Butterfly in the Typewriter (4 page)

The accomplishment of skipping two grades so early in his schooling served as proof to Thelma that she had a genius for a son. She certainly deserves credit for nurturing his imagination and intellect. But it seems her son had little choice in being so successful. From the moment he was born, his mother deemed he was destined for greatness. He was “a rarity in the category of newborn,” she explained, “because there was an aura of distinction.” The nurses at the hospital had never seen a baby with such lively facial expressions, she reported. And Thelma was convinced her child was a natural born leader of sorts: when he cried in the nursery, “everyone cried.” In her remembrances of him as a child, his mother always emphasized his maturity. In a keepsake baby book, Thelma chronicled his early years but races past his infancy, seemingly eager to showcase the development of his mind, his awareness, and his wit. He had “the charm of a six-month-old baby” from the day he was born. It seemed to her he was “ready to get going and achieve” from his first moments of life. And when she told him that he was going to go to school at the age of three, the same age at which she started school, he rebelled. “He had the mentality of a six-year-old,” she explained. From his intellect to his looks, his mother was convinced he was a prodigy. She even thought he shared a “striking resemblance” to the son of World War II hero General Douglas MacArthur. And, of course, at the heart of Kenny's talents was a devotion to his mother. “I want to please you, Mother,” he said to her, frustrated, one day, “but I don't know how.”

A nurturing guidance eventually turned to eager encouragement that chased prestige and success. Thelma celebrated how he was “always two years younger than his classmates,” and yet they still looked up to him. She emphasized how he could stand in judgment of them. “Those children thought I was Shakespeare,” he bragged to her after a class presentation. He often referred to his classmates as “those children” when speaking to his mother. In that phrase she heard his earned sense of superiority. But certainly such posturing would have social consequences
as well, even among children. If the young Kenny distinguished himself from his classmates with disdain, one wonders how he would cultivate relationships.

Yet, classmates of Toole do not recall him having a superiority complex. They do remember, however, the immediate attention he gained as a student. Jane Stickney Gwyn, one of Toole's former classmates, recalls how he was “a bright star from the moment he entered McDonogh 14.” One day their teacher wrote “arctic” on the board, and each student had to pronounce the word. They all lazily dropped the middle “c,” pronouncing it “artic.” Only Toole stood up and pronounced it correctly. Of course, having a mother who was an elocutionist gave him an advantage.

Any sense of superiority Toole held above his classmates was tested when he started putting on weight. For a time in his youth, Toole became quite plump, and unfortunately he suffered teasing from other children. He quickly identified his wit as his best defense. As Thelma reported, one day he endured the taunts of one of the sons of the owners of the Leidenheimer baking company, makers of “Zip Bread,” a brand widely used for po'boy sandwiches throughout New Orleans. When the Leidenheimer boy called Toole fat, he quickly retorted, “Doesn't your daddy make
Jip
bread?” The response delighted Thelma, although she always maintained he was never chubby; she preferred the term “brawny.” Nonetheless, Toole remained self-conscious about his weight his entire life.

In addition to his sharpening wit, he impressed his neighbor and fellow student John Geiser with his intuition. On the first day of school and months thereafter, Geiser walked with Toole the seven blocks to McDonogh 14. One of the lasting memories that Geiser has of Toole is a rather off-handed remark in 1942. The United States had been involved in World War II for almost a year and Roosevelt still gave his fireside chats on the radio, but television was an emerging medium. One day Toole described television to Geiser as “a mixture of movies and radio” and then predicted, “After the war, TV will be as popular as the radio.” Considering this prediction became quite true, Geiser remembers it as an astoundingly prescient comment to make at the time. Toole was always sensitive to his surroundings, and it was clear, even to him at five years old, the world was quickly changing.

During his early schooling, the social climate of World War II and the following afterglow of the victory dominated the tenor of the time, especially in New Orleans, which served as a final stop for many servicemen before heading abroad. The war unified the country, and schools made it their responsibility to indoctrinate students with ardent patriotism. As evident in some of Thelma's sheet music titled
Songs for Schools at War
, children sang about the poorest of Americans giving up their “tebacker” and “smelly beer” in order to purchase war bonds. “Uncle Sam sure gets our bet,” they sang. The mentality of sacrifice and investment in the war effort proliferated through every aspect of American culture.

And as the war came to an end, Toole grew into his boyhood years and no longer posed doll-like in pictures with Mardi Gras costumes. For a time he enjoyed typical diversions of an American childhood. He swam at Audubon Park, played catch in dusty fields, and tossed a football with friends. Pictures of him around five years old suggest the possibility of a budding athlete. But Thelma maintained that her son never liked sports. “He was an artist,” she declared. And she was happy for it because, while she “celebrated champions,” she knew nothing about athletics. Besides, she had taken some measures to ensure her son would not fall into the brutish recreation of physical force. His baby book was bound in pink silk, and she had one of his baby pictures colored in hues of pink. And she had nurtured his love for Shakespeare and opera. He was intended to be a sensitive child. And while he showed some artistic talents in sketching, she identified he would be a great performer. Not only were his observations astute, but he proved to be a talented mimic as well. When he came home from school one day and impersonated the “stentorian voice” of the principal lecturing and reprimanding the student body, Thelma saw in her son a natural born actor.

It must have pleased her immensely when in 1948 he joined a youth theater troupe offered through the parks and recreation department. The Traveling Theatre Troupers was a rather large group of children and adolescents that performed plays on stages throughout the town. Thelma eagerly supported her son's interest in acting. When he was cast to play the minor role of a Chinaman cook in a performance of
A Leapyear in Arizona
around Mardi Gras season, Thelma had a Chinaman suit made for him to serve as both his costume for the play and his
Mardi Gras attire. Made of eye-catching lavender sheen, he proudly wore the costume in the production and paraded it through the streets of New Orleans during Carnival. He donned heavy makeup on his face to make his eyebrows look long and dark and his eyes appear almond in shape. When in character, he raised his cheeks, pursed his lips, and squinted his eyes, making all “the farcical expressions of the Asian face.” The production took place at an outdoor theater in a park, and Thelma recalled how children playing in the distance looked at her son gesturing at the back of the stage. “Look at the Chinaman!” she heard them exclaim. For a moment, he had stolen the show. He took this character to Charity Hospital to entertain the elderly, a performance that was broadcast on the radio.

Racial stereotypes in performance art were despairingly common in Toole's day, especially in the Jim Crow South. In
Mystery at the Old Fort
, Toole played Dick Bishop, “a boy . . . full of adventure”; and of course there was Chief Charley Horse, “an old Indian,” surely played by a white youth. And in a summer production of
Crinoline to Calico
, much of the entirely white cast, along with Toole, performed in blackface. Granted, blackface has an elaborate history in theater performance, especially in New Orleans where the krewe of Zulu, comprised of African American members, satirically parades in blackface every Mardi Gras. The musician Louis Armstrong even appeared as the King of Zulu in 1949. But in Uptown, the young actors were playing the traditional role of minstrelsy, one that would die away with the civil rights movement.

Whether her son gestured as a Chinaman, danced in blackface, or played more conventional roles, Thelma felt that the directors at the Traveling Theatre Troupers underappreciated her son's talents. So in the summer of 1949, when Toole was eleven, she started her own youth theater troupe, the Junior Variety Performers. She put together variety shows of music and dramatic interpretation, as opposed to full plays. Members of the group do not recall feeling Toole was given undue preference. However, in Thelma's own recollection, she intended to place him center stage from the first rehearsal to the last performance. When the troupe was to give a gala at the U.S. Marine Hospital to the theme of “romance in words and music,” she searched the library for material, but ultimately decided to write it herself with her son cast as the star:

Theater was serious business in the Toole home. Between the ages of eight and twelve, there were many photos of him taken that appear staged, almost professional, as if they might serve as headshots or promotional material to land much larger parts in theater or film. The newspaper featured his photo to promote performances. He appeared on television in a show called
TeleKids
. From September 1948 to May of 1949 he was a guest newscaster on a popular New Orleans radio station. And throughout his days as an actor, the coverage in the local media suggests that he now preferred being called by his full middle name, Kennedy.

As Toole strutted on stage at his mother's prompting, it is easy to cast Thelma as a typical stage mother, but many of her students cherish their memories of the productions they put on. One of her students, who later became an accomplished lawyer and returned to help Thelma with her estate at the end of her life, always attributed his clear speech to her tutelage. She made rehearsals and performances fun for the young actors. She expected much from them, and, in turn, they learned a great deal. In the end she made them feel like stars.

Surely her son enjoyed the theatrical endeavors, as well; he certainly gained many of his talents of expression from her example and direction. But it would only be natural for him to grow tired of memorizing lines, singing, and dancing on cue—especially if it never held the magic it did for Thelma. Jane Stickney Gwyn, the same classmate who recalled Toole's clear pronunciation of “arctic,” witnessed this fatigue when she saw Toole every year at Cornelia Sansum's birthday party in her grand home on Constantinople Street. Sansum was an elderly woman with white hair, who always wore white dresses and white gloves. She loved to read the newspaper in her gleaming apparel, but she detested the black print that rubbed off onto her gloves. Gwyn would be dragged to
the party to play a sonata on the piano, and Toole would have to recite some poems. Neither Gwyn nor Toole relished performing for the elderly woman, but she always had delicious cookies and punch. And the novelty of an elevator in her house provided a source of infinite amusement to two bored adolescents. After Gwyn and Toole satisfied Sansum and the other guests with their performances, they commiserated, loaded up with
petits fours
, and rode up and down the elevator, getting thrills from occasionally tripping the failsafe mechanism.

Such glimpses of Toole appearing like an average child, eating cookies, playing in an elevator, or being teased on the playground, are rare testimonies from this time period. Much of what is known of him in these early days comes directly from his mother. In her narrative, he appears as a person of perfection. In interviews she focused on stories about his early childhood. And many of her recollections, documented in her early eighties, verge on a hyperbole that can be difficult to believe. One of his grade school teachers supposedly confided in her that her son's “vocabulary is superior to Dickens.” Any proud mother deserves the right to sing the praises of her child, but Thelma left a severely limited depiction of her son at a young age. From her memory, it seems as if her genius boy appeared on the earth to begin his brilliant undertakings, suffering the occasional fool who did not recognize his talents. Beneath this veneer was a powerful and complicated dynamic between mother and son. Undeniably, Thelma was his greatest advocate. From his first breath to her last, she believed his brilliance was limitless. But her drive could be relentless, and at times it must have risked overshadowing her son's own desires and interests.

While father and son bonded over automobiles, mother and son came together in performance art. But the years of his impressionable youth were coming to an end. And every parent-child relationship must navigate the inevitable current toward independence, especially during the turbulent teenage years. Near the end of eighth grade, Toole must have lost interest in acting. Thelma cast him in one more show that she directed for the Lakeside School of Speech and Dramatic Art, a school he did not attend. She recalled her son's “resonant, far-projecting voice, dramatic flair, and stage presence brought warm praise from the audience.” His adieu came with honorable applause. But his final role as a young actor seems a more fitting end, pointing toward the scholar he
would become. In the fall of 1950 he modeled for a public service announcement that urged the public to read and study in well-lit areas. With no costumes, props, or heavy makeup, he sits at a table doing homework under a lamp. Shortly after that appearance was published in the
New Orleans Item
, he quit the stage troupe, and Thelma shifted her classes to focus on elocution.