by See, Carolyn
I took a look around the tiny apartment, the life-sized naked photo of Marilyn Monroe, my dad’s desk, where he had written his pulp stories, the books from floor to ceiling, the cozy clutter, the matchboxes, the little pewter mouse, the brass ashtray made to look like the palms of two hands outstretched …
“Oh, gee, I don’t think so. I don’t think I could do that,” I said, and hung up on her.
3. DAD AND AA
My dad and his AA wife, Wynn Corum Laws
To go back a little in time: when my dad left, he left my mother and me the house and the square piano. He took the matched set of Mark Twain and the California watercolors by Edwin Botsford. The beach scenes—the landscapes. He took a watercolor of himself by Don Masefield Easton. He took his desk. He took the records, books, and fun.
In the first year after the divorce, every Saturday or Sunday he’d come over and take me out. He was not one of those dads who evaporate or flee the scene. He insisted on never saying a bad thing about my mother, and this alone made these afternoons and evenings a total treat.
In my eyes, and in his own, he was a man-about-town. In Hollywood, we’d take in a matinee and once on Hollywood Boulevard we encountered the Great Gildersleeve. My dad was back in advertising, and during the days of Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly, Fred Allen, my dad would place his affable self in the wings where they staged these shows. When a joke occurred, an applause light would go on and my dad would step forward, waving his arms, coaxing laughter from the audience.
Fun! That’s what he had, or appeared to have. He took me to Scandia and the Brown Derby. He took me to Chinatown, often. He bought me pastries and Chinese rice-pattern teacups. We had our picture taken by “Charlie Chan.” The picture that survives shows a cardboard cutout of a drunken rake holding an outlandishly large cocktail glass, with a scantily clad nymphet perched in it. His head is in the hole where the rake’s should have been and I’m in the nymphet’s. We thought we were having fun, but the picture, when it got developed, showed two human beings in surprising misery.
My dad and me on a “date” after the divorce. I was twelve.
My father was still marginally in the mail-order business, so my clothes, when I had any, came from leftover fantasies of Rosie the Riveter, who was rapidly running out of disposable income. For a while I had gabardine suits with bolero jackets, circle skirts with poodles on them, headbands with studs. I wore these strange clothes when I went out with Dad. Once, in Chinatown, on a weeknight, when almost no one was there, he let his veil of cheer slip just a little. He said something like: “What’s it all about, Penny?” I realized with dismay and surprise that Daddy was a bit drunk. Something in the hang of his lips, the trembly way he spoke, made me think he wasn’t as happy as I thought, or as he said.
My dad had bought into the twin myths of the journalist who could drink the world under the table, and the novelist who had to drink to unleash his demons. He, like my mother, still had at least a bottle-a-day habit. The difference is that while my mother tore up the furniture and screeched, my dad kept his scotch in a drawer at work and paid the janitor to take out the empties so that his coworkers wouldn’t know.
They did know, though. Once, in the parking lot of Scandia, after a long and alcoholic lunch, my dad stood under the porte cochere, swaying slightly, waiting for his car to be brought around. He overheard one of his Jewish colleagues saying to another “shikker,” a word which even my Texan dad knew meant drunk. He was mortified, but not enough to stop drinking.
He took me to writers’ parties, where men actually did wear tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, and leaned their elbows on mantelpieces and talked about literature. I would stand in these gatherings and soak it in. People having fun. People making jokes.
Daddy began to go out with many women. They were big and flashy and towered over him. He loved that. He’d stand back and admire them, point them out. They were naïve girls, trying to make it in Hollywood. They blushed under his attention.
Then my father changed his life. He’d decided to stop drinking, my father said. (He didn’t tell me why.) He joined AA. One night in 1949 he took me to hear Peggy Lee at an AA fund-raiser. That night she was exquisite. She wore brown suede and belted out a song: the theater was packed with insanely happy people.
The window she is broken
And the rain is comin’ in …
Waves of elation radiated through the room. Positive energy! I didn’t even know how to name it.
But if we wait a day or two,
the rain will go away, and—
We don’t need a WINDOW
on such a sunny day!
After the benefit, my dad drove me on over to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, which was then a hangout—not the bar, no, not the bar, but the coffee shop—where crowds of intense people hammered out the AA program. What if you didn’t believe in God, what about that? Because these were mostly intellectuals, agnostic by nature, fed up to the gills with organized religion. But the Book just said a power bigger than yourself. That could be a bus, you know?
They drank twenty cups of coffee at a time and, wired out of their minds, denounced people who weren’t in the room for every possible crime. Infidels who did their Fifth-Step work with members of the opposite sex! Who took sleeping pills to go to sleep! Who took pain pills to get rid of pain! Who destroyed their anonymity by telling people they were in AA! The nerve! They laughed like crazy and told stories of what they used to do—how much they used to drink.
Those people in AA in the late forties and early fifties can be said to have reinvented American narrative style. All the terrible, terrible things that had ever happened to them just made for a great pitch.
The thing was: you could change your life. You could remake your life. But you had to go by the Book. And although this new, sober, moral, honest organization was aggressively classless (no heads, no directors, no dues, no bosses), a natural hierarchy began to form. How could it not? If you had a boring pitch, you didn’t get to give that pitch at an AA meeting very often. AA was small, then, no more than 2,000 members in LA. You could have almost known Bill W.
One afternoon, my father had a new and different woman in the car. She topped off my dad by the two or three inches he liked, and she was hefty. There might have been a hundred and sixty pounds to her, but she didn’t mind. She had girlish breasts, a porpoise torso, and a face that was astonishing in its beauty. Wynn Corum had translucent skin with a tiny dusting of freckles, Katharine Hepburn cheekbones, bright red hair, turquoise eyes. She was a knockout, and she knew it, and dressed like a chorus girl. She could do that because even though she’d gone through four husbands and had a flock of stepchildren, and had done jail time for drinking, she was sober now, and she had known Big Bill Wilson, who, along with Dr. Bob, had envisioned this extraordinary organization. Indeed, she would say often, she and Bill had been a mighty item. She’d come within a hairbreadth of becoming the First Lady of AA. Bill was married, unfortunately, but he did put her story in the second edition of the Big Book, under the section “They Lost Nearly All,” and even now, to go into an AA meeting and remark, “You know that story, ‘Freedom from Bondage,’ about learning to forgive your mother? My stepmother wrote that,” is to ensure free coffee for the rest of your natural life. Bill and Wynn had struck a hard but loving bargain, she would tell me often. He wouldn’t, couldn’t marry her, but he’d put her in the Book. My father, though nice, was her second stated choice.
Daddy didn’t hang out with journalists anymore. He knew sober people. When, because I moved in with them, they felt they had to buy a house, an AA banker arranged a no-collateral loan, and wealthy AA matrons showered Wynn with cast-off furniture. But Wynn and George also liked the poorest and craziest of the poor and crazy. In those early days their closest friends were an ex-skid-row bum and his ding-a-ling wife, Mabel and Booker, wow!
Mabel, if I remember correctly, had been a showgirl. Booker had been nothing but a drunk. At the rowdy din
ner parties my stepmother threw—dozens of people rocking with laughter, outshouting each other—Booker would insist that the easiest thing in the world to be was a wino, that living at the bottom was just like living at the top. He had been a beggar, and a good one. His never-fail gambit had been to take out his handy glass eye, expose his red and weeping socket to the public at large, and whimper until he’d collected enough to “buy a new eye.” When he got enough to buy a gallon of muscatel, he’d pop his eye back in, drink up his gallon, snooze on the sidewalk until he woke up. Booker had lost a few IQ points along the way, but he was kind, and full of joy.
Wynn and Mabel were fast, best friends. Together, they’d managed to sleep with most of their known world. Mabel’s marriage to Booker was, I believe, her fourth; Wynn’s marriage to my dad, her fifth. They waited tables now, to make their share of everybody’s living, they spent time together and bought fancy underwear.
At one dinner party, when Wynn and my father were still living in the one-room apartment with the twin Murphy beds, there had been a long and goofy dinner at which Wynn served one of her masterpieces—nothing but a ham hock, new potatoes, onions, and pounds and pounds of string beans, which, by some alchemical trick, turned after about six hours of simmering into the most fantastic food anyone had ever eaten. Giddy, wired on caffeine, they ate until they were dazed—thus proving that money or booze were the last thing you needed to worry about, you could live on string beans and love. They filled up the little living room, telling stories of when they had been drunks: my stepmother with tears in her eyes from giggling, recalling World War II, when she’d married her third husband because of his army captain’s uniform; how she’d met him on leave and they’d gone to the Top of the Mark in San Francisco, put down five martinis each, and then been escorted to their dinner table, which had the very best view. Wynn, perfectly blotto but gorgeous, wore a dress of ivory silk that had a hundred ivory-silk buttons down the front from neck to hem. The maître d’ seated Wynn, and took off her coat as he did so. This movement ripped off all her ivory buttons, leaving her in only the skimpiest of lacy lingerie. Husband number three was lost in the view of the city and the Bay, while Wynn and the maître d’ stayed locked for what seemed a ginsoaked eternity …
I’m laughing, my dad is on the floor howling, Mabel is in hysterics, Booker is hiccuping, the others groan helplessly, and this goes on for hours in the golden lamplight, until my dad decides he has to go to bed, and tells them, but the guests don’t pay attention, so with great fanfare and silliness he begins to take off his clothes, reappears in his pajamas, pulls down one of the twin Murphy beds, and slides on in, pulling the covers up to his nose. Then they break it to him that he’s promised to take one of the AA people home—because everybody was broke then, nobody had a car, they were all just one step up from the gutter. They break it to him that he has to get up and take someone home, and start to howl again. A dozen grown-ups, and one very relieved kid, laugh with the abandoned sense of being saved from a terrible illness, or a life-threatening car accident: we are alive! We’re here, in the present. We’re sober, we’re alive, we’re OK. We understand that we had “an obsession of the mind coupled with an allergy of the body.” We’re in the clear as far as disaster is concerned because we’ve turned our lives and our minds over to the care of God as we understand him. And as for that Notorious Fifth Step, the one where we take a moral inventory of all the wrongs we’ve ever committed, and then go through it with another person (of the same sex, please, to avoid possible complications and indiscretions), all of the people here are doing pretty well as far as the Fifth Step is concerned.
Except, you know that Ninth Step, the one where you make amends, except where it would do more harm than good? I never heard my father apologize for leaving me and my mother. I did hear him say that he had to leave or else he would have “gone mad,” and I understood that completely. When he said it, I bought it, because I loved him, and I was so grateful to him for taking me in, and being such a sport about it. But later, I did think, well, if it would have driven you mad, and you were a grown man with a job and a car, and a way to get out of the house, what did you think it was going to do to me, a kid, and before you left, my mother hadn’t even gone crazy? But I never got the nerve to ask him that, although he lived to be seventy-nine, an old-timer, very respected in AA. But he was an alcoholic, you know? So it might not have occurred to him.
George and Wynn were in great demand for double-pitching. They went out maybe five times a week, and I often went with them. What a high it was: “My name is George and I’m an alcoholic …” “Hi, George!”
My dad was Wynn’s opening act. He couldn’t help but be funny, giddy, frivolous. He talked about his crazy sex life, his naturally low mind, his evenings with chorus girls, and he’d tell about how he’d developed this wacky persona to cover a naturally sorrowful and even suicidal temperament. But such was the power of his jokey performance that even as he spoke of plotting his own death, the friends of Doctor Bob and Bill W. were rolling in the aisles.
Then he deferred to Wynn, whose tale was hair-raising, and in another time, might have been perceived as a tale of Ur-feminism—a story of a powerful woman constantly blindsided in her lifelong quest for an identity. Wynn’s mother had deserted her in order to go out and live a selfish life. An unloving grandmother reared her in strict poverty. She contracted typhoid fever and hovered between life and death for about ninety days. All her hair and (though she would not admit this) her teeth fell out. When she recovered at about age sixteen, with beautiful new red hair and a set of dentures stuck in so firmly that no one saw her without them, she began carving out a career as a femme fatale, and started drinking to bridge the gap between the grim hash-slinging reality she was born to and the golden mirage of American romance she yearned for.
As she herself told it, she thought the clear and simple way out was to marry money. She was beautiful, and so she did. That marriage didn’t work; who could have said why? In her pitch, Wynn put it down to the fact that she was full of resentments, an alcoholic through and through. In her long conversations with me, she said that the guy was a jerk, not worth knowing, that when she spoke with him she felt more alone than when she was alone. But there was also the fact that she came directly from the underclass. Perhaps his family made it hard on her.
Wynn’s second husband was a bandleader and she sang for the band. (Wynn might have been the best American I’ve ever known. She bought the line that money could finance her American dream, then, when that didn’t work out, she went for glamor as a viable alternative. She lectured me on how to apply moisturizer correctly, she gave herself pedicures and slept in socks with her feet greased in castor oil. She still sang, with a highly doubtful vibrato, all the old tunes she sang in her second husband’s band.) But the drinking had got out of control, she’d say with great dignity in her pitch, and she’d do things like come to parties stark naked.
When World War II came along, Wynn embraced patriotism, and married that third husband. The war and its excitements carried them through, but peace brought back the dread reality of the everyday. The captain turned out to be a schlumph in a business suit, and Wynn was still a waitress working for pocket money, with a serious, serious drinking problem.
Wynn had one last female dream to fall back on: the typhoid had left her unable to have children, but her fourth marriage would be to a widower with a flock of kids. She would surround herself with domesticity. She would keep house and cook and wash and iron. She would make a home. Except that the widower had been having sex with other people for many years, she said, and didn’t see why he’d have to quit now.
You could say, “She lost nearly all.” You could also say that—given even a BA degree—she could have “done something amazing with her life.” Accidents of time and place and disease and education and alcoholism kept her from it. In AA, Wynn finally found a place worthy of her energies. She took her knowledge of money and glamor, her patriotism (which ha
d turned into right-wing mania), her love for home and family (which manifested itself now in my father, and me, and the new little home they would buy), and wrapped it in the crackling approval of God Himself. Years later, I’d call her up to say hello. I’d call her just to hear her voice, because she’d done everything in her power to hold her nutty stepdaughter in some kind of loving balance, though it hadn’t worked out too well. But Wynn, when I called her, would always say:
“Oh, Penny! I told God to have you call me up today.”
So I never got any of the credit. Maybe she never knew that there were people who would call her because they loved her entirely on their own, without any bullying from God.
—
When Wynn, George, and I moved from the one-room apartment into a little bungalow in the San Fernando Valley, our fourth roommate, God, began to throw his weight around; to take up more than His share in the house.
Three people tried as hard as they could to make a family. My father worked, and once again gave up his ideas of writing. My stepmother began to try to redeem her mixed-up, teenaged stepdaughter.
I needed clothes. She bought me a green-and-black fake satin cocktail dress with a plunging neckline. She bought me mascara and eyeshadow, and tried to get me to apply it to go to school. I was in my senior year. We needed Capezio flats, long gray wool straight skirts, starched white blouses, cashmere sweater sets. Wynn bought me acrylic sweaters with sequins on them. I was in the same bind I’d been in with my mother. Before, I’d walk to school in a straight skirt and blouse, get to school, find a friend, and change into a better version of a straight skirt and blouse. Now I had a large collection of puffy rayon skirts and nylon see-through blouses with beads on the collar. I’d wear one of those outfits to school, find a sympathetic friend, change into a straight skirt and blouse, live out the day, change back into my nylon clothes, take the bus home, dump my uneaten healthy lunch into the trash, where Wynn—with God’s help—would always find it.