That’s what most of her friends called her. Our relationship took a few years to really take off. The night we met, she had already been informed that I was her son’s new girlfriend, not sure if he mentioned that we were madly and newly in love. In the creative and interesting environment that was her living room, I felt inspired to perform the Israeli dances I had learned recently in a high school Middle Eastern dance class. Ruth and her friends seemed taken with me (enchanting was the word they used) and they got up to join me in the spirit of spontaneity. We were off to a great start. It would soon crash and burn and I will admit that it was all my fault.

Ruth’s son Mark and I slept in his mom’s apartment for days on end. We, or rather I, woke up late, very late, and sometimes cranky. I would walk into the kitchen, make myself some cereal, then walk away from the table, having not cleaned up. I also never really pitched in if there was a dinner party. I guess I came off as a bit of a princess. I guess maybe I was. My history is that I was enabled by my own mother, father too, and never asked to help around the house in any way. Never made to clean up, never told to pitch in with the dishes, nothing. In my home, dirty plates & silverware were miraculously cleaned and put away. It was a nearly perfect arrangement for me, except in the real world where I was to become less than an ideal houseguest. Of course, now, in my own home, I love and admire a good guest who enlists in helping out. But I never really was that person.

For a period of time we slept in Mark’s van in the driveway, using the bathroom and yes, not cleaning up. Finally, Ruth had had enough. She kicked us out. For good. The lesson may have taken me nearly a lifetime to learn, but Ruth did the right thing.

Forced to live together, Mark and I found a bungalow in what was then virtually an art colony on Santa Monica beach, close to the pier. In a row of bungalows stretching north, there lived artists, actors and musicians. Spawned from our group of friends here were Bob Englund (later to become Freddie Kruger), David Hasseloff and Ed Carter, who was then with the Beach Boys, and might have been the only one of us making an actual living. I came home from work one day to find Mark had redecorated our home with not just a “splash” of, but all red, including a red wall-to-wall Persian carpet and a small red picnic table. It was so charming and oh, so small. Ruth didn’t visit much and my relationship with her remained strained.

I was getting acting jobs and the more money I made, the more I thought we deserved a bigger, better ocean view. So, we moved up to Malibu, and now the waves splashed at our balcony. When Ruth came to visit I spent the time hiding in my bedroom. Silly me. But I was young and stubborn and didn’t realize what I was missing.
Ruth’s dinner parties were filled with the most interesting group of intellectuals and film makers: Walter and Carol Mathau, Jack and Felicia Lemmon, British directors Jack Clayton with his wife Haya, and Karel Reisz and his wife, the actress Betsy Blair (formerly married to Gene Kelly, himself a sometime guest). The actor Scott Wilson and his wife, Heavenly.  Roger Spottiswoode.  Ruth herself had been an extremely successful stage and screen actress under the name Ruth Storey. Her best friend, a psychiatrist from New York named Janet Kennedy, often came to stay for periods of time.

The conversations were alive with talk of the McCarthy period. Of course, brilliant me, I’m thinking, are they kidding with all this blather about the long-ago 1950’s? We were in the wild 70’s now. Get with it. They did not. It was non-stop banter about politics, often the politics of that dark, “ancient” chapter in American history. This was not the Hollywood of my life; my manager-producer father hung around with Milton Berle, Red Buttons and Henny Youngman — lots of laughs with rim shots punctuating the ends of their sentences. I was oblivious to the fact that my dad’s own client, Zero Mostel, was himself a victim of the blacklist.

Ruth had once been married to the handsome actor Richard Conte. His “ghost” — he wasn’t dead yet — loomed large in her house. Nick, as he was called by his friends and ex-wife, had traveled with the Hollywood Ten to Washington where they had refused to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee. As a couple, Ruth and Nick were fighting the enemy they had in Joe McCarthy and the witch hunt he had spearheaded. But instead of soaking all this in, Mark and I would sometimes excuse ourselves to rejoin the sexual revolution, already in progress.

From the moment Mark and I broke up, I twisted the lens, and opened myself to one of the deepest relationships of my life, with his mother, Ruthie. She saw me through my first awful “George and Martha” marriage. And when I started to date the new man in my life, who I would later marry, I called Ruth to say she must meet Michael. Ruth said to me, “Fredde, treat him as you want to be treated”. I’m rolling my eyes. But she knows me so well! So she repeated it loudly (if only I knew how to underline in this blog…so, please underline these words in your head…) in her well-trained stage voice, “Fredde, treat him as you want to be treated!” Then, for emphasis: “Did you hear what I just said?” Think lots of underlining and explanation points! Though I had heard those words –the Golden Rule!–my whole life, this was the first time I really heard them. And I thank Ruth for that because I did treat my husband as I wanted to be treated. It was genius! Hey, we’re still together and this conversation was nearly 20 years ago.

I’m often heard “channeling” my father, but I also tend to channel Ruth. Each year she would call me on Rosh Hashanah and say “Happy New Year!” Though half-Jewish, I was raised with zero religion, and the first time thought she must be on crack, spreading New Year’s cheer four months early. Now that she is no longer with us, I’ve made it an annual fall tradition to phone Mark and wish him the same.

I so admired Ruth’s exquisite taste that it was more than flattering when she extravagantly praised my own. I couldn’t see her without her raving about my sense of style, and it meant the world to me.

I will forever miss her voice, her warmth, her truth, her wisdom. She had reinvented herself in her fifties by getting an MSW (Master’s Degree in Social Work) and becoming a practicing therapist well into her 80’s. For years Ruth was so generous, giving me artwork and clothes. And when she died, I inherited pieces of furniture that were so uniquely “Ruth,” that I always feel her and her great taste in my home.

We were young, we didn’t cook and in those days, we rotated between divorced parents to get a “free” meal. Veal and Peppers were one of Ruth’s specialties.
Ruthie’s Veal and Peppers
Cook Time: 1 hour

Total Time: 1 hour

Ingredients:

1 1/2 pounds boneless lean veal
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 green bell pepper, cut into 8 strips
1 red bell pepper, cut into 8 strips
1 cup sliced fresh mushrooms, about 8 ounces
pinch ground cayenne pepper
2 cans (8 ounces each) tomato sauce
salt and pepper
Preparation:

Cut veal into bit-size pieces. Heat oil in skillet over medium heat and brown veal on all sides. Add red and green bell pepper and mushrooms, cover, and reduce heat. Cook for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add cayenne pepper and tomato sauce. Simmer, covered, for 30 to 45 minutes longer, or until tender. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Serves 4. Ruth served it with white rice.

Tags: Beverly Hills high school, fredde duke, Gene Kelly, Jack Clayton, Jack Lemmon, Karel Reisz, Mcarthyism, Richard Conte, Ruth Conte, The Hollywood 10, veal and peppers recipe, Walter Matthau

This entry was posted on Friday, December 17th, 2010 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.