How to Cook Your Daughter

by Jessica Hendra

  Oh, Colorado’s calling me

  From her hillsides and her rivers and

  Her mesas and her trees,

  When blizzards snap the power lines

  And all the toilets freeze,

  In December in the Colorado Rockies…

  I sang along to most of the lyrics of “Colorado,” but I always skipped one part:

  The baby didn’t die until we’d burned

  Up all our wood.

  Considering we ate her raw

  She tasted pretty good.

  I had had enough of eating kids with “How to Cook Your Daughter.”

  Lemmings opened in New York on January 25, 1973, and it seemed a big event in my life—mainly because we got to stay overnight at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York. My father cursed Matty Simmons for being cheap. But I was incredibly impressed by the Roosevelt. I stood on the red carpet in the lobby and didn’t mind that it was threadbare. And when we left for the theater, we took a wonderfully bumpy cab ride down to the Village Gate on Bleecker Street, a no-frills venue that seemed less theater and more enormous basement.

  In true Lampoon style, Lemmings was packed with “bad” words and overt references to sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. But it was much too late to protect us from any of that. Not that anyone suggested we should have been left at home. Instead, Kathy and I sat drinking Shirley Temples and watching the show. I had a wonderful time. Although every joke and parody flew over my head, I responded to the energy of the show and to the obvious enjoyment of the adults watching it. Besides, the music was fun. I liked when Chris Guest put on a hat and played the harmonica in a Dylan parody. I giggled watching Chevy Chase act crazy in a motorcycle jacket. And, along with most of the audience, I fell in love with a fat, bearded guy named John Belushi. He threw himself around the stage and made noise with an energy that I related to—more like a kid than an adult. He stumbled and screamed his way through a Joe Cocker imitation, falling down and springing up again like an insane jack-in-the-box. I had heard the real Joe Cocker many times, coming out of the speakers of my parents’ stereo. But I didn’t recognize that John was doing satire. I just thought he was adorable as he stood there and yelled into the mike:

  And I think of days

  Of purple haze and Freon,

  Smokin’, jokin’,

  Doin’ Coke with Leon.

  I made no connection between “doin’ coke” and the white powder I had seen around my house.

  During the next few months, Kathy and I became child groupies of the show and begged to see it as often as we could. I learned all the words to songs I couldn’t hope to understand. We scampered backstage, star struck, but recognized none of the problems brewing—the predictable squabbles between actors and Belushi’s increasing drug use. All that winter and spring, I listened to the Lemmings soundtrack and sang along as if the songs were from The Little Mermaid.

  The success of Lemmings meant that my father was working much less at the magazine. And though I loved the show, I missed the Saturday visits Kathy and I used to make to the Lampoon offices, when we’d drive into New York with him, so he could finish some project there. Kathy and I would roam the empty hallways, testing out the chairs and desks. I liked Matty Simmons’ chair best. It was big and soft, and I sat at his desk and drew on spare scraps of typing paper.

  On one of those Saturday trips, months before their friendship came to a terrible end, my father took us to Michael O’Donoghue’s loft on Spring Street. I was startled to find that he didn’t have a bathroom. Not in his place anyway. You had to go all the way down the hallway and look for a closet that had a toilet in it. The loft was dark and crowded, and Michael had a bizarre collection of ragtag toys littering his home. I shrieked as I sat on the severed leg of a mannequin he had tossed on a chair. Kathy and I haltingly inspected scores of decrepit dolls. Their stuffing oozed from ripped bodies. Tattered and dirty stuffed animals seemed to leer from the loft’s dark corners. It felt as though the loft were a toy graveyard, full of the former friends of children who had, willingly or otherwise, abandoned their dolls and animals to Michael. Where did he get this stuff? It felt so creepy, as though there was some story, some message in this apartment of misfit toys. Maybe Michael doesn’t like children…. I’ll bet that’s it! And if Michael doesn’t like children…and he and Daddy are friends…and Daddy sleeps here…then maybe Daddy doesn’t like children either! I was stunned. But then it started making more sense.

  Many of the pictures of children I had seen in the Lampoon made me feel this way, especially the ones in Michael’s stories. I poured over his parody of Eloise looking for clues. There she was, this incorrigible little girl, who didn’t live at the Plaza but in a downtown fleabag full of junkies, transvestites, and dirty, old men. Then I found his Vietnamese Baby Book with its sentimental illustrations of a baby in a diaper with missing arms and stumps for legs. And his Children’s Letters to the Gestapo. It seemed as if Michael made a point of going after childhood the same way my father went after Catholicism. It sometimes scared me: These were the people in charge; these were the adults. They’d better like me. They just had to! I looked around the loft again, at the rotting toys that didn’t look happy. I just wanted to go home. Instead, I sat quietly, watching my father and Michael smoke a joint that seemed to burn forever.

  The Lemmings cast was far less sinister. They joked and laughed with Kathy and me, and during the long Lemmings run, many became regulars at the country house—especially John Belushi and his fiancée, Judy. Of all the New Jersey visitors, John was the most fun. He would hoist me up on to his wide, padded shoulders and carry me around the garden while I laughed and tottered about. Once I giggled so hard that I fell backward. John caught my feet just before I would have tumbled to the hard ground below. He played games of tag with Kathy and me that invariably ended with him collapsing on the ground in mock death. And I became to him what Freckles was to me. I followed him wherever he went. I sat next to him at meals, witnessing an appetite that truly was extraordinary. In his biography of Belushi, Bob Woodward describes John in the Lemmings era as a “menacing teddy bear.” It was precisely that quality I found so attractive about him: He seemed cuddly, yet slightly dangerous.

  On the nights we had guests, my father (and whoever was out at our house) carried a long, wooden picnic table and benches down to a stone barbeque we had inherited. Our high-tech, outdoor sound system consisted of the electrical cords of two stereo speakers stretched as far as possible toward the side door of the living room, which was left open to let music fill the garden and beyond. Daddy turned up the volume as high as it would go, and the Rolling Stones, Linda Ronstadt, the Grateful Dead, and the Beatles blared out into rural New Jersey. Its only competition? Our neighbor Doug’s chainsaw. At night, after Doug put away his power tools and lawn mower, the music had the place to itself, and the reviews from our neighbors would come in the form of phone calls and bitter gossip: “Goddamn those Hendras. Worst thing that ever happened to Glen Gardner. That music! And all those hippie bums turning up at their house! Can’t wait ’til they go back to wherever the hell they came from!”

  And what did the house think, the majestic old house? Its stone walls vibrated with guitar riffs. The smell of pot and hash penetrated its weathered beams. It had been the only witness to what had happened between my father and me, and I couldn’t help but wonder: Did it want us to go too? I still loved the house, no matter what had happened in the darkness of my bedroom. And I was sure that the house was not only alive, but that it, more than anyone else inside it, would protect me.

  That feeling was only slightly shaken by the visit from the witch who came one night to investigate the spirits my father said lived there. The witch was named Janet, and she brought her Ouija board, along with a man named Tom. They were friends of a friend of my parents, and after a few minutes, I could tell they weren’t part of the usual Lampoon crowd. These people were different. They were nice—and sarcasm-free. And Janet was very clear about her
“powers.” She called herself a “sorceress.” Of course, her ability to contact the spirits lurking in the dark corners of Fifty-five Red Mill Road became easier when all the adults smoked grass and dropped acid before the séance.

  The Ouija board came out after dinner, just as Kathy and I headed to bed. My mother took us upstairs while everyone else gathered in the living room, ready to bridge the gap between the living and the dead. In the morning, my father told us what had happened. Kathy and I shivered as he recounted the message from the Ouija board: “This is a dead house,” it had spelled out over and over again. He told us how the table had tipped and rattled as the words came forth. But he said he swore he could feel Tom pushing against the table, causing it to shake.

  He thought the Ouija-board message was a fake, but Daddy also told us he was certain that he had seen a ghost in the window of his bedroom. He said he had gone upstairs to get something while the others were still downstairs. Suddenly, a face had appeared outside. At first he thought it was Tom playing another prank. Then he realized that there was no way Tom could have gotten up one flight to the window.

  “Was it a mean ghost, Daddy?” I asked, not sure if I wanted an answer.

  “What did it look like Daddy?” Kathy wondered.

  “It was a white face, girls…a thin, white face. It was the ghost spirit of this house. It did not look mean or vicious,” he said, “just terribly, terribly sad.”

  There was something in the way Daddy said it that made me feel he really had seen something. I had always thought the house had a spirit. Now I knew for certain what I had always suspected. It didn’t want us here. And I knew something else—or at least came to understand it later. My father feared the ghost’s sadness because he feared his own death and what lay after.

  He was a bit of a hypochondriac. I remembered in California when he had a terrible flu and got himself in such a state about his impending death that my mother asked a neighbor, conveniently both a physician and a psychiatrist, to come over. I heard Daddy ask if the doctor thought it was time to send for a priest. I wasn’t sure if he was just being dramatic or whether he truly thought he was about to die. As always, it was hard to separate sarcasm from authenticity. I also remember one night when he must have been tripping or stoned, screaming that he was dead and lying in his coffin. He had the lapsed Catholic’s fear of the hereafter: He no longer believed in heaven, but he was guilty enough to imagine he would end up in hell.

  Daddy pondered his sighting for a moment and then began telling us about the other ghost—the one that lived in the study. His name was Fred Without a Head, and Daddy talked about how Fred roamed the house at night, holding his head in his hands. Unlike the sad face he’d seen hovering outside his bedroom window, we could tell he was making up headless Fred. Even so, I often thought about Fred and didn’t like being alone in the house at night.

  Perhaps that’s part of the reason I loved the late-night dinners by the barbecue. Setting up was always fun. Kathy and I were the busboys and carried the plates and silverware down to the table. We had contests to see who could carry the most without dropping anything. It was beautiful in the late evenings, when the darkness held off until just before nine. When it fell, Kathy and I got to light the candles. But after a while, when the wine was gone and the guests chose hashish and acid for dessert, I began to feel anxious. I was losing the grown-ups to the goodies on the table, and the guests and my parents got noisier and more restless.

  Most of the drugs produced elation, at least among this crowd, and the chatter and laughter grew accordingly. There seemed to be few bad reactions to anything, except, of course, until the next day, when hangovers roamed the house like headless Fred. But sometimes, things went awry. One night, when a guest brought something particularly exotic and many strong-smelling joints circulated, I watched as my mother slipped momentarily under the dinner table, overcome, by her account, by the fear that she was buried alive in the black hole that had suddenly opened beneath her. Sean Kelly leaned down and announced, rather dramatically: “A woman seems to have disappeared under this table!” At least he showed some concern, sarcastic or not. I noticed that Mom passed on the joints thereafter and took it easy on the drugs in general after that night.

  In his biography of Belushi, Bob Woodward describes the cocaine use at Lemmings rehearsals and suggests that my father introduced John to the drug. Woodward also says that my father often had to get drugs for the cast in order to keep the show running smoothly. I was too young to really be aware of all this. I saw some coke use at the time, but actually less than in the years to come, when my father’s own coke habit grew (as John’s obviously did as well). The drugs of choice in New Jersey were more hallucinogenic than speed or coke. But I do remember the flurries of phone calls later in the Lemmings run, which I now realize were probably to find the drugs needed to get Belushi on stage. By then, John was coming out to the country less often. And as he became more difficult to handle, my father’s relationship with him understandably cooled. Still, in the early months of the summer, everyone from the cast still seemed relatively united.

  Because of Fred Without a Head or anything else that might be lurking in the dark house, Kathy and I hated to go back inside alone, especially with all the grown-ups down at the bottom of the garden. If I were tired, I lay down on one of the benches and put my head in my mother’s lap or begged someone to put us to bed and sit outside the bedroom. Once or twice John’s fiancée, Judy, would sit in the window seat on the upstairs landing, waiting for Kathy and me to fall asleep. Sometimes, I woke up at two or three in the morning and looked out the bedroom window to see the candlelight still flickering at the end of the lawn. I went out onto the landing to find that whichever adult had come with us into the house had long since abandoned the post. I’d walk down the dark stairs and stand by the kitchen door, listening to the faint sound of laughter coming from the table. I wanted to check that everyone—anyone—was still there and hadn’t driven off while Kathy and I slept.

  The day after those parties, the guests—some of whom had been sent to one of the bedrooms in the Forge—wouldn’t appear at our house until late. Often, they might say their good-byes while my parents worked around the house, gardening, chopping wood, or mowing the lawn. My mother tended vegetables and made almost every meal from scratch. My father did most of the household chores. But of course, that didn’t stop him from having fun. That summer of 1973, the Lemmings summer, my father, competitive as ever, took a stout rope and an old tire and rigged up a bone-crushing swing that tretched from the Forge over the river and into the trees on the other bank. The trick was to take a running leap at the tire so that it—and you—went as fast across the river as possible. Kathy and I tried, but it proved too frightening. I smacked into a tree and almost broke my nose. But John and my father took turns battling it out to see who could swing the highest and fastest, yelling in exhilaration as they flew across the rocks, their feet wedged into the tire, their hands clutching the rope. They were better at being kids than Kathy and me.

  One scorching afternoon, my dad set up a slow-walking contest on the hot asphalt of the road by the Forge. Kathy, Becky, and I were the contestants. Whoever could walk the slowest on the burning tar would be the winner. The prize: a check from my father for $50. I walked slowly, the sticky asphalt searing the bottoms of my feet. Kathy and Becky quickly folded and ran across the road. I had won! As I hopped toward my dad, he wrote out the check with a flourish and handed it to me. I smiled as I read pay to the order of. And there was my name, Jessica Hendra. Then I saw how my father had signed the check: “Mickey Mouse.” “Never do anything just for money, Jessie,” he lectured. I simply stared at the check, my cheeks burning. He had embarrassed me, and I felt angry—but it wasn’t just because of the check. It was not that I disagreed with him, but I was beginning to sense the hypocrisy of his moral code. He was not Robin Hood. And I had come to understand that, despite what my father had told me, what he had done to me was wrong—on
that road and in my bed months before. I knew the way he teased Kathy was cruel. I knew the way he disregarded my mother was unfair and hurtful. Now, here he was, watching his daughter burn her feet on the steaming road, all to teach me about important values? I heard him rant and rave about the misdeeds of those in power, and I know he castigated them in the Lampoon. But I never once saw him look at the wreck he had made of his own family and hold himself accountable, as he held Nixon accountable for ruining the country.

  One night toward the end of that summer, deep into one of the barbeques, one of Glen Gardner’s finest dropped by for a visit. The feast had been set up as usual down at the barbecue. I remember John was there with Judy, and Sean Kelly with Valerie. Dinner had been served particularly late, and after just a few bites, I had slipped onto my mother’s lap in exhaustion. Before I went to bed, I heard John say that he had brought something “really special.” I had no idea he meant acid. Mom took Kathy and me to the house and tucked us into bed.

  I woke up a few hours later. Finding the landing empty, I ventured downstairs to do my usual check on the grown-ups. I stood by the kitchen door looking for the candlelight when I noticed a short figure with an enormous flashlight crossing the lawn, heading toward the dinner table. He looked like a policeman from the outline of his nightstick and gun. The feast was still in full swing, and I was scared. I’d been brought up in a post-Kent-State-and-Watts-riots household, where police were “the pigs.” The Brownies and the safeties at Lebanon Township School may have been fascists, but there was no question about the police. And I still remembered what my dad had said that night in Los Angeles, when the California Highway Patrol office stopped him for speeding: They always take the children to jail first, you know, girls.

  I didn’t know at the time that my parents and their guests were about to come perilously close to getting locked up for at least several years; there were enough drugs of different shapes and sizes sitting out in the New Jersey moonlight. Anxiously, I ventured out the kitchen door and stood on the lawn. My father had seen the officer, too. He rose quickly and strode across the bridge to divert Sergeant Pig before he got too close to the table. Then I heard him speaking to the officer in a plummy British accent, as if this unexpected turn of events had changed him into a character from a P. G. Wodehouse story. “So sorry, dear fellow…yes, yes, music too loud, disturbing the neighbors…how dreadful…happy to turn it down, my good man…frightfully sorry and all that…hope we haven’t inconvenienced you…”