Rita Will_Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

by Rita Mae Brown

  I turned to go up the hill to see if there wasn’t some place we could watch Muffin finish and where Jim could have some peace, and I bumped smack into Beth Bryant.

  We laughed. Fate?

  She flew out to Virginia two weeks later.

  Beth had worked her way up in Colorado National Bank. She enjoyed banking. Now, in her early thirties, she had to make a decision about whether to push for upper management, hoping to get there by her late thirties or early forties, or whether to go to law school. A lawyer with a banking background is a pearl of great price.

  Beth’s long weekend in Virginia introduced her to a cast of characters not often seen in Denver, Ellie Wood Baxter in particular.

  Ellie Wood Baxter, one of the best amateur riders of her generation—she won the Medal Maclay in 1937—is also one of the funniest women God ever put on earth. She wasn’t at all sure about this gay stuff but over the years she decided I wasn’t half bad. Occasionally we’d have lunch. During hunting season I valiantly tried to keep up with her. Her husband had died, her son lived in Florida and she liked having younger people around her.

  Ellie Wood especially likes it if you do what she tells you. Younger people in the South generally do what they are told—or pretend to, anyway.

  Well, Ellie Wood decided she’d have Beth and me over to her pool. This was especially gracious and brave because many of Ellie Wood’s friends wanted gay people to pretend they were straight. The fact that she invited me over with someone I adored really was Big News. Ellie Wood, being Ellie Wood, never gave it a second thought. She isn’t one to congratulate herself for being open-minded because she doesn’t even know that she is. Kindness covered up by bluster is the way she greets the world.

  She’ll be horrified when she reads this because everyone will now know she’s a big softie with a heart of gold. She thoroughly enjoys being Miss Tough-as-Nails.

  The day blistered, the pool sparkled. The water felt like heaven. Ellie Wood brought out iced tea. Popcorn is her favorite food, I think, but it was too hot for that.

  “What do you do?” Ellie Wood was direct since she knew that Beth was from Colorado. Southerners often assume that nonsoutherners have no appreciation for subtlety.

  Beth explained her involvement with commercial loans, how the business climate had changed from the 1970s and early 1980s. “But I’m hoping to go to law school.”

  “Do they have law schools out there?”

  Beth, good-natured, replied, “Do they have them here?”

  After that, those two got on like a house afire. Ellie Wood jumped in the pool. She never wades in. She dives or jumps. Her eye was attracted to the tiles along the inside of the pool. Touches of mold had dared to invade.

  She climbed out, disappeared and returned with two square white cubes. I don’t know what they were.

  “Rub this on the mold and it will come off.” She handed me one and Beth one.

  She repaired to her chaise longue.

  Beth and I scrubbed the tiles.

  “Is she always like this?” Beth whispered.

  “She’s on her good behavior.”

  We giggled.

  “What are you two laughing at?” came the imperious question.

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you,” I replied.

  “Why?”

  “Heat stroke.”

  Before I could give Ellie Wood the devil, Shannon Haeffner came in with her two kids. Shannon is married to one of my cousins but I don’t know how far removed. If I were to explore fully all my blood relations, this book would resemble one of those genealogies of the kings and queens of England.

  Shannon got in the pool and started working on the tiles, too.

  We laughed. Shannon has a terrific sense of humor.

  After a while Ellie Wood allowed as to how we had worked hard enough. We could take a break.

  What a pleasant afternoon, watching the children, chatting with three women who all have lively minds, drinking iced tea. I’m usually on the road or fussing at a broken tractor implement or busting to meet a deadline, so I rarely enjoy leisurely moments like these. It stands out in my memory as a lovely afternoon.

  It’s my own fault that I don’t have more of them.

  After Beth returned to Denver I missed her. However, her absence gave me the chance to write good letters and get them in return. I love letters.

  I decided that Ellie Wood needed a tweak. One day I bought two pink flamingoes. I knew she was giving a small pool party late that afternoon, one of her soirees. I thought she’d never leave the house that day and she never did. Finally, desperate, I crawled on my stomach through the hay-field in front of her house to the pool in the back. The air conditioner repairman had her busy on the south side of the house, so I hoped I could pull it off. I put the flamingoes, one of which was defecating gumdrops I had threaded on clear fishing line, by the pool.

  She had a heck of a time explaining the gumdrops.

  Beth and I dated for a year. The more I knew her the more I loved her. She’s beautiful from the inside out. I even thought about moving to Denver while she was in law school. But every time I left Virginia to look at houses I was miserable.

  I finally figured out that if I moved there, out of my element, I’d make her miserable, too. She’s very sensitive and she’d think it was her fault even if it wasn’t.

  I broke off the relationship. Typical me. I did this with no discussion with Beth since I assumed I knew what was best for her as well as myself. Oh, shades of Juts.

  I felt awful. I expect she felt awful, too.

  I still don’t know if I did the right thing or the wrong thing. Beth graduated from law school, having made the law review. She practices in Denver, enjoys politics even when she doesn’t enjoy it, plays golf and is more beautiful than ever.

  She always asks me about Ellie Wood so I bring her up to date on Ellie Wood’s latest forays, like canoeing the Grand Canyon and going to China.

  We’ve become dear friends, something beyond dear but I don’t have the word. It’s a love once informed by a physical bond but somehow beyond it. I would do anything for this woman.

  The funny thing is, she and Nancy Severson have made a life together.

  The moral of the story is: trust your instincts.

  77

  Angels Keep

  Alice Marble still played tennis. Her classic flat strokes remained fluid and powerful. When Alice reentered my life she was in her seventies.

  Like Aunt Mimi, her grasp of her own age appeared slippery. Sometimes she’d be seventy, other times seventy-three. I knew better than to be too specific.

  Our meeting had been arranged by an official of Procter and Gamble, Jack Wishard. The company was going to sponsor a television series on American women, each show a biography formatted as a movie of the week. I’d been picked to write Alice’s story. We met at a fancy restaurant tucked away near the corner of Santa Monica and Wilshire in Beverly Hills.

  Of course I remembered her. She didn’t remember me, but she did remember coming to the Holiday Park tennis courts and she loved Jimmy Evert. Everybody loved Jimmy.

  Alice regaled the assembled with stories of Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, William Randolph Hearst, Joan Crawford and other luminaries of the golden era of talkies. Alice’s stories were liberally spiced with innuendo. She was funny. She also had a hollow leg. The girl could drink.

  I spent time with her in Palm Desert, where she had a cute little house bought for her by one of her admirers. Will Dupont.

  The show was to be about Alice’s spy work during the war and how she was nearly killed. She had scars on her back from being shot. The script was good but it was never shot because we couldn’t substantiate Alice’s recruitment by the OSS (the precursor to the CIA). That’s not so strange because Wild Bill Donovan, head of the OSS during World War II, wasn’t noted for his filing habits.

  By this time I knew that Alice had a million stories, few of them true. But
the one about her work for the OSS may well have been fact. Procter and Gamble wouldn’t take the chance, which is a pity, because it was a good show and with a star like Cybill Shepherd the ratings would have been great.

  The producers, Marcy Gross and Ann Weston, struggled, as did I, to substantiate the facts. As most of the people were dead, we couldn’t. I’d worked with Marcy and Ann before, delighting in their company and razor-sharp television instincts.

  We were distraught that the show wasn’t going to make it, but none more so than Alice.

  My riding buddy Dale Leatherman, a newspaperwoman, wanted to write a book. I introduced her to Alice. The wonderful result is called Courting Danger, published by St. Martin’s Press in 1991.

  Alice died December 12, 1990. She gloried in being the center of attention. She was missing her curtain call.

  Before she died I would visit her about once a year and I wrote or spoke to her two or three times a month. I loved Alice despite her drinking. I should note here I am not remotely tolerant of alcohol and drug abuse, and if you’re loaded, I will excuse myself. I simply can’t stand it.

  But I could stand it in Alice because I saw in her fragility, vanity and glory. Eroded as her body was by the booze and by her various afflictions, she could still hit a tennis ball with precision and power.

  And she knew tennis. I enjoy another sports fan and I especially enjoy learning from someone as great as Alice, who changed the women’s game forever. She upped the aggression level with her net play and she introduced glamour. She won the national singles championship four times, 1936, 1938, 1939, 1940, the same years she won doubles or mixed doubles or both at Forest Hills. She won Wimbledon in 1939, also winning doubles and mixed doubles there that year. Alice could play on any surface. She won the national clay court singles and doubles in 1940.

  There wasn’t much Alice couldn’t do except make sense of her life. She reminded me a lot of Martina except, of course, for the drinking. Both had strong performer personalities. Remove the limelight and they wander about.

  While Martina may yet find a fulfilling purpose to the second half of her life, it was painfully obvious all Alice could do was relive past glory. But what a glory it was. As beautiful as a movie star in her high days, she attracted male and female alike. She frolicked with them, too.

  In me she found new ears, yet someone who also had known her at the end of her career. I hadn’t seen her at her peak, but when I did see her, in the early 1960s, she was damned impressive. She still blew me off the court in her seventies.

  She’d throw her arms around me and say, “Brownie, if only I could have coached you when you were a kid.” Naturally, I felt like a million bucks. Then we’d trot back out there and she’d kill me again. I never short-shotted her. That would have been dirty pool. I stayed in the backcourt, where she’d destroy me with glee.

  I think I made Alice feel young again. As she recounted her amours, I’d laugh and that would egg her on.

  I felt so sorry for her sometimes, sitting alone in her Palm Desert house. She had golfing buddies but people could only take Alice in short doses, and it was better to see her in the morning before the drinks began.

  She gave me a silver cup inscribed in her own handwriting, which says, “Love Forever, Alice Marble.” I’m staring at it as I write this. I see it each day I work and it reminds me of how fleeting and cruel fame can be, most especially for an athlete. If you’re young, the names Paul Hornung, Billy Cannon, Big Daddy Lipscomb mean nothing unless you are a football historian. To my generation those were the gods, as was Alice a sports goddess to her generation.

  Even a starlet has a better chance at a future than a jock. Alice, by refusing to marry Will Dupont, essentially screwed herself. He continued to provide for her but he did eventually marry another tennis player, Margaret Osborne. Margaret supplanted Alice. Alice liked her but was ambivalent even though she approved of the match.

  Her best friend was Mary K. Brown, a tennis great from the generation before Alice’s, but Mary K. seems to have had a better grip on reality than Alice. When Mary K. Brown died, Alice was up shit creek.

  She’d tell me how she loved women as well as men. How she hid it. How she hated herself for hiding it.

  I think Alice wanted me to absolve her. It’s not in my power to do that for anyone but I would say, “You did what you thought was best. It was a different time.”

  The last time I saw Alice she was floating in her pool, drink in hand, regaling me with a tale about Spencer Tracy making a pass at her and saying, “Kate and I have an understanding.”

  No doubt they did. He understood that if Kate found out, he’d better duck. I can’t imagine the willful Miss Hepburn putting up with much of that crap.

  The dry heat kept Alice’s bones moving; she was happy that day, for I was a rapt audience and her mind was happiest back in the 1930s and 1940s.

  Maybe, too, in drawing close to Alice I was again in the company of someone of Mother’s generation. Both women needed to be stars, although the comparison stops there, for Julia Buckingham was a grounded person. She had a wealth of common sense, and Alice hadn’t a hint of it.

  As I headed for the door Alice waved and yelled out, “Angels keep.” I think of that phrase often. It’s a kind of blessing, and I pray that wherever she is now, it’s a happier place than her last decades on earth.

  Angels keep, Alice.

  78

  Keep the Horse Between Your Legs

  Childhood, the source of primary colors, infuses our daily lives, often without us being aware. You might catch a whiff of a perfume that an elegant lady wore when you were small and a flood of memories washes over you. Or you might hear a song and your internal mercury zooms up the thermometer. Potent sensations, wondrous or dreadful, remind us of that time when the world was new.

  Books and horses provoke those sensations for me. And the music of Bizet. When I was tiny Mom used to play Bizet on an ancient phonograph bigger than myself. Bach was for church. Bizet was for the house.

  The day I found Bulfinch’s Mythology at age five in the Martin Memorial Library was the day my life truly began.

  Reading, like breathing, is energy, ideas, life. I am a promiscuous reader. Military history, biography, novels, poetry, your grocery list, I don’t care. If it’s scribbed or in justified type, I’ll read it. I love the layout of Süddeutsche Zeitung and I buy this newspaper whenever I can find it in the States. My German is verbless, but I love to read the photo captions and the headlines.

  Mother, a dedicated nonreader, never minded that I’d snuggle up in a corner and read. It meant I was happily occupied. She never censored my reading, for which I am eternally grateful. Mother figured if something bothered me, I would ask her questions. I’d become immune to violence thanks to Sunday school and vacation Bible school. The Old Testament is one war, murder, mess after another. So The Red Badge of Courage wasn’t going to put me over the edge.

  I had a marked preference for drama. I read the Greek playwrights, Shakespeare, Sheridan, Goldsmith and more before I was ten. I don’t know what I understood except that I loved the language. The theater is the supreme test of a language.

  In a novel narrative is the connective tissue. Theater lacks that device. Granted, a fine actor can make a weak play much better. Pick up the play and read it first before you see it, if you can. You’ll see what I mean. If the structure is sound, then the language will fly up like golden milkweed, little perfect words floating all over the stage, into the audience. One is surrounded by the sound of language in different voices: deep, light, raspy, smooth. Why would anyone take drugs when they can surrender to this intoxication?

  When it came to my requests, if they were affordable, Mom and Dad never denied me—except for riding. I asked to go to the local shows, you know, traveling versions of Broadway or junior theater. Mom took me as often as I asked and she also took me to the movies whenever I asked to go, which was a lot.

  Sometimes I’d sit there, my eyes
closed, listening to the actors’ voices. She’d give me an elbow.

  I’d scowl. “I’m awake!”

  When I told her what I was doing she tried it. Mother was always ready for a new spontaneous experience, which was one of the qualities I most loved about her and a quality I desperately miss in my life at this time because I’m scheduled down to the minute.

  I used to do this at the track, too, when horses were breezed. I can hear an irregular gait before I can see it. I still do this and I’m sure people wonder, what is that woman doing there with her eyes closed?

  Reading or going to the theater allows me to spend time with the best minds of many generations. I can’t think of anything more exciting and I mean that. Sex fades but that moment when Lady Macbeth begins to lose her mind and talks about how all Great Neptune’s ocean can’t wash the blood from her hand will stay with you forever. Gives me chills.

  Horses give me a similar euphoria, but with them I am relieved of language. Strange as that sounds, there are moments when we must set aside our greatest intellectual achievement, language, and return to earlier forms of communication. It’s easier to do this with animals than with people. People are prisoners to the word. Horses understand some language but do not feel compelled to repeat it. Neither do cats and dogs, both of whom have good vocabularies. I am more myself with animals than I am with people, which may only mean that I’m a primitive sort.

  One of my friends who recognizes this about me is Dale Leatherman. Since she lives in West Virginia, I rarely get to see her, but when I do we yak forever about books and horses. All the years that I’ve known Dale she has mentioned her ex-husband maybe two times. So you know we’re obsessed with books and horses because it’s a rare woman who passes up an opportunity to dissect an ex-husband. (I don’t know what pleases women more: marrying men or divorcing them.)

  A woman of exquisite sensitivity and discretion, Dale finds ways to assist you so you don’t know you’re being helped. She’s far too well bred to give a direct order. She finds other ways to lead you to water.