Free Read My Lips by Sally Kellerman Page A

the classes, and fun was in the coffeehouses, at the beach, and on Olvera Street in downtownLA—if only I could get up and out to see it. Bob and I went to the movies at the Apollo and ate too much popcorn. We rode bicycles built for two in Griffith Park and huddled in sleeping bags on Venice Beach at night. If you tried that today, you’d have your throat slit. But back then we were the only ones there! We had Los Angeles all to ourselves. We goofed around in the train station, wandered down Olvera Street—then blissfully free of tourists—looking at sombreros and eating the best taquitos in the world.
    I still saw Morgan Ames, of course. We often hung out in after-hours jazz clubs. If my poor mother only knew. I also spent time with Greta Chi, the tall, beautiful Eurasian actress who was my new roommate. I don’t remember how Greta and I found each other, but we had a wonderful apartment on Sweetzer in a Spanish-style building. It was a two bedroom with its own balcony, which we shared with another darling woman, an actress named Diana Spencer.
    I saw my parents as well, sometimes going over for a meal. My sister Diana was back in Los Angeles now after working in both Washington, DC, and Paris. She was living near the beach with her husband, Ian Graham, whom she’d met while working at the Rand Corporation. Ian was quiet and older than Diana but seemed kind and shared her love of travel. They went to Europe; they played paddle tennis.
    Diana’s marriage was a bit of a surprise, not because her husband was older but because she had confided something she was struggling with: her attraction to and affairs with other women. I was so touched she thought to share something so personal with me. I don’t know whether she had told my mother. If she had, Mom never said a word.
    It is hard enough being gay in this day and age, but in the 1950s and 1960s there was little or no tolerance of homosexuality. Back then people viewed it, at best, as a mental illness or, worse, as a dangerous perversion. Sodomy laws in most states made homosexuals subject to harassment and arrest. No one entertainedthe possibility that someone could be born gay, which is what I believe.
    So most gay people did what Diana did: married members of the opposite sex and tried to live “normal” lives, all the while pushing their feelings deep down inside, as far as they could, in the hope they would simply disappear.
    Diana and I had grown closer over the years. She had written me a letter once, while she was working overseas, apologizing for not being more supportive when I went to her wondering if I should have my first sexual experience with Eddie Byrnes. She didn’t have to do that, so I wonder now if her own struggles were surfacing then. We had grown closer still since her wedding. I remember that when I visited her and Ian’s apartment, she would ask me things like how to walk in heels and how to move around in dresses. She wanted things to work out with Ian, and I wanted to support whatever choice she was making. We had come a long way as sisters, “Dinky and Stinky,” and as friends.

    W ORK IMPROVED IN FITS AND STARTS. A COUPLE YEARS EARLIER I’d made my stage debut in Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy of the People. (Not to put down my first film role in Reform School Girl, in which I’d acted alongside my darling Luana and my first boyfriend, Eddie Byrnes—well, maybe not alongside, as I had two lines, whereas Luana was one of the leads. I was big and butch, and when I came on screen, everyone laughed.) I believed then—and still do—that plays are critical for helping an actress grow. The film’s director, John Marley, hired me for Enemy right out of Chez Paulette. That, and the fact I’d been studying acting for years and now felt ready, had emboldened me to try to get an agent.
    Today so many of the kids coming to LA get an agent immediately and then see what work they can land. But back then it was different—learning to act was your