There he was, in a photograph on the floor, this drop-dead gorgeous man whose image struck me like lightning. It was the end of the 1950s, but I still remember the picture so clearly. In it, he was leaning forward on a shabby velvet couch, holding a cigarette. It didn’t look like he smoked. The photo was strewn among others of actors and performers, perhaps left after a casting session.
Who was this man? Where in the world did he come from?
It occurred to me that he could be connected to my earlier life. Was this hunk of a man with the lucent blue eyes the image of my remote father? Possibly! With just a glance, a spark was lit, something preconscious.
It was a late afternoon in Jean Donnelly’s 10th-floor apartment, on 54th Street, across from the Museum of Modern Art. Jean had many job titles and roles: producer, introducer, arranger of talent to cause, mixer of genius to power, playgirl. One of her skills was that gift possessed by many children of well-heeled parents: a knack for bringing people together.
I stood there, in a well of silence. Finally, in a cautious voice, I asked Jean, “Mmmm … who is that?” She was aware, it seemed. “This might be someone you should meet.”
I now think of it as the split second that changed my life, the move that made my pawn a queen. Can we amble so easily into destiny? Play a single card that causes such seismic changes to our lives?
His name was Douglas Burden, and he was a 26-year-old descendant of the Vanderbilt family. William Armistead Burden Jr., his uncle, had been ambassador to Belgium. His father, William Douglas Burden, was an early version of David Attenborough whose book Dragon Lizards of Komodo: An Expedition to the Lost World of the Dutch East Indies became the basis for the 1933 film King Kong. (In the film, the 30-foot lizard is replaced with an ape.) Here was a family of wealth, adventure, and status.
Doug had an apartment on East 74th Street and was the sort of man whose refrigerator had nothing in it beyond good champagne. He had gone to prep school with George Plimpton and sailed in Hyannis Port with John F. Kennedy. He had been a professional ski racer, but a crash into a tree in the Italian Alps left his lean, six-foot-four body with a slight limp that ended his skiing career. I fell madly in love with him.
He was captivating, dreamy in every sense of the word. Was he to be the love of my life?
Things happened quickly. By the third date, we had to resist or pursue a more intimate arrangement. What next?
One evening, after my performance in The Marriage-Go-Round—a play about a Swedish glamazon who desires a baby with a hotshot, married professor—at the Plymouth Theatre, on Broadway, we were sitting on the couch at my penthouse on Beekman Place, in Midtown East, talking about ordinary things. He shared that his mother, Katharine Curtin White, had been in the theater, in a play by J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan. The pitch of his voice amused me. It was that of a countertenor, rather high for a man of his stunning height and physique.
In a quiet moment, he reached out for my hand. I stood up. He reached for the other hand, then led me into a slow minuet, a two-step, directing me across the room in a silent pas de deux. Though the steps were short, the two of us found my bedroom in no time, continuing the dance with great poise and composure. All of a sudden, I felt a hand on my breastbone. In a flash, I was on my back, in bed. Thus began a passionate love affair that lasted two years.
Around this time, my social life was expanding because I was 25 and in a hit Broadway show. How easy it was to meet the new young players, intellectuals, and whiz kids from the arts, finance, and politics.
I remember the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, after a meteoric performance at Carnegie Hall, throwing himself at my feet on the sidewalk in front of my apartment, begging me for a night of love. There were the odd trips to Fire Island, a place where gaydom ruled, where nearly everyone was bikini-clad, or less. There, a very lonely, straight Junior Mr. America, seemingly trapped in a Faustian nightmare, desperately grabbed onto me as if I were the mother who had lost or abandoned him.
One of Doug’s good friends was George Plimpton. We would all go to Elaine’s, the dusky tavern at Second Avenue and 88th Street filled with the cognoscenti. The food was good, the star power better. Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Mario Puzo, Clay Felker, and Sally Quinn were regulars. Sometimes Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev would drop in after performances. On occasion, Jackie Kennedy dined in the back with Aristotle Onassis.
You went there late. You drank, you talked, you met other people. Everyone sat and glittered at each other, all self-conscious about their brilliance and/or beauty. Elaine Kaufman was a big woman who ran the place from her table, controlling the room with her eyes. She loved writers. “I like their minds,” she would say. I was welcomed there.
I remember going to Plimpton’s apartment with Doug. Plimpton, a patrician in temperament and speech, was the influential journalist who co-founded The Paris Review. At that time, he was finding fame for his “participatory journalism.” He was the centerpiece of his own stories, pitching in professional baseball games and training as a backup quarterback for the Detroit Lions.
Plimpton gave many parties in his low-ceilinged apartment on 72nd Street. The place was so far east that it was nearly in the East River. At one of these parties, I noticed my stocking falling down—in those days we had garter belts and stockings with seams. I disappeared into an empty bedroom to make adjustments. Plimpton suddenly appeared. Quelle horreur! He’d seen my thigh, and a moment of Edwardian melodrama ensued.
Doug’s world required some adjustments from me. His family, impeccably polite and charming, spurned any and all publicity. Doug never held a job or talked of work. An obituary would later describe him as a “development entrepreneur.” Money was doled out to him, although he didn’t spend lavishly. His vacations were between other peoples’ manors, the estates of rich relatives, and the White House. He had a dark-blue Porsche Carrera and drove it fast. It seemed to fit around his body, with no room in the back, except maybe for an overnight bag and a toothbrush.
His intellect didn’t match mine or my brother’s. Intelligence was, to Doug’s breed, an acquisitional talent to be purchased. It was more important where you came from, not where you were at the moment. He took on the belief that good virtues could overcome any problem.
I melded into what I felt was his Adonis style. While in public, holding hands was frowned upon. English royalty, which set this standard, permitted no show of the kind of affection that would bring a blush to a cultured mother’s face. In the world of WASPs, a lady does not wear visible makeup, and the only timepiece is a Cartier Tank watch. No diamonds in the daytime, no long or harlot-colored fingernails.
I didn’t have a problem playing by these rules. After all, I was an actress and appeared to be pretty much the “right sort.” I was thrilled to let his polish rub off on me. Nevertheless, there was a distance between upper class and upper middle class.
Make no mistake: my world was different. In public, people stared at me because of my looks and height, whether I liked it or not. Fortunately, being nearsighted, I could pretend not to notice. But coming from the theatrical world, I needed my name in the papers. Being seen mattered. Fame would have been anathema to him—though, by the end of his life, his name might have been on the front of a university building.
What a fabulous two years it was with Doug. A dream life for me, risible and romantic. We didn’t drink or do drugs. Sex was so much fun without them. He took me to meet his mother, who had divorced his dad and re-married. We took trips to the Virgin Islands, where we ran naked on the beach at Laurance Rockefeller’s resort, Caneel Bay. In the winter, Doug taught me to ski at Sugarbush Mountain, in Vermont, and we stayed at his father’s place in Middlebury, Vermont, while suppressing our carnal needs in that thin-walled, elegant colonial house.
Other times, we’d giggle while pretending not to be seen darting over the grass tennis courts at the Maidstone Club, in East Hampton, with its cloistered, upper-class anonymity. What a spree, to be in love at the physical apogee of my life.
We were nearing the end of the 1950s. Fashion was still ladylike. We had healthy economic growth in the country. Alaska and Hawaii had just become states. There was doo-wop on the radio, and Fidel Castro revving up for a revolution. The release of the birth-control pill, in 1960, gave women hope for a more free-spirited and empowering life. Best of all, it continued to be a golden age for Broadway musicals, my trade.
Television and Hollywood offered me opportunities to make new friends and appearances in shows, such as Omnibus, a top-rated variety series hosted by Alistair Cooke. I guest-starred in Adventures in Paradise, a popular show about sailing the South Pacific, which was actually filmed on the back lot of Twentieth Century Fox. It starred Gardner McKay, a plebeian actor of dazzling good looks, a near look-alike to Doug. By 1960, I had appeared in an episode of Person to Person, the live interview show hosted by Edward R. Murrow. I filmed it at my penthouse, and it required a soundman to thread a not-so-bitty mike up through my dress. I had the pleasure of playing the opening movement to a Liszt piano piece on my Steinway.
I had always been careful about birth control. The Swinging 60s had not yet truly begun. The shock waves and career damage of Ingrid Bergman’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy with director Roberto Rossellini were a mere 10 years in the past. Mia Farrow and André Previn’s pre-marital twins—the announcement of which barely caused a flutter—were 10 years in the future. We were straddling two eras, but we were still more Leave It to Beaver than Summer of Love.
Life brings its lessons, including the one that no form of birth control is foolproof. I was pregnant. I may have forgotten to take the pill just once.
I told Doug the news. His response: not unexpected, not favorable. “Do you know anyone who … ”
He wasn’t going to marry me. He made that clear. For one, he thought our children would be too tall. But more to the point: I wasn’t of his class. I was upper middle class, educated, but not of his class.
So I went back to my friend Jean, who knew more than I thought she knew. She referred me to a doctor on East 72nd Street.
I don’t have regrets. I don’t live in the past. I would miss the 30, 40, even 50 orgasms in an evening of lovemaking that we had together. But the time was not right. I didn’t have his or his family’s blessing for this child. It would have been selfish, hurtful to his family and to the unborn child. Children must be wanted to have the highest chances for happiness. I’d seen the damage in my friend Joy from ballet class, who never knew her real parents. Her unmasked longing seemed to distract her for the rest of her rather short life.
I reasoned that this entity’s soul was then free to find another life to come through.
I went my own way, though with a sizable emptiness in my heart. Shortly after, Doug met a banker’s daughter, married her, and had a son. The marriage did not last long.
Life wasn’t the same—that much was certain. A friend recommended a psychotherapist. Talk therapy certainly broadened my way of thinking, and I found it helpful for exploring acting roles. But psychiatrists often wanted to date me, and then had to end the therapeutic relationship in order to foster their hopes. This happened more than once.
I returned to the solo life: classes, dancing, singing, acting.
I did see Doug again, three decades later. It was 1992. I was in my late 50s, a single mother with my handicapped, nine-year-old child. My only source of income was from real estate.
I was in the midst of a real crisis. I needed a manager for one of my buildings and had employed a man who sounded almost too good to be true. He turned out to be clever but psychotic. During the Los Angeles riots of 1992, he was on the roof with a gun, threatening people. My tenants started to leave, one by one, and I didn’t know why. I later found out that he was threatening them too. I called the police, lawyers, the city, and no one could help me get rid of him. The police indicated that unless there were dead bodies, there was nothing that they could do.
And during all this, Douglas Burden, the love of my life, unexpectedly reappeared at my doorstep with his problems, recovering from a disaster of his own.
He was still tall, still handsome, still the son of an upper-crust family, for whom, to paraphrase the magnificent dramatist Philip Barry, there was never a blow that hadn’t been softened. But things were different this time. It may have been that his money was tied up. Doug had been raised by a system that was built to protect his kind. He didn’t have the grit to fight and protect himself. He wanted to be taken care of. It took him only a day or two to realize that I had neither the time nor the emotional capacity to provide the devotion that he needed. I was fighting for my tenants, as well as for the life of my son. I couldn’t fight his fights as well.
Doug left as suddenly as he had arrived. He found a nice woman in Colorado, near the ski slopes that he loved. I never saw him again. He died in January 2008, at age 76.
Julie Newmar is the winner of Tony and Golden Globe Awards. She is a pianist, inventor, and entrepreneur
Excerpted from the unpublished autobiography, Nine Lives of Julie Newmar
