The Men in My Life

by Patricia Bosworth

  “I was born in San Francisco.”

  “I love San Francisco! My mother loves San Francisco.”

  I noticed she wore no makeup and she looked tired, but she was animated. She’d been working nonstop since January and had even fallen deathly ill not long before I had my two scenes with her. She’d suffered from a painful bout with kidney stones, but she hadn’t wanted to be operated on. Instead she opted for rest and relaxation, “and now I’m fine,” she insisted. She was bone thin, but she maintained she had “a healthy appetite. Yes, I am skinny, but it’s metabolism.”

  She confided, “Hubert is in the next room preparing the models. He’s one of my best friends in the entire world.” They’d met in 1952 when she was about to start filming Sabrina and decided she wanted Givenchy to do the costumes. “I had the chance to wear high fashion for the first time. It was a dream come true.”

  “Clothes are positively a passion with me,” she had said to a journalist at the time. “I love them to the point where it is practically a vice.”

  Givenchy was twenty-six when they’d met; he’d only recently left Schiaparelli to open his own atelier. He heard a Miss Hepburn was coming to see him. He expected Katharine Hepburn, and then this very thin girl with beautiful eyes and very short hair and thick eyebrows, tiny trousers and ballet slippers and a T-shirt waltzed in. She was anxious about her acting because she’d had no training, no experience, when she was pushed into the spotlight. After she won the Oscar, she made a decision—she would concentrate on her image and make it as perfect as possible. It would become her shield. “I always knew what looked good on me. Simple dresses, beautifully cut. Flats. Then I found Hubert. We started talking and we have never stopped. He is like family. He is my dear friend.”

  In public she had often referred to him as a “personality maker.” “I’ve never stopped worrying about my acting ability.” She had even gone so far as to say that Givenchy’s clothes made up for what she lacked in dramatic technique. “It is a help to know I can always look the part. Then the rest isn’t so difficult. I don’t need a psychiatrist; I have Hubert.” She laughed.

  At that point I interrupted to tell her that my favorite dress of all time was the ball gown she’d worn in Sabrina. “Yes, it was heaven,” she agreed. “Angelic bouffant layered gown . . .” She appeared magical in it, the chauffeur’s tomboy daughter turned into a swan. (A strapless organdy sheath with a buoyant overskirt, it so captured Audrey’s essence—the slim boyish figure with the airborne femininity. When Audrey walked in it, it was as if she were walking on air.)

  Then Givenchy entered the room, a very tall man in a white suit. “Tu est prête?” he asked in French. (“Are you ready?”)

  “Oh, absolutely, darling.”

  He clapped his hands. Models glided in wearing various dreamy outfits. There were tailored suits and flowing gossamer gowns; there were blouses (I learned that the blouses were $3,000 each); there were ravishing black cocktail dresses; there were boxy coats and turbans. Everything was delectable.

  When it was over, Audrey turned to me. “Would you like to order anything, Patti?” she asked.

  I demurred, “But thanks anyway.”

  Then tea was served and Givenchy began to reminisce about Audrey’s talent for fashion. “She always puts the finishing touch on my work.” He gave as an example the black cocktail dress and hat that she wore in Sabrina. She chose the hat—it suited her face. It was like a bathing cap and it covered her eyes, showed off her good profile . . . “She knows her good profile from her bad. She is very professional—so disciplined, so organized.”

  Soon Givenchy departed for Paris. I lingered in Audrey’s suite. I didn’t want to leave. I was in another world.

  Audrey lit a cigarette. “Did you enjoy the experience of working in The Nun’s Story?” she asked in that lilting distinctive voice.

  “Oh yes,” I breathed. “I’ll never forget it.”

  Audrey smiled. “Neither will I.” And then she added, “I love fashion, you know. Really love it. But fashion has nothing to do with me. The me in here”—and she touched her heart—“the private me, the interior me—inside I’m not fashionable at all.”

  AUDREY AND I kept in touch until she died in 1993. We wrote notes to each other, and whenever I went to Rome, we’d have coffee or a meal.

  Bit by bit she shared some confidences. She made more movies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s and My Fair Lady; she divorced Ferrer (by whom she had a son) and married Andrea Dotti, a Roman psychiatrist, with whom she had another son. She had always wanted children. “They are my biggest blessing,” she said. She confided she’d never been happy as an actress. She suffered constantly from melancholy and depression; she still had nightmares remembering her experiences in the war—seeing some of her family put up against a wall and shot. She hid people in her house during the Resistance, Jews who were trying to escape the Nazis.

  Audrey spent the last years of her life working tirelessly for UNICEF with refugees, mostly in Africa, seeing that children and their parents were fed and clothed, generating hope and goodwill. The last time I saw her was at the gala tribute Lincoln Center gave her in 1991. She was wearing a white satin Givenchy gown and she looked painfully thin. She invited me to the greenroom before the tribute began. When I entered, I saw her flanked by her partner Robert Wolders and by her good friend Ralph Lauren. The minute she saw me she stretched out her arms and cried, “My little nun!”

  I ran to her and we hugged. She then explained who I was and said we were friends.

  The tribute concluded with many vivid excerpts from her films. There were several beautiful sequences from The Nun’s Story. Audrey is truly luminous as Sister Luke. In the movie she achieves everything through her remarkable face—the spiritual struggle, the emotional anguish. It is all internal, all deeply felt. It is her finest performance.

  BUT BACK IN June 1959, Warner Brothers didn’t have high hopes for The Nun’s Story. They were surprised when it broke all records on opening day at Radio City Music Hall. My father and I attended that first performance sitting in the balcony; he gripped my hand when I appeared on the screen and did my scenes with Audrey. There I was in a tremulous close-up. We were stunned when a line I uttered, “So I can talk without saying a culpa or doing a penance,” got a laugh. The packed house, roughly six thousand strong, howled, and Daddy whispered, “You have the audience in the palm of your hand.” A bit of an exaggeration, but he was my doting father.

  The movie went on to be nominated for many Oscars, including another nomination for Audrey.

  The film remains popular today around the world, shown constantly on Turner Classic Movies and at film festivals. I always get a kick out of it when a friend will call me late at night and say, “I think I’m watching you playing a nun on the tube. Am I crazy?”

  MY PLANE TOOK off from Rome in the early afternoon. It was clear, balmy weather. As we rose into the heavens, I peered out the window to gaze at the terrain far below. There were the Vatican and the dome at St. Peter’s, then the rolling Tuscan hills and vineyards, the manicured tapestries of green. I was reminded of California; as my parents drove my brother and me over the Santa Cruz Mountains, we would see vineyards and rows of cypresses and, in the far distance, the blue of the Pacific Ocean.

  Midflight I realized I’d started to menstruate. I had to ask the stewardess for a Kotex. I put it on in the ladies’ room. It had been six weeks to the day.

  I DID NOT admit to having an abortion until 1972, when I signed a petition in Ms. magazine entitled “We Have Had Abortions” along with fifty-two other women active in politics and the arts, including Susan Sontag, Gloria Steinem, Grace Paley, and Billie Jean King. I wanted to join them in a campaign for honesty and freedom.

  It was the height of the women’s movement. Consciousness-raising groups abounded. Wives, mothers, college girls were all baring their souls.

  I remember at one consciousness-raising session several of us were asked, if we had to do it all o
ver again, given the change in the laws, would we still have had abortions?

  I was not so sure.

  Part Four

  Changing

  Chapter Twenty-One

  What next? IT’S my brother’s voice asking me a question.

  “I can’t answer yet,” I say.

  Try!

  I’d been back in New York a couple of weeks and I’d had surprisingly few calls for jobs. I was getting anxious; I’d assumed that my career would take an upward swing now that I’d been featured in a multimillion-dollar film. Then I saw my agent at MCA and he punctured any fantasies I might have had.

  “Look,” he said, “once you play a nun in a movie, Hollywood typecasts you as a nun.”

  I asked about Splendor in the Grass, because Kazan was directing. It was a William Inge screenplay, an intense adolescent love story. I’d heard several Studio actresses were up for parts. I assumed I could be too.

  “Nope.” My agent shook his head. “Casting’s done. Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty have already been signed as the leads.”

  I left his office so frustrated that I phoned Ruth Gordon, Gar Kanin’s tiny, indomitable wife. We’d become acquainted when I was with Pepi and she was triumphing on Broadway in The Matchmaker. Ruth was a woman rare among theatre performers in those days—an actress/writer. She and Gar had collaborated on several screenplays, including one for the extraordinary pre-feminist film Adam’s Rib. Ruth told me that whenever she couldn’t get work as an actress, she’d write something “either for myself or Kate Hepburn.”

  When we got together at her Carnegie Hall office, Ruth chewed me out for whining. She said I had to “hang on.” I argued that I was so despairing, I wanted to give up acting entirely and concentrate on writing.

  “Don’t stop acting until you know whether you can write, or whether you have anything worth writing, for that matter.” She paused. “I’ve seen my life as one long improvisation. I’ve never focused my energies on just one ambition. I’ve failed a lot. But in the meantime, keep on moving and stop kvetching!”

  It was good advice. I continued auditioning—and I kept on trying to write. Then at the end of the day I often biked in Central Park.

  I HADN’T EXPECTED to run into Mel Arrighi, but there he was one afternoon, walking around the reservoir mouthing lines. I almost biked past him, but he called after me and then I braked. He held my bike handles while we spoke, towering over me at six-foot-four. His words came at me in a stuttering stammer because he was so excited. A play of his had been optioned for Broadway, affirming his dream of himself as an artist.

  He added that he was on a break from a rehearsal for a bus-and-truck tour of Julius Caesar that Joe Papp was bringing to the five boroughs. Would I be his guest at a dress rehearsal the following night? I said I would.

  We began to see each other pretty regularly. We discovered that we lived only a few blocks from each other in Yorkville. Mel had a cold-water flat—two narrow rooms (bathtub in the kitchen, toilet in the hall) on East Seventy-First Street. “Not bad for $33.50 a month.” He grinned.

  The first time I visited him there, he insisted I read his play “before we do anything else,” and he sat opposite me smoking until I finished. It was the story of his Italian immigrant family in San Francisco and of a brother lost to him. I was moved because my brother was also lost and I reminded Mel of that. Only then did he take me into his arms, his big strong body pulsing with energy as he covered me with passionate kisses. I felt very protected.

  The following morning Mel brought me coffee in bed and he began to talk. Words poured out of him, anecdotes about his life on the road and reminiscences of growing up near Golden Gate Park with a mother who refused to speak English and left the house only to go to the opera. His older brother (now infirm) taught him to read and write, took him to the movies and concerts, told him the most important thing is to get an education. Mel had master’s degrees in philosophy and history; there were stacks of books everywhere in his apartment. I would soon be awed by his erudition.

  After listening to him, I admitted that I felt wildly ignorant. He replied, “A fool can be educated. It’s more important to learn how to think.”

  MEL DIDN’T TEACH me how to think—he caused me to think. With him, I seemed to have found an articulate tongue. Everything unsaid throughout a lifetime of holding back—there were layers and layers of unpeeling for both of us. From then on, no night was ever long enough. We were both crazy to know and to do and to see. We had found in each other the perfect audience.

  During the first months of our affair, we talked constantly about ourselves and asked each other a lot of questions. Ordinarily Mel treated me in a courtly fashion; he was polite, devoted, thoughtful. He seemed to respect my privacy. Except when it came to sex—he insisted on knowing about all the men in my life.

  So I described, but not in too much detail, my strange marriage to Jason. But I refused to tell him anything else. It was none of his business. And a voice inside me was murmuring, I might be penalized. I might lose his respect if he knew how many men I’ve gone to bed with. He might stop loving me. So I hedged.

  “Anybody better in the sack than me?” he’d ask after a passionate night of lovemaking. I’d tell him no.

  “Sweetheart, ever go to bed with a black guy?”

  “Ever go to bed with a black girl?” I countered.

  Mel nodded. Then he launched into a long story (which he later incorporated into a novel) about this particular girl. She was lovely, a schoolteacher in Harlem. “We had a long relationship. But I broke up with her when she got pregnant.”

  “You broke it up?”

  He nodded. “I didn’t want her to have my baby. I tried to get her to have an abortion. We had a great many arguments; then she disappeared. After she left, I had a change of heart. I thought, My God, I’m so stupid. I’m being racist. I wanted her to have the baby—black, white, yellow, what did it matter? I wanted a child. But by that time she’d quit her job. I couldn’t find her. I think she may have gone back to L.A. where some of her family is.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “I wonder if there is a little half-black, half-white Arrighi baby toddling around somewhere.” He tried to smile. “I do want kids.” He said it so intensely and then he stared at me hard. “Have you ever been pregnant?”

  “No,” I lied.

  BUT MEL’S QUESTIONING continued off and on for weeks, in between his obsessive hours of work. One night after he’d finished part of a novel, we met for supper and he demanded once again that I tell him about all the men in my life.

  “Did you ever make a list?” he wondered.

  “No,” I lied (although I had). “Please stop,” I pleaded.

  “Look,” he said, “I have nothing to hide. I had one girlfriend through college and we made love every night. Period. And then the girl in Harlem.”

  “It goes beyond hiding,” I told him angrily. “It’s a choice on my part. It’s a choice whether or not I tell you my ‘secrets.’” I was sure there were things that he didn’t want to share. I was positive he had something he was trying to conceal. Wasn’t that true? Mel avoided the question.

  WE WERE BOTH busy; we didn’t see each other that much, but we hated to be separated. When we weren’t together, we’d call each other on the phone constantly. The intensity and possessiveness between the two of us was almost suffocating.

  We were in love and quite dumbfounded by the experience. Nobody had been in love the way we were. We’d observe friends who said they were in love and we’d whisper to each other, “They don’t know what love is.” Love for us was warm, golden bliss under wrinkled patterned sheets . . . hours talking nonstop, holding hands on the street. We literally didn’t want to let each other go.

  When I was with Mel, I felt I was in another world where values, ideas, and even language moved away from what I’d known. He was so honest and forthright, so up-front in ways that were foreign to me. I was used to playing games with Daddy, with othe
r men like Pepi—double-talk or no talk at all. Growing up with my parents had been disorienting, and now a virtual stranger had moved into my world and I felt more comfortable with him than I did with my own family (except for my dead brother).

  We took care of each other. If Mel had a cold, I’d bring him hot tea and honey. If I lost out on an audition, Mel would be there for me with a fistful of daisies and words of encouragement. We shopped at the A&P together. We did our laundry at the Laundromat side by side. I felt comforted by the whishing sound of the water, the steamy soapy smell of the place, and Mel near me, our thighs touching.

  I depended on him. I remember one dark night I was alone in my apartment and around two I was sure I saw an intruder lurking on my fire escape. I phoned Mel hysterically. He assured me he’d be right over and he came bounding up the four flights of stairs and burst into my studio with a hammer in his hand.

  He was panting and heaving and coughing (he smoked four packs of Pall Malls a day and would eventually develop emphysema), but that night he lunged at the window, opening it wide. “Nobody there, hon . . . All clear.” Then he dropped the hammer and enveloped me in his arms.

  IN JULY I brought Mel over to dinner with my parents. It was the first time he’d seen them since their San Francisco exiles party. Mel had been eager to be reintroduced to my father; he admired his politics and he’d read about his defense of the Hollywood Ten and his writings on Israel. I hadn’t mentioned Daddy’s dark side, the alcoholism and the pill-taking. But then Daddy was in surprisingly good shape that night. Mama whispered, “He’s sober.”

  Apparently he’d been sober for over a month ever since he’d started working for Robert Kennedy. Kennedy was chair of the Senate Rackets Committee, and his brother Jack was right alongside him. The brothers, along with forty other lawyers (my father among them), were investigating the corruption within the Teamsters union.