A View From a Broad (5 page)

Throughout my childhood I wore the clothes she made, but I never realized what an artist she was until the day we opened the Crate. For years and years the huge wooden box stood in the living room right by the front door. My mother would never open it or tell us what was in it. Finally, when we moved to our own house and she
did
open it, she cried. It was her trousseau, and everything in it was made by hand, made by her. Beautiful quilts, embroidered with tiny stitches, sheets, dish towels, antimacassars, doilies, nighties, undies—everything. She never used any of it. It was her finest work. Her Testament to Hope.

When I turned twelve, Mom decided it was time for
me
to learn to sew. Both my sisters had had to undergo this ritual, and now it was my turn. What an ordeal! But it was worth it. Finally, I could make the clothes of my dreams, ensembles inspired by the revolutionary Mr. Frederick of Frederick’s of Hollywood. It wasn’t long before I was the only eighth-grader in Honolulu to come to class wearing a flawless copy of Freddie’s Satin Surrender. Of course, Freddie’s version was black. Mine was crimson and lilac. And how could it be otherwise?

You see, one of the most important differences between a Mainland-born American and your true Island-born wahine, such as myself, is that Mainlanders are brought up to believe that navy blue, beige and gray are the colors of good breeding and good taste, while in my part of the world those colors are worn only by clerics and dowagers. This is more significant than
you may imagine, for I grew up in a blaze of color provided not only by orchids, bougainvillea, hibiscus and all sorts of other aggressively flamboyant works of nature, but by the people, who decorated themselves in ways that could blind the uninitiated eye. Yellow, aqua, orange, red, fuchsia and chartreuse was a combination I particularly favored . . . ah,
quel spectacle!

Of course, my roots are always in evidence whenever I put a show together, because I inevitably include at least one tropical number. I took part in so many Polynesian Festivals that show biz and the hula are synonymous to me.

My first hula teacher was a lady named Kuulei Burke, and she was held in much awe because her great-great-grandmother had danced in King Kalakaua’s court. She weighed in at 250 and liked to throw it around. I was not a favorite of Mrs. Burke’s and was always put in the back row with the other little girls who were not so hot. I didn’t care though, because I couldn’t remember the steps anyway, not to mention what my hands were supposed to be doing. I always had to keep my eye on the girl next to me so I could navigate my way through the maze of movement that was Mrs. Burke’s hallmark as a choreographer. If she caught anyone cheating in this fashion, she would make the poor chump stay after class and sweep up—a considerable punishment if you’ve ever seen the way a grass skirt sheds.

Mrs. Burke wore her hair in a large bun perched right on top of her head—very appealing if you happened to be a bird. Once when my class of utter losers was to perform at a local talent show, she insisted that we all wear our hair that way too. Mustering up the full strength of her 250 pounds, she pulled my hair up and back so tight that I had only two little slits where my eyes used to be. My usual trick for checking out the steps was completely out of the question.

As it turned out, that was the best thing that could have happened. Having absolutely no idea what the hell I was doing, I danced blindly out of the back row, knocking down several of Mrs. Burke’s pets in the front, and emerged triumphant center stage. The audience roared and cheered me on. Suddenly I was in the spotlight, and I wasn’t going back. I was just about to segue into a torrid little Tahitian number when two of the older girls came onstage and carried me off, kicking, into the wings.

Mrs. Burke was furious, but those few unfettered moments in the limelight were my first lesson in the power of spontaneity, and it was a lesson from which I’m still learning.

Anyway, that’s what it was
really
like to grow up in Hawaii. Don’t you think I should stick to the Tong Wars?

I
t was the last day of rehearsal, and there was so much I had to do. Unfortunately, I did nothing. Instead, I spent the day stuck inside a hot dog suit.

Unbeknownst to me, the demented designers of my ten-foot marvel had used Krazy-Glu in its construction. As luck—and the lack of proper circulation inside the wiener—would have it, the glue never set properly. As soon as I stepped inside for a fitting, my just-brushed hair formed an instant and permanent bond with the rubber foam. I screamed for my hairdresser to cut me out, but he was gone, off to the
Dinah Shore Show
to discuss the carcinogenic effects of hair dyes on certain kinds of elderly rats. I couldn’t just give a yank and let the hairs fall as they might. Not with my Seattle premiere only days away. There was nothing to do but wait.

It’s funny, you know, the things that go through your mind while you’re waiting to suffocate inside a rubber-foam wiener. Things like: “What the
hell
am I doing here?” “What was I thinking of?” And the inevitable: “I deserve this.”

Needless to say, the longer I spent stuck inside that intractable hot dog, the more I became convinced that the whole thing had been a birdbrained idea to begin with. And once I questioned the hot dog, I began to question everything else I was planning to do in the show. Like my characters, for instance.

I always like to take a few characters with me when I go out on the road. They let me do things I would never be brave enough —or, some might say, stupid enough—to do under my own name. The ladies I dream up are masks I can hide behind. And I
like hiding. And I like masks. In fact, I
love
masks.

Once, when I was about ten years old and as precocious as I was obnoxious, I sneaked into an out-of-the-way room in our local library that had always fascinated me. The room had no windows at all, and was dark and cool and as musty as an old dishrag. It was like no place else on the Island that I had ever seen, and I was always drawn to it, but for some reason, children were not allowed in.

On this particular day, however, the old Hawaiian guard who usually hovered menacingly by the door was not at his post. In fact, I had just seen him sitting under the big banyan tree in the courtyard staring bemusedly up at the sky. Something about the glazed look in his eyes told me he wouldn’t be making an immediate return.

So in I ran. I didn’t know what I wanted to do in the room exactly. Just be inside it, I suppose, because it was forbidden and because it was strange. But once in the room, my eye was caught by a book with a floridly designed cover that someone had left out on the reading table. It was called
The Decay
of
Lying,
and being, even then, a confirmed and joyous fibber, I wanted to see what the book had to say on the subject. I hated to think that lying, an art which I was only beginning to master, was on its way out.

Of course, the book wasn’t about telling falsehoods at all. It was by Oscar Wilde and it was really about masks and how the only interesting thing about someone is the mask he wears—not the “real” person behind the mask. The
persona
was what mattered, not the person. According to Wilde, all that someone had to do to be devastatingly exciting was to make up a fabulous mask.

What a revelation! And what a relief! To have a great personality I didn’t have to be a great person or even a passable one. All I needed was a great persona, and
that
I could invent. And what was most terrific of all, if someone didn’t like me or what I was doing, I could always peek out from behind my mask and say, “Just kidding!” Considering how shy and basically insecure I was, Wilde certainly seemed to have the answer.

Even today, I love slipping into a new persona as much as I love slipping into a new Halston one-of-a-kind. It’s much cheaper, and far more dramatic. I call my masks my “yarps,” from an ancient Anglo-Saxon word meaning “woman who fishes for compliments.”

Take Dolores. Or, as she is more formally known, Dolores De Lago, The Toast of Chicago, entertainer extraordinaire. I first dreamed up Dolores when I saw a picture of the Little Mermaid in my Danish phrase book. What a wonderful idea for a character, I thought. A mermaid! How innocent! How vulnerable! Of course, by the time I got finished filling in the details, the innocence and vulnerability had somehow fallen by the wayside. Now I’m afraid a character sketch of Dolores would have to go something like this:

Dolores De Lago: A woman of tremendous ambition and absolutely no pride at all; a woman of tremendous determination and absolutely no skill; a woman of the grandest notions and not the simplest hint of taste. And all this wrapped up in a temperament Caligula might envy. Who else but a woman like that would dream up an act as a mermaid cavorting about the stage in an electric wheelchair, complete with swaying palms and trick coconuts? Dolores calls her act
The Revue Tropicale
and includes in it such monoliths of mediocrity as “Crackin’ Up from Havin’ Lack of Shackin’ Up” and the inimitable “It Was Fiesta and I Had the Clap.” Drawing on the lowest form of show business imaginable, the Revue’s climax—if you can call it that— is the one-handed twirling of a set of Maori poi balls, a trick Dolores was taught by an itinerant sheep shearer from Wellington. She performs it with the utmost confidence. In this, as in all things, her belief in herself is awesome.

Yes, Dolores is a pretty tough cookie. But then, I have a weakness for tough cookies. In fact, the other character I thought I might drag around the world with me was a pretty rugged soul herself.

I named her “The Magic Lady,” after a wheezy old bag lady who took up residence on my stoop one sodden July. At first glance, my besotted stoopmate bore about the same relationship to the human race as leftovers do to the feast the night before. But no matter how bedraggled she looked, no matter how used up she appeared—and was—she always had a feisty spark in her eye and a ready smile. Unkempt and certainly unhinged, the way she raised her bottle to me whenever I went out or came back home was somehow reassuring. Bruised and beaten, beaten and bruised, she was still doing her part to connect. When winter came and they took her away, I found I really missed her. Making up “The Magic Lady” was the way I got her back.

Unlike sassy, muttonheaded Dolores, who is, let’s face it, a lot like me—or someone I might have become—The Magic Lady was, and remains, something of a stranger. Whatever parts of me she came out of are not the parts with which I’m in daily touch.
In many ways, she is the exact opposite of me, her response to experience totally different than mine: sensitive where I’d be glib; open where I’d be closed; forgiving where I’d be wailing for revenge. She sits there on that same old half-broken bench, in that same old battered coat, waving that silly umbrella, forgotten and ignored. Yet if you asked her, she’d be up in a minute, dancing around the maypole, telling you how wonderful it is to be alive and part of the human race.