My Story

16 my first love

He’s married now to a movie star, and it might embarrass him if I used his real name, and her, too. I read in the paper that their marriage, only a year old, is heading for the Hollywood reefs where most of the movieland marriages come apart. A few years ago I might have felt like giving it a push, just for old times sake. But now I’m happy and I wish him well and I wish anybody he loves well.

I was coming out of the casting department at M.G.M. with the usual results—no job and no prospects—when a girl I knew introduced me to an ordinary looking man. All I could tell about him was that he wasn’t an actor. Actors are often wonderful and charming people, but for a woman to love an actor is something like incest. It’s like loving a brother with the same face and manners as your own.

We went to a café and sat down and talked. Or rather, he talked. I stared and listened. I was sick inside with failure, and there was no hope in me. His voice was like a medicine. He told me he was a musician and how much he liked to play the piano and why some music was better than other music. I didn’t think of him as a man or a musician. All I thought was “He’s alive and strong.”

He called me up, and I always hurried to join him. The first thing I saw when I entered any place to meet him, no matter how crowded it was, was his face. It would jump out at me.

After a few weeks he knew I loved him. I hadn’t said so, but I didn’t have to. I stumbled when I went to sit down, my mouth hung open, my heart ached so much I wanted to cry all the time. If his hand touched mine by accident my knees buckled.

He smiled at me through all this as if I were half a joke. When he laughed at things I hadn’t meant to be funny, I felt flattered. He talked a lot about women and the emptiness of their love. He had just been divorced and was very cynical. He had a six-year-old son whose custody had been granted him by the court.

One evening after he had put his son to bed he sat and played the piano for me. He played a long time. Then he did something that made my heart beat crazily. In order to see the music better he put on a pair of glasses. I had never seen him with glasses on.

I don’t know why, but I had always been attracted to men who wore glasses. Now, when he put them on, I felt suddenly overwhelmed.

He stopped playing, removed his glasses and came over to me. He embraced and kissed me. My eyes closed, and a new life began for me.

I moved from the Studio Club where I was living to a place nearer his house so he could stop in on the way to work or home from work. I sat all day waiting for him. When I looked back on all the years I could remember, I shuddered. I knew now how cold and empty they had been. I had always thought of myself as someone unloved. Now I knew there had been something worse than that in my life. It had been my own unloving heart. I had loved myself a little, and Aunt Grace and Anna. How little it seemed now!

I sat alone thinking a lot about the past and understanding the frosty hearted child, Norma Jean. She would never have lived to grow up if her heart had had love in it. Now waiting for him when he was fifteen minutes late filled me with agony. Had I loved anyone or anything in my childhood and girlhood, what a thousand agonies there would have been every day! Maybe there were, and I had hidden them. Maybe that was why it hurt so now to love, and why my heart kept carrying on as if I were going to explode with pain and longing.

I thought a great deal about him and other men. My lover was a strong individual. I don’t mean he was dominant. A strong man doesn’t have to be dominant toward a woman. He doesn’t match his strength against a woman weak with love for him. He matches it against the world.

When he came into my room and took me in his arms all my troubles were forgotten. I even forgot Norma Jean, and her eyes stopped looking out of mine. I even forgot about not being photogenic. A new me appeared in my skin—not an actress, not somebody looking for a world of bright colors. All the fame and color and genius I had dreamed of were in me. When he said “I love you” to me, it was better than a thousand critics calling me a great star.

I tried to figure out what was so different about my life than before him. It was the same—no hopes, no prospects, all doors closed. The troubles were still there, every one of them, but they were like dust swept into a corner. There was one thing new—sex.

Sex is a baffling thing when it doesn’t happen. I used to wake up in the morning, when I was married, and wonder if the whole world was crazy, whooping about sex all the time. It was like hearing all the time that stove polish was the greatest invention on earth.

Then it dawned on me that people—other women—were different than me. They could feel things I couldn’t. And when I started reading books I ran into the words “frigid,” “rejected,” and “lesbian.” I wondered if I was all three of those things.

A man who had kissed me once had said it was very possible I was a lesbian because I apparently had no response to males—meaning him. I didn’t contradict him because I didn’t know what I was. There were times even when I didn’t feel human and times when all I could think of was dying. There was also the sinister fact that a well-made woman had always thrilled me to look at.

Now, having fallen in love, I knew what I was. It wasn’t a lesbian. The world and its excitement over sex didn’t seem crazy. In fact, it didn’t seem crazy enough.

There was only one cloud in my paradise, and it kept growing. At first nothing had mattered to me except my own love. After a few months I began to look at his love. I looked, listened, and looked, and I couldn’t tell myself more than he told me. I couldn’t tell if he really loved me.

He grinned a lot when we were together and kidded me a lot. I knew he liked me and was happy to be with me. But his love didn’t seem anything like mine. Most of his talk to me was a form of criticism. He criticized my mind. He kept pointing out how little I knew and how unaware of life I was. It was sort of true. I tried to know more by reading books. I had a new friend, Natasha Lytess. She was an acting coach and a woman of deep culture. She told me what to read. I read Tolstoy and Turgenev. They excited me, and I couldn’t lay a book down till I’d finished it. And I would go around dreaming of all the characters I’d read and hearing them talk to each other. But I didn’t feel that my mind was improving.

I never complained about his criticism, but it hurt me. His cynicism hurt me, too.

I’d say, “I’ve never felt like this before.”

And he’d answer, “You will, again.”

“I don’t know,” I’d say. “I just know that this is everything.”

He’d answer, “You mustn’t take a few sensations so seriously.” Then he’d ask, “What’s most important in life to you?”

“You are,” I’d say.

“After I’m gone,” he’d smile.

I’d cry.

“You cry too easily,” he’d say. “That’s because your mind isn’t developed. Compared to your breasts it’s embryonic.” I couldn’t contradict him because I had to look up that word in a dictionary. “Your mind is inert,” he’d say. “You never think about life. You just float through it on that pair of water wings you wear.”

Alone, I would lie awake repeating all he’d said. I’d think, “He can’t love me or he wouldn’t be so conscious of my faults. How can he love me if I’m such a goof to him?”

I didn’t mind being a goof if only he loved me. I felt when we were together that I walked in the gutter and he on the sidewalk. All I did was keep looking up to see if there was love in his eyes.

We were in my room one night, and he started talking about our future.

“I’ve thought of us getting married,” he said, “but I’m afraid it’s impossible.”

I didn’t say anything.

“It would be all right for me,” he said, “but I keep thinking of my son. If we were married and anything should happen to me—such as my dropping dead—it would be very bad for him.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It wouldn’t be right for him to be brought up by a woman like you,” he said. “It would be unfair to him.”

After he left, I cried all night, not over what he had said but over what I had to do. I had to leave him.

The moment I thought it, I realized I’d known it for a long time. That’s why I’d been sad—and desperate. That’s why I had tried to make myself more and more beautiful for him, why I had clung to him as if I were half mad. Because I had known it was ending.

He didn’t love me. A man can’t love a woman for whom he feels half contempt. He can’t love her if his mind is ashamed of her.

When I saw him again the next day I said good-bye to him. He stood staring at me while I told him how I felt. I cried, sobbed, and ended up in his arms.

But a week later I said good-bye again. This time I walked out of his house with my head up. Two days later I was back. There were a third and fourth good-bye. But it was like rushing to the edge of a roof to jump off. I stopped each time and didn’t jump, and turned to him and begged him to hold me. It’s hard to do something that hurts your heart, especially when it’s a new heart and you think that one hurt may kill it.

Finally I left him, and two days passed and I was still away. I sat in my room watching myself.

“Stick it out another day,” I’d say. “The hurt’s getting less already.”

It wasn’t, but I stuck it out a third and fourth day. Then he came after me. He knocked on my door. I walked to the door and leaned against it.

“It’s me,” he said.

“I know.”

“Please let me in,” he said.

I didn’t answer. He started banging on the door. When I heard him banging, I knew I was through with my love affair. I knew I was over it. The pain was still there but it would go away.

“Please,” he kept saying, “I want to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to see you,” I said. “Please go away.”

He raised his voice and banged harder.

“But you’re mine,” he cried at me. “You can’t leave me out here.”

The neighbors opened their doors. One of them yelled she’d call the police if he didn’t quit making a disturbance.

He went away.

He came back again—as I had done before. He loved me now. He met me in the street and walked beside me pouring his heart out. But it didn’t mean anything. When his hand gripped my arm, my arm didn’t buzz, my heart didn’t leap.