Cloris Leachman's memoirs, Free Love

Cloris Leachman: As Miss Chicago, I was automatically a contestant in the Miss America Pageant. I was spinning from the way things were happening so I called my mother. She flew first to Chicago and then on to Atlantic City with me. Today contestants have all kinds of people to assist them in the Miss America contest, but there was no one there to aid or guide us. In the formal part of the contest, I wore the one evening gown I had from college. Right before I went out, Mama said, “Sparkle, Cloris!” And I sparkled. I was third runner-up. That was fine with me. I didn’t care about being Miss America. I much preferred winning the prize of one thousand dollars and having no further responsibilities. Three months after I’d arrived in New York, I met Irving Hoffman, an executive with the Hollywood Reporter. He invited me to the opening night of a play, Mr. Peebles and Mr. Hooker. During the intermission, Irving introduced me to William Liebling, a prominent theatrical agent. They were looking for someone just like me, a sincere, average American girl type. He told me that tomorrow morning I should be at the Broadhurst Theater. Bill Liebling and his wife, Audrey Wood, had one of the classiest agencies in the city. Liebling represented actors; Audrey represented authors, particularly Tennessee Williams. Kazan was the monarch of the New York theater. 

Kazan had directed most of the recent stage hits and nearly all of Tennessee Williams’s plays, including the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Marlon Brando. In 1947 Kazan had forged an exclusive group whose members included the cream of young New York actors. He’d called it the Actors Studio. Liebling was very smart. I took his advice about everything, and so the next afternoon I was at the building where the Actors Studio was housed. Kazan introduced himself. He said he’d seen me in A Story for a Sunday Evening and Come Back, Little Sheba, and he’d heard from other people how talented I was. He said we could start anytime we were ready. I had command of my emotions, and I could select out of the past only the part I wanted, only what was useful to me. I was welcomed into the Actors Studio, and was in the company of the best young actors in the country: Julie Harris, Kim Stanley, Eli Wallach, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Steve Hill, James Whitmore, Maureen Stapleton. When I met Marilyn she was even more gorgeous, more voluptuous—her eyes, her mouth, her body—in person than she appeared in her pictures. They asked me to understudy Nina Foch as well as another role in John Loves Mary, and I agreed. At the same time, I was understudying five separate roles in the play Happy Birthday, including the lead role, which was being performed by the first lady of the American theater, Helen Hayes. 

New York was different then. I walked all the way home one night from the Old Nick, on the Lower East Side, on Eighty-seventh Street on upper Fifth Avenue, near the Metropolitan Museum Of Art. I walked the whole way without a suggestion of fear. It occurs to me as I look back that there were two possibilities: either New York wasn’t dangerous in those days or I was just plain ignorant. Marlon became very close to Ellen, Stella Adler’s daughter, and their relationship lasted all through Marlon’s life. Kazan  and his buddies took care of me like I was Snow White, always making sure I had a place to stay. I managed to get small jobs on TV shows, nothing important, but I earned enough to keep myself in New York. Marlon took me to dinner at Sardi once but his stare looked so cruel that I couldn't handle it and I left crying. Marlon asked me out several times, but I didn’t go. I felt he’d want to take me to his apartment and probably it wouldn’t be clean. 

Also, Marlon was after every girl that twitched, and I didn’t want to be one of the multitude. “I always thought Cloris was the most talented one at the Studio,” Marlon said later. “That made me curious as to who she’d wind up marrying. What’s it like? Pretty madcap, George?” “Madcap, madhouse. Something with mad in it,” replied my husband George Englund. I can’t say that overall and through the years, I was close to Marlon. I think he saw me as an obstacle to his having the friendship he wanted with George. Marlon was unpredictable to me. The worst thing that happened between us came right after his son Christian killed Cheyenne’s boyfriend in Marlon’s house. I was sad for Marlon, but it didn’t occur to me that he’d like to hear from me. I imagined the whole world was sending condolences and trying to speak to him, and the absence of anything from me would not be of particular notice. And yet Marlon told George he would never forgive me for not contacting him after the tragedy had happened in his life. And he didn’t. George was a college graduate, while Marlon didn’t finish high school. They both went to military school. Marlon was thrown out of his, George was the highest-ranking officer at his. Both in military school and in the navy, George learned an ethic that he lived by. Marlon didn’t seem to me to have any moral commitment. 

Paul Newman was a moral man, no question. He didn’t do things self-consciously to get applause, to get noticed. He just went about being one of the great movie stars of all time and one of the kindest men of his century. George and me saw a lot of the Newmans. I did two movies with Paul: The Rack (1956) which was my first film after Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and then WUSA in 1970. It was a depressing political drama. George and me had had trouble in our marriage. I didn't know if the Newmans might have had theirs.  George had confessed to me he had been seduced by Joan Collins. We were talking about divorce. 

I remember one night that Joanne was busy in the wardrobe department, I couldn't resist to initiate an overture to Paul, something I'd later regret, since Joanne was one of my best friends. Of course, Paul, always the gentleman, acted as if nothing had happened. Our boys grew up parallel to the Newmans’ three girls, Nell, Lissy, and Clea. We and the Newmans shared parallel tragedies—the death of Paul’s son Scott and the death of our son Bryan, both from drugs. Paul Newman was put on the stage of life, and in his walk across it, he did indeed prove, in all the ways a man can, he was the most loyal. —Cloris (2009) by Cloris Leachman and George Englund

Paul Newman: "I don't like to discuss my marriage, but I will tell you something which may sound corny but which happens to be true. I have steak at home. Why should I go out for hamburger? It's not because I've been called a sex-symbol that I have to commit adultery."

In the notes for his poem Queen Mab (1813), Percy Shelley declares that ‘love is free’. He rejected monogamy, and tried to convince the women in his life to do the same. Not many people today would be shocked by this. A YouGov survey in 2020 of adults in the United States found that, of those who are in a relationship, more than a quarter are non-monogamous. But free love – by which I mean the idea that both men and women should be allowed to have sex outside of marriage, and to carry on multiple relationships at once, without judgment or persecution – was not always with us. It had to be invented. For centuries in Europe, nobody openly defended, and few dared to imagine the possibility of, greater sexual freedom for both men and women. Free love was invented in 1792, the year Shelley was born. It started when the French Revolutionaries challenged the absolute power of King Louis XVI, they energised radicals, and terrified conservatives, by questioning all traditional values. Suddenly, sexual morality was up for debate alongside monarchist government. 

The French Revolution had an electric impact on radical thinking around the world, and inspired people to reconsider the values of their own societies. At the time, Britain’s radical intellectuals were mostly a tight-knit group, centered around the publisher Joseph Johnson. His stable of authors gathered at his London home to debate the issues of the day. One of its brightest lights was Mary Wollstonecraft, the child of a shiftless, alcoholic father, who watched her family come down the social ladder fast. Forced to earn a living without formal education, she tried her hand at working as a governess before making her way to London in 1787, determined to become a writer. 

Charismatic, intellectually voracious, she blazed in conversation, fascinating and intimidating the mostly male authors who made up Johnson’s circle. And she made questions of gender and sexuality a major topic for debate. Wollstonecraft was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution. She wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), defending the Revolutionaries from the attacks of Edmund Burke. She followed this with her feminist masterpiece A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she attacked the well-established double standard whereby male libertinism is tolerated while women’s lives are punished by sexual transgressions. But her central purpose was to make the case for female education. 

Another of the authors whom Johnson published, Thomas Holcroft, showed the influence of Wollstonecraft’s feminism in his novel Anna St Ives (1792), as well as that of the French Revolution’s most radical ideas. Though his book was published the same year as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Holcroft had had a preview of Wollstonecraft’s arguments, which he heard her discuss at Johnson’s dinners. Unlike his best friend William Godwin, who was put off by Wollstonecraft’s domineering conversational style, Holcroft was entranced by her. He would later write her a gushing fan letter, calling her ‘the philosopher that traces, compares and combines facts for the benefit of future times.’ Holcroft’s novel dramatises Wollstonecraft’s guiding ideal: that of an educated woman who cultivates a friendship with an equally enlightened man, based on reason and shared values. The novel’s main character, Anna, spends her time in conversation with her friend Frank, imagining what a perfect society would look like. They decide that any future utopia must abolish private property. 

William Godwin was at that time writing his tract, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) – essentially, a defence of philosophical anarchism. Pressed by Holcroft, Godwin added a section on intimate relationships. Godwin concludes that marriage should be abolished, and monogamy along with it. People should be free to have as many relationships as they want. He makes it clear, however, that sex is something he doesn’t personally enjoy, and doesn’t think other people should either. He says that, in a society where government and property are absent, humans would develop into more refined beings who had no need for ‘sexual intercourse’. If Godwin was the first person to openly defend polyamory, he also managed to take all the fun out of it. At the end of 1792, Wollstonecraft returned to England, where she began a new relationship – with Godwin. The two could not have been more different – she was passionate and charismatic; he austere and preacherly – but they made it work. Wollstonecraft was soon pregnant, and in order to spare their child the stigma of illegitimacy, they decided to get married. 

Percy Shelley was in his late teens when he first encountered the works of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, He had a prodigious talent for poetry, the looks of an angel, and an insatiable appetite for controversy. As his widow later attested, he was ‘like a spirit from another sphere’. Kicked out of Oxford for his open atheism, he had allied himself with various radical political causes. And he used ‘the Godwinian plan’ as a short-hand term for free love. In 1812, on learning, to his surprise, that Godwin was still alive, Shelley sought out the old philosopher. Later that same year, he met Godwin’s daughter Mary, then 15 years old, and he was immediately entranced. Shelley, who was married at the time, spent his days in philosophical conversation with Godwin, then snuck away in the evenings with Mary. She took him to her favourite refuge: Old Saint Pancras churchyard, where her mother was buried. They may have first had sex on Wollstonecraft’s grave.

Shortly after they left England, Shelley insisted Mary read one of his favourite books, The Empire of the Nairs; or, The Rights of Women (1811). It was written by the most extreme of Wollstonecraft’s free-love disciples, the eccentric aristocrat James Henry Lawrence. Born in Jamaica in 1773 to a wealthy planter family, Lawrence was a friend of Godwin’s, whom he had encountered many times at the British Museum. The novel, which pays tribute to Wollstonecraft in its title, is a utopian depiction of the Nair people of Malabar, on the southwestern coast of India. Lawrence portrays the Nairs as devotees of unrestricted sexual liberty. In his novel’s introduction, Lawrence borrows Wollstonecraft’s attack on the double standard of chastity, while neatly inverting her conclusion. ‘Let every female,’ he declares, ‘live perfectly uncontrolled by any man, and enjoying every freedom; let her choose and change her lover as she please.’ The novel’s closing words are a salute to Wollstonecraft: ‘Success to the rights of women!’ 

Shelley rejected mere promiscuity, as he said in a review of Hogg’s novel, The Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff (1813). Hogg adored Shelley, and the book was a clumsy attempt to fictionalise Shelley’s ideals. But Shelley wrote that he could not regard the novel’s endorsement of ‘promiscuous concubinage without horror and detestation’. Shelley did not think sex could be divorced from love, and he saw love in elevated, indeed spiritual, terms. He believed we are moved to love by the beauty we see in others – be it ‘in thought, action, or person’. This doctrine was inspired by Plato’s Symposium, which Shelley devoted a summer to translating in 1818. In Plato, he found confirmation of Wollstonecraft’s idea that true love represents a partnership of equals. For the poet, there was something almost supernatural about such a union: ‘We should make that another’s nerves vibrated to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart’s best blood.’ Sex, he believed, was a natural and integral part of this mystical union. When we are in love, physical passion irresistibly follows. He condemned chastity as ‘a monkish and evangelical superstition’.While she was in Paris, a Frenchwoman, trying to impress Wollstonecraft told the author that she saw no need to engage in physical affairs. Wollstonecraft replied tartly: ‘Tant pis pour vous.’ (‘The worse for you.’)

Wollstonecraft, like Shelley, believed that an ideal relationship was born from a union of romantic love and physical passion. She too saw it in almost mystical terms. She told her lover Gilbert Imlay that he could never know ‘the ineffable delight, the exquisite pleasure, which arises from a unison of affection and desire, when the whole soul and senses are abandoned to a lively imagination, that renders every emotion delicate and rapturous.’ For her, it was this fusion of love and sex that alone could provide ‘the distinctive characteristic of genius, the foundation of taste, and of that exquisite relish for the beauties of nature, of which the common herd of eaters and drinkers and child-begeters, certainly have no idea.’ Shelley could not have put it better. Shelley died in 1822 and, in Britain, his ideas on free love were mostly forgotten as the country lurched towards the conservatism of the Victorian era. What we now know as the Free Love movement began in the US in the 1850s, and was shaped by the ideas of the French socialist Charles Fourier and the anarchist Josiah Warren. The Free Lovers’ objectives were closer to those of Wollstonecraft than to Shelley. They sought to give women easier access to divorce and birth control, but mostly left the norm of monogamy unchallenged. 

Shelley’s more radical ideas would have to wait another century to find a mainstream audience. Not until the sexual revolution of the 1960s did radical groups like the Weathermen turn ‘smash monogamy’ into a rallying cry, making free love an integral part of the counterculture. The 21st century has taken non-monogamy mainstream. And there are plenty of options: from polyamory, to swinging, to friends with benefits, to something called relationship anarchy, the structure of which ‘is the lack of structure itself’ – whatever that means. The relative merits of these choices are discussed endlessly in the media and online. Shelley would have undoubtedly surveyed this bewildering landscape with some pride. But what would Wollstonecraft have made of it all? It is hard to say. Perhaps she would, at the very least, view it with the same equanimity that she ultimately found in dealing with Imlay’s compulsive philandering. Realising he was never going to change, she told him, simply: ‘Be happy!’ Source: aeon.co