by Susan Lucci
I was so lucky to grow up in a home where there was always music playing and the smell of some delicious homemade meal. Since Nana lived with us, my mother never had to cook, and that suited her just fine. My mother preferred to do the cleaning. In fact, she kept a spotless and very organized home, something she tried to teach me to do, too.
I don’t have a lot of memories of my Swedish grandfather because he divorced my grandmother when my mother was just five years old. My grandfather lived half the year in Sweden and the other half in St. Petersburg, Florida. Although I didn’t see much of him growing up, I do recall that occasionally he’d write my mother letters asking how we were all doing. He didn’t completely disappear from our lives, but we weren’t close either. I don’t know many of the details about why he left my grandmother other than that he went to Sweden on a vacation and never came back. He sent my grandmother a letter saying he no longer wanted to be married. Nana was a very proud woman. She refused to take any child support or alimony from him. Instead, she chose to play the piano, supporting herself and three children all on her own. She was a very good piano player. She started an orchestra and played piano in the local hotels in the Pocono Mountains near the small Swedish-German communities where they lived. She often accompanied the old silent movies that were shown in their local movie house as well. The Milford Opera House, which looks more like a quintessential Andrew Wyeth barn than a classic opera house, was a favorite spot for my grandmother to play her piano, too. I have always been very proud of my grandmother for how she persevered and managed to take care of her children as a single mother. She was so ahead of her time. She chose to take her talent and do something with it rather than sit around and wallow in her sadness. Divorce wasn’t common back in those days. I am sure it was a challenge for the whole family because there weren’t a lot of single-women role models then for my grandmother to look up to or emulate. Hearing these stories as a young girl gave me the eyes to see and the ears to hear so that I could relate to all sorts of situations growing up. These weren’t my experiences, but they were poignant and important to the person I would later become.
I was eleven years old when my nana suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. I didn’t like to sleep much when I was a little girl. I seemed to always have lots of thoughts dancing around in my head, especially at night. Sometimes I’d fall asleep then awaken for one reason or another. I didn’t have nightmares very often or anything like that. I’d just wake up and was unable to fall back to sleep. The night Nana died was one of those nights.
I had just awakened when I heard a strange sound. It was a scary noise, unlike anything I had ever heard. I was in my bedroom on the third floor and the noise sounded like it was coming from our basement, where Nana lived. My father had finished our basement for her so she could have her own private quarters. He did a beautiful job on the space, making it very comfortable and beautiful for both Nana and Snookie.
I heard some sort of faint moaning. At first, I didn’t know what it was until I was finally able to make out that it was somebody calling my mother’s name.
“Jeanette, Jeanette.” I knew it was coming from my grandmother because everyone else called my mother Jean. Only my father and grandmother referred to my mother as Jeanette. I was so scared. I had no idea what was going on. I was always afraid of the dark and lay there motionless, frozen by my fear. I didn’t get up right away. In fact, I never got up to go to my grandmother that night. I stayed silent and still in my bed. Terrible thoughts were racing through my mind. I loved my grandmother very much. I was petrified at the prospect that she might die. That overwhelming thought was more than I could bear, so I pulled back the covers I’d been hiding under and ran into my parents’ bedroom.
“Nana is calling you!” I said to my mother. She hadn’t heard a sound. My mother dashed downstairs. Since she was a nurse, I knew she could help Nana get through whatever was happening that night. My mother called an ambulance right away. I overheard her tell the operator that she thought my grandmother Rose Granquist was having a heart attack.
“Come as fast as you can,” she said.
The ambulance got to our home within minutes. They tried resuscitating Nana while getting her onto the gurney and loading her into the vehicle so they could race her to the nearest hospital. But it was too late. Nana died.
For years, I never told another soul this story. I was so ashamed of myself for being so paralyzed by my fear. My husband heard it for the first time as I was preparing myself to write this book. I have carried my guilt for not getting up sooner and helping my grandmother since that time. Could I have saved her that night? I don’t know the answer to that. I will never know. Maybe she could have lived longer. I would have had my beloved grandmother with me for just a little more time if I had gotten out of bed sooner that horrible night. But the truth is, maybe I couldn’t have saved her. She smoked and drank coffee for many years. Like my father, Nana smoked non-filtered cigarettes. Those certainly wouldn’t have helped an already strained heart.
If either of my children had experienced a sudden and tragic loss like this, I would do my best to comfort and reassure them that what happened was not their fault. But my mother had no idea that I felt I could have possibly prevented Nana’s death that night. And even though logic tells me that I didn’t need to carry this weight on my shoulders for all of these years, I continued to feel terribly ashamed about the way my grandmother died, spending so many years wondering, If only.
Thankfully though, I have taken many memories of my grandmother with me throughout my life. Her love of food and zest for living along with her resilience, courage, perseverance, determination, and tremendous spirit are all traits I feel so lucky that she passed on to me. I can still imagine her in the kitchen wearing her housedress and pearls, whipping up something yummy. I’m so grateful that my mother gave me some of her jewelry and a green porcelain bowl Nana used all the time. I also have some sheet music from her days playing the piano in the Poconos. Maybe someday I’ll choose one of those songs to work into my cabaret show as a way to honor the deep love I have for my nana. I know she smiles down on me every day. If you believe in guardian angels as I do, there is no doubt that Nana is mine.
Although my mother was a nurse by trade, she absolutely had a love and passion for fashion. Mother’s love of style made her top dresser drawer a treasure trove for a young aspiring actress with an insatiable imagination like mine. She would allow me to play with all of her grown-up accessories. I was very big on wrapping her scarves around my head or turning them into different costumes. This was inspired by the old movies I grew up watching. Scarves and the sheer white curtains in our upstairs bathroom were magical to me because they allowed me to become virtually anything I wanted to be—a bride, an exotic princess, a first communicant. My mother often wore her hair pulled back in a chignon, with holders that were adorned with rhinestones. These were perfect for me to make a tiara out of. I’d slowly turn my head from side to side as I looked from every possible angle in the large mirror that hung over her dresser to admire the shiny sparkling headpiece I’d made. Once I had the tiara placed just right, I’d pull on her long white or black gloves and hold her ivory cigarette holder, which my uncle Leo brought back from Asia after World War II, between my fingers as if I were Ava Gardner or Gene Tierney. My mother always let me play and explore my creativity. And though she had no idea, she was inadvertently fostering what would later become my passion and calling in life.
As I got older, I began putting on shows with the other kids in the neighborhood. I was a one-girl operation, starring in, creating, writing, directing, choreographing, and costuming the entire production. By the time I was eight or nine years old, my parents knew I had developed a passion for singing, and they genuinely liked how I sang. I can’t say for sure how their friends felt about it, but after dinner, they would have to endure another song from little Susan Lucci. Wherever we went, whether to a dinner or someone’s birthday party, inevitably someone wou
ld ask me to sing a song or two. They’d clear off the table and lift me onto it, where I’d perform like a female Frankie Lymon. I was too ethnic-looking to be the next Shirley Temple. Plus, my older brother, Jimmy, listened to Frankie Lymon, a wonderful, soulful singer with a beautiful, sweet voice, so I had been influenced by his style. To our family and their friends, I was already a star.
My parents decided to send me to a parochial school from first grade until the time I went to high school. Although I enjoyed many aspects of its curriculum, the school was very strict. In fact, we were not allowed to talk during lunch hour. We were forced into silence for the entire time, which was very hard for me. We could laugh and scream outside in the school playground, but inside, it was mandatory quiet. There was always some boy who would break the silence by blowing up and popping a paper bag. Of course, he’d get into big trouble, but we secretly appreciated his attempt to buck the system.
One afternoon, my girlfriends and I were walking in the hall after lunch when I heard a couple of girls whispering and pointing at me. I wasn’t sure what they were saying, but it was obvious they were talking about me. Finally, one of them asked if I was going to be in the local Girl Scout play. I hadn’t heard anything about a Girl Scout play. I was stunned that I didn’t know about it.
“Well, we are going to be in it!” they said. “We got our scripts and we are going to all be in the play.” They were being so cavalier.
They told me the play was called Cindy Ellen and it was going to be a variation of the Cinderella story. Okay, maybe that’s why I didn’t hear about it. Everyone knows that Cinderella is a beautiful blonde. I was a brunette. Sure, all right. That made sense. I was certain that was why I hadn’t been approached. When I was growing up, there were no brunette dolls to play with. There were no brunette angels for the Christmas tree and Cinderella was definitely a blonde! I tried to justify all of this in my mind, and yet I still felt very bad. I wanted to cry but I didn’t want the other girls to see how terrible I was feeling. My girlfriend and I walked away. I was still fighting back my tears when we ran into Mrs. Morrison and Mrs. Smith, our local Girl Scout troop leaders.
“Susan! We’ve been looking for you.” I could see Mrs. Morrison holding what looked to be a script under her arm.
“We want you to play Cindy Ellen in our play.” It turned out that I was not only going to be in the play, I got the lead! I had no idea how the troop leaders knew that I wanted to be an actress more than anything else in the world, but I sure was glad they sought me out and that they thought I could do it. It was a wonderful turnaround to go from thinking I had been overlooked to being cast as the lead. I was absolutely thrilled because this was going to be my first legitimate stage appearance.
It was right around this same time that my mother handed me my very first copy of Seventeen magazine and my whole world changed forever.
“I think you will like this,” she said.
And she was right; I did.
I believe the day she gave me that magazine, my mother was encouraging me to pursue my dream. The girls within the pages were all beautiful teenagers with such nice hair. I was mesmerized by all the posing and grown-up fashion. I began fantasizing about becoming one of the models I saw on the page. The only problem was, I was very petite and my hair, which is naturally curly, didn’t look a thing like their perfectly straight and shiny hair. I spent my youth watching my mother take very good care of her skin and her health, which was a practice she passed on to me as well. The magazine was full of articles that helped me understand how important all of those things were, especially for a young girl. That was the day I realized there was a whole wide world out there to be discovered and it was mine for the taking.
When I was sixteen years old, I entered a competition to become an exchange student. It was sponsored by my high school and our local community. There was a required essay and several interviews involved in the selection process to become a student ambassador living abroad for the summer. After giving it some thought, I decided to focus on the program that was called Experiment in International Living. The program took place over three months during the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. It turned out that I was one of four kids selected from our community to participate. France and Sweden were my first two choices because I wanted to experience living in a place that I had natural ties to. Unfortunately, I didn’t get either of those locations, and I was ultimately placed with a Norwegian family.
Living in Norway was a fantastic experience. This was the first time I really knew what it meant to think in a global way. When we got to Norway, I went through orientation with nine other kids from all over the United States who had come to live there as well. I had never before met anyone who lived in places such as Iowa and Indiana. Our teachers and chaperones were a married couple who were also professors from Yale. Shortly after our arrival, we met our respective families, who typically had a child around our age. The family I was placed with lived outside of Oslo, in an island community. They wanted to host an American exchange student because they wanted their children to practice speaking English. Many citizens of Scandinavian countries encourage their children to learn English as a second language, so although I didn’t get to learn much Norwegian, I did get to experience their culture. It was interesting to talk to my Norwegian family, who asked me lots of questions about the Kennedys, American politics, and American opinions. This was an awakening for me because it was the first time I had stepped outside my own country as a “representative” of the United States of America. It was the first time I felt a responsibility for the way I spoke about America as an American. I wasn’t sure I had all of the right answers. I hadn’t spoken of these things to anyone else before this trip to Europe. But I knew the Kennedys were revered in our country, so I could easily speak to that. The world admired President and Mrs. Kennedy. It wasn’t a hard sell.
I was very lucky because the family I lived with had the means to open many doors in their country, giving me the best possible exposure and experiences. My Norwegian father was a doctor, who was quite successful. His wife often took my Norwegian sister and me into Oslo to shop and sightsee. She actually knitted a beautiful Norwegian sweater and hat for me as wonderful souvenirs. She took me into Oslo to pick out the pewter buttons she later sewed on. I adored the sweater and hat so much that I still have them.
On weekends, we spent time at their home on a small island in the southern part of Norway, where dusk settles somewhere around one o’ clock in the morning. Those long days of sunshine allowed for lots of outdoor living. We often took boat rides, walked around the island, picked bluebells and put them in a flower press, and enjoyed all the beauty this wonderful place had to offer.
Toward the end of my stay, I reconnected with the other kids from our program and our teachers so we could all spend a couple of weeks traveling around Europe together. We toured Norway for a few more days before taking a ferry from Oslo to Copenhagen. Most of us were running very low on money, so we decided to pool our funds and voted between staying in the sleeping quarters on board the ship or eating. It was unanimous. We would eat. It was a relatively easy decision for a few of us, especially one of the girls from Kansas and me, who were petite and could pretty much curl up and sleep anywhere. In fact, she and I spotted a luggage rack above some of the seats on the boat that we figured we could easily squeeze into. We removed the bags that had been stored there and climbed in. Unfortunately, the sea got very rough that night and we got thrown right out onto the floor of the boat. This was my first experience with seasickness—one I will never forget. Everybody on board was so sick. If you weren’t holding your head over the rail, you were holding on for dear life. When we got to Copenhagen, we spent a week touring and seeing all of the sites before leaving for a week in Paris and then returning to the United States.
When I arrived in New York, I remember sitting with my parents so I could tell them all about my wonderful experiences overseas. I shared how m
uch I enjoyed exploring my Scandinavian heritage and how appreciative I was for the opportunity to live abroad. The Cuban missile crisis was fresh in my mind, as it had been less than a year since that threat was posed to our nation. As a young adult, I was well aware of those tense days. After spending three months out of the country, I told my parents I thought every teenager should have the opportunity to be an exchange student. If they did, I believed it would have a big impact on the younger generation’s global outlook, and could result in less war. I was living in an era where war was happening all around us. Although I was just a little girl during the Korean War, I was old enough to be aware of Castro coming into power in Cuba and of the Bay of Pigs invasion. And I realized that we were still living in uncertain times. I followed current events closely and with great interest. I was too young to become an activist, but I wanted my parents to know that I was aware of what was happening. Like most parents, my mother and father did their best to shield me from the horrors of the world, but we were living in a time when they were hard to ignore. And to be frank, I didn’t want to put my head in the sand. I was sitting in French class on November 22, 1963, when I heard the news. A friend of mine went running past the open door to my classroom. This was a girl who was usually very upbeat and funny, but she had just heard that John F. Kennedy had been shot, and was running down the hallways of our school screaming to let everyone know. We weren’t sure if we should take her message seriously at first though. It only took a split second to realize that no one would say something so horrible in jest. Everything came to a stop. How could the president have been shot? I had never experienced anything like this before. I didn’t know what to do. I, along with the rest of our class, was in a state of shock. There was a great heaviness throughout the school for the rest of the day, week, and for many months to come. Our country was crying. Every one of us was in tears. I’ll never forget—we were supposed to put on a school play that weekend. Of course, we were taught that the show must go on. Although it seemed wrong on so many levels, my drama teacher reminded us that it was the first rule of the theater, so we all got into our costumes and were standing backstage when the school decided this was one time the show would not go on.