The fear Tom felt in his father’s presence may help explain his natural affinity for acting, as the great skill of a child in an abusive, difficult home is the ability to split off, to hide in the imagination, to simply no longer be present when things get bad. In short, to fake it. This ability gets in the way later in life, when victims cannot connect to really important emotions like love and happiness because they are inextricably linked to fear. As adults, they are able to express emotion but not feel it.
At the same time, perhaps the indulgence of his mother, her obvious devotion to her son, generated a primal jealousy and resentment in his father, a rage that only served to diminish his authority and cement the bonds among mother, son, and daughters. Every inexplicable outburst, every ugly tirade against his son, merely served to create protective sympathy for Tom, while edging his father further to the margins of family life.
As he became more of an outsider within the family, Tom Senior seemed to be increasingly at odds with society at large. He slowly transformed into an angry young man, a renegade who had little time for the system. Brought up a Catholic, he denounced organized religion and expressed contempt for doctors and conventional medicine. A restless, seemingly unfulfilled soul, he quit jobs while nursing dreams of making a fortune with various inventions. Doubtless his secret drinking fueled his tirades, the lurching unpredictable moods of brutality and remorse. “He was a very complex individual and created a lot of chaos for the family,” Tom later remarked. Finally, it all got too much for Mary Lee. It is a vivid testament to how difficult life with Thomas Mapother III had become that it was Mary Lee, a stalwart, strong-minded, churchgoing Catholic, who made the decision to leave her husband. “It was a time of growing, a time of conflict” is her only comment on this distressing event.
For a woman with a sense of the theatrical, the family departure was indeed dramatic. Mary Lee painstakingly planned the great escape with the precision of a military operation. She told Tom and her daughters to pack their suitcases and keep them by their beds in readiness for flight. At four-thirty one spring morning in 1974, when for some reason her husband was out of the house, Mary Lee roused her children, packed them into their station wagon, and headed for the border. “We felt like fugitives,” recalls Tom, the secrecy surrounding their flight predicated on the false assumption that, under Canadian law, Mary Lee’s husband could prevent them from leaving the country.
They drove the eight hundred miles from Ottawa to Louisville, where Mary Lee knew that her mother, Comala, and brother, Jack, were waiting for her. The route was not unfamiliar to the Mapother children, the family often driving to Kentucky during the summer break to spend time with relations from both sides of the family. As they sang along to the radio to keep their spirits up, it is doubtful that any of the children realized that they would only see their father three more times. They hadn’t said any sort of good-bye to him, nor had they a chance to say their farewells to their school friends. Later, Tom’s younger sister, Cass, did take the trouble to send her teacher a “sweet” note thanking her for all her help.
After the initial excitement and sense of adventure wore off, the enormity of what they had done began to sink in. They had left a safe, well-to-do neighborhood, excellent schools, and a familiar circle of friends for an uncertain future. In addition, the full extent of their financial calamity became clear once they realized that Tom’s father was either unable or unwilling to pay child support. At first Mary Lee’s mother, brother, and other family members rallied round to help, paying for a rented house on Taylorsville Road in the eastern suburbs. It also seems that they and the Mapother family helped pay the fees to send Tom to the local Catholic school, St. Raphael, which takes children up to eighth grade.
The move south had at least one advantage for Tom: When he joined the school hockey team, he was a star player thanks to his Canadian experience. During one match in Indiana, the opposing player was so frustrated by Tom’s quicksilver ability that he unceremoniously grabbed him by the collar and threw him off the ice.
There was, however, no disguising the difficulties the family now faced. They could not rely on the kindness of relatives forever. Everyone had to chip in. The two eldest girls, Lee Anne and Marian, got part-time jobs as waitresses, and Tom got back into the old routine—taking on a paper route, mowing lawns, and cleaning neighbors’ yards. This time the money he earned was not to spend on movies or indulging his sweet tooth, but in putting food on the table. “No job was too dirty or difficult for Tommy, as long as it paid money to help his mom out,” recalled neighbor Bill Lewis, a former Marine who befriended the youngster. Not that Tom was as saintly as he is portrayed. He later boasted that he saw Star Wars some fourteen times, paid for from his part-time jobs, while he once skimped on tidying a neighbor’s yard so that he could catch an early showing of his favorite war movie, Midway, a dramatized account of the World War II sea and aerial battle in the Pacific Ocean.
His mother was the main breadwinner, taking on three part-time sales jobs to pay the bills. “My mom could have sat there every morning and cried and cried,” Tom later recalled. “She didn’t. My mom was very proud. She had dignity. She’s going to work hard.” Even though the family received federal food stamps, they were ineligible for full welfare benefits because she had too many jobs. Juggling those three jobs took its toll. Mary Lee slipped a disk in her back when her boss in the electrical store where she worked part-time ordered her to move a washing machine on her own. She was in traction for eight months, so incapacitated that a family friend had to move in to help out. The store never apologized or offered compensation.
The new young man about the house was incensed, consumed with an impotent fury at his mother’s treatment. Even today the incident rouses him to rage. “He [the store manager] didn’t give a shit about his employee. My mother’s not a bitter person, but I remember just being very, very angry about that.” Solicitous of his mother, protective of his sisters, Tom took his new role very seriously. At an age when most teenage boys have little time or patience for their mother, Tom became even closer to her. He admired Mary Lee for her unconditional love, steadfastness, and optimism. She was the kind of person who always sees a glass as half full, sings in the morning, and offers hospitality to strangers. When Mary Lee eventually returned to work, she enjoyed a treat from Tom, at least during Lent. Every day for six weeks, he washed and massaged her feet for thirty minutes when she came home.
Tom was sternly possessive toward his older sisters, giving their boyfriends his stamp of approval and on several occasions threatening them if they crossed the line of propriety. Once he threatened “to kill” his sister Marian’s boyfriend if he touched her because he knew that the boy was dating another girl. Another time, a fellow pupil at St. Raphael who criticized one of his sisters found himself doing battle in the school bathrooms with an outraged Thomas Mapother. “I didn’t care, I’m fiercely loyal,” he says. His eldest sister, Lee Anne, observes that he has always acted more like a big brother than a little brother. “He was very caring and protective of us,” she recalls. “Whenever any of us girls started dating anybody we were serious about, having them meet Tom was a big deal. His opinion has always weighed very heavily with all of us.”
While he always felt comfortable surrounded by women, once observing that he trusted women more than men, they did get to be too much at times—so he called on his cousin William Mapother for company. “He only has sisters and I only have sisters, so we turned to each other for protection,” recalls William. “We have a lot of strong verbal women in both our lives.”
A hero to his uncritical mother, adored by his sisters, and with a father now held in contempt, it all rather went to his head. “It gave him a real sense of entitlement,” recalls a family friend, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “He was the king of all he surveyed.” Tom’s authority quickly extended beyond his immediate family, the youngster displaying the daredevil leadership that had made him so popular among his Otta
wa friends. His tall tales of his life outside the provincial confines of Kentucky, combined with his edge of dangerous audacity, gave him a patina of glamour and excitement. “To the neighborhood kids he became leader of the pack,” recalled his onetime pal Tommy Puckett. “He would reward our loyalty by either buying or stealing cigarettes from the corner store for all of us to smoke.” The youngsters would go off into fields with Puckett’s BB gun and take potshots at the local wildlife. Tom was apparently a good shot.
Still, he wasn’t quite the master of all he surveyed. On one occasion he came close to severely injuring himself when he rode a motorbike into the side of a house. He had boasted to older teenage friends that he was experienced with motorbikes, when in fact he had never ridden one. Mistaking the accelerator for the brake, he roared through a clump of bushes and into a brick wall. “I nearly killed myself trying to be one of the guys,” he later admitted.
Closer to home, the new monarch had an unexpected and uneasy encounter with the deposed king, his father, on the streets of Louisville. Tom’s father had eventually followed his family back to Kentucky, where he reportedly tried unsuccessfully to reconcile with his estranged wife. Tom Senior had abandoned all pretense of a professional life, living hand-to-mouth and taking on casual, unskilled work. At one point it was said that he was working on the crew of a highway construction gang. During his awkward encounter with them after months of separation, Tom Senior asked Tom and his sister if they wanted to go to a drive-in movie with him—a once-happy family event. While Tom has never spoken of this confrontation, his father later said to a local reporter that his son had told him to “stay the hell out of everything.”
In fact, he came back into his son’s life in a way that many in Louisville found incomprehensible. On August 1, 1975, just three weeks after Tom’s thirteenth birthday, Mary Lee and Thomas Mapother were officially divorced and Mary Lee reverted to her maiden name of Pfeiffer. Just six weeks later, after a whirlwind courtship lasting all of two weeks, Tom’s father remarried. In August 1975, the month he officially divorced, he met Joan Lebendiger, the widow of a well-respected local doctor who had died the previous November at the age of just forty-six. The attraction was instant and mutual, and within a matter of days they decided to wed.
Certainly Joan Lebendiger was measuring up to the translation of her German surname: “full of life.” If the Mapother clan was surprised, the four Lebendiger children were utterly stunned. “My mother told us on a Tuesday over dinner that she was getting married, and they married on the Saturday,” recalls Jonathan Lebendiger, who at thirteen was the same age as his future stepbrother. Tom and his sisters attended the civil ceremony, which took place in their home at 2811 Newburg Road, a leafy suburb of Louisville. Apart from making desultory conversation with the four Lebendiger children at the wedding, Tom has never contacted his “second family” again.
If the wedding was rushed, no sooner had Jonathan Lebendiger, his brother, Gary, and his sisters, Jamie and Leslie, absorbed the news that their mother was marrying for the second time than they literally found themselves abandoned, their mother and her new husband setting off for a new life in Florida. In this family crisis the Lebendiger children were taken in by relatives or family friends, with only the money left by their dead father to support them. Neither their mother nor her new husband contributed in any way to clothe, feed, or educate the children, just as Tom Mapother Senior did nothing to help his blood family.
Understandably, this incident has left the Lebendiger children with a legacy of anger and bitterness toward the man who turned their lives upside down. “He was the black sheep of the Mapother family,” says Jonathan Lebendiger, now a real-estate agent in Philadelphia. “I don’t know what his relationship was like with his son, but I know that he was a bad apple. His family were all lawyers and he opposed everything they stood for. I was angry about it at the time but I am not anymore.” This union—a grand passion or passing desperation—lasted for just a year before Jonathan’s mother and Tom’s father went their separate ways. Joan Lebendiger, a bridge fanatic, eventually retired to Los Angeles. She and her children were reconciled before she died in 2005. “She said that she did the best she could but admitted that she didn’t have the normal parenting skills like other people,” recalls Jonathan. “Let’s leave it at that.”
If the Lebendiger circle was aggrieved, the Mapother clan was “appalled” by Tom Senior’s behavior. “I don’t think anyone normal would go off and abandon a wife and four children like he did,” Caroline Mapother told writer Wesley Clarkson. The family did not hear from Thomas Mapother III for years—not a note or a letter or even a Christmas card. Tellingly, Tom recalls the first Christmas after the 1975 divorce as the best ever. As they only had enough money to put food on the table, his mother suggested that they each pick a name out of a hat in advance, then perform secret acts of kindness for the recipient and reveal their identity on Christmas Day. On that day they all read poems and put on skits for one another. “We didn’t have any money and it was actually great,” he has since said of this life of hand-me-downs, early-morning paper rounds, and making do.
Curiously, at that time, they lived in a handsome four-bedroom house on Cardwell Way, a neighborhood where backyard swimming pools are not uncommon. For their part, the greater Mapother family bridles at suggestions that they abandoned Mary Lee and her children to a life of struggle and poverty. As Caroline Mapother observed, “These claims make me angry because his grandmother did everything in the world to try and help support those children, especially after Tom III went off.”
Tom became particularly close to his grandfather Tom Mapother II, a retired lawyer with a wealth of tales about the colorful characters he’d encountered in his practice, as well as stories about Tom’s now-absent father when he was young. One summer he took Tom and his cousin William on a visit to Washington to see the sights; and after Tom left St. Raphael in 1976, he offered to pay the fees at St. Xavier’s, a prestigious all-boys Catholic high school that William was destined to attend.
Tom spurned his grandfather’s generous offer, arguing that unless he could pay for his sisters to attend private schools, too, he was reluctant to be singled out simply because he was a boy. This seems an odd argument, given the fact that St. Xavier’s was all boys and his older sisters, Lee Anne and Marian, were already settled in their high schools and only a couple of years from graduating. Tom later told TV interviewer James Lipton that this was the compelling reason he traveled one hundred miles north to enroll in a Catholic seminary in Cincinnati. His yearlong sojourn at the St. Francis boarding school run by Franciscan priests has been widely interpreted as indicating his desire to train for life as a priest. As he later explained, the reason was much less romantic: “We didn’t have the money back then, and I went for the education for a year, and it was free.” Still, he insists that he did indeed toy with the idea of joining the brotherhood. “I looked at the priesthood and said, ‘Listen, this is what I’m going to do,’ ” he told Dotson Rader.
Perhaps his family felt that this truculent teenager, who was forever getting into scrapes and fights, might benefit from a stiffer regime than the “monstrous regiment of women” who enveloped him. This was now the fifth school he had attended since he was seven—not the fifteen institutions he claimed to attend before he was fourteen years old to emphasize his rootless childhood. He spent a school year at the remote seminary, from September 1976 to the following summer, and he described this period with one hundred other pupils, many the children of divorced parents, as the best year of his academic career.
Tom may have appreciated the discipline and regimentation of a religious boarding school—Mass was said every day—as well as the jostling, boisterous camaraderie of twenty boys sharing a dormitory. A sense of belonging, a need to be part of an identifiable group, is a recurrent theme in Tom’s emotional lexicon. While his family fulfilled that need, the cloistered world at St. Francis seemed to become his emotional home away from home.
“He always had a smile,” recalled Father John Boehman, rector and guardian of the now closed seminary. “But he stood out because he was the smallest in his class and he couldn’t get away with anything.”
He joined the glee club, played basketball—even though he was the shortest player in his freshman year—and played on the Saints soccer team. There were hobby shops and remote-control boats and planes available, which, for a boy who had a passion for flight, was thrilling. Even more thrilling, for the first time in his academic career he made the honor roll.
Given his fond memories, it is surprising that he stayed at the seminary only until the summer of 1977, deciding to return to Louisville to continue his education—especially since he had to go and live with his aunt and uncle, the Barratts, because Mary Lee and his sisters could no longer afford the rent on their house and had squeezed in with her mother. He enrolled at St. Xavier’s Catholic school and says that he paid the tuition by taking on a paper route and, for a time, working in an ice cream parlor in downtown Louisville. It seems a perplexing choice. He knew that his grandfather had previously offered to pay his fees, and now that Lee Anne had graduated and his other sisters were established in their own schools, there was no obstacle to accepting his generosity.
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