Author at Tahquitz Falls, Palm Springs / 1942

CELEBRATING LIFE / BLOG ARCHIVE

July 10, 2016

All memoirs written by Dana F. Skolfield

Stories Never Told: Longing / Yet Still a Child / Music for the Theatre / . . . a callus on my left heel / Bump! Bump! Bump! a Wave! / Bradley’s Bar

I’ll Take Manhattan: Oh! for a Muse of Fire - Prelude / Kitty O’Brien and a Rite of Passage / Buckeyes / Birds of  Killingworth

Order of posts (today 7/10/16 – Buckeyes):

2016:

I’LL TAKE MANHATTAN (not in order):

July 10                     Buckeyes / 4^rd ITM  see today's post below

May                           Birds of Killingworth / 3^th ITM

April                          Rite of Passage, Kitty O’Brien / 2^nd ITM

March                      Oh for a Muse of Fire-Prelude / 1^st ITM
                                    in order, 1-7

STORIES NEVER TOLD (in reverse order):

Feb                             Bradley’s Bar / 6^th and last entry
                                    Bump! Bump! a Wave! / 5^th entry
                                    . . . a callus on my left heel / 4^th entry

Jan                            Music for the Theatre / 3^rd entry
                                    Yet Still a Child / 2^nd entry

2015                          Longing / 1^st entry

Buckeye Grove – Columbus, Ohio

Buckeyes

(1955-1957)

1

  Ralph Freud eases into a large chair behind his desk, sees me in the front row and with drooping eyelids, hones in. “What are you doing here?” he asks. It’s spring, 1954, and I’m seated with a group of several dozen eager actors crowded into a room in one of the prefabs behind Royce Hall for the season’s tryouts.

  Embarrassed, I mumble, “Came back to get my degree.” He smiles—or is he frowning? After almost three years in New York, I’m still reticent to call him Ralph.

  Freud (pronounced “Frood”) is directing more plays than during the 1948-50 seasons. In the fall of 1953, he has directed Carol Burnett in the Mary Martin role in the 1940’s Broadway musical, “Lute Song.”  Carol is still at U.CL.A. in 1954, seen on the arm of boy friend, Don Saroyan, dark-haired, soft spoken, laid-back sort of guy. At C.C. Clarke’s chocolate eatery next to Grauman’s Chinese movie palace, sitting with my new friends, Stan Young and Peggy McKenna, Carol and Don tell us the now well-known story of their recent stroke of luck with the San Diego businessman.

This is how I remember it: Performing at a party in San Diego, they are approached by a man in suit and tie who offers them one thousand dollars if they’ll spend it to go to New York to further their careers. If in one year they make good, they can pay him back—if not, no need to. And Carol, if successful, must promise she will help other struggling actors and performers.

  “We thought he was drunk or something,” Carol says, “but the next morning he called us and said he had the money.”

  When I do return to New York almost ten years later, in 1963, Carol is a shining star, appearing in the television special, “Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett at Carnegie Hall.” By coincidence, in 1963, Frank Dunand and I end up on the same street she had lived on, West 69^th Street, half-a-block from Central Park West. Beverly Dickson, friend from U.C.L.A., lives in the apartment, once shared with Carol. Carol’s autographed eight by ten photo hangs in the window of the block’s dry cleaner’s.

  During the rather lack-luster year of 1954, Katheryn Offill makes another appearance. She now lives in North Long Beach, teaching drama at Lynwood High School. Her boy, Sumner, is ten years old; husband, Don, in a I-want-to run-off-somewhere mode. One day at the kitchen table, as Katheryn prepares her special dish, tuna casserole flavored with a can of cream of mushroom soup, Don directs his dark, intense, somber eyes beneath his equally somber eyebrows, at David and me, suddenly loudly pleading, “Let’s go to Caracas!” He’d spent most of his army career during the war, a captain, at the Panama Canal. Soon he will leave Offill, not fleeing with an army buddy to Caracas, but vanishing into an alcoholic haze with another woman.

  Joe Geers has reappeared, actually in 1953 while David and I are still in New York on East 83^rd Street. The woman he’d run off with has been killed by a car while crossing coast highway 101 north of San Diego. So Mother and Joe remarry. This time they are together some thirty years, to the end of Joe’s life.

  Other events in 1954: the Palm Springs “matter” again surfaces. Jack Forline, Mother’s brother, has been in touch with Leon Parma (married to cousin “Babs,” Aunt Katherine’s daughter) concerning our Palm Springs inheritance. Parma and Babs have been spending an inordinate amount of time coddling Aunt Pearl in Palm Springs.

Mother and her older brother, John McCallum Forline

  Troubled, Uncle Jack invites Mother and Joe Geers to his home near downtown L.A. in a quiet neighbor close to Wilshire Boulevard and the Ambassador Hotel. Joe is, surprisingly, without transportation at the moment, so it’s up to me to drive them—in the green Chevy. A long walk between trimmed shrubbery and newly mowed lawn, bordered by Jack’s meticulously tended tree roses, takes us inside to a small but luxurious home reflecting Uncle Jack’s sophistication—rooms filled with wooden cabinets and book shelves he’s built; crystal chandeliers and a circular staircase; aroma of prime rib roast from the oven.

  Jack, John McCallum Forline, born in Western Springs, Illinois in 1895, is an elegant man, prince nez hanging from a gold chain and usually found on the end of his nose; silent and inscrutable, as if he knows all family secrets (which he does, without doubt). Mother is as proud of her brother Jack as she had been of their father. There’s no hesitation in accepting his invitation—albeit a bit troubled by his declaring on the phone, “It’s time we did something about Palm Springs and our inheritance.” Mother does not like controversy of any kind—especially when it comes to sharing family secrets, but she adores her older brother and will do his bidding.

  Jack recently has been on the radio, commenting on politics and economics. Before the war broke out in Europe in 1939, he wrote to Roosevelt and Hitler, pointing out the terrible mistake they were making in not maintaining the peace. Whether they ever got the letter, or bothered to read it if they did, he would never know. In 1954 he’s quite happy in his third marriage to Peggy, a former secretary, a savvy, petite, pretty woman, and quite elegant as well.

  Jack was old enough, thirteen, to remember when their mother died, minutes past midnight in Redlands, California, November 21, 1908. He had stood up for his mother’s younger sister Pearl when she married Austin McManus in May, 1914, a few days before their grandmother Emily McCallum died. Emily’s death was at the heart of things concerning the inheritance. As we would discover a few years later, Emily had signed a quit-claim deed on her deathbed, giving Pearl title to all the land in Palm Springs—the deed was signed with an “X.”

  Joe Geers quickly secures a strong mutual-respect with Jack, “man-to-man,”  even though Joe is a fiercely loyal member of the Teamster Union, while Jack is a corporate vice president for labor relations, previously for Douglas Aircraft, now for Richfield Oil (later Arco). Joe’s loyalty for the Teamsters would last until his retirement, even during the troubled years of Jimmy Hoffa’s rein.

  Aunt Marjorie, mother’s younger sister, also is present at the dinner, and to no one’s surprise proceeds to get loaded on Jack’s twelve-year old scotch. Dinner itself is medium rare prime rib with an abundance of side dishes; the prime rib sliced at the table by Jack. Vintage wine with a cork in the bottle. But Jack’s plan to unify the family isn’t working. Mother is, as always, totally agreeable to any and all plans her older brother may wish to instigate with the indomitable and unapproachable Aunt Pearl. But Marjorie is not.

  “I think we should all put our heads together and do something about Aunt Pearl’s responsibilities to the family,” Jack begins. I see a tiny red light on the front of a large cabinet. Later Mother will tell me she noticed it too. Is Jack recording the session?

  “It is quite certain how Aunt Pearl got the land by diverting titles and other shenanigans,” he says. “If we  confront her together, with one voice, perhaps it will spell dividends.” (He doesn’t tell us he’s been in touch with Leon Parma, and that Leon has been looking into all matters re Pearl’s estate—another bit of the puzzle we’d learn in a few years—after Jack’s death.)

  “What about Katherine?” Marjorie asks. “She’ll never agree to anything. Leon is her darling.”

  “We’ll cross that road when we come to it,” Jack says.

  Marjorie trots out her time-worn story of Grandmother Emily’s “grocery bill” and how she had given the ranch to Pearl with the promise that Pearl “would take care of May’s children.” She lashes out at Aunt Pearl. Pearl ruined her life, forced her into living the high style in Palm Springs, making up to the wealthy Stuart Abbott and other rich men who frequented the Tennis Club, preventing her from marrying the only man she’d ever loved, an accountant who Pearl felt socially beneath Marjorie.

  “It’s our mother’s fault,” Marjorie slurs. “Why did she do it?” Silence at the table; I hold my breath, focusing on my plate, a remnant of prime rib staring back at me. This is the great family secret not even Mother has revealed—I’d heard the story from my father by way of his brother, Tom.

  Jack glances at me furtively. “I don’t know about that,” he replies. Marjorie does an about face—a sudden flip-flop. “I won’t do anything to hurt Aunt Pearl. You can count me out!” she cries.

  “Why not at least look into it?” hearing my voice coming from another world. I must be nuts in this gathering of the clan, putting my two cents in.

  Marjorie turns, head wobbling, eyes blurred, focusing more or less, at me. “Aunt Pearl thinks you’re a fairy.”

  Jack glowers. “We’ll have none of that kind of talk.”

  And that’s that. No chance of “getting together and doing something about Palm Springs.” A subject closed forever. Jack will make no further attempt to get his sisters to confront Aunt Pearl. In two years, he’s gone, and in another five years Leon Parma is continuing his investigation of Aunt Pearl’s holdings and how she acquired them at the expense of her nephew and nieces, and their offspring.

  On that fateful summer night, 1954, as Marjorie reels off down Sixth Street in her lumbering Lincoln Continental, any further attempt on the part of May’s children to “correct” the injustice her sister Pearl had visited upon her descendents, fades to silence, accompanied with the screech of Marjorie’s tires as she swings around toward Wilshire  Boulevard and vanishes.

  New friends at U.C.L.A., Peggy McKenna and Stan Young, meet Aunt Pearl. Peggy, a blonde Irish woman with large eyes—not a raving beauty—is determined to get me into the sack and eventually the altar, whichever comes first. I assure her this will never happen. Stan, on our first meeting, knows all about my past history in U.C.L.A. theatre, 1943-1944, 1948-50, seeing me as “Great-Actor-Returned-from-Golden Age.” We become inseparable. He’s young, “schoolboy good looks, chiseled features, smiling, open countenance, soft brown hair and lingering brown eyes.

  David is not happy. In our game-room abode beneath the garage at Waverly Drive, he lashes out at me, then confesses he himself was never faithful—profligate, promiscuous activities in New York at every opportunity, starting almost from the beginning of living with me in 1950. Oh the time wasted! Still he runs with me and my new found friends, charming as always. We visit Palm Springs in our veteran green four-door Chevy.

  Pearl welcomes us into her home built into the mountain—the grand pink villa next to the Tennis Club—also her creation. She greets me with subdued hostility but at once takes to Peggy. who is not only a woman, but Roman Catholic. Pearl has been flirting with the Church in recent years. We lunch at the Tennis Club, swim in the pool; a grand opportunity for Aunt Pearl to show off. She questions me about my intention to enter graduate school. I mumble something about “seminars” and “history of the theatre.” Obviously my heart’s not in it.

  “What good will that do you?” she demands. Peggy is embarrassed for me and later asks why I don’t stand up to my aunt. Good question. Everyone in the family is terrified of this woman. Too bad. We could’ve learned so much more about the early years in Palm Springs; although many of her stories appeared in several issues of “Palm Springs Life,” over the years, were self-serving. She seldom spoke of her sister May, my grandmother.

  As we leave, Pearl pulls me aside. “Your Aunt Pearl likes it when you bring young girls to see her.” What can I say to that? One more failure to communicate with this strange, silent woman given to migraine headaches. Hardly anyone in the family seemed able to get through to her, much to our regret after he death in 1966.

  Summer, 1954. It’s expected I will at last take the course in Summer Theatre; get my degree and segué into graduate school. I do not, however, enroll in Summer Theatre. David wants to go back to Ohio, and that’s that. The brief affair with Stan is leading nowhere, even though I’ve met his mother, a very young happy woman who has traveled the world. How can I possibly take on the responsibilities of a fresh relationship?

  One ironic twist (historically) in our adventures: Stan drives me home from U.C.L.A. It’s late at night. We pause, parked across the street from the sloping lawn at 3301 Waverly Drive, anticipating a modest and brief, yet passionate, expression of love. A police car rolls alongside. Flashlight illuminates the front seat, and our faces.

  “What are you boys doing?”

  “My friend has driven me home from school—U.C.L.A. I live here. Above, at 3301.”

  “Okay. Sorry to bother you. We’ve had robberies in the neighborhood.”

  When, on August 10, 1969, shocked by the front page of The New York Daily News, headlining Leno and Rosemary LaBianca’s murder—full page picture of 3301, Cadillac and large boat attached to it parked below the house—it strikes me why two guys sitting late at night deserved more attention than a bunch of stoned killers moving through the shadows, to say nothing of the sound of a gunshot. Not a patrol car in sight.

  So it’s off to the Buckeyes—to Columbus, Ohio and bright red cardinals perched on bare twigs in the snow, autumn pumpkin festivals, fodder in the shock, smell of over-ripe apples littering the ground in the apple orchards, Ohio State Saturday afternoon football games. And my first job as a professional writer.

Northern Cardinal

Ohio’s State Bird

2

  January, 1955, in the Buckeye State joining the farm boys—or rather those who sell fertilizer to them—with boss, E.S. Halley, tall Lincolnesque man, Sales Promotion Manager for the Davison Chemical Company, Division of W.R. Grace & Co. Halley owns a hundred or so acres of farmland close by, which he himself doesn’t farm. Somewhat straight-laced, a bit skeptical as to my degree in theatre and from a California university, Halley hires me anyway. A farmer all his life, Halley has a degree in Agronomy from Ohio State.

  We oversee a sales force covering eleven states, Midwestern and border states, including Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, most of my time spent typing crop-yield charts onto stencils and running them off on the A.B. Dick mimeograph machine, as I try to forget, as if I could, I’ve had five years of college. The illusion I’m doing something creative accrues when photographing the fertilizer processing plant and making presentations at sales meetings and designing a logo for the company, figure of a smiling little guy and naming him “Davy Davco.”

  So spring finds this big city boy perched on a mound of hay on a flatbed, riding with Halley and other men through northern Ohio’s Cuyahoga County state university farm, rattling past experimental acres; lunch under huge tents—coffee with meal, not a bottle of beer in site, thank you; fried chicken, mashed potatoes and peas on paper plates. Strangely, I feel right at home hanging out “down on the farm,” learning names for grass crops—lush green fields of birds foot trefoil (love that name), alfalfa; learning to distinguish “field corn” from “sweet corn.” (Am I haunted by a past life, born on a Midwestern farm?)

  Halley retains his stern, distant demeanor during the hay ride—says little, hardly recognizing I exist, even as we sit under the tent devouring chicken legs. We are five hundred miles from the sea, but down on the farm this day recalls “far away places” of childhood dreams, even if I’m not sailing forever around the world. (I’m reminded of a novel read, title not remembered, of a guy wandering through Southern France; also my dad’s geese chasing me around his backyard.)

  At David’s home we cram into a small bedroom off the living room—tolerable surroundings. David, Sr. and I finding common ground in observing the weather, meteorology already one of my hobbies, as it is for him. I marvel his quietly expressed pride in the vegetable garden he nurtures on a large, oblong lot next to the house the other side of the driveway—strawberry beds, potatoes, rhubarb, tomatoes—even tobacco.

  Mother Florence and I tolerate each other. She spends her time baking roasts and pies and frying chickens, and all the housewifely chores; nurturing poppies and moss roses, her favorite flower; shopping on Saturdays, and going to church on Sundays.

  Florence on the phone: “Oh Evelyn, that’s terrible, how did it happen? Well let me know what I can do. . . What? . . . She didn’t! . . . How awful!  . . . She did? Why?  Well of course I’ll be there.”

  She hangs up. David asks, “Who was that?”

  “Oh that was our Sunshine Chairman” she says.

  Saturday shopping with Florence and David in the supermarket drives me to near insanity as she lingers long over each item before placing it carefully in the cart, or changing her mind replacing it on the shelf. Saturdays has never been bearable for me unless I’m out having fun, like going to a football game, a drive in the country—in California, sun tanning at the beach and riding the waves; or lunch at a favorite restaurant. I hated cleaning the house or washing the car on Saturdays, or shopping for clothes in department stores. Boring.

  Family folk in Central Ohio seemed always to be doing something, seldom seizing the moment to relax or contemplate. Perhaps this is why fishing and rabbitting are popular sports, allowing men to escape from their chores, to get close to nature and dream a little. For the ladies of Ohio in those years, escaping from drudgery seems to have been found in quilting bees, church socials, and bingo.

  How much I would’ve liked to say to Florence, “When do you people relax? You spend April, May, and June taking down storm windows, rescuing geraniums from the cellar for planting, painting the house (a yearly ritual), cleaning, polishing; maybe relaxing briefly in the summertime, except for the logistic nightmare of picnics; forever baking rhubarb-strawberry pies, tossing salads with greens and tomatoes from the garden; in autumn, pickling, preserving, bottling—peaches, cucumbers, tomatoes; shaking out  roots of geraniums, and hanging them in the cellar, along with overflowing baskets of apples for winter storage; fastening storm windows, spreading straw over the strawberry patch, cleaning the furnace. In October, November, December—getting ready for Halloween and Thanksgiving; shopping for Christmas, baking fruit cakes and interminable trays of sugar cookies. When fortunate enough to experience a January thaw, you might find time to take a walk in the woods. Of course, I have to admit, I thoroughly enjoyed the food and the smell of apples, and all the resultant pleasures derived from these activities. And Florence’s pies with strawberries and rhubarb from David Sr.’s garden, smothered with whip cream, sheer heaven.

  One cold, blustery April morning we did manage to get away long enough to hunt for mushrooms, David and I with David Sr., David’s brother-in-law, Norman Link and his two boys, Jeffrey and Michael; while Florence and David’s sister, Emmeline, a robust, earthy woman—Norm’s wife, waited at home to cook them. An amazing experience for a city boy, trudging among skunk cabbages and dead leaves matted beneath our feet under the Buckeye trees; occasional snow flurries filtering down through barren branches, vanishing to reveal cerulean blue sky—and not a mushroom in sight, even though David, Sr. assured us they were there—somewhere; Norm, tall, dark, and amused, looking skeptically at his father-in-law.

  Guess who spotted the first mushroom(s)? Right, this guy from California, a small clump of the little devils near the exposed roots of a Buckeye tree. Sure enough, my find is verified by one and all as safe to consume, and once found seemed to appear everywhere. David, Sr. convinced me I’d discovered real mushrooms—they were not toadstools. Later we enjoyed them at home, fried in butter. Nobody got sick.

  Hunting, rabbitting especially, another story. How despicable, cornering a wild cottontail burrowed into a hole in the frozen ground, staring up at me. I refused to shoot and stormed off the field. The shooting instigated by David’s brother, Jim, true, red-white-and blue, northern redneck (he loved Joe McCarthy), his views supported by his wife who if anything, was more conservative than he was (a kind of Sarah Palin, I  think).

  Fortunately David and I, most off-days, spend time with Emmeline and Norm and their boys. They own a small house north of downtown Columbus near Worthington, the kind of home I used to draw and dream about in grammar school—white frame with gabled roof; eucalyptus trees towering behind it—of course no eucalyptus here, but the intention to plant more trees—a live decorated Christmas tree, not thrown away, but planted  outside. Inside on cold winter nights, David and I bundle into a huge bed in the attic with a mattress we could sink into, smothered with downy quilts, isolated enough from those below to relish our lovemaking. A cellar big enough to stand up in; inviting breakfast nook in the kitchen where we idle away long afternoons and evenings in winter, gorging on “poor man’s hamburgers” and vanilla ice cream, gooey with chocolate syrup.

  Television in the living room, black and white: “The Honeymooners,” marveling that Emmeline and  Norm sit through Laurence Olivier’s “Richard III” with us. And  David and I (not so much Norm) watching singer Tom Jones. Emmeline adores him, as did many of her housewife friends, not afraid to admit why they adore him—sporting white pants in those early days of his career, revealing an ample package. Emmeline (oh how I loved her) wasn’t afraid to admit her fascination with  Tom’s bouncing display as he rolled his pelvis into the camera. He could sing, of course—a mellow, starving for love, crooning voice.

  To Norm Link’s credit, Emmeline’s fascination didn’t phase him in the least, although he teased her about it,  secure as he was, phobia-free hetero male and loving husband—a straight man to feel comfortable with. I don’t think he had a single enemy. He was self-contained and centered—not that he avoided voicing strong opinions and points-of-view; nor did he avoid confrontations. Norm worked for the telephone company like his father-in-law and when Halley was out of town, spent his lunch hours with me in my small office, sometimes bringing in sandwiches and coffee. We’d talk about the Worthington Players community theatre group in which all of us were now active; bushels of corn and frozen peach crops in Michigan; Jeffrey and Michael; sometimes gossiping about his in-laws, the Woehrles—as in the current story of Florence on the phone with the Sunshine Chairman.

  He would stretch out his legs, plant his feet on the nearest chair; a regular guy who enjoyed the company of men as much as women, unlike several young married men we knew who were not comfortable in the company of women at all, except in the bedroom, and perhaps not even there; referring here to the “Betty Willis Story” which comes later.

  Emmeline has introduced us to Dell Briggs, and nearly explodes into laughter, telling us one Sunday around the breakfast table that Dell has questioned my lunchtime rendezvous with Norm. Shouldn’t Emmeline be concerned Norm and I having lunch together in a private office? We crack up. Rumor through the years has it that telephone men do fool around a lot on the job, not averse to giving favors to men as well as women.

  As possible as this might have been for Norm (he decidedly gives off sexual vibes), he did not dispense any such favors to me, not that I didn’t think it might be fun. (And what if Halley walked in? Imagine his puzzled consternation!) Emmeline and Norm didn’t need to remind themselves they were still passionate lovers, even after the birth of two sons.

  David, easily compassionate, not one who gave a second thought to being there when he felt he was needed, took on Dell Briggs with gusto, and sad to say (sad, for  me) she wasn’t the first woman who would complicate our life. Dell was totally screwed-up and dangerously overweight, emotional complex, phobia-ridden—I suspect homophobic, although this was a term never used or even known most likely at that time. Her one great passion in life seemed to be to control people, seeing herself as one who has the answer to everyone’s problems. Unfortunately she didn’t seem to have the same gusto for solving her own problems. Me, I worried about her influence on David—a lot. But nothing ever came of it.

  Emmeline and Norm were on the Board of Directors of the Worthington Players Club, Emmeline not one  for quilting bees, Needless to say, David and I soon joined, and the club became the center of our social life.

  I wrote and directed a one-act play, “Madame Theresa” about a black-mailing carnival con artist who fancied herself a medium. For music, an LP vinyl of authentic calliope music. Not recalling the name of the woman who played Madame Theresa—dark and passionate—I do recall we argued and shouted at each other a lot—can’t remember what that was all about!

  But I will always remember Carey Lipitz who played the “romantic lead.” Carey, soft and vulnerable, was a  blend of Laura in Tennessee Williams’ “Glass Menagerie” and Blanche DuBois in “Streetcar Name Desire,” although younger than Blanche. Blonde, introverted, and troubled, like Laura; diaphanous, delicate and ethereal, yet tenacious and given to fits of depression. In fewer words, she was not a happy woman. Her husband, Ben was working on his masters in library science at O.S.U.

  Ben, mild mannered, soft spoken, as dull as an overcast sky, passionately arid, takes pride in showing us page after page of numbers with decimal points he is collating for his masters degree, none of which we understood—perhaps a new Dewey system for cataloguing books.

  A man like David—that’s what Carey desired, someone to turn her life around, and David did nothing to discourage her. It became quite clear she wanted to divorce Ben and run off with him. He would sit up with her all the long night in our apartment (we had moved to across the street from O.S.U.), listening, sympathizing. She failed to get him to bed, eventually drifting out of our lives, nor did she divorce Ben, not while we were in Ohio anyway.

  I associate Carey and Ben with the tantalizing aroma of overripe apples littering the ground in September under the trees of their one-story, ranch style house.

  As for Carey Lipitz—yes, I had my own Carey—Betty Willis. She and hubbie Wally were in the Worthington Players Club—the ideal couple—or were they? Both attractive, Betty beyond reason, with a fine looking, dark-haired son, seven years old, Wally, like his son, pleasant looking with curly black hair. He worked for the telephone company selling space in the yellow pages.

  Betty was, in a  word, movie star gorgeous, tall and amply stacked, a  dark-haired beauty, and like Carey, not happy, possessed of a Marilyn Monroe syndrome, desiring to be with a man who loved her for who she was rather than for her beauty or as a sex symbol. She confessed to me she felt cursed by her beauty, and Wally was not the man to dispel that curse.

  Friday nights were party nights in the Willis home—I mean, all the long night, dancing till dawn in their basement game room; David and I the only men  on hand to dance more than once with the women; husbands holding their buddy-buddy celebrations at the wet bar, swapping hunting stories and baseball statistics. I’m not all that great at dancing (David is Fred Astaire), but Betty falls in love with me, probably because I didn’t put the make on her, and she’s heard our stories about living in New York.

  She wants to abandon her son and run away with me to New York! I  got myself out of this entanglement by saying no, not in a million years—and never trying to hit on her.

  One of our best escapes from  both Carey and Betty Willis came to us with Maxine Davis, another member of Worthington Players. We became a steady threesome. Ah, Maxine Davis, now there was a fun loving woman! Not tall or especially beautiful, blonde, buxom, well-formed package who could toss her head back and roar with laughter. We would play together in Noel Coward’s “Hay Fever,” Maxine as Myra Arundel pursued by married writer, David Bliss—me. Favorite lines: David Bliss-“Myra, you are so tawny.” Myra—“I am not tawny.” Veddy “Noel Coward.”

  Maxine had lost her husband only a year  before we came to Ohio. Owner of an appliance sales-and-service company, he reached around a large air conditioner one afternoon to connect something or other and was electrocuted, dying instantly. Maxine fell apart and began drinking heavily; still a heavy drinker and a chain smoker. Maxine drove a Chevy coupe. How we escaped getting arrested for drunk driving, I’ll never know.

  Just after arriving in Ohio in January, 1955, we learn Daisy Belmore has died the previous December. A letter written to her promising a trip soon to New York soon, is returned with a devastating red scrawl across the envelope—deceased. We’ve heard nothing from her daughter, Ruth, so call her—she lives in California now—and she tells us Daisy died in December. Our dear friend has made her final exit through the window of her room at the Wellington, to make love to the  man in the moon.

  A turning point of sorts for me, recalling the first thought that crossed my mind,hearing the news—Daisy, dead? Impossible! How could such an indomitable spirit—the essence of this rollicking, exuberant, optimistic woman—die? Whatever the true nature of Daisy Belmore—the essence of her humanity would never die—at this moment, the seed of a belief—that such a human spirit is and ever will be indestructible. Years later, studying Buddhism, I would learn to call this indestructible spirit, not soul, but Mind.

  The ax falls at Davison Chemical. After twenty years with them, E.S. Halley is fired. Our parent corporation in New York, W.R. Grace and Company, has decided sales promotion doesn’t sell anything. Halley’s twenty years comes to an end. (Several years later, I will learn from my Cuban born friend, Frank Dunand, that when he was a child in Banes, he had to get permission from W.R. Grace to go to the beach, passed a locked wire fence.)

  For a time, after leaving Davison, David and I knock on doors in outlying Columbus neighborhoods questioning housewives about their reactions to slick adds in phony “new magazines.”  (Oddly I remember only one ad—a huge chocolate cake, probably Betty Crocker.)

  Then . . . interview with Al Schwartz, Editorial Director of Publications and Research at the Ohio Department of Highway Safety; a small, rotund, chubby little man, pleasant enough, if a bit edgy. He’s from Georgia where he served in the prison system—in what capacity, a bit obscure.

  The interview is thorough and a hang up adds suspense—no record of a college degree from U.C.L.A. I have yet to finish the course in summer theatre. I air mail special delivery to Ralph Freud who responds, “I’ve instructed the College of Applied Arts, what the hell, give him his degree.” Arts Bachelor (A.B.) Theatre Department, U.C.L.A., dated August, 1954. Other references check out. I am now “Information Writer” for the Ohio Department of Highway Safety, joining Barbara Goodwin, graduate in Journalism, O.S.U.

  I’m soon convinced Al’s title with Georgia’s prison system must have been “Organizer” or “Categorizer.” Every newspaper and publication in Ohio fill a scattering of rolodexes surrounding him at his desk—sub-divided of course—dailies, weeklies, bi-weeklies, monthlies—each with varying colors to get this or that news release. It’s tantalizing to think what he could’ve done with today’s digital data bases!

  Our “newsroom” is large, Barbara and I sharing the large room walled off from Al by a large glass partition. Our desks are close to one another corner near a window. We are housed in a 19^th Century relic, grim and needing a paint job, former state school for the blind.

  April, 1956 births our first issue of a  slick two-column, six-to-eight page magazine “Buckeye Traffic Safety Bulletin.” I’m back at Franklin High School in 1942, associate editor of the Franklin Press! However, at Franklin we were blessed with the wonderful smell of the linotype, laying out our pages in metal forms with dot matrix photos. Here our process is offset, so the smell is mucilage.

  A nifty little rag, considering space limitations; “Education, Enforcement, Engineering, Legislation” proclaims the masthead. Al allows Barbara and me a free hand. Some of the writing isn’t too  shoddy (no bylines, the following by Barbara):

“Shoveled up from the silent banks of the Scioto River here in Columbus several years ago were some unique and intriguing scraps of metal—13 porcelain finished license plates inscribed with the very first numbers ever issued in Ohio. Number One, the records show, was assigned to a United States Congressman from Cincinnati . . .”

And one of mine:

“Drag Racing” on State Highways Curbed,

Special Interceptors Prove Effective

  A warm Saturday evening in a small Ohio town . . . a handful of teenagers gather on the street corner to admire the new rod, freshly customized . . . bulled nose and shaved deck. . . a neat job, but how will she drag? Want to find out? Why not? There’s nothing else to do. . .

  Thus, the dangerous drag race on the open highway is born. . . its ingredients: the surging energy of youth, and the aggressive thrill of competition. The recipe: stir well on a balmy Spring evening in a community which has little or no safely organized activity . . .

  In the Summer Issue, 1956, we feature Mr. Wildcat Driver, and other campaigns, among which, “Slow Down and Live.” Not sure Ohio drivers paid much attention, and today California drivers would consider the slogan something out of H.G. Wells.

  Close to my thirtieth birthday, I decide to quit smoking—forever. David and I have made many previous, abortive attempts. This is not a good time for me to quit—too many pencils to chew on. As a smoker, a cigarette pack and a half a day, preferring real cigarettes, thank you—long Pall Malls in the  red pack, Lucky Strikes. Couldn’t stand the taste of filters. Today, sixty years later, I can still taste those Pall Malls!

  First step, buy a twenty-pack carton of Winston’s filter tips and smoke them all—hated Winston filter tips! – finished in a week. Then, a pipe—why not? mark of the  Midwestern College Professor, tweed coat and leather-patched elbows.

  And so, on a Sunday afternoon sitting in Norm and Emmeline’s kitchen with David and the boys, after exhausting the carton of Winston’s, I puff my last measure of pipe tobacco, tap the remnants into the ashtray and proclaim, “Well, that’s that.” Miraculously it was, although the following year was sheer hell, chewing on endless pencils and consuming countless gum drops. Most amazing, I didn’t know what to do with my hands! waving them in the air as if brushing off flies. But I could breathe fresh air again, and taste buds spiked. For years I would have recurring dreams, quite real, that I was  still smoking.

  Barbara marries a boy she’d known at Ohio State, her last name now Selanders. He couldn’t have been much older than twenty and looked  it—hardly wet behind the ears. He raised chickens and Barbara complained often about frosts and viruses, and that her hubbie spent entirely too many nights away from home with his buddies. I said guys married much too young in Ohio. “If you can’t hitch up by your mid-twenties, people think you’re abnormal.” Her  reply—silence and  knitting her soft, blonde eyebrows. She divorced him after several months—too much time out  with the boys, becoming Barbara Goodwin once more.

  Me? always complaining we should all live in New York—the only place to make it in journalism.

  “What about James Thurber?” she said. Thurber graduated  from Ohio State. The house he lived in as boy later became setting for his delightful short story, “The Night the Ghost Got in.” the old house close by. I passed it many times on  lunch hour walks.

  I answered back, “James Thurber had  to leave Ohio to become famous.”

  Who was I to  complain? I  was acting and directing almost most as much as at U.C.L.A. and at Highway Safety narrating one-and-half minute safety spots that ran on television. (Al Schwartz wasn’t too pleased about this—it wasn’t his idea, and he had no control over the project.)

  At Worthington Players Club, “Hay Fever” is followed by Moliére’s “The Miser,” creating costumes taken from photos of the U.C.L.A. production; Emmeline,  costume designer. I repeat my role as La Fléche; Maxine Davis as Marriage Broker, Frosine. Enter Bill McCormick, another “tall, dark and handsome” guy, an announcer on a Worthington radio station, part-time disk jockey. Betty Willis plays the Miser’s daughter; Wally Willis, the Miser.

  As director, I copy much of what’s remembered from Henry Schnitzler’s direction at U.C.L.A. We run three nights with enthusiastic audiences, then take the show on the road to a couple of small colleges. Norman Nadel, drama critic for the Columbus Post Dispatch, gives us a fare review. Later, Nadel will become film and stage critic for New York’s World Telegram and Sun.

  Re-enter, of all people, Ed Ludlum! Neither David nor I had kept in touch with Ed since New York in the fall of 1950. Item in Post Dispatch – Ed will direct a summer of tent theatre, “Playhouse on the Green” in Worthington. When Dell Briggs learns David and I knew him from New York, she springs into action, and calls him. Result is Ed casts me in “Sabrina Fair” as Paul, the “Frenchman with an English Nanny” as the script describes him. My scene is with Sabrina, played by Sally Kemp, daughter of the 1940’s big band leader, Lionel Kemp.

  On the way to first rehearsal up High Street, I run out of gas, so arrive smelling of gasoline. Sally takes a whiff, eyes my Levi’s with suspicion (definitely a hick!)  but soon overcomes her doubts and takes me into the fold—a motley bunch of stoned New York actors, but talented. Although my Actors Equity card is still active, Ed makes me sign a waiver, and I get paid zilch.

  Paul is a thankless part—confusing to the audience since they expect a Frenchman to enter the scene; and here he is with British accent. Sabrina questions the anachronism, and Paul replies, “Oh, I had an English nanny.” It’s a puzzle why the part is written that way.

  Returning to Worthington Players, Bill McCormick directs a production of “Blithe Spirit.” This will be my third time as Charles Condomine—the first of which was the boggled performance on Mackinac Island in 1947; and the highly successful performance at U.C.L.A. in 1950. Maxine Davis and Betty Willis play Condomine’s two wives.

  Then both David and I are cast in “The Male Animal” in Stadium Theatre’s summer season, 1957, a popular theatre venue housed in a ground-floor corner of the Buckeye Stadium. We never make it to the most prestigious theatre, the Players Club in downtown Columbus, but Stadium Theatre runs a close second. David plays anarchic student, Michael, and I, Tommy Turner, English Professor (the Henry Fonda role in the  movie). We play a drunk scene to  the hilt—one of my most exciting and  rewarding theatrical adventures.

  Setting for “The Male Animal” is Ohio State (its author, Elliot Nugent, an alumni). The central conflict evolves when Tommy Turner announces he plans to read the last letter of the anarchist Sacco Vanzetti to his English class. Ultra-conservative rah-rah Neanderthal alumunis are up in arms, and threaten to withhold funds for building a new  football  stadium, and fire Tommy. Michael protests suppression of free speech and  faces expulsion. We bemoan our pending doom by getting drunk—David and I together on stage in a beautifully written scene, thrilling to play.

  Nadel gives us a fairly good review, but complains the negro maid is played too much as stereotype. The cast gets hot under the collar and I fire off an irate letter to him. Fortunately, no copy of the letter survives. I’m sure I would be embarrassed, reading it now.

  We take smaller parts in the next Stadium Theatre production in Jean Anhouil’s “The Lark,” a poetic St. Joan, played by April O’Connell. April tries to get me interested in Zen, my first brush with Buddhism, but it’s much too ephemeral for  me—not down to earth enough, nothing I can hang on to. Haiku is intriguing, but elusive. It takes me another twenty years before Buddhism will take hold of my life, and another thirty before the teachings would thoroughly enrich it.

  Meanwhile, David has enrolled as art major at Ohio State while I continue to  chew on pencils and write for Highway Safety. By fall David is anxious for another change—a return to California. (Why,  oh why didn’t I hold out for New York!)

  In California, sister Alice has her Business Degree from U.S.C. and has passed all her CPA exams and divorced Leno. In her apprentice year at Arthur Young, she will meet and marry William Findley.

  September, 1957, David and I are off to California, this time in our white Mercury convertible. (Yes, in those days, two guys could jointly own a car, no “partnership” required.) I have been in touch with the Helen Edwards employment agency in Los Angeles, hoping that the imperial Miss Edwards will get me a fabulous job with an advertising agency because of my writing and editorial experiences with Highway Safety, and at ABC in New York. Such was not to be.

  And yet . . . little did I know that events and three jobs I did get and suffer through from November, 1957 to July, 1961 would culminate in another appearance in the Pilgrimage Play, this time as John the Beloved, connecting me with  those who will soon wrench me out of the gray 1950s into a life and world I never could’ve imagined—not in my wildest dreams. New Yorker at last!

 

Following – Prelude to the Socko Sixties “When David and I return to California . . .”

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 54^th-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. Yes, at the time 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 is about to begin.

  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 65^th 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 64^th  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 34^th 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 apartment, once Daisy asking for money as a school girl asks for an allowance, Ruth reluctantly pealing off a few twenty dollar bills, almost throwing them at her. We watched a lot of television as Alonzo, Lord of the Manor, lounged in a recliner, joining Ruth in finding fault with just about everything, recalling Ruth responding to a commercial for underarm deodorant.

  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. Periodically at the wheel, I would drop off to near-deep sleep.

  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.

  Taylor’s good looks qualify him for television, large brown eyes, soft brown hair; resonant voice; although the writers chide him (behind his back) for pronouncing “Old Gold” (the radio show’s sponsor) “Ode Gode.” Actually “anchor” is the wrong term since there’s no “team” for segments such as “entertainment” or “weather.”

  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. For the television broadcast, writing cue boards with a thick black pen for commercials touting the show’s sponsor, Levi’s oven-baked rye bread.

  Taylor’s worst moment on TV is courtesy of Frank Lloyd Wright, renowned architect.  Taylor could’ve strangled the producers for lining up this crotchety old man. For every question Taylor asks, Wright fires back with a question of his own, never favoring Taylor with an answer.  The interview is a disaster, but somehow we survive.

  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.

  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. Next day finds us on a car ferry sailing to Burlington, Vermont, in awe of the solid jade green hills covered with maple trees.

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”