by Robert Klein
We lay together on the queen-size bed, looking at the sprinting headlights on the ceiling, exhausted, secure, happy. “Thank you, my darling,” I said. I had never used the word “darling” before, but I used it unself-consciously. Love makes you say things like “darling” and “I adore you” and “I love you” and not be embarrassed.
“Thank you,” she said as we maneuvered our bodies around each other like a couple of mating pythons. “Oh, Judith.” “Oh, Robert.”
Then it was morning, and she was next to me, facing me. I had never seen her sleeping before, so I took advantage of the opportunity to drink her in, unseen. I was careful not to move, since I did not want her to awaken just yet. Her face was perfectly serene, with none of the drooling, openmouthed facial contortions or snoring common to sleepers. Her eyes opened and met mine, a big smile from both of us, a kiss. “Well, here we are,” I said. “Do we hate ourselves in the morning?”
“Uh-uh,” she said. We not only didn’t hate ourselves in the morning, we positively loved ourselves in the morning and were soon entangled in a blissful way again. The Niagara Falls adventure was a great success, and there were four happy people in the car going home.
* * *
Knowing where I would be the next year, and looking forward to it, made the rest of the term a pleasant coast to graduation. Judy decided to transfer to Hofstra University to be nearer to me. I would come home from New Haven on weekends, and she would live at home; there lay the only serious rub, because she and her mother were less than harmonious.
When classes and finals were at last over, only the seniors were left until the ceremony, which would occur in five days. It was the first week of June, and there was a heat wave, and the boys took to frequenting an old local swimming hole right out of Tom Sawyer. The portable radio blared out our rock-and-roll favorites as we bebopped around, singing along: “Ooh, baby . . . I want to know, will you be my girl?” Beer cans in hand, future doctors, dentists, lawyers, actors, not a care in the world. Then caps and gowns, long boring speeches in the summer heat, proud parents, handshakes, and hugs, and it was over.
Chapter Ten
Yale and Beyond
It was my first day of classes at Yale, and I was walking down York Street amid the ivy and the bicycles, in my tweed jacket and plaid tie, once again right out of the school brochure. As if the lovely scene were not stereotypic enough, I suddenly heard men’s voices singing “The Whiffenpoof Song”: “From the tables down at Mory’s / To the place where Louie dwells.” For a second, I thought I was hallucinating a cliché, but I backed up a few steps and the sign said Mory’s: the very place they were singing about. I took this to be a good omen.
The campus was mighty impressive, with a mixture of traditional and modern architecture and excellent facilities, in contrast to tiny Alfred. The water fountains were offered to all races, but the undergraduate colleges were still all-male.
The School of Drama was different from the rest of the university, however, with a student body that included women and Bohemian theater types. It had a brilliant reputation, which was well deserved in areas like playwriting, directing, and scenic and costume design; for actors at that time, it was a mixed bag. I did learn a few basics of the acting craft, and most importantly, this was no longer an extracurricular activity. I found myself steeped in the world of theater. Constance Welch, the school’s acting coach—who had previously taught Julie Harris and Paul Newman—was a melancholy septuagenarian given to tearful reveries about having seen a 1927 Gielgud Hamlet. She no longer possessed the good communication skills she once had regarding what she was trying to convey and who she was trying to instruct. We watched her work on scenes with our classmates, but her remarks and suggestions were murky, abstract, frequently personal. On those rare occasions when she worked on my practice scenes at all, her comments seemed out of touch, and I would inject humor into the serious proceedings, which got big laughs from the class. She invariably said the same thing: “Klein, you ought to do a one-man show.” Maybe she was a better prophet than an acting teacher.
She seemed to take little interest in the majority of the students, all of whom had been vetted from college programs around the country and had obvious talent. Her efforts were directed mainly at her favorites, Robin Strasser and Louise Schaefer (who undoubtedly showed great promise), while the rest of the class looked on longingly like neglected puppies in the litter. Every week, after my Saturday-morning Theater History class with Professor Alois Nagler (who wrote the definitive book on Shakespeare’s Globe Theater), I drove home to the Bronx and then, in the evening, to Malvern for my date with Judy.
As the fall progressed, she was, as expected, becoming more and more unhappy living at home in conflict with her mother. She was surrounded by girlfriends who were getting married one by one, and she put the subject of engagement and marriage on the table, which scared the hell out of me. I think she saw it as some sort of solution to her problems and had not thought it out clearly. I was a twenty-year-old schoolboy supported by my father, who himself had no money: a perfect candidate for marriage. Yet I had begun to feel guilty about her unhappiness, feeling that I was the cause for her transfer from Alfred, where she had thrived. All this was beginning to affect the way we felt during our time together: less happy, not as optimistic.
I brought up the subject of marriage with my father, in a hypothetical way, of course, and he replied with hearty, derisive laughter that was in no way hypothetical. “You? How you gonna support a wife?”
“I know, Dad. I’m just talking in theoretical terms.”
“Theoretical, my tuchas. Just study in school, and let’s pray you can make a living as an actor.”
I knew he was right, but I couldn’t help going through some of the motions, like looking at engagement rings in jewelry-store windows in New Haven, or daydreaming of marital privacy and sex somewhere other than a car. Judy and I had settled into a routine, and we had begun taking each other for granted. The Saturday-night bowling and movies, capped by some stolen sexual moments while looking over our shoulders for her parents to walk through the door, were losing their luster. There was an incident in which her mother gave her a hard time about a stain on the couch that we made while having sex. This threw a nice dignified monkey wrench into the already strained situation and caused a giant fight between Judy and her mother. Maybe Judy resented me a little, and maybe I resented her for resenting me; in any case, we rolled right along like nothing had happened.
That is, until early December, when Judy called me on a Saturday afternoon and broke our date for that night. She said she didn’t feel well, but I could sense that something was wrong, so I pursued the matter. “I think we should cool it for a while,” she said.
“What do you mean, cool it?” I asked.
“I mean . . . not see each other for a while.”
A chill ran down my spine. “How long are you talking about? A week? A month?”
“I’m not sure,” she said.
“Can I call you during that time?”
“It’s best if you don’t,” she said.
“Did you meet another guy?”
“No.”
I hung up the phone, stunned. She was breaking up with me, I was sure of it. Suddenly, the doldrums I had begun to feel with Judy disappeared, and I forgot any little negative thought I had ever had about her. I could only remember the good things. She was perfect and I loved her and wanted her more than ever. I could not raise even the slightest feeling of anger toward her, only adoration. The thought of not seeing her, not being with her, losing her, seemed unthinkable, unbearable. I tried to comfort myself with the possibility that she really meant what she said about cooling it for “a while,” but I didn’t really believe deep down that that was what she meant.
Thus began five months of torture for the once-again-unrequited lover. I was obsessed with thoughts of Judy morning through night, hoping she’d call, wanting to call her but waiting for a while, whatever a while mean
t. With every ring of the telephone, I hoped it was she, calling to tell me that everything was all right. Every song on the radio had profound meaning again, just as they had when I fell in love. I was filled with heartache when I heard a favorite song we had danced to, like “The Closer You Are” or “Earth Angel,” and every lyric seemed to have a new and deeper significance, no matter how banal or corny. It seemed that in breaking up I was paying attention to all the same things I had done when I fell in love, though the feeling was no longer ecstasy. Maybe if I proposed to her, it would set things straight. No, I couldn’t do that.
After four weeks and with trembling hands, I called her. She was surprised but did not sound particularly enthusiastic. “Look, have we cooled it long enough?” I asked. “I feel so terrible, I want to get back with you.”
“I don’t think that would be good,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not ready to get back together. I’m not sure I want to.”
“What do you mean?”
There was a pause. “I’ve met someone,” she said. When I had recovered from the lightning bolts that struck me and the sledgehammers that pounded me and the bullets that ripped through my chest, I spoke: “Who?”
“No one you know, he goes to Hofstra.”
“I guess that’s that, then,” I said, hoping that that wasn’t really that.
“I’m sorry about this, I didn’t plan it this way,” she said.
“Can we ever talk?” I asked, attempting to hold on to some fragment of her.
“We’ll talk sometime,” she said.
And it was over, two years after it had started. My depression became unrelenting. I was carrying a torch for the first time in my life, and it was a desperate and helpless feeling. At that point I definitely did not feel that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Fuck Shakespeare. I was sorry that I had ever met Judy. I was obsessive about the breakup, talking endlessly about it to my friends, who were patient and sympathetic, but up to their ears in it. Jim Burrows, my Yale buddy, bore the brunt of my moaning at school, while Al Uger, my oldest friend, who was at Columbia studying dentistry, helped me handle the blues at home. Minus the true misery, I presented a rather comic figure: moping like a hound dog, sighing at the moon, depressive body language, yearning for something I could never have again, day after day.
I turned to my father for advice and found him understanding but firm, in his usual blunt way. I explained that I wanted to telephone Judy, even if I only talked to her mother, who was fond of me, and left a message. “You’re trying to go through the back door,” he said. “It’s her you want, not her mother, and she found someone else, so forget about it.”
Life went on, but barely. When the spring thaw came, Jim Burrows tried to distract me with golf in New Haven, but I perfected the game quickly and became bored. The challenge was gone when I could consistently get the ball through the elephant’s trunk and onto the water wheel. Radios all over were playing the hit song: “If you want to be happy for the rest of your life / Never make a pretty woman your wife.” It broke my heart, because I had thought I would never again be happy for the rest of my life—without Judy.
Surprisingly, school provided a welcome respite from my ruminating. I was busy performing and directing scenes, appearing in a major production, and of course there were classes: in elocution, directing, theater history, and acting. There was a compulsory course for actors called Movement for the Theater, which was really a class in modern dance. It was taught by Pearl Lang, who was a direct disciple of Martha Graham, one of the premier names in modern dance. Miss Lang rarely smiled and was a taskmaster, expecting hard work and positive results from a group composed largely of actors with no dance training whatsoever.
I had been instructed to buy tights and a device whose existence I was unaware of: a dance belt. After trying it on in my room, I concluded that the thing caused a fair amount of pain to the male genitals, as its purpose seemed to be to make all dancers, male or female, look the same from the waist down—neutered. I opted for my familiar jock strap for the first class, but a simple look at everyone else’s flat groin told me that I had made the wrong choice. “You are improperly dressed for class, you must wear a dance belt,” Miss Lang told me sternly.
“But it’s too painful, Miss Lang,” I whined, which got a hoot from the others.
“You’ll get used to it,” she said with the blithe ignorance of someone who doesn’t have testicles.
In the course of my brief dancing career, she asked my body to do things that it had never done before. I had been a ballplayer all my life, but learning the five ballet positions, leaping and contracting across the room to bizarre piano music, barefoot in tights, was a lesson in humility. I hid in the back of the group, hoping she wouldn’t see me make a mess of her art. I counted my lucky stars that the old gang in the Bronx couldn’t see me now. I enjoyed watching Pearl do the various moves, the flow of the diaphanous fabric she wore, her grace and strength; it was a truly formidable thing to watch, my eye-opening introduction to dance as art. But doing it myself was another matter, an exercise in futility.
My classmates at the School of Drama were an interesting, often eccentric bunch: a combination of actors, directors, playwrights, lighting, and set designers ranging from the super-serious to the kidders. One of the directing students was a talented nun from Washington University in St. Louis named Sister Wilma. I had never known a nun before. She was friendly, outgoing, and seemingly too hip to be a nun, so I asked her a lot of questions about why she had become one, which she answered patiently. She wore the full habit at all times, though I could tell she was an attractive woman. She told me that she had been a girl who enjoyed parties and the company of men and had planned to get married, like most young women, but then came the revelation of her life. In any case, she was considered a hell of a directing prospect and one of the best in our class, taught by Nikos Psacharopoulos. We each got to direct scenes and then listened to the critiques from the teacher and our classmates. Sister Wilma directed a scene from A Streetcar Named Desire and presented it one day. Some guy in the class had several criticisms and called the direction “vulgar.” She was very offended by his characterization and answered, “I have been called a lot of things in my time, but ‘vulgar’ isn’t one of them.” Then she lifted her skirt to her shins and did a brief jig while saying, “Boop-oopy-doop, the vulgarest nun in showbiz.” It brought the house down with applause.
Another classmate was a Franciscan priest named Crispin McGuire, who sometimes wore his collar, chain-smoked Luckys, and loved to go out for brewskies with the boys. He was a fun-loving man from a prominent, wealthy Connecticut family and had entered the priesthood in his mid-thirties. If nothing else, I learned that nuns and priests, these mysterious, costumed characters, could be multidimensional, interesting people and friends.
The acting students came to Yale having been the stars of their college productions and now had to prove themselves in a more competitive, advanced setting, starting at the bottom rung. Jim Burrows, a directing student, was my pal in comedy. It was in his genes, given that his father was Abe Burrows, the great Broadway writer, director, and illustrious wit who then had the biggest hit in New York: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Jimmy took me to the show about ten times, and we sat in the aisle, stood, or watched from the wings. I met Bobby Morse, Michelle Lee, Donna McKechnie, and a bevy of beautiful dancers smelling of perfume and makeup. I met Charles Nelson Reilly smelling of perfume and makeup. He had a comical feud going with Jim: “Ding-dong, Jimmy, the school bells are ringing, go back to college already.”
I couldn’t get enough of Morse and his virtuoso performance, which, as far as I could tell, broke all of Miss Welch’s acting rules. He mugged, he went over the top, then he brought down the house with a simple turn of his head or the subtlest gesture. His performance was perfect for this delightful cartoonish musical, and I’d never heard such laug
hter. He had the timing down pat, total command, and he made it look easy, as if he was enjoying it as much as the audience.
I got the backstage opportunity to see how the Broadway magic was made, how the scenery changes went up and down, in and out, like clockwork. It turned out it was all the work of cigar-chomping, third-generation-on-the-job Irish stagehands who all had the Daily News in their back pockets.
I did know this. I wanted to do what Bobby Morse did. I didn’t think of Judy when I had these hopeful theater daydreams, except that I envisioned her coming to my star Broadway dressing room one day with her boring insurance-salesman husband, sorry she hadn’t married me. Jimmy had a beautiful sister named Laurie, who was my first date since I had gone into mourning. Come to think of it, the cloud had lifted a bit. The Drama School scene felt eons removed from falling in love at Alfred. Also, I had tasted big-time show business and the life of the rich and celebrated. I spent time with Jimmy and his father at Abe’s beautiful apartment at the Beresford on Central Park West. He took us in a stretch limousine with Bobby Morse to the Giants championship football game at Yankee Stadium, where I heard some inside show-business tidbits.
During the ride, Morse angrily complained to Abe about how the choreographer Bob Fosse had taunted him during the pre-Broadway run in Philadelphia. “You can’t do it,” Fosse had told him. Abe soothed him with diplomacy: “I know he was tough on you, but it’s not personal, he just wants excellence.” They both had a laugh about how cheap Rudy Vallee was; he was one of the show’s stars. For the six-degree temperature at the game, Abe had purchased expensive special shoes at Abercrombie & Fitch: just for a football game! If you could afford it, why not keep your feet warm?
