BLOOM’S FIRST VISIT to Connecticut was scheduled to begin May 10 and last three weeks; later it struck her as typical of Roth’s “deep ambivalence” toward commitment that he’d specified “very clearly” the finite duration of her visit. For Roth’s part it occurred to him, also later, that she hadn’t expressed the slightest compunction about leaving her sixteen-year-old daughter for whatever length of time.

  Bloom was nervous that she wouldn’t seem intellectual enough to Roth, perhaps underestimating the extent of his awe toward the “greatly gifted actress” with whom he’d fallen in love as a teenager: “I thought I was with a peer and a comrade,” he wrote a friend in 2012. “And for the first year I was.” As it happened Bloom was remarkably well read, able to recite the intricate plots of almost every major nineteenth-century English novel; also, during that first visit, she introduced Roth to Kierkegaard’s The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, wherein the philosopher reflects—resonantly for Roth, as one may imagine—on “the petty persecution” of recognition, of the rabble “beating the great drum of triviality.”

  Oblivious to bicentennial festivities that spring, Roth had finally started a new novel after a long fallow period, and Bloom was forewarned that he’d be working on this (“What else is there to do?”) throughout her visit. “I was happy and cheerful in the mornings, until Philip left to go to his studio,” she wrote; “then I began to wonder how I was going to get through the day.” She tried reading, planning elaborate meals, and so on, but she had no pressing work of her own and mostly she waited for Roth to emerge in the afternoon so they could take a walk together and begin the pleasant ritual of wine and dinner and reading beside the fire. For the most part they had an easy-seeming rapport, though even then Roth’s occasionally abrasive shtick was apt to rub the genteel actress the wrong way. “I didn’t come here to be insulted,” she murmured at one point, and Roth burst out laughing. “But of course you did,” he said. “We all did. That’s what I want carved on my gravestone. ‘Philip Roth. He came here to be insulted.’ ”

  Roth claimed that his stipulation of a three-week visit hadn’t been a matter of gun-shy ambivalence—rather he’d assumed that three weeks was the most a working actress (and mother) could spare; as he soon learned, however, Bloom’s career had tapered off (à la Kierkegaard’s aging actress) until she worked maybe two months out of the year. Because of problematic finances, she’d agreed to write a children’s book about her early life as an actress (“Thus avoiding all lovers and husbands,” she wrote Roth, “who should have been avoided in the first place”), and Roth encouraged her to occupy herself in Connecticut by expanding this into a full-length memoir. First he fed her questions that she answered on a tape recorder, and then, with Roth’s help, adapted into written form. “She was a natural writer with an extensive vocabulary and could compose fluent sentences,” he remembered, “but nonetheless the writing was flat and the content skimpy until I prodded her to go back into the material time and again.” During those early sessions they would work as much as two or three hours a night—assistance Bloom was happy to acknowledge in later interviews: “He was very hard, and accurate, and devastatingly cruel,” she remarked with a smile.

  Limelight and After: The Education of an Actress would be finished in 1981; Roth gave it a final polish before handing it over to his friend Aaron Asher, then at Harper & Row, who scheduled its publication to coincide with the author’s fifty-first birthday on February 15, 1982. The centerpiece of its promotion in the States was a New York screening of Limelight, which was attended by the likes of Lehmann-Haupt and his Times colleague Michiko Kakutani, who nonetheless passed on reviewing the book, as did every other major American critic.† Still, Roth was proud of it: “I think it’s the most intelligent book about being an actress that’s been done,” he wrote a friend. Even more gratifying, to Roth, was its total absence of gossip; one was led to believe, for instance, that Bloom’s friendship with Richard Burton had entailed nothing more prurient than “read[ing] poetry endlessly to each other in our digs.”

  “ALL IN ALL, our first foray in domesticity was a success,” Bloom wrote of her time in the country, remembering how sadly she’d watched the little scroll calendar on Roth’s mantel as it ticked off one day after another toward her departure. After her visit Roth also took a “reckless step forward” away from what she’d perceived to be his epistolary reticence—that is to say, his disturbingly noncommittal “Dear Claire” was replaced with “Dearest Love.” Indeed, that was the least of it: “I think you are going to have cock enough to last you a lifetime,” he wrote her in June; she’d left a dress behind in his closet, and a motif of his letters that summer concerned his tendency to ravish the garment in her absence. Writing from Venice, she less ribaldly mentioned how her desire for him had almost made her faint in a gondola on the Grand Canal.

  From August 10 to September 2, she hosted Roth at her three-story town house on Fawcett Street, near Chelsea, a few minutes away from Fulham Road. Roth was apt to describe the place as charming. On the first floor were lace-curtained living and dining rooms, both with fireplaces, and a little terrace out back with a plane tree and garden; on the second floor was Bloom’s “luxurious, slightly whorish” bedroom, said Roth, who never mentioned the stuffed animals that Barbara Jakobson swore she saw on the bed (Dick Stern’s wife, Alane Rollings, recalled that Bloom liked to take these on planes to calm her nerves); and on the third floor was Anna’s room and bath, as well as a little guest room where Roth set up his workshop during the weeks of his stay. Bloom was good friends with Gore Vidal and had assured Roth that her daughter was “well trained by Gore” not to be noisy while he was working; Anna, however, was in Switzerland with her former nanny for most of Roth’s stay, and seems to have kept mostly to herself during the one or two days they coincided.

  Bloom was starting rehearsals for The Innocents, an adaptation of James’s The Turn of the Screw, and Roth was eager to see her at work, especially since the director was Harold Pinter.‡ Most mornings Roth would walk Bloom to rehearsals at a church not far from her house, and sometimes he’d stay and take notes on her performance (“sometimes brutally critical,” Bloom wrote, “always completely accurate”)—this in hope of improving what was, he feared, a “terrible (alas)” play. But usually he stayed on the third floor at Fawcett Street, where he worked on a ninety-minute screen adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Name-Day Party,” since Bloom had complained about a paucity of good television roles. The story, about the grueling hypocrisy of bourgeois life, had a character that Roth considered perfect for Bloom: Olga Mihalovna, who spies her husband flirting with a pretty seventeen-year-old guest at his name-day party; already vexed by the man’s boorishness, she passes the day in a state of incipient hysteria, until finally she explodes at him in private (a passage Roth heavily underscored in his copy of the text):

  “You may as well know that all this is revolting—revolting—revolting! I’ve hated you all day . . .”

  “Olya, I wish you would give me warning when you’re out of sorts so I can sleep in my study.”

  Roth’s first attempt (of several) to create a proper vehicle for Bloom’s talents “made the rounds” but was never produced.

  On September 4, Bloom arrived in New York for out-of-town tryouts; she’d rented an apartment on the East Side, where she planned to stay with Anna and her mother for the duration of the play’s Broadway run. Meanwhile, during tryouts in Boston, she was interviewed by a Globe reporter who described her as “a frail, white-china faced woman with . . . a manner as tremulous as a butterfly”: “ ‘We’re friends . . . have been . . . long time,’ ” she “murmur[ed], almost inaudibly,” when asked about her appearance on Newbury Street with Roth. When The Innocents premiered in New York on October 21, Roth brought his “thrilled” parents, and all agreed Bloom was wonderful as the governess; the play, however, closed after only twelve performances. In Doll’s House, Bloom pondered her decision to remain in New York, with Roth, while she sent her mother and daughter back to England in early December; the “furious” Anna had pointed out that she’d “once again chosen a man over her,” and Bloom worried the girl might be right: “perhaps I was unconsciously sacrificing her in favor of Philip.” To Roth, at the time, it seemed a wholly conscious sacrifice.

  One afternoon the couple returned to Roth’s apartment, where Bloom discovered a note on the dining room table. “I went into the kitchen and didn’t see it,” Roth remembered, “but suddenly Bloom was wailing and screeching and wildly running about the apartment. She was holding in her hand a two-word note from the cleaning woman. It read, ‘Christa called.’ She began screaming about Christa. Who is Christa? You’re having an affair with Christa! How dare you invite me to America under false pretenses! How dare you make me abandon my child to come to America while you were carrying on with this Christa!” This went on for about an hour, according to Roth. Christa was a German journalist living in Berlin who’d interviewed him a couple of years back for her newspaper; they’d hit it off and become friends.§ Evidently she was in New York and wanted to get together. Some twenty years later, after Roth and Bloom had divorced, Christa remarked that she’d occasionally tried to phone him in London, but whenever she gave her name Bloom hung up on her.

  Bloom, it must be said, was no stranger to furtive liaisons, and in her second memoir, at least, she was refreshingly candid on that point. Richard Burton was married to another woman during his “precious and deeply spiritual” affair with Bloom, ditto Laurence Olivier and Yul Brynner, and Bloom herself was still married to Rod Steiger when she dallied with Hilly Elkins (prior to his becoming her second husband). As for Roth, he was rarely less than forthcoming (except with whoever happened to be his main female companion at the time) on the subject of straying: “God, I’m fond of adultery,” he and Mickey Sabbath liked to say. “Aren’t you?” Even with so staid a fellow as Malamud, Roth couldn’t resist alluding to his extracurricular love life: “Claire is off in London doing Brideshead Revisited,” he wrote his colleague from Connecticut in 1979. “It’s not easy being Stage Door Johnny. But it has its compensations.”

  Roth’s foremost compensation in Warren—during the entirety of his time with Bloom, and then some—was a Norwegian named Inga Larsen,¶ a physical therapist who lived a mile down the road with her husband, a contractor, and four children. Conarroe remembered her as the sort of woman who gave off “vibrations” (“even to me”) the moment she entered a room, and little wonder she served as model for the insatiable Drenka in Sabbath’s Theater, and also—“falsified beyond recognition” (Roth)—for the doting, submissive “Erda” in Leaving a Doll’s House. Inga had known Roth casually since his move to Warren in 1972, but nothing carnal happened until the fall of 1976, when he summoned Inga for her professional services. As she recalled, Roth sat in the kitchen, depressed, while she worked on his neck, and after she packed up and was ready to go, he put a hand on her breast; the following spring they picked up where they’d left off, and so began an eighteen-year affair that, said Roth, “became an adjunct to my domestic life, without which I couldn’t have continued my domestic life.”

  Inga’s own domestic life was far from ideal. After work she would come home, make dinner, and put her children to bed, whereupon her husband would fall asleep and she would tipple chardonnay, though Roth was mostly unaware of her drinking until she entered rehab many years later. At the height of their affair, she and Roth would meet as often as possible at their favorite trysting spots: behind a cluster of boulders near the Housatonic—a place vividly evoked in Sabbath’s Theater (like Sabbath and Drenka, they were almost spotted in flagrante by a helicopter scouring the area for marijuana farms)—and, in a pinch, a spot in the woods midway between their houses. Such outdoor emergencies were relatively rare, though, since Bloom was less and less in Connecticut; Roth estimated he and Inga met at his house or studio, all told, “over a thousand times.” They also liked to meet socially: Roth was fond of Inga’s husband—the man designed the remodeling of Roth’s studio in the late seventies—and the two couples often entertained each other. During the decade that Roth lived half of each year in London, Inga would visit him and Claire for a few days en route to seeing relatives in Oslo (she so admired the decor of Bloom’s guest bedroom that, on her return to the States, she went straight to the Laura Ashley store in Westport).

  Inga was as much a kind of co-conspirator as she was a lover to Roth, who urged her not to skimp on details when telling him about her other affairs with, say, the wealthy alcoholic businessman whom she blew in his limousine. Often she’d marvel aloud at the disparity between her private shenanigans and public image as a supercompetent professional and homemaker—a duality, or multiplicity, Roth relished in both their lives: “the kick of having a multiple self who behaves various ways in numerous lives and of possessing an impressively lavish endowment of self-abandonment.” Later Inga would refer to her and Roth’s “mutual addiction to sex,” an idea Roth would have rejected as psychobabble, though other perceptive friends were apt to describe their affinity in precisely that way. “They were both secret junkies,” said one. “Philip’s a secret junkie. . . . Because the nature of eroticism is a share under the table; it’s not visible to others. And that’s very important to him.” Another friend—who used to attend AA meetings with Inga—said that Roth, though hardly an alcoholic, consummately behaved like an addict in the way he compartmentalized everyday life, the better to get away with transgressive behavior. More and more, however, in his life and certainly his work, he became almost disarmingly candid about things. He hooted at Bloom’s coy reference to “the dark part of [her] sexual nature” that she’d discovered vis-à-vis Hilly Elkins: “I enjoyed, through my long, adulterous liaison with [Inga], the bright side of a stupendous sexual nature.”

  Roth’s own endowment of self-abandonment arguably exceeded even Inga’s, though she took pains to seem a worthy peer in that respect. She pretended to be pleased when he’d press on her a semen-encrusted napkin or some such fetish, and she became more and more adept at looking entranced whenever he’d suddenly, apropos de rien, begin masturbating in front of her. “This is a man led by the penis,” her therapist observed when she mentioned this compulsion of his. Roth later pointed out that Inga had often assured him that she loved to watch men masturbate, the way they gradually lost control before coming; indeed her remarks on the subject were given almost verbatim to Drenka.

  During his London years, Roth would call Inga long-distance and expect her to listen while he masturbated. Such calls were inconvenient, given the time difference. “Here I am,” Inga remembered, “and here’s this guy on the line there and I have patients and the doctors around and he wants me to listen. And then as soon as he has come, ejaculated, he bangs the receiver and that’s it.” She paused. “And then sometimes he calls back and there’s a conversation: ‘How are you?’ . . .”

  IT WAS ROTH WHO suggested to Bloom that they live together in London for six months out of each year, beginning in September 1977, when she was returning to start rehearsals for Ibsen’s Rosmersholm at the Haymarket. Roth would follow a couple of weeks later, once he’d gotten maximum seasonal use out of the recently completed, 18-by-55-foot Franklin Library Memorial Pool—so named because it was paid for with proceeds from Roth’s signing six thousand books, at two bucks a copy, for the Franklin Library First Editions Book Club. Roth had phoned Updike to inquire whether the feat was really possible: “Just,” Updike replied.

  According to Bloom’s memoir, Roth was willing to live with her in London on the condition that her daughter live elsewhere, until Bloom frantically persuaded him to give “some form of family life” a try—marveling the while at what would prove an all-too-characteristic “mixture of kindness and cruelty” on his part. Roth later insisted, however, that the subject of Anna’s cohabitation “had never arisen” up to then, and as for his alleged “cruelty”: “If there was any cruelty directed toward Anna, it was Bloom’s, as Anna well understood and as the disastrous consequences I saw played out between mother and daughter in London confirmed. It will not do to shift the ‘cruelty’ onto me, who at this time barely knew Bloom’s adolescent daughter and had no particular interest in her one way or another.” Bloom’s willingness to sacrifice her daughter (consciously or unconsciously) in favor of her own interests had hardly begun with Roth, who pointed out that the girl was all of nine when Bloom left her father for one of his closest friends. Hilly Elkins is perhaps best remembered as the producer of the risqué 1969 revue Oh! Calcutta!—the same year he began his liaison with Bloom. “Strangely, Hilly had some of the same features as [my father] Eddie—certainly the same weak mouth. Still more bizarre, they even shared the same birthday.” Be that as it may, the main point of Elkins appeared to be his show-business pull, which helped his wife’s career even as he stole, by Roth’s account, “tens of thousands of her dollars, if not more, while she looked on and let him do it.” Naturally Anna Steiger despised Elkins, and Bloom admitted she and the girl had seen little of each other during this turbulent but productive era: “Those years did a lot of damage to us as mother and daughter, and yet they were the years when I played the roles I so wanted.” Bloom also pointed out, not unreasonably, that a child tends to resent the mother far more than the father for “going off like that.” In the event, once she got rid of Elkins, he became “the unmentionable” to mother and daughter alike.