Foreign Correspondence (7 page)

At the age of thirteen, Sonny already knew her destination would be London. To her, that was where culture came from, and where she would go to break into acting. At school, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were the fodder for Abbotsleigh’s annual school concerts. At home, she watched English TV dramas such as the
Forsyte Saga
and comedies such as
Not Only But Also
.

But I had already started looking in another direction. I wanted to go to America. I had known it from the midsummer evening in January 1961, when we gathered around our television set and watched a handsome young man with tousled hair being sworn in as President of the United States.

4

Beam Me Up, Joannie

“GLO-OORIA! Glory! Glor-eeeee!”

The voice over the back fence was as irritating as a buzz saw.

“Oh, for goodness’ sakes, what does she want?” said my mother as she tilted my chin to the bright light that poured through the dining-room window. A smear of dust and blood started at my knees, blurred the front of my dress and smudged my split lip. It was a Saturday morning in 1963 and I’d just come off my backyard swing face first.

“GLORY! ARE YOU THERE? GLOR-EEEE!”

With a sigh of aggravation, my mother put down the washcloth and went out to see what her neighbor wanted. Edna, a lonely woman whose husband had deserted her, was always calling my mother for one trivial reason or another. Her voice carried through the screen door.

“Gloria, they’ve killed him. Someone’s shot Kennedy.”

Fresh tears stung my eyes and overflowed into the little runnels of dust down my cheeks. Australian Catholics loved
Kennedy; we considered him one of our own. My mother hurried back inside and switched on the radio.

Kennedy’s election in 1960 turned Australia’s gaze toward the United States. The new President’s youthful glamor contrasted with our dreary old man Menzies who, by that time, had held power for eleven years. To lonely women like Edna, the conspicuously Catholic Kennedy was part saint, part pinup. Other Australians saw an idealism in him that resonated with their own sense of themselves as people of a young country. I was enthralled by a President prepared to imagine a place for human beings in space.

By the early 1960s even a sycophantic Anglophile like Menzies could see that Australia’s future didn’t lie entirely in its links to a tiny island across the world. Menzies saw an advantage in aligning himself with the popular American President. He listened to the urgings of Australia’s chief diplomat in Washington, D.C., when he cabled that we could “without disproportionate expenditure pick up a lot of credit with the United States” by helping Kennedy in Vietnam.

My father’s American-accented voice was one of the few raised against Australia’s shift from British to American client state. “We don’t need to get mixed up in a blue because of the Yanks,” he said. (A “blue” is Australian slang for a fight.) “And we don’t need Yank materialism shoved down our throats.”

Most Australians saw nothing wrong with the new influences. We called Americans “Septics”—in rhyming slang, septic tank equals Yank. But there was no malice in the name. Americans, in most Australians’ view, were a bit like golden retriever puppies—well-intentioned, good-humored, but a little thick. Many Australians had brushed up against them during World War II, when they took rest and recreation leave in Australian cities. There had been some blues over competition for
women—the saying “Overpaid, oversexed and over here” reflected the view of the Aussie “Diggers,” whose miserable army pay couldn’t underwrite the free-spending good times the Americans showed their dates. But there were also lots of jokes about American ineptness, like the G.I. who showed up for a date with a lovely bunch of lantana—considered a noxious weed in Australia and most often seen covering country outhouses.

Slowly, American syndicated columnists began to leaven the British drone in our newspapers. In 1966 we shed the ridiculous complexity of the twelvepence-a-shilling, twenty-shillings-a-pound currency we’d inherited from Britain, and adopted a decimal system. While a few brave voices called for an indigenous Australian name for the new hundred-unit note, we settled for American-style dollars and cents. I walked around the house humming the jingle, sung to the tune of “Click Go the Shears,” meant to prepare us for the change:

In come the dollars, in come the cents
.

Out go the pounds and the shillings and the pence
.

Be prepared, folks, when the coins begin to mix

On the fourteenth of February 1966
.

“Just think,” wrote Sonny excitedly, “tomorrow is ‘changeover day’ and I just saw my first 1 cent and 2 cent pieces.” At school, the playground buzzed with excitement when someone scored one of the new coins. They may have been named for the United States currency, but their look was Australian, with interesting animals such as frill-necked lizards and platypuses on the obverse side. Unfortunately, the head on the other side remained the same boring old Brit, Elizabeth II.

On television American programs started to edge out British-made ones. It didn’t seem odd to me to wander around humming the theme song to “Daniel Boone”: “… and he fought for America to make all Americans free.” Or to be able
to recite the prologue to “Superman”: “who … fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way.” On Tuesday nights, when my sister wanted to watch the British spy spoof “The Avengers,” I lobbied desperately for the new American science-fiction series “Star Trek.”

“Star Trek” arrived in Sydney in 1967, one year after its U.S. debut. From the first creaky pilot program where the aliens’ makeup looked like it had been crafted hastily from Plasticine, I was hooked. I became obsessed with the starship
Enterprise
and its five-year mission to boldly go where no man had gone before.

For the first time in my life I had a non-nerdy interest I could share with others my age. I was about to turn thirteen, the age that robs so many girls of their childhood confidence. For me, the opposite happened. I had been shy and awkward before, and I would be again; but for a blissful couple of years I blossomed.

I was in sixth grade—the end of the line at St. Mary’s. Soon our class would split up and go on to various regional high schools. But for the time being we were the “big girls” and we owned the playground. Before long I’d organized half of sixth grade into a parallel
Enterprise
crew, engrossed in a “Star Trek” game that we played every recess. Our group laid claim to a section of the playground benches, which became the
Enterprise
bridge. A popular classmate consented to play Captain Kirk. Soon the playground was ringing with commands: “Ahead warp factor one, Mr. Sulu. Open hailing frequencies, Uhura.” When the “ship” hit a force field or came under fire from Klingons with the shields still down, we all fell about on the benches, simulating impact about as convincingly as the real cast on the set in Burbank. Our Dr. McCoy would crouch over the prone form of a classmate designated expendable, and intone: “He’s dead, Jim,” with perfect gravitas.

I played the half-Vulcan science officer, Mr. Spock. Actually, I
lived
Mr. Spock, cutting my bangs to match his basin-style
haircut and surreptitiously plucking my eyebrows into as much of a slope as I could get away with. To convincingly imitate Mr. Spock’s “That’s illogical, Captain,” I had to learn something about syllogisms and inductive versus deductive reasoning. I started borrowing textbooks on logic from the local library. Because innumeracy was undesirable in a science officer, I resolved to apply myself more diligently in math class. I sent away for a mail-order slide rule and instructions in how to use it. As a result, I mastered logarithms before I had a complete handle on long division.

In those days before tie-in merchandising, we improvised
Enterprise
paraphernalia, borrowing our fathers’ electric shavers to stand in for “Beam me up, Scotty” communicators, and making Starfleet lapel pins out of cardboard and glitter. When a model kit for the
Enterprise
turned up at a local hobby shop, I braved the gaze of the boys buying Spitfires and biplanes, and for the next several days walked around slightly high from the airplane glue that seemed to adhere to everything but the flimsy plastic pieces of starship.

After school on Tuesdays, I fretted. I would hang around the phone, hoping Darleen would call to say she had a date for dinner and wouldn’t be home in time for “The Avengers.” Some afternoons, as the hour advanced, I’d actually be reduced to praying that someone would ask her out. I never told Darleen that divine intercession was responsible for the fact that she got so many dates on Tuesdays.

In December 1967 the cloned crew of the starship
Enterprise
said tearful farewells in the playground of St. Mary’s and boldly went off to the strange new world of high school. I returned to Bland Street, to the school across the road from my parents’ old Victorian terrace house.

At Bethlehem Ladies College, red brick classrooms and plasterboard
temporary buildings jostled each other for space. The grounds were a treeless expanse of concrete and bitumen. But the headmistress was that rare thing in the 1960s: a feminist nun. Rather than arming us with facts and force-marching us by rote through the prescribed curriculum, Sister Ruth hired an eclectic staff encouraged to teach us how to learn.

A remnant of the old
Enterprise
crew had transferred to Bethlehem with me, but our desire to fall about on benches under Klingon attack withered under the gaze of the much older girls who shared the playground. Instead, we became avid consumers of “fanzines”—the badly printed, execrably written TV and movie magazines on sale at the railway station newsstand. I would devour the contents of these, then cut out every “Star Trek” picture for the growing collage on my bedroom wall. Soon the Sacred Heart was banished in favor of an enormous full-color picture of Mr. Spock, eyebrow raised quizzically.

It was in one of the fan magazines that I found the U.S. address for the Mr. Spock fan club. When its newsletter arrived, I was disappointed. I wanted to know about the planet Vulcan and the politics of the Federation and I couldn’t care less about the family life or previous roles of an actor named Leonard Nimoy. But one feature in the newsletter caught my eye—a list of fan club members looking for pen pals.

Sonny had shown me that pen-friendship allowed the bridging of otherwise unbridgeable spaces. But I had failed to interest her in my “Star Trek” obsession. Sonny had obsessions of her own: the theater, tap class, ballet, singing lessons and, increasingly, boys. She planned to leave school as soon as she could, enroll in acting classes for a year, and then head for London. Slowly, our correspondence had worn down like an unwound clock.

A hot prospect in the fan-club newsletter was an American girl named Joannie who listed her interests as science and reading.
She was just three months older than I. An American pen pal would see “Star Trek” episodes months before they were screened in Australia and would be able to fill me in on the plots. And she might be able to answer other questions as well. I was curious about the United States. I wanted to learn something about the world my father had inhabited when he was my age.

My father said very little about his California childhood. The few stories he did tell were so sad that I could hardly bear to listen. Slowly, I pieced together the outlines of his early life from stray remarks in adult conversations; things said and quickly hushed, hints dropped before the exchange of meaningful looks and brisk changes of subject.

My father’s parents each had a wild streak. His mother, the daughter of an attorney, had been allowed to leave her home in New York’s Saratoga Springs at the age of seven, to tour as cornet soloist with a band called the California Brownies. “Little Louise,” as she was billed, developed an opium addiction and was married for the first time at sixteen. Soon after my father was born, the marriage ended when her husband caught her in bed with another man.