My First Five Husbands (17 page)

“Look at those pecs!” Lette would mutter under her breath. “Look at that basket!”

During the first week of rehearsals—when the cast and crew romances almost always flourish—Lette started dating Joe, the conductor, and I started feeling some powerful chemistry with The Italian. As he and I were walking back from lunch one day, he said, “I’m waiting to hear if I got cast in
Galileo
at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. I’ll take it if they offer it to me. If not, I’ll stay in
Walter Mitty
.”

“Well. Good luck,” I said, but I was thinking,
Oh, dear God, please let him get
Galileo.
If he stays in our show, I’m sunk
.

The Italian didn’t get
Galileo
. He got me.

The first night we spent together, I discovered something lovely: He smelled wonderful. A delicious, natural fragrance. No deodorant! I thought,
Nobody who smells this sweet can be
all
bad
. And I was right. He wasn’t
all
bad. Early in our relationship, I had my first orgasm
ever,
and they continued from then on. He was damned good in bed: slow, patient, and sweet. Not at all the way he turned out to be while vertical. For FQ, he gets an A. (Husband Quotient would later turn out to be a Z—for zero.) In November, he asked me to move in with him in Little Italy, and like a little idiot, I did—with the understanding that options were still open.

John Hayes wrote that he’d been hired by a Long Island company to make industrial films and was flying his Cessna to New York. It was audacious of him, a rather inexperienced pilot flying cross-country, and I worried until he arrived safe and sound after a week aloft.

“I haven’t stopped caring about you, Rue,” he told me. “Let’s try it again.”

I said, “I’m seeing someone, John. I can go out with you during the week, but I have to reserve weekends for him.”

It had always been my policy never to be sexually involved with two men at the same time, but that policy went out the window. As I compared them, each had qualities I did and didn’t cotton to. I was leaning toward gentle Irish John, but he hated New York, which tipped the scales toward the volatile Italian, who once angrily threw an ashtray at me across the kitchen, which tipped the balance back toward John, who took me for a walk one afternoon and said he’d now decided he could happily live in New York, since I was there. The most important factor was my firm resolve to bring Mark back to live with me. John hadn’t been a friend to Mark or a good father to his own daughters. What would The Italian be like with Mark? Would John drift away from me again? He’d drifted before, and The Italian was the type to stick like wet cement. I needed time to explore both possibilities, but I was given an ultimatum by The Italian as I was leaving to meet John for dinner.

“You’re behaving like a harlot! You should be ashamed!” he bellowed, blocking the door. “You’re not leaving this apartment until you promise to break it off.
Tonight
.”

Backed against the wall, I felt guilty and scared, like a scarlet woman. I tried to get past him. “Promise!
Promise!
”

“I…I promise,” I said meekly. “I’ll tell John I can’t see him anymore.”

Remember, on
The Golden Girls,
how Sophia always said, “Picture this!” and then launched off into some bizarre tale? Well…picture this:

A restaurant. A cold rainy night. John and I at a table for two. John tells me he didn’t have a job offer at all. He flew to New York to propose marriage to me. The man had flown for a week cross-country to propose to me.

Well. Would someone please help me off the floor? You’ll need a shovel.

I had waited four years to hear those words! He wanted to marry me!
And
he wanted to help raise Mark! I stared at him in horror. One hour before, I had sworn to break it off with him. I had
promised
. And I had been brought up never to break a promise. I remember repeating, “I promised, John. I promised.”

“You’re making a terrible mistake, Rue. You’re settling for second best.”

I stammered, “But my word is my bond!” Or some such horseshit.

I actually felt honor-bound to uphold my promise; it was not just an excuse for all those other doubts. I was miserable because I knew John was right. The Italian was not the best man for me. And yet I kept thinking how standoffish John was with his two little girls and the whole rein-loosening thing and that double-cross last time…good God. What
should
I have said? Come on, now. You knew there would be a quiz on this. What are those all important words?

Let me think it over!

But did I say that? Are you kidding?

“I can’t see you anymore,” I told John miserably. Boggles the mind, no?

I’ll never forget that vision of him. All six-four of him, standing under a yellow streetlight in the rain, tears streaming down his face—big six-foot-four tears—as I left him for a relationship I later wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Oh, dumb, dumb, dumb.
Dammit!

Shortly thereafter, I got a letter from Melinda saying she and Sheridan were going to start adoption proceedings unless I got Mark away from Mother, who was spoiling him rotten. She thought he’d be better off with her family. And I actually thought they could do it! Melinda told me later that she’d written that fateful letter merely to startle me into bringing Mark to New York. There in her little Texas house with her husband and children, she had no idea how hard I was struggling to get a foothold, how achingly I missed Mark, and how unprepared I was to support him. But at the time, that terrible letter threw me into a three-alarm swivet. I thought I had to bring Mark to New York.
Now
. Come hell or high water.

So when The Italian proposed (actually, he said, “Do you, um…maybe…want to get married…someday?”), all I could think of was that letter.

“How about next week?” I piped up.

He was somewhat taken aback, but I was desperate to have Mark with me. Maybe it would be possible with a husband, I thought. Round out the old family life, that sort of thing.

Not
a good reason to get married. Neither is having regular orgasms.

Something I hadn’t paid much attention to along the way—distracted as I was by the orgasms and all—was that The Italian had a chronic postnasal drip that caused him to make this…
snort
.

Well, I paid attention to it now. Criminy, did I pay.

One day, we were in a Greenwich Village restaurant and he was doing the snorting thing. Right there in front of people. I looked at the clock on the wall and timed the snorts. One every forty seconds. And I thought,
How am I going to stand this?

That’s 2,110 snorts a day…14,770 snorts a week…770,150 snorts a year.

For as long as we both shall live.

Yee-ikes
. Would somebody please pass the Valium?

CHAPTER TWELVE

E
very now and then, as I lounge in bed eating a lovely breakfast—mango, muffin, black tea—I think of the thousands of breakfasts I have cooked. How, when, and for whom. And that breaks open one particular crystal-clear memory: Making Breakfast for The Italian.

I learned quickly how to crack two eggs without breaking the yellows; splash them lightly with bacon grease till they were beautifully white but still quivery; gingerly turn them with my New Homemaker spatula without disturbing their lovely shape; remove them at precisely the right moment, sliding them oh-so-carefully onto the spanking-clean plate; add two strips of flawlessly sizzled bacon, and—
voilà!
—the final touch: half a tomato hot from the broiler, decorated with a sprig of fresh parsley. And, of course, toast. Tawny brown. The pot of coffee. The pitcher of juice. Every morning.

Except when I made pancakes.

Or waffles.

Or French toast.

Also perfectly done.

On the Egg and Bacon Mornings, if I accidentally broke a yellow, the infraction was never overlooked by my meticulous spouse. To this day, I can hear his quiet pronouncement:

“You broke. The egg.”

This implied that breakfast was now ruined, and I had been irredeemably careless and would probably go to hell. So nowadays, as I nibble at my mini-muffin, I fantasize about slowly upending the plate over his head, and as the broken yellows slide sinuously through his thinning waves and the tomato seeds drip into his ears, I chirp cheerfully, “
Bon appétit,
y’all!”

Each marriage—and each affair—holds particular culinary memories for me. The Italian Episode (and I use “Episode” here much as a doctor treating epilepsy: “Has he had any Episodes lately?”) was noted for its highly regimented breakfasts and for two dishes concocted by His Nibs: Fettuccini Alfredo and kidneys in cream, each of which he prepared twice a year. These infrequent respites from my wifely duties were not given as time off for good behavior, as is the case in any decent penitentiary, but rather came up unexpectedly when he felt the urge to cook. He’d worked as a waiter at a popular Italian restaurant and apparently picked up these two tricks there. (As much as it pains me, I shall exercise restraint and not make a cheap joke here.)

Or maybe he learned them from his mother, one of the most gifted kitchen wizards ever born. She made heavenly pasta from scratch, delectable meats, cakes as sweet as that sweet lady herself, so light they had to be weighted down with rocks. I’d sit at her table and weep with gratitude for the extraordinary taste marvels she set before us. Her husband, The Italian’s dad and role model, would take a bite and sourly remark, “You ruined the meatballs, stupid.”

This while actual tears of bliss ran into my spaghetti!

I am what’s known as an “extreme taster,” meaning I experience a heightened reaction from my taste buds. (We did a taster test in a college zoology class; one of my parents came out “taster,” one tested “extreme taster,” and my sister’s litmus paper tested “cuter than a bug.”) Exquisite tastes move me to tears of rapture the way great art does. In Florence I stood before Michelangelo’s
David
and wept helplessly. It was the only time I’d ever witnessed man-made perfection (not counting Raquel Welch). Of course, this tendency for waterworks gets a little embarrassing, but it’s not a big problem, since truly heavenly tastes come along so rarely. I never worried about disgracing myself over the cuisine at glitzy showbiz banquets. The food at those swanky Hollywood affairs generally falls short of what you’d expect, given both the amount spent and the overblown importance of such events. (In other words,
it sucks
.)

But back to the fettuccini and the kidneys.

The Italian’s fettuccini was superb. Full of cream and butter. As for the kidneys, this was my virgin encounter with that concoction. Never had it before, ate it many times during our marriage, and haven’t tasted it since. Not that it wasn’t good. The man slaved over those smelly kidneys for half an hour, patiently trimming away the stringy white gristle, making them fit to be immersed in the cream and…my God, that must have been fattening! But we were young. It was the sixties. We gobbled bacon and eggs, kidneys in cream sauce, Fettuccini Alfredo. I baked chocolate-chip cookies, peanut butter cookies, sugar cookies, and Mark’s favorite, orange poppyseed cake. We had ice cream for dessert—
Lordy!
How did we stay so svelte? Now I look cross-eyed at 2 percent milk and can’t zip my Levi’s. And cream? Please! I don’t even buy eggs anymore unless I have houseguests, or if I need them for the odd recipe.

Bea Arthur contends that all my recipes are odd. Bea is a super cook, and so was Estelle. As for Betty White and me—our talents lie…
ahem
…elsewhere. (We can tap-dance.)

My father still wanted his fried eggs for breakfast when he was ninety.

“Bill, they’re not good for you,” I said.

He just smiled rakishly and smacked his lips.

T
he Italian and I were married in a brief civil ceremony on a cold spring afternoon in April 1965. We drove up the coast of Maine for a three-day honeymoon. The first evening, we stopped at a little restaurant out at the end of a peninsula. I had fish. What kind of fish, I don’t remember. But definitely fish. Back at the motel, I threw up most of the night. Frankly, I don’t think it was the fish. I think my subconscious was saying, “Kid, there’s something fishy here.”

He insisted we have sex every night. Because he wanted it. For the most part, that was okay, because he was a different person during sex, warm and sweet, not at all like he was while vertical. During our interminable heated arguments, he was utterly
alien
—harsh as barbwire, unyielding as a toothache. He insisted we
not
go to sleep until I agreed with him, whatever the difference of opinion. And not in a “let’s not go to sleep angry” way—it was more like Stockholm syndrome, where a captive is eventually conditioned to admit that black is white, up is down, in is out. This lasted seven years, the longest of my first five marriages. But only because I dug in my heels and doggedly refused to give up. I’d had two divorces and was darned if I’d have another one—ever.
Ever, ever, EVER!

While Mark was finishing out first grade in Ardmore, I played the wife, Linda, opposite Vincent Gardenia’s Willie Loman in
Death of a Salesman
at Moorestown Theater in New Jersey. I was really too young for Linda, but the plum role was too good to resist. With only one week to prepare that complex play, we worked on blocking and our characters’ motivations during rehearsal, then gathered in the lobby afterward, running lines for hours. I came to admire Mr. Gardenia as an actor and a fine person. Vincent was also impressed with me.

“You’d be ideal for summer at the Hampton Playhouse,” he told me, and put in a good word with the owners, Al Christi and John Vari, who hired me for three months, to begin in June. The Italian was hired at a playhouse in Minnesota and was upset that we’d be spending the summer apart.

“That’s showbiz,” I pointed out. “I’m just happy we’re both employed.”

And I was! Happy as a clam. He was as happy as a—oh, how about a piranha?

I loved the Hampton Playhouse! The whole cast lived in a three-story house run by a delightful lady named Maddie. We had one week to prepare each play, which ran for a week while we rehearsed the next one. Demanding, to say the least. One week,
Mary, Mary,
the next,
Ladies’ Night in a Turkish Bath,
then
Tobacco Road
—with real dirt covering the stage, which set off my hay fever something fierce.

The first week, Al and John threw a get-acquainted party for the cast and crew at Maddie’s and, to my utter surprise, The Italian suddenly showed up. He hadn’t liked the Midwestern summer stock company. Disgruntled, he took his suitcase up to my room, I following.

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you. Why don’t you come down and meet everyone?” I cajoled. “Come on. The party’s in full swing. It’ll be fun.”

I introduced him around and got him some food, and everyone welcomed him heartily, full of high spirits, laughing. I was having a swell time kibitzing with my castmates, full of
joie de vivre,
when Husband came over and instructed me to say goodnight.

“Come up to the room with me now.”

“I need to get to know the company,” I said. “Let’s stay a little longer.”

“We’re newly married. You should be with me.
Right now!
”

Crestfallen, I said goodnight to everyone and slunk upstairs. He remained miserable and hard to get along with the rest of the summer. I learned and performed some challenging roles, doing my best not to be distracted by Little Caesar’s dampening presence.

“Come Take a Bite of My Apple” in
Burlesque,
The Hampton Playhouse, 1965.

“We’d like you to come back next summer,” John and Al told me at the end of the season. “We’ll find some parts for your spouse, if that makes your decision easier.”

Boy, did it! Maybe if he were acting, he’d be less of a horse’s patootie. We returned to New York and Mother brought Mark up to start second grade. I had located a good school on East Eighty-second Street, only two blocks from our rent-controlled fifth-floor walk-up on East Eightieth. Mark made a friend right away: Phillip Arndt, a tall, handsome boy who was half Chilean Indian. We moved uptown, and oh, was I glad to get out of The Italian’s gloomy apartment with its black velvet drapes and bathtub in the kitchen! I hoped maybe our married relationship would improve.

Oh, ha ha, and
ha
. Sure.

The apartment on East Eightieth had a mouse-size bathroom, no room for a kitchen table, bedrooms barely big enough for a bed and chest of drawers. I asked Husband if he could build a small kitchen table on hinges to lower and raise from the kitchen wall and a similar piece for Mark’s bedroom on which to attach his Marklin train track, which I’d bought at FAO Schwarz the previous Christmas. To my surprise, Husband built those two tables quite well. I’d had no idea he could do carpentry. We scrounged old furniture from friends and from the street: a sofa, chair, two kitchen chairs, some lamps, two beds, and other sundries.

I found two big trunks on the curb and painted one green and one blue. The blue one functioned as Mark’s toy box. We used the green one as a table in the living room, and in it I kept Mark’s drawings. Unearthly creatures in violent combat. Dinosaurs fighting to the death. I still have his meticulously made flip pads of stories—the kind you flip through to make a “movie” appear—most of which ended violently. Those drawings worried me. They were so full of turmoil. On our little black-and-white TV, Mark watched
Popeye, Mighty Mouse, Bull-winkle
. Heroes fighting evil. Does that tell you something? It told me something.

A clothing budget was out of the question, but one day I ran across an ancient cast-iron Singer sewing machine, which I bought for forty dollars on layaway. Those were the days of minidresses
way
above the knee; simple designs that could be made from two yards of material. I stood outside store windows sketching dresses I liked, then cut patterns from newspaper. I scouted out some fabric for a dollar a yard—linings fifty-nine cents, thread and finishing tape for pennies—and
voilà!
Three new summer dresses for less than four bucks each! All the same design, but various fabrics for a different look. People stopped me on the street to remark on my little white eyelet frock with yellow flowers. That eyelet number was the winner. I wonder if I still have it. My Shirley Temple doll might fit into it, or I could use it for a sleeve. I couldn’t make men’s shirts or pants, but I did whip up a short Japanese kimono for The Italian. He didn’t like it, but I thought it was snazzy and wore it a lot. I kept that thing into the late seventies, which was a lot longer than I kept him!