by Diane Keaton
Dad didn’t get it and didn’t want to. But Mom, Randy’s greatest audience, cheered him on.
Four bedrooms was a big step up from three. Robin and Dorrie’s faced the roofed-in patio across from me. Mine looked onto the driveway, where Dad parked his Santa Ana City loaner car, one of the perks of his prestigious new position. With such a unique gift, we were suddenly elevated into a two-car family. On my desk, I displayed my very own hardback copy of The Diary of Anne Frank, the first book that made me cry. With time, I saved enough money to buy two travel posters from France, where, I decided, I was going to go as soon as I graduated from high school. Randy’s bedroom was at the end of the long hallway next to the kids’ bathroom, and across from Mom and Dad’s master suite. Besides a bed, Randy’s den of hibernation had a long table, where his collection of junk rapidly grew, beneath a window that seemed to offer no light. With time, his room became a haphazard mess, housing ugly plastic dinosaurs surrounded by stacks of horror comics and Mad magazines with weird-looking gap-toothed Alfred E. Neuman on the cover.
It was a rare occasion when one of us ventured into Mom and Dad’s bedroom and private bath. In a way it seemed like an off-limits, separate home of its own. We didn’t knock on their door. Once in a while, I felt sorry that Randy’s room was not only next to the ever-populated family bathroom, but also across the hall from the mystery of Mom and Dad’s suite. Through the doors, he must have been privy to their slowly evolving relationship.
As often as possible, Randy retreated to his bedroom. It was there that his preteen fantasies took form. I knew because Rocky Lee, his friend from up the block, took me aside one day and told me that Randy, who was thirteen, had found a Playboy magazine near the Rohrses’ orange grove and hidden it under his bed. Being a good Christian, I sneaked in, grabbed the Playboy, and ran down the hall screaming for Mom. After all, wasn’t sex a sin in God’s eyes? With Jesus Christ and his father, God, on my side, I conveniently erased the fact that Randy had never ratted me out.
As Randy’s fantasies secretly grew behind his bedroom door, Mom was busy spiffing up our new home. She took particular pride in decorating the mostly unused living room with homemade shell boards, a mosaic coffee table, and a framed print of a Maurice de Vlaminck landscape. Sunset magazines were laid on top of the coffee table in front of the modern couch, with two upholstered chairs on either side. On occasion, Mom would make popcorn and we’d all gather there as Dad projected our color slides. One image has withstood the test of time: Randy, standing on our brand-new Griswold-Nissen trampoline, three and a half feet off the ground, is smiling with unexpected authenticity. There is no blank-faced grin. His blond hair is short. His ears stick out like two small buttons. He’s wearing a white tee shirt and a pair of blue shorts that highlight a set of great-looking long legs. Contrary to my memory of a weak, unexceptional boy, Randy is handsome. But most of all, he’s self-assured. Standing on the trampoline, framed against a gray sky with me behind him, Randy is a study in confident, spontaneous joy.
Looking at this slide now, I’d lay ten-to-one odds he’d just completed a perfect backward flip. Why else are his arms flexed as if he were Superman? It’s not that Robin and Dorrie couldn’t perform their own stunts; it’s that Randy was the master of both the forward and backward flip. He wasn’t afraid of upside down. Maybe engaging in an out-of-sync world gave him a sense of power, even authority. He didn’t mind letting his body say goodbye to gravity.
* * *
—
As King of the Back Flip, Randy let go of everyday constraints. He must have had a plethora of eureka moments on that old Griswold-Nissen, but he never talked about them, nor did he boast of his dexterity. He was not a braggart. He chose to explore wrong-side-up thoughts in secret. I can imagine Mom’s disappointment when the click of the camera didn’t capture Randy spinning in midair. Perhaps she felt hemmed in by Dad’s mandates: “Don’t get carried away with lassoing dreams, Dot.”
That was around the time he nicknamed her “Dot.” Maybe it was inspired by Frank Sinatra’s rendition of “Polka Dots and Moonbeams”: “I learned the meaning of the words ‘Ever after’ / And I’ll always see polka dots and moonbeams.” Sometimes I wonder if he was jealous of her singular affection for Randy. I can imagine him laying down the law, telling her not to waste what little money she had in her budget by taking too many pictures of a son who needed structure.
For Dad, it was always about money, just as it had been with his mother. Grammie Hall was tight with a buck. Not only was she a fairly successful neighborhood loan shark, who hid money under the floor in her closet; she didn’t trust anyone, including her son. Somewhere in Mom’s old journals, I found a highly unusual letter from Dad to Grammie Hall dated June 11, 1960.
Hi Ma.
Well, Dorothy and I didn’t do too good in Las Vegas. I want to thank you for buying our meals and paying for the rooms. It made the trip very inexpensive. I am attaching the last payment on my loan from you. The amount borrowed was $7904.45 at 3 percent interest. This was a very good deal for me. Thanks. I made 185 payments to you of 100 dollars each. I never missed a payment once. If you have any questions. Let me know.
Love, Jack
Poor Dad. After he passed away, I remember going through a chest of drawers where I found several Gerber jars full of pennies, nickels, and dimes invading the socks. Quarters and fifty-cent pieces were saved in red-and-white-striped paper rolls the bank passed out to its loyal customers. Dad oversaw the saving of his hard-earned money with caution, care, and concern. And he chose to make sure every investment he made on behalf of the family was thrifty, almost to the point of causing a different kind of risk.
The letter to Grammie Hall, along with cutting back on Mom’s thirty-seventh birthday by presenting her with a box of See’s candy and a five-dollar bill, may have been a result of his “new idea.” Dad was determined to create his own engineering firm. He began to map out a plan, but, more important, cut back on family fun time to save money. There would be no pitched tent at Huntington Beach, and certainly no trips to Disneyland in 1958. Tucking us in at night, Mom would tell us Dad was wrestling with big ideas that would, she said, “change our lives for the better.” But it wasn’t clear to me what “better” meant. For Randy, stuck between Mom’s unvocalized demands to try harder, and Dad’s so-called helping out with homework, it was all too much. Sometimes I could hear Dad harping behind Randy’s shut door: “For God’s sake, think it through.” Or “I just told you, four times six is twenty-four. Got it? Add six four times and memorize the damn thing.” “Damn” and even an occasional “goddamn” became frequent additions to his vocabulary. He disappeared into longer workdays, and at home he’d stopped utilizing the soft sell with us the kids, and with Mom, too, in favor of the hard.
For all of Dad’s successfully executed plans, he didn’t have a methodology to solve the mystery of his blond-haired boy. I don’t know if Randy recoiled from Dad, or from his drive. I can’t imagine what it was like for him to be Jack Hall’s disappointment. “Pick up your junk.” “What are you doing? That’s not the way to mow a lawn. At least finish the damn job, son!!!” Dad’s struggles further fueled his impatience with all his children, but especially Randy. Following a host of mandated masculine endeavors such as Toastmasters, Boy Scouts, and skin-diving off the Palos Verdes cliffs with Dad’s friend Bob Blandon and his son Gary didn’t help. Even though Randy reluctantly learned how to string a bow for Indian Scouts, cut abalone meat from its shell, and on occasion catch a fly ball in Little League, he knew he would never become what our father wanted him to be.
Dad’s ambition, his work ethic, his awkward relationship with his son, his disappointment, his longing to help Randy even though he didn’t know how, were beginning to look like failure—Dad’s least favorite word. Randy had no interest in becoming Jack Hall, Jr. In his journal, he would later write:
I didn’t think
much of my father. Every time he came home I was scared the whole night, which means every night. My youth was full of seagulls circling the beach, and a freedom that only came to me when I saw waves burst from the rocks or smelled salt on my sunburned skin. Now my eyes are full of saltwater. Dad left me long ago.
CHAPTER 4
A HAWK’S TALONS
In 1960, thirty-nine-year-old Jack Hall quit his job at Santa Ana City Hall to become the president of Hall and Foreman Inc. Mom wrote:
It was a risky choice, but Jack held firm with a kind of courage that surprised everyone. He must be given 100 percent credit for his business acumen by applying his mentor Dale Carnegie’s tried and true techniques. I’m sure we will all look back and remember when dad took off on his own and never stopped. I’m writing it all down so we will have evidence to make it clear that on June 18th he left the city of Santa Ana to start Hall and Foreman.
Dad was smart to partner with his former boss, Hugh Foreman. Their detailed résumé specified a responsibility for overseeing civil engineering, environmental planning, and land surveying on everything from housing developments to office buildings. As a mid-century modern businessman, not only was Dad a charming salesman, but he was, as the saying goes, honest to a fault. He didn’t take his cue from Grammie Hall, the former neighborhood loan shark. Oh no, he had a grander vision of what all his planning, self-improvement, and hard work would deliver, and it did.
I doubt any family member, including Mom, understood what engineering really meant. According to Wikipedia, “Civil engineers survey installations, establish reference points, and guide construction. They estimate the quantities and cost of materials and equipment.” In other words, he designed and created sound civil structures, “a series of connected elements that form a system which can resist a series of external load effects applied to it.” He worked hard on public projects like highway improvements and bridge construction, sidewalks, and parking lots.
At home, Dad seemed frustrated. Apparently, the principles of his day job didn’t apply to fatherhood. Still, he urged us to “Plan Ahead” and “Be Positive.” He even tried to teach us how to have firm handshakes. God only knew what he was going to do with his four drifty children. Every day he methodically built his business, ascending both professionally and financially. And every night he came home to us, where we presented him with our stubborn fragility.
After just a few years on Wright Street, Mom began to understand she was on a one-way street, heading into a future filled with more of the same. There was no going back to dreams she didn’t have the courage to admit she wanted. Not only was she the mother of four children; she was also playing the role of mother to a man whose own mother hadn’t been mother material. As Dorothy’s husband, Jack felt entitled to her undivided attention. When he complained about clients who wouldn’t pay their bills on time, she’d reassure him: “Don’t worry, honey. Keep at it. Don’t let it affect your mood. It’s time Hugh Foreman stepped up and supported your efforts with more zeal!” She single-handedly gave him enough confidence to think through psychologically complex issues, which in turn helped sustain the firm’s success.
When it became all too apparent no one was going to encourage her own dreams, Mom’s world darkened. After a while, Jack Hall couldn’t help but perceive Dorothy as yet another employee, one whose job included the distribution of three meals a day, shopping, decorating, washing, researching extracurricular activities for the kids, and, yes, if time permitted, the pursuit of her artistic hobbies. But only if. After all, he was paying for everything, including her shiny new Buick station wagon.
In response, Mom may have unconsciously pitted us against Dad. The driving force of her unspoken resentment was his attempt to turn Randy into his kind of man. Her solution was to form a secret society in which the four of us kids unwittingly excluded our father. When he unexpectedly came home during one of Mom’s after-school fun sessions over crackers and cheddar cheese, his presence meant that fun took a back seat. He wasn’t welcome.
In her journal, she kept close tabs on twelve-year-old Randy’s progress at Willard Junior High School, especially his potential gift in writing.
Willard seems to be the school Randy needed. All the movement from class to class, the feeling of adulthood; he even buys his own lunch now. Apparently, there’s no trouble with the locker set up and he brings his schoolwork home every night. I see a new boy in the making. One week has gone by and suddenly he’s eager to get to the bus at 7 am. He even prepared a paper on “Safeguarding our American Freedom.” We went to the library for books and ideas and made it home in time to battle out a theme before dinner. The result: his paper was one of the 15 chosen for final judging. He was very pleased with the outcome. He’s such a good kid. One needs to spark him up a bit. He has no trouble sparking when he’s interested in something.
I can’t remember Randy’s presence at any of my landmark moments at Willard. When I was elected class secretary, and when I finally became a Melodette Songbird and performed for local groups such as the Kiwanis Club or the PTA’s annual Founders Day Luncheon, he showed no interest. But, then, why would he? After I sang “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” for Willard’s talent show, Randy didn’t seem to notice, but I didn’t have time to monitor his accomplishments, either. Still, it was odd. I never saw him hanging out with friends. He didn’t seem to have any.
One weekend afternoon, when I was sixteen and Randy was fourteen, I heard noises coming from down the hallway as I was cutting out pictures from Mademoiselle magazine’s special issue for “The Girl Moving Up.”
Someone was screaming. Running toward Randy’s room, I heard Mom shout the word “divorce” as Dad yelled back, “Jesus Christ, get one.”
When I opened Randy’s door, I found him sitting at his desk, reading Mad magazine as if nothing were happening. The yelling got louder. “What’s going on?” I whispered. “Oh my God, do you think they’re going to get a divorce? I’m scared.” My heart was pounding. I asked him if we should call the police. Tears started rolling down my face. Without so much as a glance my way, Randy put the magazine down, got up, opened the door, and then started running down the hall toward the front door. I tried to stop him. “Randy, what’s going to happen? Shouldn’t we do something?” As he reached the front door, I grabbed him, looked into his eyes, and begged him to go back and try to talk to them. Couldn’t he hear them throwing things? They might hurt each other. Without so much as a nod, Randy slipped out of my grip and ran outside. He never bothered to look back.
Hours later, when he did return, it was as if the incident had never happened. There was the seemingly usual dinner that night, and the nights thereafter. When I tried to talk to Randy, he just shrugged his shoulders and walked off. Gradually, Mom and Dad’s arguments became more frequent, but also harder to detect. From behind the bedroom door at the end of the narrow hallway, their anger pushed Randy deeper into an even more solitary world, where normalcy was no longer an expectation.
* * *
—
Not long after I left for New York to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, Mom and Dad moved the family to a new, more expensive house on Towner Street.
Dorrie wrote me about how Randy was faring:
Dear Diane,
Randy has a few hippie friends. He wears high boots tucked into his pants with a suede jacket. His hair is kind of a Beatle cut brushed to one side. He looks very handsome and put together. He plays the guitar and writes, even sings songs. Here’s one. It goes like this: “I am a freak at the fair, people stare but I don’t care, I am a freak at the fair.” We haven’t told dad about his view that working to obtain material things and prestige stand in the way of more meaningful pursuits. For Randy meaningful pursuits means writing poetry. He uses unusual imagery, and strange thoughts of a random, even confessional nature.
Love, Dorrie
In June 1966, Randy graduated from high school. I flew home from New York City to attend the ceremony and stay for the summer. As he walked to the podium to accept his diploma, he looked pretty dandy in his cap and gown. Mom and Dad were beaming. After all, Randy had succeeded in continually getting up at 6:30 a.m. each school day to trudge his way to and from classrooms for three years. Wasn’t that what high school was all about? As we sat in the grandstand of the same high-school auditorium where I’d graduated two years before, Dad looked at Mom with a combination of pride and willed optimism and said, “That boy is a sleeper, and someday…watch out.”
My summer vacation in the new three-thousand-square-foot home on North Towner Street revealed an underlying sadness in everyone, even though our family had entered the upper middle class by purchasing a house for the exorbitant price of forty thousand dollars. It was a big step up from Wright Street, to a much more upscale Santa Ana neighborhood. The backyard was dominated by an oversized pool with a little fountain in the middle. The unattached former maid’s room became Randy’s private bedroom. With a new stereo setup, he introduced Dorrie and Robin to Frank Zappa, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell. I slept in what felt like guest accommodations. Remnants from my past had all but disappeared. We’d rarely pile into the station wagon and drive to the beach; camping was a thing of the past. Dad didn’t have time to surf with his old buddy Bob Blandon. On the plus side, Robin and Dorrie no longer had to share a bedroom. Mom was busy working on her teaching degree at Cal State Fullerton. Hall and Foreman was a flourishing enterprise. Our dinners were eaten in an actual dining room. Along with serving the meal, Mom placed a new bottle of wine on the table every night. My days were spent bleaching my hair blond, shopping with Mom when she had time, hanging out with Dorrie and Robin, and occasionally visiting Randy’s world.
