When they began looking for jobs, nobody wanted either one of them. Then she had an offer to work on radio in Tulsa, and they persuaded the station to hire them both for a total of $25 a week. He was twenty years old when they were married.
They put together a dollar or two and tried to crash Hollywood. They failed, went back to New York, found a cheap little Greenwich Village flat, and sold their car so they could eat. A baby was on the way.
Bob and Jennifer, whom he called “Phyl” all his life, took turns in tending Bob, Jr., while the other scoured the town job hunting. They were poor as church mice, happy as larks. These struggling days were bound to leave their mark on both of them.
He broke into New York radio in time to pay the obstetrician’s bills. He made a fair living in soap operas, so they had another baby. They outdid each other in looking after their two infant sons, born only a year apart.
One day Jennifer went out looking for a job, bearded David Selznick in his den, and landed herself a contract. Letting her go to Hollywood was almost a sacrificial blow to Bob, but he stayed in New York with his soap operas to hold up his end.
But lightning struck twice in the Walker household—the only miracle he ever knew. He was offered a part in Bataan that let him join Jennifer in California. They were wrapped up in each other’s happiness until Selznick fell madly in love with her; then the Walkers separated. She divorced Bob in June 1945, after six years of marriage. David’s wife, Irene—Louis B. Mayer’s younger daughter—was separated from her husband two months later. She divorced David in January 1949, and David and Jennifer were married six months later.
“The breakup with Jennifer,” said Bob on my patio, “gave me an excuse for amplifying my troubles. When I had a few drinks, I got to thinking about Poor Me and the broken home and all the et ceteras. Only now I can talk about it freely. I used to refuse to discuss my breakup with Phyl because I felt it was nobody’s business. I talk about it now because it’s part of the story that I want to get over. So far as I’m concerned, she is first and foremost the mother of my two children.”
He went on working, detesting himself. “Laying oneself open to be hurt,” he said, “is an agonizing way to be living.” He tried another marriage—with John Ford’s daughter, Barbara, after he’d known her eight weeks. That was two weeks longer than they lasted together as man and wife.
He relied chiefly on liquor for survival. It was a news picture of Bob Walker drunk in a police lockup, with fists clenched and mouth distorted, that convinced him he needed psychiatry. “I would rather have had a knife stuck in my side,” he told me, “because then I should have known what was wrong. There was terrific remorse the day after. I decided that sometime soon I was going to end up dead. I tried an analyst in town, but I wasn’t ready for him. My back wasn’t yet up against the wall.”
When Dore Schary took over Mayer’s job at Metro, he had Bob in for a talk. “I think you need help,” he said. “I want you to go to the Menninger Clinic.”