Audition (28 page)

Jane and John were so determined to find that tall blond boy that they were once again pursuing private adoption. Most adoption agencies at the time divulged few details about a child’s natural parents; even basic facts like health and family background were kept secret. So Jane and John had asked their company’s lawyers to locate prospective unwed mothers of suitable backgrounds and physical characteristics who planned to give up their babies for adoption. The lawyers also met, if possible, with the fathers. The lawyers had a checklist of what to look for when interviewing the parents—for example, had they attended high school, had they graduated? The lawyers were also instructed to find out if the parents had any possible genetically inherited diseases, like diabetes.

I remember being shocked at their calculated approach toward custom-tailoring their children, although in these days of “designer babies” it doesn’t seem that strange. But then all I could think of was Nietzsche’s belief in a superior being and Darwin’s theories about the survival of the fittest. Lee and I didn’t care what the sex of our child would be or his or her hair color or height. We just wanted a healthy baby.

Then came an offer we couldn’t refuse.

Jane and John wanted a boy. Period. Again, back in the sixties, there was no way of knowing before the baby was born what sex it would be. So they were looking for a couple who would absolutely agree to take the baby if the child was a girl. Lee and I looked at each other and said, almost simultaneously: “We will.”

We told no one. We did not decorate a nursery. We did not buy a layette. We waited quietly.

Jane called from time to time to say the lawyers had met this woman or that couple, but no one who fitted their specifications. Finally they felt they had found just the right candidate. The mother-to-be was single and came from a good family. The parents did not know their daughter was pregnant. She was living in a different state, and was only nineteen, so she did not feel she could take on the responsibility of raising a child. Both she and the father-to-be were tall and fair-haired. No known hereditary diseases.

We continued to wait.

Then came the unforgettable day. I had just gotten off the air and was myself being interviewed by a print journalist when my phone rang. It was Lee.

“It’s a girl,” Lee said. “She’s ours!”

I looked at the woman who was interviewing me and burst into tears. “I’m a mother,” I sobbed happily, and swore her to secrecy.

Actually I swore everyone in the office close to me to secrecy. I didn’t want the word to reach the papers for fear our baby’s biological mother would learn we were the parents. But what I really wanted to do was to rush up and down Rockefeller Plaza and shout out the news, “We have a baby! We have a baby! Hallelujah!” I was out of my mind with joy and couldn’t wait to see her.

That night Lee and I laughed and cried. We made love without worrying whether or not it was the right time of the month. We bought airline tickets to fly to the state where the baby was born. The hospital told us we’d have to wait until the infant was four days old before she could leave the hospital. The birth mother was fine. She had no idea who we were and had no desire to meet us. Nor did we want to meet her.

Remember, this was long before the idea of “open adoptions” became a reality or even an option. The identity of adopted children and their birth parents was kept sealed and not available to the child or the new parents. This was considered the best way. The adoptive parents could handle the situation however they wanted and tell their child whatever they wanted.

I don’t know if Jane and John ever found their fair-haired, blue-eyed, very tall son. After the birth of the baby, we lost touch. But let me just tell you that my daughter has blue eyes, fair hair, and today she is slightly over six feet tall.

I immediately told my parents and sister, who were living in New York at the time, about the baby’s birth. They were ecstatic. We decided to name the baby Jacqueline after my sister. This was fine with Lee. For my sister this naming was truly meaningful. She was now in her early forties. She would never have her own child, and baby Jackie would help to fill that need.

Right after I told my family I told my producer, but I also said that I would not mention the baby’s birth on the air, nor would I send out announcements. Again, I was afraid the birth mother would put two and two together and realize that I was the woman who now was parent to her baby and I didn’t want her to be in touch with me—or eventually with Jackie. To this day, she never has been. She must have wanted secrecy, too.

All we knew about our baby was that she was healthy. We knew there was no diabetes in her family. We were also told the mother had a high IQ and that she was not Jewish. In turn the birth mother knew almost nothing about us except that we were married and would be loving parents. She didn’t care in what religion her baby would be raised. We paid all the birth mother’s hospital expenses and her lawyer’s fee. That was that.

The same day as the wondrous phone call, I called my cousin Lorraine in Asbury Park, New Jersey. She had followed her father into the clothing business and owned a children’s store. Lorraine, who knew much more about what I would need for the baby than I did, immediately sent me a complete layette—bibs, diaper covers, undershirts, one-piece jumpers, blankets, sheets, towels. She also sent a bathinette and a changing table with compartments for diapers, everything I would need. A close friend loaned me her own baby’s bassinet and, later, her crib.

The new baby would sleep in what had been our library. It had dark brown fake leather walls. Very chic for a library, very grim for a nursery. No time to paint. Our creative set designer on
Today
made us huge pastel butterflies. We hung them on the walls, and the room was suddenly enchanting. We hastily called a domestic employment agency, did some quick interviewing, and hired an experienced baby nurse.

Four days after the baby’s birth, we flew to pick her up. On the one hand I was impatient with desire to hold her in my arms. On the other hand I was nervous. Would I even know how to hold her? I hadn’t had much experience with babies and had no parenting lessons. Maternal instinct would have to make everything all right. I had brought with me a soft, flannel one-piece pink bunting for our new daughter, along with a white cuddly blanket, diapers, a bottle, formula—whatever I was told was necessary. I was more or less prepared.

I didn’t want to go to the receiving floor where the baby was to be delivered to us because I was afraid of meeting the birth mother. Lee went upstairs with the bunting. A nurse then dressed the infant and put her into Lee’s arms. He came downstairs and put our baby in my arms.

Even as I write this, I get tears in my eyes. I cannot properly express my joy as I welcomed this tiny pink bundle. Her face was partially covered by the blanket, so I gently pulled it back. My daughter, Jackie, was the most beautiful baby I had ever seen. Perfect features. One little dimple in her left cheek. My cousin Shirley, when she first saw Jackie, said: “She has a mouth like a rosebud.” No hair, just some blond fuzz. Blue eyes. Perfect hands and feet. Perfect.

According to the baby book I immediately began to keep, our daughter weighed seven pounds and was twenty-one inches long, a little longer than average. Later on I also noted in the book that she smiled spontaneously at the age of one month. (Could it have been gas?) She discovered her hands and feet at twelve weeks and recognized Lee and me easily by four months. She crawled by eight months and was, of course, the most brilliant baby ever born. Not only that, she may well have been the only baby born that year who had to lie about her age.

After receiving Jackie, Lee and I went immediately to the airport. “How old is the baby?” we were asked at the check-in counter. “Four days,” we said proudly. “Too young to fly,” said the ticket agent. “A baby has to be eight days old to be allowed to fly.”

We turned in our tickets and went to another airline. “Eight days,” we said, and we boarded a plane with our sleeping infant.

I changed her diaper on the plane. Awkwardly. Diapers were cloth then and fastened with huge safety pins. I stabbed myself several times before I got the hang of it. I fed her a bottle. I held her to my chest, to my face, to my lips. “She is ours,” Lee kept saying. “She is ours.” Seven days earlier we had no way of knowing if we would ever have a child. Now we were parents.

And my parents were grandparents. My sister was her aunt. From the time of the baby’s birth, there was no thought in their minds that she wasn’t their flesh and blood. I don’t think they ever used the word “adoption” to me. Their newborn granddaughter was theirs, and by “theirs” I mean all three of them. And that was fine with me. I wanted them to feel that the child was as much a part of them as she was of Lee and me. Judging from the way they doted on her, they did. All three couldn’t get enough of her.

When Jackie was born, Lee’s son and daughter were in their late teens. They were very sweet with her, but they had their own interests as well as other younger half sisters and brothers, for their mother had also remarried. So although they held their new baby sister, made the proper cooing noises, and never expressed any jealousy, Jackie was not really a part of their lives.

You can read all the baby books on the care and handling of an infant, but nothing prepares you for the reality. I remember the sweetness of the smell of a newborn. It is the purest, most delicious scent. I remember how teeny she was, and my fear that I wasn’t supporting her head properly when I bent over to take her in my arms. I remember testing the water of her little bathinette with my elbow as I had been told to do, to make sure the water was not too hot. Both Lee and I diapered her. In those days you scraped the diapers clean into the toilet before you rinsed them out and put them in a big hamper for a diaper service to pick up. Nothing was too much. Everything about this beautiful little creature was wondrous. In particular I thought my Jackie had beautiful legs. Now, almost forty years later, she still does. I also delighted in that one little dimple on her left cheek. How adorable.

In the months after Jackie’s birth, I didn’t say a word about her on the air. When I finally began to talk about her, I got letters from some viewers saying that they had known all along that I was pregnant. They could see it. By the way, had I actually been pregnant, I would not have been allowed to appear on the air unless I disguised my pregnancy. Pregnancy was hidden then. In her stint as a
Today
Girl in the fifties, a pregnant Florence Henderson was always shot from behind the desk. But then again, there were few women on live TV at that time, pregnant or not.

When Jackie got older I didn’t bring her into the studio, the way many working mothers do today. Now, if you are on television and have a child, you can carry the baby in, change it, nurse it, put it down to sleep, and everybody oohs and ahhs, as they should. Some cast members on daily talk programs even negotiate a special room for their babies and nannies. When Rosie O’Donnell was doing her own daytime talk show at NBC, she had a whole nursery set up, not just for her own children but for the small children of members of her crew. It was like a day-care center. But when Jackie was born, children weren’t welcome. It would have been like bringing in a puppy who wasn’t housebroken.

I tried to stay home as much as possible. On the nurse’s day off, Lee stayed with Jackie until I got off the air at 9:00 a.m. and raced back to the apartment. I loved to give Jackie her bottle, although the pediatrician told me that she was what was known as a “spitter.” After she was fed her bottle, she would regurgitate quite a bit of the formula when you burped her. I became an excellent burper, but my clothes were getting ruined. My mother solved the problem by buying me a bunch of cotton dresses called Swirls. You tied them around you and they covered whatever you were wearing. Jackie finally grew out of her spitting phase, but to this day she has a bit of a weak stomach. Only she won’t let me burp her.

Jackie was never with an occasional babysitter. During her first two years of life, we hired two different women who were qualified, experienced infant nurses. They didn’t want to stay with a family for more than a year, as they deliberately resisted getting to love the child too much. I’d heard of nurses who resented the fact that the mother wanted to be a mother, and I made certain that mine allowed plenty of time and space for Mommy. I wasn’t nursing Jackie, so it was all the more important for me to feed her her bottle as often as I could. That included her 5:00 a.m. feeding. After all, I was already awake myself.

When Jackie turned three, two amazing women came into her world. They were so integral to her life, and mine, that I want to introduce you to them. One was a vivacious, extremely intelligent French woman named Thérèse de la Chapelle. She asked us to call her “Mademoiselle,” which we shortened to “Zelle.” Everyone who ever came into our house knew Zelle.

I could write a book just about Zelle. She came from a distinguished family who had an old but still very-much-lived-in château close to Lyons in France. Her father was a baron, her mother a baroness. When her beloved
bonne maman
died, Zelle herself became a baroness. Not that it did her any good. She was the eldest of fourteen children, and as her large family needed the money after World War II, she was sent all alone to this country to take care of relatives in Chicago. There she learned English and stayed until her relatives said they no longer needed her help. She then moved to New York and helped to raise a little boy, whose mother was an alcoholic, until he was ready for boarding school. I heard about Zelle from friends of the boy’s mother. Zelle remained close to this child all his life. Ours was only the third position Zelle had ever taken.

I remember the first day she came to us. Jackie was barely three, and it was time for us to hire someone who we hoped would take a permanent position. I was on the telephone (of course) when Mademoiselle de la Chapelle arrived. While I was talking, Jackie toddled up to Zelle and put her tiny hand in hers. It was love at first sight for both of them.