• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 594 0

therapeutic. She was, when she stood up, tall and slender, with a ferociously cropped skullcap of black hair and the almond eyes of a Modigliani—Douglas’s eyes, actually—set in a narrow, triangular face. She was the kind of young woman (she was then thirty-two) who could war with her beauty and still look beautiful. We proceeded to have an oddly disjointed conversation; only later did I realize that Anita was so uncomfortable that she made me feel uncomfortable. She was terribly shy, as her father and grandfather were, but she also seemed to struggle in the medium of language; she would pull up short before fairly ordinary words. As a child, she had been severely dyslexic, and she still had trouble memorizing lines for a part; reading took real effort. Though trained as an actress, Anita was drawn to the kind of avant-garde work that often didn’t require much in the way of speech. A few years before, she had played a mute and sullen secretary in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant; a critic in the Times had described her as “spectacularly creepy.”

Anita was the oldest of Douglas’s three children. She had been precociously ungovernable, appropriating a family car and driving it into trees at age thirteen—a story that Douglas told with some combination of awe and bewilderment, for she had set standards of willfulness that Douglas himself had never approached. School had been a nightmare: shipped off to prep school in ninth grade after proving a hopeless failure in public school, she was kicked out for smoking pot, took a one-year sabbatical to shack up with a biker, and was then enrolled by her obviously desperate parents in the kind of vocational school that was meant to be the last stop before the streets. “The classes were like ten minutes long,” Anita said, “and then in the afternoon you worked.” Anita earned her high school diploma by tending bar at a pizzeria. College was out of the question. She had no clear idea what to do with herself; her parents, having at least shepherded her through high school, asked her to move out. And then Seymour, of all people, invited her to move in.

Seymour was the kind of charming oddball who can seem highly appealing to a rebellious teenager. He passed no judgments, asked no probing questions, and wanted nothing more than a faithful listener, which Anita was formed by nature to be. She moved into the Fiction Room, way up on the fifth floor, and came and went as she pleased. After a few years, she was ready to leave, but Seymour couldn’t bear to be parted from her. “He said, ‘Bring all your friends here,’” Anita said. “At one point, I had four or five people living with me.” And so Anita lived, very happily, in the midst of a commune. She browsed through the giant leather-bound two-volume set of Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection, and through the six volumes of I. N. Phelps Stokes’s Iconography of Manhattan Island. She listened to Seymour’s stories and crotchets, and she had breakfast with him every morning at the Burger Heaven down the street. Seymour recruited his librarians from among the waitresses there, since he claimed that professional librarians kept trying to improve on his “quintessimal” cataloguing system.

Like many shy people, Anita fell in love with acting. Unlike most of the others, she had a father who owned Broadway theaters. In 1990, Douglas agreed to let En Garde Arts, a “site-specific” theater company with which Anita was associated, put on a play in the wreckage of the majestic Victory Theatre. Douglas quickly became Anita’s chief patron. He allowed her to use the semi-defunct Diplomat Hotel, on West 43rd Street, for a play called The Law of Remains, in which, Anita says, “Andy Warhol and Jeffrey Dahmer meet in Heaven.” The play was apparently based on The Egyptian Book of the Dead. The hotel had a series of splendid, haunted-looking ballrooms. “The big ballroom was Heaven,” Anita says, “and God was a Puerto Rican drag queen with an erection.” Douglas says that Seymour would leave after the first few scenes of these shows and report,