My First Five Husbands (19 page)

But he couldn’t move his legs.

Evan and Marge, only minimally injured, knelt over him. Medics appeared on the scene and he was taken to a Reno hospital, a chunk gouged from his forehead, another chunk from his right arm, his spinal column broken just above the waist. For the next eleven months, he was rotated from his back to his stomach until he could be moved to his parents’ house in Ann Arbor. He never asked the driver what caused the crash, but he was told they’d run through a roadblock of sawhorses and warning signs. I’ve always figured she fell asleep at the wheel.

He was the same old ebullient Norm. No emotions. Just the facts, ma’am, and funny anecdotes about the other patients at the Reno hospital. I decided to visit him in Ann Arbor over our short holiday break. Husband objected vociferously, but I went anyway. Norm’s brother, Jerry, met my plane in Detroit and drove me to Ann Arbor. Norman was in a wheelchair but quite hearty. His sister, Joyce, was also there, and we had a wonderful Christmas. The Hartwegs were still funny, smart, and very devoted to one another. God, they were great.

I had to get back to Hartford to open a play on New Year’s Eve, but Norm and I resumed our voluminous correspondence. He wrote to me about his job as counselor in a boys’ dormitory, and I wrote back about Mark’s fascination with Jean-Claude Killy and the Winter Olympics. Norm wrote to me about the work he was doing toward his Ph.D. in philosophy, and I wrote back that Tyrone (oops,
he
was a
she
) had delivered three kittens, but one was dead, so Mark did a drawing of Tyrone and her kittens, with a gravestone representing the dead one. (I still have it.)

The kitten incident had been the latest in a string of people, places, and things that rankled The Italian. When the final play closed, I told him, “Mark and I are going to visit Norman.”

“That’s the last straw!” ranted Husband. “If you go, we’re through! I’m leaving you!”

As you wish, love-cheeks,
I thought, but out loud I just said, “Fine.”

After all, I wasn’t allowed to argue.

N
orman wheeled out of the Ann Arbor house, and he and Mark had instant rapport, as always. We spent a marvelous time together. Kibe, Norm’s dad, was curator of the Herpetology Department (fish and reptiles) at the university, and we went to visit his pal, who had built a rain forest room onto his house with all sorts of tropical animals. Mark had read a lot about tropical animals but had never seen them in the flesh. He still talks about that exciting afternoon. Mark and his friend Phillip flew to Oklahoma for the summer, and I flew home to New York. The Italian had made good on his threat to leave me, so I happily moved in with another actress from Hartford who shared her posh Upper East Side flat with me while I looked for a place. I was stunned to learn that she earned money by climbing into bed with an elderly man, who paid her to simply lie next to him since he couldn’t perform sexually. First time I’d ever heard of that!

I found a tiny place on East Eighty-third and Madison, two blocks from the best public school in Manhattan, where Mark would enter fifth grade in September. He could walk to Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since there was no kitchen, I got a secondhand hot plate and a roaster oven and washed dishes in the bathroom. A friend had furniture he needed to store, so his sofa bed, chairs, and lamps became our furniture for the next year. Bill, Mother, and Melinda came to visit that September, and Bill built a dandy loft bed for Mark, completing it in jig time despite his cussing indictment of the limited facilities offered by New York lumber stores.

Mark did better at the new school than he had anywhere else. He was cast as the Prince in the school play, and he was marvelous. That is the only time I ever saw him act on the stage. He was very good, but he didn’t want to be an actor. Who could blame him? Besides, he was interested in paleontology and art just then.

Meanwhile, this Little Miss Nobody was clawing her way up a very roughly graveled mountain, with hundreds—no,
thousands
—of other Little Miss Nobodies right beside her. And some of them had good connections! Dear reader, it was monumentally difficult. And for any aspiring actress who may be reading this, best she should know what it can really be like. Murderous! Full of dumb jobs only laughingly associated with acting—all paying the hot Equity minimum of fifty-five clams a week. Or whatever it is these days.

“Come back to Ardmore and open a dancing school. Live a normal life!” Mother begged about ten jillion times over the years, but for me it simply wasn’t an alternative. This was do or die. I had the talent, I had the drive, and I knew it was only a matter of time and luck.

Unless Life intended to play some monstrous joke on me, that is.

That black possibility haunted me every day.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T
he next couple of years were a trip to the carnival, complete with roller coaster (hold on to your cookies!), fun-house mirrors (boo!), and merry-go-round (grab that brass ring!).

Enough time had passed since my last waitressing gig that I was finally eligible for unemployment as an actor. Standing in the M line one day, I looked over to the B line and saw Tom Bish. I wasn’t even positive it was him, but I ran and hid in the ladies’ room anyway. When I returned to the end of my line, he was gone. I’d heard he was a salesman at Brooks Brothers, so I knew he was in New York, but I certainly didn’t want to run into him.

In August 1968, I auditioned for a new Broadway comedy with music,
Jimmy Shine
by Murray Schisgal, starring (let’s have a big ol’
WOWZIE
right here) Dustin Hoffman! The role was a prostitute visited by the virginal seventeen-year-old Jimmy in a cat-and-mouse scene, culminating in a nose-to-nose confrontation, he down to his skivvies and shirt, she in black bra and panties. She whips open the closet, out bursts her boyfriend, and Jimmy leaps out the window. A memorable, albeit “cameo” scene, with Dustin as the naive kid and me as the jaded thirtysomething crook. (Dustin was actually thirty-one, and I was thirty-four.)

At the audition, I “read” the scene (I had it memorized) for director Donald Driver and the producers. They called me back to read with Dustin. We clicked. I got it! My first Broadway play! One of the best-written little roles I’d ever done. I would also mix with the crowd in the party scenes, singing and dancing in far-out costumes befitting the liberated, psychedelic sixties. Rehearsals began at the theatre we’d actually be playing in, the Brooks Atkinson on West Forty-seventh, which was a boon to the actors and a testament to the faith the producers had in this production. No bleak rehearsal hall with tape on the floor. The actual stage itself! A luxury!

Dustin was red-hot from his movie
The Graduate,
so his fans were legion—particularly adolescent girls, who wanted to eat him with a spoon. He was creative, energetic, and funny, always acting the clown, not at all stuck on himself. Murray Schisgal was still rewriting the script, and some actors gave Driver trouble over suggested changes, but Dustin took it all in stride. He had his character down pat and was undeniably the star of the show. I loved watching him work, but in performance he kept ad-libbing the scene he had with me. He’d stick to the script for a few performances, then start to ad-lib again, so every two weeks or so, I had to request a cleanup rehearsal, which he always attended without complaint. Throughout the years, I’ve watched his talent evolve, and I am so proud to have worked with him.

In the fall of 1968, we took the show out of town to try it out, two weeks in Philadelphia, four in Baltimore. Mother came to New York to be with Mark while I was on the road, and Bill tolerated her absence because he knew this was the biggest break I’d ever had. Schisgal was rewriting every day, changing lines, changing scenes. The costume department changed our party garb almost nightly. I started out in an orange mini with a yellow boa, then everyone was put in men’s white shirts and dark ties for one night, then the whole party switched back to the original outfits—with the addition of a huge orange wig for me. Spare no expense! Full steam ahead!

Our last week in Baltimore, Schisgal took me aside and gave me directions on how he wanted me to play the scene, quite different from what Driver had directed. I tried to make the two irreconcilable viewpoints work for three performances—oh, how I tried!—but the conflict was making me frighteningly insecure. I asked Driver for help, and he hit the ceiling.

“What?”
he exploded. “The
writer
is giving you
direction
?”

Schisgal was thereafter forbidden to speak to the actors about the play. It’s an unwritten rule of the theatre that writers may not direct actors. Chaos will almost always ensue. I went back to Driver’s directions and the scene was funny again. Then the producers fired Driver and brought in another director, then another—but none of them tampered with that scene, thank God. It was money in the bank. When the show returned to New York, we opened to rave reviews and were sold out through the run. Hordes of teenage girls came to see their new idol, who even played a snatch of classical music as he passed by a piano in one scene. Classically trained, dontcha know.

Mother and Bill came to see the play with Mark, bringing me a new Singer sewing machine and a very handsome stand-up thread-and-accoutrements box. (I still use that thread box.) Before the show, I took us all to a Greek restaurant I loved. We ordered all manner of Greek dishes, finishing with American coffee. Bill, who’d been quiet all through dinner, took a sip and commented, “Well, at least the
coffee’s
good.”

He was an Oklahoma meat-and-’taters man and could do quite well without moussaka and spanakopita, thank you. But he and Mother were proud of me. I was in a great show. Mark was happy at his new school. He and Phillip Arndt were still fast friends, trekking often to the Museum of Natural History and Central Park. Life was going splendidly.
But…

Question: Why does there always have to be that
but
?

Answer: Because it’s Life, darlings! Every loaf of bread must have its heel.

The Italian started coming over to visit, and I felt myself being sucked back into my old insecurity and panic. Mother came to New York for Christmas, and to her dismay and mine, The Italian showed up and stayed the whole not-so-jolly evening. Mark delighted in his new Marklin Train cars and other toys and politely accepted the clothes Mother and I gave him. Mr. Italy tried to be cheery, but just having him there dumped a big fat cow patty on our spirits.

Shortly after the holidays, a brutal snowstorm put buses and taxis out of commission for over a week. I had to walk from East Eighty-third and Madison to West Forty-seventh near Eighth, a long haul in snow up past my knees. On matinee days, I slogged home, made Mark’s dinner, and high-stepped back through the white stuff for the evening show, happy as a speckled pup to be on Broadway. I’d have snowshoed downtown from Siberia if I had to. All over town, the few cars with snow tires offered rides. In emergencies, New Yorkers really do come forth.

I
kept urging The Italian again and again to go with me to marriage counseling, but he felt a Real Man wouldn’t be caught dead in therapy. But about the time of the big snow, a Real Man told The Italian that he and his wife had gone to counseling and it had saved their marriage, so Macho Man reluctantly agreed to try it. We met with our counselor, Mandrake Penobscot, who was impartially insightful—brilliant even—picking up on the esoterics of our relationships with our parents and each other. Manny, as he was called by his patients, asked us to include Mark in a session. Mark sat on a stool, stiff as a stone, answering in monosyllables. I’d never seen him like that.

After fourteen sessions, Manny announced, “In all my years of practice, I’ve advised only one couple to divorce. Only one. You are definitely the second. I think you should end the marriage. And I strongly advise each of you to seek individual therapy.” He suggested that The Italian meet with a female therapist, I with a male, since we both needed help dealing with the opposite sex. Manny already had fourteen weeks of background on me, so he offered to take me as his client at a rate I could afford.

One night, Prince Charming picked me up at Penobscot’s office after my session, and by the time we had walked to the corner, we were enmeshed in an argument. He became so angry and irrational, I was frightened when he marched into the subway and onto a northbound train.

“Don’t we need to go south?” I asked meekly.

He didn’t reply. Simply couldn’t admit he was wrong. Stations whizzed past. After a while, we were up in the Bronx, heading for Canada. Finally, when he could no longer ignore it, he wordlessly stomped out the door and we crossed over to the southbound trains.

Getting on the wrong train is no big deal, but his response was insane—as if by force of will alone he could make the whole of New York State rotate like a lazy Susan to prove he hadn’t made a mistake. And I realized I was doing much the same thing. Penobscot had advised me to end the marriage. Did I? Hell, no! I was neurotically resisting that divorce, stuck on a damn train to the North Pole.

And folks, I really wasn’t interested in trying out an Eskimo.

M
y L.A. friend Jered Barclay, the star of
The Crawling Arnold Review,
came to New York to direct
Tonight! In Living Color!
at The Actors’ Playhouse, Off Broadway. It was an evening of two one-acts by the then-unknown A. R. Gurney, and Jered wanted me and the terrific Tim O’Connor to play Betty and Bill in
The Golden Fleece
. The second play,
The David Show,
featured a fabulous cast, including the gorgeous Holland Taylor and F. Murray Abraham, who had started out as a Fruit of the Loom underwear guy and ended up nominated for an Oscar. Not exactly chopped liver. I knew it was a great show, but I had no idea
The Golden Fleece
would prove to be a turning point in my life.

The play is set in a suburban meeting hall, where locals have been invited to hear Betty and Bill’s famous friends, Jason and Medea, tell the inside story of their turbulent marriage, which culminates (big surprise) with Medea slaying their children. A funny but powerful script, and Tim and I played the boots off it. At the opening-night party, I was seated across the table from our producer’s father-in-law.

A guy named Norman Lear.

“Your performance was amazing,” he said. “I hope I’ll be able to hire you someday.”

“Oh, thank you. What are you working on?” I asked, bedazzled.

“A movie called
Cold Turkey
. Then I’m going to Hollywood to get into TV production.”

Cold Turkey
was hilarious, and two years later, in 1971, Lear’s
All in the Family
made its shatteringly successful debut and changed sitcoms forever with its edgy writing, daring subject matter, and fall-down-funny characters.

And bless his heart, Mr. Lear did not forget me.