Love, Ellen: A Mother/Daughter Journey (8 page)

The last few times I had seen him, Daddy seemed almost at loose ends, and in spite of his appearance of health, unbeknownst to us he suffered from high blood pressure—which was not helped by his smoking habit.

Mother later told me she had been fixing lunch and called Daddy when it was ready. When he didn’t come in, she went to look for him and found him lying on the bed in the guest bedroom. He told her his chest and his left arm hurt. Clueless as we were about these things, Mother still had the presence of mind to insist that he get in the car. She immediately drove down the block to their doctor’s house. The doctor came out to look at Daddy and said, “Oh, it’s probably the flu. Take him to the hospital and I’ll meet you there later.”

As directed, Mother drove to a very small hospital in Metairie where Daddy was admitted to a double room. It took Mother and Helen—who arrived quickly—forever to find me at church. Of course, I rushed as never before to the hospital, only to find that the doctor still had not arrived. Daddy was perspiring heavily—not a clue to us, but it certainly should have been a clue to somebody—and I wiped his brow and face for him.

There are many “if only’s” that would haunt me for years. I’ve always wondered what that doctor could have been thinking of. The flu? Did he really believe what he said?

Not realizing what should have been obvious—that my father had suffered a heart attack—we decided it would be best for us to leave so he could rest. As Mother and Helen walked out of the room, I paused, staying behind momentarily to make sure he was resting comfortably. And at that very moment, Daddy died. It happened so quickly. One minute he was here and then, within seconds, he was gone. I called desperately to the nurse who was attending to the man in the next bed. She came at once and called for more help. Everyone got busy doing CPR, but it was too late.

In the months and years following his death, Mother, Helen, Audrey, and I speculated that if Daddy had been given better immediate care, he would still be with us. We always ended these musings the same way—agreeing that if it meant he would be an invalid, then this was all for the best. Since we all knew well that patience was not Daddy’s long suit, we couldn’t even imagine him coping with that.

Although up until this point I hadn’t realized it, my father had been my true anchor—the strong person in my life who had made so much of his own life, embodying the role of protector and provider for the family that loved him so. When Daddy died, my world, as I knew it, fell apart.

Even worse, I could find no spiritual comfort. While other religions have helpful ways of dealing with loss—like the Catholic wake or the Jewish days of mourning—Christian Science basically ignores the entire subject of death, referring to it as a transition to a happier state but not taking into account the natural, normal grieving process.

In leaving Christian Science, I was not alone among the Pfeffers. Daddy had never joined and after he died Mother soon went back to the Catholic church, which gave her lots of support and put her back in the company of many longtime friends. Having married men who weren’t Christian Scientists, Helen and Audrey both had drifted away years before.

When I left the Christian Science church, it never occurred to me not to go to another church. Though I would later come to feel that an organized religion isn’t necessary for a full spiritual life, at that time church was important to me. It was a way to enrich my life and to soften the rough edges of everyday existence. I shopped around and very soon found that I was comfortable at the Episcopal church. Since Christian Science shuns ritual and pageantry, I had been missing that for a long time. I enjoyed the ritual of communion, and kneeling for certain prayers. Vance and Ellen came with me a few times, but it didn’t hold the same appeal for them. They continued to go to the Christian Science church with Elliott for a few more years.

It’s hard to conceive of anything that would have given me comfort in those first days and months after Daddy died. Without knowing it, I was going through a mourning process that has several stages. According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who has written extensively about death and grief, these stages follow a natural course: from denial to anger to bargaining to sadness and, finally, to acceptance.

A
FTER THE FIRST
shock and my own denial wore off, anger set in, slowly and covertly. Meanwhile, the DeGeneres household reverted to its old harmonious mode, making an even greater effort to pretend that everything was fine. Ellen later made the observation that we had become a paper doll family, with everyone going through the motions. We didn’t even qualify as a TV family anymore.

One of the last family vacations we took together was around this time. We drove down for a long weekend to Fort Walton Beach, Florida, in our new-to-us Mercury Cougar—a sporty model with a black hardtop and turquoise body. Since Vance was learning to drive, he was at the wheel with Elliott at his side. Ellen and I were in the back. We must have thought it would be safe for Vance to practice on the long stretches of highway along the Florida Gulf Coast. And it was, until he decided that he had time to pass a car before oncoming traffic arrived.

Even the ever-calm Elliott was screaming, “Vance, get back in your lane!”

I chimed in, “Hurry, Vance, hurry!”

And Ellen was just screaming.

Vance passed the car and got back into his lane in the nick of time.

This was more excitement than any of us were used to. We probably would have done well to scream a bit more often. Instead, we went back to our pretense of normality.

Thirteen-year-old El was the one who saw through it. I think she knew before I did that her parents’ marriage was ending. Vance was less aware; he was busy finishing up high school and working as a DJ, and he was starting to spend time traveling on the road with his band. On the other hand, as he himself would be inclined to comment, even if he had been around more, we simply didn’t talk about what was really going on. There were always jokes, but there was no talk about anything meaningful or substantive. If that one aspect of our marriage had been different, maybe Elliott and I would have stayed together.

Oh, yes, there was another move. We were now renting a lovely lower duplex in Lake Vista that a church member owned. When we moved there, Elliott and I bought a beautiful walnut dining table. I remember that table and exactly where it was, but I don’t remember happy times around it. I believe it was too late for that.

Once I made the decision that I could no longer, in good conscience, embrace Christian Science, Elliott and I lost one of our strongest bonds. It made matters worse that he was resentful about my new affiliation with the Episcopal church. I had stifled so many years of frustration that when, at long last, Elliott had begun to show more of an interest in sex, that too seemed to be too late. Also, there was a catch: he thought I should be the one to buy the prophylactics. Horrors. Back then, condoms weren’t at the check-out counter. You had to ask the pharmacist for them—that was much too personal for me.

And, of course, because Elliot refused even to mention the possibility of more babies—which I would have loved—without some form of birth control sex was out of the question.

My anger was such that even though there was no cursing in the DeGeneres household, one day I used the word “crap.” Elliott was horrified. He must have known that I was at a boiling point, but as usual he was in denial.

So, on my own, without any discussion, I began to take steps to leave our marriage. One day when Ellen and I were walking, I spotted a
FOR RENT
sign outside a nearby apartment complex. Scared but resolved, I told her of my decision to find a place to live.

Young as she was, she was well aware of my feeling of desperation. “This will be fun,” El said, in an instinctive effort to cheer me up, and then went on to describe all the adventures Vance, she, and I would have as bachelor and bachelorettes. Not to mention that it would be a nice change for her pet snake.

As planned, I contacted the apartment owner, saw the apartment, and arranged to move in.

One of the saddest moments in my life was telling Elliott that I wanted this separation. It was after work, just the two of us. I arrived home a short while after him, came inside and told him, simply, softly, “Elliott, I’m moving out.”

He said nothing. But I could see in his eyes, as they filled with tears, how devastated he was. A few minutes later, Vance came home, realizing instantly that something was wrong.

Speaking with difficulty, Elliott explained, “Your mother’s leaving me.”

Vance’s eyes filled up with tears too. It was heartbreaking. Nothing more was said. In my mind, I desperately wanted Elliott to beg me not to go. He never did, not then and not in the two years that followed, before our divorce was final. Had he come after me at any point in that time, my resolve would surely have weakened.

When I left Elliott and our shell of a marriage, I left behind the security of the status quo—the only life I had known for eighteen years. As a kind of metaphor, I also left behind that beautiful walnut dining table, as well as an irreplaceable antique pine secretary, and an antique cypress coffee table. This continued to be a habit of mine—leaving material things behind, not wanting reminders of my failure.

Sometimes one clear-cut event precipitates the end of a marriage. In this case, though there was no specific last straw, I finally caved in under the weight of layers of resentment, inaction, and wrongs that had built up over the years. The moment I chose to leave, I began to shed those layers.

In the death of our marriage there would remain many “if-only’s.” The top of my list: if only we had developed a way of talking about our issues. In another place and time, we might have gotten help that could have saved us as a couple. These “if-only’s” are part of the bargaining stage of grief. They can never change that which has died.

There is no blame here. I was just as much a part of the “Don’t talk about it” conspiracy.

The great irony of the pretense of normality is that it is so commonplace. We have an idea that everybody else is “normal,” and we keep our concerns secret, in the hope that we can pretend them away. When we finally admit them, it turns out that a lot of other people have the same secrets. In the end, nobody is normal—or at least nobody is your idea of “normal.”

Do I regret leaving Elliott? Yes. Looking back, with that perfect 20/20 hindsight, I have wondered if I should have waited until Vance and Ellen had both finished high school. But whenever I’ve talked about it with them over the years, the consensus is always the same: I couldn’t have waited another day. The wonder is that I waited as long as I did. At that point, my life was in turmoil, and I took whatever steps I felt necessary to bring some sense and meaning into it.

But, as it turned out, feeling the need for sense and meaning doesn’t mean it will suddenly happen. For me, this was to be a long journey, and I was just beginning.

It was a terribly hard time for everyone. As I moved out of the bargaining stage and into a stage of sadness, I was so depressed that years later Ellen would recall this period as her most vivid childhood memory. She particularly remembered trying to cheer me up and make me happy by getting me to laugh. It was not an easy task, but El rose to the challenge by doing imitations of me. I’d laugh so hard I’d cry. Then she’d do imitations of that and I’d laugh even harder. If there was a silver lining, it might have been that her gift was being discovered and shaped through our family sadness.

And the other good news was that we were no longer a paper doll family. Our pretense was over.

For some families, when a son or daughter comes out to them, it shatters all their myths about who they think they are. In our case, the myths were already shattered.

4

Atlanta, Texas

Y
OU COULD NEVER HAVE
called me a “gay divorcée”—a term which was popular when I was growing up but probably means something very different today. Even so, at age forty I came out of my eighteen years of marriage ripe for the picking. Attention from the opposite sex was not in short supply. Although I missed all the big movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the sexual revolution hadn’t totally passed me by.

It was flattering to have a busy dance card, and my squashed self-confidence got a boost as I adapted to my single lifestyle. A feeling of independence is not the worst thing in the world. I still had an entrenched idea that ultimately I needed a man to take care of me, but for the time being I seemed to be managing surprisingly well.

The kids and I had moved into that little two-bedroom apartment in Lake Vista with just enough of our furniture to fill the small rooms. Vance had one bedroom, while Ellen and I shared the other, along with—yes, of course—her snake that ate live mice.

Elliott also got a one-bedroom apartment in the area so the children could see him often. After an initial period of difficulty and discomfort, he and I developed a cordial manner of talking to each other about matters having to do with the kids. Fortunately, he had a support system with friends in the church.

To a certain extent, Mother was my support system. Ellen was very much so. There had always been a special bond between us, and now we grew even closer. I know that mother-daughter relationships can often become strained when daughters go through adolescence, but that was not the case with us. If I hadn’t be going through a divorce, this might have been different. As it was, our difficulties strengthened our bond.

Another move came a short while later—to a townhouse in a Metarie complex. And another came soon after that—to a larger apartment in the same complex.

By now Vance was hitting the road with a band which would take him out of town on tour for several months to the area around Charleston, South Carolina. So El and I often spent our leisure hours as a twosome, enjoying each other’s company. As she blossomed into her girl-next-door good looks, she was well-liked by boys, and she would tell me about her crushes—mainly on famous rock stars. We went shopping together for clothes—something she was becoming more interested in as a teenager—and we would go out to eat together. One of our favorite indulgences was to stop at the one and only Camellia Grill at Carrollton and St. Charles to share a small slice of their sinfully rich cheesecake. Whenever we arrived, there was one waiter who always greeted Ellen by saying, “Hi, star.” Apparently, he knew something we didn’t—yet.

The cheesecake was so rich that we only needed one piece. We would sit talking about this and that and Ellen would soon have me laughing with some unusual, funny observation. She would later tell the interviewer Judd Rose on his
PrimeTime Live
profile of her that the divorce and our constant moves were very hard on her—she was always having to adjust to a new group of kids, always feeling a little different.

When he asked if the kids were mean to her, Ellen joked, “Oh, no, they just poked at me and called me big-head; nothing too bad.” So El’s humor helped her cope as much as it helped me. Like all kids, she wanted to be liked. And that she was—by everyone. I know that my friends all enjoyed her a lot, though it was somewhat unusual for a thirteen-year-old to be so interesting to adults.

Ellen was precocious in other ways. In her efforts to cheer me up, she not only used jokes but found other, very sensitive, ways of being thoughtful. I was working at the time for Ella Brennan of restaurant fame, first as a secretary and later in reservations. On my birthday, unbeknownst to me. El called up the management to say, “It’s my mom’s birthday, so please be extra nice to her all clay, please.”

And when I got home, Ellen bestowed upon me an autographed picture of herself. Glimmers of things to come!

“D
EAR
M
OM—
G
OD
, I’m finally here,” began the first letter I ever received from Ellen, postmarked August 10, 1972, from the Colorado Rockies where she attended Christian Science summer camp for a week at age fourteen.

This was the first time we had ever been separated from each other, and her letters reflect that. They also show what a flair for the dramatic she was starting to show, even then. I had to laugh at some of her spelling and grammar, not to mention her experimental language. She continued:

We were soon happily reunited. And all in all, at least for a short while longer, life wasn’t so terrible. But after two years of not being married and an unhappy relationship or two, I changed my tune. The novelty of the dating scene and being a working single parent had definitely worn off. As Mrs. Nungesser used to say, “Things can’t be nice.”

It was in this frame of mind that I met a man and fell hook, line, and … well, you know the rest. It was one of those accidental meetings; we lived in the same apartment complex. Of course, being so enamored, I thought it was fate when he caught my eye from across the pool one Sunday afternoon not long after Ellen and I had gone down for a swim. It would have been hard not to notice him, since he was staring at me unabashedly. Well, I was in a two-piece bathing suit and quite slim and tan. He obviously liked what he saw, and in a few minutes someone we both knew was introducing us. That was it. He pursued me vigorously, and I didn’t run. I loved him, as the saying goes, “not wisely but too well.”

Mindful of past mistakes, I took it as a good sign that he was nothing like Elliott in any way. For that matter, he was nothing like any man I’d dated. In style, he was a cowboy—short on culture but long on charm, with his West Texas twang and his earthy, macho good looks. The word “spiritual” probably wasn’t even in his vocabulary, but with our powerful physical attraction, that didn’t bother me much at first.

When we met and for the next seventeen years that we were together, this man had a first, last, and middle name. At present, because of later events, he has been reduced in my memory to an initial: B. I would have erased that too, but I have kept it for the purposes of this book, at least as a way to refer to him. He would play a central role in the next few tumultuous chapters of my life and of Ellen’s.

What an idiot I was. Unfortunately, it has been my lot in life to be a late bloomer. As with those nasturtium seeds I planted in childhood, which seemed to take forever to grow, it has taken me a long, long time to get things right. Life was always giving me lessons, but how much was I learning? Apparently not enough—and not fast enough.

Once again with B. I was jumping too quickly into a relationship, all because I was so eager to be in a “real” marriage, to be safe—as if that would make me whole. If only I had been more eager to stand on my own to find wholeness and safety. I had a lot yet to learn. And one of the big lessons, in being my own person was learning how to trust my instincts.

There were clues even at the beginning that my new Romeo wasn’t all I envisioned. I ignored them. The knowledge that B. was a salesman—in fact, that at one time he had been a used car salesman—should have told me something. When he took me to his hometown on a visit and introduced me to his old friends-—similar types, also in sales—I remember having a flash of insight that he and his friends weren’t the basic, warm sort of people to whom I could relate. But as was my habit, I rationalized that uneasy feeling away.

Instead I listened to my libido, which directed me to his very male appeal, his attractive appearance, and his healthy sexual appetite. I liked his gregarious personality, his take-charge attitude, and his practical know-how about car and house repairs and gardening. With B. it was always, “Betty, honey,” and he could never tell me often enough how cute I was.

And he was a character. I remember when we were in Dallas and went to Sakowitz, a very upscale store, on opening day. B. and I were sitting near the escalators on the first floor, and Bob Sakowitz was near us talking frantically on a walkie-talkie to someone on the third floor about escalator problems. B. looked at him and in his flat West Texas way said, “Beats hollerin’, don’t it?”

Then there was a time, when we first started dating, that I agreed to meet him on the City Park Golf Course, a flat, wide-open expanse. When I got there, I looked out and saw groups of golfers as far as the eye could see. Then I saw, in the distance, a hat flying high up in the air like a Frisbee—his way of showing me where he was.

B. was direct and outspoken; actually, he was crude, though I misinterpreted that as refreshingly forthright. Like me, he was divorced. He had three kids from a former marriage, and he seemed to be a strong father figure to them; seeing that, I thought he might offer Ellen a bit of needed discipline. And when he proposed, asking me to move with him to a tiny dot on the map in East Texas, some eight hours northwest of New Orleans, the change of environment seemed just what the doctor ordered.

The area of Metairie we were living in at the time was known as “Fat City.” It consisted of apartment complexes, shopping areas, and nightclubs—not the best neighborhood for a young girl to grow up in. The high school, Grace King, was good, but on weekends and some school nights Ellen and her friends were somehow gaining entrance to a local disco, and at fifteen she was too young for that. Some of her friends were older and worked part-time at the mall. Ellen told me about one friend who was stealing jewelry. All this worried me, and I was only too glad to get her out of there.

T
HE IMAGE
is etched forever in my mind: fifteen-year-old Ellen, a lovely girl—slender and rather tall—with her shiny shoulder-length blond hair, standing alone in front of her high school, shrouded in the morning fog.

It was the first week of April, 1974, a few weeks after I’d remarried, and I was leaving New Orleans early that morning for East Texas. It had been decided that Ellen would stay with her dad until June so she could finish her sophomore year at Grace King. We would see each other in a few weeks, for Easter, but we had never been separated for even that long.

The school was across the street and down the block from our apartment, and Ellen and I walked together, just the two of us. We hugged and kissed and said our temporary goodbyes. She went on alone, turning back and waving through the fog, then walking slowly and sadly with her head down, then turning and waving again—playing it for all it was worth. A bit of the actress was emerging already. She was so dramatic, my Ellen.

Just before she disappeared from view, she paused as if to say something.

I thought of Ida Lupino’s great farewell speech: “All of us are standing in the mud, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

But Ellen’s farewell moment took place in total silence. Then she vanished into the fog.

I walked back to our apartment and locked up. Then, with two cars loaded—B.’s and mine—we headed off for Atlanta, Texas, population 6,000.

I
LOVED THE
novelty of East Texas right away. The quiet, easy pace of small-town life was a new experience for me, and I relished it. The countryside was beautiful, with rolling hills and tall pines—a sight for sore eyes after all the years I had spent in a city below sea level with not a hill in sight. In New Orleans, we had to drive across Lake Pont-chartrain, to Slidell and Covington, to see forests of pines. But they didn’t grow to the size and extent of the pine trees in East Texas. I suppose I was just ready for a change of scenery.

Atlanta’s little two-square block downtown didn’t have a building over two stories. And I was especially taken with all the pickup trucks. In New Orleans, it seemed that only plumbers and electricians drove pickups. Here, practically every other vehicle was a pickup. The sight of women driving pickups was also a novelty. I thought it was all very quaint.

Downtown consisted of a drugstore, a greasy-spoon café, and a few miscellaneous shops. My first visit downtown made the priorities of my new community pretty clear. I had already noticed more churches per capita in this tiny town than in any place I’d ever been. When I walked into shops, people knew immediately that I was new in town. One shopkeeper asked, “Do you have a church home?”

“Yes, I do,” I replied, never having heard that expression before, “but I can’t find it.” So far I’d spotted only various other Protestant denominations and one small Catholic church.

The woman wasn’t sure where the Episcopal church was, but she seemed to think there was one. Finally, I met someone who gave me directions: go up a certain street to the end, turn left, go to the end of the next street, turn left up the hill and into a little open field. And there it was, a darling little white frame church with bright-red doors that opened into a simple interior of natural wood pews.

I turned out to be a welcome addition, not only joining the congregation but playing the small organ during services for many months.

Then one Sunday morning I arrived with other church members to find our much loved church in smoldering ashes. It was a terrible shock for all of us. All that wood and the secluded location had made it entirely too easy for an arsonist to torch and destroy our place of worship. As is often the case, the perpetrator of the crime was never found and the motive remained unknown.