My First Five Husbands (6 page)

E
very life includes a cast of thousands. Some are principal players, others have walk-on roles, and extras are always coming and going in the background. Theatre may seem strange to those who’ve never been backstage. For one thing, theatre people know that “theatre” is the art of actors on stage, and “theater” is the place where you go to see a movie and hopefully get kissed between previews. As in real life, you get hams and clowns, comedy and tragedy, seasonal relationships that end all too soon but are no less sweet to remember. In theatre, we work in an intense group dynamic for the run of the show, then say “Ta-ta!” Do we weep at the parting? I certainly do! But we add some people to our permanent repertory company. In my case, the journey is of paramount importance, a powerful, unbreakable trip, a golden lifeline, if I may wax melodramatic. And I don’t allow the truly important people to get away. Friends are crucially important to me in theatre and in life.

Every year, summer stock theatre companies spring up in small town and country settings, rehearsing and performing shows that run in tight rotation from June through August. Thousands of young actors apply, and the summer after my sophomore year in college, I landed my first summer stock job with the Jatoma Players, a little company in Alpena, Michigan. There I met dear, fascinating Norman Hartweg, who became a major player in my life. Norman had a whale of a crush on fifteen-year-old Melinda, who came with Mother on vacation and effortlessly threw all the boys into a dither. Unlike me, Melinda did go through a rebellious stage, sneaking out and doing all manner of things I never would have dared. Gorgeous, self-assured, and sex on wheels, she proceeded to break Norm’s heart. I nursed him through his misery, doing eight plays in nine weeks, including two with dancing, which I choreographed and taught to the cast, all for the magnificent sum of $50 a week.

All summer long, I exchanged frequent letters with my college sweetheart, Bill Bennett, a tall, good-looking engineering major who was both brainy and musically inclined, with big brown eyes and a wonderfully quirky sense of humor. I was overboard about him and foaming at the mouth to see him my first night back at school. He pulled up in front of my rooming house, and I flew out to jump into his car.

“Eddi-Rue,” he said, “my mother says I shouldn’t see you anymore. You want to be an actress. She says you’re a dreamer. So I’m afraid this is it. I’m sorry.”

Heartbroken, I stepped out of his car into a deep, dark hole. That old childhood panic gripped me for weeks, subsiding only during play rehearsals. I threw myself into classes and theatre activities, but I eventually came down with bronchial pneumonia and became so ill my landlady called Mother, who came the next morning. I confided in her for the first time about the panic that had plagued me since I was eight. She took me to an M.D., who did nothing, but then she took me to a pet shop and bought me a parakeet. Caring for that little budgie and having another living creature with me in the dark brought me enormous comfort, and in a few weeks I was well again.

As an amusing footnote to Bill Bennett’s truncated role in my passion play: Years later, his younger sister went off to New York to become an actress. Mrs. B must have shit a brick.

Meanwhile, Norman and I wrote voluminous, witty (we thought) letters back and forth over the next year. He was the smartest person I’d ever met, and a wonderful writer. Mother, Melinda, and I went to the Jatoma Players reunion in Ann Arbor in February of 1955 and stayed with the Hartweg family at their comfortable, welcoming home. I adored the intelligent, affectionate Hartwegs and instantly wanted to be one of them. We saw everyone from the Jatoma Players and filmed much of our visit with Mother’s Super 8 camera.

One night, after everyone had gone to bed, I found Norm standing in the corner of the dark living room, the glow of his cigarette marking his presence, obviously creating a dramatic moment right out of a 1940s movie. Playing my assigned role, Lana Turner or perhaps Ingrid Bergman, I walked over to him, and he, in the role of Stewart Granger or perhaps Humphrey Bogart, took me in his arms and kissed me. Then we said goodnight and went to our separate bedrooms. This was our first awkward attempt to move our friendship into the romantic arena.

I spent the following summer at the Perry-Mansfield Dance-Drama Camp in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, with Mother, Melinda, and good ol’ Skipper Edelen, along for the ride, and late in the season, Norman showed up to round out the motley crew. Skipper got a job washing dishes in a restaurant, but after a few days of dirty plates, he announced, “I can’t deal with vulgar tradesmen.” He got a far more prestigious job delivering clothes hangers for a cleaner’s. Norm just hung out. Melinda, her hair bleached platinum blond, kept herself busy vamping a troupe of love-blinded swains.

The Colorado camp’s
marvelous
modern dance teacher, Harriet Ann Gray from Hunter College in New York, offered me a full dance scholarship with an offer to join her professional dance troupe after graduation. I had also been offered a full scholarship in the German Department at TU. If I took the latter, I’d get to play all the leads in the plays, since I’d be a senior. But if I took the dance scholarship, I’d become a professional modern dancer. I agonized over the decision for days. Am I a dancer who can act or an actress who can dance? I wanted to express myself with my voice as well as my body, so I decided to return to TU and head toward a theatrical career.

My freshman year at TU, I entered Varsity Nite with five fellow Kappa Alpha Theta apprentices in a little dance. Ordinary stuff. My sophomore year, I codirected the entire program. My junior year, I conceived a modern dance piece I intended to call “Three Embryos in Search of a Womb,” but Mother wouldn’t hear of it, so the piece became “Three Eggs in Search of a Beater,” danced and sung by a funny character actress named Mary Ann Cooper, a big, dreamy blonde, Carol Carter, and me—three barefooted nymphs in pink, yellow, and lavender leotards with white tulle streamers. My senior year, I entered “Revelations of the Female Subconscious,” a musical examination of five different types of female, and what they do to get a man, for which I wrote the words and music, accompanied by my dear friend J. Martene Pettypool. Carol, Mary Ann, and I also did “Sur la Plage,” a number from the Broadway hit
The Boy Friend
. We won lovely gold cups for Best Individual and Best Sorority, and if I’d had one more year to enter, we could have retired the cups.

In the fall, Norman transferred to TU for our senior year, rooming with Skipper until Skipper’s fastidiousness and Norm’s sloppiness drove them both crazy. The Odd Couple, 1955. Norman and I played the leads in most of the plays, including Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. We spent a lot of time together and were terribly fond of each other, but we made no more attempts to ignite a fire that just didn’t seem to have the proper matches. Something essential was missing.

“I’m just not in love with Norman. There’s no sexual thing there,” I told a girlfriend. “Maybe when I’m forty, and that sex stuff is all behind me, maybe then I can marry him.” And hey, folks, I truly believed that! Forty seemed
exceedingly
old and awfully far away.

Meanwhile, Marino Grimaldi, a handsome, intelligent grad student from Massachusetts, transferred to our theatre department and instantly took a shine to me. He played piano, sang, cooked, and was unfailingly cheerful. We cut up and wrassled like two kids. I hadn’t dated anyone since Bill Bennett took a powder, but Marino was so jolly and uncomplicated. And so
persistent
. He took me dancing and camping, and I took him to visit Ardmore, where everyone loved him. One night, he drove me out to Swan Lake in Tulsa. The moon was out. There was a balmy spring breeze. Marino, looking utterly heartstruck, reached in his pocket and drew out…oh, no.

“It’s an engagement ring,” he said. “I love you, Eddi-Rue.”

“Oh…well…my goodness, Marino. I, um…what a surprise.”

He was a swell guy, but I wasn’t in love with him. And he was Catholic, which meant (Mother of God!) I would have to become Catholic, too.

“Please, wear it, Eddi-Rue. I’d be honored.”

“Marino…I don’t know,” I said.

“Please,” he said, his soulful eyes full of emotion. “Wear it for me.”

Promise me that if you take one thing away from this little journey of mine, it will be to henceforth and forevermore always summon the wit to say, “Let me think it over.” Repeat after me:
Let me think it over.
If only those words had come out of my mouth! But I couldn’t bring myself to break Marino’s heart. He tenderly slipped the ring on my finger, and like a fool—for the first time, but unfortunately not the last—I allowed myself to be stampeded into an ill-fated engagement.

I began Catholic instructions under Monsignor McGuldrich, and
oooh, my Gawd,
those four months of instructions were painful. I tried to be a good little convert, but I could have more easily turned myself into a duck-billed platypus. I didn’t believe a word of it. It struck me as a way to keep people in awe and keep the church all-powerful. I was confirmed the day before graduation from college and tried to be a good Catholic, attending mass every Sunday, but I never did learn to quack. The dogma, incense, confessions—it all made me sick as a dog. Physically sick at my stomach.

T
he summer of 1956, Marino and I were accepted as summer apprentices at the Fitchburg Playhouse in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and encountered big-time showbiz personalities for the first time. I roomed with a nice Irish Catholic girl from New York, Eileen Brennan. I arrived a day ahead of her and the third female apprentice, and a young male apprentice showed me to our cabin, warning, “The pipe under the sink is sawed off, so the water empties into this bucket.” I unpacked, washed my hands in the sink, then emptied the bucket—into the sink. As water gushed through onto the floor, I fell back onto the bed laughing. What a ninny!

That summer, I was in three of the plays, all negligible roles, but it was a bang-up introduction to New York theatre. Eight different stars passed through on one-week stock tours. The first week, Henry Morgan, a famous New York personality, played a fellow who daydreamed of beautiful young women, we apprentices being the delicious apparitions he conjured up. At the start of each performance, I crouched out of sight behind the sofa, waiting onstage with Mr. Morgan for the curtain to rise.

“So, Mr. Morgan,” I said one night, “you must find Fitchburg pretty boring. What do you do all day?”

“Masturbate,” he replied, and up went the curtain!

Guy Palmerton, the owner of the playhouse, was under a lot of stress or going through menopause or something that summer. He bashed his fist through a window in his house and came to the theatre roaring drunk on opening nights, reeling down the aisle, shouting that the play stunk, the star stunk, the playhouse stunk, and show business stunk, until the strong, young male apprentices forcibly extricated him. He had all the female stars in tears. Four male apprentices left right away, two more a week later. Marino stayed, and Guy liked him, though he hated almost everyone else. He also liked Eileen, who went out drinking with him nearly every night. She didn’t go regularly to mass or confession. I figured lifelong Irish Catholics must be more lax about the rules and regulations.

“You’ll be a superb actress when you get over that Camille fixation,” Palmerton said to me one day. I guess he thought I should have Eileen Brennan’s spunk. Maybe I should’ve gone out drinking with him. Then I, too, could have slept through the morning yard work instead of whitewashing the rocks that lined the driveway.

Gypsy Rose Lee came through and was a darling. She spent mornings in our cabin, hair in curlers, chatting over coffee, advising us on the care and tending of the mama cat and kittens we’d acquired. Of course, Guy had her in tears. More male apprentices left. Spirits were low. Then along came Tallulah Bankhead, playing Peter Pan in stilettos and tights with James Kirkwood as her Captain Hook. From the wings, I shot about fifteen seconds of her opening number on Mother’s 8mm camera and later had it transferred to video so I’d always have it. This giant personality impressed me with her every move. Ain’t nobody gonna reduce
that
lady to tears! Hearing her tell off Guy Palmerton was music to our ears. She had
him
in hysterics. Coulda floored him with one rabbit punch.