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

he drove me back to the hotel in his convertible. He talked about his wife, Robbie, and put his hand on my breast.
    The other big event was about God. I was sunbathing on the roof of the hotel with my parents and maybe thirty residents in various stages of undress. The smell of suntan oil filled the air along with music from someone’s radio. I was the only one sitting up.
    I saw a girl a little older than myself with loose dark hair open the door to the roof. I had noticed her earlier in the day, arguing with a boy on one of the staircases near the elevator.
    Standing by the roof door, she took off her skirt, her blouse, and her shoes, and hung her coral necklace on the doorknob. In just her white bra and panties she moved to the edge of the roof, climbed onto the edge, and jumped. Her beads were still swinging on the doorknob.
    I went to the edge of the roof and looked down. There on the black tar of the parking lot, ten floors below, she was spread like afour-pointed star. I looked around the roof. People were talking quietly, tanning themselves, or dozing in the sun, Perry Como on the radio; a woman laughed. Had I dreamed this? No. Her clothes were by the door, the beads still swinging. The white star in the upside-down black night catapulted me out of all childhood certainty, introducing me to the unknown, Chance. The appointment in Samarra.
    The casualness of the girl’s death shook me out of a prolonged childhood. I ran down five flights of stairs to my hotel room. My father, sitting on my bed, tried to comfort me. I asked him about God. He said God was a force for good in the world.
    For me, God had always been a kind of Christmas Santa. At night, I prayed, “Dear God, let me pass this test.” “Dear God, make my legs thin. Make Stanley fall in love with me.” He was a personal deity, there for me in all my important quests.
    Now, God as I knew him left, and plain superstition crowded in to take his place. I couldn’t go onstage without something to protect me. Knocking wood, a penny in my left shoe, someone saying “Good luck” three times, wearing a red string around my wrist. When my children fly, I light a candle. The fear of senseless chance disaster never leaves me.
    •   •   •
    A fter
Oklahoma!
I did a play in summer stock. The stock company was in Sayville, Long Island. I was still living at home. Also performing in Sayville that summer were John Randolph, his wife, the actress Sally Cunningham, and Warren Stevens, a young leading man who would play the juvenile lead on Broadway in
Detective Story
.
    They asked me to go out with them one night. The journey in the car was a revelation. Warren Stevens drove, Sally and John sat in back, and I was in the front passenger seat. They were so passionate about something they read in the newspaper that day that I kept looking atthem to see if they were putting me on. They were connected to something totally foreign to me at that point, a political passion I didn’t understand until I was blacklisted. I admired their connectedness, their young fire, and I loved John and Sally. John, the recruiter, never stopped trying to make a Communist out of me.
    “Say you have two shirts, Lee. Wouldn’t you want to give one to someone who doesn’t have a shirt?” Completely earnest.
    “John, leave me alone. I don’t care about shirts. Take them both. It means nothing to me!”
    John led me up two flights of stairs to a crowded room where young people were arguing. Stalin felt the music written by Shostakovich wasn’t geared to the people. It was too elitist, or something. “Who is Stalin to tell a great musician how or what to write!” I turned around and walked back down the stairs.
    John sent me a book to read. It was about conditions in the United States for working people, particularly women. I read it the week I had a bad cold, and it touched something in me. That was the day poor beat-up Mabel came to clean the apartment. I lectured her straight