Which brings us closer to the Chamberlain Family Paradox—our multiple feet of clay.
Dad was an imposing fellow, with a big voice and a room-dominating personality. From the remote heights of his mythic, self-aggrandizing authority, he ruled our household and provided for our needs. He was the majestic and mysterious source of our security, and our ultimate judge (doesn’t this sound like the conventional image of God?). He somehow convinced us that his natural gifts and his accomplishments were far beyond anything we might ever attain. He was intelligent, sometimes charming, sometimes charmingly cruel, always in command, except on rare occasions when the presence of an even more august personality would cause a certain fading of his confidence. (I remember whenever Bill Wilson, the celebrated cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, came to visit us, Dad’s overbearing presence seemed to shrivel.) Dad loved his work and was a good provider. And, for reasons of his own, he was a drunk, or more precisely, a periodic alcoholic.
Why Dad blitzed his brains with booze was a complete mystery to us at the time. Looking back, it’s obvious to me that his inner sea of doubt and insecurity beneath his towering facade was darker for him than for the rest of us. Towering, domineering facades are not built by people at ease with themselves. And I remember how cool and unbending his mother was, running her small Indiana farm. She was a devout Methodist and thought Dad was damned for his drinking, and, when he sobered up, that he was damned for turning to AA instead of her church. Dad desperately and unsuccessfully sought her approval and affection most of his life, driving his old Ford “back east” to Bloomfield at least once every year until she died. She never told any of her five children that she loved them.
Dad’s periodic drinking—a few weeks on the wagon, a few weeks off—actually increased his enormous power over the family. Sober times brought us relative happiness and security; drunken times dashed hopes and fed anxiety. (Our glorious leader seems to have gone mad! Will we starve and be forced to beg in the streets?) None of us knew anything about alcoholism. When Dad was sober he may not have been a barrel of laughs, but we felt safe; the family would hold together. His periods of drunkenness were to his children inexplicable, insane, and dangerous.
We loved Christmas. Even with limited means, we always made a big deal out of it; we always had the biggest, prettiest tree in the neighborhood and lots of presents. Our family seemed happiest during these holidays.
One Christmas, when I was around seven, Dad was off the sauce, and it seemed like we’d be having a sober Yule: Hopes were high. After I’d gone to bed the night before Christmas Eve, I heard Dad drive into the garage, heard the car door slam, heard Mom open the back door to greet him, and heard Dad say in a guilty (or was it a bit sadistic?) little boy singsongy voice: “Honey, I’m drunk again.” Mom said, “Oh, Chuck, no,” and everything seemed to collapse. With four little words, Dad transformed our Christmas into a kind of soggy nightmare. That’s power.
After graduating from college, my brother, Bill, made the mistake of going to work for Dad at City Refrigerator Company, where Dad was now boss. After several months with the company, Bill went to Dad’s office with a detailed plan to increase efficiency on their production line. As Bill was explaining his well-thought-out plan, Dad quietly got up, put on his coat and hat, and walked out without comment or acknowledgment of any kind, leaving Bill talking to thin air. Later when a friend of the family said privately to Dad that he thought he was much too hard on Bill, Dad replied that he knew he was, but he just couldn’t help it.
Shortly after Dad joined AA around 1943, my mother became very active in Al-Anon, the organization for the beleaguered families of alcoholics. She started one of the first Al-Anon groups in Beverly Hills, which often met at our home, and then formed another in Laguna Beach when they moved there in 1956. One evening Dad walked into the kitchen where Mom and I were clearing up after dinner and out of the blue began explaining to her why her work in Al-Anon was really quite trivial compared with his profound work in AA. Helping non-alcoholics was child’s play, hardly worth notice compared with saving alcoholics. But when a real sinner like himself found God and sobriety, all the angels in heaven rejoiced!
Another time, when I was about fifteen, my newly sober dad called us all into the living room and, sitting in his big throne chair, explained that he, like Christ, might be “called” by God to abandon us and go out into the world to heal the sick with his newfound divine powers. He was dead serious, and we felt we suddenly didn’t matter at all. Mom quietly wept. What a shame that we were too intimidated to see the wacky humor in his absurd fantasy; we missed a good laugh. But then again there was the fear of laughing Dad right back into his bourbon bottle. The danger of a return to booze was still a veiled threat, an effective way to control us. As luck would have it, though, the “call” never came, and Dad stayed home.
I remember, in later years, visiting my folks shortly after returning from a life-changing seventeen-day spiritual workshop. I was excited and inspired by my first glimpse of openheartedness, and the wonderful experience of meditation. Ever the optimist, I thought Dad would be delighted to hear about these discoveries. After I’d finished sharing my experience with him, his only comment was that if you look like you’re meditating, you’re not meditating. In our family code he was saying: For great mystics like him, all of life is a meditation; they don’t have to sit in silence with their eyes closed like us poseurs.
Dad was never physically violent; he never hit us or pushed us around. His violence was psychological. When he was drunk, he’d stagger recklessly around the house or slump in his big living room chair, emitting angry vibes that seemed to me like a radiance of pure evil. It was like living with the devil. And he could quell anything remotely like fun and frolic with his famously lethal sneer. That sneer was like being slashed with a machete.
I think Mom suffered the most. Dad’s drinking drove her into a deep despair that, try as she might, she couldn’t hide from her kids.
And there were unpredictable episodes of genuine insanity, the drunkard’s terror: delirium tremens. Dad would have horrifying hallucinations of being savagely attacked by rats, or feeling that his face and body and bed and the whole room were covered with scurrying cockroaches. Off and on, we were living with a madman. I don’t know how he managed to keep working at City Refrigerator; I guess he was just too good at the market business to get fired.
When I was about nine years old, the booze had beat up Dad so badly that he finally “hit bottom.” One night Mom, Nonnie, and I were playing cards in the living room. Dad, who had been on a bender for weeks, staggered down the hall to the kitchen. We figured he was after something to eat. Suddenly there was a terrible crash of breaking dishes, and indescribable sounds issued from his fallen body.
We all ran to the kitchen. There was big, scary Dad, writhing on the floor in grotesque convulsions. We were terrified and helpless. What do you do with a flailing, slobbering body on a kitchen floor? Mom managed to call for an ambulance. They came quickly and carted Dad away. We thought he might be dying.
Dad recovered, knowing he had totally lost his battle with alcohol. This colossally arrogant man at last gave up and turned to AA for help.
So there we were. My father, though holding down his job and dominating his family, was self-absorbed, lost with his demons and addiction. My mother, though a dutiful wife and mother, was unable to shield either herself or her children from her husband’s covert cruelties. My brother, though athletic and glamorous, was uncertain of his aptitudes. And then there was me. Though playful and imaginative, I bobbed between unconvincing self-aggrandizement and debilitating self-doubt. We were a profusion of contradiction: four healthy, good-looking, well-educated, variously talented, well-liked people plagued by severe inner discomfort while pretending to be absolutely perfect. The Chamberlain Magic Show.
Contrary to my pretended perfection, most of my life has been ruled in one way or another by fear. Not so much by fear of outer threats like muggings
or financial ruin, but by my fear of inner poverty, unworthiness, inadequacy, and especially the fear of not being fully alive, of not fitting in at all. At times I felt that God’s assembly line carelessly forgot to include parts of my heart and soul. For reasons I’ve never understood, children of alcoholics often feel these lacks in varying degrees. A psychologist would call this warped sense of self “subjective phobia.” My most frightening nemesis was none other than me.
If I were to look for a central dynamic in my life, it would be the long peregrination from fear to love. But I was afraid of love, afraid that love would find me unworthy, inadequate, boring. I was afraid of what I most desperately sought: to belong to humanity; to love and be loved.
So what to do?
My initial and almost lifelong response to this dilemma was to bury as deeply as possible my offending self and create an image that would be lovable, or at least likable. This process of course begins with assessing what people around me like and then trying to be those things. Thus my life as an actor began very early. I learned to write my role and act my life. My motto was: Please the crowd at all costs.
And unbeknownst to me the costs were very high. A life of pretense is exhausting and debilitating. One’s inner reality will eventually push through any outward show, however charming. If not, a failure to deal with one’s inner turmoil and self-rejection can lead to illness, even death.
Though I’ve never been sure of the sources of my alienation, which began long before the revelations of puberty, I suspect it was exacerbated not only by my father’s suppressive nature, but also by my being forced by family and state to enter public grammar school. I feared and loathed school. It was a traumatic loss of my former freedom. I hated being told what to do. As a four-year-old I could roam our neighborhood as I pleased finding adventure all over the place, unencumbered by responsibilities of any kind. Why, on turning five, was I thrust into the clutches of all those ornery teachers ordering me around?
My mother had to drag me kicking and tearfully protesting into the unfamiliar and terrifying cage of kindergarten. Apart from one or two other loudly defiant children being pushed in by their moms, most of the kids seemed just fine, inexplicably happy to be embarking on this big adventure. I was not mollified.
The demands of kindergarten weren’t daunting, the curriculum being mostly playtime and naps, so as the days ground by I calmed down and adjusted somewhat. But I never discovered the knack of joining these confident mainstream kids who seemed to be having such a good time. For instance, the play room was equipped with large, hollow wooden blocks with which the other five-year-olds built ships or trains that you could actually get into and play conductor and such. I wasn’t ever enlisted as a builder or even a passenger, so I constructed a sort of ticket office and demanded that all passengers pretend to buy a boarding ticket from me. My scam worked the first day and I was delighted with my power, but then tickets became passé and my office was dismantled to build a caboose.
Luckily in almost all situations misfits can find other misfits to commiserate and play with, and some of us strays became pals. I graduated from kindergarten without honors, but with some fun and friends.
Entering first grade was an entirely different saga. It seemed to me that our childhood idyll was instantly smashed against the rocks of adulthood, devoured by the ferocious three-headed dragon terrifyingly named Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic.
My parents had accepted the then-conventional wisdom that they should not interfere with schoolteachers’ methods by introducing their children to any of these reptilian subjects ahead of time—I entered the dragon’s den totally unprepared. While the other kids all knew that a certain three letters spelled cat and that two plus three equaled five, I could not for the life of me figure out what was going on.
This school stuff is definitely not for happy-go-lucky me, I thought, so I plunged into full-scale passive resistance. I refused to learn (while pretending to try), and I refused to play team sports. Although this passive-aggressive behavior gave me a neurotic sense of power (the power to frustrate grown-ups I seemed to have no chance of pleasing), it also made me look and feel like a real dummy. It took me ages to learn to read, for instance. Being made to stand before the class and attempt to read aloud was the sheerest agony, especially when our tall, straight-backed, gray-haired, infinitely authoritative school principal, Mrs. Abbey, was monitoring us. Math too continued to baffle me for a long while. And though I had unconsciously brought these failures on myself, at least in part, I began to feel supremely stupid and alienated from the system and from the rest of the kids, most of whom were doing very well, whizzing through those flash cards and batting those baseballs.
Dickie Venamen, who lived just across our back alley, and Arden Phillips, who lived just across the street, were my closest pals since before I can remember. Arden’s family was especially dramatic. Her handsome elder brother was bedridden with undulant fever, which he caught, the doctors guessed, from drinking unpasteurized milk. But he had a very sexy girlfriend who used to spend a lot of time in his bedroom. One evening Arden’s father, several sheets to the wind, kicked their pet kitten clear across their front yard. I never forgave him for that. Her mom sang in the local church choir with my mother and brother. Mom and Mrs. Phillips vied for the solo parts with smiles and covert enmity.
When I was about to enter the third grade, Dickie’s industrious father invented salt and pepper shakers that released their tasty contents from the bottom when a button was pressed at the top—no more arduous shaking required. These ingenious devices quickly appeared in homes and restaurants everywhere, making the previously impoverished Venamens rich. They packed up and moved away to a mansion up in the hills with a pool table and a pinball machine. Of course they pulled Dickie out of Beverly Vista and plunked him into a posh grammar school on the right side of Wilshire Boulevard. I was dumbfounded and heartsick at the loss of my first best friend.
Dickie was a year ahead of me in school and shortly before he abandoned our neighborhood he warned me that Mrs. Redpath, the infamous third-grade teacher, actually ate children alive, a grim fate he had barely escaped. I was appropriately terrified and begged my parents not to force me into her murderous clutches. Amazingly, they ignored my fears and on the appointed day sent me off to my imminent death. For three days I pretended to go to school, but instead I just wandered around town, occasionally peeking into the playground and wondering why none of the kids were dripping blood.
The evening of the third day the school authorities called my mother wondering where I was and thus revealed my criminal truancy. I was duly lambasted, and the next morning Mom dragged me once again into the dragon’s den.
As it turned out, Mrs. Redpath was a wonderful teacher. She even gave me my first starring role in a lavish student production of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Decades later when I was playing Cyrano de Bergerac at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, Mrs. Redpath, whom I hadn’t seen since school, surprised me with a backstage visit after the show. It was a joy to see her again and to have the opportunity to thank her for inaugurating my acting career.
Though I missed my playmate Dickie a lot, I still had Arden—or so I thought. To my dismay, that same year the Phillips family mysteriously moved away, too, and I was doubly devastated. But Skeeter McComber and Mousie Newman were still around and somehow I got over it. Besides, we had a real gangster in the neighborhood to contend with.
Tony Carnero, a former bootlegger and current gambling czar, lived in a modest house next to ours. He was a stocky fellow of medium height with black, slicked-back hair and ebony eyes. He always dressed in a dark suit and hat and had the potent look and romantic aura of the movie mobster. Carnero was one of the powers behind the Lux, a large ship he’d converted into a spectacular gambling casino that was anchored three miles off the California coast beyond the reach of the law. To the consternation of the authorities, gamblers were transported back and forth in luxurious motor launches that the police
were powerless to stop. The Lux was a smashing success and a thorn in the paws of the cops and politicos alike.
Carnero’s house was protected by an elaborate electronic eye mechanism that surrounded his property. This fascinated all of us kids, and we occasionally dared to try to set off the alarm, but without success. I guess it was turned on only late at night.
Once in a while when I was little, and things weren’t going my way, I used to go down to the bottom of the low hedge that separated our two houses and yell and cry as loud as I could, alerting the entire neighborhood to my woe. Carnero, tired of my infantile operas, came outside during one of these tirades and, instead of threatening to take out a contract on me, said quite sweetly that if I cut out the noise for good he would give me an “A Number 1” Christmas present every year. I shut up, and Tony gave me a nifty little red bicycle on Christmas.
Earl Warren, the governor of California, was mighty unhappy to have Carnero’s Lux operating so blatantly off his coast. The governor’s investigators finally discovered two helpful facts. They found an obscure old law on the books that forbade ships without engines from mooring in California waters, and they discovered that the Lux had no engine. They were able to raid and close down the floating casino, thus handing Earl Warren a “great” victory and paving his way to the United States Supreme Court, where he became a remarkable Chief Justice.
Carnero then became involved in building the Stardust Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas where the waters seemed more welcoming. However, there were apparently dangerous behind-the-scenes power plays even in gambling-friendly Vegas.
One summer evening our family was having dinner in the breakfast room, which faced Carnero’s house. It was hot and Dad was sitting at the head of a small table in his undershirt, showing lots of chest hair. He was sober, the pot roast was tasty, and all was well until we heard a single gunshot that seemed to come from Tony’s house. My brother and I sprang up to run outside and see what was happening, at which point Dad said with absolute command, “Sit right back down, boys! There aren’t going to be any witnesses from this house.” We heard an ambulance siren coming fast. It stopped at Tony’s briefly and then wailed off to the hospital. Soon the police came to question us. Dad told them that we had heard the shot at about 6:20 P.M., but that we had seen nothing. The cops left disappointed.
Shattered Love Page 2