Shattered Love

by Richard Chamberlain

  About half an hour later, Barbara, Tony’s live-in girlfriend, came to our door all disheveled and sobbing, begging us to let her stay with us for a few days because she was terrified to stay at home. After she had calmed down a little, she told us that Tony had been shot. A delivery-man had come with a package for Mr. Carnero. Barbara had answered the door and called for Tony. When Tony came to the door, the delivery guy, whose hand was surreptitiously inside the package with a hidden gun, shot Tony in the stomach, ran to his nondescript car at the curb, and zoomed off like a rocket.

  With her bleached hair and a certain female swagger, Barbara wasn’t the classiest gal in town, but we’d found her friendly and rather sweet underneath her tough-dolly veneer. Of course Mom asked her to stay with us. She slept in Bill’s bed in the small bedroom he and I shared, and Bill moved to the living room couch. That evening Barbara seemed to fall asleep instantly, but all through the night I heard her quietly weeping.

  The next morning I wolfed down my breakfast and ran off to school to achieve at least temporary celebrity by regaling my newly admiring fellow students with wild tales of gangland warfare right next door. To my everlasting dismay, Mousie Newman’s brother, Kurt, who lived across the street and was my neighborhood nemesis, had already told the story a dozen times on the playground, achieving stardom and making me last year’s headlines. My celebrity would have to wait a couple more decade.

  Two days later, Barbara asked me to take the suit that Tony was shot in to the dry cleaners—I got to see the bloody bullet hole and everything. My school chums were still unimpressed. Kurt remained the Mario Puzo of Beverly Vista School.

  Carnero survived the shooting, but about a year later he mysteriously died at the Stardust Hotel. His shady cronies claimed it was a heart attack, but Dad was pretty sure they’d decided to snuff him for good. As usual, high drama in the neighborhood often superseded the subtler difficulties lurking beneath the surface at home and at school.

  Abandoned by my friends Dickie and Arden and with adolescence approaching, I was troubled by another potentially disastrous problem. I began to notice that I was more attracted sexually to boys than to girls. In high school I played the game and had several wonderful girlfriends. We’d go to dances and neck in the backseats of friends’ cars like everybody else (I was known as a great kisser), but it grew ever more clear to me that my heart was elsewhere.

  At the beginning of this new millennium when our understanding of homosexuality is slowly leading to acceptance and, better yet, disinterest, it’s difficult for those who weren’t around in the forties and fifties to appreciate how deeply terrifying it was to imagine being labeled a faggot, a pansy, a pervert. It seemed to me then that even traitors and murderers were generally held in higher esteem than I would be if anyone ever found out the truth about me. I remember walking home from school one day solemnly swearing to myself over and over that I would never ever reveal my loathsome secret in any way to anyone.

  This solemn commitment to deception reminds me of the most purely honest thing I’ve ever done, perhaps my last absolutely honest and independent act for decades. It happened during an eighth-grade YMCA track meet. I could always run faster than everyone else in grammar school, and I’d never been beaten in a race. The YMCA meet involved several grammar schools and took place at the Beverly Hills High School track. I was scheduled to run in the hundred-yard dash.

  The starting gun was fired and we all took off. To my great surprise I noticed a kid from another school pulling out ahead of me so I put on more speed. So did he. Try as I might, I couldn’t catch up with him. So I just quit running and walked off the track. I had no interest in running a race that I couldn’t win. What was the point?

  My father (sober) was there on the field, and he ran over to me with several of my school friends wanting to know if I’d pulled a muscle or something. I said no, I just wasn’t winning so why bother. To my utter amazement they all were scandalized. What about sportsmanship? What about team spirit! Shame! The disapproval of one’s tribe is potent indeed. Win or lose, I’ve never stopped in the middle of a race again, but I still feel that what I did that day was totally fresh and free and honest, and delightfully oblivious of the dreaded norm.

  An alcoholic father, scholastic paralysis, and sexual dismay certainly aggravated my self-esteem problem, but I suspect I may have entered life with this particular challenge of imagined worthlessness, which by the way would eventually push me to a long, sometimes bumpy journey toward self-discovery and healing—toward love. Sometimes the intense discomfort of that irritating grain of sand creates a pearl. Fortunately, along with the pain and fear inherent to this progress, I had a nascent interest in spiritual possibilities and an irrational sense that somehow I would someday make a big splash in life.

  Interlacing these stormy times were rays of sunshine. As a youngster at home I had a warm relationship with my mother and superb grandmother. Between fights, Bill and I had fine times.

  In these early years, Mom was funny, athletic, and playful. An actress and a stage director in college and at the Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, and an excellent pianist and singer from a musical family, Mom was always an interested audience for my juvenile playlets and piano lessons. We used to love to whistle tunes in harmony while washing dishes and doing other chores. And Mom did a great orangutan imitation.

  When I was small, Nonnie used to wake me at dawn to watch the colors of the sunrise. After dinner she’d sometimes take me for a long walk in the neighborhood. As we strolled, we both liked to peer into people’s front windows from the sidewalk to get a glimpse of how they lived. Nonnie was as close to a raconteur as a woman could get in those days. She’d tell endless stories about how her family crossed from Nebraska to California in covered wagons, about their scary adventures with the Indians, about her sister Ella, who was the first white woman ever to climb to the top of Mount Whitney, and about her brief, but colorful career as a professional singer. Nonnie had one of those “Star Is Born” experiences in The Merry Widow on Broadway just after the turn of the century. She had a small part in the operetta and because of her wonderful voice she was understudy to the star. Well, on opening night the star fell ill and Nonnie went on in the lead and brought the house down. The next day she got marvelous reviews, but after a few weeks she quit the show and returned home, saying she just didn’t like show business—too much backbiting, she said.

  Six and a half years older than me, my brother, Bill, won all our fights, but he was at times great fun. He carried me around on his shoulders and played all sorts of games—once in a while he let me ride his racing bike. And I was fascinated by his numerous girlfriends, all top-of-the-line gorgeous and the most sought after in school.

  In high school and college I always had a group of close friends and lots of interesting activities. Even neurotics can enjoy good times, though the unreality and pretense at the center of neurosis increasingly demand one’s attention.

  Following my mediocre performance in high school I was happily surprised to be accepted by Pomona College, a highly respected institution in Claremont, California. Though my high school grades had been average at best, I scored high on the SAT tests, and I had an interesting list of extracurricular activities. I’d been a four-year letterman in track, chief justice of the Student Court (not a friend-winning position), and I’d won an art department award and a summer scholarship to Art Center School. Much to my surprise I’d also been voted most reserved, most sophisticated, and best physique by our Beverly Hills High senior yearbook staff, a trio of accolades bound to impress the most dour of admissions officers.

  In 1952 Pomona was one of three small colleges nestled among the fragrant orange groves of a then sparsely developed agricultural area of Los Angeles County, at the foot of snowy peaked Mount Baldy. Coed Pomona, Scripps College, and Claremont Men’s College were all adjacent to the sleepy little town of Claremont with its single cinema and ever-popular hamburger joint.

  The campuses of bot
h Scripps and Pomona were idyllically beautiful, with classically designed, vine-covered buildings surrounded by towering sycamores, California oaks, and lovely parks and fountains. Pomona secretly thought of itself as “the Oxford of the Orange Belt.”

  An old-fashioned liberal arts college, Pomona had high scholastic standards, and the leisurely, romantic aura that graced such institutions before the glories of art and literature and philosophy were overrun by the clamor of technology and commerce. This was the perfect place for a dreamy romantic to discover the riches of human thought and creativity, removed from the harshness, insecurities, and competitive scrambles that all students face after graduation.

  Even with my lousy work habits, emotional confusion, and general unease, I was dazzled by Pomona’s rich curriculum. I could have imagined no future more wonderful than the glamour of acting, but my near catatonic inhibition and terror of appearing ridiculous led me to the even less practical choice of majoring in painting and art history. Practicality was nowhere to be found in my nature—I somehow figured that if I couldn’t make it as an actor, I could support myself as a painter, perhaps a commercial artist.

  Partly because I lived on campus, tuition was considerably higher than my folks could afford. My grandmother had given my mother stock in a previously defunct oil well in Lodi, California, and in what seemed like intervention from on high, this considerate well began to produce precious black crude just as we were making plans for Pomona. It continued to produce for four years. My mother’s share paid for my higher education and then the well went dry as mysteriously as it had become unexpectedly wet. My undying thanks go to Mom and to Mother Nature!

  I loved learning to paint and sculpt, and my art history professors were fascinating. But early in my freshman year I made the mistake of joining some new friends at Pomona’s legendary Holmes Hall Theatre to watch tryouts for a college play, a deathless comedy called George Washington Slept Here. The director, Virginia Allen, spotted me in the audience and persuaded me, against my ardent objections, to read for the part of the flamboyant actor. I did get up and read a scene, undoubtedly very badly, and for enigmatic reasons Mrs. Allen gave me the part.

  This was the beginning of Richard the art major moonlighting as a perennial DP. DP was the current, slightly unkind acronym referring to members of Drama Productions. It also had overtones of Displaced Persons. Despite my shyness and inexperience, I got a few laughs as the egocentric actor and I was hooked.

  In the early 1950s the Korean War was still recent history and young men were subject to the draft. I had a college deferment and had to maintain a B average to stay in school. Because I was spending so much unaccredited time in drama department activities, and still more time as a member of Pomona’s track team (running the hundred-yard dash, the two-twenty, and the four-forty relay), I started to have trouble earning decent grades in my official studies. So I managed to avoid as many difficult courses as I could; when it was possible to take the likes of music appreciation instead of physics or a foreign language, I did so.

  Though I was fast losing my heart to drama, I didn’t switch majors because as a performer I was still desperately inhibited by self-doubt. I had to rehearse on my own before play rehearsals because I was afraid to try anything new in real rehearsals that I hadn’t carefully planned out beforehand. I did not trust myself to find my character spontaneously with the other actors. Acting during these years (and to some extent even later on) was an anxious mix of elation and terror.

  It wasn’t until my senior year that I had a life-changing breakthrough as a neophyte actor. I’d been in many plays the past three years and must have improved because Mrs. Allen cast me as Bluntschli in Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man. Like his name, Bluntschli was straightforward, wry, practical, and very funny, and in the end he even got the girl. I loved this character and worked very hard on the part, but I didn’t manage to break loose into an all-stops-out performance until opening night. Somehow the audience brought me fully alive, and I managed to give a really spirited performance (in amateur terms) and pretty much stole the show. When I made my final exit following a brilliantly written speech, the audience broke into thunderous applause that stopped the show cold. Holmes Hall was filled with laughter and cheering for all four performances, and I was delirious with the joyous realization that maybe I could embrace my first love and actually become an actor! I gleefully decided to throw fine arts out the window and give my heart unreservedly to acting, that great escape.

  By the time I graduated from college I’d figured out how to live (well, get by) in the protective, richly diverse world of academia. Now, like all former students, I’d have to figure out how to live in that huge, raucous, foreign-looking Real World out there.

  So how did this hopeful but inwardly lost product of the Chamberlain Magic Show, well trained in covering intense insecurity with the pretense of outward “perfection,” plan to cope with his long-delayed debut into Real Life?

  My strategy, only partly conscious, was to continue the construction and maintenance of my self-image—the alternate, much improved Richard I presented to the world—to refine my ability as a pleaser, and to strive with all my might toward that big splash which would justify my existence on the planet. Not a healthy mix.

  ON MAKING A BIG SPLASH

  There are worlds of difference between the “humble nobody” who may achieve great things but cares nothing for prestige, and the “neurotic nobody” for whom prestige is everything, his lifeblood. As a near perfect neurotic nobody I was desperate to at least seem to belong, so I became obsessed with somehow making the big splash that would catapult me up the hierarchical ladder to “somebodyhood.”

  Shortly before graduating from Pomona College in 1956, I was approached by a talent scout from Paramount Studios who had seen me in a couple of college plays. She wanted to set up a meeting for me with some studio executives who might want to put me under contract. I was flabbergasted.

  Bachelor of arts degree in hand, I did meet with these studio suits, and they did offer a seven-year contract. I sought advice from a family friend on the fringe of show biz and proceeded to attempt to negotiate terms with Paramount on my own, not being able to afford a lawyer.

  The executives, who no doubt had chewed up and spit out plenty of performers and agents with real savvy, must have found my puny attempts at negotiating a fair salary hilarious. Mercifully I was saved from signing myself into slavery by the dreaded draft notice. I toppled from my fanciful dreams of fame and fortune into the very real drudgery of enlisted army life.

  The U.S. Army and I were not exactly made for each other—mine is not a militant nature. If I felt an alien in civilian life, I was positively Andromedan in the infantry.

  My basic training took place at Fort Ord in northern California. If kindergarten had seemed like intolerable bondage, then basic was the beginning of a life sentence at Sing Sing without parole. There were two bright spots. The first was a hot competition between the various company mess halls for the best wall mural. Our company commander noticed that I’d been an art major and drafted me to paint our mess hall mural in whatever spare time I could find. He wanted a vast picture of San Francisco’s famous Fisherman’s Wharf, eighteen by thirty feet. So with the help of Tony Landau, a high school classmate who happened to be assigned to the same company, we painted while everyone else ate. Tony wrote me recently, and in his letter he included a photo taken in the 1970s of himself and his two children standing in front of our mural. He said the painting graced the mess hall for nineteen years until Fort Ord was dismantled.

  A logistical glitch of some kind created the second bright spot—we were allowed, in fact ordered, to go home for a two-week break at Christmas (I’d been inducted in early December).

  It was shortly after this blissful, unexpected break that I wrote the following letter to my best friend in college, Joe:

  Dear Joe,

  If you’re an observant ex-Marine, you’ve noticed that it’s Sunday. Yo
ur old pal has toted his stationery into the hilly, mossy woods overlooking Monterey Bay. Tiny white lines of sea foam appear and disappear far below along the coast, while a martyred sky supports tons of pompous Roman clouds. The neighborhood dogs bark in intermittent conversation (which, feeling left out, I try unsuccessfully to join). Amplified church bells drone flaccid Presbyterian melodies, and an early spring already begins to stab the earth with wee green hints of tomorrow’s underbrush. This should be enough, but I guess we’re pretty hard to please.

  And about that letter from Nan extolling the arts! Christ, I’ve wasted so much time fearing the arts were a refuge for the gutless—how nice to be disillusioned.

  Would you know what I mean when I say that I’ve learned from the army that to live well is not so complicated and difficult a matter as I once imagined? Within this drudgery, simple things mean a lot.

  And have you felt the disappointment in this military predicament of speaking to an intelligent face and receiving a sort of grunting reply? Some of these guys are made of good stuff, but just don’t know what to do with it.

  Don’t remember telling you much about my Christmas leave. One evening just before The Birthday I was home alone at my folks’ house in Laguna Beach, sipping wine and writing letters. Handel’s Messiah suddenly plunged forth from the radio, and since we of the Pomona College choir sang this work Christmas before last, it brought forth such painful nostalgia for all those wonderful times that I listened and cried shamelessly for about half an hour.