“Mother, you need to drive up to Dallas or Oklahoma City once a week and talk to a therapist,” I urged, but she pooh-poohed such an unheard-of notion. Lette and I both told her therapy had made big changes in our lives and could help her understand what was going on. But she left for Ardmore the next day, sure she could handle it herself, which worried me.
One crisp morning in October, a golden retriever trotted into our front yard. He had a collar but no ID. I checked the local paper and saw an ad that fit his description.
“Yup,” said the man who answered the phone. “Sounds like my dog.”
The fellow showed up within the hour, coming from a canyon several miles west of us. Toole saw Josh. Josh saw Toole and immediately ran and jumped onto his chest, licking him joyously. (You can surmise which was the guy and which the dog.) Josh had been missing for a week, and this happened to be the last day of the ad. How lucky!
And speaking of getting lucky…this guy was not bad-looking. Fancy that.
Do you smell another escapade? Are your loins girded? If not, gird up.
Toole and I chatted a bit, and while I was less demonstrative than Josh, I found Toole—oh, what did I find him? Awfully nice. Tall and slender with light brown hair, a country manner, easy to talk to, about ten years my senior. We took to each other, as they say, and exchanged phone numbers. (Just in case Josh should decide to fly the coop again, you see…ahem.) Soon, he called me. Would I like to see his place in the canyon? Ooooh, would I. I’m nuts about canyons! Nuts about goldenrod! Hay fever? Nuts about hay fever!
I drove out the next afternoon, finally locating his secluded acreage. He was living in a trailer near the spot where his hand-built house had recently burned down. Seems he’d bought this acreage and built a house, then gone back to Oregon, where he had an apple orchard, which provided his income, and during his absence the house had caught fire. He suspected arson. It was all very intriguing. I liked Toole, but I was nervous. This was such a different sort of man from any I’d ever met. Very sexy, in a low-key sort of way. Quietly masculine. Quietly unlettered. Of the land.
We climbed down to the creek and up to the hill where his house had been, and after about an hour, he asked if I’d like a cup of tea. Yes, I would. We had it inside his trailer. The tea was nice. Toole was nicer. Definitely an A+. Oh, yes. A+. Definitely. He and his wife were virgins when they got married and had found sex easy and natural. He’d been with no woman but her. I was his second? Wow! I looked at him like he was a unicorn. He never inquired about my experiences, being not the least bit curious. I seemed to suit him fine.
Need I say we saw each other rather frequently? Usually at his place out there in the canyon, beautiful in a dry California kind of way, with all that shoulder-high, incessantly waving, godforsaken goldenrod. I sneezed, my nose ran, I sneezed, my nose ran. Luckily, Toole had a lot of handkerchiefs. In fact, he usually wore a checkered one tied around his forehead, like a hippie. A hippie farmer. He looked cute and terribly sexy.
One weekend, Toole took Mark and me up to the Mojave Desert for an overnight camping trip under the stars. The desert was blanketed with tiny flowers of all description, and the light changed every second, coloring the bluffs and buttes with reds and golds and purples. I had no idea the desert could be so breathtaking.
We drove to the top of a mountain to “Burro” Schmidt’s Tunnel. According to local legend, this guy Schmidt had been told he would die from tuberculosis unless he moved to the desert, so he did, spending the next thirty years in that forsaken place. He’d hand-laid tracks half a mile long, digging through the mountain with just a burro and a small wagon all summer, tending sheep for ranchers in the winter. It was an inspirational story. Mark and Toole and I explored the tunnel with lanterns, coming out high over the desert. Back in the ramshackle house, I bought four kerosene lanterns from the roughshod woman who ran the place. She was quite fascinating herself, telling us how she dug the water well and once fought a mountain lion on her own. Mark still has those lanterns, and they still work! That night, Mark and Toole and I slept on army cots under the stars, more stars than I’d seen since the 1950s in Oklahoma.
The second season of Maude debuted to great reviews. It wasn’t as popular as All in the Family, but it was solid. I was having a marvelous time in the show. And I was having a pretty marvelous time with Toole. He was so…bucolic. So unfailingly, easily, sexy. Meanwhile, Mark was happy at Newbridge, a progressive private school. He was drawing and painting like crazy and learning to play guitar with a teacher who judged him inordinately talented. Mother had bought him a guitar that summer in Ardmore, and I now bought him a better one. He practiced for hours every afternoon after school and all weekend.
We had a party at The Hen House practically every weekend, with Mark and Lette jamming on piano and guitar and Lette and Linda singing well into the night. (I must have heard “Cabaret” 460 times.) Lette had a brief affair with a Greek realtor before she met Jack Quigley, the “rooster” who would become the love of her life. Linda was in a new series, and as I recall, sleeping with the lighting man.
Oh, let me promise you, The Hen House Herald was full of news.
For one thing, the new batch of gerbils immediately moved to Timbuktu.
News from Mother in Ardmore in early October. Gretl had her puppies.
Six days later, on October 15, Mother had a heart attack.
She was ordered by her doctor to stay in bed four weeks and not lift a finger, so her sister Irene, who had helped raise me, came from West Texas to care for her, staying for over three weeks. Melinda drove up from Louisiana and took Gretl and her brood home, finding homes for the pups. (Then she had the good sense to have Gretl spayed, and I’m happy to say that Gretl lived with Melinda to the end of her days, and they got along swimmingly. That Gretl was one of the best dogs I ever knew. You couldn’t help but love her.) As soon as Irene left, the second week of November, Mother got up and started doing things and had another heart attack, which put her in the Ardmore hospital.
Maude was on a week’s hiatus just then, and I was in the middle of a large role on a TV special about mothers and daughters. Torn whether to complete the week’s work or go visit Mother right away with nobody to take over my role, I decided to finish the work, then ask to be let out of Maude for a week. On November 16, the day the TV job wrapped, I got home to The Hen House, walked into the living room, and put down my purse.
The phone rang.
My uncle Billy Joe, Mother’s brother, said, “Well, Eddi-Rue, we lost her.”
The bottom dropped out. I fell into a chair. He said she had had a third heart attack at the hospital and died immediately. In the mail that day was a letter from Mother written November 12, saying she wasn’t satisfied with the care in Ardmore and thought she’d go see an Oklahoma City specialist at the end of the week—the very day she died.
I told Mark, who took it well. I didn’t take it well at all. I was in shock, glassy-eyed. I booked us a flight to Dallas. Billy Joe drove us to Ardmore for the funeral. Everyone in the family seemed to be taking it in stride. Only I and my father, who’d been out of town when he heard, were clearly devastated. Relatives stayed at the house, sleeping all over the place. Nine-year-old Mimi and I shared the pull-out sofa in the living room. As we lay in bed the night before the funeral, she asked me, “Aunt Rue, what if an elephant falls through the ceiling on us?”
“Mimi,” I said gently, “never in the history of the world has an elephant fallen through the ceiling on anyone. So don’t worry.”
She said, “Aunt Rue, this could be the first time.”
The kid had a point. I felt as if one had already fallen on me.
Funerals are obscene. Looking at Mother in the casket at the funeral home—that strange, unrecognizable face, laid out in an ugly dress she had hated—this wasn’t my beautiful Mother! It was some clumsy wax effigy. Watching the casket being lowered into the earth—surreal! Impossible! In the limo on the way back home, I couldn’t control my
grief. All the kids stared at me, embarrassed.
“Aunt Rue,” Mimi said, “there’s nothing to be sad about.”
Mimi had known Mother nine years. But at thirty-nine, I had lost my dearest friend, my most powerful ally, the woman who’d stood by me selflessly, helped raise Mark for fifteen years, the only person I could always depend on, who could make me laugh in a special way. I was astounded to see Mark so in control. My father was obviously shaken to his roots, remaining distant and silent. If anyone had depended on her more than I did, it was Bill. They had been married forty years. She was only sixty-one, he sixty-five. Way too soon.
In my childhood, when I was afraid, I’d say, “Mother, I don’t want you to ever die.”
“Oh, don’t worry, Eddi-Rue,” she’d always assure me. “I promise I’m going to live to be a hundred. My father’s aunt—my aunt Belle Haney—why, she lived to be a hundred thirteen!”
And now our little redheaded dynamo was gone.
Unable to stay in that Ardmore house, I drove to Denton, Texas, with Melinda and her kids. We picked up pecans in their yard at dusk, my panic raging, then had supper. Sheridan was out of town, so I crawled into Melinda’s bed with her, needing to talk, gripped in a paroxysm of grief. But characteristically in control, she went to sleep. I lay awake, reading one of her science books all night.
Thanksgiving day, I flew back to L.A. and walked into the dark, empty Palisades house at dusk. Lette and Linda were away for the holiday. Mark had stayed in Ardmore a few days. Not a soul in the place. As the desolate darkness swept over me, I picked up the phone and called the only pal I could think of.
“Bea?” I said unsteadily. “I’m back from Mother’s funeral, I’m alone, and—”
“You’re coming out to my house,” she said. “Right now. We’re just finishing dinner, and there are plenty of leftovers.”
When I arrived, there were maybe ten people around the table, including her mother, who lived with her and her husband and their boys. Bea made me a plate of food, then tucked me into bed in a guest room. Her tender, gentle care finally brought me peace, and I slept soundly.
The theme song played at the start of every episode of The Golden Girls was a little ditty called “Thank You for Being a Friend.” A bouncy little bit of bubblegum music. Hardly a tearjerker. But those words probably don’t get said enough. A friend in a moment of deepest need—that’s truly something to be grateful for.
I shall never forget Bea Arthur’s loving kindness that night.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“We’ve been visited by several flying saucers. One green creature even came into my son’s bedroom.”
—DEBBIE, SPA MASSEUSE
Christmas in Southern California. Rudolph the red-nosed coyote. Deck the Hills with plastic holly. Oh, what fun it is to ride in a Porsche Cabriolet. Baja humbug!
Yes, yes, I know the Christ Child story originated in a desert clime, so it makes sense cinematically, but I never got accustomed to all that damn sunshine. I want the schmaltzy all-American holiday magic with chestnuts roasting on an open fire. I want to go caroling and freeze my nose off, then come home and warm my cockles (whatever those are) with a big old mug of hot cider! I need that. That’s Christmas. Give me a Winter Wonderland. Brother, you can have all that sand.
Toole and I drove up into the mountains one day in December and happened upon a yucca stalk on the ground. It’s illegal in California to dig up yuccas, but this one was long dead. Lette and I made it into our Christmas tree. Somehow, it seemed appropriate. Tall, yellow, dead, leafless. We festooned it with decorations and composed a song: “Hang Your Balls On the Yucca Tree.” (After Christmas, I tied it to my car aerial with a big yellow bow, and I never had trouble spotting my Mazda in a parking lot.)
The Maude production schedule continued without catching a breath, but my grief took its time becoming bearable. Bill came out the week of Christmas, bringing with him a big, blond lady, who stayed a day or two before departing to visit relatives. She ran the Rod and Reel Motel that Bill owned in Arkansas, and I don’t know what else their relationship was. He said women had been coming out of the woodwork, and that Marie, who worked in Mother’s beauty parlor, was particularly making a play for him. I tried hard to create a somewhat cheerful Christmas for Mark and Bill, who said he still dialed their home number to talk to Mother, although he knew no one was there. Hearing him say that cut me to the quick.
Lette’s brother, Huntzie, had a ranch in the hills, and we drove out on Christmas Eve day to spend the afternoon with him and Lette’s parents, Bertha and Dickie. Lette did her best to lift my spirits, but this was not Christmas as I had ever known it. It was alien and wrong in that dusty, hot environment with people I didn’t know that well—or particularly like. Lette’s family was nothing like her. Dickie was a nebbish, Bertha loud and pushy, and Huntzie was a hotshot ladies’ man, always on the make. They spent the day watching football, while Lette and I wandered the scrubby hillside trails.
When I was a child, I had a recurring nightmare in which I slogged through knee-deep sand, watching my mother and father fly away in an airplane. Now, how many Freudians does it take to screw in that lightbulb? The meaning of the dream was obvious, and now that nightmare had come true. Wandering that arid, alien desert on that hot Christmas Day, Mother’s absence was almost intolerable. The bottom of my world had dropped out, and I fell through the hole into panic. Grief doesn’t describe it. Grief is painful, but it makes sense. Panic is a pervasive, unreasoning terror, and the dark heart of my panic had always been the fear of losing Mother. Being abandoned.
The reality of it gripped me in razor-sharp jaws.
Bill and I struggled through our first holiday without her, then he went home to Oklahoma and the throngs of widows vying for his attention. Still hale and hearty at sixty-five, he was bidding on jobs and building like crazy. He kept the beauty shop going, getting more and more entwined in Marie’s web. Bill loved the house he’d started building in 1946 and was still busily improving, planting, watching things grow. Mark continued to go to Ardmore during the summers, riding minibikes with his pals, comfortable in the house where he’d spent much of his childhood. But I had a hard time being there. The empty rooms screamed at me. If Bill was the soul of that place, Mother was the heart. And now the heart was gone out of it.
Looking back at it, The Hen House was similar to The Golden Girls. Lette, Linda, and I were three single women in our late thirties, one with a son living with her. Dorothy, Rose, and Blanche were three single women in their fifties and sixties, one with a mother living with her. However, while both routinely qualified as comedy, one was real life and one was pure fiction. All the women had conflicts, that’s true, but in Sitcom World, everything works out in thirty minutes minus commercials. The differences between Lette and Linda and me were harder to resolve.
We three little showbiz cutie-pies had our share of arguments and, after I got my Irish up, a couple of monumental fights. Perhaps our lifestyles were—how shall we say—a mite incompatible? Lette was neat to a fault, demanding that the kitchen be kept pristine, always on time with her rent payments and her part of the utilities. Linda was—how do I say this?—much less disciplined. This meant that I was in the middle—not sloppy, not superneat, but in between—so neither of them liked how I did things, and both kept coming to me with grievances.
One day Linda confronted me, furious because a package of cookies was missing from the pantry. I asked Mark, who said he’d eaten them, not realizing they were Linda’s. I replaced them, but she was still pissed off. Obviously, she really loved those cookies. Meanwhile, she was almost always late with her payments. I collected the rent and utilities and mailed them out, since the house was leased in my name. I was always bugging Linda for her tardy portion, but it didn’t lessen our friendship. She was just lackadaisical. And we had a lot of fun when things were going well, giving dinner parties galore.
Lette was hot and heavy with Jack, Linda dated various guys, and
I kept seeing good old Toole. Mark was in love with his guitar and getting quite good. He and Lette kept playing music together, which helped improve his technique. She’d gotten a job as lounge pianist and singer at the Jolly Roger, a North Hollywood restaurant. Never one to disguise her feelings, Lette called it “the Jolly Cocksucker.” Many nights I went down to catch her act, that glorious soprano delivering both torch songs and comedy numbers with equal prowess.
“Never forget, Lette love, that you are singing for all of us who would give our eyeteeth to sound like that,” I kept reminding her.
Much of the time, her talent made me blubber. But the girl could not act to save her life. Of course, she wanted desperately to get into television, and I coached her, but she couldn’t interpret a script well enough to get a role on TV. Put her in a stage musical and she was fine, but in a nonsinging role she was lost. I drove to a dinner theatre near Disneyland to see her play Mammy Yokum in Li’l Abner, Agnes Gooch in Mame, and other leading comedy parts. Between these gigs, she played and sang at the Jolly You-Know-What. She and Jack were getting to be quite the ticket, but Jack, who was divorced with four teenagers, had no inclination to get married. She was frustrated—head over heels about him.
I, however, was becoming less and less head over heels about Toole. He was basically a laconic ex–apple farmer, not doing much to restore his burned-down house or improve his land. He was odd, offbeat, but not intellectual or artistic, and although he was sexy as could be in a plaid shirt and dungarees sort of way, I felt the need for more…stimulation. So to speak.
The Pacific Northwest was his stomping ground, and he wanted to take me on a car trip up the California coast. All the way to Eureka and back—in a week. Eureka is about seventy miles from the Oregon coast, so this would be one heck of a lot of driving. Everyone knows that a car trip—all that confinement—is a valuable litmus test for learning how two people get along, so when Maude shut down for its spring hiatus in March, we set off on our adventure, Toole driving so I could enjoy the gorgeous coastline.
My First Five Husbands Page 20