In the course of long, leisurely days, the folks would read and drink wine. My brother and I would make forts and dam up sections of a river, moving rocks and pieces of wood around to make its course change. We looked at beaver dams and tried to make ours just as big and strong. These projects would keep us busy all day. Mom was the best angler among us; she was very patient and very lucky. She would cook the fresh fish on an open fire. Everything tastes better when you have been outdoors and the air is clean and you have been playing hard, moving around all day just for the fun of it.
One memorable spot we stayed in was an abandoned logging camp near the Canadian border. We were there for a few days on the edge of a glacier stream. I have a picture of us naked with the ice-cold water dripping off of us as we pose for Mom’s camera. When we were not hunting or looking for animals, our campsite was filled with music. We would bring along a portable record player and blast the music really loudly with no neighbors to hear us. Dad and I sang along with Barbra Streisand at the top of our lungs as her rendition of “Cry Me a River” echoed off the canyon walls in the beautiful, lonely hinterland. We brought jazzy urban music to the wilderness, and the clash of realities made each sweeter. It was as if we had the entire country to ourselves. We always left each campsite as pristine as possible when we finally drove off.
* * *
Mom and Dad had a book called The U.S. Interior Guide to Thermal Springs. That book helped us plan our camping trips so that every few days we would hit one of the hot springs to bathe in. Some were just holes in the ground filled with other naked hippies like ourselves. But others were in beautiful bathhouses, like the ones in Hot Springs, Arkansas, that were modeled on the great spa towns of Europe. These bathhouses were remnants of a time before antibiotics, when these health-promoting waters provided sick people with one of the few hopes for getting well. Back in the day, if you were ill, you might spend weeks at the bathhouse in Georgia or Arkansas, but by the early 1960s, modern medicine had left these institutions practically empty; they were abandoned Victorian palaces. The few attendees left in these resorts that had gone out of fashion were as ancient as the buildings themselves, and they were overjoyed to meet a whole young family of bathing enthusiasts.
When we actually took “the baths,” the attendants separated the men and the women. After you took your clothes off, they wrapped you in big white sheets and moved you from one bath to another of varying temperatures. At one point, they closed you into a metal box with a hole for your head to poke out of: it looked like a torture chamber from some strange dystopian movie, but it was in reality an early steam bath. Toward the end of the “cure,” they wrapped you up tight in yet more sheets till you were like a giant swaddled baby, at which point you were left to lie down and rest in a darkened room so you could have time to savor the health-giving effects of the water treatment.
I have made pilgrimages to Hot Springs, Arkansas, several times on my own over the course of the many years since we first found it in near ruin. The place is now quite a tourist town. Some enterprising residents have capitalized on the feeling that when you go there, it feels like you are living in a bygone era. It is at the edge of a huge national forest, and for me, going back there is a journey to one of the many adventures of my childhood.
Later, when Dad was working in television and we had settled in LA, my folks found places we could go to regularly to get out of town. We went to an Italian place in Ojai where there was a huge, beautiful field to picnic in; we went to Solvang, which is a Danish-style village near the vineyards of the Santa Ynez Valley and where the folks could do some wine tasting. When the schedule was tight, we’d head for the big sand hill just north of Malibu, and we’d slide down it, toward the ocean. And if we really were pressed for time, we’d head off to the Santa Monica Pier that stretched out over the Pacific Ocean and where we’d have dinner and take a ride on the vintage merry-go-round and play in the arcade.
But one of the best places we visited regularly was a rustic getaway called the Double Rainbow Ranch; it belonged to Barton MacLane, Dad’s fellow actor and dear friend on I Dream of Jeannie. On the show, Barton’s character, General Peterson, was often angry at Dad’s character, Tony Nelson. That was funny to me because their offscreen relationship was very warm, almost paternal. Barton was something of a cowboy. On his ranch, he was Western through and through. At night, Barton’s friends would come around to the back porch to sing folk songs. One would bring a washtub bass, another would bring a ukulele, and Dad would play guitar. Barton was as rugged a man as anyone could ever find, but he sang love songs with this sweet, super-high-pitched falsetto voice that amazed me as a young girl. I loved sitting with them, looking up at the sky filled with so many stars. They showed me which ones were not stars but satellites, and I learned all about Sputnik, which was launched just before I was born. Barton took Dad hunting, and he became something of a father figure to him. Their relationship came at a perfect time because my dad’s own father, Papa Ben, had died just before the first episode of Jeannie aired. I am sure that hunting on Barton’s ranch made Dad feel close to his departed father, and this was where I remember learning to shoot a gun. We shot rabbits because, as Barton told us, rabbits were a nuisance to ranchers; they ate everything and kept multiplying. Barton and his neighbors paid a dollar apiece for each rabbit any of us killed, and back then, I hunted too. We shot so many rabbits that we had to dig a big pit to bury all the pelts and guts in. We sat at the edge of this pit, skinning the animals and throwing the bloody fur into it so that Dad could cover it over before nightfall and keep the coyotes and other scavengers from coming around.
My aunt BB also got excited about shooting bullfrogs. Frogs legs were a French delicacy, and she had learned how to cook them when she apprenticed to the head cook at a castle in Sweden before she became a nurse. She was an excellent cook and thought, for a time, that she might become a chef.
BB was a good shot, and one day, she killed a bunch of frogs. But because frogs are cold-blooded, they don’t die easily; the legs still hopped around even after they were cut from the bodies, and it was quite a sight seeing them hop around the skillet as BB poured wine on them as they cooked. A few years later, I started to get squeamish about killing things. It no longer seemed like fun to me, and Dad naturally excluded me from his hunting life.
* * *
Dad also took my brother and me on location with him when he went overseas, even when it meant pulling us out of school, because he believed we could learn more by seeing the world and being with him than by sitting behind desks being fed the same information everyone else was getting. At first when we were in grade school, it didn’t make much difference to our education, like when I was six and my brother just two and we went to Rome for several months. Dad was doing a film called The Cavern, and Mom did not have to work. She rented a tiny Fiat 500 and took us to all the museums and street markets and to the Sistine Chapel again and again. At times, we were the only people in the big, high-ceilinged hall, and she would have us lie on our backs so we could look up at the splendor Michelangelo had created. The Coliseum was full of wild cats we would feed regularly, and I fell in love with octopus pasta on the Amalfi Coast.
On another occasion, Dad was making a movie in Chile with Trini Lopez, who was known mostly as a singer. For part of the time, we stayed at an abandoned whaling village far from any civilization. We took long walks in the countryside at night, and Dad taught us about the different stars you could see in the Southern Hemisphere. I was studying Spanish; no one else in my family spoke any Spanish, and I translated as best as I could when we needed to buy train tickets and such. In an attempt to improve my language skills, I read the newspapers, and I learned quite a bit about the political struggles going on in Chile while we were there. It was a very volatile and dangerous time due to the fact that the Chilean people had elected Salvador Allende, the first Marxist to become president of a Latin American country. This was in 1973, and when I went back to school, I had a
lot to talk about with my Spanish teacher. Soon after we returned home, President Allende was assassinated.
These trips formed who I am today. My parents provided us with an eccentric, rich education. And Dad was proud of having raised us so differently from other kids. He was never apologetic about that. Certainly, our unusual upbringing was not what was haunting him at the end of his life, when he kept saying, “Forgive me.”
9
Life Above the XXX Cinema
AS A CHILD, I delighted in going to the theater, especially when it was to see Dad or Ganny in a show.
I was three years old when Ganny gave me a theater trunk with a big gold star painted on it that was filled with costumes, which included tiny Victorian high-necked gowns, cowgirl dresses, and a Chinese jacket and pants made of embroidered silk. Whenever I went to the theater to see her or Dad, they would be in costume, so I would visit them completely outfitted in one of my very own costumes.
Ganny was starring in The Sound of Music then, and Dad had a good role in a play called The Beauty Part. I was such a regular backstage at both of their shows that the stagehands would set up a tall stool and make a little cigarette hole in the backdrop so I could peek through it and watch the show from center stage and see the audience.
I loved my little perch and sat there as quiet as a mouse, but I am sure there are all sorts of safety rules that would make it impossible for a kid to do that these days. I watched The Sound of Music so many times that I thought I knew all the words and cues and songs; I secretly wished the youngest girl in the Von Trapp family would get sick one day and I would be asked to take her place.
I became awestruck at this early age by the power of live performances in a theater. One night, when Mom and I came to visit after a show, I let go of my father’s hand while the grown-ups were talking and carefully stepped onto the stage. I was a very small person alone on the dark proscenium jutting out into the theater with nothing but the single bulb of the ghost light on; the place was silent, but my ears were still ringing, and all my senses were so alive that I could feel the vacuum left by the recently departed crowd. It was an amazing feeling to be where the actors had been performing less than an hour before. I felt all tingly, transported by the awareness that the physical space I was standing on held an energy that lingered there, left by the magic that the actors had so recently created. I was standing on the exact same spot where those actors had commanded the attention of the entire audience. That audience was filled with individuals who walked in the doors of the theater carrying with them all the joys and sadness of their everyday lives, and once the lights went down, they gave themselves over to the actors, who in turn took the attention they were given and turned the occasion into a communal experience during which people came together to share intense emotions. The theater was a sacred place. It was larger than life, and for years it was the centrifuge of everything our family lived for.
* * *
When I was seven or eight, Ganny painted a picture of me standing in front of the cheval mirror that was in her gigantic penthouse bedroom. She loved to paint but rarely painted faces or hands because they required too much detailed work, but this painting was an exception. She painted my happy, smiling face exactly as it appeared when reflected in her mirror. She stood behind me as she painted, so the picture showed both my mirrored image and my back. I stood very straight; perfect posture was important to Ganny. My long blond hair cascaded down and was held in place by a bow that was the exact same color as my pink velvet dress. I distinctly remember how that dress felt on my body, how it fit me tightly under the arms and swung out into the crisp A-line shape that was fashionable at the time. I was precociously aware of how clothes fit because my mother was a clothing designer, and I liked wearing Ganny’s hats, because unlike her dresses, her hats fit me perfectly. Ganny let me have free rein to play with everything in her closet and dressing room. Next to the walk-in closet that smelled like Ganny, she had an antique chest of petite drawers, each just the right size for one cap or dainty hat. These hats were works of art with veils and flowers or feathers. They had no utilitarian purpose; they were hats with attitude and created strictly for beauty and pleasure. I would carry armloads of them across the room to the big mirror so I could check out how great they looked. I felt very grown up wearing them, and I would try them on for hours with Ganny suggesting how a hat should be tilted or adding a scarf to my ensemble. When she was satisfied with my appearance, she would step back and say, “Egads, you look simply marvelous, my dear.” Neither of us ever tired of the game, and a game it was: I was never allowed to wear the hats outside on the street. They were treats just for the privacy of her big room, where she was my best playmate.
Getting dressed to go out in public was something else. There were lots of rules about how a little girl should look when we went out together. I could only wear my hair pulled back with a matching headband or the right size bow, nothing too big or showy. Then there were all the necessary accessories that every properly dressed little girl had to wear. No one today could imagine the fuss that was made about what must be worn to go shopping at the department store. The requisite outfit included the previously mentioned little white gloves as well as ankle socks neatly folded above my shiny, polished patent leather Mary Janes. These shoes were flats, of course, as any shoe with even the tiniest heel was tacky, so Ganny said, on a girl my age. I was often reminded about how I must behave, down to the folding of my hands so I would not twiddle my hair and the crossing of ankles so my feet would not swing as they hung down from my chair. I was made to understand that my behavior was being watched, that everyone’s eyes were looking at us when I was out with Ganny because Ganny was a star.
She began taking me on special shopping trips just before Easter when I was just four years old. The approach of spring after the long, cold winter was a magical time in New York. Our neighborhood was particularly gray and dirty in the winter. Unlike Ganny’s neighborhood where there were planters full of pine trees and awnings and jolly doormen with uniforms that had big brass buttons on them, on our street there were girly posters pasted up and cheap restaurants and liquor stores so Peggy kept me indoors to play. But she still found lovely places to take me while my mother was working. She was a Catholic, and she walked me to Saint Pat’s, which was close by, and once inside the church, we could smell the incense and see the candles lit below the pictures of saints and angels with beautiful wings. As spring approached, she and I spent more time walking in the park where the forsythia would sprout its yellow blooms and the primroses and daffodils began poking through the remaining snow and tree after tree seemed to ready itself to burst into glorious yellow or pink blossoms.
In my home, there was a lot of preparation and excitement leading up to Easter, not the least of which was buying the perfect Easter outfit to wear in the Easter parade. A few days before the big event, Ganny would pick me up in her chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, which would pull up to our apartment building right in front of the triple-X cinema. One of my parents would walk me down the five flights of stairs to the grimy street below. The chauffeur would open the backseat door, and I would hop into the car and enter a different world. Inside, Ganny would be dressed in a chic designer suit with one of her precious little pillbox hats placed jauntily on her head. Around her neck, she wore several layers of pearls interspersed with diamonds, and her shapely legs would be crossed in such a way as if to demonstrate to me how it should be done. As she sat on the creamy leather upholstery of the big backseat, she would be sipping a cocktail. My drink, a Coca-Cola on ice, would be ready for me in a glass on the mahogany minibar in front of my seat.
Then, the Rolls would head a few blocks east and then north to Bonwit Teller or Saks Fifth Avenue. These were enormous stores, with ceilings that extended several stories high and glass counters everywhere on which would be displayed a profusion of perfumes or lipsticks or pastel-colored scarves and hats. In those days, women dressed up to go shopping, a
nd there were ladies everywhere, most of them trying to look like Jackie Kennedy, which meant they were all immaculate in their straight skirts, matching jackets, and what had become the required pillbox hat. There were also beautiful women walking around dressed in evening gowns. These were the store’s models, who styled themselves as much as possible to look like Grace Kelly. It was a mind-boggling sight to someone my age; these stores were another world.
We would take the elevator upstairs, and when we arrived at the girls’ department, we’d be rushed past all the brightly colored, beautifully frothy dresses. The plan was that we would be sequestered away from all the other shoppers, hidden in the privacy of our extra-large, mirrored VIP dressing room that had several elegant chairs in it. Once we had caught our breaths, we were greeted by our own private shopper. The shopper would of course be very elegantly dressed, and I had been instructed to curtsy to her, and this would prompt her to exclaim how cute I was, and then very discreetly, she would tell my grandma that she was a huge fan of hers and she had seen The Sound of Music several times and that it would be such an honor to help us find the right outfit for me. She would listen intently to Ganny’s very specific instructions about the perfect au courant ensemble she envisioned for me. The shopper then went around the children’s department selecting outfits and hats that my fashion-conscious grandmother would delight in and Richard would approve of. I always wanted frilly, gaudy dresses with lots of lace, ribbons, and bows, preferably in some shade of pink or purple, and I know I made a bit of a fuss about it, but I never even got to try on the gaudy things that attracted me. Instead, we always left the store with me dressed in something elegant and restrained that had no lace, few bows, and absolutely no purple.
The Eternal Party Page 9