Paula loved acting and she loved the theater, maybe even more than the movies, which were kind of a family religion. We saw my father in so many plays, and we went to lots of other theater, too, and invariably when the orchestra struck up the first notes of the overture, or the lights went down and the curtain went up, my mother would grab my hand and squeeze it with an excitement I found slightly embarrassing then and envy now. After both my parents died, I found a birthday card she’d made for my dad, in which she’d inscribed an unattributed quote: “How wonderful to sit in a theater filled with anonymous people all paying for the privilege of sharing him with me. I would hear the applause, the oohs and aahs, the sighs, the comments, the coughs all around me. At the sound of the familiar, deep voice, I would smile, titillated by the bittersweet pleasure of knowing him in a way no one else could.” And she had added, “For all the magic moments in the theater, the intimate days and nights and the lovely years together, I thank you and love you.” That was in 1982, by which time they’d been married thirty-four years; she was fifty-four and he was eighty.
I think she also saw something in Lyle that perhaps none of his previous wives or girlfriends had—the essential sweetness beneath the suavity, the hard drinking, and the playboy rep. She used to say that at heart he was a small-town Nebraska boy who really, really wanted a family and secretly feared it was far too late. About the people she loved she was uncommonly insightful—so much so that it could sometimes feel intrusive. She could read my emotional state from the way I said “Hello” when I picked up the phone in my college dorm. “I know, I know. I’m a witch,” she’d say. “I read minds.” I bridled against it sometimes, but now I miss it every day of my life. My sister said the same thing to me recently. “Mom wanted to be so close—that whole I know what you’re thinking. I can feel what you’re feeling. It was oppressive sometimes. But I miss it now.” There’s nothing like being truly known, not just for what you did but for how you felt about it, known and at the same time extravagantly loved. In any case, she was right about my father; he was a simple person in a certain way, he did long for domesticity, and though I don’t think anyone but Paula would have predicted it in 1948, he did make a very fine father.
“And they said it wouldn’t last,” my mother used to say, decades into their forty-year marriage. We’d chuckle indulgently, but when I think about it now, that was surely an understatement. They got married in June 1948, a little over a year after they met. She was twenty, he was forty-six. For some reason my father opted for Tijuana, where he’d launched his last, spectacularly unsuccessful marriage, as their wedding venue. My mother always said they’d gone south of the border to avoid reporters. My father was particularly interested in discretion at that point, to give the marriage a little breathing room and Paula a little privacy. Her family stood up with them. Paula wore a lavender wool suit with a cinched waist and a pencil skirt, and they spent a brief honeymoon at Laguna Beach.
The newlyweds moved into the bachelor pad on Camrose, and in February 1949, their first child, Stephen Henderson Talbot, was born. David was born two years later, on September 22, 1951; Cynthia on April 1, 1953. My parents were smitten with their three healthy, talkative golden-haired and blue-eyed children. When Lyle, in the waiting room for fathers, got a call from the delivery room telling him Steve had been born, he was so excited that he yanked the receiver right off the cord, much to the annoyance of the other expectant fathers in the room. Paula, whose intoxication with her children once in a while produced an off note, had wanted to name my sister Treasure. Fortunately my father talked her out of it, pointing out that Treasure Talbot sounded an awful lot like a stripper. She hadn’t seen it as tacky, because treasure was so overwhelmingly the right word for how she regarded her children. My mother was one of those people who took to parenting with a warm, natural authority and the conviction that her innate playfulness finally had a legitimate outlet. Though she was still in her early twenties, had not gone much beyond junior high, and was married to a man who was a first-time father at forty-seven, she had definite, and progressive, ideas about how they would do things: she breastfed her babies at a time when bottle-feeding was the norm, and forswore spanking. When a fifth-grade teacher replied to a challenging question Steve asked by saying, “Curiosity killed the cat,” Paula, who had spent so little time in classrooms herself, mustered the wherewithal to complain to the teacher in person. Years later, when we were all grown up, she told my sister that before she had children, she would wake up every morning aware that her first feeling was one of vague emptiness, and that after she had children she never felt that emptiness again.
Yet objectively speaking, constructing a family life with Lyle was a bold-faced gamble. Five years into their marriage, she had three children under the age of five, and the family was moving every year, just like hers had, just like she swore she never would. They lived in my father’s Camrose bungalow; in a little house off Laurel Canyon with a view, over the palm trees, of a giant concrete ice cream cone and the sign “HOME OF THE MILE-HIGH CONE”; way out in Tarzana, in a tan stucco house with a stubbly lawn like a five-o’clock shadow; and finally in the Highland Towers, a hulking apartment building in the heart of Hollywood that had been put up in the silent era with an eye to grandeur but was now rather tatty. It was not the sort of domestic setting that Dick and Jane from Steve’s school readers or any of the families on 1950s television lived in. Steve remembers the Highland Towers as “a literally quite dark, sort of seedy place, full of weird actors and magicians. In retrospect, it was very film noir.” One day when Steve was playing in a little park nearby, he was startled to see a boy about his age eating out of the garbage can. “I told Mom about it and she said if you see that boy again invite him home. A few days later, I did and I invited him back to the apartment and she fed him lunch.” Hollywood Boulevard was just a short walk away, and that was where Lyle took five-year-old Steve to see the first movie he ever went to, Prince Valiant, in the new wide-screen CinemaScope format at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Lyle bought Steve a sword and shield in the lobby and they walked back to their noir tower of a home, hand in hand.
Lyle was still having trouble finding work—by this point his reputation as a drinker was beginning to hurt him—money was tight, and Paula had set her career aside while the kids were little. Though it was true that Lyle virtually never turned down a job, he might, if he hadn’t had a growing family to support, have turned down the ones he took next: working for a director named Ed Wood. Lyle knew Eddie Wood as a peppy young man who had worked as a gofer on a movie he had made a couple of years earlier at Universal. “He was this young, eager-beaver type—a very personable, very nice, very sweet guy,” my father recalled. “He’d come to me—he used this same speech with the various actors that he afterwards used when he made pictures—and his pitch was: ‘You know, Lyle, you’re my favorite actor.’ He was sincere about it; he meant it when he said it. He’d say, ‘Someday I’m going to make movies and when I do I want you to be in them.’ So what do you say? I was an actor who very seldom turned down anything, because I wanted to work. So consequently I worked in all kinds of pictures—good, bad, and indifferent. Anyway, I said, ‘Well, sure, Eddie, call me.’ Well, two or three years later I got a call from this Eddie Wood. I’d forgotten who he was, but he told me he had this film he was making, and he had a great part for me. He said, ‘I don’t have much money, Lyle, and I know you get a pretty big salary—but I’ll give you just as much as I can.’ It amounted to three hundred dollars a day. He said, ‘So you know I’ll pay you, I’ll pay you every day.’”
The movie was Glen or Glenda, and like all Wood’s movies it was so very bad in so many and such bizarre ways that it would eventually transcend, if that’s the right word, the utter shoddiness of its production and become a cult classic. Actually, Wood’s work was first rescued from oblivion when the writers Harry and Michael Medved anointed Plan 9 from Outer Space the worst film of all time. That w
as in 1978, two years after Wood died of a heart attack at age fifty-four, depressed and in desperate financial straits after years of eking out a living writing pulp and porn. But after a while, the Internet started showing its capacity to draw together aficionados of the obscure. It rustled up all the arch and ironic film buffs, all the knowing, winking connoisseurs of Bettie Page bondage flicks and the lesser-known films of Val Lewton, and along the way, even some with a secret, sincere fondness for Ed Wood. In 1994, the director Tim Burton made his biopic about Wood, with Johnny Depp playing him as a sincere if absurdly buoyant film lover, and that image stuck. After that, Ed Wood might still be billed as the worst filmmaker in the world, but he elicited a certain befuddled affection, too. Yes, he had made atrocious movies, but he didn’t seem to know it—he loved his films!—and that earnest belief in his product seemed like such a delirious act of will that it was almost like art itself.
“I feel the fans must be responding to the love and dedication Eddie had for the business, because even at his most absurd, Ed Wood believed so much in what he was doing,” my father told an interviewer in the 1990s, after Wood had been rediscovered. “And he worshipped actors like Bela [Lugosi]!” Wood seemed genuinely hurt when Lyle referred to the flying saucers in Plan 9 from Outer Space as garbage can lids. They were not, he indignantly assured Lyle; they were hubcaps. “Eddie was serious about his movie,” my father would say later. “It wasn’t a rip-off. He wanted to keep making them and he wanted to improve. And that’s why I don’t think you can ridicule the poor little guy.”
Then, too, Wood assembled a stock company of players for his movies who were themselves so odd that they constituted at once a realistic rendering of the underside of Hollywood and a sort of living avant-garde performance piece. There was Bela Lugosi, the heavy-accented Hungarian-born actor who’d played Dracula in the 1930s but had since fallen on hard times. Lugosi had successfully fought an addiction to painkillers and was now hoping to make a comeback under Wood’s auspices. There was the four-hundred-pound, bald-pated Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson. And there was the ornately muscled bodybuilder Steve Reeves, who would go on to become the highest-paid actor in Europe, starring in sword-and-sandal movies in which he never spoke, because they were dubbed in Italian. Wood’s girlfriend, the wide-eyed, strangely innocent Dolores Fuller, who went on to some success as a songwriter for Elvis Presley movies, was his leading lady. And for an ahead-of-its-time touch of goth sex, there was Maila Nurmi, a Finnish-born pinup model who’d invented a persona for herself as the hot-and-cold “glamour ghoul” Vampira, a TV host who introduced horror movies. (She had a full-throated scream, a scarily tiny waist she showed off in a long black gown, and an acerbic sense of humor married to a disarmingly large ego.) The ensemble also embraced Bunny Breckinridge, an openly gay gadabout and drag queen from a wealthy and prominent family who played the role of the alien leader in Plan 9 from Outer Space wearing abundant, incongruous eye makeup.
Finally there was The Amazing Criswell, an amazingly unreliable mystic who made regular TV appearances where he intoned his trademark line: “We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.” One of Criswell’s predictions was that Denver, Colorado, would be destroyed by “a strange and terrible pressure from outer space” that would “cause all solids to turn into a jelly-like mass.” He also predicted an outbreak of cannibalism in Pittsburgh, of all places, for November 1980. Criswell did marginally better when it came to future fashions. He predicted that body decoration would become universal, though in Criswell’s version, women would “decorate their breasts with startling colors,” while men would “decorate their genitals.” Still, if tattoos count, he was on to something. He said nose rings would come into fashion in 1966 for both men and women, and hey, by about 1996 they did!
You had to be pretty seriously weird to register as weird with my father. He’d grown up around carny people, acted with and been directed by every kind of personality you can think of, and basically lived his life in the company of exhibitionists. If you were a nice person (big bonus points if you listened to his stories), then your eccentricities were safe with him. Criswell was one of the few fellow performers I ever heard him describe as “a very strange person.” (Hell, he didn’t even describe Ed Wood that way.) Criswell lived in the Highland Towers at the same time that Lyle and the family did, and when they ran into him in the elevator, he’d speak to them in the same stentorian tones in which he’d predicted the future enslavement of men by women (not at all a bad thing, in his view) and fix them with that nearly translucent blue gaze (were those contacts?) from beneath that frothy platinum coiffure. Either the guy never broke character or he truly believed in his psychic powers. Both explanations puzzled my father, a performer who was almost never in character when he didn’t have to be—that is, when he wasn’t actually working—and who’d known too many charlatans in his day to set much store by psychic powers.
In the Ed Wood company, Lyle was the straight arrow. Sure, he might have been a heavy drinker, down on his luck and married to a woman twenty-six years his junior, but in Wood world, he was reliable, presentable, a regular Boy Scout. Wood cast him twice as a police inspector and once as a general in charge of repelling an alien invasion. I don’t think I’m bragging when I say that he brought a note of professionalism and a faint hint of rationality to the proceedings, accomplishments that would inevitably be undone a moment later, when say, a loud and inexplicable burst of flamenco music interjected itself on the sound track.
Plan 9 and Jail Bait, two of the three movies my father made with Wood, are really unwatchable for me. When I saw them once or twice with friends who were cracking up over them, I just felt sad and queasy and embarrassed for my dad. They reminded me of the cheap, off-brand Day-Glo candy you’d sometimes get in those claw-grabber machines at an arcade. Candy was so good; how could anybody make it so wretched?
When I finally made myself watch Glen or Glenda, though, I found it kind of . . . touching. Of course, it was still awful—botched and awkward, and surreal in a style you could be pretty sure was not intentional. (The deployment of Bela Lugosi in this movie’s dream sequence, uttering gloomily about “snips and snails and puppy dog tails,” is truly bonkers, and not in a good way.) But it was also, in its peculiar fashion kind of a brave and earnest plea for understanding and empathizing with people who didn’t conform to their assigned gender. Wood had been hired to make an exploitation movie based on the story of Christine Jorgensen, whose sex-reassignment surgery had been generating headlines in late 1952 and early 1953. When Jorgensen showed no interest in cooperating, he switched gears, producing a movie centered on a man who likes—or as Glen or Glenda puts it, “desperately wish[es]”—to dress in women’s clothes. The quasi-documentary-style narration, written by Wood, is at once completely ridiculous and emotionally truthful: “Give this man satin undies, a dress, a sweater and a skirt, or even the lounging outfit he has on and he’s the happiest individual in the world. He can work better, think better, he can play better and he can be a credit to his community and his government because he is happy. These things are his comfort.” You shouldn’t send transgendered people to psychiatrists with the goal of punishing them or eradicating their “strange desires,” the narrator intones, because “this is their life. To take it away from them might do as great a harm as taking away an arm or a leg or life itself.” Honestly, these are beliefs that have only quite recently, and after years of activism on the part of transsexuals and their allies, become more widely accepted.
Glen or Glenda was Wood’s own story; he was a devoted cross-dresser who claimed that he had fought as a Marine at Guadalcanal wearing red satin panties and a bra beneath his fatigues. Supposedly his mother had dressed him as a girl when he was little, and he harbored lifelong, obsessive memories of how soft those clothes were and how good they felt to him. Although he was sexually attracted to women (he had girlfriends like Fuller
who were very into him, and he was married twice), he was also really, really attracted to their clothes—especially their angora sweaters.
On the set of Wood’s movies, Lyle’s “A job’s a job” attitude got him through, abetted by a certain amusement at Eddie’s seemingly guileless chutzpah. Lyle had acted in shabby independent productions before (“She Shoulda Said ‘No’!” wasn’t exactly Academy Award material), so he was used to directors who stole shots, filming on the street without permits. Sometimes a director would see a good shot, and even if it had nothing to do with the movie he was making, he’d grab it, figuring the studios could use it somehow. “So, for instance, one time we’re winding up the day’s shooting—it was in Long Beach—and here comes this big battleship into port,” my father recalled. “And the director says, ‘Holy Jesus, we’ve got to get that,’ and he’s lining up the cameras and they’re having trouble, so he starts yelling at this giant dreadnought, ‘Back up! Back up!’”
But “Eddie took stealing shots to a whole new level.” He never got permits to film anywhere—he couldn’t afford them—so his camera crew was always prepared to pack up and flee at a moment’s notice. “We were shooting at a motel on the Sunset Strip,” my father recalled, “and he hadn’t gotten an okay to do this. We were shooting around the pool when the manager came out and said, ‘What the hell is going on here? You better get out!’ So everyone—the cameraman who had worked for him before and a couple of the electricians—they’d rush to get the hell out of there and go somewhere else.
The Entertainer Page 37
