Kitchen Privileges Page 15

  He listened to all of us, nodding solemnly. “We’ll have a meeting tomorrow.”

  The next day he announced the Gordon R. Tavistock plan. He restated that he was only keeping the office open for us kids. He didn’t need it. Nothing but aggravation. Now he was going to share the company with us. Starting now, we would go on a point system. As of today, we would get points for shows kept on the air, for expenses kept down, etc. When anyone got x number of points, that person would be entitled to one share of stock in the company.

  One share of stock. Nothing was said about the five past years I’d spent there. I did a quick calculation. Based on his timetable, if I was lucky, I’d be eligible for that one share of stock in about a year and a half.

  “What do you think, Mary?” he asked.

  “I have not words, Mr. Tavistock.”

  He beamed. “I knew you’d love it.”

  When I got to the office the next morning, I learned that he’d be in at twelve, and a caterer had been ordered to serve a luncheon to celebrate the new G. R. Tavistock company plan. The caterer arrived, turned my desk into a tabletop, and started putting out the bologna. G.R. made his entrance and heartily greeted all of us.

  I handed him my resignation.

  “You have another job, Mary?”

  “No, but I’m afraid I can’t work for you any longer.”

  At five o’clock he invited me to have a drink. “You’re going to open up across the street from me. I know it.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I replied, which was honest. Frank and Don and I had discussed the possibility of starting out on our own, but nothing definite had been decided.

  “If you do, there’s room for both of us.” The drinks arrived and we clinked glasses. “To a spirit of cammawaddawy,” he said cordially.

  The next morning when I went back to the office to collect my belongings, a burly uniformed guard was sitting at my desk. “The boss says you take nuttin’ outta here, lady. Absolutely nuttin’.”

  In 1975, at my kitchen table, where I wrote Where Are the Children? as well as several other of my earliest books.

  Fifteen

  Frank and Don and I did start our own company. We called it Aerial Communications. Don didn’t stay long, but after a cashless eight months, the company was up and running. Going that long without salary, as well as scraping together five thousand dollars to kick in for start-up costs, had me on the ropes financially. I borrowed on my insurance, hocked my engagement ring and two bracelets Mrs. Clark had left me, and somehow got through it.

  Our first office was a one-room sublet on Forty-second Street. We needed a typist, and in response to my phone call to the State Employment Agency, hired a man named Roy on a part-time basis. He was a balding, flabby guy of around forty, with wide, innocent eyes and a baby face. In a hesitant voice, he told me he lived with his mother in the Bronx, did not drink, and could type fast.

  The latter was the understatement of the century. He could practically make the typewriter smoke, and he never seemed to make a mistake. I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been snapped up for a typing pool on a full-time basis, because he made it very plain that he wanted to work. I hired him and, lunch bag in hand, he arrived the following morning.

  He immediately moved his desk a little to the left so that it was in a direct line with the windowsill. It really didn’t matter to me, but I was curious and asked him if there was any particular reason for the move.

  His eyes round and guileless, his tone reverential, he said, “Oh, didn’t I tell you? The Blessed Mother likes to sit on the windowsill near my desk when I’m working.”

  Roy lasted with us for about six months, then called in to say he didn’t want to work any more and his mother said it was okay to stay home. During those six months, I would steal occasional glances at the window. It was comforting to think that the Mother of God might be blessing our endeavors.

  We began to have a healthy lineup of shows and talent. Betsy Palmer, Bess Myerson, Bill Cullen, Arthur Kennedy, Fred Gwynn, Vivian Vance, Lee Merriweather, and Chiquita Banana were among our celebrity hosts. It was a hectic time. Frank and I wore a dozen hats, including writing, selling, producing, and distributing the various series. But as the budget got healthier, we were able to take on additional help.

  Those years between 1971 and 1973 were probably among the busiest of my life. David graduated from St. Joe’s in ’72 and began his freshman year at Dartmouth College. Now I had one child in law school, two in college, and two in Immaculate Heart Academy. I was starting to make fairly good money, but there never seemed to be enough to cover all the bills.

  I was writing a radio show for the actress Peggy Cass at that time and was astonished to learn that she was a sophomore at the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University. Like me, she hadn’t gone to college after high school and wanted to make up for it now.

  I decided that if Peggy could be working toward a degree, I could too. She was a busy actress, appearing both in movies and on stage, but she was able to manage it. Carol was seventeen. Patty was fifteen. I could certainly plan to stay in New York for classes after work, and get home late a couple of evenings a week. Broke as I was, I phoned Fordham and got the necessary applications. I think it was the hottest evening in summer 1974 when I took the bus from the office to Lincoln Center to register. There were long lines to sign up for classes, and it was ten o’clock before I finally got my student I.D. photo. My head was slightly tilted to the side and, to put it charitably, I looked dazed, confused, and bewildered. When Johnny saw it, he burst out laughing, and using a voice thick with an Irish brogue said, “I go to church regular, I never so much as drop a dish, and I’d never have a man in my room, ma’am.” He was right. From looking at that photo, I could have been typecast as the greenhorn maid in the Broadway hit play Life with Father.

  The kids got their jollies by buying me bobby socks and warning that if I didn’t keep up my marks, they’d rescind my driving privileges.

  Johnny’s wife, Connie, was very ill with cancer, and she died shortly after I started classes at Fordham. They’d been married less than five years. On the ninth anniversary of Warren’s death, I was sitting at Johnny’s side in the funeral home. That night in my diary I wrote:

  I sat there wondering how it had happened to us—I widowed and John widowed. Why so much grief and pain?

  A month later, I received a phone call from a hospital. A voice that barely spoke English said, “Mrs. Clark, I’m sorry to tell you that your brother’s dead.” John had fallen down the slippery marble steps of his apartment building. He broke his hip but otherwise seemed to be fine; the hospital hadn’t picked up the fact that he was bleeding internally. He had just turned forty-three.

  Because his death was unexpected, his body was sent to Jacoby Hospital for an autopsy. A driver from the funeral home, Paul Becker’s funeral home, of course, drove me there to identify the body. Jacoby had been built on the fields where the three of us used to go sleigh riding. As Johnny’s body was wheeled in on a gurney, in my memory I could see Joe setting the pace on his sled. Again I could hear Johnny’s voice: “Isn’t this fun, Mare?

  Little brother, little brother, little brother. The reproach of Margaret and Mary when their brother Lazarus died echoed through me: “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.” Mother and Daddy and Joseph and John, I thought. Where does it end? I am the only one left, the last witness to Tenbroeck Avenue.

  We got back in the car, and the driver put on a turn signal. “No, please go this way,” I directed. We drove up Tenbroeck Avenue and I had him stop for a few moments in front of our house.

  Sunday night is my delight…

  Hahaha…I made my Popsicle last…

  “If you’re going sleigh riding, be sure to keep the top button of your coat closed, and watch out for Johnny.”

  “Be home before dark.”

  I told the driver, “We can start now.”

  “This house
special to you, or do you know the people who live there?” he asked.

  “I knew the people who lived there, and yes, the house is special.”

  The novel I was working on was my hope for deliverance. Every morning I’d go down to the kitchen, pick up the typewriter from the floor in the corner, and set it on the table. Then for a few moments, I’d glory in the feel of the growing pile of pages. I was convinced it was a pretty good story. Finally, after many months, with quiet exultation I wrote “THE END.” It was finished.

  There was a poem written by a fifteenth-century monk that I keep a copy of on the wall of my Cape Cod house. It expressed my emotion on completion of the novel, and goes something like this: “The book is finished…let the writer rejoice…. God be praised…the book is finished. Instead of a pen, let the writer be given a fat goose….”

  I started to retype the manuscript to get a clean copy, but in the process realized I was a long way from the fat goose. The novel needed a ton of work. It was another full year before I wrote in my diary,

  I have finished the book and it is good.

  I was so sure that I had a saleable manuscript that I vividly remember what I was wearing when I dropped a copy of Die a Little Death on Pat Myrer’s desk in early September 1973. The title had been inspired by a journal I had read that had been written by a mistress of Louis XIV. When her baby died before it was a year old, she poignantly expressed her grief with these words, “And I with my baby died a little death.”

  I thought the title was appropriate, since in my manuscript the main character, Nancy, has forced herself to bury in her subconscious the events that preceded the loss of her first two children. If she is to save her new family, however, she must recall those events immediately.

  On pins and needles, I kept waiting to hear Pat’s verdict. Weeks passed and still no reaction. Finally I got up the courage to phone her. “Did you get a chance to read the manuscript?” I asked, fearing what she’d say. She told me she had sent it to the publishing house then known as Harper and Row.

  I was stunned. I had fully expected her to tear it apart with suggestions on how to revise it. Pat had been a senior editor with a major publisher before she became an agent, and she often had me rewrite a story before she felt it was ready for submission.

  “Then you don’t think it needs work?” I asked.

  “Absolutely not. It’s fine the way it is.”

  “Then it’s going to sell,” I told her.

  “You can’t be sure about that.”

  “Yes, I can. If you put your imprimatur on it, it’s going to sell.”

  Harper and Row returned it without comment. Delacorte turned it down on the basis that a story of children in jeopardy might upset their women readers.

  Here we go again, I thought. Memories of those years of rejection slips for my short stories came flooding back. But then on April 4, 1974, I got an excited call from Pat—Simon and Schuster wanted to buy the novel and had offered three thousand dollars for it.

  In my journal I wrote,

  At last the dawn breaks through. Die a Little Death sold to Simon and Schuster. I write and do not yet believe. All the trying, the rewriting…the feeling of hopelessness…. Dear God, the book has been sold!

  The kids and I called our friends. We had a party going in fifteen minutes. I knew that three thousand dollars wasn’t going to make any significant difference in our stretched-thin finances, but that wasn’t important. The book had sold.

  Then, on July 18, I received another call from Pat. The paperback rights to my novel had been sold to Dell for one hundred thousand dollars. In the journal I wrote,

  Somebody thought enough of my book to pay one hundred thousand dollars for it. The news came just after Warrie, Carol, and I had talked about how broke we are.

  That night we all celebrated at one of our favorite restaurants. Dave was doing a summer term at Dartmouth. Carol called him with the news, and he called back a few minutes later. In honor of the occasion, he had ordered a keg of beer for his fraternity.

  That one hundred thousand was split with the hardcover publisher, and, of course, my agent got her commission. But it meant a net to me of forty-five thousand dollars, to be paid over three years, and that extra income took the worst of the choke collar off.

  I had compiled a list of all the things I wanted to do in this lifetime and never had a chance to do. Finishing my college degree topped the list, and now I was doing that. I also wanted to learn how to ski and that winter started to do it, with Joan La Motte Nye, who had lived down the block from me on Tenbroeck Avenue. We’d gone to the Villa together, and for those four years in school, had always tried to sit next to each other in assemblies. We had a running game of trying to make the other laugh at solemn occasions. We still make each other laugh.

  That next year after Johnny’s death, it was a big help that Joan and I went skiing a number of weekends. We decided that, one way or another, we always seemed to be in uniform together. This time the uniforms were our ski paraphernalia—shopping separately, we’d bought very similar oufits. But this time, instead of oxfords, we had ski boots.

  We went to Stowe in Vermont and Hunter Mountain in New York and to smaller slopes in New Jersey. At first I started on the bunny hill, which is the worst possible thing to do. You have three-year-olds cutting in front of you, and if they don’t do you in, other beginners will attempt to break your neck by wobbling into you from behind.

  One day after a frustrating afternoon on the slopes, we got to the aprés-ski at the lodge, and I told Joan that I felt like an old dog trying to learn new tricks, that I was a hopeless case. She’d been skiing for a couple of years and had made a lot of progress, but it was too late for me.

  A good Samaritan at the next table overheard me. “I’ve been watching you, and you can do it,” he said, “but not on the bunny slope. Tomorrow you’ve got to go to the top of the middle slope with me.” I forget his name. I never saw him after that first morning of going up in the lift and following him down the ski slope, but I bless his memory. He was right; it made all the difference. For the next fifteen years I had a marvelous time skiing—until eventually I smashed my shoulder after, like an idiot, trying my inadequate skill on the expert slope at Sun Valley.

  My skiing adventures included going with Joan and Richard to Adelboden in Switzerland. There a horse and carriage picked us up at our gingerbread cottage and brought us to the slopes—another glorious adventure that made me feel a long way from the Bronx.

  Another serious item on my list of things to accomplish was to learn how to play the piano. My long-ago stab at it with Miss Mills of our “kitchen privileges” days hadn’t stuck. I decided to try it again, but not until after I had gotten my degree from Fordham.

  A future item on my list was to have a piéd à terre someday in Manhattan. Carol would be leaving for Mount Holyoke College in the fall; Patty would also be in college in two years. Looking ahead, I realized that before too long, I would be facing an empty nest. Rather than having to go home to a lonely house, I thought it would be great to be able to stay in Manhattan a couple of nights a week.

  My book was scheduled to come out in August 1975. My first editor at Simon and Schuster felt that Die a Little Death was the wrong title, that it made it sound like a hardboiled mystery. S&S wanted to position the book as a novel of suspense and suggested I call it Where Are the Children? After the title disaster of Aspire to the Heavens, I was happy to agree.

  Pat Myrer cautioned me to get started on a new book. If this one worked, Simon and Schuster would want another very soon.

  Where Are the Children? didn’t make the hardcover bestseller list, but it did sell very well and was favorably reviewed. It was optioned by legendary producer Ray Stark for development as a film for Columbia Pictures. I envisioned the premiere in Hollywood, complete with red carpet, flashbulbs, my gracious acceptance of the praise for the fabulous story I had created.

  When I got the phone call about the movie op
tion, Warrie and Dave had summer jobs with the Bergen County Mosquito Control Commission and had just come home from a long, hot day killing mosquitos. Hearing my news, they told me they were immediately quitting the jobs and forming an ad hoc committee to save the mosquitos.

  But Ray Stark never made the picture. Ten years later, it did at least reach the screen, courtesy of producer Zev Braun. When they were ready to begin shooting on Cape Cod, he asked me to do a cameo in it.

  Come! Let us dance to the music of this happy day. As a young girl, I once had won a drama medal at the Villa, and now as a bona fide thespian, I would at last have my day in the sun. I was cast as a reporter. When the main character, Nancy, is led out of the courthouse after being convicted of murder, I was to lead the pack of baying media types, demanding to know if she’d admit she’d killed her children.

  Jill Clayburgh was starring in the film.

  “Ready everyone,” the director called, then looked at me nervously. “Ready, Mrs. Clark?”

  I gave him a thumbs up.

  “Action,” he shouted.

  The camera was on Jill Clayburgh, handcuffed, looking dazed and heartsick as she’s half-led, half-dragged by two policemen.

  I saw the camera shift to me and rushed across the courtyard. A swarm of local residents hired for the day to depict media types thundered behind me. I shouted, “Come on, Jill, admit it! Did you kill your kids?”

  “Cut!”

  We all stopped. The director looked at me. “Mrs. Clark, the character’s name is Nancy.”

  I knew it was a good idea I’d stuck to writing.

  A great deal of the action for my second suspense novel took place in Grand Central Station. When I was growing up, there had been a radio series on the air called Grand Central Station. The tease for the program began like this: “Grand Central Station—crossroads of a million private lives.” That was why my working title for the book was Crossroads. I was still writing between five and a quarter of seven each morning, seated at the kitchen table. And once again the manuscript was growing.