My First Five Husbands (14 page)

We arrived in Tulsa, and John came into my room the next day.

“They fired me,” he said. “I have to go back to L.A.”

“
Wh-what?
” Shaken and dismayed, I stood there gaping at him.

Then he laughed. “I was only joking, Rue!”

I slapped him. The one and only time I ever slapped anyone. It just flew out of me.

“That. Was not. Funny,” I told him, and he quickly apologized. I consider myself to have a pretty darn good sense of humor, but after the wringer I’d been put through in the last year?

I was in no mood.

Mark had grown by leaps and bounds and was now talking a blue streak. We had a wonderful Christmas together. Another New Year. Now it was 1961, and I was still too woefully short of funds to rent my own place and pay a full-time sitter. John spent Christmas in New York, then dropped by Ardmore with his mother, Kate—a jolly, outgoing Hell’s Kitchen character with a thick New York Irish accent.

John had persuaded Kate to come with him to California, and they offered to share a house with me. But not with Mark. That was my big problem with John. He had two little girls who lived with their mother, and when they visited him, he wasn’t very fatherly. He had a lot of issues from his childhood. Kate had farmed him out to his uncle and grandmother when he was a kid, and at seventeen he’d joined the Navy. When he returned, Kate pointed out a place across the street from her apartment and said, “Why don’t you go see what they’re doing? They seem to be having fun.” It was Irwin Piscator’s acting workshop. John checked it out and hooked up with Ben Gazzara, Tony Franciosa, Shelley Winters, Harry Guardino, and that bunch. He played Cheech on the road in
A Hat Full of Rain,
then a small role of a cop in the Broadway production of
West Side Story,
during which time backstage he wrote his movie
The Kiss
.

I loved John but couldn’t commit to any kind of future with him. If he didn’t want Mark, he couldn’t have me. But I wasn’t financially able to get to New York with Mark, and I sure as hell wasn’t staying in Ardmore. So what to do? After much soul-wringing, I decided to go where I could most likely get work, leaving Mark with Mother.

John, Kate, and I set up housekeeping in a large ranch house in North Hollywood, and I hooked up the latest of my multitudinous waitress jobs. But Kate hated California. She missed her home in Hell’s Kitchen, with the loo in the hallway and boisterous neighbors to gossip with. After four months of too much sunshine, she gave me her recipe for eggplant lasagna and fled back to Manhattan. John and I finished the six-month lease without her, then moved to a little cottage in Beverly Glen Canyon. There was an unheated bedroom built on out back, which we rented for $25 a month to my dear college friend, J. Martene Pettypool. Remember the guy who lost his shoe at
Così fan tutte
? He was now an escrow real estate officer in Los Angeles. (Where else would you find a one-shoed, piano-playing escrow real estate officer?)

That year I waitressed at four different places, and I don’t know which I hated the most. I hated them all the most. One was a busy restaurant in North Hollywood from which I got fired after working one lunch. “Lack of experience,” the man said. I felt like a fool in that uniform and hairnet, anyway, and I looked like Shelley Winters in
A Place in the Sun
. Next I worked at Chez Paulette, a coffeehouse on Sunset Strip. Max, the owner, played recorded Israeli folk music and hired only actresses to wait tables. The girl I replaced—Sally Keller-man, as I recall—had just gotten a movie role. Everyone in the place was very cool. Hollywood cool. Movieland cool. Max combed his hair like Napoleon and strode around with one hand tucked inside his vest—I swear to God! His mother, Paulette, a volatile Hungarian, was the chef. Once she dropped a fish entrée on the floor, picked it up, angrily slapped it back on the plate, and handed it to me to serve.

While waiting tables at Chez Paulette, I met Mervyn Nelson, a bright, funny New Yorker who had put together revues in the Big Apple and founded Theatre East, an actors’ workshop, in Hollywood. He invited me to join, which I eagerly did. We presented scenes for other members to critique—strictly for our growth and experience as actors, no public audience allowed. It was a great place to keep my acting chops up, and Mervyn and I quickly became fast friends.

One night, J. Martene Pettypool came into Chez Paulette with a friend and stayed to closing. During the course of the evening, they ordered about twelve beers but he whispered to me to charge him only for nine, and I nervously did. Max fired me the next day, which I felt only appropriate. I was embarrassed for cheating but didn’t mind losing the job. Paulette’s patrons were so terribly cool they followed through with minuscule tips. I looked for a bigger, busier place and was hired at the Largo, a huge, popular strip joint on Sunset.

Down, boys—I was hired as a cocktail waitress.

We all had to wear fishnet stockings, dangling earrings, and a strapless leotard with a plunging neckline—as if I had much to plunge for. After four months of racing between the dining room and kitchen in high-heeled stiletto pumps on concrete floors, my feet felt like a six-toed cat with hangnails. I never really learned the difference between a Manhattan and a pink lady, and I loathed the butt-pinching, whiskey sour–swilling atmosphere of the strip house. The patrons weren’t supposed to fondle us cocktail waitresses, but it was an unending battle.

All the while, I ached for Mark and for a family life. John and I were together most of the time, but he never said he loved me. He kept himself conveniently unavailable, blaming his estranged wife for refusing to begin divorce proceedings. Whenever I saw how distant he was with his little girls, I was sad for them. And not a little heartsick for myself.

H
aving been honorably discharged from the army, Norm was now living beneath a club on Sunset Boulevard. And I mean,
beneath
it. In a crawl space about five feet high, with a mattress to sleep on, books stacked harum-scarum all over the dirt floor. Once when Mark was visiting, I took him there and they were thrilled to see each other.

“Would you like to live with Norman again?” I asked Mark on the way home.

He said, “Oh, no, Little Mama. His place is too wrecked up.”

Norm wanted us to get back together. We were still married, after all, and he was great with Mark.

“Quit that job at the Largo,” he said to me. “I can’t stand to see you demeaning yourself.”

Boy, no need to preach to this choir!

I boomeranged between sexy, masculine John and intellectual, loving Norm—back and forth like a loony bird. But the deciding factor was all too clear. John said that if I brought Mark to live with me, he’d move out. So be it. Mark needed me, and I needed him. And I couldn’t do it alone. John was out. Norm was in.

“But this is my last attempt,” Norm made it clear. “No more getting jerked around. If it doesn’t work this time, that’s it.”

I quit the Largo job and went home to soak my feet, then to Ardmore to get Mark. Norm left his “wrecked-up” crawl space and, just before New Year’s 1962, he moved in and John moved out. Our friend J. Martene Pettypool was still renting the unheated spare room out back. Mark and I had a fine time racing around with Tiki, his curly-haired puppy, taking him on excursions to the nearby park, away from the heavy traffic that flowed through the San Fernando Valley, and to a larger park in Beverly Hills, where we flew kites. Or tried to. One day as I was running along in shorts, trying to get the kite to catch the air, a passing male motorist who was watching me appreciatively cruised headlong into a tree.

Norm didn’t take part in these trips to the parks. He slept every day until after four, when the sun was going down behind the mountains of Beverly Glen. For the first few weeks, he had a job in a Westwood bookstore, but he overslept so many times, he was fired. His father, Kibe, wrote to him, saying that just as fathers in the old days gave their firstborn sons farms when they got married, he was sending Norm a hundred dollars a month until he got on his feet. It was a big help, but not enough to pay rent, utilities and phone, gasoline, and buy groceries. Norm halfheartedly looked for work, but sleeping past four limited his success.

It was lonely for me having no adult to talk to all day. Mark was a great kid, but he was just past three and I grew very hungry for adult conversation. Evenings, on the other hand, were great fun, with Mark and Norman drawing, and J. and I playing double solitaire, a lightning-fast game at which J. was a whiz. Sometimes we all played “I Doubt It”—a card game in which each player proclaims the winning cards he’s holding. If the other players think he’s lying, they say, “I Doubt It!”

But Norm—ever the man of integrity—always lost. Every time he tried to lie, he unconsciously brushed his hair back with his hand.

I liked that about him.

CHAPTER TEN

M
ark astonished me with his vocabulary, his perception, his beauty, his…
everything
. I was happy beyond belief to have him with me again and did my best to keep up with his unbridled energy. The fence around our backyard was made of redwood planks, spaced just right for his small feet to climb up. I warned him repeatedly not to go too high and came running from the kitchen a few times to grab him just before he toppled over. I wasn’t big on discipline or “tough love,” but one day I saw him going up and thought,
I’ll let him learn from experience
. Sure enough, he went ass over teakettle and started howling. I went around to the sidewalk and rescued him, scared but unhurt.

“Li’l Mama,” he said to me, “dat wan’t fun.” And he never did it again.

Life and gravity have a way of teaching us what we need to know, and in those years, I scaled a few forbidden fences and took a few hard falls myself. And it wan’t fun.

Mervyn Nelson was directing
The Crawling Arnold Revue
—Jules Pfeiffer’s one-act, followed by a musical revue—at a large Hollywood theatre, and I asked if I could try out. He had no inkling I could sing or dance but reluctantly agreed to let me come make a fool of myself. Well, I blew his ears off, if I do say so, and he cast me as Miss Sympathy, a social worker hired by snooty parents to cure their maladjusted son, Arnold, who comes home from work every day, puts down his briefcase, falls to all fours, and starts crawling. Miss Sympathy opts to crawl along with him, and of course, love blossoms. The second half of the show featured songs and sketches from the famous New York club Upstairs at the Downstairs, several numbers by the very clever Portia Nelson. A great show with two extra perks: I got to join the stage actors union, Actors’ Equity Association, which was a big deal, and I lost seven pounds just from dancing! The costumer put Miss Sympathy in a beautiful blue silk frock—size six! I was so small, my head looked like a pumpkin on a stalk. But stunning! On the downside, both I and Jered Barclay, who was playing Arnold, got water on the knee from crawling and had to wear knee pads.

Many days I took Mark to rehearsal because Norm was still sleeping. Mark sat in the wings on a high stool, watching the proceedings, until our lunch break, when I’d take him home to Norm, who would watch him until I came home at six. I was earning enough to keep the household functioning and having more fun than I’d had in years. We opened with high hopes for the show. The next morning, a review in the
L.A. Times
began: “Intimations of disaster played like summer lightning around last night’s opening of
The Crawling Arnold Review,
as the curtain was delayed twenty, then thirty, then almost forty minutes.”

Alas, I’ve forgotten why we were so late with the curtain. Some last-minute trouble. And Hollywood wasn’t ready for such an offbeat evening. A short play followed by a revue? What was
this
? Neither fish nor fowl. We ran only a few weeks and then I was out of a job again. But hey, I was a size six! For a while. My next job was another waitressing gig at Wil Wright’s Ice Cream Parlor. Forty flavors. Twenty toppings. Two little macaroons with each order. One dollar an hour plus tips and all the ice cream I could eat. I sampled every variation of sundae possible, my favorite being black walnut with raspberry topping. After two weeks, I advanced from a size six red-and-white-striped Wil Wright’s pinafore to a size eight. Then to a size ten. Then a twelve. I was heading for a size thirteen when I quit. The tips weren’t good enough and the ice cream was
too
good. One night, I was the only waitress serving a private birthday party with twenty mothers and their children that lasted over two hours. The bill was over two hundred dollars, and they didn’t leave a tip. Not a red cent! Now, that can hurt a hardworking waitress’s feelings. Make her feel bad. Make her cry. Make her want to dump them in the cream vat.

I played the mother of the drowned boy in
The Bad Seed,
for which I received a glowing review saying I had a range that “covered a gamut of emotions from pleading to crowing” or something edifying like that. Then I played a tipsy wife in another John Hayes and Paul Lewis film,
The Grass Eater,
and then I played Poochie, a deranged girl who lives in a junkyard, prostituted by the yard’s owner, who sends men to her little wreck of a trailer.

“Why not?” she says when asked to service them. “It only takes five minutes.”

At last, I was no longer playing a waitress. I was playing a crazy whore! Hurrah!

John cast Norman as a lost soul who also lives in the wrecking yard, and he had several difficult, excellently acted scenes. This strange independent film is now called
Five Minutes to Love,
and
Walk the Angry Beach
is now called
Hollywood after Dark
. They can both be found on Netflix.com and in Hollywood at Sinister Cinema, along with
Angel’s Flight
—the film noir performance I’m most proud of—which is often included in those wonderfully gritty film noir retrospectives.

A
nd speaking of things getting gritty…

Norman had altogether stopped bathing, brushing his teeth, and shampooing his hair. I was baffled by this. He’d always been a slob, but this was way beyond normal slovenliness. We’d had sex exactly twice since getting back together, and now I couldn’t stand to be in the same bed with him. He slept in the living room, leaving a brown smudge on the arm of the sofa. That man went eight months without bathing, shampooing, or brushing his teeth! J. Martene Pettypool moved out, unable to deal with the inescapable odor. An actor I was working with at Theatre East dropped out of our scene when he learned I was married to “Pig Pen.”

“Norm, why are you doing this?” I asked. “Why would you go out of your way to make yourself so physically repulsive?”

“I want to find out who values me for my inner self,” he said, “no matter what my exterior is like.”

Well, I valued him for his inner self, but who could get close to it, for God’s sake?

“What is it you want?” I asked. “Do you need to go off by yourself for a while?”

“I don’t know,” he told me, his eyes dull and bleak. “I can’t think straight.”

Now, there’s a news flash. Clearly, he was suffering some sort of breakdown and our marriage was circling the drain again. It broke my heart to see him with Mark, who accepted him inside and out. During those difficult months, Norman created a marvelous cartoon painting on a huge piece of hardboard, an extravaganza of nursery-rhyme characters, and Mark adored it. I wish I could say I still have it, but it was lost in one of my innumerable moves.

John Hayes and I had been scrupulous about keeping our relationship on the set strictly professional, but desperate for help, I asked him to have dinner at our house one night. Norm was fidgety and sullen through the meal, then left the table and disappeared somewhere in the house. I put Mark to bed and sat at the table with John, feeling completely despondent.

“I’ve missed you,” he said, and it took my breath away to hear it.

“I’ve missed you, too, John.”

“Honey,” he said, “this situation is sick. I want you and Mark to come back with me.”

“And Mark?”

“Yes. And soon. Will you?”

“Yes.” I nodded, but it tore my heart in two to think about telling Norman.

When I did tell Norman, he tightly said, “I knew it was only a matter of time. Do what you want, but I’m through. You’ll never suck me in again.”

I mentioned getting a divorce, but Norman didn’t see any reason for that.

“Why bother?” he said. “I’m not going to get married again.”

But I wasn’t comfortable leaving it like that. I contacted Judge Caldwell again, and because Norman and I had actually gotten married a month before my divorce from Tom was final, he was able to make it an annulment. As Norman carried a box down the stone walk, moving out, John was coming up the walk, on his way in. They exchanged a curt nod.

“Good luck!” Norm muttered bitterly.

Norman made his exit from my life for a while, but you can pick up his story in Tom Wolfe’s book
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
. He joined up with Ken Kesey and the chemically adventurous Merry Pranksters. In fact, Norman drew that beautiful, iconic “Can you pass the Acid Test?” poster (though he seldom receives credit for having created it), which is still seen in college dorm rooms, head shops, and tattoo parlors.

“Norman, zonked, sitting on the floor, is half frightened, half ecstatic…,” wrote Wolf. “The Prankster band started the strange Chinese cacophony of its own, with Gretch wailing on the new electric organ. Norman got up and danced, it being that time.”

Wait a minute…
Norman
? Got up and
danced
?

When I next saw Norm, years later, he told me he went on fifty LSD trips—forty-nine delicious and one really horrific, after which he quit. But for him, it was apparently a trip worth taking. He’d become patient and tranquil. And clean. He’d learned to value himself, inside and out.

“
K
eep your eyes on the highway!” John shouted. “Just in case we have to make a crash landing!”

He had taken flying lessons at Van Nuys Airport, gotten his license, and bought a little Cessna, but he was not a very confident pilot. The same dynamic held true for our relationship, as it turned out. To him, “back with me” meant Mark and I living a block away in a little unfurnished apartment at the rear of a two-story house. This felt like a double-cross to me. I slept on a mattress in the living room and put Mark in the bedroom in an actual bed, with a phonograph beside it, so he could play his favorite record,
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm,
while falling asleep. I went back to Wil Wright’s, shuffling babysitters. The tips were still spare, but I ix-nayed the ice cream and got down to a size ten. Then the people in the front house offered me a waitress job at their coffee shop on Hollywood Boulevard. Whenever I returned from a day off, Fran, the short-order cook, would remark, “Oh, kid, you shoulda been here yesterday. We were busier’n catshit!”

Oh, baby, I was prancin’ in high cotton!

I kept that job a few months, until Mark came down with chicken pox, and the doctor quarantined us for a week. The couple fired me! Astonished, I scrambled for another job, which was several desperate weeks in materializing. (And would you believe it? Six years later, when I was on Broadway in a play with Dustin Hoffman, this couple came backstage to see me, sweet as pie, and like a dope I was nice to them, but I was thinking,
A pox on thee, you putzes!
)

I found a position setting type for a small newspaper, putting together articles claiming that the rabble-rousing Abraham Lincoln was part Negro and General Grant was a Jew who’d ruined the South. Desperate as I was, I refused to aid and abet these reactionary fools, so I answered an ad from Upjohn Pharmaceuticals looking for a “Private Secretary to the Regional Manager. Must type and take shorthand.” Well, I’d never studied shorthand, but I convinced the boss I could write longhand really fast. And boy, did I learn to write fast. I kept that job eleven months, earning $95 a week but barely escaping being bored into stupefaction.