The Eternal Party

by Kristina Hagman

  * * *

  Dad got together with Mom when he was just twenty-three years old, and from then on, even when his earnings were slight, she always made sure that wherever he lived was beautiful, even the second- and third-rate hotel rooms they stayed in when Dad was in a show on the road. Mom always traveled with candles and nice bed coverings; she would place shells around the room if they were on the coast or put wildflowers in tin cans to brighten a room. After I was born, they would take me along, and she would open a drawer in the bureau of their hotel room, line it with towels and pillows, and transform it into a crib for me. She loved the romance of being on the road with him and didn’t really want him out of her sight. I am sure that having us along created a moderating influence on his drinking behavior.

  That summer of tough love that Mary and Richard had imposed on my father had lasting effects on him. Dad never forgot about being forced to live on a tight budget, and no matter how much money he made, he never really believed he had any. Even after Dallas made him rich and with my mom at his side constantly working to create a cozy home for him, he still felt a deep insecurity. He always liked to have some cash on hand and told me that he liked owning some gold because he didn’t trust U.S. currency.

  Dad’s unusual behavior delighted and amused most people, but sometimes his antics backfired, and folks found him difficult. Predictably, Richard was one of those who never got Dad’s sense of humor. Dad loved the attention he got from his antics, and sometimes they were truly outlandish.

  For instance, one night in the late 1960s, Mary and Richard were hosting a formal dinner at a mansion they’d rented outside Seattle while on the road with Hello, Dolly! It was a typical Richard-style event, which means it was part of his plan to hone Mary Martin’s image as the First Lady of the Musical Theater and to further enhance her career. As we pulled into Everett, Washington, on our way back into the States after a camping trip to Canada, we had no idea that Mary and Richard were nearby. We had been on the road for several weeks, and when we pulled into a market to get food, Dad saw on the front page of the newspaper that Mary Martin was appearing at the local theater, starring in Hello, Dolly! This was a tour that took her all over the world. Luckily for us, our peripatetic paths had crossed.

  Low on cash and in need of a place to bathe, Dad found out where they were staying and drove up to the big, gray, stone mansion, and with rock and roll blaring out of the speakers, we pulled to a stop, and all hopped out of our neon-blue-and-green VW hippie van. Dad was wearing what he called his “Engineer Bill outfit”—striped overalls with a flowered peasant blouse billowing out from under the straps and his ubiquitous rose-pink hippie glasses. The rest of us followed closely behind, tired and dirty; my brother and I hadn’t bathed in days. When his startled parents emerged out of the grand entryway, Dad said, “Surprise! What a great place you have here! Can we camp out on the lawn for a few days?”

  I could see Richard get really stiff, so uptight that he actually seemed to get taller, and I could tell he was about to lose it when Ganny got her dresser, who traveled with them, to rush us into baths, while the butler hastily rearranged the formal seating for the dinner party they were hosting that evening to accommodate us. Once seated, Dad, who had stopped smoking by this time, pushed Richard even further by blowing soap bubbles in the faces of all the guests who were enjoying their between-course cigarettes, all the while protesting in his booming voice that the smoke interfered with his enjoyment of the food. Cigarette smoking at dinner was the norm then, but there must have been some proper etiquette guidelines forbidding blowing bubbles at the table, because we heard about it the next day and were told that we had to take down the tent from the front yard and be on our way.

  By then, Dad so deeply disliked the caustic Richard that he did everything he possibly could to provoke and annoy him. You could argue that he owed Richard an apology for years of this sort of behavior. But I know for certain that it wasn’t Richard he was thinking of on his deathbed when he was asking to be forgiven.

  7

  The Eternal Party

  HAVING BEEN SHUTTLED FROM one family to another and never really fitting in, Dad had a particular need to create a family of his own. He kept us close to him always. At the same time, he lived each day as if it were a party, so my mother made it her life’s work to create the perfect party environment for him.

  The mundane was banished from our existence. In my earliest childhood memories, I have visions of our home life; whenever my parents were not at work, our home was full of people having fun, eating, and drinking; there was the beating of bongo drums and lots of music of every imaginable genre. In the early days, we lived right near Times Square, and Mom transformed an old wreck of an apartment into a bohemian party palace. She was an astute student of all things fashionable. Though she had come from a small town in Sweden, her years in London as a clothing designer had made her a connoisseur of elegance.

  She absorbed the lifestyle lessons of my grandma’s friends, like socialite Slim Keith, who was one of the greatest hostesses in Manhattan, and was married to Leland Hayward, Ganny’s producer. Mom borrowed ideas from these affluent ladies of society about how to light a room and make it smell wonderful; though inspired by this decorous style the apartment we lived in was anything but stuffy and traditional. She didn’t need much money to transform it into a place that was truly unique, because Mom knocked out walls and reconfigured spaces in interesting ways. She opened a passageway between the kitchen and dining room and enlarged the door to the dining room to make it an open archway, which led to a big social space she created by tearing down the wall between the bedroom and living room to make one big, open, loftlike space that was the width of the entire front of the building. She covered the wall with fabric and installed a giant bed with built-in lighting and shelves at one end that made it look like a lounging den. When she was given furniture that Ganny’s society friends were throwing out, she made slipcovers for them that gave new life to the old, worn Victorian pieces. When they had first moved in, it had been a wreck of a place, but it had lots and lots of rooms, so bit by bit, she transformed the entire floor. Always in need of more money, she rented a room at the back of the apartment to a Swedish masseuse, which added to the exotic Scandinavian allure of our home.

  The masseuse liked to practice her craft on everyone; I was getting massages from the time I was a toddler. Another person who lived with us was my aunt BB, my mother’s younger sister, who was a nurse and a great cook and had come to help with my birth and just stayed. We were soon joined by another sister from Sweden, my aunt Lillimor, an interior designer. In this household of creative, enterprising women, Dad held court. His friends would drop by with wine and food, and Mom and her sisters would turn whatever they brought into a delicious feast.

  My mother, Maj, is Swedish. She grew up in the industrial town of Eskilstuna, where her father owned a car dealership. The family also owned a farm outside of town that helped them all live decently through the Depression because they grew their own food and grew flax to weave into fabric for new clothes. Mom wanted out of the small-town life and had fantastic energy and ambition. She was a talented artist and was awarded a scholarship to art school, but she had no patience for sitting around in school for a minute longer than she had to. Like Dad, she dropped out of school because she wanted to get on with life. She worked in a clothing factory and gained experience as a seamstress and learned all about manufacturing clothes. She took those skills and became a designer, first in London and then in New York. She and her sisters were strong women who felt that America was a vibrant place that offered more opportunity than they had back home. But they held on to the values that had been instilled in them while growing up in Sweden: respect for self-reliance and nature, the importance of making things with your own hands as a means of controlling your destiny. They were always busy, redecorating the house or analyzing the latest fashions and making their own version of an outfit that was even better than the ones
in the magazines. They worked together like a well-oiled machine in the kitchen, and when I was younger, the sisters spoke Swedish together till one day Dad complained that he “did not want to continue to live in a house where he was surrounded by the damn foreigners who speak in a secret language.”

  As soon as I could, I was standing on a stool to cook with them; we all sewed and painted and cooked together.

  * * *

  One Christmas, Mary and Richard gave my parents a gift of four dozen beautiful, hand-dipped French candles. It was their way of being sensitive to Mom’s culture: Swedish people are very fond of using candles to brighten up their dark winters. However, this was at a time when my father was having trouble finding work and was so afraid of not being able to provide for us that he got in the habit of stuffing his pockets with dinner rolls when he went to parties, saying jokingly, “You never know when you’re going to be able to get another meal.”

  The gift of the candles incensed him because it was so extravagant. They were clueless about how broke we were; my dad was too embarrassed to tell them that what we really needed was cash for food.

  Dad stormed out into the snow to walk off his frustration, and by some amazing twist of fate, he found a crumpled twenty-dollar bill in a gutter. He came home with bags of food to make a big spaghetti dinner and invited all his friends over. At first, Mom was distraught; she thought Dad had stolen the money. When she heard the whole story, she got into the swing of things. We were going to have a great party! Instead of asking people to bring food, as was the normal custom, she told them to bring flowers. Slim Keith had told her that any dump could be turned into a place of elegance by filling it with candles and flowers. That night, they lit every single candle. The warm glow of so many candles burning at once made winter seem like a distant memory, and their beeswax scent mingled with the many flowers our friends brought, making it feel like a fantastical, dreamy, warm springtime indoors.

  If you wanted to have fun, my parents were the people to be with; if you wanted to get serious, Dad usually tuned you out and would start whistling or singing or telling a joke.

  But he could also be so warm and patient as he was when I was a toddler and he helped me confront my fear of the dark. Like many small children, I would wake up in the middle of the night afraid of being alone in the pitch blackness. I would run into my parents’ bed to snuggle next to them. My exhausted folks tried all sorts of incentives to get me to stay in my own room, like treats and a night-light, but nothing worked. In a final attempt to teach me not to be afraid, Dad took me to the scariest part of our apartment, a fifth-story walk-up on West Forty-Ninth Street, where there was a long, dark, windowless hallway leading to the front door.

  I was so scared that every muscle in my body was tight, and I grabbed on to his hand as he knelt down beside me and told me to keep my eyes wide open so that I could let them get used to the dark. He stayed there by my side holding on to me until the dark seemed to take on a benign, velvety quality. After that, I still often came into their bedroom at night, but I wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore.

  For the first six years of my life, we remained in that apartment, which was right above the Sun Luck Gourmet Chinese restaurant and a triple-X cinema. Occasionally, we ate downstairs at the Chinese restaurant. Pearl, who ran the place, let us eat there on credit. Before moving to America, she had worked in the Chinese circus as an acrobat, and she understood the financial challenges that went with being a performer. She was also a smart businesswoman who ultimately established the most popular Chinese restaurant in the theater district, an elegant place called Pearl’s, where stars like Paul Newman could be seen waiting outside, on the street, for a table.

  Pearl had kept a thorough accounting of everything we owed her over the years. As soon as Dad got work on a TV series in LA, she asked him to pay up. Dad was disappointed. He always wanted to believe that the pleasure of his company was payment enough.

  * * *

  Sun Luck Gourmet was on the left of the triple-X cinema; on the right, there was a pizza place where ragged-looking children were always hanging around. They wore many layers of clothing, as if everything they owned was on their bodies at once. In Sweden, Mom had been around gypsy kids, and she did not trust these American street children. One day, I said I wanted to wear my long-sleeved shirt under my short-sleeved shirt like the girls downstairs did, but she pointedly told me that I should never try to look like them. One hot summer day, they opened the fire hydrant in front of our apartment and played in the water on the street. I was jealous and wanted to join the fun, but I was not allowed. There seemed to be no rules for fun-loving grown-ups, but there were lots of rules about how I must behave, especially around Richard. With him, I had to be super polite, wear little white gloves, take dainty bites of my food, and only speak when spoken to, and when asked how I was, I should say, “I’m fine, thank you. And you?” while tilting my head and looking directly into the adult’s eyes. Those were good manners, and I took direction well, because I knew how important it was to Ganny that I make a good impression on Richard and their guests.

  Back in our neighborhood, the streets were full of prostitutes who hung out on corners and in doorways. One day, my mom was struggling to juggle several bags of groceries while keeping hold of my baby brother. She was becoming exasperated because she could not find her keys to open the downstairs door, so she turned to the woman standing nearby and asked her to take the grocery bags for a moment so she could dig around in her purse to find the keys. Hiding behind Mom’s skirt, I was fascinated by this woman who had bright-red hair and wore colorful, fancy clothes, but I could see that my mother didn’t want me to talk to her. Years later, when I was in my adolescence, my aunts still lived in the apartment, and once, when I was visiting them, I sat at the front window with my friend Bridget Fonda, and we watched as women picked up guys on the street, and, minutes later, we’d see a light go on in the upper floors of the building opposite, and then the light went out and we couldn’t see anything anymore. Within an hour, we’d see the same women back on the street.

  Dad got a kick out of the fact that our apartment had previously been a brothel run by a famous madam whose customers still showed up from time to time. But because of this, I was never allowed to open the front door unless a grown-up was at my side. I loved running to the door when anyone came because many of my parents’ friends didn’t have children, and I got a lot of loving attention and candies from them.

  * * *

  When Dad wasn’t appearing in a play, he would carry me on his shoulders to West Forty-Fourth Street to see the people arriving at the theater for an opening night. The streets were filled with vibrant nightlife and an amazing variety of signage. On the way there, we could see an enormous billboard at the end of our street, and on it, looming down at us, were the giant faces of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in an advertisement for the movie Cleopatra, both of them looking incredibly glamorous. Just below the billboard was a store that displayed sexy lingerie. Even as a three- and four-year-old I was intrigued by what the dummies in the window were wearing—undies with bright-red lace around cutouts at the nipples and the crotch—but I could not linger for long on why the undies were made like that, because we would quickly approach my favorite billboard on the way to Times Square, a giant coffeepot that was suspended in space above the next building. This was the most amazing advertisement of them all: it had a blinking percolator knob, and it tilted and poured neon coffee into a cup from a spout that had real steam billowing out of it.

  Farther down the street, we would walk past the peep shows and topless clubs, where the hawkers outside called out to men passing by as they tried to drum up business. The black curtains just behind them would be cracked tantalizingly open, and music would come blaring out, and Dad would stop in front of it so we could play a game of trying to catch a glimpse of women dancing in the bright lights.

  When we got to West Forty-Fourth Street, we’d stand outside the St. James or
the Broadhurst Theatre to watch the elegant first-nighters, those beautifully dressed women and men who would emerge from limousines and then wave to the quickly gathering crowd before sweeping into the theater. In those days, an opening night was a black-tie event. The men looked like princes in their perfectly cut tuxedos, and the women in their full-length gowns of satin and lace topped off by jeweled necklaces and tiaras which made them look like princesses in the fairy tales my parents read me at night. It was thrilling to see them. I couldn’t wait to grow up and be like them, though of course by the time I was an adult, customs had changed, and opening nights were no longer the all-out glamorous affairs they used to be.

  Mom and Dad were often at the theater together. Mom would wait backstage to be with him after the curtain call, and even when Dad wasn’t in a show, they wanted to make the scene, watching their friends performing in plays or at a jazz club. It was clear from early on that they needed someone to take care of me. After a few disasters with on-call babysitters, they sought someone who could be hired on a more regular basis. Through the Irish Times, they found Peggy, a big, solid Irish widow from “the old country” with teenage girls of her own. As the story has been told to me, when they hired Peggy, Dad was only making around thirty-five dollars a week in the theater. They had to pay her more each week than he was earning as an actor. This made Dad feel that his work was sorely undervalued, and he complained to my mother that they were spending too much on child care. They argued for a few weeks, and in the end, Mom’s decision to keep Peggy prevailed.

  Mom and Aunt BB were the main breadwinners during this time in our lives, and that gave them authority to allocate how money should be spent. During our early years in New York, these women from Sweden demanded the opportunity to have their own careers and social lives rather than being stuck at home every night with the baby while Dad was out on the town. Dad stopped complaining so much about the money when he saw that having help in the household eased the tension between him and his wife. They began to rely on Peggy more and more, and she always proved worthy of their trust.