What falls away : a memoir (8 page)

Three months after my seventeenth birthday, in 1962, I graduated from high school, counting the days until I could get out of the house and back to school in England, where I had been happy. Given our money anxieties, I didn't know whether this would be possible; so when my parents agreed to let me go, I was overjoyed. I had by then abandoned thoughts of becoming a nun: now I hoped to become a pediatrician and work with children in Africa or Southeast Asia. I loved children, and I was drawn to the idea of help-

ing them. Once this idea took root 1 was tremendously excited and eager to get started, but my grades had been inconsistent, and my education frequently disrupted. In need of extra credits to get into a good university and medical school, I returned to London for extra preparation for A-level exams.

By the time I joined my mother for Christmas in New York, relations between my parents had shattered completely. In a humiliating role reversal, my proud and elegant father, with his monogrammed silk shirts and handmade shoes, was left in the house that nobody loved on North Roxbury Drive to preside over the children, while three thousand miles away, his wife worked to send money home. Her paychecks apparently were not enough, and their phone calls were brief and bitter.

But my mother had entered a glittering new world. Her Broadway play. Never Too Late, was a smash hit and she was the toast of the town. After all the hard times it was great to see her riding high and so happy. Clutching her coattails, I was introduced to Manhattan: Broadway shows, backstage hobnobbing, stars every night crowding into my mother's dressing room, "Who's out there tonight?" Life didn't begin until after the show: there were parties, invitations, more parties, restaurants, pubs until all hours—heady stuff.

We were staying at the Algonquin Hotel, and we didn't get up until late afternoon, then we ordered a rare steak and spinach and a potato and we went to the theater. Kirk Douglas was starrmg in One Flew Over the Cuckooes Nest across the street and he sometimes took us to dinner after the show. Often we ran into Brendan Behan, who was drinking hard and streaming strong, barely intelligible words, poetry, observations, stories, and advice. It was Brendan who bought me my very first drink, a brandy Alexander.

Since the show was clearly going to be running for a

long time, Mom rented an apartment in early 1963. I pretended not to notice that George Abbott, my mother's director, seemed to be takmg more than a professional interest in her. But when my father phoned in the early hours of a January night, I could not, could not tell him where she was. And later still, when the phone rang and rang and rang, I pulled the pillow tight around my ears.

And when, in the hard light of day, we learned that my father had died that night of a heart attack with the phone in his hand, winds of nothmgness blew cold across my soul.

There was a flatness to the day my father died, as my mother and I moved through the thick silence. She spoke briefly on the phone in a small strange voice. She took cottage cheese from the refrigerator and looked at it for a while, then put it back. In a brief exchange we agreed that, given the shortage of money, it was pointless for me to accompany her to California. He was, after all, dead. She packed a few things and went out the door.

Again I was alone, lost in the swarming of memories: my father holding his head high in the sunlight, afternoons shared at the bookstore and trying to match his long stride along Beverly Drive, and John Donne, and the doubting and trusting of the deep dive beneath the waves, and his laughter, and Saturday barbecues and the hero's medals and Christmases and waiting in my mother's bed for the knife in my chest and the years of hopelessness and anger and despair, and the final phone call that rang and rang and rang. I couldn't answer it. Dad, I couldn't. And I thought of Mike too, and all the sorrowing from which we never emerged, and the disintegration of my family, and my helplessness in the face of these incomprehensible things; and the unutterable pain of being here on this earth.

Ghapter four

Now that our father was dead, the family's survival depended solely on our mother. She was employed, but she was fifty-two years old, her profession was far from reliable, and she had four children vounger than me to raise. Before Never Too Late she hadn't worked in years. "It was as if something died in me too," said my mother. "A moment before I'd been drunk with the euphoria of a big Broadway hit, and the next moment I was a lonely widow unable to live without tranquilizers. The only thing to do was get out there and keep working. John didn't leave any money. It was all a big struggle with lots of ups and downs and there were times when it was unbearably lonely."

Except for Patrick, who joined my mother and me in New York, my younger brother Johnny, and sisters Prudence, Steffi, and Tisa stayed in California, supervised by our gentle housekeeper, Marcel. Mom, Patnck, and I moved into an unfurnished apartment on Fifty-ninth Street. We purchased three mattresses,

three lamps, and three pots. I made a dressing table from an upside-down cardboard box, bought a mirror and some makeup, and began to look for an agent. It was no longer possible for me to return to school; it was time to help my family if I could, and at the very least I would pull my own weight.

I gave myself four months, six at the most, to get an acting job. I had no confidence that anyone would ever want to hire me; on the other hand, I was seventeen years old with little education—and nothing to lose. If I failed I would try something else, and someday, hopefully, I would go back to school. In the meantime, I sat in on acting classes with Stella Adler, Herbert Berghof, and Wynn Handman, and I began making the rounds.

My father always claimed he'd "never met a happy actress," and his disesteem for women in that profession was made clear to me in countless ways throughout my childhood. When I was fifteen, walking down Roxbury Drive with our dog Tuffy, a man jumped out of his car and pressed a card into my hand: he wanted me to screen-test for the movie Lolita. I said, Sure, and ran home to show my father the card, which he shredded into tiny pieces as he hit the roof. My success in school plays and a prize for reading from Our Town only reinforced his position. He hoped I would meet an English aristocrat and settle in London with chintz and china. Now, before he was cold in his grave, I was wearing makeup and looking for acting work, and thinking more than once how disappointed he would have been.

A month after my father's death and just before my eighteenth birthday, I found myself in an elevator, headed ambivalently toward a party on the top floor of the St. Regis Hotel. When the doors opened to a crush of strangers, smoke, and noise, I stood twisting my beaded evening bag

until the elevator emptied and the doors shut in front of me. Before I could even feel relief, a sound startled me; I whirled around to see, for the first time, a quite extraordinary-looking man.

"Very good, very good," he chortled. I had never seen a mustache like his: several inches long, waxed and wire-thin, It sprang antenna-like from above his pursed lips into a jaunty curl at each tip. His eyes popped outrageously, and his black hair fell past the collar of a pm-striped morning coat under which glimmered a gold brocade vest. Gold too was the handle of his cane, which he raised slightly to say "Bonjour," with a short bow. Never mind that it was nine at night. "Good morning" was my reply.

When the doors opened onto the lobby, the mustache-man suggested "Encore?" with an upward gesture of his cane, and, abandoning my foothold in the real world, I nodded. There were three or four more ascents, three or four brief studies of the party, and then my companion introduced himself.

"I am Dali. Le divine Dali. I am completely crazy."

So I knew where I stood when I joined Salvador Dali and his wife Gala for lunch the next day at Le Pavilion. He did not smoke or drink himself but ordered for me a fragrant liqueur called Mirabel, cautioning that it was "only for smell."

It was Dali's custom to visit New York each fall, where he stayed at the St. Regis Hotel until St Patrick's Day when, as he put it, "everything becoming too green," and he moved on to Pans. In New York City, Dali had accumulated an eclectic assortment of companions, including a beautiful hermaphrodite, a ballet dancer, a scientist, a woman who resembled George Washington, and a dapper little man who managed some aspect of the Dalis' affairs— el Capitan, as he was called—who had an accent, wore a uniform from no known place, and was usually accompanied by an ocelot.

From then on we met daily, sometimes with Gala, more often without. We lunched on butterfly wings and toured New York City with the garbage collectors. Speakmg in a unique combination of French, Spanish, and a smattermg of English, Dali led me into the world of surrealism, cutting loose my thoughts and throwing the walls from my mind. People have said that I was looking for a father. I don't know about that. Certainly I was looking for guidance—I had lost my bearings in what seemed a sea of senselessness. But Dali had long ago begun his celebration of absurdity and he embraced the part of me that was wildest and most frightening; he embraced the emptiness and the chaos, and the meaninglessness and nonsensicalness of the world; and his lawless interpretations transcended structure and illuminated another order that had its own shining, untrampled significance. "We are at the heart of a labyrinth and we can find our way while becoming labyrinths ourselves," he told me.

In a single, unfurnished room of the hotel, Dali kept a large, beautiful, silver helium balloon that he visited at various times during the day, noting and delighting in its autonomous, barely perceptible movements. "I am penetrating more and more into the compressed magic of the universe," Dali said.

When the first three-dimensional photographs emerged, Dali was as excited as a child. He carried one in his pocket to scrutinize and show to any passing stranger, and when he noted a relationship between the photograph and a streaked fabric called moire, a swatch joined the photograph.

A permanent fixture in that same pocket was a billfold or wallet in the final stages of disintegration. Its covering was a waffley, metal-like substance, gold and silver on reverse sides, that was peeling to bits. One day he pulled off a piece and gave it to me, saying li I kept it I would always have enough money. Dali loved gold. He said that "bankers are the high priests of the Dalinian religion." And he once

told me he would like to live in a house that was entirely made of gold, behind the wallpaper, and under the porcelain of the bathtub and under the tiles of the bathroom floor and under the wood of the staircase. That, he said, would give him profound pleasure, knowing that everything is made entirely of gold, while others were unwittingly trampling over it. He constructed a Dalinian calendar for me, using gold paint. "I never know if I am rich or poor," he said. "Gala takes care of all the money." Which was just as well, I thought, as I watched him gleefiilly flinging fistfuls of bills out the window of his hotel room, proclaiming, "Very important! Everything coming back one millions times!"

Whether Gala was present or not, Dali's devotion to her was unreserved and always in evidence. "I love Gala better than my mother, better than my father, better than Picasso, and even better than money," he told me. "Without her I would no longer be Dali. She understands everything about me, she is my protector, my mother, my queen. She calms me. She convinces me of my ability to live. She is always there to explain everything, bring me back to normal, she turns my obsessions into genius."

For my eighteenth birthday, in the lobby of the St. Regis, Dali took a gauze-swaddled bundle from his safety deposit box and gave it to me. It was, he said, "a piece of moon," given to him by a famous scientist. It was more ordinary-looking than I would have thought, black on one side and gray on the other two. For luck, he gave me a talisman, an old print about the size of a playing card with an owl's picture and his name inscribed all over it. I put his gifts in the box I've kept since polio, a small wooden trunk I called my "magic box."

On my nineteenth birthday, Dali arrived unannounced at our apartment and placed an object on the hallway floor. "Violence in a bottle," he declared, then turned around and left. We—my sisters, Johnny, my mother, and I—gathered

around the glass jug painted in many colors but predominantly blue. The pamt was still wet. Inside the jar was a rat consummg a lizard. The commotion would have delighted Dali: my sisters shrieked, my mother screamed, "Get it out of here. Out!" and my brother ran outside and threw it over the wall into Central Park. Days later it occurred to someone that perhaps we should have kept it; after all, it was a Salvador Dali painting. My brothers looked for it halfheartedly without success.

Dali took me to a Greenwich Village party where the hermaphrodite host/hostess opened the door wearing a mink coat, which he/she stepped out of and, stark-naked, led us into the living room, where perhaps a dozen people were in various sexual tableaux. Dali could barely contain his amusement and kept looking at me, all twinkly, checking whether I was okay. I was okay. I put off thinking about it. He never took his cape off, which was a relief, and he didn't leave my side, which was gentlemanly. We stood for three or four minutes tops, and left. He said it was "very beautiful.*' For himself, he said, he considered sex to be "too violent." And showers, too.

Through all these Dalinian adventures, I continued with my acting classes and auditioning for parts. It seemed that I was too old for child roles and too young for leading ladies; teen roles were scarce. You need an agent to help you get a job, and you need a job to get an agent. My wastrel existence and butterfly lunches ended when, to my astonishment, I replaced another actress in the role of Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest at the Madison Avenue Playhouse. The reason I was chosen, I supposed, was because I could slide easily into an English accent.

My mother was proud of me, and I was thrilled myself. Now, every evening, we set off from the apartment to our separate theaters and met again after the shows to compare