One Friday in February 1955, Jessel took her to the races in the afternoon. He later recounted to the police something he’d told Adams, his longtime girlfriend, that day: “Girls who don’t succeed in Hollywood ought to go home.” Early Sunday morning, Adams was found dead from an overdose of sleeping pills, after a night of drinking at Ciro’s and the Luau. She was thirty-seven and left an estate of $500 and a bunch of mementos from Jessel that were auctioned off to a crowd of strangers.
Three years later, Lyle’s old drinking companion Phil Van Zandt was found dead in his apartment on Gower Street in Hollywood. He had been depressed about his dwindling career and his gambling debts, and had separated from his wife. He, too, had taken an overdose of barbiturates.
It was always alcohol with Lyle, not pills. But in the late 1940s, his path tracked close to theirs nonetheless. He could so easily have gone the same way.
Chapter 10
FROM ED WOOD TO OZZIE AND HARRIET
They say you should never marry a person you mean to reform. Marriage is not a reclamation project. A spouse won’t turn himself inside out for you, nor should he. They say that a big age difference between husband and wife is probably not conducive to a long and happy marriage. The older partner will get sick or feeble and the younger one will have to become a caretaker when she—it’s usually a she, after all—is still in bloom. Resentments will fester. The relationship will strike other people as weird or a bit ridiculous. As for a man who’s been married four times before, each time briefly, well, it goes without saying that he does not seem like a good marriage risk. Add in the information that he is an alcoholic, and no sensible person is going to put odds on that union.
Surely this is sound advice. If my daughter were to someday tell me she wanted to marry a multiply divorced boozehound twenty-six years her senior, I doubt I’d be overjoyed. Yet if my own mother had followed this perfectly valid line of thinking, I would not be here, nor would my three siblings, nor any of our beloved children. Life will sometimes flip over these wild cards, show us these sports of common sense, these dark horses that make it to the end of the race. And how lovely that it does.
It helped that my mother was nineteen when she met my father, barely twenty when she married him. At twenty, you don’t know what you don’t know. You still find it plausible that people who are cautioning you against this feeling have never felt it. Besides, my mother was a person of uncommon determination and trust in her own judgment, particularly about people. She may have been sparsely educated, ebullient to the point of ditziness at times, blond and sexy and, at a scant five-feet-two, not especially imposing, but she knew her own mind and she knew how capacious her heart was. She knew she was stronger than she looked.
My mother was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, on May 8, 1928, the second of three children of Fred and Margaret Epple. The fact that she was named Margaret—as I would be—tells you something about my grandmother’s ego. It’s usually only men who pass their names down, but in my grandmother’s family, her version of the world held sway. (It was she who insisted, on pain of not speaking to my mother again, that I be named Margaret.) My namesake had been born into a distinguished Philadelphia family, with one Titian-haired wayward sister who brought some kind of disgrace on the family and was institutionalized—a trauma my grandmother still spoke about decades later. Margaret went to college, unusual for a woman born near the turn of the last century, at Bucknell, and became a schoolteacher and a principal. At one of the schools where she worked, she met her future husband, a fellow educator named Emil Frederick Epple, who was the son of German immigrants from Alsace-Lorraine. He thought that Emil was too old-world a name, and asked Margaret to call him Fred. Fred’s own mother, Ursula, was so domineering that none of his brothers ever married or left home. Fred managed to break away—but he married a woman as formidable in her own way as Ursula had been.
Margaret lived her life with a brittle sense of having come down in the world. The story she always told was that her father was a ship’s doctor who, on a trip to England, fell in love with a music hall singer and brought her home to Philadelphia as his wife. His family thought it scandalous to marry a woman who’d been on the stage and shunted him aside. After he died, when his family would have nothing to do with her, the music hall singer took up with a much younger handyman, whom my mother dubbed “Uncle Eddie Do-Hammer.”
My plain but intelligent grandmother took after her father but adored her mother, who sang like a tinkling bell, was blessed with the most beautiful red-gold curls (the wild sister evidently inherited those), and was not terribly interested in motherhood. As my grandmother told it, her father’s family, the Abbotts, already cool toward him after he married the music hall girl, were not impressed when their granddaughter married Fred, whose people were immigrants and poor. To me, these Abbotts sounded snooty and unpleasant; who wouldn’t choose romance over them? But my grandmother clearly felt that she’d been banished from a golden circle and was as prickly as a hedgehog when it came to perceived social slights. Today I’m sure she’d have some sort of psychiatric diagnosis—borderline personality disorder, maybe, or mild bipolar syndrome. She was prey to gloweringly dark moods, but she could also be lively, generous, and funny, especially with the grandchildren. My mother said she was a “pepper pot,” or like a grown-up version of the little girl with the curl—when she was good she was very good, and when she was bad she was horrid.
As a child, my mother vowed very early on to create a family that would be more stable and harmonious than her own. Yet she remained close to my grandmother all her life, and took care of her even when she locked my mother and grandfather out of the apartment and snarled invective at them from the other side of the door. (My grandfather, a much gentler spirit, would call my mother to come over and “do something about your mother.”) My grandparents lived a five-minute drive from us all my life, came over nearly every day, regularly accompanied us on our family vacations, and were the only people who ever babysat for us. My mother was a loyal person, and a deep believer in family ties, but her mother intimidated her, too, I’m sure. She was probably the only person who did.
In the household my mother grew up in, her parents had fierce and frequent arguments, often about money, of which there was never enough, or status, which the older Margaret always yearned for more of. They were verbal clashes, but my mother decided then that words—particularly the contemptuous words that were her mother’s weapons against her far more mild-mannered father—could do irreparable damage. She called her parents’ quarrels “burners” and always found a place for herself and her younger sister to hide when one flamed up. She often had to stake out new hiding places—under the stairs, in a pantry, beneath a lilac bush—because the family moved so often, something else my mother firmly disliked about her childhood. Margaret Epple was restless, mercurial, and ambitious for distinction of some sort. In the 1930s and early 1940s, during my mother’s childhood, the family bounced around among Hackensack, New Jersey; New York City; Biloxi, Mississippi; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and Los Angeles, with summers spent in Atlantic City, where Fred earned extra money managing a hotel on the boardwalk. Money was always tight. My mother and her sister learned the trick of mixing ketchup from the hotel dining room with hot water from the tap to make tomato soup for themselves. The years in Chapel Hill, when my mother was in her early teens, were her favorites. My grandfather had earned a degree in educational psychology from Columbia University Teachers College, and then managed to get an academic post at the University of North Carolina. The family lived in a house with a wraparound porch and a magnolia tree whose bright, waxy leaves looked to my mother as if they’d been individually polished by fairies, and the college campus was like a big playground for her and her sister. Margaret acted in college plays, and dated a nice local boy named Motley Morehead, whose mother invited her for tea and served rose-petal jam sandwiches, a taste so sickly-sweet she never forgot it.
Though the Epples were intelligent people—and educators to boot—they had a strange notion of child rearing. They cast each child in a very particular role. The roles were certainly based on the talents of the child in question, but they allowed for very little straying from the script. Robert, the oldest, who was very bright and had a gift for mathematics, attended the Cathedral School at St. John the Divine in New York and the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, and as an adolescent was enrolled at the University of North Carolina. (He finished his education at UCLA and became, literally, a rocket scientist, designing guidance control systems for the space program at North American Rockwell.) The youngest, Liz, was the sweet, innocent, marriageable girl. The middle child, Margaret, was the focus of her mother’s stagestruck ambition, and frankly a breadwinner for her family. She had a lovely soprano singing voice. At the age of eight, when Margaret won a voice competition sponsored by the New York City Music Education League, the opera singer Lily Pons presented her with the gold medal. As a teenager, she helped support the family by singing everywhere from army bases to funerals, though after one service, to her chagrin, the bereaved family gave her a huge, white Persian cat in lieu of payment. She could suit her voice to light opera or musical comedy, hymns or blues, but her forte was the mid-tempo jazz standards, songs like “Fly Me to the Moon” and “I Wish You Love.” For my mother, an education wasn’t part of the script. She sang for her supper and never finished high school.
When she was singing at an army base in Biloxi, she met a young enlisted man named Paul Deaven. They dated a few times, and after he’d been transferred to another base, he sent her a telegram saying he was coming to Biloxi on a weekend leave “if you are willing.” My mother, naturally enough, interpreted this to mean “if you are willing to see me.” She wired back, with characteristic exuberance, “willing, and thrilled.” When Paul showed up at her door, however, it was clear that he had been referring to marriage, and though my mother had never given it a thought, she felt too sorry for him to say no. She was just sixteen, but apparently her parents didn’t think to say no, either. The newlyweds had only a few weeks together before Paul was shipped overseas.
Not long after, the teenage Margaret was spotted by a talent scout from Twentieth Century–Fox who invited her out to Hollywood to do a screen test. My grandmother, always up for a new and disruptive adventure, packed up her three children and headed west. (Fred joined them later.) Robert enrolled at UCLA and lived on campus. The two girls and their mother found a place to live off Highland Avenue that was like something out of the movie Stage Door—a boardinghouse packed with young women trying to make it in show business. (They included a sword swallower with the memorable name Gloria Dick.) One day a man showed up at the door asking for Margaret; when she ran downstairs, she didn’t recognize her husband for several awkward moments. It wasn’t that the war had changed him. It was just that she had barely known him beforehand. This time, though, Margaret managed to explain that she really didn’t want to be married, and Paul accepted her decision. She never saw him again, but she did keep one important token of their marriage: she adopted “Paula Deaven” as her stage name (or as she liked to say, “Paula Deaven, a little bit of heaven”). The Deaven soon fell away, like the spent booster on a rocket, but Paula became, for all but legal purposes, her name.
The screen test she’d come out for either did not materialize or did not yield up any movie roles, so Paula was relieved when, after answering an ad for an understudy in a touring production of a play called Trouble for Rent, she got the part.
The star of the play was Lyle Talbot, a much older man whom she’d seen in a few movies. He wasn’t a crush or anything—like her mother, she was an anglophile, and when it came to movie actors, her heart belonged to Laurence Olivier and Leslie Howard. (When I was growing up, my mother would drag me to any revival house in Southern California that happened to be playing Wuthering Heights or Gone With the Wind.) The leading lady in Trouble for Rent was none other than Estelle Taylor, the onetime silent star who had been Jack Dempsey’s wife and my father’s girlfriend in the 1930s. My mother remembered her as a dauntingly glamorous woman who wore a silk turban, wreathed herself in some spicy perfume, and had nothing nice to say to a young understudy. Once, when my mother was a little girl in Atlantic City, she left behind a much-prized new pair of sandals on the beach. When she ran back in a panic to get them, she found that a lady had spread a blanket and was sunbathing on the exact spot where her sandals had been. “Would you mind moving a little?” Margaret asked timidly. “Little girl,” the sunbather drawled, “I wouldn’t move if you were the Queen of Sheba.” Estelle Taylor reminded her quite a bit of that woman.
Lyle didn’t have much to say to the young understudy, either. He was polite, but “he was like the sailor with a woman in every port,” my mother told me. “Every place we went—Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, there’d be some dear female friend, sometimes several, at the stage door.” Paula was lonely and homesick, and the one night she got to go onstage, she was so nervous that she forgot to put on underwear before she slipped into her dress and spent the entire first act in a terror that someone in the front row would notice.
When she got back to L.A. in the late spring of 1947, her mother told her to write a letter to Mr. Talbot thanking him for all his help. “What help?” Paula asked. “He barely spoke to me.” “Doesn’t matter,” her mother said. “He’s a big name, just do it.” So Paula dutifully wrote a letter. It happened that when he received the letter, Lyle was about to go out on tour again and needed someone to look in on his house while he was gone. She’d seemed like a sweet kid and she lived nearby; why not ask her? So while Lyle was away, Paula walked over to the little Mediterranean-style bungalow he was living in on Camrose Drive, a winding street above the Hollywood Bowl, took in his mail, and watered his succulents. After a while, she started bringing along her sister, Liz, who was by then studying nursing at UCLA, and they’d raid Lyle’s cabinets and lie around reading his Life magazines. He always kept a nice supply of smoked oysters, and Paula and Liz were always a little on the hungry side.
After Lyle got home, he called Paula up and offered to take her out to dinner to thank her for looking after his bachelor pad. They ate steaks at Musso & Frank and afterward drove back to his house, where they listened to Sarah Vaughan sing “Tenderly” on the record player with the living room windows flung open to let in the honeysuckle-scented air. They fell in love hard and fast. Paula was good-looking, certainly, with her wavy ash-blond hair, teal-blue eyes, and curvy little figure, but Lyle had known a lot of good-looking women by that point. He had never met anyone, though, who was as bubbly as she was without a single drink. Paula never drank. As a teenage girl singing in clubs and canteens, she’d found that men often tried to ply her with alcohol, and she’d learned to be on her guard and to like the feeling of being the one person in the room who had her wits about her. She was giddy and fun-loving, and a great enthusiast of sex—but she valued being alert and in control too much to enjoy the blurriness of inebriation. In many ways, she was the embodiment of the wife Lyle had said he was seeking in those articles back in the 1930s: someone with musical gifts, a sense of humor, and a mind of her own who knew how to put people at ease. She was earthy and sensual, a little raunchy, firm in her own sense of self, but unlike some of his previous girlfriends who may have had some of these same qualities, she was also a deeply warmhearted and decent person.
My mother always told me that you should only marry someone for whom you had an undeniable passion: that heat would be your secret stash, the way you provisioned yourself against the seasonal vagaries of marriage. You had to start with a generous supply of pheromonal stickiness and genuine admiration between you. It helped, she used to say, if you really enjoyed looking at the person you’re married to. Once she told me, “It sounds so simple, but I remember sitting with your father in the car on a date, and just looking at his hands on the steering
wheel and his forearms and how strong they were, and thinking, yes, I could look at this man forever.” I think my siblings and I were aware for as long as we can remember that they had a strong sexual bond. Not that we walked in on them or even overheard them. (Okay, my brother Steve did once, when he thought my father was having a heart attack in a hotel room next door and burst in to save him.) As my other brother, David, put it, when I asked him about this sense we had: “There was always a little bit of sex in the air. Maybe there was even a sense of something naughty about their relationship, something kinky just built in because of the age difference. But beyond that, it just seemed like they had a love affair. He’d be in the kitchen making breakfast, cooking the bacon, and she’d come in singing, and grab him and kiss him. And of course he had that booming voice, and he’d just sound delighted: ‘Well, hi there, honey!’ They had a really playful sense of love and marriage. They sort of had this gossipy, secret world between them, too, reading the trades and talking about show business together. Flirting. It made marriage seem more fun than what I saw in other people’s households.” When I was in college, our mom once told my older sister and me, “You know, your father was into oral sex before it was in.” More than you want to hear about your parents, but somehow, after the initial squirm, I was happy for her.
The Entertainer Page 36