And I bit my tongue. I said nothing, as always. I recall sitting at the dinner table, looking into my son Ted's eyes after David had made yet another series of disrespectful comments to me. I remember wondering if he was learning that this is how you treat a woman. Are my boys learning how to be men from watching David? And what do my girls learn from watching me? That you just take it when your partner is ugly to you? That you cry and say nothing because that's what Mommy does? Will they pick partners by my example?
A couple of years earlier, I was watching the news and there was a terrible story that had riveted the nation about a man, Joel Steinberg, who had murdered his six-year-old daughter. His common-law wife, Hedda Nussbaum, was attracting almost as much attention for not protecting the child and was claiming also to be the victim of Steinberg's abuse. There was a media and public frenzy around this: they were asking her, "If he was so bad, so cruel, so abusive, why didn't you just leave?" I was sobbing, watching these news shows.
I knew why. David was by no measure the monster Joel Steinberg was; but I knew why. Hedda didn't leave because she didn't know she could. I hadn't left David because I didn't know I could. I was stripped of self-confidence; I was fearful and uncertain. I felt as impotent in my own house as Hedda seemed to feel. I don't mean to be claiming some victimhood greater than what I experienced, but I think the emotional dynamics between me and the Heddas of the world don't differ all that much.
David took his sweet time finding a new place to live. He was working with a couple of Realtors, one of whom had actually called me on the set, back when I was still filming Family Ties! She had been showing him places for months, knew about our situation, and wanted me to know that in her opinion, David was not looking for a place to live. He was killing time, being difficult, and frustrating all the Realtors who were working so hard for him. I suppose if it were so bad, I could have moved out of the house, but I would never have left without the children and I had no permission to take them away from him. There was nothing for me to do with this information except let it go to my stomach. Everything was agitating me; my stomach was hurting constantly from a small ulcer, I had lesions on my gums, and my hair was falling out ... all a combination of stress and drinking. I'd added sake to my cupboard staples; I'd heat it in the microwave and it served to keep me warm and foggy on difficult nights.
David finally found a great place in Santa Monica on the beach, which he couldn't move into for about eight weeks because he wanted to remodel it. Just as I was picturing another two months of our cohabiting hell, he got a six-week job in Czechoslovakia. Sweet relief. Out of town was better than the police.
Before he left the country, we divided up the furniture, Post-it notes identifying his piece or my piece. He left all of his clothes hanging in our closet and said he would leave them there until he got back from his job. He wanted his Post-ited furniture, all his stuff, to stay where it was since his new place wouldn't be ready until he was back in the country and his remodel finished.
The day of his departure to Europe finally arrived and I watched David load up his suitcases and walk out the front door. As his car drove away, I burst into surprised tears of loss and failure. I had wanted so much more and didn't know how to get it. Once again I'd sent my children's father away. I felt like such a loser, that this was the best I could do after fifteen years of marriage. I was totally unprepared for my reaction; I'd expected to feel joy and jubilation, FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST, and dancing in the streets. I must have cried for at least an hour.
Then I called a storage facility and asked them to come pick up his portion of the furniture, his clothes, everything the next day. I wanted every reminder of him removed; I was not going to live in a state suspended between marriage and divorce with his furniture and all his clothes until he returned in two months. Recovery from David, I knew, was going to take me a very long time and I felt I needed every day I could wrest for myself. And finally, doing something in a way that suited me instead of just him felt mighty fine.
I went upstairs and into the closet we shared. Much of it was filled with his custom-made shirts and meticulously tailored clothes. David ran regularly and was a pretty fit, handsome man who dressed in a manner that he felt flattered his lean physique. But when I looked at his clothes, this is what I was remembering: times we'd be traveling, in a hotel, and the lining of his suit jacket might have come untacked--and he'd fling it at me to fix on the spot; times when he'd disparage me for wearing long skirts and boots because of the "message that I was sending." I was feeling the weight of his arrogance and vanity and I got really angry.
I got a ladder and lugged it up to the closet and perched on the uppermost step, even with the top tier of David's jackets and shirts. I moved aside some old corduroy number and found one of his newer, nicer jackets and opened it up, exposing the silky lining. I took my seam ripper and gently snapped every third stitch out of the base of the lining along the bottom of the jacket. Addressing the back of the jacket, I very carefully snipped about every third stitch in the center seam at the tightest section below his shoulders. I repeated this with a few other blazers, then turned my attention to his pants, loosening back seams where they took the most stress. My fantasy was for gaping holes to occur not immediately but once the clothing had been on for a while, in public, miles away from the house, perhaps. And that this would happen repeatedly and unaccountably, striking him in his narcissistic self-regard. My warped satisfaction from this sophomoric act came from years of strangled silence and impotence and it makes me sad that this was the only recourse I felt I had.
In the end, our divorce dragged on for more than eight long years. There were scrutinized in-home visits from child custody evaluators, sessions with court-appointed therapists, rafts of scathing, accusatory letters fired off between attorneys. We both used the children as pawns and whoever had possession of them for the moment won for that moment. At the time, I was desperately upset when the court determined that we would share custody. Today I feel it was ultimately for the best, but the whole process was awful--punitive and rife with suffering for all parties. I swore I'd never get married again.
I have some misgivings about revealing so much about my life with David here. But so many women have been in situations similar to mine, I'm hoping that by seeing how I, too, participated in the abusive dynamic, others will recognize the pattern, realize they are not victims and do have some power, and find a way out.
In no way is it my intent to hurt him any more than I think he intended to hurt me. I think he acted in the only way he knew how, to take care of himself. I don't think I was the target; I was just the one there. I do feel that if he could have done better, he might have.
Chapter 12
With David Ogden Stiers in a scene from The Kissing Place in Toronto, 1990.
Gone does not necessarily mean forgotten. Furniture, clothes, shoes are all easily boxed and stored. Harder to capture, contain, and store were the memories, the feelings that lingered long after the Porsche pulled away. In the absence of the abuser, we often abuse ourselves. It's a dirty job but someone's got to do it.
David used to stand in his bathrobe at the bedroom window, one shoulder higher than the other, wineglass in hand, surveying the front yard and our neighborhood. What I read in his stance was power, decisiveness, certainty. I never questioned that's what he felt because that's how I experienced him. We, the rest of the world, were wrong; we were stupid, we weren't up to the task. And I wanted that certainty that he seemed to have. I took to standing at the window or wandering around the yard, always with the glass of wine, trying to tap into the power that was surely as available to me as it had been to him. Okay, if it's not in the yard, it must be in the glass, so I committed myself to the search for fearlessness through alcohol.
I was forty-three years old, mother of five, and single for the first time in more than fifteen years. The world had a new and exciting patina to it; I decided to think of it as my oyster and treat it as such: I we
nt looking for pearls. I hadn't really navigated the dating scene, and the idea of having to meet someone, tell him my story, listen to his story was seriously fatiguing. I felt reckless and in a hurry; I wanted to cut to the chase. I wanted to feel attractive, desirable, desired. I wanted an affair. Not having any confidence in my seduction muscles, I picked three good guys, friends I'd known and worked with over the years. All of them were safely married. I approached each individually, one after the other, and basically proposed that we have an affair.
Each rejected me very gently, without shaming me, saying in various ways, "Thank you. I'm very flattered. But I'm in a good place with my family and my wife and I don't want to do anything to threaten that." I'd picked those rare birds who valued their relationships. The lovely part is we're all still friends today.
At least I had my work. I was excited that I had a new agent. In casting off the bondage of my marriage, I thought I might as well be thorough and let go of the other men I was tied to who felt like weights to me. I held my own Saturday Night Massacre and relieved myself of Jack Fields (my agent, my stepfather, my agent, my stepfather) and a nice but ineffective man who had been my press agent for many years. I wanted to start clean with people I could count on who didn't have any agenda with me.
Through my new agent, John Kimble at the William Morris Agency, I was offered a fun, edgy role playing a serial baby-snatcher from Atlanta in a made-for-TV thriller called The Kissing Place. It was the story of a young boy who discovers that the woman he calls his mother (moi) abducted him as a toddler from a New York playground. Not only did I get to be Southern, but my character, Florence, who becomes Crystal, was subject to violent mood swings where she'd be talking softly with her son one minute and, seconds later, seething with anger and planning his death. She was pretty creepy but I identified with the wild, unbridled fury that governed this character and I wanted to walk around in her skin.
The Kissing Place was filmed on location in Toronto, Canada, and the group I was working with was great. I met and became fast friends with Suzanne Benoit, our Oscar-winning makeup artist. She was an artist, a French-Canadian character with great style, intellect, and vivacity, and this was the first of many movies we did together.
I liked living in my hotel suite in the middle of Toronto. I think I was living out the fantasy of being a young single girl working in the city. I'd whip up some spaghetti with a hotel room-version, garlicky marinara sauce and balance that with a couple of glasses of wine, usually white. After dinner I'd most often go over my script for the upcoming week's work. I liked to be a few days ahead in memorizing my lines and it was important for me to have a strong sense of the story's arc. Or, I might sit at my window on the twentieth-something floor with my chardonnay and look out at late-night Toronto and cry and miss Kate and Mollie and Peter.
The twins were five; Kate, fifteen. Peter and Mollie were out of the country with David and near impossible to reach. Kate was in school in Los Angeles and because we had a lot of night shooting, even connecting with her was very hard. I've never been great on the phone anyway and I think I put guilt first in all my conversations. Eva was finishing her senior year in boarding school; Ted was in college.
It's hard to explain separation with little ones, and when location took me away from them, I used a method I'd hit upon that I hoped would smooth their understanding of the elapsed time and to know, to see when they would have me back home. I drew a tree and attached small cutout leaves equal to the number of days I'd be gone. Every night at bedtime, they would remove one leaf from the tree until it was bare ... then I'd miraculously walk in the door. I have no idea how effective it was for them but it helped me.
It was second nature to start pouring the wine as soon as I got back into my hotel room at the end of a day. I didn't have to be sad, or overtired, or in a divorce depression. I just liked it. I felt I deserved it. I liked the way the wineglass stem felt between my fingers. I felt this was how one dealt with the adversities of adult life. I was posturing as an adult.
As the filming progressed, I was anticipating a tough late night when shooting the final scenes of the movie where my character, Crystal, gets pretty nuts and the scene climaxes up on a high fire escape. I didn't have a lot of confidence in how to play the scene, felt the dialogue didn't really help, so I was a little out there as the night approached. I usually liked to have a good tall chardonnay on hand in my trailer before hitting the set, especially when there was a gritty scene. I hadn't had time to get to a package store so the morning of the dreaded scene, I was reduced to begging a teamster to pick up some wine and bring it to me later on location. The early filming went okay but I was wound really tight from anxiety about the night work. When my friendly teamster delivered the wine, I was stupefied. It was red. He brought me red wine, which was simply not going to do the trick. White took me to where I needed to go; I couldn't imagine red doing much of anything. How the hell was I going to pull this off with red? Okay, drink two. Problem solved. I chug-a-lugged two tumblers and changed into my stunt wardrobe.
I never nailed the scene. It is dark; I drag the little boy up the fire escape to avoid the police, who are climbing up from below, then yelling, yelling, dialogue, dialogue, throw myself over. (Okay, I fake throwing myself over; a stunt woman does the real thing, shot from a lower angle, falling onto a very thick stunt mattress below.) It was pretty tricky, pretty highly emotional, and it took several trips back to my trailer to make sure I was on pitch but it never came together for my satisfaction. It was a disappointment. I should have had white. Damned teamsters.
Once at a press junket, a reporter had asked Andrea Baynes if we were ever going to work with anyone else. But the truth is, she'd produced three movies with me and we were a great team. I loved her, loved her grasp of story, her humor and perception. When she came to me with a fourth project, a TV movie script for a steamy melodrama called Burning Bridges, I signed on immediately. This character was light-years from mentally disabled Winnie Sprockett or Crystal, the child menace. I played Lynn Hollinger, the wife of a college professor and mother of two little boys, who has a sizzling fling with a married doctor. I finally got to play a character with a sex life! This was also network TV in 1990; her affair leaves her so racked with guilt that she ends up having a nervous breakdown.
There were so many things I loved about making Burning Bridges--we shot it in picturesque Vancouver and the material had the potential to close the book on my wholesome Elyse Keaton image. Always looking for validation, I also started a real affair with my handsome Dutch "doctor" costar. He was blithe about the fact that he had a wife and three sons back in the Netherlands, and I got the impression that he was no stranger to location romances.
On the downside, I found the adult content far more difficult than I could have predicted. The director, Sheldon Larry, wanted me to be topless for some of the love scenes, totally nude in another--which I found puzzling because ABC's Department of Standards and Practices wasn't going to allow nudity to be shown on prime-time TV.
I balked and said I wanted to at least be wearing a bra. Then one of the executive producers--not Andrea--came to my dressing room and bullied me, taunting me about my modesty, calling me a schoolgirl. By the time she'd left my trailer, I felt humiliated, powerless, and childish and caved in, agreeing to be topless and wear nude-colored underwear.
I decided that if this was what I'd signed on for, I should just get fortified: do it and shut up. I abandoned any boundaries I'd drawn about not drinking on the set. I made sure I had a tumbler of white wine within reach or in my hand at all times. When they called for first team to come in, I'd hand it off to Stacey, my fabulous costumer, and saunter onto the set. Drinking during a scene was the next natural step and because I was playing a visibly distressed character anyway, a nice glass of wine made sense. As it turned out, being topless only applied to one long love scene with the Dutch actor, and whenever my bra was off I was safely pressed against his chest. And blind with alcohol.
The truth is that I got through it and I was inordinately proud of my performance. So much so that a month after I got home and found out that Burning Bridges was going to have a screening at Paramount Studios, I invited my mother and Allan to come see it, which I had never done before. I was always afraid of her judgment, but this time, I wanted Whitney to see what I considered to be some of my finest work.
We all gathered in the theater, the lights went down, and as soon as we started watching the movie, the tears began rolling down my face. I was moved less by the painful saga of my character's personal awakening than I was by reliving how agonizing it had been for me to risk looking foolish, to play a sexy and complicated woman and really put myself out there. I didn't see on the screen the brilliance I was expecting to see, the splendor I'd felt while I was performing, but I didn't have a critical eye for myself that day.
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