Authors: Carine McCandless
Over a decade later Chris would tell me the true history behind that mystifying photograph. Through Chris, other family members, and my own recollections, in time I pieced together the entire story.
Back in the early 1960s, before I was born, my mother was a beautiful young dance student fresh out of high school. She left the small town of Iron Mountain, Michigan, for the dream life of affluence and prestige she believed awaited her in sunny Los Angeles. Her name was Wilhelmina Johnson. Friends called her Billie.
My mother was the third of six children born into a hardworking, low-income family. The siblings shared one bedroom in a tiny house built by their father and nestled in an expansive pine forest. I remember Grandpa Loren as an accomplished out-doorsman, with a body that seemed too thin, skin that seemed too thick, and a smoldering cigarette permanently attached to his right hand. He had great hair—a lush wave of deep brown and silver that flowed straight back until it disappeared behind his ears. His voice was gentle and kind when he spoke to me, to my brother, or to the wildlife around his home, but it grew harsh when he criticized my Grandma Willy—for being overweight, for the mess that accumulated indoors, or for being lazy. Grandma—a thoughtful woman who always had her hands busy crocheting, making crafts for her next church bazaar or gifts for her many grandchildren—barked back just enough to let him know that she had heard him and was choosing to ignore him.
I remember Mom often speaking about her difficult childhood. How they had very little money, how she had to endure the brunt of Grandma’s aggression, which was not aimed back at the proper assailant. But she also spoke of the solace she found along the wooded trails where she led tourists on horseback as part of the family business and the comfort she found in the peaceful snowfalls of a long winter.
At eighteen, Billie was bright and eager but also naïve. She thought the dance lessons she’d taken in Iron Mountain could be parlayed into a career, but after several fruitless attempts to develop her talent in the bustling entertainment capital of California, she tagged along with her roommates one day to apply to be a stewardess. Although her slight figure fell within the strict requirements of the era’s airline industry, her height did not measure up to her adventurous spirit. Unafraid of hard work and determined to succeed in her independence, she created a fallback plan with her excellent typing skills and landed a secretarial job at Hughes Aircraft. There she met her new boss, Walt McCandless.
Walt was a respected leader in his division and quickly climbing the ladder. In the decade after the Soviets launched Sputnik, the U.S. space program was well funded, and the Hughes operation in California was large—the epicenter of the effort to prove American dominance in space. Walt wore his lofty position well. He was well educated, a hard worker, and a talented jazz pianist with a voice that made ladies at after-hours socials swoon. He was also a married man with three children and another on the way. Billie was attracted to his success. Walt noticed.
I can imagine my father as my mother must have seen him. When he walked into a room, he commanded it, his magnetic hazel eyes daring you to look away. But when he laughed, his eyes watered, making him look far less dominant. He swept you up in his knowledge about books, world history, music, travel, and science. He knew how to make a perfect omelet and how to make his smooth singing voice heard over an entire congregation’s. His fiery temper made you watch him as you would a volcano, awestruck by the intensity even as you wanted to get out of its way. You wanted to do everything you could to please him, and you drove yourself harder and harder to receive the nod that said he was impressed.
And I can imagine my mother as my father must have seen her. She was easy to fall in love with. She was a gifted homemaker who could resurrect a dining room table someone else had discarded on the street and serve up a delicious and healthy casserole concocted from a week’s worth of leftovers. When she ice-skated, her dance background showed in every elegant move of her wrist or smooth turn across the ice. When my parents danced together, my father’s movements became graceful, too, because she led him so well. She was refined, she was determined, and she was unfailingly loyal—though toward the wrong person.
I’d like to think they knew better. I’d like to think they tried to stop themselves. Eight years older and well aware of his influence, Walt took immediate advantage. Billie—old enough to know it was wrong yet youthful enough to let desire override her conscience—willingly pursued the affair. Walt convinced her that he was going to leave his wife, Marcia, as soon as the time was right. The problem, he told Billie, was that Marcia refused to grant him a divorce. He went so far as to keep a separate apartment for a while, to convince Billie he was trying to extricate himself from the marriage. But in truth, Walt had no intention of divorcing Marcia—or of letting Marcia ever divorce him.
Walt and Marcia’s history was long, and she was a very different woman from Billie. Marcia was quiet in nature and inclined to avoid conflict. She came from a small family with strong-willed yet devoted, loving parents. She was a few months older than Walt and had grown up with him in the small town of Greeley, Colorado, about fifty miles from Denver. They began to date when Marcia was just seventeen. Though Walt showed signs of aggression during their courtship, Marcia told me he never hurt her until after they were married.
Marcia had been reared with the values of her community, which had been founded as a sort of Utopia, a place where all who breathed its air would shun alcohol, worship together, and raise strong families. She had every reason to believe her childhood sweetheart wanted just what she did, so when her father asked her on her wedding day if she really wanted to go through with it, she said yes.
By the time Walt and Billie began their relationship, however, Marcia had grown weary of Walt’s history of indiscretions. One day while tending to Walt’s dry cleaning, she found Billie’s ID in one of his jacket pockets. When she voiced her suspicions, she remembers they were met with a vile mix of aspersions, threats, and violence—all easily anticipated by Marcia and her three young children, Sam, Stacy, and Shawna. Another daughter, Shelly, had just been born. The family life Marcia envisioned had become a distant dream.
The affair continued into the following year, when Walt in his arrogance began to flaunt his relationship with Billie, not bothering to deny it and even orchestrating moments when Marcia would see it firsthand. Once when Marcia and Walt were out having dinner together, Billie came into the restaurant with some of her friends. She was eight years younger than Marcia, who recognized Billie from the ID in Walt’s jacket. “Hi, Walt,” Billie said coyly, smiling directly at Marcia as she passed by.
Soon after this incident, she told Walt for the first time she was going to leave him, and she tried to pursue a separation over the next several years. But Walt had an imperious drive when it came to the women in his life, and needed to make them feel trapped into staying under his control. Whenever Marcia showed her resolve to follow through with a divorce, his propensity for physical violence amplified. Marcia gave birth to another son, Shannon, just three months before Billie gave birth to my brother, Chris, in February 1968.
In a desperate attempt to protect her reputation, Billie scheduled a portrait sitting for her and Walt and sent the picture to the Iron Mountain newspaper as a post-wedding announcement. They appeared to be the perfect couple and Billie the epitome of success, a shining example of what was possible in a life outside the limitations of her small Michigan hometown. She went so far as to send pictures to her family of her and Walt on a trip together, claiming it had been their honeymoon. Of course the marriage could only exist in her mind, but she lied to herself enough until lying to others became second nature. She was learning from the master.
Walt acquired a home for his second family with Billie, a little beach-style bungalow on Walnut Avenue, and divided his time between the two residences. Marcia quietly struggled to find the means to follow through with a divorce, while Walt continued his oppressive reign over her life and her children. Shawna remembers being terrified of him during one such incident, when Shannon was just a year old. The tirade her dad unloaded onto her mom resulted in Marcia being left alone again to tend to her worried children and a new injury. A future visit to the doctor would confirm that Walt had fractured a vertebra in Marcia’s back.
I WAS BORN THREE YEARS AFTER CHRIS,
in July of 1971. The stress in Billie’s life began to lift, with a progression of Walt’s promises seeming less hollow. He spent more time with us and paid more attention to Billie. She was also busier than she’d been before, because she now tended to two young children and their father and had started selling Jafra Cosmetics.
My father continued to tell Marcia all about my mom; Marcia says when he left her for two weeks out of every month, she was made to understand that he was staying with his second family. He was proud of having produced so many offspring and saw no reason to hide his other children from her. In fact, he envisioned us all eventually living together under one roof, and by way of convincing Marcia, pointed out that my mother made a fantastic pot roast—Marcia’s least successful culinary endeavor—but he said that Marcia’s spaghetti sauce was much better. Marcia remembers that in response, she quipped, “I didn’t know you were a Mormon fundamentalist, Walt.”
The two families wouldn’t come to live in the same house, but my father kept a special phone line in the office of his home with Marcia that no one was allowed to touch. All the older kids knew that phone line was for Billie.
Marcia wanted out and went back to teaching in order to save money. My dad showed up on payday and asked for her check. “It’s already in the bank,” Marcia explained as she continued making dinner for her children.
“In our account?” my father asked.
“No, in mine,” Marcia said in her understated way. Dad punished her, but she won the day—her money remained in her account, in her name.
My mother’s awareness of Marcia was much less clear, and it remains confusing to me how much she actually believed and how much she just chose to believe. I also don’t know if my dad’s violent and threatening behavior toward my mother began before or after Chris was born. My dad claimed to be working out of town for the two weeks out of every month he was living back with Marcia. But Dad’s secretary, Cathy, tired of her role in the charade; when my mother called the office one day about an order Cathy had placed with Jafra and mentioned Walt’s business trip, Cathy told her Walt was
not
out of town. When my mother told her she must be mistaken, Cathy replied that she was looking right at him. My father’s excuse for his latest deception was yet another false claim—he concocted a ridiculous story to appeal to my mother’s compassionate side, saying he couldn’t desert Marcia because she had terminal cancer.
There were repeated encounters like this between my father and both women, some that led to angry confrontation, others that were just shrugged off out of fear, frustration, or convenience. But for anyone who cared to see the truth, it was obvious: Walt was not leaving Marcia.
In time, the women in my father’s life reached a forced acceptance of the bigamous situation. Dad even dropped Chris off with Marcia while my mother was giving birth to me. Though the two women were rarely in the same place at the same time, all their children began to spend time together in varying combinations. Marcia occasionally took care of Chris, and Marcia’s kids visited us on Walnut Avenue.
Then, on a balmy summer morning in 1972, a knock on the door began to weave yet another strand into this expanding fabrication. Mom remembered standing face-to-face with an officer of the court. Maybe my father would never leave Marcia, but Marcia had decided yet again to leave him—and this time she was determined to follow through. She had filed for divorce and had listed the Walnut Avenue address as the location for Walt to be served. As Mom looked through the petition of complaint, she came to the section where dependents were listed: Sam, Stacy, Shawna, Shelly, Shannon . . . and Quinn McCandless. Quinn’s name was a surprise. Billie knew the others, of course, and had had the older ones over to her home on numerous occasions. But surely there couldn’t have been another baby with Marcia, one Billie didn’t know about. She would have known. Walt would have told her. Mom immediately loaded three-year-old Chris and me into the car and drove by Marcia’s house. There she saw Marcia out in her yard, watching five of her children play and holding a sixth—a toddler—on her hip. According to the court petition, Quinn had been born just before Christmas, 1969.
The evidence of our father’s continual dishonesty was too large to ignore, and my mother was infuriated. She even packed Chris and me up and sent us away, to her parents in Michigan. But in a pattern that would become all too familiar, she soon forgave Dad and retrieved us. Quinn wasn’t his, Dad insisted.
Mom chose to believe him.
Shortly before Marcia had filed for divorce, Walt had beaten her so badly that Sam—who was thirteen years old—called the police. When they got to the house, they’d simply asked Dad to leave and not come back. But Marcia was no longer concerned about the lack of protection from police or Walt’s next menacing act. It didn’t matter, because
she
was leaving. She sold the house, packed up their six kids, and moved back home to Colorado. Then Dad got a job that moved Mom, Chris, and me to Virginia. Distance now separated the two families, but we were intertwined and always would be.
THEN AND FOR THE YEARS TO COME,
I knew my half siblings only as fun, cool playmates who would pick me up, play with me and Chris, and then leave until next time. As a little girl sitting on Mom’s bed, my hands playing in my sun-bleached curls, I knew none of this puzzling history.
Instead, I knew sometimes we had a large family, and sometimes we didn’t. When we didn’t, it was Chris and me, partners against the evil forces of the world. When our family was larger, it felt like the Brady Bunch, but with a lot more yelling. There were group outings with Dad and Mom; there were visits with family and friends. On one occasion, my mom had made all the girls identical green dresses to match her own for a party we attended, and we all wore our hair in matching fancy updos. Shawna recalls feeling special, finally included by way of these thoughtful gifts from Billie, and beautiful. To partygoers, we were the darling and closely blended family. But what Shawna remembers most about the day is the way her stepmom required the dresses back when the party was over and the pictures had been taken.