Fortunately for all of us, she was unable to find anyone who would go along with her scheme. Many years after the actual occurrence of all this, I was privately impressed that none of the people she must have contacted were willing to do such a thing to a 14-year-old boy, no matter how much money she offered them. I surmised that actually participating in such a scheme was somehow much more offensive than simply turning your back on practices you know are wrong.
I didn’t know about any of this when it was taking place. All I knew was that my brother had been transferred and kept in touch with him through Rupert or personal visits when I could afford the train fare.
On August 14, 1958, my grandmother died. I might not have found out about it at all except that my friend who had promised to visit grandmother, wired me about her death. I think mother was still in Bermuda at the time, or perhaps had just returned to New York when she received the news. The doctors had advised her of grandmother’s serious condition well in advance, but mother had not gone to Los Angeles. Mother did not call me to tell me that grandmother died. She did not ask any of us to attend the funeral. She and daddy flew to Los Angeles, made the arrangements for a closed casket and the burial. I don’t know how long it had been since mother had seen grandmother. I think it was a least several years.
I quit my temporary job at MCA the week the regular receptionist was due to return. Shortly after that I had to tell mother that I didn’t want to return to Neighborhood Playhouse. I decided that in this case, it might be better to write her a letter about it, giving her time to think about it before she spoke to me. I wasn’t looking forward to the result, but I didn’t want to return. I was so tired of having to be grateful for the tuition and the measly allowance and I thought it was about time I tried to look for regular work.
She called immediately after receiving my letter. She asked me to come over to the apartment right away.
About an hour later, I arrived at 2 East 70th street. It wasn’t the “right away” she probably had in mind because I had to either take the bus or walk and I chose the bus. It was still very much summer time and at least the bus was air-conditioned.
The minute I walked into the apartment, I realized that I should have taken a little more time and changed my clothes. I had on Bermuda shorts, a blouse and sandals. Mother had said something nasty about dressing for the beach instead of the city, but I didn’t hear it clearly enough to reply.
I followed her into the small den she called her office and saw daddy sitting on the opposite side of her large leather covered green desk. I started to go over to him, but she ordered me to sit in a chair half-way across the room. I knew this was it. This was the show-down I’d almost been expecting. So I just sat where I was ordered and waited for the show to begin.
She started by saying that she was shocked I’d quit the job she’d worked so hard to get me at MCA. Before I could reply, she went on to say that if I couldn’t finish anything, if I couldn’t abide by my parents’ wishes and stay in school, then I would have to go out on my own.
I looked from her face to daddy’s, but he was fiddling with a pen and didn’t look up at me.
Mother continued, saying that they were both very displeased with my decision, very displeased that I chose not to continue school.
At this point daddy spoke to me, half looking at me and half fooling with the pen. He said that he thought that he could arrange for me to get into his old alma mater, Northwestern, which also had an excellent drama department and that I’d only be one year behind, which wouldn’t be too bad for me. I asked him point blank if I’d get enough money to live on while I was there … or was it always going to be me begging.
Mother cut in, saying that I had no concept of money, that I had no concept of gratitude for what had already been done for me, that I was obviously too irresponsible to stick with anything I started and that I was never going to make anything out of myself with that attitude. I started to answer back but daddy started talking at the same time as I did.
All daddy managed to say was “Joan, for God’s sakes, give the kid a chance to …” Mother cut him off. She said, “Damn it, Alfred! They’re my kids and I’ll decide what happens to them. Just shut up and don’t interfere! I don’t interfere with yours and you don’t have anything to say about mine.”
She was yelling at him by the end and I could see that daddy was getting mad because his face became quite red and then drained to a paleness that wasn’t normally like him. He didn’t say another word.
Mother asked me how much money I had. “About enough for one month,” I answered. “Well,” she said, “then I guess you’d better go out and find a job. You’re on your own now.”
That was it. That was all there was to it. I was dismissed without further discussion. Neither mother nor daddy got out of their chairs. No one said goodbye to me. In fact there was a silence so pointed that it was absolutely clear to me that I was expected to disappear now. I was expected to pick up my purse and exit. Of course, that’s exactly what I did.
I didn’t know what I was going to do. I tried to think of what sort of job I could look for and realized I was totally unequipped for anything other than perhaps a domestic servant! That I knew like an expert, but nothing else. I could type only adequately and I’d been a receptionist for three months, but other than that I didn’t know how to do anything.
What I didn’t know that awful hot day, as I was walking home from the penthouse duplex on Fifth Avenue, was that I wouldn’t see my mother face to face again for nearly eight years. I didn’t know that I’d never see my daddy alive again.
What I would learn almost immediately is that life works in very strange ways. When I finally got back to my little cold water flat, I fixed a glass of instant iced coffee and sat down alone in the living room to contemplate my very precarious future. I had no idea how to look for a regular job, nor even what I should be trying to get. I decided to buy the Sunday Times and start there. Perhaps it would give me a clue. Then I thought I’d call some of my friends and ask if they knew of anything. That chance was slim because most of them were just beginning to be out on their own and were hustling for themselves. Well, I thought … I’m nineteen years old and I better just get after it. I’m scared and I’m inexperienced, but I’ve got to make it somehow. The “how” was my major question.
I must have been sitting there for a long times, sort of daydreaming because when the phone range I realized for the first time how dark the apartment had gotten. I answered the phone and turned on a light.
To my amazement, it was my friend Jim calling to see how I was getting along. It made me feel so good just to hear a friendly voice and know that somewhere in this great big city, a person cared about me. If that had been all he called about, it would have been enough to get me through the night. But, there was more … there was the strange quirk of life. What Jim was really calling about was to inquire whether or not I might be interested in a job at his dad’s restaurant! I couldn’t believe it. He said that they had a position open one night a week as cashier and that they’d train me. He said it only paid $10 a night but that I could also have dinner there. To me, the second half of the “pay” was almost as valuable as the cash and I told him I could start immediately. Ten dollars a week wasn’t going to do any more than pay my rent, but it was a hell of a start, considering I’d only been out on my own a few hours!
Jim’s dad gave me the job, however, the first night I worked for nothing except my dinner because there was an even $10 missing from the register at the end of the evening. I was horrified that anyone might think I took it, but the bartenders later told me that I was just being taught a lesson the fastest way possible. From that first night on, I was nicknamed “hawk-eye” because I never let anyone touch that register when I was on duty. It became a great joke among all of us who worked at O’Henry’s, located at 18th Street and Irving near Grammercy Park.
Chris was never allowed to leave any of his schools, so he became somewhat of
an expert at escaping them. Usually he ended up with his friends at my cold water flat, since I was the only person he knew he could trust. Usually I’d talk him into going back to school, but once the police were sent to pick him up. When that happened, he was taken to Bellvue Hospital as a juvenile runaway. That was awful. He was put in one of the so-called “non-violent” locked wards in the old Bellvue, which looked like a medieval fortress.
I was working at the restaurant more than one night a week now, for which I was very grateful. I’d also started group acting classes with a director from the Actor’s Studio named Frank Corsaro … the same man who had directed Hatful of Rain a few seasons before. My acting classes were several afternoons a week and I was working several nights a week at O’Henry’s. So in between, I would go down to Bellvue and spend time with my brother. It was then that I began to learn about the juvenile justice system.
I was one of the few relatives that visited and I was only a couple of years older than most of the boys, so they told me their backgrounds very openly. Many of them were not juvenile offenders. By that I mean they had not committed any crimes. The majority of the boys I got to know were from broken homes. It became ordinary to hear of mothers who were prostitutes, mothers and fathers who were alcoholics and junkies. It was also common among these boys to hear of beatings. Most of the boys had been seriously hurt at least once by another member of their family and most had witnessed their mother and father beating one another.
Running away was as normal on this ward as breathing. These boys ran away from everything and everyone. They trusted only their own age group, none of them believed anyone in a position of authority. They’d already been through the social workers and the probation departments. They’d been in regular schools and foster homes. The majority were now headed for county detention schools as wards of the court until they reached eighteen years old. It seems odd that under these conditions, we usually had a lot of fun when I visited my brother. But it was like one of the few positive events in their lives. I always stopped on the way down and bought candy and soft drinks. The boys would make up songs in the rock style of the day and sing in funny little groups with me as their only audience. I got to know all the attendants by first name and a good number of the boys.
After over a month, my brother was sent to another school in Connecticut. I went up there to talk to the head mistress and tried to explain the full situation to her. She seemed like a reasonable woman and we tried to work out some way to get my brother to stay put in this establishment. I visited as often as I could which amounted to about every other weekend.
I had gotten a room mate to share half of the expenses. She was my age, wanted to be a dress designer and her name was Lotte. We’d met when I was at Neighborhood Playhouse and she was attending a design school a block away. She had some mad story about being a Yugoslavian countess, whose family had fled the communists leaving all their worldly possessions behind. Half the family went to Turkey and Lotte when with her mother to Italy. The part about leaving Yugoslavia I think was true. The other part about being titled nobility I’m not so sure of, but there were a lot of nutty people running around New York those days claiming to be descended from royalty of one sort or another and it got so that you just didn’t pay much attention after a while. They had a sort of spiritedness about them, very good manners and no money. So you learned to take it rather lightly.
Between the cold water flat and working nights in a restaurant, I was learning a lot about the bottom rung of the ladder in New York. I worked until 1 or 2 A.M., left alone and was scared most of the time. I learned about the numbers, about the payoffs, about the cons. I met the bookies and the hustlers, the struggling artists and the junkies. I learned which dark New York streets were okay to walk if you minded your own business and hurried along and which were worth your life to enter. If I had to live in this world of the bottom, I decided I damn well better learn enough to stay alive.
What fascinated me most was that everybody had a scam going. There wasn’t anybody who worked with money and didn’t short-change customers. They did it so well and had it figured out so perfectly that they even knew in advance who to pull it on and who not to. Most of them played the numbers or the horses or any other long shot with the big pay-off. That was what everyone was looking for … the big hustle with the big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I guess they almost had to do something to make the routine dreariness of the old apartments and the tiresome job, year in and year out, bearable. It was something exciting … something challenging … something more than their everyday lives could offer.
September 29, 1958
Christina darling,
Thank you for your sweet letter.
Am glad your acting classes with Frank Corsaro are coming along so well, and that you are so happy. Glad, too, your job at the restaurant is so interesting.
The twins have a magazine subscription drive again at school, so I have ordered “Seventeen” for you. I hope it is all right.
I am off to the Coast, to be gone just a couple of days to do a Bob Hope show, so if you need anything call Faith either at the Pepsi office, or at the house where she will probably be some of the time.
I had an idea. By eating my only full meals at the restaurant for free and saving every dime I could get my hands on, maybe I could go to Europe for a couple months and visit the friends I’d made on our 1956 trip. I wrote my friends in England and asked if I could stay with them for a while in the spring. They wrote back and said they’d be delighted. So, that’s what I worked toward. I opened a savings account and every spare dollar went into it. I worked as many nights as I could and took some temporary typing jobs during the day.
Mother was very aggravated when my working at the restaurant appeared in one of the newspaper columns, but now I didn’t care what she thought as long as my own conscience was clear. Now that I had a clear goal, the work became easier. Now that I had something to look forward to I didn’t mind the scrimping and saving so much.
As hot as the summer had been, it was easy street compared to the winter. Lotte and I used to sleep in slacks and sweaters with our winter coats over the blankets. We had no heat at all except the antiquated gas stove. When the snow came I was glad to be living over the boiler room, but even that didn’t warm the rooms up enough. Every night we heard the radio warnings about trying to heat with the gas kitchen stoves, about what a terrible fire hazard it was, but we had little choice. It was either leave the oven on and a pan full of water on top of the stove or risk freezing to death in your bed. It was miserable, to say the least.
This winter there was no money from my family at all. A few weeks after the confrontation with mother and daddy, there was a knock on my door one night rather late. I was afraid to open the door, so I asked who was there. A muffled voice replied, “Jimmy … open up.” There before me was Jimmy, daddy’s valet and body guard. He seemed in a terrible hurry and was talking very fast, looking over his shoulder down the hallway as though he was afraid of being followed. He made me instantly nervous, but I asked him inside. He stepped through the doorway but wouldn’t come any further. “Your dad sent you this,” he said, thrusting something into my hand. Then he whispered, “Don’t let anyone know … it’s just between your dad and you. Don’t say nothing about it!” I nodded, “okay.” In my hand there was a hundred-dollar bill. Tears welled up in my eyes and I was about to ask Jimmy to thank daddy when he said, “Your dad says to tell you he sends his love and hopes you’re getting along all right.” As Jimmy was nearly out the door I grabbed his arm and said, “Tell daddy I’m just fine and thanks.”
After I’d closed and locked the door, I sat down on the edge of the kitchen chair staring at the money from my father. As much as I needed and appreciated the money, I appreciated the thought even more. I wished I could have called him and talked to him, but I was afraid to for fear it would cause trouble.
Then I started thinking about my father, chairman of the board of a maj
or corporation, a responsible adult having to sneak around mother to do something decent for me. She was relentless when it came to having her own way. She even finally got to him.
It never ceased to amaze me that people would give up so much of their own free will just to be around her. I couldn’t do it. I never was been able to do it. She was my own mother. She was a famous movie star. And there was no way on earth that I was going to live my life according to her dictates ever again if I could help it. Because, for me, that wasn’t living at all. That was no better than being a slave. She always held out the promise of great rewards in return for your voluntary slavery. She always held out the promise of undying love in return for your total devotion, but in my experience with her it never happened. And now she had daddy playing slave, too.
She’s gotten him to buy her everything she wanted. She’s gotten him into incredible debt. This made him give up his own salary to fulfill her wishes. She’s gotten him to live according to her schedules and prerogatives. And now she’s gotten him to sneak around behind her back for fear of her anger. But that’s how it is with her. I knew the pattern well enough by now. She draws the perimeters of what was acceptable behavior according to her definition so tight, that in order to express any free will at all you have to sneak around trying not to get caught.
Poor daddy, I thought. I wonder if he still thinks he got such a bargain. I wonder if he knows he’s already sold his soul to the devil herself, in return for nothing. I wonder if he knows she’d already got him and he’ll never get out alive. I bet he doesn’t and there’s no way for me to help him. There’s nothing I can do but watch it all unfold like a movie plot.
Mommie Dearest Page 41