Free I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir by Lee Grant

commission, sleeping most of the time, with a high fever. The doctor visited. Hotel maids moved in and out of my room. Waiters with tea and lemon. I slept.
    Days later, there was a knock on the door. A man’s head looked in.
    “I brought you some soup.”
    He pulled up a chair and fed me chicken soup, blowing on each tablespoon to cool it off. He felt my forehead. Was he the doctor?
    “You still have a fever.”
    “I know,” I said, slipping back to sleep.
    Later, I asked the maid if she knew who he was.
    “Oh, they live in the suite next door.”
    Two men, nice men, tough guys, took turns feeding me. I felt very taken care of on my first foray to this strange new town, this strange new country outside New York City.
    The real hotel doctor checked on me. I was more awake. He let me wash my hair. I was sitting up in my big bed now, but I had company. The men next door were friends now. They were my new family. Like uncles. And they were giving me a going-away party in their suite the night before the company went to San Francisco. These men fussed over me as if I were Beth, the poor dying sister in
Little Women
. They set me up in a big comfortable chair in their living room and introduced me, to my surprise, to a very handsome and self-assured boy, about my age, whose father, they said, owned the biggest factory in the state.
    “Very rich,” they said in front of him.
    He nodded. I had a feeling
marriage
was the unsaid word here. Then, my two uncles put on a record with hot music that filled the room.
    “I can’t dance,” I protested. “I’m still weak.”
    A girl younger than I, sixteen or so, pale, with a sloping chin and bent shoulders, stepped out from the foyer and started to strip to the music.
    “What’s this?” I asked.
    The girl continued to take her clothes off, gracelessly.
    “It’s your going-away present,” one of my uncles said.
    I jumped up from the place of honor. “No! No, please! Don’t!” I took the girl’s arm and dragged her back into the foyer. “Don’t do this.” I was urgent and alarmed. “Please, you don’t have to do this.”
    “They paid me.”
    “How much? I’ll pay you.”
    “I want to,” she said.
    I looked at her. I went back to my chair in the living room and looked at the floor till the girl was naked. The uncles picked up her discarded clothes and told her to put them back on. They saw me back to my room two doors down.
    “Sure, sure,” they said when I told them I was still sick. “Sure, sure, you take care of yourself, take care now.” Their big fingers patted my head, stroked my hair.
    Later I learned there was a big mob presence in St. Louis.
    •   •   •
    W hen we arrived in San Francisco, I bought a pair of dangly rhinestone earings, one of which I still have. I went to the theater every night and sat with the chorus, makeup on, just in case Dorothea should slip and fall again. I learned how to bead my lashes with black wax and use thick #3 theater makeup. I begged to be permitted to stand on the porch with the rest of the cast for the finale of “The Farmer and the Cowman,” and for a week had a wonderful time preparing, piling makeup on for my entrance on the porch. Apparentlythe makeup was so distracting that several audience members complained and I was sent back to the dressing room.
    I had a one-night, or should I say a half-an-hour affair with my third lover, in San Francisco. First there’d been Buster, then my night with Herbert Berghof, and now the tenor from
Oklahoma!
We both lay half-dressed across the bottom of the hotel bed with its squeaky springs.
    Within a few minutes his breaths were rapid and heavy, and suddenly “Mama” erupted from his mouth like a song. “Ma-maaaaa!” He was Italian.
    When the company traveled to Los Angeles, my mother and father joined me at our hotel downtown. Two extraordinary things happened. I saw John Garfield in
Awake and Sing!
with other Group Theatre actors—he was stunning in it—and