Love, Ellen: A Mother/Daughter Journey (14 page)

I opted to buy her the cassette player in Atlanta. Lucky me that Ellen would later reward me with all that she offered and more—except for buying me Dallas, that is.

Ellen’s struggles were far from over. Her next letter came during one of her low points—after the old Chevy Vega broke down and her latest job had gone bust. Comedy wasn’t paying the bills—nor was anything else, for that matter. She wrote in November of 1980:

Work and lack of money had her down, and I gathered that she was also really yearning for someone special in her life. When I asked in my letter if she had met anyone recently, she wrote back:

Two weeks after that low, Ellen’s fortunes changed significantly when she auditioned for Clyde’s Comedy Corner in the French Quarter, the hottest comedy club in New Orleans at the time. The people at the club were impressed enough to give her a regular Monday night spot—for pay. Not only that, she wrote, but a man named Marty Bensen, a VIP in the comedy business who had caught her act, had told her, “You’re a natural. You’re real funny. I think you’re gonna do it.”

And thus Ellen entered the world of professional standup with her weekly set at Clyde’s Comedy Corner and a grand sum of something like $15 a night when she started, though she worked up to as much as $25 a night. El didn’t have to wait long before she was offered a position emceeing the shows. This six-month stint as an emcee gave her a real comedy education. She got a chance not only to observe more seasoned performers but also to hone her own talent for improvisation as she announced the other acts. El was brilliant when she had to react spontaneously to hecklers and loud-mouths. Sometimes she could silence a drunk with just a look.

From early on, Ellen took an adamant stand against using dirty language or obscene subject matter in her act. Her reason? “My mother’s in the audience,” she used to say, even when I wasn’t. Many people in the comedy world believe you have to be “blue” to get a laugh, but I think Ellen DeGeneres made them think twice about that.

By the following summer, she was starting to do small out-of-town engagements, including an appearance at the Dallas Comedy Corner. In a breathless phone call, she let me know how exciting this was. “They love me,” she began. “It’s going great, fabulous, wonderful! What can I say? I’ve never done so well.” She went on to describe Dallas and how much fun it was being somewhere new and different. “And the people here. Everyone is real rich and real good-looking. We rode around in a limousine all day today!”

Things were looking up. Around this time, I had been hearing about Ellen’s new girlfriend Kat. Before long, El moved in with Kat. When I heard the news, I eagerly made plans to meet the new love in Ellen’s life as soon as I got a break from school.

W
HILE
E
LLEN’S
C
AREER
was beginning to take off, the one who was really riding high in 1981 was Vance, who was now playing bass guitar for The Cold. With his matinee-idol looks, he was gracing the pages of magazines like
People
and the covers of local music magazines. The band was sensational, one of the forerunners of the New Wave sound of the 1980s. And the lead singer, Barbara Menendez, was phenomenal. I always say that she was Madonna before there ever was a Madonna—very sexy, very talented, and a commanding presence onstage. They recorded a few albums, with some promising singles that they were hoping would take them on to national recognition.

Everything appeared to be going well for all of us. But then, in what exact order I can’t remember, came a series of disappointments and difficulties.

For Vance, the problem was that although The Cold was one of the hottest bands to come out of New Orleans, it somehow didn’t quite get out of New Orleans. The big chill probably came about when Barbara—so much a part of the band’s success—got married and became pregnant. Vance and some of the other band members regrouped later as the Backbeats and continued to lead the way in the New Orleans New Wave sound, but never with the same magic as The Cold.

Then Ellen suffered a devastating personal loss. One evening, while driving somewhere, El passed an auto accident and saw that there had been a fatality. Later that night, she learned that the person who died was Kat, her girlfriend. This had been her first serious relationship, and it was the first time she had gone through the death of anyone close to her age. Just as I had grappled with the fact of our mortality when my father died, Ellen now questioned everything she had learned in her spiritual upbringing. If God was good and if God was love, how could He allow such things to happen?

Gradually, as she began to get some perspective on her loss, she developed a hypothetical dialogue with God about all sorts of questions. This was to be the basis for her “phone call to God”—a bit that would later impress Johnny Carson.

The amazing part of this story is that even in her despair, after she had moved out of the apartment she shared with Kat and into the flea-ridden, roach-infested apartment where she wrote the bit, she knew that she would one day do it for Johnny on
The Tonight Show.

It went something like this:

In later years, Ellen talked candidly in interviews about how she came to write this monologue that earned her so much attention—though not with total candor. Because of her secret, when Ellen talked about the car accident she had to refer to Kat as a friend rather than a partner or lover. It hurt her, I’m sure, to have to diminish the importance of that relationship. This was another burden of having to be in the closet.

Unbeknownst to me until 1981, Ellen had been keeping another secret, about two ordeals she had suffered with B. when she was in high school. Had I been in a happy, healthy marriage, she may have chosen never to tell me. As it was, on one visit I told her that B. and I weren’t getting along well, but the last thing I wanted was another marital failure. I confided in Ellen that I just didn’t have the resolve to leave and live on my own.

Ellen’s face showed her disappointment. “You deserve better, Mother,” she said.

“El,” I said, “he has his good qualities. And we love our home.” And besides, I added, “Whatever his faults, I know he loves me a lot.”

That’s when Ellen shook her head, sighed, and told me what had happened one day not long after my mastectomy, when she was seventeen years old. The words didn’t come easily. She began, “He asked to feel my breast. You were taking a shower.”

She stopped. I looked at her incredulously. What was she saying ?

Ellen went on. “He said you were worried about your other breast and he wanted to feel mine to see if yours was like mine.”

I felt sick to my stomach. What a horrible experience for her! How could she say no? She was only seventeen at that time, and she was used to confiding in me about everything. But for five years she had said nothing.

Now I spoke with effort, asking, “Why didn’t you tell me this before ?”

Ellen started to cry, “After what you’d been through, I couldn’t hurt you like that … and then …” Her voice trailed off.

“Something else?” I asked.

El looked around helplessly, as if wishing she didn’t have to tell me. Then she nodded. There was something else, she said, a lot worse, that happened about a year later. One weekend when I had to fly down to New Orleans because Mother was ill, B. gave Ellen a ride home from the movies and made a pass at her. Still crying, El said, “I pushed him away. He let it go but when we got home, inside the house, he tried again.” She paused, composing herself.

I was furious, confused, and bewildered. “And then what happened?” I asked with dread.

“I ran into my room and locked the door. I was terrified. When he tried to force it open, I climbed out the window.” She spent that night at a friend’s house.

“Oh, Ellen, I’m so sorry,” I said, hugging her. “I’m so sorry.”

The pain of what she had gone through tore me up. It hurt even more to know that she had carried the burden of her secret, unable to tell anyone, and it touched me beyond words that she had done so because her concern for me and my well-being was so great.

It is as painful for me to write about this today as it was to hear about it almost two decades ago. Of course, I was angry and disgusted with B. But more than anything, I blamed myself. Most of all, I blamed myself for being so oblivious. “I should have known,” I kept saying. “I should have known.”

I thought back to El’s senior year when she suddenly wanted to drop out of school and return to New Orleans. Absolutely not, I had said, putting my foot down and insisting that she graduate. It made no sense to me at the time. Now I understood why she was so anxious to get away.

In all honesty, I would rather not have included these events in my story of myself as Everymom. That probably comes from my old tendency for denial, for a pretense of normality in which such things just do not happen. Well, they did and they do. And, after some deliberation, I chose to talk about them in this context in the hope that some other mother—or any reader—who might be in denial will pay attention to instinct and act on it. This is not just about loving and protecting your child; it’s also about loving yourself. Unfortunately, I still hadn’t learned the second lesson.

Rather than talk to B. on the telephone about these events, I decided to drive home and confront him in person. I prayed the whole way there that it wasn’t true, that there was some logical explanation. When I got to the house that night and marched inside, B. was still up. Before I could get a word out, he started saying, “Betty, honey, I missed you.”

“Ellen told me what you did,” I interrupted, furious.

A look of confusion came over his face. “What are you talking about?”

I repeated the story of how he had felt her breast. B. listened, nodded, and shook his head in dismay. Top-notch salesman that he was, he poured it on, using all his skills on me. “I’m sorry about that,” he admitted. “It was poor judgment. I was just so worried about you.”

“If you were so concerned,” I pointed out, “why couldn’t you have asked your own daughter?” He and his daughter—who lived not too far away—were very close. “Why didn’t you check it out with her?”

B. shrugged. “I wasn’t thinkin’, I told you. It was wrong.”

I let that go. But then I brought up the other incident, repeating to him what Ellen had described. As he listened, B. gazed at me sadly, with an expression of hurt and surprise.

“I don’t understand how she could’ve said that,” he muttered. “That’s not how it happened, Betty, I swear …” He appeared to be struggling, wanting to confess something but then saying nothing.

“What?” I demanded to know.

“It was the other way around. Ellen came on to me,” he said quietly. “She made a pass at me.”

When I accused him of lying, he said Ellen was making it up so that I would leave him. Then B. turned it on some more, begging me not to leave—not to give up on our love and our home and our life together, which we had worked so hard to build.

When I called Ellen the next day and told her everything he had said, all I could hear on the other end was her breathing. She was crushed, aghast, and uncomprehending to think that I would even consider his side of the story.

My heart and mind felt ripped into pieces. Caught between my impulsive side which told me to leave immediately and my tenacious side which told me to stay on board even if the ship was sinking, I was, in effect, paralyzed. I could never really trust B. again, that I knew. But I hadn’t stopped loving him—not yet, or not enough to acknowledge a third failure. Nor did I have the fortitude to leave and brave another period of adjustment while I made a new life—again! I regret to this moment that I did not leave then. It is my greatest regret.

It’s hard to see how my relationship with Ellen survived. She had a difficult time understanding how I could stay with B., and rightfully so. Thankfully, it is her nature to forgive. Forgiving myself, though—that has been another story.