A Girl's Got To Breathe (Hollywood Legends Series) by Donald Spoto

Author:Donald Spoto [Spoto, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2016-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

1. Among the many performers in various plays at the Sombrero were Tallulah Bankhead, Ginger Rogers, Gloria Swanson, Shelley Winters, Walter Pidgeon and Groucho Marx.

2. Many sources wrongly state that Teresa performed the role of Georgie Elgin in The Country Girl at the La Jolla Playhouse in August 1951. That possibility was discussed but it never materialized. The 1954 Vancouver production, from April 2 to 10, was her only appearance in this play.

CHAPTER TEN

1957–1959

AT THIRTY-NINE, ROBERT ANDERSON WAS SIX FEET TALL, LEAN, AGILE and an avid tennis player. Courtly and handsome, he sometimes seemed like a university professor with his horn-rimmed eyeglasses and authoritative manner. There was something melancholy and tentative in his nature, but he was a welcome presence at any social gathering. He had a fund of anecdotes about his early years, his first marriage and his success on Broadway; about the movie version of Tea and Sympathy, which greatly disappointed him; and about the several stage and screen projects completed or in process. He was also, like Niven Busch, something of a chauvinist: he adored women but rarely accepted them as intellectual equals. Still, they found him fascinating.

For one thing, Bob was an attentive listener and obviously well educated. He quickly and sincerely recognized people’s emotional backgrounds and temperaments; he empathized with their struggles; he condoled and encouraged them in their sorrows. He was also generous with his time and resources, and in later years he became a valuable teacher and mentor to apprentice writers. Often at his own inconvenience, he supported an event or sprang to a need in a friend’s life. I was very often the recipient of his kindness and his wholehearted endorsement of my career, and I was but one of many to be offered the long arm of his friendship—in my case, for thirty-five years.

Bob Anderson was highly literate and talented; more important, he was a good and decent man who never hurt anyone—at least not intentionally. He was frank about himself and did not have to be asked to discuss his sexual exploits, often to the point of providing too much information. He was a jumble of unsorted feelings, and although he understood the dark corners in other lives and enabled people to laugh at their faults, he was for the most part imperceptive about himself and slow to mock his own foibles.

Despite all that, he evoked the love and loyalty of an intimate circle over his long lifetime. And not incidentally, he was unfailingly courteous, the living embodiment of the ideal of the respectable, socially presentable gentleman.

Just days after the passionate rapport with Teresa began, Bob met and charmed young Mary-Kelly, who thought that he was “terrifically nice not only to Mom but also to me. He didn’t condescend to me, and he was sincerely interested in my school activities, my interests and my friends. He seemed to know just how to make a nine-year-old feel special.”

Whatever professional duties Bob had to dispatch during March 1957, he found ample time

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