The Men in My Life

by Patricia Bosworth

  “And what is that exactly?” I asked.

  “Star quality is the ability to project, without effort, the outlines of a unique personality.”

  Looking back on it, I lived in a kind of dream the entire time I played in this show—even after Marty came backstage on opening night, bearing flowers and telling me, “You looked beautiful in your costumes, honey, but the play is a bomb.”

  The reviews were respectful, but not very good. The producers, out of respect for Sherwood, kept the play open for a while. We continued to act our hearts out and Gar would visit us every night to cheer us on. So he was standing at the back of the house one matinee when Warner LeRoy didn’t show up in the middle of the second act to deliver a letter. Jan and I had to ad-lib for several minutes. I froze; Jan took over and improvised some dialogue while Gar raced up to the fourth floor of the Barrymore Theatre and found Warner deep asleep on a cot in his dressing room. He was so ashamed of what he’d done that he insisted on taking the entire cast to Frank Sinatra’s midnight show at the Copa.

  I’ll never forget walking in through the nightclub’s kitchen (à la Goodfellas) and out to ringside tables, where Sinatra greeted Warner and all of us personally and then began belting out his songs in true Sinatra fashion. As he sang, he lounged at the piano holding a smoking cigarette and a glass of Scotch. His voice was so supple he could take banal Tin Pan Alley songs and transform them into something very personal and poignant. I felt as if he were singing directly to me.

  DESPITE OUR BEST efforts, Small War on Murray Hill closed after twelve performances. I felt depressed; when a show ends it’s as if you’ve lost part of your family. I’d become especially close to Danny, who remained a lifelong friend. It pleased me to see him in London triumphing in shows as diverse as Betrayal and Follies. I kept in touch with Warner too; he would soon turn his restaurants, Maxwell’s Plum and Tavern on the Green, into sparkling fantasy palaces.

  But I had little time to miss anybody, because a few weeks after the demise of Small War I was cast in another Broadway show called The Sin of Pat Muldoon by John McLiam. It was about an Irish Catholic family and James Barton, an old character actor best known for creating the role of Hickey in the original Iceman Cometh, was playing the irascible Muldoon. He spends most of the play slowly dying in bed, but is alive enough to argue endlessly with his children about heaven and hell.

  I’d won the role of Muldoon’s long-suffering daughter Theresa, who cares for her father even as she is falling in love with someone he disapproves of. The part was even bigger than the one I’d had in Small War and it was more challenging, since I was going to sing two Irish ballads in the show a cappella. I took singing lessons every day and thought I sounded pretty good until I learned that the role of my older sister had been taken by Elaine Stritch. Elaine was a brassy, tart-tongued actress/singer who’d done only a couple of shows—among them Bus Stop and Pal Joey—and already everyone was talking about her “I’ve seen it all” manner and her whiskey voice. She could stop a show with her wild inventiveness and manic energy.

  I thought I’d be intimidated by her, but Elaine was subdued and quiet when we were introduced. She was beanpole tall and skinny and she had acne scars on her cheeks. We discovered we had a lot in common, not the least of which was that we were both practicing Catholics and had gone to Sacred Heart.

  A COUPLE OF days before rehearsal started (and just before I signed my contract), the associate producer of Muldoon, sleek, debonair Richard Adler, invited me for a drink. Adler was the composer and lyricist (along with Jerry Ross) for two smash hits then running simultaneously on Broadway, The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees. He’d won a couple of Tonys, so he was pretty pleased with himself.

  Richard took me to Dinty Moore’s and ordered champagne. We toasted each other. He said I was going to be “lovely as Theresa,” and then he got down to business. He’d decided I should be “his girl” on the road. He’d have a suite at the Taft Hotel in New Haven and another suite at the Ritz when we played Boston. We’d enjoy each other. Then when the show opened on Broadway “we will be finito,” he explained very calmly, and then he clasped my hand.

  His proposition sounded like a variation on the casting couch, a phrase used to describe lecherous casting directors and actresses willing to trade sexual favors in return for roles. I knew this kind of thing went on all the time in show business, and it was disgusting.

  I withdrew my hand from Richard’s, told him that I would never agree to such an arrangement, and left him sitting by himself at Dinty Moore’s. I was sure I would lose my job.

  But the following morning my agent called; he informed me that although he’d put up a battle, “Dick Adler will only pay you minimum. Even though you have the second lead, you are getting the last billing.” (Later when I saw the program, my name was in the tiniest print.)

  So that’s how he’s getting back at me, I thought. So what? I’m still going to do my damnedest.

  I came into the first rehearsal defiant, but worried that Richard might be there. He wasn’t, and as far as I could tell, nobody in the production knew that he’d propositioned me. I saw him periodically throughout the run, but we never spoke of the matter again. It was as if it hadn’t happened.

  IT WAS SNOWING outside when the cast gathered in a rundown office on West Forty-Sixth Street. Everybody was a Studio member (James Olson, John Heldebrand, Cliff James, and Katherine Squire, once again playing my mother). The director, Jack Garfein, was Lee’s special protégé. A Holocaust survivor, he’d been responsible for the Studio’s first big theatrical success, End as a Man.

  Coffee was served. That’s when I noticed there was one non-Studio actor, Gerry Sarracini (who would be playing my lover). He stood apart by the window watching the snow blanket Times Square. A powerfully built man, he had a wary jug face. I went over to say hello, but he turned away. He seemed to be favoring a bandaged hand.

  Just before the start of our first rehearsal, Jack cautioned, “You mustn’t look at James Barton, okay? He was in a terrible fire and he lost his nose. He always wears a fake one when he’s doing a performance, but in rehearsal he likes to work without it. So act natural around him.”

  “You mean don’t ask, ‘Pops—where’d your nose go?’” Elaine demanded. Everyone laughed nervously, except for Gerry.

  “That’s exactly what I meant,” Jack told her.

  At that moment Barton appeared in the doorway, a bent, white-haired old man. He shuffled toward us and then took his cap off with a flourish. “Hello there, everybody. I am so glad to be here.” We murmured our hellos back, trying not to stare too hard at the two gaping black holes in his face. Jack made quick motions for us to gather around the big table in the center of the room for the first read-through.

  WE WORKED LONG hours, but the play didn’t come together. After the second week Elaine and I slipped into St. Malachy’s Church to light candles and pray for the production.

  Gerry Sarracini’s antics didn’t help our uneasy mood. He’d shamble into rehearsal sporting a black eye and he’d fly into rages with Jack over his direction. The rest of the cast started keeping their distance from him, but I couldn’t—we were playing lovers. I wanted us to be able to connect to each other onstage.

  “Be careful,” Katherine Squire warned.

  I didn’t listen. I’d often bring Gerry coffee if he appeared hungover. “Thanks,” he’d say. He knew I felt self-conscious whenever I sang for Pat in the play, because Elaine was onstage listening. He’d whisper, “Forget Stritch—you’re not entertaining her, you’re entertaining your father.” That suggestion helped; it reminded me of the times I’d sung at parties for Daddy and my voice would wobble horribly until I saw my brother in a corner smiling his encouragement. Gerry did that too, nodding and smiling as I sang “Molly Malone” clear and true. “Thanks,” I’d tell him afterward, and he’d shrug. “De nada.”

  We were having problems with our own scenes; they were so underwritten. There wasn’t enough dialogue t
o suggest our so-called illicit passion. Gerry suggested, “Let’s improvise” during one of the stop-and-go run-throughs. We figured out a nice little moment. No words. We’re sitting in the kitchen in the middle of the second act; Gerry’s playing the guitar. He notices I’m chilly, so he puts down his guitar and wraps a sweater around my shoulders. He caresses the sweater; his hands clasp my arms just for a second and our eyes lock and then he goes back to playing the guitar. It was make-believe rapture and it seemed to work. Jack told us to keep it in the show.

  Gerry and I began going to the Theatre Bar after rehearsal. I’d sit there watching him drink and then strum on his guitar. He’d be frowning, his thick, powerful fingers plucking away at the strings. I had no idea what he was thinking. He was inscrutable. Whenever he spoke to me, it was slowly, almost lazily, through half-closed eyes. I decided after a while that the world seemed too bright for him to handle. He shied away from talking about himself. Sometimes I was afraid that if I asked too personal a question he might slap my face. But I did discover he hated phonies (as did my brother), and that before he became an actor in Canada, he’d been a professional boxer.

  The happiest times for us before we left for New Haven were the nights at Birdland or the Five Spot. Gerry loved jazz. We’d sit in the smoky darkness listening to turbulent, lyrical, raucous music, and between sets he’d introduce me to his friends—the drug addicts; the black trumpet player, his face shiny with sweat; the fighters from Stillman’s Gym. Oh, I’ll never forget those nights. They seemed to gratify my hunger for experience devoid of thinking. Gerry never once touched me or kissed me, and whenever he left the room, I was afraid I’d never see him again. He was so busy burning himself up in front of my eyes. Nobody could live at his pace and stay the course, and every so often in bursts of intimacy he said as much. He seemed to want me to know this.

  WE PREMIERED The Sin of Pat Muldoon in New Haven to mediocre reviews. Playwright John McLiam attempted some rewrites; we tried them when we opened ten days later at the Colonial Theatre in Boston, where we received even more mediocre reviews. By that time Jack had decided to “freeze the show”—no more repairs. We all thought the show was worse; cast morale sank.

  Only Elaine seemed jubilant; she was stealing everybody’s scenes with her brassy hard-boiled performance, plus she’d fallen madly in love with Ben Gazzara and he seemed equally crazy about her. Sexy, magnetic, hard-drinking Ben with his deep, rich, taunting voice and Italian good looks—he’d just finished a successful run in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof playing the enigmatic Brick. Now he was either in Elaine’s dressing room or watching her from the wings whenever she was on. After the curtain came down, they’d often get roaring drunk and loudly proclaim their boozy passion for each other.

  One night Elaine insisted I join them in her suite at the Ritz, and she also asked Gerry. The evening started off by Elaine ordering sandwiches from room service, and then she passed out martinis. I’d never had one. When I took the first swallow, the gin burned my gullet and I choked.

  “You don’t know how to drink, do you, kid?” Ben asked. He was sprawled on a couch smoking a cigar and already three sheets to the wind.

  “Of course I know how to drink,” I insisted. Daddy had given me my first taste of liquor when I was fourteen, an Old Fashioned. And he would frequently give me sips of his late-night drink, Jack Daniel’s on ice.

  “So take a man-sized swallow, twerp,” Ben teased.

  Gerry was observing me from a far corner of the suite. “Leave the girl alone,” he ordered Ben quietly. Gerry had a strong gravelly voice, a commanding voice even though he was speaking softly.

  “Why don’t you fuck off?” Ben retorted. His words slurred.

  Elaine was busy mixing up another batch of martinis. “Boys, boys!” she trilled tipsily. “Patti is gonna learn how to hold her liquor!”

  With that, Elaine began dancing around the room shaking the martini shaker up and down like a castanet. “It gets better and better, don’t it, Benny! What did Tennessee say? You wait till you hear that click in your brain . . . and then you start feeling relaxed and you feel almost tired, but you aren’t scared or anxious anymore and nothing can harm you!” Elaine bent and twirled, still holding the martini shaker—her long slender legs flying, her blond curls bobbing. She went around the room refilling our glasses. When she finished, she cried out, “Oh, Gawd, do I love to drink! Do I love to drink!”

  (Elaine didn’t stop drinking for many years until she suffered a severe hypoglycemic attack and almost died. When she recovered, she joined AA and fought to stay sober for the next decade. I once asked her what she wanted most when she got to heaven. “A big fucking bar, sis, with every kinda liquor imaginable! Oh, do I miss drinking—I miss it every goddamn day of my life!” The year before she died, she confided fiercely that she’d started drinking again, but furtively—secretly. “Had to! Had to! Had to have that one little drink every night.” Then she rolled her eyes. “That’s how I survive. Do you hear me?”)

  The evening progressed. Ben and Elaine grew impatient with Gerry’s dourness. He sat in his corner, drinking steadily right along with them but not saying a word.

  “You are a boring drunk, you know that, Gerry Sarracini?” Elaine declared. “I wish I hadn’t asked ya.”

  Gerry looked at her balefully. “I only came to make sure you weren’t gonna fuck with Patti.”

  “You don’t think Patti can take care of herself?” Elaine demanded. “She’s stronger than you realize, asshole.”

  I sat there barely able to focus. Did I really come across as strong?

  “Patti!” Elaine bellowed. “Aren’t you stronger than we realize?”

  When I didn’t answer, she singsonged, “You remind me of myself when I was your age—pure innocent as the driven snow, but with demons underneath. You had to go to Confession all the time . . . Back in Michigan my parents taught me how to drink. I learned from them.”

  “My father is an alcoholic.” I stopped. Why was I saying this? So they might feel closer to me or that I might feel closer to them?

  I sank back in my chair wondering why drunks were such gifted, lovable bright people. Men and women with brains and talent, yet totally focused on destroying themselves . . . I’d watched Daddy progress as an alcoholic for years—the endless cocktail parties he and Mama gave in New York and California. Daddy would get loaded, but he never seemed drunk until very late, and then after Bart’s suicide, he’d had blackouts and couldn’t function.

  In front of me Ben stumbled around, trying without success to relight his cigar as Elaine primped in front of a mirror. I noticed Gerry sat morosely staring into his drink. They were all lost in their own little worlds . . . and I was too. Tonight I crazily, irrationally, wanted to see if I could drink and maybe it would make me feel better, melt my reserve, my numbness—maybe I could also understand why my father drank, why Elaine drank, why anyone drank. “Cuz we’re all scared shitless of life, of going to hell,” Elaine had confided once.

  BY THREE A.M., Elaine was staggering around the room holding forth on her love for Ben. “I was a virgin until I hopped in the sack with Benny,” she announced. When nobody reacted, she cried out, “Ya hear me, babies?”

  I stared at her. “I don’t believe that. How old are you?”

  “I am thirty fucking years old, sis! I was raised by nuns at the Convent of the Sacred Heart and my uncle is Cardinal Stritch, for fuck’s sake! I was taught to believe that sex was bad, sex was dirty, sex was a sin until you got married.”

  After hearing that, I downed another martini and confessed I’d married my first husband because I felt I had to. “I’d gone to bed with him and I knew I’d committed a mortal sin. That’s why we eloped.”

  Elaine screamed with laughter. “And didn’t you regret it? Didn’t you realize you’d made a mistake?”

  I nodded. She poured me yet another martini and I drank it.

  “How you feelin’—feelin’ no pain?”

  “I’m feeling a
little nauseous.”

  “It’ll pass—drink up!”

  So I tried to keep up with her and to keep up with everybody else in the room. Elaine exhorted, “Keep goin’, Patti baby, it’ll put hair on your chest!”

  AROUND FOUR A.M., Ben seemed to turn cold sober. He recited the “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy from Hamlet and then he passed out. Soon Elaine passed out as well and began to snore.

  Gerry remained in his corner drinking steadily. Every so often he’d stare hard at me. I’d stare back. A kind of electricity flowed between us. I was drunk, but I felt aroused; my skin prickled; my heart pounded so loudly it seemed to vibrate in my eardrums.

  By now the room was littered with plates of half-eaten turkey sandwiches; a gin bottle rolled around on the floor. Then I realized I was very nauseous and staggered into the bathroom, where I heaved and retched and then collapsed, hugging the toilet bowl like a life preserver. Moments later Gerry stumbled in and held my head while I vomited some more. Then he washed my face very gently with a wet towel and half carried me back into the living room, where he deposited me on a couch. I watched as he poured himself another drink.

  “I haven’t touched you all these weeks because I knew if we ever got together there would be trouble,” he said.

  “Trouble?” My voice sounded so weak. “What kind of trouble?”

  He sat down and put his arms around me. “I am the worst kind of drunk. Worse than Ben or Elaine. They enjoy drinking. I don’t. But I have to drink,” he told me. He was very drunk, but he was an amazingly controlled drunk, like my father.

  We left Elaine’s suite and walked out into the street. It was snowing heavily. We were both staying at the Touraine, a cheaper hotel not far from the Ritz. We went back to my room and fell asleep. From then on we were inseparable; we even decided to share a dressing room.

  After the show we’d go back to the hotel and crawl into bed. Gerry would play the guitar and then we’d pass a bottle of whiskey back and forth until we got a wonderful buzz and then we’d make love. I’d count the number of times we made love during those nights because each time was different and we experienced deeper pleasure, sometimes so hot it seemed to burn our skins. We were brimming over with desire. Afterward we’d just hold each other; we didn’t talk, two lost animals cuddling in a hotel cave.