What falls away : a memoir (6 page)

Visits to that place by the sea inspired intense and indecipherable feelings, a confluence of wildness and order, of magic and the commonplace, of vitality and death, content-

ment against unutterable yearning, instantaneous and eternal.

When I was ten, and had resumed full school days, I began playing with an El Salvadoran girl who spoke little English, named Roxanna Tinocco. Soon, she was one of my closest friends, but her family was going back to El Salvador, and who knew i£ we'd ever see each other again? So we were shuffling morosely around the school yard, arm in arm, when Roxy invited me to El Salvador for the summer. The thought of going so far for so long was frightening, but by the time her parents made the invitation official and my own parents got enthusiastic, I could see that it would be an adventure.

My mother insisted on taking me out to buy new clothes for the trip, even though shopping was an ordeal we avoided whenever possible because I hated it so. I hated having to look at clothes and hated trying them on and invariably I became cranky and literally faint from boredom. But this time she kept the expedition brief and cheerfril— soon we were sipping tea at the Beverly Hills Hotel, eating delicious cakes and chatting happily. And as we sat there, I became aware that my mother was talking to me like a friend, as if I was grown-up. In that moment some essential part of me, stirring in my most intimate, shadowy center, was acknowleged and stepped blinking into the bright afternoon light.

The departure was wrenching. The Tinoccos had to pry me off my parents and I cried all the way to San Salvador, where, within hours of our arrival, the resident seamstress came to measure me for riding clothes. Later, three sets of snow-white jodhpurs and shirts arrived, neatly folded and wrapped in brown paper and a perfect fit, for my lessons the following morning.

On a tour of the house I noted that the Tinoccos'

kitchen was bigger than our living room. One of the cooks sat talking animatedly to Roxy while wringing a chicken's neck. Their conversation, which of course I understood nothing of because it was in Spanish, continued until the hen was bald. I felt homesick.

The three younger Tinocco girls and I spent our days horseback riding and soon I picked up a little Spanish. We also spent considerable time scheming to prompt the highly strung English governess to resign. (Release a bat in her bedroom, put toads and spiders between her sheets, spread peanut butter on the toilet seat, and speak only in a language she cannot understand.) We had no sense then that El Salvador was smoldering and would soon be torn apart by terrorists representing both the left and the right, that a bloody revolution was imminent, and that the wealthy elite like the Tinocco family would flee for their lives. During that summer of 1956, everything seemed peaceful throughout the countryside, where we galloped thoroughbred horses through the immense coffee plantations and I stared back at the unsmiling workers waiting in line for a spoonful of black beans slopped onto a tortilla.

Two years later, in 1958, my mother retired from the screen. For reasons we did not understand, movie offers had thinned out for my father—he'd only made four films in four years instead of four in one year, as in 1951. Now money was a concern. I caught the strained tones and overheard snatches of conversations, and I worried.

But finally a project, John Paul Jones, did come together and our family moved to Spain for its filming. Mike, three months shy of his nineteenth birthday, didn't want to leave California, so we left him there in the home we loved on Beverly Drive and flew all the way to Madrid, where we loaded into the Castellana Hilton Hotel. What we didn't know, what we had no inkling of when we left that morn-

ing, was that this trip would bring about an end to the life we had known.

In Madrid we lived under life-sized portraits of Conrad Hilton and explored every inch of the huge drab hotel; we spied on fellow guests, ordered room service, attended Spanish schools, and within a month I was dreaming in Spanish. Dad gave Johnny and Patrick parts m the movie and he said I could be in it too—he even gave me a line, which was "From our petticoats, sir." "My" scene wasn't due to be shot for five months but already I was nervous. My father neglected to tell me in what context my line would appear, so I imagined every conceivable scenario and gave "From our petticoats, sir" every interpretation my twelve-year-old mind could come up with.

When Bette Davis arrived to play Catherine the Great, she brought her daughter BD, who was my age, and I was taken along on many of their sightseeing expeditions. BD was quiet, well-behaved, and pretty. Bette was energetic, blunt, bossy, vivid, and of course completely intimidating, but she was kind to me and I liked her. She, in turn, has described me as "quite mousy-looking, a lonely little girl . . . born with an old soul. She lived all alone in her own world."

Benidorm, on the southern coast of Spain, was a sleepy little village then, with burros wandering through the colorful marketplace, long pristine beaches, and a few midrange houses for the tourists, who were scarce. When Dad moved there for the final three months of the shoot, our family rented one of these houses. Our father did not live with us, but in one of the two big hotels that loomed incongruously out of the dusty town, sleek harbingers of what was to come.

But It was quiet then, nothing happening. We swam, drank lemonade, and tried to sell some to the handful of German tourists. We nursed our sunburns, argued, swatted at flies, drew in the dust with sticks, read, and I practiced

H MIAFARROW

my line. After dark, by candlelight we played cards, checkers, chess, argued some more, swatted the mosquitos, and sometimes we played a version of the Ouija board, using an overturned wineglass and pieces of paper with the letters of the alphabet written on them. One hot night, my mother and some of the kids and I were doing this, and asking questions, when swiftly and purposefully a seemingly self-propelled glass whirled from letter to letter, right out from under our fingertips, and spelled out MIKE DEAD. We didn't play after that.

When the day finally arrived for my film debut, I was nervous after the months of anticipation and preparation. "From our petticoats, sir" had to be the most practiced line in cinema history. Wearing a costume made specially for me, I was taken onto the set, a huge sailing ship, and placed among a cluster of women surrounding the star, handsome Robert Stack. I was shaking. There was some talk, and then suddenly Robert Stack was saying, "And where did you get the material to make this flag?" My cue, surely this was my cue. I opened my mouth to speak when, from behind me, a velvety, seductive voice was saying, "From our petticoats, sir." Stunned, I whipped around: the ravishing woman speaking my line was Mrs. Robert Stack. So it goes.

I was miserable in Spain and wrote my friend Maria, "The people here don't seem to like their dogs or their children." I missed Mike, and our dog Tuffy, and my friends, and home, and I seemed to be sick all the time. Whatever the reason, I grew listless and pale, and dark circles settled permanently under my eyes. My mother was worried: this was how I'd been in the months before my ninth birthday. The doctor couldn't find anything wrong with me, but I was so weak I could barely sit up.

Then a strange thing happened. The town of Denia, where the film was being made, put on a huge week-long festival each year, and because I was the movie director's daughter, I was chosen Queen of the Fiestas, and there was

no way around it. Four long gowns had been made for me and I wore a crown and elbow-length gloves and rode in floats through the crowded streets, waving. I danced with the mayor and made a long flawless speech in Spanish to thousands of people. I visited schools and churches and handed out baskets to the poor and my mother was absolutely astonished that I could do these thmgs, and I myself was beyond amazement. The minute it was over I again grew pale, and the circles under my eyes reappeared, and I went back to bed. For years my mother would say, "Remember in Spain how you rose to the occasion?"

Money troubles were hangmg over us all the time. From the start, financing for John Paul Jones had come in irregularly. So we were relieved when the film was finally finished and we headed for the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland, where I rode horses all day and visited with my cousins.

In the fall we joined our father in London, where he was editing the movie, and the family took up residence in the Park Lane Hotel. Johnny and Patrick were sent to school in Bournemouth, and Prudence and I were enrolled in a convent boarding school in Surrey, while Tisa and Steffi attended a day school in London. We all survived an intermmable shopping expedition at Harrods, where we bought uniforms, nightgowns, sheets, towels, hot-water bottles, and quilts, and we spent quiet, nervous hours with Barbara, our nanny, sewing name tags into every single item. Finally, on a gray September morning, a chubby, bespectacled chauffeur named Freddie drove Prudy and me out to the school. The austere brick building was set at the edge of Richmond Park. It looked a grim, forbidding place.

My sister and I were taken to separate quarters, where we cried for hours every night. I telephoned our parents begging them to let us come back even for a weekend, but they took a firm stand. It took a toothache to bring me "home" to the Park Lane Hotel.

"Get up Mia, get dressed." Our nanny's voice, with the firm, cheery Scottish accent, now seemed strange, muffled, cracked, as she pushed the trolleyful of English breakfasts into our hotel bedroom.

"What's the matter, Barbara?" I asked, but her lips stayed pressed together, her eyes lined pink, searching the floor. A heavmess leaned into me. I put on my uniform to return to school after breakfast. I'd been to the dentist the day before, but I wasn't thmkmg about cavities now.

Barbara turned to dress my little sister Tisa. I pushed around my cereal and fixed on a single tear as it slid crookedly through the lines near Barbara's right eye to hang trembling on the soft jowl below her plump cheek.

"I can't eat any more." I waited.

"Go to your mam and dad now," she said, still not looking at me.

My parents' suite was at the end of the hallway and I kept my eyes on their door, stomach turning over empty. I wanted to run—run the other way before it was too late, up the long corridor, down the six flights of stairs out into the watery English morning, where it would be seven-thirty and an ordinary day. But I put my stout black shoes one in front of the other, even when I heard the terrible sounds from deep inside my mother.

I pushed the door open and took a couple of steps into the suite. In the living room, toward the right, my father sat crookedly on the couch, bent over, silent. My mother was standing, facing him, her back to me. She threw a pillow at him hard. I shouldn't be seeing this, I thought, nor hearing these sounds.

"Mom, what happened? Mom?" She moved past me heavily, out of the living room, and I followed toward the bedroom, where she twisted slowly toward me, my serene and beautiful mother, her face torn wild, ripped apart. The

scream never left my throat; I could not move nor make a sound.

"Mike's dead," she said. Then, from a great distance I heard words: plane crash, flymg lessons, leavmg today, Mom and Dad, California, Mike's body, a funeral, do you understand? No, no I don't understand anything are you sure it's him mayhe it's a mistake maybe it's someone else.

"Go back to school now," she told me. Would I be all right? Would I tell Prudy? She stood apart, she didn't touch me.

"Yes, Mom, I will. I'll tell Prudy. We'll be all right ..." I could not bridge the terrible gap between us.

"We'll be okay," I said. But I toppled hard. Never again would death catch me so unprepared. At the age of thirteen I vowed to stand ready.

Back at school the nuns had been notified and on my arrival I was taken to the Reverend Mother Elizabeth's office, where she rambled on about "God's will." I interrupted to ask if she would find Prudy, please. "I need to tell her. My mother said to tell her." It would be the most terrible and important thing I had ever done, and I would do It better than anybody because I cared more than anybody.

But when the nun returned with Prudy some minutes later it was clear that from the lips of this stranger who neither cared nor knew anything about Mike or Prudy or me or our exact and fierce love, and therefore this our own and nobody else's loss and fury and pain—my sister had been told her brother was dead. I held her, hating the Reverend Mother, who would not leave the room, and my helplessness and God himself, yes, Goddamnyou Jesuschristgod. If You exist, damn You to hell.

Did he feel pam? Was there time for fear, or just surprise? Was there a final thought? Did he love me last? Rage and grief are savage companions, but despair is the final undoing. Mv brother's death plunged me into the struggle

of my life, drenching every bitter, brutal hour of each day and each long, foreign night. Everything was overturned, broken into senselessness.

But gradually over the next months I became aware that deep within me hope had survived. And after hope came strength, and with it a fragile clarity—just enough to reach for what was essential. So in the end I found myself at the beginning. And once again, all the world was brand-new.

And I learned a useful thing about anger—^you can feel it, all of it, and then let it pass through you. It can be done —I know because I've done it countless times; the rage can just pass right through you. And eventually grief gathers tight into Itself and in the most intimate, lacerating concentration of pain it takes its final, permanent place. And there is nothing to be done about it.

Ghapter Three

After Mike's death, my parents moved from the Park Lane Hotel to a tall, quamt house on Swan Walk, m Chelsea. I was given the attic room, flooded with light, from which you could climb out onto the rooftop for a splendid view of the Thames. I painted the room myself, a palest shade of peach, yet I rarely stayed there; by then I preferred being at school in Surrey. Tensions between my parents had escalated. Their demons were driving them apart, and in their grief they found no solace in each other.