A little more than a year before Dad died, I got a call from him. He was in a Paris airport; it was at 5:00 A.M. my time. I am an early riser, but not that early, and I was barely awake when I answered the phone. He sounded very worried and asked, “Have you heard about the tsunami? Are you okay? Are the kids safe? Is Noel okay?”
Noel, my brother’s daughter and the firstborn of the five Blondies, was staying in Dad’s apartment. I shook my head and asked what he was talking about. He said there had been an earthquake in Japan that was going to send a tsunami to the coast of California. “Do you have enough gas in your car,” he wanted to know, “so you can get to high ground?”
“Now do exactly what I tell you to do,” he continued. “Turn on the news and take a look at what is happening, then get gas in your car. Next, go straight to my condo and check on Noel. I can’t reach her by phone, and the condo is right over the ocean. I won’t board my next flight till I hear back from you when I know that you’re all safe. Do you have that?”
“Yes, Dad, okay. I’ve got it!”
I jumped out of bed and went on the Internet, where I saw terrifying images of the giant wave washing away an entire town in Japan. I did not linger. I followed Dad’s orders exactly as I had been trained to do on our hunting trips when I was a child. I checked on my kids. I jumped in my car. I got gas and went straight to his condo. After rushing like mad, it felt surreal to find myself looking out the windows of the elevator at a beautiful sunrise and the ocean spread out below me as calm as glass. I stepped out of the elevator, and I rang the doorbell. There was no answer. I rang again to report news of a coming disaster that there was no evidence of … Still Noel did not answer. I was not sure what I should do. Dad said he would not get on his next flight until I called him back with the report that everyone was safe, so I went to the back entrance of the condo. I used my key and went in, saying hello in a loud voice, but though Noel’s stuff was lying all around the place, no one answered my calls. Before turning to leave, I thought I would make one last attempt to do what I was told to do. I knocked on the bedroom door. At least then I could tell Dad I did everything I could to check on his eldest granddaughter. Just as I was turning to go, Noel came out of the bedroom wrapped in a sheet. She looked at me like I was crazy. I told her that Grandpa wanted to make sure she was safe because there was a tsunami coming from Japan. She said something like, “You have got to be kidding,” and then we both looked out of the giant wraparound floor-to-ceiling windows at a picture-perfect day. With embarrassment, I turned and left. As soon as I got into my car, I called Dad, telling him that there did not appear to be any danger. He had been waiting to hear from me, and now he quickly proceeded to board his flight.
That beautiful sunny day continued with unusually low surf. But after years of Dad’s contemplating this precise disaster, I decided to keep my daughter at home instead of letting her go to her high school, which was only four blocks from the beach. I wanted to be absolutely sure there was no danger because for years and years, Dad had been saying the “big wave was coming.”
Though we were safe that day, Dad took the Fukushima disaster as a sign that the next big one might really hit his Santa Monica penthouse. When he returned from his trip, he bought an electric bike to use as a getaway vehicle in case the next tsunami were to pose a threat to his his life. The bike was like an off-road vehicle with studded tires and big panniers to hold all his emergency gear. He was eighty-one years old then, but he was ready to be a road warrior.
15
Finding Work, Dallas, and Fame
DURING THE YEARS between I Dream of Jeannie and Dallas, we lived in high hippie mode following Dad’s lead. On top of taking hallucinogens regularly, he experimented with Eastern mysticism, vegetarianism, pacifism, and lots of other isms. These activities superseded his ambition to be the best and most famous actor on television. In those days, his interests were guided by ideological slogans: Stop the War, Give Peace a Chance, and Be Here Now.
Dad wanted to align his work life with his beliefs, so he refused any work that portrayed violence, which limited the parts he went after. Though Dad, as a teenager living with his father in Texas, had taken to owning guns and enjoying the local hunting culture, he had totally turned away from those pastimes and interests. Instead, he immersed himself in the Malibu lifestyle. His priorities became the joy of being on the beach and playing Frisbee at the edge of the surf. He became so committed to this new way of life and thinking that he avoided guns completely and wouldn’t even let my brother have a toy gun or war toys of any kind. But like many hippie parents who took this stance, Dad found that little boys, like my brother, will invariably take a stick and turn it into a sword or gun.
When Preston hit adolescence, Dad started to pay more attention to what his son was interested in; he realized that he was out of touch with his boy. So he changed his stance and used guns and the hunting culture as a way to reach out to Preston. This was history repeating itself; Dad was using the same tactics that his dad had used to get close to him when he’d returned to Texas after being separated from his father since early childhood. Once they found an activity to bond over, Dad and Preston became much closer. For the rest of their lives together, the two of them went hunting several times a year, and when Dad died, as mementos of their time together, my brother became the recipient of Dad’s collection of guns.
Adolescence is not an easy time for anyone and I had was struggling both academically and socially. I was very unhappy in public school. My learning disability caused me to be in some remedial classes and, as they had when I was much younger, kids teased me for being a misfit. I wanted desperately to find some adult guidance. I felt that the year I started high school would be a chance to make a big change in my life. So I convinced my parents to send me to a new alternative school that was just being started in Santa Monica. Sadly for me, the new school, though based on well-meaning hippie values, was very disorganized; it was not the supportive learning environment I craved. With my parents’ consent, I dropped out of that school during the last half of ninth grade to do an independent study program that the headmaster set up for me. My assignment was to help one of the teachers collect data for her advanced degree in education. She had me interview middle school–aged kids in Watts about their school experiences. Though I only did a few interviews, no one could have found a better course of study to convince a young person about the importance of a good education. I learned how to articulate what kind of school I was looking for, and Mom contacted a learning specialist who found the place that would be a perfect fit for me, but it was a long drive away from Malibu, in the San Fernando Valley.
Oakwood High School was an alternative school that had a mission to respect students by fostering creativity and establishing a consciousness of community. It was much like the Woodstock Country School that Dad had attended and loved. My first year there, I blossomed. I found teachers there who really understood who I was and challenged me. The other students were like me: curious about the world and eager to learn from caring adult mentors. I loved the school and really wanted to finish high school there, but over the summer, Dad told me he could not afford the tuition. He said he was broke again. He reminded me that he was not getting enough work to pay the bills because many of the roles he was offered would require him to play murderous characters who killed people and thus promoted gun violence.
At my school, students were encouraged to question authority. So I confronted Dad about his mode of protest.
I asked if he had let anyone in the media know about the stance he had taken on gun violence and why he was not accepting violent roles. When he told me he’d never made a public statement about it, I replied that his protest did not make sense to me since no one but his family knew why he was not working. This was a new kind of discussion for us to be having. I remember it as clear as day, and I wrote in my diary about it. I was really tough on him. I said, “If you want to say something that would make the world a better p
lace, I want to do it with you, but what you are doing now is asking me to sacrifice the best school experience I have ever had for nothing. Nobody knows why you’re turning down so many of the jobs you’re offered. You are not changing anything.”
Money was such a difficult issue in our family. Even as a child, I always felt guilty about being supported by my parents, because as long as I could remember, there had been talk about how hard up we were. I wanted to do everything I could to ease their burden, and I stayed busy doing anything that made money, like giving art lessons and painting murals and cooking for neighbors. I did not understand why our financial situation was so precarious. It is only now, after Dad died, that I have tried to piece together what was really going on. I have had long conversations with friends of the family about my parents’ repeated portrayals of money troubles. All during the time we were “broke,” Jeannie was on the air in reruns. No one could understand why Dad was not getting a piece of that action. The reason, as Dad told it, was that Ronald Reagan had messed things up for actors. He had been the head of the Screen Actors Guild six years before Jeannie went on the air. Dad said Reagan had not fought for actors to get a fair share of the profits from residuals. He said Reagan did not believe the public wanted to see a show more than twice, so after a show was aired a few times, all the money went to the producers. I cannot vouch for the veracity of this story, but I heard it from my father often. Still, it’s hard to see why jobs were in such short supply since there were plenty of shows that did not call for gun violence. In fact, Dad was working regularly throughout the ’70s. There was The Good Life in ’71, though it was canceled midseason, and then he was in Here We Go Again, which was also canceled early. He also did guest appearances on other shows.
One of the best gigs he got during the ’70s was when he got a job in London working with Lauren Bacall in a TV version of the Broadway show Applause. As usual, we all went on location with him. This was the first time my brother and I got to go to England, the place where our parents met and were married. We stayed at the home of one of Dad’s oldest friends, the writer Robert Carrington. Bob had a big run-down apartment just off Kensington High Street that had not been cared for in decades. I loved it because I had my own garret in the domed turret of the old building just like the one the protagonist has in The Little Princess, which was one of my favorite childhood stories. It was magical. Each day I would go to the gated public garden in the square just outside the flat and pick violets that I’d arrange in a glass bottle and keep beside my cot. While we were in England, we toured around the British Isles and had real hands-on encounters with history. We did things kids cannot do anymore. These days, ancient historic monuments are recognized as delicate and irreplaceable, but when my brother and I were in England, we straddled medieval sarcophagi in Westminster Abbey and made rubbings of their brass plaques by laying a sheet of paper on them and tracing over the plaques’ engravings. This was so much fun, but by the mid-’70s, making brass rubbings at the abbey was no longer allowed. At Stonehenge, we climbed over and around the monolithic stones that had been knocked to the ground, while Dad recounted fascinating myths and legends about the people said to have built them.
But being pulled out of school in my teens had challenges that I had not had to face when I was in grade school. For example, in 1973, we spent quite a lot of time in Chile, where Dad did a movie with Trini Lopez called Antonio; it was in the same year that we went to London, where he played in the Comden and Green musical Applause. I was trying to teach myself geometry, and once a week, I had to take several trains on the London Underground to get to my math tutor. Riding urban public transport was a culture shock for a sheltered girl who had lived mostly in Malibu, and I did not have the tools to cope with all the strange people who confronted me in the city. When I got back home to my high school, I was well behind my classmates academically. The comments that accompanied my grades from my first year at Oakwood paint the picture of a girl who did not know the material and was always tired in class. I was sent to the principal because my English teachers thought I was on drugs. When confronted with this accusation, I told the head of school that I was up late several nights a week because we had so many people coming over to our house and I drank wine with the grown-ups at dinner almost every night.
After my interview with the headmaster, the school contacted my parents and recommended we all go to family counseling, but my dad didn’t really want to go. I finally convinced him to try it, and all four of us met with a female therapist. In that session, I talked about how hard it was to study at home with all the entertaining they were doing and how much I worried about our financial situation. The therapist was very supportive and encouraged me to express my feelings, but I think I was the only one in the family who liked the session. Both Mom and Preston said very little. When it was Dad’s turn to talk, he let me know just how pissed off he was by what I had said, and he made it perfectly clear that he did not want to have anyone criticize his behavior, especially not his daughter. “Darling daughter, you can say anything you want to say because it’s water off a duck’s back to me. Nothing you say will change the way I feel about you nor the way I conduct my life. I am number one, and I am always going to take care of number one first, and you should do the same for yourself.”
I had often heard Dad say, “You have to look out for number one,” meaning yourself, but this time, the statement, spoken through clenched teeth in front of the whole family and the therapist, frightened me. I was worried that I would never have my father’s affection and approval again, and his words shut me up very effectively for a long, long time.
We never went to the follow-up visit the therapist suggested, but I thought a lot about what Dad had said, and I came to the conclusion that for me, taking care of number one would mean staying at my school. After that session, I had identified a clear goal for myself, and I was determined to continue at Oakwood. In order to do this, I began to search for any way possible to make money, even though I was only fifteen years old.
I looked to my mother for inspiration because she had always found unorthodox ways to earn enough cash to pay our mortgage and other bills. Now it was my turn to find ways to make enough that I could stay at the private high school I loved.
My parents’ friends up and down the beach knew what a good cook I was; they had been coming over for dinner and eating my food for years. If Mom was too tired to cook for everybody, I made dinner. However chaotic our home was, it was well known that there was always good food in our house and that dinner would be on the table sometime after sunset. For example, Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim’s daughter, Vanessa, was just a toddler when she learned to walk into our house and open the fridge to find something to eat. Jerry Brown was another friend who dropped in often. He was California’s secretary of state at the time and was dating Linda Ronstadt, who lived down the beach. She was busy making music, so he would often show up at our house at dinnertime. Dad was always happy to invite him in for a meal, but once, I turned him away before Dad saw him. It was an evening when I was struggling with schoolwork, and I knew if we had company that I would have to stop what I was doing to cook up something especially good. I saw Jerry walking up the steps to our house from the beach, so I quickly got up from the kitchen table where I was working and stopped him at the top of the stairs. I handed him a can of Progresso soup and a can opener and told him that dinner was not happening that night.
Whenever Dad threw a wrap party for a show he was in, I always did a lot of the cooking, sometimes for as many as two hundred people. Mealtime was always important in my family. Wherever we lived, our home glowed with comfort, and ever since we had moved to Malibu, my mother made sure that we prepared the most welcoming homecoming for Dad every night. We would have the fire lit, there would always be flowers and candles on the beautifully set table, and dinner would be cooked and ready the moment he walked in the door so I thought maybe I could cook for people to make money.
I was on the
lookout for any way to implement my plan to make enough money to stay in my private high school, and as luck would have it, my friend Jonine offered to let me help her with a job her father gave her. During spring break, she had wanted to keep busy and asked her father, Cal Bernstein, if she could work at his production company, Dove Films. She envisioned going to his office and answering phones, but the only job he had available at that time was for a caterer to feed the cast and crew of a commercial shoot he was doing at a circus. This might sound like an ambitious undertaking for a fifteen-year-old girl, but Cal had a lot of faith in his daughter; he was confident that she could do it. Cal was what we would now call a “foodie”: he wrote a restaurant guide and shared his love of good food with his daughter. From the beginning of my friendship with Jonine, her very warm and supportive parents had included me at family dinners that took place at unusual and interesting restaurants all over LA. They took me out for my first sushi meal, and over my first bite of raw fish, we talked about the possibility of Jonine and I working together to cook for the filming at the circus. Jonine’s mom came up with some suggestions that would lighten our load on that first job, like getting already poached salmon. With great optimism, we started a catering business. I was a few months older than Jonine and had just gotten my license, but for the first few months after passing the driver’s test, teen drivers are not allowed to drive other minors who are not family members, so her mother drove us around on our first jobs. Between Jonine’s family connections and mine, we got a lot of work. In fact, our business became so successful that we were reviewed in The New York Times.
The Eternal Party Page 17