Free Dinner with Edward by Isabel Vincent Page B

$12—the equivalent of about $200 today—from his high-­school drama teacher. In the letter, she praised his acting in the school production of
Death Takes a Holiday
, and she had given him the money toward his new life in the Big City.
    Edward was determined to become an actor in a place that back then was still considered foreign and exotic to many Southerners, an American Babel. “All we knew about New York at that time was that there were people from all over the world who all spoke different languages,” he said. “It might as well have been a different country.”
    Edward’s mother had arranged for him to stay with a man she had once done business with in the South. His name was John, a German émigré who lived at University Place and Eighth Street. Edward rang his doorbell at 12:30 the night he arrived but there was no answer. Which is why he decided to settle into an armchair in the lobby of the nearby Lafayette Hotel and, before he knew it, he awoke at daybreak.
    Edward returned to John’s studio apartment, and this time the wiry, red-­faced man opened the door. It would take a month of sleeping on John’s daybed but finally Edward secured his own place on the second floor of a MacDougal Street tenement where he was to be the building’s superintendent. The job entitled him to free rent and he could make his own hours. Now, he would have his days free to work with
real
actors. And on that first day at the Provincetown, he met the woman of his dreams.
    Eager to impress Paula on their first date, he went shopping for a bottle of wine. He couldn’t afford the French wine that a salesman suggested and ended up buying “the sweet wine that the bums on the Bowery drank.” He didn’t own any wine glasses; on that romantic night they clinked coffee cups.
    â€œI asked her if she wanted to sleep over, and she said ‘yes,’ ” Edward told me matter-­of-­factly. To my mock-­shocked expression, he explained, “I had two beds and I was damned if I was going to let her sleep alone, so I crawled in beside her.” They soon became inseparable, eagerly planning their lives together over the 50-­cent plates of Chinese food at the Dragon Inn in the Village and on long walks in Central Park.
    Several months later, when they decided to try their luck in Hollywood, Paula insisted that she travel to California as an honest woman. “Our intention had been to marry at city hall but when we tried to take out the license several days before, Paula’s birth certificate showed her name as ‘Pearl’ and the bureaucrats said no dice. Not the same person.” So, the day before their trip to the West Coast they went from church to church in Manhattan, hoping they could convince someone to marry them in a hurry. The pastor at Trinity Church in lower Manhattan agreed, but could they come back in a month? Edward took Paula’s hand and they returned to the Village, determined to get married that afternoon.
    It happened at the Washington Square Methodist Episcopal Church on West Fourth Street across from Washington Square Park and around the corner from the Provincetown Playhouse, where they first met.
    â€œOn November 8, 1941, Paula and Edward were married in this church,” reads the index card next to a yellowing newspaper photo of the Washington Square Church in Edward’s scrapbook. Their friend Lenny Black served as best man. Before the ceremony, as he waited with Paula and Lenny at the entrance to the church, Edward debated how much he was going to pay the pastor to perform the service. Edward sheepishly asked if he would accept $2.
    â€œI’ll accept whatever you’re willing to give,” said the pastor, who didn’t ask any questions of the young couple.
    A few minutes later the chords of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” boomed throughout the Romanesque Revival building. “Paula and I both