If my thinking had changed radically, my conditioning remained the same: I wanted a man to share my life with. Yet, for all this seemed to matter, the recent relationships I’d involved myself in were perversely unlikely: liaisons with men on distant continents with whom I spoke no common language. The greater the guaranteed distance, the greater my interest. Curious choices for someone with a hankering to settle down.
In Europe I’d met and been pursued by a pleasant, if improbable, man, affectionate and insistent, charming. A man whose relentless devotion was reassuring after the battle fatigue incurred with Robin. It was a manageable mismatch whose main attraction was the avoidance of pain; unlikely to get messy or out-of-hand. But it was not a relationship in which I belonged, and I was tired of not belonging.
Ironically, in this imbalance of affections, as I remained uncertain and unconvinced I began to behave like a man in a similar circumstance: withholding commitment and dictating my own terms. Though I accepted the unconditional affection that was offered, I felt guilty for not repaying it in kind and, when the need arose, played the role of provider instead, in exchange for the freedom to do as I pleased. The ancient male maneuver of control.
I enjoyed it for a time; it felt good to be in charge, to be the one to hold the reins, to be at my liberty, to pick up and leave. But gradually I began to sound like so many men whose behavior I deplored: talking in controlled, condescending tones; smiling patiently, patronizingly; speaking in simple language as if to a child. Sounding like all the men I knew who were in relationships with women for wrong reasons: uncomplicated companionship, “low maintenance,” the absence of pain. Who assumed financial obligations instead of emotional ones.
I quickly came to hate it—and myself as well. Some men did it so often, so easily—suffering adoration in silence and smug superiority, pausing to stroke their partner like a pet. But I found myself glancing over furtively, wondering what I was doing with this person with whom I had nothing in common, to whom I had little to say. Was this better than being alone? And I came to resent this man for loving me, and myself for not loving him and for not leaving. What was once comfortable soon became unconscionable. Avoiding pain was one thing; inflicting it was another. If this was life on “my own terms,” I wasn’t having any. And so I moved on.
To South America. “It’s no accident he lives five thousand miles away, Candy,” a wise friend said to me after I had just gotten back from another trip to Brazil, where I went, like a South American shuttle, to visit a man with whom I was having an affair. A dashing, self-destructive man. A journalist who had been with Ché Guevara when the rebels entered Havana; a Communist who had been a political prisoner, put in solitary in Brazil; a declared “enemy of the state” who had spent years in exile. A man without a penny to his name who would give you the shirt off his back. A man with a giant spirit and a death wish to match. A man who liked hard drinking and handsome women. A South American man.
And in Brazil, I found an intensity of feeling, a crazy connection that was food for my cool North American soul. This man and his friends lived so hard and fast that at times they threatened total burnout. I could tolerate the sensual siege, the relentless pace only for short periods before I had to fly back to New York, wrecked and ruined, relieved to recuperate and recover.
I spent one Christmas on a coffee plantation north of Sao Paulo with kind and gracious people. But suddenly I missed my family. My friends. Why wasn’t I spending Christmas with them instead of wandering among the coffee trees like Juan Valdez?
I was getting a little long in the tooth for this sort of thing. Romance with the safety of a six-thousand-mile separation. Conducted in Italian as a common language. I no longer had time for flings with no future, for flights down to Rio. If I was going to have any relationship at all, it would be one for keeps on shared soil.
What I wanted was the part where you read in bed, rub feet and watch TV together. No Latin love themes or tangos on tropical terraces—just to be with someone with whom you don’t have to hide anything or pretend to be better than you are. But I had acquired habits of selfishness and solitude and wondered if it was too late.
Turning thirty was harder than I thought.
What made it easier were friends. My friends were my extended family: true-blue, old-shoe, longtime friends like George-Ann and Peter Hyams and Marty Elfand. Friends with whom nothing sacred, no-holds-barred behavior prevailed: dressing in gorilla suits, pelting each other with pies—there was very little we wouldn’t stoop to to make each other laugh.
Ali MacGraw was a true-blue friend. We had met my first summer modeling in New York when she worked as a photographer’s stylist. Dashing off drawings, collecting accessories, bringing her instinctive sense of style to the set, she radiated intelligence and vitality. Sassy and classy, she could charm a snake if she chose to, and I was drawn to her generous spirit. But it wasn’t until years later, when we were both in films and living in Los Angeles, that we became close friends, spending long evenings by the fire at her house at the beach, catching up on changes—or lack of them—in our lives and occasionally weathering rocky reviews together.
And Kitty Hawks—“The Hawk” I called her—was one fine, fierce friend. Tall, elegant, slender, she wore her hair in a braid that grazed her waist and swayed to a languid, giraffe-like gait. Uncommonly articulate, she was a woman whose opinions I respected and whose friendship I cherished.
And there was Connie Freiberg, with whom I was closer now than when we were a team in high school; Tessa Kennedy, who included me in her English country Christmases; Ann Sterling, a strong, savvy woman who worked in fashion and gave me infallibly caring advice on everything from knitwear to life; Carol Ryan, a tall, exotically beautiful lawyer who was funny, loving and wise; and Rusty and Mary Ellen, of course, with whom I continued our ten-year tradition of lunches at the Russian Tea Room. Rusty, recently divorced, with a young daughter, was working as an editor for Rolling Stone, and Mary Ellen was always just back from someplace and on her way to another: Bombay, Manila, Tangier.
Like so many other women, I was finding an increasing sense of connection—even a sense of wonder—in the comfort of female friendship. If, after the women’s movement, relations between men and women had grown fraught, friendships between women had never been tighter. Suddenly, we were seeking out, celebrating each other’s company, and it was odd to remember that only a few years before, women had shunned each other’s company at parties, preferring that of men.
It was my friends who gave me a sense of proportion about my attacks of Premature Mid-Life Crisis, and who steadily kidded me out of my coma. It would appear that I am a slow learner, but when I emerged from my cocoon, the lessons seemed clear at last. There is a price to pay for our choices, a simple law of cause and effect. A choice of college based on an ivy-covered campus. Of men for shoes. Of films for locations. Of travel in the name of avoidance.
I now saw my periodic months of absence as an abandonment of my family and friends. I was devoted to them, indebted, and I wanted to be as available to them as they had been to me. My appetite for travel diminished. Gradually, I began to eliminate excess in my life—people, parties, places—and to choose silence over noise, contemplation over distraction. Where once the very concept of responsibility had instilled terror if construed in any but the narrowest sense, I now began to welcome it. From acknowledging my responsibility to my extended family of friends, it was a short—if halting—step to acknowledging responsibility for my own life.
Iarrived in Kansas City in midwinter, rented a green Granada and drove through three hours of frozen farmland to Roscoe, Missouri, wondering who I would find when I got there.
For my first ten years, the one constant in my life had been my governess, Dee. The last time I’d seen her was ten years before, when I was just back from filming in the Orient; I had gone to visit her and her husband, Don, at their California farm. Soon afterward they had moved to the small county in Missouri where Don was bo
rn and raised, and we’d kept in touch by cards and occasional phone calls. In the years that followed, preoccupied with the business of growing up—or avoiding it—I had underestimated the strength of the bond we formed. Now, in the small step back I had taken from my life, I had a sudden longing to see once more the woman who did so much to raise me.
Theirs was a simple two-story house with a weathered red barn in back. The moment I pulled in, they came out the door—looking like strangers, and yet seeming exactly the same. They’re old, I realized with a shock; the difference is they’ve gotten old. We hugged each other awkwardly, Dee and I holding back tears, feeling more emotion than we were yet comfortable sharing. It was a sweet and sudden reunion, charged with sentiments of a childhood long since gone. Seeing them made me even happier than I’d imagined.
We went inside and eased in with each other. Dee, always small and delicate, had thickened some; her face was deeply lined now and her head shook slightly in a steady small nod. But it was Dee, all right; it was still Dee.
She had on a double-knit slack suit and wore a short wig someone had given her for Christmas. “I have to wear a wig, Candy,” she said. “I’m so short it gives me height; it makes me look better.”
Don was in overalls, plaid wool shirt, high-topped Wellington boots, a pocket watch hooked on his suspenders. The farm boy come home to roost. He wore thick glasses now. “Since his cataract operation,” Dee explained, “without them he’s almost blind.”
The house was small and cozy: a fourteen-year-old living-room set, a roll-away bed for me, plastic horses on the mantel, a stereo. “We finally bought a stereo set but we haven’t bought any records to play on it yet,” Dee said. “They’re so expensive. Six dollars apiece. Oh, we do have one someone gave us for Christmas—Loretta Lynn.”
After the house, we toured the farm. A horse and cow dozed in the barn in the back and in the shed nearby was a cellar for shelter from tornadoes; one had flattened the barn across the road last year. In the cellar were shelves lined with Mason jars filled with homemade preserves, jams, jellies, vegetables and fruit from the garden. They were selling the farm, they explained, to move to the little town nearby in order to be nearer a hospital, a clinic, a doctor—“in case something happens.” They’d sell the cow, too, and maybe the horse. “I want to keep my horse but my wife won’t let me,” Don said, a little bitterly. “She’s very economical, too much so.” “He’s too sick to care for her, Candy,” Dee whispered to me, adding ruefully, “We’re senior citizens, now, you know.”
Dee sat, staring at the fire, her tiny head softly bobbing. “You know, we lost all our savings when the bank failed a couple of years past and it set us back something awful.” She looked up at Don. “We can talk about it like this now but the day it happened we just came home and sat in the living room and bawled. At our age, we had to start all over.”
Conversation changed at dinner. Random chatter, catching up. “Don,” I asked, “whatever happened to Teddy, the collie? He was some dog.”
There was a pause. “Well, Teddy turned queer on us,” Don said, chewing quietly.
“Queer? A collier
“Yup. I guess he’d never bred a female and he started becoming insane for sex and all we had were chickens on the farm and he started having sex with the hens and he killed a couple of ’em. Just plain wore ’em out. So we had to have him put to sleep.”
And gradually the conversation spiraled around to all the subjects we’d never discussed before—that only an adult can ask about the childhood that was.
“What was it like, Dee, at those parties we used to have? When the governesses stood behind the kids while we were eating our cake (and having it too). What did all of you talk about together?”
“Oh, we’d make dates to have lunch together, to meet in Beverly Hills, you know, and sometimes we’d gossip a little. Do you remember Dottie, Betty Hutton’s governess?” I didn’t, but I nodded yes. “Well, Dottie used to tell me that Betty Hutton walked around the house all the time nude and Dottie threatened to quit if she didn’t stop it. I think that’s finally why she did quit, too, but she also said Betty Hutton wouldn’t let her children kiss Dottie goodnight, and Candy, they wanted to. They loved Dottie but Betty Hutton said no: that children should only love their parents.”
“It’s a good thing your parents didn’t feel that way,” Don chuckled, scraping the ice cream off his plate. “You wouldn’t go to anyone if Dee was around. You’d just hang onto her and wouldn’t let go. The only one you asked for was Dee; once, your mother joked and told her, ’Sometimes, I wish you’d change your name.’ I think she was a little annoyed.”
“Oh, gosh, once we went to New York, just you and I, when you were fifteen months old,” Dee said, shaking her head. “You’d just learned to walk. Your parents had been away in Europe three months. They met us at the station when we arrived and you wouldn’t let go of me—you didn’t know them. You cried when your father picked you up, so I walked away a little, just to let you get used to them, and then it was okay. My goodness, you would just cling to me. You didn’t trust anyone.”
After lunch the following day, Don went to check on a new calf while Dee and I sat, talking, at the table. “You know, Candy,” she said slowly after a while, “Don just isn’t the same anymore. He forgets things now. He came into the house last week and couldn’t remember where he’d been or where he was or what he’d been doing. I said, ’You’re standing in the living room by the TV, Don.’ He said, ’Where did I come from? What was I doing?’ So, he’s afraid to be alone now. It’s his heart, his blood pressure.” She stopped, her hands lying limply in her lap, and stared out the window. “You know, he used to be so good at figures and now he makes mistakes. But I never say anything.” She shook her head slowly. “Never.” Then, as if she read the question in my mind, she began simply, “If something happens to Don, I want to go back to Oklahoma. To my family. I want to be buried in the Catholic cemetery there.”
We spent the rest of the afternoon in the living room before the fire while the wind whipped and whistled outside. Dee brought down boxes of photographs from the attic and we pored over them wistfully. Photos of Dee when she was young and sassy in Oklahoma, photos of them together at the start of their courtship—just after they’d met on the floor of the Aragon Ballroom—looking smart and spiffy, large expensive prints of her and me and my parents, the birthday parties, the sprawling hacienda on the hill, the turtle funeral, the lush “at home” layouts with Charlie.
We went over our lives, sitting there toasted by the fire, Dee’s head gently bobbing as we reminisced and she talked of Holland and Oklahoma and Beverly Hills and Roscoe; of wanting to travel. Of feeling old. Of feeling young.
That night, after dinner, Dee went outside to check on the horse and the cow. Don sat back and ran a hand smoothly over his bald head. “It means a lot to us that you’re here, Candy. We never had any children and we consider you like one of our own. It means a lot to us.”
“It means a lot to me, too, Don. I wish I hadn’t waited so long.”
We sat silently for a while and then he sat up and, resting his elbows on the table, hunched over his plate. “Candy, do you notice how Dee’s slipping a little?” He looked anxiously toward the door. “She’s not what she used to be. You know she’s seven years older than I am, but she looks better for her age than I do.”
“I thought you were the same age. She told me she was seventy.”
“Nope, she’s seventy-seven. She lied on her birth certificate from Holland.” He chuckled. “She was born in 1901 and she changed the one to an eight but when she applied for her retirement, they sent to Holland for her birth certificate and they found out. She was really hot under the collar, but she needed her retirement.” He leaned back, smiling. “But she looks better than I do and you see the way she drives around and takes care of the farm and she always protects me and takes care of me. But she’s seventy-seven, all right.”
I had come to Roscoe hopin
g for insights on my own life from two people who had done so much to nurture it, and found, instead, that they wanted to share theirs with me. What I’d seen, in two short days, was more loyalty and friendship, generosity and trust than I’d ever thought existed. Two people who kept an extraordinary commitment to honor each other for a lifetime, faithfully, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. That was love, that was marriage. It took them to show me I’d completely missed the point.
The next morning I was leaving for the airport in Kansas City; we decided I should start driving by 6 A.M. They were both worried about the weather and offered to drive in with me and take the bus back. My leaving made all of us sad and we stayed up late talking, holding onto as much as we could of the last two days.
Later, lying in my rollaway, I heard Dee, the old diehard, snappily patting cream on her face—a fragile, feminine blonde of seventy-seven. None of us slept much that night; Don was up and down checking for the approaching storm, and I heard the two of them talking in concerned voices throughout the night. By five o’clock, Dee and I were both in the kitchen; I was eating a new crunchy cereal that she had highly recommended. “Candy,” she asked as I crunched, “do you use Crest?” “Nope.” “You don’t?” She sounded shocked. Old habits die hard.
She handed me some homemade bread and jam to take to my mother. I saw by the clock on the stove that it was time for me to leave. Dee went in to wake Don, who had fallen asleep again, and he shuffled out in his wool robe and slippers, without his glasses. “He’s almost blind without them,” I remembered Dee saying. Don told me to come back soon. “The mare’s due to foal and I don’t want you to miss that little colt. He should be a beauty.”
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