Well-wishers kept knocking on the door. Ward Costello, another understudy who had the dressing room next to mine, called out, “Break a leg!” and Jack Devereaux rushed in to ask if there was anything I wanted to go over.
“I’d like to go over any number of things,” I answered, “but there is no time.”
Then Barry Nelson, the wonderful actor who played Mary’s husband, poked his head in and said reassuringly, “You’ll be okay, kid.” And just then I heard, “For this performance the part of Mary will be played by Patricia Bosworth,” followed by groans from the audience, since Barbara Bel Geddes was the star draw. I found myself quaking in the wings, waving my hands up and down, up and down, as I’d seen Barbara do, and then I marched across the stage and made my entrance to deathly silence.
I seemed to slip into a zone of semi-reality. The lights were blinding hot. I saw a blur of faces out front and then I said my first line and got a laugh. I continued to get laughs where I was supposed to. The role of Mary is a smart, wacky one; she has hilarious comebacks for every occasion. As time went by, I loosened up and even started to enjoy myself a bit.
The theatre turned dead quiet during Mary’s poignant monologues. I did make mistakes, a lot of wrong moves onstage, and Barry had to say a couple of lines for me when I went up in my cues, but overall, when the curtain came down, the applause seemed enthusiastic.
Afterward I sat in Barbara’s big dressing room drained and exhausted, sweat streaming down my face. I felt like a real professional. I’d been tested on everything I’d ever learned.
Mel ran in with a bunch of flowers and we hugged. “You were wonderful, sweetheart, just wonderful!” And then the playwright Jean Kerr appeared. I recognized her; a big Valkyrie of a woman, she’d just been on the cover of Time. She was currently one of the most famous humorists in America and the author of Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. She said she’d decided to catch the show because she’d never seen anyone but Barbara play Mary.
I knew she was Catholic, so I joked, “I hope you prayed for me.”
“Pray for you?” She laughed. “I went to St. Malachy’s and lit a dozen candles.” Then she patted my shoulder. “You were fine, Patti, just fine.” And she was gone.
I had lived through the understudy’s nightmare and survived. But the earth didn’t shake and nobody knew or cared that I’d gone on. Of course I’d momentarily fantasized that some important person would see me and star me in another show. But my life didn’t change (unlike Shirley MacLaine, who subbed for Carol Haney in The Pajama Game the night Alfred Hitchcock was in the audience). I went back to reality and continued to be the double understudy, and in time I’d go on as the ingenue Tiffany and then for other Marys in the star role.
MONTHS WENT BY. I was securely stuck as a double understudy and I felt more and more like a ghost. I didn’t exist in the production unless I went on in a role. I was paid for doing nothing, essentially, and when I did go on, I basically just did the show. Part of me lived in a kind of limbo of expectation and dread. My agent would send me on auditions, but with Daddy gone, I found I’d lost my ambition to act.
Eventually I brought my typewriter and some favorite books to my dressing room on the fourth floor of the theatre. It was a good-sized space with a cot, a washbasin, and one barred window that looked out on a fire escape.
“Reminds me of a prison cell,” Mel joked.
To liven it up a bit, I began papering the walls with photographs of Jackie Kennedy in all her youth and sphinx-like glory. Like millions of Americans I was a Jackie watcher, a Jackie junkie. I loved contemplating the images of Jackie in all her configurations: Jackie in riding togs, Jackie in her satin Givenchy greeting General Charles de Gaulle in Paris, Jackie in that brilliant orange dress she wore in India, where she rode on an elephant with her sister Lee Radziwill. Jackie in dark glasses, Jackie in her pillbox hat, Jackie in turtlenecks.
For the next four years I hid from the world in my dressing room, surrounded by Jackies, writing and grieving for Daddy, although I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing at the time. While I was there I finished my novel, although it went unpublished, and then I began making notes on what I remembered about the city of my childhood, San Francisco.
“The smell of eucalyptus leaves . . . The predawn hush of Golden Gate Park as my friend Terry Ashe and I exercised the polo ponies, their hooves clop-clopping across the soft, dark earth of the bridle paths. Once we saw a squirrel sitting unafraid in the middle of the silent road.”
Then I slowly, laboriously began a roman à clef about growing up in California with my brother, and I began retracing Mama’s dreams and watching my father’s rise in politics. I titled it Anything Your Little Heart Desires.
Chapter Twenty-Four
MEL AND I had been together for three years; we were both poor, but we managed. He kept asking me to marry him. Our relationship was the most sustaining one I’d ever had, but I kept putting him off. Even though I loved him, I was worried about money. Then I got the Mary, Mary gig and Mel began writing for the CBS-TV soap opera Search for Tomorrow.
It was grueling work; the pressure was intense and Mel complained as he batted out three scripts a week, attended story meetings, wrote up outlines for future plots. His ability to write good characters with big problems and fast-paced dialogue to match soon brought him the offer to be head writer. This meant he’d be earning over $100,000 a year and then some. I thought this would be the answer to our financial problems, and maybe then I would marry him. Yes, I loved Mel, but I had to be practical; I was supporting my mother and worried about money, as always. It did make a difference to me if he was financially stable.
After the offer came, we were invited to dinner with the head writers he was being groomed to replace, a middle-aged husband-and-wife team who’d been grinding away on this TV soap for over twenty years. They were millionaires, with a condo in Florida along with their big Park Avenue duplex. They assumed Mel would jump at the chance of taking over the show, and they praised him for his writing, saying he was “perfect for the job.”
Mel listened, tight-lipped. Writing soaps was like writing pulp fiction, he’d told me. “It’s nothing to be proud of.” He wanted to be compared to Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
So, in spite of my pleadings and the pleadings of the head writers, Mel quit the job after four months. “It’s killing me,” he said, and besides, he had to go back to his mystery novel. His agent, Annie Laurie Williams, hadn’t sold it yet, but he knew she would if he had the time to finish it. So if I would lend him the money to help support him . . . just for a couple of months. I did so immediately.
I TRIED TO justify loaning him the money, first in my journal: “Now I’m paying Mel’s (admittedly small) rent and his phone bill . . . and I am doing it because I love him and he has to finish that novel,” and then more heatedly during one of my extended conversations with my brother. I maintained I’d never have worked so hard if I hadn’t had to be responsible for so many people—before it had been Jason; now it was Mel and Mama. “But I am naturally lazy,” I concluded.
With that, Bart broke in with a curt, You are a compulsive giver. Mel could drive a cab and Mama could wash her own hair. You’ve been a fool about money and maybe you’ll always be a fool about money, all in the name of love.
In the end, although I did resent loaning the money to Mel, I didn’t tell him. Dr. Rado said, “You’re afraid of being abandoned again; you have already been abandoned by your brother and your father.” At that time I wasn’t sure he was right, but now I think maybe he was.
MEL WAS GROWING more reclusive. In the evenings I would get back from the show and beg to go frugging at some disco; he would want me to stay with him while he read his latest draft. I got frustrated. Once I went off defiantly to have drinks with a nightclub comic because he made me laugh, and then I wrote about him in my journal and left it open on my desk for Mel to read. (Now what was that about?) Mel went ballistic; we fought about what he called my
“roving eye,” my furtive need to have other men in my life. Mel’s beef was that I couldn’t be up-front about it.
“At least be honest with me!” he’d shout. “I’m faithful to you.”
I was faithful too, I’d scream. Until once I wasn’t, and then I told Mel, so he went off with someone else. Then we made up in bed and vowed we’d always be faithful—always, always, always.
Fidelity. How did I really feel about it? Extremely ambivalent. I had the example of my mother in front of me; she was a rebel and I disapproved of her behavior when I was a kid. But now I was beginning to understand how enticing it was to succumb to someone new. I got such an actual rush—it made me feel so alive—and then if I did allow myself to be seduced, the sex could be so passionate and fresh. I never told Mel any of this. I was terrified I’d lose his love, so I controlled myself—most of the time.
As the years passed, I began to realize that long-term passion was very rare, and that passionate sex was not necessarily about intimacy, but about something more immediate and raw and mysterious. That said, women have never been able to express their true sexual natures without being scared shitless. We’re afraid that we’ll lose our lovers or husbands, as well as our reputations, and we might even suffer physical abuse. Even today, most women don’t talk openly about what they like to do in bed. The deepest truth about female sexuality is that we have never had the freedom to shape it.
SO I KNEW I was in love with Mel, but I also knew that things were starting to fall apart. We both knew it and we worked like hell at staying together, but the efforts left us stressed and skittish. In the meantime, after all this Sturm und Drang about money and staying faithful and God knows what else, Mel’s relentlessly hard work paid off. G. P. Putnam’s Sons bought his mystery novel Freak Out, and they optioned a sequel called The Death Collection. Otto Preminger expressed interest in a rough draft of a play called The Castro Complex, about a girl who gets turned on only when her lover dresses up as Fidel Castro.
To celebrate his good fortune, Mel surprised me with a weekend in Montauk. He rented a car, reserved a big room at Gurney’s Inn. We started off late at night. When we stopped for gas, the attendant gave us the wrong directions. We lost our way and didn’t get to the beach until dawn. I was sick with fatigue.
I remember flopping down on the bed and hugging a pillow.
Mel nuzzled me. “Sweetheart, don’t go to sleep yet.” He sounded wide-awake; his voice was urgent.
“Let me sleep just a little,” I murmured.
“Not until you say you’ll marry me.”
“Oh, Mel—not now.”
He pulled me into a sitting position. “Marry me, sweetheart! Make an honest man out of me.”
I didn’t say anything. I felt groggy.
He waited and then he asked me again. This time his voice was irritated. “Will you or won’t you?”
I rolled over and put the pillow over my head. “I’m tired, so tired. Please don’t make me answer you now.”
With that he grabbed my arm so hard I cried out, “You’re hurting me! I just have to sleep.”
Mel stared as if I’d hit him. Then he retreated back into himself. “I’ll get some breakfast downstairs,” he said as he started out the door.
As he left the room, I called out, “I love you!” Of course he didn’t reply.
MEL KEPT TO himself for the rest of the day; he walked along the beach for hours. I slept most of the time. We didn’t see each other again until we were ready to return to New York. As we drove back in the pouring rain, we were both in a terrible mood.
Approaching the Midtown Tunnel, our car skidded. Mel managed to steer us to safety between two other cars. (Some mysterious force saved us from crashing through the windshield; cars didn’t have seat belts then). After we left the tunnel, we drove in silence to the Helen Hayes, shaken by our near accident and the botched-up weekend.
That same night Mel dropped by my dressing room after the curtain came down. He then announced that he was leaving for the West Coast. “More TV prospects—got to follow them up.” He said he might be gone for quite a while.
“How long?”
He shrugged; he didn’t know.
I was the one who challenged him with “Is this the end for us?” and he answered that he wasn’t sure. Then he added, “Look, we both know it’s not working anymore, because I love you more than you love me.” He went on to say quietly, “I’m not blaming you or me. I’m not whining. I’m just telling you how I feel.” Before I could interrupt, he went on, speaking very slowly so he wouldn’t stutter. “There . . . is . . . always one person . . . in a relationship who loves more. I’ve always known I loved you more than you love me.”
“That’s not true. I love you very much,” I exclaimed. “Is this because I won’t marry you now? That I want to wait? My God, Mel, I love you with all my heart and soul.”
“You love the way I look. You keep telling me I’m so beautiful.” His tone was contemptuous. “You know something? Inside I’m a fat, insecure little boy. I was a very fat kid when I was growing up.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I never told you,” he retorted angrily. And he left, calling out “Bye-bye”—something he always said and that didn’t fit with his tall gangly frame.
I WENT HOME and fell into bed, but I tossed and turned. I missed Mel’s body next to mine, so big but strangely soft and warm against my skin. I’d always slept like a baby in his arms. Now that he was gone, I was wide-awake and anxious, my heart beating rapidly.
Around four a.m. I rose and drank some brandy and then returned to reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, the novel that was becoming the Bible for many of my female friends. I’d been reading it for weeks. In it, Lessing writes profoundly about the split between women’s sexual and emotional identities. She seemed to understand the anguish of women who hide out in bad relationships because they don’t want to be alone.
By dawn I was telling myself that I’d made the right move to say no to Mel. I wasn’t ready to settle down and get married yet. I didn’t know what I was going to do next, but I knew I had to do whatever it was by myself.
In the next weeks I held to my routine and that saved my sanity. I attended sessions at the Studio, and then I had understudy rehearsals, and had to be at the theatre promptly every night. I felt edgy and overprepared in the event that I had to go on, but I rarely did, so I’d hole up in my dressing room, tacking up new Jackie pictures and trying to write.
I hadn’t expected Mel to walk out. The breakup had taken me by surprise, so I did what I always did when surprise turned to upset. After the curtain came down, I’d wander over to Downey’s, sit at the bar, and have a whiskey sour, or I’d move in and out of various parties. But I couldn’t avoid the loneliness, and I didn’t, nor the frightening silence of my apartment when I entered it. I felt as if I was winding down and moving onto a different track. The intensity of my feelings for Mel hadn’t lessened. I loved him as much as ever and I missed him terribly.
There was something else that was making me slow down. I’d been having persistent gynecological aches and pains; sex with Mel hadn’t always been that enjoyable of late. I blamed it on the abortion. In the past I’d relied on Marcia and Lils for doctor recommendations and medical advice, but they weren’t much help. We all had a historical lack of self-knowledge about our bodies.
Lils did give me the name of one male gynecologist; when I went to see him, he discovered that I had a vaginal cyst that had developed into an infection. He started me on expensive heat treatments designed to “burn the infection out.” He knew I was an actress and that I didn’t have much money. I can still see myself wrapped in a sheet on his examining table while he stroked my arm and murmured that I could come to the office for free heat treatments if I gave him a kiss and maybe more.
He was a middle-aged man with a pencil-thin mustache and very chilly moist hands. I slid off the table and told him, “No, thank you. Thank you, no.”
I dressed and was out of there in record time (as an actress I was master of the quick change).
I never saw that doctor again, but luckily I eventually found a wonderful doctor, Norman Pleshette, who answered my questions and helped heal my body. I was his patient until he died.
IN THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, Lessing’s heroine Anna Wulf keeps several notebooks of different colors—black, yellow, and blue—which deal with different aspects of her life. I too had notebooks dated by the year and labeled “Quotes” and “People I Love,” and then there was one marked “Fate.” I’d scribbled only a couple of sentences in it about predetermination.
I decided I should take a writing course. Maybe that would help me focus. All the while I tried not to think about Mel. I did love him so and would probably never love like this again.
I enrolled in a memoir workshop at Columbia that was taught by the soft-spoken, white-haired cultural critic Gerald Sykes. At the first class, Gerald defined memoir for us as “a corner of your life that is especially vivid and intense and framed by unique events.”
Other members of the class included a retired policeman, a former ad executive, and a divorcée who had a bright pink rash on her cheeks. One by one they read their little pieces. And then I read mine.
It was the rough draft of a story I’d set in San Francisco, when we were living in an apartment overlooking the marina. My father and Bart were playing chess together there on a gray, rainy afternoon. They played together only once, so I cherished the memory.
I can still hear the foghorns as they hooted from the bay, can still hear the sea gulls. Our windows faced the Golden Gate Bridge and, directly below us, Fisherman’s Wharf. Bart and Daddy were by those windows, hunched over the antique chess table, totally engrossed in the game.
The table itself was a thing of beauty (Mama’s words). It was small and dainty, with a chessboard grid of sixty-four squares; each square appeared to be a different shade of wood—blond, mahogany, tan, taupe. Bart loved polishing the board to a fine sheen before he played on it.
The Men in My Life Page 30
