurette comes along once in a century, like Duse.”

  Gore grew irritated. “The part must be played by a grand eccentric. Helen is mundane. The play is about the romantic individualism of the artist, and Tom emerges as a writer self-affirmed. Tom is Bird,” he explained to me. “Bird” is how he addressed Williams.

  (“Why do you call him Bird?” I asked Gore once. He answered years later in a seminal essay on his dear friend: “The image of the bird is everywhere in his writing—the bird in flight, the bird in time, the bird in death.”)

  As the evening wound down, Gore drew me out, asking questions about where I’d gone to college and who my parents were. He knew of my father and his defense of the Hollywood Ten. When I said I’d worked with Arthur Penn in Blue Denim, he let loose with a tirade: “Untrustworthy prick!” Gore had just finished writing a screenplay of Billy the Kid for Paul Newman, with Arthur directing. “He cut some of the best scenes. He’s an illiterate.”

  I would soon find out that Gore had a cruel streak in him, although he was never cruel to me. He had a real cynicism about human nature. I think he trusted few people. I made one mistake that night by praising a story I’d just read by Truman Capote. Capote was attracting a great deal of attention, and this bugged Gore, who didn’t suffer rivals gladly.

  “Truman stole from Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers,” he told me. “The only thing he and I have in common is our mothers are both drunks.” He ranted on for a while longer. By the end of the evening we were exchanging phone numbers, and before he and Williams escorted me back to my boardinghouse, Gore said he’d like to see me again.

  BEFORE HE LEFT for New York, we took a walk on the beach. I felt shy. I was twenty-five and Gore was then thirty-one, but he seemed years older—his attitude about life was world-weary and his reputation daunting. He’d already written five novels, as well as numerous mysteries under pseudonyms; he’d produced scores of adaptations as well as shows for television. He would soon have his first play on Broadway, Visit to a Small Planet.

  He confided that he wanted to make lots of money and be surrounded by a blaze of publicity. “Never lose an opportunity to have sex or be on television,” he declared to me (and many others). I could tell he was restless, driven, on the move to fame and fortune in whatever form it might take.

  I wanted to say that I’d read The City and the Pillar and it had changed the way I’d felt about homosexuality. I was starting to believe that maybe my brother and Clark had loved each other, but they’d been ashamed and kept it to themselves, and that after Clark killed himself, Bart had felt hideously guilty.

  But I didn’t say any of that. Instead I confided that I hoped to be a writer as well as an actress, and did Gore think that was possible? “Of course!” he exclaimed. “Acting and writing are both forms of showing off.” Then he turned serious and wondered what, if anything, I had written. I was trying to finish a novel, I said, and I kept notes on the Actors Studio. Did I keep a journal? he asked. Yes, I nodded.

  “Good, so just keep at it and at it. You never know what you think until you see it on paper.” A long pause, and then he offered to read my work when and if I wanted to show it to him.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Why would he want to take the time to read my work? I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

  I DIDN’T SEND him anything right away, however. In the next few years we continued to see each other as I progressed in theatre and Gore in everything. Sometimes we’d have coffee at Downey’s or a drink at his apartment on East Fifty-Fifth Street. We talked about books and writers and writing, and I finally did send him a rough draft of a story about Jason and the bird, which he pronounced “creepy.” Gore never wrote his comments to me; instead he phoned and we’d discuss what I’d sent. Very often he’d ask, “Why are you writing this?” or say, “Too general.”

  Over twenty years passed and then in 1978, I sent him my biography of Montgomery Clift. He liked the book very much and gave me a wonderful quote for the jacket. After my Clift biography was published, Gore and I were having drinks at the Plaza and I finally asked him what I’d always wanted to ask him.

  “Why did you suggest I send you my writing? You barely knew me at all.”

  “Oh, but I did know you,” he answered. “I learned everything I needed to know about you after I watched you play Laura.”

  THE WEEK OF performances of The Glass Menagerie sped by. We played our last performance on January 2, 1956. I slipped into Helen’s dressing room after the curtain came
down. I wanted to thank her—it had been a privilege and pleasure working with such a legendary artist.

  Helen was seated at her lighted dressing table, still in Amanda’s wrinkled old robe. She was wiping the makeup off her face. Her wig was on its stand, her gray hair pulled back in a bun.

  “Patti!” she exclaimed, looking at my reflection in the glass before she turned. “Oh my Lord, I am so relieved!” She gave a laugh that sounded like a sob and began to shake her head.

  “What is it, Helen?” I asked, concerned, and she whirled around to face me.

  “Great God, I hate this play!” she cried. “Hate it.” And then the story came out. She’d seen the original with Laurette Taylor and Taylor was “magical. She managed to get a radiance and sympathy into a role that had been written with so much anger.” Helen had gone backstage to tell Taylor how thrilled she’d been with her performance. Then she told a lie. She said she loved the play too, and she repeated the lie to Tennesee Williams when they’d joined him for dinner. Laurette planned to take the Broadway production to London, but she didn’t live to do that. After her death, Helen was informed that it was Laurette’s fond wish that if she couldn’t do Menagerie in London, Helen should star as Amanda there. Helen was caught in a trap. “I couldn’t back out without losing face”—so she agreed to do it. “I must say I gave the performance of my life because I still hated the play, but I was determined to rise above it.”

  HOW IRONIC. I loved The Glass Menagerie. The part of Laura would be the finest part I’d ever play. I would never forget the experience of being in a masterpiece that not only dramatized a mother’s obsessive love and ambitions for her children but also explored the closeness of a brother-sister relationship. While I was in the show I had remembered Bart all over again, remembered our times in the hideout at Aptos when we escaped into fantasy and make-believe.

  Sometimes we’d get silly and have belching contests, which would make us sick with laughter. Other times we’d run outdoors and play hide-and-seek in the woods on a hill covered with a thick bed of myrtle. It was so thick and green I could disappear into it very easily, but somehow Bart always found me. I could never find him; he could make himself invisible. Was it because he was smaller and quieter than I? I’d usually start giggling whenever he crept close.

  I’d vow that somehow we’d always be together. But he would shake his head.

  “Not possible,” he’d say. “Nothing is forever, Attepe.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  I RETURNED TO NEW YORK with a sheaf of good reviews, and for a couple of days I existed on a high. But then the bad winter weather arrived, and the snow, sleet, and freezing cold temperatures as I slogged to and from auditions left me depressed and feeling like a failure.

  I hadn’t yet developed the thick skin I needed to survive the onslaught of rejections as I went to cattle calls, lining up on a stage with dozens of other hopefuls, only to be eliminated time and time again because I was too short or too tall or too young or too blond (I’d been bleaching my hair). Once I was even informed I was the wrong astrological sign. Then there were the cold readings, where a script would be thrust in my hands and I was expected to give it my all immediately.

  Marty advised me, “Learn to wing it,” and then he’d add, “Go for an objective, like play you have asthma [I became an expert sneezer] or you are late for another appointment—that’ll give the reading urgency, anything to make you seem alive and in the moment.”

  There was one agonizing series of auditions for the female lead in a Broadway comedy called Fair Game. I read the same scene over and over and over for weeks. Finally it was down to me and another actress, a very determined brunette with the professional name Ellen McRae. She got the part and changed her name to Ellen Burstyn. After my agent, Bret Adams, quietly informed me, “You lost out, honey,” I slunk home and shut myself up in my narrow bedroom overlooking the back garden. I’d stay in my room until it was time to come down for cocktails. I hated living at home. I was worried about my career. Nothing was happening.

  Marty said, “Feast or famine. You gotta adjust to it.” But I couldn’t. By March I thought I might be heading for some kind of nervous collapse.

  UNBEKNOWNST TO ME, Daddy was very aware of what I was going through and he’d phoned his left-wing buddy, the Broadway director Herman Shumlin, and asked if he could help. It turned out Shumlin needed a new understudy for Bethel Leslie, who was playing the female lead in Shumlin’s latest Broadway hit, Inherit the Wind, starring Paul Muni. The play was a fictionalized version of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial,” and Muni was playing Henry Drummond, a flamboyant crusading lawyer (a character based on Clarence Darrow) who represents a teacher on trial for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in a Bible Belt school in Tennessee.

  I auditioned for Shumlin, a bald husky man whose deep angry voice made me tremble even though he hired me straightaway. Not only would I understudy Bethel, he informed me curtly, I would appear in all the crowd scenes. I would be a spectator in the courtroom. I would be listed in the Playbill program as “the town hairdresser.” He then ordered me to start memorizing my part immediately (Bethel was playing the teacher’s sweetheart, and she had two big emotional scenes in the show).

  The following week I had my first understudy rehearsal with the stage manager, who walked me through Bethel’s part as I scribbled down the blocking in my script. Then I was fitted for my costume (a cotton print dress that hung on me unattractively). The next thing I knew I was hustled up the four flights of stairs to the attic of the Billy Rose Theatre to join seven other actresses giggling and smoking and slapping on makeup. When five minutes was called, we all trooped back down the four flights of stairs and were packed into the wings along with a wisecracking Tony Randall, who played E. K. Hornbeck, an H. L. Mencken–type journalist, and the bombastic Ed Begley, who played Matthew Harrison Brady, a three-time presidential candidate and noted Bible scholar (based on William Jennings Bryan).

  Before I knew it, the curtain rose, lights blinded me, and I was pushed out onstage along with a crowd of fifty-five other actors. We were all there to greet Henry Drummond as he made his grand entrance. There was much banging of drums and tootling of horns from the small band that accompanied us.

  It was my opening night on Broadway.

  I felt myself being shoved center stage with the other actors. I found that I was leading the pack, dutifully waving my placard emblazoned with welcome henry drummond. Out front I could dimly see the audience—a thousand expectant faces—and then hear applause as Paul Muni made his entrance from the other side of the stage. The applause increased as he approached me in a rumpled brown suit and hat, carrying a bulging briefcase.

  Suddenly, without warning—and just before he was about to launch into his opening speech—my shoe fell off. But instead of flopping off my foot, it flew up into the air and landed at Muni’s feet just as he was about to say his first line. Muni glanced at the shoe, then at me, and went into his speech, giving it his usual brilliant rendition.

  I stood stock-still. What had I done? What could I have done? I kept looking at the offending shoe. It was a big clodhopper of a shoe; it just lay there. The scene went on; the curtain came down.

  Seconds later I heard a voice over the loudspeaker, requesting, “Patricia Bosworth go to Paul Muni’s dressing room immediately.”

  I hurried to the star’s quarters. When I got there, the door was closed, so I knocked.

  “Come in.” I found Muni at his dressing table, head in hands.

  I approached him. “Oh, Mr. Muni, I am so sorry!”

  He looked up at me sadly. “I just ordered you a pair of shoes that fit.”

  I gasped.

  “Don’t you know an actor should always wear shoes that fit?”

  “Well, I’m a replacement. I knew they didn’t fit too well [my costume was hanging on me]. But I didn’t want to say anything.”

  “Well, now I have,” he told me shortly. “You may go.”

 
“Thank you, Mr. Muni. Thank you.”

  He waved his hand. “Go . . . go.”

  AFTER A COUPLE of weeks playing in Inherit the Wind, I had earned enough money to move into my own apartment. I found a one-room studio on East Sixty-Sixth Street off Second Avenue for $125 a month. It was a four-flight walk-up with a kitchen and bath, and it had a working fireplace. The building was next door to a convent. I felt that was a good omen.

  When I informed my parents I was moving, all hell broke loose at cocktail hour.

  “We just got you back after your divorce! We thought you’d want to live here for a while,” Mama cried, gesturing to the double duplex with its two living rooms, three bedrooms, and deck overlooking the garden. “We rented it for you!” she went on dramatically. “You have all the privacy in the world.”

  “No I don’t!” I shot back. “You monitor my comings and goings—”

  Daddy sat hunched on the sofa with his drink and cigarette while Mama paced the floor and I continued to rant.

  “I’m over twenty-one. I’m earning my own living and I am divorced.”

  “Don’t remind me of that embarrassing humiliating period,” Mama cried.

  With that, I let loose: “It is my life, Mama, and I am leaving!” And I stormed out of the living room and started upstairs to pack.

  “I have lost my own son and now I am losing my only daughter,” she called after me.

  I stopped. Mama always knew how to get to me. I walked slowly back into the living room and hugged her. “You have not lost me. I am going to be at the end of a phone and we are certainly going to see each other.”

  Mama was wiping her eyes. “I won’t hold my breath.”

  For the next decade my battles with my mother went on and on and on. But at least I now had my own apartment.

  MY LIFE SETTLED into a routine. I was now busy six nights a week with two matinees and understudy rehearsals as well. I was taught some rules: Always be on time and come prepared (of course I’d memorized the part of Rachel thoroughly). In the next months I learned how to project my character and throw my voice so it could be heard in the last row of the balcony. Until Inherit the Wind I’d played only in small houses. The Billy Rose was a big barn of a theatre that seated 1,500 people.