“Jack and Bobby will stop at nothing until they destroy Jimmy Hoffa,” Daddy told us that evening. “I’ve never met such driven, ambitous men.” He and Mel sat in a corner smoking and discussing what a volatile age we were living in. The Eisenhower era was winding down and these men, these Kennedys, my father declared, were rising up as powers in the Democratic Party. They represented something unpredictable.
In the next year, Daddy would be helping the Committee challenge the validity of Hoffa’s 1958 election as Teamster president, since the unions were riddled with corruption. After thousands of anti-Hoffa ballots were discovered, dumped into a laundry chute, nineteen dissident Teamsters got an injunction against Hoffa to keep him from taking office. Then their lawyer Godfrey Schmidt and Hoffa’s lawyer Edward Bennett Williams met in secret. As part of an attempt to remove all gangsters and mobsters from the union, Schmidt was appointed as one of three monitors to keep Hoffa honest. Hoffa knew Schmidt was out to destroy him, so he kept him from being paid. That’s where my father came in—he was Schmidt’s lawyer. He’d been hired specifically to collect Schmidt’s fees, which by spring of 1959 amounted to more than $100,000. My father’s fee was contingent on whether he collected.
What followed was a bizarre series of clandestine meetings with my father, the Kennedys, and the FBI. Teamster goons would appear at the duplex. Once Mel and I were in Garrison visiting my parents. Eddie Cheyfitz, Hoffa’s loyal PR man, appeared in the garden and ordered my father to “stop nosing around.” Another time the phone rang and a guttural raspy voice demanded, “Is Bart Crum there? Jimmy Hoffa wants to speak to him.”
Daddy told Mel and me that he enjoyed being back in the corridors of power, on a first-name basis with the Kennedy brothers. Whenever he was in Washington, Bobby would grab my father for a quick lunch in the Senate cafeteria, and often Jack would join them. Daddy would report off-the-record stuff he’d been collecting from the pro-Hoffa Teamsters. He was discovering the same pattern in all his secret talks, that Jimmy Hoffa had total disregard for the welfare of the rank-and-file Teamsters.
FOR A WHILE I lost track of what was happening with my father because I was working so much. I appeared in an Off-Broadway revival of The Moon Is Blue; I went on tour with Inherit the Wind, starring Luther Adler. I played the part I’d understudied on Broadway.
Then I flew to Chicago, where I was featured opposite the pop singer Tommy Sands in the mystery Remains to Be Seen. It was a memorable experience for me. Something was happening now when I tackled a part—I enjoyed the process of discovery. Sandy’s classes were paying off and so were the years I’d spent soaking up Lee’s ramblings. I was starting to know what I was doing. During the run of Remains to Be Seen I reveled in being able to create genuine behavior for a character—in this case Tommy’s mistress, who was a call girl. A character who was nothing like me. I talked out of the side of my mouth, I paraded around the stage in an iridescent bathrobe, and I had a great time.
The same was true in the show I did right after that, a comedy that toured all over the eastern seaboard in which I played Henry Morgan’s long-suffering secretary. Henry was a celebrity panelist on the popular TV game show I’ve Got a Secret, so he had a devoted following. In person, Henry was a nasty, horny man and I couldn’t stand him, but we loved to improvise.
I remember one night we threw pillows as we ad-libbed and taunted each other. I could feel the audience bouncing back and forth between us, an “I’m on his side,” “No, I’m on her side” kind of thing. I’d never connected so viscerally to an audience before. It was exhilarating.
I had started to find things inside myself that connected to the roles I was trying to inhabit. I would look for a particular energy and let it grow inside me. I finally started to enjoy acting. I was still not sure I wanted to continue in theatre forever, because my desire to write was so strong, but this was a turning point for me. I was no longer dissatisfied; I felt I was making some kind of progress in my career.
BUT WHEN I returned from the road, my mother phoned me about Daddy. He’d fallen off the wagon. In July 1959 Robert Kennedy had asked my father to testify in front of the committee and describe what was going on behind the scenes vis-à-vis the monitors. Daddy agreed immediately.
But he was in no shape to testify, Mama said; the drinking and the pills made him jittery and forgetful. His law partners cautioned him not to testify as well: “It won’t help your career.” However, my father didn’t listen to anybody and went down to Washington by himself on the train.
Mel and I watched the proceedings on TV. When Daddy appeared on the screen, he was pale and bespectacled as he recounted in detail the pressure he’d been getting for the past year from pro-Hoffa Teamsters. He ended his testimony by charging that just the day before he’d had lunch at Duke Zeibert’s in Washington with Edward Bennett Williams, Hoffa’s lawyer, who had said he’d pay part of Schmidt’s fee of $5,000 immediately if my father agreed not to testify in front of the committee.
At that point Williams jumped to his feet and denied it was true, saying that he had a witness to prove it.
Daddy’s testimony was a front-page story across the country.
The following day Hoffa got on the stand to deny being party to a bribe.
THERE WERE HUMILIATING repercussions. My father’s law partners told him that if he didn’t recant, he would be asked to leave the firm immediately.
“Perjure myself?” my father cried out in anguish.
The following week he returned to Washington. He agreed to accept Williams’s statement that he did not intend to offer a bribe.
When he returned to New York he had dinner with Mel and me at 21. “I told the truth,” he insisted. “I did tell the truth.”
I discovered years later that Daddy had been telling the truth. I would learn that Edward Bennett Williams did indeed offer my father a bribe, but he’d done so at lunch in New York at the St. Regis on a Tuesday rather than at Duke Ziebert’s in Washington on a Thursday. Tragically my father’s consumption of pills and liquor had made him suffer memory loss. He often made mistakes about dates and places.
I discovered the truth myself on an old calendar decades after the event, when I read Williams’s FBI files as I was writing my first memoir about my father. The file confirms that Williams “offered a lawyer a bribe in July 1959—the lawyer was to be bought off,” the informer states. But Williams was too shrewd and smart to be caught in a lie.
I NEEDED A break from what was happening with my father, so I escaped into theatre. In the fall of 1959, the Great White Way was electric with activity. Sometimes on a matinee day Mel and I would buy standing-room-only tickets for $2.50 and see a play like Chéri with the tremulous Kim Stanley or Gypsy for the third time or A Raisin in the Sun with Sidney Poitier, which had won every award. The play was by twenty-eight-year-old Lorraine Hansberry, and it told the highly charged story of how a black family survives in white supremacist America.
Then one morning I brought Mel to the Actors Studio. I’d returned there because I was still absorbing, still listening and learning from Lee and other artists. The Playwrights Unit had agreed to give Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story a first reading directed by John Stix. He’d been my original contact at the Studio and he’d phoned, urging me to see it. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever read—it’s poetic, it’s shocking.”
Mel and I joined the crowd of the curious, including Molly Kazan (who ran the Unit), Norman Mailer, Israel Horovitz, and María Irene Fornés. Romulus Linney, then an aspiring playwright, was stage-managing.
The setting was a bench in Central Park. With scripts in hand, the two actors began reading: Lou Antonio as Jerry, a scruffy outcast who’s fearing and longing for human contact, and Shepperd Strudwick as Peter, a complacent, uptight middle-class fellow. What followed was a searing, blistering confrontation between two opposites; the dominant emotional note was anger, but there was pitch-black humor in it too. The playwright’s distinctive voice was eloquent in documenting the b
ase animal in our natures.
The play ended in bloody violence and left the Studio audience visibly rattled. Everybody began quarreling, saying things like “It doesn’t go anywhere,” until Norman Mailer jumped to his feet. “I’m surprised nobody’s said what a marvelous play this is. This is the best fucking one-act play I’ve ever seen.”
Mel and I were shaken by Albee’s words, and from then on we saw everything he wrote. To us The Zoo Story seemed to suggest that there could be a kind of poetry in a character’s conflicted impulses, and that a diffident soul like Peter could be brutally surprised by what lurks inside himself. We heard later on that Albee had based both characters on himself, “the two Edwards—the one who lived in Larchmont when he was a lonely rich kid and the ambitious, dissolute drinker who lived in New York City.” Everything, he insisted, was an amalgamation of what he observed and experienced and then subsequently invented. “The thing that happened in The Zoo Story was I suddenly discovered myself writing in my own voice. It’s that simple.”
Discovering your own voice in your writing isn’t easy. It took a long time for me to find my voice.
After The Zoo Story opened at the Provincetown Playhouse Off-Broadway on a double bill with Samuel Beckett, it became an international hit and Albee became the most important new voice in theatre since Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Off-Broadway became a cultural force and Mel and I got caught up in seeing everything, like Jack Gelber’s The Connection (about a drug addict in need of a fix) and all the Phoenix Theatre productions too. We’d haunt La MaMa and Caffe Cino, and we weren’t alone. Young playwrights and actors and directors all over the Village and Lower East Side were seeing everything, talking, arguing, and experimenting.
Mel would get a play of his, An Ordinary Man, produced at the Cherry Lane Theatre (about the rise of black power and its inevitable backlash). It proved controversial enough to have FBI agents visit backstage to investigate. But the Broadway option on his most personal play about his Italian immigrant family back in San Francisco had been dropped. We soldiered on; I organized readings of Mel’s other plays at the Actors Studio, and we started writing a musical together.
THEN I GOT cast in another Broadway show called Howie. It was a slight comedy by Phoebe Ephron, a slender, quick-witted woman who’d written some very successful screenplays with her husband Henry, among them Desk Set starring Katharine Hepburn. The biggest plus as far as I was concerned was casting fellow Studio member Albert Salmi as Howie; he would play the title character with such sweet lumbering modesty that audiences sympathized with his problem. Howie has a genius IQ but can’t get a job, so he stays at home and drives his family crazy. I played his exasperated teenage sister-in-law, Sally Sims; I spent much of the show either on the telephone or trying to get him out of the house so that everybody could have some peace.
We had a terrific supporting cast: Leon Ames, Peggy Conklin, and the hilarious Gene Saks. The first read-through was fine, but then in rehearsals the atmosphere turned tense because Henry Ephron would barge in and start interrupting. He’d criticize Phoebe’s rewrites. Once or twice he leaned close to me and I smelled liquor on his breath. We knew the Ephrons usually partnered on scripts, but this one Phoebe had chosen to do alone. Henry had no business interfering, but our director John Gerstad, an urbane, mild-mannered fellow, didn’t know how to deal with the situation. So tempers kept flaring.
In New Haven the reviews were so lukewarm that Phoebe began more rewrites. We were told we’d be trying out some new scenes once we reached Boston. I’ll never forget what happened next. The entire cast had gathered on the stage of the Colonial Theatre when we saw Phoebe running down the aisle with Henry following her. They were both shouting at the top of their lungs, something about a couple of lines of dialogue. When they reached the footlights, Henry socked Phoebe so hard he broke her jaw and knocked her out cold.
Confusion reigned; Phoebe was rushed to the hospital. Somehow amid all the chaos we managed to rehearse. Phoebe had her jaw wired and she gave us more rewrites. She and Henry calmed down. They behaved as if nothing had ever happened. Howie opened on Broadway to tepid reviews on September 6, 1959.
It was nice to meet Phoebe’s daughter Nora backstage. She came into my dressing room to say congratulations, a small, dainty young woman with high cheekbones and a toothy smile. I immediately wanted to ask her how she coped with her alcoholic parents. Was she an enabler? I’d never known someone close to my age who was going through what I was going through. But of course I said nothing. Instead we made small talk.
“Did my mother tell you Sally was inspired by me?” Nora asked.
“No, she didn’t,” I told her. I knew Phoebe had four daughters; she’d bragged about them and said they would all be writers. “Do you see any resemblance?” I asked.
Nora shook her head. “Maybe a line or two, and I do talk on the phone a lot.” She paused. “Why are you wearing such big falsies in your striped top outfit?”
“Your mother specifically bought me falsies to wear. I didn’t want to, but she insisted.”
Nora smiled thinly. “How weird is this, considering that my mother hates bras. She never wore a bra until after she gave birth to her fourth child.” (Two decades later Nora would write one of her most notorious essays about being flat-chested.)
I changed the subject to colleges. Nora was about to attend Wellesley. I spoke about graduating from Sarah Lawrence.
“I want to be a newspaper reporter,” Nora said. I told her I hoped to be a writer too.
We went on to the opening night party at Sardi’s. My parents had a ringside table. I brought Nora over to meet them. Daddy tried to stand up, but he couldn’t; he was too loaded. Nora pretended not to notice. She moved on and joined the Ephron party. Howie closed after four performances.
As my father’s alcoholism worsened, I longed to confide in Nora, but I never did. Nora was private; she was stoic. She’d stopped talking to a mutual friend when he mourned too much over his dead wife. Nora’s motto was always “Get on with it!”
I did see her more frequently after we both became journalists. We were together at demonstrations during the women’s movement; we’d picnic in East Hampton. We’d have long evenings at Elaine’s. At that point Nora always spoke of her mother in glowing terms—how she’d raised four daughters, was a wonderful cook, had a terrific career. She did it all, she’d brag. Later she would write the following: “Alcoholic parents are so confusing. They’re your parents, so you love them; but they’re drunks, so you hate them . . . They have moments when they’re still the people you grew up idolizing; they have moments when you can’t imagine they were ever anything but monsters. And then, after a while, they’re monsters full-time. The people they used to be have an enormous power over you . . . but the people they’ve turned into have no power over you at all.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
BY NOW MY father had completely fallen apart after the debacle at the Senate Rackets Committee. Alcohol had poisoned his system. I felt sad about him all the time. At night I’d lie in bed with Mel describing what he’d been like when I was a little girl and he’d been my hero, so smart and brave and funny. Now it was very difficult to be with him, but in those final months Mama and I kept cleaning up his messes, stashing his liquor away, hiding his pills. Every so often he would cry out, “My son, my son . . . I think about you every day.”
At a party to celebrate his birthday on December 9, 1959, he seemed briefly his old self. With ravaged intensity he conjured up his glory days as a young radical lawyer yakking with President Roosevelt on the phone, sharing a Chinese dinner with Harry Truman. His friends laughed and applauded before they left the duplex; they did not see him stagger off to bed.
The following morning, Mama found him slumped over his pillows, dead from an overdose of Seconal.
I rushed to the duplex in time to see my father carried out in a body bag. Mama was sitting in the living room, looking shell-shocked.
“Did he leave a
note?”
She shook her head.
“Are you sure?”
No answer.
I raced upstairs and into his room. The bed was unmade; there were pillows on the floor, his glasses by the lamp, which was still burning. I went over to his desk and took his crucifix—the one his grandmother had had blessed by the Pope—and the yellow lined pad he made notes on, put them both into my tote, and ran downstairs.
SIX YEARS EARLIER, almost to the day, my brother had shot himself in the head. Now my father was gone, and nothing would be the same. His death unleashed a terrible blackness in my soul and spirit. The grief hit me, and along with it, memories so painful I couldn’t bear to relive them. At the opening of Howie, he’d appeared so sick and drugged that one of my friends had commented, “Your father shouldn’t be seen in public.”
I had so many unanswered questions. Was his suicide a rational choice deliberately made? Did he mean to do it, like my brother? At his birthday dinner he’d seemed almost jubilant. By then, I surmised, he’d decided to do away with himself and he felt good about it.
Within hours I discovered that he’d left no will and Mama had only $11,000 in the bank. Also, most of his papers had disappeared. How could a lawyer who’d defended the Hollywood Ten and worked for Truman, Roosevelt, and Willkie leave only a small paper trail?
“I’m counting on you to take care of Mama when I’m no longer around.” He’d been saying that to me since I was a teenager. So I sprang into action like a mechanical doll, even though I felt hollowed out from so much loss.
But underneath I was seething too. A huge anger rose up in me, but I couldn’t access my fury—my rage at all that was happening to me—so much responsibility along with the pain.
I managed to borrow $10,000 from a wealthy friend to keep Mama afloat. Then I organized the funeral in record time, inviting the guests, choosing the casket, even wiping the excess rouge from my father’s waxen face just before the viewing at Campbell’s.
The Men in My Life Page 28
