My Mother Was Nuts (5 page)

Afterward, June spoke with my mother. Then, I guess, she spoke with Mr. Gleason, because a few weeks later we learned that we had the job.

We were on the last episode of the season. June put together a number where her high-kicking dancers stepped up a riser and disappeared behind large, hollow columns. After waiting a beat, we danced out from behind and down the stairs, looking exactly like them except we were children. The sight gag was simple but effective. Rehearsals ran through the week. We learned the moves easily, and we were given costumes that matched those worn by the professionals.

Hours before the live broadcast, though, we were informed that
our white tap shoes were the wrong color. Apparently you weren’t supposed to wear white on TV. My mother saved the day again. She had us paint them with pancake makeup until they were the same color as our costumes, rose. I had one more problem: I was sick with the flu. Slumped in a dressing room chair, I watched my mother apply makeup to the other girls as the fever radiated from my skin and caused me to shiver uncontrollably.

When it was my turn to get made up, my mother stooped in front of me and looked directly into my droopy eyes. Then she glanced at my backup, another girl who was standing a few feet away, talking to some of the other girls, the other Junior Rockettes.

“Do you want her to be in the show instead?” she asked.

This appearance on
The Jackie Gleason Show
meant more to my mother than it did to me. For her, the show always came first. So I stood up on my shaky legs and shook my head.

“Okay, I’ll dance,” I said.

I looked bored throughout the performance. In reality, I was concentrating on not throwing up on live TV. But everything worked, and the number was a hit. After the show, June and her sister, Marilyn, who became Jackie Gleason’s third wife in 1975, complimented each of us. I liked Marilyn. Later, I sent her a bottle of perfume and she sent me a picture, thanking me.

Before leaving, one of the show’s producers approached my mother and Mildred and suggested we buy our costumes for fifty dollars each. Aghast, Mildred turned to my mother and said, “I can make those for a buck eighty.” So we left them. But when June asked us back the next year, there was a catch: We had to wear the same costumes. As a result, only the girls who could fit into them were able to be in the show again. I didn’t have a problem—I was still built like a beanpole.

As would be the case many times throughout my life, I managed to shine despite my general apathy. After our second appearance, June said that I had the potential to become one of her dancers someday if
I took a few years of ballet lessons. I thanked her as my mother patted my back, but both of us knew I wasn’t going to end up a June Taylor Dancer. I hated ballet.

A short time later, in fact, I tried to quit dance altogether. My mother responded the same way she always did to such outbursts. “Fine,” she said. “On Saturdays you’ll go shopping and do the laundry and clean the house like everyone else.”

Well, I checked with the other kids and nobody had those kinds of household chores. She was just making shit up.

My mother had us entertain at any place that would feed us, and she made sure we were prepped to say the right thing, depending on where we were booked. If we were at a church, we might be Episcopalian or Catholic. If we were at a temple, we might be Jewish. We appeared on TV—
Star Time
, the talent show starring Connie Francis, and
The Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour
—and at prisons and shipyards, charity events, telethons, and Alexander’s annual gala. Local newspapers wrote stories about us: “Youngsters Aid Polio Fund,” “Strutters Aid Blind Children,” “Junior Rockettes to Dance on Arthritis Telethon.”

Whatever my mother lacked as a homemaker she made up for as a producer/choreographer/road and stage manager. She taught us to pack our suitcases with costumes for the last number at the bottom and the first one on top. She rehearsed us on subway platforms. People stared. She didn’t care. Backstage, she put rouge on our faces with a bunny tail brush and added lipstick. Other parents helped with costumes. Sometimes Mildred’s husband, Adolph, pulled the curtain. One time a girl couldn’t find her white blouse between numbers and my fake aunt Tina quickly unbuttoned her own white blouse, gave it to the girl, and stood backstage in her bra.

My mother had her littlest students sing songs during costume changes and she wrote them original recitations to perform in front of the curtain.

Every Monday Mommy goes
to Alexander’s store.
She buys me skirts and tops
and shoes and socks galore.
She brings them home,
we try them on,
she takes them back that night.
She doesn’t like the look—
or some don’t fit just right.
Last night I read of a baby sale.
It gave me such a scare.
I’m glad I was born in a hospital
because you can’t return things there
.

Each venue was an adventure. At Delmonico’s, our feet slid out from under us on the slippery floor. We all landed on our butts. In the Village, my mother ushered us through a club full of women, whispering to us, “Keep close. Keep close.” Later, I realized we were dancing for a party of lesbians. But I don’t think my mother cared who was in the audience as long as we got to perform. We danced at an insane asylum; at an Army hospital where the soldiers were lying in bed and holding mirrors so they could see us; and at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for a group of Greek sailors, who clapped like crazy watching a bunch of teenage and pre-teen girls kicking their legs up.

We went to Fort Dix, Fort Jay, and Fort Hamilton on the Brooklyn shore where the water splashed over the wall and got us wet as we tapped. I think we invented a new step: tap-splash, tap-splash, tap-slip-fall, get up again. At a place in upstate New York, they put us on a gravel driveway. Then they told my mother that there wasn’t going to be a piano. Rather than complain, she pulled a kazoo out of her purse. She played the kazoo as we kicked gravel around.

We were on
Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour
three times. To better our chances during the first appearance, I helped lock our competition, a group of Irish folk dancers, in their dressing room. They nearly missed their cue. But my mother played by the rules. Before each show, she put up signs in our elevator, telling people to call in and vote for us. It must have worked. We won each time and went to the finals at Madison Square Garden, where we opened for Pat Boone but ultimately lost to child star Jojo Vitale singing “That’s Amore.”

Even though I danced like this through high school, I never thought of myself as an entertainer. I suppose I was. I do know that I got way more out my mother’s insufferable dance classes than I ever realized at the time. Years later I fell back on my ability to dance. I tapped on
Laverne & Shirley
. I did the lindy with Barry Manilow on his first TV special. I break-danced on TV before most of America had even seen break dancing. Those classes I hated so much had given me a Plan B and a lifetime of confidence. But like most people, I needed to live most of my life before I could look back and understand how lucky I was to have been tortured.

A portrait of Penny’s parents, taken in the 1930s
Godfrey Durr

I
WENT TO CAMP EVERY
summer starting at age nine, and every one of those days I was there I wrote a letter home. You had to in order to get into the mess hall for dinner. My letters were all variations on the same theme:

Dear Mom & Dad,
Hi, how are you? How are Nanny and Grandpa?
Send candy.

Love,
Penny

Aside from wanting to satisfy the daily requirement to get into the dining hall, I might have asked for food so I could build up a reserve and not have to come home. I would have gladly stayed at camp year-round if it had been possible. Going was a family tradition. Both of my parents had spent their childhood summers at camp. My mother had been the dance counselor at Camp Geneva in Lake Como, Pennsylvania, and she kept going even after she was married.

Before any of us went away, though, we spent summers taking family trips to Avon-by-the-Sea on the Jersey Shore. I enjoyed going
there, too. It meant no dance school. My mother closed the ballroom for two months and we loaded up the family car and headed south on the highway. Within an hour or two, Garry, Ronny, and I began to throw up. Once one of us vomited, it set off a chain reaction. We all threw up. It was a sure sign summer had arrived.

In Avon, we rented rooms in a large two-story home a short walk from the beach. After we unpacked, my father drove back home and went to work. I guess that was his idea of a vacation—life without the rest of us. However, he returned on the weekends. As a little kid, I enjoyed his company. He took me to the arcade in Asbury Park and horseback riding in Belmar. Without him around, though, my mother exhaled. She put on her satin bathing suit, covered her hair with a scarf, and spent the day in the sun, visiting with friends.

I could tell she had started to relax when she began talking about the young men she had liked in college before settling on my father. It took a week or two of her watching other couples on the beach (“Look at that niceness.”) before she started in on how she should have married Godfrey Durr, Matt Chambers, or Tom Farrell instead of my father. It was hard to tell if she meant it as a joke.

I went topless until I went to camp. In every picture I have from Avon, I am only wearing bathing suit bottoms. Sometimes I wore suspenders—but no top. Why didn’t my mother get me a top, too? I don’t know. No one ever said anything, though, and I never felt like a centerfold-in-training as I ran around the beach, digging holes and poking my nose into other people’s business.

One of my favorite days in Avon was when the lifeguards pulled someone out of the water and I found myself standing right next to them. People formed a circle around us as they watched, and I loved having a ringside seat for the drama. The next summer a friend of my sister’s cut her foot on a piece of glass, and a lifeguard carried her away. That was also an exciting day for me. So were the days when the jellyfish invaded the beach and swimmers limped out of the water in tears to the lifeguard station.

The lifeguards made a big impression on me. At home, I hugged any man I saw wearing a uniform. “Don’t ask,” my mother explained to friends and neighbors who wondered why. “She just does that.”

Then one summer Garry went to a Boy Scout camp instead of going with us to Avon. We knew he would get sick or injured, and he did. He got poison ivy. But he survived. He sent letters every day. He was doing fine. In addition to clean underwear, he had taken four hundred gallons of calamine lotion. The next year my sister went to camp. Now both of them were sending letters. I was deeply envious. They were having a good time while I was left with my mother and Nanny, whose old lady friends would ask me to play canasta with them.

“We need a fourth. Can Penny stay home from the beach and play cards?”

I was good, too. I was only eight, but I could meld like a seventy-year-old.

The next year it was my turn to go away. I went to Camp Odetah in rural Connecticut. On the first day I was placed in the extra milk line, given two chocolate milks every meal, and told to play. I never wanted to go back home.

Dear Mom & Dad,
Having a great time. How’s everyone? Send me a salami.

Love,
Penny

After one summer there, I switched to Camp Geneva, the same camp my mother had gone to as a teenager. My sister was there, too, and my brother was on the boys’ side, Camp Onibar. My mother wrote one letter each week and sent a copy to all three of us. Ronny always complained that she got the third carbon every time. “Here, take mine,” I said. I didn’t care whether I heard from her all summer. Family? What family? This was my escape.

Geneva was a kosher camp for rich Jewish kids. We, of course, were neither. We got in because my mother’s best friend, my fake aunt Blanche (she and my uncle Leo were my godparents) was a Rabino, and they owned the camp.

I arrived with strep throat and spent the first week of camp in the infirmary, where I found out that I was allergic to penicillin. That was fun. Once recovered, I threw myself into the activities. Geneva was a paradise of green fields carved out of a thick Pocono forest, with social hall, bunks, tennis courts, a lake, a baseball diamond, golf, and an archery range on the edge of an apple orchard. It also emphasized singing and dancing.

After a morning reveille, we lined up around the flagpole and put our hands over our hearts as the stars and stripes were raised. After breakfast, we sang songs—a primary activity—cleaned our bunks, and then received our first activity for the day: basketball, softball, swimming, volleyball, archery, baton twirling, or golf, which I never liked. What was the point? You hit the ball and walked. I was bored in five minutes. I liked sports where you ran.

I was assigned to bunk 7, where I became instant friends with Dede Levy from Long Island, Sherry Arbur, Barbara Peltzman (or Peltzy) from Forest Hills, Nancy Cohen, and Jill Rubenson and Andy Stein, both of whom were superb athletes. We spent the next four summers together, trading stories and teaching one another about music, boys, and our changing bodies. This was a time when no girl’s parents talked to her about that kind of thing, so, for instance, if one of us started our period, it became a group activity.
Who’s got a tampon? Who knows how to work a tampon? Who’s got a mirror? Ouch, this hurts
.