Out Came the Sun

by Mariel Hemingway

  It wasn’t a drab existence, just an extremely focused one. When I watched TV with my mother, she liked me to entertain her with burlesques of the commercials, so that’s what I did. I learned to apply my mother’s makeup, and to feel a vanity that she didn’t. She was content to leave the edges of her base makeup sharp and exposed, but that looked strange to me, her head and her neck were different colors, and so I smoothed the lines.

  Summer lost its sense of freedom. I stuck close to home. I jumped on the trampoline in our backyard and perfected front and backflips. My friends Kelly and Sara came over sometimes, but I found myself trying too hard to convince them that everything was okay, and that was exhausting.

  A few times a week, I took my bicycle and rode north to Galena Lodge, a spot about twenty miles north. On the way home, I sometimes stopped at Easley Creek, where there was a church camp filled with big-city kids who came in jaded and then, after a few weeks, found themselves totally bewitched by mountain living. I watched them jump into the river for the first time. One of the kids, a boy about my age, detached from the group. “Do you live around here?”

  “Pretty near,” I said. “I’m from Ketchum.”

  “Why are you allowed to ride so far by yourself?” the boy said.

  I shrugged. I didn’t really know the answer. Was I privileged because I had more freedom, or just neglected? Part of me wanted to tell him the whole story: the cancer, the alcohol, Muffet, everything. But I wasn’t the kind of person to vent to a stranger. I didn’t even really talk about those things to my friends. I just wanted them to feel that everything at my house was okay. So whenever I spoke about my mother’s illness, I emphasized normalcy and routine.

  That strategy had long-term consequences; it short-circuited my ability to recognize and respond to emotional problems. That would last decades, resurfacing now and again to upend my life—or, more to the point, to make sure that inertia won and productive change was impossible.

  At the time, though, I didn’t do much of anything about it. I broke down only once, when I was with my aunt and my uncle, my mother’s sister and her husband. We were in Boise, where my mother was getting chemotherapy. “I wish…” I said, and trailed off.

  “What?” my aunt said. I think she thought I was going to say something about where I wanted to eat dinner or get ice cream.

  I was suddenly crying. “I wish I could change everything,” I said. “I wish that Mommy wasn’t sick, and that she and Daddy were happier, and that Muffet was better too.”

  My aunt and uncle put their arms around me. They consoled me with genuine compassion. “Things will get better,” my aunt said. “You’ll see.” I looked into her kind face and saw only platitudes. I knew that I couldn’t change things by wishing.

  And because I couldn’t change anything near me, I started to change things inside me. I went from being terrified of throwing up to being completely obsessed with food. I wasn’t anorexic or bulimic. I never went through a period where I didn’t eat at all, and I never really threw up. But I became fixated on certain types of foods and certain eating habits. I told myself that the foods I was eating were for my mother, that I was minimizing any possible shock to her system—Muffet always liked to talk about food that was in harmony with the universe—but the truth was that they were for me too. I remember passing through a period where I would only eat peanut butter and honey sandwiches, nothing more, for close to a year. I rationalized it: they were soft, so they wouldn’t upset anyone’s stomach, they had enough protein and nutrients, and they wouldn’t spoil easily.

  My list of permissible foods grew slowly. “Here,” I’d say, giving my mother brown toast and jam made from only berries, along with wild rice. “This has nothing unhealthy in it,” I said. “It won’t cause any stress.” Nothing came out of a box. If my father caught fish, I prepared it on the barbeque with butter, salt, and pepper. I learned to forgo any and all guilty pleasures, from cheese in a can to sugary cereal to Ritz crackers and Wheat Thins, even though the woman in the Wheat Thins ads was a gymnast and seemed healthy enough.

  When my mother felt stronger, she cooked with me. We might make whole wheat bread and eat it while it was still hot, with honey and French butter. When she was weak, I cooked on my own. We made lots of the recipes that irritated my father—good, solid American food—though I adjusted for my new ideas about healthy eating. I tried a fried chicken recipe in a skillet, and it was delicious, but the frying was unhealthy, so I tried again with a flour made from nuts. That was too dry—not enough butter—and I tried yet again, succeeded, and fed the failed first experiment to the neighbor’s dogs.

  My food habits were healthy enough, but they were connected to other forms of compulsion. On the school bus, I only breathed out of my nose—furthermore, I stuck my face as close to the glass as possible so that I imagined I was only getting the air from outside the bus. Maybe every kid has these private rituals, these ways of mastering their immediate surroundings. Later, when I was a mother, I saw that kind of behavior in my own children and their friends. But at the time, I had no perspective on those beliefs. They were both my private magic and private science, the only things holding the world together.

  6

  THE DAUGHTER IN THE MAGAZINE

  IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES, Evel Knievel hatched a plan to jump over the Snake River Canyon, a huge scar cut into the earth in southern Idaho. The stunt required extensive planning: he had an aeronautics engineer design a rocket-powered motorcycle that he hoped would take him across the canyon, which was a quarter-mile wide in places and five hundred feet deep. Much of the operation was local—staking out the canyon, checking things like winds and sight lines—and they needed neighborhood kids to help out, deliver notes, get coffee, that kind of thing. Margot had a friend who was working onsite, and then Margot, too, went to work there.

  That first week, a man who was also working the event was staring at Margot. “What?” she said. She wasn’t the type to let something like that go.

  “You’re very beautiful,” he said. Margot thanked him, I’m sure, and then probably went and partied with him and his friends. At any rate, she didn’t come home for a few days. It had happened before. Her early-teen habit of getting drunk at a party and calling my dad to come and pick her up had evolved to the point where she would frequently crash at friends’ houses. A week went by. Maybe we got a phone call, but she didn’t resurface. No one was worried. And then she reappeared. To our shock, it wasn’t in person. Rather, it was on a national magazine cover.

  In retrospect, it may not have been quite as sudden as it seemed. She had traveled to New York with my father the year before and made contacts in the fashion world. But it seemed like it was an overnight transformation. There was a marked physical difference too. She had left town with light brown hair, and suddenly there she was, on a magazine cover, with blond hair. She had left town struggling with her weight, always a little heavier than she wanted, always wearing these huge wide belts, which she must have thought covered her up but actually created the impression of thickness, and there she was wearing the finest clothes and looking sexier than anyone ever had. She also had a new name: Margot was gone and she was now “Margaux,” which sounded more cosmopolitan and worldly and came with a funny story about how she was conceived, something having to do with my parents and a bottle of Chateau Margaux.

  In some ways, Margot’s rapid rise, and the appearance of Margaux, made perfect sense. She was always a very social person, always good at getting along in the outside world. She had a talent for surviving, certainly, and she was more experienced—which isn’t to say sophisticated—when it came to the riskier aspects of teenage life, especially sex and drugs. But nobody ever expected that she would be famous. When I thought about it hard, it made me a little dizzy. It was as if somebody had twisted my head on backward.

  That first Christmas, she came home. Hemingways always came home for Christmas. She had a serious boyfriend with her, a guy named Errol Wetanson, whose fa
mily ran the burger chain Wetson’s. His older brother was the actual businessman, the true heir of the hamburger empire. Errol was a social butterfly and a playboy. He had an image, to say the least—he had black curly hair and a mustache, and he wore white pants and shoes. “Where does a person find clothes like that?” my father wondered.

  Errol filled in some of the gaps of how Margot had become Margaux. He had met her when she was visiting New York with my father, and then they had been together when she had returned to the city. He claimed that he had introduced her to the big names in the fashion world—to people like Marian McEvoy, who was the fashion editor at Women’s Wear Daily; to Frances Stein, who was the fashion editor at Vogue; to the photographer Francesco Scavullo; to Halston. Errol also talked about how smitten he was, how he would meet her plane with flowers whenever she returned to the city from a trip. It was, for me, a glimpse of an adult life that was very romantic and not entirely convincing. The people around Margaux seemed to want something from her, even if it was something she seemed more than happy to give them.

  Within about a year, she got the Babe campaign, which made her the spokesperson for a Fabergé perfume. That meant more than magazine covers; it meant advertisements everywhere, on billboards and in magazines and even in television commercials. In June 1975, she was on the cover of Time magazine, with a headline that read “The New Beauties,” and that September Vogue called her “New York’s New Supermodel,” which was a word that hadn’t been used very often at that point. It’s what they had called Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton and not very many other women.

  Over the years, I had to think about Margaux’s fame, either as an independent idea or in relation to my own, so many times that it’s hard to recapture that first phase of it. How did it make me feel? I felt confused, for starters. It’s an exaggeration and maybe an inaccuracy to say that I was jealous. I was too young to be jealous. But there was something patently unreal about the way she became so famous so fast. Margaux had become one of the most recognized women in America: one of the faces everyone wanted to see, one of the standard-setters for beauty. During one of her vacations home, a magazine came out to Ketchum to do a piece on our family, and there was a photograph of the three of us—me, Margaux, and Muffet—walking down the highway with the mountains in the background. We were immortalized in the caption as “Margaux Hemingway’s sisters.” I hadn’t thought of us that way before, not exactly, and it felt like a nice way to redraw the picture.

  * * *

  GROWING UP IN KETCHUM, we didn’t have lots of movie theaters. We had exactly one, in fact: the Sun Valley Opera House. The Opera House was built in 1937, the year my grandfather published To Have and Have Not, a story of love and smuggling set in Cuba and the Florida Keys. To Have and Have Not was also a movie, of course, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. In it, Bacall speaks her most famous line: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and…blow.”

  The movie, I’m sure, screened at the Opera House, though I don’t remember seeing it there. But I saw tons of other movies there over the years. Every Friday and Saturday night, they had fifty-cent showings, and all the kids went. Most of the time we didn’t even watch that closely. We crawled under the seats and popped up next to friends. Now and then, a boy would reach for your hand in the dark. For me, in third grade, that boy was Sean Paterson. He was a real-life dream, a paragon of male beauty and virtue. I would catch him looking at me when I was looking at him. He talked about how he would defend me against other kids who might have thrown a cup and accidentally hit me in the head. I developed a theory of love after that: people were there to increase your safety, to stop cups from hitting you in the head, and you rewarded them by letting them hold your hand. I was good at that.

  After those few perfect months, Sean and his family moved away, and the movies became ordinary again, just a loud place with lots of kids and seats that you could crawl under. My social life wasn’t ideal. Maybe that’s the case for any teenage girl, but I felt like I was especially insecure. I was too tall—taller than all the boys—awkward and leggy and flat-chested and self-conscious to a painful degree. Everyone in my family was tall. I dealt with almost everything by giggling: comedy, tragedy, even ordinary information. I noticed early on that girls weren’t straightforward with their loyalties. They would be nice to me in one-on-one conversations, but in groups they would pretend that they didn’t like me. It was like a form of gaslighting, really: they would have normal conversations with me when we were on our own, reject me as soon as someone else showed up, and then reassure me as soon as that other person left. Once I was sitting under a portico by myself, wondering why none of my female friends would sit with me. They were off in a separate group, probably trying to attract the attention of guys. As luck would have it, the guys noticed me, and two of them came over to talk. Except that they weren’t interested in talking. They walked right up to me, swung back their ski-booted legs, and kicked me in the shins. I fell over, trying not to cry. It hurt so much I couldn’t even giggle. None of the girls came over to see how I was, but then later that day one of them called me to apologize. None of that behavior was that uncommon, or that extreme, but I had a hard time finding kids who could rise above it.

  I found some. There was Kelly, who was my partner in crime in everything. We created our own radio show, the Kelly & Mariel Hour, which went straight to cassette. We did fake interviews, sang songs, tried out accents—I was best at French and Kelly did a perfect Frito Bandito voice like the ads on television. Her house was the opposite of mine: messy (Christmas tree still up in April), warmly noisy, openhearted, and relaxed. Her mother smiled as much as my mother frowned. Her father disciplined her, but with humor and patience rather than anger. Kelly’s parents had two much older boys, and by the time Kelly came along, their parenting had relaxed significantly. Kelly would tell me about trips that she would take to the beach in Mexico, her family in the camper for a solid month, and I couldn’t even imagine. My family had trouble being in the same car for twenty minutes on the ride to a dinner party. Then, if we went somewhere, it was in segments: I might go fishing with my dad in Oregon, or driving with my mom to see friends in California.

  My other best friend was Sara. We bonded over horses. She had her own horse, called Chocolate Revel after the ice cream, and I borrowed a horse from the Sun Valley Center. We adventured around the valley on trails or took the horses into the shallow parts of the river. I wanted to show my parents that I was responsible enough to get my own horse, so I put in my time in the stables, mucking the barn and feeding the animals. The horses were rewarding to be around. They always responded to affection and watched carefully as you moved around in their space. They also talked to you all day long if you knew how to listen, pinning their ears back in frustration or flicking a glance to let you know that they were ready to go out. Starting around sixth grade, I also worked as a guide, leading trail rides for tourists, which were an entirely different kind of animal. They would say they were experienced riders, but the second they were up on the horse, they’d freeze up, and the horses would sense their terror. Sometimes they’d overcompensate for the lack of control they felt and start kicking at the horses, or screaming at them, and the horses didn’t take very kindly to that. But since they were tourists bringing in money to our little town, I was instructed to tell them that their horses were skittish, and to take them back to the barn and get them a Pokey Joe horse. Every once in a while, I would get revenge on one of the more arrogant tourists by leaving them on a real horse, which would grow more and more fed up with the incompetence and the clumsiness and the cruelty and eventually take off running back to the barn, tourist clinging on for dear life.

  I worked hard that summer, cleaning and guiding, making my case for a horse. But I was operating from a deficit. Two years earlier, my parents had made the same deal with Margot and gotten more than they bargained for. She wasn’t careful with her horse, didn’t take the time to train h
im and run him, and he jumped the fence daily and had a habit of parking himself out on the highway. That was Exhibit A for the prosecution. My mother kept asking me who would take care of a horse if they ever decided to get me one, which they were pretty sure they wouldn’t. So I dreamed of it instead, as hard as I could. I imagined that I had magical powers to make one appear.

  * * *

  WITHOUT A HORSE, I threw my energies elsewhere. Around that time, I redecorated my bedroom. It had been mostly white, with a white bedspread and a white dresser. I kept the white walls but redid everything else in red: red curtains, red furniture, a red bedspread that I made myself. I moved furniture around every few months, just to give myself the feel of a new room. I liked nothing more than pulling the desk against a wall where it hadn’t been before, or rearranging the figurines on my dresser.

  When I wasn’t interior decorating, I was outside, mostly with Mr. Bubba, my yellow Lab puppy. He came along with me and Sara whenever we went riding or playing by the river. “Bubba,” I would say, and he would run to me, big feet fast over the ground, and jump into my arms.

  One morning, I let him out to play in the garden and run over to the neighbors’ house to beg for a little snack of bacon. Before I rode my bike into town, I went to say good-bye to him until the afternoon, when my dad would bring him to the river. I didn’t see him in our yard, not even making a mess of the lettuce patch, so I rode over to the neighbors’. He wasn’t there, either.