Jeannie Out Of The Bottle (3 page)

In the early thirties, my mother attended business college, where she learned dictation and accounting, and eventually she got a job at the Western Auto Company. In many ways, she was ahead of her time, and truly emancipated. Thinking back to my pioneer great-grandmother and my schoolteacher grandmother, I’d have to say that I was born of strong women, and that thought makes me proud.

Yet these women were also warm and loving, and I’ll always remember how lucky I felt as a little girl to have my mother’s hand to hold on to, and my grandmother’s as well. My grandmother would hold my hand loosely, my mother more firmly, but either way, they both made me feel safe and loved.

My mother was the baby of her family and was particularly close to her sister, Margie, who lived in San Marino, not far from LA (of which more later). Margie was as pretty as my mother, possessed a vivid, whimsical imagination, and christened everyone in the family with secret fairy names. I was dubbed “Music.” My mother was “Smile.” And Aunt Margie called herself “Mischief.”

I guess I must have inherited Aunt Margie’s fanciful imagination, because from the time I was a small child, I had three fantasy friends: Dagolyn, a girl; Good Johnny, a boy; and Bad Johnny, who I believed lived under my bed. Dagolyn and the two Johnnies were always a rich and vibrant part of my childhood imagination, though I loved Good Johnny best. Looking back, I can’t help wondering at the coincidence that my current husband, the love of my life, is named Jon.

Margie and my mother loved practical jokes and were always playing tricks on each other and the rest of the family. One time, my father (who didn’t like anyone to look at his feet, and always made sure to wear slippers or shoes) was fast asleep, and Margie and my mother sneaked into his room. While he was snoring away, they pulled back the bedcovers and painted his toenails red. When he woke up and caught sight of his bright red toenails, he went ballistic, but then calmed down and laughed uproariously.

Another time, one of my uncles, who worked for the government, had to attend a crucial business meeting, and when he wasn’t looking, Margie and my mother sewed up one of his pant legs so he couldn’t get it on. They were always playing practical jokes like that, and I was always vastly entertained by all their pranks, however childish.

My grandfather, Charles Benjamin Franklin, was a loving and kind man who took great care of me. At the end of most days, he’d put his snap-brimmed hat on, say, “Get your hat, Barbara Jean” (which is what my grandparents and everyone else called me back then), take me by the hand, and set off for the grocery store with me.

On the way back, he’d always stop at a bar and have a beer; I had a soda. One day I came home and informed my grandmother that I’d drunk a whole glass of beer all by myself. Such was the force of the conviction in my voice that she believed me and practically had a fit until my grandfather convinced her otherwise.

My grandfather had beautiful reddish brown curly hair, and I remember when I was about three and asked, “Can I wash your hair, Grandpa?” and he let me. Even then, it was clear that he couldn’t refuse me anything.

One day I begged him to buy me a pair of red shoes, and he did. When my grandmother saw them, she screamed, “Charles!” and whisked them away from me, putting them out on the fence. My grandfather and I exchanged rueful glances, but both of us knew better than to go against my grandmother’s iron will. By morning they had vanished, and I never saw them again.

Another time, I overheard my mother and my grandmother saying that they were going to the movies. Off they went, leaving me at home with my grandfather. I went over to him, tugged on his coat-tail, and said, “Grandpa?” Without looking up from his newspaper, he said, “Yes, child?” Encouraged, I went on, “Grandpa, would you take me to the movies?” Without a moment’s pause he said, “Yes, child.” Then he put on his hat, and off we went together.

At the movies, we won a raffle, and brought home our prize, a case of Dr Pepper, so we couldn’t hide our outing from my grandmother after all. Whether or not she minded, I’ll never know. But the memory of my grandfather’s good nature and abiding desire to please me always makes me happy.

My grandmother may have been puritanical and a little stern, but she also loved me without reservation. When I was about three, she and my mother became worried that I was thin and listless, so they took me to a doctor. The doctor took one look at my white, pinched little face and decreed, “She’s a hothouse flower! She needs sun. Get her outside and let her play in the mud. She’s far too clean.”

So my grandmother took me into the garden, presented me with a spoon and a can, and showed me how to make a mud pie, while I squirmed in distaste. And even though I obeyed my grandmother’s instructions to the last letter, as soon as I’d finished making one pie, I’d run inside the house and plead for her to wash my hands immediately.

I still remember vividly my grandparents’ house on Upson Avenue in El Paso—where my red shoes disappeared. It was built in the Victorian style, with a little walkway going around the porch. About four years ago, I was booked to do a show in New Mexico, and flew into El Paso. A couple of sheriffs were on hand to drive me over the state line to the theater, and on the way I asked them to take me by my grandparents’ house. It was still standing, and I was pleased.

When I was five, we moved to 1207 Bush Street in San Francisco. I attended my first school, Redding, and my life began in earnest. Not that I was happy to leave home for school. I felt far too safe and secure at home to want to venture out into the world, and I would much rather have stayed at home with my mother and my grandmother.

In fact, leaving my serene cocoon of home and family and being hurtled into school was a severe shock for me. On my first day there, my only happy moment was opening my lunch box and finding the sandwiches my mother had so painstakingly made for me that morning—a little piece of home.

I might have eventually settled down in school, but one day—just after I started the first grade—I looked up at the blackboard and suddenly couldn’t see a single word written on it. My parents were petrified that I might be going blind, and although the doctor’s diagnosis of a lazy eye was a relief, my mother still cried bitterly.

At the time, I couldn’t grasp the reason, but when the very next day the doctor hooked a black patch onto my glasses (“We must cover the strong eye and make the lazy one work” was his edict) and ordered me to wear it all the time, I understood the reason for my mother’s tears.

Funnily enough, none of the other children at school gave me a hard time about the patch. My only worry, though, was that I wouldn’t be able to read properly. I loved reading so much, and still do. Learning to read had opened a whole new world up to me, and my mother always said that I went to school one day, and the very next began to read without stopping.

My mother and aunt got me my first library card when I was in the first grade, and I read The Wizard of Oz and all L. Frank Baum’s other books, and The Secret Garden.

Although I spent hours and hours reading, lost in my imagination and quiet as a mouse, I still wasn’t an easy child to raise. I always questioned everything. I’d usually end up doing what I was told, but not without running through a long list of questions first. In fact, I once overheard a relative clucking to another of the aunts, “Alice is going to have her hands full with that one!” I felt a flash of pride, but the reality is that I was never much of a rebel.

Part of the reason was that I loved my mother so much, but I also knew that rebelling wasn’t polite and, more than anything else, I’d been schooled in politeness. Right through my childhood and way into my teens, whenever I went out, my mother always reminded me, “Always make sure you have your please, your thank you, and your handkerchief in your pocket.”

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, I also had an innate sense that we were living in dangerous times and that my parents were struggling to survive; I feared I could lose them at any minute in a bombing raid. After the United States entered World War II, San Francisco was on high alert. There were air raid alerts practically every night, blackouts were mandatory, and even the lampposts were partly painted black. I remember having to go to school with a little dog tag around my neck, which bore my name and address and the name of the person to contact if I were lost or wounded during an air raid.

Meanwhile, my parents were doing their utmost to scratch out a living. My father worked very, very hard doing PBX wiring on ships, which kept him out of the army. Other than that, he worked at Pacific Bell Telephone his entire adult life, until he became seriously ill and couldn’t work anymore.

His illness first manifested itself when he was traveling home from work on a streetcar and started vomiting blood. The doctors were puzzled to find cuts in his stomach; they speculated that ground glass somehow might have gotten into his food and that he unknowingly ate it, but none of the doctors ever knew for sure. Eventually he healed and went back to work, but he was never the same again. He became very angry and started to drink heavily. In the end, my parents had to sell their house on Forty-fifth Avenue so they could pay his medical bills. But although Mom and Dad were upbeat about the house sale, nothing was ever the same between them again.

In 1969 I was living in Sherman Oaks and married to my first husband, Michael Ansara, when I got a call from my mother telling me that my father had passed away from a cerebral hemorrhage, caused by a surge of high blood pressure. Afterward, paramedics found a great many blood pressure pills in his pocket. Though they had been prescribed for him, he had opted not to take them, for reasons I’ll never know. I felt guilty that I hadn’t been around to convince him to take the medication and that I hadn’t gone to visit him more often. I still feel I haven’t thanked him sufficiently for the man that he was. He worked so hard to support us.

My mother worked right through the war and after, as the credit manager for a Granat Brothers jewelry store. She didn’t own much good jewelry herself except for a watch and her wedding ring, but even if she wore costume pieces, people routinely stopped her in the street and asked her where she’d gotten them. She had a wonderful, inborn sense of style that never left her, not even at the end of her life when she was frail.

My parents’ financial existence was so perilous that we moved around a great deal. I attended five different schools in San Francisco, and we lived in five different homes, including one we shared with my aunt Margie and her husband.

We also spent a great deal of time with my great-aunts, Aunt Nora, Aunt May, and Aunt Nell, and with my great-uncles, Uncle Will and Uncle Tom, who lived in San Leandro and Vallejo, across the Bay. We’d go to visit them via the ferry, and when we’d come home very late at night, the foghorns would blare and I’d feel extremely sleepy and happy. I look back on those nights with warmth and affection.

Once I became a teenager, though, those happy times were punctuated by the occasional tussle with my mother over clothes, makeup, and of course boys. In high school I wasn’t really attractive; I was thin, underdeveloped, and geeky-looking. Even if I had wanted to improve my appearance, my mother would have stood in my way. She was very strict: she frowned on lipstick, and even if she had allowed me to wear more fashionable clothes, we simply couldn’t have afforded them. Later on, she drilled into me that I shouldn’t go steady too soon, and that I definitely shouldn’t marry early in life. In retrospect, I believe she wanted me to remain a little girl for as long as possible.

I don’t know whether it was due to the era in which I grew up or the way I was raised, but I was really sheltered, not in the least bit like teenagers today. I was so very square. I was banned from ever swearing; once, when I was long since an adult, my mother and I saw a swear word written on the sidewalk, and she went white and said, “Barbara Jean Huffman! That is not a good word.”

Such was my mother’s power over me that even when I appeared as the madam in a production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and the script called for me to repeatedly utter a four-letter word (one beginning with the letter f and ending in k), I initially couldn’t bring myself to say it.

I didn’t know anything about the facts of life until I was thirteen or fourteen, when my mother, who secretly believed that she was extremely progressive, read me a few excerpts from a book, Being Born. I must have given her a blank look, because she proceeded to have a whispered conversation with my father.

“Harrison, you’re her father. You have to tell her about it. She has to know,” she said.

My father gave a weary sigh.

“You’ve got a part in this, Harrison, whether you like it or not.”

“All right, Alice, all right,” my father said. “At breakfast, I’ll have my robe open and she’ll see the hair on my chest.”

So the very next morning, that’s exactly what he did: left his robe open so the hair on his chest was visible to me.

I blushed and looked away.

He saw my reaction and stuttered, “Barbara Jean, I—I just want you to know that as you get older, there will be body changes, so don’t be surprised or shocked by them.”

He didn’t say a word about the hair on his chest, and I remained none the wiser until a couple of girls at school set me straight and I finally learned what sex was all about.

EVEN WELL INTO my teens, dating wasn’t much of a priority for me, and I wasn’t at all bent on having any romantic entanglements, simply because my whole life revolved around my love of singing. From the time that I could first talk, I was determined to grow up and become a singer. Luckily for me, my mother—always my biggest cheerleader—supported me every step of the way.

Apart from singing with her while we did the dishes together (she washed, I dried), whenever we had company I used to entertain them with a song or two. One day when I was fifteen, my mother’s best friend, Elinor Hoffman, slipped me a hundred-dollar bill (which was probably equivalent to a thousand dollars in today’s money) and said, “Barbara Jean, you’re genuinely talented. You should study singing and this ought to help you.”