Seducing the Demon (15 page)

COLETTE

My father always regretted leaving show business. He made a lot of money selling tchotchkes, but what he really respected were musicians, songwriters and composers. He was not a trained musician and he idolized them above all artists. He used to say the name “Juilliard” with the same reverence he reserved for Mozart, Brahms and Puccini. He knew what was good and he didn’t measure up to his own standards.

He wrote a few published songs in the thirties, played nightclubs and weddings as a bandleader, even introduced one great song in a Broadway show—“Begin the Beguine.” He’d auditioned for Cole Porter and got the gig in Jubilee (1935). That was destined to be the high point of his musical career. At an early age, I knew what moved him—fame. I was not a musician, but I was always comfortable on stage. I was a terrible ballet dancer as a little girl, but when Tex and Jinx (the celebrated talk-show hosts of the fifties) came to the American School of Ballet they picked me to be interviewed on TV because I was such a fluent talker. Even now, I can stand up in front of thousands of people and feel no fear, but when I turn in a book manuscript I’m a wreck.

At camp I was no athlete but found a way to get attention anyway. I couldn’t play softball and that was all that mattered at the camp my benighted parents had sent me to at age seven. The girls in my bunk hated me for being a bookworm, a ball dropper and for speaking with what they called an “English accent” because it wasn’t Brooklynese. (My mother was born in Britain and still, at ninety-three, has certain Britishisms of speech.) I was never so lonely and lost in my life.

When it came time to take the camp photo, we were all herded into the “rec” room, where dozens of photos of camp from years past lined the walls. In every photo there were hundreds of identical blobs representing camper faces. Most were so small that the kid’s identity was lost.

I studied these monuments to years past and some devilish daring rose up in me. When we had been carefully placed on benches and arranged according to height, when the photographer looked through the lens and instructed us to say “cheese,” I suddenly whipped my head to one side to look different from the rest. In the middle of all these blobs would be a profile with a ponytail.

“You
rooned
the picture!” my fellow campers yelled.

I pretended contrition. I was secretly delighted to have “rooned” the picture. I believe that was the first stirring of my lust for fame. Not to blend in, not to be a blob, not to be invisible in an overcrowded world—these are some of the reasons we lust for fame.

Later, other fantasies come into play: to be loved, to be fucked, to be rich, to be immortal, to get good tables in restaurants. Fame seems at first to be a protection against the common lot of humanity. The common lot of humanity is to be a blob that rots. With fame we can outsmart decay and be embalmed for times to come.

Of course it’s not really us but a version of us, an eviscerated version with all the blood and guts gone. Embalmed for posterity, like Lenin. We’ll take it anyway. And thanks. Better to be known for the wrong things than not to be known at all.

Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.

I never consciously wanted to be an actress when I was young. But when Eve Ensler and Shirley Knight approached me to be in a three-week run of
The Vagina Monologues
in New York, I said yes so quickly that I must have had hidden motives. This was my chance to get out of writing and into theater. Maybe a movie role would follow. Not that I hadn’t been in one of Woody Allen’s movies—but I went by so fast that nobody actually saw me. Besides,
everyone
has been in Woody’s movies. There’s even a web site that lists the poor slobs from other professions in Woody’s movies. I believe Woody is a (sometimes misguided) genius, but that’s not why we did it. Like most writers, I will do anything for a day away from the torture of the desk. As a novelist, I wanted to know viscerally what an actor’s daily life is like when she is working—or so I told myself dutifully. It was bullshit. I had stardust in my addled brain. Besides, most writers are closet exhibitionists. Maybe this was a way of not having to write my next novel. When people asked me why I was impersonating a vagina for Eve, I said, “After a certain point in life, we are trapped in the métier we have chosen and there aren’t many opportunities to try on other lives.” Yeah, right.

So there I am, sitting on a high stool blinded by an intense spotlight. Two actors flank me on either side. We have bonded while putting on our makeup, done our good-luck rituals—a few interactive yoga postures in the wings, followed by kissing each other passionately on the lips—but now each of us is alone in her aureole of light. The lights go out on the others. I am isolated in my spotlight but for the anticipatory rustle of the audience.

My first monologue requires me to be an ancient crone who cannot call her vagina by its proper name. She can identify it only as “down there.” I have found a voice for my character—God only knows where—and that voice is thoroughly Bronx, full of exploding “t”s and “p”s—a voice in which I have never before spoken. My character was prudish only in words. Her body was full of juice. Whenever a man appealed to her, she would produce a flood in her nether regions and was sure everyone could smell its odor and feel its wetness. Of course, she was the only one who could—which is the subtext of her monologue—but her juiciness so embarrassed her that she gave up men and sex forever. Comic but also tragic, this woman’s story is the story of a needless, self-inflicted sacrifice. When I got the monologue right, the audience felt this. When I was too broad, the audience laughed hysterically but probably didn’t understand the deeper narrative. What a responsibility an actor has. A whole life rests on her interpretation.

My next monologue required me to be a Yugoslavian girl raped in the Balkan war who feels invaded, besmirched, and wants to be spiritually cleansed. She compares her life to a river, a torrent of water. She dreams of a mountain stream cleansing her and returning her to girlhood, bringing her home. My next monologue required me to impersonate a stepmother awed by the process of witnessing her stepdaughter giving birth. For each of these I had to find the voice, the pauses, the subterranean meaning. I came to understand more about the use of voice than I ever had performing my own poems—where I was only required to be myself. And I certainly came to understand live theater in a way I never had before.

Every morning I would get up planning to write, but would find myself puttering aimlessly all day, waiting for my 5:30 p.m. pick-up in the dented minibus, which was all the off-Broadway producers could afford.

The two and a half hours of preparation and makeup were essential, as was the bonding with the other actors. We talked about everything: men, politics, kids, other jobs, what we hated about our looks. We became backstage sisters. The Westside Theatre has a tiny dressing area, so we were crammed together at a common dressing table, sharing space, makeup, perfume, brandy drunk straight from the bottle.

I fell in love with one of my two co-stars. Angelica Torn was a delicate pale blonde—the daughter of Geraldine Page and Rip Torn. She was pretty and intense and tortured. But it was Lauren Velez, a lush Latina with golden skin, who stirred me up. There’s a sexuality backstage that makes you open yourself wide. How can you not want to fuck your fellow cast members? We three kissed each other wetly before each performance. For the first time I really understood Colette’s blithe bisexuality.

The backstage world is a lot less lonely than the writer’s habitual workplace. As actors, you may be terrified, but you’re all in it together. After the show, there is a real sense of triumph and elation. And food tastes better than it ever does to a writer.

But the words are not yours. You don’t have the anxiety of making them up from scratch, and you don’t have the euphoria of putting something in the air that wasn’t there before. Despite all the struggle of being a writer, the echoing void of the blank page, I also love making it up as I go along.

It’s like building your own plane, then learning to fly it. Sometimes the words spill out and later make no sense at all. Sometimes they only make intermittent sense and for the next ten days you have to wrestle them into another kind of order. But sometimes their sense is utterly clear and you wonder who wrote them.

I’m glad to have moonlighted as an actor once, but I’m not planning to quit my day job. (Those offers never materialized. I’m still waiting.) Acting may be sexier, but writing is most productive when it’s most mischievous. In that, writing is a lot like acting. You get ready, study, learn, memorize, rehearse and then forget all the effort and fly.

Probably all the arts are like that: intense effort, which must be absorbed into your being and never shown in the work itself.
Sprezzatura
—the art of making the difficult look easy—is the sine qua non. The actor must become the character, the painter must impersonate light and the writer must fly in a winged chariot of words. All our wings must be invisible, with no wires showing.

Like magicians, we cannot give away our tricks. When it’s going well we believe we
have
no tricks and are being carried by the gods themselves.

I now realize I was moved to try live theater by Colette’s example. She was the original
femme de lettres qui a mal tourné
—the woman of letters who turned out badly.

She was the one who gave up writing for theater when her first divorce forced her to earn her living on the stage. And she was the one who missed writing so much she wrote this paean to it in her book about being a reluctant performer,
The Vagabond:

The itching of
a
scar.
What a perfect description of the urge to write. My little holiday in the theater also reinforced this compulsion. By leaving my métier, I also came to newly appreciate my métier. I had been sick of writing. Now I longed to return to it again. Or so I told myself.

But if you know a good agent who’s looking for a woman of letters who has turned out badly, send him to me. I can always be persuaded to take some time off.

 

 

When I was in my twenties and wanted to be a writer so bad it hurt, I received a letter from a man called Louis Untermeyer who lived in Newtown, Connecticut.

“What are you doing in that mess of mediocrity?” he asked. One of my longer poems, written in Heidelberg, had appeared in some obscure poetry anthology—and Mr. Untermeyer wanted to know what else I had written.

I recognized his name from poetry anthologies and textbooks from my high school and college days. His anthologies of American and British poetry were so ubiquitous that even the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky had one of them with him in exile in a labor camp north of the Arctic Circle. Brodsky studied it with the help of a dictionary. And learned about English poetry that way. Louis Untermeyer was famous—though I didn’t yet know the full extent of his fame. Nor did I know that he was my grandfather’s age. After some letters back and forth and some poems I proffered, Louis Untermeyer pronounced me the real thing and invited me to his house in Connecticut for lunch.

I boned up on him. He was a prodigious anthologist and translator, the author of many books of poetry early in his career, the former editor of the Marxist journal
The Masses,
a witty guest on
What’s My Line?
(fired in the fifties for his leftist affiliations) and a supporter of Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound and many others. He adored poetry, wisecracks, conversation—as I was to learn when I took him up on his offer and visited him in Newtown.

I found an energetic nonagenarian, a twinkling old gent with an eye for young blondes, living with his fifth wife, Bryna. We talked of poetry while Bryna brought us a delicious lunch and joined intermittently in the conversation.

From then on, Louis became my poetry adviser and mail-order critic. Allan Jong, my second husband, and I were frequent visitors to the Untermeyers’ Connecticut house. It was there that we met Arthur Miller and Inge Morath, Bette and Howard Fast, Muriel Rukeyser, the choreographer Martha Clarke, the director Arvin Brown and his actress wife, Joyce Ebert, as well as the actress Teresa Wright and her playwright husband, Robert Anderson. Dozens of other writers, actors and directors were guests at the Untermeyers. Because of Louis, I became friends with Howard and Bette Fast, who were to introduce me to their son, Jon, who became my third husband and the father of my daughter Molly.

Because of Louis I became friends with Arthur Miller and Inge Morath. “I guess we love each other because Louis loved us both,” Arthur said to me at a memorial service for Louis. I thought of that typically ironic, self-deprecating Arthur Millerism when I went to a memorial for Arthur at the Majestic Theater in New York.

Memorial services are funny things. Some are there for love and some for careerism. At Arthur’s, most seemed to be there for love. Oh, there were plenty of stars—Mike Nichols, Kurt Vonnegut, John Guare, Tony Kushner, Edward Albee, Daniel Day-Lewis ... but since Arthur was the presiding spirit, there was love in the air.