A Lotus Grows in the Mud

by Goldie Hawn

  Rut Hawn was a Southern gentleman from Little Rock, Arkansas, with values straight out of the Victorian era. His mother had four boys and no girls, all of whom treated her like a queen. My father was always uncomfortable discussing sex or anything having to do with it, much less joking about it.

  When I was young and feeling the hormone wave envelop me, I started dressing differently and putting on my pink frosted lipstick and black eyeliner. Daddy was the last person I wanted to see me walk out the door. In fact, I would race past the back room where he was reading a paper or watching TV so that he wouldn’t.

  “Wipe off that lipstick!” he’d yell, his nose all wrinkled up as if he smelled something stinky. He really didn’t want me to grow up and be like the other girls.

  I remember when I snuck out of the house once to go to a sock hop at the Armory in Silver Spring, Maryland, telling my folks I was going to a friend’s for the night. There were about a hundred and fifty kids there from all the other schools, and it was dance, dance, dance, the music blaring, arms flying.

  In midjump, Jean Lynn hissed, “Goldie! Your dad’s here!”

  I froze.

  I looked up and saw my father, his limp hands dangling from the sleeves of his full-length brown gabardine coat. His eyes searching madly for yours truly. He spotted me. His pursed lips meant business. A man of few words, he said, “Get in the car, Goldie.” We drove home in silence. He was more hurt than angry. I had lied to him. How could I do that? I thought, the guilt eating me up inside. There were no harsh words spoken, no curfews. Disappointing my father was punishment enough.

  I finish my song, “So please don’t eat my plums…,” shooting my father a guilty look and rolling my eyes. He shrugs his shoulders and he mouths, That’s show business!

  Daddy and I wave at the entire crew as they drive back down to Denver to nestle in their comfy hotel rooms at the end of each working day. They leave Central City the ghost town it really is, with just a few crazy locals and us left. Not for us the five-star hotels. We are braving it out in a ramshackle Victorian house with no heating and bad plumbing I have rented on a dirt road. Each night, we walk up the road toward our castle in the crisp night air, nine thousand feet up, nearer heaven than I have ever been.

  Feeling chilly, I wrap my arm in his. The crew has scattered sawdust all over the set streets, and it crunches beneath our feet. There is still a smell of horses in the air. Along the way, we stop and look in the windows of the perfectly preserved stores. Walking past the Helen Hayes Theater Company, I say, “Daddy, just imagine what it would be like if we really lived here and this was our home. Wouldn’t it be neat if life was this simple and every morning we could wake up in the mountains?”

  “Yeah,” Dad replies wistfully, “gotta stop and smell those roses, Go,” as we turn onto our little dirt road.

  Back at the house, my father hands me a steaming cup of freshly brewed coffee.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I say, warming my hands around the cup.

  He pulls up a rocking chair and sits down next to mine on our front porch. Cocooned up to our noses in layers of sweaters, we sit side by side and watch the sun dip below the horizon.

  “Go, I want you to hear me out,” Daddy begins, and I know that I am in for a long haul.

  “If they drilled a hole in the Santa Monica Mountains, it would create a vacuum that would empty out the whole damn basin of the smog,” he tells me. “See, it would create a suction that would vent out in the desert.”

  “But then the desert would have smog, Dad.”

  “Yeah, well, let them worry about it.”

  I laugh. I have heard the story a hundred times, and I never tire of it. I know he’s half serious, if only someone would put his crazy idea into action. And then he talks about other things, about how he wishes my sister didn’t have to work so hard and how he wishes my mom would get out more instead of sitting around the kitchen table drinking coffee, smoking and gossiping with her relatives. He tells me of his ideas for movies he wants to write. He repeats stories about his travels. How, as a young boy in the thirties, he hocked his violin on the way to the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, where he had been offered a scholarship, to buy a saxophone. How he taught himself how to play and got a gig with a band.

  “Did I tell you about the time I was on my way back home to Las Vegas and my car broke down in Death Valley?”

  “I don’t remember,” I lie, eager to hear the story again.

  “Some guy picked me up in his Maserati…”

  I cut him off. “His name wasn’t Stu, was it, Daddy?”

  He laughs. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Well, my car broke down in Death Valley too, you know, except I gave someone a ride. I never told you that story.”

  “Oh, anyway, as I said, Go, hear me out.”

  I let him go on telling me about this man who picked him up, and how he told him he was Goldie Hawn’s father. How he tried to prove it by pulling a picture of me out of his wallet. Trouble was, I was only three years old.

  “And what did he say, Daddy?” I ask again, prompting him.

  “I couldn’t get him to believe me!” He laughs. “He thought I was crazy. He floored the Maserati and never spoke another word.”

  We sit in silence for a while, drinking our coffee. Tilting back on his rocker, Daddy points to the derelict wooden house opposite ours. The shutters hang off their frames like the broken wings of birds. The wooden picket fence has collapsed onto itself like a set of old dominoes.

  Mists of steam rising from his lips as he speaks, Daddy says, “People throw things away before their time. Look at that fence over there. You know, that fence was made from an old tree that once stood somewhere on the earth. Even though they cut the tree down, they made a fence out of it, so that it is still alive and useful.”

  I look at Daddy and can’t help but wonder if he is talking about himself.

  He goes on. “Things can always be recycled and used in other ways.”

  “Well, I think that fence could definitely be recycled, Daddy!”

  He laughs, his eyes twinkling. “I’ll get right on it tomorrow.”

  We sit in silence for a while longer, rocking in squeaky syncopation.

  “I guess it’s time to turn in,” Daddy says, getting up.

  I kiss him good night and go to my room. Through the walls, I can hear his radio playing. The comfort of knowing he is lying there, listening to his talk shows, sends me off to sleep.

  Daddy isn’t required every day on the set, or in every shot, and when he’s not needed he disappears into the frozen countryside, like the will-o’-the-wisp he is.

  “Where did Daddy go?” I ask the crew. “Hey, did anyone see Daddy?”

  “Well, I saw him walking down Main Street about an hour ago, Goldie, holding some stick with a weird thing on the end of it.”

  “Oh God, not his metal detector!” I cry. He carries that crazy metal detector wherever he goes, hoping to find some old piece of junk someone has dropped along the way. Then, with a hammer or a bit of wire and some nails, he’ll make something out of what he has found. It might be an ashtray fashioned from a rusty old carburetor—his “nicotine art”—or a recycled scrap made into a plant pot for the garden. Every evening when I get home, he shows me what he has come across with childlike wonder.

  I think of all the crazy things Dad has invented in the past, like his home heating system utilizing Mom’s vacuum cleaner. Or the alarm he concocted that blasts Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture every time somebody turns the front doorknob. Or his homemade air-conditioning unit for his car, a huge cylinder strapped to the window that blows water-cooled air only when he reaches 47.5 mph.

  My father is a gentle man, a philosopher and a dreamer; he is as light as air and just as refreshing. With his blue, blue eyes and the looks of a forties crooner, he is terrible at business and hopeless at being a husband, but he is great fun to be around. People regard him as eccentric, and, I guess, weak, because my
mother is so domineering. He has always seemed more vulnerable and more perishable, but in many ways he is the stronger of the two: a survivor. He tells people with self-effacing honesty, “I’m not eccentric. I am just an unusual man who does unusual things.”

  Not long after I first left home, Daddy left home too, after almost thirty years of marriage. It was as if he was secretly waiting for the right moment. His departure was masked as a decision to go west for work, but he never really came back. Instead, he became the gypsy fiddler, feigning to look for work, roaming the country in his Volkswagen Bug, recording his encounters with strangers, playing golf and dropping in on us from time to time.

  He was happy enough, and endlessly self-entertaining, but my poor mother was left home alone with no children, no husband and the bitterness of never having lived the life she dreamed of. There was a continent of regret and guilt between them.

  When I look at my relationships with my parents, I think it was a gift, or maybe just survival, to be able to see them separately, because to see them as one would have been a very dangerous illusion.

  I hurry home from the set, hoping to find Daddy on the front porch waiting for me. As I round the corner, I smile with relief. There he is.

  “Hey, Go!” he yells. “Slow down. You might miss something.”

  I steady my pace, and he yells, “How was your day? On a scale of one to ten?”

  “A ten,” I yell as I skip happily toward him. A big, fat ten.

  That night, sitting on the porch, watching the sun disappear behind the old house, we sit in silence, our chairs creaking in some sort of mismatched harmony. Staring out at the bitter Colorado landscape, I rock back and forth until it becomes like a meditation to me, just being by his side. A lot of the time, my father just sits there next to me, silently thinking. When he opens his mouth to speak, I turn to him in anticipation of each nugget of wisdom he shares with me, the little nuggets I am stringing into a priceless necklace.

  “Kink,” he says finally, turning to me, his eyes locking with mine, “you understand me, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I whisper. “Yes, I do.”

  Rocking back in his chair, looking out at the landscape, he says, “Go?”

  “Yeah, Dad?”

  “Never forget how good a glass of water tastes.”

  “I won’t, Daddy. I promise.”

  Some people have wonderful relationships with their fathers; others don’t. I was lucky. Daddy was my first love, and it was he who shaped me. There was no other man that I ever loved more than him. He was the one for me, for better or worse. One look could have crushed me. One pat on the back could have made me feel like the most beautiful girl in the world. He had that power, as all men do with their little girls.

  That is why it is so vital that men understand their value and what effect they can have on their little girls. How they shape their lives is the singular most important thing that they will ever do. How our fathers define us becomes how we see ourselves, or how we don’t see ourselves; how we feel sexually, how we don’t feel sexually. They inform so much of how we view ourselves as females and how we view men—not only as providers, lovers or givers of the seeds of life but also as friends.

  My father wasn’t perfect. He hurt my mother badly, and I don’t think she ever fully recovered. There were things he didn’t do for me too, never snuggling or offering cuddles. I never heard him say, “Hey, Go, come and sit in my lap.” I just did because I needed to.

  This treasured sojourn in Colorado was the last time we were able to spend this sort of quality time together. I was embarking on a new relationship, which was to lead to a new marriage and parenthood for the first time. I always planned to go on a cross-country trip with Daddy one day in his little Volkswagen Bug, but somehow life got in the way.

  We wonder who we take after. We wonder if we are more like our fathers or our mothers. The truth is, we are never like just one of them, but are a conglomeration of the two. It was certainly the sweetest of luck to have them both in my life. Everything that I am is thanks to the great love they gave me. My father’s gypsy spirit lives on in me, as does my mother’s need to nurture. I am both the genetic fruit of their loins and the product of the environment they created for me, good and bad. What happened to their marriage, sadly, was also a great reminder of how important it is to stay truthful to your feelings.

  I think if I were to answer the question honestly, I’d have to say I’m more like my father. I am just the same gypsy he was—traveling, questing, learning and constantly inventing new ways to make life funnier. And, thanks to him, I never forget what that glass of water tastes like.

  The following Christmas morning, Daddy couldn’t wait to give me my present. He handed me the strange-shaped package, gift-wrapped as usual in old newspaper (always the funny papers), and laughed as he watched me unwrap its jangling contents.

  The first thing I saw was a laminated picture of Central City, welded into some rusty old frame. Beneath it, suspended on nails, were eight metal railroad bolts, undoubtedly some of the ones he had found with his metal detector in Colorado.

  Lifting the strange contraption out of its wrapping, he held it up and struck each of the bolts in turn. Each bolt was perfectly in tune; each one had been painstakingly chosen for its tone.

  As I sat there in openmouthed wonder, my daddy played me his own special rendition of the song he felt best summed up our time together in Colorado. He played “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” It was one of the greatest moments of my life.

  prayer

  Never doubt the magic of miracles.

  Just because we can’t see them, taste them, touch them or smell them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

  This is my first baby. I am three weeks overdue and feel like I am spawning a whale. My feet are a distant memory. Just getting out of a chair requires assistance. This fifty pounds of love is an adjunct to my belly.

  To say I have eaten my way through pregnancy would be an under-statement. Vichyssoise and coconut cake are my dietary staples, and my mother—who seems ever-present—makes my every culinary wish her command.

  But the days of eating for two are coming to an end—or so I hope. This baby doesn’t seem in any hurry to present himself. Or maybe he just likes it in there. I take long walks, hoping to coax him into the world, pointing out its beauties. But he seems attached to his amniotic bliss.

  It is 5:30 A.M. Outside, birds sing. Through the window, the sun shines early-morning hues on my bed. Lying next to me, fast asleep, is my new husband of less than a month, Bill Hudson, a singer in a band. This time, my wedding was arranged by my mother, down to the last detail. Determined to take charge of this one, she left no stone unturned. The backyard where I grew up, at number 9 Cleveland Avenue, was transformed into a Garden of Eden.

  I was eight months pregnant in a silk cream-colored jersey dress with ruffles around the shoulders. I looked like a great white whale. I had to strap my belly button down so it wouldn’t show through my wedding dress.

  My prudish father, dressed in a blue suit, looked like one tall drink of water, hips thrust forward. He swaggered down the steps of the back porch, me holding on to his arm for dear life as I negotiated the stairs in heels. Walking down the aisle, my heels sinking into the soft grass, I was having a real wedding at last. Our family and friends all flew in. Waiting for us were a priest and a rabbi, to keep both sides of the family happy.

  Standing there in my backyard, the place where I had always imagined getting married, I looked around at everybody from my past—Jean Lynn, David and Jimmy Fisher, my aunt Sarah and uncle Charlie—and grinned. This is what I’d longed for when I put crinolines on my head as a child and pretended to be a bride. Here I was—me, my father and my belly full of baby Oliver.

  Now, a month later, September 7, 1976, Oliver’s big day arrives with a bang. Pain. Yes, pain. My long-awaited, longed-for baby is on its way. I slip out of bed, calm and in control. I pull some things together, pack them i
n a bag, take a shower and wake Daddy Bill to tell him it is time.

  “Time?” he cries, popping out of bed like a firecracker. I assure him there is nothing to worry about. My mother appears at our bedroom door, dressed in her long white cotton nightgown, making me feel all is right with the world.

  “Is it time, kids?” she asks in her warm, gravelly voice. “I’ll get a ride to the hospital. Don’t worry. You get going.”

  We fly down the empty streets of Beverly Hills with the excitement of young children on Christmas morning. As I gaze out the window, I can hear my mother’s words of warning: “Goldie, dear, you know when you have a baby, your life will change. You will have to say good-bye to your much-cherished alone time.” She is right. But, at thirty-one years old, it isn’t just my alone time that will change. It will be my faith in God and the miracles that life can bring. Little do I know what I am about to face.

  They bind a fetal monitor tight around my belly. I can see the heartbeat of this new life I have come to know so intimately. I think of all the times I sat by the fire and talked to him while he gently rolled around inside me. I told him I could feel his kindness and his poetry. I promised him I would be the best mother I could be, and his most trusted friend. I shared with him my most intimate thoughts about the universe, how connected we are to nature. Together, we were doing our job of making more good humans to grace the earth.

  But now the cold, green walls of the labor room are beginning to close in on me. There is not much pain, not much change. Morning seems to morph into afternoon, and the baby still isn’t moving down that narrow passage into the world.

  “He’s going to take his time,” I announce with a grin. “He’s showing us who’s boss already.”

  No one laughs.

  My doctor, Fred Pasternak, a beloved and trusted friend, examines me again with a seriousness that makes me uneasy. Then a brigade of unfamiliar interns marches into my room and examines me, one at a time. I study their expressions as they poke and probe inside me.