The New York Times Review by Alex Witchel July 19, 1992
WILLIAM SAROYAN was lousy in bed except on his wedding night, when he skipped sex and read Gullivers Travels instead. Maureen Stapleton rarely bathes. Barbara Sinatra is stingy. Dinah Shore is a bad cook. Merle Oberon was a bore.
So says Carol Matthau, wife of the actor Walter Matthau, who has spent her life among the rich and famous. Her memoir, Among the Porcupines, reads like the story outline for a sweeps-period mini-series. It begins with a bleak childhood spent in foster homes until the age of 8, when she was rescued, Cinderella-style, by her mothers second marriage (to a co-founder of the Bendix Corporation) and relocated to an 18-room apartment on Fifth Avenue. There she made fast friends with a debutante set that included Gloria Vanderbilt and Oona ONeill, and developed a taste for writers.
She married William Saroyan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, twice, despite a quotient of mental cruelty that could fill hours of Donahue. Truman Capote was a lifelong friend who used her and her white-blond hair as a basis for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffanys. She was madly in love with James Agee, but wouldnt have sex with him because he had a bad heart. Kenneth Tynan was also a beau, but she never had sex with him, either. Then she gave up on writers and married Walter Matthau. They have sex a lot.
Mrs. Matthau writes: It seems strange that everyone Im writing about was very famous. I wonder about it, too. Didnt I ever find anyone interesting who was not famous? Actually, no, I didnt. Fortunately, Mrs. Matthau was a good audience, and she has a master hand with an anecdote. Her insights into other people can be keen and incisive, especially when she doesnt like them and doesnt feel compelled to compliment them.
She especially dislikes anyone who comes on to Mr. Matthau, though her barbs here are never as biting as the one Capote specifically attributed to her in the section of Answered Prayers called La Cote Basque: When a Swedish starlet with a beautiful face, ample bosom and unusually heavy legs takes her flirting too far and Mr. Matthau asks her age, Mrs. Matthau interjects, For Gods sake, Walter, why dont you chop off her legs and read the rings?
It is when Mrs. Matthau writes about herself that her book feels anemic. Although she recounts events of her childhood, incidents from both marriages to Saroyan, her work as an actress in the New York theater in the 1950s and her ensuing years in Hollywood with Mr. Matthau, she seems oddly absent at the center of her own story. Mrs. Matthau is such a practiced dinner partner, who can regale you so engagingly with an account of Kay Kendall flinging her drink in the face of her lover, Rex Harrison, that she distracts you from the fact that she never comes up with the goods on herself.
Who exactly is this movie-magazine Scheherazade? What about her elicited such passion from such prominent men? It seems, sadly, that she was a genius at talking to them about themselves, to the exclusion of herself. But while that method might have worked magic at El Morocco, a full dance card does not a memoir make.
One telling insight into Mrs. Matthau comes during her recollection of an encounter with Karen Blixen, who wrote under the name Isak Dinesen. I saw a lot of Karen Blixen . . . after being twice married and twice divorced from Bill. She remembered our first meeting very clearly and said a very sweet thing to me: Why, Carol, you didnt grow up. This unseemly wish to remain a child, denying the cost and the triumph of becoming an adult, robs her book of depth. It can too often read like the diary of a teen-ager. Everyone, she says, has somewhere perhaps deeply hidden a private ambition. Mine has never changed. I would like to become the best person that I can be. I know that that does not mean a perfect person, yet I want to be the best that I can.
Perhaps it is too painful or distasteful for Mrs. Matthau to reflect on professional roads not taken. This is her first book since 1955, when under the name Carol Grace she published The Secret in the Daisy, a novella about her childhood. She says that book had edge. But like many women of her generation, she seems not to have had the encouragement, or the courage, to keep that edge honed. It was easier to have a drink with Karen Blixen than to be Karen Blixen. Mrs. Matthau writes: Having a book published was a big thing in my life, and it might have been a turning point if Id kept on writing. But I didnt. I had a lot of beaus and saw a lot of friends and got all dressed up every night after the theater to go dancing. . . . And within a year I would fall in love again. Being in love to me was not only more important than any book, it was more important than anything.
Excerpt from Among the Porcupines
When Charlie was born, I was more awake than I had been for the other two births, and Dr. Greeley held him up in the air and said, Its Charlie! Its not Amy Rose. Its Charlie! I looked up at the absolutely luminous pink and white perfect little baby and Dr. Greeley put Charlie in my arms and said, Now you can both rest for a while. Ill be back.
It was perfect. Charlie fit so sweetly into my arms and there was an immediate, unmistakable bond and I knew it would be that way forever. I felt it. There he was our love, in person, in matter. I was looking at love, this little boy was made of pure love.
Excerpt from Among the Porcupines
Gloria and Oona and I were the closest of friends. By that I mean our pasts were shared in certain ways. We lived far away from one another Gloria in New York, Oona in Vevey, I in Pacific Palisades. But tender feelings know no distance. I feel that they are still each a part of me deep, true, and loving. How they felt about each other I dont really know. I think sometimes they were close, and much of the time they were not. They were girls together, women, and then widows.
Its like being part of the same space capsule, more than it is an everyday I love you. I was closer to either of them than they were to each other. And the three of us lived very different lives each disconnected in its way to the other and yet there was that closeness that is hard to describe. We were drawn together. Our lives started together. It was the eve of the war. And that didnt matter. There are so many changes in women, all the silly, sad, obvious arguments. They will always have my love, in very different ways.There is the matter of Matthau’s surname. The most reputable encyclopedias list it as Matuschanskayasky; it occassionally has been spelled Matasschanskayasky. All are bogus. Walter had a legendary penchant for fabricating his past. When he was born, his surname was Matthow; after World War II, while an acting student in New York at the New School for Social Research, he altered it to Matthau.
What is indisputable is that the actor was born in New York City on October 1, 1920. “I was very young when I was born, ” he remarked. Also unquestionable is the Lower East Side community in which he came of age, and the cruel fact that his childhood was, as Matthau admitted, “a nightmare, a dreadful, horrible, stinking nightmare.”
Excerpt from Among the Porcupines
At 3:00 every morning that I was in New York, I would meet Truman Capote at a private club called the Gold Key Club on West Fifty-fifth Street. The lights were low and we would sit in big chairs in front of a fireplace and talk and talk. Even when we'd been on different continents, I was never not in touch with him, either by phone or note. But now that we were both in New York, he wanted me to know what the city was like, especially as I really hadn't lived there in such a long time.
He drank and I drank. Actually, I had started drinking each night after work when I left the theater and went out dancing with a date. I drank gin and ginger ale. Truman told me that it was a low-down combination.
Each morning, we'd end up eating doughnuts and drinking the coffee in front of Tiffanys. The same guard was always there. He was rather friendly and got to know us, so every so often we'd bring a doughnut and some coffee for him, too.
After standing there and just staring at all the diamonds and gold, we would cross back to the other side of Fifth Avenue and go to the Plaza, where we would sit on the steps of the fountain. Then I would go to the loo and wash my face and fuss with my dress and put on fresh makeup and perfume. We were now ready for an early lunch at Romeo Saltas, which was near. We had that early lunch every day, drinking right through it and still feeling wonderful and not drunk.
One night, he began telling me, I knew a girl once, she was nothing like you. In fact, she was almost a hooker, but I liked her a lot. She came from the South, I dont know how she ended up, and I've always wanted to write about her. But Id like to do her as you, I'd like to have the things that I know happened to her happen to you. I want you to stick around with me a little bit, I'm going to do you as Holly Golightly.
Breakfast at Tiffanys was published in 1958 but not quite as soon as I'd anticipated it would be. For Truman kept showing me the last page and asking we what I thought. It's perfect, Id say, and he'd say, You think theyre all perfect.
He called one day and said, I got it. I'm bringing it over to show it to you. I want you to see this. And this time it was completely different from his previous versions. It took Truman three months to do that last page, but the minute I read it I knew he had been right.
Excerpt from Among the Porcupines
One late October afternoon in 1941, Gloria telephoned me from California, where she had gone to spend the summer with her mother, who was thrilled to have some time with her daughter. Gloria had blossomed into a beautiful, luminescent young girl and she needed a mother. And she wanted her very own man to love. Gloria told me that she had met the man of her dreams and that they were going to be married in December. She told me how much it would mean to her if I would come out and be one of her bridesmaids.
She told me his name was Pat di Ciccio and that he worked for Howard Hughes. Gloria told me he was a very handsome, romantic man.The wedding was on December 28, 1941, in Santa Barbara. There was a whole series of parties, and one’s clothes had to be perfect for each event. The ushers were all the handsomest men in Hollywood, actors and very famous people. They were Pat di Cicco’s friends. My escort for all the wedding festivities was Errol Flynn, at his swashbuckling peak, so cavalier. I had a big crush on him.
Excerpt from Among the Porcupines
In the years that I was alone, I learned a lot and fell in love once. He was the most extraordinary and brilliant man I have ever met to this day, and unbelievably handsome. He probably was the best writer I ever knew. In fact, the book I had begun to write was going to be dedicated to him, but I decided not to do that because I knew that some day it would be as if I had dedicated the book to William Shakespeare a most self-aggrandizing act.
He was James Agee.
It became so natural to be with Jim every night. It was absolutely natural when we finally kissed about a week after the first visit. And a week after the first kiss, it seemed only natural that we would go to bed together. But I couldnt. I just could not. I knew Mia too well. I knew his children. I knew he had had a heart attack. I didn't know exactly what a heart attack was in those days (what happy days those must have been, not knowing about heart attacks), but I was afraid that if we actually had an affair, he would die.
Excerpt from Among the Porcupines
George was a very talented young writer-director I'd first met while living in California.
And, sure enough, while I was in New York for The Time of Your Life, George offered me a part of the secretary in his new play, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? It was the Faust story set in Hollywood, with Walter playing the writer, Jayne Mansfield the big movie star, and Martin Gabel playing the agent, otherwise known as the devil.
I knew Walter was married. I could tell he wanted to go to bed with me. I had never had a one-night stand. And I was sick of myself for falling in love as deeply and totally and insanely as I always had. I calculated, He's perfect. He's the perfect one-night stand.
Excerpt from Among the Porcupines
Onstage Walter and I had an interesting relationship. Our scenes were supposed to be simple, but Walter began to get obstreperous, doing things that only I could see, like crossing his eyes when he spoke to me. Naturally, I was riveted with fear each time I came onstage.
Walter, I said, dont do those things. Im not as experienced as you and Im having a horrible time.
He wouldnt stop, though, so one night, when he came in and said the line, Is this Rita Marlowes office? I looked at him sweetly and instead of saying yes I said, No, its across the hall. He said, You know youre cute.
That was my only victory on the stage.
Excerpt from Among the Porcupines
The major social move we made after coming out here to the West Coast to live was to give a party for Charlie Chaplin and Oona. It was 1972 and Charlie was coming back to the United States to be honored, first in New York and then by the Motion Picture Academy with a special Oscar. Gloria was going to give them a party in New York, and we were giving them a party here. Charlie was no longer in the very best of health, so Oona suggested that I make it a luncheon. I asked her for a guest list, so with the exception of a few really close friends of ours, the selection was theirs.
The party went very well, with people who had not seen one another for such a long time getting together again. Charlie and Walter were walking around the garden, and Charlie looked out to a brilliantly bright blue sea with what seemed to be thousands of tiny sailboats floating gracefully.
Charlie gazed out at the sea for a long time and then said to Walter, Now that really must have cost you fortune.
Charlie was that way. He saw life in terms of movie sets or scenes or ideas for movies. He loved seeing Lewis Milestone and Groucho Marx and Danny Kaye and Oscar Levant and Frances Goldwyn.
It was the last time Charlie was to be in California.