Life Is Not a Stage (3 page)

“Would you just rub my back?” he’d often ask me. Within a few moments, he’d try to take advantage of the situation. I’d find his hand touching one of my calves. Looking back on these incidents, I know they could have been so much worse than they were. No matter how young or innocent I was at the time, I always had an inbuilt sense of my surroundings and knew when something might be dangerous or harmful. While things never degenerated to a more severe degree of sexual assault, the sacred bond of comfort, protection, and safety that a child wants to have with her father was damaged forever.

If there are any explanations for what triggered his binges, I think it was a combination of factors. As I described before, growing tobacco and farming the land were hard work, and the years had taken a toll on him. He also had the daunting responsibility and pressures of raising ten children.

It might sound Pollyannaish, but my faith made it possible for me to always be optimistic and feel that there was help available to me to face any situation. It also made me feel a sense of love for everyone. I recently read a passage by the great spiritual teacher Paramahansa Yogananda. He wrote that when you really experience being in union with a spiritual force, you begin to more easily see the good in everybody. This was a bit confusing for a small child confronted by the unpleasant sides of humanity—that I could still love that person despite their hurtful actions. It had made me feel guilty at times.

It is true that my upbringing stressed loyalty and God forbid you should say anything negative about anybody, especially your family. But that will only take you so far. I did not want to go the other way where anger and bitterness take the place of love. I found a piece of writing I did in a notebook when I was six or seven years old. It read, “Dear God, give me the gift of understanding.” That’s the way my little mind worked. I think I realized that I was in a situation for which I needed to have more compassion and understanding. Maybe I understood my situation far better at that early age than I thought.

In the months before my father’s death, I returned home from my studies at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York to see him. That particular visit haunted me the most. No different than I had seen him hundreds of times before, he was on a big toot. But on this occasion he also had a large swelling on his face that was hard not to notice. As I rubbed his back, I told him, “Daddy, I hate it when I see you like this.”

Without pausing, I said, “I’d rather see you dead.”

“Don’t say that, Gal.”

Not long after, I came back from New York and saw him for what proved to be the last time. I shaved him. I had no idea that he was so sick. Despite the abuse I had suffered, my prophetic words to him about wanting to see him dead and the fact that I did not attend his funeral disturbed me greatly.

I was so troubled that I went to confession and told the priest about the situation. His advice was to try to go easy on myself. “Don’t feel bad about it. As young people, we all feel these things about our parents. We all go through rough times. But as we get older, we learn that we didn’t know everything.” He went on to speak to me about forgiveness. Easier said than done. The incident continued to bother me for years and marked the first onset of my insomnia.

There was a strange irony as I accepted my fate that I would not be attending my father’s funeral. There was a sense of gratitude that, for once, finally, I got a free pass from the trauma. Instead, with
Oklahoma!
and the whirlwind of work that would follow with my success, I was in full stride on my mother’s notorious galloping horse. The ensuing adventures in my life are proof positive that it would be many years before I would feel safe enough to slow down and relax.

My father used to say his prayers every night before bed when he was sober. I once asked him what he prayed for. He replied, “I pray for everybody but I also pray for a happy death.”

Because of my studies in New York, I wasn’t there when he took ill. My sisters Pauline and Babby took care of him. He had a terrible form of cancer that started in the sinuses and spread from there. It was the root of that swelling I had noticed during my visit. Pauline told me that he repeatedly apologized for taking so long to die. When the time was nearing, they called for the priest to give him the last rites and to hear his last confession. Pauline said that she could overhear laughing and carrying on from his room. From those sounds, I think my father’s prayer was answered, but he was also given an extra bonus. From my sister’s account, I have some peace and gratitude knowing that he also had a courageous death.

CHAPTER 2

Singing for My Supper

M
y mother, Elizabeth, left when I was about twelve or thirteen years old. For Babby and me, it was par for the course. Like the other traumas we had experienced, we had learned that there was little other option than to accept it and try to cope the best we could. We knew that sitting by the door hoping that she would return was a waste of energy and would set us up for more disappointment. It was a nebulous time, of which the memories are a little bit foggy around the edges.

There was also a part of me that understood that the situation was perhaps not as harsh as it could have been, and for one good reason: From as far back as I can remember I had experienced so little maternal love in the first place. Kind words or any gestures of affection from her were virtually nonexistent. I was, after all, the last of her ten children, and she had no doubt already reached the end of her rope. It was the way things were. I didn’t give my mother’s absence that much more thought, I blocked it out. Things would be okay. I put my energy instead toward staying optimistic.

Years later, when I faced a crisis in my own marriage, I had a different perception of what my mother did. I pondered the courage that it took for her to leave. It gave me the courage to change my life. Curiously, both my sister Pauline and I left our marriages at the same age my mother did.

Along with my father’s alcoholism and all the children to care for, my mother had little material comfort or support. There was no running water or electricity at home for much of the time. And medical care for childbirth and everyday problems was basically unaffordable. When Babby and I got a bit older, my mother brought in a little extra money working at a nearby café, but that didn’t improve matters greatly. She also cleaned houses. One day when I went along with her to one of the homes, I could not resist the temptation of a real luxury item within my grasp. It was a stick of gum. My mother read me the riot act that theft was still theft no matter how small the item was, and gave me a whipping to make sure I didn’t forget it.

My sister Ilean, who is ten years older than I, thinks that our parents went “a bit crazy” soon after she left home. She could recall that Daddy went for a decade at one time without drinking. She wrote to me in a recent letter that she was certain he was hurt badly when Mother didn’t come back. She said that life was hard before I was born, but admitted that she had grown up under more tranquil conditions than what Babby and I had to endure. Like me, she also has an appreciation for the fact that our parents instilled in all their children the values we needed to get through life. Despite the hardship and all the traumas, they left us with the skills to take care of ourselves, do the right thing, and have integrity.

Ilean also remembers our mother from her childhood as being strict but fair, with a bark that was far worse than her bite. She thought that behind her toughness was a more loving manner toward all of her children, but that the hard life forced her to be on the defensive. “She didn’t want to leave herself open to get hurt,” Ilean surmised. Our mother didn’t really think she was abandoning Babby and me, according to Ilean’s recollection, perhaps part and parcel of that defensive shield.

Babby and I were only told that she was going to Cleveland to work. Although she left, I still longed for my mother’s affection and never gave up hope for the rest of her life that things would improve in that regard. We spent more time together periodically as I got older and became successful in show business. But she remained a tough nut to crack.

She was a beautiful woman with black hair and bluish-green eyes. Her colorful and larger-than-life character was the kind an actress might dream of playing. She also had a large physical presence, accentuated as she went up and down in weight as she got older. She was tough-talking and strong-willed. No doubt if she were alive today and read this book, she’d probably be angry and try to “beat the gizzard out of me,” even though I write of my father and her after the passage of time with love and forgiveness (along with candor). My father, on the other hand, would have cried melancholic tears of remorse.

Regretfully, I know so little about her life before she met my father, especially about her childhood, because she hardly ever wanted to talk about it. Her maiden name was Elder and her family was primarily from England, with ancestry linked to Sir Isaac Newton. There was also Irish mixed in, and some of her features also looked distinctly Native American. The irreverent joke in the family was that an Indian in the woodshed might have had something to do with her conception.

Questions like how she met my father and why she chose to marry such an older man are mysteries that no one remains around to answer. When I spent more time with her as an adult, some details leaked out from time to time. I asked her once, given all the ten children, whether she and my father had a good love life. “Yes,” she answered, “when he was sober.” She also told me about what happened when she got her first period, a story that shines some light on why her personality was the way it was. She said she was swimming in a pond when she noticed the blood. She immediately ran home and told her mother the news. What did her mother do? She promptly gave her a whacking. Such was parenting in those days.

When my siblings and I get together, we can tell stories about our mother and laugh in retrospect, although things weren’t always so funny at the time. One such episode that best epitomizes the kind of love/hate relationship I had with my mother was about my high school prom. Although I had a job after school working at a soda fountain and lived with the Chinn family taking care of their kids, I didn’t have very much money and not nearly enough to buy a dress. So I wrote to her in Cleveland to ask if she could help me out with this all-important milestone in my life. I would have been overjoyed if she had sent me a couple of dollars, but instead a box arrived. I opened it up, and my heart sank. Inside was a white frilly dress, the kind that a young girl might wear to first communion or confirmation in the church. God knows why she sent it to me. Was it because she had no money? Stinginess? Or was it simply that she was ignorant of what was appropriate for a teenage girl? Or all of the above?

I told my brother Joe about it. I guess I had loaded my entire inventory of disappointment onto this single event. It was impossible to hold back how deeply upset I was about the situation. Like he did in many situations, he came to my rescue. He sent me ten dollars, and I got a dress.

One other memorable example of when Joe stuck up for me happened a few years earlier. It was during World War II, and he had come home on leave dressed in his sailor uniform with the white hat. Mother was fed up, exasperated by how I was asking too many questions all the time. But he had a question of his own. “Why do you think she’s so smart?” he asked her. “It’s because she’s asking questions. Don’t ever stop her from doing that.”

My memories of my mother’s departure from the family seem shrouded in fog. I was resigned to it, but I also didn’t want to think about it because it would remind me that my situation was not okay. It was the child’s mechanism for coping. That was the way it was. I put it off to the side. “If she comes back, she comes back,” I thought. You just go about your business. I was the optimist, convinced that everything was going to be all right. At the same time, my father was beginning to get terrible headaches, probably the precursor of his cancer, so I was frankly more focused on his well-being than my mother’s.

I would see my mother from time to time after she moved away, and I grew much closer to her late in her life. But she never came back to Rockport, not for my hospitalization for appendicitis nor for my high school graduation. In fact, she never set foot in our family home again.

No one outside the immediate family except my best friend Oscar came over regularly to visit. There wasn’t much to see. It was exactly how you would imagine Depression-era poverty to be. From the outside, it didn’t look that bad—a small, well-built wood-frame house. In fact, it still stands there today, albeit in much better shape than when we lived there. Downstairs, there was a small kitchen and a living room with a stove for warmth and a radio that my father often tuned in to listen to the boxing matches.

One bright spot in the sitting room was a sofa covered in a yellow plastic-like fabric. To the best of our abilities, Babby and I tried to fix the place up. We painted and put up curtains. Where there were holes in the walls, we stuffed old clothes and rags into them to protect against the cold. We then put paper over the hole and painted it. It didn’t look too bad.

Another downstairs room just by the staircase was full of some old storage trunks, mostly things that my mother had left behind and other assorted junk. Since we didn’t have a car, the adjacent garage was also used for storage, including the stockpile of emptied liquor bottles.

Upstairs, there were two small rooms, one more filled with junk, and the other a bedroom where my sister and I slept in one bed and my father in the other. The bedroom closet was also short on amenities. The few clothes we had hung from hooks on the wall instead of the customary bar with hangers. In the winter, the bedroom’s broken windows gave no protection against the cold air, overwhelming any warmth that might rise from the woodstove in the living room below.

To deal with the cold, my sister and I often slept like spoons, turning over systematically in intervals, switching when one side was warm to heat up the other side. On really cold nights, my father put a big old overcoat on top of our blanket.

Inside our Rockport house, Babby and I had more serious things to deal with than the cold. We always had to be on guard, hypervigilant around our father because we never knew what to expect around him when he was drinking. Since there was no one else there to protect us, we saw up close and took the full brunt of the daily reality of the destructive nature of alcoholism. We learned quickly how all semblances of human dignity, morality, and judgment of what’s simply right and wrong can evaporate into thin air.

“Pauline, I know he thinks that I’m Mother,” I told my oldest sister one day when she was visiting.

“You made that up,” she snapped back. “Dad wouldn’t do that.” But she saw that I wasn’t joking.

“I’m going to wait outside the door, and we’ll see,” she said.

I went back in the room. My father grabbed me, trying to hold me too close. Pauline came in yelling and broke it up. Had she not come in, who knows what would have happened. I probably would have spoken up and told him to stop. I was about fifteen and as tall as he was, so if that didn’t work I could have probably overpowered him. He felt terrible because he was caught in the act.

Another time, Pauline and her husband and children were staying with us. Again, my father was not behaving, and my brother-in-law Charlie, who was a terrible drunk himself, took great offense at what he was witnessing.

“Pauline, we’re going,” Charlie announced and abruptly signaled for my sister and their children to pack up their things and get to the car. Babby and I begged them, “Please don’t leave us.” Pauline was painfully torn as she did what her husband asked. “I have to go with Charlie,” she called out to us as she was hurrying to leave. She said that she regretted her action that night for the rest of her life.

The trauma of alcoholism was not limited to within the four walls of our home. One hot summer night, Babby and I were staying across the river in Owensboro with my cousin, who had a house across the cornfield from her parents, my uncle Jim and aunt Loretta. They were closer family than most: Loretta was my mother’s sister, and Jim was my father’s brother. My aunt and uncle’s daughter was married to another raging alcoholic. He came home that night horribly drunk. Anticipating this, my cousin had locked all the screen doors on the windows that were left open because of the heat. Once he discovered he was locked out, he went on a rampage.

We heard him rip the screen door off its hinges as we were huddled together on the kitchen floor waiting for the hurricane to pass. Then he turned over a table covered with glass jars filled with food my cousin had canned that afternoon. With the sound of the smashing glass, I crawled over and opened the lock on the bottom of the kitchen door. We bolted out of there running for our lives, tearing across the cornfield petrified that he would catch us. Once at the farmhouse, we woke up Uncle Jim. He got his shotgun and went back after him. I don’t know what else happened that night, but this was hardly the last of these incidents my sister and I had to endure.

Even though I was just a young girl, I had developed a fairly thick skin. I had no other choice. Maybe it helped that I had nothing else to compare it to, so I accepted it in that spirit.

When I look back at pictures of myself from those early years, I see a lot of sadness in the eyes of that little girl. But there was also a lot of pride. I want to go back and hug that child. Remarkably, portraits of me taken in recent years seem to look more youthful than those from my childhood. I think it was because my spirit got lighter as I got older. I came more to terms with what happened. That was the way it was. This is the way it is now. Now, get on with it. I never wanted anybody to feel sorry for me. No different than children caught in the middle of a war zone who find a way to play even in the smoldering rubble, I found a source of inner joy. It came from the simple act of singing.