Still Talking (10 page)

Though I intended to have anesthesia when I had my baby, I decided to go to natural childbirth class, and know everything, have every tool there was for the birth. Edgar dropped me off and picked me up, but refused to come inside, so I looked like a widow or a divorcee, and the teacher had to be my partner. But I told myself, “That’s

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Edgar.” So stubborn. To hell with it. Maybe Lamaze fell into the same category as therapy, which he had always scorned.

The baby turned sideways in the ninth month-which meant a breech birth.

“You have no right to do this to us,” I kept telling my stomach, “you must turn back. This is ridiculous.” The day before she was born, she turned back. Typical Melissa. Had to do things her way, when she was ready.

On January 19, 1968, when I was onstage at the Downstairs at the Upstairs, the first contractions began. Between shows I did an interview with a writer from The Milwaukee Journal. I finished the last show at 2:00 A.m.

and went home. At noon the next day Edgar took me to the hospital, and two hours later I had Melissa. Talk about timing!

I saw her the minute she came out, bright red, her nose flattened all over her face. I was so excited-but also upset. I had made such a connection with her, my feelings were hurt when she did not sit up and say, “Mommy!

Wow! So that’s what you look like!”

For a permanent nanny, I put an ad in the paper with the come-on “Show business couple, meet and greet the stars.” We got calls: “Are you Barbra Streisand? Are you Goldie Hawn? “-followed by sighs of disappointment. One applicant was Scottish, spoke with a burr, arrived elegant in the white uniform and the blue cap, very proper. She had worked for Vanderbilts and Firestones and literally interviewed us. Finally she said, “I will take the position, but only on one condition. I insist that the parents, no matter how busy they are, spend a half hour a day with their children. “

I told her she didn’t have to worry. In fact, poor Lily Anderson did not know what hit her. She was thrilled to meet the show-biz people who came through the apartment. She even became a little show biz herself. Once I heard her saying to another nanny in the park, “When Miss Ann-Margret came to our house, Melissa wore her white didee. ” Then there was the time when Lily, in her uniform, went on a TV quiz program, where the panel guessed what her employer does-and nobody could imag-

ine she worked for a standup comic. She won a mink stole.

Over the years a series of nannies became part of our lives, but 1 raised Melissa. I put her on my schedule. When I arrived home around 2:00 A.m.

after performing at the Upstairs at the Downstairs, I walked a lot through her room, and the minute she stirred, I got her up and we took a bath together. The next morning I would get up and have breakfast with Edgar while she slept. When Melissa woke, we’d play in bed for a while. In the late morning I would go see my manager, check in, find out what offers had come in, and maybe have a business lunch.

I was usually home in the afternoon, and there was never any “Here, Nanny, she’s wet.” That little bottom was wiped by me, and shake, shake with the wonderful talcum and “We smell so good now” and the kiss on the stomach before the diaper. And then I would put her on my bed and tell her everything.

Unless she could come with me, I usually stayed home all afternoon. If I had a dress fitting, I took her into fitting rooms. Once, when I went looking at jewelry, Tiffany opened its side delivery door for the carriage.

If I was driving somewhere, Melissa came in the limo and we played together. I have a picture of me at a woman’s luncheon with Melissa on my lap. I am sure nobody wanted Melissa as a lunch date.

Of course, having a baby continued to be a big section of my act. I told the audiences that while I was in labor, the nurse had tried on my dress and said, “If you die, can I have this?” The intern was so young, he expected the stork to come though the window. I said that Edgar didn’t understand much about the whole thing. After Melissa was born, he stood and waited for her luggage to come out.

Edgar used to wonder, “Doesn’t she bore you?” I would say, “No, we have the best time. We just went to the park and bought a balloon.” Probably because of his own solitary childhood, Edgar did not know how to do children things and was made uncomfortable by them. I knew he loved Melissa and wanted to be the best father he could manage, but he was so fearful of emotion, of opening up

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and being vulnerable, he seemed in pain trying to express love. Sometimes he tried to unbend with her, doing Halloweens and Easter egg hunts. But he did not spend time and connect with Melissa until she was truly verbal and they could exchange ideas.

That was okay with me. I was happy that she was all mine, the little person who could absorb all the love pent up inside me. The first time I really knew she loved me back, Melissa was nine months old. During her nap time she somehow climbed out of her crib and crawled all the way to my room to see me. I said, “Oh, look. I have a visitor,” and my heart melted, and I got down on the floor with her.

She was my pal. When she was older, we watched late movies together. The day after Zulu, I took her to Temple Emanu-El nursery school to be interviewed. She ripped off the sticker that said, HELLO, I’M MELISSA. She would not play with the other kids. The teachers said, “Your child is very antisocial.” I said, “That’s because there was a wonderful late, late movie with Michael Caine, and we stayed up together.” They just stared at me. As we were leaving, Melissa threw clay at another little girl. I told her, “We blew it, honey,” and we went to Schrafft’s and had breakfast.

From the minute I had Melissa, I would rather spend time with children than with adults. Their innocence is so unscathed. Their trust, their unquestioning belief, makes you a better person. The layers of social deceit have not yet formed, and they call things as they are. You hear a child say, “I don’t want to play with you because I don’t like you.” Good! Now we know where we stand, and we can go from there.

At the same time, children have not learned to ration their love, and they accept your love totally. Their joy is complete-and they get rid of unhappiness so easily. A child is crying, and in three minutes you can have her smiling and laughing again. I love that.

Having Melissa to come home to, looking forward to

spending time with my daughter, was all-important. My career had not yet become the glue that held my life and marriage together. The rock at the center of my tiny universe was still the baby and the home and the marriage.

5

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JUST because I talk about plastic surgery on television, people think I’m a plastic-surgery addict, that I have plastic surgery every day. I think every woman should have plastic surgery if she wants. My mother always told me, “There’s nothing good about old age, so accept it with dignity.” To me plastic surgery is like a touch-up, a tuneup that makes me feel good about myself. You take your car to be Simonized. You get your dresses cleaned. Why not a little job under your chin?

After shooting my movie Rabbit Test in 1977, I was down and depressed. I figured, get the whole face done and nobody will see me while I’m editing the film. So I told the best plastic surgeon in Los Angeles to do everything, and he did, and I was sitting in the editing room thinking, Gee, my eyes are great-you can’t even see the stitches. Then I went for my first checkup, and the doctor was taking the stitches out behind the ears, and I told him, Boy, my eyes look terrific. Suddenly he turned bright red. He’d forgotten to do the eyes! So I got an IOU for one eye job by Los Angeles’s number-one plastic surgeon. I wanted to give it as a raffle for a charity, but no one would take it. Now, they’d grab it!

Right before the Fox show I finally had my eyes done and along with it I did a very light acid wash. It was nothing, like a sunburn. It takes away the top skin, and with it, all the little lines. For me, it was no pain, no burn. Three days later I was performing at Lake Tahoe.

I once wanted to make my nose thinner, not a whole big job. Unfortunately I was on the cover of People mag-69

azine that month, and the doctor looked at me and said, “What can I do?

Everyone has seen this picture.” “Just thin it,” I said, “no one will notice.” They didn’t.

When I had to have a hysterectomy, I asked if a plastic surgeon could sew me up. There were four other ladies in the hospital crying, “Boo-boo, I’m no longer a woman.” Me? I was thrilled. My tummy was as flat as a washboard. Nothing like a tummy tuck at the end of a hysterectomy.

In 1968, long before 1 did, my career got a major facelift. Because of my comedy success, the William Morris Agency offered to package a TV talk show for me, using the syndicators, Trans Lux, to sell it to independent stations around the country. I was ready. I felt I had done standup comedy, had proved I could succeed, and longed to move on to less confining, more diverse ways to communicate.

Edgar wanted to be the show’s producer-which meant quitting Anna Rosenberg.

I kept saying to him, “Are you sure? Are you sure? What’s going to happen if the show doesn’t work?” To me he was already a movie producer, and this little half-hour morning show seemed like a comedown.

I worried that he was giving up his power base. What would happen if this man, who was used to going to work every day and wielding power, was now home all day? Would that put a tremendous strain on the marriage?

I remember I was sitting on the bed with my legs up, and he was taking off his shirt and tie and he said, “I’ve always wanted to go back and produce for television. If the show only lasts thirteen weeks, I’ll produce other things.” I did not realize at the time that Telsun was winding down and he had no other film possibilities. Anna Rosenberg Associates was a public-relations firm, a far distance from show business, Edgar’s addiction, where he had tasted its glamour and power at the top level. In New York Edgar enjoyed the perks of an important producer, had offices on Fifth Avenue near Rockefeller Center, and his secretary, Ruth Feyer, had been General George Marshall’s secretary. Romancing clients is no longer stimulating when for years you’ve been flying from New York to

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France to Yugoslavia to walk onto movie sets and solve everybody’s problems.

Edgar earned the right to tremendous pride in what he had done. And Edgar’s pride as a man-along with his intellect and experience as a producer-was a big asset for me because I was so vulnerable, so constantly in need of support and reassurance. I did not realize that the roots of that pride extended dangerously deep into his psyche, that it was rooted in lifelong emotional needs that would handicap him for the next logical step into the film business.

Through Telsun he had access to major movie people like David Lean, Tony Richardson, Peter Sellers, and Sean Connery. All sorts of doors were open.

With a partner named Sidney Kaufman, he looked for production projects, but they always seemed to be holding out for the perfect deal. If Edgar did all the development work on a film idea that interested Sam Spiegel, Edgar thought he deserved half the money. It was not in him to give away 80

percent to get Spiegel’s backing, though that would make the project happen. To Edgar the unfairness was a breach of honor and principle, an insult that diminished him. For better or worse, he was not a compromiser, and you had to respect that.

Also, Edgar did not have a gambler’s soul. Closing a deal is shooting crap, putting your reputation and selfesteem on the line. He could oversee my career, but was terrified by risking his own personal failure. Once a package had been put together, he could run it brilliantly-but somebody else had to throw the dice.

The William Morris TV-show package was irresistible because it put Edgar at the top with complete control. Where my showbusiness addiction is drinking in love on a stage, his drug was to be the boss, answering to no one. At the time I believed he was simply a strong, take-charge person, but ultimately events turned that need into a flaw that brought us both down.

I think Edgar craved control because he had such a hard time handling uncertainty. And I believe the reason lay in his past. Whenever a goal had been in his grasp, it had always been yanked away.

Born in 1925, Edgar grew up in Bremerhaven, Germany, doted on by his dominating mother and three aunts. His father, Berthold, owned a prosperous butcher shop. In that family they believed that if you did well financially, you were smart. If you did poorly, you were dumb.

The family, threatened by the Nazis, fled first to the larger city of Hamburg, and then, when Edgar was eight, to Copenhagen, Denmark. Edgar told me that they crossed the German border with only what they could carry, and he had chosen his pet canary and toy soldiers. At the crossing a Prussian guard took these most prized possessions away from him.

Perhaps this one terrifying moment of helplessness accounts for his continuing need to own things. Edgar did not have one shirt, he had fifty.

I do not know how many watches he owned. After two years, as anti-Semitism grew in Denmark, the Rosenbergs decided to move to South Africa, a haven for many European Jews. They settled in Cape Town. By now, after all the uprooting and losses, Edgar was a loner-shy, introverted, awkward at making friends, indulged by his mother. But he was a star student who read a half-dozen books a week. I suspect his whole persona-what inner security he had-was built around being that voracious reader and superior intellect.

Six months before he died, he told me his darkest secret. As a boy in Cape Town, he developed tuberculosis. “Don’t tell Melissa,” he kept saying, his voice aching with shame. In those days in South Africa-and much of Europe, too-tuberculosis carried a social stigma. Virulently contagious, Edgar was instantly ripped out of school and sent three hundred miles north to the Neelspoort Hospital in a desolate, arid region called the Karroo. “It was horrible, horrible,” he told me. “Don’t tell Melissa.”