Read My Lips (4 page)

But I had a lot still to learn.

A
FTER ABOUT SIX MONTHS OF BREATHING AND SCENE STUDY
and sitting in the middle of the floor looking like a frump, Jeff Corey took me aside one day after class. He could see how uncomfortable I was with myself, how I couldn’t take a compliment. He told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to see an analyst and start to deal with some of my self-esteem issues. It was quite clear to him, he explained, that I didn’t like myself.

I waited for him to finish, then began to wail like a child.

“But I don’t want to hate my parents!!”

I was sure that was what would happen if I went into therapy. Who would ever want to hate Edith and Jack Kellerman?

My mother, a dispenser of treats and unconditional love, is probably responsible for the sugar addiction that I have to this day. She made three different kinds of fudge and always iced her cakes too early. She brought them to parties like that—cracked. But they were delicious. She came from the tiny town of Portland, Arkansas—one of those towns that you were leaving the minute you entered it.

She was tiny and adorable and sometimes a little plumper than she would have liked. But in her teal blue housecoat with black
velvet piping, I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

My mom was a piano teacher with a daughter—me—who could not learn to play, no matter who was teaching her. But I sang everywhere and all the time—grocery stores, church, alone—and I always got all the best laughs at all the recitals. My parents had met in a piano store, where my mother, then nineteen, was giving demonstrations.

My father was handsome in that man’s man kind of way. He had a winning smile and was born to wear a suit, tie, and a fedora. He could be stern but he was funny. Not knowing which side of him would show up was tricky sometimes.

He’d wanted to be an actor. That lasted two minutes. When he couldn’t get a job, he became a traveling salesman instead, at first for Shell Oil. Two sides of the same coin, I guess—acting and sales. My dad had no problem quitting jobs when he wasn’t promoted as quickly as he thought he should have been, but he was never out of work and excelled even at jobs he didn’t like that much. He bloomed where he was planted. Move on. Reinvent.

Daddy got up at six every morning to read the paper and came home at around seven each night, poured himself a drink, and read
Time
magazine before dinner. He liked to brag that he weighed 175 pounds all his life. Beyond that, he never talked about himself. Never. Not a word, except maybe about work.

Not until much later in my life did I learn both my mother and father had been abandoned by their parents. My mom had lost her father to jail. He’d shot someone in a card game on a riverboat. And my father had three fathers die by the time he was nineteen years old. Father number three drank away all the money before he passed, and Daddy had to join the Marines instead of going to college. I think that made him feel less than everyone else somehow.

My mom and dad loved each other. “Edith, you’re just going to have to stick up for yourself,” Dad would say about their fights.
At one point or another we all had to endure my father’s disappointed nagging. For example, there was The Coffee Incident.

“Edith! This coffee is not hot!” he would say.

“Oh, dear,” Mom said. “Let me get you another cup.”

Then, the next day: “Edith! This coffee is not hot. Can you not make a good cup of coffee?”

“Okay, dear, I’ll get another pot.”

Yet another day: “Edith, if you can’t make a hot cup of coffee, I’m going to have to get a divorce!”

After about three weeks of this, of my mother rushing back and forth to the kitchen fetching coffee and my father threatening divorce, my mother finally turned on her heel and said, “Well, then, Jack dear, why don’t you get one?”

I was terrified. I was sure that was it for my parents. DIVORCE. I raced over to my neighbor’s house.

“My parents are getting a divorce!” I cried and told them about my dad’s coffee.

The next day the neighbors saw me outside and, laughing, called over the fence. “Sally, are your parents divorced yet?” They thought it was hilarious.

The neighbors knew it wasn’t serious, but I didn’t know which end was up sometimes in my house. Diana called Dad’s outbursts “flying off the handle.” I hated seeing my father act entitled and my mother placating. Daddy always apologized, but that didn’t stop him from doing the same thing again.

My parents never divorced, and my fears about that eventually subsided.

I
WONDER WHY
G
OD CHOSE ME TO SEE THE WORLD THROUGH
my eyes? You knew right away I was going to be an actress.

This was the thought that popped into my head at the age of seven as I sat under the bushes in Granada Hills in the San Fernando Valley. I was in the country, often alone, except for my black cocker spaniel, Shadow. I looked up to my sister, Diana, but
she didn’t want me tagging along. Her full name was Diana Dean Kellerman, but my father called her “Dinky Dean.” “Hi Dinky!” I’d always squeal. Oh, how I worshipped her. “Shut up, Stinky!” she’d respond. She was always trying to get rid of me, as older siblings often do to their younger, pesky brothers and sisters. She was always tackling me and snapping towels at my legs and behind while we were washing the dishes. She liked books and studying; I sang until it drove her crazy and wanted to wander, wanted to be outside.

I was happy out in the world, in the groves of the valley with my pal Shadow. I would sit and look around, knowing that what appeared before my eyes—the eyes that God had chosen for me—looked different from what it would look like to any other person anywhere else in the world. To this day I am an overwhelmingly visual person, stimulated more by images than words on a page.

Being in the country thrilled me. It still does. I lived in the real San Fernando Valley back then, not the Valley of sprawling suburbs and strip malls. It was the Valley of orange groves and pastures, of dirt roads, eucalyptus trees, and fields of flowers, and of making colorful papier-mâché creations at the old Spanish Mission. There was one store in Granada Hills, a service station with two pumps, and a Chow Dog snack shop, which was the closest thing we had to a soda fountain. When we’d get off the bus after school, we’d go to the Chow Dog. The boys in my class would pull back the lid of the freezer, take a bite from an ice cream, and put it back. I scolded them every time, but one day I was out walking by myself and it was so hot and I was so hungry that I suddenly found myself eyeing that freezer. The man who ran the shop was in the back, and I thought,
Maybe just this one time if I snuck a bite it will be okay.
As the cool ice cream bar headed toward my mouth, out came the shopkeeper. “So YOU’RE the one who’s been taking all the ice cream!” he shouted. I had to run all the way home to get the ten cents I owed and—worst of all—tell my parents.

The heat will make people do all kinds of things, and the Valley
was hot, hot, hot. Summers were about swimming in all the public plunges and getting our yearly haircuts.

“Time for your haircut,” Mom would say.

I got used to it, but it could be disconcerting for other kids. I remember Dickie Forrest moving in across the street just before my annual lopping.

“Hey,” he said, “how come you cut your hair when I was just getting to know you?”

Then there was the time when my beautiful cousin from New Orleans, Millidge Marie Haas, was getting married and asked me to be her flower girl. That called for a special haircut. So my mom sat me down, got out the shears, and cut my long, brown hair off all the way up to the middle of my ears. Then off we went to the beauty parlor for the finishing touch, something called a “permanent.”

If only it had been a “temporary.”

I sat down in the chair, the hairdresser snapped the long bib around my neck, and the next thing I knew I was sitting beneath a machine that looked like it was from outer space. They put what felt like a fifty-pound bucket on my head and plugged me into a wall.

When I emerged I looked like Larry from the
Three Stooges
: my hair was flat on top with fuzzy frizz sticking out to either side. What a trauma! I was completely devastated. I wanted to hurl myself off a cliff. I was six years old and wasn’t sure I could go on.

My mother thought I was overreacting and tried to reassure me. “You are God’s perfect child,” she told me, as always.

M
Y MOTHER WAS A
C
HRISTIAN
S
CIENTIST, WHICH IS ONE OF
the most misunderstood faiths going. There were no doctors or trips to the hospital, this was true. But there was a lot of calm and faith and joy, if my mom’s example was typical.

No doctors meant that when I got sick I got Red Hots for pills and got to lay in my mom’s bed and listen to
The Shadow
on the
radio. If I felt particularly bad, she would make me floating islands too—little bits of meringue resting on a runny vanilla custard to soothe what ailed me. Baked custards too. And if I ever came home from school crying, I got cinnamon toast with butter and a cup of cocoa. Finding candy in our house was like a game. It was stashed in the linen closet, in my father’s golf bag in the trunk of his car, even in the bottom of the dirty clothes hamper. I thought the hunt was fun. While other kids were studying, I was looking for candy in the laundry room.

To my mind, mom’s was a spiritual, loving God. She reminded me of this and her abundant view of the world on a daily basis:

“You are God’s perfect child.”

“Supply is unlimited.”

“The expectancy of good.”

“Fear has no power, only what we give it.”

But one of her sayings scared me a little.

“Ingratitude is the back door through which all our blessings escape.”

God forbid I had an ungrateful thought. I worried that every time I complained I was shooing my blessings away.

Perhaps the one that has given me the most comfort is “Everything we need is within us.”

I think of books today and various movements that rely on visualization or embracing gratitude and trusting that all will be revealed in the best possible way, and all I can think is that my mom was ahead of her time. She had her faith in God tested on more than one occasion, but she never, ever complained.

“I sure wish I was taller” was about the only thing even close to a complaint that I ever heard from her lips.