You've Got to Have Fights, Claims Anne Bancroft

NEW YORK--"The best time to pick a quarrel with your husband," said Anne Bancroft, a bride of three months, "is when he's just up. . .

"When he hasn't shaved yet and is mad at everybody anyway.
"That's when you bring up things like 'Why don't you hang up your ties?' or 'Why did you say all those things last night in front of those people?' That'll get him started!"
Miss Bancroft was gloating a little, I thought, over her success in picking quarrels with the writer-comedian Mel Brooks whom she married in August. She feels that only a quarrel-picker will get abused and insulted by her husband . . . and that getting abused by a husband makes a wife feel secure.
"It's in us all--a little bit of being pushed around is nice," she gleamed. "Don't you," she said, "like a little passivity in the girl?"
"I might it I ever saw any," I answered (cringing at the time, in case my wife heard me).
This strange discussion took place at the American La Ronde Room recently when Miss Bancroft was out plugging her new film, "The Pumpkin Eater," which has already won a Cannes Film Festival award.
"Mel would fly to London to see me on weekends -- risking his life coming over in a plane -- and then we would quarrel. . ."
Anne seemed to enjoy remembering that delicious battle. "He said something about my body -- and I said, 'My body! Don't you know that's my instrument?'
"He said, 'Oh, yeah? Well, let's hear you play "Begin the Beguine" on it.' That sort of broke the battle."
As we were chattering, Anne said suddenly. "We were married just three months ago today! I must bring him a flower . . . that'll make him feel bad . . . because he won't have brought me one."
In the Greenwich Village house of great charm where they live, Anne has, she said, provided a "thinking room" for her creative husband.
"But he's hardly ever in it," she added. "That is not the room he does his best thinking in."
With Anne in "The Pumpkin Eater" are Peter Finch, James Mason and the late Sir Cedric Hardwicke.
"Sir Cedric knew he was going to die when we were making the film," she recalled sadly. "He said he had to get out of England because 'once the fog comes in, I'll probably drop dead.' We got his part over as fast as we could to save him, but we didn't succeed after all.
Anne said the worst time to pick a quarrel with a husband is very late at night when he's about to go to sleep. He'll probably agree with every criticism . . . the ingrate!"