The Road to Reality

by Dianne Burnett

  Mom, a sweet-hearted homemaker who doted on us kids, was a disappointed beauty who’d once hoped to become a film star. She’d had a better shot at it than most: her cousin, Joseph Valentine, had been a famous cinematographer during Hollywood’s Golden Age, and her often-told stories about him planted a seed in my own young mind, nurturing fantasies of becoming an actress. Joseph was best known for filming movies with Deanna Durbin; he’d made his name with Abbott and Costello, shooting their classic In the Navy. Joan Crawford so adored him that she refused to be photographed by anyone else. Over the years, Joe worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Jimmy Stewart, Lucille Ball, and Ginger Rogers on more than four dozen films. Nominated for five Academy Awards, in 1948 he won the Oscar for Cinematography for Victor Fleming’s film Joan of Arc, starring Swedish bombshell Ingrid Bergman.

  When my mother, Joanie, was in high school, Joseph made a trip to New York. Upon seeing the young beauty, he invited my mother to Hollywood, where he promised to get her show-biz career rolling and invited her to move in with his family; my mother was ready to leave the next day. The idea of pursuing a film career didn’t play well with her mother, a widow, but she finally relented: upon graduation, Joanie could move west to live with Joe. But no sooner did she have the train ticket in hand than the phone rang: Joseph had died of a heart attack. He was only 48. His death changed her destiny: Joanie took it as a sign that she was destined to be a wife and mother; while the first was a tough role, she excelled in the latter, doing everything for us kids.

  Dad had entertainment aspirations of his own, seeing the name Dominick Minerva, accordionist, on the marquee in his mind. Decked out in a tuxedo and bowtie, at 16 he worked in Brooklyn as a movie usher, where he was so enthusiastic, he was soon promoted to chief usher. Riveted by the performances of Dick Contino (“the Rudolph Valentino of accordion”), who entertained before movies at Brooklyn’s Capitol Theater, Dad saved up to buy a squeezebox of his own. Performing in amateur shows with variety acts and comedians, he eventually reached the finals at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and proudly displayed his plaque on the wall for being named “Best Instrumental.” After winning contests at a local Brooklyn theater, he appeared on a televised national talent show, where accordionist Dominick Minerva wowed the audience with the classic instrumental song “Saber Dance.”

  In his 20s, Dad split his time between playing accordion gigs and working as a stock boy at the Abraham & Straus department store. After work at the store, he pulled out his accordion and practiced. But his talent didn’t seem to impress Joanie Valentine, the svelte redhead working in the main office, where she price-tagged wholesale merchandise for retail displays.

  Every day, Dominick—who back then everyone said was a dead ringer for dashing crooner Vic Damone—asked her out, and every day she said no. It went on for months. One day while turning him down, Joanie mentioned that she was competing in a swimsuit contest that evening. Dad made sure he was in the audience at Loew’s King Theater (an ostentatious venue in one of the most affluent parts of Brooklyn) on Flatbush Avenue that night. Twin sisters took first and second place, while Joanie came in third. For Dominick, though, it was no contest. Having laid eyes on her legs, he was head over heels.

  When my father proposed to her soon after, she accepted; as far as I could tell, they’d lived unhappily ever after. Within 12 years, their family had grown by four—with one son (the eldest) and three daughters, of which I was the youngest.

  I don’t know what went wrong—they both had their sides of the story—but the harder Dad worked, and the longer his hours, the more Mom was convinced, possibly with good reason, that he was having affairs.

  Every night she read me fairy tales after tucking me into bed in “The Ballerina Room,” carpeted in princess pink. Decorated with velvet cutouts of ballerinas, the bed had a sheer pink canopy draping down from overhead. I’d doze off with visions of sugarplums and gingerbread houses in my head, until Dad got home—often in the wee hours of the morning. Then their spectacular clashes began.

  My fantasies of galloping out of Long Island and becoming a star were the antidote to my parents’ rocky union. Cinderella, an icon to American girls, became a survival mechanism to me. Every time I heard my parents yelling yet again, I shut my eyes, tightly clasped my hands over my ears, and blasted the soundtrack from the movie in my head: “Someday my prince will come” … Shriek! “Someday I’ll find my love” … Crash! “And how thrilling that moment will be” … &*@#! “When the prince of my dreams comes to me” … Boom!

  Bellowing voices and slammed doors were run-of-the-mill, and the walls bore testimony to the heated emotions in our home. Dad punched his hand in the wall plenty of times during their arguments. My brother, Steve, who spent most of his time shut up in his room playing nothing but Elvis Presley on the record player, added a hole of his own the day “The King” went to the great Graceland in the sky; Steve was so distraught that he wouldn’t come out of his room for a week.

  Even my sisters and I made our contributions to the well-holed wall on Peppermint Road. One evening, my sister Lisa and I got into an altercation in the foyer at the top of the stairs. She wrestled me to the ground and was beating the living daylights out of me when my eldest sister Vicki heard the ruckus and flew up the stairs. Vicki grabbed Lisa by the shirt and threw her into the wall, where her rear end created a massive crater in the sheet rock.

  Lisa was stuck, screaming, “Help! Get me out! Get me out!” Even though she’d been attacking me moments earlier, I started crying, fearing she’d be stuck in the wall forever.

  When I was six, just before my First Communion, Dad moved out for good. My parents filed for divorce—at the time, a scandal and an ordeal, involving court appearances and priests. I was one of the few kids in my crowd who came from a “broken family.”

  The yelling around our house stopped, but new stresses appeared, as the checks for alimony and child support sometimes arrived late. At points, we were forced to go on food stamps, and I was horrified that I qualified for “free lunch” at school; I was always the last one through the lunch line, wanting to keep my mother’s financial state a secret between me and the cashier.

  Mom, suddenly forced to juggle two jobs, was overwhelmed and exhausted. My sisters and I cooked dinner, and our already substantial chore load increased; at night, I often heard Mom sobbing in her bedroom. After a few months, to my delight, her mother—our grandmother, Nana—moved in to help, giving up her cozy apartment to live in the damp basement playroom where she slept on the sofa bed, not far from the toy chest, bumper pool table, and bookcase heaving with encyclopedias.

  Many of my happiest childhood memories are from the two years Nana lived with us: she was the only grandparent I knew; the others had died before I was born. She brought warmth and cheer to a house that had turned cold and empty when my father took off. On brutal winter days when the snow fell nonstop and Arctic winds blasted, Nana made hot cocoa and baked delicious crumb cake from scratch, while my siblings and I shoveled snow off the driveway. Coming inside, shivering, and feeling like ice cubes had formed around our fingers and toes, we thawed to the scent of cinnamon sugar wafting from the oven, and quickly stripped off galoshes, snow jackets, mittens, and ear muffs, resting the wet clothes on the radiator to get them toasty before our next shoveling shift.

  Nana was always home, usually in the kitchen, providing not only supervision but an audience for the skits my sisters and I performed. She helped me with my lines for school plays, and applauded loudly whenever I put on private flute recitals for her.

  “Nana, look what I learned in gymnastics today!” I’d exclaim, demonstrating a back flip. “Nana, look what I made in school!” She displayed the sort of gushing attention my mother used to bestow upon us when she had more time. By then, my mother’s presence was often detected by doors: the sound of closing door when she left for work before we went to school, and the sound of the opening door when she arrived late, when we were supposed to be asleep. However,
she tried to schedule her shifts so that she could make an appearance at dinner.

  Despite my mother’s demanding workload, whenever I performed—in a school play, band concert, or gymnastics competition—Mom was always there in the front row. “Yay!” she yelled out, whenever I delicately walked across the balance beam or put the flute to my mouth during a recital. “Yay!” she yelled out, at every line I delivered in every play.

  By day, Mom worked as a dispatcher at a security company on Long Island, and in the evenings, she was a restaurant hostess. When I was older, she worked as an aide in a psychiatric hospital, and we were mesmerized whenever she told us about her interactions with the patients. Roxanne, for instance, had a split personality. “Good morning, Joan,” the patient said whenever my mother entered the room. Then Roxanne would instruct her other personality, saying, “Now Roxanne, you say good morning to Joan, too.”

  Not long after her divorce, Mom met Otto, a burly German truck driver, who was Dad’s opposite in almost every way, except in his persistence. Every day, Otto visited Mom in her bulletproof booth at the security company, bringing her doughnuts and coffee, and asking if she’d ever go to dinner with him.

  “Absolutely not,” she replied every time. She knew he was married.

  Several weeks later, Otto moved out of his house and asked her to dinner the next night—Valentine’s Day. She advised him to buy flowers and chocolate and take them to his wife. And he did. Six months later, however, Otto moved out for good, and he was back to bringing Mom coffee and doughnuts, and still asking her out. She finally gave in a bit, allowing him to come around as her handyman, and he used that opening to ultimately become her “best friend.” Otto stopped by every day, ostensibly to do odd jobs around our house—repairing the garage door, fixing the plumbing, and doing random carpentry work. Mom always called him “Mr. Fix-it,” and he proved to be her emotional fixer-upper as well.

  Nana wasn’t impressed. “Joan, what the hell are you doing with that ugly guy? You’ve gone from Dominick to this guy who drives an oil truck?” When Otto tried to win Nana’s approval, bringing her a carton of Pall Malls, she grabbed it, said “Thanks,” and slammed the door in his face. He was not a good-looking guy, but he was a sweetheart. He kept proposing marriage to Mom; he wrote her beautiful poetry, always brought pastries and flowers, and simply adored her. They were close for 20 years, but Mom never would marry him. (Years later, however, when we dropped by Otto’s apartment, I noted Spanish décor all over the place, reminding me suspiciously of Mom’s “Spanish room” in our home.)

  Back then, like us kids, Nana was hoping that Mom and Dad would get back together—despite my father’s suspected infidelity. My grandmother had known about cheating husbands herself: my grandfather, John, had been quite the ladies’ man—as Nana discovered the day a mysterious woman showed up at the house to return the wristwatch my grandfather had left at her place the night before. Timing is everything, and Nana figured her time with John was up.

  Nana was soon gallivanting with actor William Brooks, who appeared in movies with Jimmy Durante. Whenever show biz slacked off, William worked as a metal lather, which paid very well in that era of booming skyscraper construction in New York. When her husband fell on tough financial times, Nana scandalously moved in with William, leaving John—and leaving her children to be raised by him.

  When the Valentine family (minus Nana) moved out of their fancy Flatbush apartment and into a dive over a noisy restaurant/bar in a not-so-great neighborhood, Mom’s sister Barbara, a fashion plate who dressed in fabulous furs, ran away from home. Mom’s oldest sister, Ginny, a flaming redhead, also refused to step foot in the place. So my mother—like me, the youngest—lived alone with her father, who took his parental duties seriously. One morning when she was eight years old, my mother woke up, noticing it was 8 A.M. Normally on school days, her father called her to breakfast at 7 A.M.

  That day, however, the house was strangely quiet, with no smell of eggs and bacon from the kitchen, so my mother went to his bedroom to check on him. He appeared to be sleeping, but when she grabbed his arm to jostle him awake, he was stone cold. She let out a scream. Running outside in her pajamas, she found a traffic cop and pleaded with him to help. He ran up the stairs to the apartment, trying to revive her father. But it was too late.

  “Nana, come out and watch me take a jackknife!” I yelled from the diving board one summer morning. When Nana walked out, she tripped on a maple-tree root that was breaking through the cement patio. Immediately, her ankle swelled up to the size of a grapefruit. Since she couldn’t go up and down the stairs, we set her up on a cot in the dining room.

  She called me her “little Florence Nightingale.” I iced her foot every day, then soaked it in Epsom salt baths, and rewrapped her ankle with an Ace bandage. Her ankle soon healed, but soon thereafter, she developed a bad cough. The doctor diagnosed pneumonia and hospitalized her immediately. By then, Nana, 78, was my confidante, cheerleader, and best friend.

  Every day after school we visited Nana in the hospital. I presented my latest artwork from school, my sisters brought flowers from our garden, and Mom snuck in homemade soup. After several weeks, Nana returned to our house for what was anticipated to be a quick recovery.

  A week later, I was sitting in the kitchen, wearing a hooded, purple paisley sweatshirt, jeans, and brown loafers. Mom was at work, and my sisters had left for school. As I was eating my cereal, I heard Nana’s footsteps creaking up the basement stairs. Something wasn’t right. She sat down for a moment on the top step to catch her breath, then fell backward, crashing through the double doors onto her back on the hallway floor. As Nana lay unconscious, I screamed, paralyzed with shock.

  My brother Steve barreled out of his bedroom. Aunt Barbara heard the commotion and ran upstairs to where Nana lay motionless. As Aunt Barbara tried to revive her, Steve rushed to call the paramedics. Minutes later, the medics arrived and carried out Nana on a stretcher; Steve and Aunt Barbara jumped into the ambulance next to her, and the vehicle shrilly sped away. I started crying.

  I was left by myself on that cold November morning, unsure what to do. I’d never felt so alone. I picked up my books, strapped together by an elastic band, and headed to school, sobbing the whole way. My crying intensified when I returned home that day and heard the news. Nana had been rushed into surgery, but her heart gave out.

  Bitter winds howled outside that evening when relatives and friends came by to pay their respects; I lay hiding underneath the dining-room table, tears rolling down my face. I could barely hear their voices, but was aware of the arrival of newcomers by their shoes. Toward the end of the night, I snuck upstairs and sat in the dark on the steps. Most of the mourners had left when the doorbell rang, and Steve went to answer. When he saw who it was, he burst into tears. Peeking through the wrought-iron banister at the visitor, I, too, started crying.

  By this time, Mom and Dad had been divorced for two years, and their separation wasn’t amicable. Dad was usually unwelcome in our home, but that night was an exception. I had never seen the two of them show any sign of affection for one another, but that evening, in their despair, they embraced each other in the front doorway. Although I was overcome with sadness at the loss of Nana, seeing my parents embrace gave me a glimmer of hope. Her death had brought my parents back together, if only for a brief moment. Steve put his arms around both of them, hugging them tightly in a three-way hug, sobbing as he told my father, “Mom still loves you.”

  By the next month, however, it was the same old, same old, and Dad was forbidden to come to the house. And from that point on, I often felt like I was raising myself.

  Chapter Three

  GROWING PAINS

  Knowing from childhood that you are

  valuable is essential to mental health.

  — Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

  BE A MODEL—or just look like one!

  I was 11 years old, flipping through one of my sister’s Seventeen magazines, when
the advertisement for The Barbizon School of Modeling jumped out at me. I studied the picture of a lithe, big-eyed blonde, looking glamorous, her hair flying back, then read the ad again. Hopping out of bed, I ran down the hall to the bathroom and looked in the mirror—I adopted sophisticated expressions and poses, imagining myself being a model and looking like one. I found a lipstick and did up my mouth in fuchsia, then I applied blue eye shadow, which I thought offset my hazel eyes nicely while distracting from my Roman nose, and I practiced poses again. I was upstairs practicing my catwalk turns in the hallway when my friend Denise came over. I showed her the ad. She, too, was wowed.

  “Dianne, we’ve got to get in!”

  Step one: getting the brochure. Denise and I ran to the phone, and with a racing heart, I dialed the number.

  “Barbizon School of Modeling,” a woman’s voice said. I thought I was going to faint. Afraid that you had to be an adult to order a brochure, I pretended to be my mother and gave the woman our address. When an envelope from Barbizon arrived several days later, I ripped it open. Inside was the brochure, which I read over and over. Then I turned to the insert with the fees. My heart sank. The prices were steep—and there was no way my mother could afford it.

  So I organized another talent show—with a $2 admission—and for this one, proceeds went to my Barbizon fund. Be a model—or just look like one! became my mantra, and the dream of attending the modeling school became my reason to live.