A CARTOON FOR THE NEW YEAR

Two Birds sitting on a wire
FIRST BIRD:  When the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and there's music in the air, it's hard to feel bad about life.
SECOND BIRD: Trump is president.

EUNICE HARRIS, BETTE DAVIS, ROSALIND RUSSELL, AND OTHER GIRLS There was, and, I hope, still is, an artist in Hollywood named Paul Jasmine. Nobody knows how to find him, not intimate friends, not those who collected his work. But he was/is of such an original turn of mind, I can only imagine he would never have done anything as usual as die. Besides his gifts as painter and, later, photographer, he also had an assumed persona, a nasal, twangy Midwestern woman named Eunice Harris. It became a bit of a local legend that his was the voice of Norman Bates’ mother, in the upstairs of that weird house in ‘Psycho.’ I’m not sure of the truth of that-- I never checked it out with Tony Perkins, though I know they were close friends, if not more. But it will help to convey the timbre and sound of the voice he put on, when he made some remarkable telephone calls. I don’t know where or how he obtained the phone numbers. But he successfully got through to many of the women who were major stars at the beginning of the Sixties. More impressively, even miraculously, he managed to really engage them on the phone. By the end of their conversations, this perfect stranger would have made them his/her friend. It was a late-night sport to which some of us were privy, lying around in jeans on the floor, our vestigial adolescence making it the hot ticket in town, to be one of those listening to Paul putting on the stars. But we had to learn to contain our laughter, as it was the early days of speakerphones: the person on the other end, Ingrid Bergman, for example, hearing the sniggers, might hang up. But only one person ever did. “Hi,” he would say, in his funny, aging, just-got-in-from-the Midwest voice. “This is Eunice Harris. Colonel Tom and I just drove in from Iowa and tired as I am, I just had to call you before I could even dream of sleeping. I hope I’m not inconveniencing you,” he would say. “I know how busy you are, and of course I am one of your most ardent admirers.” They almost never asked him how he had gotten their number. By the time they might have thought to ask, Eunice had gently wormed her way into a real conversation, telling them what a hard time she’d had finding a decent place to stay, the smog was so terrible that night, people were so unhelpful, what a hardship it had been driving in from Nebraska or Wyoming or whatever her place of origin for the sake of that particular call. She would ask about their children by name, having dutifully pored over fan magazines. That would inevitably get them. In the case of Doris Day she was very proud of young Terry. Best of all the conversations was the one with Rosalind Russell, who began talking so fast and so much that Eunice could lay back and just listen. Miss Russell, every bit as elegant and funny on the phone as she’d been in Auntie Mame , was gently guided by Eunice into a discussion of her visit to the Eisenhower White House. “Is it true,” Eunice asked, “that Mamie is an alcoholic?.” “Oh, what nonsense!” Rosalind Russell said. “Mamie just enjoys her Old-Fashioned. She’ll say, ‘Oh, any minute now we can have our Old-Fashioned.’ Then a little while later, ‘Soon the sun will be over the yardarm, and it’ll be time for our Old-Fashioneds.’ Or, ‘It’s almost five o’clock, and then we can have our Old-Fashioned.’ Then the clock will strike five and she’ll absolutely light up and say ‘Old-Fashioned time!’ But no, of course she isn’t an alcoholic. “And what she’s done with that White House is not to be believed!” Miss Russell exclaimed. Then the actress launched into a discussion of the Lincoln bedroom, and the other rooms, the fabrics, the materials Mamie herself had chosen, surprising, Roz said, in view of the way people saw the First Lady, which was mostly chintz. It was at this point that we had to hold our stomachs, along with our mouths. Stanley Kubrick made a tape of the tape we’d made, ‘Eunice Harris talks to the Stars,’ and secreted it in his vault in Elstree when he moved to England. But while he was still in Hollywood, he’d had me invite the bona fide Eunice (Paul) to his house, and had her call, watching how she did it. Stanley, who did not smile easily, sat there grinning all the while, reveling in the mischief. He gave her Janet Leigh’s number, and Janet was so gracious I felt bad for her, knowing her and liking her as I did, but the phone call was harmless. Eunice said at the end of it that they’d have to get together, and Janet, very much the kind lady, agreed. “Yes, we must do that,” she said. “Would you mind coming over to the Valley?” Eunice asked. “I’m in this little motel right by the freeway, and there’s all this noise from the traffic, but I’m sure we can find a Mexican restaurant or something, and I’d love to treat you to lunch.” “Oh, I couldn’t let you do that,” Janet said. “All right,” said Eunice. “I’ll let you pick up the check just this one time. When do you want to do it?” “I’m sorry, I haven’t got my book with me right now,” Janet said. “Well, why don’t you go and get it, honey,” Eunice said. “Or I can call you back in a few minutes.” “I’m sorry,” Janet said. “I’ve got some company here.” “I’ve heard you give the best parties,” Eunice said. “I’ll be right over.” Then she hung up, leaving, we were sure, a very anxious Janet on the other end of the phone, crouching against the fearfully anticipated ring of the doorbell. By this time, Stanley, giggling like the bad little boy I always suspected he secretly was, turned over a prize: author Vladimir Nabokov’s number. One must understand that as protective as people in Hollywood are of their friends’ privacy, on the right occasion, under the right circumstances, many of them will betray one another on a dime. In this case, it was not for money or power, but for a really great laugh, as rare and prized in those environs as a heartfelt hug. Stars allowed into Eunice’s circle would happily volunteer their dearest pals’ unlisted line. So it was that Stanley, in the midst of making the movie of Nabokov’s erotic bestseller, Lolita, gave Eunice the number of the master, at the moment ensconced in a rented house in Cheviot Hills. “VLADIMIR!” Eunice enthused, the moment he answered the phone. “Colonel Tom and I have been driving night and day from Council Bluffs, hoping to get here in time. You’ve got to get rid of that dreadful Sue Lyon. There’s only one girl who can play Lolita, and that’s our daughter, Cindy. We brought her with us, Colonel Tom and I, and she’s perfect for the part. Delectable. Adorable. And she doesn’t look a day over thirteen.” “Who did you say this was?” asked the hapless Nabokov. “Eunice Harris. Mother of the girl who must play the part. Cindy. You’re just going to love her, being the prevert that you are. You’d never be able to tell that… she’s… well.. thirty.” Stanley lay curled up with laughter on the floor of his living room, holding his mouth and his stomach. Poor Nabokov, genius though he might have been, was no match for Eunice. And it was from Jasmine’s inspired, lunatic dialogue, that Stanley was to harvest the word ‘prevert,’ that echoed throughout the screenplay of Dr. Strangelove. Eunice was merciful with Ingrid Bergman, who was back in Hollywood after the disrepute of her running away with the Italian director Roberto Rosselini. Because her image had been virtually angelic, her public equating her with St. Joan, a role she had portrayed in Otto Preminger’s production, filmgoers found it unacceptable, her turning out to be a passionate, living human being. She had even been denounced by Congress. So Bergman was quite anxious at the time. When Eunice asked her, ‘just between us girls,’ about the end of her marriage, Bergman said she really didn’t want to talk about it. “Not even with me?” Eunice said cheekily. “Well, I’m not really sure who, exactly, you are,” said the great lady. “I understand, dear. We can’t all be Ingrid Bergman.” “I didn’t mean that,” Ingrid Bergman said, apologetically. “I’m not really that sure who Ingrid Bergman is supposed to be.” Bergman was really a lovely, if openly melancholy woman. I met her in the still- striking flesh a few years later, when the writer Sterling Silliphant invited me to join them for a drink at ’21.’ She seemed edgy and depressed, having survived her fall from sainthood. She and Rosselini had had twins, a daughter, and a couple of terrible movies. Now she was making films in Hollywood again. But the remarkable success of her early career had vanished, as evanescent as the glow of her complexion. I don’t think there was ever a more carved, exquisite face on the screen than hers in ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ where she was victim to Spencer Tracy’s temporarily murderous villain, or in ‘Gaslight,’ when she was driven nearly mad by Charles Boyer. Phillip and Julius Epstein, the writers of the all-time classic ‘Casablanca’, graced by that face, were later to be accorded a standing ovation by the same U.S.Congress that had denounced her. But there in ’21,’ she seemed lustrous and sad. “You are,” I said to her, after some moments, sensing her unhappiness, “the most beautiful woman ever to be in films.” It sounded, I know, sycophantish, but I was sincere. “How very lucky for me,” she answered, coldly. It dismayed me slightly, her haughty and ironic delivery. It disappointed me even more when I saw Saratoga Trunk on television some years later, and heard her say the same line in the movie. She was, after all, only an actress. But she’d been cordial on the phone with Eunice Harris. I cherished her for that. And now we come to the only movie star ever to hang up: Bette Davis, staying at the Chateau Marmont with her then husband, Gary Merrill. Once connected by the operators at the Chateau, who, in those days were a little air-headed, and didn’t always screen the calls, or necessarily connect them, Eunice launched instantly into her most successful terms of entrapment. She told Bette Davis she had just been selected to be the poster girl for the Daughters of Bilitis. That was a name for a lesbian organization, but Miss Davis didn’t know that, and Eunice didn’t elucidate. She said only that there would be a photographer there the next morning to take the star’s picture for the cover of the Daughters of Bilitis magazine, and they’d like her to be in a tennis outfit. “I don’t play tennis,” Bette Davis said. “And I’m not posing for your magazine. Now go away!” Even the way the phone crashed into the cradle sounded soooooo Bette Davis.

EUNICE HARRIS, BETTE DAVIS, ROSALIND RUSSELL, AND OTHER GIRLS

            There was, and, I hope, still is, an artist in Hollywood named Paul Jasmine.  Nobody knows how to find him, not intimate friends, not those who collected his work.  But he was/is of such an original turn of mind, I can only imagine he would never have done anything as usual as die. Besides his gifts as painter and, later, photographer, he also had an assumed persona, a nasal, twangy Midwestern woman named Eunice Harris.  It became a bit of a local legend that his was the voice of Norman Bates’ mother, in the upstairs of that weird house in ‘Psycho.’  I’m not sure of the truth of that-- I never checked it out with Tony Perkins, though I know they were close friends, if not more.   But it will help to convey the timbre and sound of the voice he put on, when he made some remarkable telephone calls.

I don’t know where or how he obtained the phone numbers.  But he successfully got through to many of the women who were major stars at the beginning of the Sixties.  More impressively, even miraculously, he managed to really engage them on the phone.  By the end of their conversations, this perfect stranger would have made them his/her friend.  It was a late-night sport to which some of us were privy, lying around in jeans on the floor, our vestigial adolescence making it the hot ticket in town, to be one of those listening to Paul putting on the stars.  But we had to learn to contain our laughter, as it was the early days of speakerphones: the person on the other end, Ingrid Bergman, for example, hearing the sniggers, might hang up.

But only one person ever did. 

“Hi,” he would say, in his funny, aging, just-got-in-from-the Midwest voice.  “This is Eunice Harris.  Colonel Tom and I just drove in from Iowa and tired as I am, I just had to call you before I could even dream of sleeping.  I hope I’m not inconveniencing you,” he would say.  “I know how busy you are, and of course I am one of your most ardent admirers.”

They almost never asked him how he had gotten their number.  By the time they might have thought to ask, Eunice had gently wormed her way into a real conversation, telling them what a hard time she’d had finding a decent place to stay, the smog was so terrible that night, people were so unhelpful, what a hardship it had been driving in from Nebraska or Wyoming or whatever her place of origin for the sake of that particular call.  She would ask about their children by name, having dutifully pored over fan magazines.  That would inevitably get them.  In the case of Doris Day she was very proud of young Terry.

Best of all the conversations was the one with Rosalind Russell, who began talking so fast and so much that Eunice could lay back and just listen.  Miss Russell, every bit as elegant and funny on the phone as she’d been in Auntie Mame , was gently guided by Eunice into a discussion of her visit to the Eisenhower White House.  “Is it true,” Eunice asked, “that Mamie is an alcoholic?.”

“Oh, what nonsense!” Rosalind Russell said.  “Mamie just enjoys her Old-Fashioned.  She’ll say, ‘Oh, any minute now we can have our Old-Fashioned.’ Then a little while later, ‘Soon the sun will be over the yardarm, and it’ll be time for our Old-Fashioneds.’ Or, ‘It’s almost five o’clock, and then we can have our Old-Fashioned.’  Then the clock will strike five and she’ll absolutely light up and say ‘Old-Fashioned time!’  But no, of course she isn’t an alcoholic.

“And what she’s done with that White House is not to be believed!” Miss Russell exclaimed. Then the actress launched into a discussion of the Lincoln bedroom, and the other rooms, the fabrics, the materials Mamie herself had chosen, surprising, Roz said, in view of the way people saw the First Lady, which was mostly chintz.

It was at this point that we had to hold our stomachs, along with our mouths.  Stanley Kubrick made a tape of the tape we’d made, ‘Eunice Harris talks to the Stars,’ and secreted it in his vault in Elstree when he moved to England.  But while he was still in Hollywood, he’d had me invite the bona fide Eunice (Paul) to his house, and had her call, watching how she did it.  Stanley, who did not smile easily, sat there grinning all the while, reveling in the mischief.  He gave her Janet Leigh’s number, and Janet was so gracious I felt bad for her, knowing her and liking her as I did, but the phone call was harmless.  Eunice said at the end of it that they’d have to get together, and Janet, very much the kind lady, agreed. “Yes, we must do that,” she said.

“Would you mind coming over to the Valley?” Eunice asked.  “I’m in this little motel right by the freeway, and there’s all this noise from the traffic, but I’m sure we can find a Mexican restaurant or something, and I’d love to treat you to lunch.”

“Oh, I couldn’t let you do that,” Janet said.

“All right,” said Eunice.  “I’ll let you pick up the check just this one time.  When do you want to do it?”

“I’m sorry, I haven’t got my book with me right now,” Janet said.

“Well, why don’t you go and get it, honey,” Eunice said.  “Or I can call you back in a few minutes.”

“I’m sorry,” Janet said.  “I’ve got some company here.”

“I’ve heard you give the best parties,” Eunice said.  “I’ll be right over.”   Then she hung up, leaving, we were sure, a very anxious Janet on the other end of the phone, crouching against the fearfully anticipated ring of the doorbell.

By this time, Stanley, giggling like the bad little boy I always suspected he secretly was, turned over a prize: author Vladimir Nabokov’s number.  One must understand that as protective as people in Hollywood are of their friends’ privacy, on the right occasion, under the right circumstances, many of them will betray one another on a dime.  In this case, it was not for money or power, but for a really great laugh, as rare and prized in those environs as a heartfelt hug.  Stars allowed into Eunice’s circle would happily volunteer their dearest pals’ unlisted line.  So it was that Stanley, in the midst of making the movie of Nabokov’s erotic bestseller, Lolita, gave Eunice the number of the master, at the moment ensconced in a rented house in Cheviot Hills.

“VLADIMIR!” Eunice enthused, the moment he answered the phone. “Colonel Tom and I have been driving night and day from Council Bluffs, hoping to get here in time.  You’ve got to get rid of that dreadful Sue Lyon.  There’s only one girl who can play Lolita, and that’s our daughter, Cindy.  We brought her with us, Colonel Tom and I, and she’s perfect for the part.  Delectable.  Adorable. And she doesn’t look a day over thirteen.”

“Who did you say this was?” asked the hapless Nabokov.

“Eunice Harris.  Mother of the girl who must play the part.  Cindy.  You’re just going to love her, being the prevert that you are.   You’d never be able to tell that… she’s… well.. thirty.”

Stanley lay curled up with laughter on the floor of his living room, holding his mouth and his stomach.  Poor Nabokov, genius though he might have been, was no match for Eunice.  And it was from Jasmine’s inspired, lunatic dialogue, that Stanley was to harvest the word ‘prevert,’ that echoed throughout the screenplay of Dr. Strangelove.     

Eunice was merciful with Ingrid Bergman, who was back in Hollywood after the disrepute of her running away with the Italian director Roberto Rosselini.  Because her image had been virtually angelic, her public equating her with St. Joan, a role she had portrayed in Otto Preminger’s production, filmgoers found it unacceptable, her turning out to be a passionate, living human being.   She had even been denounced by Congress.  So Bergman was quite anxious at the time. When Eunice asked her, ‘just between us girls,’ about the end of her marriage, Bergman said she really didn’t want to talk about it.  “Not even with me?” Eunice said cheekily.

“Well, I’m not really sure who, exactly, you are,” said the great lady.

“I understand, dear.  We can’t all be Ingrid Bergman.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Ingrid Bergman said, apologetically.  “I’m not really that sure who Ingrid Bergman is supposed to be.”

Bergman was really a lovely, if openly melancholy woman.  I met her in the still- striking flesh a few years later, when the writer Sterling Silliphant invited me to join them for a drink at ’21.’  She seemed edgy and depressed, having survived her fall from sainthood.  She and Rosselini had had twins, a daughter, and a couple of terrible movies.  Now she was making films in Hollywood again.  But the remarkable success of her early career had vanished, as evanescent as the glow of her complexion.  I don’t think there was ever a more carved, exquisite face on the screen than hers in ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ where she was victim to Spencer Tracy’s temporarily murderous villain, or in ‘Gaslight,’ when she was driven nearly mad by Charles Boyer.  Phillip and Julius Epstein, the writers of the all-time classic ‘Casablanca’, graced by that face, were later to be accorded a standing ovation by the same U.S.Congress that had denounced her.

But there in ’21,’ she seemed lustrous and sad.

“You are,” I said to her, after some moments, sensing her unhappiness, “the most beautiful woman ever to be in films.”  It sounded, I know, sycophantish, but I was sincere.

“How very lucky for me,” she answered, coldly.

It dismayed me slightly, her haughty and ironic delivery.  It disappointed me even more when I saw Saratoga Trunk  on television some years later, and heard her say the same line in the movie.  She was, after all, only an actress.

But she’d been cordial on the phone with Eunice Harris. I cherished her for that. 

And now we come to the only movie star ever to hang up: Bette Davis, staying at the Chateau Marmont with her then husband, Gary Merrill.

Once connected by the operators at the Chateau, who, in those days were a little air-headed, and didn’t always screen the calls, or necessarily connect them, Eunice launched instantly into her most successful terms of entrapment.  She told Bette Davis she had just been selected to be the poster girl for the Daughters of Bilitis.  That was a name for a lesbian organization, but Miss Davis didn’t know that, and Eunice didn’t elucidate.  She said only that there would be a photographer there the next morning to take the star’s picture for the cover of the Daughters of Bilitis magazine, and they’d like her to be in a tennis outfit.

      “I don’t play tennis,” Bette Davis said.  “And I’m not posing for your magazine. 

Now go away!”

       Even the way the phone crashed into the cradle sounded soooooo Bette Davis.

            There was, and, I hope, still is, an artist in Hollywood named Paul Jasmine.  Nobody knows how to find him, not intimate friends, not those who collected his work.  But he was/is of such an original turn of mind, I can only imagine he would never have done anything as usual as die. Besides his gifts as painter and, later, photographer, he also had an assumed persona, a nasal, twangy Midwestern woman named Eunice Harris.  It became a bit of a local legend that his was the voice of Norman Bates’ mother, in the upstairs of that weird house in ‘Psycho.’  I’m not sure of the truth of that-- I never checked it out with Tony Perkins, though I know they were close friends, if not more.   But it will help to convey the timbre and sound of the voice he put on, when he made some remarkable telephone calls.

I don’t know where or how he obtained the phone numbers.  But he successfully got through to many of the women who were major stars at the beginning of the Sixties.  More impressively, even miraculously, he managed to really engage them on the phone.  By the end of their conversations, this perfect stranger would have made them his/her friend.  It was a late-night sport to which some of us were privy, lying around in jeans on the floor, our vestigial adolescence making it the hot ticket in town, to be one of those listening to Paul putting on the stars.  But we had to learn to contain our laughter, as it was the early days of speakerphones: the person on the other end, Ingrid Bergman, for example, hearing the sniggers, might hang up.

But only one person ever did. 

“Hi,” he would say, in his funny, aging, just-got-in-from-the Midwest voice.  “This is Eunice Harris.  Colonel Tom and I just drove in from Iowa and tired as I am, I just had to call you before I could even dream of sleeping.  I hope I’m not inconveniencing you,” he would say.  “I know how busy you are, and of course I am one of your most ardent admirers.”

They almost never asked him how he had gotten their number.  By the time they might have thought to ask, Eunice had gently wormed her way into a real conversation, telling them what a hard time she’d had finding a decent place to stay, the smog was so terrible that night, people were so unhelpful, what a hardship it had been driving in from Nebraska or Wyoming or whatever her place of origin for the sake of that particular call.  She would ask about their children by name, having dutifully pored over fan magazines.  That would inevitably get them.  In the case of Doris Day she was very proud of young Terry.

Best of all the conversations was the one with Rosalind Russell, who began talking so fast and so much that Eunice could lay back and just listen.  Miss Russell, every bit as elegant and funny on the phone as she’d been in Auntie Mame , was gently guided by Eunice into a discussion of her visit to the Eisenhower White House.  “Is it true,” Eunice asked, “that Mamie is an alcoholic?.”

“Oh, what nonsense!” Rosalind Russell said.  “Mamie just enjoys her Old-Fashioned.  She’ll say, ‘Oh, any minute now we can have our Old-Fashioned.’ Then a little while later, ‘Soon the sun will be over the yardarm, and it’ll be time for our Old-Fashioneds.’ Or, ‘It’s almost five o’clock, and then we can have our Old-Fashioned.’  Then the clock will strike five and she’ll absolutely light up and say ‘Old-Fashioned time!’  But no, of course she isn’t an alcoholic.

“And what she’s done with that White House is not to be believed!” Miss Russell exclaimed. Then the actress launched into a discussion of the Lincoln bedroom, and the other rooms, the fabrics, the materials Mamie herself had chosen, surprising, Roz said, in view of the way people saw the First Lady, which was mostly chintz.

It was at this point that we had to hold our stomachs, along with our mouths.  Stanley Kubrick made a tape of the tape we’d made, ‘Eunice Harris talks to the Stars,’ and secreted it in his vault in Elstree when he moved to England.  But while he was still in Hollywood, he’d had me invite the bona fide Eunice (Paul) to his house, and had her call, watching how she did it.  Stanley, who did not smile easily, sat there grinning all the while, reveling in the mischief.  He gave her Janet Leigh’s number, and Janet was so gracious I felt bad for her, knowing her and liking her as I did, but the phone call was harmless.  Eunice said at the end of it that they’d have to get together, and Janet, very much the kind lady, agreed. “Yes, we must do that,” she said.

“Would you mind coming over to the Valley?” Eunice asked.  “I’m in this little motel right by the freeway, and there’s all this noise from the traffic, but I’m sure we can find a Mexican restaurant or something, and I’d love to treat you to lunch.”

“Oh, I couldn’t let you do that,” Janet said.

“All right,” said Eunice.  “I’ll let you pick up the check just this one time.  When do you want to do it?”

“I’m sorry, I haven’t got my book with me right now,” Janet said.

“Well, why don’t you go and get it, honey,” Eunice said.  “Or I can call you back in a few minutes.”

“I’m sorry,” Janet said.  “I’ve got some company here.”

“I’ve heard you give the best parties,” Eunice said.  “I’ll be right over.”   Then she hung up, leaving, we were sure, a very anxious Janet on the other end of the phone, crouching against the fearfully anticipated ring of the doorbell.

By this time, Stanley, giggling like the bad little boy I always suspected he secretly was, turned over a prize: author Vladimir Nabokov’s number.  One must understand that as protective as people in Hollywood are of their friends’ privacy, on the right occasion, under the right circumstances, many of them will betray one another on a dime.  In this case, it was not for money or power, but for a really great laugh, as rare and prized in those environs as a heartfelt hug.  Stars allowed into Eunice’s circle would happily volunteer their dearest pals’ unlisted line.  So it was that Stanley, in the midst of making the movie of Nabokov’s erotic bestseller, Lolita, gave Eunice the number of the master, at the moment ensconced in a rented house in Cheviot Hills.

“VLADIMIR!” Eunice enthused, the moment he answered the phone. “Colonel Tom and I have been driving night and day from Council Bluffs, hoping to get here in time.  You’ve got to get rid of that dreadful Sue Lyon.  There’s only one girl who can play Lolita, and that’s our daughter, Cindy.  We brought her with us, Colonel Tom and I, and she’s perfect for the part.  Delectable.  Adorable. And she doesn’t look a day over thirteen.”

“Who did you say this was?” asked the hapless Nabokov.

“Eunice Harris.  Mother of the girl who must play the part.  Cindy.  You’re just going to love her, being the prevert that you are.   You’d never be able to tell that… she’s… well.. thirty.”

Stanley lay curled up with laughter on the floor of his living room, holding his mouth and his stomach.  Poor Nabokov, genius though he might have been, was no match for Eunice.  And it was from Jasmine’s inspired, lunatic dialogue, that Stanley was to harvest the word ‘prevert,’ that echoed throughout the screenplay of Dr. Strangelove.     

Eunice was merciful with Ingrid Bergman, who was back in Hollywood after the disrepute of her running away with the Italian director Roberto Rosselini.  Because her image had been virtually angelic, her public equating her with St. Joan, a role she had portrayed in Otto Preminger’s production, filmgoers found it unacceptable, her turning out to be a passionate, living human being.   She had even been denounced by Congress.  So Bergman was quite anxious at the time. When Eunice asked her, ‘just between us girls,’ about the end of her marriage, Bergman said she really didn’t want to talk about it.  “Not even with me?” Eunice said cheekily.

“Well, I’m not really sure who, exactly, you are,” said the great lady.

“I understand, dear.  We can’t all be Ingrid Bergman.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Ingrid Bergman said, apologetically.  “I’m not really that sure who Ingrid Bergman is supposed to be.”

Bergman was really a lovely, if openly melancholy woman.  I met her in the still- striking flesh a few years later, when the writer Sterling Silliphant invited me to join them for a drink at ’21.’  She seemed edgy and depressed, having survived her fall from sainthood.  She and Rosselini had had twins, a daughter, and a couple of terrible movies.  Now she was making films in Hollywood again.  But the remarkable success of her early career had vanished, as evanescent as the glow of her complexion.  I don’t think there was ever a more carved, exquisite face on the screen than hers in ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ where she was victim to Spencer Tracy’s temporarily murderous villain, or in ‘Gaslight,’ when she was driven nearly mad by Charles Boyer.  Phillip and Julius Epstein, the writers of the all-time classic ‘Casablanca’, graced by that face, were later to be accorded a standing ovation by the same U.S.Congress that had denounced her.

But there in ’21,’ she seemed lustrous and sad.

“You are,” I said to her, after some moments, sensing her unhappiness, “the most beautiful woman ever to be in films.”  It sounded, I know, sycophantish, but I was sincere.

“How very lucky for me,” she answered, coldly.

It dismayed me slightly, her haughty and ironic delivery.  It disappointed me even more when I saw Saratoga Trunk  on television some years later, and heard her say the same line in the movie.  She was, after all, only an actress.

But she’d been cordial on the phone with Eunice Harris. I cherished her for that. 

And now we come to the only movie star ever to hang up: Bette Davis, staying at the Chateau Marmont with her then husband, Gary Merrill.

Once connected by the operators at the Chateau, who, in those days were a little air-headed, and didn’t always screen the calls, or necessarily connect them, Eunice launched instantly into her most successful terms of entrapment.  She told Bette Davis she had just been selected to be the poster girl for the Daughters of Bilitis.  That was a name for a lesbian organization, but Miss Davis didn’t know that, and Eunice didn’t elucidate.  She said only that there would be a photographer there the next morning to take the star’s picture for the cover of the Daughters of Bilitis magazine, and they’d like her to be in a tennis outfit.

      “I don’t play tennis,” Bette Davis said.  “And I’m not posing for your magazine. 

Now go away!”

       Even the way the phone crashed into the cradle sounded soooooo Bette Davis.

ALL GORE IS DIVIDED INTO THREE PARTS

ALL GORE IS DIVIDED INTO THREE PARTS

     There is a review in this week’s New Yorker, to which I have after a long time away started to subscribe as magazines have so fallen in favor, they are cheap, and you can feel their desperation—so literate in a world where so few people now turn to the actual page—of a Gore Vidal biography.  And I feel how lucky I am to have had, in one lifetime, a man who loved me as much as Don did, and a friend—as much as he could be one—like Gore Vidal.

         Don and I were living in London as a young couple with little kids, going for our first visit to Rome.  It was early enough in our lives so we were still friends with the powerful and witty agent Sue Mengers, who told us to call Gore.  Invited for tea, or more probably it was a drink, to Gore’s rooftop apartment in Rome, we apparently passed the audition, and he said we should go on with him to dinner.  Impressed and excited,--or at least I was, --- we did.  

      His companion, and, as he was to seem from time to time, clever and funny friend Howard Austen was along.  So was one of the Andy Warhol girls: Ultra Violet, I think it was. 

         The dinner was obviously Italian, and the words, though I can’t remember what all of them actually were, were dazzling.  There was little he seemed to be able to say without its being framed and mounted like a celebrity photo on a mantel.  And I do remember vividly Gore’s looking at me intensely at one point and asking if I was wearing contacts.  I told him no.

     “It’s just that your eyes are so beautiful I thought you must have something in them.”

    Well, let me tell you, dear reader, if one you are and you are there: there is nothing more dizzying than being hit on by one of the world’s most notorious and dazzlingly articulate homosexuals.  As I remember, I was stunned into silence.

     Don, viably straight man that he was, who’d been captivated but less than comfortable for most of the evening, was furious.  “It just shows what a pervert you really are,” he said in the taxi back to the hotel,” that you enjoy the company of Gore Vidal.”

      And I did, and continued to, whenever I was in the same city he was.  When he came to Los Angeles I would meet him at the Beverly Hills Hotel where he stayed with appropriate panache.  And I recall vividly, his squeakily saying “Really?” when I relayed something flattering that had been said about him.  Then there was going to visit him at his home in Ravello, when Don had died shatteringly young, and much too early, and I was questing for the upside of being alone, and he had invited me.

        “This…” Gore said, arms outspread, as he gazed down from the side of the mountain his villa was perched on, overlooking the ocean, “is our view.”

         I was still so overcome at having an actual relationship, such as it was, with Gore Vidal himself, that I didn’t really register how pretentious it sounded.  Even now, all these years later, I prize having had the contact, and sorrow over the deterioration that was to come, the inevitability of decay if you are lucky enough to have a long run.  At the time, though, he was still superior, literally and geographically above it all, contemptuous even while appearing the sort-of gracious host.   Howard, though, was patently pissed, not enjoying Gore’s being interested in a woman, though it was Nothing Really Personal.

         I told tales of having gone to the nude encounter marathon, the wet adventure that was to be the center of  most of my career difficulties, when the novel that resulted started an egregious landmark lawsuit.  Both Gore and Howard were visibly un-enchanted.   Gore became contemptuous, and when I gave him a novel of mine that I had brought as a gift, MARRIAGE, not a smart choice of subject on my part, was dismissive.  I don’t imagine he ever even bothered to read a work of mine.

         But after Howard died, and he was lonely, I was invited to be with him on a number of occasions.  He waited for me at the gate to the path that led down to his villa.  I could almost hear him holding his breath as I approached, and I realized he was actually anxious for my company.

      But he became more arch, and less appealing with every visit.  Sort of happily, I had had one phone conversation with Howard before he died, amicable and even borderline hearty, and that made me happy.  I do like to make friends, especially when they don’t like me.

         Reading about Gore in The New Yorker, -- once my, and everybody’s as I remember-- favorite magazine, it is easy to see how far or maybe near we have actually come.  The cartoons are no longer so funny or so well drawn, but the prose is still read over the nose as if it were a transom, and everybody should be standing on tiptoe.

      Gore, from a distance, seems actually closer than one could really get, and I realize how glad he was for my company though he less than prized it, and how desperately he longed for literary acknowledgement.    “The very rich are different from you and me,” Fitzgerald said to Hemingway, and Ernest replied, “Yes, they have more money.”

         “The very literate are different from you and me,” I say.  “Yes,” I answer back, trying to be fork-tongued. “They pretend to read The New York Review of Books.”

JESSICA'S BIRTHDAY

It's my sister's birthday.  I know most of you don't even know I have a sister, as it's one of the things in my life that has least factored into it, my life that is.
    My mother got pregnant in her affair with Puggy, whom I came to adore, I think while Elizabeth, his wife, was still alive.  Puggy and Elizabeth pulled up to the front of the hotel where my mother was social director, a position she had worked up to by a cleverness had she used it to the extent she was able but had no idea she could, she might have been the first woman president, though obviously that will not easily or perhaps ever happen, the way the world is.
She thought Elizabeth was his mother, and social director that she was, made them her closest friends.  So close that at the end of the summer, Elizabeth, knowing she was dying, invited my mother to come live with them, and the rest is, though not quite history, my probably best book, the one that would have been a great bestseller except the country had to be saved, so there was ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN.  It hurts me to put it in caps.
     Something in my mother was definitely off, so even while she loved him and got to marry him when Elizabeth died which was not long after, she could not help tormenting him, driving him crazy, being cruel to his son, a genius but off, (she despised him) and punishing my half-sister Jessica who came not long after from that union, for just about everything, driving her even crazier than Puggy's son, Mickey.  It is all so sad, but made a wonderful novel.
    Puggy left Helen, my mother, for Mickey's girlfriend Kathy who dumped him because he was a Jew, married the Gentile heiress, and died in the bathtub, right after we had a loving conversation on the phone.  I never have to make anything up.
    I hope to have the opportunity to write most of these things in story form somewhere before I die, though am not sure any of it will matter when Trump destroys the book market which will probably be soon.

VERY BAD PLOT INDEED

So I went to the Apple store after being up most of the night to correct my e-mail.  But the Apple store is canceling one-to-one (the sessions where you can actually be helped) because they were not making enough money.  I guess it's good Steve Jobs died.
     There has been little in my life I was unable to solve other than mathematics and George Segal being a shit at Haverford with me at Bryn Mawr until this computer thing.  It is my hope that I still have creativity and its spawn inside me, but when I get frustrated I get mad and when you get mad you get stupid.  Non-functioning, that is.  So I have lost several days of my life recently as companies acquire each other and cancel services, all the while they tell you on TV that they are expanding, but it comes up on your screen that it's not going to come up on your screen. So I have been raging into the night which at my age you shouldn't dare do-- we just lost Florence Henderson, and look how pleasant she always was--and so in the late morning, when Elzie Fedora couldn't get together-- she wasn't so well either-- I went to the Apple store.  There they told me the reason I had been on hold for several hours was that I was dialing one of those bogus companies.  But then I checked it out and the company isn't bogus at all-- they're actually listed, they just don't answer for several hours and then when/if they do, they don't know what's going on.  I mean with anything.  I would say they were fucked but maybe children can read this, and it's bad enough you hear them saying that word on the street when there's not really reason enough to get that angry.
     So the Apple store rescheduled my appointment for tomorrow and I better go, in case Trump actually becomes president and we all get killed and nothing is left but his properties. (Does he really have any, or is it all just bluff?)  
    I am so scared and sad for the United States of America, a mouthful that never actually offended me, because I believed in it.  This is all about the power of money, which he really doesn't have but knows how to sham about.  My apartment in New York-- a maid's room it probably was when the very rich lived there,-- it's just a little one-stop now, but on a great street, or at least it was till the Donald lived up the block.  It upsets me to refer to him as that, since my very late husband was also named Donald, but there was the offhand about him, so he was much more 'Don.'  
     Oh, what a world what a world, as the wizard said when Oz was collapsing.  That a stupid little man as that, with his tiny hands that he insists do not portend a little member, could have any effect on a bright old little girl like me.  I really do hope someone kills him.  And Me, a Jewish Quaker, except I was so depressed I couldn't get up to go to Meeting.