Somebody to Love? (2 page)
After a rousing evening of performing for assorted drunken cowboys in a saloon and shooting a rabble-rouser, she shows up for her trial the next morning, where she speaks out of order and then winds up shooting the judge in the ass.
A comedy.
The point is, what nine-year-old Grace saw was a woman who looked like a princess, behaving in a primarily offensive, often masculine way and producing slapstick results. No heavy feminist stuff, no serious reprimands. Just a series of entertaining events, showcasing the character's comedic qualities and instinct for following her whims.
In scene two, Betty's character, as a little girl, is being coached in sharpshooting by her grandfather.
“Can I go play with my dolls now?” she asks.
“Young lady, the frontier is a wild place,” says her grandfather. “Nobody's gonna take care of you; you gotta take care of yourself—and nobody argues with a gun. You get good enough with that piece, you won't find no trouble you can't get out of.”
Little Betty blows ten bottles off the wall from twenty paces, and says, “Can I go play with my dolls
now?
”
“Okay,” says Gramps, mumbling under his breath, “Boy, she's an amazing shot.”
In the following scenes, Betty's adult character continuously lets fly with sarcastic remarks, takes no guff from children and adults alike, and lets her various suitors know she's charmed by their attention but not available. A class A gunfighter, she hikes up her skirts and plows into the fray with John Wayne–style resolve. When she falls in love with Cesar Romero,
she
has to save
him
—both from winding up on the losing end of a gunfight and from his own confused thinking.
Significantly, she takes it all on with no whining or lobbying against sexist attitudes. She just tackles one problem at a time, always with a sense of humor, always self-possessed, always unruffled. At the end of the film, when she discovers that Romero has a woman on the side, she dumps him with a few well-chosen remarks and shoots the same judge in the ass again—this time hitting
both
cheeks.
“Feminist comedy,” practically an oxymoron, had a couple of good years after WWII. Chalk it up to the forced female autonomy that occurred during wartime, when Rosie the Riveter went to work in the factories, constructing the Allies' war machines while taking charge of the finances, the home, and the children. Those movies gave little girls in the audience the green light for self-reliant, admittedly-leaning-toward-violent behavior. No preaching, no bra burning, just facing and enjoying the humor of life as it was, wherever you were, whatever was going on.
All those images on celluloid filled out a picture of how
I
wanted to be.
Even though the fifties seemed to regress into the pocket of a fluffy Doris Day apron, I clearly was influenced by the do-it-yourself heroines I'd watched as a child. They took it all on without viewing “it” as something that needed a great deal of support to handle. Consequently, in the early sixties, when women started telling me I should join “the Cause,” that we should stand up for each other, march in D.C. and so forth, I thought that was about as interesting as joining the Daughters of the American Revolution. It seemed like a new slant on an old Tupperware party.
By the time I was old enough to consider how I wanted to live my life, I'd read about and heard of Golda Meir; Indira Gandhi; Babe Zaharias; Clare Boothe Luce; Eleanor Roosevelt; Marie Curie; Cassandra of Troy; Cleopatra; Elizabeth Taylor; Melina Mercouri; Anna Pavlova; Moira Shearer; Isadora Duncan; Maria Tallchief; Mary, Queen of Scots; Queen Isabella and Queen Victoria; Mary Shelley; Louisa May Alcott; Betsy Ross; Susan B. Anthony; Marian Anderson; Ella Fitzgerald; Carmen Miranda; Tokyo Rose; Sarah Bernhardt; Georgia O'Keeffe; Gertrude Stein; Annie Oakley; Amelia Earhart; Joan of Arc; Mother Teresa and Guru Ma; Julia Child; Pamela Harriman; Catherine the Great; Evita Peron; and Snow White.
The above-listed women collectively represented every attitude and occupation, so I figured my field of possibilities was wide open. I assumed that women who lived for the home front—housewives, homemakers, whatever the euphemism was—
chose
to do that; otherwise, they'd be doing something else. I couldn't imagine anybody doing something they didn't
want
to do.
Apart from rectal examinations and dental visits, why do something you don't like?
Financial circumstances might have demanded certain unpleasant activities, but if you did decide to specialize in the homemaking arts, I thought it should be because you were fulfilling a dream, not bowing to societal pressure.
At the time, that wasn't the accepted way of thinking, but since adults had made the Betty Grable films, I figured
some
people
somewhere
knew it was possible to experience life on a grand scale. They knew you didn't have to acquiesce, didn't have to be drab.
For years, I've followed the Grable credo: say what you mean, mean what you say, and throw a joke and a song in the mix now and then.
I Love L.A.
“I
f I didn't get straight A's on my report card, my mother would beat on my rear end about twenty times with the wooden side of a hairbrush. We wore so many petticoats under our dresses in those days, the spankings didn't hurt as much as she thought they did. I'd try not to laugh out loud when she'd go at it so hard, all the hairpins would come flying out of her head in every direction, ruining that big doughnut-shaped hairdo that was stylish then. By the time she got through running after me, tripping on the hem of her long dress, and working on my butt, she looked like
she
was the one who'd been punished.”
That wasn't me speaking; those were my mother's words. For my grandmother, societal pressure had been everything and my mother received the brunt of her Victorian propriety. When I was growing up, the pressure to conform wasn't exactly imposed; usually it was implied. But God only knows what kind of absolute discipline was acted out on my grandmother, because she never mentioned it. The stories she told me were usually wonderful lies about fantastic adventures she'd enjoyed as a young girl
I called my grandmother Lady Sue, not as a result of any nobility. It was just logic; I liked nicknames, she was a lady and her name was Sue. Lady Sue used to sit in a big chair by my bedroom window and sew costumes for me, because she knew my world was largely inhabited by colorful characters from the children's classics: Robin Hood, Alice in Wonderland, Snow White, Peter Pan, and certain cartoon heroes like Red Ryder, Prince Valiant, and Li'l Abner. I
became
those people, man or woman, it didn't matter. Put on the outfit and the twentieth century disappears. Go back in time, switch gender, change my accent, change my age—no problem.
I'd sit by my grandmother's side, both of us squeezed into the big chair. Her hands moving quickly with the needle and thread, she'd just start talking, never looking up from her work, and as she told each story, the costume for it was materializing.
Beautiful.
One day, when she was making a short skirt for me to wear to the ice skating rink, she began, “When I was about your age, I was asked to be the star of a number in the Ice Follies. You see, I could skate so fast, it was like watching a blurred image circling the rink. So, to make it even more spectacular, I attached tiny electric light bulbs to the top of the toes of my skates. What the audience saw was a fifty-mile-an-hour rainbow of colors streaking around the darkened arena.”
Of course, when she was a little girl, they couldn't do that with electric lights. My forward-thinking grandmother. She and I both knew she was making up stories as she went along, but together, we entered altered states with amused conviction. My mother would walk into the room from time to time and smile at what looked to her like two children thoroughly lost in make-believe. She couldn't join in—it was a small club, and she was too pragmatic for the existing members.
My mother, Virginia, was a twentieth-century woman, modern, sophisticated, and elegant. Her land of enchantment was “right now.” No going back, no sci-fi. She wasn't tedious about it, though. She had her own way of “dressing up,” and she was good at it. So good, I often viewed her persona as some elevated, barely attainable level of existence.
In the early thirties, my mother had taken a shot at Hollywood, becoming an understudy for Marion Davies (newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst's paramour). She also did some nightclub work as a band singer, performing at the old Pantages Theater on Sunset Boulevard. But when it came time to be the wife of a young investment banker, her less than pristine entertainer's life had to stop. Maybe, if she'd made it to the Betty Grable stage, I wouldn't be here at all. She'd probably be on her fifth husband and her unfortunate daughter would be writing a nasty little book about her.
My parents both graduated from the University of Washington, Seattle. Soon after they were married, my father was transferred from the San Francisco–based investment firm of Weeden and Company to the Chicago office. Then, on October 30, 1939, at Chicago Hope Hospital, Virginia Wing gave birth to Grace Barnett Wing at 7:47
A.M
. Well, not really. I don't know my actual time of birth or the name of the hospital, because they weren't written on my birth certificate. Back then, record keepers weren't as anal-compulsive as they are today, so I've always made up my own stats when it was time to fill in the blanks.
After my mother had taken lots of legal drugs (they weren't into natural childbirth in those days), with no perceptible complications, she and my father, Ivan, took their firstborn back home to 1731 Rice Street, Highland Park, Illinois. (That address
is
on the birth certificate.) We lived in an old, dark wood-shingled house surrounded by trees, flowers, squirrels, and birds. My mom and dad were the prototypical
Leave It to Beaver
–type parents, as yet unsuspecting of the iconoclastic behavior that would shortly issue from their fat blonde daughter. Yup, I was blonde at birth and stayed that way until puberty.
My only memories of that time come from what my parents told me, or from the pictures in my father's photo albums. Whether or not we're
supposed
to remember what those big faces were saying about us when they were hovering over our cribs, I don't know, but a train ride is one of the first things I can remember, unaided by photographs.
When I was three years old, my father was once again transferred to another office, this time in Los Angeles. While my parents stayed behind in Chicago to take care of packing up our belongings, my mother's youngest sister accompanied me for the three-day trip on one of the old Pullman sleeper trains. Navy blue-uniformed porters set up a small hammock directly over my aunt's berth by the window. That was my bed. My most vivid memories are of the constant train rhythms, a dance where you don't have to move, it moves you. The hammock's swinging, trees and buildings parading past the window, the clacking of the wheels as they hit the small splits in the rail, the diesel smell that overpowered the fragrance of a single flower in a white vase on a white tablecloth in the dining car—these are all clear pictures and sensations I have in my head of the train working its way west. But I don't remember how my aunt looked or what she said. My memory is only of the machinery.
Infanta: me at three. (Ivan Wing)
All of my mother's relatives lived in Los Angeles: three sisters, their husbands and children, one brother, and my grandmother. Suddenly, I had a huge family. “I love L.A.,” croons songwriter/singer Randy Newman.
So do I.
Our big family would get together at my uncle Fred's Malibu home, where various sisters, aunts, children, assorted family friends and dogs wandered in and out of the beach house talking, laughing, and eating. The country was at war in Europe and Asia then, but I was aware of it only through the adults' conversations. And even then, the impact on me was minimal: squeeze the red dot in the margarine to make the white cube look yellow like butter, pull the shades down for blackouts, and cover your ears during air raid sirens. It all seemed like a game. I was too young to understand and lucky enough to be unaffected.
My uncle Fred, a writer, sometimes took me to his office at the Farmer's Market, where I loved the carnival-like atmosphere. Colored booths and outdoor shops were decorated with Mexican hats and dolls, and garlands of red peppers and postcards were strung across restaurants serving food to laughing bronze-colored people in big sunglasses. Another uncle, Daniel, was a cinematographer at MGM. He introduced me to Dore Schary, who was then the head of the studio, but I wasn't as impressed with the production end of the business as I was with the “artists.” I thought films were the ultimate art form, a medium that included all of the other arts—music, dancing, set decoration, photography, costume design, acting, and writing. It was
moving
art, not something that was tucked away in a palace where only a privileged few could appreciate it, but an accessible and constantly changing experience for everyone.