Crane (15 page)

15

My folks divorced in June 1970, and four months later on the Stalag 13 set my dad and Patti were united in something less than holy matrimony. My dad’s parents attended the celebration. Feeling sympathetic toward my brokenhearted mom, my sisters and I did not.

My dad enjoyed Patti as his confidante and the female pal he never had. He felt he could talk to her about anything, and to him that just eradicated the traditional boundaries of “husband” and “wife.” From my cynical perspective, I think Patti saw from the outset that my dad was a pliable subject. I never saw their relationship as one of equals. One person had to bend in their relationship, which may be the case in most relationships, but my dad was the one who had to do all the bending.

When my dad and Patti exchanged their vows on the Hogan’s soundstage, Fraulein Hilda just happened to have a strudel in the oven. That she was pregnant would not have been remarkable except for the fact that my dad had had a vasectomy in 1968 when he was still married to my mom. He had had the procedure because he knew he didn’t want any more kids and also because as a big-time TV star he was having affairs with lots of women, and free love or otherwise, out-of-wedlock children were still a big issue in Hollywood in 1968. Now it’s the norm.

I know about the vasectomy because for some reason I never discovered, my dad showed me a document from his doctor confirming the fact he’d had the procedure. A document that doesn’t count for much considering the swelling of Patti’s midsection. Her pregnancy raised a lot of eyebrows in our family. Maybe the doctor had botched the job. Maybe my dad should have been neutered. That might’ve helped.

During Christmas break of 1970 my newly married dad thought he would emulate Dr. Joyce Brothers and promote positive relationships and understanding—in other words, he’d turn us into the Brady Bunch. What better way to share the warmth than to take the clan for a weekend to
Mammoth Mountain in California’s High Sierras: his new bride, Patti’s daughter by a previous marriage, Melissa (known as Mits), and Debbie, Karen, and me. I invited Diane to come along as a kind of buffer, a neutral party in the multifamilial lineup.

We stayed in a rented condo right in the heart of rustic Mammoth Lakes. I was the only skier, so instead of schussing the slopes we spent hours riding plastic saucers at breakneck speed down steep, snow-covered hills. There were laughs and screams as my dad played camp director. He was trying hard to wipe out any lingering ill will harbored by his kids.

Many people love new beginnings and most wish for their happy outcome, but from my corner I felt—I knew—it was only a matter of time before gravity deflated this balloon of bonhomie. I could see that Patti had no use for my sisters, who still felt a guilty sense of betrayal to my mom for spending time with the enemy. Just as Yoko was perceived as the cause of the Beatles’ breakup at that time, Patti was fingered by my sisters as the linchpin in the destruction of my parents’ marriage. They were too young to understand the underlying circumstances that had led to the dissolution of our folks’ marriage.

Diane immediately picked up on a feeling that Patti invested herself most successfully in a male world. Patti’s daughter, her husband’s daughters, his mother, and ex-wife could only be obstacles to her manifest destiny. Still, Diane and I had fun that weekend: we saucered, hiked, and made love in the back of my dad’s frigid station wagon. Our breath and heat fogged the windows, and we loved and laughed until just before the sun came up. My dad liked Diane, and he was really glad that I had a girlfriend. He was enjoying his sex life with his new spouse, and he wanted his only son to also have a berth on the love train. In the past he had shown impatience with my constant self-doubt and analysis. “Damn it, Bobby, jump in and get the good!” was always his fatherly advice.

Diane and I would visit my dad from time to time on various sets. These were opportunities for Diane and my dad to spend time getting to know each other. Since her father was a television writer, “the business” was no big deal except on one unforgettable occasion. My dad was shooting a big, bombastic, flag-waving post–Labor Day special called
Make Mine Red, White and Blue
at NBC in Burbank. I had arranged for Diane and me to spend most of the afternoon visiting the set because unbeknownst to her, Diane’s hero, Fred Astaire, was the host of the show. During a break my dad and I introduced her to the iconic dancer. Diane
just about levitated as she shook Mr. Astaire’s hand and told him what a dedicated fan she was. I watched with glee as her smile virtually lit the set. That brief meeting ranked high on her personal best list for many years, and seeing her reaction made me fall for her harder than ever.

While I was never much into hero worship, John Lennon was one of my guiding lights. I loved his songs and prose, his seductive singing voice, his Rickenbacker rhythm guitar, and his witty, elastic imagination. John and Yoko had really long hair (plus beard for Lennon), and I suspect looked more religious than they wanted to, or maybe not, but being the chameleons they were, they transformed themselves when they decided to cut off all their hair to raise money for their peace project.

With no false courage from drink or drugs, Diane and I talked each other into shearing our own rather bountiful locks in emulation of John and Yoko. So one night in that Town & Gown dorm room I shared with Fryer, who always seemed to be out, Diane and I cut each other’s hair off. It was not quite crew-cut length, but it was really short, heretical for 1971. The difference between our appearance earlier in the day and that night was profound. We put our intertwined tresses in a Plexiglas box; we were young and silly, and thought watching our hair cohabiting was exciting. And as I said, all of this was done without any chemical enrichment. There was laughter in the air and sex and wildness and kissing and holding and going to films together on opening day. We were getting high on each other and the life we were sharing.

Whereas Chris Klauser and I had had more of a “like” relationship, the twinges in my stomach I felt with Diane inspired the word
love
from me for the first time. At times I had to see Diane right away or I’d go crazy. We still spent hours on the telephone, often meeting each other at 11:30 at night (not necessarily a wise idea on the USC campus) after studying, attending film classes, making art. I was giddy with a happiness and contentment I’d never known before.

So my first two years at college became a daily regimen of Diane, film, license plate frames, and avoiding Vietnam. My academic life, however, was much too reminiscent of high school. My undergraduate requirements included geology and biology, which had no relevance to life as I knew it. It was like being stuck in thirteenth grade. It was the fear of a Private R. D. Crane body bag that kept me in school.

As 1971 began to unfurl, I couldn’t imagine myself with anyone other than Diane for the rest of my life. Our passion was raw, mentally and
physically. It was a love riot. We were going to be fueled forever by an intoxicating, highly combustible mix of creativity, art, love, and sex. One night as we were standing in a long Westwood queue waiting to see that great date flick, George Lucas’s low-budget futuristic
THX 1138,
we killed time by stealing kisses, holding hands, and whispering “I love you.” At one point there was a pronounced silence—the longest dead air we had experienced to date. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. In fact it was just the opposite. It was a bubble of warmth and serenity that enveloped and protected us from all the turmoil the world was offering on a daily basis.

“Should we get married?” I asked. It was as much a dare as a question.

“Yes,” Diane answered immediately, her eyes glistening.

We embraced and shared a long, deep kiss. The line started to move. Since we’d already paid for our tickets, we decided to see the Lucas/Coppola production. Besides, it had been filmed in the San Francisco Bay area, and we had talked about moving north for the next episode of the Bob and Diane Show, so even if the film was awful we might be able to scout locations.

Wanting to go public with our engagement, we decided to take our love on the road. Our first stop was Westwood; my dad and Patti, newlyweds themselves, were soft targets. Of course they liked the idea; they were on their own love high. Patti and I still had a good relationship at the time, but her support of our conjugal scheme seemed like a loan for future repayment.

Next stop on the Love Me Tender Tour was Hermosa Beach, where the plan was presented to Diane’s parents, Bob and Betty. Bob was a no-nonsense television writer of shows like
The FBI, Dragnet,
and
Ironside.
Betty was a wonderfully charming, funny, cute-as-a-button mother of three daughters, Diane being the middle child. There were genuine smiles and a group hug. So far, so good.

Then we drove to Tarzana to meet with my mom. This was during the pre-Chuck era. My parents’ marriage had always been the support structure for my mom’s existence, and with its deterioration and collapse, chaos reigned over the Vanalden homestead. Forty-one years old, my mother was trying to be both parents to my young sisters while coping with her own mother, who did nothing but complain about my mom’s poor choice of a husband. Now her oldest child, her only son, was about to embark on a road that she felt could only lead to the cul-de-sac of heartache.

Diane and I laid out our concept of matrimonial bliss. There was a long, very long silence, and then my mom hit the roof. The yelling was volcanic, the contained misery of several years suddenly erupting and flowing like lava down Kilauea. Because her own marriage had ended so badly, mom’s feeling was that mine would be the same, if not worse. While she might have been concerned for my best interests, there was also an elephant in the room—an Oedipal elephant. I don’t mean to imply there was ever anything other than a mother’s love for her first and only son, but from our earliest days in Stamford and Bridgeport, it was always Mom and Bobby, her little man. She loved me so much she didn’t want me to be with another woman. She’d already lost one man. Her world was sliding away right before her eyes. She saw my potential marriage only as another divorce, for her and for me.

My mom felt Diane and I were playing dress-up adults. She said we were good at playtime but not so effective at the nuts and bolts of everyday life. Where were we going to live? How were we going to support ourselves? What was I going to do for a living? My mom spoke the unpopular truth about most young courtships. She was the voice of reality, speaking about responsibility, about growing up. She marshaled wisdom in her attempt to talk down two love addicts. I tried to act as referee between the two most important women in my life, but in trying to mediate, to be the negotiator, I never put my arm around Diane and challenged my mom’s authority. I never said, “We’re doing this whether you like it or not!”

My mom used her emotion and condemnations like a good prosecuting attorney. Hearing this kind of ominous projection of her own future and seeing her mate’s inaction, Diane reached her breaking point. “You’re not going to fuck up my life!” she yelled back at my mom, index finger pointed menacingly.

“This is going to end badly,” my mom replied quietly, taking the air out of not just the room but the bubble that was Diane’s and my love.

The drive back to USC was interminable. Diane and I experienced the longest silence of our relationship. I couldn’t fathom what she was thinking and feeling. Reflecting on what just happened? Shutting down? Planning her next art project or mulling over a list of potential new suitors? I didn’t have the nerve to ask, and I’m not sure I even wanted the answer. The one thing I was sure of, ultimately, was that I trusted my mom’s judgment more than my own.

Diane and I had ridden a wave of euphoria for a couple of days, but after the opera at Vanalden we never talked about marriage again. Not once. That was the beginning of the end of my relationship with Diane. She was bitterly disappointed that I hadn’t stood up to defend her, our love, our future partnership in life’s challenges and rewards. Marriage was to be our next step, and I had hit a wrong note in our relationship that would never go away. We continued to see each other, but there was always a dissonant chord reverberating somewhere in the background.

If the failure of our engagement was the earthquake in our relationship, then I provoked the aftershocks that pretty much wiped out whatever remained standing. It started in a drama class at USC taught by Joan Tewkesbury, aka Joan McGuire, who was a Robert Altman associate. Tewkesbury was a script supervisor by trade who later penned the critically acclaimed
Nashville
for Altman. The class was an easy four credits, but I recognized it more as an opportunity to learn how to communicate with actors since I was still under the impression that I was going to become the next Francis Ford Coppola.

Two of the more interesting students in class were Stephen Randall, whom I would later write for at
Playboy
magazine and who would become deputy editor there, just below Hef on the masthead, and a quietly driven blonde named Laura Ziskin. Laura would much later become best known for producing the
Spiderman
films as well as two Oscar broadcasts, among a long list of other achievements, including the formation of the Stand Up 2 Cancer charity.

One of our acting class exercises included sitting in pairs, closing our eyes, and touching the other “actor’s” face. This was frighteningly intimate to me, but it was also thrilling, especially when I finally got to square off with Laura. I wanted to behave like an adult since she was vastly more mature—a year older. As my fingers traced her heavy, half-moon eyelids, which trailed off at the corners, creating a sad, weary, but seductive look, and her thin eyebrows, diminutive nose, and sweet lips, I knew I was falling in love. My feelings were not reciprocated equally, but Laura did take a momentary interest in me, and one night after class we met at the Old World restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood down the Strip from Whisky A Go-Go. In the course of our evening I must have said something worthwhile because she invited me back to her place. I’m sure I had the look of Jean-Pierre Léaud’s stock character Antoine Doinel from Truffaut’s films, a mix of amazement, trepidation, and surprise, as I
followed Laura to her small bungalow rental on Norwich Avenue a few minutes away. She gave me a one-minute tour of the crowded space before leading me to her bedroom. Unfortunately for Laura, I won no Oscar for my performance that night. Not even a nomination. What I lacked in experience and creativity in the sack I made up for in speed.