A Complicated Marriage (31 page)

Our first months with Sarah were wonderfully bumbling and happy. For the first time Clem and I were a team, both starting at zero. We quickly learned her language, vocal and physical. Mind reading was another skill we tried to master, Clem tending to the more obvious interpretations, I tending to the more subtle. Sarah was patient and a great teacher. When we were on the wrong track, she promptly steered us back on course. Clem took great pride in his diapering expertise, especially after I discovered the cloth diapers with snaps at Bloomingdale's that eliminated his fear of impaling her with pins.

Clem was also most often in charge of her daily outings, to Barney Greengrass, the bank, the park, she in her carriage, he reading. Proximity was the key. During the day or in the late afternoon, when the visitors would stream through, wherever we were, there she was in her carrier. “She doesn't want to miss anything,” the chief mind reader would say. From day one her father had bestowed upon her his highest praise when he had pronounced her “at home in the world.” Sitting in the office feeding her at four in the morning, watching for the first glimmers of dawn, I experienced a peacefulness such as I had never known.
How fortunate to have parents like us
, I thought. And she repaid us in kind by slipping gracefully into our lives with a contented smile.

Sy proved to be a wise and skillful analyst. Over the years he provided me with basic parenting tools; he reminded me that I was the grown-up, that a screaming child was a terrified child, to always pick my battles carefully, that there were no winners and losers between her and me, and so much more. Equally important, he doubled his efforts to help me see that I could be a wife, a mother, and also have a life on my own terms. Virginia Woolf knew about the importance of having a room of one's own. And, to my amazement, at twenty-nine I discovered I could have a life of my own, something I had never dared imagine, much less yearned for. Within a year after Sarah joined us, I found myself in the basement of the YMHA on Lexington Avenue and Ninety-second Street.

It is a lackluster room with a raised platform at one end, on which
stands a short, dark-haired woman with a gruff manner and voice to match. This is Ethel Stevens, who gives me, and fifteen or so men and women, a quick run-down of some basic acting exercises and what we will be doing the next few months. I am the baby in the room; everyone else is at least in their forties, on up to doddering. They seem to be old hands at this stuff.

After more than a year of push and pull with Sy, I had finally admitted that at one time I might possibly have been interested in the theater. I told him about my summer at age fifteen at a theater camp, where I was too tall, too awkward, too self-conscious to be cast in anything. Nonetheless, I had the best time of my life. And about having been shot down later by my Bennington counselor, Howard Nemerov, when I whispered that I might like to take a theater class. “Too low-brow, a waste of time,” he growled. He was a growler. I blushed in shame and buried the notion. To Sy, who looked like he had swallowed a damn canary, I quickly tried to cover my tracks by adding to my theater camp list of inadequacies, “I'm too old.”

Ethel asks everyone to say who they are and why they are here.
Okay, I can do that, I know how to lie
. Funny thing: When I open my mouth, the name that pops out is Jenny Van Horne. That throws me and I fumble around, trying to take it back by saying my real name is Jenny Greenberg, as if I'm either a blithering moron or some sort of self-hating Jew disguised as a shiksa. Blood in my head, sweating—and I am famous for never sweating—I mutter something about wanting to learn how to act. I curse Sy's smug face.

Ethel next asks us, two by two, to do an improvisation where one person wants something and the other is opposed. Big problem—
wanting
is a word I don't recognize, and
confronting
? Well, I'd as soon jump off a roof. My partner is a beautiful, confident older woman who looks like confrontation is her middle name and she has gotten everything she has ever wanted. When it is our turn, all I can think about are her high heels, gold bangles, and January tan, versus my loafers, sweaty wool, and ponytail. We begin: She wants, I apologetically resist, she overcomes. Over and out.

For the finale, Ethel asks each of us to go to the platform and tell about
a meaningful moment. My lights go out. The old men tell funny stories to make us laugh; the women tell about children and grandchildren. I'm still brain-dead when I get up there, but then, from somewhere, out pours the story of the baby that died. Not a tear, not a quaver, just that catatonic voice, like at Sy's. I'm thinking,
Some fucking actress, I can't even cry
. Then something else happens: For a second, I actually raise my eyes from my feet and see the people in those folding chairs, I actually hear my voice. I am speaking and they are listening. I sit down and my body tingles to my toes. I actually have a body. I am awake. Whatever happened, I want more and more and more of it.

 

That November Helen Frankenthaler and I had lunch at a plush East Side restaurant, Helen-style. A few years after Clem and I married, Helen had married Bob Motherwell, a nice man, someone I had always liked. Over the years Helen and I had become friends, occasional friends, but friends nonetheless. And there had been many parties, with no tears in the bathroom. I discovered that Helen and I had something besides Clem in common; we found the same things riotously funny. That day, after gossiping and laughing our way through lunch, the headwaiter came to the table with the news that the President had been shot. In shock, we went back to her house nearby and watched television and drank brandy. I called Clem, who had already heard the news, and told him I would be home soon. Helen and I sat until the living room was dark. There would be flurries between us over the next decades, missteps—some mine, some hers—and long interruptions now and then, but I had bonded with Helen that day, and remained so.

That fall was the occasion of a lighter, and also memorable, moment when Diana Vreeland, editor of
Vogue
, swept through our apartment the day the magazine was taking photos for a feature about living with art. She was dismayed at the evidence here and there of a baby living on the premises and ordered them removed posthaste. Sarah, six months old, was at the baby sitter's for the day, or I am sure she would have been put in a closet along with the diaper pail.

“Children are tacky,” Vreeland proclaimed with an imperious wave of her hand as she swanned out. Oh, Diana, you were marvelously
something, marvelously beyond words. Her minions tried valiantly to spruce up the place with flowers and clever lighting, but the art would have to carry the day. I hated to think what Diana would have said if she had walked into the apartment before the influx of furniture from my grandmother and Altmans.

Clem wrote a short text, but the feature was largely pictorial and went on for pages. On the opening spread was a small, stylized photograph of us. Clem was full face; I was in profile. Not my finest angle. I look dark and severe, one of those
is that really me
? photos. Nonetheless, it is a rare shot of us where I am in the foreground. Who would've thought?

Not long after, I sat across from Diva Vreeland at a dinner party at Helen and Bob's. Riding on some cloud of self-importance and gin, I suggested that her
Vogue
column, “What People Are Talking About,” bore no semblance to what the people I knew talked about. Quite a conversation stopper. Maybe it was tit-for-tat for “tacky,” but it was certainly rude. And, not for the first time, Bob stepped in with his soft-spoken aplomb and smoothed the waters for me.

If I was becoming a bit cocky, it was because I was off and running. As I turned thirty, Sarah turned one. That summer, as I took my first steps, she took her first steps up at Ken's new place in South Shaftsbury, Vermont, which would become our home away from home. Any fears I'd had about dripping my depression over her as she lay in her crib had evaporated. At the end of the term at the Y, Ethel put on a production of
The Crucible
. I played one of the righteous crones of Salem, out for blood. My debut, and it could only go up from there. But I was proud and I guess Clem was, too, because he and a gaggle of our art buddies came to opening night and were polite enough to sit through it.

The fall of 1964 I took my next step and moved on from the Y to HB Studio on Bank Street, right down the block from where I had begun my life with Clem. There, during the next three years, in the class rooms of Alice Spivak, Bill Hickey, and Steve Strimpel, I worked, learned, and gathered around me a gang of actors to hang out with, my first new friends since college. HB was like a clubhouse, and later, as we moved into the real world of theater, we opened doors for each other. The whole idea that one step could lead to the next was a new concept. Clem's world was
Clem's world, where no door had ever opened to me. And why should it have? But now, the playing field was level, and it was so easy.

A few months after starting at HB, I went to my first audition, at a church on West Seventy-ninth Street.
The Red Badge of Courage
had an all-male cast, plus two token parts for women. They chose me. Okay, so it was for the mother's part, but they chose me. No dressing room, no backstage, needless to say, no money, and, most problematic, no heat. For performances I would dress in the bathroom, then dash to my position behind an upstage curtain, where I would sit on the floor under a bank of drafty windows, waiting for my two one-minute scenes with my soldier son. After shivering through the opening—I had now wised up and invited no one—for the rest of the short run, I huddled in my grandmother's fur coat, slugging down Calvados out of a flask I had splurged on at Dunhill's. Not the Bowery-bum rotgut, but the French Napoleon kind someone had given Clem, the kind that kept my home fires burning while the clashing, blood, and gore of the Civil War spilled across the church altar a few feet away.

What an extraordinary decade to be in New York and in the theater. It wasn't about Broadway anymore: theater was happening uptown, downtown, East Side, West Side; anywhere there was a loft, industrial space, church, storefront, café; anywhere there were a few chairs and a few bucks to pay the light bill. And it all fell under the new catchall of off-off-Broadway. At St. Mark's Church in the East Village, in a protest play by Sam Shepard, I writhed on the floor in the finale as smoke was pumped into the dark space, sending the audience groping in panic for the exit while we held our collective breath and our eyes teared.

Early on, I fell in with a few directors who thought I was God's gift and cast me in everything they did. June Rovenger was the first. Her space, Second Story, was on Seventh Avenue and Twenty-third Street. There, over a bodega, I painted myself green and wailed in widows' weeds for the war dead. Always the Vietnam War nipping at theater's heels. It didn't do a lot for the quality of theater, but it fueled the energy. From there, I was off to postrevolution Russia and a titled young woman who went from posh to politics in a play called
Marya
. June was a pushover for casts of thousands who invariably outnumbered the audience. But no
matter, most nights we ended up swilling tequila at El Quijote under the Chelsea Hotel and telling each other how great we were. Then again for June, an Ann Jellicoe play,
The Sport of My Mad Mother
. I bought two mangy red wigs at Woolworth's and, plastered with white powder and with kohl-rimmed eyes and mostly bare skin, I gave my all as a violent-but-nurturing leader of a London street gang and gave birth onstage.

Clem certainly didn't come to see every play I did; as with all things, he was discriminating. But when he did come, I had trepidations—on the one hand, about what he would think of the play, because, again, as with all things, Clem told it like it was and I wasn't sure I wanted to hear all that. Not that he was ever disparaging about my work. On the contrary, he was happy I had found something I enjoyed so much. But whatever he said, even if it was about the direction or the play itself, I would manage to take it personally. My other concern was that Clem might want to stick around and hang out afterward. At least in the beginning, needing to keep my two lives separate, I guarded my anonymity, my privacy. I wasn't ready to share my fun with Clem. In the natural course of things, that would change as I opened Central Park West to rehearsals and parties where our friends mingled.

So many plays in so many places. One month, a bride run amok in the newly opened Lincoln Center Library Theater, followed by a production of
R.U.R.
at a derelict factory space on Great Jones Street, so decrepit that an actor's leg went through the floor and the show continued. At Caffe Cino, I did a one-act, boy-meets-girl play that was so bad the audience never stopped slugging caffeine and talking.

I had a brief encounter with Joe Chaikin's Open Theater. His ensemble company was at the cutting edge of the growing segment of theater that was moving toward group-created works. My stay was brief because the work was so antiwar-focused that marching around town in protest became part of the communal agenda. Acting was acting and agitprop was agitprop, and I knew which came first for me. Of course, there was more to it than that. I had been initially drawn to the seductive “family” aura of the company. Also seductive: We would be participants in creating our text. Yet there again, I resisted. Acting was still too new and thrilling for me to put text and character work aside. But the real
deal-breaker was that working with any ensemble required a sustained, intense commitment. Too much, when my first commitment was to Clem and Sarah. Besides, I thrived on the variety of new plays, new parts, and new people.

Like Arthur Sherman, another director who took me on when I auditioned for a production at the New Dramatists, a first-class operation dedicated to the development of new plays. I had shown up in a pair of brown-and-white-checked pants. Really disgusting, but he flipped, kept muttering about “legs that never stopped.” But the part of a yenta from Brooklyn? “You'll be fine,” he assured. “You'll do it in pink plastic rollers.” The big theater was jammed, the production a disaster, but the actors had a ball. I worked with Artie again, with equally dim results.