A Complicated Marriage (45 page)

My cornerstone was EST's weekly writers' workshop. Through one of my new friends, I also started going to a monthly workshop, the Writers Bloc. A large group, it served all genres, from screenwriters to novelists, and was more formal. One signed up in advance to have a reading by group members, many of whom were actor-writers. Criticism was fast and furious—everyone had to have their say, which ranged from gratuitously harsh to insightful—and I learned to take what was useful and toss the rest. I also honed my ear and taste by listening and critiquing the work of others.

Soon, without a whisper of self-doubt, I slipped into thinking of myself as a playwright. To be a playwright in Hollywood sounded like an oxymoron, but there was a plethora of small theaters that presented original work and attracted enthusiastic audiences. Fortuitously, I had taken up the right trade in the right place. In L.A. I could experiment and get my work produced, precisely because it was a movie town and theater was treated as an impoverished, but charming, cousin. In New York, theater was God and the turf inviolable.

Engrossed as I was in my work, I continued to make frequent trips to New York, where I would stay for several weeks. In 1983, on one of these trips, I sealed my commitment to my life in L.A. by selling the apartment at 257 Central Park West. It had gone co-op a few years after Sarah and I moved in, and, to my amazement, we now lucked into a sizable profit. I merged our two Central Park West apartments and, keeping the best of both, took the opportunity to refurbish 275, which was, and still is, a rental. Clem, as usual, barely noticed, except for the wall-to-wall carpeting. He never wore shoes at home, and, as I knew he would,
he luxuriated in the deep-pile softness underfoot. I would continue my regular visits to New York to see Clem and Sarah; the only difference, now I would be staying at 275. Clem was content. I was content. I had tidied up my life.

Well, not quite. There would be one more bit of domestic tidying up when, in 1988, we sold the Norwich house. Clem not only took it in stride; he seemed relieved. I think that increasingly he had spent long periods of time at the house simply because it was there. The last time Clem and I would be at the house together was for Al Velake's funeral. A fitting time to leave. I scattered the fossil rocks around the property to be discovered by the next wide-eyed voyager into the past. I sold the cars and put mementos and the oak furniture from the loft into a storage unit. I found I was still unwilling to relinquish those symbols of my first foray into an independent life. Otherwise, nothing went to New York that wouldn't fit in our rental car, and the rest went to whoever wanted it. No financial bonanza from that sale. We sold it for what we had bought it for. Even after fifteen years, it was still a house too small and too offbeat for most.

In January 1984, I got a call from Billy Hopkins, who was production manager at the Ensemble Studio Theater in New York. The L.A. playwrights had been encouraged to send plays to their Marathon, a highly esteemed and well-attended annual festival of one-act plays. I sent
Fine Line
, the first play I had submitted anywhere. When Billy called, I screamed. He was delighted; so refreshing, he said, after the usual blasé responses he got from most writers. Not that it was a shoo-in, but I had made it to the final cut.

A few weeks later I was on the second floor of the Ensemble, listening to Christine Lahti and Judith Ivey give life to my Doty and Zee as they tried to unravel the age-old dilemma of how to leave a man. It was the first time I had experienced the joy of hearing my words channeled through actors of such sensibility and experience. I still see Lahti casually stroking a scarf she had put on the table—such a simple gesture, but one that brought the bedroom and the furs to life. Billy had done my play proud. Watching were Curt Dempster, the über-meister founder/director of the theater and a committee of judges. Afterward, I was so high I
walked all the way uptown. I stopped at a florist and called Billy for the actors' addresses and enclosed gushy notes. They had changed my life. I knew, somehow I had known from its conception, that
Fine Line
was a winner. And I was right; the play would be produced in the Marathon.

Again, thanks to Billy, I was gifted Harris Yulin to direct and Roxanne Hart and Jill Eikenberry to star. The rehearsals were intense for me as I learned when to battle, when to cave. The designers, the music and sound, the costumes, with Billy masterminding down to the last detail, the Marathon was first-class all the way. The experience surpassed the thrill I had felt as an actor. Now, I had created this piece and was part of the team that was devoting their talent and skills to make
Fine Line
the best it could be. A thrill that would never grow stale.

The opening, the laughter, the absorbed audience; afterward, the long table at the restaurant on the corner of Tenth Avenue and Fifty-second, jammed with my old theater cronies—so like those days, only better. I didn't miss a performance. There were some good reviews, followed by an offer from Samuel French, the primo play publisher, to publish
Fine Line
under its own cover, an honor for a one-act. The play was also selected with two others as the Best of the Marathon, to be performed at the SUNY play festival that summer. I also received a request from CBS to see more of my plays with an eye to TV work. That one I passed on. I had to—I had no “body of work” to show them.

I had gotten off to a remarkable start, from finding a home base at EST/L.A. to having my first two short plays produced. I had known from the first lines I had written that playwriting was right for me. The quick validation was the gravy. What had started as a plan to secure my sense of self while I nurtured my relationship with Russ had now blossomed into a vocation. Who would've thought? And as the plays multiplied, I started mailing them out to regional theaters. I had done my job; now I sent them out into the world to do theirs. Being a playwright, I had all the fun, none of the angst—no auditions, no stewing about whether I was too old or too tall, no having to shave my legs or put on a happy face.

Soon, thanks to another writer friend, Shirl Hendryx, I became a member of a third writer's workshop, the Actors Studio in L.A. It matched its
New York mother ship in intensity and tough standards of the work and criticism. It also perpetuated the cliquey-ness and elitism that ensured its edginess. However, I missed the intimacy and fellowship that was possible in New York. In typical L.A. fashion, everyone drove up alone for a session and drove off alone afterward. There was no Jimmy Ray's or Joe Allen around the corner to hang out in. It was a daunting venue to work in, but once I had sorted out the objective folks from the die-hard misanthropes, I was able to keep my focus on presenting my work. Just as my acting life had snowballed in the sixties, one thing led quickly to the next. Once again, I was feeling that exhilaration of using myself completely.

I was always on the prowl to hitch up with a particular director or nucleus of performers, as so many other playwrights did. I kept thinking,
Maybe this time I will find the perfect mesh of actors and director who not only will hear what I hear in the plays but will astonish me with their own artistic insights
. To that end, I came as close as I would get with Pamela Gordon, who directed a quirky play,
Three at Squam Lake
, about the slippery shifts of power between two men and a woman. It was workshopped twice at the Actors Studio and then staged at the Wilton Theater with Bill Pullman. That perfect mesh was there. At its nadir, there was
Provenance
, so lavishly produced on the large main stage at EST. The set, the skeletal frame of a nineteenth-century Cape Cod beach house, conveyed both beauty and foreboding and illuminated the play perfectly. Sadly, the lead actors, querulous and egocentric, abetted by a limp director, jettisoned the delicate play about love and the fear of change. But oh, that set.

And in between the two I think of
Keepers
, the play that might have been but never was. For me, it was the most achieved of my “musical” plays. The harmonies, the duets, the quartets, the arias, were music to me. It had a highly polished staged reading with Salome Jens and Kevin McCarthy at the Actors Studio. It came close. There followed another reading of
Keepers
at the Skirball Theater, where dream casting came through, almost. Nancy Marchand, set to play the lead as the tyrannical curator of her past and everyone else's, had to drop out two days before
the reading, when her friend with whom she was staying in L.A. died. Always a bridesmaid,
Keepers
, as admired as it was, would be optioned twice but never produced.

Closest to my heart among the productions was
By Sections
, a play for an unlimited number of actresses in eighteen “sections.” It was inspired by a vision I'd had of a group of women, all ages and colors, seated as if on the rim of a half-moon across the stage. The playlets—some monologues, some for two, some for more, some comic, some sad, some strident, some soft—flowed with all the voices of all my women. The director, Dan Hamilton, through lighting and projection, carved out the sections while making the whole cohesive, as he brought the actors to a transcendent place. When it was done in New York, the director chose not to use the ensemble on stage and though the pieces worked on their own, the impact was lost.

By Sections
was a later play, and by then I had accepted that once a play was out in the world, it was a win some–lose some game and each play would have to take its chances. The lesson was hammered home one rainy night when some friends and I went deep into the Valley to see a production of
Fine Line
. By that time, the play had had many incarnations, few of which I had seen. That night I saw a different setting and different opening lines. I had to double-check the program. The young actresses sprinkled the play with
you know
and
like
, dropped lines, and added others. A Valley girl romp. We snuck away, went to a bar next door, and laughed until we cried into our double martinis.

When I had first moved to L.A., I had established a connection with Russ's internist. I went to see him for annual checkups and minor things over the years. In 1986 I had a virulent and persistent bronchial infection, and the doctor suggested I go to the Barlow pulmonary clinic in Pasadena to be evaluated. I was at the clinic all day. First, my history: family health, childhood scarlet fever and severe whooping cough, walking pneumonia, and, of course, smoking history. Then the testing: blood work, X-rays, breathing into tubes and inside space capsules, sitting, standing, running. The result, “mild emphysema.”

As I drove home, I saw myself suffocating as my father had. What had the bastard bequeathed me! Mainly I cursed myself for years of smoking.
I had started in college, stopped during my pregnancies, picked it up again for eight years, quit again for ten years after the hysterectomy, then started again after moving to L.A. I had never had any trouble quitting, but then, almost whimsically, circumstances would shift and lighting up would seem like a fun thing to do.

As I sat stalled in rush hour traffic, I thought of a house on Beacon Hill in Boston in 1952, I a bridesmaid at my ex-roommate Sandy's wedding, twiddling a glass of sherry, wearing a spectacular red velvet gown, and yearning for a cigarette, which was verboten in that house. Sandy's father, Dr. Little, a handsome, authoritative man in tails, stood at the center of the wedding party as we waited for the ceremony to begin. He told us of the research he had recently spearheaded that proved without question the devastating effects of smoking. “Cigarettes kill,” he summed up. “The government knows; it is only a matter of time before the public will know.” I imagined his frustration as the decades passed and the government sat on its hands and the public puffed itself to death. How awful to think that I had heard him, had never forgotten hearing him, but hadn't listened. That day at Barlow, I listened. I never smoked another cigarette. When I got home, Russ held me for a long time. I was scared.

But I had my usual antidote: work. Sick of my own bitching and moaning over the years about inadequate directors—and perhaps feeling a need to take control after my health scare—I decided to take a shot at directing one of my short pieces,
Security System
, at the Actors Studio. Casting it with Richard Behmer, Pamela Gordon, and Barry Stattles, I figured it would be easy for four old Studio pros like us to plumb the depths of the material. We presented the piece and it fell flat. The audience clobbered me, the actors, and the play. Mostly me. That failure gave me new respect for directors. We had all plumbed beautifully, mined glorious nuggets of nuance, but my inattention to the overall shape of the piece and my inability to clearly communicate the play's intention, to either the actors or the audience, had reduced it to shambles. Lesson learned.

I finally accepted that though I had created the characters and endowed them with my personal voices, to expect others to hear them and what lay beneath them shouldn't be necessary. If the frame of the play was solid, it should serve as a vessel for any amount of interpretation and
experimentation. Too often I had underestimated the mystery that is at the heart of theater. How else to explain how a scene can work one night and fail the next? Oh, I still fretted about not having things my way, but unless there was a shipwreck I might avert, more and more, I put my feet up and trusted the mystery.

However, all was not the world of make-believe. Real life stumbled along and sometimes took a fall. By 1988 we had moved once again, this time triggered by the financial lure of cashing in on the real-estate boom. Selling our cozy Broadlawn nest, we moved farther up the hill to Mulholland Drive, to a jerry-built house that was ugly inside and out. But it had a major selling point for us: a back yard with large pool and Jacuzzi, palm trees, masses of bougainvillea, lush vine-covered walls. A tropical paradise. Perhaps we could overlook the small nonfunctional rooms, the low ceilings, the darkness. The place was cold, unwelcoming. Indeed, as we arrived, the overhead entry light exploded.