Dandelion; Memoir Of A Free Spirit

by Catherine James

  He went on to say that we could sail to Tahiti, where it was common for eleven-year-old girls to marry, and that no one would ever find us there. I understood the essence of what he was saying, but couldn’t comprehend the full concept. He was speaking to me like I was a woman, but I hadn’t had enough life experience to understand the emotion behind the words. I was just a kid, and he was scaring me. As a distraction I turned on the transistor radio he had bought me and held it close to my ear. I blew big pink bubbles with the juicy was of Double Bubble in my mouth, trying to pretend this wasn’t happening, but Richard floored the gas pedal.

  “Damn you, Catherine, if you don’t put that radio down and listen to me; I’m gonna crash this car straight into a wall. I promise I’ll kill us both!”

  I set the radio in my lap and stared out the passenger window while he raved on. The jig was up, he wasn’t my stepfather, and I couldn’t stay at his house anymore. When we came to a stoplight I jumped out of the car in the middle of traffic on Sunset, and ran. I didn’t want to go back to my mother’s house; there had to be someplace to go where someone rational loved me. The only place I could think of was my real father’s house.

  I hadn’t seen my father in seven years, since I was four, but still remembered my way to Ozeta Terrace. I walked the Sunset Strip all the way from Beverly Hills, past Doheny, and finally arrived at the big house on top of the hill.

  There they were, the same two old Cadillacs still parked in the garage. The grand old Spanish house with its tiled roof, wrought-iron gates, and perfectly manicured rolling front lawn looked just as I’d remembered. I walked the extended brick steps leading to the front door and was greeted by my glamorous Aunt Claire. The statuesque Claire was as always, dressed to attract. She stood in the doorway wearing a figure-hugging calf-length black jersey dress with a single strand of long pearls and a black wide-brim hat with a red silk rose.

  Aunt Claire, my dad’s older sister, was one of the many girls who auditioned for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. Although she didn’t get the part she did have a speaking cameo with Vivien Leigh. She’s been married to the famous choreographer Busby Berkeley, in addition to having been Miss California. She had also been a Ziegfeld girl who still loved in the old glory days.

  “Your father doesn’t live here anymore,” she said. “He’s remarried.”

  Still, Claire invited me in and offered to call him at his new home. Nothing in the old house had changed. It was as though time had stood still. My grandparents had bought the house new in 1930, and it had never been redecorated.

  I waited in the elegant living room, sitting straight with my feet together on the cushy rose velvet sofa. This beautiful room, with its floor-to-ceiling arched French windows, now had an eerie stillness. The weighty green curtains were drawn and laden with years of dust. The once vivid Deco carpets were worn and fading. Over the fireplace hung a life-sized oil portrait of Claire, which easily could have been mistaken for the beautiful actress Gene Tierney. Below her canvass sat the old mantel clock, gently clicking off the seconds, but the quarter-hour Westminster chimes sounded sorrowful and slightly out of tune. The ebony piano was covered with dusty family pictures and beauty pageant trophies from a happier time. It felt like the place was slowly rotting.

  As I gazed at the life-sized portrait of my boyish father in his military school dress uniform I realized he was a mystery to me. I hoped he’d be happy I was here, and wondered, had he missed me as much as I missed him?

  My surprise visit had caused a bit of a stir. While Claire frantically tried to locate my dad, I wandered about the house reminiscing about my childhood memories.

  I heard a symphony of ticking sounds and traced the clamor down the hall to where my grandparents used to sleep. The room was almost breathing with a profusion of alarm clocks. They were of every ilk and era and covered every flat surface of the room. There were at least a hundred timepieces, all click-clacking in bizarre unison.

  There were the old matching high beds, still covered with the same dusty pink embroidered satin coverlets. By the window were two wide chests of drawers, obscured by clocks and separated by the shredding, pale-pink fainting couch.

  Since my mother and I left there had been a changing of the guard. My grandfather, Clarence, had died of heart failure and Aunt Claire, having been divorced for the fifth time, had moved back into the house with her son, Blake. Blake was my cousin and we were the same age. We used to play and share the dayroom here when we were toddlers. Like my father, he attended Black Foxe Military Academy, and liked to march around in his dress uniform. Claire still worked as a day player in the movies and employed the clocks to be sure she’s rise for her five A.M. call. She was still wildly eccentric.

  I heard the roar of my dad’s ’59 Corvette charging up Ozeta Terrace. For seven child years I had dreamed of this moment. He jumped out of his roadster and squeezed me almost too tight. With tears in his eyes, he gushed, “You’re coming with me. I’m taking you home.”

  As he hugged me, I remembered his scent, his hair, his clothes, the smell of his breath. He smelled just the same as when I was a little girl: soft baby powder; engine fumes with a hint of distilled spirits on his lips.

  We sped up Mulholland Drive and turned onto a steep hill leading to his home.

  “Wait in the car for a minute,” my dad said.

  I heard shouting coming from the house. It seemed that he hadn’t mentioned to his wife that I was coming along, and she wasn’t exactly delighted.

  Loren was a bit of a plain Jane my dad had dated at Beverly Hills High. When he met my mother he had dropped Loren like a live grenade. After my parents divorced she won him back, but made sure he carried the cross. My existence was a sorry reminder of his early indiscretion and the subject of bitter contention.

  What Loren lacked in beauty, she made up for with style and a sarcastic disposition. She was as thin as a rail, with boyish, cropped bleached hair. She wore her crisp white blouse with the collar up and tails tucked neatly into black pencil-leg capris. Spiked Spring-O-Lators slapped against her heels as she paced from the living room to the bar area. She held her Viceroy cigarette at arm’s length and whipped it through the air with an off-with-their-heads manner. I felt like an unwelcome bug politely sipping my ginger ale while they downed cocktails in their spacious, modern living room. Loren patronizingly addressed me as “dear.” She scrutinized my face with a forced smile.

  “You look just like your mother, dear.”

  Then my father drunkenly blurted, “Your mother was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  As that little gem fell from my father’s lips, Loren lost her cool.

  “Sheeee’s the most beautiful? How dare you!” She shrieked. Loren flung her dry martini in my father’s besotted face, and they wrestled to the floor. Whatever fantasies I had had over the past seven years of living with my dad were gone, out the window. After the scuffle Loren said that if my dad wanted me here so badly, we could sleep together in the guest bedroom. Loren stormed into the guestroom off the hall, and began making up the double bed in silent fury. As she shook out the pink top sheet it billowed with air and landed neatly on the mattress. Holy Mary, was I really going to have to sleep with my father tonight? At the last minute my dad, who was still drinking, thankfully said, “Come on, we’re getting out of here.”

  Instead of the Corvette my dad was going to take the Cadillac in the garage. Loren chased after us and screamed, “You are not taking my car!”

  She flung her body in front of the opened driver’s side door, and the next thing I knew her fingers were smashed in the slamming door. She sadly held out her crushed, bleeding fingers, screaming, “And don’t even think about coming back here with her.”

  We ended up taking the Corvette and my tipsy dad sped down Mulholland as if the cops were chasing us. I was terrified as we slid around tight curves with the tires squealing. My dad, being a race-car driver, used only the high gears to slow us
down, and I felt my body pressing hard against the passenger door from the speed and the force of the narrow corners.

  “Forget about her,” he slurred. “I have some nice friends in San Francisco, you wanna drive up there with me?”

  At this point I wanted to be anywhere but in a race car with my dad, who was swigging Jack Daniel’s straight from the bottle.

  “I don’t think I’d better,” I squeaked.

  He seemed a bit miffed, but after a hair-raising ride, I was thankfully back at Ozeta Terrace, and my dad disappeared back into the night.

  My Aunt Claire was already waiting at the front door.

  “So how was it, how was seeing your father?”

  I didn’t bother to commiserate with her. The evening was really nothing out of the ordinary for my family; this was how they related to each other. It didn’t really matter how anyone felt or was affected; I came from a family of self-centered egomaniacs. Everyone else, including myself, was like a prop, a mirror to reflect bad behavior.

  “He was fine,” I sighed, and left it at that.

  Through her glory years my Aunt Claire had amassed a plethora of sundries, extravagant costumes, and endless beautiful accessories. There were so many shoes and dresses that she had turned three entire bedrooms into walk-in closets. Two rooms were wall-to-wall clothes racks with aisles of silky gowns, furs, and extraordinary vintage dresses. Each piece was meticulously tagged and labeled from the 1930s to the present. Another room was floor-to-ceiling with barely worn shoes and period hats, mostly from Bullock’s Wilshire, and all in their original vintage boxes. It was like the choicest wardrobe section at Hollywood’s Western Costume. Through the mothball sachets you could still smell the powdery perfume and faded glamour. This wondrous old home was once filled with life and dreams. Now it was only my old grandmother Helen with a touch of Alzheimer’s, my fading Aunt Claire and her son, Blake, marching aimlessly in his military attire.

  I slept that night in the room with the clatter of the clocks, and to this day I can’t sleep with a timepiece within earshot.

  In the morning Claire drove me back in her 1949 classic black Cadillac. It was four blocks back to my mother’s house.

  “You’re supposed to be living with your mother,” she said. “Now go home.”

  5

  In the few months I’d been away, things had changed on Harriet Street. It was 1961, and Diana had fallen back in love; this time she had found herself a charismatic folk singer. He was part of a successful folk group of the early sixties. The group was flying high on several gold records, and was a sellout all their venues, including the Hollywood Bowl.

  He was handsome, tall and lanky with magnetic elegance and charm to spare. My mother actually seemed to soften under his melodic spell. He serenaded her with his original and Spanish love songs, and kept her days and nights occupied between the sheets. Diana was completely absorbed in her new traveling minstrel, and in short time our house turned into a happening folk hangout. Everyone from a young Leon Russell to Glen Campbell crossed our threshold. The big, burly Hoyt Axton wrote his hit song “Greenback Dollar” in our living room, and we even had a full-on bluegrass band, the Dillards, camp out in our house for over a month. Our two-story Craftsman house rang with amazing music and exotic drugs late into the dawn. I was relieved when we had company, as it averted Diana’s tyrannical focus away from me.

  Even though my bleak circumstances had slightly improved, Mitch Jayne, the bass fiddle player for the Dillards, was sufficiently concerned with the way my parents treated me to come up with a plan to rescue me. His wife and daughter lived in Missouri, and he was simply going to put me on a plane and send me to live with his family in secret. We were actually about to go through with the crazy plot. To introduce myself I wrote his wife a letter of gratitude and hid it under my mattress. The next day when I went to mail it, it had disappeared. My heart almost stopped on the spot. My mother found the letter and that was the end of that. The Dillards moved on.

  We’d moved into the early sixties, and although we were comfortable enough, my mother still had very strange notions about nutrition. Basically, the food in our house was only for her, and she’d beat us to bruises if we dared to touch it. She had a refrigerator chock full with rotting morsels, but my brother Scot and I were not allowed to partake until the food became unrecognizable with mold and frothy decay. She hoarded perishables in her bedroom, and kept two special cupboards in the kitchen. One was her personal reserve, emblazoned with a wrathful sigh warning my brother and me: “Keep your fucking hands out.” The shelf for us was sparsely stocked with surplus canned food and an occasional package of Saltine crackers, and even then we had to ask permission to open a tin. Diana was, however, quite generous with the Tabasco sauce. She kept a foreboding bottle in plain view on the sill above the sink. She called the hot sauce “lie medicine.” Whenever she suspected a falsehood or disrespect, my brother or I would have to serve ourselves a red-hot spoonful. If we were out of pepper sauce, a swig of dishwashing liquid would suffice. The same rule also applied to our dog, Tolly. Diana kept the wolfhound bound to a chair, with a foot long tether. The dog was as thin as a corpse and only got enough dry rations to keep her alive. She also wasn’t allowed water because she’d pee in the house. I felt sorry seeing our dog suffer, and I’d secretly feed her when my mother was sleeping. For me, I basically survived on pinching Hershey bars from the candy display at Turner’s liquor store on Sunset.

  You’d never know by looking at the folk singer’s handsome face, but his dark side surpassed even my mother’s. He preferred psychological to physical abuse. His crazy tortures were far more sophisticated and carefully thought out. One night he sat me down and made me stare close into his eyes without looking away. After the first half hour his face would appear to contort and morph into scary-looking demons. With his eyes locked and piercing deeply into mine, he’s say chilling thing to me: “I have the power to take you to places you’ve never imagined; I can show you the deepest depths, the darkest corners of hell.” And I believed him. He had several sadistic rituals that came from out of the blue. Sometimes he’s have me or my brother lean against a wall, bearing all our weight on one finger until it ached like fire, or he’d have us stand on one leg till it got so tired we’d fall to the floor.

  One night he told me, “Get in the car, we’re going for a ride.”

  It was rare that I went anywhere with the dark duo, and wondered, where could we be going? We drove way past Hollywood, deep into the barrio. When we got to the dilapidated depths of downtown Los Angeles and hit the railroad yard, he stopped the car and my mother simply told me to get out. They then drove off, leaving me on a dark and desolate road next to the train tracks. There was no one around but a few drunken bums teetering in the distance, and I was terrified. It wasn’t just that my parents had left me there; I was just a little girl, only eleven years old and completely vulnerable to the perilous elements.

  Down the road I saw a cluster of friendly bushes, a small bit of sanctuary to hide myself in. I didn’t know what to do except stay out of sight and wait for the sun to rise. I worried that the local drunken derelicts would spot me and maybe kidnap me, or worse. Hours later I saw Diana and her folk singer circling the block, and I ran from the brush waving my arms. I don’t know why they came back for me. Maybe they hoped I’d just disappear but then thought better of it. Maybe it was their twisted way of showing me the grim alternative, and how grateful I should be that they were kind enough to let me live in their house.

  We got back to Harriet Street around midnight and the folk singer brought out the Bible. He turned to the Book of Ruth and instructed me to read it, and then to write a thesis on Ruth’s life. When that was finished I was to write a paper about my loving, devoted family, about how fortunate I was to have one. Before they went off to bed my mother gave me one of her Dexamil uppers, and watched to make sure I swallowed it.

  The Book of Ruth was a story of obedience, piety and sacrifice. It wasn
’t an easy read. I also had to keep in mind the spin of what they wanted me to write. By the time I finished Ruth and the two essays I could see the dawn light from the window. I felt flibberty from the Dexamil, but it was time to get ready for school.

  West Hollywood Elementary was my refuge, a brief repose from my secret life at home. This month my class was studying drug awareness, with a spotlight on marijuana, the dangers of wacky weed. I’m sure I was the only one in my sixth-grade class with firsthand information. At my house you could get high just walking through the front door.

  I wanted to join the school orchestra, and had my heart set on the cello. When I asked my mother if she would sign the paper authorizing me to take the instrument home for practice, I got a plain and simple no.

  “The cello is not for you.”

  She couldn’t bear for me to have anything of my own. Even when my grandmother Mimi sent me a birthday gift, Diana returned it to the store and exchanged it for something for herself. She said Mimi was her mother, not mine.

  Diana never missed a day without reproaching me. She said I was unsightly, and constantly criticized me: “Why couldn’t you have been more like me?”

  Even the sound of my breath sent her into a rage. I became so self-conscious, I could barely move without first contemplating it. I didn’t understand her fury toward me. All I knew was that I was powerless to change it. I don’t think it was my unfolding beauty, as I’d been a source of irritation since I was born. I just became accustomed to her madness.

  There was a stunning pivotal moment when my mother was screaming and trying to beat the life out of me because I’d misplaced one of her sewing needles. She woke me in the middle of the night, and I couldn’t find it. I remember thinking, maybe she was right. Maybe I was round the bend and bad to the bone. I just didn’t know it because I was crazy. For a moment I thought if I just gave in and accepted that was not sane, thing might be better between us. I was about to acquiesce, to jump off the deep end, when I heard a loud clear voice in my head echoing, “No!”