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Patricia Bosworth rubbed shoulders with the greats — and lived to tell about it
She modeled for Diane Arbus, studied acting with Monroe and Brando and made a film with Audrey Hepburn.
While you can’t call Patricia Bosworth’s life charmed, exactly — touched as it was by alcoholism, suicide and an early, abusive marriage — it was certainly eventful. Especially during the ’50s, when she flitted, Zelig-like, through a city pulsing with brilliant actors and writers.
In “The Men in My Life: AMemoir of Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan,” Bosworth tells what it was like to be a young actress at the mercy of many: the producer who asked her to be his “on-the-road” squeeze; the acting teacher who forced her to strip in class; the director who locked her in a closet.
All three — Richard Adler, Lee Strasberg and Arthur Penn — are now gone. Did she wait until they died to publish this?
Not at all, the 83-year-old writer told The Post: “I was too busy writing biographies” — of Arbus, Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. It wasn’t until she wrote about Jane Fonda that she suspected her own life was memoir-worthy: Like Henry Fonda’s daughter, Bosworth, the child of a celebrity lawyer, grew up privileged; both are suicide survivors.
Bosworth’s gay younger brother and confidante, Bart, remains the most important man in her life, decades after he shot himself at college.
And what a life. She grew up in California, with people like John Steinbeck and Paul Robeson at the dinner table.
After the family moved to New York, she married young and miserably. Divorced by 20 and bent on a career in theater, she auditioned for and was accepted by Strasberg’s legendary Actors Studio.
Soon she was at parties with Paul Newman, Harry Belafonte and Elaine Stritch; wrapping her legs around Steve McQueen as he rode her on his motorcycle and sharing a cab with Marilyn Monroe whom, she noted, had dirty fingernails.
“I think she was disheveled because she was on tranquilizers and pep pills,” Bosworth said. Drugged or not, Monroe was gorgeous. Ushering at a benefit one night, Bosworth saw the “Some Like It Hot” star enter with Brando and was too stunned to move.
“For God’s sake, Patricia,” someone shouted. “Let Marlon and Marilyn go in the room!” As Bosworth recalled it: “Marlon put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Thank you.’ I didn’t wash my shoulder for weeks!”
There were drinks with Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams, a visit to Helen Hayes’ house and advice from Ruth Gordon (“Keep on moving and stop kvetching!”). And there were many affairs and one abortion — when Bosworth, 25 and single, finds she’s pregnant just before she’s to film “The Nun’s Story” with Audrey Hepburn.
Of all the stars she’s encountered, Bosworth said, none was more luminous than Hepburn: “The first time I ever saw her, when we were going to do a scene together, she came over . . . and it was as if she had always wanted to meet me. I realized later she probably did it with everyone, but it was so heartfelt.”
Yet Hubert de Givenchy’s muse radiated sadness. “She didn’t like making movies,” said Bosworth, who believes Hepburn was happy only later in life, when she aided refugee children for UNESCO.
So what did Bosworth leave out? She may tell more at the 92nd Street Y on Thursday, when she’ll be part of a panel discussion about the city in the 1950s. She may even discuss Norman Mailer, who gets short shrift in her memoir. She told The Post he’d written a play — “it was ‘The Creation’ or ‘Eden’ ”— in which she initially played Eve opposite a strapping young James Earl Jones.
“Mailer wanted us to play it in the nude,” Bosworth said, “but we refused.” Other actors took their place, she recalled, and the play bombed: “Norman said, ‘If Patti and Jimmy had done it, it would have worked!’ ”
They seem to have done pretty well without it.
The Men in My Life A Memoir of Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan by Patricia Bosworth Harper