By Myself and Then Some (60 page)

The Baltimore press was unfavorable to the play. Washington’s best critics had come to review it, also unfavorably. Our business was great – sold out everywhere – but Washington critics know plays and their criticism coincided with that of all the previous critics: the fault lay in the play. Poor George was a wreck, rewriting constantly, directing. Alas, directing was not his forte. He’s a highly intelligent man, with great humor, sensitivity, and kindness, but he’s a playwright – he expresses himself better on paper and he was too close to the play, he couldn’t have judgment about it. Leland would go away for a few days to return with a fresh eye. In Philadelphia, our last stop, Sarah Marshall, daughter of Herbert Marshall and Edna Best, came in to replace Cara Williams in the most important supporting role. She was a first-rate actress and comedienne. We had only two weeks left before opening in New York at the Lyceum Theatre, where I’d auditioned for
Franklin Street
so many years earlier. We had to freeze the play soon so we could play it and refine it without further changes. George promised us it would be frozen one week before Broadway. He went back to New York for a few days to get some perspective – he’d been working too many hours, sleeping too few.

At last George turned up in Philadelphia with a big last scene, to go in only a few performances before New York. I thought it was good, so did Leland. Even Sydney felt it could work. It was a lot for me to learn – a two-page monologue. We rehearsed it during the day. It was to go in the next night. I didn’t object to the rush, my feeling being that if it was going to be, the sooner I learned it the better. It was all part of the creative process of the theatre. Oliver Smith’s wonderful set, so good to move around in, was a big help to that final scene.

The night the new scene went in I was in a terrible state of nerves – so many words, so much to remember. I have to say it was probably the best performance of that play I had ever given or would ever give. It was one of those nights when everything works. We all felt very confident.

Sydney was admirable and helpful, as always. It’s such a good feeling to share a stage with someone supportive, for whom you have great affection. He and I really liked each other, respected each other, but no romance. He’d had that experience once and never again. A love affair with your leading man or woman is not easy. If there’s an out-of-town fight – and they’re inevitable – it grows out of all proportion, and you still have to look each other in the eye eight times a week. Hopeless. So it didn’t happen with us – I was much too preoccupied, and he was in love with Noelle Adam, a beautiful French dancer.

Then my first exposure to the assigning of opening-night seats, a matter of great importance then. Who would sit where? There had to be laughers next to the critics. Leland and George choreographed it. Who was on whose guest list? We had many of the same friends, which helped. Adlai wanted to be there, and I wanted him, of course. Alistair and Jane Cooke and David and Hjordis Niven, the Reynoldses and Zuckermans, would also be my guests. And my mother and Lee, who had to have the best seats, to say nothing of Stephen and Leslie.

Opening-night audiences are traditionally ghastly – critics who dissect; friends over-anxious, either laughing too loud or too often; professional opening-nighters, there to see each other not the play. There’s seldom a true reaction to a play. At my most relaxed (which is most people’s most tense), I can’t bear to know who’s out in front – just one friend unnerves me. This audience was almost entirely friends – plus Adlai. God!

The curtain went up – the play started well – laughs in the right places. I made my entrance to tremendous applause which only made me quiver more – I had to lift a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to my mouth to take a drink and almost knocked my teeth out because of the shakes. We played our first scene, in which Charlie (me), trying to convince George (Sydney) of his identity, recalled a time only the two of them could know about and described the moment of truth in the stateroom in bed with his host’s wife, where, upon trying to escape through the porthole, Charlie was shot. The scene ended with me turning to
George, saying, ‘Look, look,’ and opening my trenchcoat with my back to the audience. One could feel the men in the audience turning cold. From then on, it was uphill. They tried to like it, but the concept was so unattractive to them that they couldn’t react properly to anything else.

George and Leland came round at the intermission to encourage us. ‘It’s going great – just play the play.’ The adrenaline was flowing to such a degree I felt wonderful.

The curtain came down to great applause. Still shaking, Sydney and I hugged each other. There were photographers outside my dressing room, which was so full of flowers no visitor could get in. Hundreds of telegrams, gifts. I quickly changed for the photographers, but Adlai was my first sight on emerging. He kissed me, congratulated me – said something witty, of course – but was self-conscious with all the cameras around. Niven, Betty and Adolph, Alistair and Jane, so many friends pouring out love. It was a high point. I’d found new territory. I felt good about being there, and they felt good that I was there.

At the party after, before the reviews came through, I was standing at the bar with Moss Hart. I know now, of course, that he realized the play wouldn’t go. He said, ‘Don’t take personally anything you might read – you should feel very good about tonight, your first time onstage in a leading role. You’re good. You can do it and you should be proud of yourself.’ Here I was, home, eighteen years after I started out. Finally I was starring on Broadway – my name was in lights – and it had been every bit as exciting as I dreamed it would be. But waiting for the reviews was hell. When they finally arrived, Sydney opened the
Tribune
, read one paragraph of Walter Kerr’s review, and said, ‘Well, let’s see what the Knicks are doing.’ The critics definitely did not like the play, though they did like the actors. I was welcomed as a movie star who handled herself well on a stage. Movie stars are suspect on Broadway – are we just dabbling, not taking it seriously? We’re not of the theatre. It takes a long time to be accepted. But I still felt good. This play was a beginning.

George took a terrible beating critically and it sent him into a decline. He’d worked so hard, put so much of himself into
Goodbye Charlie
. He’d been the critics’ darling since
The Seven Year Itch
. Their harsh words really hurt him. It put a strain on our relationship for months until his wound healed.

We ran for three months to full houses, but audiences did not like the play. We closed because the advance was dwindling.

At one performance I knew someone special was out front, but didn’t know who – from the rumbling backstage, it must be someone important. Toward the back of the orchestra I saw a shock of white hair. I was afraid to think it might be Spence and Kate – they would never come together, and he’d never come at all, I didn’t expect that. But when the curtain came down, into my dressing room walked Katie – adorable, warm, loving – full of compliments. And then the door opened again and in he walked. I threw my arms around him – he’d actually come to the theatre and sat out in front through the whole play. It moved me beyond words. Oh matchless, uncommon, wondrous beings.

New Year’s Eve, Quent Reynolds picked me up at the theatre. We were to appear on a late TV show, then go to Lee and Paula Strasberg’s party, where everyone in New York theatre would be. I was liking my life in my old town a lot. I felt no yearning for California. My Sinatra scars had not quite healed – he actually called me backstage one night to ask how I was, but I never saw him. I loved being on the stage – felt good there. And, most important, I felt I’d finally landed someplace where I might belong, might enjoy my days, might be able to relax. For the first time in years I felt I might have a future.

Quent and I arrived at the Strasbergs’ – a sardine crush. And there was an actor I’d met once, before my trip to Spain. Leland and Slim, Jerry Robbins, and I had gone to see
The Disenchanted
, and backstage they had introduced me to the star, Jason Robards. Audrey Hepburn had told me once while I was still in California that I should meet him, that I would like him. The second time I saw him was that New Year’s Eve. He was feeling no pain, and we hit it off instantly. He stayed with me until I left. Rex Harrison called me the next day to say that his last view of me had been talking to Jason as he was burning my shoulders with his cigar.

Jason was rehearsing
Toys in the Attic
at the Hudson Theatre, a block away from the Lyceum. He sent me some notes written on the envelope of his first rehearsal pay – a smart seventy or eighty dollars. He was quite dazzling – and a little crazy. A remarkable actor and unlike any I’d ever known. Everyone thought he looked like Bogie, but I never did and I still don’t. The flirtation began, was fun. Nothing
is more fun or exciting than the unknown – the possibility of something …

He was a pure theatre man and considered by his peers to be a rarity – a great talent – someone who brought something indefinable to every role.

What followed next wasn’t surprising. He picked me up at the theatre one night for supper. It was a Tuesday night, the first time I’d heard an old theatrical adage – beware of Tuesday and Friday nights, a natural pitfall because they precede matinee days. To many of us who were daring and a little crazy, an obvious night to stay out late. He was completely sober that night – rather shy, quiet, and very attractive. He had three children, two of them within a year of Stephen and Leslie, one a good deal younger. We gravitated toward each other immediately. My need for someone having been denied for so long, it was impossible for me to turn away. In the course of that night I found out that his three children were the result of his first marriage; that he had married again, but it wasn’t working. My history with married men is peculiar, considering my early training. Mentally I had it straight – it was wrong to become involved, to have anything at all to do with a man who belonged to somebody else. If he didn’t like it where he was, let him get out of it and then come around to me. With all of that firmly implanted in my brain, I found that, with the exception of Frank, every man I was really attracted to had a wife. Was it because all the best men were already taken? Was it some underlying, mysterious, subconscious wish to screw up other people’s marriages? Or was it simply that the few men I was drawn to who were simultaneously drawn to me had married young? For whatever reason – it happened. I suppose Jason and I could have stopped seeing each other, but we didn’t. It wasn’t a daily contact – he’d call at odd hours of the morning, slightly looped. We’d meet in the Palace Bar around the corner after my show, a place full of characters with a very simpatico bartender – not unlike Harry Hope’s bar in
The Iceman Cometh
. It became our hangout. Jason was a drinker. My interpretation was that he drank out of unhappiness – a logical conclusion from past experiences. His show went to Boston, and he called me from there often and late. I was being drawn deeper and deeper into a relationship with him – looking forward to his calls, hoping for them. I was in desperate need of someone to love – someone to belong to. Having lived through a few relationships, I do
know now that I have endowed the men in my life with the qualities I wished them to have, rejecting whatever qualities they actually possessed that interfered with my romantic notions. Patently unfair to them.

Having left California, I seemed to have lost some of my career identity in the transfer to New York. At least, I felt as if I had. The identity given me by a complete life with an extraordinary man who was also a star seemed to have been buried with him. Perhaps it had been. A lot of it. I’d found fame, fortune to a degree (certainly it was, compared to what I’d arrived in California with), an entire life connected to another person’s life, had spawned two children – and returned to New York emotionally raw, still looking for recognition, identity, and love. Though I never consciously entered a room looking for a man, I knew one when I saw one. Jason seemed a totally natural happening – and an inevitable one. He was not only attractive and wildly talented, he was unpredictable; there was an element of danger, which I suppose always keeps me awake, among other things. And he was new.

His reaction to me had nothing to do with my name or fame. Much more important, we each had children, and all of us seemed to have a common need to be a family. Built-in-brothership for Steve and Jady, sistership for Leslie and Sarah, and care for David.

Toys in the Attic
opened in New York at the end of February, and from then on we saw each other more and more. We’d send notes to each other through our dressers – silly, romantic, funny cards. One rose. Nights he would call late and arrive at my apartment still later. He often stayed over.

Charlie
closed March 19. It was an unhappy day for us all. The backers more than made their money back – sold it to films – but there was no advantage in going on investing money in a loser. Leland was philosophical; George, devastated, took off for California. I, on the other hand, though the run had been short, gave no thought to being anywhere but New York.

I became more and more involved with Jason. A few friends dropped hints about his drinking – ‘Are you sure you want that?’ I didn’t accept it as a problem. A couple of times he’d behaved erratically with me – not showing up, once calling me Mrs Bogart. I chalked it up to a life of struggle – his first marriage breaking up; his first wife having had a
drinking problem herself; his children sometimes neglected; his youngest son, David, being born partially blind; his helping his father, whom he adored but who had given up in his forties; his feeling of rejection by his mother. A black childhood and young manhood. Plenty of reason to drink. Like many other women, I was sure that if his life were different, he would be too. Naïveté, thy name is me.

One Saturday or Sunday morning, Steve was in bed, and when his door opened and Jason walked in, Steve’s face broke into an enormous smile. It was as if he’d seen his father again. I’ve never seen anything like it. His face had not lit up like that since Bogie’s death. Jason and I wanted our children to meet, to become friends. Both sides were receptive, both had something missing.