Rita Will_Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

by Rita Mae Brown

  While contempt is the surface emotion, fear is the underlying one. The money boys need us. If they could act, direct and write, they probably would. Since they can’t (even if they won’t admit they can’t), they are dependent upon those who can. Instead of seeing this as an opportunity to create, the talent is viewed as another mouth to feed. The talent, in return, hates the money men. Since the dynamic is over seventy-five years old, it will take more than Fannie or myself to change it.

  And we don’t want to be administrators or film revolutionaries. We want to act and write.

  Fannie finally knew that age would bring her acting career to a screeching halt. Why not learn another craft before that dreary day?

  Writing is close to acting in that both disciplines require one to create character. The Grand Canyon separates them after that, for on one side is a primary art, writing, and on the other side is an interpretive art, acting.

  The actor, director, conductor or dancer starts with a piece of work. The writer, composer or painter literally makes something out of nothing, brings temporary order to chaos.

  For Fannie to master the discipline needed for this transformation was going to be a genuine leap over the Grand Canyon.

  She was willing to put her heart in it. That gave her wings.

  Her first novel, which took three drafts, was published as Coming Attractions. Wendy Weil, my agent, took her on. Fannie was in business.

  Fannie gave me no public credit for the help I had given her. Again, she was frightened of being openly associated with me. And the final rewrite, which she did for her publishers, was strictly hers.

  Exhausted by burning the candle at both ends and by the adversarial nature of the industry, I wanted to go home. I figured I could mail my screenplays in, and if Hollywood needed to see my face, I’d endure that long flight to Los Angeles.

  More than anything, I didn’t want to become an embittered person endlessly reciting stories of how I was screwed in Hollywood. Even Heidi Fleiss got screwed in Hollywood.

  The one thing I must protect in this life is my talent. Imagination is exotic; it needs shelter. All the more so since we live in a nonfiction age, duller than dishwater.

  I told Fannie I had to go home.

  “Where’s home?”

  “Maryland or Virginia. My people are from those places.”

  “Well, mine are from Alabama.”

  “Do you want to go to Alabama?”

  “When I’m rich I want to live in Gulf Shores.”

  Baby Jesus, high in a lemon tree, listened. I was trying to get her down. An old greenhouse, its glass broken, squatted in the middle of the abandoned grove, and I didn’t want Her Highness to run in there. She’d been out for two hours. Even Cazzie and Frip had come in, lured by tuna treats.

  Baby Jesus preferred trees. Pecan trees would have pleased her as much as mighty oaks.

  “Why don’t we look in Virginia first?” I pleaded.

  We did. We ran the Virginia realtors, Bill Leach and Chris Georges, ragged. Fannie worried that Virginia was too far north for a sunshine girl, but at least it wasn’t Maryland, even farther north and a border state to boot.

  Then a simple Federal farmhouse caught our eye. Situated on a scant thirty-four acres, it had a garage and a little gardening shed, and best of all a cow barn that could be converted into a stable. The sheep pens were falling down, though, the fields needed a heavy dose of fertilizer and the fences had long ago rotted away. The house, in decent condition, was large enough for Fannie to have her private quarters and me mine.

  On the way back to Los Angeles, we fretted because we weren’t sure we had the money. The property cost about $350,000.

  Finally, somewhere over Palm Springs, Fannie said, “I’ll give you my money. When I need it back you give it back with whatever the place is worth at the time. You’re good with money. I know you’ll make me money.”

  She kept her apartment in the Flats but agreed to spend as much time as she could in Virginia.

  We sent in the deposit. I don’t know who was more scared, Fannie or I. Probably I was because I had to make her some money.

  I moved everything to Virginia. Fannie stayed back in L.A.

  The first night in that old house I rolled up in blankets just like I used to do in my cold-water flat in New York. Baby Jesus slept next to my head, Cazzie at my feet. Frip had died before we left. She didn’t survive a dental operation.

  Baby Jesus, who pretended that Frip was a pain in the butt, missed her terribly. But by the time we reached the house framed by huge trees, she was ready for adventure.

  The electricity hadn’t been turned on. I had no water and no heat. It was early fall and the nights were cool. Despite sending in the required deposits and making numerous cross-country phone calls, this simple procedure proved too much for the power company. I had to go down in person. Had to do it for the phone company, too.

  At the end of that week an old car rolled up in the driveway. A petite woman emerged. She marched up to knock on the front door.

  “Hi.” I stuck my head out the upstairs window. I was trying to put together the bed I’d bought.

  “Hey. I’m Betty Burns. Chris Georges said you needed help.”

  “Help? I need a miracle.”

  Betty Burns was that miracle. We’ve worked together ever since. We’re growing old together. She cleans, repairs my torn clothes since she knows I rarely shop, and every now and then she brings me food. Betty is a good cook. I don’t know what’s better, her cabbage or her fried chicken, which is as good as Mom’s.

  Betty always says to me, “If anyone taped what we talked about, we’d be in big trouble.”

  True. We talk about everything together: husbands, children, lovers, money, football, the latest scandal. Fortunately, central Virginia abounds in scandals, most of them of a sexual nature. I’m in my element. Started with Jefferson, of course.

  With Betty working inside, I spruced up the outside.

  By the time Fannie arrived for her first visit it looked as if someone lived there. She wanted a room devoted to ducks. We took the pretty back room overlooking the gardens—the previous owner had been a first-rate gardener—and hung duck curtains, found duck chairs, scrounged for decoys. The room did everything but quack.

  The handsome young fellow down the lane, Dannie McLaughlin, built stalls in the cow barn, among other tasks. Danny’s a doer, not a talker, but I’d elicit a few tidbits from him. He used to make me laugh because the girls chased after him something awful.

  Fannie’d say, “That boy’s going to hide up here and some girl’ll be showing up with a rifle.”

  Baby Jesus preferred my workroom, a big room on the south side of the house. It was the prettiest workroom I’ve had and I miss it.

  Fannie’s workroom was upstairs. Even she couldn’t work in the duck room, but she liked sleeping in there, as the breeze kept the curtains dancing.

  Fannie rarely stayed for longer than two weeks but I cherished our time because, more than anything in the world, she made me laugh. Usually I was the sparkplug. How refreshing to be entertained.

  The two of us would have been better sisters than lovers. I’m not a romantic person. Fannie needs a great deal of attention. I think she loved me. I know I loved her. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Fannie.

  Her life was somewhere else. She needed the excitement of L.A. and she needed Alabama. The reserve that is so Virginia, friendly but correct, irritated her.

  “These people are about as bad as Yankees,” she’d grumble.

  Then, too, she liked horses but they weren’t her passion. I had my stable filled with boarders even before I had my bed put together. I did all the work: mucking, grooming, medications. I loved it. I love physical labor.

  “You’re wasting your time. Pay someone else to do it.”

  But I wasn’t wasting my time. I get some of my best ideas picking hooves, bush-hogging on the tractor, tying up sweet peas.

  I missed Kate. I ho
ped she’d visit.

  Few people visited because Fannie didn’t want them to know we lived together. She had some friends in New York whom she didn’t mind knowing. When we went to the city, we’d see them, but most of the time she kept people far away.

  One crystal clear October morning we walked outside and saw that a banana spider had spun a web as big as a dishtowel between two English boxwoods. Covered with dew, it caught the sun’s rising rays and turned from silver to gold to blood red.

  Transfixed, we watched until the banana spider popped out from the boxwood. She was a major spider. When bananas get pissed off they sit in the middle of their web and make it sway like a trampoline. I thought she would fly off her web, she was so incensed. We were keeping her prey away, so we left her to catch her breakfast.

  As time went by it became more and more obvious that Fannie wasn’t happy with me. She loved me but I wasn’t what she wanted or needed.

  I don’t know if she had affairs in Los Angeles. I never asked. It was none of my business. She was good to me and that’s what mattered.

  She never promised me a lifetime commitment or even one of two months’ duration. I had no room to criticize her. Apart from her homophobia, I had nothing to criticize. When she drank, she could be a bad girl. Other than that, Fannie was perfect.

  That Christmas she appeared in Old Acquaintances, at the Town and Gown Theater in Birmingham, Alabama. The play was about old friends and rivals and it was just right for Fannie. Fannie played the woman who winds up writing the commercial successes, while soap opera star Susan Flannery played the “literary writer.” At one point they overdid the fight scene, falling into the orchestra pit. The audience, thinking it was part of the show, applauded wildly. Fannie and Susan, rolling around in the pit, cussed each other a blue streak. When they finally crawled back on the stage the audience was in convulsions. They cracked up, too.

  Birmingham, a great city, kept us busy. At Christmas we shopped and visited Tallulah Bankhead’s wardrobe, displayed in the basement of the Town and Gown. Tallulah was a childhood heroine of mine.

  Fannie drove me out to the Iron Cafe, frequented by the railroad workers. Bill Neal’s sister, Iggy, having battled the bottle herself (ran in the family), helped the railroad drunks dry out. She lived with another woman. The two women were kind but tough. Fanny always believed her aunt was a lesbian. As the good woman and her companion had been dead many years, I had no opportunity to form my own opinion.

  We poked, prodded and talked about how to frame the story. Fannie didn’t want to write a lesbian book. What a surprise. But her aunt’s story was a great story. I told her she could soft-pedal it. Just write the women as she remembered them. I helped her with the structure.

  This was the novel that eventually became Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.

  Fannie doesn’t need my help anymore. I’m very proud of her.

  Riding back to Charlottesville on the train from Birmingham, we flattened our noses, pressing against the cold window, to view Christmas decorations in tiny towns across Dixie.

  I knew I was losing Fannie. Somehow that made every second precious.

  No blowup occurred. She just came to Virginia less and less. The following summer, 1978, I met Martina Navratilova and her young girlfriend in Richmond. Martina had won her first Wimbledon that year, defeating Chris Evert, and I’d seen her in person when she was fifteen, which I think was the first rime she played in the States. As round as she was tall, she had tremendous talent even back then.

  I was writing Southern Discomfort, which has a minor Czech character in it. Research, important to me, brought me to Martina through a mutual friend.

  I met her for lunch. She was twenty-one, sweet, and wrapped up in her girlfriend, who was two years younger.

  I kept in contact with her after that, usually by letter. I genuinely liked her.

  Her romance unraveled the following January. She began calling constantly. I told Fannie. She wasn’t thrilled but she was big enough to recognize she’d consigned me to the shadows.

  I planned to meet Martina in Kansas City at a tournament. She was three weeks on the road, one week off. I drove to National Airport, that little corridor of hell, and called Fannie in L.A.

  To my surprise she begged me not to go, said she’d fly right in. I then called Martina and made my apologies, saying I owed Fannie a sit-down talk, which she was now finally willing to have.

  Although disappointed, Martina didn’t carry on. I turned around and drove two and a half hours back home in pouring rain.

  When Fannie came home she gave me a postcard of two draft horses pulling a plow. On the back she’d written, “Don’t break up the team.”

  She loved me. I know she loved me and I loved her. But we’d gone along for over two years rarely being in the same place at the same time. I would have moved to Alabama, but she didn’t want to be a farmer, and for me that’s life, real life. I survived the cities. I flourished in the country.

  We needed different things even though we needed each other. We hadn’t a clue as to how to resolve our dilemma, to know what neuroses we inflicted on each other and to clearly see if we had a future.

  Fannie trusted no one, which hurt me. It meant she didn’t trust me either. My remoteness hurt her, as did the fact that I communicated through deeds, not words. She used to tell me I loved the cats more than I loved her.

  “Close,” I’d say.

  I thought we might work it out. I wasn’t sure. I felt terrible and I knew that she felt terrible. When I got up the next morning there was a note on the refrigerator. She’d left and she asked me to leave her alone. I did but it hurt.

  Years later we were sitting in the Jockey Club in New York and Fannie said, “Why didn’t you come after me?”

  “You told me not to.”

  “Rita Mae, you don’t know anything about women.”

  I laughed and wondered if that was true or if I just didn’t know enough about Fannie.

  I kept my promise, though. I made her a little money. When she needed her investment back I sent it to her at the going rate. It wasn’t a bloody fortune but it was, as Mom always said, “thankful increase.”

  As for Fannie, I will love her until the day I die.

  61

  Out of the Frying Pan

  Mother, in one of her rare nesting moods, visited me. Without Fannie’s furniture the farmhouse was bare. I was back to minimalist decorating. Also, carrying the mortgage alone, I worried about buying furniture.

  Mom, like so many people of her turn-of-the-century generation, could make something out of nothing. She rummaged around fabric stores. We trolled every Salvation Army shop between Richmond and Charlottesville, to say nothing of the sorriest stores.

  Knowing I loved Fannie, she restrained herself from saying, “I told you so.” She liked Fannie but had felt my fame or notoriety, take your pick, would pull us apart. Then, too, Fannie wanted to be the center of attention and so did Mother. Now firmly back on center stage, Mom was surprisingly cooperative.

  Actually, her cooperative mood expanded over the years as I was able to send more and more money. The high point had come four years before, when I took her to Hawaii for her seventieth birthday. Two islands and one mother. I was exhausted but she was blissful. Before leaving for Oahu, we stayed at the Bel Air in Los Angeles and Mother packed away every ashtray, glass, cup and saucer she could lay her hands on; we were staying in Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s bungalow. I snuck off before we left and paid for it all. The staff of the hotel enjoyed the ruse.

  Once in Honolulu she went wild. The flight in sobered us, though. It’s horrifying to look down at Pearl Harbor; no amount of time passing can alter the jolt of seeing those ships under the water. Once we recovered from that sight, Mom put the pedal to the medal. After she ransacked Oahu, we forged on to Kauai for relaxation. Her idea of relaxation was rising at dawn, goading me into the car and being chauffeured to every part of the island. I saw enough p
ineapple farms to consider myself an expert. The one time her strength flagged was when we climbed Waimea Canyon. The altitude made her sick.

  Now, as she puttered in the garden, advised me as to how to trim my wisteria and directed me in general, I marveled at her youthful energy. At seventy-four, Mother ran circles around people half her age. She’d endured sickness over the years, always the same trouble—adhesions in her bowel, scar tissue everywhere. Her body produced scar tissue at a bizarre rate. Her heart and everything else were terrific.

  If you stared at Mother’s face, you would have guessed her age—but only after she stopped talking. Animation made even her face seem young. Her hair, pure silver now, was beautiful. She moved like a young woman, too. Aunt Mimi, by contrast, moved old, but that was due to her back trouble. She had as much energy as Mom. The Buckingham girls had inherited thriving genes.

  As we worked we chatted or sang. Mother is the last person in my life who sang with me while we worked. People don’t do that anymore. I miss it. Her light voice, quite good, lifted my spirits.

  My troubles had just started, although I thank the gods for keeping me ignorant. Had I known what I was about to undergo, I might have turned tail. Instead I chased it.

  Mother knew. Not only had she the advantage of age, she had the advantage of knowing me better than I sometimes knew myself. She had been in her thirties in the thirties. I was in mine in the seventies and eighties. The thirties are a dangerous decade. You’ve lived long enough to think you know something.

  I inhabited a peculiar territory as the only public lesbian in a nation of 200 million people. Mother sensed this far better than I. It wasn’t that other public figures weren’t thought to be bisexual or lesbian, for instance Marlene Dietrich, but I said it, no sidestepping or crawfishing. Apart from bringing down abuse on my head, my position forced me into isolation. It’s a good thing I’m not a social person or I would have been devastated.