Get Happy (7 page)

Much as she enjoyed performing before an audience, so, to an equal degree, did Babe detest singing before unresponsive movie executives. Her ordeal, which is what the trips to the studios were for her, began each Friday afternoon when the last school bell rang. That was a signal for her friends, the regular kids, to throw down their books and run off to the baseball diamond or the Jazz Candy Shop. For Babe it was a summons to go home to have her hair put up in curlers for a Saturday morning audition. But before she went into the house, she sat down with Muggsey and cried, so much did she dread the twenty-four hours to follow. “She hated going, just hated it,” said Ming, who often went along to keep her company.

Nearly every Saturday, when dew was on the grass and the morning air was sharp with the smell of alfalfa, the Gumms’ dark blue Buick backed out of the driveway on Cedar Avenue. Because Ethel, who was in a hurry even at that early hour, refused to give the engine time to warm up, it was seldom a smooth getaway. Sputtering in shocked protest, the Buick jumped down the block like a jackrabbit—
chug, chug, chug, chug, chug
—until the motor caught. Huddling together in the backseat as Ethel speeded down the Mint Canyon Highway, Babe and Muggsey sang, talked and occasionally dabbed at coloring books with their crayons—anything to keep boredom at bay.

For Babe, the long drive might have been less onerous if she had known that at the end of the journey there would be a reward—a clapping of hands, some amiable words, perhaps a hint of a smile. But enthusiasm seemed to be a precious commodity in Hollywood. “She would knock herself out,” said Ming, “and those studio people would sit there so stern-faced, never cracking a smile, never saying whether she was good or whether she wasn’t. Just blank faces. I used to feel real bad because they were so mean.”

Silence and sour expressions were not the worst of it for Babe. What made those sessions so unnerving was her belief that when her own audition was over, her mother’s began. Babe was convinced that, in hopes of furthering her career, Ethel would then have sex with one or more of those blank-faced men. “That’s the main reason Babe hated going down there,” said Ming. “That’s why she always wanted me to go along, so she wouldn’t be alone.” What proof Babe had, what conversations she had overheard or what incidents she had witnessed, Muggsey never knew. Muggsey knew only that when Babe had finished singing, Ethel would order the two of them outside to play, while she remained inside, sometimes for an hour or more. Whether Ethel, who was still several years shy of forty, was, in fact, trading sex for favors is impossible to say. What can be said is that Babe and Muggsey believed that she was. Yet even if they were wrong, they were right in thinking that there was virtually nothing that Ethel would not do, or make Babe do, to see the Gumm name at the bottom of a studio contract.

Indeed, Babe had proof that that was the case, evidence she could hold in the palm of her hand. When Babe’s energies flagged, as they often did, Ethel did what she had done with her two older daughters: she gave her pep pills. Then, when the pep pills started keeping her awake at night, Ethel counteracted them with sleeping tablets. “I’ve got to keep these girls going!” was her bright, cheery comment whenever Dorothy Walsh suggested that she was pushing too hard. Thus, even before she had reached her tenth birthday, did Babe become acquainted with the drugs that were to be her companions evermore. And her mother, her guardian, her defender, her shield against the world, had made the introductions.

The question is not why Ethel did what she did to Babe, but why Frank allowed her to do it. Babe herself thought she had the answer. “She defeated him, you know. And he was a very strong man, my father! Very strong. There was nothing weak about him at all.” But she was only half right. If the occasion warranted, Frank could, in fact, be tough; movie distributors could attest to that. But he was tough only with outsiders.
When he came up against his wife, he might just as well have been made of rubber, so easily did he bend and stretch to her will. Ethel did, indeed, defeat him, but only because Frank let her.

It was a measure of his love that where the welfare of his girls were concerned, he actually did try to stand up to her. “Slow down! Slow down!” he would shout. “Stop pushing them. Stop wearing them out.” These arguments usually occurred late at night, and Ethel often concluded them by rushing into Babe’s room and pulling her out of bed. “We’re leaving Daddy,” she would announce. When Babe objected that she did not want to leave her father, Ethel would say simply, “Then you don’t love me,” a comment that left Babe feeling both guilty and helpless. Sleepy and confused, she would then be bundled into the backseat of the Buick and, for the rest of the night, without a word of explanation about where they were going or when they would return, Ethel would drive at high speeds across empty desert roads. Dawn would usually find the Buick pulling into the driveway on Cedar Street, but sometimes Ethel drove all the way to Los Angeles, where she and Babe would stay three or four days in a hotel.

Ethel never physically abused Babe, never even spanked her, but her brand of discipline left scars nonetheless. If Babe did something wrong during one of their trips, her mother would pack her bags and walk out of their hotel room, slamming the door behind her. Babe never knew when, or if, she would return, but until she did, anywhere from one to five hours later, Babe would sit silently in a chair, afraid that if she cried or made even the smallest sound, she would never see her mother again. Her panic, she said, was beyond description. Only when the door opened again did she allow herself to cry, telling Ethel that she was the most wonderful mother in the world. “Well, you’re just lucky I came back at all this time,” Ethel would reply, “because the next time I won’t.”

Yet Ethel could be kind as well as cruel, doing little things—cooking special meals, for instance—to make her youngest daughter happy. Nor was she always heartless. One year she had arranged for Babe to work on Christmas Day, but felt guilty herself as just the two of them were sharing a lonely Christmas dinner at a drugstore across from the theater, eating hot enchiladas rather than turkey and the trimmings. “You
should be home with your family having a beautiful Christmas dinner,” Ethel suddenly cried, and there was nothing Babe, who was quite happy with her enchilada, could say to console her. Such moments made Babe love Ethel, but she always knew that even then, even “in the middle of great kindness or loud laughter, she was capable of saying something or doing something that would scare me to death.” For Babe, love for her mother was always mixed with fear.

At home, on Cedar Street, her parents had all but declared war, and from her vantage point next door, Dorothy Walsh could hear them battling, angry words occasionally punctuated by the crash of a hurled pan. Inside the house, where the clanging pans reverberated like thunder, Babe would put in an emergency call to Muggsey. “Would you come over?” she would ask. Faithful Muggsey always did, arriving to find Babe crying under a tree on the front lawn. Tears produced more tears, and soon they were both bawling, not stopping even when the shouting ceased and Frank sat down at the piano to sing a love song, the signal that a cease-fire had been signed. On the lawn outside, that was an occasion for still more weeping. “His songs were always so sad,” said Muggsey.

Nothing in the world is more frightening to a child, Babe would later say, than the sound of parents squabbling. It was frightening to her, in any event, and the disturbances at home, combined with pressure from an overbearing mother, doubtless contributed to her obvious anxiety. Her hands sometimes shook and she suffered from insomnia, sleeping well only when she stayed all night with Muggsey. “She seemed to relax just getting away, even if it was only a couple of blocks,” said Ming. Listening to the sounds of combat as she sat on that tiny lawn, that beleaguered spot of green in a khaki-colored town, Babe must have thought that the verdant Eden of Grand Rapids was as distant as the mountains of the moon.

It must have seemed equally faraway to Frank and Ethel, who were more and more at odds. The arrangement that had kept them together in Minnesota had broken down, irretrievably and beyond repair. Both were to blame. Undeterred by the scandal that had caused them to
leave Grand Rapids, Frank continued to lust after teenage boys, while Ethel, for her part, had taken a lover.

Will Gilmore was Ethel’s lover’s name, and he and his wife, Laura, were the Gumms’ best friends in Lancaster. The two couples spent much of their free time together, at bridge games and picnics and on trips to the ocean and scenic spots in the desert. Wherever the Gumms were, the Gilmores were also likely to be. Their offspring were friends as well, the Gilmores’ daughter, Ruth, often joining Babe and Muggsey on their excursions around town. Bill, one of the two Gilmore boys, was a close friend of Muggsey’s brother, Wilber.

A salesman of the water pumps that were so vital in that thirsty region, Gilmore was tall and broad-shouldered, with sharp, aquiline features, dark hair and a forceful, if dour personality. On the hottest days, when most other businessmen surrendered to the heat, loosening their ties and rolling up their shirtsleeves, he defied the thermometer, keeping his coat on, his high-collared shirt buttoned and his tie firmly knotted. Though he was a few years younger than Frank, his stern and unbending demeanor made him seem older, at least to those of Babe’s generation. “He was a sour old man,” said Wilber. “I was scared of him.”

So, apparently, were many other people, and Gilmore had a mean streak to match his violent temper. He once planted the teeth of a rake in the back of a dog that tried to break into his chicken pen, then gave chase to the terror-stricken animal, which was painfully dragging the rake behind it as it tried to escape. When he caught up with the dog and extracted his rake in front of the Ming house, Sam Ming, Muggsey’s father, stepped out to tell him what he thought of such cruelty. “He was a peculiar bastard,” Sam Ming said of Gilmore. “I never had any use for him.” Neither did Babe. “A terrifying man,” she later wrote. “I loathed him. He had very white teeth, very bad clothes, a miserable haircut, and he was a petty, weak man, narrow-minded and unkind.”

A man more unlike the genial Frank could not have been born, but that may have been Gilmore’s chief attraction for Ethel. When Frank
was away, Ethel often took her girls to dinner at the Gilmore house, where Gilmore himself seemed to take as much delight in torturing Babe as he had the unfortunate dog. He criticized Babe’s eating habits, her table manners—everything she did, in fact. To make her empty a glass of milk, he once shook the dinner table so violently that he overturned an entire pitcher of milk, all but coating her in white. “Each meal was a horror,” she said, “and the anticipation was worse.” Worse still was watching her mother stand idly by, sometimes, indeed, even joining in, the two of them laughing at her as she walked to a miserable bed.

Though probably few in Lancaster objected to Ethel’s affair with Gilmore—there were many such couplings in that frontier town—they did feel sorry for poor Laura Gilmore, who was confined to a wheelchair by a stroke. “We thought it was pretty stinky of Mrs. G. to be ‘playing bridge’ with Will Gilmore while Laura was unable to get around” was the way Dorothy Walsh summed up the prevailing sentiment. If it had not been for a game of hide-and-seek, Babe herself probably would have remained ignorant of her mother’s adultery.