Love, Ellen: A Mother/Daughter Journey (4 page)

Whatever misfortune fell—from rain spoiling a picnic to getting jilted by a beau—Mother would sigh and say, “Things can’t be nice.” That expression explained away every unpleasant thing that ever happened to us.

Its author was a woman by the name of Mrs. Nungesser. Mother grew up next to the Nungessers. The Morrills and the Nungessers were good friends, and Mrs. Nungesser was looked up to as the matriarch of both families. The Nungessers had a son and a daughter. Their daughter, Marie, never married. I always laugh when I remember a comment Mrs. Nungesser made when she was about ninety-five years old and “Miss Marie’’ about sixty-five. Instead of concern for her daughter’s future, Mrs. Nungesser said, “I’m old, but Marie has her whole life ahead of her.”

All these messages that taught us not to speak about unpleasantness were compounded by the fact that in the South, at least in the 1930s and 1940s, such talk was thought impolite and improper, particularly for well-brought-up young ladies. “Don’t talk personal,” was how most people said it in New Orleans. And then there was the perennial, “Don’t say anything if you can’t say something nice,” and the ever-popular, “What will people think?”

It would take me many years to recover from all that worrying about what people were going to think and to realize some of the other negative messages I got in the process: Don’t rock the boat; don’t make a scene; don’t be different; fit in; and, of course, just be normal.

C
LEARLY
, I
CAME
from a background which in no way prepared me to become a spokesperson. There was however, one exception—the training I received from my Aunt Tillie, Daddy’s older sister. A remarkable woman, Tillie founded and ran, for many years, the Carrollton School of Elocution. Later, “elocution” became passé and the name was changed to the Carrollton School of Speech.

Aunt Tillie was short, just over five feet, and I always remember her in high heels. She was a human dynamo, teaching classes to high school students on Friday afternoons and to younger students on Saturday mornings. When she wasn’t teaching she was typing and making copies of poems and readings for her classes. She also taught piano and managed to find time to give me lessons, in addition to special outings like plays and concerts.

Tillie’s influence on our whole family was unmistakable. Even though New Orleanians have a distinctive accent—a sometimes strange blend of rural southern and urban East Coast—none of the Pfeffers or Morrills talked that way. In New Orleans, those people are called “Yats” because of how they ask the question “Where are you at?”—“Where’re y’at?” There were to be no Yats in our family—at least, not once Aunt Tillie got hold of us.

Helen, Audrey, and I were each required to attend the Carrollton School of Speech. After all, Aunt Tillie let us go free. With no tuition, there was no question—we had to go. It was drudgery, especially on Friday afternoons and Saturdays, when I knew that my friends were out having fun while I was in speech school learning and reciting poems and studying mythology, Shakespeare, Longfellow, the arts, and other boring stuff.

At the time, I didn’t realize how blessed I was that Aunt Tillie was so determined to have “Miss Betsen,” as she called me, exposed to real culture. Nor did I have any idea that she was not only giving me a foundation for my later career as a speech pathologist, but also giving me the only background I had for the public speaking I do now.

Try as I might, speech school was one thing I couldn’t beg my way out of. So I settled down and participated rather well. Those who didn’t got a look from Aunt Tillie. That’s all she had to do, and order was restored.

Although the school was in her basement, it was immaculate and thoroughly professional. I would take my seat with the rest of the girls and boys in class, and we would form a semicircle of folding chairs around Aunt Tillie’s chair and table at the front, “Sit tall in your chairs,” she would remind us, so we learned the importance of good posture and breathing. And when we stood up, her well-articulated instructions continued: “Shoulders back; chest up and out …” and so on. This is how we began every class—with deep-breathing exercises and vocalizing different vowel sounds. There were no nasal voices in our family!

We had poetry recitals in February and plays in June. Many of these plays were written by Tillie herself. The most memorable recital was the one when Cousin Maisie and Betty Ann Nicholson were reciting a poem together and one of them got the giggles.

Soon that got the other one going.

Tap, tap, tap went Aunt Tillie’s baton on her stand, waiting for them to calm down. That only made Maisie and Betty Ann laugh harder. Aunt Tillie had to ask them to leave the stage. They left in shame, but laughing all the way.

That was a strong lesson for me—keep a straight face no matter what. It comes in handy both in life and in public speaking.

In the summer, when we didn’t have speech school, Aunt Tillie gave us a reading list and we had to read a certain number of books by September—an experience that fostered in me a love of reading from that time forward. Here’s another poetic effort to pay tribute to those days:

Aside from this early appreciation for the written word and the lessons I learned from Aunt Tillie about speaking, nothing in my background prepared me to be an activist. I never heard anyone in our family speak out or take a definite political stand and act on it. We pretty much lived quiet, private lives, summed up in all those old messages: Don’t make waves and don’t take an unpopular position. And, once again, don’t be different.

F
EW OF THOSE
messages have changed much in our supposedly more progressive times, especially for teenagers. Today, as always, gay teens go through hell because they’re different. My heart goes out to those kids. I remember my adolescence and how important it was to fit in.

I was a typical teenager, wanting so much to conform, to be just like all my friends. But deep down, because they were all Catholic and I went to the Christian Science church, I felt different. So I didn’t follow Christian Science very much. Instead, I followed the crowd. We went everywhere together.

On Saturday mornings in cooler weather, I’d ride the streetcar downtown to meet my friends at our regular meeting place: under the clock at D. H. Holmes, a large department store that was a landmark everyone knew. The girls in my crowd acted and dressed alike. For school, it was dresses only. On our off-days our “uniform” was blue jeans, a boy’s white dress shirt worn “out,” and, of course, saddle oxfords or penny loafers. And only white socks.

After we’d all gathered, we managed to spend the entire morning window-shopping. (I can’t imagine much of any other shopping going on.) Then we’d head over to White Castle and buy hamburgers, greasy little square things; take our food with us to the Orpheum, Loew’s State, or Saenger; and eat while we watched the movie.

On Saturdays in warm weather, instead of meeting downtown, my girlfriends and I took buses and streetcars—as many transfers as it took—to the lakefront. It was a more modest time and we wore skirts over our shorts. If we swam, we changed into our suits in Krupp’s bathroom. Krupp’s was on the lakefront and sold cold drinks and sandwiches. We didn’t really go to swim. We went to meet the boys in our crowd, boys who went to Fortier and Jesuit.

One afternoon, I caught the attention of one of the cutest boys, all because I laughed instead of getting mad. He was tall and wiry with Irish-American good looks and had quite a sense of humor. This day, acting like a smart aleck as always, he picked up my skirt—a full, gathered skirt, white with a pattern of large red flowers, rolled it up tightly, and threw it out into the lake. I watched as my skirt opened up and landed on the water like a big round flower. For some reason, it struck me as a very funny sight. When I laughed so spontaneously, he was completely surprised that I wasn’t furious. And I will never forget the smile that broke out on his face and how, in that moment, I looked into his eyes and felt something stirring inside me that I had never really felt before. Major sparks!

Soon after that, he called and asked me out. We ended up going steady for a year or so. Was I in love with him? As an adult, I’m inclined to wonder what, at that age, I could have really known about such things. But at the time, experiencing that first love, I felt a passion that, in some respects, I wouldn’t feel again. In any event, we were very serious. That is, until one day I flippantly mentioned that I might want to date someone else too and he made the honest mistake of giving me an ultimatum.

“Him or me,” he said flatly.

I hate ultimatums. I always make the wrong choice—“Oh, yeah? Well, I’ll show you.” I really didn’t care about the other boy. But, stubborn and impulsive, I shot back, “Him.”

We broke up. He married young (as I was also about to do). In fact, he married the very next girl he went out with. Through my turbulent years ahead, I often wondered what had happened to that cute boy with the great sense of humor. Forty-eight years later, at my mother’s funeral in 1993, I reconnected with him. There were still some sparks. We renewed our friendship and relationship and had plans to marry.

It would have made a very sweet story—girl next door and first boyfriend meeting up after all those years—a fairytale ending like the ones I grew up on. But it didn’t take long for reality to set in. We were two very different people. He had never left New Orleans; I’d moved on a long time ago. Our worldviews had little in common. At first, this came out in subtle ways. But he was opinionated and closed-minded; also, he was an ardent debater who tried incessantly to convert me to his way of thinking.

When it came to our opposite stands on abortion, for example, he wouldn’t even listen to me. He was vehemently pro-life. “Pro-life” is a term I resent. Every thinking, caring person is pro-life. How could we be any other way? But some of us vehemently believe that a woman’s body shouldn’t be a subject for legislation. We believe that abortion should be legal and safe for women who find it necessary to make that terrible choice.

He and I broke off our plans after encountering a bigger and more personal conflict. I was the proud mother of a daughter who is gay, while his son and daughter-in-law were vocally antigay, claiming something along the lines of gay people not being in sync with their family values.

“Family values” is another term I’ve come to resent. Unfortunately, this perfectly nice phrase has become far too politicized. Now, coming from a background where it’s not polite to talk about personal matters, I generally believe that politics and religion are topics that should be avoided whenever possible. People feel too passionately about both. However, since I have delved into religion, I might as well go a bit further and delve into politics. Although I was raised in a Republican, conservative household and voted along those lines most of my life, I have not always agreed with the party-platform or the candidates—especially in the last decade. In fact, it was in 1990 that I first voted for a Democrat—Ann Richards, for governor of Texas. A strong, articulate woman who, in my opinion, was the best suited to serve the state and its needs, she also appealed to me because of her tolerant stance on diversity.

In the meantime, watching the extreme right move the Republican party toward its stance of intolerance has run me off—and turned me off—as the right has done to many-others who want to think for themselves. When the party becomes more moderate, I may return. I hope by then we’ll have gotten beyond that exclusionary phrase “family values,” with its narrow definition of “family” as only heterosexual married couples and their biological children. This excludes single parents, or couples without kids, or gay couples, or gay partners raising kids, or adoptive parents, or extended families without biological ties.

What defines a family? Well, definitely not political affiliation. For me, a family is simply a group of people related by blood or friendship, looking out for each other and loving each other, the older members helping the younger to grow and flourish and reach their potential—and vice versa. When I think of my family—the one I came from and the one I made—I see a pretty average American family, with good, basic, real family values. Given that definition, somehow I suspect that your family is a lot like mine.

In my family I also see a group of wonderful characters, unique individuals, all of us with the differences that make each so special. I only wish that I had learned to appreciate my own differences when I was younger. I am so grateful for Ellen’s differences and for my ultimate ability to accept them. Instead of an ordinary daughter, I was blessed with an extra-ordinary one.

In 1979, my aunt Gladys Mercer Morrill, who had married Mother’s oldest brother John, published
Of Old Places and Dear People
, a small volume of family genealogy. In her foreword, Aunt Gladys wrote:

In other words, we’re all related. We’re all family. Thank God for our differences.

2

Motherhood

E
VERYONE WANTED TO KNOW—
who was the girl with the legs?

The newspapers were calling it a Cinderella story. The girl whose legs matched the legs of the girl in the picture was about to go to the ball.

It was the summer of 1948, and I was a coed at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Having completed my freshman and sophomore years, I was attending summer school that session—not because I was filled with scholarly zeal but because I had to make up for bad grades. In my first go-around at college, I was into the social whirl and was not the least bit motivated to study.

I may have been a party girl, but even by the standards of the time I was as naive and unsophisticated as a person could be. Once at a party, a young man walked in on me in the bathroom. I thought I would die of embarrassment—literally. Another time, at another party, the belt on my dress broke, and instead of taking it in stride, I was mortified. What would people think?

Earlier, as teenagers do, I had experimented with smoking and drinking, though it’s hard to imagine anybody serving me a drink then—I looked fifteen until I was well into my twenties. But by the summer of 1948, my serious college romance was with a Christian Scientist, and I dropped all those vices. A short time later I officially joined the church.

I’d love to say that not smoking or drinking meant that I was starting to think for myself, but I can’t. In fact, I had gone to LSU in the first place only because both Helen and Audrey had gone there. Like them, I joined Phi Mu. Like them, I majored in speech and drama. That was natural, given our background studying with Aunt Tillie. Still, it might have been nice if I had explored other academic options, or even thought about what I really wanted to do when I grew up.

Instead, I kept busy with dating and sorority activities. I did dabble in radio at the LSU college station, with my own show,
Especially for the Ladies.
Also, as part of my speech and drama curriculum, I acted in school productions. This is significant for at least two reasons.

For one thing, this was the first time in my life, to my recollection, that I heard that someone I knew was gay. It came out in gossip between some of the girls in a drama class—a particular handsome, talented young man was said to be “that way.” Upon overhearing this, I looked so confused that someone explained, “You know, he doesn’t like girls.” There was an obvious negative connotation. A short time later, it was whispered that a girl on campus was a lesbian, which sounded ominous, but I had no idea what it meant until someone explained that she liked other girls. Again, there was an underlying sense of taboo.

I didn’t exactly think there was something wrong; rather, the idea was just unheard-of. It was like saying gays and lesbians came from another country or spoke a different language. This exposure left me as ignorant as before.

What a shame that homosexuals were kept so much in the closet in those days that a relatively well-educated eighteen-year-old, such as myself, had never known or met anyone who was gay. Imagine how much easier it would have been for me to deal with my daughter’s coming out if I had been informed during my own growing up that there are plenty of gay people in the world—that there always have been, in all walks of life. As it was, not until 1978, thirty years later, would I meet and actually know a gay person, my daughter.

Once I became more knowledgeable, I realized that in fact there were other gay people in our family. One was my father’s cousin, Elmer Schunke, whom Mother and Daddy chose to be my godfather. The family understood him to be a “confirmed bachelor.” He lived in San Antonio and, as I recall, I met him only once, in 1989. At some point, I heard that he was gay. Nothing derogatory was said. It was simply a fact.

Similarly, I found out that Daddy’s cousin Freddy was gay. And there were close friends of Helen’s—two women who were more than likely a lesbian couple, though they were accepted just as longtime companions. I only regret not knowing about these friends and relatives sooner. It would have been helpful in my own process with Ellen if people had talked more openly about this.

The second interesting aspect of my involvement in speech and drama at LSU is that I got a chance to meet and act with a classmate who went on to become one of our nation’s great actresses—Joanne Woodward.

Joanne and I used to try out for the same parts. No need to guess who always got the part. Joanne was impassioned about acting; I wasn’t. To me, the stage was still a chore, a reminder of many childhood hours spent at the Carrollton School of Speech.

I have an indelible memory of standing in the wings with Joanne as we waited to go on in a play we were doing together. At this important moment, Joanne leans over and says to me, “Oh, I’m so nervous. I always get such stage fright.” And I reply, cool as can be, “Oh, I never do.”

This incident may prove that stage fright is a good thing. It gets you “up.” In any event, the conversation stayed with me as I watched Joanne’s career unfold over the years, including her performance in
The Three Faces of Eve
, for which she won an Academy Award.

Ellen knows this tidbit from my past, of course, and with her skewed view of things she likes to say that Paul Newman could have been her father.

My first taste of celebrity, though not as an actress, came that summer of 1948. It happened, mainly, because of my legs.

Bear in mind that the Dior look had just come in and hemlines had dropped, so legs were becoming an uncommon sight.

One hot July afternoon I was at my dormitory helping to paint signs for the impending LSU-Texas football game. Although the game wasn’t until September, it would be the first time the LSU Tigers had played the Texas Longhorns, and so we started our preparations early. I was wearing shorts that day and had kicked my shoes off as I painted a game banner when a photographer for the campus paper took a flattering picture of me and my legs.

Suddenly, I was making front-page headlines throughout Louisiana and Texas. Here’s how they reported it in
The Summer Texan
:

And so, the article went on, editors of
The Texan
had sent a telegram inviting me to come; and the next thing I knew, I was being crowned the LSU “Ambassador.” As the game approached, the papers continued to follow the story closely. The event and my role in it kept expanding until the day of the big event, and my itinerary included a meeting with Governor Jester and the president of the University of Texas, an interview on the local radio station, a reception at Austin’s top hotel, and a presentation at halftime.

Once again, Aunt Tillie’s lessons helped me to be poised and articulate. That game—won by Texas, by the way, though that did not spoil my fun a bit—was a highlight. I’ve often wondered what would have happened had I completed my degree at that time and stayed with my budding career as an ambassadress. Who knows? Maybe it might not have taken me five decades to become a national spokesperson for an important cause.

That may have been better for me, but would it have been better for Vance and Ellen? I don’t think so. In fact, they may not have been here at all. And that’s exactly why we can’t second-guess the choices we make in our lives. After all, how else would I have had my career as Everymom?

As it turned out, in the fall of 1948, once the excitement cooled off and I got back to my regular routine, that was the direction my life was ready to take.

B
Y NOW, BOTH
Helen and Audrey were married and had become mothers. Helen had given birth to her first baby, a boy, the first of three boys; and Audrey had a new baby girl, her first of three girls. I was greatly impressed by their leap into parenthood, and once again I wanted nothing more than to do just what they were doing—get married and have babies. After Audrey gave birth to Carol, I made the baby a darling little sunsuit (is there still such a thing?) and hand-painted butterflies and flowers on it. With every stitch, my desire for my own baby increased.

These were the factors, combined with a lack of any other real goals or direction for my future, that led me to accept a proposal of marriage. It had been a lovely college romance. I was Cinderella and he was my ever-so-handsome Prince Charming with shiny black hair and dark eyes and a beautiful smile—and he came from a prominent south Louisiana family. But it should have stayed just a romance, at least until I had finished my last two years of college. Instead, we married when I was still nineteen and he was just twenty-one. I was a spoiled youngest child and he was a spoiled only child. We didn’t have a chance.

Almost from the start, I felt that he was sorry we had married—that he felt trapped. In the middle of our first argument, he just stopped talking and walked out the door. When he came back, hours later, and I asked in tears, “Where were you?” he said he had gone home to his parents’ house. That happened a few more times. For my part, there were far too many weekends when I found excuses to go home and see my parents. Apparently, neither one of us was ready to leave the nest. Marriage is for grown-ups, after all. It didn’t take long to see that ours was a disaster.

I’ll never forget the day that Daddy and Mother came to pick me up and take me home. With very little to say, they walked me to their car—a new dark blue 1950 Studebaker. There wasn’t much to pack. Perhaps in my twenty-year-old mind, I didn’t want any reminders of my disappointment. This would not be the only time I left behind material items. Nonetheless, I was taking away with me a deep sense of failure.

At the same time, I was relieved to be going home—a place that I never wanted to leave, not for kindergarten or summer camp or college, not even for marriage. As Daddy drove us back to New Orleans, Mother at his side, I sat in the back and looked out the window, listening to the car radio, which, thankfully, made conversation unnecessary. Sitting there in silence, I hardly allowed myself to feel all the terrible dejection and sadness inside me. Instead, I tried to put on an indifferent face, as if this wasn’t the end of the world. It was my version of “Things can’t be nice,” another negative lesson teaching me to bury serious emotions and passions.

Then a song came on that was popular at the time—“Because,” a romantic song, often sung at weddings. It was then that Mother finally spoke.

“Oh, Bets,” she said, “how can you listen to that and not cry?”

F
LASH FORWARD:
I
N
February of 1998, I gave a speech to a civic organization in Los Angeles that supports gay businesses. Afterward, as people thanked me, one man shook my hand and said, “Lucky that you’re such an extrovert—makes your job easier, I’ll bet.” I loved that! An extrovert? I hadn’t been blessed, or cursed, with that description before.

A few months later I was at the HRC event in Oklahoma City, and after my speech I got a chance to meet some of the wonderful people who were attending and hear their stories. I received another compliment from one of the local HRC members who told me, “You’re so at ease with people, such a good listener, and you talk to them so easily.”

What’s funny about these reactions to the new me is that for most of my adult life, the old me was rather reserved. Of course, when I was young I wasn’t reserved. But somewhere along the way I changed, probably after the end of that first marriage.

I kept a cheerful front and neatly tucked away feelings of shame and disappointment. But inside I was shell-shocked, and what had been a fairly healthy level of self-confidence began to erode.

To their credit, Mother and Daddy took me in with open arms and were not in the least judgmental. Maybe they were just happy to have their baby back home. At any rate, the idea of getting my own apartment wasn’t even considered. Also, divorce was rather uncommon and it never occurred to me, as a divorced woman, to return to school, so I went out and got a job and embarked on what, through the years, would be a variety of jobs as a secretary, administrative assistant, and employment counselor—not to mention many other full-time and part-time positions that would include getting my real estate license.

One of the first places where I went to apply for an office job was the California Company (now Chevron). When I walked into the personnel department, I spotted a familiar face—a young man named Elliott DeGeneres. I’d known him casually for years through a Christian Science young people’s social group.

Elliott worked at the California Company as the editor of its company newspaper. He was tall and thin, and he had a habit of bending over a bit, as if he were uncomfortable with his height. Elliott didn’t have the kind of dashing good looks that I had grown up expecting of a Prince Charming. But he did have the most beautiful blue eyes (which Ellen would inherit), set against dark hair and lit by a warm smile; and his personality instantly put me at ease.

We spoke briefly that day—I don’t remember about what. I filled out an application and went home. That night, Elliott called to make the helpful suggestion that it would be easier for me to get a job there if I learned shorthand. We chatted about other things, leaving the door open for him to call later. A friendship began to grow.

As it turned out, I soon found employment at Hardware Mutuals Insurance Company, which made learning short-hand unnecessary. But in the meantime, my phone conversations with Elliott had led to our attending church together and, eventually, dating. He proved to have a great sense of humor and kept me laughing at his silly jokes and funny remarks. Once, while sitting in church, he whispered to me, pointing to the
EXIT
sign over the door, saying, “You know what that stands for? Elliott’s Xylophone’s In Tune.” He delighted in complicated little jokes like that. Some of them were groaners—he was, and is, shamelessly corny. But some were quite clever.