atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business (4 page)

A Couple of Stars Fall out 

The Wind died down and the Thistle stopped spinning, and my brother Bruce died that summer. He had suffered for six years from colitis. Today they treat it with penicillin and can cure it quickly. In those days, before penicillin, they operated and operated and operated. The doctors didn’t know what they were doing. And when Bruce came out of his sixth operation, he caught on to their charade. He was twenty-one when he said to my mom, who was sitting at his bedside in the hospital, “I don’t want to live anymore.”

He turned his head to the wall and died.

When my mom told me this, we were in Boston sitting side by side on my bed at the hotel in Boston. We were there to be close to Bruce in the hospital. She started to cry. I was twelve years old, and I had never seen her cry before. I had never seen any adult cry before. I was sitting very close to her, but she didn’t hug me. I put my arm around her, which caused her to get up quickly and leave the room. I sat by myself for a while. Then I got my suitcase out and started packing.

Confined to the house for long recovery periods, Bruce had studied on his own with a tutor and taken the college boards in his bedroom. He had earned the highest marks and his pick of colleges. He had settled on Princeton or MIT. Now it didn’t matter. He wasn’t there to go anywhere.

The family ran aground after Bruce’s death. My father’s response was to drive himself even harder at work. I can see him coming across the front lawn in the evening, his brown overcoat, which he hadn’t bothered to button, open and flapping, his beat-up medicine bag in his hand. He walked slowly, worn out from performing mastoid operations all day at the free clinic. Penicillin could have taken care of that problem, too. The following year, a heart attack would pick him off as well.

Nothing for it. Grin and bear it.

I turned thirteen that last year. Dad had begun delegating. He hired an instructor to teach me how to ride horseback. My mother usually took me to the lesson, but one hot day, my dad didn’t go to work and took me to the riding academy himself.

“Stay in the ring,” he said. “Don’t go out on the trails. I’ll be back.”

My instructor, Mr. Fish, and I rode around the ring under the August sun until he said, “This is ridiculous. Nobody in their right mind rides around in circles under a sun like this.” So off we went to the cool woods and trails of the reservation.

Mr. Fish was funny and made me laugh. I adored him. He was about forty with an open, clear face that stayed immobile whether he was giving instructions or encouragement or telling a joke. I had just said something funny myself, and we were both laughing when we got back to find Dad standing by the stable door. He looked distant, like a cop before he makes an arrest. Suddenly, my body went cold and then numb, and then I felt like needles were stabbing me everywhere.

“Go on. Get in the car. Go ahead now,” he said from very far away.

He remained behind, chewing out Mr. Fish as I walked the long path to the parking area. I got in the front seat and waited. After what seemed like a day and a half, he came along and got in behind the wheel. He didn’t start the car; he just sat looking straight ahead. I could see he was trying to control his rage, find his balance. His face was so red that he looked like he was going to explode. Gripping the wheel and clenching his teeth, he might as well have been a character in the funny papers with a balloon above his head saying, “#’X!?#!*!”

“What did you think you were doing?” he finally said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Mr. Fish said it would be all right, that it was perfectly safe.” I started to sob. “That I was ready to do it.”

“I’ll tell you when you’re ready. Not some goddamned instructor. You’re not old enough to go cavorting around in the woods with that bastard. Who the hell does he think he is? You’re a child, for God’s sake! You’re a little girl, and he’s a grown man! He has no business taking you into the woods!”

It was hot in the car. The sun had moved, taking the shade of the tree with it. Sweat covered his face, but he paid no attention to it. His voice rose, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. The August heat made the stables shimmy in the distance. The sun glared on the car hood, hit the white fence around the riding ring, and blinded my eyes. He ranted. The air stopped moving. The trees stood at attention. A free-range turkey strutted by, unaware of its future. He roared on and reached a decibel level that made me cover my ears. I stopped crying. He was going to use up all the oxygen in the car with his yelling, but I didn’t move or open my window. I could see the headlines: “Hottest Day of the Year; Father and Daughter Cooked in Car.” I could no longer hear him. His mouth was moving, but there was no sound. Still looking straight ahead, hands white-knuckled on the wheel, he saw the turkey crossing in front of him. He tried to swerve to avoid hitting it before he realized the car wasn’t moving. It was then that I fell asleep.

*       *       *

My father died that November, one morning shortly before his birthday. He had been out in the yard rigging up a run for the new dog, a springer spaniel named Buck who was going to go hunting with us the next week. Dad went into the house and upstairs, where he told my mom that he didn’t feel well and went into their bedroom to lie down. She called his friend Dr. Synott, who came right over, but again, in those days there was nothing he could do to save Dad.

My mother met me at the front door when I came home from school. I followed her into the dining room, where she stopped in front of the sideboard. We stood there in front of the picture of Jim and Bruce as babies in white gowns playing beside a fish pond. I was fingering a crocheted lace runner as she said, “He’s gone.” I didn’t respond. I just stood there. Suddenly, she threw her arms around me, then just as suddenly pulled away and ran upstairs. After a while, I went into the kitchen, where I ran into Nellie, the cook, who wanted to comfort me and hug me. I broke away from her and ran up the back stairs to my room.

Later that day, I stood in my dad’s study, next to my parents’ bedroom, where he was lying. My report card lay on his desk, unsigned. I had gotten all the A’s he had ordered. It came to me that if I went in where he was and kissed him on the lips, he would come back to life. I didn’t do it. Years later, I told a group of people about the shame I felt about this fantasy, and one of the women said, “Oh, yes. That happened to me, too.”

*       *       *

Twelve years after his death, my father came to see me in my first appearance on Broadway. The play was Moonbirds by Marcel Aymé. It starred Wally Cox and Sir Michael Hordern. I was the ingénue in this French farce, so naturally my second entrance was in a merry widow corset. While I was onstage stealing the scene, I saw a man sitting in the first row studying me. He frightened me. I wished he would go away. Who was he? A critic? No, a critic would be wearing a jacket and taking notes. This man looked as if he had just been working in the garden. He possessed a power that threatened to paralyze me.

A chill charged through me, and I saw that it was my father sitting there—not a ghost, but very real. For a moment, I thought I was going to faint. All my life I had been performing for him. All my life he had been there egging me on and then leaving just when I needed him to stay.

So now what’s he up to? Is he always going to show up and sit there? Let me know I’m just a little kid still? Suddenly, my fantasy saved me. Strength rose in me and led me to drive him out of his seat, will him up the aisle and through the exit door, and kick him out of the theater. I went on with the scene.

He still comes back to haunt me, telling me to stay small, hide, apologize, get his permission, acknowledge his authority. But I’m okay; I watch out. I point to the exit, and to my amazement, he goes.

Mom On-stage 

One night my mother put on her Montclair hat, the high-crowned tweed, over her curling rods before she came to pick me up at Miss Sawyer’s Dancing School. The curlers were large and formed what looked like a hat itself. The tweed looked like a second hat on top of them. When I asked her the next day how she could appear like that in public, she said, “It was dark and raining, and I didn’t think anyone would notice.”

That was the night Bumble had asked me to join him for the last dance. Bumble was tall and skinny and had curly, dark brown hair. He had a gawky walk, and I could hear Felix the Cat cartoon music as he beelined across the dance floor to me. Then he did his Jimmy Cagney impression: “Wanna dance, kid? Shake a leg, maybe?” I said, “Why, yes, I’d love to, ya big lug.” We slow-danced off.

When he asked if he could drive me home, I told him my mother was coming for me, so he offered to escort me through the rain to my carriage. We were Scarlett and Rhett leaving the ball. He held his coat over my head as we walked along the driveway, protecting me from the storm, looking for my mom.

As my mother pulled up, backlit by the lights of the car behind her, she became a two-headed silhouette, one head growing out of the other. Bumble was not prepared for her. He took Kay Watt home the next week and didn’t ask me to dance again.

“He is the first regret of my life,” I said.

“He doesn’t have enough inner resources,” Mom said.

*       *       *

I was fifteen when my mother and I, in an effort to recapture some of the fun we’d had at the shore back when we were a family, took a trip to the beach. This was before swimming caps were covered with rubber flowers. My mother put on a plain white one as we faced the breakers on an empty Long Island beach. We dove into one that was higher than we had expected and were immediately knocked down and dragged away from the shore. We were rolled and mixed with the sand, the seaweed, and the horseshoe crabs. The air was pounded out of us, and water stuffed our noses and throats. The ground switched from above to below us and back again, making it impossible to get our footing. I saw my mother, her white cap gone, being pulled out to sea; she was caught in the undertow of the ebbing wave. I tried to grab her but missed. She disappeared into another wave and then reappeared, and I grabbed again. That time, I got hold of her. In a valley between waves, salt scraping my eyes, I got my head into the air, coughed, and spit until my lungs started working again. Then, gripping her wrist, I dragged her onto the beach, where we lay in the hard sunlight next to a giant timber from a ship that had been washed up just ahead of us.

I lay there thinking of my mother’s hats and how when she went ice skating, she wore a red band around her head to keep her hair in place. I loved my mother in red. She wasn’t much of a skater, but she was game and would skate around the edge of the rink while my father waltzed, fox-trotted, and tangoed in the center with the other women in the club. Once in a while, he’d go over and waltz with her, but it was a shaky affair. It was too late in her life for her to become an athlete. She had been so beautiful that she’d never been called upon to be anything else.

I loved my mother in her black evening dress with the red poppies on it. Her innate wisdom couldn’t be matched, and her naïveté had always protected her. She had a good mind and loved to laugh, but when Bruce died and my father followed the next year, she became lost, left alone with only me in a three-story house that used to be full of servants, children, company, various dogs, and my father. Now it was hard to keep going.

I loved my mother in her cornflower-blue evening dress that she wore with her pearl dangle earrings. I can smell the French perfume she would dab behind her ears. Essence of Héliotrope Blanc, contained in a miniature crystal whiskey decanter, stood faithfully on her dresser at the ready.

Oh, please Mom, I would think, make some friends and get a life and let me go. She couldn’t do that. She clung to me, and I squirmed away.

I loved my mom in her New York hat with the breathtaking wide brim and the “I dare you” red wooden cherries on it.

Some time after the near-drowning incident, I stood in the driveway with her under the cherry tree as its blossoms blew away on the spring breeze. She wasn’t wearing any hat at all. She said, “When I die, I’d like to go like that, just like a leaf floating on the wind.”

Then she said, “My wedding dress is on the shelf in my closet. I’d like to be buried in it.”

She believed she was going to see them again, Bruce and Dad.

Aunt Bea Spills the Beans 

My apartment on the Upper West Side at tea time.

My Aunt Bea started it.

“You know your father had a log cabin on top of the old Hotel Nassau?”

“In Manhattan?”

“Thirty-fourth and Lexington.”

“I never knew that.”

“Nobody in your family knew it.”

“Mom would have known.”

“Your mother didn’t know anything.”

“How did you know?”

“He invited your uncle Gardiner to dinner there when I was in the hospital.”

“I don’t believe this!”

“It’s true. Gardiner told me about it. Could I have another cookie? They are so—”

“What! What did he tell you?”

“Oh, I probably shouldn’t have—”

“Tell me!”

“Well, it was a snowy night, and Ed said, ‘Come on, Gardiner. I’ll blow you to dinner.’ They went to the Hotel Nassau, up in the elevator and out on the roof, and there, sitting in the middle of the snow, was a log cabin with smoke coming out of its chimney. They could have been way off in the woods somewhere if it hadn’t been for the water tower. They went inside, and there were candles on the table, a white linen tablecloth, silver dinnerware, and a colored maid to serve them. How about some more coffee?”

I went into the kitchen. I had no idea my father had spread himself so thin. Here’s what I knew about my father. He was a doctor. He thought he was going to live forever, so when he died we had to pay a double inheritance tax: one in New Jersey, where we lived, and one in New York, where he practiced because he wanted to be able to vote wherever he was and influence everyone he could.

I came back to the living room with coffee and cookies for my aunt.

“Is that where they had dinner?”

“Lovely dinner. Cocktails, roast chicken, salad, apple pie.”

“Goodness.”

“Coffee. Brandy.”

“Did Uncle Gardiner tell you this?”

“Gardiner told me everything.”

“Did you tell Mom?”

“Of course not. What do you think I am?”

“Why are you telling me?”

“Well, it’s all ancient history now, don’cha know?”

“I suppose. You think he had trysts there?” I said.

“You tell me.”

Aunt Bea looked at me sideways.

“I guess with the candles and all… I know he used to get a red rose delivered to him every Christmas. One year the rose came and it was withered, and then no more after that. He and Mom had a huge fight about it, doors slamming and everything.”

“You don’t say.”

In the silence Aunt Bea reached for a cookie and popped it into her mouth. Crunch

. . . crunch. She brushed her fingertips together to get rid of the crumbs. Her manicured hand was covered with age spots.

This revelation of Dad’s secret other life made me shake inside. Why didn’t we know this about my dad? I needed to breathe. I needed my Aunt Bea to go home.

“Did Uncle Gardiner tell you about the bathtub gin and the FBI?” I said.

She stopped mid-bite and squinted at me. Her silver-rimmed glasses reflected the setting sun from the window behind me.

I said, “Well, what we knew was that Dad had access to medical alcohol. Mr. McCarthy, the manager of the Hotel Nassau, had access to empty rooms with bathtubs. They’d meet on Saturday afternoons and make gin.”

“Never heard that.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “and one afternoon when they were busy in the bathroom, the desk clerk rang to say FBI men were on their way up with a search warrant. So Dad and Mr. McCarthy turned into Laurel and Hardy, stumbling over each other to hide the apparatus and pull the plug out of the tub. The last of the gin went glug glug glug down the drain just as there was a knock on the door. Mr. Mac opened it. Two men flashed their badges and asked him if he was the manager. He said he was, and how could he help them?

“One of them said in a low voice, ‘We have a warrant for the arrest of some counterfeiters we believe are in the room next door.’ Mr. McCarthy whispered back, ‘Be my guest. Here’s my passkey.’ The counterfeiters were taken away, and Dad and Mr. Mac were still at large, minus a bathtub full of gin.”

Aunt Bea sat stunned. How had she missed this? What else had Uncle Gardiner kept from her? The room had grown dark.

“That was excellent gin,” she said. I could see she remembered it. She sighed and said, “Where’s my hat?”

*       *       *

Later, after she’d gone, as I was doing the dishes, images of my dad bounced around in my head. When I was five, I thought he was a train conductor on the New York Ioneer. Great trains had names like that in those days: the Northwest Commander, the Southern Pacific, the New York Ioneer.

“He’s not a conductor. He’s a doctor,” said my mother.

“On a train?” I said.

“No, he takes the train to the New York Eye and Ear Hospital.”

“Why does an eye and ear need a whole hospital?” I said.

My mother, who was driving the car at the time, said, “Sweetie, I can’t talk to you just now. I have to make a turn.” It was a lot for me to keep up with.

Dad was usually late for his train because he’d have been in the backyard looking at his roses. At the last minute there was a mad scramble of running up and down stairs, dogs barking, my mother calling, “Ed, I’ll go warm up the car!” and Dad answering, “Where’s my bag, Margaret?” “Just where you left it!” she’d call back, and the screen door would slam and she’d start crunch crunching on the gravel to the garage while he looked for his bag in the closet upstairs and I’d look in the hall closet where he usually left it. Finally one of us would find it, and the three of us would end up in the Packard chasing the De Camp Bus because he’d missed the train. After he was safely on the bus, my mother and I would turn to each other and sing, “De Camptown Race Train five miles long, oh de doo-dah day.”

My father raised money for the new hospital where he served as executive surgeon. He worked long hours and donated his services to the clinic once a week. The porous mastoid bone behind the ear can get infected in cold and flu season or from swimming in public pools. In those days, it had to be drained in a delicate procedure, and Dad could perform up to fifteen mastoid operations a day. Today that procedure has been replaced by a dose of antibiotics. Out in the world, my dad was beloved by all for his generosity, good looks, and charm.

Sometimes he’d call from New York to tell my mother that he wouldn’t be home for dinner—not often, but enough that I remember it.

Coming home, he was on his own. He’d take the crosstown bus and a downtown subway and then stop at the Washington Market. He’d pick up some Roquefort cheese, consider the moose head on the wall behind the butcher, and then hop on the ferry to Hoboken, where he’d call my mother to tell her which train he’d be taking. Then he’d buy a paper and board the DL&W. commuter train (dubbed by us the Delay, Linger, and Wait). There he’d take a seat and proceed to get furious with the “commie pinkos,” Max Lerner, and the World-Telegram. I can hear him muttering “Dog-eat-dog” and “Sonofabitch, country’s a shipwreck.” No wonder he sometimes went to his log cabin instead.