In a last-ditch effort to avoid the inevitable, I resorted to hiring a chauffeur to get me around town for auditions and anything else that required driving. This was no ordinary driver. Her name was Lahaina Kamilah Coquelin, formerly married to New York City’s revolutionary night club entrepreneur of Le Club, Cheetah, Hippopotamus fame, Olivier Coquelin. The same gorgeous woman who had wanted to show me her leopard cubs when I visited Haiti many lifetimes ago, Lahaina was indisputably the most beautiful woman in the world and had been the toast of New York, after apparently bewitching Olivier.
She had almond eyes so large they were almost alien. Her skin had a hue of obsidian stone and not a single imperfection. Her aura was completely serene, like a child without a care in the world. Though she had once been trapped in her gilded cage, or so it had seemed to me, she had gone through a bitter divorce, leaving her without her posh Manhattan penthouse, two Yorkshire terriers, the Picasso, and the surreal opulence that had been her reality with Olivier Coquelin. Vestiges that she kept reminiscent of that period were an enormous diamond ring, an heirloom brooch, once belonging to her mother-in-law and that I could speculate was nineteenth-century or older, and a portrait of herself sitting in a chair flanked by full-grown leopards—no longer cubs.
Transplanted to Los Angeles and needing a car, she left her diamond ring as collateral for a used Toyota Corrolla. She needed an income and so, in exchange for a fee, she accepted my offer as a pseudo-driver for the time being. Remarkably, there was never a hint of superiority or resentment from her. We both knew we now needed each other and had come a long way from speedboats, escargot, and big cats. Lahaina needed cash and I needed wheels. It worked.
Lahaina drove me to auditions and meetings and showed me how to understand the complexities of getting around L.A. freeways and back-streets. She taught me how to read the “yellow pages of maps,” The Thomas Guide. As an aspiring actress herself, she knew the lay of the land, what opportunities to count on, which ones to avoid.
I couldn’t have had a better teacher. Before long, facing down my fear, I forced myself to learn to drive, something that turned out to be not at all mysterious, and was ultimately an empowering, liberating experience. Rolling on at my own pace, in the slower right lane of the freeway, I now understood the driving metaphor that defined life in Southern California. The reputation for laid-back and casual that Hollywood was supposed to have in comparison to New York was deceptive. In truth, everyone was even more in a rush to make it into the fast lane than anyone I’d seen in New York. The only thing we did faster in NYC was walk and talk. Sure, fast and flashy could be fun, but I preferred the speed limit for now. I looked at traffic like a huge corps de ballet, the freeway being its stage.
For reasons that had less to do with my success and more to do with the part of Tom’s world and life that I knew little about, he continued to go missing in action more often than not. His multifaceted legal and financial complications mushroomed from one day to the next. It failed to amuse me that nothing on the soap opera on which I acted by day could ever approach the drama that was unfolding in my personal life by nightfall. With my skill for keeping secrets, not one person at work had an inkling as to what was transpiring on the home front: settling legal disputes and raising a baby.
After testifying in court, I knew, as he did, that a divorce was immanent. Either way, I couldn’t afford Tom, emotionally or financially. Because he had accepted all of me, hyperhidosis and all, and because we shared a child together meant that I would always care for him, no matter what. When Tom eventually got back on his feet, he structured his life around being a committed father and making Maya a top priority.
All that happened in the span of a year. I came home from work one evening, said goodnight to the sitter, and collapsed in Tom’s left-behind baby blue crushed velvet La-Z-Boy. I flipped on the television and absentmindedly listened to the evening news while folding laundry. Consequently, what I heard next resulted in my dropping the laundry as I raced for a pad and paper. I scribbled the information as fast as I could about preeminent neurologist Dr. Martin Cooper’s hyperhidrosis procedure, then called the television station to no avail.
At first, my efforts to be seen by Dr. Cooper were for naught. His office insisted that the waiting list was at least six months long, not to mention that the risks outweighed the potential. How could I have explained to a stranger that vanity meant little or nothing when you desired human touch? What I did explain was that the opportunity to have a consultation with Dr. Cooper would be the chance of a lifetime. I was granted my request.
The moment I walked into the examining room, I made my decision, trusting the essence of Martin Cooper implicitly. He wanted me to be very sure, first by making me understand the procedure, which required me to sit perpendicular under anesthesia while holes would be drilled into my temples and two rods inserted to maintain complete immobility. A lung would then be navigated in order to sever a nerve through my back that controlled the hyperhidrosis.
Obviously undaunted by the disclosure of these particulars, I told Dr. Cooper that I wanted to schedule the surgery as soon as possible. Dr. Cooper again reminded me of the risks, especially the possibility of facial paralysis. He continued, explaining that I would be in intensive care for one week and that the pain would be so intense I would need to be on a morphine drip.
Holding back tears, not revealing my foster past, I simply said, “I am thirty-one years old, and all of my life I have been afraid to touch people and allow them to touch me back.”
Before surgery I wrote the letter to Bill Cosby that had been in my heart to write for some time, first telling him about my recent work with Whoopi Goldberg and Will Smith, among others, then going to note:
In our last phone conversation you referred to something I believe that occurred the last time I appeared on the show. If you recall I had horribly sweaty hands and thank God you didn’t want to hold my feet…I was terribly embarrassed because of it and felt that you made mention of acting classes not for technique but to enhance possibly my confidence. I don’t perspire due to lack of confidence but due to a disorder I’ve had all of my life called hyperhidrosis, which is an abnormality caused by a nerve (ganglion) in the spinal region.
Over the years I have tried just about everything on the market with only marginal results. I knew of the surgery, but to find a neurosurgeon who specializes in this disorder was another story. Quite by accident I have found one (Dr. Martin Cooper) and am scheduled for surgery on December 7, 1990, at Cedar-Sinai Hospital.
Enclosed is a tape that better describes the procedure and a letter written by a woman who has undergone the surgery.
All of the information might seem excessive but I don’t want the hyperhidrosis mistaken for lack of confidence. This is something I’ve told very few people—it is confidential.
Looking forward to shaking your hand after December 7.
When the day for the surgery arrived, Tom joined me out of support and continued to tell me, “I like your hands just the way they are Vic.” For a moment I became apprehensive, not of the possibility that some medical mishap might occur, but of its success, its removal of my protective shield.
In the twilight of going under anesthesia, I gently reassured myself that it was time to be touched in a meaningful, fundamental way. Time to break another cycle, time for Victoria to take care of little Vicki by not abandoning the core of her being. No more secrets. No more hiding. I would be all right.
Moments later, or so I imagined, I opened my eyes in recovery, tentative about my new self. With the soothing music of operating room machines clicking away, I wondered how long I’d be allowed to stay in this amazingly serene state of floatation. For now, I would have to enjoy and bask in this feeling, even if it was through a morphine drip, even if I would extend it with the pills that would follow. Even if I would have to face the consequences later.
TEN
THE SISTERS WHO TAUGHT ME
The operation was a compl
ete success. I carefully placed my trusty bottle of aluminum chloride and iontophoresis machine in a box for posterity.
I was emboldened to stretch further and higher than I ever had before, as I came to fiercely love my independence while accepting the inspiration and support that came from my various surrogate sisters. Friends, colleagues, and peers—some had been in my life in earlier eras, and others were new sisters. No matter how low life laid my soul, I never felt abandoned. These grounded women who carried the mantle of their forerunners in my life reminded me often of what Alice Walker wrote in The Color Purple, “Is solace anywhere more comforting than that of a sister?”
Demonstrating that love by example, and sometimes by confrontation, they each helped to keep my feet on the ground and eyes on the prize. More important, these sisters were teachers, providing me with life lessons that, in the final analysis, changed my life forever, and saved it.
Part of this was possible because without the protective shield that hyperhidrosis had given me, my relationships deepened. I didn’t have to carry all the secrets anymore. I was even able to start sharing more with others about the challenges of growing up as a foster child.
Within months of my return to work after surgery, I did something that I’d been promising myself to do since I was eighteen and had made my first ten-dollar contribution as a patron of the arts—I founded the Rowell Foster Children Positive Plan, a charity focused on providing scholarships in the arts and higher education to foster and adoptive children. For years, I would run the charity out of my home, before obtaining office space in the Department of Children and Family Services building in Los Angeles.
From the beginning of my work on The Young and the Restless, the creator, William Bell Sr., and I developed a special bond. We appreciated hard work and working together. After he had done so much to gain my trust, I shared with Bill my love of dance and how helpful having that anchor had been for me when I was growing up in foster care. I never could have imagined his reaction. He ingeniously penned a customized story that wove my passion for ballet and acting all into one. It was the first time that my actual ballet technique proved valuable in an acting capacity. The blending of two performance arts I loved equally into one charged moment. It was atomic! William Bell understood as I did that work was what you made of it wherever you stood.
When Bill Bell asked me to stay on his show, knowing the high attrition rate for daytime actors going off to work only in feature films and/or prime-time television, I promised him I wouldn’t leave as long as he was there. Instead, we found ways of allowing me to do it all.
In 1991, for example, I asked Bill if he would consider collaborating with producer Leonard Goldberg, to iron out some sticking points so that I might be able to work opposite Eddie Murphy, in Disney’s The Distinguished Gentleman. He smiled and said, “Leonard and I are old friends. I’ll give him a call.”
That was followed by an even bigger request to Bill Bell that required the collaborative effort of then Columbia Broadcasting Systems; the senior executive director, Jeff Sagansky; the former executive director of ABC Television, Fred Silverman; and the producer Dean Hargrove and VIACOM. The focus for this effort was, in a name, Dick Van Dyke, the personification of excellence and elegance. I had the privilege of working with this master of contortion, song, and dance for eight years on Diagnosis Murder, a show loved by a generation of people who didn’t fit into the specifics of America’s coveted demographic for advertising dollars.
When I was pregnant with my son, Jasper, and working on two shows, Dick surprised me with the gift of a beautiful wooden crib. As an executive producer, he gave me another gift. It was the nod of approval to stretch not only as an actress but as a writer. Membership in the Writers Guild of America was on the horizon. I cowrote a script about what I knew by telling the story of a Chinese dancer leaving everything behind—an entire family—for a dream. Ballet was more than dance for so many, whether we lived in America or not. It was a passport to a better way of life.
From the outset, it was me and the boys hammering out a way to cohesively make all of the work, work! And we did. I would go on to break television history as the first actor to consecutively perform on two shows for six years in two different mediums—daytime and prime time. My incentive? Owning my own home. Unquestionably, this was my window to lay down tracks, to be autonomous, and to build a financial foundation to become a proprietor just the way Agatha, Ruthie, Millie, Barbara, Sylvia, Esther, and so many other women had taught me to do.
The 1923 Italian-villa-style house allowed me, at long last, to permanently unpack all the cherished gifts that I’d been towing behind me for so many years. Later, through a major renovation, I would restore the house to its full splendor—in tribute to the influences of the many women who had raised me. In the meantime, their gifts to me were very much on display. There was nothing like the feeling of moving in to stay. There was nothing like knowing I finally had an heirloom to pass on to my children. Walking out on my terrazzo, I thanked all the women who taught me how to pray as only women know how. I looked at the yard where I could cultivate my own garden and thanked Mother Earth. I’m home, finally, and it’s beautiful here.
One of the first social events I hosted at my home was a garden party fund-raiser for the Rowell Foster Children Positive Plan. When I started to put the elements together, since I was still getting my feet wet in the nonprofit arena, I employed the services of political fund-raising veteran Maryann Maloney. As this was to be my first West Coast fund-raising event, my hope was to reach out to Bill Bell. Nervous and not sure what the protocol was to make a financial request and one from a boss who had already given me so much, I had no idea how to begin. Maryann promised to guide me through the process.
Sitting uncomfortably in Bill’s well-appointed office on Beverly Boulevard, I told him why I thought the event was important and how it would help foster and adopted children in Los Angeles.
Before any guidance was needed, Bill looked at me with his ice blue eyes and asked, “Do you need fifteen or fifty thousand?”
I nearly fell off my chair. Bill revealed something that I’d never known about him, that his sister, Mary, born with a severe cleft palate, had been a foster child. His mother, Gertrude “Trudy” Bell, had taken an interest in the little girl and provided the funds for the surgery and later adopted Mary.
Of all the connections I had to Bill, this was probably the single most important one. It meant the world that he had decided to tell me about his sister after the years we had known each other, especially in the context of my coming to him with a funding request.
William Bell graciously underwrote my first garden party for the Rowell Foster Children’s Positive Plan. Wynton performed, and it was a huge success. The event was attended by Representative Diane Watson, Dick Van Dyke, the Honorable Michael Nash, the Annie E. Casey Foundation director, Douglas Nelson, who would later appoint me as Casey’s Family Service’s National Spokesperson for Foster Care and Adoption, people from the Los Angeles Department of Children’s and Family Services, and many other celebrities, important representatives, and organizations. How far Agatha had carried me from our mock tea party the first time we met when I was two years old in Gray, Maine.
Through a network of fellow activists and child advocates, I found myself with an expanding sisterhood that brought me the inspiration and education of women like Pat Gempel, one of the founders of HOPE Worldwide, an organization dedicated to global relief. Before getting to know her, I couldn’t imagine how she maintained the stamina to take on so much, championing the needs of abandoned and orphaned children in the United States, Africa, Russia, and India, working to support her hospital in Cambodia, along with all of the global relief she did for AIDS through HOPEWorldwide. What drove her? I wondered.
While in Philadelphia, where I had flown to help with her charity event, I received some insight when she invited me to lunch. I knew this was serious because Pat doesn’t have time to take people to l
unch. We sat in a lovely civilized café at the National Museum of Philadelphia. She, clearly uncomfortable, told me that there was something she wanted to tell me for a long time. In uncharacteristic fashion, tears filled her eyes as she said, “I gave my own daughter up for adoption a long time ago.”
Instantly, I loved Pat more. I sat across from her as she wiped her alabaster face with her napkin. Her tears represented so many mothers’ tears. There was no embracing, no holding of hands. We just let time pass between us before speaking again. Then I said, “It’s all right; I understand,” and proceeded to tell her about my own mother.
In the oddest of ways, one person’s suffering is another’s salvation. Dorothy, in her absence, was teaching me what compassion really meant.
Pat and I got to know each other more through other events, including a Christmas celebration in east Philly, where “the Rev,” tactical and proactive, cared enough to care about the forgotten. “The Rev” dressed up as Santa, I as Mrs. Claus, and Pat as herself, in order for the three of us to pass out wrapped gifts. The crowds were so great and families in such need that the police had to be called to maintain order. I would never forget feeling the desperation of hands reaching, reaching, and reaching again, some coming up empty-handed.
When Pat called me one day, not long after I moved into my home, and invited me to accompany her on a trip to Russia, I leapt at the offer, deciding that I would take advantage of time off and take Maya with me. Travel fed me on every level—allowing me to carry on the tradition of the travelers who raised me, like Agatha, Esther, and Paulina—and also was a passion I would instill in my children.
The Women Who Raised Me Page 29