Me and My Shadows

by Lorna Luft

  Meanwhile my grandfather, handsome and lonely, was home alone, and at some point he got involved with a woman. I don’t know that it was a real affair, but it was a something—maybe a midlife crisis. Anyway, he cheated on my grandmother while she was gone.

  Sometime afterward the “other woman” wrote a letter to my grandfather referring to their rendezvous, and like an idiot, my grandfather put the letter in his sock drawer and kept it. When my grandma Leonora got back from Europe with the children, she found the letter. Naturally, she was furious; she started screaming and carrying on like a madwoman. Needless to say, my father and Aunt Peri overheard the argument. Dad asked my grandfather what was going on. What were they fighting about?

  The next part of my father’s story still amazes me. My grandfather had many talents, but he wasn’t much of a liar. According to my grandfather, he’d been driving through New York that day, and since it was very windy and blustery, he’d been driving with the windows down. When he got home, it seemed really warm in the house after the nice breeze in the car, so he’d opened the windows to cool the house off. The wind came rushing in through the open windows, and all of a sudden, the strangest thing happened. A letter blew in through an open window and landed on the carpet, where my grandmother noticed it and picked it up. As it turned out, it was some sort of love letter. Just because the letter began with the words “Dear Norbert” (another coincidence), my grandmother had jumped to the conclusion that it was written to him. He finished the story by telling my father, “I just cannot understand why your mother does not understand this. Your mother is just being very, very . . . well, I just can’t understand why she doesn’t comprehend how this could happen.”

  My dad was dumbfounded. He just looked at his father and said, “Are you kidding me? It just blew in the window, with your name on it?”

  Somehow, my grandfather couldn’t succeed in convincing my dad, or anybody else for that matter. Grandfather kept repeating, “I can’t see why nobody seems to understand.” Grandma Leonora never did understand. Shortly afterward, she divorced him.

  When I knew her, Grandma was domineering and very particular about the proper way to do things. (By the time she died, she was insisting that each knife, fork, and spoon be wrapped separate in cellophane before being put back in the drawer!) The staff at our house dreaded Grandma’s visits. Each time she arrived to take care of me when I was small, she caused havoc. Everything had to be done her way. Of course, she was usually right about the best way to do something, but she drove the staff crazy saying, “What are you making? What are you doing? Why are you doing that? What are you opening tins for?” Oy!

  She drove everyone around her stark raving mad, overseeing every move they made. She treated canned food as if it were poison and had no intention of seeing it served to her grandchildren. She seemed to believe it would kill us. If she saw one of the staff opening a can of food to prepare for us kids, she would fly off the handle and say, “What do you think you are doing? You feed them this?” Then she would order the cook out of the kitchen and fix us something herself, from scratch. An afternoon with Leonora was a Russian food fest. I wasn’t too crazy about the borscht, but the breads and cakes were wonderful.

  Even when Grandma wasn’t around, I was always well taken care of. I had a large suite at one end of the house, with my sister in a suite next to me and the nanny nearby. When I awoke in the morning, the nanny would always be there. When Mama’d been up late at a party or concert, she always slept until well into the afternoon unless she had an early call. The nanny would fix my breakfast, bathe me, and dress me, always in the latest fashions, and always in dresses. No pants or grubby clothes for me. When I was little, it was pinafores and knee socks, and later it was always a lovely little frock, even for playing. I had long blonde hair, which I always wore with the top half pulled back over the crown and fastened with a clip or a ribbon.

  After feeding me breakfast and dressing me, the nanny would take me to Holmby Hills Park if the weather was nice, which it usually was. The chauffeur always drove us in my dad’s big Mercedes or Cadillac, so I’d arrive in style like all the other little Beverly Hills princesses. Once we got to the park, my nanny would chat with the other nannies and keep an eye on me while I ran around or played on the slide and swings. An hour or two later I would be driven back home for an early lunch and a nap. My parents gave instructions for the nanny to give me freshly prepared, healthy food, with milk or juice. I might have a peanut butter sandwich, but canned spaghetti was out of the question, and there were never any soft drinks in our house. My dad was almost as health-conscious as my grandmother, and no daughter of his was going to drink Coca-Cola.

  After my nap I would play with my nanny or my dad until my mom woke up, usually about four in the afternoon. Someone would come and tell me, “Your mom’s up,” and I would run screaming down the hall to my parents’ room to pile into bed with my mother. They had a big bed with a satin-covered headboard, and my mother would be propped up with a snack and the sleeping mask she always wore on the pillow beside her. I would try on the mask (I was always begging for one of my own) and play on the bed or explore the room while Mama got dressed. My daughter does exactly the same thing today, piling into bed with me first thing in the morning to ask, “What are you watching? What are you doing?”

  My parents’ room was a child’s paradise. Their suite was really big. The bed seemed gigantic, and I loved jumping up and down on it. There were couches, too, and these tall lamps from the Star Is Born set—blackamoors, the bases were called, statues of big tall black men in eastern clothing with curved swords and turbans. I remember that the turbans were lampshades. But my parents’ room was never like a museum; it was a real bedroom, the kind you can play in. Nobody ever told me, “You can’t touch this” or “You can’t touch that.” My mom would let me wander around and play with anything I wanted. It was heaven for a little girl because there was lipstick and perfume and clothes and everything else you can think of. There was also a bathroom, a dressing room, and a truly amazing closet.

  My favorite thing was the closet. Mama had the best closet in the world for a kid to play in, a big movie-star closet stuffed full of wonderful clothes and dozens and dozens of shoes. I spent hours in there looking around and trying things on. I loved putting on Mama’s glamorous dresses and hats, and I especially liked trying on the shoes. My mom always wore those high spiked heels when she went out. I’d put my small feet into what seemed like big shoes to me (size, after all, is relative) and try to walk around in them. I thought they were just the coolest thing there was. Needless to say, I had very little success with the walking around part, and this frustrated me.

  When I’d had my fill of trying on the goodies, I’d go over to the dressing table and watch Mama put on her makeup. It drives me crazy now when my seven-year-old wants to watch me in front of the mirror, but it never seemed to bother my mother. Maybe she was just used to it after all those years of makeup artists fussing over her at MGM, but I think it was more than that. I think she really enjoyed my company. I remember watching intently as she carefully transformed her at-home face into her movie star face. She applied the makeup carefully, professionally, with a sureness and precision that came from good training and long practice. The eyebrow pencil and false eyelashes were essential; my mother didn’t feel dressed without them. I would watch her carefully in the mirror, admiring the deftness with which she applied her lashes. In the light of the dressing table mirror, I would marvel at the whiteness of her skin, and trace the tiny blue veins with my eyes. I especially liked to watch her applying her lipstick. As she traced the perfect scarlet line around her lips, I would lean farther and farther forward so I could see better, so close to her face that she could feel my breath on her cheek. She would struggle to keep from laughing as I came close to her chin, and the scarlet line would waver as her lips trembled. Sometimes she gave up altogether and burst into uncontrollable laughter, and I would laugh with her. The makeup table
was part of our special ritual together.

  Some days she and my father would stay home in the evening, and we’d all play or watch television together, sometimes with my dad’s son Johnny. Other times they went out in the evening, and every now and then, they had grand parties at home. On those nights the nanny would put me in my nightgown and carry me in for a good-night kiss before I had to go to bed. I was still very small then, and my parents were strict about an early bedtime. My sister, who was lucky enough to be seven years older, always got to stay up later.

  It was a good life, an untroubled life. I was Mama and Daddy’s little princess, the center of attention, as was only right. And then one day, before I’d even reached the tender age of three, disaster struck.

  My mother had another baby.

  In March of 1955 my brother Joey was born at Cedars Sinai Hospital. Frank Sinatra and Betty Bacall kept my father company in the hospital waiting room, along with ever-faithful Vern. Joe’s birth was quite a media event—literally. In the interval between my birth and my brother’s, A Star Is Born had been released, and my mother had been nominated for an Academy Award. She sorely wanted it. The juvenile Oscar she’d won for Wizard had always smacked of tokenism to her, and she longed for the validation a “real” Oscar would give her as an actress. She was in the hospital recovering from Joey’s birth on the night the ceremonies were held; a swarm of television technicians were there to wire Mama’s room—and Mama—for broadcast in case she won. She had wires running up her nightgown and all over the bed; her room was filled with sound equipment and other apparatus. It wasn’t the ideal way to recover from a cesarean section the day before, but somehow it all seemed normal for Mama.

  Further complicating Joey’s birth was the fact that my mom had taken more prescription drugs during her pregnancy with Joe than with Liza or me. In 1955 doctors still believed that in the womb unborn children were at least partially protected from chemicals in the mother’s bloodstream, so my mother didn’t realize what a risk her medication was to her baby. The result was that my brother suffered some physical damage; Joe still struggles with the long-term effects of our mother’s intake of Benzedrine and barbiturates during pregnancy. Joe had only one functioning lung when he was born and barely survived the birth. The doctors told my parents that Joey was a high-risk baby with a fifty-fifty chance of survival, at best. My parents refused to believe that Joe wouldn’t make it and tried to look calm in front of each other, but underneath the brave front they were both worried sick. Two days after birth Joe’s second lung opened, and it was clear he was going to survive. My mother didn’t win the Oscar, but Joe’s recovery was the best consolation she could have gotten. Joey, my parents agreed, was my mother’s award. He was going to be all right, and that was all that mattered.

  At two and a half years old, I was oblivious to both the Oscar ceremony and Joe’s birth. While all this drama was going on at the hospital, I was blissfully playing with my nanny and grandma at home on Mapleton. Finally, though, the worst happened. They brought my brother home.

  Life would never be the same for me again.

  To truly understand Joey’s impact on me, you have to understand one thing: I didn’t have the faintest idea he was coming. I hadn’t noticed my mother’s pregnancy. Nobody had told me there was a baby inside my mom or had let me feel the baby move. This was 1955, long before child-raising experts published books on preparing siblings for a new baby in the family. My parents never sat down with me to say, “You’re going to have a baby sister or brother,” and even if they had, they would have told me that the stork had brought the baby. Then, when Joe was born, no one told me about him at first because nobody thought Joe was going to survive, and they didn’t want to upset me.

  So all of a sudden, there he was, this tiny squirming creature. My mom and dad came in the door carrying this baby I had no idea even existed. To my horror, my mother, my mother, was cuddling this little creature and telling me that the stork had brought us a wonderful new baby, and wasn’t that great?

  A new baby? Being Mama’s baby was my job. I took one look at my new brother and said, “Tell the stork to take him back.”

  That pretty much sums up my early years with Joey.

  Of course, my parents didn’t take him back. Joe’s arrival was deeply painful for me in the beginning. Everything was about “the baby,” and that baby was no longer me. “But what about me?” I thought. I was Dorothy Adorable, the little princess. Who was this stranger on my mother’s lap? Even worse, Joe was a boy, a boy who had nearly died. After two daughters, my mother finally had her son. The fact that Joey had come so close to dying made him doubly precious to my parents. From the beginning they saw Joe as a special gift, more fragile than their other children. This was especially true of my mother. The special bond between Joe and my mom is obvious in pictures taken when Joe was a baby. They adored each other; my brother’s face still lights up with tenderness when Mama is mentioned. My father paid the same attention to me that he always had, but it was different with my mom. She loved all her children, but Joe was her baby, her last child, her precious little son.

  I was painfully jealous. I felt as if I had been replaced in my mother’s affection, and I desperately wanted to return to the days before Joe was born. I had never been jealous of Liza; she was nearly seven years older, and she spent a lot of time at her father’s house. Liza and I lived in separate worlds at that age. Her presence never threatened my position as my mother’s baby. Joey was another story.

  My jealousy led to a crisis when Joey was about a year old. I’d resented his presence in our home. I would stand next to his crib and stare at him when he cried, wondering why he didn’t shut up, wondering why he was always crying and squawking. Eventually I just couldn’t take it anymore. One night when he was crying, I crawled out of bed in the middle of the night and went over to his crib. The little intruder was lying there, making that awful racket again. I’d had enough of the noise and more than enough of Joe, so when he continued to cry, I decided to do something about it.

  I climbed over the crib railing, into the crib with him. I still remember bending over him, staring at his face in the darkness. Joe was a beautiful baby, round and plump by that time, with a head full of blond curls. To me, though, he was the enemy, the creature who had stolen my parents. After staring at him for a moment, I suddenly lost control. Overcome with pain and anger, I began scratching at his face, gouging as deeply as I could with my fingernails until blood was running down Joey’s face. His screams awakened the nanny, and the next thing I knew I was being pulled out of his crib, and all hell had broken loose.

  I had really done it. I got the spanking of my life, and my mother was too angry to speak to me for days afterward. I don’t blame her. At three I was too young to understand the seriousness of what I’d done, but I did when I grew up. I could have seriously injured my brother. Forty years later Joe still has a deep scar under his eye, about three-quarters of an inch long, where I scratched him that night. At the time I not only hurt my brother but made everything worse for myself, because now everybody loved the baby even more and was angry with me. Life seemed barely worth living.

  My father tried to help. A couple of days after the “incident,” we flew to New York and he took me out to breakfast at Lindy’s. My mother had told him, “Take your daughter out of here,” because she was still so angry with me. My dad thought it might help if we spent some time together, just the two of us. I think he knew how miserable I was.

  Dad carried me into Lindy’s and introduced me to Milton Berle, who was sitting with friends in a nearby booth. My dad vividly remembers how I looked that morning. I was dressed up in a little blue coat, white gloves, white stockings, and little pumps. Dad says I looked “cute as hell.” He asked me what I wanted for breakfast. In full pout, I told him “nothing.” He went through the whole menu item by item: You want pancakes? No. You want eggs? No. And so on and so on. No matter what he named, I said I didn’t want it. I wasn’t
going to be bought that easily.

  Finally my dad gave up and ordered his own breakfast. He was furious with me by that point. I sat next to him and stared at him in angry silence as he polished off a large meal. Every now and then he’d offer me a bite, but I’d have none of it. I was miserable, and I was bound and determined to make everyone around me as miserable as I was. If my parents were going to keep Joey, I was going to make them pay. My dad finished his breakfast and paid, and as we walked out of Lindy’s, a woman approached us and asked if she could take our picture. I said, “No pictures, please,” as I’d heard my mother say many times.

  Dad glared at me and said, “Stand there and have your picture taken.” I saw that picture once. I’m standing there, holding my father’s hand, looking as if I’d like to strangle someone.

  It wasn’t the last time I made my parents angry. Joey and I were in the living room one afternoon when he was a toddler; my dad had fallen asleep in the chair nearby. Somehow Joe got hold of a big pencil with soft brown lead, and he started drawing on the carpet. The carpet was very light, so the pencil marks stood out clearly. Joe started scribbling on the white carpet. Now, I was old enough to know better, but instead of trying to take the pencil away from Joey or waking up my dad, I just let my brother keep drawing. The whole time he scribbled, I kept thinking, “This is great. Boy, is he in for it. He’s going to get in so much trouble when Dad wakes up.” By the time Dad did wake up, the carpet was a mess. Unfortunately for me, though, my plan backfired. When my father saw the pencil marks and realized I had sat by the whole time and let Joe do it, he was angrier with me than with Joe.

  “You’re the oldest!” he told me. “What did you think you were doing? Joe’s just a baby. He doesn’t know any better!” Once again, I was in trouble. Life can be tough when you’re the big sister.