Somebody to Love?

by Grace Slick

  That wasn't me speaking; those were my mother's words. For my grandmother, societal pressure had been everything and my mother received the brunt of her Victorian propriety. When I was growing up, the pressure to conform wasn't exactly imposed; usually it was implied. But God only knows what kind of absolute discipline was acted out on my grandmother, because she never mentioned it. The stories she told me were usually wonderful lies about fantastic adventures she'd enjoyed as a young girl

  I called my grandmother Lady Sue, not as a result of any nobility. It was just logic; I liked nicknames, she was a lady and her name was Sue. Lady Sue used to sit in a big chair by my bedroom window and sew costumes for me, because she knew my world was largely inhabited by colorful characters from the children's classics: Robin Hood, Alice in Wonderland, Snow White, Peter Pan, and certain cartoon heroes like Red Ryder, Prince Valiant, and Li'l Abner. I became those people, man or woman, it didn't matter. Put on the outfit and the twentieth century disappears. Go back in time, switch gender, change my accent, change my age—no problem.

  I'd sit by my grandmother's side, both of us squeezed into the big chair. Her hands moving quickly with the needle and thread, she'd just start talking, never looking up from her work, and as she told each story, the costume for it was materializing.

  Beautiful.

  One day, when she was making a short skirt for me to wear to the ice skating rink, she began, “When I was about your age, I was asked to be the star of a number in the Ice Follies. You see, I could skate so fast, it was like watching a blurred image circling the rink. So, to make it even more spectacular, I attached tiny electric light bulbs to the top of the toes of my skates. What the audience saw was a fifty-mile-an-hour rainbow of colors streaking around the darkened arena.”

  Of course, when she was a little girl, they couldn't do that with electric lights. My forward-thinking grandmother. She and I both knew she was making up stories as she went along, but together, we entered altered states with amused conviction. My mother would walk into the room from time to time and smile at what looked to her like two children thoroughly lost in make-believe. She couldn't join in—it was a small club, and she was too pragmatic for the existing members.

  My mother, Virginia, was a twentieth-century woman, modern, sophisticated, and elegant. Her land of enchantment was “right now.” No going back, no sci-fi. She wasn't tedious about it, though. She had her own way of “dressing up,” and she was good at it. So good, I often viewed her persona as some elevated, barely attainable level of existence.

  In the early thirties, my mother had taken a shot at Hollywood, becoming an understudy for Marion Davies (newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst's paramour). She also did some nightclub work as a band singer, performing at the old Pantages Theater on Sunset Boulevard. But when it came time to be the wife of a young investment banker, her less than pristine entertainer's life had to stop. Maybe, if she'd made it to the Betty Grable stage, I wouldn't be here at all. She'd probably be on her fifth husband and her unfortunate daughter would be writing a nasty little book about her.

  My parents both graduated from the University of Washington, Seattle. Soon after they were married, my father was transferred from the San Francisco–based investment firm of Weeden and Company to the Chicago office. Then, on October 30, 1939, at Chicago Hope Hospital, Virginia Wing gave birth to Grace Barnett Wing at 7:47 A.M. Well, not really. I don't know my actual time of birth or the name of the hospital, because they weren't written on my birth certificate. Back then, record keepers weren't as anal-compulsive as they are today, so I've always made up my own stats when it was time to fill in the blanks.

  After my mother had taken lots of legal drugs (they weren't into natural childbirth in those days), with no perceptible complications, she and my father, Ivan, took their firstborn back home to 1731 Rice Street, Highland Park, Illinois. (That address is on the birth certificate.) We lived in an old, dark wood-shingled house surrounded by trees, flowers, squirrels, and birds. My mom and dad were the prototypical Leave It to Beaver–type parents, as yet unsuspecting of the iconoclastic behavior that would shortly issue from their fat blonde daughter. Yup, I was blonde at birth and stayed that way until puberty.

  My only memories of that time come from what my parents told me, or from the pictures in my father's photo albums. Whether or not we're supposed to remember what those big faces were saying about us when they were hovering over our cribs, I don't know, but a train ride is one of the first things I can remember, unaided by photographs.

  When I was three years old, my father was once again transferred to another office, this time in Los Angeles. While my parents stayed behind in Chicago to take care of packing up our belongings, my mother's youngest sister accompanied me for the three-day trip on one of the old Pullman sleeper trains. Navy blue-uniformed porters set up a small hammock directly over my aunt's berth by the window. That was my bed. My most vivid memories are of the constant train rhythms, a dance where you don't have to move, it moves you. The hammock's swinging, trees and buildings parading past the window, the clacking of the wheels as they hit the small splits in the rail, the diesel smell that overpowered the fragrance of a single flower in a white vase on a white tablecloth in the dining car—these are all clear pictures and sensations I have in my head of the train working its way west. But I don't remember how my aunt looked or what she said. My memory is only of the machinery.

  Infanta: me at three. (Ivan Wing)

  All of my mother's relatives lived in Los Angeles: three sisters, their husbands and children, one brother, and my grandmother. Suddenly, I had a huge family. “I love L.A.,” croons songwriter/singer Randy Newman.

  So do I.

  Our big family would get together at my uncle Fred's Malibu home, where various sisters, aunts, children, assorted family friends and dogs wandered in and out of the beach house talking, laughing, and eating. The country was at war in Europe and Asia then, but I was aware of it only through the adults' conversations. And even then, the impact on me was minimal: squeeze the red dot in the margarine to make the white cube look yellow like butter, pull the shades down for blackouts, and cover your ears during air raid sirens. It all seemed like a game. I was too young to understand and lucky enough to be unaffected.

  My uncle Fred, a writer, sometimes took me to his office at the Farmer's Market, where I loved the carnival-like atmosphere. Colored booths and outdoor shops were decorated with Mexican hats and dolls, and garlands of red peppers and postcards were strung across restaurants serving food to laughing bronze-colored people in big sunglasses. Another uncle, Daniel, was a cinematographer at MGM. He introduced me to Dore Schary, who was then the head of the studio, but I wasn't as impressed with the production end of the business as I was with the “artists.” I thought films were the ultimate art form, a medium that included all of the other arts—music, dancing, set decoration, photography, costume design, acting, and writing. It was moving art, not something that was tucked away in a palace where only a privileged few could appreciate it, but an accessible and constantly changing experience for everyone.

  On the first day of preschool in L.A., I inadvertently marked my territory (like a good dog does) by being too polite. The teacher was speaking and I had to go to the bathroom, but I didn't want to disrupt the class by butting in with a request to leave the room. I thought I could hold it, but just before she finished her speech, I raced from the room, trailing a yellow stream behind me.

  Welcome to higher learning.

  That was my first taste of embarrassing myself in public. I must have enjoyed something about it because I've been getting myself into embarrassing situations ever since. Sometimes they're inadvertent, usually they're planned, or at least they seem like a good idea at the time.

  3

  Geisha Grace

  In 1945, reality kicked in again. Another transfer for my father, this time to the main office in San Francisco.

  We moved into a small stucco row house, 1017 Portola Drive
, a busy extension of Market Street, one of the city's main thoroughfares. Directly across the street was Saint Brendan's Catholic school, and I felt sorry for those kids, all having to dress the same, constantly being watched by those strange, gray-faced women in the long black outfits. I was glad my parents didn't belong to any weird organization that required such rigid, ritualized behavior. It was much later that I learned how each person imposes some version of rigidity on themselves anyway, with or without the help of organized religion.

  I went to kindergarten at Miraloma, an old World War I army barracks with cloakrooms and coal-burning stoves. We lived directly below Mount Davidson, which was covered by forest and crowned with a gigantic cement cross, and I instantly became Robin Hood on that hillside. I'd drop the twentieth century and all its prefab buildings and drab clothing, and go back to a time when everything was handmade—when artisans spent long hours creating the houses, the bridges, the clothes, and the books. No assembly-line products, no carbon monoxide, no atom bomb, no DDT. I followed my imagination to the Renaissance, to the grass banks of the River Thames, to the turn-of-the-century Wild West, to the court of Priam of Troy, to the steps of Notre Dame, to the palace of Ramses, to Jerusalem, Kenya, Oslo, Saint Petersburg—anywhere but where I was. Anywhere I could invent myself all over again.

  One of those places for invention was here and now, however—the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. Located across from the band shell and the aquarium, it was a grand and beautiful neoclassical building filled with antiquities, the four-structure enclosure spreading out from the Japanese tea gardens to the tree-lined streets. Every time I walked up the steps to the museum, I knew I was about to be surrounded by handmade beauty: paintings, sculpture, suits of armor, displays of antique clothing, and the elegant exterior of the building itself.

  A quiet appreciation of the museum's contents instilled itself in everyone who entered—children and adults alike. Some people who'd been loud and hurried outside became quiet and reverent as soon as they entered the main hall. Because of its size, there was a noticeable echo and a nice residual sound from the clicking of high heels on the marble floor. Red velvet cords looped through brass poles, which were placed four feet in front of the paintings as a reminder to “look but don't touch.” They were right to rope off the exhibits. I would have loved to have touched those paintings, to have felt the ridges of the brush strokes. I moved in as closely as I could to see the manner in which the artist had layered the paint.

  Just below the museum was the band shell, where I used to watch orchestras play. I loved to see the forties musicians with their chairs, sheet music, dark suits or long dresses, and, of course, the conductor. As an adult, I played that same stage many times, but we had amplifiers, no written music, jeans and T-shirts—and no conductor. Instead, we had a wild assortment of individuals wandering around onstage “shit-dancing” (a term my daughter uses to describe the way white people move awkwardly to rock music), smoking dope, handing out flyers, and interacting in their own way to whatever was going on. Little did I know then, as I watched the rigidity of the forties performances, that I'd be a part of loosening up the band shell ritual. Today, there are still “respectable” orchestras playing there, but the rock bands broke the tradition of formality generally associated with Sunday concerts in the park.

  On one side of the De Young Museum was a Japanese tea garden. It offered an excellent duplicate of the seemingly free-form arrangements of plants, rocks, steps, and flowers that typify the Japanese style of specific placement, which ironically gives the illusion of impressive spontaneous growth. Even during the time we were at war in the Pacific, the tea gardens continued to employ delicate-looking, young Oriental girls dressed in the elaborate costumes of Japan's Meiji era. The girls served tea and cakes to a steady stream of tourists and locals who, for at least a half hour, were able to suspend knowledge of the carnage that was taking place half a world away.

  The weekly art classes I joined in 1946 met right there at the tea gardens. About ten elderly women and seven-year-old Grace would bring paper and pencils and, for an hour and a half, struggle to capture the beauty of the place. Each of us was hampered by a lack of artistic ability, but we'd all compliment each other, primarily for persistence. If I finished or gave up before the allotted time, I'd drift into a reverie and “become” a fifteen-year-old geisha girl, serenely waiting to be the performer in some elaborate ancient ceremony.

  At seven years of age, I not only imagined myself as various characters, but I rummaged around in our closets and my mother's sewing boxes for actual costume and prop possibilities. On one dress-up occasion, I managed to make my parents run for the camera and, if only for a moment, reconsider their Republican political choices.

  I cut out a rectangle from a black piece of paper and stuck it on my upper lip—Adolf Hitler. I put on my father's coat and hat, which, with the mustache, softened Hitler into the then current presidential Republican candidate, Thomas E. Dewey. Finally, I stuck my hand into the coat between the second and third button for the Napoleon look, completing my impromptu triad of conservative power freaks. My parents still voted for Dewey, unswayed by their incipient liberal daughter, who was simply filling time until Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce would really have them in the aisles.

  Since my favorite cartoon character was Red Ryder, on my eighth birthday, I got a blue fat-tired Schwinn bicycle, a cowboy hat and boots, two pearl-handled thirty-eights with a double holster, a plaid flannel shirt, and a pair of Levis. So I was Red Ryder for at least six months. Then, at Christmastime, I turned my parents' hearts to mush by “becoming” the Virgin Mary, complete with white cardboard halos for me and my doll named Jesus, a white sheet draped over my head and down my body, some Kleenex swaddling diapers for Jesus, and a nauseatingly benign smile plastered on my face for the duration of the performance. You would think with all this carrying-on that I would have become an actress, but the idea of having to say someone else's lines has always bothered me, right up through the writing of this book.

  Don't put your words in my mouth.

  Fear of forgetting lines added to my distaste for the acting profession. If someone gave me a situation and let me make up the dialogue as I went along, I would have loved it. But movies cost too much to rely on that much freedom of expression.

  At my school's fourth-grade talent show, I decided to die. The decision was inspired by Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite (one of the three albums that composed my parents' record collection), which had a particular cut I liked, an instrumental piece called “Asa's Death.” I purloined one of my mother's old gray curtains, wrapped myself in it, and did an unintentionally funny four-minute dying scene, writhing around on the floor to the accompaniment of the dolorous music. “It looked,” my mother said, “like a send-up of Isadora Duncan.” But she was kind enough to keep that criticism to herself until I was old enough (thirty-five) to appreciate the humor.

  In hindsight, the most appropriate getup of all was the Alice in Wonderland costume Lady Sue made for me to wear in my school's Halloween parade. I was about the right age, eight, and at that time, I had long blonde hair, so apart from being a bit too chubby, it was probably the closest I came to actually looking like the character I'd chosen to inhabit for the day. That was my second-favorite Halloween costume, the very best being an accident of nature and my own stupidity.

  As I was walking to school one morning, I noticed some beautiful, bright red and gold fall leaves. I gathered up an armful to take to my sixth-grade teacher, running all the way to school to get there early and surprise her with my lovely gift. She was surprised, all right. And she forgot to thank me. The instant I walked into the room, she said, “Grace, put the leaves in the garbage very slowly, and then go home and tell your mother to take you to the doctor.”

  It was poison oak and I had third-degree burns all over my arms and face. By the time Halloween rolled around, the red raw skin had progressed to a disgusting crust of scabs, and the oozing sores prevented m
e from going out with my friends for trick or treat. But my disappointment was fully redeemed by the horrified expressions on the little kids whom I greeted in all my ghoulish splendor, holding a plate of dyed-red scrambled eggs for their “treat.”

  No one had a better Halloween outfit that year.

  4

  1798 or 1998?

  My childhood desire to wear costumes and travel back in time had nothing to do with being unloved. It wasn't about having a dysfunctional family or abandonment issues or domestic violence or obsessive/compulsive disorder or “de Nile” or “adickshun” or … yawn. It had to do with aesthetics. The way things looked to me, the way they sounded, the way they felt.

  To understand what I mean, I'd like you to place yourself in two different settings—the first, a bedroom in the year 1798.

  It's 8:00 A.M. You're lying on your back in bed. Everything you see in the room is handmade, including the big wooden crossbeams supporting the troweled ceiling. The bed and the dresser have been carved by an artisan and rubbed to a warm finish with stains and waxes. Your night-gown or nightshirt, the wrought-iron chandelier, the honey-colored candles that you extinguish with a brass candlesnuffer, the ceramic bowl and water pitcher on the dresser, the leaded glass windows framed by crown moldings and covered by homespun curtains—each is the result of an individual's imagination and ability to realize the final artifact.

  Your dog, who's been sleeping on a cushion in the recessed window seat, slowly wakes up, stretches, looks out the window, and listens to the soft clicking of the horse and carriage passing by on the cobblestone street. He goes over to the solid oak door with the hammered brass handle and barks. He's letting you know that it's time to take a morning walk on the three-hundred-year-old brick path, lined with trees, flowers, and the occasional deer or rabbit scampering in the bushes where birds are chirping at the sunrise. The path leads to the center of town, where a few red-cheeked merchants are rolling out their wheelbarrows full of produce from the local farms, to display around the town square.