Making of a Writer (9780307820464)

by Nixon, Joan Lowery

  At that time the requirement for students in all English classes at Hollywood High was to write ten themes a semester. This was fine with me, since my favorite class assignment was to write.

  Miss Standfast double-graded: one grade for spelling and punctuation and one for writing style. I usually received double A’s, but occasionally we had a difference of opinion concerning my choice of verbs.

  I have always loved action verbs and thought of them as better descriptive words than adverbs and adjectives, since one well-chosen verb can paint a complete mental picture.

  On occasion, though, no one had invented the verb I wanted, so I invented one myself. Someone had to create the language. Why couldn’t I do a little of it myself?

  In my themes someone would squeegle through the mud under a fence, or a harsh laugh would rackel in someone’s throat.

  Miss Standfast would write on my papers, “You can’t make up verbs. Look in the dictionary. There are plenty of very good verbs to choose from.”

  There were. She was right. I looked for verbs. Action verbs. I realized, even then, that good, strong action verbs made my stories and themes come alive.

  I didn’t completely give up the idea of making up words, however. One day, as we ate lunch on the lawn in front of the administration building, I brought up a puzzling question to a friend named Nancy Monegan.

  “Who makes up slang?” I asked. “Suddenly everyone’s saying some new slang word, and before long we read it in our magazines. Then, just as quickly as it comes, it disappears, and new slang takes its place.”

  Nancy and I looked at each other. “Somebody has to make up slang,” Nancy said.

  “Why not us?” I asked. “Want to try it?”

  Nancy grinned. “Okay. We’ll call it our own jabberwocky.”

  Together we organized our plan. We’d make up a new word or expression for something and use it around campus. We’d then see if others would use it and how long it would take to spread.

  I don’t remember what our first attempt was, but I do remember that it caught on quickly. It was fun hearing other kids use it, and when Nancy and I later read it in a movie magazine gossip column, we celebrated with a hot fudge sundae at Brown’s on Hollywood Boulevard.

  We tried other words and expressions and watched them enter the vocabulary of teenagers and magazine writers across the country.

  But our days of jabberwocky were soon over. We now knew who invented slang. We did. We had proved our point and had influenced the world of our peers. But slang was only a word game. There were more exciting things to do with words, more demanding directions, more complicated challenges. Satisfied that our plan had worked, we quit the game covered in glory.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Over the next three years at Hollywood High, Mary Lou and I went on double dates together, enjoyed the same movies, sighed over the same handsome male movie stars, rode the Santa Monica streetcar to afternoons at the beach, and listened to each other’s problems.

  But in our first year of high school, during the Sunday afternoon of December 7, 1941, we were shocked and horrified as we listened to the radio and heard President Franklin D. Roosevelt tell us about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Our country was at war.

  Mary Lou and I did everything we could to help the war effort. Frustrated that we weren’t old enough to work at the Hollywood USO or join the navy’s WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) or the army’s WACs (Women’s Army Corps), we found other ways to become involved.

  On Sunday mornings, after early Mass, we sometimes helped serve breakfast to the countless soldiers, sailors, and marines—many of them not much older than we were—who had come to Hollywood on weekend leave. To give them a safe place to stay, cots were set up on Saturday nights in our school’s gym, and the girls in the home ec classes, under their teachers’ supervision, prepared and served hot breakfasts.

  Mary Lou and I often worked in the Red Cross hut on campus after school, cutting cartoons out of donated magazines and pasting them into scrapbooks for the servicemen who were wounded and in hospitals.

  We took the Red Cross safety course so that we could help wounded victims if Los Angeles was attacked.

  During our first citywide blackout, all those who could remained in their homes. Mother had sewn blackout curtains for all the windows that needed them, but that night, as the sirens sounded their alarm, we turned off all our lights and gathered together on our open upstairs sun porch.

  We saw and heard a gigantic metropolis shudder to a stop. All city lights suddenly disappeared, as if a giant had snuffed them out. Automobiles pulled to the side of streets, lights turned off. Not a cigarette glowed, not a house light appeared. Air raid block wardens patrolled the streets, prepared to cite anyone who broke the lights-out order.

  A strange thing happened as the metropolis went to sleep. Stars overhead seemed as large and bright as those viewed from darkened mountaintops. They shone over a city that was totally silent. We spoke to each other in whispers, awed by the change we had just experienced.

  Almost before we were ready, the sirens sounded again. The blackout was over. We had successfully closed our city, preparing it for possible attack. This was just practice. Sometime in the near future a blackout might mean invasion.

  Before I went to bed that night I slipped a long butcher knife from the kitchen under my bed. Maybe we would never be invaded or attacked. But, on the other hand, maybe we would. And if we were, I wouldn’t go down without a fight.

  Mary Lou and I comforted the girls at school who lost brothers or cousins or friends in battle, and we kept in touch with some of the boys in our classes who enlisted in the navy or marines as soon as they reached the age of seventeen. Mary Lou’s father joined the army and, because of his age, was assigned to be a driver for one of the officers. We were grateful he was not fighting on the front lines, but he was away from home, and Mary Lou worried about him.

  Los Angeles officials, concerned about the number of men who swarmed to the city on weekend leave, begged the citizens to take the servicemen into their homes for Sunday dinners.

  My parents responded immediately. Mother decided that a boy who would go to church while away from home must be a good boy. So she and Daddy would go to Blessed Sacrament Church on Sunset Boulevard after Mass and invite servicemen to come home to be with a family.

  Many of the young men who eagerly accepted the invitation were not much older than I, so I’d invite Mary Lou and a few other girlfriends to come to the house. Daddy had painted a shuffleboard court on the driveway and had created an open area at the bottom of our property for tetherball. Inside our house were a Ping-Pong table, a pool table, and a pinball machine that had been fixed so that it didn’t require coins.

  Often the sailors, soldiers, and marines would come back each weekend until they shipped out, and we’d entertain them by riding the Hollywood streetcar to Los Angeles’s historic Olvera Street, with its booths and shops selling spicy taquitos, fragrant homemade candles, and cactus candy. We’d eat lo mein in Chinatown, compete in teams at the huge bowling alley on Sunset Boulevard, and take in a movie.

  “Will you write to me?” most of the servicemen would ask before they left for assignment in the Pacific.

  “Of course,” I’d promise, and I’d dutifully write each week, even though the list grew to eighteen, nineteen, then twenty. Mary Lou did the same.

  We weren’t alone. Most of the girls we knew wrote stacks of letters to lonely servicemen away from home.

  Not all the letters were platonic. Many of the girls in high school found that absence and worry absolutely did make the heart grow fonder. And so I found something I could do.

  Every few weeks I’d write a light, romantic oh-how-much-I-miss-you poem. Each time I composed a new poem, I’d take it to school before classes began, and the word would quickly spread. At least half a dozen girls would sit on the steps of the administration building and quickly copy the poem. Then they’d let
their friends copy it, and their friends would continue to share it. I sometimes wondered how many lonesome boys overseas were made to feel just a little bit better because of the loving poems their girlfriends sent them.

  I felt a strong sense of satisfaction. I was no longer writing just for my own pleasure. I was writing for others, to fill a need.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Everyone’s teen years are hard. Everyone’s teen years during World War II were harder. Teenagers were edgy. Adults were edgy. But it wasn’t just over the war news. Little things played a strong part. Mother was highly vocal about it.

  “Why are you asking for another roll of toilet paper already? Don’t you realize that I have to shop at all the grocery stores in the area at least twice a day to try to find toilet paper for sale? There’s not enough toilet paper because we’re at war!”

  “I don’t care if you hate squishing orange dye into the white oleomargarine. We can’t get butter, and the legislature went along with the dairy lobbyists, so margarine has to be sold white. The military gets all the butter. We’re at war.”

  “Don’t ask again if you can learn to drive. Age has nothing to do with it anymore. Gasoline is rationed, and we can’t get rubber for tires because we’re at war.”

  At times I wondered if I’d ever be able to please my mother, but I began to understand emotional ups and downs and realize the strong part emotion played in what we both thought and did.

  Nanny was not only my roommate, she was also my buddy, but at times I had problems with her, too.

  Late one night a suspected Japanese submarine had been sighted off the coast near Santa Monica, and our coast guard had fired at it. Nanny described the action to me the next morning. “I stood right here at our bedroom window and watched the bullets trace red lines across the sky. I was terrified. I didn’t know if we were being attacked or we were defending ourselves.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me?” I moaned, unable to believe I had slept through the battle. “This was part of history, and I missed it.”

  Nanny looked surprised as she answered, “It was a school night. I wouldn’t wake you on a school night. You’re young. You need your sleep.”

  I planted and tended my victory garden lovingly. There would be a show of our produce at school, and I was sure that one of my cabbages, which was growing more gigantic by the moment, would win a prize.

  The day of the victory garden show arrived, and I went out to cut my cabbage.

  Someone had been there before me, and I knew who. We had met one of our neighbors the week we had moved into our house, when my mother found her in our rose garden, cutting an armful of roses for herself.

  “It’s all right,” Mrs. R. had said, smiling and waving her shears. “You have so many roses, we can all enjoy them.”

  She continued to enjoy a variety of our flowers, along with lemons and cherries from our trees and mint and herbs from our garden.

  When I saw that my cabbage had been taken, I stormed into the kitchen. “I’m going to walk around the hill to her house and ask for it back,” I insisted.

  Nanny shook her head. “You can’t do that,” she said. “It would embarrass her. It wouldn’t be neighborly.”

  “But it’s my entry in the victory garden show.”

  “Take something else. There are some nice onions in the garden,” Nanny said. “You can’t be rude to a neighbor.”

  “She’s a crazy neighbor!”

  “But she is a neighbor, and we must be polite, so take something else to school.”

  Mother backed Nanny up, and reluctantly, I had to agree. Retrieving the cabbage wasn’t as important as sparing Mrs. R.’s feelings. I entered three onions in the show and won only a third place.

  Life was complicated enough. Why did I have to keep tripping over questions of right versus wrong? I wanted peace in the world and peace in my home, and I often couldn’t find either. Even though I wanted to be totally independent from my mother, my emotions sometimes mirrored hers. My mother sometimes talked about World War I and how she had missed my father and worried about him when he joined the army. Circumstances might be different from generation to generation, but the emotions we felt were the same. We could measure the span of our days through our emotional ups and downs. I began to write about my characters’ emotions, and they became more believable and real. Emotions had no boundaries of age or time. The need to love and be loved, the fears, the concerns, the joys, the excitement, and the sorrows didn’t vary.

  Then I discovered a place of refuge—a grassy spot in front of the three mansions at the top of the hill that crowned Laughlin Park. From this vantage spot on a clear day I could make out the outline of Catalina Island on the horizon, and below I could see the tiny cars and ant-sized pedestrians on Hollywood Boulevard.

  Tiny people, tiny problems, and my own problems seemed just as insignificant. The figures I watched were characters in a gigantic citywide play, and I was a character, too. The air was clear and bright, the blue-purple hills of Catalina rose solidly in the far distance, beyond the thin blue line of ocean, and the sun warmed and relaxed my back.

  As a writer-to-be I knew that a story is not a story if it doesn’t have a problem to solve. Why should the ongoing story of my life be any different?

  Chapter Nineteen

  For as long as I could remember, I had gone to Sunday Mass, said my morning and night prayers, and tried to obey the laws of God. But as I grew into my teens, questions began popping up like dandelions after a rain.

  As I searched for answers and found them, I discovered that I no longer dutifully followed my parents’ religion. I had begun to embrace it as my own, and it became not only a comfort, but a challenge. It was not only a gift, it was a responsibility. It helped me make choices and set standards. At times my faith was a lifeline.

  When I was fifteen I went horseback riding for the first time with a group of friends. We rented horses at a stable in Griffith Park and set off for an adventure along the bridle trails.

  Unfortunately, it had rained for a week, and the horses had not been exercised. One of them spooked at a sudden noise, and the entire group bolted. My horse dumped me in the middle of Griffith Park Boulevard, and I woke up lying on a park bench with someone telling me, “Be still. The ambulance is coming.”

  I was taken to the Hollywood Emergency Hospital, where I continued to lie quietly on a cot in a room smelling of ether and disinfectant, until finally someone shined a light in my eyes, turned my head this way and that, and said there was nothing wrong with me.

  In my dazed state, the nurse who hovered over me looked like the prison matron in a movie I’d seen, so I wasn’t surprised when she jerked me out of bed and slammed me down in a wheelchair, grumbling under her breath about kids who pretended to be injured, while she rolled the wheelchair to my mother’s car.

  “How about my friends?” I struggled to ask. “Was anyone else hurt?”

  “They’re all fine. You are, too,” she snapped.

  But I wasn’t. At home I continued to lie in bed with a headache so miserable it became a barrier against the rest of the world.

  After a week, when the pain in my head didn’t abate, my mother took me downtown to the medical group to which my family belonged. The doctor, who at first also thought there wasn’t anything seriously wrong with me, finally X-rayed my head. A short while later he came into the room with a serious look on his face. “She has a fractured skull,” he said. “We’ll keep her in the hospital on her back, with her head propped so she can’t move it. Then all we can do is wait to see if she’ll recover.”

  My sister Pat, who was in fifth grade at Incarnate Word Academy, tearfully confided to her teacher that she was so worried about me it was hard for her to think of anything else. The nun who taught Pat’s class promised that on Sunday afternoon at two o’clock, when all the nuns in the convent gathered for special prayers, they would pray for me.

  On Sunday afternoon soon after two o’clock, in spite of my
never-ending headache, I fell asleep, and I dreamed. In my dream my grandfather walked into the room and sat beside me, stroking my forehead. As his strong hand gently moved again and again against my hair, the pain began to lessen. Finally it left completely. Pa bent to kiss me; then without a word he was gone.

  To everyone’s delight, an hour later I awoke free of pain. The next day, Pat excitedly reported my dream to her teacher.

  Because I had had to miss so much school that spring semester, it was necessary to make up two classes in summer school. Geometry II and Spanish II were offered only at the same time at Hollywood High, so I signed up to take the classes at Incarnate Word, which offered to arrange classes to fit my schedule.

  The nun who was registering the summer students gave me a long, searching look. “You were healed while we prayed for you,” she said.

  “Yes,” I answered, remembering the thank-you note I’d written to them. “And I’m very grateful to you.”

  She gave a little wave of her hand, as if to push my gratitude aside. “You received a message from God,” she told me. “You must listen and look within yourself. I believe that God wants you to become a nun.”

  It didn’t take long for me to listen or to look within myself. How could I shut myself up in a convent at the age of fifteen? Especially since I had recently discovered that the world was full of good-looking guys.

  “Well?” she asked me.

  “I’m not sure what message God gave me,” I answered truthfully. “Maybe he wants me to become the mother of a bishop.”

  That was the end of our conversation. She wasn’t happy with me. But I was happy with myself, and my faith hadn’t suffered.

  Later, I began to see that my beliefs, my standards, and my outlook on life were as much a part of me as the color of my hair and eyes, and they influenced what I wrote and how I wrote it. The main characters in my stories, in whole or in part, reflected what I believed and what I liked about the world.