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Eccentric Alliance. Hollywood gossips kept track of Anne's long and apparently aimless list of dates. Says she: "I wanted to get married—just about anybody would have done. I'd even thought of marrying Jessel." She finally married Martin A. May, nine years her senior, the son of a wealthy ranching family. It was an alliance that seemed eccentric even for Hollywood. Martin was studying law when he met Anne (after five failures at the bar exam, he gave up the effort). He wanted to keep the marriage a secret until he could tell his mother in person; the newlyweds moved into separate apartments, which they occupied for six months. Her husband always slept with a loaded revolver under his pillow. It made her nervous, she admits, but years later she told Playwright Bill Gibson: "I thought all husbands had guns under their pillows."
After the couple moved into one apartment, it was often filled with young actors sitting up all night reading plays. "Annie was intense about everything," May remembers now. "She'd lie on the floor and watch television by the hour, or she'd fry an egg, standing there leaning over the skillet staring as if the fate of the city depended on that egg. She was either a hungry tiger or a lovable lap dog."
On their first wedding anniversary the Mays were remarried in the Roman Catholic Church to please Anne's parents. But the marriage was already beyond salvage. In 1957 Anne tried for a church annulment and failed; Martin then got a divorce on the ground of mental cruelty. Anne no longer enjoyed the life of a Hollywood bachelor girl. "One can always be popular with the boys," she says, "but the rules are different in Hollywood than The Bronx. Out there you play for keeps."
"Lousy, Huh?" After six years, Hollywood was beginning to pall in other ways, too. "The studios wanted to give me the Monroe-type sex buildup," she says. "I wanted to develop my acting, not my body." When TV Actor Richard Basehart recommended Anne to Producer Fred Coe as an ideal Gittel for Two for the Seesaw, Anne was only too anxious to try. She was going East for a sister's wedding anyway; she read the play and decided that she would impress Coe, not by acting, but by being Gittel. "I made sure he found me with one shoe off, scratching my foot," she recalls. "And when I got inside his office, the first thing I said was, 'Where's the John?' It was just the sort of thing Gittel would have said. I didn't have to go, really, but I went. He asked me to come back the next day."
GITTEL LIVES, wired Coe to Director Arthur Penn in Hollywood. Next day Playwright William Gibson was equally convinced. Anne was Gittel for him too. "So how was the Coast?" she greeted him. "Lousy, huh?" The Seesaw team, which had already signed Henry Fonda for the male lead, had found its real star.