Crazy Salad (18 page)

Bootsie carried on. She alerted the press as to her comings and goings. She appeared at a Washington literary party and identified herself as the woman who had knocked Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s breakup off the front page. She spoke to a group of Democratic women, many of whom cried as she vowed to continue
as first lady. “I want you to know that I am a very proud woman,” she said, “very very proud of everything I’ve done since I’ve been a little girl. Life does not always work out the way you want it.…”

In the end, what kept Barbara Mandel in the governor’s mansion as long as she stayed was not the pathetic hope that her husband would return—she had long given up on that—but the fact that her presence there was the only wedge she had to negotiate a substantial money settlement. Mandel’s first offer to his wife, she told friends, was $6,250 a year, a quarter of his yearly salary as governor. Her lawyer ultimately negotiated a six-figure settlement. And on December 20, with a crowd of reporters standing outside the wrought-iron gates, Barbara Mandel moved out, with her hope chest, love seat, artificial flower centerpieces, and eight wardrobe boxes of clothing. “Five and a half months have passed and our marriage has not returned to normal,” she said. “Therefore, with deep regret, I am leaving the mansion.”

She moved to a two-bedroom apartment in Baltimore—in the same complex where her married son and daughter live—and when I reached her on the telephone, she told me she preferred not to say anything. “I’m very busy,” she said. Doing what? I asked. “Just the normal things,” she said, “the normal things you have to do for yourself.”

“I’ll tell you a story,” one of her friends said a few days ago. “The day after Marvin moved out, last July, Bootsie went to the family cemetery. She sat looking at the graves, and she wished that he were dead. She felt she would have been better off as a widow. I can’t help thinking she was right.”

January, 1974

I suppose it is completely presumptuous for me to write even one word on the saga of Pat and Bill and Lance and Kevin and Grant and Delilah and Michele Loud. Last year, I managed to miss every single episode of
An American Family
. But I did catch the Louds on the talk shows, and it seemed to me at the time that, with the possible exception of Tiny Tim, no group of people had ever passed so quickly from being celebrities to being freaks. I was amazed at the amount of time they lingered on, being analyzed in print, taking up space on the air, stealing valuable time from any number of people I would prefer to have read about or seen, even including Shecky Greene. Finally, though, like a toothache, the Louds went away. And the other day, when Pat Loud’s book arrived in the mail, I felt terrible that I had not spent the months of their absence grateful for it; it is always easier to have a toothache return when you have at least had the sense to appreciate how wonderful it was not to have had one.

Pat Loud: A Woman’s Story
was written by Mrs. Loud with Nora Johnson, and the publicity director at Coward, McCann & Geoghegan
assures me that its style—which is slick and show-biz rat-a-tat-tat—reflects Mrs. Loud’s way of speaking exactly. “Gloria was a lamb chop.” “Rose gardens he doesn’t walk through.” Like that. The book itself is sad and awful, and at times quite fascinating and moving. All these adjectives ring a bell: it seems to me that they were applied to the television series as well. In fact, the only thing about Pat Loud’s book that is different from the television series that propelled her into her book contract is that no one who reads it will ever wonder Why She Did It. She did it because she wanted to tell her side. She did it because she had very little else to do. And she did it because she has come to believe that her brand of letting-it-all-hang-out candor is valuable to others in her position. Will she ever learn?

“Every other writer and cocktail circuit sociologist is contemplating the problem of the 46-year-old mother-housewife who suddenly isn’t needed anymore,” Mrs. Loud writes. “But most of these ‘problem women’ never had what has saved me, at least so far, from that devastating moment of truth: instant fame.” The television show may not have saved Pat Loud from the truth—her own head seems to have done that job perfectly well. But the experience certainly confused her, and confused the issues involved to boot. Pat Loud’s book is not the straight I-found-myself-through-divorce women’s lib confessional; her case is too unusual. Rather, it is a rambling, perplexing, contradictory account by a woman who is trying, and failing, to make some sense out of a series of events that probably defy sensible explanation.

The real story of the Loud marriage, as told in this book, is a good deal more complicated and tacky, mainly tacky, than what I gather came out in the television series. The Louds and their five children lived in Santa Barbara, California, Pat working hard at being Supermom, Bill at his strip-mining-equipment business. As
the marriage went on and the number of children increased, Mrs. Loud began finding telltale clues around the house. First a love letter to Bill from another woman, then a loose glove in his suitcase, lipstick on his handkerchiefs, a brochure from a Las Vegas hotel. The love letter enraged her so that she packed her four children into the family car—she was pregnant with the fifth—and drove off into the night. As it turned out, she did not get very far; Mrs. Loud, who has no selectivity index whatsoever, explains: “When I’m pregnant, I have the trots all the time, and sometimes it’s really essential to get to a john fast … and there wasn’t any gas station.… So finally I turned around and went home.” In 1966, she found a set of her husband’s cuff links, engraved “To Bill, Eternally Yours, Kitty,” and all hell broke loose. Her husband assured her he had bought the cuff links in a pawn shop, but she did not believe him. So she snuck off, had an extra set of his office keys made, and while he was off on a business trip she went to look through his files.

“It was all there,” she writes, “as though it had been waiting for me for years—credit card slips telling of restaurants I’d never been to and hotels I’d never stayed at, plane tickets to places I’d never seen, even pictures of Bill and his girls as they grinned and screwed their way around the countryside.”

Bill Loud returned from his business trip. Pat Loud slugged him, in front of the children. He slugged her back, in front of the children. They both went to see a psychiatrist. They both stopped seeing the psychiatrist. They spent night after night getting drunk as Bill Loud recited the intimate sexual details of his infidelities. The subject of open marriage was introduced. Pat Loud began going to local bars during lunch and picking up businessmen. “We would have a few drinks and some tortillas,” she recalls. “Then we would let nature take its course.” She threatened divorce. He started seeing his women again. And in the midst of this idyllic existence,
Craig Gilbert, a film-maker with a contract from public television, came into their home and told them he was looking for “an attractive, articulate California family” to do a one-hour special about.

It is impossible to read this book and not suspect that Craig Gilbert knew exactly what he was doing when he picked the Louds, knew after ten minutes with them and the clinking ice in their drinks that he had found the perfect family to show exactly what he must have intended to show all along—the emptiness of American family life. Occasionally, in the course of this book, Pat Loud starts to suspect this, nibbles around it, yaps like a puppy at the ankles of truth, then tosses the idea aside in favor of loftier philosophical pronouncements. “If he knew it,” she concludes, “it was not necessarily because he actively smelled it about us, but because he knew in a way what we didn’t—that life is lousy and it’s tragic and it’s supposed to be and you can pretend otherwise if you want, but if you do, you’re wrong.”

Gilbert had no trouble persuading the Louds to cooperate. Bill had always been outgoing and exhibitionistic. Pat, for her part, saw the show as a way to appear as she had always wanted to—the perfect mother, cheerfully beating egg whites in her copper bowls. When Gilbert informed them that the show was going to be so good that he would shoot enough for five specials and then twelve, the Louds consented, apparently without a tremor of anxiety.

“Of course,” Pat Loud writes, “if you’re going to be in print or on the radio or TV, you can’t help thinking of all the people who will read or see you, and the first ones I thought of were all Bill’s women. There they would sit in frowzy little rented rooms scattered about California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona, little gifts from Bill here and there, a memento from some trip or something he’d bought them, pathetic scraps of forgotten pleasure in their failed and lonely worlds. Their bleached blond hair would be
falling sloppily out of its hairpins and their enormous breasts would be falling equally sloppily out of their torn, spotty negligees as they clutched their glasses of Scotch and rested their fat ankles on footstools to relieve their aching, varicose veins.… In pathetic, panting interest they would turn on their televisions to look at the Louds, and they would weep.… If they’d had Bill for a few hours or days, if they’d had a few sessions of what they probably thought of as blinding ecstasy, I had had him a thousand times more.”

—

Pat Loud offers a number of other explanations as to why her family agreed to Gilbert’s proposal—the one she seems to believe most firmly is that anyone would have. But she is less sure about why the reaction to the show was so enormous. “What nerve have we touched?” she asks at one point. “I would like to know; I would really like to know.” I suspect I know. I think the American public has an almost insatiable need to feel superior to people who appear to have everything, and the Louds were the perfect vehicle to fill that need. There they were, a beautiful family with a beautiful house with a beautiful pool, and one son was a homosexual, the rest of the children lolled about, uninterested in anything, and the marriage was breaking up. All of it was on television, in
cinéma vérité
—a medium that at its best (I’m thinking of the Maysleses’
Salesman
and the Canadian Film Board’s
Lonely Boy
and
The Most
) has always tended to specialize in a certain amount of implicit condescension.

It is on the subject of the making of the series that Pat Loud is most interesting.
Cinéma vérité
film-makers have always insisted that after a time, their subjects forget the cameras are there, but as Pat Loud makes clear, it’s just not possible. “You can’t forget the camera,” she writes, “and everybody’s instinct is to try and look as
good as possible for it, all the time, and to keep kind of snapping along being active, eager, cheery, and productive. Out go those moments when you’re just in a kind of nothing period.… You don’t realize how many of those you have until you’re trying not to have them.… And what you also don’t realize is that you
have
to have them—they’re like REM sleep.”

Ultimately, Pat Loud seems to have come to believe that she owed more to the film-makers than she did to herself or her husband; any concept of dignity or privacy she may have had evaporated in the face of pressure from them. Again she nibbles around the edges of this, almost but not quite getting it, but the suggestions of what happened are there: the illiterate Californians trying to impress the erudite Easterners; the boring, slothful family attempting to come up with a dramatic episode to justify all that footage; the woman who had always tried to please men—first her father, then her husband—now transferring it all to Craig Gilbert.

And when, in the course of events, Pat Loud decided she wanted a divorce, Craig Gilbert convinced her that she owed it to him, to all of them, to do it on the air. “If I decided to divorce during the filming,” Mrs. Loud says Gilbert told her, “I must be honest enough to do it openly and not confuse the issue further by refusing to allow it to be shot.” Again she almost has it, almost sees how she was conned, and then falls into utter nonsense. “Couldn’t it be,” she asks, “that since circumstance and fate had put me in a position to rip away the curtain of hypocrisy, that maybe, just maybe, we could help other families face their problems more honestly?” And then she switches gears, and makes sense again: “A psychiatrist told a friend of mine recently that in his experience he’d found that there is almost always a third force present when divorce finally happens. The miserable marriage can wobble on for years on end, until something or somebody comes along and pushes one of the
people over the brink.… It’s usually another man … or another woman … or possibly a supportive psychiatrist; in my case, it was a whole production staff and a camera crew.…”

And so the marriage and the television series ended, and along came the notoriety. And now there is the book, and there will be more: more talk shows, more interviews. It all seems sad; there is no way to read this book and not feel that this bumbling woman is way over her head. She has made a fool of herself on television, and now she is making a fool of herself in print. She does not understand that it is just as hard to be honest successfully as it is to lie successfully. And now, God help her, she has moved to New York. She will get a job, she tells us at the end of the book, and perhaps she will be able to fulfill her fantasy. Here is Pat Loud’s last fantasy. She’s at this swell New York cocktail party, “exchanging terribly New York in-type gossip about who’s backing what new play and who got how much for the paperback rights to Philip Roth’s latest,” and there is this man who takes her to dinner, and then to bed, and they have a wonderful affair. “I’m not saying he would solve everything, or pick up the pieces, or even make me happy. Nor is he as important as a good job. But the nice thing about fantasies is that you don’t have to explain them to anybody. They are absolutely free.” There she goes again, almost making sense, talking about the importance of work, and the need not to look to anyone for the solution of her problems, and then she blows it all. “They are absolutely free.” That’s the thing about fantasies. They’re not absolutely free. Sometimes you pay dearly for them. Which is something Pat Loud ought to have learned by now. Will she ever?