Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [77]
There was one exception—an especially torrid clinch in a Naked Angels production of Chelsea Walls, where the theater was tiny, I was in a slip, and the bad-boy actor in question, clad only in boxers, threw me on the bed with Method gusto. Later that night, John refused to speak to me and insisted on walking around the block alone. To cool off, he said. But he never forbade me to do anything. He gave me freedom, and I believed it was because he trusted me.
In November, after I’d returned to New York from playing Ophelia in Baltimore, we went to a dinner his aunt Jean gave at her town house for Roger Stevens, the veteran theater producer and founding chairman of the Kennedy Center. I was seated next to Jane Alexander, an actress I had always admired. Over the toasts, we spoke of her long-cherished project, a film about Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, which she would both produce and star in. Maximilian Schell, newly signed to play the famed photographer, would direct. And, she added, with palpable excitement, he was flying in next week from Munich. I hadn’t seen his Academy Award–winning performance in Judgment at Nuremberg, but I knew his film Marlene and thought it was genius. After dessert, she handed me her card and said that I bore an uncanny resemblance to Dorothy Norman, Stieglitz’s much younger, married lover and protégée of almost twenty years.
Five days later, I was on my way to meet Jane, the screenwriter, and Maximilian Schell in his rented suite at the Warwick Hotel. I’d been out of drama school a year, and although I’d come close on film and television roles, I had been doing plays since I’d graduated. The script was unfinished, my agents said, so over the weekend I rushed down to the Gotham Book Mart to find a copy of Encounters, Dorothy Norman’s newly published memoir, in an effort to glean what I could.
At fifty-six, the Viennese-born actor was still handsome—his eyes bright, his thick hair peppered with silver—and the nubby black scarf thrown about his neck gave him the air of an old-time impresario. As I entered the room, he appeared to smolder, impatient perhaps with the long day of meeting young actresses who, he would later confide, were “too American.” I sat in the chair opposite him, and after the initial chitchat and a perfunctory glance at my résumé, he leaned forward.
“Are you Jewish?” he said, searching my face.
“No,” I answered, then quickly remembered that Norman was. “But I am a New Yorker. And my friends say I was Jewish in a past life.”
He frowned. “My friends say I was Peter the Great in a past life, but I’m not. Still … there is something Jewish about you.”
Instinctively, I knew not to appear cowed by him and began to assume what I imagined were Norman’s qualities: passion and an alluring, penetrating smarts. He loosened up and so did I, and soon he had us laughing with his stories. He didn’t look like Stieglitz, but when he spoke, I could picture the legendary black cape over his shoulders. Finally, Jane rose. It was late, and she had to beat the traffic to her house upstate. “Why don’t you stay,” she suggested, placing a soft hand on my shoulder, and the screenwriter followed her out the door.
Hours had passed, and I was still there. It was dark by the time she called. There was only the light from the street and the glow from the table lamp between the two couches. Though by no means an assurance of getting the part, a heavy whiff of flirtation wasn’t uncommon in auditions, but this was beyond anything I’d experienced. Perhaps it was European, I told myself, and when he offered me a glass of wine, I moved closer, to the empty couch nearby. Tossing my head back, I sat with my feet curled under me, and although I could see a wedge of bed through the half-opened