With all the hard work, this was also a time of liberation, and I made sure to also have a lot of fun despite living on very little. My friend Sonya and I would go to the Horn & Hardart automat, the early- to mid-twentieth century’s idea of a fast food chain. We would go up to a wall of little windows displaying ready-made food. You put a coin into a slot that unlocked the little door so you could take out your fruit cup. When Sonya’s mother came up to visit from Washington, D.C., she took us to dinner at my first fancy eatery, Jack Dempsey’s Broadway Restaurant (owned by the famous heavyweight boxer). “Whoa, this is something!” I said. There were lots of people, white tablecloths, and things on the menu I had never been able to afford, such as a steak.
It was also an exciting perk going to school in the Carnegie Hall building. We found a way to sneak into the upstairs portion of its famous performance hall. One day, I saw the legendary cellist Gregor Piatigorski rehearsing with the symphony, his long fingers caressing the neck of his instrument and the other hand smoothly guiding the bow back and forth. As he finished his solo and rested his bow, he looked up with his intense Russian profile accentuated by dark raised eyebrows toward the conductor, Dimitri Mitropoulos. He suddenly started shaking his head back and forth in a cadence as if saying, “No, no, no, no.” I whispered to my friends with firm conviction, “He’s not happy.” But no one else besides me seemed to take notice of his displeasure. As the rehearsal went on, I realized that I had jumped to a conclusion. It was just his mannerism to follow and feel the music and no sign of discontent. Here I was worried that somehow Dimitri was not doing it right.
While at the academy I also decided, “I’m going to have a boyfriend, and it’s going to be great.” Jerry Sanyour, a classmate, came along to fill that role nicely. He loved to dance, and so did I. We would go to Greenwich Village on a Saturday night with Sonya and another boy. There’s a first time for everything, and my true inexperience came out (literally) as he held me on the dance floor. Hmm, what’s that? Oh, so that’s an erection.
One of the establishments in the Village we went to as part of my continuing education about life was the Rainbow Club. On the stage, there was this beautiful girl with a great figure. For her last move, the girl took off her bra and she was suddenly a flat-chested he. To my knowledge, I had never seen nor met a homosexual or a cross-dresser, but the Rainbow would change all of that. That same night, a great big burly blonde with long hair spotted me from the stage and walked over. Titanic was her name. She had a cigarette and gently blew the smoke in my face as she imparted a short but succinct nugget of wisdom: “Don’t worry, honey, I was young once.” It would take a little while before I fully understood what she meant. She had seen the somewhat disturbed look on my face. She saw that I had so much to live through to truly understand. When I was young, I could be very judgmental, something that my oldest brother, Joe, worked with me to temper. The compassion was not quite there, because I had not had much opportunity to make many mistakes up to that point (but I sure made up for it later). Titanic’s quip helped me truly step forward and remove any remaining hesitation.
The intensity with Jerry ramped up as well. One day, we sat in a little park area on Riverside Drive. “I have to tell you something,” he said in that tone that could only mean something heavy and serious was about to be delivered. My mind raced in the pause. What could he possibly say? He was a bit dark-skinned and had curly hair. Was he going to tell me he was black? It was a good guess but not right. “I’m Middle Eastern,” was the big revelation he wanted to get off his chest.
“Yeah. So? I don’t understand.” He wanted me to know his background and his religion. I told him that it didn’t matter to me. He must have experienced some prejudice and wanted to get it out in the open and cleared out of the way on the front end of our relationship.
A bigger issue was that he wanted to get serious and have sex. We made out, but it was nothing compared to today’s standards. As a token of his affection, he had given me a small gold football charm he had been awarded in high school. But I said, “No, we can’t.” I was getting more and more confident in my career, and I didn’t want to get embroiled in something that could take me off track. And I was only seventeen going on eighteen. Also, I still went to confession!
He started dating someone else because I wasn’t putting out, but he never asked for his gold charm back. We remained friends and continued socializing for a while. Many years later, when I was appearing in Toronto I got a letter from a woman who lived
