The Men in My Life

by Patricia Bosworth

  Once while I was lying naked in Gerry’s arms, my father called me from New York. I usually phoned him when I was out of town, but this time I hadn’t. Daddy wanted to know if everything was all right. I said it was. I had the impulse to cry out, “I’m in love for the first time!” But I swallowed my words.

  In retrospect Gerry filled a more powerful need than Pepi ever did, because Gerry was an alcoholic. I could take care of him as I tried to do with my father. I could take a drink away from Gerry when he got too soused; I could take his cigarette away before it burned his finger. Being drunk and miserable was a familiar condition to me. I knew how to handle such men. But of course at the time I wasn’t aware of any of this.

  WHEN I RETURNED to New York I made the mistake of bringing Gerry home. The meeting was a disaster. He came over to the duplex very hungover. He didn’t say much and he bolted right after the meal, saying he had an important appointment to get to.

  As soon as he was gone Mama lit into me. Daddy did nothing to stop her.

  “Another long-suffering artist!” she cried out, her eyes filling with tears. “You seem to invest every one of your losers with noble qualities. When will you settle down with a decent, responsible man who will take care of you and give you children? Right now you are living to be possessed and consumed.”

  With that I jumped to my feet, trembling with anger and frustration because I didn’t know how to answer her. I put on my coat and left the duplex, with Daddy calling out to me, “Don’t do anything rash!”

  I knew where Gerry would be, at the Bolivar, his fleabag hotel. It catered to drug addicts and prostitutes, and it was on Broadway and Sixty-Fourth Street, where Lincoln Center is now. In those days the area was dense with tenements and delis, some Chinese takeout places, and numerous falling-down bars.

  Gerry was lolling on his bed and playing his guitar. But he wasn’t drunk; he was cold sober.

  “Your mom is a piece of work.” He chuckled.

  “How come you’re not drinking tonight?”

  “Want to be able to see you, feel you, touch you . . . Love you with a clear head.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Yeah, oh my God. I surprise myself sometimes. We better take advantage of this. I don’t know when I’m gonna be like this again.”

  We spent a beautiful night together.

  THE OPENING OF Pat Muldoon was a disaster. I’d been playing assuredly in front of audiences for four weeks, but opening night I froze when it came to singing my song at the end of the first act. I sat next to James Barton on his bed and stared blindly out at the sea of faces. I could not for the life of me remember the opening lyric of “Molly Malone.” Barton waited for a couple of minutes and then sat bolt upright on his pillows and, in true musical comedy fashion, belted out, “In Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty . . .”

  The curtain came down. Jack Garfein and John McLiam rushed backstage to confront me as Barton raged, “If you ever do that again, girlie, I will knock yer block off!”

  Moments later Jack and the playwright descended on me angrily. “You changed the meaning of the first act! Pat is supposed to be dying. Pat isn’t well enough to sing a song.”

  I slunk back to my dressing room, sure that nothing worse could happen now—but I hadn’t bargained on Elaine. She’d always hated the monologue she had at the end of the third act, which was directed at Barton. She’d been threatening to do something about it, and in the last five minutes of the show, she did. Sashaying center stage, she swooped over and held Barton down on the bed, adlibbing a funny, scathing torrent of words designed to total her father and tell him off for all the stupid things he’d done in his life.

  The entire cast gathered in the wings to watch, goggle-eyed, as Barton thrashed on the pillows. Elaine kept at him, flaunting her long, slender legs and tossing her blonde curls; she brayed, she yelled, she even sang a few bars of a song. The controlling daughter let her old bastard daddy have it. It was completely improvised and it brought down the house.

  Afterward we all crowded outside her dressing room to hear her explanation. “What were you trying to do, Elaine?” the playwright wailed. “You have ruined my play!”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” Elaine replied demurely. She was seated in front of her dressing table staring impassively at her reflection in the glass.

  Jack Garfein was irate. “You gotta apologize, Elaine. What you did is not acceptable. You changed the play . . . you . . .”

  Elaine whirled on him, eyes blazing. “I don’t know what you are talking about! Now please get out of my dressing room!”

  The reviews were terrible, except for Elaine’s. She received raves. Pat Muldoon closed four nights later. After the last performance Gerry and I wandered over to the Theatre Bar and sat at “our” table surrounded by shopping bags full of our stuff from the show—makeup, dying flowers, and telegrams.

  Gerry seemed quiet and depressed.

  “What’s the matter?”

  He told me swiftly that we were finished. “I don’t want to fuck up your life.”

  “You’re not fucking up my life! I love you.”

  “I would fuck up your life. I fuck up everybody’s life if they stay with me. Trust me.” He got up. “I mean it. This is good-bye. Don’t follow me, don’t call me. This is it.” With that, he left the bar, calling over his shoulder, “You can keep the guitar.”

  AFTER GERRY LEFT me, I felt bereft; my life seemed so painful that the only thing I could think of to do was to escape back into the Actors Studio and be enveloped by the manic energy of the place. There was always so much going on—such an abundance and variety of talent—it continued to amaze me. Norman Mailer was writing plays there for the newly formed Playwright/Directors Unit, headed by Kazan and Arthur Penn. I immediately got involved with Mike Gazzo’s All That Jazz, improvising scenes with George Peppard. And of course the Studio remained in the news, mainly because Marilyn was still attending classes. Reporters had sneaked in to hear Lee talk. There had been accounts in the press that he was encouraging eccentric, uncontrollable behavior—that actors were working out “personal problems” onstage.

  A portrait of the Studio actor was emerging in the public’s mind as a rebel against refinement, decorum, and gentility. Kazan defended the Method as a revolt against romantic rhetorical theatre, and Harold Clurman had added that this rejection of gentility and decorum was another step on the road to a greater “reality,” truthfulness, directness of expression. That said, to many outsiders Studio actors were crazy mixed-up kids.

  But I didn’t think so. There was the astonishing morning when Lee directed Anne Bancroft and Viveca Lindfors in The Stronger by August Strindberg, a tour de force in which Annie’s character remained mute as Viveca’s unleashed a boiling torrent of words about their rivalry. All the while, Lee softly advised “not to give anything away.” Annie chafed under that restriction, growling as Viveca continued to goad her. Finally Annie could stand it no longer and struck Viveca; the two women struggled, then started punching and slapping each other. It was so violent that Shelley Winters screamed, “Stop it! They are hurting each other!” Lee thundered back, “Let them continue. This is really a fight. Two washerwomen couldn’t do it better.” (In subsequent sessions Viveca and Annie continued to work on the scene, confiding that their fight had pushed them to a new level of acting.)

  I was inspired to try something new in session too. I’d adapted the last chapter of a long-forgotten pulpy novel for myself because the heroine was so vibrant and alluring, and she had an angry monologue directed at her stepfather, who was trying to seduce her.

  None of my friends were available to work with me, so I chose a middle-aged actor I barely knew to be my partner. His name was Ernie. We didn’t have much time; everybody had projects, so the downstairs rehearsal room was almost fully booked. We ended up rehearsing for only two hours.

  Ernie had difficulty memorizing lines, and he was annoyed by the fact that I had mos
t of the dialogue. “I’m basically the straight man,” he complained.

  I suggested we improvise. I’d been doing a lot of improvs with George Peppard in Mike Gazzo’s play earlier that month and I felt a new confidence in myself, but Ernie didn’t. He balked even when I told him there was no right way to do this kind of playacting. “You’re simply in the moment,” I said. “Let’s experiment with the situation. It invariably intensifies the reality onstage.” I didn’t know he would take me so literally.

  As usual, the Studio was packed. The scene began: Ernie as my stepfather attempts to embrace me; I struggle with him, telling him off. But I’d said only a couple of lines when Ernie, in response, began hitting me. He’d never done that in rehearsal. His blows immediately triggered memories of Jason when he’d catch me off-balance with slaps. Then I’d cower to protect myself, to ward off more blows.

  But this morning I found myself fighting back, kicking and crying and pulling Ernie’s hair until he yelped. He hit me again. I grabbed his hand and bit his wrist, and after that I managed to speak a few more lines of the actual monologue.

  Ernie was so surprised by my vehemence that he lost his balance and toppled to the floor. Luckily he was really out of shape, so I took advantage of this, hopping on top of him and straddling him as one would a bicycle. I began pinching his forearms hard. He huffed and puffed. “For Christ’s sake, stop,” he bleated, writhing under me. I kept on squeezing his flesh.

  God, this felt good! I was finally in control. In the past I’d always been pushed to the breaking point before I protected myself. I hadn’t left Jason until he almost strangled me to death.

  For a few minutes Ernie made a tremendous effort to move out from under me, but I wouldn’t let him. We rocked back and forth until Ernie grew so exhausted that he stopped fighting me and his body went limp. I gazed down at his red, perspiring face and a triumphant groan filled my throat. I opened my mouth for the bereaved creature inside me; the groan turned into an exultant scream and I began to cry, tears rolling down my cheeks.

  A patter of applause rippled through the membership (applause was something that wasn’t encouraged at the Studio, but it meant people had liked what they’d seen). There was no point in continuing any further, so I hopped off Ernie’s inert body and struggled to my feet. Ernie followed. We tottered over to Lee to hear what he had to say.

  Lee was smiling at me. “Darling,” he said, “you were alive and in the moment. This was the best acting I’ve ever seen you do.”

  “I wasn’t acting, Lee,” I heard myself saying in a trembling but clear voice. “Ernie was hurting me. What I did had nothing to do with acting.”

  With that Lee held up his hand imperiously. “No, you weren’t ‘acting,’ darling. You were being. Being in character, experiencing genuine emotion before you act. Before you inhabit a part.” He glared at me.

  I glared back, shaking, quivering with so much emotion I felt incapable of continuing our discussion, so I ran out of the theatre. Nobody stopped me. I could hear Lee calmly questioning Ernie as I ran down the stairs and out into the street. My body ached from Ernie’s blows. I got as far as Forty-Fourth Street and Ninth Avenue before I realized somebody was calling, “Hey, Patti, wait up! I wanna talk to you!”

  I stopped, and there was Marty Fried jogging up to me, rumpled, swarthy, handsome, his expression concerned. For years, unless he was working, Marty attended sessions. If anyone knew what Lee was talking about, Marty did.

  Now we were vaulting through traffic to the other side of West Forty-Fourth and into the local greasy spoon where we often gathered, heading to our regular table by the window. Marty ordered coffee and doughnuts for two.

  After we settled ourselves, Marty proclaimed, “You had an emotional breakthrough—you know that, don’t you?”

  Yes, I thought, but I was bothered by the distance between actor and character. The inevitable gap between simply being (as Lee said) and giving a performance. This hadn’t been clarified for me. It was as if to be “yourself” in a real and believable situation was enough.

  “Lee can be confusing,” I told Marty. “I’m not sure I know what he’s saying half the time.”

  “It’s like learning Chinese. You gotta be patient.”

  “I’ve been working professionally for almost two years,” I blurted. “I still don’t know what I’m doing onstage!”

  That thought silenced both of us. For a while we didn’t say anything. I realized I had come close to cracking through my frozen emotions, but it didn’t mean that I knew how to act.

  “Maybe I’ll study with Sandy Meisner for a while,” I confided to Marty.

  Marty shrugged. “Most people end up doing that. But you’ll be back.”

  SANDY MEISNER WAS Lee’s archrival; they’d both been members of the Group Theatre. They disagreed so violently about how to teach Stanislavski’s Method that they no longer spoke. Sandy believed Lee overemphasized personal emotions at the expense of other key elements in acting. Sandy’s approach: The Reality of Doing—creating truthful behavior within the imaginary circumstances of a play.

  I made an appointment to see Sandy almost immediately and found myself in the presence of a tall regal man who chain-smoked Pall Malls. When he discovered I was a member of the Actors Studio, he didn’t want me in his classes. I pleaded that I had to study with him, that I had no training. I was working a lot, but I needed to be taught the basics—“Lee doesn’t teach the basics,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Sandy snapped. “You will learn to act with me. At the Studio you work on yourself.”

  I confided I might have been accepted as a member of the Studio because of my “quality,” not because of my talent.

  “Very possibly,” Sandy nodded. “You are a lovely-looking girl. Hides a multitude of sins.”

  He finally agreed to let me join his professional classes, but he tried to persuade me not to return to the Studio “ever! Lee supports the cult of personality. The place is a hotbed of celebrity fuckers and Lee is the worst. And you know it.”

  I didn’t answer, but I knew I couldn’t promise I’d never go back to the Studio. Many Studio members—Julie Harris, Eli Wallach, Lee Grant, Sydney Pollack—had trained with Sandy at the Neighborhood Playhouse before they studied with Lee.

  I studied with Sandy very diligently and I learned a lot. His teaching was simple, direct, and not pretentious. He stressed good diction and bodily grace; he made me aware of character motivation and breaking down a script.

  I WAS ABLE to test what I was learning with Sandy quite soon. I got a great job on a TV soap opera, a running part on a CBS show called The Secret Storm. For a couple of months I played the ubiquitous girl next door. Except she was a rather neurotic girl next door, so I could occasionally chew up the scenery.

  The Secret Storm was directed by the chain-smoking Gloria Monty, who went on to be part of that show for forty years. I’d never been directed by a woman before, and Gloria brought all sorts of feminine insights into my character, including, “She’s very tightly wound; she has one goal in life—to lose her virginity.” I tried to “play” that whenever I could, and it worked.

  It was the so-called golden age of live television, and you never knew what would happen next. Christopher Plummer (who also worked in soaps) said it was like doing summer stock with cameras. I remember one sequence when the character I was playing became suicidal and jumped out a window screaming bloody murder (the camera didn’t catch me landing on six thick mattresses). I was paid $500 extra for that jump. I received hundreds of letters from worried fans concerned I’d hurt myself. Meanwhile my character recovered and went on to suffer more emotional turmoil.

  It was a fourteen-hour day, up at dawn to rehearse and block the show, have a dress rehearsal, then do it live at three p.m. I had to memorize up to forty pages of dialogue a night; sometimes my memory would fail me (as it did most of the actors in the cast), so we invented frantically, often improvising entire scenes. During one show I was moving
into camera range carrying a breakfast tray to bring to my ailing mother when I tripped and the tray crashed to the floor. Zero in on close-up of my face ad-libbing, “I’ll be back in a flash with some coffee.” Blackout while Gloria bellowed from the control room, “After the commercial, tell her you’re sorry and you will clean the mess later.”

  I learned a lot doing The Secret Storm. I couldn’t take hours preparing as I did at the Studio. I learned to think on my feet and forgot about being nervous. The accident-prone quality of live TV made me feel as if I was living on the edge as an actress.

  “Nothing better than a job, even if the part doesn’t always make sense, huh, baby?” Elaine Stritch commented. She was working nonstop too. We had continued to see each other. We’d go to a late Sunday Mass, have breakfast at Schrafft’s, and then hike through Central Park. Elaine loved to walk, usually in slacks and a windbreaker with a cap perched on her blond curls, no makeup, and huge dark glasses. She kept up a stream of conversation about the heady highs and lows of show business. Elaine was timeless, fearless, on a roll, climbing steadily up the ladder of stardom and celebrity, rarely referring to the darker aspects of her life battling alcoholism.

  She was having an affair with Gig Young; Noël Coward was writing a show for her. I talked to her about Gerry: “I need to see him—I miss him terribly.” “So call him, baby.”

  Elaine and I remained friends until she died in 2014 at the age of eighty-nine.

  THEN IN THE winter of 1957, Christmas Eve to be exact, Gerry phoned me. I hadn’t heard from him in months. He’d just opened on Broadway in Romanoff and Juliet. I started to congratulate him on great reviews, but he interrupted to ask if we could meet for a drink that night after the show at his favorite bar on West Sixty-Fourth Street. Of course I said yes, even though I’d never liked the place; it was gloomy and chaotic and seemed to be peopled with only drug addicts, prostitutes, and drunks. But Gerry felt comfortable there and knew many of the regulars. He’d often spend hours listening to their tales of woe.