Carol Matthau, 78; Writer, Longtime Wife of Walter Matthau

Carol Matthau, a former actress and writer who married famously three times -- twice to author and playwright William Saroyan and once to actor Walter Matthau -- died Sunday of a brain aneurysm at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.

She was married to the celebrated comic actor for 41 years until his death in 2000 at age 79. Her first marriage to Saroyan in 1943 lasted six years; her second, in 1951, lasted six months.

In between, she was wooed by critic Kenneth Tynan and writer James Agee, and she professed to be the inspiration for Holly Golightly, the insouciant protagonist of Truman Capote’s 1958 novella, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

She wrote, often tartly, of her circle of Hollywood and literary friends in a 1992 memoir, “Among the Porcupines.” The book, which was warmly reviewed by critics, fairly drips with well-known names, from Isak Dinesen and Henry Miller to Maureen Stapleton and Cary Grant.

“It seems strange that everyone I’m writing about was very famous,” she wrote. “I wonder about it too. Didn’t I ever find anyone interesting who was not famous? Actually, no, I didn’t.”

Foster Homes

Matthau’s early life was anything but charmed. Born in New York City, she never knew her father and lived in foster homes as a young child after her Russian immigrant mother, Rosheen Doree, went to work in a factory after a failed marriage.

When she was 8, her mother married Bendix Corp. executive Charles Marcus, who warmly welcomed his wife’s illegitimate daughter. Matthau lived with them in a posh, 18-room apartment on Fifth Avenue. Like Cinderella, she was transformed. She used $50 lace handkerchiefs, attended the tony Dalton School and became best friends with Oona O’Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill (and later the wife of Charlie Chaplin), and Gloria Vanderbilt, the socialite and fashion maven.

She was a 16-year-old blond beauty when bandleader Artie Shaw, a family friend, introduced her to Saroyan at a Hollywood restaurant. She knew all about Saroyan, having acted in his play “Jim Dandy” in school. She thought that the mustachioed Armenian American, who had won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for the play “The Time of Your Life,” “looked like a gangster,” but she found him thrilling.

“On a superficial, social level, I don’t think there was a more charming man,” Matthau wrote. “He was funny, articulate, and you could never guess what he was going to say next.... He really talked to me and I was really able to talk to him -- of people, the world. I learned from him.”

Saroyan, who was twice her age, was infatuated with the striking debutante, who, like her pals O’Neill and Vanderbilt, maintained an ethereal pallor with the aid of chalky-white face powder. But he told her that he would not marry her until he knew she could bear children, and she complied. When they were married in a civil ceremony in Dayton, Ohio, in 1943, she was two months pregnant with their first child, Aram. A daughter, Lucy, was born in 1946.

The marriage was tortured almost from the start. In the 1940s, Saroyan was one of the most successful writers in the country, earning $75,000 a year in book and play royalties. But he was a hopeless gambler who squandered their savings and abused her emotionally and physically. By Matthau’s account, their marriage ended for the final time after he threw her down a flight of stairs and attempted to choke her in front of their children.

She popped up in his autobiographical writings over the years. Friends said Saroyan, who never married again, remained in love with her until his death from cancer in 1981 at age 72.

She moved into her own apartment and supported herself and the children by acting and writing. She wrote a 1955 novella, “The Secret in the Daisy,” under the name Carol Grace.

Breakfast With Capote

She often joined Capote, a childhood friend, at a Manhattan nightclub for 3 a.m. parleys over gin and beer. At 7 a.m., they would buy a breakfast of coffee and doughnuts and eat it in front of Tiffany & Co. Years later she reported in her memoir that he told her that she was the model for Holly Golightly. “You are Holly,” she recalled him saying. “It’s just that you don’t do those rotten things Holly did.”

She met Walter Matthau in 1955 when she was hired as an understudy in a play he was starring in, “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” A rising star on Broadway, he had a raunchy humor that she found appealing. “He was the most fun to talk to because his mind always ran away from the conversation you had begun to the conversation that he had decided to have, and that conversation was either about what he was going to have for dinner that night or if he had been to the loo that day (and whether or not he was happy about it),” she wrote. She decided that he was “the perfect one-night stand” and proceeded to seduce him, although he was married.

Lasting Affair

Despite her calculation, she fell in love with the actor. They had an affair for four years, finally marrying in 1959. In 1962, their son, Charles, was born.

Like Saroyan, her second husband also had a gambling problem. Several years into their marriage, they found themselves several hundred thousand dollars in debt. But she was supremely tolerant of his addiction. “She has the gifts of a born courtesan,” longtime friend Stapleton told People magazine in 1992. “Most wives would yell if their husband had the monumental gambling problem Walter [had], but not Carol.”

“I have always felt like the girl of the world with him,” Matthau wrote of her actor-husband, holding little back in explaining their deep bond. “We slept together everywhere. This has never waned....” She later added: “Of course, we have all been taught that sex is the first thing to go, but I know differently. Money is the first thing to go.”

Her memoir barely mentioned her children with Saroyan. In later years, she acknowledged that she was estranged from them for reasons she would not disclose. Aram became a writer, who has published works of fiction and nonfiction. Lucy, an actress, died in April at age 57.

Matthau is survived by her sons, Aram of Los Angeles and Charles, a filmmaker, of Manhattan; a sister, Elinor Pruder of Brooklyn; and three grandchildren.