SHATTERED LOVE
A MEMOIR
RICHARD CHAMBERLAIN
DEDICATION
For Moani
with all my heart can give
CONTENTS
DEDICATION
FOREWORD
PROLOGUE
THE CHAMBERLAIN MAGIC SHOW
ON MAKING A BIG SPLASH
STATUS AND PRESTIGE
A BRUSH WITH ROYALTY
MY FAMILY REACTS
SELF-IMAGE
JOAN CRAWFORD, SELF-IMAGE EXTRAORDINAIRE
BEYOND KILDARE
THE SEVENTIES
DISCOVERING LOVE
LOVE
MARTIN
THE FIRST MINISERIES
FATHERS AND SONS
SHOGUN
MIFUNE-SAN
NANA
WHAT IS: THE DIVINITY OF NOW
BENEDICT CANYON
DREAMING ON HIGH
THE THORN BIRDS
SHATTERED LOVE
THE NINETIES
CANVAS, BRUSHES, AND PAINTS
THE FLAME OF ATTENTION
A MUSICAL INTERLUDE
THE INDEPENDENTS
THE THORN BIRDS II
HATRED AND FORGIVENESS
WHAT IS HATRED ANYWAY?
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AND YET ANOTHER REINVENTION
A LETTER CONCERNING SELF
DEPENDENCY, FEAR, AND HAPPINESS
THE ONLY THING TO DO
THE BEAUTY OF BREATHING
ON GLIMPSING ONE’S SOUL
ON MONEY AND SPIRIT
DREW CAREY
AWARENESS, CLEAR AND CLEAN
FINDING HEAVEN
INTIMATIONS OF ETERNITY
PICTURE SECTION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
FOREWORD
The astonishingly enthusiastic response to Shattered Love has taken me quite by surprise.
Until about two years ago, writing a book was nowhere near my agenda. Though I have worked very hard, enjoyed success, traveled broadly, and experienced a generous amount of glamour, torment, and fun as an actor, I judged my life to be pretty much dedicated to the creation and nurture of a somewhat artificial self-image (both private and public) that removed me from the realities, and therefore the profundities, of “real life.” No book here.
Then one fateful day in 2001, I was talking on the phone to Judith Regan about an author friend of mine who was in line to write a project for ReganBooks. Suddenly Judith said, “What about your book?” Under the spell of Judith’s charm I sat down and commenced the daunting task of writing a book.
Finding my way into authorship was hit or miss in the beginning. My original intent was to write a somewhat philosophical tome with occasional glimpses of my personal life. My editor and Martin, my partner, kept insisting that the book must be predominantly personal; that in order to understand the philosophical points, the reader should see clearly how these ideas grew out of my actual life experiences. Being habitually shy and private, I resisted for some time, but finally realized they were right.
Writing Shattered Love was the most intense and rewarding learning experience of my life. I found that truth is the only valuable aspect of living and that no-strings love is the wellspring of truth. Sharing my life and my evolving personal philosophy seemed a dangerous gamble, opening me to possible mockery and ridicule. To my external surprise and joy, quite the opposite occurred. During the extensive book tour that followed publication, with numerous television interviews and book signing events, I was totally floored by the extravagance of friendship, interest, enthusiasm, and love that radiated from just about everyone. Writing Shattered Love brought about so many insights and freed me from so much of my ancient and unfounded self-dislike and fear that I was able to go out and meet the world just as I am, without any need for self-defense, spin, or pretense. I was happy from the inside. I had nothing to lose. The world was sweet.
PROLOGUE
I grew up in a single-story house, somewhat Mediterranean in style, fronted by a patio with high, thick walls. The outside wall met the house in an upward curve that formed a comfortable backrest for little kids like me who liked to sit on walls. Inside this corner an old ornamental walnut tree spread its branches over the terra-cotta tile roof, keeping the dining room cool.
As kids, we often climbed this nonproducing tree and charged around the patio walls and roof like demented monkeys, terrifying my mother, who would run out and urge us down to safer ground.
One hot afternoon, during summer vacation from grammar school, I wandered in the yard looking for something to do. None of my pals seemed to be around, and I was bored. For want of a better idea I climbed the walnut tree and sat on the wall, leaning back against the restful curve. A light summer breeze ruffled the leaves as I watched the occasional car or pedestrian pass on the street. I gazed up at the overhanging branches and hoped some of our local feathered friends—mockingbirds, blue jays, and doves—would come to visit me.
As I sat there motionless, something absolutely new happened to me. I was filled with total stillness. It was almost as if I wasn’t even breathing, almost as if I’d become part of the wall, part of the tree. And in this stillness I was observing everything around me with complete neutrality, with no thought at all. There seemed to be observation, but no observer.
I don’t know how long this lasted—probably not more than half an hour, possibly less. I did not know what was happening to me. I only know that my thinking went silent, and my sense of self disappeared. I experienced absolute simplicity and peace.
Of course I couldn’t have described any of this at the time. At seven I had no context, no knowledge that would have allowed me to name and understand what was happening. I simply felt a vibrant, alert peace, and I loved the feeling.
I had no urge to talk about this experience with my parents or friends. But I did very much want it, whatever it was, to come back.
Several times after this magical day I climbed up and sat in the same place on the wall hoping to repeat the mysterious experience. It didn’t come again. That is, it didn’t come again in quite that way until a few days ago, over sixty years later.
THE CHAMBERLAIN MAGIC SHOW
I was born in Los Angeles during the Great Depression and was quickly whisked off to Beverly Hills. Alas, it was to the normal, pre-90210 part of that glittering town, the “wrong” side of Wilshire Boulevard—and, even worse, the wrong side of Beverly Drive. In short, the wrong side of the now-vanished streetcar tracks.
My folks took out a thirty-five-year mortgage and bought a three-bedroom, one-and-a-quarter-bathroom house for a hefty seven thousand dollars. There were five of us: Chuck and Elsa, my father and mother; Bill, my brother; and soon Nonnie, my wonderful maternal grandmother.
There were no freeways, no tall buildings in L.A., no jet planes, no zip codes, no smog, no TV—and consequently no video games, no computers or cell phones, no drugs or guns at school. Some of our neighbors still had iceboxes instead of the newfangled fridges, so the ice truck trundled down our street every other day, delivering big blocks of ice. We kids used to clamor after the truck, begging for chunks to lick on hot summer days. The Good Humor man drove by too, ringing real bells. An ice cream bar cost five cents.
Who needed TV? We had the movies, at ten cents a double bill. And it was the golden age of radio—soap operas and music, dramas and news, on weekdays, and an extravaganza of comedy and variety shows on the weekends: Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Fred Allen, Red Skelton.
I loved listening to radio dramas and fairy tales and mysteries. Television scenes are limited by the varying skills of the actors, and especially by limited p
roduction budgets—you get only what the producers can afford. But my imagination had unlimited funds to spend on the images my radio evoked. And the picture tube in my head was wide-screen, full color, and a hundred feet high.
There were vacant lots galore with tall grass to play in. We used to hide in the grass, pulling up clumps with dirt clods at the end and then lofting these missiles over where we thought our friends were hiding. When you got hit with one it didn’t usually hurt that much. The neighborhood was full of kids, and even at preschool age we were free to roam and play and invent adventure. No kidnappers, no molesters, and no drug dealers—house and car doors left unlocked—we felt safe; we took safety for granted.
I was seven years old on that Day of Infamy when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and savaged the U.S. Navy, awakening the Sleeping Giant and drawing us into mortal combat with the rampaging fascist forces of Germany, Japan, and Italy. Children pick up on just about everything, and my parents’ initial shock at suddenly being at war scared my brother and me. Seeing this, they changed their tune and explained to us that the fighting was very, very far away, and that our brave and righteous military would keep us as safe and sound as we’d always been. Still believing that moms and dads speak only the truth, I bought this, and the war became in my juvenile imagination a distant high adventure, a rough-and-ready sporting event that we good guys were bound to win.
The war released a tremendous energy in the United States, which until then was still suffering the deprivations and gloom of the Depression. The accelerating war effort took on a youthful determination, a robust, vital innocence—we were so obviously the white-hatted heroes fighting valiantly against the black hats of darkness.
Even through our inevitable defeats and losses, Americans remained feisty and optimistic. Our energetic optimism was apparent in our jive-filled, swinging music, and in our exuberant jitterbugging. Movies fortified our confidence in our superb fighting men and pumped up our loathing of the villainous Germans and Japanese (somehow the Italians never seemed that dangerous). If you have to march out and kill people, it’s useful to hate them.
Our grammar school had paper drives and scrap metal drives. We kids would collect old newspapers all through our neighborhoods and pile the playground high with stacks of carefully tied bundles of the Los Angeles Times and huge piles of scrap. Once I took a fancy to a sort of Oscar-like shiny brass trophy on one of these piles, stole it, and took it home. When Dad saw it he asked where I’d gotten it. I lied, saying that I’d found it in the alley. He asked me to show him exactly where. I was mighty scared, but I took him out into the alley behind our house and pointed out with my shaking finger a particular trashcan. Dad, no fool drunk or sober, fixed me with a gaze of Olympian severity and asked again, “Where did you get it?” I admitted, stuttering, “The s-scrap pile.” We returned home and I got spanked, more for lying than stealing.
Food was rationed with allotted food stamps. I remember that butter and sugar and meat and, worst of all, bubble gum were in particularly short supply. Margarine was easier to get, but the dairy companies got a law passed permitting the sale of only white margarine in large, unbutterlike chunks. To make this white stuff more appetizing, my grandmother would soften it in the oven and then mix in yellow coloring. The newly yellow margarine would be cooled in molds the shape of normal butter cubes. This was a tricky procedure because if the margarine actually melted it would separate and become an inedible mess.
Automakers were all making military vehicles—Jeeps and tanks and such—so new cars were just about impossible to find. By the end of the war my dad’s old Ford had well over two hundred thousand miles on it. Car tires were difficult to replace (old ones were recycled), and gasoline was severely rationed. And yet the war remained “over there,” and our lives went on pretty much as before.
For me the only really frightening aspects of the far-off fighting were the frequent air-raid warnings and nighttime blackouts. When the sirens sang, we had to turn out all our lights. Los Angeles became absolutely dark, invisible to enemy planes except for searchlights blazing into the sky, which might have given something away. My mother, block captain of our neighborhood militia, would go out and organize her bomb and fire squads. I remember one nighttime air-raid warning that seemed particularly real. I was in bed frightened to tears. Dad came in and told me our superfast P-38s were up in the sky and would surely shoot down enemy planes before they could even get close. It worked and I went to sleep. That’s one of my rare good memories of Dad.
Another good memory was when Dad would drive me to Aunt Blanche’s house somewhere in the downtown L.A. area. Normally, driving alone with Dad was extremely uncomfortable—I could never think of anything to say to this mythic, dark man, and I always felt silently disapproved of. But on the way to Aunt Blanche’s there was a San Francisco–type steep hill with a special bump that, when traversed at high speed, would almost fling the old Ford airborne and make my stomach dance around weightlessly. Occasionally I could wheedle Dad into hitting the accelerator and giving me the thrill of being a part-time astronaut.
Beverly Vista, our local elementary school, was a five-minute walk from home. It was an excellent school, not yet strangled by bureaucracy. It had beautiful buildings, first-rate teachers, a large playground, classes in art and music, and plenty of sports along with the full academic curriculum.
My father was a salesman for City Refrigerator, a small company that manufactured supermarket furniture: freezer cases, shelving, checkout stands. They supplied Vons Markets, among others, and Dad was said to be honest and smart.
A strapping farm boy from Indiana (some thought he looked a bit like Clark Gable), Dad was doing well at Indiana University when a football leg injury stopped him cold. The bone became infected, and after unsuccessful treatment Dad moved to California “to die,” he said.
In Los Angeles Dad met Ernest Holmes, the founder of the Church of Religious Science. They became friends, and Dad credited Holmes, a gifted metaphysician, with spiritually healing his damaged leg.
Around the same time, Dad met Elsa, my mother. She drove into a gas station where he was the attendant. He flashed a smile (great teeth). She gasped. Both were beautiful. Both, for better or worse, fell in love right there at the gas pump.
The handsome young couple, Elsa and Chuck, visited my mother’s parents’ home several times, and Grandpa was polite to the new boyfriend. When they announced their plans to marry, though, Grandpa vehemently told them that he did not approve of Chuck at all, and that he opposed the marriage. Perhaps he thought a farm boy was beneath his lovely daughter—or maybe he saw a flash of meanness in Chuck’s eye. When the two lovebirds announced that they would wed in spite of Grandpa’s opposition, though, the old man relented. He said that loving his only daughter as he did, he would, despite his objections, support their union unequivocally.
A couple of years after they married, my brother, Bill, was born. Six and a half years later I slid into the world from that unknown world of spirit, trailing, as all babies do, clouds of glory. The clouds lingered; the glory got a bit iffy.
Elsa was an excellent mother. She was lovely looking, quite talented in both music and acting, and had thought seriously of a career in the theater. Acquiescing to the mores of the day (ladies didn’t have careers), she happily became a domestic slave, a housewife. She shopped and cooked (very well), she cleaned and laundered and ironed (perfect shirts). She kept the accounts and paid the bills. She helped with our homework and worried about our grades. She cared for our ills (before vaccination was available we all got chicken pox, measles, and mumps). She was, especially in the early years, strong and funny and always available. Strangely, though, despite her awesome sense of duty, despite her talent and charm, Mom silently suffered a dearth of self-confidence, exacerbated over the years by her husband’s covert suppression, and she had almost no aptitude for self-knowledge. Or so it seems to me now. But then, introspection wasn’t exactly de rigueur fifty years ago.
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br /> When I was about five, Nonnie, my grandmother, came to live with us after she lost her husband. Grandpa had unluckily walked by a pile of burning ragweed to which he was extremely allergic. He arrived home feeling rotten and took to his bed. Nonnie tucked him in and went to brew some tea. When she returned, steaming cup in hand, he was dead.
My grandparents had lived just over the hills in the San Fernando Valley before it was so haphazardly developed. It was all orange groves and walnut orchards—an agricultural wonderland in which a little kid could wander for days. I loved to visit them.
Grandpa had smoked a pipe that made their whole house smell good. In his workshop he built all sorts of exotic things from wood: model sailing ships and carved furniture and ornaments. He had been quite successful buying and selling real estate in the twenties. At one time he owned a considerable chunk of the Hollywood Hills, but, alas, he lost it all when the Depression hit. Nonnie possessed the greenest of thumbs and tended a lavish acre of flowers and fruit trees. They had black widow spiders in their garage, which we’d kill with bug spray. High adventure!
Nonnie was a welcome addition to our home. She was the only member of the family who really knew who she was. She liked herself, and she loved us. And she made great pancakes, spaghetti, and apple pie.
It’s interesting that some of us are born with, or acquire along the way, a dark sea of inner doubt and insecurity that keeps us adrift, continually swimming to catch up, while others, like my grandmother, seem to charge into life with eager confidence, seldom questioning their worthiness. Nonnie was quite happy just being Nonnie.
As a kid, I idolized my older brother, Bill. At that age six years makes an enormous difference—he seemed to know and be able to do just about everything. Though an indifferent student, Bill was handsome, lively, great at sports, and often a lot of fun. He was “popular,” as we used to say, and adored by the schoolgirls, who were gaga over him. I was proud to be his little brother. I couldn’t understand why Mom sometimes said Bill had an “inferiority complex.” To me he seemed way ahead of the pack.
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