A young woman wondered why, under national health (utopian compared to our insurance/pharmaceutical anti-health services), it took forty-eight hours for a G.P. to grant her an appointment. Blair’s unfamiliarity with this flaw in the health system got him booed by others with the same complaint. To compare their audience of informed average citizens—quaintly called subjects, thanks to the ubiquitous presence of the phantom crown—was jarring to anyone foolish enough to believe that the U.S. is at all democratic in anything except the furious imprisoning of the innocent, the joyous electing of the guilty.
TWENTY-FOUR
It is sometimes harder to get out of local politics than into it. Some time after the 1960 election I was visited at Edgewater by Mike Prendergast who had succeeded Carmine di Sapio as head of New York City’s Tammany Hall. Would I be the Democrat candidate for Senate? Since I was convinced that no Democrat could defeat Jack Javits, the Republican who usually voted like a Democrat, I said, no, thanks. But then Howard and I discussed the possibility of living in Rome, a city I’d fallen in love with as a schoolboy in 1939 and, again, in the fifties when I returned to write the script for Ben-Hur. Although Howard had many friends at nearby Bard College, he’d never really taken to the area, which was changing from agrarian to suburban thanks to IBM’s plants in Poughkeepsie and Kingston. Our friend Alice Bouverie, one of the reasons that I’d bought Edgewater in 1950, was dead and Eleanor Roosevelt was dying. The last time I saw her she said, almost cheerfully, “There has always been something wrong with my blood; and they hope to do something about it at last.” I wrote her a note, wondering if I should make the Senate race. She wrote me a few lines; despite shaky handwriting, she was as practical as always. She was also not in the habit of advising others about their business. “People are what they are,” she liked to say. She may have suspected that I was ready to follow Apollo’s advice to Rilke and change my life which meant going to Rome and finishing Julian in the stacks of the American Academy’s classical library on Janiculum Hill. During this time, Eleanor died of tuberculosis of the blood. I don’t think she was ever fully aware, as a widow, how powerful she was, always ready to engage in dialogue except when Stalin, suspecting the president was murdered, insisted she have an autopsy performed. “Marshal Stalin doesn’t know we are not like that,” an ironic response in the light of later events. When Khrushchev came to the UN, she invited him to Hyde Park to view FDR’s grave and talk politics. Khrushchev rushed from New York City to Hyde Park, saw the grave and rushed back. She was disappointed; also stoic. “Mr. Khrushchev,” she told me, “is interested only in power and I have none.” But of course she did, which he did not grasp.
I left New York on the Italian liner Leonardo da Vinci for what was to be a “celebrity cruise.” A number of so-called celebrities would sail for free (to the annoyance, no doubt, of the paying customers). Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward saw me off. I was booked as far as the Piraeus where Howard would join me and we’d then move on to Rome and an apartment in the Via Giulia rented sight unseen. Howard had just recovered from an operation at Manhattan’s Memorial hospital where a great lump on his thyroid had been removed. It was benign but in the anxious time it took to get him booked into Memorial I developed a duodenal ulcer.
Once the Leonardo was under way, feeling cut off from all the world, I drank a glass of milk for my ulcer and then went into the dining room to find Paul and Joanne seated at the captain’s table. They had only pretended to see me off on the cruise when, actually, they too were fellow passengers on what we ungratefully dubbed the ship of fools. On the cruise Paul proved to be our star of stars. Women sometimes behaved oddly when they saw him. Once when we were walking down Madison Avenue, a large young woman came toward us from the opposite direction: quickly, he tucked his chin into his collar to hide those arctic blue eyes. He also increased his pace. “Keep moving,” he whispered as we passed her. Then there was a crash behind us. “Don’t look around,” he said, looking around; then he broke into a run. “What happened?” I asked. “She’s fainted,” he said and leapt into a taxicab.
TWENTY-FIVE
Although I have never enjoyed large parties, when Howard arrived in Rome we went to quite a few, largely to see the interiors of a number of palaces. Rudi and Consuelo Crespi were at the center of the city’s social life which was like Rome itself—a bit on the sleepy side but the settings were splendid. Consuelo Crespi was a beautiful American with that very American urge to bring different sorts of people together. This works just about everywhere but not in Rome during the sixties. Everyone she asked to their flat in Palazzo Taverna gladly came but the various groups stayed together like floral arrangements, each rooted to its own Aubusson rug. One group would consist of the so-called black nobles, created by the Popes. Then the whites, ennobled by the kings. Literary figures like Moravia and Bassani stood apart in the corners, while movie people swarmed. A few years later I arrived at a Roman reception to find the current prime minister holding court. The hostess apologized: “They aren’t making films at Cinecittà anymore so now all we get to see on television are politicians so everyone is starting to invite them. Odd, isn’t it?” Although Consuelo and Rudi were most diplomatic there was no way that members of one group were going to commingle with members of another. By and large, the intellectuals who had a lot to say spoke no English while the aristos, thanks to childhood nannys, spoke perfect English but had little to say. So, one ended up learning a great deal about how to heat a five-hundred-room palace and nothing at all about The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. The only time I saw the Romans close ranks was against the Prince and Princess of Monaco. The Romans executed a sort of graceful military maneuver, leaving Rainier and Grace Kelly alone at the center of the room, radiating serenity. Since Grace and I had been under contract to MGM at the same time, I paid my respects. She was unchanged. We always talked about her uncle the playwright George Kelly whom we both admired; unfortunately, he was as right wing as Grace who, invariably, with flushed cheeks, would explain how FDR and the New Deal had stopped him from writing plays. I would slip quietly away. Across the room Howard was discussing the Oceanographic Museum at Monte Carlo, a subject dear to Prince Rainier who was interested in saving the Mediterranean over, to hear him tell it, the dead bodies of every Italian politician.
The Princess of Monaco: having second thoughts about makeup call?
Grace and I chatted about distant romantic Hollywood, not that she pined for her days of glory. I did ask her once, why, at the peak of her career, she had quit to become, in effect, the doyenne of an amusement park. Her answer was to the point. “You know about the studio’s makeup call?” I did. The actresses who were to work on any given day were staggered so that the makeup department would not be overcrowded as famous stars would be meticulously turned into reasonably accurate replicas of their best selves. “Well, my makeup call was still pretty late because I was still very young. But I have a tendency to put on weight. When I do, my call is earlier. On my last picture, it was…” she frowned at the thought of the dawn’s early light which one day she would have to face as had Loretta Young and Joan Crawford and a host of stars of yesteryear some of whom were obliged to report to makeup before sunrise. “It was the sudden change in my makeup call that decided me it was time to go before I absolutely had to.” There was no talk of romance, only the snuffing out of a career based upon the fading of her uncommon beauty. Nevertheless, there were those who were puzzled that after so much hard work to become the biggest movie star of her time Grace would quit to become Princess of Monaco. A worldly lady of my acquaintance purred the answer: “Never forget that she is from Philadelphia.”