“On Plan 9, our ‘studio’—what a name to call it!—was down an alley off of Santa Monica Boulevard, and it was behind a four-story hotel that mostly housed prostitutes. It was this wooden shack—maybe it had been a garage or something. It certainly wasn’t soundproofed.” And the lights! “The lights were on little music stands and they were literally tin cans with a bulb in them.”
Wood was true to his word, though, when it came to paying Lyle every day. (The shoots usually lasted only about a week.) “I always got a large stack of singles, maybe some fives in there, and they were all sort of wrinkled, as if he’d gathered them in small amounts and stuffed them into his pockets. He obviously collected them somehow”—Lyle didn’t even want to think about the circumstances—“from different people.” Lyle found it sad, but also—he couldn’t help it—funny. And that was before he even knew that one way Wood had raised money for Plan 9 was by getting some elders from a local Baptist church to chip in, promising that he’d take the money he made from this sure-to-be-a-hit horror/sci-fi flick to make an epic series of movies for the church about the twelve apostles. Before they got the money, Wood and several others from his inner circle, including the big man, Tor Johnson, had to agree to be baptized. No record exists of what kind of undergarments Wood was wearing for his immersion.
Then one evening, after the premiere of one of the Wood movies, Lyle was tasked with driving him home. Wood was drunk and couldn’t or wouldn’t tell Lyle where he lived, so Lyle drove to his own place, parked the car, and left Wood there to sleep it off. At about two in the morning, Wood knocked at the door and Lyle let him in. My mother insisted that he stay the night rather than calling a cab, and offered him the main bedroom. She and Lyle would go sleep in the kids’ room. The next morning, Paula and Lyle were eating breakfast with the little boys when Wood emerged wearing a filmy black nightgown and a bra of Paula’s that had been hanging in the bathroom. Paula, who had never met Wood before that night, was momentarily speechless. Lyle, who apparently thought Wood had only been acting in Glen or Glenda and who was still a little vague on the whole cross-dressing thing, was furious, and ordered Wood out of his wife’s nightie and out of the apartment. That morning it must have seemed to him that the seediness of Wood’s world was encroaching, seeping into the cracks of a home life that must have felt increasingly precious and fragile to Lyle.
And it was—because of Lyle himself. His drinking persisted despite my mother’s pleading and her own abstention. “He was not a mean drunk. I don’t think he had a mean bone in his body,” said my mother’s brother, Robert Epple. “But he’d drink till he passed out. He’d drive badly—very slowly, but very badly.” One night my mother called Robert. She was crying. Lyle had his friend Phil Van Zandt over at the house in Tarzana and he and Lyle were smashed, with the kids there. She wanted Van Zandt out of the house, but she was holed up with the little boys in their bedroom, because she didn’t want them to see their father that way. When Robert got there, he was so angry at Van Zandt, whom he’d decided was a bad influence on Lyle, that he made the first indignant gesture a fundamentally peaceable and rational man like him could think of at the moment: “Van Zandt had this beautiful, fawn-colored suede jacket. I took it and threw it out in the gutter.”
In the spring of 1953, just after Cindy was born, Paula gave Lyle an ultimatum: Either he stopped drinking or their marriage, this whole experiment in making a new, family-oriented life, was over. In the summer, she filed for divorce. Lyle moved out, and Paula sent baby Cindy to stay with her parents for a few weeks while she took care of the boys, then five and two, and tried to figure out what to do from there. She had been reading up on Alcoholics Anonymous and on the new understanding of alcoholism that had been gaining purchase in the United States since the late 1930s. Alcoholism was a disease, the new thinking held, rather than a moral failing. Or maybe it was more like an allergy; for people who were susceptible, alcohol was something they simply could not tolerate, even in very small doses. A vow to drink in moderation was not tenable. The only way to regain control was to stop drinking altogether. Lyle, she decided, would have to try this approach.
After several weeks—the papers said two, but I think it was longer—Paula decided to take Lyle back. He must have promised, in a way she found newly convincing, that he wouldn’t drink again. “Probably the most unlikely place in the world for romance is the Los Angeles Domestic Relations Court,” read the chirpy account in the Evening Herald-Express, “but that is where love bloomed again today for Screen Actor Lyle Talbot and his wife, Margaret, who is officially suing him for divorce.” The Talbots walked “out of the courtroom arm in arm,” the paper reported, “and planned to have dinner together that night.” The children, said Paula, “need their father—and I need him, too,” adding, “I expect to go back with him. I have every hope the problems we have can be worked out successfully.” One of the photos shows Lyle smiling broadly and gripping Paula’s hand, while she leans against him looking sleepy and a bit stunned, though her hair is perfectly curled and she is wearing a smart little black dress with a jaunty white collar.
“When I think back on it,” my mother’s brother told me recently, “I think how really strong she was to do that. Here she was, in her early twenties with these three little kids, and no money. But I also think how strong he was, because it must have been really, really hard, but he did it for her.”
Lyle got sober partly through AA. He hardly ever talked about it—and certainly never threw twelve-step lingo around. But when AA did come up in household conversation, both my parents spoke about it with a certain low-key respect. Lyle apparently did do some formal or informal sponsoring of other alcoholics, especially if they, too, were in show business, for some years after he got sober.
When my brother Steve was about ten, the family was spending part of a humid summer in Indianapolis while my father did a play there. They were staying at a big old resort-style hotel in a leafy part of town. The marquee out in front of the hotel boasted Lyle Talbot’s name as a guest. But one day, Steve noticed that Lyle’s name had been demoted to second billing beneath that of the Lone Ranger, who was in town for a personal appearance. Steve, who was a huge fan of the Lone Ranger TV show, ran back to the hotel room to tell the family the thrilling news. “No sooner had I blurted out who was coming,” Steve wrote me in an e-mail recently, “than the phone rang and it was the Ranger himself in his unmistakable voice. And even more incredibly, he was coming up to see Dad. I could barely contain myself, though I noticed that Dad and Mom’s excitement was muted for some reason I couldn’t understand.” The next thing Steve knew, the Lone Ranger was at their hotel room door. “And he was not wearing the mask! I was stunned. How could he reveal his identity like that? He was a little bleary-eyed and tired-looking, too. He shook my hand and said hi. Maybe he slurred his words a little, but he seemed very serious and he wanted to talk to Dad and they went off to another room. Mom told us later that he had a drinking problem and that’s why he needed to talk to Dad.” Steve remembers other actors calling the house, not famous ones, just names or voices he sometimes recognized, for what he knew somehow was the same reason. After he’d told me this story, he googled Clayton Moore, the actor who played the Ranger on TV from 1949 to 1957, and saw that “he spent the next forty years of his life living off the same role, doing personal appearances, and lived to be eighty-five. So he must have pulled himself together. Guess he had to uphold that image of the honorable law man who lived by a code of justice and propriety.”
Paula and Lyle at the Highland Towers, with baby Stephen.
My parents were involved with an Episcopal church in Los Angeles at the time. The minister was young, liberal and—always an important credit in my parents’ eyes—good-looking. The church was integrated and rather hip. Nat King Cole sang in the church choir. Lyle used to like to talk with Father Pratt and found in those sessions during the time he was quitting alcohol the closest thing he�
�d ever had to therapy.
Mostly, though, he took strength from the powerful motivation of doing right by Paula and their children and being allowed to keep his life with them whole. He was a doting father. From the time they were toddlers, he took the boys to the set—not of Ed Wood movies, of course, but of the TV westerns he was also doing. He let them dress up in the cowboy gear and wander around the dusty streets and push open the swinging doors on the fake saloons. On one set, David made the mistake of shouting in excitement after the director had called all quiet on the set, and the director started haranguing him. “Normally, Dad was very deferential to directors,” David said. “He had the actor’s thing of almost becoming childlike with the director. But when this guy yelled at me, and I remember thinking this was very cool, Dad turned on him and said, ‘Don’t you ever talk to my son that way.’” Lyle was physically affectionate and told his children every day how much he loved them. “I can remember thinking he was sweeter than the other dads,” my brother David says. “You know, he’d put his arm around me when we walked down the street, hold my hand. This was in the ’50s and early ’60s, when dads didn’t do that. Of course, it was embarrassing sometimes, especially when I was a teenager! But I also appreciated that he was more affectionate than other dads.”
Family portrait: just after my parents’ reconciliation.
Our mother “became his anchor and his mood stabilizer,” as David put it. He still did have his black moods sometimes—actually, I’d call them dark gray—and if in the past he drank to try to break those moods up, now he looked to my mother to buoy him up instead. She was very, very good at persuading people out of their self-doubt or their sadness. Her own willful optimism was partly self-taught. Some of it was in her nature, but some of it was what she had learned, from childhood, to tell herself. Words were talismanic for her, and she became the Scheherazade of comfort talk, resourcefully spinning out a more convincing, more engrossing story than whatever self-pitying version you were telling yourself about your life.
During the forty years he and my mother were married, neither my sister nor I ever saw Lyle take a drink, let alone get drunk. I never harbored an anxiety that he would drink. But David remembers coming down the hall once as a small child and seeing my parents silhouetted in the kitchen, my father slumped at the table, his head in his hands and my mother standing over him, lecturing him. At the time, David just felt there was something strange and wrong about the picture, and wanted to get away; in retrospect, he figures it must have been one of the times when my father relapsed.
Both my brothers have told me about the one time they actually saw him drunk. This was some years after my mother had delivered her ultimatum and left my father; David was in seventh grade by then, Steve in tenth. They were both enrolled at Harvard, a boys’ prep school a few minutes from where we lived. One evening, Harvard was hosting a father-son sports banquet at which my brothers were to get trophies. My father had been looking forward to it, but he arrived late. And when he got there, it was immediately apparent that something was very wrong.
“I’d never seen him drunk,” David recalled, “but I knew what it was. He was staggering. Steve and I were sitting at different tables because we were in different grades, so we didn’t even really have each other for solidarity. Dad kind of lurched over, he was slurring his words, and he went over to one of my teachers to say, ‘Oh, David just loooves your class.’ I was mortified, of course. It was like seeing your dad suddenly turn into an alien—just deeply disturbing. We went home. It was a Friday night and I remember Steve and I watched Route 66 on TV, just sitting there in this deep silence. I don’t think we even said anything about it to each other.
“The next morning Dad came into our bedroom, and if he wasn’t actually crying, he was very teary. He apologized over and over again. He was so pained. And it made it even harder in a way because we’d never seen him that way either, never seen him crying. He said it would never happen again. And it never did.”
What I can remember is that all my life, every time we went out to dinner (and I went out to dinner a lot with my parents) and the server would ask if we wanted to order wine or some other alcoholic beverage, my father would hesitate. The pause would seem a shade long to me. Then he would always say the same thing: “Not tonight, thank you.” As though there could be a night when he would say, “Yes, bring us a bottle of your best white wine,” or “How about a Scotch on the rocks?” I suppose that he might have been tempted each time, might have been steeling himself with each offer to refuse. But I think it was also a case of feeling, somewhere inside, a little embarrassed to be a teetotaler—as though he hesitated before answering, in order to seal his affinity with a more sophisticated tribe he’d had to leave behind. I don’t believe that he ever really regretted giving up alcohol. He told us again and again over the years that my mother had saved his life, given him a whole new life. And he must have had that point driven home each time he read about the sad demises of some of the people he was drinking with in the late 1940s—Phil Van Zandt’s suicide, the premature deaths of his last two ex-wives. But I do think that in a dark restaurant, with a heavy leather-bound menu in his hand and the flicker of candlelight in a little red globe on the table, he could feel a twinge that was partly real longing and partly the need to perform his role as a gentleman of the world.
One way that my mother ensured he would not feel this twinge more often was to build a social life for our family that was oriented to the kids and built around her own family—Liz and Robert each had married and had three children and were living near Los Angeles—none of whom drank at all. We had a lot of pool parties with our cousins and drank a lot of iced tea. “Mom put her foot down and then she drew that very bright line,” as my sister put it. “She created a haven. Our family life was very insulated from Hollywood. We rarely entertained people from the industry, or even from outside our extended family, at home. We’d see them at the theater; Dad would socialize with them on the set or before a play. But for the most part we did not invite Hollywood into our home.”
My mom and me in Union Square, San Francisco, 1964.
That attitude extended sometimes to my father’s bristly protectiveness when people approached him in public. Usually he was very gracious when someone came up to him and asked for an autograph, or said they’d seen him in this or that, which happened fairly often. He’d ask them where they were from and then say: “Oh, you’re from Kansas City / Cincinnati / fill-in-the-blank? Oh, I love Kansas City / Cincinnati / fill-in-the-blank. It has some of the best barbecue”—or steaks or ice cream or whatever it was that city had. Or, barring a specialty he could name, he would always dub it “a great theater town!” And tell the person that he’d played there in 1923 or 1943 or whenever, because he’d played almost everywhere and he did know and love his cities and the tasty items they were known for. But the old joke about people coming up to an actor, maybe a down-on-his-luck actor, and saying, “Didn’t you used to be so-and-so?” is actually true. Sometimes people did say exactly that. Or worse, “I thought you were dead!” Or, gesturing toward my mother, “Is this your daughter?” At which point my father would get very icy. These interlocutors hurt his own vanity, but more than that, they embarrassed him in front of his children.
In 1955, Lyle and Paula were able to buy a house, the home where they would spend the rest of their life together, and where I would grow up. The down payment came from the sale of the old Talbot Hotel in Brainard, which was still standing in the 1950s, some twenty years after Mary Talbot had died. My brother Steve remembers the trip to Nebraska to sell the place, stopping in to see Ed and Anna Henderson at the apartment building in Omaha where they lived among other old troupers, and then the long drive back in a rattletrap black car that seemed to him like a Model T. It broke down entirely in Arizona, and to Steve’s amazement, the family was rescued by actual Indians from a nearby reservation who came out to tow the car. Back home in C
alifornia, Paula and Lyle and their three kids moved into a neat, white house on a cul-de-sac at the end of Goodland Avenue, in Studio City, near Coldwater Canyon. Like the Bing Crosby song had it, they were “going to settle down and never more roam, and make the San Fernando Valley [their] home.” That same song described the Valley as “cow country,” a place to which the singer’s mail would have to be delivered “RFD.” There were still parts of the Valley that rural in the mid-1950s, but Studio City was not one of them. It was named after the Mack Sennett studio, where they had made Keystone Kops movies in the silent era, and which later became Republic Studios and then CBS. It had a busy little commercial district with a toy store, a Sav-On drugstore and a Du-par’s pie and coffee shop and—this was still L.A., after all—a bar called the Queen Mary that featured female impersonators.
“To me,” says Steve, “the move from crumbling Highland Towers in Hollywood to suburban Studio City in the mid-1950s was like moving from black-and-white to Kodachrome. It was the big dividing line in my childhood and I think in Dad and Mom’s marriage and the life of our family. I had the feeling afterwards that our family was on an upward path.” The house was a modest split-level, built in the 1930s, with a sunken living room and three bedrooms. My sister and I, who were eight years apart, shared a room, and my two brothers shared a smaller one, sleeping in bunk beds and doing their homework side by side at the same built-in desk till they went off to college. My parents’ bedroom was up a short flight of stairs and down a little hall from mine and my sister’s. On nights my sister wasn’t in her twin bed yet and I had trouble getting to sleep, I’d call up to my mother, who’d often be reading in bed, and she’d call back that everything was okay, we “were close as two peas in a pod.”
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