The move turned out to be fun for me in many unexpected ways. I'd thought I'd start tenth grade at Hollywood High, as had my brothers; instead I found myself at James Monroe High School in Sepulveda, two blocks from my dad's house. I seized the opportunity to reinvent myself. I changed my name to Mardi, thinking somehow that would free me to be a more interesting person.
And I actually was popular at school for the only time in my life. I went out on a couple of dates. I made a good friend named Judy, who lived just around the corner, and we would spend many afternoons at her house, singing and playing the piano together. Living in my father's simple tract house in the flats was so different from living in the isolated Hollywood Hills, far from school with no friends nearby. I really felt, Wow, I'm a different person!
I'd never really spent any serious stretch of time around my father. People found him very charming and energetic with a nice sense of humor and a penchant for bad puns. ("How's the flying business, Tom?" "Oh, up in the air." He had been a pilot and worked with charter aircraft at Van Nuys Airport.) He was very charming and amusing but not very interested in me, it seemed. I'd come in the house, whether from school or back from a week away, and he'd be sitting in his chair next to the floor lamp, buried in and obscured by the newspaper. "Hi darling," he'd say energetically but without lowering the paper. "You look great!" So, yes, that was amusing but not inviting, not bonding.
The only physical interaction I ever recall having with him was when my brothers and I were three, four, and five, and we started playing a game we called 1-2-3-GO! My father would lie on the floor while we stood, eagerly poised in various corners, while he counted, 1-2-3, and on GO! we'd all race to see who could sit on his stomach first. His job, of course, was to keep that from happening. I loved the physicality of it; we'd shriek when we made it to his stomach and shriek to play it again and again. We milked that game for what it was worth for years until my father opted out because he thought he was going to get hurt. I also remember that he had taken us to Yosemite for a few days after his divorce from my mother. And while I was living with him he gave me a driving lesson in a parking lot across from his house. That was pretty much it.
I was very fond of my stepmother. If there was going to be any substantive mother figure in my life, it was Ginger. She and my father had two of their own children by the time I came to live with them (and two more shortly after I left), and although she worked part-time as a Tupperware dealer, too, she always made time for me. Ginger was the youngest of three sisters and came from a very protected Baptist family. Occasionally, my brothers and I would get to be part of holiday celebrations with Ginger's family out in Alhambra in the early years of their marriage. There'd be the usual spread of food and chatter, but what I loved most was when all of the women in her family would go into the kitchen after dinner to wash and dry the dishes, and they'd be singing and laughing. There was a real sense of warmth and family. I can remember Memaw, my aunt, and Whitney being in the kitchen together, but there was never a feeling that they were enjoying one another's company. Because of Ginger's family, though, washing dishes and singing and chatter in the kitchen is something that I've tried to re-create with my children. When my daughters come home and we're cooking together, we're always singing and laughing, baking and throwing flour at one another.
I was doing okay at Monroe High School and had an unparalleled social life: I had a few people I went to football games with. I tried out for the B Team cheerleading squad, which I didn't make. I think I was a respected part of the drama class. But I got homesick. I don't understand why. But halfway through the semester, I told my father, "I miss Whitney." Which is funny, right? What did I miss, her absence? I think it hurt my feelings that she was just continuing her life without me. So I moved back to Whitley Terrace and finished tenth grade at Hollywood High.
It was right around this time that two new preoccupations came into my life: the high school drama department and LSD. It was 1962, just when the acid craze began to take hold in this country, and my brothers jumped right on the psychedelics bandwagon. Dick was the first to offer me a tab of acid. I remember him standing there with two little white pills in his hand, one for me and one for him. At the time he was eighteen and way cool and usually paid little attention to me. If those tiny squares were worthy of an interaction, that was good enough for me. I don't even think I asked what it was.
It was Brian, not Dick, though, who became my LSD partner. He was living with friends but still going to Hollywood High when I moved back home, and we'd meet up and take it together on weekends. At this point he had full-on hippie hair: beard, mustache, and a long, red ponytail. Brian, his friends, and I would drop some acid, go out to Santa Monica, and walk around the beach at night, holding candles, just laughing and laughing and laughing at everything, interspersed with the occasional shriek of "Wow!" Then we'd go to the International House of Pancakes. We'd watch way too many plates arrive at our table and eat six bites before something about the color of the ketchup distracted us. Or the pat of yellow butter melting. Or the golden maple syrup oozing slowly from the dispenser. Or our waving hands leaving afterimage trails in the air. Once some guy walked into the IHOP dressed as a clown with a bulbous red nose and big floppy shoes and we thought we'd lose our minds! "Wow, man! Wow! Far out!" Afterward, we'd head up to Mulholland Drive, and, as we came down from the high, have long, convoluted discussions about what we'd seen, experienced, and hallucinated.
Taking LSD made me feel connected to the others; I loved that we were sharing insights, beauty, and laughter together, even though it was totally forgotten the next day. I started taking play production classes at school in search of the same connections. There wasn't really any other place for me. I was one of the last to get picked at team sports because I was not very agile. While Hollywood High had a Greek system in place, none of the sororities wanted me, even though Dick leaned on an old girlfriend who was a Delta and got her to pull some strings. The Deltas passed anyway. Then I tried to get into the Lambdas. No deal. I wasn't unfriendly, but I had no people skills; I didn't bring much to the table. I was just looking for a place to be.
The theater gang was a different story. We were all on the outside of the Hollywood High social whirl. I was never assigned the important parts. A typical role for me would be playing Hera, the goddess of marriage, in The Tempest. But at least I felt I belonged. One day in drama class an eleventh-grade girl, Tory Thompson, casually mentioned to me that she and two of her friends were going to a football game that night. Tory was very tall and slender and I thought she was just beautiful. I must have mentioned that the game sounded like fun because she then asked if I wanted to come along.
"Really?" I asked. "Of course!"
I didn't have permission to leave the house that night. But I figured that since Jack and Whitney were going to be out, they'd never know. That evening after the football game, Tory's friend offered to give me a ride home. So Tory and I climbed into the bed of her friend's pickup truck facing backward. We turned off of Sunset Boulevard and, while heading toward Whitley Terrace, we stopped at a red light. A pale blue Cadillac pulled up behind us and I froze. In it sat Jack and Whitney. The flat, deadly look in Jack's eyes was terrifying. I don't think I even looked at Whitney ... it was Jack I feared. I think I stopped breathing. He smiled faintly, nodding slowly. I was in such big trouble that I've totally erased from my memory what happened when I got home.
For Tory and me, this turned out to be a bonding experience. Tory, whose father was a raging alcoholic, knew what it was like to live with an unpredictable parent. I'd managed to make a friend who actually preferred the strained, pretentious atmosphere of Whitely Terrace to the wine-fueled turbulence she might find at home.
Tory and I spent a lot of time together and at some point she met my brother Brian, and they began dating. Around the same time a sweet, unassuming senior I knew from play production class named John Herzog asked me out. John was a very good actor and had most of the choi
ce leading roles in our high school productions. We dated for about a year and I still have the photo from when he took me to his senior prom. He's handsome in a pale tuxedo jacket and black slacks; I'm in a spaghetti-strap gown that barely supports my DD-size breasts (I remember losing many cookie and cheese crumbs down my ample cleavage that night) and my hair is up in a circle of heavy braids with tiny white roses stuck in it. It was like I had a big flowered Danish on my head. I looked pretty goofy but I remember having a good time. There was normalcy and routine, both in school and in friendship, that felt stable.
I liked being with John. He was a good, gentle guy, and one year after the prom, I will lose my virginity to him. I won't be in love; I won't be eager to do it; I will sadly feel a little dead with no connection to him or the event. That pretty much is the end of us.
In the summer of '63, my mother was starring in a summer stock production of a romantic comedy called Janus at the Cherry County Playhouse in Traverse City, Michigan; Jack, Dick, and I came, too. For a sixteen-year-old who hadn't been much of anywhere, that part of the country was breathtaking. Traverse City sits right at the tip of a bay that feeds into Lake Michigan; it was a small town with a river running right alongside the historic downtown area. Even better, Whitney was happy. In northern Michigan, my mother's role on Hazel made her a huge celebrity, and after another ego-bruising season as Missy B, she just drank in the attention. We stayed in a tiny white house out on the peninsula that my mother rented from a woman named Mrs. Wysong. She was warm and friendly--sort of like a white-haired, bespectacled Mrs. Santa Claus with a Michigan accent.
All of these images were part of the attraction the following summer, when I returned to Traverse City to be an apprentice in the same summer stock company. It was Jack's idea to pull some strings with the Cherry County Playhouse and get me an apprenticeship. Jack said I could bring a friend, so Tory came along. Jack paid any expenses that Tory's parents couldn't afford. I found Jack's occasional bursts of generosity confusing but welcome. At the time, my older brother Dick was working as an editor and features writer at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, and although he still lived at home, he wasn't there very often. Looking back, I can see that for all intents and purposes Jack and Whitney would have the house to themselves for two months, and I imagine they relished that.
For the first time in our lives, Tory and I were free to do whatever we wanted. We shared a rented room in the house of a local doctor and put in long hours at the theater, but no one monitored our comings and goings. Apprentices showed up at the playhouse very early in the morning to help out with whatever needed to be done--cutting gels for the lights, printing out playbills, getting wardrobe ready. We stayed late into the night, taking tickets, delivering wardrobe to dressing rooms, running and then taking inventory of the concession stands, and waiting until the play was finished so that we could strike the set. I loved it.
The Cherry County Playhouse was a theater in the round held in a huge red- and white-striped circus tent. On hot nights or afternoons, the intense heat collected under the high peaks of the tent and the apprentices had to ventilate it by rolling up the side flaps. When the weather turned blustery or it rained, strong winds would blow in through the entrance flaps and literally lift the tent up. When this happened, it was up to the apprentices to hold the tent down. I remember times when Tory and I, working with the others, tied the flaps closed and climbed up the sides of the tent, mooring ourselves between staves during the performances, our full weight stabilizing its vibrating panels. The part that always made us laugh was when a powerful blast of wind would catapult us into the air, loose ropes whipping like lariats. It was wild. The work we did was varied and demanding but always exciting.
During that summer of '64, I worked with the comedy legend Joe E. Brown, who starred in our production of Harvey and who was best known as the millionaire Osgood Fielding III, who falls for Jack Lemmon in drag in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot. My part was to stand in the wings and belt out a song intentionally off-key, but I still considered it a feather in my cap that we shared--kind of--the same stage.
This summer was also the first time I really tried my hand at alcohol. I'd not paid much attention to it before, being put off by the noxious taste. Here, everyone drank a lot: cast, crew, and apprentices. I had a crush on the stage manager, Barry. He drank Cutty Sark and water. That became my drink of choice. It was disgusting. I can remember one strike night there was a cast and crew party in the tent for the closing of a show, and I began counting out loud how many drinks I'd downed. I think I hoped I was impressing Barry. "I've had eight!" was the last thing I recall shouting. The next thing I knew, it was morning and I came to--where I'd passed out--smack in the middle of the stage floor. I probably wasn't the first apprentice to spend the night there.
Barry and I got involved. It didn't seem to take me much time, maybe because I was no longer a virgin, and in retrospect, my decision seems capricious and cavalier. And it was tricky because he was thirty-five, married, and had two small daughters. Just like my internship, Barry's stage manager stint was only for the summer. His family stayed back in whatever city they lived in, while he had a tiny rental in the town.
I don't remember how the affair evolved; I can summon up a vision of myself kind of standing around, being available, wondering if I caught his eye. (Do you see me? If you see me, I am worthy.) Barry was short with dark eyes and a narrow face and resembled a skinny, not-as-handsome Al Pacino. What drew me to him was how nice he was to me. He gave me books: the collected short stories of Charles Lamb, some Shakespeare, a few John Steinbeck novels. I felt like he really understood me, that he grasped that I was the kind of girl who was interested in these sorts of things.
To be honest, the fact he was married hadn't made much of an impact on me until the day of the crew picnic, toward the end of the season. I was so stupid I went even though I knew Barry's wife and two little daughters would be there. But why did I go stand near his picnic table while his wife was unloading their food?
"Who's that, Mommy?" said one of his little girls.
"Oh, darling, that's your father's girlfriend," she sighed. She seemed to have a world-weariness and acceptance that far surpassed anything I understood. How she knew or why I went over to the table is beyond me. Seeing her reaction made me realize that Barry had a life and responsibilities that had nothing to do with me. And I felt terribly foolish and small.
My internship was over at the end of the summer stock season. I was sad to see my independence come to an end. Tory and I had had great fun, although my being with Barry had cut into our together time. Now she was going home by bus and Whitney and Jack, who had been in Chicago, drove up to get me. They surprised me by announcing that there was a famous performing arts high school called Interlochen Center for the Arts about nineteen miles from Traverse City and that before we headed home we were going to check it out as a place for me to enroll the following semester. This was the first I'd heard that I wouldn't be going back to Hollywood High. I was very unsure about the whole idea. Six weeks away for summer stock had initially seemed daunting; being so far away from home for a whole school year was paralyzing.
Interlochen Center for the Arts sits on 1,200 woodsy acres of land with two lakes and an outdoor amphitheater. There was a year-round academy and a summer camp. Kids come from all over the world to study writing, dance, theater, and art. But the central focus was music. Years later, in fact, my daughter Kate would go there for three summers in a row to study piano. By the end of her first summer she knew how to take apart and reassemble a harpsichord.
There were few basketball games or mixers at Interlochen. Students were too busy putting together brass quintets or composing six-part cantatas. Walking through the shady pine forests where the practice cabins were located, from one you'd hear a flute student teasing out a Poulenc sonata, from another the soaring sounds of a voice major practicing an aria; farther on a wind ensemble would be working out their different parts. It was
thrilling, transporting, and electric with artistic invention. If only it had been contagious.
It's not easy to get into Interlochen. Everyone who went there was put through a rigorous audition process. I enrolled as a voice major. Now, while I had a nice singing voice for a seventeen-year-old, "nice" was about the extent of it. Before I arrived in September to begin my senior year, I had sent an audition tape of me singing show tunes, which is what I'd usually focused on at home. That tape just couldn't have had any bearing on my acceptance to the school.
Standing in the soprano section of my first session with the choir--I can remember so clearly to this day--copies of the Vivaldi Gloria are passed around, and the darling, round choirmaster, Mr. Jewel, takes his place in front of the choir, raises his hands, and ... obviously expects us to start singing something we've never even seen before! Except, I realize, everyone does start singing ... except me. They are sight-reading the Vivaldi Gloria in Latin! I could belt out "I Cain't Say No," but I cain't sing in Latin.
I felt ashamed, disheartened, and out of my league. I was thousands of miles from home at a place I never asked to come to, where I was so ill equipped. Why would they send me away to a place I wasn't qualified for? How could they not have known?
The campus itself was exhilarating. I knew this school was a gift and was rich with opportunity for me to grow and become a stronger, more varied singer. I really wanted to love being there, but I just couldn't. Perhaps at another time in my life--but not then.
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