I finally cured myself of it. With Terry and Lana and the others, I just saw them from time to time and went to bed with them rarely. It was reassuring to know they were there and that they liked me, but I didn’t do it out of deep need. I don’t think that’s anything to be ashamed of. I’m sure it’s common to most men. Only most men never see what they’re doing. Fortunately I did, after a while.
And even then I made mistakes. Just about that time some actress I was going out with got pregnant. It’s probably the only time in my life I’ve ever gotten a woman pregnant, and I was using every possible precaution and so was she. But the superficial evidence pointed to the fact that it was my responsibility. Neither of us wanted the child and I didn’t want to get married to her. That was out of the question. And so I got in touch with Verne Mason and he took her over to a clinic in France for an abortion. They flew TWA, of course.
I suppose I’m a little bitter about it because I did feel that this girl was trying to trap me into marrying her. I don’t trust women – that’s a fact, sad to say – and I have trouble communicating with them. I have the disquieting notion that the female of our species is as foreign to the male as a lioness is to a bull moose. I’ve never understood women. I don’t even understand my own involvement with them, and my need for it. There are times when I felt that I was punishing myself – in all instances but one. If you knew what I’d been through, you’d understand.
Who’s this other person you talk about? I have a feeling there was someone else in your life besides your two wives.
You’re badgering me to death and I see you’ll never let up, so we better get this out of the way.
I’ve revealed more to you than I have to anybody for a long time. I’ve opened up these windows to my past – not only for you, but for myself. It’s strange. My original idea in this whole thing was to give you my ideas and views, to talk about the present, and I find myself going deeper and deeper instead into the past. Oddly enough, I see myself sometimes with your eyes. You have very hard eyes sometimes. Well, that’s neither here nor there. It’s been a very strange experience, this telling the story of my life. Not always so good for me, though. I think sometimes you take advantage of me, try to make me the donkey. You’ve picked that up. And I don’t guard against you, which I should do.
But we’re at a critical point. I don’t want to sound poetic, but I’m peering in at a window that I’ve kept locked for many years. So let’s open it.
I’ve told you about Billie Dove, the woman I loved in Hollywood in the early Thirties. Billie and I very likely would have married, and almost did, but for a horrible thing that happened, which I suppose, has colored my relationships with women ever since. What you call my ‘germ phobia’ may stem in great part from what happened to me with Billie Dove.
She gave me the clap.
At that time it was not a laughing matter. This was before penicillin, and I went through the agonies of the damned. I thought my pecker would fall off every time I took a piss. While that creature, who gave me her social disease, walked around as though nothing had happened. You have no idea what lengths I had gone to for this woman, what favors I had done her. She and her husband, Irving Willatt, were estranged, and I paid him $325,000 in cash, in thousand-dollar bills, to get out of her life, to open the way for us—
Now, wait a minute. Let’s start at the beginning.
Well, the beginning – what is the beginning? The classic movie plot. Boy meets girl, boy buys off husband, boy gets clap from girl, boy leaves girl. I don’t mean to be flippant – I’m not telling you this to provoke laughter. You’re leading me into that. This was a serious matter for me, and don’t be misled by my temporary jocularity.
I didn’t know where Billie got the clap. I never did find out. But it terrified me, as well as making me sick. First of all I had to undergo a nasty period of treatment. This was in Hollywood, in 1931. I was twenty-five years old, a man with a limited sexual experience. I was in love, and I took sex very seriously. I still had the deepest idealism regarding women. Billie shattered that, and it was a long time before I entertained serious thoughts about a woman again.
Billie and I would certainly have been married if it weren’t for my getting sick that way. That terrified me. When I learned what I had, I went through my house – we were practically living together on Muirfield Road – and I gathered all my clothes, everything I owned, even including the towels and the rugs from the bathroom floor, and I packed it all into burlap bags, like mail bags, and I gave them all to Noah Dietrich and I told him to burn them. Burn everything! Including the shirt off my back. I found out later he gave it all to the Salvation Army.
I didn’t leave the house for days. I ordered a fresh supply of sheets and towels until the rooms were fumigated. Then I had some clothes brought in to me and started life over again. The delivery people came to the door to deliver the clothes and sheets – I was stark naked, had to hide down behind a chair to cover myself and hand them the money for the sheets and things.
Billie then went on to have an affair with George Raft, who was in all those gangster movies. I always wondered if she passed the disease along to him. He might have had her rubbed out.
You can imagine, having corrupted myself in such a way that I would actually pay money for her, to have had this other thing happen to me, crushed me for years. It almost emasculated me.
After that I never made love to a woman without using a minimum of two contraceptives. And even then I felt unsafe. I had worshipped Billie, I had never dreamed that she could be carrying such a disease. After that I felt: what woman is exempt?
My sexual needs were never very strong – I had the reputation of being a ladies man, but it was undeserved. I married Ella, and that didn’t work out. I made a certain show out of being a ladies man, because I thought that was what the world expected of me. I suppose I was trying to follow in my father’s footsteps, if you want to put it simply – something I could never do. Very often I would take out a woman, and always a beautiful woman, and when the time came to perform, I felt I couldn’t. I’m not trying to say to you that I was impotent. I wasn’t at all. If I got into bed with a woman I did what had to be done, what she wanted.
But I remember, time after time, I would drive someone home and she’d say, ‘Aren’t you coming in for a cup of coffee?’ – and I had a vision of myself being unable to perform or getting bored and I would almost always say, ‘No, I’m sorry, I have a business appointment. You know I keep peculiar hours.’
Or I would arrange when I was out with a girl that a telephone call would come to me just before midnight, just about the time we were supposed to leave the club, wherever we were, saying my presence was urgently needed somewhere else.
I look back on it now, from the vantage point of sixty-five years, when such problems no longer plague me, and I have nothing but pity for myself as a young man. Pity because of the problem that I had and because the image of me that people had, even my closest friends, was so different, that I didn’t dare tell anyone. How could I go to Glen Odekirk or Jack Frye or Bob Gross, men who loved me and would have done almost anything for me – and say, ‘I’m afraid to go to bed with a woman for fear that I can’t perform or that I’ll be bored?’ I didn’t have the vocabulary for that, and I lived with this ridiculous feeling of shame. I lived a terrible life.
Part of this was this Texas thing we’ve spoken about, and which still very much ruled my thinking. I thought of myself as a Texan, Big Hard’s son. Still today, to come from Texas, to be a Texan, you’re supposed to be a big-balled son of a bitch. And frankly, that wasn’t me.