High on the shelf above, impaled on wooden stands, hovered the accompanying heads, anonymously hooded in brown velvet bags. They would be Charlie’s heads, of course, but did he need so many? My father, seeing me staring dumbstruck at the row of heads, the rack of bodies, chuckled and gently lifted down the heads to show me.
Holding them by the short, notched wooden stalks extending like spinal cords from the neatly severed necks, he carefully slipped off the protective hoods and, one by one, Charlie’s faces appeared. The first face to be revealed—the mouth slightly smiling, the upturned nose, a monocle in place over the left of the wide brown eyes, the red hair ruffled—was friendly and familiar. It was the Charlie that hung in the office foyer, shook hands in photographs, wisecracked at me across my father, who held us face to face, perched on opposite knees. That was a face I would never forget. But there were others materializing from the soft, smooth hoods; my father was pulling them out now like rabbits from hats. A Charlie whose face was ugly with anger, the features twisted, contorted with rage, was followed by a bleary-eyed, baldheaded Charlie—a face for whom time had not stood still. The skull was smooth, the forehead furrowed; the thick red hair had vanished, leaving only sparse gray patches that barely fringed the ears and failed to conceal the hearing aid now worn in one. The face was tired and flaccid, the expression weary—the eternal boy grown old.
Extra heads with extra faces to be inserted into waiting well-heeled bodies costumed to the nines. The possibilities were endless, the combinations infinite—this dummy had everything. Yet the eyes in all the heads stared dead and dark, the many faces lifeless. Because, after all, he needed my father for that part. Because he was nothing without my father.
When I was ten, Dee left to get married; my parents agreed I no longer needed a governess and decided on summer as the easiest time for Dena to leave. I would be away for the first time at Camp Big Bear, which would help distract me from her departure, giving me a month to adjust to her absence before I returned. In a tearful phone call Dee and I said goodbye, faced for the first time with the depth of devotion between us. But it is in reflections on the time after Dee left that my memory of my mother begins to shape and sharpen.
She was lovely to look at, uncommonly graceful, fun-loving and quick to laugh, and with these qualities, she made her way easily among strangers and new acquaintances. But the one person whose approval and acceptance she so eagerly sought, she never seemed to get: though she spent her life trying, it was always held beyond her reach. And one of the early revelations of my childhood was that however plentiful, however strong was the love that ran between us all, it was never to be spoken.
Often, before my mother came in to say goodnight, I’d make myself promise to tell her I loved her, but I never could. We were not in the habit. I’d decide to say it on the count of ten, but something in me always froze and then I’d be on 25, 26, 27, and she was walking across the room, 28, 29, 30, and she was walking out the door, 31, 32, 33, and her footsteps clicked softly on the marble hall, and still I hadn’t been able to bring myself to say it, so terrifying was the prospect, so unfamiliar the words. It happened like that a lot. On nights like those, I was afraid I’d spend my whole life counting while everyone closed their doors and went to sleep.
My mother looked to me like a fairy princess, far too beautiful to be a Mom—a fair, rare creature who lived in a magic kingdom. I always entered her dressing room as if drawn into a dream. Her domain was draped in ice-blue taffeta sprinkled with violets and sparkled with antique silver, Venetian glass, and tiny enameled boxes. Only a princess belonged here, not a six-year-old with clumsy hands. I was more at ease in the hills with my dogs.
Where I tended toward being a tomboy, my mother had grown up wrapped in cotton by her mother, Lillie Mae. My grandmother, desperately protective of her only child, ever mindful of Southern etiquette, kept her little girl high, dry and ladylike—indoors, out of harm’s way. As a result, Frances was filled with fear of virtually everything. Still, she was game, a good sport.
During their courtship, when my father took her up in his airplane, she was so frightened that she threw up. Yet as a wedding gift to this passionate pilot, she mastered her fear long enough to learn how to fly. Taking lessons secretly for weeks, she completed her first solo, made a perfect landing, climbed proudly from the cockpit and fainted flat on the runway. When she presented my father with her pilot’s license, he practically did the same.
She was even more terrified of water, and it was my father who taught her how to swim, pulling her up and down the length of the pool, sputtering, by a rope tied around her waist.
Determined that I not be saddled by the same fears, she saw to it that I hit the water, sat a horse, had a dog before there was time enough to think—instilling, if not a lack of fear, at least the will to overcome it. Or even, perhaps, to proceed because of it.
My mother had barely learned to be a wife before she had a daughter. In some ways, she still felt like a daughter herself. She’d had little enough fathering as a child, and unconsciously she looked now to her husband, twenty years older than she, to carry on the task.
“Your father literally raised me, Candy,” my mother would often say. I suppose, in some sense, it fell to my father to raise us both. Certainly as I grew up, she seemed more like a sister than a mother to me, and in later years, we were forever compared as such.
How did she feel, having found this husband-father, at suddenly having to share him with another daughter? With a sister, perhaps, to the child in her that was still growing up? Another thing she said to me often was, “Your father always wanted a daughter, and you were the love of his life.” If I was the love of my father’s life, I wondered, where did that leave her?
Little girls get taller. Then someone—a Freudian fairy godmother—sits on our shoulders and whispers that fathers can’t be Mr. Right. We keep it from ourselves, this crushing revelation, by brilliant decoys, delusions, rebellions. We’re ten or eleven and life is not moving fast enough. Everything is normal, it’s just that we have all this feeling, and it comes in strange, mythical, overblown forms. Mine was in the shape of heartbreaking crushes on horses.
By now, radio was in its decline and television ascending; my father’s work was less and my parents’ absences fewer. When they did travel now, more often than not they took me with them; and weekends once spent as exclusive father-daughter twosomes now became family outings with the three of us—Mom, Dad and me.
We often spent weekends and holidays at our house in Palm Springs, where my father, who first taught me how to ride, would take me, on weekends in the desert, to Shadow Mountain Stables for the Sunday morning breakfast ride.
There we would join a group of eager children and a few game fathers, mount horses held by weathered wranglers and ride out into the desert, past tumbleweed and barrel cactus, through scattered spring wildflowers, down ravines and up arroyos, to arrive, an hour later, at the Chuck Wagon, sniffing the sausage, coffee and flapjacks we would eat while our horses waited in the shade.
Most mothers gladly passed up the breakfast ride, seizing the chance to sleep late, curious that anyone would choose to get up at 7:00 A.M. on a Sunday and ride for an hour on horseback to eat breakfast when you could so easily have it at home. My mother, for one, subscribed to this point of view. So it was especially hard for her to understand when her daughter fell in love with a horse.
We were introduced by a wrangler early one Sunday, assigned to each other for the morning. He was a chestnut quarter horse called (of course) King, an eight-year-old gelding that stood sixteen hands high, with powerful shoulders, a roached mane, three white socks, and a blaze down a face with fine brown eyes. I was almost eleven and stood five feet three inches, had blond hair in braids, blue eyes, and knew at once. This was it. As we started off into the desert, I hung back deliberately, riding not side by side with my father, as usual, but alone—with King.
I then asked for him—begged for him—each Sunday,
began taking him on trail rides on Saturdays, wrote his name on my notebook in school, dreaming only of the weekends when we would be together again. Soon, everyone knew—King was Candy’s horse, and I aimed to keep it that way: bringing him apples, sugar, carrots, earning the right to gently uncinch his saddle, easing it off his hot, steamy back, slowly slip off his bridle and fasten on his old rope halter, hugging his neck, kissing his nose, as my father told me for the fifth time that it was time to leave.
We drove home and my thoughts were only of King—my King—and Sunday afternoons, Mom, Dad and I would climb into the hot, stuffy cabin of the airplane that had been baking all weekend on the desert airstrip, strap ourselves in, taxi down the runway and take off into a slow right bank that brought us high over the stables—King’s stables—and, like clockwork, sitting alone in the back, I burst into tears, stifling deep sobs, crying out in a tiny choked voice—a voice racked, ruined with emotion—“Oh, King!” To which my father would reply, “Oh, Jesus!”
That summer my parents took me, for the first time, to Europe, sailing from New York to Sweden on the SS Grip-sholm. Then Denmark, England, and finally France, where we stayed for ten days in the south on what was then called the Riviera. We stayed in swank hotels with high-ceilinged halls and walls like cold tapioca. The smells were damp and unfamiliar: Europe was Old, and that is how it smelled—old and damp and musty.
We stayed in villas that clung to rocks high over the sea and we visited others; one was called Le Roc and belonged to a man named George Schlee, on whose terrace we were to have lunch. He was awaiting the arrival of a guest—a guest whose name seemed to cause some commotion among the grownups assembled. A guest named Greta Garbo—though they called her by her second name. Who is that? I asked my mother, who laughed and said that she was a great actress, a great movie star, one of the greatest. And soon she arrived, by sea, in a sleek teak power boat, a white-clad sailor at the wheel. The host raced down the stone steps to greet her while the others watched from above. As she approached, the women murmured, “How beautiful. …”
I did not understand. This was not a movie star. Elizabeth Taylor was a movie star. Susan Hayward. Lana Turner. They were movie stars and behaved as such. They dazed and dazzled, arrived glossed, sprayed and shaded, seductively sheathed, shimmering in sable, diamond rings and all those things—that was a movie star. Not this tall, storklike woman who caused a hush as she came and went, quietly padding on long, tanned legs and wearing baggy blue Bermudas, striped T-shirt, and dark glasses under a floppy straw hat. Folding herself into a canvas chair on the terrace, she spoke low and slow and seldom while the Cote d’Azur did its fan dance behind her. From time to time I sneaked peeks at her, hoping for a glimpse of what these grownups called “greatness and glamour,” but she was not a real movie star, of that I was sure, and I felt frankly disappointed.
Our last stop was Paris, where my parents gave me the grand tour. But in the City of Light, all I saw was King. My parents, confident the affair had blown over, were shocked when, on the bridge of Alexander III, I swooned at the statues of rearing horses, stone hooves pawing the air above the Seine. In the galleries of the Louvre, standing before the portraits of kings of France, I gazed, instead, at the royal mounts, eyes wide and nostrils flaring—and in Notre Dame, bathed in a patchwork of colored light streaming from the rose window, I lit a candle for King. The candle really did it. “You and your goddamned horses!” my father said. “We show you Europe and all you see are horses! Jesus!” He had a point.
And so we left the City of Light and returned to the City of the Angels, where my parents finally caved in and bought me the horse, which they hid in a friend’s stable for me to find on Christmas morning. Opening the door to the stall to find King (eating), I gasped, screamed, flung my arms around his neck and wept with joy. My King, oh, God, My King—while the horse calmly continued eating.
King was the first of many horses my parents put up with—followed by a strawberry roan and a neurotic palomino—that found me happily spending most of my weekends grooming manes and tails, cleaning tack and mucking out stalls in the Valley.
Mine was a classic case of horse transference if ever there was one. A safe and permissible expression of romance, it was certainly simpler than the illicit love that preceded it—and infinitely easier than the ones to come.
4
KIDS grew up fast in Beverly Hills, its young natives suffering from varying cases of Too Much, Too Soon. What we wanted most was to be grown up, and the sooner we got there, the better. What I wanted to be was not twelve going on thirteen but twenty-four going on twenty-five. It was hard living in Hollywood and being twelve. There was very little you could do with that. You could not be a movie star or Brenda Starr or go to premieres with Troy Donahue or drive a 190 SL. You couldn’t even date. The most you could do was own your own horse, and, by thirteen, I was on my third.
I had thought things would improve at thirteen, but I found that life took on a baffling, bone-crushing intensity for me and my friends; the mere playing of our favorite song on the radio produced a sharp but exquisite sense of pain, a kind of sweet seizure that alarmed whatever adult was around as we yelped loudly, clutching our hearts with one hand and reaching frantically for the volume knob with the other, gasping as if the music we turned up were pure oxygen. “Oh, God, this song’s so neat—” Then we sat transfixed, teary, till its end: “And so I asked the stars up above/Why must I be a teenager in love?”
To be a teen was to suffer. We were passionate about everything from movie stars to cars; all we could think of were boys, and we were never out of love.
My girlfriends, of course, were of primary importance. I was now in the Upper School of Westlake School for Girls in Holmby Hills, where I had gone since first grade. There, as young ladies in the pursuit of excellence in education, West-lake’s daughters were cloistered in gracious Spanish Colonialist buildings on a wooded campus in the heart of Bel Air. Thick with banana palms, bougainvillea, magnolia, wisteria and pine, nature trails and tennis courts, it was a rare and dreamlike place, sheltered and serene, where, it was hoped, we might be shaped into upstanding young women. Possunt Quia Videntur. We wore uniforms with blazers bearing the school crest, regulation saddle shoes, and no makeup or jewelry “other than a simple timepiece.” Uniform inspection was held in the mornings before chapel; dirty saddle shoes were a misdemeanor, and a pair of loafers could get you sent home. Smoking or drinking in uniform was usually met with expulsion, and to be reported doing either out of uniform meant possible probation. Teachers patrolled the halls in nylons and saddle shoes, some severe but all well-meaning, and were loved, respected and feared in turn.
Students were accepted or rejected according to whether they were or were not “Westlake material.” The exact nature of the fiber required to meet the school’s standards was difficult to define. It helped, certainly, if the parents were well-to-do—if only to meet the steep tuition. There were some children of “celebrities,” but we were an understated, tailored bunch. The more flamboyant kids of flashier famous folks (some movie stars, singers, nightclub entertainers, even agents) went to Beverly Hills High School, where the high-gloss, well-heeled student body looked sharp and talked tough. Beverly High was Big Time, show biz, where kids who lived north of Sunset took pity on kids who lived south of Wilshire, the base poverty line. Students were snug in Jax slacks and alpaca sweaters, drove convertible T-Birds and read Variety. They thought Westlake girls were boring and would not put out. This was not entirely true—on either count. But, as Westlake girls, we went out with boys from Harvard, a private military school nearby—which seemed to suit everyone fine.
One of my friends at Westlake was from earliest childhood: Vicki Milland and I had danced around the maypole together at my sixth birthday party. Another friend was Lo-lane Garrett, who had a lush kind of beauty and was “stacked” even at thirteen—giving her an incalculable edge over the rest of us. She fell in love with darkly handsome men of twenty-thr
ee with a thrill of danger about them and rap sheets instead of diplomas. Once, during a fight with her father, an aeronautical tycoon, over just such a match, she jumped in protest, clad only in her nightgown, off the hill of their Trousdale estate, escaping with minor abrasions and front-page headlines in the Herald Examiner. While it couldn’t be classed as a serious suicide attempt, I admired it as a romantic, reckless gesture all the same.
Pale-skinned, dark-haired, dressed head to toe in black whenever out of uniform, Liz Frank, daughter of screenwriter and director Mel Frank, was one of the few true intellectuals in the school. She shunned the sun, embracing socialism instead, and invited us over freshman year to see a film on the life of Lenin or agrarian reform in the Soviet Republic—who knew? Perched in our seats in our pastels and polka dots, listening sincerely as she explained the symbolism of the hammer and the sickle, we mistook it for a travelogue of a place we didn’t want to visit.
Westlake was not anti-Semitic, at least not in so many words, but in those days you had to look closely to find many Jewish students. The year before Liz Frank joined our class, a girl named Connie Freiberg had arrived in midterm, and stood out not only as a new girl but also as our class’s first Jew. And so her adjustment as a “new girl” was doubly hard. She came from Cincinnati, and her arrival was met with cool curiosity: we virtually ignored her for weeks, then, after a time, began to accuse her of attention-getting behavior. To which she replied, “Of course I’m trying to get attention! No one has talked to me for two months!” That changed abruptly when, in softball in spring semester, she hit a home run. Suddenly everyone wanted her on their team.
The two of us became a team of sorts, a prep school Laurel and Hardy. We had ink fights in study hall, put fetal pigs in each other’s lockers, regularly disrupted and got expelled from class. Wavy-haired and wiry-bodied, Connie seemed to go in all directions at once. Her wit was fast and she soon became the court jester of the class. Because she made us laugh, she was sometimes not taken seriously. But she was also the class crusader, and no one taught me more about conscience than Connie: it was from her that I acquired even an incipient political awareness. She was concerned about blacks when all we cared about were boys, and nudged us toward more generous, democratic beliefs, urging tolerance and understanding. I looked to her on any social issue, knowing that hers would be the correct moral position.
Knock Wood Page 6
