I’M ALWAYS PRESSING MY NOSE TO THE AIRPLANE WINDOW
One of those buildings feels like my foster child. A musician named Hillsman Wright was involved in a effort to save from demolition the grand old Orpheum Theater at Beale Street and Main, the ornate movie palace of my childhood dreams, where I’d seen The Ten Commandments and Gone With the Wind. He took me backstage, up rickety staircases, and across catwalks dating from its days on the vaudeville circuit, and he played Bach on a monster Wurlitzer pipe organ as it rose up from the orchestra pit. That was all I needed to get involved in the fund-raising campaign, making a public service announcement and eventually singing Hoagy Carmichael’s “Memphis in June” at the Orpheum’s fiftieth-anniversary celebration.
One night I went with my brother to Blues Alley, a smoky club on Front Street near the riverbank. Leaning against the bar was a burly, dark-haired man whom I first mistook for the cameraman, the English cad who broke my heart. This was David Ford, who was twenty-five years old (three years younger than I), and still living with his parents in the suburb of White Haven and working as the manager of the parts department at a Mercedes repair shop near the airport to pay for classes at the University of Memphis. I sent him one of those nakedly undisguised C’mon-a-my-house looks that are possible between strangers in nightclubs, and before the evening had ended, I knew we were destined to be lovers. I thought: Maybe I can find happiness in Memphis with a regular guy.
Thus began an interesting confluence of events, as my mother and I were both dating others but living under the same roof. While David and I were necking on the living room couch, I’d hear a car pull in the driveway, idling for too long until the motor shut off, when Mother would come inside with a satisfied smile. The first time David and I made love, we had to wait until my mother was asleep before we raced to my brother’s bedroom. After all those years, I was still sneaking around.
Before urban renewal almost renewed Beale Street out of existence, most white folks went there in the wee small hours after too many martinis, observing a tradition known as Midnight Rambles. Back then, Beale Street was mainly whorehouses, pawn shops, and saloons like Pee Wee’s, where in 1912 William Christopher Handy first put the notes on paper for a song he called “Memphis Blues.” No one had ever used the word blues in a song title before, and as a result, in the 1970s Congress proclaimed Handy “Father of the Blues” and declared Memphis “Home of the Blues.”
David Ford became my companion in the search for my musical roots. He introduced me to Ma Rainey II who, from a wheelchair, could whoop up “Got My Mojo Working” better than anybody. I also got to know Furry Lewis, another Memphis legend. Though his recording career had ended in the thirties, he’d had an amazing career revival in the sixties, opening for the Rolling Stones and making frequent appearances on the Tonight Show. During the lean years in between, he had been employed as a street sweeper for the Memphis sanitation department. His slide guitar technique, sweet voice, and songwriting skills were backed up by a dignified but wicked sense of humor. One time we visited his home where he sat on the side of his bed playing guitar, singing, and talking. He wore thick Coke-bottle spectacles to compensate for cataracts, and kept a saucer on the top of his glass. In between sips of Ten High Whiskey he said, “I can’t see too good and I want to be sure there’s nothin’ in there but the High.”
I was privileged to get to know and work with many more great Memphis musicians: Lee Baker, Jimmy Crosthwaite, Jim Dickenson, Little Laura Dukes, Prince Gabe, Honeymoon Garner, L. T. Lewis, Harold Mabern, Don McMinn, Jamil Nasser, Calvin Newborn, Sid Selvidge, Bob Talley, William Thais, and Mose Vinson. Grandma Dixie Davis would so inspire me with her barrel-house version of Handy’s “Beale Street Blues that I would sing it for twenty years and finally record it in 1998 on my CD Talk Memphis to Me.
When you hear the blues in Memphis, the musicians kind of sit back on the melody, playing a little behind the beat so that if the leader holds a phrase out for an extra measure they can follow with a kind of fa-lop. That’s what makes it funky. That’s what makes it Memphis. As Lee Baker used to say, “even the Memphis Symphony plays behind the beat.”
In 1978 I recorded Vanilla, my third album of standards, featuring the renowned jazz pianist Phineas Newborn, Jr. The producer was tenor saxman Fred Ford (he had howled like a dog on Big Mama Thorton’s recording of “Hound Dog”). He was surrounded by his Beale Street USA Orchestra, usually twenty pieces but, as he said, “mortified down to twelve for this occasion.”
In 1978 I was quite optimistic about my first TV movie. A Guide for the Married Woman was a follow-up to A Guide for the Married Man, a clever romp about the art of adultery. David managed to take some time off and accompany me to Los Angeles, staying at my apartment. I sent David and a bad toothache to the dentist who treated Peter and me, and the two of them happened to cross paths in the office. The dentist mentioned that the shaggy-haired fellow, who’d just left was an out-of-town referral from me, and Peter figured it out. When I drove to Copa de Oro to see Peter, he confronted me with his suspicions. I admitted to the affair and in a fury he threw a heavy crystal ashtray across the room. It was a final gesture of disillusionment at the end of our grand plans. There was a visible dent where it shattered on the tile floor.
We did have one last phone call. Feeling bad about the ashtray-throwing scene and knowing that both of us were in Los Angeles, I tried to reach out to him and called to ask if it was okay to come over and talk. I didn’t know that his latest squeeze, Monika, was also in residence and that he was hosting a party for a dozen of our mutual friends.
“It’s really not a good time,” he said with genuine discomfort in his voice. Later he would say that he wanted to make everyone else disappear. Although he’d never told me, I think he wanted to give our relationship another chance. But I was calling to repair, not renew. Our reparations would be postponed, but once made, they have endured to this day. Peter remains one of my only truly intimate friends, and I think the main reason for our abiding friendship is that I never took him to court to get money. When I moved out, I said, “Send me whatever you think is mine,” and he sent rugs, books, his father’s paintings. There were no lawyers to extend the period of discontent. And we say “I love you” to each other as much now as when we were a couple.
The best thing about A Guide for the Married Woman turned out to be the way, my hair looked. Next, in the summer of 1978, I was cast in a remake of the witty forty-year-old Hitchcock classic The Lady Vanishes, shooting at Pinewood Studios outside London and in the Austrian Alps. I was cast as a “madcap heiress” working with a Life photographer played by Elliott Gould to solve the disappearance of Angela Lansbury on a train. Though I’d played madcap before, this time I got the wardrobe right: a bias-cut white silk satin dress worthy of Carole Lombard. (The costume department made nine identical copies.) In one scene I was supposed to run alongside a vintage steam engine on fist-size sharp gray rocks, wearing high heels. I had sprained my ankle playing basketball in high school, so the director Anthony Page agreed to let me do it in high-tops, shooting me from the knees up and earning the eternal gratitude of my ligaments. Angela and I sang Gershwin together while waiting for scenes to be set up. But Gould was mercurial, seemingly detached from the process and easily miffed. One day we were told about some glitch in production.
“Oy vey,” I said with a weary sigh.
“Don’t ever use that expression again!” snapped Gould. “You have no right.” (Years later I would tell this story to the Jewish producer of Moonlighting, Glenn Caron, who said, “That’s ridiculous,” and immediately wrote me an “Oy vey” scene.)
I didn’t want to be away from David, but he knew that if he took any more time off from his job, he’d be fired, so his arrival in Europe, unemployed, was a rather emphatic declaration of love and commitment. The only discordant note in our reunion was a bellhop at the hotel asking him “Where shall I put your bags, Mr. Shepherd?”—a portent of things to come. We stayed near
Pinewood at a three-hundred-year-old inn called something like the Crocked Bull, with ceilings so low that we had to bend over to climb the stairs. There was no central heating, and I had to report to the set in the frigid predawn, so David lovingly got up with me and filled the tub with the hottest water. When we made love, I had the primal, mystical, earliest awareness of conception.
Not long ago, that child remarked, “I wish I’d been wanted.” Extracting the knife from my heart, I convinced her that nothing could be further from the truth. Just because a pregnancy is unplanned doesn’t mean a child is unwelcome. My children were wanted, which is the most important message of pro-choice, for to be wanted is a child’s surest protection against being abandoned or abused. David and I decided to live in Memphis (naively, I thought it would be possible to have a career while bringing up my child in the place that felt like home, a feeling that eludes even native Californians). And we decided to marry, despite my lack of enthusiasm for the institution, because in my hometown, wedding bells are the socially acceptable antecedent to impending parenthood. When Michael Carreras, the film’s executive producer, heard there was to be a wedding, he asked if we’d like to be married in the Anglican church and signed an affidavit stipulating that we’d been staying with him in the parish to satisfy the residency requirements. But I had to fill out a lot of paperwork for the rector at St. Peter’s of Wynchecombe. He wore pince-nez over almost colorless eyes that indicated years of study in musty church archives, and had no discernible sense of humor.
“How old are you?” the vicar asked.
”’Twenty-eight,” I said.
”A spinster,” he noted.
”I am not,” I said, heartily offended.
”Miss,” he said sternly, “if you’re over eighteen and unmarried, you’re a spinster.”
The wedding took place just before we left for the States. I recited the standard wedding vows about “honoring,” eliminating the “obeying” part, but in private I made a heartfelt pledge to David. “I will never lie to you,” I promised. “I will never cheat on you. I will always be honest with you. Just don’t ask me any questions if you don’t want to hear the answers. And don’t leave me alone.” I didn’t have any illusions about happily ever after, and left to my own devices, I didn’t trust myself to be faithful. My wedding gown was a boldly printed red and black dress that was the best thing I had in my suitcase. I didn’t have a mother or a father there, butI had a producer and director: Michael Carreras walked me down the aisle, and Anthony Page was best man. But I was so violently nauseated, it was all I could do to keep from tossing my cookies at the altar (although my queasiness about marriage might have had something to do with my equilibrium), and I literally ran from the magnificent poached salmon at the wedding lunch, held in an old vicarage owned by Anthony’s sister. For months, the food that stayed down was avocados and digestive biscuits. And we lied to my grandmother about the date of the wedding.
There was a glorious Victorian house for sale in a historic district of downtown Memphis, but Bob Sanderson, the real estate agent who was a friend of my mother, kept intoning in a solemn voice, “Dead in bed, you’ll be dead in bed.” So we chose (and I paid for) a modest 1928 bungalow on Court Street, half a block from the apartment where my mother had lived as a baby. One of the two bedrooms had a deck shaded by a beautiful old dogwood, but what sold me was the huge wooden swing, big as a bed, on the front porch. My mother never forgave Bob for letting me pay the asking price. He said $75,000, and I said okay. I figured if I paid the full freight, they’d have to sell it to me. (The owners of another house I wanted had reneged on the deal when a better offer came along. As Kipling said, “There is no promise of God or man that goes north of ten thousand bucks.”) And I went to the dealership where my grandfather bought a new white Cadillac El Dorado every year (my family had made a religion of white automobiles) and got myself a silver Caddy.
David and I attended childbirth classes given by two certified nurse-midwives: Peg Burke, a former nun who had served in Vietnam during the war, and Linda Wheeler, who had worked for Vista. Their attitude was: even though there is no such thing as a “normal” birth, every woman should have the freedom and dignity of being prepared. They gave me an extensive reading list that included Childbirth Without Fear by Grantly Dick-Read. Nearing the age of thirty, I had heard next to nothing about menopause until I read these books, some of which reduced the process to a one-liner: you dry up and you take hormones. (I decided I’d skip that stage.)
I gained forty-five pounds during my first pregnancy (even though I kept missing my mouth whenever I ate because my swollen belly kept me at some distance from the table), and just to keep me company, my husband, David, gained fifty. But our mutual leviathan state was not a deterrent to a satisfying sex life, proving once and for all that size has nothing to do with eroticism. Relatively late in my third trimester, I was given permission to fly to London for the premiere of The Lady Vanishes, my doctor figuring that I’d literally be in good hands, since it was a benefit for the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. But none of my maternity clothes were worthy of a premiere, let alone a royal one. A kindly saleswoman gave me the name of a shop in Palm Beach that catered to very wealthy, very large women. I was sent a fire-engine red dress festooned with read feathers and beads. I looked like a transvestite Santa Claus. I turned my instructions about meeting the queen into a little mnemonic verse (wear white gloves, don’t chew gum, call her Ma’am, which sounds like Mum), and I should have charged admission to the comic routine of a gigantic me trying to curtsy while towering over the petite and porcelain-skinned monarch.
Guided by the midwives, David and I had made a list of things to take to the hospital: nuts, raisins, cheese, lollipops, a thermos, a plastic rolling pin, and a sock with a tennis ball for back labor, lotion for back rubs, Chapstick, breath freshener, tape recorder, guitar, change for the vending machines, and a pre-washed flannel baby bonnet. As I was packing the bag, we had a fight. I have no idea why. I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and cleaned the whohouse. As I was dusting the bookcase, my water broke. There were no contractions, so we were told to go to the hospital. Room 518 had been reconfigured into a birthing center. Peg, Linda, and David took turns breathing with me, rubbing my shoulders, feeding me ice cubes, and keeping me as comfortable as possible. David tried to distract me by sticking an empty diaper box on his head and playing the guitar. But twenty-seven hours later I was exhausted but not fully dilated. I was given the synthetic hormone Pitocin to stimulate contractions. It felt like being electrocuted. I couldn’t handle any more pain and pleaded for drugs. My epidural lasted for forty-three minutes and then it started to wear off.
“I’m ready for more, please,” I announced.
“You can have more,” Peg said. “It’s your decision, but if you do, you might not be able to push the baby out when the time comes, and if that happens we’ll need forceps.”
“When is this motherfucker going to be born,” I growled.
She looked at the clock, which said 6:11 P.M. “Seven o’clock,” she said.
My darling Clementine arrived at 6:59 P.M., weighing eight pounds, two ounces. After the hardest work of my life, I was starving, and David brought me an enormous stack of blueberry pancakes with double bacon on the side.
When she was christened six weeks later at Calvary Episcopal, I wore Birkenstocks. My mother and grandmother complained, but I told them Jesus wore sandals and would have understood.
I’d never seen anyone nursing a baby until I was pregnant myself, at my first meeting with the La Leche League, an international network of women dedicated to promoting and sharing information about breast-feeding. I called the instructor for advice all the time, especially when I started to travel. Some doctor in a strange city would tell me I couldn’t nurse if I was taking a certain antibiotic for strep throat, but the La Leche leader would check the most updated list of medicines and assure me that Clementine would suffer no ill effects. It was a wonde
rful way to start parenting, a bonding experience that my own mother had been denied because of a breast infection, although she was horrified that I nursed in public places.
“I just hope you don’t embarrass the family,” she said. “How long do you intend to do this?”
“I think Clementine should be weaned by the time she’s in first grade,” I said.
“Sarcasm does not become you,” she harrumphed. “And of course you know you’ll lose your bustline. You’ll probably need one of those breast deductions.”
The first appearance I made after Clementine’s birth, when she was six months, was an album-signing for Vanilla, and just as I was chatting up the disc jockey of a local radio station, I started to feel the pins and needles that signaled my milk letting down. I was still wearing pregnancy clothes, and the sticky fluid seeped through the synthetic red knit material of my pantsuit jacket, making a rapidly expanding wet circle. I grabbed an album and held it in front of me until I could stop the leakage by pressing my wrists against my nipples.
I was still about twenty pounds overweight when I tried out for an Albert Finney film called Wolfen, having been told that the director wanted “a Lauren Bacall type.” I wore high heels thinking I’d look thinner. (I had to look it up to know that the part went to... Diane Venora.) Instead, I got to do The Return, not quite the worst movie ever made but close. The plot, such as it was, concerned aliens who come to Earth and inhabit cows. Raymond Burr played my father, Martin Landau was a scientist, and Jan-Michael Vincent was my love interest--a rather sad group of actors, all of us trying to resurrect our diminished careers. Burr read his lines off a teleprompter. To simulate the spaceships comig to Earth, there was a helicopter rigged with lights that created a dust bowl as it hovered above us, so noisy you couldn’t even hear yourself scream. I did the scene once, then walked over to the prop man and asked to borrow his walkie-talkie.
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