Advance copies of the book have made its author the hot topic in New York literary and theatrical circles. Besides Roth, Bloom candidly discuses her two previous marriages and her numerous affairs with the likes of Yul Brynner, Laurence Olivier and Richard Burton. (No, she didn’t have an affair with Elvis, but he flirted with her once.) But it’s Bloom’s attempt to give Roth a dose of his own invective that has people talking. After all, the author of “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “Sabbath’s Theater” has made a literary career out of fudging the line between his life and his fiction, writing endlessly aborn misogynistic protagonists teasingly named Philip. And he’s never been squeamish about crafting thinly veiled portraits of friends and lovers in his fiction. In “Deception,” he writes about a philandering novelist married to a tiresome English access. In her book, Bloom says she had to threaten to sue to get him to stop calling the character Claire.
The Roth who emerges in “Leaving a Doll’s House” is a commanding figure, loving and generous one moment, cold and selfish the next, and unflaggingly manipulative: “Philip always sought the upper hand in any argument,” Bloom writes, “and with his razor-sharp wit could easily issue something amusing and cutting to make my position appear futile and humiliating.” But in sifting through the shards of their “long, complex, rich, rewarding, but ultimately tortured relationship,” she is just as critical of her own passivity and neediness: “The more I told him that I loved him, the more cold and rejecting he became,” she writes of the last days of their marriage. “The more cold and rejecting he became, the more I felt motivated to tell him that I loved him.”
More than anything, Bloom is mad as hell. Before agreeing to marry her, in the last two years of their relationship, Roth stuck her with a mean-spirited prenuptial agreement (he could divorce her at any time with no penalty, for example). She caught him taping one of their phone conversations. He made a pass at her daughter’s best friend. When she asked for the return of her personal possessions during the divorce proceedings, he retaliated with a bill for, among other things, $150 an hour for the “five or six hundred hours” he’d spent helping her go over scripts.
Bloom takes pains to praise Roth’s gifts–even his zeal in polishing furniture. But even as she confesses her own masochism or stresses that his cruelest moments occurred late in their relationship, after he began suffering severe depression, there is never a doubt as to who is the more sinned against.
Some of his most egregious behavior occurred long before his mental suffering began. Bloom reports that in the late ’70s, a couple of years into their relationship, Roth handed her a letter, “one of many I was to receive during the course of our years together.” In it he said he’d continue living with her only if her teenage daughter, Anna (her child from her marriage to actor Rod Steiger), “agreed to move elsewhere.” Unsparingly, Bloom reports that she elected “the security of a companion” over “the welfare of a daughter.” Then, in the most chilling passage in this sobering account, she writes, “Philip made character assessments the way surgeons make incisions. He knew I would make any compromise to support our relationship. If I was willing to jettison my own daughter in this manner, what could I ever deny him?”
Even in an era when dishy celebrity biography and autobiography are as common as driver’s licenses, Bloom’s tale still manages to shock. One-sided? Of course, but never fear: given Roth’s penchant for turning the facts of his life into the substance of his writing, we haven’t heard the last of this story.
