Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (7 page)

“Mom, Nicole wants me to go to a movie tonight.”

“You went out with her last weekend. That girl’s pushy. Don’t you want to stay home with me and watch
Dallas
and
Falcon Crest
?”

No. I want to go out with Nicole.
“Well, I really want to see
Tootsie
. It’s supposed to be a great movie.”

Mama Jean never said, “Go out and have fun.” She always begrudgingly gave a yes with a layer of guilt: “All right for you, but you’ll be sorry when I’m gone.”

Hunter was a budding actor like me. We twirled the phone cords nightly, talking about how we were going to take over the drama club, ripping our classmates to shreds, and ending our calls with “Well, let me let you go.” Hunter and I competed for Nicole’s laughter with dueling impressions of our teachers and classmates. Hunter always won with his signature, showstopping impression of Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford doing the “No wire hangers!” bit from
Mommie Dearest
.

My first drunk was with Hunter and Nicole. We drank like girls. Frangelico. Amaretto. Cr
è
me de menthe. And we got what we wanted: we got drunk. We found a dusty bottle of Frangelico liqueur at my house when Mama Jean and Dad were out one evening. Once the syrupy hazelnut lava had burned its way into us, we found ourselves lying on my bed, me in the middle between them, our heads at the foot, staring at the whirling ceiling fan. We laughed hysterically at the idea that the friar-shaped amber Frangelico bottle looked as if he could be the alcoholic brother of Mrs. Butterworth, the grandma-shaped pancake-syrup bottle. We thought everything we said was hilarious. I wasn’t smashed, but perfectly buzzed, as if everything were underwater and I was floating weightlessly through it all. It was a perfect storm of joy. I had finally found friends who understood me. I was moving toward whom I wanted to be. I almost felt like an adult. The current that pooled it all together was booze.

As I surveyed the scene in the Russian Tea Room, I knew I had chosen the right way to see New York.

“Do you remember that scene in
Tootsie
where Dustin Hoffman meets his agent for lunch?” Mama Jean asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, that was shot here.” She flicked her diamond-braceleted wrist toward the red banquettes along the hunter-green wall. “Didn’t I tell you this is a see-and-be-seen place?”

She was right. The trip from the entrance to our table in the back had been a celebrity minefield. At the front corner booth was the actress Ruth Gordon of
Harold and Maude
fame and her playwright husband, Garson Kanin. Two tables down was the comedienne Madeline Kahn, star of the Mel Brooks comedies
Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety,
and
Blazing Saddles
. At a table in the middle of the room sat a man with a bush of Crayola-yellow blond hair and a handlebar mustache. As we walked past, Mama Jean asked Dad in a stage whisper, “Look. It’s that confetti-throwing fruit on all those game shows. What’s his name?”

“It’s Rip Taylor, honey,” Dad answered, but I could have. Rip Taylor I knew. He was also on a Saturday-morning kids’ TV show,
Sigmund and the Sea Monsters
. He had two trophies at his table: the lynx-fur jacket he was wearing and a comely, much younger black man. Even though Mr. Taylor wasn’t ejaculating confetti, the flamboyant gestures of his fur-clad arms left fairy dust on the table.

With a nod of her head in his direction, Mama Jean said, “I want a lynx for my next fur. But full-length.” She and I both wanted some of what Mr. Taylor had.

Where is that champagne cocktail?
I needed it to keep my head from spinning.

It arrived with bubbles rushing for air from the sugar cube at the base of the tall flute, the champagne discolored to a rosy amber from the Angostura bitters.

Dad made a toast. “To Jamie-poo’s first trip to New York. Maybe you’ll be on that stage someday.”

“I would love that.”

“Yes, but that’s a hard life,” Mama Jean said before clinking her glass with Dad’s and mine. I savored the first gulp of the drink, a mixture of dry bubbles sweetened by the sugar cube and given a zesty punch by the bitters. When it hit my nearly empty stomach, it made an instant impact.
Heaven.

“God, I love a champagne cocktail,” Mama Jean said.

“Too sweet for me,” Dad said, sipping his dry chardonnay.

“Too bad we’re not able to see Henny while we’re here.” Mama Jean was referring to her childhood friend who used to put on shows in the backyard with her. “When I lived up here during my training and Daddy visited, Henny showed us his apartment down in Greenwich Village.”

“Well, it was two apartments,” Dad said with raised eyebrows.

“He had combined two apartments, connected with a funny little crawl space. He took us through the crawl space, where he said his ‘friend’ had the other side.”
Friend
was said in scare quotes. “We didn’t get to meet his ‘friend,’ but I think they were more than friends. Like really,
really
good friends.”

“Is his friend an actor too?” I asked.

“A dancer,” Mama Jean said. “I guess they’re happy, but I can’t help but think that being … gay … is still a sad, lonely life for most people.” I don’t know what she based that on. Maybe the directors she brought in from New York to produce the annual
Luv Forum Follies
fund-raiser she started for the Junior Forum ladies club when she was president. She said they all drank, and one time she and Betty Jane Bundy had to drive one of the directors to the emergency room at one in the morning. When the nurse told Mama Jean he’d be fine once they removed the Coke bottle lodged up his ass, she said, “That son of a bitch!” Not in reaction to the Coke bottle but the one
A.M.
call, I presume
.
When I asked Betty Jane if this story was true, she replied, “Yes.” Then she cleared her throat. “But it wasn’t a Coke. It was Dr Pepper.”

I looked away from Mama Jean across the room at Mr. Taylor and took two deep gulps of my drink. Just a week prior to this moment I had sat in the bathtub crying silently into the royal-blue washrag—the same one that Mama Jean pressed against my eyes when she still washed my hair—because I was gay. Not that I wanted to be straight. I was completely on board for the love of another man or men.
Bring ’em on!
But what would it do to her? I was always more invested in her feelings than my own. Everything I did in life carried the baggage of WWMJT?—What would Mama Jean think?

“Acting’s a hard life too,” she continued. “One in one hundred make it. And you wouldn’t like struggling. You have expensive tastes.”

“Well, to judge by this room, acting isn’t a bad profession,” I said.

“Yes, but you can’t judge by this trip. I’ve only shown you the glamorous side of New York, not the seedy stuff.”

I didn’t mention the sights I’d seen in Times Square: a bronzed Adonis, three stories high, wearing nothing but Calvin Klein briefs (I hadn’t been as excited about a billboard since Mama Jean’s
MILLION-DOLLAR PRODUCER
one on Calder); and the marquis of the Gaiety, a series of light boxes of hunky men in various stages of undress, all of them winking, smirking, leering (its promise of “an all-male, all-nude gay revue” thrilled me as much as the Broadway shows we saw every night).

By the time the check came, I was feeling warm and doughy from the second champagne cocktail I’d snuck in while Mama Jean was in the ladies’ room. New York was another universe compared to Beaumont, and the windowless Russian Tea Room was another planet within that universe with its flying saucers of cocktail-filled silver trays orbiting stars made of chattering celebrities. I wanted to stay there and keep drinking forever.

Mama Jean looked away from the check and over her frosted-gold reading glasses at me. “
Somebody
had an extra champagne cocktail.” Then she glared at Dad.

“Oh, honey, it’s vacation.”

She sighed as she slid her credit card across the table to Dad. He slipped it into the leather case of the check and gave it to the waiter.

On our way out, we were bunched up in the bottleneck of the vestibule, waiting in the coat-check line. I heard Dad’s unmistakable stage whisper—“Jean, look who’s in front of us”—and whipped my head around.

She looked. I looked faster. In front of us, waiting for her coat, was a fine-featured, statuesque blonde with a pixie cut fluttering over her heavily mascaraed, false eyelashes. She wore a tight-fitting, one-piece, black pantsuit and was talking and laughing with two men who matched her in height and good looks. Mama Jean made a silent, openmouthed
Oh!
of recognition that I could not share.

“Who is it? Who is it?” I whispered in desperation.

“Shh!” Mama Jean said.

I bugged my eyes loudly to ask the question again.

“It’s Joey Heatherton,” Dad whispered.

“Who’s Joey Heatherton?”

“You don’t know who Joey Heatherton is?!” they both hissed at me. They were always genuinely shocked when I didn’t recognize a celeb. Like the time I asked them who the Muppet of a woman was talking to Johnny Carson. “You don’t know who Carol Channing is?!” I was seven.

I looked at the lady in question again, as if another glance would unlock the mystery of who this obvious somebody was. It didn’t. One of the men helped Miss Heatherton slip into her full-length mink. The false eyelashes seemed to weigh down her glazed eyes. She cooed and licked her lips as they expanded into an elastic smile. She locked arms with the men and walked onto West Fifty-seventh Street.

Mama Jean got her mink and locked arms with Dad and me, and we exited to embrace the exhilarating city outside: sharp cold, honking horns, clanging Salvation Army bells, nasal voices. Joey and her escorts were ten paces ahead of us.

Joey was flipping her artfully messy pixie cut to and fro between the two men as she cooed and cackled. One man goosed Joey at the waist. She squealed.

You can have Disneyland. Who needs that when there’s New York?
I thought.

I looked down the canyon of West Fifty-seventh Street and glanced up at the chorus line of towering buildings. Just as my gaze came back to earth, Joey screeched to a stop on the sidewalk. She tore open her mink, tossed her head back in a laugh, and threw her right leg over her head in the highest kick I’d ever seen.

The three of us stopped in our tourist tracks as strangers whirled past us. Mama Jean and Dad turned to me and said in unison, “
That’s
Joey Heatherton!”

Joey closed her coat and kept walking, her ecstatic laughter leading the way.

I learned later that Joey had once been a movie star, had once been a TV star, had once been a Las Vegas headliner. Had once been. By that time she was better known for dancing provocatively in Serta mattress commercials in a hot-pink, bell-bottom, halter-top pantsuit. Four years after her high kick on West Fifty-seventh Street, headlines blazed, “Arrested for Drugs and Assault, Perennial Starlet Joey Heatherton Finally Crashes to Earth.”

But the essence of what I knew about Joey Heatherton on that brisk December day, on West Fifty-seventh Street in New York City, was that I wanted to feel like her at that moment. And I never wanted to crash back to earth.

SEVEN

Lost in Acapulco

Somewhere in Kansas There’s a photo of me. I’ve never seen it, but the details of that snapshot are almost as clear to me as every other detail of the day it was taken. I’m standing in the surf of a beach in Acapulco and flashing a virginal smile, my braces sparkling in the brazen Mexican sun like sequins on a Bob Mackie dress. Besides that smile, I’m wearing a pair of cornflower-blue, nylon, Ocean Pacific, short-short swimming trunks with three stripes in red, pink, and orange forming a
V
at the Velcro fly. Not a teaspoon of fat is on my fifteen-year-old frame, and my hair shines like a new penny. The ocean is behind me and I’m facing the Acapulco Princess resort, but I’m not looking at the Princess. I’m standing with my hands on my hips and inviting the photographer to stare back at me. Hard.

It was day two or three of a family vacation with Mama Jean, Dad, and my brother Jeffrey in 1983, the summer before my sophomore year. I was almost as excited to be there as I had been on that New York trip. Acapulco was loaded with the promise of glamour and excitement. I remember Mama Jean and Dad’s stories about spending a week at a cliffside villa. And Jackie O spent her first honeymoon in Acapulco. Come to think of it, Mama Jean spent
her
first honeymoon in Acapulco. If I believed Mama Jean’s talk about good girls not putting out before the gold band, I suppose she became a woman in Acapulco.

Ah, Acapulco. It had been a dream destination since I was five.

We didn’t start out at the Acapulco Princess. We were booked downtown at the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza. None of us were happy there, especially Mama Jean.

“Well, this looked a hell of a lot nicer in the brochure. And the place is full of Mexicans.”

“Well, Jean, we
are
in Mexico,” Dad said. “The Mexicans here aren’t like the ones we have at home.”

That night Mama Jean and Dad surprised us with a fancy dinner at the Acapulco Princess, which was twenty miles from downtown. Mama Jean primed me to be dazzled. “If you want to talk about swanky, you’re talking about the Princess. I’m telling you, y’all won’t want to leave.”

We arrived at dusk, the palm-shaded road still dappled with sun. As we made the mile-long approach up the drive, I peered out the taxi window, eager for my first glimpse of the famed resort. I felt like Joan Fontaine as the innocent young bride in
Rebecca
as her jaded husband, Maxim de Winter, drives her through the forested path on her first approach to his legendary estate, Manderley: full of desire and anticipation but not knowing quite what to expect. The trees and tropical vegetation parted to reveal three ersatz Aztec temples of luxury. I gaped in wonder as we crossed the marble-and-stone, open-air lobby, which soared to the peak of the building with vine-covered balconies stair-stepped along the way.