Still Talking (5 page)

I found myself liking him. He got my jokes, which is essential for me. And he had a great sense of humor himself, very dry. Edgar never laughed at his own jokes, which were ironic and sophisticated, very black, and tuned in to the ugliness of life. We had so much in common. He was looser then, more accessible, not yet so self-protective. He was simply charming.

I felt he respected me, but there was no outward sign of affection. As our relationship grew, I came to see he

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was not the type to express feelings directly. “Joan works very hard” or “Joan is the highest-paid opening act in the business” was all he was apt to say, even after many years of our being together. His emotional reticence never bothered me, though, because our relationship was not about passion, it was about friendship, support, protection-and business. At the best times in our marriage, we were loving partners.

There in Jamaica the British public-school accent and reserve came off as courtliness, an elegance that was extremely appealing because it reminded me of my mother and was what she wished she had married. People called him “sir,” and he knew how to treat servants with a perfect blend of graciousness and distance. He knew how to eat those glazed strawberries and knew it was all right to eat the brie with the crust.

He also understood right away what my life was all about, knew that the mouthy girl onstage was not the real me, knew the real me wanted to live well and have beautiful things. I realize now that he understood because he had the same dream, the same consuming obsession with show business and success-and the same insecurity and hunger for respect. He had spotted a soul mate.

The second day in Jamaica the Mankiewiczes had a huge fight. While Edgar was off consoling Chris, I sat on the beach with his wife, an Italian model he had met during the filming of Cleopatra, fabulous in her bikini with her tan and dark hair and flashing eyes. While she talked and talked and talked, telling me that Chris had become a different man when they got back to the States, telling me the pain she was in-she kept poking at crabs with a stick, flipping them over, tormenting them. I was on his side.

They left that afternoon, and suddenly I was alone with Edgar in this lush, incredibly beautiful romantic resort with nobody else around. Our pool was just above the aqua Caribbean. Two white jacketed servants were assigned to us alone. Everywhere were fresh flowers.

I panicked. What did this man have in mind? We still had done no work. I needed protection. I called my writer

friend Treva Silverman in New York and told her, “Get down here fast.”

I wanted career, not romance. Eight years earlier I had had the grand passion of my life, an all-enveloping love affair. In the end-at a time when he was saying he could not sleep or eat or exist without me-he got one of his old girlfriends pregnant. I could not endure such pain and grief again.

That night at Round Hill I felt a little nauseated. When I complained, Edgar brought a brown leather Dunhill case from his room. Inside was every pill for every ailment known to man. I was frightened of this traveling drugstore, and took nothing-and thought, How strange. He’s prepared for anything.

On the third day at Round Hill, with Edgar still postponing any work, I went off again alone and swam at another empty villa. Afterward, I came back to my room, and there was Edgar, standing in the doorway. Suddenly, when I saw him, I had a deep sense of well-being, of coming home, a certainty that he was what I had been looking for, that this was absolutely right! Yes, so quickly. It was as if … in a split second, with one step forward, we went from absolutely nothing to everything. We made love, and then, as though it were the natural order of events, he proposed and I accepted.

Everything fit. Here was a man I could trust who was going to take care of me. We were a good match-he gave me class, I gave him warmth. We filled each other’s gapshe was the intelligent one with the English accent, and I was the performer, full of the fun he did not know how to have.

After Edgar proposed, we took out our date books to find the earliest day we could get married in New York. “Okay, I can do it on Wednesday.”

“Wednesday’s not good for me.” “How about the afternoon of Thursday?” “You got it.” Then he asked me, “Do you want a ring or pearls?” I said, “Pearls.” No ring. Can you imagine? Me?

So when my duenna, Treva Silverman, arrived in Ja-

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maica, she was too late. The three of us spent two days in the swimming pool, finally working on the script. On the flight back to New York this elegant gentleman leaned over and took my hand and held it and stroked it.

In public.

The Peter Sellers script was never finished. In New York I moved immediately into Edgar’s apartment, and when I told my mother, the dowager queen of Larchmont, she was in shock. “No, no, no.” I said, “We were married in Jamaica. We’re just going to get remarried. ” I know it’s hard to believe: out of college eight years and still lying to my mother!

I took Edgar to Larchmont to meet my parents. We pulled up to the house in a limo, and the driver got out and came around to open our door. Just then my mother rushed out of the house, saw this nice-looking young man in a dark suit, called “Congratulations,” threw her arms around him, and planted a big kiss on the driver. “No, no, Bea, this is Edgar.”

They got along immediately. Despite the scene at the limo, they were both formal and set great store by dignity. They were loners who had almost no friends and trusted very few people. They wanted the finer things. As Edgar used to say, “We’re both snobs.”

I was about to marry my mother.

On July 15, 1965, three days after we returned from Jamaica, Edgar and I were married by a judge in the Bronx courthouse. The couple ahead of us were Filipinos escorted by the whole Philippine Navy-the first and last time that Edgar and I were the tallest people anywhere. I had on a twentysix-dollar dress, black with cream lace, from Bloomingdale’s. Like Edgar, I do not show affection in public; I play the game of “Oh, it’s nothing. It’s nothing” when it’s everything. So the ceremony was brisk and businesslike. Treva Silverman stood up for me, and the elusive Eugene Burdick for Edgar, almost the last act of his life. The next day Burdick flew to California and died shortly thereafter of a heart attack on a tennis court.

Before I left for Jamaica, I was performing at the Bitter

End in Greenwich Village. When I came back, I asked the owner, Freddie Weintraub, if I could have my wedding night off. He said, “Sure! Hey, you’re getting married. Just get me somebody comparable.” We said, “Fine.” He said, “Get me Woody Allen or Bill Cosby.”

So I did two shows that night. My agent, Irvin Arthur, came down. Six months earlier he had told me to quit the business because I d never make it-but I stayed with him out of loyalty. Now, everybody thought he was my husband and congratulated him. Edgar had refused to come. “I’m not going to be a backstage husband,” he said. Famous last words.

3

EME

DURING that first year of marriage to Edgar, his smart friends were having trouble matching in their heads this elegant intellectual with what, to them, was a lowly, uneducated standup comic. I was sure Anna Rosenberg thought he could have done much better. I acted like a mouse around her.

Barbara Walters, who was then the hostess on the Today show and friendly with Edgar, said the first time she met me, “We never thought he’d marry somebody like you.”

In fact, nobody had thought Edgar would even get married. He had been coddled for forty years by his mother, Frieda, and her housekeeper, Heddy, who cleaned for us daily and disapproved of Edgar even having a wife. She continued to do his laundry, but left mine in a heap on the floor.

The main woman Edgar had ever had in his life-except for a six-year relationship with an actress-was his mother, who lived just down the hall in an old-lady apartment with sparse, heavy blond thirties furniture-memory furniture, bits and pieces from a grander time of life-some beautiful handmade lace, and lots of pictures of dead relatives. Everything was meticulously neat, as though ready for her to die in the next five minutes.

Frieda was a short, heavy woman. Edgar had her stocky build and the same piercing dark eyes, heavy nose, and round face. She had just one close friend, a nurse she had met in the hospital. Frieda was so proud of this friendship, proud to say, “I’m going to the movies tonight with Mar33

jorie” and “Marjorie and I were shopping yesterday.” It was sad.

Going from bachelor son to married man was a major adjustment for Edgar.

For the first time there was another person interfering with his privacy.

One night I discovered him taking a Valium. I said, “What is this?” He said, “I do it every night. I need my sleep.” I was shocked, I am vehemently opposed to taking any kind of drug. I hardly touch an aspirin.

I said, “No, no, no, you cannot do that. You must stop.” I still don’t know if he ever did.

We had another big fight when I wanted to lighten up his apartment, which was decorated in blacks and tans and brown leather. I suggested off-white, pale celadon, and pale, pale apricot. He said, “Never! This is the way I like it, and this is the way it’s going to be.” He told me all this macho stuff-“I am the man, and I will not help you with housework, and I will not help you cook and clean. None of it.” “Absolutely,” I told him. “You’re not expected to do anything.” Oh, shit, I thought, here we go. But I kept quiet.

But Edgar wanted me to be happy. Within weeks, Heddy was working only for his mother, and he was scraping dishes and taking out the garbage. Edgar had to assert his CEO front because, like all men of his generation, he was insecure and needed to know he had an old-fashioned marriage in which he was the head of the family. Once I had said, “Okay, you’re the boss” and checked decisions and got permissions-he could relax-even though I actually ran the household. But I enjoyed hiring the help, worrying about the dry cleaning and laundry, planning the parties, arranging the flowers, being the woman of the house.

Edgar was comfortable with those dynamics. His father was a mensch, and the powerhouse Frieda was actually in charge. Later, as executive producer of my Fox show, all Edgar really wanted was to hear Barry Diller say, “You’re the boss of the show”-and then everybody could go about their business. But I could not have kept those two men from their collision even if I had realized from the first the enormity of Edgar’s pride, how great his need for recognition. And I never would have blocked him from being

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the show’s producer. By then, our business partnership was an unspoken bargain at the core of our marriage.

I look at pictures of myself in those days-my 1960s hairdo and pink nails-and feel absolutely no relationship to that girl. She still believed in happy endings. She was naive about the treachery, about the pitfalls, the backbiting, the meanness, the stupidity in big-time show business. The success that was happening for her seemed absolutely right and logical. She had worked hard and, by God, was a rising star with a wonderful, successful husband. Well, the movie should have ended there.

The day I was married, I escaped my old struggling life-living in a dinky struggle apartment over a deli, wearing struggle clothes. As I crossed Fifth Avenue, all my hand-painted struggle furniture turned back into pumpkins. The second half of the sixties was a sweet, happy time.

Overnight I made the tremendous psychological jump of saying, “I’m grown up now and no longer a kid in Greenwich Village.” I could release the side of me suppressed under those black dresses and hairpieces and boa, the me that wanted to bring out the Georgian silver and be my mother’s daughter.

Edgar was making a very good salary with Anna Rosenberg, and we pooled our incomes. At that time in our marriage he had that WASP caution over building and preserving capital. But I began relishing the money I had never had. Immediately I bought new clothes. No, not Oscar or Geoffrey Beene or Galanos. Those designers were still far in the future. And my husband was conservativeanything other than a black dress and pearls to him was like wearing a scarlet letter. I had my parents’ house painted, put on a new roof, bought my father a Cadillac and my mother a fur coat. I had a great time.

There was a playfulness to everything then. Our lives were young and adventurous and unpredictable, our expectations unlimited. Edgar had never had fun friends, was always the bachelor invited to dinner, and now I brought serendipity into his life-running out together to

six different coffeehouses to see six different comics, going to three movies one after another, popping out to the Hamptons on Long Island to see friends.

When I performed in the Catskill Mountains, Edgar drove me up, left hand on the wheel, his right hand reaching out to mine, or conducting the Broadway show tunes we played on a tape recorder. Sometimes friends came, six of us in the car, everybody silly, all laughing, driving back the same night and stopping at the Red Apple Inn for sandwiches. We’d get home to New York at 4:00 A.M. and go to the Stage Delicatessen where the other performers were just back from their Catskill dates-Rodney Dangerfield, George Carlin, Dick Cavett, Dom DeLuise, Stiller and Meara-and the generation ahead of us-Alan King, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.

I joined Edgar’s career as the producer’s wife. I was there by his side when he went to Nice for the filming of the Telsun movie The Poppy Is Also a Flower, starring Yul Brynner, Trevor Howard, and Rita Hayworth.

Everybody stayed at the Negresco Hotel. In the middle of the night Rita woke up and did not know where she was and panicked and began smashing furniture. I was in the lobby when she was led through at 3:00 A.M. in a Chanel suit, surrounded by the doctors and orderlies that Edgar had called, all trying to calm her-“Rita, Rita, Rita”-and she was pushing and fighting and yelling, her hair disheveled and wonderful. We thought it was alcohol, but maybe the Alzheimer’s had begun.