To the extent that any of that attaches to me, I have made it through, yet, oddly enough, the vulnerabilities that led to my mistakes, and to my being susceptible to the bullying of certain “villains” along the way, were born of the very same early experiences that fueled the life-and-death determination that allowed me to survive.
I simply never imagined when I started this journey just how many backstabbings, cliff-hangers, and oncoming trains lay ahead.
• • • •2• • • •
I haven’t kept many photographs from my early life, but I did manage to hang on to a watercolor painting I did in primary school when I must have been about seven years old. It’s of a house and two stick figures, and on the back I wrote, “My parents hate me.”
Uncertainty about parental love is, unfortunately, a fact of life for many children. But my mother’s raging lunacy flared up so routinely that it left me in a constant state of bewilderment. I could never understand what I’d done to deserve her wrath.
Her animosity rarely escalated into violence. It was more of a steady drip, drip, drip of psychological assaults and her evident pleasure in hurting me. I was stupid. I was lazy. I was ugly. I was a hypochondriac. These were her endearments.
One Christmas—I was probably four or five—I woke up and walked into my parents’ bedroom, only to have my mother look at me and say, “What are you so excited for? You haven’t got anything.” I went back to my room and cried my eyes out. Later I went downstairs and there were presents after all. So what was the point of the cruelty?
The randomness of the little digs, as well as the raging invectives, left me like a lab mouse pressing the bar, hoping to get the food pellet, but more often getting the electric shock, until I simply gave up in despair. At a very early age I simply learned to shut down and never show any emotion, either happy or sad.
The older I got, the more fully I internalized the lesson that the way to survive was to be invisible. Any time I showed up on her radar, whether because I was feeling good or feeling bad, I became a target. But the trigger for the most dramatic outbursts was any time my father showed me the least bit of attention. Whenever that happened, my mother would throw an absolute fit.
When I was small we lived in Berkshire, in a Tudor cottage with a swimming pool and tennis court. There were pretty gardens, a well-kept lawn, and six bedrooms, though two of them were the size of cupboards. My father, a big man, had to bend down to get through the door frame built in the era of Henry VIII.
Then we moved to California, and from the time I was about eight, television became the center of my existence. Three’s Company. The Brady Bunch. Mork and Mindy. I never identified with any of the images I stared at so aimlessly, hours on end, but it did serve to introduce me to American culture.
We lived on Whittier Drive in Beverly Hills, next door to Nancy Sinatra, as it turned out. My father had come to the States to introduce Vidal Sassoon salons and hair care products as a national brand. This involved a dramatic surge in living standard for us, which was very exciting, especially with the blue skies and bougainvillea and the reflected glow of Hollywood. But despite the insistent sunshine, the move to California is when I remember things getting really bad for me, like a curtain coming down.
Just the other day I was tidying up my own daughter’s room, rummaging through the board games, arts and crafts materials, pens and pencils, helping her organize it all, and I thought back to my childhood bedroom where there wasn’t a desk, there weren’t books, there were no games, certainly nothing for arts and crafts. There was a bed, and a TV, and a set of barren shelves. It was like a cell.
Psychologists say that women who have very narcissistic mothers often take one of two very different paths in life: They either go down the rabbit hole of drug addiction, or they become overachievers. In a way I followed both paths, one after the other. They’ve also discovered that the women who become overachievers usually have a strong connection with their dads. This was always the case, at least in terms of my emotional makeup. But it wasn’t until we began to work together on Jimmy Choo that I began to feel that sense of connection being reciprocated.
• • • •
I GREW UP WITH TWO brothers—Gregory, three years younger than me, and Daniel, three years younger than he—and the three of us went to El Rodeo School, which was just at the foot of the hill below our house. My father drove us, and my mother would pick us up. It wasn’t long, though, before I was transferred to Marymount, a Catholic girls’ school a few miles away in Brentwood, and my mother began to drive me both ways. Our most memorable trip was the morning she was trying to mask the smell of liquor on her breath with a drop or two of Binaca. She was careening along through this exclusive neighborhood in her red Mercedes convertible, head back, bottle upended, when the cap came off and about three ounces of breath freshener gushed down her throat. She had to pull over to the side of the road and vomit.
As my mother’s drinking escalated, my father had us go around putting Post-it notes on all the liquor bottles saying, “Please, Mummy, stop drinking.” At other times he’d empty out the vodka and refill the containers with water. All the while we got the clear message that we were not supposed to talk about the drinking or about how crazy she was. The unspoken directive for the three of us children was to Keep the Family Secret and to, above all, Look Good and Act Normal.
The allure of being a “normal” family was so strong that my father once got it into his head that we should rent a recreational vehicle and go camping in Yosemite. So the five of us, plus another English couple, went off into the woods for this very “Ozzie and Harriet” adventure. Of course, my mother got stinking drunk, tripped over a log, and fell on her face, then began to rain long, obscene curses down on me. I think if a meteorite had struck the campsite, she would have similarly blamed me. When we got back to L.A., we had to make up some lie about what had happened to her face.
The joke, of course, was that this woman who devoted so much attention to how she looked went around the house wearing an unkempt dressing gown, no makeup, and her hair as frizzy as a fright wig. In her drunkenness she obsessed about the tiniest of imperfections, like the little fuzz balls that would appear on the carpet. Perhaps the finest moment of my childhood was the day she staggered down from the second floor, raging at me for God knows what, stooped to pick up a ball of lint, then slid headfirst and spread-eagled, all the rest of the way down. Shortly thereafter she was in a car crash, and she must have really erupted at the other driver, so much so that the man called my father at his office to ask, “Is your wife on drugs?”
Through it all I think my dad was simply overwhelmed, trying to keep the peace and make the best of it with three kids and a crazy wife. I didn’t have to go too far into some Freudian fantasy to believe that getting away from my mom and being alone with my dad would make things better. I always wished they would get divorced and that I could live with him.
Divorce was not a great option from his perspective, though, because in those days, despite my mother’s obvious shortcomings as a caretaker, custody almost certainly would have gone to her. As far as he was concerned, then, the only way it worked was for it to work, however superficially. And in his mind, I think he could rationalize the cruelties he saw visited on me as being merely verbal and emotional. As in, I wasn’t being branded with cigarettes or beaten with coat hangers. (She merely threw them at me à la Mommie Dearest.) In other words, I would survive.
My father did the best he could as a typical “man’s man” of his time, someone for whom hugging and expressive conversation were simply not part of the repertoire. And that’s before we factor in the whole matter of English culture, the stiff upper lip and all that. He had his hands full, and he simply wasn’t equipped to cope with the fact that he had a severely depressed daughter.
Only once, and long after I’d grown up, do I remember him coming clean, as least to the extent of saying, �
�Your mother is the most selfish and self-obsessed woman I’ve ever come across.”
Of course, she was also one of the most beautiful. She’d been a model when they met—the peak of her career was a print ad for Chanel—and for her, life was still all about how she looked. Her mornings were a lengthy ritual of dressing and applying makeup. Then it would be lunch with a girlfriend, then picking us up from school. She had no particular passion for gardening, or tennis, or charity fund-raisers, or any of the other things that wealthy women sometimes do. For her it was shopping, lunching, drinking. We had a pool, but she couldn’t swim. As far as enjoying the Southern California lifestyle was concerned, we might as well have lived in Glasgow.
• • • •
MY BROTHERS WERE VERY CLOSE, and they shared a room and had the same friends. They were a team, and they used to go out in the street and play with other kids on the block. As the only girl, I inhabited a different planet, almost as if I were an only child, and definitely home alone.
On those rare occasions when I tried to bring over friends, it was a disaster. My mother would fly off the handle and kick them out of the house for making too much noise, or for some minor infraction like leaving a candy wrapper in the sink. After a while I stopped inviting anyone over, and I retreated to my bedroom, closed the door, and watched TV. There was no one saying, “Got any homework today? Let’s sit down and maybe start into it. Are you hungry? Do you want a snack?”
My mother’s primary form of engagement with me was an ongoing effort to humiliate. To her friends she would make cutting comments or play the victim, making the case that I was a terrible child. Then she would get these friends to come talk to me. I remember being at home on Whittier Drive when a woman I’d never seen before came up to me and said, “Can’t you be nice to your mother?” Being older and more aware never helped me in understanding these strange psychological games. The more I thought about it, the more bewildered I became.
When I was about thirteen, a girlfriend invited me to go with her to the movies in Westwood. She was a little older, old enough to drive, with a nice family, a nice house in Beverly Hills, and a white VW Rabbit. She drove by and picked me up, we went to the movies, and then she dropped me off back at my house. At which point my mother came out on the lawn tearing her hair in a rage, screaming about how this girl was trying to seduce me into a lesbian relationship. The exact and very charming phrase she used was, I believe, “Get off her, you cunt!”
I never saw my friend again.
During my brief stint at El Rodeo I met two sisters and they were my most consistent social connection. I would go to their house, rather than the other way around, but what I saw there differed very little from what I experienced at home. It confirmed my belief that all the mothers in Beverly Hills were simply out of their minds.
My parents’ own social circle extended into the English contingent in Hollywood. Michael Caine would have us over to his house for Sunday lunch, and I remember meeting Sean Connery once at the Beverly Hills Hotel, shortly before my parents took a trip with him to Morocco.
Because of my father’s extensive business connections, there were long stretches when they would go out to dinner every night, leaving my brothers and me to eat at home with the Mexican housekeeper. In the movies there’s always the nanny or the maid, usually a black woman but sometimes Hispanic, who gives the lonely child all the love she’s not getting from her distant parents. Unfortunately, our domestic helpers came and went in an endless succession, and I never developed a relationship with any of them. For reasons that may appear obvious by now, none of them chose to stick around our household very long.
One evening I brought along a friend to a restaurant called Jimmy’s, where my parents were having dinner with a group that included Phyllis Diller. My mother kept leaning over to stage-whisper in my ear, “Get that whore out of here.” For an instant I thought she was talking about the comedienne, but then I realized she was talking about my friend. I didn’t know what to do or even where to look. A little later I walked into the bathroom and there was my mother passed out on the floor. I went back to get my dad and he had to carry her out to the car. I remember he seemed very humiliated, even as he drove away in his white Rolls-Royce.
About this time my mother took a flight somewhere by herself and got drunk on the plane. She became so unruly that she had to be taken off and searched and held by the police. In these days before cell phones, she was missing for hours and my father was in a panic because he didn’t know where she was. He was calling the airport frantically, and I remember standing there thinking why on earth would he want to look for this woman, much less find her? I know that a bit more compassion and forgiveness would reflect better on me. I will go so far as to say that I’m still working on it. But certainly those admirable qualities were not available to me as a teenager. At the time, I was barely able to process. And, of course, whenever one of these little dramas occurred, nobody ever said anything, much less offered an explanation. So all that was available to me was my own sense of shame and humiliation, while my mind struggled to make sense of it. Essentially, I was reduced to the primitive options of fight, flight, or freeze, and I chose the latter, which was to become my default response throughout life to any unexpected act of aggression or any “shocking” situation that defied easy explanation.
• • • •
WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN MY parents decided that I should go back to England for boarding school. Perhaps my father saw that putting a broad continent and an equally wide blue ocean between me and my mother was the only way I’d survive. Or maybe he thought getting me out of the house would make his wife easier to live with. I wanted to go to Beverly Hills High because one of my friends was going to go there, but as soon as a return to the UK was presented as an option, I saw that as a fine idea. I would have happily shipped off to join the Red Guard if that’s what it took to get away from my mother.
Back when we’d lived in Berkshire, our local doctor also served as resident physician at Heathfield, in Ascot, the sister school to Eton. It’s very English, of course, with lots of girls with titles and double-barreled names, but that wasn’t my background at all. We were nouveau riche with a capital N. So my father called up his friend the doctor and asked if he could help get me in. The doctor rang up the school and said there’s a girl who needs to come from California, and an interview was arranged.
My parents were planning to stay on in Beverly Hills, but we all flew over for the admissions interview with the headmistress, Mrs. Parry, and on the drive out from London, my mother hid a bottle under her seat, but not very well. I had no doubt that the clear liquid peeking out from inside the plastic bag was vodka.
We stopped first to see their friend the doctor, all three of us, and as my parents chatted in his drawing room, I went back outside, snatched the bottle from under the car seat, and hid it.
Later, all through our rather formal encounter with the rather formidable Mrs. Parry (her husband was a housemaster at Eton), I had the pleasure of watching my mother squirm and fidget, deprived of her tranquilizer. She went absolutely mad with twitching, after which she threw a raging fit, but she really couldn’t go into why she was having the fit because she couldn’t admit to having brought along the booze.
Heathfield was very adept at producing Sloane Rangers, the perfectly coifed, usually blond young women you see coming and going from the luxury shops near London’s Sloane Square. It was incredibly snobby, but I was this sort of funny, alien thing from Beverly Hills, so I got a pass. If it hadn’t been for my exotic American accent, I’m sure I would have been given the frostiest of cold shoulders.
I was also exotic because I arrived with hair curling combs and Calvin Klein underwear, which was an endless source of fascination to these daughters of the aristocracy still forced to wear granny pants under their pleated, navy skirts, white shirts, green ties, and navy V-neck sweaters.
The c
ulture shock went both ways, of course, especially when they played sports like “netball,” which I’d never even heard of. I missed my friends, and the L.A. lifestyle, but at least I’d escaped the insanity at home. Then again, I hadn’t escaped at all. The damage had already been done.
• • • •3• • • •
Even though I was out of the house, and out from under my parents’ direct control, I was by this time thoroughly embedded behind a wall of glass, the detached observer, emotionally flat. I felt that the girls liked me, but I also remember them teasing me with, “Hi, Tamara. Anybody there?” The only way I overcame the numbness and came to life was with the help of a chemical stimulant.
On my very first day the girls took me with them to the bushes, pulled out their cigarettes, and lit up. So I began smoking, too. As everyone who’s ever done it knows all too well, the first cigarette is revolting, but you carry on because you want to be part of the group.
At night we broke out the wine, which was far more agreeable. There was a shop up the road where they’d sell us anything we wanted, and we’d go out into the woods and jam the cork down into the bottle with a stick. Why we never thought to buy a corkscrew, I don’t know, because I’m sure they would have sold that to us quite happily as well.
With the exception of these brief moments devoted to sin, the days at Heathfield were nothing if not well organized. We’d get up in the morning, have breakfast (at least we were supposed to—I never made it), sit through chapel, do classes, then sports, then dinner, and more studies, until nine p.m., when it was time for bed. Each of us had her own room with a single bed, a desk, and a cupboard. What little time I had for introspection was spent in there daydreaming, staring into the mirror at a face that my mother had convinced me was quite ugly.
In My Shoes: A Memoir Page 3