A Complicated Marriage Read Online Free PDF Page A

got something.” In Clem-talk, high praise. A clumsy girl, tripping on the mic cord—part of her act? And endearing, because she couldn’t seem to get anything right until she was on that stool, in a pin spot, singing. We felt that we had discovered her.
    That was the way it was at Bon Soir. I was enthralled. Ever since I had seen Carousel on my eleventh birthday, I had harbored a secret yearning to be a singer. After hearing Barbra, I found the courage to go through the curtain leading behind the small stage. To a man standing there, I said I wanted to talk to her. He said no, and that he was her manager. I said I wanted to sing, and who was her teacher? He said, no teacher, she just knew. I retreated. Somehow I wasn’t surprised by what he said. Years later I heard her say, when asked about how she achieved her amazing sound, that if she could hear the sound in her mind, she could sing it. By then I had achieved my dream, and I almost cried because she had put into such simple words what I had instinctively come to believe was true.
    Bon Soir was not a place where an entertainer stood elegantly in front of a mic, delivering some patter or a song, like at the Blue Angel, or #1 Fifth Avenue, or the uptown hotel nightspots. At Bon Soir the audience felt like insiders, performers ribbed each other and us, it was theater, it was family.
    And then, during those first months, there were a few unforgettable parties. Like the one at André Emmerich’s apartment-gallery on the parlor floor of a brownstone in the East Seventies. At that time André was a private art dealer, handling mostly pre-Columbian work. The main room was large and packed with a crowd that even I could recognize as the usual assortment of artists and collectors. But there, dead center, feet away from me, were Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. This was my first movie-star-in-the-flesh moment. How perfect. And young—well, within a decade of me—in the full blush of their power couple-ness. And here was André introducing them to us, as if they were real people. Clem hadn’t a clue who they were, but I was a junkie.
    That night I might as well have been twelve, cutting out pictures of
Rory Calhoun and Guy Madison from Photoplay and Scotch-taping them to the wall next to my bed. For some reason, right there with the hunks was the prince of the snarly bad boys, Richard Widmark, who never got a girl to kiss but who I thought was sex walking. And the girls? Jane Powell and Debbie Reynolds, because I wanted to sing and dance and be five feet tall and, like Nancy Drew, have dead mothers and adoring fathers who were handsome and doting, thus fulfilling my Electra dreams. But that night at André’s I was thrilled to make do with the movie stars at hand. Quite content to have no conversation, I just stared and stared at Tony’s curly black hair and headlight teeth and at Janet’s enormous breasts and tiny waist. They were perfection in miniature. Clem would gauge the world by me. “She’s even taller than Jenny,” he would say, not that the opportunity came up often. The stars would already be divorced in a few years, but, blissfully ignorant of the reality ahead, I feasted on the fantasy at hand until I’d had my fill.
    Later that evening, I confessed to Clem how ashamed I was for being such a starstruck idiot. And he told me that he had had his own starstruck moment when he was in his twenties. He had been in Hollywood for a job interview and one night had gone to the Pasadena Playhouse. During intermission he found himself standing near Marlene Dietrich. As she pulled out a cigarette, he leaned toward her with a match. As she exhaled, she looked at him with those eyes and said, “Thank you, darling,” with that voice. He said his knees had buckled. “Not the kind of thing you forget.” I felt warm all over and no longer like an idiot.
    Most of the big parties had a way of clashing with