Point to Point Navigation

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.