The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  He also followed his children’s lead. “By the end of the 1960s,” as Steve said, “I think he just looked up and saw that his wife and his children, the people he loved best, were all on one side, and he was on the other, and he didn’t want to be there anymore.” He grew sideburns, clipped cartoons by the liberal L.A. Times cartoonist Paul Conrad, drove my cousin and me around to supermarket parking lots where we passed out hand-scrawled leaflets urging shoppers to boycott grapes and iceberg lettuce in support of César Chávez’s United Farm Workers. He boycotted grapes and iceberg lettuce himself. By 1972, he was a fervent supporter of George McGovern, about as liberal a mainstream presidential candidate as we’ve ever had. (It helped that McGovern was a midwesterner.)

  When David was a senior at Harvard, the prep school he’d gone to since seventh grade, and his campaign to get the school to drop its ROTC component had earned him the opprobrium of the administration, it was my father who backed him up. One of David’s teachers, an inspired educator named Paul Cummins, had left Harvard to become the principal of a progressive new private school called Oakwood. One day, David walked over there by himself and asked Cummins if he’d take him in. When he said yes, David went home and sat my parents down to say he wanted to leave Harvard. Our mother was opposed to it, anxious that he was blowing his education by leaving his prestigious school for some new, experimental one, and in the middle of his senior year, too. “Dad was just sitting there very quietly,” David remembers. “And then he said, ‘I can see that you’re doing this out of conscience. So I think you have to do it.’ And that was it.”

  In 1975, when he was seventy-three, Lyle gave an interview to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in which he explained his transformation, and unlike a lot of people his age, he sounds sweetly, if ingenuously, admiring of the younger generation. “The thing about young people today is that they are much more aware than we ever were,” he said. “We came of age when football and Joe College were big even for those of us who never finished school. It was the image that was the thing. Today’s kids go to college and they discover that things aren’t everything they’ve been cracked up to be. And they want to do something about it. They want to right their world. My own kids woke me up to what was going on in Vietnam—the sadness and futility of it all. They kept saying, ‘Dad, they’re lying to us.’ And they were. Maybe these kids can do something for our world, each in his own way. At least they’re trying.”

  • • •

  NONE OF US FOUR KIDS became actors. At fourteen, Steve decided he wanted to focus on school and sports, and my parents supported him in that decision. If they were disappointed, they didn’t show it—though we did find it funny that they’d sometimes say, “Acting is something Steve could always fall back on,” given that acting is about the least secure way to make a living I can think of. As a kid, David had gone out for a few parts and didn’t get them, and my father was very indignant on his behalf. Plus, David was chubby as a pre-adolescent, and Lyle was concerned that he not be typecast as the fat kid. As a young teenager, Cindy thought she might like to act, but my parents were pretty wrapped up by then in the importance of education, so they told her she should wait till she was older, and by that time, she was launched on a different, more academic path. And I had zero acting talent. I get nervous before speaking at a meeting. In the Post-Dispatch article, my father affectionately refers to me, at fourteen, as a poetry-writing “women’s libber” (feminist, dad, feminist!), determinedly sending my work to publications with names like Amazon Quarterly. That gives you an idea of what I was like.

  Still, my mom used to say that she figured my sister and I would grow up to be showgirls. We were so tall compared with her! She was five-feet-two, and my sister and I were five-feet-eight and five-feet-nine. If only she’d stuck to her guns and named Cindy “Treasure”! It was sort of a joke and sort of not. I think she actually would have been proud if we’d been showgirls—as long as we were happy non-drug-using showgirls with husbands who loved us. But when it was apparent we were going a different way, working our brains more than our bods—believe me, nobody would have paid to see me as a showgirl—she enthusiastically went with that. Steve became a successful and prolific documentary filmmaker who’s won lots of prestigious awards and who hired our father a couple of times to narrate his films; David became an author and editor and the founder of the website Salon .com; Cindy earned a medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco, and a master’s in public health from UC–Berkeley and became a family physician who also teaches in a residency program; and I went to graduate school at Harvard, thinking I’d become a history professor, then switched gears and became a magazine journalist. “I got the impression later in his life that Dad was sort of in awe of us,” Cindy said recently. (And he certainly was of his “daughter, the doctor.”) “It was, like, now how exactly would I have been involved in producing them? He always gave Mom the credit for it.”

  • • •

  ISAID THAT HAVING AN OLD FATHER didn’t bother me, but in one respect it did. I used to worry that he would die. I mean I knew he’d die, of course, but I worried that he would die sooner than I could bear. In the end, though, it was my mother who died first. Twenty-one years later, that sentence is still very hard for me to write. I don’t even want to look at it on the screen.

  When I was in elementary school, and the last kid left at home, my mom took a new kind of job. The only paid work she’d ever done was acting and singing, but she had let her career fade in deference to child rearing. If she felt any serious regret about that, I thank her for never showing it. But really, I think she was a person who found tremendous fulfillment—and fun—in raising kids. In any case, now she needed the money; my dad was still working, doing guest spots on prime-time TV and touring with plays, but the work wasn’t as steady, and they had tuition to pay. Lacking a high school degree, my mother didn’t have many choices. She ended up as a clerk on the dialysis ward at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. Being Paula, she soon reimagined the job as a kind of ambassador of goodwill. She accompanied scared children to the operating room, holding their hands and singing to them. She became a friend and confidante to an unlikely assortment of coworkers: a dauntingly intellectual doctor who was the daughter of a prominent Marxist theorist and German émigré; a cocky young tech whose father was a big-time Latin jazz musician; a very tall and homesick Dutch female doctor who was doing a fellowship there; a pampered and beautiful Peruvian woman who was shocking her upper-class family by working as a licensed vocational nurse to assert her independence. My mother got them all to tell her their stories. One year, she won the hospital’s Humanitarian Award, an honor that usually went to doctors or nurses.

  She had gone to a play with a group of these friends from Children’s one night in November 1985 and woken up before dawn with a terrible headache. It turned out to be a bleed from a brain aneurysm. She had emergency surgery and survived but with lingering aphasia and paralysis on one side of her body. Still, she was able to live at home with my father, her optimism intact, though it must have been tremendously frustrating for a person who loved her heart-to-hearts not to be able to chat and advise as she once had. Her brain did not heal well, and after a year or so, she started to have seizures and small strokes, and finally, in the summer of 1988, a major stroke. It began to seem clear that my father, who was then eighty-six, could not care for her at home anymore, even with our help. In the winter of 1989, my father sold the house on Goodland Avenue, and we packed him up and moved him to San Francisco, where my brothers and their families lived. My mother was to stay at a nursing home in San Francisco, where my father could visit her regularly. But she died almost immediately after the move, on March 17, 1989, at sixty years old. Lyle was suddenly the one thing a man who marries a woman twenty-six years younger never imagines he’ll be: a widower. My mother had been the radiant heart and soul of our family, and my father’s personal jar of sunlight, for forty years
. We were all devastated by her illness and her death.

  Our father seemed hollowed out, lonely, and physically fragile as we’d never seen him. In San Francisco, he lived in a condominium downtown near the Opera House and the City Hall. At first, when my brothers would come to take him out, he didn’t want to go anywhere; he preferred to sit among the familiar things we’d brought from Goodland Avenue. Then one week, Steve read in the paper that the beautiful old Castro Theatre would be screening Three on a Match. Lyle said he didn’t want to go, but Steve finally coaxed him into it. In the darkness of the movie palace, Steve watched our father watch a version of himself sixty years younger, eternally handsome, eternally on the verge of a stardom he’d never achieve. “You know, I’m the only actor in this movie who’s still alive,” my father whispered to Steve. “And this movie’s probably gonna outlast both of us,” Steve told him. “Maybe,” he said, and smiled a little. “When he rose unsteadily from his seat at the end of the film and raised his arm to acknowledge the audience’s applause,” Steve said, “I could swear the guy looked ten years younger.” “Where are we going to dinner?” Lyle asked when the clapping had subsided. “I’m starved.”

  It was the kind of moment my siblings and I had laughed at before—the old actor rejuvenated instantly by the elixir of applause. We still laugh about it now. But we were also grateful for the sweet, reliable spark between the entertainer and his audience. We were grateful for my father’s unbowed vanity. We knew it rekindled him and, at the same time, that the effect was fleeting. My father could rise to the occasion when the spotlight found him, but it wasn’t like it brought my mother back.

  I guess we had all come to cherish the old pro in him, the instincts of the workhorse actor, the ability to get out there and turn on the brights for an audience. My father didn’t talk much about the philosophy of acting, except to say that he didn’t believe in Method acting. He didn’t believe you should try to lose yourself in a role, merge your identity with it, access your own buried emotions. You always had to remember you were acting; you could get emotional, but you had to maintain control. If he had a credo, it was a credo of entertaining. You owed something to the people who came to see you. You did a job for them. You kept working for as long as you could, with as much love as you could muster. That didn’t make him the best actor, and it didn’t make him a star, but it made him a lifelong working actor, a man who raised a family without ever working at anything he cared for less than he did for acting. “I think you can only learn to act by acting,” he told an interviewer once. “And if you have to start sitting down and theorizing, it’s too late. You don’t have time to tell the audience what you’re thinking. You can’t say, ‘Look, when I say this line, here’s what I really mean.’ You’ve got to do whatever the script is, and it’s got to immediately have an impact with the audience if you’re going to act for an audience and I don’t know why else you would act. . . . You don’t act for yourself.”

  In the seven years he lived in this world without my mother, he missed her keenly. He often talked about being reunited with her, his dear Paula, after death. But he also revived in San Francisco; life jangled its bells and flashed its beads at him, and he did not turn his back on them. Steve and David and their wives, Pippa and Camille, took him to trendy restaurants he enjoyed dissing, and to some he loved because they served a good hamburger and he liked flirting with the waitresses. He became close friends with a much younger documentary filmmaker who interviewed him for one of her projects, and he got in touch with the few old friends who were still alive, including a handsome charm bomb of an actor named Walter Reed. And he gave other interviews, to reporters and oral historians and obsessive film buffs—several of them devoted, to his astonishment, to the career of the long-forgotten Eddie Wood. He cooked delicious omelettes for himself at breakfast, went to the movies a lot, found a barbershop where they made just enough of a fuss over him. He got to know his grandchildren, one of whom, Steve’s daughter, Caitlin, was already continuing the family tradition of staging plays in the garage and who would in fact grow up to be an actress, and another of whom, Steve’s son, Dash, went to high school up the street and came by most afternoons to check on Lyle and partake of his snack supply. He stood up with me when I married my husband, Art, on a typically chilly summer afternoon in San Francisco, under the Beaux-Arts domes of the Palace of Fine Arts, and he delivered a fine and funny toast at our party the night before.

  He did a couple of things he had never done before, too. He drank wine when we went out to dinner. After all those years, it didn’t seem to do much more than make him a little sentimental. None of us had the heart to tell him to stop. And occasionally, to my brothers, though not to my sister or me, he would mention something about one of his previous wives. “Dad had never talked about other women with us, either,” David told me recently. “He was never the type of dad who’d ogle a woman when he was out with his sons. He was very respectful of women, gentlemanly. He didn’t want to embarrass Mom or to gloat. He was discreet. And he wanted us to think—and he really felt at some level—that his marriage was the beginning of his life.” But one time, during those last seven years in San Francisco, he did do just a little bit of gloating. David and he were having lunch at the Zuni Café, and Lyle told him, “You kids think you invented free love in the sixties. You have no idea what it was like to be young and beautiful in the thirties in Hollywood. Everyone was sleeping with everyone.”

  “Okay,” said David. “You win.”

  • • •

  WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, I used to spend a lot of time with my father in the car. He’d take me to school and pick me up most days, drive me to after-school activities, take me on errands. And in the car he’d tell stories about touring with the old rep companies through the winter-bound Midwest, about Hollywood in the 1930s. For some reason, I always remember the drive over Coldwater Canyon, when we had been on the west side and were coming home, almost floating home, it always seemed to me, inscribing a lazy zigzag through the hills, like thistle down on the breeze. In my memory, it is sunset, with a rime of orange on the horizon, the smog that turned beautiful at this time of day with the sun refracted through it. We’d drive past Mulholland, past the houses on stilts, their wide windows blazing with late afternoon light. And sometimes I was lulled by his voice, and sometimes I was really amused, and sometimes I was bored and eager to be home.

  But over the years, I realized stories were what made my family. Stories were the soft golden net that enmeshed us. My father’s stories. And my parents’ stories—how they met, how she saved him. It was a fairy tale, really, the brave and lovely young princess who unlocked the cage—but true, too.

  My father died on March 2, 1996, when he was ninety-four years old. He died at home, in his own bed—thankfully, for he hated hospitals and feared wasting away. His heart stopped. He was ninety-four, and my brother David was with him. He was lucky. Luck of the Irish.

  After that, I found that I wished for those stories again, the stories my mother told us, the stories of Lyle as a magician’s boy and a matinee idol and an elegant pre-Code gangster and even a figment of Ed Wood’s imagination. I dreamed my parents were alive but weak, except for their voices. I dreamed I was hearing their stories again.

  Tell me.

  Tell me one more time.

  And I wished so hard, and with such a keen memory of my father, cresting the canyon, drifting into the past and down into the valley, that at last, when I knew I would never hear them again from him, I had to tell them myself.

  Acknowledgments

  One of the best parts of finishing a book—the vanilla bread pudding, the peach pie à la mode, or whatever your favorite dessert happens to be—is that you get to thank people you’ve been waiting to thank. For somebody like me who didn’t manage to write a first book till pretty damn late in my career, the reward is even sweeter.

  So, thank you, first of all, to the gifted
editors who have helped me learn and keep practicing the craft of long-form magazine journalism: Jeffrey Kittay and Judith Shulevitz at Lingua Franca; Andrew Sullivan, the late Michael Kelly, and Leon Wieseltier at The New Republic; Adam Moss and Katherine Bouton at The New York Times Magazine; David Remnick and Daniel Zalewski at The New Yorker. Leon was the first person who encouraged me to write about my father and entertainment history, and I’ll always be grateful for that opening.

  My current journalistic home, The New Yorker, is a privilege to work for. I am grateful to David Remnick for keeping a venerable institution lively and indispensable, for his kindness as an editor and the high bar he sets as a writer. Having an editor like Daniel Zalewski to work with makes me feel lucky all the time: his remarkable ability to see both the bones and the heart of a story before its writer does, and often more clearly, amount to a kind of X-ray vision. Dorothy Wickenden and David Grann have been inspiring to me as authors, and wonderfully supportive as colleagues. I’ve also benefited from the editorial rigor of Amy Davidson, Virginia Cannon, and the magazine’s crackerjack fact-checkers.

  If there is one person without whom this book would not have been written, it’s Sarah Chalfant of the Wylie Agency. It was Sarah who first saw the possibility of the book back in 1998, in a short piece I wrote for The New Republic, and she has been unfailingly encouraging and insightful about the project ever since. Her intelligent championship of writers and books is a marvelous thing.