1.HOSTILITIES
Daddy1 is how we have to begin. The only way he knew to have fun with us was by playing ear-training games, challenging us to identify various intervals and, later, chords. He would strike two notes on the piano—say, a G and a B-flat—and my sister and I would race to come up with “minor third.” Or he’d try to trick us with ninths, thinking we might confuse them with seconds. It was all quite easy until we got to diminished fifths and augmented fourths, which on a piano look the same. I later learned that this was a routine exercise in elementary music theory classes, universally considered boring. But Linda2 and I liked it because Daddy seemed to like us when we answered correctly. And to like himself for having taught us so well. Neither of which likings we saw much evidence of otherwise.
We also played word games at the dinner table; it was one way to get a conversation going. Or we played a form of Twenty Questions we called Who Am I? Good question.
A game called Slapjack was a great excuse for me to slap Linda, which I kept doing, more or less, for seven decades.
Our mother3 drove us crazy with something called Snakes, which involved very rapid arithmetic. When she got to the end of a long series of connected math problems, we were supposed to supply the answer pronto. Neither Linda nor I thought it was fun—especially me, with my complete incompetence when it comes to zeroes—but Mummy, whose friends called her “La Perfecta,” sure did: She knew the sums.
Years later, when I had my own kids,4 we played better games. A favorite was Camouflage, in which you hid twelve ordinary items in plain sight: things like a battery, a paper clip, a key, a wedding ring. Then the players, in teams of two, were allowed into the room. They could not touch anything; when they located an object, they pretended they hadn’t, and quietly checked it off their list. Whichever team completed the list first won. But the fun was really in the cleverness of the hiding. The wedding ring might be sitting right on the lid of that brass canister. A black knee-high stocking on the leg of a piano bench. Once I stuck a banana among the yellow pillows on the sofa: Adam5 couldn’t believe he couldn’t find the fucking banana. With enough ingenuity you could make almost anything completely disappear. A Tylenol wedged between the white dust jackets of two coffee-table books. A pair of glasses in the bottom of a crystal vase of flowers. For grown-ups I once devised a version with only dirty things: an enema tip between the black keys of the piano, a tampon in the venetian blind. I had a Tiffany crystal clock with a gold band at the circumference; I put my diaphragm around it. The next morning, Tod,6 who was helping me pick up all this stuff, found it and said, “Mom, where do you want me to put your knee guard?”
We also played the Hearing Game, in which we blindfolded all the kids and made noises they had to identify: nails on an emery board, the waterfalling of a deck of cards. And Rhythm: a kind of Name That Tune but with just the beat, not the melody. And Sardines, in which the person who’s “it” hides somewhere, and when you find him—say, perched on a shelf inside a closet—you have to climb in there with him, until gradually you are left with one person still looking, and everyone else incredibly stuffed in a closet full of people.7
And Skin. For that game, you masked someone’s entire body beneath sheets and blankets so you couldn’t make out their form at all, leaving just one small patch of skin exposed. The players had to guess what part of the body it was. Sometimes it was something perfectly innocent, like a kneecap. Sometimes it wasn’t.
That was more of an adult game. We played it, along with many others, at Steve’s.8
Steve and I played a game the first time we met. This was at Highland Farm, Oscar Hammerstein’s home in Bucks County, in the summer of 1944. Steve was one of the semi-orphans and sad strays with rotten parents whom Ockie9 and his wife Dorothy10 were always quasi-adopting, including the fey and fascinating Shawen Lynch and the mysterious, haughty Margot de Vaulchier, who was either a royal descendant of some unidentified mini-kingdom like Liechtenstein, or maybe an escapee from Staten Island—who knew?11
1957: Stephen Sondheim. “At that moment I thought I would never be as infatuated with anyone again.”
I guess I had come with my parents; maybe Daddy and Ockie were working on Carousel, which opened on Broadway the next spring. Anyway, there we were: a thirteen-year-old girl, fat and ungainly, as my father kept telling me, and a fourteen-year-old boy genius with a crazy narcissist divorcée of a mother12 who’d put him in military school—which he loved.
With nothing in common except R (me) and H (him), what do you do? You play chess. Three games. He beat me fiendishly, took no time at all. Once we ran through that, we went to the piano, where he played either Rhapsody in Blue or An American in Paris. I didn’t know those Gershwin things, oddly enough. Growing up, I only went to Daddy’s musicals; at home, he never played Gershwin records. He didn’t play records much in general, but in specific he didn’t play Gershwin, the only composer he might have envied—well, maybe not the brain tumor part. Or maybe even that.
I was dazzled by Steve, completely stunned. I knew right away he was brilliant; he just reeked of talent. Which, not illogically, was always the biggest turn-on for me. I married two tall, blue-eyed men,13 but the ones I had the most fun with were dark. And, boy, was Steve dark. He wasn’t obnoxious, but impatient, a bit snappish. Pleasant, but not boy-girl pleasant. I was just a body there. I don’t think he thought I was as bright as he was, and he was right. He knew I wasn’t up to his standards. But nobody was. Later, we did become almost equals, except in the brain department. But at that moment I thought I would never be as infatuated with anyone again. Which turned out to be true.
When we were adults, we played much more elaborate games. Steve’s scavenger hunts were especially ambitious, and eventually famous—or, in the case of that movie, infamous; the plot was so complicated I eventually gave up.14 In real life, he’d form a bunch of his showbiz friends into teams and make them follow a series of insanely tricky clues that led all over the city. I remember I was once on a team with, among others, Phyllis Newman.15 We somehow made our way to a brownstone on East Seventy-third Street that happened to be the home of his lady shrink. Standing on the stoop, if you listened very carefully, you could hear music coming from the gap between the outer and inner doors. Somehow, he’d rigged a record or tape to keep repeating “One for My Baby,”16 specifically the opening musical phrase. We all knew the lyric, of course: “It’s quarter to three, there’s no one in the place except you and me.” But what to do with it? Eventually I figured, aha, it’s “quarter to three”—two forty-five. So the next address we had to find on the map would be at number 245. I can’t remember if we won that time, but I do know that everyone was starving because it took all evening to solve and Steve hadn’t warned us to eat ahead. One clue was hidden in the icing of a cake we found somewhere in the process, and poor Phyllis was so hungry she ate the clue.
When kids or huge success arrived in all our lives—usually not both—everyone outgrew the scavenger hunts; they took too long and cost too much. (Steve would send us around town in limos.) But there was always time for Hostilities, and it didn’t cost anything, at least not financially. You would sit in a circle, having been assigned a number from one through ten if there were ten of you. On scraps of paper, you’d write an impertinent question for each of the nine other players, fold them up, and “address” them on the outside with their number, in pencil. So let’s say Adolph was No. 7; you might write, “Who’s smarter, your spouse or your collaborator?” then fold it up and address it to No. 7. After everyone got their “mail” they would write answers to the impertinent questions and—this is important—erase the number on the front before throwing it into a pile in the middle. Then they’d all be read aloud. But when they were read aloud you didn’t know who wrote the question or whom it was addressed to unless it was you. The supposed point was to match them up.
We ended up calling it Hostilities because it could get very nasty. (That was the real point.) One time we played it at Arthur’s in Quogue. Are you surprised that Arthur Laurents,17 the little shit,18 would be associated with a game called Hostilities? Sometimes I’m surprised, and ashamed, that I was associated with him as long as I was. But we were still good friends in the mid-1960s, when I was in my mid-thirties and this particular game took place. By then I was married to Hank; out in Quogue on Long Island we were neighbors of Arthur and his partner, Tom Hatcher,19 four lonely Democrats among the Quoglodytes. Also there was Lee Remick20 and her then-husband Bill Colleran. Lee had recently starred in Steve and Arthur’s flop musical Anyone Can Whistle; she was lovely in it, even though she was not known for her voice. Anyway, we were all sitting in our circle in Arthur’s living room, and among Hank’s pieces of “mail” (he told me later) was one asking, “Do you think your wife has any talent?” Well, that was tricky whichever way you answered it, because even a strong defense would cast doubt on my talent, which I was sensitive about. But Hank looked around the room and figured a way out of the trap. His answer was, “She has talent, but not really for singing.” So when it was read aloud, everyone thought the question had been sent to Bill, not Hank—Lee’s husband, not mine.
1972: Arthur Laurents in Quogue. “Are you surprised that the little shit would be associated with a game called Hostilities?”
Another game of Hostilities took place in my living room with, among others, Arthur, Tom, Lenny,21 my Once Upon a Mattress lyricist Marshall Barer,22 and the Ryans, Johnny and D.D.23 I wrote this question for Marshall: “How many people in this room have you slept with?” I knew of two: me (between my marriages, even though Marshall was gay) and D.D. But the answer came back, “Three.” That’s interesting, I thought.
One of the rules of Hostilities was that you were not supposed to investigate the answers; you had to let them go, not call someone the next day and ask, “Was that you?” But I called Marshall that very night and asked, “Who was the third person you slept with?” And he said, “Arthur.” Which didn’t surprise me except that I hadn’t known about it earlier, and Arthur always bragged about such things. Two seconds later the phone rings and it’s Arthur. “I know it was you who asked that question,” he says, “and I know you and D.D. slept with Marshall. But who was the third person?” And I said, “It was you!”
He was floored. He didn’t remember anything about it. Which was very disappointing to Marshall when, yes, I called him back and blabbed.24
2.LOVE ME TONIGHT
Somewhere, there is a wonderful home movie of Daddy playing with me on a lawn. He looks happy, as adorable as anybody would be with a chubby new baby; I couldn’t have been a year old. The first time I saw it I almost burst into tears, though I rarely cry; I taught myself not to because I never wanted to give my mother, who cried constantly, the satisfaction. When I was punished or humiliated for doing something wrong—and I was always doing something wrong—I used to look up at the sky and think, Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t let her know she got to you. To this day I let myself cry only at lovely things, like when someone unexpectedly apologizes to someone else. Or at acts of selfless kindness. But watching Daddy in a pair of swimming trunks on the grass, beaming at me with good-natured, silly joy, I thought: Where did that nice man go?
I just ached to relive the implied experience—though probably, because he was a showman, and my mother even more so, it was staged.
I certainly have no conscious memory of his being very happy with me, and my conscious memory goes way back. We moved from New York to Beverly Hills in November of 1931: my father to work at MGM on musicals; my mother to mind him; and her mother, the very funny but not very bright May, for whom I was named—and whose intellectual curiosity didn’t go much beyond the juicy novels she rented at Womrath’s bookstore—because she was recently a widow and what else was she going to do?1 Larry Hart,2 whom I loved, also came, and lived with us until my mother couldn’t stand it. And ten-month-old me. I don’t remember the move, thank you very much, but I do remember, less than two years later, the big earthquake of 1933.3 Because I was in my mother’s arms, not the nurse’s, and my mother held me only when Mam’selle, as we called her, had her day off, I know specifically that the earthquake occurred on a Wednesday.4 My mother stood in the doorway with me, trying to figure out whether it was safer to be inside or outside, and that’s what I remember: her indecision. Is it safer to be inside or outside?
1934: Mary and Richard Rodgers. “Where did that nice man go?”
1927: Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Hart called Rodgers “the Principal.” Rodgers called Hart “the Shrimp.”
My father and Larry were in their office at the MGM lot with the story editor of the movie they were writing.5 Daddy was playing and Larry was singing when suddenly the room started shaking and the piano started sliding across it. At first Daddy followed the piano, still playing, but as it approached the window, he and the others decided they’d better jump. Because the air conditioner kept the window from opening, Larry threw the piano stool through the glass, and out they went, but it was just the first floor, so nothing happened. They fell into a bunch of shrubbery. An earthquake was just about the only thing that could dislodge Daddy from the keyboard when he was writing, or I suppose that was what he wanted us to know when he told us the story.6
By that time, I was able to talk. Every morning I would say to him, “Where are you going?” and he would answer, not very nicely, as if it were an imbecilic question, “Where do you think I’m going?”
“The studio?”
“That’s right,” he’d say, and pat his jacket pockets on both sides to make sure he had his supply of Lucky Strikes for the day: three green boxes. I’d hear the cellophane crackling as he left.
Two years later, when Linda was born, same thing. “You have a baby sister,” he announced.
“What’s her name?” I asked.
“Linda.”
“What’s her last name?”
I knew the answer, but this was the kind of pathetic thing I always said to keep him with me longer. It didn’t work.
“What do you think her last name is?”
Stalling for time, I said, “I thought maybe she’d have a middle name.”
“No,” he answered, and left the room.
Though he was a composer, Daddy was fanatical about words: He demanded, not just from his collaborators but also from his daughters, clarity and concision. He hated having his time wasted with intangible things like emotions, and found excess of any sort distasteful. I’ve always had a hugely broad smile, apparently too huge for him; when I had my picture taken, he’d say, “Don’t smile.” And he’d wince every time I’d laugh loudly, which is another thing I do a lot. He would actually recoil. Which is somewhat unfair because, you know, he made me. It was like I was a golem, a glob, a repository of all his and my mother’s fears about their own excesses. My weight was a constant disappointment, from birth onward. “You are so fat,” he once told me, “that your arms swing out on either side like an ape.”7 And there was my always perfectly slim mother sitting at the lunch table, breezily saying, “Oh well, when I feel I am gaining weight I just don’t eat dessert for a while.” I wanted to push her face into the soup.
She was even more fanatical about appearances than he, which made her a very difficult parent but a very clever decorator. She once designed a home with all the mechanical systems—pipes and ducts and flues and what-have-yous—color-coded in primary colors. The cellar was like a Mondrian. She started a repair business, patented a line of dress patterns called Basically Yours, invented the Turn and Learn toy, selling it in 1972 to Ideal.8 But let’s not waste space on her full résumé; you can read about it in her several memoirs. The point is that the contrast between her imaginative ideas (a hollow bracelet filled with refrigerant) and her conventional demeanor (also, in a way, a hollow bracelet filled with refrigerant) made her seem a hypocrite.
Strike the “seem.” Among her inventions none was so glamorous as the Johnny Mop, a tongs-like contraption with a detachable, biodegradable pad for cleaning toilets that she sold for a hundred thousand dollars to Johnson & Johnson, which then minimally altered it to cheat her of royalties. This all blew up on the day Tod was born—the same day Nixon delivered his Checkers speech—in September 1952. When I woke from the anesthesia and asked what had happened while I was out, she told me about the great mop caper and said she was so hopping mad that she was going to put on her “respectable Republican cloth coat”—though she was of course a Democrat—and sue the bastards, meaning Johnson & Johnson.9
But the point is that the Toilet Queen, as we called her afterward—she was surprisingly good about being teased, even when I gave her a gold key chain charm in the shape of a mop—wouldn’t get down on her knees to play with us because she’d then have to send her pants to be pressed. She had imagination about objects and processes and even bookkeeping but none about children. I promised myself that if I ever got out of her home alive, I’d do everything exactly the opposite of the way she did it. And I kept my promise. If you doubt me, ask my kids who taught them all the bad words. I told them they could say fuck, shit, and cunt to me all they liked, but maybe not so much to an Episcopalian priest. The trick children need to learn is how to determine the right context.
I doubt either of my parents really even wanted to have children, not the way children want to be had. Mummy’s idea of a daughter was a chambermaid crossed with a lapdog; Daddy’s, Clara Schumann as a chorus girl. There was only one, maybe one and a half, of those four things I had any chance of being. And it certainly wasn’t the chambermaid, even if Mummy had us cleaning the bathroom and making the beds when we were still in single digits. Which is fine, except that what she meant by making the beds was ripping all the sheets completely off and turning the mattress, then putting the top sheet on the bottom and a new sheet on top. Twice a week! Keep in mind there were no fitted sheets in those days.
What I wanted, desperately, was my parents’ affection, but it wasn’t there to be gotten. Or I didn’t know how to get it. Despite many efforts, I was no chorus girl. And all my childhood curiosity, the normal accidents and mischief of growing up, they took as deliberate provocations. One day when I was three, and not yet fully potty-trained—which was considered nearly defective in those days—I came to my mother’s bedroom, where as usual she was just lying in bed, probably pregnant with Linda, and I peed in the doorway right in front of her.10 She was so angry that she got up, dressed, packed her overnight bag, and left the house directly for the city. To me, now, that seems like an embarrassing tantrum, but she was very pleased with the story, and would tell it often to show what an effective mother she was. And it was effective. But there are other, kinder ways to be effective.
To be fair, she was depressed throughout most of my early childhood. She was certainly depressed in Hollywood. Both she and Daddy detested it. They had moved there for money and got it, but Daddy was frustrated because everything he and Larry wrote, no matter how good, was thrown out. They didn’t have any hits during those three years except for the ones from Love Me Tonight: “Isn’t It Romantic?” and “Lover.”11 In New York and London they were the toast of the town, not yet fully themselves but getting there. In California they were contract hacks who, far from being celebrated, were silenced. Daddy spent his days playing tennis, his nights playing bridge.
For my mother the problem with California was that she couldn’t make the A-list; she was new to Hollywood society and didn’t have enough clout. Rather than have the wrong friends, she chose to have none. She was also trying to manage Larry. Once he came home in the middle of the night and flipped an emergency master switch that turned on all the lights, waking my mother, May, Mam’selle, and me. Another time he invited a jazz band over for a midnight concert. More than once, he got the cook drunk. Whatever he did, the next morning we’d stumble upon the forty-seven pots of orchids he’d ordered as an apology. We’d also stumble on Larry himself, bashfully smoking big cigars into the curtains, sometimes burning holes in them. Mummy finally made Daddy kick him out.
She had a lot to tolerate, including, no doubt, Daddy’s affairs, which she never complained about, probably because she feared he would leave her if she did. Sometimes I think my sister and I were produced as some kind of marital collateral. So even though she didn’t want the bother of children, she would have had more if she could. There was another pregnancy, in California, but it lasted only six months; the premature baby, also a girl, died within minutes in August of 1932. Mummy said it was one of the few times I was sweet to her: “It was as though you understood.”
Mostly I was a terrible nuisance. I was always doing rotten things, which is where The Rotten Book came from.12 In third grade, I lit an organdy curtain in my bedroom on fire—not out of bad-seed evil but just to see what would happen. What happened was instantaneous and horrifying: The whole window was aflame within seconds and then the flames leapt to the other window. I ran to the next room where Linda and the nurse were sleeping, the nurse ran into my parents’ room, my father ran into my room, yanked both pairs of burning curtains to the floor, and managed to extinguish them.
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