Hirschfeld in The New York Times
© Al Hirschfeld Foundation
The Birds of Killingworth
(“I’ll make love to the Man in the Moon”)
1
For Daisy Belmore, Automat chicken pot pie is like Pheasant under glass at the St. Regis as
she spoons it on to a white, warm,
porcelain plate (no plastic at the
Automat!), gathering peas and carrots, bits of crust and chicken with fork
held in left hand, knife in the right, European style, savoring. “Such lovely
veg-e-ta-bles.”
November, 1950. David Woehrle is introducing me to her at
the West 54th-at-Broadway Automat. She’s sitting between us, perhaps
to protect her from imaginary autograph hounds. Daisy at 76 has had a long
career in the theatre, films, and radio, but isn’t well-known. Some notoriety will
come to her in February when she appears at the Martin Beck Theatre as the
witch in the new Tennessee Williams play, “The Rose Tattoo.” No longer may she
identify herself as “the most known unknown in the theatre.”
Daisy, hair colored apricot, eyes blue as a June sky considers
me. Shall I get the part, will she welcome me to her world as fellow actor, or
send me off to the cheap seats in the balcony?
“What happened to your hair?” David asks.
“I’ve had it colored apricot, and Tennessee loves it!” her voice, young, petulant.
She’s a large woman, well shaped bones suggesting control, but a certain tremor
in her voice reveals vulnerability. “If you know anything about the theatre,
David,” between savoring forks-full of lovely veg-e-ta-bles, “you would know
this color will catch the lights and transform it to gray.”
“I hope so,” David says, “but anyway, I guess apricot
might be okay for a witch’s hair.”
“Stray-ga,” she
corrects, dropping several lumps of sugar and a dollop of cream into her coffee.
“That’s Italian for witch and you should know under pink gels, my hair will
appear gray.” I want to ask, How do you
know they will be pink? but think better of it.
Making the most of the Automat’s mundane setting, she
performs eloquently, lofty and formidable to the last detail, chicken pot pie
followed by rice pudding (“Nothing like my recipe,” she complains); the
two-course meal lacking only critical notices and applause. Daisy is “in and of” the theatre once more.
She invites me to study with her. “Why don’t you come
along with David the next time for Shakespeare? Have you studied Shakespeare?
You’re not one of the mumblers, are you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Have you learned to pro-ject (rolling the “r”) so you can be understood in the balcony?”
“It’s not a problem, I don’t think.”
“Well, dear, I’m sure you’ll do very nicely.”
The Shakespeare project is delayed until Daisy returns
from out-of-town tryouts, opening on December 29 at the Erlanger Theatre in Chicago . She writes us, “My
dears, they’re laughing at everything!” But “The Rose Tattoo” for me transcends comedy, one of the most joyous,
heart warming odes to the human spirit of all Tennessee William’s plays.
The play opens in New York February 3, 1951. Daisy as the
strega clatters about chasing a goat and making a nuisance of herself in Act I,
but later in one magical moment, totally at rest, she hooks me with her
wizardry standing perfectly still listening at the window of Serafina’s house.
Daisy Belmore, the Strega
eavesdropping at Serafina’s window
Serafina, (Maureen Stapleton), is demanding the young
sailor, Jack (Don Murray) drop to his knees in front of the Madonna and swear
he will “respect the innocence of her daughter and the daughter of her dead
husband, Rosario
delle Rose.
The Strega
creeps into the yard listening as Serafina conducts a lengthy challenge to the
young sailor. Daisy comes to rest, not moving a muscle, centered in the
moment, quietly listening. Her intense stillness draws me forward, spellbound.
I shall remember the moment always.
On my first visit to Daisy’s sixteenth floor apartment at
the Wellington
(painfully near Kitty O’Brien’s”), the wiry, not so tall elevator operator eyes
me suspiciously “You’re visiting—who?”
“Daisy Belmore.”
“Did you phone from downstairs? Is she expecting you? “
“Yes.”
“It’s all ladies on this floor, so we have to be
careful,” as if he were the only one in the hotel privy to this information. He
slides the elevator to a halt. Escaping into the hallway, I find Daisy’s room.
David greets me and I’m welcomed by the shrill whistle of a tea kettle.
“You’re announced—by a tea kettle,” David says.
Red hair flying, Julia Cross puffs on a cigarette,
coughing through smoke. “Hello, dahling.”
The small, well-organized room has bed against one wall
under a high window, chest of drawers against another wall; fragile TV tables
on spindle legs, a couple of straight-backed chairs, one large overstuffed
recliner, hot plate in a corner, upon which the tea kettle sputters. The window
above the bed looks out on windows not more than fifteen feet away in another
wing of the Wellington .
This, Daisy’s home for the rest of her life.
Holding a fat rose-hued teapot in both hands, Daisy moves
over to the hot plate. “Bring the pot to the kettle, not the kettle to the
pot!” she sings.
Cough-cough
from Julia. “Daisy is telling us a Rose Tattoo story.”
Taking center stage, Daisy pours hot water into the
teapot. “This actress my dear, her timing was thoroughly out of joint in
rehearsal. She’s rushing her one big line and will lose her laugh. I have to
yank her aside and tell her how to do it! She’s the schoolteacher, you see, and
has come to fetch Serafina’s daughter to her graduation and is being chased by
this gaggle of women all prattling away in Italian. She stops them with Please ladies! You know I don’t
speak Italian!—well, my dears, that’s her line, but she just rattles
it off, taking no pause. I tell her she’ll never get her laugh that way.
She must pause and wait a moment for
their complete silence—Please, ladies! – pause,
and then, You know I don’t speak Italian!
Daisy glances around the room, waiting approval. Julia
inhales a wad of smoke, David stares in silence. Me? I laugh. I get it, but
Daisy doesn’t seem to notice.
“Well, don’t you see?” now peevish. “She must take the
pause to get her laugh. Please,
ladies!—long pause—and then, You know I
don’t speak Italian!”
Julia says, “Daisy dear, didn’t the director mind your
interfering?”
“Certainly not! Danny Mann has given me cart blank. He
knows my long experience in the theatre. Don’t you understand? Her timing is
off!”
Julia laughs through coughing fits. Daisy pursing lips.
“What’s so funny, Julia?”
“Daisy dear, it’s carte
blanche, not cart blank. It’s
French.”
“Oh bother!” Pout lingering, she pours the tea. “Julia,
you’ve been smoking too much.”
“I know, Daisy dear, but it’s so hard to quit.”
“You too, David. Clear speaking demands breath control!”
“Tallulah Bankhead smokes like a locomotive,” David says,
“and you can sure hear her in the balcony.”
“ Oh never mind!” Daisy now the scolded child. “If you want
to sound like Tallulah with her whiskey vocal chords, go right ahead!” blue
eyes glancing toward me, at last recognizing my presence. “Did you bring your
Shakespeare?”
“Well, no, I—”
“We’re reading the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet,”
she says sternly, “and it’s much too late for me to exude an extra copy!”
Julia laughs again, coughing through tears. “It’s
ex-hume, Daisy dear—not ex-ude.”
“He can borrow my copy,” David interrupts. “I know the
lines.”
“Let’s get on with it!” Daisy says, passing a tin of
biscuits. “Are you prepared, Julia?”
“Yes, dear, I’m prepared, as soon as I ex-ude a copy of the play from my bag so
that I can ex-hume my lines.”
Daisy lifts her chin a notch, scowling, settling into the
recliner. David begins, “But soft—”
“Wait for us, dear,” Daisy says.
“I’ve got the first line.”
“Yes, but—are you ready, Julia?”
“Yes, I’m ready.”
David continues, “But soft, what light through yonder
window breaks. It is the east and Juliet is the sun. Arise fair sun—“
“No! No, David, more passion! He’s in love with a lovely
young maiden. He pines for her. Now then—once more.”
I’m assigned apparently to audience only. The balcony
scene continues, Julia, coughing through, “Oh swear not by the moon, the
inconstant moon—” stopping suddenly to light another cigarette. “Daisy, why
don’t you read Juliet? You do it so beautifully.”
Daisy glows, no coaxing required. “Well, all right, my
dears. . .” settling into the recliner. “Oh Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou
Romeo . . .” transforming herself into a young girl, vibrant, clear intonation,
singing the words, blue eyes shining. Unforgettable.
Even before she’s left for the Chicago
tryouts, and before the Automat introduction, David has become her dependable
escort—dinners at the Wellington ,
gatherings of theatre people. She’s furious when he announces he can’t take New York anymore and might just go back to California —to Hollywood .
Daisy says, “I nearly died out there!”
She began her movie career in 1917 at the age of
forty-three. Sometime in the 1920s she married Sam Waxman and lived with him in
Australia .
They had two children, one boy, one girl. (The marriage is never mentioned in
her biographies.) By 1930 she was divorced and living in a trailer in Hollywood .
“Garbo called me Nana,” she tells us, appearing (uncredited)
as the flower shop owner at the beginning of “Camille,” bringing a large
bouquet of camellias out to Garbo waiting in the carriage. Their paths must’ve
have crossed frequently on the MGM lot.
For Famous Players at Paramount in 1917 she played “an
evil witch” (was this an omen?), and a beautiful woman who transforms seven
brothers into swans in “The Seven Swans” staring Richard Barthelmess and
Marguerite Clark. In 1930, as Darmour in the radio comedy “Dizzy Dates,” with
Tempe Pigot (who was in the Pilgrimage Play in 1948). In the 1931 Bela Lugosi “Dracula”
Daisy played “woman in the English coach”—uncredited.
Her brother Lionel Belmore had a much longer career in Hollywood , playing the
Burgomaster in “Frankenstein,” and a list of credits, and uncredited, in films
reaching back to 1914. He would retire in 1945 to the Actor’s Home in Woodland
Hills after appearing in his last film, “I Was a Criminal.”
Daisy is on stage in 1910 in the “original musical”
Our Miss Gibbs, followed by four plays to 1919, seven plays and two musicals in
the 1920s, seven plays in the 1930s, a revival of “Love for Love” in 1940 (it
ran only five days). In 1944, her last
appearance, six years before “The Rose Tattoo,” is in “Last Stop,” running for
less than three weeks. Indeed she had become “the most known, unknown in the
theatre.”
In April 1951 we’re gone, no special farewells. We didn’t
keep in touch, and would learn on our return in 1952, Daisy, beginning the
national tour with “The Rose Tattoo” in Buffalo ,
suffered a heart attack. She recovered, but no longer robust, just, in her
words, “A bag of bones.” Forced to leave the show, she had returned to her sixteenth
floor room at the Wellington .
But this was not the end of our
friendship.
Old Aqueduct Trail
The Birds of Killingworth
(“I’ll make love to the Man in the Moon”)
2
Our light-and-dark two-toned green 1947 Chevy four-door
sedan brought us cross country to Yonkers
in March, 1952. Yes, David and I (jointly) owned an automobile, thanks to
Alice, my sister, and hubbie, Leno LaBianca, who made the down payment—monthly
payoff, our responsibility—one of the highlights of that not-so-memorable year
in Southern California. The Chevy was to become home away from home for Daisy
and daughter Ruth on many excursions northward up-the-Hudson to Lake Champlain,
across the Lake to Burlington Vermont
down through the state—Labor Day weekend on Cape Cod .
The Chevy also becomes coach for new-found buddies, Beatrice Swann and husband
Gus Coan, to and from their home in Connecticut .
In 1951 we are back in California . Mark Buchoz, now going for his
master’s degree in Speech and Drama at U.S.C., has found us a bungalow in a
court near the campus in a quiet residential neighborhood with blooming
magnolia trees fronting most houses—as well as a growing number of TV antennas
sprouting on their rooftops. We deplored (oh, weren’t we the wise ones)
increasing numbers of families glued to tiny black and white screens watching
Milton Berle and other live offerings mostly originating in New York. Movie
attendance was dropping fast.
Don Olson, still living with Mark, is building a stone
fireplace in their living room. We pal around with them from time to time,
trips to Laguna Beach in Mickey Feay’s Ford
convertible in what we considered our “escape” to less restricted Orange County L.A. county was more
repressive, and Laguna Beach
had gay bars free from harassment. This wouldn’t endure, unfortunately.
Bill Curtis and Anne O’Neil reenter my life. Anne, David,
and I are cast in S.N. Berman’s “Biography.” The director, whose name
fortunately I would forget upon returning to New York , we suspect is a Scientologist or
member of a similarly manipulative cult. He seemed to delight picking David’s
brain, especially when the cast gathered at our bungalow. Perhaps he was trying
to break us up—whatever, and it really bugged David.
Curtis now and then comes to rehearsals with Anne, but
he’s pursuing his own career. I’ve got
the plum role of Richard Kurt, young rebel who believes he’ll never grow old.
“I’ll be dead before I’m thirty!” David, with German accent, plays Melchior
Feydak; Anne, Slade Kinnecott. All characters revolve around the star
(director’s girlfriend whose name I can’t remember) as Marion Froude, an
artist, the play set in her New York
studio. Our performances are in the Hollywood Athletic Club which many years
later will become a smart, Hollywood disco in front of which the young River
Phoenix will o.d. and die.
Other events that year, working as shipping manager for
the California Electric Services, Inc. on Alvarado Boulevard, David part of the
“crew” along with a couple of lesbians.
Once more, David has got the travel bug. Ronnie
Leach, a lanky dark-haired Australian (sexuality questionable) and another girl
from the Pakistan Mission to the United Nations in New
York are on a road trip, and urge David to return—his job at the Mission still open, and a
spot for me as well. “Diplomatic Courier to the U.N.” sounds glamorous, and the
pay is good, a little over $250 a month. Ronnie has a friend at the U.N. who
has a sublet in her apartment building in Yonkers —we
can drive her to the U.N. in the morning on our way to the Mission . A new adventure beneath my beloved Manhattan Towers
Expecting to be free from winter storms, we take the
southern route east from Los Angeles .
I’m at the wheel all the way, and wouldn’t you know, although we can’t get much
more south than Tucson , Arizona ,
we’re surprised leaving Tucson
in darkness (it’s four a.m.) we drive headlong into a blinding snow storm on
mountain roads outside the city. Driving in the dark with snow swirling on the
windshield for the first time, is harrowing, to say the least.
This will be the last of bad weather. We explore bat
caves near Carlsbad, New Mexico, drive from El Paso, Texas, north through
Oklahoma, Missouri and into Tennessee where smooth, black-topped roads with
white and yellow markings welcome us in the darkness—the best roads since
leaving California.
Final destination—Yonkers to an apartment building on the
Hudson River, below the hills which separate us from Yonkers’ central city—a
large, ground floor apartment on Warburton Avenue. Soon I will become a real
New York driver, taking us down F.D.R. drive every weekday morning in the rush
hour, surviving traffic on Second and First Avenues, maneuvering through an
army of big rigs, dropping Eleanor off at the U.N., north to the Mission at 12 East 65th
Street. Fortunately, parking on the street is not as draconian as it will
become years later.
As “Diplomatic Couriers” we do not have briefcases
handcuffed to our wrists, or carry weapons. This is the period when Pakistan and India
are fighting over the Kashmir now
occupied by Pakistan ,
a Muslim nation. (They are to this day, 2016). The Indian mission and Consulate
is behind us on East 64th Street .
Colonel Chatari, large, black-mustachioed villain right out
of “Lives of the Bengal Lancers,” blustering, arrogant, runs the mission. Naz
Usef, chewing beetle nut, teaches me a few words of Urdu. David tells the story
of Chatari once throwing a batch of files on the floor in front of him and
yelling, “Pick them up!” David had other
tales about the Pakistanis, once trying to explain to a new arrival he’d
escorted from Idylwild to his hotel room how to flush the toilet—to which the
man replied, “I can’t do that, it will splash all over me!”
On weekends we discover a jungle of green foliage on a
pathway at the bottom of the hills above Warburton Avenue , and learn it’s the Old
Croton Aqueduct Trail, overgrown with crab grass and fox tail in the summer,
wild growing maples and gray birch and flowering dogwood and copper beech
trees. David, clinging to his love of the outdoors, can’t get enough of it. On
our first hike, we stumble on a grand stone staircase disappearing into wild bushes
above us, weeds spreading out from the steps, reaching upward to Untermeyer
Park, and later, above, on Broadway in Yonkers, a hundred-room stone villa.
The villa was built in 1840 by John T. Waring, a hat
manufacturer in Yonkers ,
who called it “Greystone.” In 1879 it
was bought by Samuel J. Tilden who’d amassed a large fortune from practicing
corporate law and had been elected governor of New York in 1874 after he broke up
corrupt Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed, swindler of seventy-five to two hundred million dollars from New York
City from 1865-1871.
Democrat Tilden ran for President in 1876 against
Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, and actually won—but because of an electoral
dispute his victory was compromised away. In 1879, twenty years after Tilden’s
death, Samuel Untermeyer bought Greystone, and by 1899 had created its gardens as
one of the best in the area. We found only remnants of a bulldozed estate—a
columned gazebo on top of a raised small mountain; an impressive walled in
garden area abutting the St. John Riverside Hospital ;
fourteen Corinthian columns in a circle (no roof), with a view of the Palisades . Today, the Estate has been completely restored.
Not a drop of snow has fallen in New
York or Yonkers .
April comes, then May, and David can’t wait to drive up the Hudson . By the first week in May, sudden
bursts of color resplendent in emerald green woodlands, dogwood trees laced among
magnolia and white mulberry trees, red oaks and Japanese maples—towns and
pathways with magical names, Briar Cliff Manor, Hastings-on-the Hudson,
Tarrytown, and legendary Old Sleepy Hollow Road where once road the Headless
Horseman. Our beer drinking becomes the stuff of legends when we discover a bar
overlooking the Hudson ,
becoming addicted to Löwenbräu in ice cold glasses.
Our of nowhere, Jack Conway hooks up with David at the
U.N., and so one summer day finds David in Jack’s convertible, top down, on
their way to our Yonkers apartment, while I trail close behind in the Chevy.
Needless to say, I’m a bit squeamish with the reemergence of this old love (and
it will not be the first time Jack Conway will appear out of the blue). Jack is
pleasant enough, but David more than once in the midst of an argument has suddenly
crooned, “Black, black is the color of
my true love’s hair.” I suspect, looking back, Jack and David did have
an “illicit” rendezvous at some time during these years in New York , but alas, I’ll never know.)
Resignation from the Pakistan Mission comes swiftly.
We’re anxious to get back into the theatre. Colonel Chatari declares, “You
Americans think about nothing but money!
What are you going to do when you leave here?” The theatre! The theatre! We are called by the muse.
So, it’s back to the East 34th Street labyrinth—this time in a
room graced with a small window over the street allowing a glimpse of morning
sun. We live on over-easy eggs cooked on a hot plate—toast and orange juice,
the morning fare. I begin to write short
stories, but nothing comes of it.
A younger Daisy Belmore, Nurse (left at desk) in
“Scarlet Pages”
The Birds of Killingworth
(“I’ll make love to the Man in the Moon”)
3
Employment agency add in The New York Times: ”Mimeograph Operator.” (Hey! I can do that!) Taking a quick look at my résumé, an elegantly
coiffured woman sends me off to the American Broadcasting Company at West Sixty-sixth Street
and Columbus Avenue ,
where a youngish, sandy hair blond guy, comfortably seated behind a desk,
glances over it. “You can take the mimeo job if you want it, but something else
has opened up here. We need a copy boy in the newsroom for the eleven o’clock
television news broadcast. Are you interested?”
Am I! only a
meager fifty dollars a week but sounds a helluva lot more fun than running a
mimeograph machine. Eight hour shift, four in the afternoon to midnight,
shorter hours on holidays—the news demands work on holidays.
David has found a night job at NAPA ,
National Auto Parts Association, buried in a warehouse near the Hudson River shipping auto parts around the country. We
can leave forever the grim prison-like complex on East 34th Street and move to a
studio apartment on East 83rd in “Germantown ”
for seventy-five dollars a month. Like most eastside apartments, it’s small, kitchen
and separate bathroom; however, a sunny outlook from a couple of south-facing
windows on the back overlooking a school yard.
David loves living in Germantown , perhaps because we begin to spend
more Saturday nights than we should at the Brahause on East 86th Street , singing with the locals
at the bar, Du, du, liegst mir in herzen
and other Teutonic songs. Vien, Vien, es
du allein . . .
Outings with Daisy begin in earnest. She even makes her
way via express subway to the 86th
Street stop and I drag her to a matinee of George
Pal’s “The War of the Worlds” at the local Eighty-sixth Street Loews. “Oh, my
dear!” she cries as we leave the theatre, “It was so loud!”
Occasionally on Saturday afternoons finds us with Daisy
at her daughter Ruth’s apartment in Rego Park; Ruth’s husband, a proud, boisterous
Puerto Rican, Alonzo Garcia. Ruth, herself a blustery large boned woman like
her mother, with red hair, commands an explosive sense of humor too often
directed at her mother. Her favored shtick, mimicking Midwesterners – “I mean
ta tal you!” She has been in and around theatre most of her life and harbors a
deep resentment of homosexual men, even though she has several friends who
are—practically of all Daisy’s male friends are gay.
Her relationship with Daisy was painful to watch—making
fun of her whenever the vulnerable Daisy gave her the chance. David and I would
bear the brunt of her manipulations in years to come. It’s likely Ruth resented
her mother for marrying the Australian, Sam Waxman, who was Jewish. (Neither
Ruth nor Daisy see much of Daisy’s son.) Ruth tells anti-Semitic jokes and is
virulently anti-Catholic, and has taken up Christian Science feverishly.
Years later when I was leaving Los Angeles for New York
with Frank Dunand, she assumed Frank, Cuban born, was Catholic and urged me to
go back to David, even though Frank, influenced by his friendship with Mary
Adams, had taken up Christian Science, while David had become a brother in a
Capuchin monastery!
In 1957, Ruth divorced Alonzo and married an accountant, Leonard
Lindsay whom she’d met working at an insurance company in New York . Leonard, short, pudgy, was a bland,
soft-spoken man. Ruth once accused David of trying to hit on him. Out of the
blue during one of our frequent “separations,” she said, “You homosexuals are
all alike!”
Ruth was full of pain, born of her resentment of her mother.
Daisy, no doubt, hadn’t been the greatest, most attentive mother in the world. Daisy’s
son also had little or nothing to do with her—I can’t even remember his name; hearing
only from Daisy the time her son and Ruth made an attempt to get her to move from
the Wellington Hotel into an “old ladies home” somewhere on Long Island. Daisy fought
back. “You may be assured I will not stir from this room until they carry me
out in a basket!”
There were awkward and disturbing moments at that Rego Park
Job Interviewer, “Don’t be half-safe, we cannot
afford to hire people who offend.” Ruth shouting at the TV, “Don’t be half-safe, use it under both arms!”
followed by a loud guffaw.
David’s friendship with co-worker, Gus Coan is
developing, but Daisy still gets most of our attention on weekends. Christmas,
1952, finds me at the wheel of the veteran 1947 two-tone dark and light green
Chevy, driving Daisy and David all through the night on a five hundred,
uninterrupted, harrowing journey over snow-covered roads to David’s home in Columbus , Ohio
Amazing how peaceful one feels drifting into slumber-land
behind the wheel of a speeding vehicle accompanied by “hypnological hallucinations,” a term I would learn several years later when
working for the Ohio Department of
Highway Safety. No danger of falling off, however, for, fortunately, during
bone-chilling moments early in the
morning attempting to get past groaning semi-trucks slipping and sliding
in front of us up steep icy hills on two-lane highways. It’s a wonder we ever get
to Columbus
alive.
Daisy scores a hit with Florence , David’s mother, and Dad, David Sr.,
and with older sister Emmeline husband, Norman Link, himself a real charmer. Emmeline
is fun loving and full of zest, fascinated by her. Daisy entrances the two
children, Jeffery and Michael. We didn’t know at the time how many times Daisy
had “toured the provinces,” but she was in her element in Ohio, becoming “the
British Actress on Tour,” her speech more and more British as Christmas
approached, rolling her “r’s”, helping Florence in the kitchen, preparing
endless pots of tea; and fascinated by the simplest things, telling Florence,
“My dear, you must use your special chinaware every day, not only for special
occasions!” taking beautifully painted china cups out of a glassed-in cabinet.
In 1952 ABC “Eleven O’clock Television News” was lodged
on the first floor in a large, windowless room on Sixty-seventh Street . No anchors
appeared. It was essentially a slide show with male staff announcers in voice
overs telling the day’s events. Even Milton Cross, famed host for Saturday
afternoon broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, did a stint occasionally,
proclaiming the nightly news in familiar, sonorous, upward inflected tones as
if introducing a performance of Carmen, or Tosca, or describing gowns worn by the
divas during curtain calls in front of the Met’s illustrious gold curtain. In
our broadcasts, “And now the news
to-night!”
Mary Laing, young and comfortably tall, sandy hair and
taciturn, “not given to much talk,” perennially dressed in simple gray skirt
and flowered blouse, writes the copy and puts the show together with my
assistance which includes mounting slides messengered in from all over town and
ripping sheets off from the teletypes spitting out news from all over the
world—Associated Press (AP), United Press (UP), International News Service
(INS) “wires,” and weather reports.
Mary and I hit it off from the start. Her quiet, “no
bullshit” manner and wry sense of humor disarms me. A few weeks into the job, she
says, “Why not call yourself editorial assistant? Sounds better on a résumé than
copy boy.” No wonder we got along. This
woman’s got class. So, “Editorial
Assistant” I become.
Strange, exotic and disarming people with a variety of
political outlooks wander in out of the newsroom. Mary’s boyfriend is a young,
dark-haired, rather hefty Philip Scheffler, cameraman at CBS (then, and for
another four decades)—both of them extreme left liberals. Another liberal,
Pauline Frederick, red head, taller than Mary and a bit less feminine, whose
beat is the United Nations, is frequent late night visitor, her two white toy
poodles leashed at her feet. She seems quite fond of Mary, but by all appearances, not aggressively so.
Other frequent visitors: Taylor Grant whose “Headline
Edition” is broadcast on ABC radio. Another “member” of our liberal gathering
is young Jules Bergman, science reporter who will have that title for many
years on ABC Television, becoming well-known for his repots on NASA’s space
program and the moon landing.
Close-knit group we are (I’m in heaven)—like minds resisting the emergence of McCarthyism
and the approaching 1952 presidential election between Adlai Stevenson—with
holes in his shoes and blasting the Republicans “who got dragged and screaming
into the Twentieth Century!” opposed by Dwight David Eisenhower, heroic and
dearly loved by most everyone. Eisenhower’s running mate is Richard Nixon. We
watch, appalled, to his “Checkers”
speech in the newsroom, an answer to his taking the bribe for his home, ending
with “And now they even want to take my little dog, “Checkers.” Later comes
Senator McCarthy’s “pumpkin” speech which launches his accusations of
“communists in the State Department. Mary is frustrated and flabbergasted,
marring her usually quiet voice. “Is the American public really going to swallow
this crap?”
On election night I work in a huge sound stage, running
popular vote totals from the teletype to the anchor, John Daly, recently
recruited from CBS to head ABC News. At CBS, he’s won fame hosting the
long-running, “What’s My Line?” For some
reason the popular vote tally I hand him is behind totals chalked on the huge
black board in this day before computers. After several hours, Daly finally
throws his hands up in despair, calling down to me from on high, forced smile
laced with arrogance, “Look, chief, can’t you get this to me sooner?” Can’t
blame him for not wanting to be embarrassed on television in front of a
nationwide audience, but his attitude certainly lacks grace. In another few
months, when he takes over as Vice President in charge of news, my dislike for
him intensifies—for good reason.
Prior to the election, a gang of ultra-conservative men
and women—a robust, fifty-or-so Irishman named Ryan who reeks of cheap
after-shave and traces of bourbon—brings in his hand-picked production crew,
and assistant, a woman with kinky red hair and taut face whose name I fortunately
can’t remember, to put together and
produce a first for television—a one-hour news program. Our easy-going,
humanistic sanctuary has been invaded by the Philistines! It’s uncertain
viewers will stay with an hour broadcast. Mary Laing hopes they will not.
The show is flagrantly right wing, in spite of Mary’s
attempts at unbiased writing. The commentator’s have no intention of sticking
to the script. We continue our eleven o’clock stint, welcoming those late night
hours after the McCarthyites have fled when both of us have time to think and
dream of other things—I, sketching out a floor plan for the ideal theatre,
modeled after an ancient Greek amphitheatre; Mary and Pauline huddled in quiet
conversation with Phil until departing for late night supper and drinks at
Healy’s—the local hangout.
As to my theatre design—Walter Kerr in the Times,
sings the praises of a new theatre in Canada designed just as mine, breaking down
the proscenium arch, extending the stage out into a surrounding audience, a
design which will soon invade New York—particularly in the 1960s when Lincoln
Center is built.
Daisy Belmore
The Birds of Killingworth
(“I’ll make love to the Man in the Moon”)
4
In March, 1953, the eleven o’clock news is discontinued,
so it’s off to the mimeograph room—not a bad job. Every Friday night Milton
Cross picks up his mimeographed script for the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday
matinee broadcast. Even in casual conversation he sounds like his describing a
curtain call at the Met: “And now, thank you veddy much! for delivery of these
pages to me on time and with such perfection!”
Half-hour ABC Television is launched a month later, with
Taylor Grant as anchor, still continuing his long-running radio show, “Headline
Edition.” With the radio and TV shows back-to-back, he needs an editorial
assistant and remembers me from the late night gatherings with Mary Laing and
the libs. I’ll get forty bucks a week paid out of his own pocket—a “glamour
job” it’s true, but who cares? I’ll be at the heart of ABC network news.
So here I find myself in the newsroom, two writers at the
side of me—both men, young, and cynical, with plenty about which to be cynical
as the news in 1953 is about one crisis after another—the United States
attempting to wind down the Korean war—if not end it altogether; appeals from
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg supporters to save them from the electric chair for
giving atomic bomb secrets to Russia, and their final executions after
Eisenhower refuses a stay; burgeoning black lists of supposed commies in the
government, theatre and Hollywood; a cold war with Russia getting colder,
blatant racism sweeping through southern states.
My tasks primarily are for Taylor ’s
radio “Headline Edition,” lining up remotes from correspondents, sent to us on
tape, mostly from Washington ,
D.C.
One of the writers—actually, the only guy I remember—is
around thirty years old and balding. He’s fathered a large family, pointing out
to me that his baldness is “a sign of virility,” as he glares at my full head
of hair; then shrugging an apology, “It’s really all in the genes,” he says.
Both writers are right out of “Front Page,” reporters
with crusty veneers hiding their feelings, referring to both tragedies and
up-beat events when they cluster the wire services, as “good news days.” Like those zany
reporters in “Front Page,” authentically portrayed in the film, “His Girl
Friday,” beneath their acidic attitudes beats lingering sentimentality. One
thing both have in common, along with every one else in the newsroom, is the
fervent dislike of the ultra-conservative legions running rampant n the land.
John Daly, whose politics are unknown, as newly appointed
“News Director” appears in the newsroom, and seems not to give a hoot whether
he’s liked or not. My own experience with him on election night, has not
endeared him to me. Then on the phone one day, he loses it, screaming at his
auto mechanic who’s been late getting the job done on his car. “Well,
goddammit, if you want to get paid you’d better get it finished this
afternoon!” and slams down the receiver.
We sit in shocked silence as he storms out.
But nothing
can stop John Daly; he’s on the
ascendant—well known from “What’s My
Line,” is he not? It’s inevitable—he will take over ABC’s Evening News. Taylor is out, and it’s
back to the mimeograph room.
5
When Taylor Grant hired me in April, 1953, he suggested I
first take a week’s unpaid vacation so he can get himself organized for his
first stint as TV news anchor. Gus Coan, David’s fellow night hawk at NAPA and wife Beatrice Dwan invite us to spend the week on
their thirty-five acres of undeveloped land, north of Guildford ,
Connecticut close to the Hammonasset River
Beatrice is ultra-elegant, tall and serene, Boston Irish, fashion
sketch artist for the big department store, her full page ads appearing in the
Sunday New York Times. We will spend many weekends with them at their weekend
getaway, a small house in Guilford , just east of
New Haven . So
David and I venture into the wilds of Killingworth to rough it in a wooden
shack—no electricity, no kitchen, no plumbing, just like Thoreau!—David is in Seventh Heaven, and so am I.
On weekends at their Guilford home, and sometimes in the
woods, Beatrice and I, the dreamers, perform great legends in realms otherworldly: Beatrice is Irish Queen wandering along
the ramparts of her castle; I, the Troubadour below, strumming a
mandolin—David and Gus looking on stoically, as we down boiler makers (beer
with shots of Irish whiskey), getting euphorically drunk.
Beatrice disdains those American Irish who know nothing
of their ancestry; of Niam and his White Steed, Trelawney of the Wells,
Deidre’s Sorrow. In the city, she and Gus lived on Park Avenue for as long as I
knew them, at several addresses—north of Grand Central, below Fifty-ninth
Street, in one of the large residential apartment buildings, in courtyard
entries with fountains, before office towers rose above Park Avenue north of Grand
Central (and below the enduring, grand homes north of Fifty-ninth). When I
returned to New York in 1963, Beatrice and Gus
still resided on Park Avenue —but the less
fashionable and commercial Park
Avenue South , below Grand Central. Unlike their
earlier tiny apartment with set-in kitchen, their Park
Avenue apartment is quite spacious, in a large, modern building.
On one of our outings with them, they introduce us to
Esther Pinch (yes, I swear, that was her name), small, wiry and spry in her
eighties, living in a quaint stone house in the woods near Guilford . Esther, deliciously
straight-forward, one might say a miniature Kitty O’Brien, is more
sophisticated than Kitty. This is some sixty years ago, and I’ve never
forgotten her—not every detail of that visit perhaps, but most certainly one of
her jokes.
“In a church the pastor makes it a habit to forgive all
sins, as long as they are confessed publicly. A woman stands to confess to the
large, approving congregation she’s
committed adultery. Suddenly another woman in a back pew leaps to her feet (I wonder if it might have been Esther Pinch
herself and this is a true story), shouting out, Well I
don’t forgive her! Since I joined this
church it’s nothing but fuck and forgive! fuck and forgive!”
Our one-week life in the woods manifests my childhood
longings, roughing it with a guy (and now a lover!), the birds of Killingworth
scattered in the woods, calling to one another, one shrill single-note whistle,
answered back with a three-note whistle with a dying fall. In bed with the
setting sun in a candlelit shack, rising with the sun in the morning.
David indeed is worthwhile companion to revel in such
wonders of nature, as in many of our tours in New York—spring erupting along
the Hudson and in Central Park the first week of May, pink tulip trees
exploding blossoms behind the Metropolitan Museum, exploring Hudson River
valley, autumn drives down country roads bordered by trees bristling vermillion
and gold. Sleepy Hollow, the tree in Tarrytown
where traitor Captain André was hung.
Visits to the Wellington
and trips with Daisy are difficult to pin point in time, but they were many and
certainly memorable. Daisy, happy when we passed an Esso gas station—frequent
stops necessary because she was taking
diuretics. Daisy: “Esso has the cleanest rest rooms” and after a stop,
returning to the car, thanking us with, “For this relief, much thanks,
that’s from Shakespeare, my dears—Hamlet.”
Occasionally I would visit her alone in her room,
and learned she wasn’t too happy with my associating with David—“He
dominates you too much,” she would say, “he’s keeping you from following your
career—are you making rounds?”
On one occasion, inviting me alone to a “chicken and wine” dinner in her room—the chicken boiled
with veg-et-ta-bles on a hot plate; wine from a large bottle of burgundy Gallo
with a screw top. Once I challenged her when she accused me of lacking a clear
identity of who I was. She rose to
her feet and banged her fist
on the fragile TV table exclaiming, “Who
do you think created Daisy Belmore? I
created Daisy Belmore!”
On a walk in and around Seventh
Avenue one day, we ran into
Danny Mann, director of “The Rose Tattoo.” (She did not introduce me.)
She asked him, “Do you have anything for me, Danny?” He took her hand and with
pained expression, said, “I’m sorry Daisy, nothing. These are hard times in the
theatre.”
But Daisy never quit. She sailed forth often from the lobby of the Wellington sometimes with me on
her arm, picture hat framing her eager face on her way to the “offices” and
would say, “Look at all these lumps sitting around in the lobby staring into
space!”
July Fourth weekend, 1952, finds us with Daisy and
her daughter, Ruth, traveling north to take us all the way to Lake
Champlain . We run into a traffic jam on the throughway, cars
stalled at the side of the road because, as Ruth explains, “vapor lock.” Daisy,
as if riding in a golden chariot, regales us along the way with stories, wit
and disconnected phrases never explained: “Oh my dear, it’s as hot as Africa !” Not even Ruth could tell us when her mother had
been in Africa . Her biogs don’t mention Africa . And then, as we struggle through the traffic jam
Daisy begins to sing:
I’ll make love to the man in the moon,
I’m going to marry him soon,
and behind some dark cloud,
where no one is allowed,
I’ll make love to the man in the moon.
I’m going to marry him soon,
and behind some dark cloud,
where no one is allowed,
I’ll make love to the man in the moon.
Ruth laughs loud and long, but soon we are singing with
Daisy, I’ll make love
to the man in the moon, I’m going
to marry him soon . . .
We tour Fort
Ticonderoga , Au Sable Canyons, then
overnight at a small hotel on the shore
of Lake Champlain Burlington ,
Vermont
6
Taylor Grant gets me an audition—well, perhaps not an
“audition,” rather cutting a record for a news broadcast I’d written. Alas, it
turned out to be doleful—sonorous, funereal, descrying the impossibility of
having our way with the North Koreans in gaining a cease-fire; no longer a
“Second World War” situation when we bombed the hell out of the enemy and
played to win. Now we couldn’t cross the Yalu
River and drive the Chinese communists
out of North Korea ,
or drop an A-bomb to have our way.
“I wish you’d shown me your material before we cut the
record,” Taylor said, advising me to get work at
a station in a small town and work my way back to New York . But damned if I would. I had a
strong foothold in New York ,
and here I would stay.
Such determination kept me going, running off scripts in
the mimeograph room. David gets work as ticket seller behind a cage in the
center of Grand Central Station. Then
suddenly, the New York
adventure is subverted. It is required for his job that David get a “Police
Card” and he fails. He’d been arrested in Bryant Park in a sting operation and
spent a night in the tombs—this before I’d met him. He says he can’t take New York anymore and we’ve got to go back to California .
Should I not have said, “Go ahead, I’m staying here.” But
the commitment to him is strong and how can I make it alone in the big city
without him? Hoping to turn the sudden shock of departure into something
worthwhile, I decide to return to U.C.L.A. to finish degree work—maybe even
continue on to graduate school.
This is the last we will see of Daisy Belmore—a painful
farewell on Seventh Avenue, Daisy standing at the curb, waving goodbye as we
head for the Holland Tunnel.
February, 1954, I’m at U.C.L.A. “back-tracking,” as
Wally Boyle accuses me with painfully obvious sarcasm, “into academic theatre.”
Next – Buckeyes (1954-1957) memoir preceding “Socko
Sixties”
