Audition (4 page)

More revealing, perhaps, was her observation that she couldn’t recall my having any playmates. “I don’t remember Barbara as being social,” Miss Gillis said. “School was a place of business for her.”

I disagree with that last pronouncement. I desperately wanted playmates, to have friends over to my house, to belong instead of always feeling like an outsider. When I was about seven years old, the school put on a little performance for adoring parents. It featured a robin redbreast as the lead and a chorus of little brown-costumed chirpers. I was assigned the leading role of the robin. But here’s the thing: I didn’t want to be the star. I wanted to be in the chorus, to be like all the other kids. So to this day I recall going home and watching my mother, who sewed very well, cheerfully making my robin costume. I tried it on, with its big, gorgeous red belly, spread my wings, and burst into tears. When I told my mother why, she came to school with me the next day and explained the situation to the bewildered teacher. My mother and I went home, tore up the costume, and I became a chirper in the chorus like everyone else.

My sister also went to the Lawrence School, but only briefly. And she didn’t get to chirp at all. According to another interview, this with Elizabeth McGuire, the school nurse, Jackie was placed in the “ungraded group,” a euphemism for children with developmental disabilities. Jackie evidently had to repeat first grade at least once, and there is no record of her achieving second. My poor parents. My poor Jackie.

Also interesting to me was Miss McGuire’s diagnosis of Jackie’s condition as something usually caused by a birth injury. Years later, when my mother and I did talk about Jackie’s condition, my mother thought that Jackie had been delivered by forceps, so Miss McGuire may have been right. Miss McGuire cited Jackie’s lack of coordination, her “unsteady gait,” and her stuttering. “Perhaps,” she offered, “Jackie suffered from a mild form of cerebral palsy.” Later Jackie was tested for this, but it didn’t seem to be the case. We never did know what caused her condition.

Now I wonder if it wasn’t genetic. Would Jackie today be diagnosed as “autistic”? Two of my cousin’s children have some form of “developmental disabilities,” but live relatively normal lives. They are considered to be autistic. The word “autism” didn’t exist when Jackie was young. Today there are special treatments, diagnosticians, workshops, support groups. Most of all there is understanding. But then there was no place for my sister or my parents to go. Seeking guidance, my mother was often told to “just send her away to an institution.” That was never a consideration.

For a short time Jackie was enrolled in another public school called Devotion, which also had a program for the “ungraded,” but she didn’t last long there either. She then stayed at home and had tutors who taught her to read and write, although I’m not sure at what level, as I never remember her being tested. (I would guess third-or fourth-grade level.) Nor do I know her IQ. She was home, always.

My mother did her best not to make Jackie feel different. It usually didn’t work. Once there was a neighborhood talent show. Jackie and I were taking tap-dancing lessons, and my mother allowed us to enter the contest. She made us matching costumes, and off we went to perform. Well, Jackie got panic-stricken and forgot the few steps she had learned. She just couldn’t follow the music, and finally she simply stood there on the stage watching me. The audience booed. I was embarrassed and frightened. I took Jackie’s hand and we walked home to our mother.

But was it a terrible childhood? A friend once said, when another pal was complaining about her childhood, “You didn’t have a terrible childhood. Helen Keller had a terrible childhood.” I had love. I never lacked for food or clothes. I had cousins with whom I happily played, especially in the summers. I had uncles who taught me to swim and took us to amusement parks. I had a mother and a grandmother who doted on me. I had a father who, although often absent, was never unkind or abusive.

I did have a friend here and there. (I remember one when I was about ten, with whom I smoked cigarettes stolen from her mother.) So if I was a sad and serious little girl, I can’t say that my early childhood package was wrapped in plain brown paper. It had some shiny paper, too, provided by occasional excursions into my father’s unusual life. And it also had some pretty bows, tied carefully by my mother.

“Skinnymalinkydink”

O
VER THE YEARS
as I was growing up, Mother, Dad, Jackie, and I would from time to time visit the Walters family in New Jersey. My uncle Harry Walters was a leading citizen in Asbury Park, New Jersey, just over an hour from Manhattan. He and his wife, my aunt Minna, owned a big dry goods store in Asbury Park. They sold sheets, towels, and even children’s clothes. They did very well. When we visited, Uncle Harry would give us presents from the store.

Uncle Harry and Aunt Minna had three daughters around my age (sadly all have died, but I do still see their children). My cousins had a governess, an honest-to-god governess. The sisters loved one another and played together.

I never remember either of my parents setting foot in a temple. My father used to say he was an atheist. But Uncle Harry was very involved in the synagogue. He and Aunt Minna celebrated the Jewish holidays; they fasted on Yom Kippur and celebrated Passover with big feasts for the family. We never did. The closest we ever got was when my mother would light Sabbath candles on Friday night. Friday was the only night my father would make a special effort to be home. We certainly knew full well that we were Jewish. But practicing the religion just never seemed important. As a result I have no Jewish education or any religious education and don’t observe the holidays.

One more thing about Uncle Harry and Aunt Minna. They seemed to have a very good marriage. Everyone in the Walters family came to them for advice, comfort, and, oh yes, money. Uncle Harry headed the family. He was handsome, easygoing, sweet, and, I guess, predictable. His older brother, Lou, my father, was adventurous, a gambler, an artist in his way, and definitely not a family man. I envied my three happy cousins (talk about belonging), and yet, when we grew up—forgive me for saying this—my life was so much more interesting than theirs. Not necessarily better, but much more interesting. And for better or worse I came to value “interesting” far more than “normal.”

The Walters side of the family always looked down on the more common Seletsky side. And, no surprise, my father never fitted in with the Seletskys. But we spent much more time with my mother’s relatives.

Every summer for about five years, when I was a little girl, my mother, father, Jackie, and I shared a house with my mother’s sister, Aunt Lena Alkon; her husband, Sidney; and their two sons, Selig and Alvin, in Nantasket. Nantasket, now a Boston suburban community called Hull, was, and is, a skinny peninsula twenty miles or so from Boston with Massachusetts Bay on one side and Hingham Bay on the other. It wasn’t a swank summer resort like Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, site of the home compound for the Kennedys. But I loved it, partly because I was with Selig, my hero, who was five years older than I, and Alvin, who was two years older and my best friend.

Our house was smack on the main street of the tiny town, so all cars going in and out of Nantasket had to pass us. It was not a location most people would want, and it had just a small front yard and a porch facing the street. But all life passed by, and we felt very much in the swing of things. In addition, because it was such an unprivate and crammed piece of property, it was cheap to rent.

In contrast to our quiet life in Brookline, the summers were busy and boisterous. Also sharing the house with us were my grandmother Celia and, at one time or another, at least two or three of my uncles, all of whom had nicknames ending in
y
or
ie
—uncles Sammy, Maxie, Eddie, Danny, and Hermie. There was only one bathroom, which we all used. Perhaps that is where I developed the bladder of a camel, something that would prove to be a huge asset in the countless hours I would spend live on camera. I cannot, however, attribute my other invaluable career asset to the Nantasket summers. I don’t perspire. No matter how hot the television lights or how broiling the setting is, like the inferno of shooting for hours in the Saudi desert, for me it is “no sweat.”

The Nantasket beach was long and beautiful. The ocean was cold, with big waves. We would get up each morning praying for a “beach day,” and while my mother or Aunt Lena was cooking or cleaning up after all of us, usually one or more of my uncles would walk with us the six very long blocks to the beach and help to teach us how to swim. There was no such thing as a swimming pool. It was straight into the waves.

Some days my mother would come to the beach. I remember her in a one-piece black knitted bathing suit that came down almost to her knees. She had those beautiful legs and that ample bosom. My mother wore her dark hair in a bun, but sometimes, coming out of the ocean, she would let down her hair, and it spilled to her waist. I thought she was just gorgeous. My sister, usually holding on to my mother’s hand, also had a lovely round little body. Only I was all angles and bones, like a little dark spider. My nickname, as I’ve told you, was “Skinnymalinkydink.” (If only someone would call me that name today—and mean it!)

Meals were cooked by my mother, the better cook, or Aunt Lena, the quicker cook, who was described by her son Selig as “an Olympic-quality bad cook.” But cooking anything in that kitchen was no mean accomplishment. It had an old coal stove you lit with a match and had to stoke constantly. The word “icebox” was also current in Nantasket. Though by then there were millions of Freon gas–fueled refrigerators in the United States, our house gave meaning to “the iceman cometh.” And “cometh” he did, every day or so, lugging a new block of ice with giant tongs and putting it in the top of the icebox, where it kept the milk and eggs cool and dripped into a waiting basin. You could also chip off pieces of ice to dissolve on your tongue on sweltering days. Divine. Forget air-conditioning. Never heard of it back then. Just open the windows. And listen in at night as the adults tuned in to their favorite radio programs, like
Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour
or ventriloquist Edgar Bergen (Candice’s father) and his irreverent wooden companion, Charlie McCarthy.

And of course you could always hear my aunt Lena. Aunt Lena didn’t talk. She yelled. She used to terrify me when I was a child, but I later loved her almost as much as I loved my mother. The two sisters could not have been more different. My mother cared about clothes. Lena couldn’t have cared less. My reserved mother had only one or two close friends. She didn’t play cards. Lena belonged to four bridge clubs and seemed to know every woman within ten blocks of any neighborhood she lived in. My mother couldn’t or wouldn’t learn to drive. (Neither, unfortunately, would I.)

Lena did the shopping for the whole house and anyone else who needed something. She would travel miles to save three cents on a roll of toilet paper. It would drive my mother crazy. Yet, as much as they were oil and water, they were very close. Close and so different that they bickered all the time and argued over virtually everything. We were all used to it. We didn’t even hear them.

Still, years later, when our family left Boston and moved around to other cities, it was Lena who would come with my mother on every move, helping her sister pack and unpack, hang up and put away at each new house. Lena was the salt of the earth, the noisy, loving center of the Seletsky family. My grandmother until she died lived with Lena. My bachelor uncles also lived with her. Lena is real and visible to me in my mind to this day.

W
HEN MY FATHER
was due to arrive home from his travels, Mother would arrange Jackie’s and my hair in braids like coronets over our heads and dress us up in our best clothes. When home on Sundays, Daddy would take us to the local baseball game to watch Nantasket play a neighboring team. I am sure my father would rather have gone alone or with one of my uncles, but Sunday was our day, and my dad patiently taught Jackie and me all about the game. To this day, thanks to him, I love baseball. I am a Yankees fan now, but then I rooted for the Boston Red Sox.

It all sounds very ordinary, doesn’t it? Well, it was. The summers were a welcome respite from the quieter, darker days of our winters. And it probably wouldn’t have changed drastically through the years. Dad would have continued to eke out a living doing shows wherever he could. I would have gone from public grammar school in Brookline to Brookline High and then maybe on a scholarship to the state university. I might still be living in Boston.

But the cancan girls changed our lives forever.

Sixty-three Cents

Y
OU KNOW THAT EXPRESSION
“My life turned on a dime”? Well, ours turned on sixty-three cents. That’s all my father had left in his pocket in 1937 when he took over the lease on what had been an old Greek Orthodox church in Boston and turned it into a nightclub. The club was called the Latin Quarter. It made my father successful, rich, and famous.

At the beginning, however, it was a huge gamble. The deconsecrated church at 46 Winchester Street had been the setting for a series of failed ventures like an expensive club with an Egyptian theme named the Karnak, and a Chinese restaurant, but my father had a vision.

Boston had its share of nightclubs already. What Boston did not have was an inexpensive nightclub that served a full dinner for under ten dollars and was naughty enough for grownups but tame enough for families. My father toyed at first with using the Congo as a theme, with lions and tigers painted on the walls and a chorus line of pretend native dancing girls. His next idea was to re-create a more bohemian club, like those in New York’s artsy Greenwich Village. But after seeing the new movie
Gold Diggers in Paris
, starring Rudy Vallee as a nightclub owner with a chorus line of American girls transported to Paris, he decided to do the same thing in reverse: He would bring Paris to Boston.