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Carol grace11/10/2023 ![]() ![]() Aram became a writer, who has published works of fiction and nonfiction. In later years, she acknowledged that she was estranged from them for reasons she would not disclose. Her memoir barely mentioned her children with Saroyan. This has never waned.” She later added: “Of course, we have all been taught that sex is the first thing to go, but I know differently. “I have always felt like the girl of the world with him,” Matthau wrote of her actor-husband, holding little back in explaining their deep bond. “Most wives would yell if their husband had the monumental gambling problem Walter, but not Carol.” “She has the gifts of a born courtesan,” longtime friend Stapleton told People magazine in 1992. But she was supremely tolerant of his addiction. Several years into their marriage, they found themselves several hundred thousand dollars in debt. Like Saroyan, her second husband also had a gambling problem. They had an affair for four years, finally marrying in 1959. She decided that he was “the perfect one-night stand” and proceeded to seduce him, although he was married.ĭespite her calculation, she fell in love with the actor. “He was the most fun to talk to because his mind always ran away from the conversation you had begun to the conversation that he had decided to have, and that conversation was either about what he was going to have for dinner that night or if he had been to the loo that day (and whether or not he was happy about it),” she wrote. She met Walter Matthau in 1955 when she was hired as an understudy in a play he was starring in, “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” A rising star on Broadway, he had a raunchy humor that she found appealing. “It’s just that you don’t do those rotten things Holly did.” “You are Holly,” she recalled him saying. Years later she reported in her memoir that he told her that she was the model for Holly Golightly. ![]() At 7 a.m., they would buy a breakfast of coffee and doughnuts and eat it in front of Tiffany & Co. She often joined Capote, a childhood friend, at a Manhattan nightclub for 3 a.m. She wrote a 1955 novella, “The Secret in the Daisy,” under the name Carol Grace. She moved into her own apartment and supported herself and the children by acting and writing. Friends said Saroyan, who never married again, remained in love with her until his death from cancer in 1981 at age 72. She popped up in his autobiographical writings over the years. By Matthau’s account, their marriage ended for the final time after he threw her down a flight of stairs and attempted to choke her in front of their children. ![]() But he was a hopeless gambler who squandered their savings and abused her emotionally and physically. In the 1940s, Saroyan was one of the most successful writers in the country, earning $75,000 a year in book and play royalties. The marriage was tortured almost from the start. When they were married in a civil ceremony in Dayton, Ohio, in 1943, she was two months pregnant with their first child, Aram. But he told her that he would not marry her until he knew she could bear children, and she complied. ![]() Saroyan, who was twice her age, was infatuated with the striking debutante, who, like her pals O’Neill and Vanderbilt, maintained an ethereal pallor with the aid of chalky-white face powder. He really talked to me and I was really able to talk to him - of people, the world. “He was funny, articulate, and you could never guess what he was going to say next. “On a superficial, social level, I don’t think there was a more charming man,” Matthau wrote. She thought that the mustachioed Armenian American, who had won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for the play “The Time of Your Life,” “looked like a gangster,” but she found him thrilling. She knew all about Saroyan, having acted in his play “Jim Dandy” in school. She was a 16-year-old blond beauty when bandleader Artie Shaw, a family friend, introduced her to Saroyan at a Hollywood restaurant. She used $50 lace handkerchiefs, attended the tony Dalton School and became best friends with Oona O’Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill (and later the wife of Charlie Chaplin), and Gloria Vanderbilt, the socialite and fashion maven. Matthau lived with them in a posh, 18-room apartment on Fifth Avenue. executive Charles Marcus, who warmly welcomed his wife’s illegitimate daughter. When she was 8, her mother married Bendix Corp. ![]()
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