Object of Desire : Carol Matthau Has Devoted a Lifetime to Charming, Soothing and Inspiring Great, Sometimes Troubled Men

After a long day playing big grumpy characters, Walter Matthau comes home to a sprawling manse that is frankly, for want of a better word, feminine.

When the actor arrives at his Pacific Palisades home, he is greeted by a 4-foot doll in Victorian dress, and a litter of lighted jeweled-fruit baskets. He takes his rest amid posies and roses that sweeten the air and the garden, that climb the walls and languish in baskets all over the house.

Indeed, there is one particularly dainty difference between Matthau’s home and the rest of residential America:

There is a ladies’ loo. And a separate room for gentlemen.

“But we don’t stick to it,” insists Matthau’s ethereal wife, Carol, the source of all this feminine muchness. “If a woman goes in there, I’m not going to say . . . “--she emits a Hitchcockian gasp--” Don’t go into the men’s room .”

Domestic superlatives aside, don’t mistake Carol Matthau for your everyday Woman Behind the Man, eager though she might be to wear that mantle. If being frankly female is an art, then the distaff Matthau is, if not the Picasso of her generation, then at least the Jackson Pollock.

At 67, she’s a paradigm for a generation of women whose main--sometimes only--hope in life lay in cultivating their womanly virtue. And for the most supremely--and creatively--virtuous, for the quintessential female, there was that covert but glorious life role, the Woman Behind the Poet--the Muse.

And in that arena, Carol Matthau is a champ. Truman Capote declared her a moon maid and modeled “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” insouciant Holly Golightly after her. Critic Kenneth Tynan wanted her. James Agee won her. William Saroyan married her--twice. And Walter Matthau managed to hold onto her.

“She lifts me to several levels above that which would make me comfortable,” says Walter Matthau, Carol’s husband of 33 years. “I would have been an ordinary character actor on Broadway with no desire to do anything else.”

Says her longtime friend, Felicia Lemmon, wife of the actor Jack Lemmon: “I never met a woman before I met Carol who really let her imagination go.”

Carol Matthau’s conquests are laced through her new memoir, “Among the Porcupines,” which has garnered generally warm reviews. But while the New York Times acknowledged the contact fascination of a woman who fascinates such prominent men, the paper sniffed, “It seems, sadly, that she was a genius at talking to them about themselves, to the exclusion of herself.”

Which is precisely the point about Carol Matthau.

“Better put this way: You only talk to great men about themselves,” Matthau says in her diaphanous voice.

But such talk of sheer unadulterated fame leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of one of the great men she writes about, her old friend Artie Shaw, who introduced her to Saroyan. Clucking his tongue at her for “name-dropping,” Shaw balks at any hint of haughtiness in Matthau’s book, as in this particularly cloying passage: “Didn’t I ever find anyone interesting who was not famous? Actually, no, I didn’t.”

“The closest thing we have to royalty in America is movie stars and Walter was a very big movie star,” says the former big bandleader. “Obviously they met a lot of people, but they also met other people. It just isn’t like that. It’s too Noel Coward.”

But when you ask Matthau about her quote, she is wide-eyed and typically disarming.

“Actually, Walter once said there was no one in my address book less than the Shah of Iran. But a man I know--it was a very below-the-belt kind of thing--said, ‘You don’t know anyone who isn’t famous. Do you only like famous people?’ So I gave him the answer he wanted. I said, ‘Oh, yes. I only like famous people.’ Who’s going to believe that? It’s ridiculous.”

And even the famous Shaw said he was totally charmed by Matthau, calling their relationship “a longstanding peculiar platonic love affair.”

“There was a kind of remarkable--I can only use the word antic --spirit about her,” he said. “She’s always had that.”

*

A Noel Coward kind of life? Charlie Chaplin might be more to the point. So would the great conductor Leopold Stokowski. The two artists were famous husbands of her two famous best friends--Oona O’Neill and Gloria Vanderbilt, respectively.

The three women met and coalesced during Matthau’s Cinderella youth, which came with all the by-the-book, rags-to-riches trappings. Her mother, Rosheen Doree, was only 16 when Matthau was born. (She never knew her father’s identity).

Matthau spent much of her childhood in foster homes while Doree worked in a hat factory, but Carol’s beautiful mother later made a brilliant match to Charles Marcus, the aviation pioneer who helped found the Bendix Corp.

The family reunited in an 18-room duplex on New York’s Fifth Avenue, and Matthau plunged into the giddy life of a debutante before the war. It was in that romantic context that Carol, Oona and Gloria joined forces.

Matthau wrote of their particular bond: “We had an unbreakable tie. No father, no father, no father. We have spent our lives making up for it.”

They began by marrying older men, preferably hugely talented ones. Matthau married William Saroyan, 16 years her senior, after Artie Shaw introduced them at a Hollywood restaurant. “I thought Saroyan was so dark, and oh,” Matthau says, suddenly projecting herself into the past, “he’s so old and everything. He’s wonderful .”

Their first marriage lasted from 1943 to 1949. “I was an idiot girl and all my friends were right there with me. I was taught that the man, that’s the thing.”

Matthau was wooed by Saroyan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning way with words, but love ultimately turned to fear of her emotionally abusive husband. “The fear was that he would stop loving me,” she says. “He was a man straitjacketed in his own poisons.”

Saroyan was a gambling man. And because of his great success as a writer, he had plenty to gamble with. In fact, he insisted on it. Matthau writes:

“ ‘You know, kid,’ he said to me . . . ‘I’m a writer who needs to be behind the eight ball. I’ve never done any writing when I had money.’ ”

Saroyan took care of that little problem by demolishing their savings. Later, Matthau found another inveterate gambler in Walter, a parallel she is unable to explain. But Felicia Lemmon says: “It’s masochism on her part. I think she’s attracted to that danger.”

What’s particularly telling about Carol is her tendency to soft-pedal her husbands’ costly flaws. “I would not have a discussion with Walter about it because it wouldn’t help the situation,” she says.

“She puts up with a lot of difficulties where other women might throw up their arms,” says Lemmon.

Saroyan’s abusive behavior, however, was ultimately not so easy to overlook. “When I loved him so much, I said to myself, ‘He’s in a rage because he’s a poet and he thought life was going to be so beautiful, as life could be really. And it’s the margin of disappointment that makes this rage.’ I didn’t know he had a belch.”

Matthau finally packed up their two children, Aram, now a writer, 49, and Lucy, a 46-year-old actress. (She is now estranged from the Saroyan children for reasons she won’t discuss. Aram didn’t return a reporter’s phone calls and Lucy couldn’t be reached for comment.) But with Chaplin pleading his cause, Matthau returned to Saroyan less than two years later. Artie Shaw says he helped mediate.

“She looked like a frightened rabbit. He yelled at her. He said, ‘I love you. I love you.’ I said, ‘Your voice says: I hate you.’ ”

“He put tremendous pressure on me to come back,” Matthau says, “and I’m not great under pressure. Oona kept saying, ‘He’s a writer. He’s plying his trade.’ I said, ‘I know, but I like it.’ ”

Their second stab at matrimony lasted only six months, and the second time Matthau left, she did it in grand style. While they were together, she writes, she was “the most perfect wife/friend/lover/cook/dry

eaner/gardener/shopper/housecleaner/secretary/laundress/housepainter/man’s man/you name it.”

Until his abuse escalated into physical violence. “One day, he threw me down a flight of stairs and began to try and choke me. He said to the children, ‘Look at your beautiful mother now.’ I said, ‘Goodby, Bill. I’m leaving.’ I never went back.”

And when she walked out, she left him with the legacy--and myth--of a perfect woman he’d never be able to replace. She calls it “the only act of my life that I could say was evil.”

*

Between marriages, Matthau led the high life in New York. She performed in Saroyan’s “The Time of Your Life,” was courted by beaus in after-theater dalliances and joined her childhood friend Truman Capote for 3 a.m. parleys at the Gold Key Club. At 7 a.m., they left to buy coffee and doughnuts that they would down in front of Tiffany’s.

Capote borrowed from those early morning jaunts to craft the personality of the offbeat heroine of his 1958 “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” although the events in Holly’s life were inspired by the life of a hooker he’d once known. And in his ritual mornings with Matthau, Capote would gently berate her for responding to men for the wrong reason--love.

“He just thought I should marry someone with tremendous money and sleep with anybody I wanted to,” she says, “but I could never live that way. It’s out of my orbit completely. I think love holds the hand of exclusivity.”

For her, love held the hand of Walter Matthau, a witty, outrageous young actor she met during the New York run of “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” Matthau was married at the time, and Carol’s initial assessment of Walter as “the perfect one-night stand” turned out to be off by several thousand nights. They married in 1959 and joined forces to produce Charlie, now a 29-year-old director who lives next door.

“To this day, he’s the one,” she says of her mate. “But now I’m married to a loving magnificent man. . . .”

“The duality with Walter is, Walter goes to a party and sort of drags himself through it because he hates to go to parties. But when we’re here alone it’s a party. He’s a beautiful man. The most tender. The most romantic. To this day--and we’ve been married forever--I can’t believe my good fortune. Not everyone gets a second chance.”

As for Walter, he is duly enthusiastic. “She’s a brilliant wit with ostensible evidences of ignorance. She looks like a dumb blonde until you start talking to her. . . . All sex is cerebral, and if you don’t have cerebration, then you can’t have celebration.”

Matthau began to write as a corollary to a strange illness she sustained in the mid-’80s that she was similar to anorexia in its effect if not intent. Her weight dropped to 80 pounds. Her eyesight failed. Her hair fell out in clumps. “I said, ‘My God, I’m disappearing,’ ” she says. Doctors called it “malabsorption.”

At the time, Walter was in Tunisia for Roman Polanski’s hapless “Pirates.” When they talked of Carol’s return to New York for medical care, “he didn’t want me to leave,” Carol says. “He was very unhappy on the picture. He said, ‘I won’t finish the picture,’ and I felt terrible when he said that. So I figured I’d stick it out . . . I made myself live. I think there’s a decision in death somewhere.”

Lemmon believes that Matthau’s concern for Walter was compounded by her own hatred of hospitals. But when Carol is asked whether her refusal to leave Walter behind in Tunisia crossed a line somehow, that perhaps she had taken the self-sacrifice demanded of the capital courtesan a life-threatening step too far, she quickly demurs.

“No. Because in the end I always do what I want to do. And I must have wanted to stay.”

When Carol returned to California, she took to writing snippets of her memoirs because writing “energized me” and helped her heal. But even now, Carol writes only in the hushed hours after Walter has gone to sleep, waiting until the sun breaks before she goes to bed herself. She is unabashedly devoted to Walter and the romantic ideals of her youth which she says are epitomized by the film “Wuthering Heights.”

“It’s about love unashamedly, passionate, passionate love. That’s the greatest thing in life--to fall in love and go crazy with it. There’s nothing going to beat that. Well, I’m still in that theater now.”