The Eternal Party

by Kristina Hagman

  His four years in the military changed him. By the time they ended, he had gained a great deal of confidence and was no longer the angry, self-absorbed youth who had arrived in London as a part of his mother’s entourage. Those were important years for him: he was in the cast of one of his mother’s finest theater productions and then in the Special Services entertaining the troops. He had learned to deal with responsibility.

  * * *

  Throughout this time, Dad had no trouble dating some of the most gorgeous women in London, like Jackie Collins, but he found he was happiest when he was with Maj Axelsson, the woman he most wanted to impress and whose opinion he valued. Maj was different from other girls he had experienced; for one thing, she was not in show business. She was a well-paid clothing designer for a fashion house, talented, ambitious, and somewhat older than he was. At first, she wasn’t all that interested in him; but that soon changed. Despite that, and the demands of her work, she went out with him almost every night. He impressed her with his knowledge of all different genres of music. She also liked the fact that he was able to get the best seats to any show in London. Dad said he knew it was getting serious when she decided to keep a toothbrush at his place. Eventually, she stayed at his apartment for a few months while he was on tour.

  While he was away she completely remodeled Dad’s bachelor pad in Saint John’s Wood near Regent’s Park, painting walls and sewing slipcovers for the worn-out furniture. When he came back it was Dad’s turn to be impressed. She had made a home for them, which was something that all Mary’s fame and money had not afforded him; he did not want to lose this woman. They were married not once but twice: first in a civil wedding and then in a church wedding with her family in attendance. He was convinced that with Maj at his side, he would make his name as an actor.

  * * *

  Mom and Dad arrived in New York City in 1956, a time when the city was beginning to wake up from the quiet of the postwar years and was brimming with a rebellious spirit. New York, my parents believed, had eclipsed London and Paris as the birthplace of the “new thing,” in matters ranging from fashion to art exemplified by abstract expressionism. There were experiments happening on stage too, due to the proliferation of low-budget theater, which gave Dad lots of opportunity to be in front of an audience, though it did not offer much money. Over the next six years, he did about a dozen plays, many of them running only for a month; he also did several live TV shows.

  Dad played all sorts of roles, from the love interest to beatniks and hustlers, but regardless of how he was costumed, there was no hiding the fact that he was very handsome, and his looks would play a part in how he was cast. Through his work he met some fine actors, like Burgess Meredith, Carroll O’Connor, and David Wayne, who remained in his life for years to come.

  Mom was neither annoyed nor frightened by the fact that Dad was not making much money. She was independent, and she was resourceful. She could make things with her hands—which Dad could not do—and he admired her for it. She also had a great knack for turning whatever assets they had into cash.

  She used to tell a story about a time when they didn’t have enough money to get through the week. This was soon after I was born when we were living in the first apartment my parents had in New York, a small place on fabled MacDougal Street, an Italian neighborhood that was also home to the bars and clubs that were frequented by writers and artists, among them Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. Dad was in despair about money, but Mom was fearless; she had talked to the other mothers in the building who often had trouble with cash flow due to the unsteady incomes of their husbands; this was a neighborhood that watched out for its own. The women told her she could get help if she went to the local restaurant where the Italian businessmen who bankrolled most of the establishments in the area could be found at lunchtime every day. Unbeknownst to Dad, she walked down the street carrying a bag of clothes she had designed and crafted while also cradling me in her arms. She entered the restaurant, and the men sitting at the back of the place paused their meal for a moment and nodded to each other. They knew her by sight, and with that nod, she was encouraged to approach them. She respectfully asked to borrow just enough cash to pay the rent because Dad would not get a check in time from his work in the theater. She showed them examples of her expert sewing technique and told them that if she did not pay them back by the end of the month, she would make their wives something beautiful to wear.

  She knew she had made a good impression, and by appealing to their ingrained respect for a mother with a newborn, she got what they needed, and Dad went to pay them back before the month was over. He told this story of Mom’s ability to get the money to cover the rent many times, and I think it was a reminder to him that he never wanted to be in need like that again.

  In that same year, Dad had some big successes. He finally had his Broadway debut, in a play called Comes a Day. He loved being on the stage, but the thing that most excited him at this point in his life was getting a role in one episode of the TV series Harbormaster. Working on that show caused him to recognize for the first time that TV was a medium he loved working in. He also realized it was potentially where he could make some real money for his growing family and emerge from under the immense shadow cast by his mother’s talent and fame.

  So he began to pursue roles on television. He appeared on numerous live television shows, including The DuPont Show of the Month, Kraft Television Theatre, and Studio One.

  Over the next few years, both my parents worked like mad. Mom was designing and sewing elegant, one-of-a kind gowns day and night while Dad continued to do plays at night and, during the day, work in television and audition while continuing to take acting and singing lessons. When work was finished around 11:00 P.M., they would meet at the theater Dad was performing in, and they would often go out and socialize, which would not have been possible without Peggy as well as Mom’s sister BB, who was like a second mother to me especially on those occasions when Mom needed to travel alone with Dad.

  * * *

  Looking back on it, there was no natural way my parents could have kept up their frenetic lifestyle. Even when I was very young, I remember them talking about taking what they called “pep pills,” which is what amphetamines were often called in those days. They were popping them in their mouths the moment they felt the least bit tired, and between the pills and three packs of cigarettes a day, they were both super energetic and very fashionably thin. I have boxes filled with pictures of them taken during these early years, looking chic and in love and beautifully dressed. But it was not all glamorous. Tempers flared often, and in the midst of all this restless energy and success there was something missing; there was a fatigue under the surface and a nagging sense that life at this abnormal pace was unsustainable.

  * * *

  When I was three years old, a big thing happened that changed our lives. Dad got regular work on a soap opera. I remember going with Mom to watch him work on the set of The Edge of Night. I was always attuned to my mother’s moods, and I could see how thrilled and excited she was that Dad was on television. They talked a lot about TV, about how it was going to be the next big thing. She liked that he had regular work because she was pregnant again and needed some time away from working such long hours. As much fun as they were having doing the work that both of their ambitious temperaments craved, it was hard to live in New York City on the cheap. They began to envision what a life outside of New York City could be like.

  * * *

  All that winter, we had been freezing in our rent-controlled apartment where the landlord kept turning off the heat in the hope that it would force us out so he could raise the rent on the next tenant. I remember going to court with Mom when she fought for our right to have heat. By then, my brother had been born, and she must have been a sympathetic vision with two young children at her side. If freezing were not enough, there was also the constant deafening rat-a-tat-tat of jackhammers because workmen were digg
ing up the street below us to put in a new sewer system. For a household that stayed up till all hours of the night, the deafening noise at 8:00 A.M. was torture. My Swedish aunts would shake their heads and, in their lilting accents, quote the slogan displayed on billboards all over the city: “Dig we must for a growing New York.”

  After two years on The Edge of Night, my dad got his big break when he was finally cast in his first big movie role, as a serviceman in Ensign Pulver. It was time to get out of New York, and 1964 was a big year for Dad. The film could not have come at a better moment. It was quickly followed by Fail Safe with Henry Fonda, and then came In Harm’s Way with John Wayne and Brandon de Wilde. Soon we were flying off to Rome for a film called The Cavern. I was so young when the film was released that I never saw it. I looked all over for a copy of it, but the most I could find was a five-minute clip on the Internet that included a short, intense performance by my father. The film was set in World War II, and as the name suggests, it took place in a cave. It could have been shot on a soundstage anywhere, but luckily for us, it was made in Europe. In it, Dad played a guy who was secretly drinking. He was good at playing drunks.

  In a break from shooting I Dream of Jeannie, Dad was in a film in which he played a really mean drunk. It was called The Group and was based on the novel of the same name by Mary McCarthy. The film told the story of the loves, losses, and tribulations of eight attractive, affluent young women who knew each other from their years together at Vassar. Dad played the unscrupulous would-be theater director who marries one of the girls and hurts her so much with his ravings that she’s driven to an apparent suicide. It’s one of his finest performances and certainly one of his most startling portrayals. He’s so out of character playing Harald Peterson in that film that most people seeing it today don’t realize that my dad played Harald.

  In the mid-1970s, he played a drunk again in one of his best acting roles ever, in our neighbor Paul Mazursky’s film Harry and Tonto. The man he portrays has hit bottom and breaks down as he confesses his failure of character to his father, played wonderfully by Art Carney. I will never forget the way that performance made me feel because in his agonized admission of guilt, I saw my father being more vulnerable on film than I had ever known him to be in life.

  Working on films and in TV paid a lot better than the money Dad was getting as an actor in the theater. Also there is no denying that we were all having a much better time living on location than in the apartment, where Mom worked night and day to keep us afloat. My parents decided together that it was time to move to California, the mecca of film and television, but before committing to such a big change in our lives, we all went out west for a few weeks to see if we would really like it.

  Dad’s good buddy Carroll O’Connor loaned us his house while he was on location. Peggy came along on this trip too, even though it meant she would have to camp out with us in a tent as we drove our Jeep across country to get there. We all loved California.

  After returning to New York, my folks knew they wanted to live out west, but Dad needed to get steady work. For him, that meant getting on a show that would keep him steadily employed for years before he would take took the major step of moving the whole family away from New York. He borrowed some money for the airfare to Los Angeles, where he planned to audition for a number of roles while staying with his old high school friend Ted Flicker, who had become a successful director and writer.

  Mom had to stay in New York City, where she continued to make dresses to support the family. She hated being away from Dad and never seemed to get any sleep. She was constantly working. She designed, cut, and sewed the most beautiful and glamorous gowns for performers like Jane Morgan and Sophie Tucker, people my parents met through Mary and Richard.

  Jane Morgan was Mom’s best client. Mom made so many outfits for her that we had a dress designer’s dummy in our house that had been padded to be an exact replica of Morgan’s body. That way the singer did not have to be present for hours of fittings.

  Mom took me with her to buy fabric, an easy walk from our apartment on West Forty-Ninth Street. All the guys at the fabric store knew my mother; we were regulars. They must have been good family men because rather than being annoyed that a patron had brought a child along, they knew how to make me feel comfortable. They would seat me at the very top of the stepladder and cut bright-colored swatches of fabric for me to hold. From my vantage point, I could see my mother walk all over the place getting inspiration for new designs by looking at the multitude of colors and textures of these gorgeous fabrics. There were bolts and bolts of fabric stacked high to the ceiling; she would ask the assistant to bring down any bolt that caught her eye and seemed to be worth a closer inspection. The big, strong assistants would climb up to the top of the stacks and shoulder the heavy bolts to bring them to where my mother stood beside a tall cutting table. Then they would unfurl the fabric dramatically from the bolt so we could see how it would catch the light and move. Mom taught me how to rub the fabric between my thumb and index fingers and analyze what the piece was made of. I would close my eyes and feel the texture and weight of the material. Mom and the salesmen taught me the different characteristics of finely woven silk as contrasted with heavy wool fabrics woven into a herringbone pattern. They taught me the difference between muslin and polished chintz and how to tell if lining fabric was synthetic by the way it felt and the way it smelled.

  These experienced salesmen enjoyed having a buyer in their store who understood their product as well as my mother did. She would have them cut samples so she could take them home to inspire her and help her decide which material to invest in for an outfit or gown. She knew how to bargain with them, because the price of the material would cut into her profit, but she was respectful of paying the right price for good quality. As young as I was, I admired my mom and her interactions with these men. She was a fine businesswoman.

  Mom always had deadlines to meet. Jane Morgan was mercurial and seemed to want a new gown for a show at the very last minute, and making it that quickly was always a challenge, since Mom did everything herself. She said her pep pills would keep her awake so she could get the work done; she was edgy with Dad gone. She turned our dining room, which was big by New York standards, into a studio. I still had the habit of seeking out my parents when I woke from a nightmare, and one night I went looking for Mom, who was still at work. The dining room/studio floor was completely covered in shimmering bright-red silk organza for a gown that, according to the sketches Mom had made, would be cut on the bias and trail out behind the singer as she walked on stage. In my half-asleep state, I was really worried about Mom; she looked so tired, trapped behind all that red.

  I wanted to go to her, but as I approached, she yelled at me and told me not to come anywhere near the precious fabric. It was an unforgettable image: my mother at the far end of the room behind a sea of smooth red fabric with hundreds of shiny, sharp silver pins in it. I felt the need to comfort her, but I was a helpless child. I wanted to grow up fast so I could take care of her.

  * * *

  At last there was good news from LA. Dad had done a screen test for a new show called I Dream of Jeannie. He was well aware that our family desperately needed a change, and in his wildly optimistic way, even before he knew whether or not he had gotten the job, he rented a little cottage in Santa Monica Canyon, just three blocks from the beach. Soon after that, we learned that he had been cast in his first leading role in a television series. We were all overjoyed and relieved! Mom had been working so hard, and everyone in our whole household had been completely focused on this goal. Now Dad had what he’d always wanted.

  When he came back to New York, we packed up and piled into the station wagon bought with profits from my mother’s dress designing and drove across the country. I was excited to go, but as we got farther and farther from New York I was sad that my aunts BB and Lillimor and my babysitter, Peggy, were all staying in the city. The one upside to this was that, for several years, my aunt
s kept the rent-controlled apartment in New York, so I was able to retain a connection to the life and place that were familiar to me.

  As we drove through the South, Mom was very outspoken about the discrimination she saw. She had grown up in Sweden and had very little experience with African Americans or the horrible way they were often treated in America. She chastised a young white man at a café who called an older black man “boy.” As she did this, everyone in the place went silent. Quickly, Dad knew how tense things could get in the South and hustled us all out to the station wagon. Mom was fearless and indignant and wanted to change things right there and then, but Dad knew she could put us all in danger, and he was not about to be the lone man defending his outspoken foreign wife. Dad was well aware that, in 1964, bad things happened to folks in the South who stood up against racial inequality.

  I’ve always regarded this story as being less about my mother’s politics and more about what a loose cannon she was. She was reckless and fearless; in the story as Dad told it, she had even had the courage to contact the Mafia to get rent money. Sadly this story is the forerunner of things that would happen as Alzheimer’s took her over, and she became the uncontrollable person who hit her caretakers.

  But on that particular day, no one thought too much more about it; we were focused on moving along down the road to our new life.

  * * *

  My very first memory of Los Angeles was of Dad driving us into Santa Monica Canyon and my being awakened by the lush scents of night-blooming jasmine and orange blossoms that were carried by the warm, caressing Santa Ana winds and wafting through our station wagon’s windows. If this was any indication of what our new life in California was going to be like, our move was truly going to be wonderful.

  The trip across the country had been so exciting that after a while I had forgotten that I was leaving my aunts and Peggy behind. I had more time with my parents than I could ever remember having, and I loved it. They kept commenting on the weather and how great everything was going to be now that we had moved away from the gray, cold, crowded city.