Robert Altman

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  I don’t think that we were terribly close. I don’t know much about her. I only know her in our relationship—that was the job she had in my life, being my mother for a short period of time. She was very kind. But in the best and worst ways of the word. She was, I think, kind of ineffective. I remember a situation where I was eight or nine. I was never a great baseball player, or even a good one. But it was in the culture. I remember what I really wanted was a baseball mitt. And I knew I wasn’t qualified to get it. It would be like getting your first bicycle, you know? And my mother came home—most of my memories of her were from when I was lying on a couch sleeping when I’d have a fever. I was lying on the couch and she came in from a shopping trip.

  She said, “I have a surprise for you. I bought you a baseball mitt.”

  I went, “Wow!”

  She takes this package out and it’s a baseball mitt that she’d bought at the drugstore. It was just wrong, a thing for a four-year-old. And I just got furious.

  I realized, if not that day, then shortly after, that I’d hurt her feelings a lot. I understood it. And I didn’t know how to correct it. But I knew that whatever pain it caused me was my fault, not hers. She had no way of knowing. She had the best of intentions, but the worst came out of it. And consequently I think I scared her a little. I think she was afraid of [pause] getting on the wrong side of me.

  But I was always proud of her. I mean, I was always happy to introduce her to my friends. And if people would come to my house, I was content and proud. I never had a sense of “Oh God, how am I going to explain her?”

  I knew my father a lot better. I mean, I can pinpoint him a lot easier than my mother. Nobody called my father Bernard. He was “B.C.,” but “Nag” was his nickname. I never called him that, but when he was a kid, he was called Nag, ’cause his older brother, Frank, used to say, “Quit nagging me!”

  I’d say he was a gambler. But that was an avocation. He was an insurance salesman. And he got his business, I now realize, by being in the country club, and by playing gin rummy, and all that. The more friends he had, the more insurance policies he could sell to all those people. He was kind of a hail-fellow-well-met.

  He would come home at night—I didn’t see him a lot. I remember a long session of homework, where I had to write something a hundred times or something like that. And my mother would always have to sit up and do those chores with me. I can’t recall my father and school ever crossing paths.

  He was very careful about his appearance, how he appeared to people. He was a natty dresser. I find myself emulating him. Many times I’ve been in a situation where I’ve said, “God, I’m dressing like my father.” But I did that more ten years ago and twenty years ago and thirty years ago than I do now. That’s gone now. But I remember being in military school and he came down to visit once on parents’ day or something, and he had a camel-hair coat on, and he was really natty-looking, and he stood out from the crowd. I thought, “I kind of like that. But that’s not a quality.”

  His good qualities are not the kind of qualities that I admire in people today. He was a good guy, people liked him. He went out of his way with strangers. He’d be the first one out on the street with a snow shovel, or if somebody’s car would break down he’d stop; he’d be the first to stop and change their tire. But it all came from himself. It was all about those things that served himself. It was about having everybody like you. If you lose three hundred dollars to that person, that three hundred dollars you get back when you sell them an insurance policy.

  BARBARA ALTMAN HODES: How can Bob say Dad served himself? When you do something nice for someone, who gets the best benefit? You do, right? Well, in that sense maybe Bob’s right. But Dad was always helping others. A couple of guys that Dad sold insurance said, “Hell, I don’t care, I want to cancel that insurance policy. Hell if my wife can’t take care of herself.” And Dad would keep those policies current with his own money. I remember him going over when the guy died, and he’d go over and give that policy to that woman. Can you imagine the feeling she had? He must’ve felt good, too. There’s nothing more satisfying than if you can help someone. Dad always wanted Bob to go into the insurance business with him. Of course you know that didn’t happen.

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: My father-in-law was a real player, a gambler, a swinger, anything goes. I know there were even times when Bob was in his twenties when he and Bob would be going after the same girl and all that kind of stuff. He always had a big wad of money. Bob always had to have a lot of cash, which was so unusual to me. For security or something. A big tipper. I’m sure he was influenced a lot by his dad and his dad’s behavior.

  JERRY WALSH: When my father ran for Congress they had a storefront headquarters downtown, and I would go and be a messenger boy. Bob’s cousin Frank Altman, who is the son of B.C.’s older brother and was a friend and contemporary of mine, he and I would go down to the headquarters. We used to love it that B.C. had a receptionist there who was a very sexy little blonde woman named Ginny Hewitt, and she would be nice to us.

  Bob later told me that, after the war, when B.C. lived in Los Angeles for a few years, Bob met Ginny Hewitt and he asked her for a date. B.C. took him aside and said, “Listen, son, I’ve got to tell you something here, you know? Ginny and I have a little thing going on.” And Bob said, “Okay, okay, I won’t …!” [Laughs]

  KATHRYN REED ALTMAN: His mother was a Catholic convert—his father was born and raised Catholic—and you know what they say about converts. So Bob did all the childhood stuff of the Catholic boy—Catholic schools and an altar boy and all that kind of thing. I nicknamed her the Billie Burke of Kansas City. Billie Burke was an actress in all the old MGM pictures and she was the fluttery one. She never accepted reality. Everything was always just fine, nothing would get serious.

  With his mother and sisters

  * * *

  JOHN ALTMAN: He was the oldest cousin of about fourteen from our generation, and the hero to all the rest of us. I mean, my gosh, Mister Charming and a sweet guy, you know? To his sisters, too. You could tell they just idolized him.

  ROBERT ALTMAN: Growing up, my sisters were just a couple of toys for me to torment, as I recall.

  JOAN ALTMAN SARAFIAN: My first memory of Bob is when he was running away from home. I would have been four or five. I went and got my doll suitcase and packed it with whatever was in the bottom drawer of my dresser. Then he came in and said he wasn’t going, maybe because I was tagging along.

  BARBARA ALTMAN HODES: I remember one time we were down at the Ozarks. He said, “Mother, I’m going to take Barbara and teach her how to swim.” Oh, I was so excited. We go down, he throws me in the deep end and says, “Swim.” That’s not a very good thing for me to tell, is it?

  I just worship my brother, okay? Let’s get it out. Let’s just lay it on like it is. He couldn’t do anything wrong in my book.

  JOAN ALTMAN SARAFIAN: My baby sister was the sweetest, most adorable child you could ever imagine, and we both adored her. She always called Mother “Dolly.” So Bobby and I took Barbara out to the side of the house.

  Bob would say, “All right, say, ‘Mo.’”

  She said, “Mo.”

  “Now say, ‘Ther.’”

  She said, “Ther.”

  He went over and over it, “mo” and “ther.” I’m watching him and I’m looking at Barbara and she is so adorable. And he would say, “Now put that together.”

  And she’d say, “Dolly.”

  That was the end of that.

  BARBARA ALTMAN HODES: We were reared, the three of us, with etiquette, class, to take people for who they are when you meet them, not what they have on, or their citizenship papers, or FBI record or library card.

  SUSAN DAVIS: You have to remember we were brought up Southern. We weren’t brought up Midwest. It was going to cotillions, and we had Negroes, we had black folks. We had nannies. They were the ones who helped raise us. Our mothers were there, but the nanny was the one that put you to bed.


  ROBERT ALTMAN: We had a black maid, Glendora Majors—we called her Glen—and she was very important, maybe more important than my mother. A person like that in a household becomes someone in between a parent and a sibling. She was a parent I could manipulate more. She was more of a confidante.

  JOAN ALTMAN SARAFIAN: Glen was unbelievable. She was so smart. Played all our games with us, taught me my multiplication tables. She loved Bob. Rabbit, she called him. I don’t know why. Bob loved her, too. And Barbara she called Ducky. It broke my heart because I didn’t have a nickname. Mother was different from Glen. Glen was more of a mother than Mother was. Mother was just so dear and so sweet and so captured; I mean, she had no life but us. She was a very gentle, kind, loving woman. Glen was tougher. Glen was tough love.

  BARBARA ALTMAN HODES: When we’d get on the streetcar to go down to Brookside to the drugstore, Glen would say, “All right, I want you girls to sit up front there and be sure you act like ladies.” Well, I’d get up and run back and sit with her. I never knew the difference between black, yellow, green, or orange, Catholic, Jewish, Methodist, Protestant, or whatever. You take people for what they are. And she’d say, “Oh no, now, you go back up there and sit with Joan, and I want you to act like a lady.”

  I never knew there was a Depression. We had a nice house. It wasn’t an expensive home. I mean, it wasn’t big, big like if you’d drive down Ward Parkway, the big homes. No, it was just a little house on a street. And we had a formal dinner in the dining room every night. First thing, we’d have to say grace before meals. Glen would go put a clean uniform on, a clean apron, come in and serve dinner. We all had to clean up before B.C. got home. You know, take a bath, put a nice little outfit on. I don’t know if it was a cold bowl of chili, a rotten egg on dark toast, but we ate it, and I had a bottle of ketchup to go with it all, every time. We didn’t know Dad was working at night downtown in a garage where they parked cars to make ends meet. But every night, that ice-cream man would come by, and every kid on our block would be waiting, and Dad would buy every one of them an ice-cream cone.

  JOAN ALTMAN SARAFIAN: I was born in ’29, but in June, just before the Depression. So Dad had already bought “Blue Boy,” which was a Pierce-Arrow. And he used to take us for drives on hot summer nights. I remember Bob there, because he asked me why I was crying, and I said I felt sorry for everybody because they weren’t as happy as we were. I can’t imagine anyone having better parents than we did.

  BARBARA ALTMAN HODES: Dad took care of Glen all that time, and he took care of Bud, who did the yard work and really was a bum, and of Geneva, who used to come and make our little pinafores with our little matching underpants, and Mabel, who would come and iron and make the biscuits. Dad and Mother always had these cocktail parties, and Mabel would make these little biscuits with ham in them that were just succulent, you know?

  ROBERT ALTMAN: I have an image in my head of Glen sitting me down and saying, “Now, you listen to this—the best music that ever was.” She introduced me to jazz. I’ve told people that “Solitude” was the first piece of music I remember hearing. I heard it from her.

  Music from the last scene of Kansas City: Duke Ellington’s “Solitude,” performed in bass duet by Ron Carter and Christian McBride.

  HARRY BELAFONTE (actor/singer/activist): Glendora Majors did something to him, opened him up on race. He’d see through her eyes. She played an important part in his growing up, maturing, and in that maturity he found his own center.

  * * *

  JOHN ALTMAN: I don’t know that we felt it was anything special to be an Altman in Kansas City back then. Maybe it was to other people. I don’t think Bob felt that we were any great shakes, not at all. I don’t ever remember Bob having any kind of preconceived, egotistical position about anybody. I mean, he did not suffer fools gladly, but you had to prove you were a fool first.

  ROBERT ALTMAN: My grandmother, my mother’s mother, lived with us all through the time I was growing up. Momma, we called her. She called my father Mr. Altman, and she’d make a face at him when he turned his back. I remember one time she said, “Bobby, get all of your friends in the neighborhood and bring them over there. I want to talk to them. I have a surprise.” So I went running around and I got four or five of these kids, my group who lived in the neighborhood. We went down in the cellar of the house and she came down and sat on the stairs. She said, “Boys, I have a surprise for you.” I just felt so good about this. And she said, “One of you broke my lamp”—or something like that—“and I don’t know how, but you’re going to pay for it. It’s going to be a quarter apiece.” I just exploded. And I called her—I said dirty words, and I screamed at her and ran out. She was just a mean person.

  BARBARA ALTMAN HODES: Bob had a doll when he was little. A little boy doll. You’d push the stomach and it would whistle. And the little doll’s lips were puckered. Momma, our mother’s mother, kept it when Bob was away. I would ask to see the doll and she’d bring it out. She wouldn’t let us touch it. She had it wrapped in tissue paper. When Momma died, we gave it to Glen. It was the cutest little thing.

  * * *

  JERRY WALSH: When Bob was about twelve or thirteen years old, he went to a Boy Scouts meeting one evening each week at a location that was near the Kansas City Art Institute. Walking home after the meeting one evening, Bob and several other Boy Scouts discovered that they could climb up a wall and look through a window at a naked woman posing in a life-drawing class that Thomas Hart Benton was teaching at the Art Institute. They spread the word to other Scouts, and for several weeks there was quite a crowd of boys on the wall. Eventually, someone noticed them and told Tom, who came outside and chased them away. Bob concluded the story by saying, “It greatly improved attendance at the Boy Scouts for a while!”

  JOAN ALTMAN SARAFIAN: Bob was a Boy Scout, and he went to camp. That’s where he made friends with Phil—I don’t know his last name. Phil was the snake man, and Bob loved snakes and collected snakes. When he came home he brought the snakes with him and he turned the bookcases—you’ve seen those legal bookcases—into snake cases and put them in the back of the garage. B.C., our father, wouldn’t let them in the house. B.C. had a phobia about snakes, but he still pulled his car into the garage every night; it made him very, very nervous.

  At Boy Scout camp in Osceola, Missouri, circa 1938, when he was about thirteen

  We went on summer vacation and Bob brought Phil with us, which Mother and Dad didn’t understand because he was so much older than Bob. Bob and I went out tracking snakes. And he caught a cotton-mouth by the tail. Bob got his height early—he had zoomed out to six-foot-two by then. So he pulled the snake out by its tail and he was just turning around to hold it out straight, ’cause it was really long, huge. I was barefooted, which I always was. And he wanted me to step on the head. So he kept turning around with this huge snake, round and round, and I’d get up close as I could and I’d look at that mouth. Have you ever seen a cottonmouth? This was a big one; I’m not exaggerating, it must have been over five feet. And I couldn’t do it. He was furious with me. So he said, “Run up and get Phil.” So I ran up—my feet were bleeding—and I got Phil, but by the time I got back, Bob was worn out and he had tossed it. I felt so bad about that. That was his best snake for the whole time.

  The next vacation we were on was in the Ozarks. We had a cabin on a high cliff. And again he was collecting snakes. There was a group of goats and for some reason they were chasing me. So I was running. Bobby had trapped a copperhead. He had just lifted up the rock. I ran over it and stepped right on it and killed it, and then I tripped on a log. And I would have gone over the cliff, which was oh, maybe five hundred yards down—it was really, really up there—but Bob grabbed me, saved me. The next day, Bob tied a rope around one of the aspens at the edge, and he hauled himself over that cliff and swung himself into a cave. I thought this was the end. Evidently the cave was filled with stalagmites and stalactites, and as he described it to me, it was just gorgeous. Of cours
e somehow he got out, made his way back up top.

  That night, after he was in the cave, the sky had turned just coral. The whole sky was just absolutely gorgeous. We were staying in a cabin. We had our dog Teddy with us. Teddy was a great dog, half husky and half chow. We were all lying out on this sleeping porch—me, my cousin Louise, my baby sister, Bobby, and I think one or two of his friends. The wind started coming and you could hear it from miles away, hitting those trees. This wind was unbelievable, but approaching slow. You knew it was coming. Bob was telling us that he had already chartered a spaceship. They’re coming to pick him up, and he’s going up to the moon because the world is coming to an end. And he can only take two people. Well, it just scared the shit out of all of us. Of course we were all begging, begging him, “Please let us go with you. Why only two?” Barbara, I think, was crying. He really was very convincing. At first we pooh-poohed him, but he convinced us.

  * * *

  ROBERT ALTMAN: I loved movies, but it was like all kids—they were just movies, just entertainment. I must have been seven or eight, and I remember climbing out of the window. I had the mumps. It was maybe a mile, two miles, from my house to the Plaza Theater, and I have this memory of running down to that theater and seeing King Kong, sitting through it a couple of times.

  The Four Feathers and Viva Villa!, too. I liked Gunga Din. There was something about the adventure of those films—every one of them took me into a culture and a place, a space on the Earth that was different than anything I knew. Later, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was another—I like that movie a lot. It had a different convention from other movies—the hero was not a hero in the conventional sense. It was all fresh to me at that time.