My Life So Far (14 page)

“Jane, this is Susan.”

She was only nine years older than me. Still, I so desperately needed a woman to show me how to
be
that it must have been the angels who climbed over our prostrate hearts to bring Susan to us. If she was a “tomato,” it was definitely the sweet, sun-ripened kind.

In the summer of 1951, a little over a year after Mother’s death, was when I got to know her. I was going on fourteen. Dad was finishing the national road tour of
Mister Roberts
and would be performing in Los Angeles all summer, so he had arranged for Peter and me to spend the vacation with them there.

We were ensconced in a magnificent mansion built years earlier by William Randolph Hearst for his paramour, actress Marion Davies. It had been converted into a hotel with marble columns, mosaic tile floors, gold-leafed mirrors, an Olympic-size tile swimming pool, and a beach club. We spent that entire summer at the beach, partly because it was a fun place to hang out and partly because Susan, a New Yorker, didn’t know how to drive. Other wives might have demanded that Dad get a chauffeur in order to spend a lot of time in Beverly Hills engaging in “cash therapy.” Not Susan. She hung in there with us. I don’t understand it, given what might be my own callowness at her age, but somehow her twenty-two-year-old soul had the generosity and know-how to wrap itself around Peter and me and be a mother. Peter liked to call her Mom Two.

Susan on the beach at Ocean House.

One perfect California evening, when the sun was setting red and the breeze was velvet and smelled of salt and kelp, she and I were sitting on the marble steps leading down to the pool when she asked me how I was feeling about Mother’s death.

I stopped breathing. In all that time—more than a year—no one had raised the subject of Mother with me, much less asked how I
felt.
It was a germinal moment. The problem was that I had no words to offer her. I was so unused to expressing my feelings that I’d become emotionally illiterate. I did tell her that I hadn’t been able to cry at the time and that I had learned it was a suicide from a movie magazine. She was quiet for what seemed a long time. I don’t think she knew what to say. I certainly wouldn’t have at her age, but I remember her suggesting that perhaps Mother’s death had been a blessing in disguise. It seems strange to me now that I could have found those glib and potentially insensitive words comforting, but my thinking about Mother was so utterly confused that “blessing in disguise” provided me with a handle, a way to explain the event to myself. Maybe Susan knew I needed a handle.

She was lithe, with tiny, well-turned ankles and long, El Greco knees. She’d studied dancing with the fabled Katherine Dunham, and dancing was important to her. She was superb, often twirling or cha-cha-ing around rooms with pretend partners, her waist-length hair flying, while singing Broadway show tunes. Sometimes she’d doo-wop to a jazz record, fingers snapping, head shaking, eyes closed, while she’d dance a cool little jitterbug in place. I would go to my room afterward and try to imitate what I’d seen her do. I imitated her a lot. If I could be like her, maybe Dad would love me more.

Laughter, which had been an unfamiliar sound in our family for a long time, was a gift from Susan to us. She had a repertoire of jokes, some long, elaborate ones that would crack her up when she finally got to the punch line; some Jewish jokes that required my learning Yiddish words; some from the dark, smoky world of jazz musicians, a world with which she was familiar. Susan was a wonderful combination of goofy and sophisticated, with a little pioneer thrown in for ballast. Her joie de vivre washed over us that summer.

Mother’s younger sister and her alcoholic husband had joined Grandma as our caretakers in Greenwich and were reportedly trying to get legal custody of us. Susan told Dad that it was unconscionable for us to be adopted by relatives and that he absolutely had to take us to live with them in New York. I guess he was thinking of leaving us in Greenwich and just visiting from time to time. If the wife who followed Mother had been someone other than Susan—say, like wife number four, the Italian one—I honestly don’t know what would have become of us. I would have survived, maybe, but not as a productive citizen. During her brief five years with my father, Susan taught me by example how to be a stepmother. Little did I know how well that would serve me later when, between one husband or another, I would have six stepchildren of my own.

I was too smitten and immature to notice (though I probably saw but quickly forgot what I’d seen) that Susan wasn’t quite the same when Dad was around. Of course, nobody was the same when Dad was around, except Peter. Her ebullience would dim a little. If she got too rambunctious, Dad would rein her in, perhaps embarrassed that her spontaneity and exuberance accentuated their age difference—twenty-three years. She once said it was as though Yente the matchmaker from
Fiddler on the Roof
lived with Ibsen’s uncompromising Minister Brand. When she was interviewed by Howard Teichmann, she said, “I was your typical Japanese wife. I wanted to do everything to please him.” Again, I was seeing woman-as-pleaser as the way to “do” relationship. Unbeknownst to me as well was that she was bulimic, which I would soon become.

These things don’t take away from the fact that Susan wanted to be in a real relationship with me and I was ready to meet her there. She found in me not damaged adolescent goods but a responsive partner. As I look back, I see that my girlhood retreat into the Lone Ranger persona was my way of holding out for a real relationship: If it wasn’t real, I’d just as soon be by myself, thank you. But like a heat-seeking infrared laser beam, I could scan the horizon and pick up the presence of anyone warm and real I could learn from and go there. But by late puberty (by which time Susan and Dad had divorced), I’d turned off the laser beam and settled for whatever relationships were out there, real or not. Being alone didn’t feel like a postpuberty option!

In California that first summer, Dad and Susan would often take Peter and me with them when they went out to dinner in swank Hollywood restaurants like the Brown Derby and Chasen’s, one of Dad’s favorites. We had never been with him in these kinds of social situations before, so while I knew in an abstract sort of way that he was famous, I didn’t know how fame manifested itself in his life. I was struck by how, when he entered a restaurant, there would be a shift in energy, as though he were a magnet. Restaurant owners like Mr. Chasen would call him by name, and as we’d be ushered to Dad’s “special” table or, in the case of Chasen’s, the red leather booth, heads would turn and I’d hear, “Why, that’s . . . ?” being whispered at other tables. Having waiters know your name and what to bring you to drink without your even having to say anything became a sign of celebrity for me. Sometimes his agent from MCA (the Music Corporation of America) or Lew Wasserman and Jules Stein, who ran MCA, and their wives would join us.

Being invited to share Dad’s grown-up world was a chance for me to see how it all worked. I noted with interest how Dad behaved differently in a social setting, how he was warmer and funnier with people who were not intimates, especially after a couple of Jack Daniel’s. But it was Susan I watched most closely, logging in the details of her social moves, how she became very prim with certain older (important) people and riotous with chums like Johnny Swope and Dorothy McGuire from Dad’s early days. Once, driving back to Ocean House, she reached into her dress and pulled out a falsie from her bra, laughing loudly at herself. I wondered if I could ever be that open in front of others. If there was something not perfect about myself, like the size of my breasts or bottom, I always tried to hide it as best I could and hoped no one would notice. I had a tiny waist, about nineteen inches around, and a full, high bottom that seemed to me way too big in proportion to my waist. Worse, I had overheard Dad say that my legs were too heavy. When I heard him say that, I went to bed and slept for two days, the only way I knew to escape those words that haunted me for the rest of my life.

This was a summer when I was closer to Peter than usual, literally and figuratively. Because our bedrooms adjoined and we shared a bathroom, we had ample opportunity to nurse each other’s sunburns and hang together. We’d left our Greenwich friends behind, and all we had was each other as we accommodated ourselves to what was clearly a new chapter of our lives. On weekends at the hotel there would be dances for adults in the grand ballroom on the ground floor, complete with live orchestra. Under Susan’s spell, I had decided dancing was something to be cultivated, so Peter and I would sneak downstairs and waltz madly together in an empty room next to the party. Sometimes we’d slow-dance real close. It was nice to have a brother to practice on safely. That summer I learned how much I cared for my brother, and I also saw more clearly how very different we were.

We have different rhythms, different life views, and different ways of handling situations. A lot of this has to do with Mother’s preferring him, or at least trying to make him hers, while I was more my father’s child. Recently Susan described for me how the differences manifested: “You were watchful, taking everything in. Peter was frenetic, acting out.” Though it wasn’t intentional, Dad was often cruel to Peter. I use the word
cruel
because, though not deliberate, the effects were the same as cruelty. He often tried to be a good father, doing things he must have done with his father: fishing, flying kites, building model airplanes—the male bonding rituals. But if a parent doesn’t like herself or himself very much, it is the child of the same sex as that parent who has the hardest time. Multiply the impact severalfold if the parent is a celebrity. It’s not just your father who is making you feel like a sissy; it’s an icon, adored by millions as someone of integrity. I don’t think Dad liked himself very much, and perhaps he saw reflected in Peter the sensitivity and emotionalism that he had somehow buried. As Susan once said, “There’s a scream in your dad that’s never been screamed and a laugh that’s never been laughed.”

Dad hated any displays of emotion. “You disgust me,” he would say to at least two wives if they cried. Perhaps it scared him; perhaps he sensed that if he ever allowed his own emotions to surface, they would swallow him up. I believe that early on Dad was taught that to be a “man” you had to disconnect from emotions like tenderness, intimate connection, and need—qualities associated with women. We have all seen how almost universal this is among men and at what price they forfeit these qualities. In my father’s case, the masculine ethic may have been exacerbated by the example set by his father and rugged midwestern stoicism. Like the Ogallala Aquifer that lies beneath the surface of the Sand Hills of his native Nebraska and occasionally pops through the topsoil to create lakes, Dad’s buried “other self” surfaced in his gardening and his artistry: the painting, the needlepoint, his deeply sensitive portrayal of Tom Joad.

As a girl, I intuited the tensions playing themselves out inside him, like opposing forces on a battlefield. It was his underground softness that I loved, that I needed. In
I Don’t Want to Talk About It,
psychologist Terrence Real says, “Sons don’t want their fathers’ ‘balls’; they want their hearts.” Daughters, too. If Dad could have embraced the sensitive part of himself full-time, he would have been happier, and so would several subsequent generations of us, for the belief system that undergirds the old notion of masculinity is a poison that runs deep. Dad learned the steps to the relational dance of patriarchy at his father’s knee, as his father likely learned it from his father (though sometimes it’s learned on mothers’ knees), and its toxic legacy has continued across generations, until now.

I am determined before I die to try to help change the steps of that dance—for myself, for my children, and for others.

Peter is all deep sweetness, kind and sensitive to his core. He would never intentionally harm anything or anyone. In fact, he once argued with me that vegetables had souls (it was the sixties). He has a strange, complex mind that grasps and hangs on to details ranging from the minutiae of his childhood to cosmic matters, with a staggering amount in between. Dad couldn’t appreciate and nurture Peter’s sensitivity, couldn’t see him as he was. Instead he tried to shame Peter into his own image of stoic independence. Peter gets attached to people and animals. That summer at Ocean House he was always sifting through the sand underneath the beach club dressing rooms looking for money that might have dropped between the wooden slats. When he’d get enough coins he’d add it to his allowance and make a long-distance call back to the house in Greenwich to ask Katie about our family’s six-year-old Dalmatian, Buzz. During one of those calls, he learned that Buzz had been put down without anyone asking us how we felt about it. Peter was deeply affected by this. I could hear him crying himself to sleep in his room next door. I, on the other hand, felt nothing much. Greenwich was, to all intents and purposes, a chapter about to be closed. We were going to be living in the city with Dad and Susan and . . . well, dogs in the city weren’t practical.