My First Five Husbands (18 page)

Husband worked off and on in telephone sales and as a bartender in various places, and I had a few kit-and-caboodle acting jobs. In mid-October I was offered two plays in Moorestown, both to be directed by Arthur Allen Seidleman:
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
playing Sister Woman, and
Romeo and Juliet,
playing the Nurse.

“Are there any roles open for my husband?” I asked, and they agreed to cast him as Brother Man in
Cat,
so Mother came up to stay with Mark while we went off to New Jersey for three weeks.

“I hate this role,” groused The Italian. “I hate Seidleman.”

Good grannies! He hated life in general, I guess. I stayed on for
Romeo and Juliet,
but The Italian went back to New York. Mother returned to Ardmore and Husband laid down the law, “I refuse to be a baby-sitter.” So I took a small apartment near the Moorestown school and enrolled Mark in their second grade. They were teaching arithmetic by a new method that totally confused Mark—as did everything else about the new school, which was drastically different from the New York school he’d just been getting used to.

I was equally befuddled by the Nurse role. Arthur Allen Seidleman had cut that juicy part to shreds, eliminating most of the Nurse’s lines.

“We need to throw the attention onto Romeo,” he said. “This actor has been called the Romeo of the decade.”

I had to stifle a laugh. The Romeo of the
decade
? He wasn’t the Romeo of the
week
. This turkey was not a top-notch rendition of Shakespeare’s masterpiece. To make matters worse, poor Mark got the mumps. I didn’t want to leave him but had to ask our landlady to watch him while I performed. One night after I got home, he was still awake, having feverish hallucinations of toy soldiers marching over the bottom of the quilt toward him.

“Here they come, Mother! Look! There they are!”

“It’s the fever, honey. It’s just your imagination,” I tried to explain, but it took a good half hour to calm him down enough to get to sleep. Poor little guy.

The summer of 1966, both Husband and I had jobs at the Hampton Playhouse. Mother came up and roomed with Mark at Maddie’s house. Husband was not pleased. He was also not pleased with the roles he was given to play. In fact, he wasn’t pleased with much of anything.

I, however, was delighted with my terrific roles that summer. I played Maggie, the tortured Marilyn Monroe character in
After the Fall,
and the wild cat dancer in
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
. The costume department was swamped, so I sewed my own little leopard-print ears, bra, and bikini bottom with a curled tail. I also did a specialty ballroom duo with the show’s choreographer for
The Sound of Music,
in which I played the vain and silly Baroness. In the final flourish of the dance, my partner lifted me overhead at center stage under a huge chandelier. One night, as we exited, the chandelier fell, smashing into a jillion pieces. Shaken, I looked at the mess onstage, thinking,
I was under that five seconds ago!

I wasn’t that lucky with The Italian. One late-summer night in our bedroom, I objected to something he said, and he slapped me hard across the face and warned, “You are never to display disagreement or anger toward me again. Or you can expect much worse than a slap.”

Playing the Baroness in
The Sound of Music,
just before the chandelier fell.

Shocked to my roots, I stood trembling, not a doubt in my mind that he meant it.

The season ended, and we loaded the car to go home to New York. Mother had given Mark a kitten a few weeks before, but Husband snapped, “We’re not taking that thing with us.”

Mark looked up at me, blinking back tears, breaking my heart. Mother was silently furious. But I was afraid to argue. We drove back to Manhattan in silence. Without the kitten.

One should always take note of how a prospective husband’s father treats his wife, but alas, I was married to The Italian before I caught his father’s act, the sadistic, humiliating way he treated his darling wife, Olga. It explained a lot—a little too late. During one of his many attempts to whip me into shape, The Italian brayed at me, “It’s the wife’s duty to wait on her husband, keep his house clean, and bring him his pipe and slippers!”

Staring at this dinosaur, I asked, “And what, pray, is the
husband’s
duty?”

Stumped, he stomped off, but after a few seconds returned triumphantly and said, “To mop the kitchen and take out the pail!”

In his father’s house, that was the husband’s job. No man in my family or, indeed, my acquaintance back home would be caught dead mopping the kitchen. But all his life, The Italian had watched his dad do it, so he did it, docile as a lamb. Family tradition.

More effective than hypnosis.

I
n September 1966, Mark entered third grade at his Eighty-second Street school, happy to see his good buddy Phillip again. I was gainfully employed as a lady of questionable repute in the musical
Take Me Along,
starring Tommy Sands and Tom Bosley, at a theatre within commuting distance of home. My agent submitted my picture and résumé to the producers of
MacBird!,
a new play to be done at The Village Gate. This was heavy stuff, a political satire speculating about LBJ orchestrating the Kennedy assassination, just as Macbeth murdered King Duncan with Lady Macbeth hectoring him to do it. My photo was submitted for Lady MacBird, a send-up of Lady Bird Johnson, but she was a brunette, so the producers didn’t want to see me.

“Call them back,” I said. “Tell them I do an authentic Texas drawl. And I’m a brunette.”

I restyled the dark wig I’d worn in
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,
knocked them on their—
ears
—and was hired as Lady MacBird.

What a show! All the actors were as yet unknown: Stacy Keach, only twenty-five then, did magnificently well as MacBird, the Scottish-Texan despot, in a leather kilt and cowboy boots. Cleavon Little was brilliant as one of the three witches. William Devane was terrific as Robert Ken O’Dunk (and I see he’s been busy lately playing Secretary of Defense Heller on
24
). The rehearsals were thrilling, the sword-fighting energetic and exciting, the roles complex. The script was dark and riotously funny, enlarged from a treatise by Barbara Garson, a Berkeley student. My role as Lady MacBird was almost impossible to decipher. It didn’t really follow the chronology of the Shakespeare text.

“Why did you scramble her part?” I asked the writer, hoping for some insight on how to play it.

She replied, “Oh, I just stuck the role in because it was necessary to include Lady MacBird. I didn’t give it any thought. You figure it out.”

So I was on my own, with what help I could get from the hot-tempered young director, who didn’t offer much, but I got laughs and had a helluva good time in my chiffon dresses and Texas drawl. The play got stupendous reviews and was sold out for months. We had several bomb threats and had to vacate the premises while crews searched the theatre, but nobody ever blew us up. Lots of important personages came to see it at the Village Gate, and later, in the summer of ’67, we moved uptown to Circle in the Square.

There was plenty of drama backstage, too. Every actor was considered for dismissal during rehearsals, since whenever a new play is in trouble, the producing entities always think a cast replacement will solve the problem—though that is rarely the case. Meanwhile, the director, a tightly wired, twenty-five-year-old New Yorker, was embroiled in a riotous, hateful love affair with the producer, an English blonde of thirty…something. She visited his closet one night and slashed all his clothes to shreds. Someone was always angry. The Vietnam conflict was being actively protested in public meetings and marches, and Bill Devane was obsessed with the cause, cursing a blue streak. Every other word he uttered was “fuck.”

“Those fucking empty-fucking-headed shmucks! We’ve got to fucking get out there and stop this fucking stupidity!” And the like.

During the run of
MacBird!,
both Husband and I auditioned for several playhouses, including the Hartford Stage Company. I was offered a job, September through May of ’68, for $175 a week. They said they would also hire my husband. For $125 a week.

“Couldn’t you make each of our salaries an equal $150?” I asked. “And please, don’t tell my husband I requested it.”

They agreed and, of course, we accepted. When I gave two weeks’ notice, I had been in
MacBird!,
earning the Off Broadway minimum of fifty-five dollars a week, for nine months.

Just before we left for Hartford, I came home from the theatre one night and saw, crouching under the stairwell, a small frightened black cat. I took him upstairs and, surprisingly, Husband agreed we could keep him. He was sometimes whimsical that way. Mark named the cat Tyrone, and we all moved to Hartford for the fall and winter season of 1967, settling into a cozy two-bedroom within walking distance of Mark’s school and fifteen minutes from the playhouse.

Rehearsing one play all day, then playing another play at night, my time with Mark was even more limited than it had been in New York, but The Italian’s mother was happy to ride the bus across town to stay with him, and I was relieved beyond words to have her there. I came home from afternoon rehearsal every day to make dinner and be with Mark for a couple of hours. Olga made dinner for her monster husband (who refused to let her learn to drive and told her if she ever tried to leave him, he would kill her), then took the bus to our place for the evening.

I was given leading roles in
Skinflint Out West, The Threepenny Opera,
and several other shows and played the frumpy maid in Noël Coward’s
Hayfever,
a play I loved—though, of course, I wanted to play the lead! The Italian was displeased with every part he was given, even the large role of the roué in
Hayfever
. He was actually very funny, playing the stiff, stuffy role with humor and skill. Whattaya know? He was hilarious. But he wasn’t happy with it.

And if The Massah ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

T
hat fall, a letter from J. Martene Pettypool brought news that hit me like an avalanche.

Rue, did you know Norman was in a terrible car accident? He’s paraplegic now.

I called the Hartweg home in Ann Arbor, and there he was on the phone: cheerful, working on his master’s degree at the University of Michigan, living at home for the time being. And he said yes, he had been in a car wreck in April of 1966, on his way to New York for an interview as drama critic for
The New Republic
. He’d been traveling with two friends, Evan Engber and a woman called “Marge the Barge,” to share the driving. Norm drove from L.A. to Reno, where, exhausted at three in the morning, he turned the wheel over to Marge. Evan was sleeping in the back. Norm fell asleep in the passenger seat. None of them was wearing a seat belt. Just out of Reno, he was jarred awake by a thunderous cacophony of crashing sounds. He was thrown forcibly from the car, skidding over forty feet on the pavement. The next thing he knew, he was on his back, staring up at a beautiful black Nevada sky full of stars.