I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (25 page)

At the Neighborhood Playhouse, one of the elements of concentration I was taught was the fourth wall. The wall between the actor and the audience. Privacy in public.

In theater, I was good at fourth walls. The laughs, the coughs, the late entrances, the matinee chatter, all absorbed in a comforting way, as “the neighbors,” a kind, supportive group who all laughed at the same lines and, at the curtain call, suddenly appeared, clapping, loving, homogeneous. Not unlike Fremo and my mother.

I wasn’t a performer. I had no need to seduce, or astound, to impress in any way. The Method was taught by Sandy, to create the world of the play. To plug up any holes and believe in my new life and its situations totally.

So (in addition to my feeling of being turned in to the HUAC)
when Peter looked at the audience and gestured to me with his thumb, his thumb also broke my fourth wall; the conceit, the scrim, the protection came tumbling down, and all these strangers were staring at me, hundreds. I was caught with one boot off in the former privacy of my own living room.

In the last four performances of
The Prisoner of Second Avenue
, I’d lost the magic.

Lost my freedom to fail onstage.

Lost.

An actor’s wiring is too peculiar and sensitive to figure out. I knew I had to get up on the horse again after I finished
The Prisoner of Second Avenue
.

•   •   •

B
ack in Malibu, it seemed one week I was telling Joey to get a job or go back home and the next week he opened a TV commercial company with Dick Chambers, which took off like gangbusters. He changed his name to Feury when his clients couldn’t pronounce Fioretti.

What did he know about the commercial business? He’d been an apprentice plumber and a ballet dancer. Suddenly, he raised the money for two low-budget films and produced and sold them that year, this before he was thirty. He made it happen because he learned fast. Emergency fast. Hyper-fast. Down-the-road-before-I-get-my-foot-out-of-the-car fast. Dangerous fast, sometimes. Dangerous. That’s the overused word I was looking for. The Italian non-Jew I wanted in my life. I’d experienced the Jewish intellectual. This experience was healthier for me, but came with its own risks. This man was ridiculous. This man was unexpected. He was lovable, loving, eruptive, and talented. He was a great, great protector and friend. A pain in the ass. Mine.

It was in that period that Joey started talking about having a baby. I wanted a baby for Joey. He should have his own child. But Joey was terrified for me to get pregnant. His mother almost died of purpura hemorrhagica when his younger brother was born. But I was in my forties then, and it turned out that I couldn’t conceive anyway.

Still, he wanted a baby, and it fed into my sudden and urgent need to adopt a little girl, fueled, I’m sure, by losing Dinah to the Malibu circus. Don’t we all have a problem when our beautiful, dependent babies, our mommy-adoring children, mommy-needing children, who want only mommy to lie in bed with them at night, cross that cruel line into adolescence? That was me.

We went to a lawyer about adopting a baby. Back then, you couldn’t adopt without a marriage certificate. I had no desire to marry again, but I made an appointment for late on a Sunday afternoon with the minister at the little Malibu Church off the Pacific Coast Highway. We invited two couples over to play poker. I told them we had to pick up stuff at the market, and we went to the church. I wrote our names on a piece of notepaper and handed them to the minister. We could see a calm ocean through the big church windows. It was nice. We were getting married only so we could adopt a child, but I had scribbled our vows on a piece of paper ahead of time and brought it with me. This is what I wrote:

Will you please continue to be my dearest friend—to be there when I am afraid, or lonely, or unwanted—as you always have been? To help me grow, even when growing separates us, and will you continue to acknowledge my freedom and solitary rights, as I must acknowledge your freedom and solitary rights?

Answer: I will try.

We both said “I will try,” not “I do,” thanked the confused young minister, went to the market, and went back to our friends, who remained totally ignorant of the fact that they had missed a wedding.

A few weeks later I received a yellow store receipt from the state saying our marriage was official, and we started looking at pictures of children.

A
dopting a child opens a door to a new complicated world.

We contacted a lawyer who dealt in adoptions. The first baby he told us about was one born in Florida to a waitress. We learned the mother was perennially pregnant by God knows who, turned the babies over at birth, and made a good living from it. A one-woman baby mill.

Joey and I were interviewed by some state adoption people at our home. We acted very parental, but never heard back. At the time it was hard to adopt in the United States. I don’t remember why.

Then our lawyer showed us pictures of a pair of twins, three-year-old girls.
They’ll have each other,
I thought, thinking of the trauma displaced children have to deal with.

The lawyer put us in touch with Dr. Stephen Youngberg, a Baptist minister based in Bangkok who arranged introductions to adoptable children, several of whom lived with him at one time or another from birth on.

I didn’t want a baby. I wanted a child whose eyes I could look into and see the person. I realized this was going to be a long, complicated relationship.

The child we found would have had a life before us; her new parents would feel like kidnappers to her. On the other hand, children whose fathers were American servicemen paid a terrible penalty.

There was an American base in Thailand and many houses to sexually accommodate them, many Madame Butterflies available for housekeeping arrangements. The girls had their babies, and the American boys returned to the States after their tours were over.

The penalty fell on the mixed-race children born of these relationships. They were not allowed to live in the mainstream, not allowed an education; both sexes were channeled into prostitution.

That was the new daughter I wanted to save.

Just before we were to go to Thailand, I had a really flimsy film to do in London,
The Internecine Project
. The script was no more than a sixteen-page outline, but the money was good and my costar was James Coburn, an actor I admired and wanted to play with. After filming, Joey and I planned to fly to Bangkok to meet with Dr. Youngberg and his children, all of whom had been given to him by their Thai mothers, who had other children to care for, wanted their new babies to have a better life, or needed the money that came with adoption.

Lufthansa lost our luggage, so I left freezing London and landed in steaming ninety-degree Bangkok in a fur coat and rain boots, a stranger from another planet.

It was still morning when we taxied to the Dusit Thani Hotel, a modern Western-style building with big air-conditioned rooms and a balcony that looked out onto a huge live elephant, the hotel’s signature pet. I ran down to the hotel’s dress shop to find something to wear while Joey called Dr. Youngberg. I changed out of my soaked cashmere sweater and jeans and into a long light Thai dress and weightless sandals. The doorbell rang, and a shortish man stood in the doorway with what looked like a two-year-old boy and a two-year-old girl, one under each arm.

Joey checked them out and said, “We’ll take her. Let’s have lunch!”

We had met our daughter.

She was a slip of a thing in an oversize dress, no panties, a boy’s haircut, and large, wary, lived-in brown eyes.

•   •   •

W
e went up to the roof garden for lunch. The little girl, whose name was Lindah, ate everything she could get her small hands on. The little boy, James, roamed the restaurant
.
He was two and a half, she was two—not brother and sister, more like twinned casualties. We ended up keeping both children with us in the hotel room for the two weeks it took to finalize the adoption.

I took care of them at night, Joey in the morning, and we shared the afternoon. After lunch Joey called the desk for the bellboy. “Thai sticks,” he yelled. “Thai sticks.”

“How many?” the bellboy asked.

I was indeed a stranger in a strange land. One night at the Dusit Thani, our very international hotel, I reached in the dark for my glass of red wine to wash down my sleeping pill, but I couldn’t get the wineglass to my mouth. I quietly climbed out of bed and took it to the bathroom. There, standing in my wineglass, was a water bug as long as a finger, its feelers waving at me. I screamed and screamed till Joey came. I could only point and scream.

We drove through the empty countryside to small communities where many other children were up for adoption. The houses were basically open-air platforms raised about two or three feet above the ground. The first one we saw had about eight or nine children laughing on the platform, including five-year-old twin girls who regarded us with a cool distant gaze. It was a photograph of these two girls that first drew us to Thailand. Sitting on a chair with them was a large
woman in a sari whose teeth and gums were red with betel juice. Other platforms had straw walls and roofs. There was no furniture. Every home had a framed picture of the king.

The offices we visited to legalize the adoption were crammed with desks and people; stacks of papers were balanced all the way from floor to ceiling. They were records, but of what? How does someone remove one paper without bringing down the whole stack? Each desk had a roll of toilet paper, presumably to take with you to the bathroom. All bathrooms, except in modern buildings and hotels, were deep holes dug in dark, damp earth.

We had to meet Lindah’s mother in order to get her signature on our adoption papers. We then brought those papers to these offices behind the many desks.

The little girl’s mother met us in a park near the hotel, bringing two fair-haired, fair-skinned sons with her. They looked to be about eight and ten. The mother had had several children, but Lindah was the only one she ever offered for adoption. I asked her, “Why this little girl?” She said she’d had very little contact with Lindah since she was born. Her grandma had raised her. I asked her about Lindah’s father. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember.” She was pleasant and ordinary and matter-of-fact. We gave her five hundred dollars; she gave me Lindah.

I had wanted to name Lindah something Russian, since that was my mother’s background. As she lay in her crib next to my bed, I would whisper to her, “Natalia, Natasha, Ninushka.” She would sit there, as self-possessed as a cat, staring at me with big, dark, wary eyes, her spine curved to protect herself against me. I would set her small weightless body on the toilet. “Please love me,” I would plead as she peed, watching me.

One night during the search for the right name, I threw up my
arms and said, “Oh, be Lindah! Be Linda, Belinda.” She blinked. That was enough for me. Belinda.

Just before we left Bangkok, I was invited to lunch with the American ambassador. As we were leaving the embassy living room, heading for the garden where lunch was set up, my brand-new soles slipped on the carpeted stairs and I fell. Joey’s hand reached for me, my hand reached for his, and in slow motion I seemed to sail right over a flight of stairs, landing hard at the bottom. I was shaken up, dizzy, and embarrassed. I had been talking party talk a second before, and now all these faces were staring down at me. “No, no, no, I’m fine,” I assured them. My head was buzzing, my legs wobbly.

As Joey steered me across the lawn to the white gazebo, a duck nipped at my heel. I was seated next to the ambassador, and cold soup was served. I tried but could not get the soupspoon to stop shaking on the way to my mouth. I knew I would not be invited to any more parties in Bangkok. “Sir,” I said, “Mr. Ambassador. I’m in the process of adopting a Thai child. What can be done about the G.I.s who are serving over here taking responsibility for the children they spawn and leave behind? Huh? Don’t you think they should help to raise their babies somehow? Money? Support? Anything?”

The ambassador smiled at me. “Oh, Lee. You can’t stop the boys from having a little hanky-panky, can you?”

The morning before we left, Joey took James and Belinda to the hotel coffee shop. He ordered food. When the big breakfast arrived, Belinda made sounds like words. Joey called the waitress over. “What is she saying?” he asked. Belinda made more sounds.

The waitress said, “She said, ‘We don’t have the money to pay for the food.’”

Her first words. Joey emptied his pockets and gave her the change.
When we flew home to the Red House, we bought her a little chest and filled it with money. It was her favorite toy.

•   •   •

S
ome months later, I registered Belinda at the nursery school across the Pacific Coast Highway. As I was leaving, I saw one of the girls who had tormented Dinah in the third grade. Our eyes met. I went out the door and drove back home. There was no way I could send my new daughter to a school where that girl would be caring for her. The question was, did I sit down with the owner and tell her why, about that girl’s history with Dinah? The phone rang. It was the girl. Could she come to my house now and talk to me?

In ten minutes she was sitting across from me. An unexceptional young woman. “I loved Dinah,” she said. “I loved her. I don’t know why I did what I did. It’s haunted me ever since. Please, please, let me make it up to you. I will take care of Belinda the way I should have been a friend to Dinah. I need to.”

By this time, Belinda was three and a half. She spoke not a word of English, only Thai. Until we took her home with us, she had lived with an old grandmother, who raised her and adored her. In Belinda’s mind, in a three-and-a-half-year-old’s mind, I’m sure Joey and I were two big white kidnappers who stole her away from her beloved grandma.

I looked at the blond girl sitting across from me in the living room of the Red House. “Please,” she said. “I promise you won’t be sorry. Let me look after her.”

“Okay, we’ll try it out.”

“You won’t be sorry,” she said.

I wasn’t sorry. Dinah’s nemesis became Belinda’s angel. She babysat for her. She made her Halloween costumes for two years. She
protected her at nursery school. She gave her the attention a strange child in a strange land with strange new parents needed.

Belinda adored Joey, and he was a great and magical daddy for her. He hugged her, threw her in the air, covered her with kisses, tickled her, blew in her face. He wore down her resistance, much as he had worn down mine when we first met. She took right away to Joey’s mother, Rachel, as well—the best, warmest Italian grandmother, lion, boss of the block in Wilmington, Delaware. Later, when we hired Trini as our housekeeper, Belinda would be spoiled to death by both women. She resisted giving me her heart.

For the first year she slept on the long window seat in our bedroom. There was a stone fireplace in the room. It was bright and cozy and safe. She wanted a baby bottle filled with juice at night, but it was turning her teeth gray, and the dentist told me to wean her off it. In a few months her teeth were white. She still bent her back, but she let me rub it gently. The doctor said she had no spinal problem, but it wasn’t until I took her to gymnastics that it straightened entirely.

She held out on me emotionally. I knew in some way she felt abducted and it was my fault and no one else’s. She wouldn’t kiss me, though I was allowed to kiss her cheek. She let me lie with her and sing to her at bedtime. Once she told me that the Peter, Paul, and Mary song “Leaving on a Jet Plane” reminded her of me. I knew she cared about me, but also knew that by withholding she could manipulate me and hurt me.

Soon after we brought Belinda home from Thailand, our friends Len and Jenny Friedlander, who had no children, adopted James. The Friedlanders also lived in Malibu, so James and Belinda had each other still and saw each other all the time.

When Joey’s mother first plopped Belinda in her big warm lap, Belinda got her grandmother back. Not me. Me she kept at a distance,
making me work for every smile, for every sign of approval, holding on to the reserve she needed, a private place away from me. Her real mother was in Thailand, not in Malibu. I understood it was going to take a long time and knew that the only way for Belinda to really, really accept me as her mother was to go back to Thailand and spend time with her birth mother and grandmother when she was older.

After Belinda finished high school, I hired a detective to track down her mother in Thailand. She was making silk from silkworms on a farm outside Bangkok. Dinah accompanied Belinda with a movie camera. She and Belinda had a huge fight at the hotel. When they returned home, Belinda wouldn’t talk to Dinah for a year. Belinda wouldn’t talk about her mother for a long time, but I knew at long last that the longing-for-the-mother-in-Thailand myth was busted. She was mine, but at what price?

In Thailand she met new brothers and sisters and old brothers she had never known. Her father had been a U.S. serviceman, stationed in Bangkok; her mother couldn’t remember his name. She’d had many children, with many fathers. Belinda was the only one she gave away for adoption. On the ride back to the Thai airport, Belinda finally asked her mother, “Why me? Why did you give me away? Why not them? Why me?”

Her aunt told her, “The fortune-teller told us to give you away, because you were sick and might die.”

Her mother didn’t say anything. Belinda finally broke down and bawled hot tears of rejection, while her little bent granny patted her hand and her mother looked out the window at the passing wet green countryside.

My turn finally came when Belinda graduated from college. She made a drawing, a pencil drawing of flowers, and on the side she wrote, also in pencil:

Dear Mom,

No one works like you do, no one makes people happy like you do, no one makes people angry like you do, no one understands how I can stand living with you when you are not here. But I do. Because when you are here you make it all up. And that is why I love you. For the things you do. No one can love like you.

Unsigned