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By Root 421 0

Zvai Leumi, whose leaders believed that terrorism and military action were necessary to wear down British resistance and lead to the early creation of Israel. I sided with the militants, as did a lot of my Jewish friends. Seeing the films made during the liberation of the Nazi death camps had been a searing experience for me, and I thought that Jews, who had suffered so much, had to do whatever was necessary to acquire a safe place where they could not be punished further by the world. I contributed as much money as I could to the Irgun and helped raise money to buy food for the internment camps, then became a member of one of about twenty two-man teams that traveled around the country soliciting support for the League for a Free Palestine, which in fact was a front for the Irgun. In Jewish schools, synagogues and other places, we described how European Jews who had been lucky enough to survive Hitler’s death camps were being imprisoned in displaced-person camps nearly as inhumane as those the Nazis operated. And we argued that the British had to be pushed out of Palestine. There was always a lot of yelling at the temples we visited between the Jews who favored Ben-Gurion’s approach and those favoring the terrorists whom I supported and who at the time were called “Freedom Fighters.” Now I understand much more about the complexity of the situation than I did then.

16

IN A LETTER written to my parents from Washington while I was helping the Irgun, I told them: “Washington is strongly anti-Negro and I’m getting awfully mad, so I hope we leave soon. Saw in the newsreel that the Ku Klux Klan is beginning to function en masse again.… It makes you gape in awe to think about it. When I get to Chicago, I’m going out to Libertyville to speak on the food drive. I send almost all my salary over to Europe, but I can’t feel that it’s enough.… No definite plans for the summer yet, but a thousand possibilities, maybe a play with Tallulah Bankhead …”

Edie Van Cleve wanted me to try out for a production of Jean Cocteau’s The Eagle Has Two Heads, starring Tallulah, who was a close friend of Edie’s. I would have done just about anything Edie asked me to because she was kind, extremely generous and helpful to me during those formative years. Besides, I needed the money.

Before Edie sent me to up to Tallulah’s home in Westchester County for an audition, a friend told me that she was gay, but I quickly discovered otherwise. Tallulah was an example of a performer who wasn’t much of an actress but who became a star because of a distinctive and unusual personality. She had an engaging deep voice, smelled of Russian Leather perfume and smoked English cigarettes, which she pulled out of a red box, pressed into a long silver holder, and lit slowly and deliberately, as if she were doing it onstage. She had a sharp nose and chin and a slash mouth—perfect casting for the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. With her low, alcohol-fouled voice, Tallulah could be very entertaining. She was intelligent and witty and told funny stories. She informed me she’d recently been involved with a man with a huge nose that was covered with warts; he was truly a monument to ugliness, she said, and after she spent a weekend with him, she told a friend she had performed fellatio on him.

Her friend, who knew how ugly the man was, said she was astonished. “How could you possibly have done that?”

“Darling,” Tallulah said, “anything to get away from that face.”

As soon as I finished the reading, Tallulah asked me to be in the play, but I think she was more interested in me for sex than for the part of Stanislas. After rehearsals started I discovered that she usually got sloshed early in the day and spent the remaining hours getting drunker. She began inventing reasons for me to visit her at the Elysee Hotel, supposedly to go over the script, and I dreaded it, but she was the star of the show and I needed the money. She would spend the early part of these evenings with her eyes at half-mast, her lips lurking around the fracture of a smile, and then begin the arabesque