atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business (2 page)

Prologue 

I lived through my mother saying more than once, that she would “no more do that than go to the moon” and my father announcing just as often, that he was “going down to the cellar to shake up the furnace.”

I lived through times way before free love, Roe v. Wade, condoms, and AIDS. Hell, I spent twenty-five years as a virgin so a man would respect me and propose. “A kiss was a promise” in those days. If a girl got pregnant with no husband to show for it, she’d have to find someone who’d put her in touch with the “Angel of Ashford” instead. That was a doctor in Pennsylvania who wore a half-inch-long fetus curled up in a bracelet on his wrist. Or maybe she’d go to Puerto Rico, where she could get an abortion that didn’t entail the use of a clothes hanger. However she dealt with it, it was first-degree murder if she got caught.

The gangster, Dutch Schultz, was brought to justice—shot and killed—three towns away from ours. I can still see the oversize headlines in the Newark Evening News, folded and tossed with deadly aim onto our doorstep by a boy on a bike, causing a hullabaloo as all four of us children tore into it and fought to get to the comics that we loved: Dick Tracy, Major Hoople, Blondie, The Katzenjammer Kids, Li’l Abner.

My grandfather worked on the building of the railroads in the Southwest and once did a man a favor there. This man told my grandfather that he’d give him whatever he wanted in return. My grandfather said, “I want a seat on the stock exchange,” the price of which was $25,000 at the time. The man gave it to him, but we never learned what the favor had been. Soon, Grandpa was playing poker with Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell and was worth $7 million—before the crash in 1929. After that, his fortune vanished, and he lived in a rented room in Queens with his caretaker, Mrs. Merrill.

There was Lucky Lindy flying solo across the Atlantic, to my mother’s astonishment, although it didn’t stop her from saying, “I would no more do that than go to the moon.” Then the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped. Later, Amelia Earhart, whose name I had carved into the beech tree as tall as our house, disappeared over the Pacific.

On The March of Time newsreel, we saw the Hindenburg, a hydrogen-filled dirigible, explode in the air and sink in slow motion as flames consumed its passengers and crew. Later, on the radio in my parents’ bedroom, Orson Welles announced that aliens had landed in New Jersey, and we couldn’t get the operator on the telephone. I didn’t know what aliens meant and nobody would tell me, so I went down into the cellar and gave my dog, Molly, a bath in case they dropped by.

Isadora Duncan’s scarf got caught in the spokes of the wheel of her escort’s car and strangled her. I didn’t understand why anyone would wear such a long scarf around her neck. It seemed to me to be asking for it. Anita Zahn, her disciple, taught us creative dancing on the lawn of the Women’s Club of Upper Montclair, the same place where we gave a recital during which my slipper flew off my foot and sailed high in the air to dangle from the branch of a tree while the grown-ups laughed.

My brother Jim warned me to beware of old ladies with white hair who would stop in their limousines and offer a ride. “Never get in,” he told me. “She’ll stick you with a long hat pin full of drugs, and you’ll be whisked off to South America and end up in the white-slave trade.”

The summer ended. I was about to go to school for the first time! The world was opening up. My sister Adeline, as in “Sweet Adeline,” would take me there. She was in sixth grade, and I would be in kindergarten. The school was two lots away from our house, just cut up the back, through the Kelloggs’ cornfield, and past the Gilbreths’, where the children lined up for the bathroom according to the efficiency schedule posted on the refrigerator. (Later, there would be a book called Cheaper by the Dozen and three movies about them as well.) Then we would turn left on High Street, and there it was: Nishuane Public School. Over one door, it said, “Boys”; over another was carved “Girls.”

Nishuane included kids from kindergarten through sixth grade, and it demanded good marks from its students. Some schools pushed everyone on to seventh grade in another school, but not Nishuane. If you flunked a year, you could repeat it until you passed. The girls always passed, but some of the boys didn’t. They were only interested in playing football and couldn’t care less what grade they were in. They would grow tall over the summer. One was close to six feet that year. When a boy got to be six feet, regardless of what grade he was in, he was asked to leave and go find a job.

On the afternoon before the first day of school, Adeline—Sweet Adeline—came home and said to my mom, “Mother, what does fuck mean?” Mom said, “Where did you hear that word?” And Adeline said, “At the playground at school. One of the big boys asked me if I wanted to.”

The next day, as the autumn sun glinted down on us, we were enrolled in the Kimberley Day School for Girls. Life had sent me spinning into a safe deposit box for the subsequent sixteen years.

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EGINNINGS 

Mom 

My mother was born in 1886, the year Coca-Cola was invented, in the horse-and-buggy days. The railroads were still being built across the country. The slaves had only recently been freed. Women remained tethered to the home, where they raised many children and weren’t allowed to vote. Only a few of them escaped to pursue careers. When my mother had gentlemen callers, my grandfather went to the stair landing at ten p.m. and set off an alarm clock to advise the young men that it was time for them to leave.

My mother and father met at a Halloween party, where they were both dressed as ghosts in white sheets. They stood together over the hot air heater in the floor, talking, while the sheets billowed around them. They courted for four years and were engaged for four more.

Grandpa Muir had misgivings about Dad; he thought he was a bit of a playboy and had too much fun. When Dad finished his residency at the New York Eye and Ear hospital, Grandpa asked him which he would prefer as a wedding present, a trip to Europe or a house in New Rochelle. Dad saw through the trick question and said, “A house in New Rochelle, of course, sir.” Grandpa gave up trying to keep his favorite daughter home with him and offered them his blessing.

My mother told me that on their wedding night, my dad waited patiently while she knelt beside the bed and said her prayers.

When it was my turn to be born, my mom was forty-three my dad was fifty. My dad was so delighted with his prowess that he concocted a theatre piece for the event. He set up a trap to catch me in case no one was home when the stork arrived. I might wander over to the Kelloggs when it left. The trap was disguised as a rose trellis. I have a photo of my brothers, Jim and Bruce, standing beside this trellis trap, with my five year old sister, Adeline, standing in for me, posed on one leg in an arabesque, tangled up among the roses, captured. I spent a lot of time later on with the family album, pondering that event. It had the look of Edward Gorey about it. It was a hard copy of my parents’ imagination, odd, romantic, and screwed up. I fit right in.

Dad 

My father was the star of our family, the mover, the shaker, the man who told us what to do and how to do it. If we didn’t shape up—for instance, if we came home with a B instead of an A on our report cards—he would mock us jauntily in song:

He had a two-part philosophy of life.

1. The world is out to get you; it’s dog-eat-dog out there.”

2. You’d better be first if you want to make the grade.”

After reminding us of these principles, he’d go into his closet and take a slug of bourbon from a hip flask he kept there.

Franklin Roosevelt infuriated him: “Makes my blood boil.” Socialized medicine was socialized bossism: “Nobody’s going to tell me how to treat my patients.” The WPA, FDR’s answer to unemployment during the Depression, was, in his opinion, a bunch of freeloaders who stood around leaning on their shovels looking for a handout.

I spent a great deal of time staring out our front window at a ditch digger leaning on his shovel. One day the shovel’s handle broke in two, throwing him to the ground. When I told my father about it that night, he studied me, his eyes hard with righteousness, and said, “See?” I wanted him to be clearer, but he was inside his thoughts and I didn’t seem to be there anymore.

One Halloween when some children came to the front door and held out their paper sacks, he invited them into the hallway, where he had just put down his medical bag and hung up his coat. He said, “C’mon in here. Make yourselves at home,” and led them into the living room.

“Now, what are you going to do for us?” my father asked them.

They turned and looked at each other, their large eyes filling with suspicion. My father enlightened them.

“Before we can give you anything, you must do something for us.”

They looked at him blankly. One child giggled. The smallest one burst into tears, which soon developed into a wail.

I was writhing with embarrassment for them, for my father, for myself as a partner in this surprise entrapment of our small neighbors.

“You could sing a song,” he went on, “or do a dance or tell us a story. Then we can give you some candy and treats. That’s the meaning of Halloween, don’cha know?”

Each child was tricked into telling us something or doing a little dance. One of them even whistled “Dixie.” After all had participated, they were each given a treat for their efforts. Into the paper bag it went, and then they were out of there, in an altered state of consciousness. I was awed by their performances. It was a first for me. I wondered how they had learned to entertain us so fast. My father found the whole evening a great success.

Jimmy Durante 

When Jimmy Durante was starting out, still an unknown, singing and playing at a piano bar in Coney Island, he needed to see an ear, nose, and throat doctor. That doctor turned out to be my father the ear, nose, and throat specialist.

In those days, the doctor—specialist or not—personally took down all the information on the patient. It was a much more caring arrangement than we have today.

“And what do you do, Mr. Durante?” asked my father.

Jimmy, sounding like a Brooklyn construction worker with his rock-rough, gnarled voice, said, “I sing, Doc.”

My dad didn’t believe him, so Durante invited my parents to come hear him at the club. They went, and they were the only customers there. It didn’t faze Jimmy at all. He changed the lyrics of If I Had You to But I Have You. He knew where he was going—to sing for huge audiences with a wall of romantic strings to back him up. He had autographed pictures ready to hand out and gave my parents several, for the whole family. He wrote a special one for Bruce, who was sick.

It was my first introduction to a celebrity, to a star, and I looked at that picture often as a child—the big nose; the huge, open smile; the light twinkling in his eyes; the pleasure glowing in his face. He seemed to invite me to join him, and I sensed that his world was different from mine and that I might prefer to live there. I listened to him faithfully on the radio. His voice was extraordinary; the musicality perfection; the communication complete. When he spoke of the sound he made, he said, “Them is the conditions that prevails.” My kind of guy, I thought.

A few years later, after he had developed a reputation and some fame, he remained the same, sounding and looking like the cousin of a bum who might have slept outdoors the previous night. When he came around to my dad’s hospital to visit a friend who was recuperating there, he was carrying flowers. The receptionist thought he was a delivery man and sent him around to the freight elevator, so he went up the back way. When the nurses upstairs told the receptionist what she had done, she was horrified. But it didn’t matter to Jimmy how he got upstairs.

Corn 

In our dining room, Dad was having an argument with Nellie, the new cook. Her hair was gathered in a bun on top of her head and wisped down on the sides. They were arguing about the carving knife. “It’s dirty,” said my father. “No, it’s not,” said Nellie in a heightened Irish accent. “It’s water stains. Here, give it to me.” She wiped it on her apron and offered it back to him. This did not go over well with my father. He was a doctor and believed in germs. “For God’s sake, Nellie! What the hell are you doing?” Nellie said, “It’s clean now. You can see yourself in it.” My father’s face turned red and his voice rose. “That’s no way to clean the silver! Damn it, what’s the matter with you?” The dog barked, left her puppies, and ran in from the laundry room to defend him.

Nellie stood with her hands on her hips and said, “So that’s the way you get mad, huh?”

The dog stopped barking and ran back to her puppies. My father clenched his jaw, gripped the arms of his chair, looked straight ahead at the centerpiece of roses from the garden, and said, “Just go and get me a clean knife.”

Nellie came back from the kitchen, handed my father a fresh knife, raised her eyebrows, pinched her lips together, and made a stout-hearted exit.

My brothers exchanged a look. My mother said, “Jim, will you start the mint jelly around the table, please?” My sister reached for her water glass, misjudged the distance, and knocked it over. “Oh, Adeline,” my brothers groaned, their voices dripping with disdain. I’m ashamed to say I echoed them. She was so vulnerable. She invited our cruelty, and we were merciless. Napkins were passed to her while my father carved the lamb. Grandmother Pope looked on from her portrait above the fireplace, holding a fan in her lap and wearing an onyx and gold ring. The white skin of her face, forearms, and neck stood out against a black taffeta dress trimmed in lace. The armchair she sat in blended into a dark background, and she never took her eyes off of me. I dropped my napkin so that I would have to go under the table to retrieve it; she couldn’t see me there, but when I came back, she was still sizing me up.

When the lamb, the vegetables, and the mint jelly had been passed around, I seized the opportunity to collect for the manners pot.

“Elbows on the table! Ten cents!” I had caught my brother Jim, and he had to put ten cents in the pot. The fine was usually a nickel, but elbows were major. When the pot was filled up, it paid for a trip to the movies. Strangers in the Night with Merle Oberon was playing through that Saturday, and I really wanted to see it.

We were concentrating on eating corn on the cob with a fork that summer, so there was a good chance we would have a full pot of fines by the end of the meal. You had to put your fork horizontally along the rows of corn, twist, and lift. I could get only three or four kernels at a time.

“Three weeks, kids. Three weeks to get that corn from the cob to your mouth,” said my dad. “Don’t disgrace me now.”

“Who is Mrs. Prentice?” I said.

“She’s John D. Rockefeller’s daughter. She’s giving the hospital money, and we’re going to her farm for lunch,” said my mother.

“Only if we know how to eat corn on the cob with a fork when we get there,” said Dad, as he jammed his fork alongside his corncob and ripped off a mouthful of kernels. Gradually, he transferred his feelings about Nellie to the corn. “See that? See that? It can be done! Come on. Don’t let me down. Don’t give up.”

We dug in and collected more money for the manners pot as the conversation drifted over my head, with subjects like Farming for Famine, Roosevelt and Germany, and Grandpa Muir and Mrs. Merrill.

We had strawberries and Borden’s heavy cream for desert. The manners pot filled up, and we went to see Myrna Loy, William Powell, and their dog, Asta, in The Thin Man.

Dinner at the Prentice farm three weeks later turned out favorably. We were invited back for Christmas even though Adeline dropped her peach melba, passed around by the butler, into the finger bowl with a splash, and when Mrs. Prentice told us that the china plates were set in gold, we picked them up and held them over our heads to inspect their bottoms.

We watched Mr. Prentice gnaw his way from left to right and back again on a corncob and then hold his napkin up in front of his face and pick his teeth with a gold toothpick. My father told funny stories at dinner but was curiously quiet on the drive home.