February 2, 1958
Dearest Tina,
Thank you for your sweet letter. I’m so happy that you and Mickey enjoyed “West Side Story”. You will find the Helen Hayes play even better, I’m sure.
We are having a wonderful time here. I thought I was relaxing and resting the first week, but yesterday, on the tenth day, I suddenly wanted to sleep after breakfast and after lunch, which I did but suddenly made it out to the beach at 6:00 P.M. with the sun going down at 6:30. Cindy and Cathy are getting freckles and a tan. The gin rummy score is going up and down like “Rock-a-Bye, Baby.”
We will be home in California on the 12th, and I’m doing a “General Electric Theatre” - will rehearse on the 17th and 18th, and shoot on the 22nd and 23rd, and fly back to New York on the 24th or 25th because Daddy has a Board Meeting on the 27th.
We’ll be seeing you soon, and we love you very much.
“Mommie”
Nobody could make a two-day shoot into a bigger deal than mother. It was part of her particular genius, part of her star image that turned two days of shooting on a television show into a three-ring circus! My allowance check was late because she’d “been so terribly busy making all preparations and story conferences for the television show.” She sent the check special delivery with a brief apology.
What others took in stride, mother made into an event. What was normal procedure had to be changed for her. She was a dedicated perfectionist who made damn sure that everyone around her knew she was a real star, if only by the inconvenience incurred in the process.
February 21, 1958
Tina darling,
I loved your letter of the 17th. You have a nice choice of words and write beautifully.
It’s hard to imagine New York ever being virtually paralyzed, but a 24-hour snowstorm could do it! Fifty-eighth Street must have been a fantastic sight, with snow mounds all the way out to the middle of the street.
We tried to fly into New York on next Tuesday morning, but the flights are taken for that day, and the only thing we can get is a flight on TWA on Monday night. So we’ll arrive in New York early Tuesday morning.
The General Electric film is going magnificently, Tina dear. Tom Tyron, John McIntyre and Sidney Blackmer are in the cast with me. I think you will go crazy when you see Tom Tyron. He is your type guy, and an excellent actor. He will replace IT in your heart.
So glad you enjoyed Paths of Glory. I’ve read so much about that film, be we haven’t had time to see it yet. What a shocking story that is. Kirk Douglas is always great.
Please give my best to the Coburns and to Mickey when you next see them. I’m so glad Mickey is finding her niche at Carnegie Tech., and has changed her major, as I remember so well that she wanted so much to write.
Since I don’t finish the G.E. film until Monday, I’ll work right up to plane time that night, and we’ll catch a 9:00 P.M. plane.
Bless you, and we’ll see you very soon now.
“Mommie”
P.S. Call any time after Tuesday - noon -
CHAPTER 22
I called, I visited, I wrote, I remembered all the holidays and birthdays and anniversaries. I tried to be what she wanted me to be but I knew in my heart that my own life was beginning to change radically, and it was getting harder and harder to bicycle between the two.
Some months before, I’d met a jazz musician and started going out with him. I’d sit in the back of the clubs while he played with the group, usually on weekends. The clubs were in terrible parts of New York, mostly on the lower East Side at the edge of the Bowery. It was definitely “slumming” for me at first, going from the dingy clubs to the various lofts where there were usually parties afterwards lasting until daylight. It was the first time I’d seen dope passed around. I was very naive about almost everything connected with my new boyfriend’s life, so once again I retreated behind watching and listening to the people around me. I guess it was because I was obviously such a green kid and obviously not a narc, no one paid much attention to me. I was just around all the time. No one offered me any of the goodies and I never asked, so I just remained a bystander though eventually accepted. Eventually I learned to step over the drunks and ignore the junkies just like everyone else in this strange night world. But what I saw as the evenings rolled by and the music played on was that dope was a dead end. I can’t begin to even remember how many people I knew got busted that year and sent to Rikers Island. When musicians I actually spent time with got sick and when I heard about junkies dying, I decided that dope was not for me. My boyfriend tried to teach me how to smoke joints, but I felt so stupid and inept that my pride overtook my curiosity and I gave up. Grass was okay, but I was so scared of being locked up anywhere ever again that it simply wasn’t worth the trade-off. I didn’t think the cops would ever believe me if any of these places were ever raided and the whole thing was just so dangerous in 1958 that I started being a lot more careful. Finally we stopped seeing each other but the dope and the shooting up was only a part of it.
There was no going back into total innocence about what life in the big city was like. From this point on I knew as much about things I never even thought about before as I possibly could without actually being an experiential part of it. I was no longer just a casual observer, I had been initiated. These people weren’t just statistics, some of them were my friends. I couldn’t go to that cold white palace at 2 East 70th Street anymore not knowing there was any other world.
The concentricity of mother’s life, the absorption in herself, the lack of real concern for anything but my superficial well-being was beginning to be more than I could politely nod through. I couldn’t tune it all out anymore and pretend everything was okay. The way she chose to live was so far removed from anything even remotely available to me that sometimes just that insight alone left me feeling quite helpless. How could I explain what was happening with me, when her main concern was the plastic covers on her closets full of clothes or making sure no one walked on her white rugs without taking their shoes off first? Where could I begin relating what I was seeing for the first time when she had such a screaming fit about my wearing jeans to move furniture? Sure, I knew she’d come from hard times … but that was so long ago for her … she’d done such an incredible job of erasing every single trace of it … she’d launched such a massive campaign into elegance and money and what was properly acceptable that there were no visible traces of the person that might listen to my discoveries. At least there were no visible traces to me at that time in my life. There was not one thing about my mother, her half-million dollar apartment, or her attitude that gave me a hope or a hint of understanding.
April 17, 1958
Christina dear,
I had a long talk with Mr. Meisner, who feels that you are getting along exceptionally well. There is only one thing that bothers me, and that is that you have not been taking dancing since December. Your dancing teacher says that you told her you were not allowed to take dancing lessons because of doctor’s orders. I called Dr. Nactigall, and he knew nothing about it, and he said certainly it was not by his instructions. I would like to know why the dancing has been eliminated, because it is certainly one of the most important things you could study.
I’d like to know what your plans are for the summer - if you are going back to Westport or not. I’m having some people check on other theaters for summer stock, where the younger players really get to act, and I should have this information in a week or so. However, you would not get a salary. The “New School” is definitely out.
Since my schedule and hours during the day are so irregular, and you are out all day in school, I think it would be better if you drop me a note explaining about the dance situation and your plans.
Love,
“Mommie”
That’s what I really loved about mother. She lived on 70th and Fifth, I lived on 58th and First. This letter was again hand delivered instead of being sent through the mail. She communicated with me through l
etters and chauffeurs or the secretary instead of picking up the phone or asking me to come over and talk. She didn’t have the guts to work anything out with me … she didn’t want to talk about it face to face … she hid behind doormen and secretaries and chauffeurs and her work. Anything to keep from being straight with me. She put the restrictions on our communication, on our relationship and on my entire life. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t make decisions, I couldn’t get free of this constructed, manufactured, phony, hype!
What she was saying was that she didn’t want to talk to me. What she was also saying was that if I tried to call and talk to her about this, she wouldn’t “be available”. She never answered the phone herself and so she never had to deal with anything she didn’t want to. She never had to come face to face with reality not of her own choosing like the rest of us mortals and were forced by life itself to do. She was above facing reality. If she didn’t like the reality she blamed someone else for it. Because she always had to be right. She always had to protect herself by being the one who knew what the ultimate truth was. If reality and her truth didn’t match … well then reality was a bad, ungrateful dirty girl.
I didn’t answer her letter. I didn’t call her. I didn’t do anything but go about my own life for the next few weeks as best I could.
At school, we were beginning to prepare for final projects. That was much more interesting than the usual routine of scenes and acting exercises. It was the first time many of the students would be on stage in front of an audience and some were very nervous. Part of being asked to return to Neighborhood Playhouse and finish the second year was riding on how well you did in the final project, so there was a lot of anxiety running rampant among students.
My room mate and I were definitely not getting along now. She had her friends staying over at night and my space was getting smaller and smaller. Rather than face the prospect of loosing the friendship completely, I decided to find another apartment and move after school was over for the summer.
As I started looking for a new apartment, it began to dawn on me that it was not going to be easy to find something I could afford by myself, without a room mate sharing half the expense. I followed leads in the papers and asked around the school if any of the other students knew of anything or heard of something that was available to let me know.
One afternoon, a girl I didn’t know too well told me that she had a friend who sublet apartments. I found out that there was sort of a black market in cheap tenement apartments that were still rent controlled. The way it worked was that you paid “key money” to the person holding the legal lease and then paid double or triple the legal rent controlled price. The apartment mail box had to have the legal tenant’s name on it and you just added your own name below theirs. Most of the places available were in wretched parts of New York. I looked at half a dozen of them, knowing full well that I could never survive in those neighborhoods. They were scary as hell during the daytime so I could just imagine what they’d be like by myself at night. I was getting very discouraged. I thought about having to go to mother and ask her for more money. As unpleasant as that was, if I didn’t find something soon, I’d have to do it. I couldn’t afford the $175 a month rent on the apartment Mickey and I shared and I didn’t know anyone else I’d be comfortable living with. So I continued the seemingly futile search, hoping that I’d find something that was acceptable.
Just a week before school finished, I went to look at a cold-water flat on the ground floor of a building on York Avenue near East 72nd Street. The apartment consisted of three rooms. The front door to the flat opened directly into the kitchen which had the oldest working three burner gas stove in New York City, a large sink like a laundry sink and a bath tub! There was a room of equal size to the left of the kitchen which was a living room with a fire place that had been sealed up and didn’t work and another small room to the right of the kitchen which had a closet in it and served as a bedroom. There were windows in each of the room but because it was on the ground floor, they let in neither much light nor much air. Although laws had been passed in the city many years before requiring heat and complete bathrooms in each dwelling rented, this particular cold-water flat had neither. There was hot running water in the sink and bathtub, but there was no heat of any kind and the toilet was in a small cubicle outside the apartment down the hall. The toilet also must have been there since the turn of the century, when the building was first built. It was a real old fashioned water closet, with a pull chain flush! There was no lock on the door and only a hook latch inside. But, despite all these decided inconveniences the man only wanted $200 key money and $35 a month rent.
The only good thing about the entire situation was that the neighborhood was not a slum. All the buildings were definitely old tenements, but most of the people living in them were families with children and the area was one of the safest in New York. In the year or so that I lived there, I never heard of even one robbery. Everyone knew each other and looked out for their neighbors. It was mainly a German and Polish neighborhood, bordering on Yorktown, the large German shopping center of Manhattan. The East River was only a block away and the breeze from the river helped to keep the area a little cooler in the summertime. Most of the stores and shops were owned and run by local people so it had a small town feeling to it.
The end of April, another of the hand delivered notes arrived from mother. I had not answered her original letter. I didn’t intend doing anything about the dance classes I wasn’t taking, except ballet which I liked. I had asked her about attending college at the New School for Social Research in New York, but she didn’t like what she’d heard about the school’s political leaning. She said she’d been told there were socialists and even communists at the school and she didn’t want me associated with it. I never did figure out whether it was for her sake or mine that she didn’t want the association, but it didn’t really matter at the time, because if she refused to pay the tuition I wasn’t going. I decided to stick it out at Neighborhood Playhouse for the second year, if I was asked to return.
Tina darling
I wrote you a couple of weeks ago asking for a note from you explaining the dance situation at school -
Surely you can be responsible for these little things I’ve been calling but there is no answer.
Daddy just received your birthday card as it was sent to the coast and had to be sent back here -
Please let me know what your proposed plans are for the summer and the dance bit -
Love
“Mommie”
It is not entirely to my credit that I was becoming so stubborn with her. There were so few areas in which I could exercise any control over my own life that I chose the negative in many cases. It sort of became a battle over who would win these stupid “you will - I won’t” confrontations. She wanted me to write a letter about a situation that I thought she should have enough concern over to talk to me personally. I thought it was insulting to be told to write her when she was right here in New York. I also thought it was a way for her to avoid me. Therefore, I didn’t write the note. I waited to see what the silence would bring forth from her, knowing full well that it would make her mad. Then we would both be in the same boat … angry. Both of us thinking we were right and the other was wrong. Both trying to manipulate and no one really winning. She ultimately won in the sense that she held the trump cards … she held the purse strings. But I was getting so fed up with being the puppet on the end of those damn strings, jumping and begging and bowing on command that I was just about to the point of telling her to take her measly money and shove it.
The surprise of my life came on my birthday. I had already moved into the cold water flat. Michael Du Pont had borrowed a car to help move the furniture and some of my other friends had helped me move the few boxes of things and my suitcases on the bus! The bus fare was only 15 cents and we made several trips in a ridiculous caravan for less than one cab ride would have cost. I’d given mother my
new address and phone number, explaining that the apartment was small and in an old building but that the neighborhood was all right. I’d also told her the reason for the move, that Mickey and I weren’t getting along that well and I couldn’t afford to keep the apartment by myself. She said she understood, but she didn’t offer any more money, so I just went ahead with the move. On my nineteenth birthday, I went over to the apartment to see her. She’d bought me a couple of summer skirts and blouses which were still on hangers. I thanked her and thought that was the end of it. It came as a complete shock when she handed me an envelope and told me that was the rest of my birthday present. I opened the sealed envelope and found a note from her saying that here were the keys to my car! I was being re-given the Thunderbird that had been taken away from me the previous fall after the disaster with the towing and impound ticket. I couldn’t believe it. I had absolutely no more idea how I was going to care for it this time any better than I had the last, but I was determined to give it a try. Despite the previous experience with the garage discussion, mother made no mention of making arrangements for a garage or giving me extra money to pay for a garage myself. All she told me was that I could pick it up in a few days because it was being serviced right now and they hadn’t finished the work in time for my birthday. I didn’t see Daddy that day because he was at the office, but I asked mother to thank him for me.
Mommie Dearest Page 39