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.

VERY BAD PLOT

Comedy was once my best suit, one I could wear on the most sophisticated of occasions.  But I find myself caught in a plot so unthinkable, even for high-line farce, that I am hardly able to function.  That is, I appear to be functioning, but I cannot believe my surroundings, or, indeed, anything that appears to be taking place.
     Let us play this one out: a man walks into an empty country and says "Who's the president here?" and a voice says "Nobody."  And the man says "Okay.  I'm the president."
     That is a sort of joke that my loved and very funny friend Mel Brooks made about my father Lew Davis, the failed pharmacist and soldier-- my mother got him the commission when she left him so he could pay her alimony which she was to spend several decades suing him for after he moved to Tucson and became mayor.   "A man walks into a town," Mel said, imagining, "and says: 'Who's the Mayor here, and someone answers 'Nobody.' 'Okay,' he says, 'I'm the mayor.' 
    That this Trump clown,-- not fair, it is an insult to clowns-- should have the future of this up till now mostly great country, and so the world, in his stubby-fingered hands, is unthinkable, even as it becomes a reality.  On the Internet his people are selling hats and banners that are left from this campaign, so he will profit even as he has failed to pay anything he owes the country, all the while managing to keep hidden how much it is.  This is a plot Mel could have come up with. 
   It only works as comedy if we are sure the world will not come to an end.
     

BURYING A CHILD

It is, I would suppose stupidly, one of the last things you would ever imagine: Burying a child.  In this case, Madeleine Anne Mitchell, as I read from her death notice just received in the mail from Arizona, was very much more than a child.  But she was mine, though I hardly gave her the attention I should have.  More than remiss, I am.  Stupid.  Insensitive, for such an allegedly bright woman.  So caught up in what might happen to Robert, who came second, and, as my mother, the fierce Helen Schwamm said, "Anyone could have a girl."
      Madeleine just died at fifty, under circumstances that might be characterized as mysterious, though the officers in charge of the investigation were satisfied that there was nothing untoward about her death, if death can be characterized as toward.  She was, I think, a good girl, but as her body was not found for many days, it had begun to smell, and that's what brought the police.  A terrible story. Not one I would have written, even on my worst day.
     Even now, I am having difficulty getting the words out, putting them down or clinking them out on my computer, what I use now to express myself, other than shrieking in the night.  I am no longer sure who this person is, having myself become ill for what I think is the first time in my adult life, other than the stuff you go through without becoming alarmed or scared.  Or, in this case, inert.  Stupid.
      I am so sad for Madeleine, though as a friend pointed out, she is free from pain.  I have been sifting through the works of Kay Boyle, a great writer who championed me when I was going through the horror of Doubleday's lawsuit against me, and I still didn't appreciate her enough to have read her except for snippets.  As it turns out, I am not as nice as I should have been, especially considering all the great people who stood up for me in my lifetime, when I should have become more than I did.  Silas, my remarkable grandson, has already done more for others at thirteen, than I have really done at my very (how is it possible?) advanced age.
       So Madeleine is very gone.  I have just put the death notices, come from Arizona, into the chute as I have to ready this apartment for my permanent departure, which I believe and hope will be soon, as there's no point my being here.  New York is an old fantasy, one from my twenties, when all of life seemed to lay ahead of me, and I had a play on Broadway, even failed.  Driven back to the hospital opening night(I had just given birth) by Mel Brooks and his beautiful wife, Anne Bancroft, who I considered my closest friend, certainly the most gifted one, for whom I had written the play but she had another commitment, only to have gotten to the theatre there in time for the closing curtain and the last laugh, which wasn't there.  "Well you had two things happen this week," Mel said in the taxi back to the hospital,  "If one of them had to be less than perfect, it should have been your daughter." He was always funny, but the laughter was pained.  Now it is, funnily but grotesquely, fifty years later, and she is gone.
   I threw the notices away.  I don't think I need to be reminded that she is gone.  The roof across from my little, ugly, ungraceful step-onto it and don't fall off it terrace, is bleak and joyless like the day. I can no longer think of living here.  That is to say, I can think of it, but the thought saddens me.  It's time to go back to California.

ARE WE STILL FREE?

    So it is 4th of July weekend, the celebration of our nation's Freedom, which may be coming to an end with the ascendancy of Donald Trump, the blatant fascist and closet ignoramus.  I have just returned from the commemoration in Scottsdale for my daughter, Madeleine, looking teenagerly beauteous in the photo at her service, but actually fifty at her death, though still unnecessarily too soon.  But it was uplifting, in a dark way, to see the people there were who cared about her, not the least of whom was me.

     Madeleine, named after the woman fired from  the lead in my Broadway comedy that opened and closed with her birth, died under mysterious, ugly and cloudy circumstances in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she bolted seven coffees every morning at Starbuck's, worked out two hours every day but still, desperate, didn't find love.  My friend Ann Busby, who should have her picture in Wikipedia under the definition "friendship,"drove me there from LA and funneled all information back to me when it fell out of my head, and being a lawyer, siphoned out what would hold up under scrutiny after our meeting with the police.  To my relief, they were genuinely nice guys, a word I wouldn't usually use, but here it obtains.  Clear, direct, and having conducted what appears to be a thorough investigation, except for the drug reports. That will take six months to be completed, there is apparently so much of that kind of death in Arizona.

     I guess Madeleine went to college there because she didn't have the equipment or longing to aspire higher, and my father had been mayor of Tucson, moved there during my teenage years because the woman my mother introduced him to as she was sure Selma, the second wife, would kill him.  But instead, her allergies drove them to the desert version of greatness.  He was less than a wonderful man, but apparently they didn't see that in Tucson, as I am fearful we might not be able to see it in America. Or maybe we just no longer care.

     So because Lew Davis, Lew, the Mayor, as my friend Mel Brooks called him, had standing, Madeleine went there to college.  But she was less than a devoted student, though my colleague from graduate writing school at Stanford who taught her at the U of A told me she had talent, which, sadly, she didn't use, so busy was she questing for love. She married three times.  The first dumped her after little more than a year, once she had signed over her car; the second adored her but she didn't want him anymore until he had married someone else; and the third I never met but I know he'd had her arrested.  Not a pretty story, and certainly not one I would have written out of choice.  Or inspiration.

      When Madeleine was a little girl, I told her how much I loved her, how wonderful she was.  "Than why did you have Robert?" she asked me.

    I suppose that that is a question that resonates through the minds of many children.  It got a laugh at the Quaker Meeting I grieved for her at, and again at the memorial for Maddy, as her friends called her.  Not a nickname I would have chosen, but her life wasn't up to me, or it would have been better. 

     When her brother was born on the eve of my would-have-been-bigger-bestseller, had I had a better publisher, The Pretenders, my editor, a really smart man, Bob Gutwillig, sent me a telegram: "A boy! How marvelous!"  My mother said simply, cuttingly, as most of her judgments came, "Anyone could have a girl."

     I was so busy trying to pick us back up from my failed Broadway comedy, The Best Laid Plans,  an ill-chosen but ironically apt title, that I didn't really process how cruel, and untrue, that judgment was.  That I had gone to what is arguably the best college in the world, still for women only, Bryn Mawr, seemed beside the point.

The point was success, as it seems enduringly to be in America.  Scary.  And sad.

    My husband, Don Mitchell as he'd changed his name to, Miskie being too Jewish and Bronxy to be swallowable by my mother, Helen, born Finkelstein changed to Fink (I never have to make anything up) had lost his job as a television producer in New York just as we'd decided to put off having children.  But I found out the next day  I was already pregnant with Madeleine, as we were to name her as compensation to  Madlyn Rhue, the leading lady in my comedy, fired just before it opened, and I went into the hospital to give birth to my daughter.  To give you some idea of how much loyalty and love there was in the New York theatre world of 1966, the heads of several studios whom I considered really close friends, coming to  my hospital room to congratulate me the evening of her birth, were unreachable after the reviews.  The director, Paul Bogart, had been fired just before the opening, and Hilly Elkins, the producer, had brought in Arthur Storch, who didn't have a clue, and  kept changing everything, so everybody went up on their lines opening night.  Mel, married to Anne Bancroft, my close friend, for whom I'd written it, only to have her tell me she was doing The Devils, ("Well, who knew you would write a play in a week?" she'd said,)  taxied us back to the hospital that night.  Don and I had gotten to the theatre in time for the closing curtain, and the last laugh. Only it wasn't there.

     "Well, you had two things happen this week," Mel said.  "If one of them had to be less than perfect, if your child had been born with six toes and two noses... that would have been okay.  What mattered was the show."

     It was, like most of Mel's lines, funny.  But, sadly, in terms of New York and the theater world of the Sixties, the truth.  Mostly, as I remember,  I spent what was left of my youth trying to make up for America's greatest sin: failing.

     No one would return our calls.  I was still kind of chubby, so when I would pass people I knew on the street I would secrete myself behind telephone poles, imagining that would hide me.

    But Annie and Mel came over to visit. She read the reviews out loud, spitting at them.  I really loved her.  When you do life over in your mind, she plays the lead in my play, so I am a hit and my whole life is different.  But maybe not as interesting.

    But this is supposed to be about Madeleine, as her whole life should have been.  But wasn't.

    Don was without work, and I was limelight failed.  I had a friend in Carol Burnett, so I called her on the sly, and asked her to give Don work.  Her new show was starting in California.  So it was we left New York, and I no longer had to hide behind telephone poles.

    We stayed in the attic of Carol Burnett's guest house till we found a place to live.  When we did, the man who opened the door to rent it to us, turned out to be Les Colodny, the funny, self-promoting man who'd hired me in New York at NBC when I was twenty, as a comedy writer, and he ran the program of new talents that was just starting.  It was to audition for him that Eliott Kastner, --that is another saga-- had had me come back from Europe and sing my songs, to be hired on the spot, only to have Les and the writers he liked better go to Hollywood leaving me to be fired as the department fizzled though I had two or three musicals under my arm.  But that is several more stories, and this is supposed to be about Madeleine.  

     As Madeleine's life should have been. But apparently never really was.  So maybe her death can be.  I hope so.