I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (18 page)

I
n the fifteen years since HUAC had invaded the movie business, the victims of its accusations had become older, sicker, poorer, stressed out of their careers, marriages, and lives. The world had changed. I still couldn’t get off the Blacklist. It seemed like the only people who couldn’t get official sanction were Morris Carnovsky and me.

One day, Max Kampelman called. He had been at lunch with the head of the Committee. The man asked Max to do him a political favor. Max said to him, “I’ll do it if you let Lee Grant go.”

The committee man said “Okay,” and that was it.

The world ends with a whimper, not with a bang. It was 1964. I’d been twenty-four when I was blacklisted. I was now thirty-six.

A couple of days later I received an official letter on government stationery. In the vaguest of terms, it said I was a “good citizen.” And that was that. I sent it to my agent and had offers almost immediately for TV shows in New York.

In those days most TV was still shot in New York. There was a big studio in Queens. And there were many, many decent producers waiting in line to employ me—David Susskind, Herb Brodkin. I did an
episode of
The Doctors and the Nurses
directed by David Brooks, which no one today could get permission to do with his concept. It was about a woman who checks into a hotel and wants to commit suicide. He shot all day long, no breaks, and all night long, so that the character would enter that state of exhaustion and vulnerability. Then I went right into E. G. Marshall’s
The Defenders
. Stu Rosenberg directed that one. It was about a prostitute who sues her client for rape. After that there was a drama starring George C. Scott. I put my salary checks in my bureau drawer, then couldn’t find them. I called my agent, Phyllis Raab.

“Did you send my checks?”

“Yes, two weeks ago.”

“Oh.”

They had piled up amid my underthings and slipped down into the bureau. What a wonderful problem to have.

I
n September of 1964, while we were living on 83rd Street, I was called to do David Janssen’s series
The Fugitive
, which everyone in America tuned in to. It was a big deal for me. It would be my first step into the Hollywood mainstream. All the other TV shows I did came out of New York. I watched an episode that guest-starred an actress friend of mine. She looked awful. Her makeup was thick and overdone. I had been taught makeup by a genius. When I first moved into 83rd Street, my ex-boyfriend Alan filmed me there for about three weeks for an independent movie. I’d wake up in my bedroom, my friend Dick Smith the makeup artist would arrive, I’d move from the bed to the makeup table, then straight out to the crew and the director in the dining room, the living room, or wherever they’d set up, and go to work acting and filming. Not a bad job! And I learned exactly what was right for my face from the master.

Back to
The Fugitive
. I arrived in Hollywood, where I stayed again at the wonderful, sleazy actors’ hotel, the Montecito. I looked out the windows. Across the street a big sign said
BACH APARTMENTS
.
Wow,
I thought.
This must be an artistic area, like the Village in New York, to name your building after Bach.

I went to the set ready to work, and of course went first to the makeup room. A nice man in his fifties showed me to a big chair, like a barbershop chair. It was still dark out. I said to him, “Thanks, but I do my own makeup.”

He stared at me, then left the room. In a minute the director of photography entered and introduced himself. “George does the makeup for everyone here. He does David Janssen’s makeup.”

“I’m sure he’s wonderful,” I said. “I know he’s wonderful. I’ve seen the show, everyone looks great. It’s just that I prefer to do my own makeup.”

“We don’t do that,” the director of photography said. “George does the makeup.”

I was beginning to squirm. I felt guilty and very uncomfortable. I also felt resentful. I wanted to do my own makeup. I had entered into a phobic phase that would never really leave me. How I was lit and how I looked came before the actual work many times and took away from the work I should have been doing. The gift that Stuart Rosenberg gave me on
The Defenders
in concentrating on my face turned out to be a blessing and a curse. I wanted to look like that forever and ever. I remember passing the editing room on
The Defenders
set and seeing this face fill the screen. I stopped in my tracks.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“You!” Stuart answered.

I’ve searched for that miracle ever since. But it was that face (and performance) that was bringing me everything I wanted.

George the makeup man was watching with big eyes, watching the camera guy do his fighting for him. This was the worst possible way to start a job, with the DP against me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s no reflection on George. I don’t know George. I’m used to doing it myself.” The DP gave me a long contemptuous look and left the room with George. I was shaking. I made myself up. There was no one else in the small
makeup room. I went out to the set. George was there. The crew around him. None of them looked at me. The director, Billy Graham, was oblivious. His head was deep into a book about boats, which I was to learn was his passion.

David came on set. He was, well, David Janssen, in the flesh, right in front of me, with a deep brown tan—or #23 Max Factor makeup—groggy from all-night partying, but a pro. He would fall asleep standing up when the camera was on me. My jaw dropped. This was a new world. We shot for about five days, and in all those days no one from the crew would meet my eyes or say hi. The set was frozen to me. At the craft service table, George’s back would be slapped, coffee handed to him. He was loved. I, the actress from New York who did her own makeup, was hated. George’s reproachful eyes followed me. He powdered me when I got shiny. When the DP called, “George, her nose is shiny,” he dutifully crossed the set, watched by the crew, took a long time carefully pressing powder to my face, then slowly walked back to the crew.

At night I would lie on my couch at the Montecito, dreading the morning, trying to think of a way out. I slept on the couch because the Murphy bed scared me. I thought it might slam me back into the wall while I slept, swallow me up like a giant mouth. Finally I came up with a plan.
Why don’t I simply lie?

We had a night shoot before our last day. We were in cold, dark woods. I was walking back and forth to keep myself warm. The DP walked past.

“May I speak to you for a minute?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.

I pulled him off to the side. I had difficulty talking. Tears sprang to my eyes.

“I want you to know something; it’s hard for me to talk about this.”

“Go ahead,” he said.

I took a dramatic breath.

“I was once almost raped by a makeup man.”

Silence.

“My God!” he said.

I envisioned myself fighting off a crazed makeup man, him pushing me down on the big makeup chair, trying to separate my legs, his hand over my mouth, suffocating me, the two of us alone in the makeup trailer.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t want to—”

“Oh, you poor kid . . . No wonder—”

“Please, I don’t want people to know.”

“Oh, sure. Poor kid—why didn’t you say something? Jesus!”

“I couldn’t.”

“Sure. C’mon, get some hot coffee in you, you’re shaking!”

“I’m just cold. I’m okay.”

“No, no. Hank, get some coffee for Lee,” he said, patting my back. Oh, it felt so good being loved again. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? All that night and the next day, men were jumping to help me. Chairs pulled out, food pushed in. Hellos, good-byes, concern all the way around.

Billy, the director, whom I was to work with fondly on many projects, remained oblivious, still immersed with his ship book. David was friendly and funny. There were lots of hugs at the end of the show, especially from the DP and even one from sad George.

When I got back to New York, my agents telephoned. The producers of
The Fugitive
had called.

“They said they know you lied about being raped by a makeup man, and they never want you to work on
The Fugitive
again.”

“Almost raped. There’s a big difference, you know . . .”

•   •   •

A
telegram came the day after. It was drizzling outside. Dinah was composing a song on the piano with a single finger. “Oh my! Sigh, sigh! Nowhere I can play, play, play on this rainy day, day, day. Oh my. Sigh, sigh.” I opened the telegram. It had black letters on white paper, not the usual yellow telegram. It said,
I know you named me—that’s why you’re working.
Signed,
Arnie
.

My mouth started working, but nothing came out. The blow took the air out of me, as that little blond boy had on the
Île de France
when he punched me hard in the stomach when I was five.

I sat down on the chair near the desk, waiting for the buzzing in my head to clear. For this heavy sensation to lift. This fog of something like pain or shock or surprise. Stunned, slack, I fell in on myself.

Arnie didn’t know that at the very least I was a decent person.

How could he not have known me? All those years.

I felt struck to the heart. In limbo. Dinah left the piano and came over to where I was sitting, on a straight chair near a desk. She looked in my face, put her hands on my face. “What’s the matter, Mommy?” I shook my head. I couldn’t speak to comfort her. My throat was closed. She climbed on my lap, so warm and round, and petted my face. “It’s all right, Mommy, it’s all right.”

A
rnie was fifty-one when he died, and our friends focused on me as the widow. Arnie and I had been divorced for a year, but they needed to honor the struggle of all of our lives together. Solly and Fra pushed in the door and told me.

“Arnie had a heart attack. He is dead.”

I thought of him lying cold and alone on a gurney in a hospital hallway. Suddenly my living room filled with his friends. My friends from another life. A nice psychiatrist, whom I didn’t know, must have seen how dazed I was. Old friends coming in the front door like a dream, outside of Fra and Solly, people I hadn’t seen in years. The psychiatrist asked me where my bedroom was, steered me in, and closed the door, talking all the while.

“You’re in shock,” he said as I sat down on the edge of the bed and stared out.

I should run down to the hospital and put a blanket over him, he must be cold,
I thought.
So cold on a gurney in an empty gray hallway.

I was screaming and crying, bawling hot tears sliding into an open mouth, backing up against the pillow on the headboard of the bed,
backing away from what I didn’t want to hear, know, accept. How could Arnie die?

Anger, fear, terrible regret, loss. Arnie, whom I had loved and feared most in my life.

Relief that I wasn’t with him when he had the heart attack because I know it would have been my fault. I would have killed him. I would not have been able to go on.
Thank God,
I thought,
he was with her, whoever she
was, and not me. I was here on 83rd Street.
Arnie had endured so much, too much, and I’d loved him, feared and loved him. Both fill me, now, fear and love. Arnie Manoff . . . and then:
He can’t take Dinah now.

I felt the strangeness and the expectations of old friends filling the apartment, the kindness of them bringing cake, making coffee, imposing the role of wife on me whether I wanted it or not. They took the arrangements out of my hands altogether. I don’t think either the boys or Eva came to my house. The shock, the horror of sudden death swept me away. I was afraid Arnie would punish me; I couldn’t believe his power left that suddenly. I thought I would always be proving to Arnie that I was good enough and smart enough, or even trusted enough.

At the funeral, Dinah, then eight, sat with Eva. I was the mourning wife. I was terrified. I had been pushed alone into the room where Arnie’s body was lying in his coffin. It seemed as though I was looking up at him. He was beautiful, his eyelashes resting on his cheeks. Mouth full, skin tan and smooth. I thought he moved. I ran from the room. I ran.

All that winter as I rode the bus, I would look out the window and see him moving in the crowds on the sidewalk—appear and disappear. I would lean back sharply in my seat so he wouldn’t see me.

T
his was the time, 1964–1965, when Joe Papp succeeded in his vision. The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park was now a reality. Joe Papp. Papirofsky. Joe. Diminutive in size. Handsome. So handsome. Brown hair falling over one eye. Dynamite. He had asked some actors to meet him at Mayor Wagner’s office at City Hall. I was walking down the hall to the last office when I heard Joe’s voice—loud. He was yelling at Mayor Wagner, jumping up and down. He was demanding a theater and a cultural park for the people of New York, and he was literally throwing his weight around, jumping, stomping, punching his fist on the desk, to force the mayor to give it to him. And Joe got it.

In 1964 I finally got to work with him. He would open the season with
Hamlet
; he asked me to read for the following play,
Electra
. I got the part. Joe set me up with a breathing and speech teacher.

Electra
is for a woman what
Hamlet
is for a man. She has lost her father, hates her mother, and longs for her soldier brother to return. It is, of course, Greek tragedy and to me the key to the tragedies of my own life. My training was there for me to use, fully. There wasn’t one line that I had as Electra that I hadn’t written an equivalent of for
myself, that took me deep and deeper into Electra and into myself. We were, in that period, a perfect fit.

I had so much bitterness, rage, and anguish bottled up inside me, from my marriage to Arnie and my loss of the boys to my long battle with the government, the FBI, and other groups I had fought and abhorred for twelve years. Electra was the first part that allowed me to release everything I’d held inside for so long.

The series debut,
Hamlet
, had been televised and sent out to millions of American homes. It was a disaster; it ruined the career of a very good actor, Alfred Ryder, who had a very bad night. (Alfred’s sister, Olive Deering, was famous in those years for her sentiments during her filming of the endless DeMille epic
The Ten Commandments
: “Who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?”)

Electra
was supposed to be televised but wasn’t because of Alfred’s disaster. I was relieved. I knew that the work I did would have compromised me; for me, the camera was an intruder.

In those days, we performed seven days a week. I was exhausted, and the doctor from the first floor on 83rd Street was giving me B
₁₂
shots. I was literally crawling onstage. The designer had built a ramp from the lake in the park to the twenty-foot-high grotto I pushed through to make my entrance. In my mind it was the dungeon of my past Electra was kept in, crawling out to open the gates. “Thou holy light, thou sky that art earth’s canopy” was my Electra, yearning for freedom from the dark, the past, and her bottled-up need to take revenge on those who had submerged her and kept their heels on her neck for so long. Electra was not a charmer; she was primal, that animal part of me bursting to get out.

Once during
Electra
, it was still light at eight at night—or it could have been a matinee in those days—and it started to pour. I wore a heavy, blood-colored dress designed by Theoni Aldredge, and the bottom was soaked through. With the cold rain pouring down, I splashed
around the wet stage, dragged my soaked skirt with my hands. Olympia Dukakis, who played my sister, came on. She stood facing the audience, declaring her lines, while I stood with my back to them, hissing, “Get me off this fucking stage. Tell them to stop the show. It’s raining too hard to move.”

Her eyes widened in alarm, but her lines went on.

“Tell them,” I hissed.

I turned to face the audience. No one had moved, but a sea of newspapers floated over their heads. Troupers. A little thing like the rain wasn’t going to stop Joe’s audience, Joe’s people. I learned my lesson from him and from them.

•   •   •

I
’d reached my apex as an actor in
Electra
. My Method training, the breath and speech work, and my own life collided and exploded. It was as close to my best work and passion as I would ever reach in the theater.

It was also the only time I took the challenge of carrying the play.

Everything depended on me.

Many times since I was offered great roles, real challenges.

I was afraid.

Resistant.

Electra
was the only true risk. If I’d stayed with Joe Papp, I think my talent would have grown and grown. I had no fear with him leading us.

•   •   •

T
here’s a life-string that began the next season at the Public and has taken me to the present, today. It was the summer after
Electra
. I was rehearsing another play for Shakespeare in the Park. It was a wonderful, hot New York day. I was standing onstage, facing Central Park West. I’d become one of the Joe Papp actors. It was a good time. Dinah
was in third grade in a public school a block from our building on West End Avenue. She walked to school. Phyllis Raab called me at rehearsal. She was hysterical.

“I’ve taken a job for you. I’ve signed the contract. Don’t you dare say no. You have a child to support and no money.” Her voice continued to rise. “And don’t you yell at me. You’re leaving for L.A. next week.”

“I can’t. I’m opening
As You Like It
in a week.”

•   •   •

I
left for L.A. The job was
Peyton Place
, the most-watched show in America. I completely fucked over the man I was most grateful to.

Joe Papp didn’t speak to me for years, but I had to go.

Phyllis knew I had no money. I was thirty-four. I felt I had only till forty, six more years, to work in television and film before my age and looks caught up with me. In theater I was accepted. But the theater could never pay the bills. Hollywood was where I had been barred. It was where the blacklist began for my artist friends. I was off the blacklist. Whatever success I might have, there would also be a kind of revenge. For me, for all of us. Actors. Writers. When my character, Stella Chernak, was introduced,
Peyton Place
was on television three nights a week. Three new stories a week. Mia Farrow, Ryan O’Neal, Barbara Parkins, Dorothy Malone. They were gods and goddesses and members of the audience’s family.

Phyllis was right. She grabbed it, grabbed me, and threw me right into the big world, big exposure, and for me, big, steady money. Getting back at the blacklist. Showing them took over my life.

•   •   •

I
don’t know what good angel led me to the great Pool House I rented in the Malibu Colony. The Colony was a gated, exclusive community, separated from the Pacific Coast Highway by a wall. A Bank of
America was just over the Colony wall, its sign reflected in my pool. That first day I threw myself, clothes and all, into the watery Bank of America, splashed the
B
, kicked the
A
, lay back on the whole damn thing and looked up at the blue, blue California sky. Dinah and I were not only safe; this was fun, freedom—a new world.

The New York Times
printed a letter from Robert Brustein, who at the time was the dean of the Yale Drama School. I’d been asked to do a piece in the Entertainment section about transitioning to L.A. I’d written what I’ve written here about Malibu. The dean called me a sellout; he was in a fury against those of us whom he accused of abandoning the theater. It was so gloves-off academia, so far from the reality of an actor’s life that it made me smile. Ah, yes—a sellout at last!

Three TV shows in New York, one in London. An independent movie filmed in my apartment, summer in Central Park doing
Electra
with Joe Papp, and then suddenly a magic ride that spun out of control and landed me on
Peyton Place
. There must be some mistake. The heavy past I’d been carrying seemed to be slipping away. Now, hand in hand with twenty-five-year-old Joey, I was the youngest midthirties woman in Malibu. Old paranoia, caution, disbelief, clutched me—was I really getting away with this? But it dissolved into sheer, blind bliss. I was safe.

I ran on the beach, arms out, and ran and ran until I ran myself out. Hands on knees, panting, my feet in the ocean—this was a miracle.

•   •   •

M
y first time on the set of
Peyton Place
was a night shoot. It was with Don Quine, the actor who played my troublemaker brother, Joe. The scene went fast—everything went fast, they had a half-hour show to film. They had built a new set on the Twentieth Century lot. A
waterfront—with water. The Chernak family’s home base, on the wrong side of town.

When I watched the show, my name wasn’t listed in the credits. I called my agent at William Morris and asked for an appointment with Paul Monash, the show producer.

I went into Paul’s office by myself. Just the two of us. He was a good guy or he wouldn’t have hired me. I knew that. I asked him why my name wasn’t listed with the rest of the cast at the end of the show. Paul said he was going to ease it in; he was waiting to see if there was a reaction to casting me after the blacklist.

I told him, “If my name’s not listed with the other actors, I won’t work. Replace me. I’ve fought too hard to use my name. I want to be listed with the other actors. Be brave and take a chance. Audiences don’t look at credits, anyway.”

He understood. From then on, my name was there with the other actors’.

The other thing I needed to raise with him was how I looked on-screen. This was an issue that would both free me and cripple me as an actress in the years to come. I looked terrible in the waterfront scene. I knew I wouldn’t work in Hollywood if I didn’t look good, and I was up against great natural young beauties like Mia Farrow and Barbara Parkins.

“The waterfront set was lit,” I told Paul, “but not me, certainly not with the care that’s taken with the other women on the show.”

Dorothy Malone, who was older, was not easy to light, but great care was taken. He understood this was a practical question. I had a new career to protect, and looking beautiful was a simple employment issue. Nobody on TV or watching TV cared about your quality as an actress or your talent. Talent was my secret weapon. But to survive in Hollywood, I had to physically fit the town’s requirements for a young
woman. I had to be pretty, and I had to be cute and funny on set. No trouble at all. I understood that. I was fortunate. Ted Post, from my Actors Studio days, was one of three directors, and I worked with a DP who surpassed all dreams I might have had. He knew about lights I’d never even heard of. A master.

I loved, loved my job. I was the only bad-girl character, so I reaped the cream of the drama three days a week. My character’s father was sick and dying, my brother was in trouble all the time; now he was fighting with Ryan O’Neal. I was having a secret on-screen romance with the doctor, Ed Nelson. Omigod! I was having such a good time and got to cry on camera at least once a week.

•   •   •

W
hile I was on
Peyton Place
, Oscar Levant started calling me. Joey handed me the phone one afternoon. “It’s Oscar Levant,” he hissed.

“Really?”

So began a long-term phone affair between Oscar and Stella Chernak from
Peyton Place
. Oscar would interrupt himself in the middle of his monologue, hearing his wife’s footsteps. “Uh-oh, June’s coming,” he’d rasp, and quickly hang up.

“I want to meet June,” I interrupted on one of those calls, though I knew the fun of it for him was cheating with Stella.

I loved his calls.

“Listen to this, listen to this,” and he’d tell me hoarsely about bad reviews of plays that opened on Broadway a half a century ago, like Judith Anderson’s terrible reviews for
Hamlet
and Sarah Bernhardt’s reviews as a one-legged man—all about women playing men. He’d chuckle over each bad review as if the plays had opened on Broadway the night before.

I felt privileged sitting on the floor of the sun-drenched living
room. Hidden behind a big yellow plaid armchair, I would sink to the thick carpet and listen to bits and pieces of whatever was on his curious mind. I would listen sometimes for an hour before Oscar hurriedly hung up as he heard his wife’s footsteps.

After we’d moved to the Red House I insisted that Oscar visit with June. So the wife and the faux mistress hugged as co-conspirators. Oscar’s phone affair ended, and June invited Joey and me to dinner at their house in Beverly Hills.

To me, Oscar was a real celebrity—he was George Gershwin’s best friend, for God’s sake. I heard him play “Rhapsody in Blue” in an open-air amphitheater one warm New York summer when I was thirteen, my freshman year at Music & Art. There are pieces of music that dig into your soul when you’re a teenager. “Rhapsody” was music to faint by—romance, loss, spring rain on pavement, longing. And here now was the artist who awakened all that in me. Oscar Levant, my new friend.

We were introduced to Oscar’s longtime friend Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia Records, and his beautiful wife, the ballerina Vera Zorina.

Someone, Vera Zorina maybe, said, “Play for us, Oscar.”

“No, no,” he said. “The piano isn’t tuned,” mumble, mumble. “The Steinway people spy on me.”

“Oh please, Oscar,” I pleaded, “please, please play Chopin, play Chopin for us.” Right out of some bad MGM movie. I was his muse, Hepburn-like, leading the fading artist back to his glory.

We all moved to the music room. The others sat around while I, center stage, stood by the piano, encouraging him with my smile.

Oscar plunged into Chopin fiercely, attacking the piano, his face flushed with music and focus. His hand hit dead keys.

Half of the keys didn’t work.

Goddard moved forward in his chair, puzzled and concerned.

The finale’s powerful chords were punctuated by farts escaping with each effort; with each passionate chord Oscar rose from the piano bench accompanied by farts, whilst I, the muse, stood by him at the piano, my smile frozen on my face.

Everyone was quiet as I stole to a chair and sat.