life in the penthouse on Riverside Drive once owned by George Gershwin. They gave glittering parties where famous faces were glimpsed in smoke-filled rooms. “A tinkling piano in the next apartment / Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant.” I thought those lines were written for my parents; they certainly evoked my feelings about their parties—where ladies in satin and marabou smoked cigarettes in holders, clinked champagne glasses, drank in a way nobody drinks anymore, and changed husbands as they changed platform shoes. The men had darkly mirrored hair and thin mustaches like Adolphe Menjou. Limousines circled the block, awaiting them. Chauffeurs were black and wore caps. Maids were black and pretended to be obsequious. They put on their hats when they went home for the day.
When McCarthyism ended their show-biz careers and my parents returned from Hollywood at the height of the Blacklist, they found the Gershwin duplex and filled it with three decades’ worth of memorabilia. It was a movie set as much as an apartment. Even the floor in the gallery was mirrored for exhibition dancing. The double grand pianos were lacquered white. The library had framed pictures of them from all their movies and leather-bound copies of all their scripts. The powder room off the gallery was an infinite hall of mirrors where I could stare at innumerable multiples of myself becoming greener and hazier with each reflection.
I never really knew how the Blacklist had affected them. They had plenty of friends who were also ruined by it, but my parents were too fiercely ambitious—even in the engagé thirties—to have signed the wrong petitions. The Blacklist coincided with the end of their salad days as performers. It was time to do something else anyway.
So they came back and set up Hollywood on the Hudson. They had smartly squirreled away their Hollywood money (despite what Dorothy Parker said about it melting in the palm like snow), and eventually their theatrical book and autograph shop, Bibliomania, also prospered. In a business—rare books—populated by nerds and ladies in Boston marriages, my parents were unusual. They had a flair for the dramatic and a flair for mixing people. Many couples fell in love at their parties. It was as if their love were contagious.
For three little girls in black velvet dresses and British black patent-leather Mary Janes that had to be fastened with button-hooks who watched from halfway down the stairs at their parties, it seemed that our parents were the King and Queen of Cool. It seemed we’d never live as glamorously as they. And it seemed the height of ambition to grow up and become our parents.
Now I know that many children feel that way. And that the lucky ones are the ones who outgrow it. Toni, Emmy, and I had never outgrown it. That was why our lives were so hard. We weren’t starving or drinking polluted water, but we were stuck in a kind of emotional poverty all the same.
What struck me always, sitting at my parents’ bedside, was that it was time for me to take off the black velvet dress and stop sitting in the middle of the stairs.
It was at one of my parents’ parties that I first decided I was going to be an actress. All because of Leporello Kahn. I was sixteen when I met Lep Kahn (at the time the pun was lost on me). Lep—whose father was a famous opera singer at the old Met—was originally named after Don Giovanni’s side-kick. It was a lousy thing to do to a child. Lep’s name was a joke, so he tried to turn his life into a joke. He grew up to be one of those merry, seemingly harmless plump middle-aged men who brilliantly know how to appeal to teenage girls. He was the first man to let me know I was beautiful, and he was so suave and clever that he promptly made all the sixteen-year-old boys I knew seem like louts. (Not that it was hard.)
I met Lep at one of the first parties at which I actually drank vodka (in slavish imitation of my mother). I was wearing a strapless peony-pink gown with a harem skirt (those were the days of harem skirts), and with every drink, my breasts bobbled farther out of my boned top. Lep was looking at my breasts and saying, “You must come down to the Russian Tea Room and have lunch with me.” The Russian Tea Room meant show business glamour in those days. Now it has morphed into an unrecognizable simulacrum—like everything else connected with that vanished world.
Lep was an important Broadway producer who did everything from Shakespeare to Pinter. A big macher. He promised me Juliet in a new production of Romeo and Juliet, and though the role fell through, my affair with Lep did not.
Without Lep Kahn, would I have had an abortion at sixteen, quit school at seventeen, moved to the Village, and appeared as Anne in the road show of The Diary of Anne Frank at eighteen (the part that deluded me into thinking that the theater was a viable profession)? No. No. No. No. Looking back, I should have stayed at Walden (which was loose enough to accommodate all kinds of hanky-panky), finished high school, gone to some arty college like Bennington or Bard, and never gotten involved with Lep Kahn—but who could have known that at the time? His passion for me seemed like the key to the life I wanted.
He was one of those attractive plump men. His stomach shook when he laughed in the nude. He had breasts almost as big as mine. But he also had melting brown eyes and long silky black lashes, wore wonderful tweed jackets, had a beard and mustache peppered with gray (which gave him an authoritative air), smoked a meerschaum pipe, and smelled of honeyed tobacco and Old Spice (sexy, then). He chewed cinnamon-and-clove gum—which I found harmlessly eccentric. I didn’t think he was fat. He seemed Falstaffian to me—especially since he could quote Shakespeare by the yard. He was what I did instead of my senior thesis.
“‘But, soft! What light from yonder window breaks? . . . It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. . . .’”
Imagine having that quoted to you while you are playing hooky from high school to drink vodka and eat blini with beluga at the Russian Tea Room—always thinking you will be glimpsed with Lep by one of your parents’ friends! The fear of exposure was part of the thrill.
Since Lep was the reason I quit school at seventeen, having had an abortion at sixteen, you might say he was a child molester who ruined my life. But I didn’t think so at the time. I was so excited about becoming an adult and an actress. I assumed the couch casting came with the territory. Lep arranged the abortion, in fact—back in the days when it was illegal—with one of those show business doctors who practiced right down the block from the Russian Tea Room.
However grown up I felt sneaking off to meet Lep at the RTR and then going to his pad (as he called it) on Broadway and Fiftieth Street in a big old gloomy apartment that also served as his office, imagine how scared I was going off to get an illegal abortion without my parents’ knowledge. How alone in the world I felt! Though Lep went with me and held my hand. Even paid for it. I think he got me the Anne Frank role because he felt so guilty.
Which of these tableaux should I present? The abortion doctor’s seedy office? Lep’s gloomy, cavernous apartment facing a courtyard filled with filthy pigeons nesting? Lep dancing naked with his belly shaking?
Sex with him was not amazing, but I had nothing to compare it to at the time. He knew how to eat pussy, though—perhaps to make up for the fact that his penis was not always operational in those pre-Viagra days. He compensated for the softness of his prick with the hard truth of poetry. And then with the part of Anne Frank, who in those days represented all innocence, beauty, truth—the summit of every young actress’s desire.
I see myself at sixteen, walking hand in hand with Lep into the abortion doctor’s lair, sure I would be dead by nightfall. (Everybody then had heard of a girl who died from—or was sterilized by—a botched abortion.)
No nurse was present. No receptionist. Abortions were done then without the benefit of witnesses or anesthesia. I dressed in a gown (as later for my face-lift), lay on the table with bare feet in the cold stirrups, gratefully accepted the shot of whiskey proffered, and fell into a red hole of pain so excruciating I can feel it to this day. I can still remember my womb horribly cramping, still remember retching and nearly choking on my vomit, still remember
