My First Five Husbands (4 page)

We were enrapt.

I played the fairy godmother in the
Cinderella
musical and Aunt Polly in
Tom Sawyer
(I can still sing my solo from that show, and am likely to, at the drop of a hat), using Mrs. Moore as my model for Aunt Polly: strict with a well-hidden heart of gold. A local radio station held a contest for kid singers, and I entered with “His Rockin’ Horse Ran Away,” one of those fast and furious Betty Hutton numbers with murderously tongue-twisting bim-bang lyrics. The only other contender was a pudgy young man who sang “Across the Alley from the Alamo.” Well, I made short work of him. Rode my rockin’ horse right up his alley, thank you very much, and won the contest hands down.

I
n February of 1945, my father got orders that he was shipping to the Pacific in May for parts undisclosed. Mother drove Melinda and me out to California to be with him for his last two months in the States. We left on my eleventh birthday in Mother’s old car with bad tires, having flats all along the way. Tires for civilian use were strictly rationed, so Mother had to find black-market dealers to replace our blown-out ones. Bill’s camp was in Oakland and we lived on the base, first in a trailer house (very exciting), then in a Quonset hut (even more exciting!). I was bussed off to Catholic School in Pleasanton, where I spent every recess hiding in abject terror from a gang of big, rowdy Filipino boys. I made no friends, since I was always hiding, but my teacher adored me, as I was the only well-behaved kid in her class. After Bill shipped out, we drove home. I’d put on a bit of prepubescent girth while I was gone, so three girls in my class taunted me unceasingly. “Roly-poly Eddi-Rue! How do you get home, roll down the hill?”

They wrote insulting sentences on the blackboard every morning before class. And Yvonne wasn’t there to be on my side. I dreaded going to school. But by the beginning of the sixth grade, I was trim again and had a new best friend—Glenna Anderson, the principal’s daughter. I turned twelve in February and, a few days later, got my period. Mother was getting ready to go out for the evening and hastily handed me a Kotex. “Here. Put this on.”

My friend Skipper Edelen was spending the night, he and Melinda and I sleeping on pallets on the floor, and the two of them banded together, kidding and razzing me. I thought their behavior was unforgivably crass. I suddenly felt much older, having crossed the threshold out of childhood.

H
alloween at Washington Irving Grade School in Durant was a spectacular event, with games, prizes, and cookies and candy for sale. A haunted house in the basement was reached by a slide down some narrow stairs. Mr. Bateman, the custodian, created it differently every year. All the events cost a dime ticket, except the spook house, which was fifteen cents and worth every penny. For the sixth-grade Halloween night, Mother made me a white satin hoop-skirted frock trimmed in black lace. I had just read
Gone with the Wind
and thought I was Scarlett O’Hara. Sashaying down the crowded hallway, I ran into Benny Frank Butler, on whom I’d harbored a secret crush since third grade.

I curtsied.

He bowed.

I almost fainted.

We ended each happy term in May with an all-school picnic at the city park, a huge, rambling acreage full of running space, trees, and a stream. Some people said the stream was the city sewage line, but it looked clear enough to us and just narrow enough to jump over in some places. (I only fell in once.) The picnic went on all day and we never got tired.

At the start of the seventh grade, my friend Don Knight was at my house one afternoon, and I revealed my long-held crush on Ben. Don jumped on his bike and bounded away, to return twenty minutes later with Ben in tow. Luckily, Ben was also smitten with me. Tall, with an understated, dry wit, Ben took me for rides on his horse, walking the stolid mare along with me sitting close behind him, my hands on his waist. Joy sublime? You better believe it.

One evening, Ben and I were sitting in Mother’s Chevy in the front yard and he said, “Eddi-Rue, remember I told you I’d kiss you when you least expected it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, do you expect it now?”

The outcome lay squarely in my lap. I took a breath and innocently said, “No.”

And…oh, Lord…he kissed me.

That piece of acting ranks right up there with winning the Emmy.

A
fter serving in the Army and dancing in ballet choruses in New York City, a certain Newcomb Rice returned to his hometown of Durant with his Scottish wife, Kitty, to settle down, have children, and establish the Oklahoma Dancing Academy. He was an excellent teacher, schooled in the Russian ballet system. Mother enrolled me in his classes in the fall of 1946, and I was enchanted from the get-go. Every Saturday morning, I walked up North Fifth Street to Southeastern College for a glorious hour of ballet instruction on the basketball court. (Basketball and ballet became forever entwined for me.) After a year, we were moved up to pink toe shoes. I found the technique difficult but the soul of dancing natural. Newcomb used to say we were “Pygmalion and Galatea,” like the Greek legend about a statue brought to life by her mentor.

All through the seventh and eighth grades, we had wonderful parties at my house. We danced—and I mean to tell you, we
danced
! Mother had taught Melinda and me to jitterbug, Charleston, “sugar,” foxtrot, and waltz, and many of the boys were good dancers. (Sadly, Ben was not among them, but maybe that would have made him too perfect.) We played Spin the Bottle and Post Office and other kissing games. In Go Fish, a girl was blindfolded and all the boys lined up and walked around her. Whomever was in front of her when she said, “Stop!”—well, she had to walk around the block with him.

Holding hands
.

But who wants to walk around the block holding hands with some twerp? Ben and I worked out secret signals, a carefully timed sneeze, a little cough. He and I shared a sense of humor and a special romantic rapport. Moonlit Oklahoma nights, balmy or brisk, holding hands with Ben—sheer heaven! We went steady for two years, ages twelve to fourteen, with only one week off when we agreed to trade partners for a week with another steady couple, Tawana Lou Clark and Carol Roberts. Both Tawana Lou and Carol were awfully good-looking, but I didn’t really have much to say to Carol, so when the week was up, Ben and I were both eager to change back. (Hey, maybe if married couples could take a week off and try another flavor…but then again, maybe not. It didn’t work wonders with me and Husband #2.)

What a wonderful time junior high school was! Hayrides out at Joe Walter Colclazier’s house, playing Kick the Can and Red Rover at my house after school, getting Miss McKinney back for our seventh-and eighth-grade homeroom teacher. All those shows she put on—even Ben joined the chorus. And—can you believe it?—I was elected cheerleader in the eighth grade, along with Tawana Lou Clark, who had the cutest figure in junior high. I was floored. I didn’t think of myself as the cheerleading type. Of course, I was. A flat-chested cheerleading type.

But casting a shadow over those happy years was that deep, underlying panic I felt, along with the knowledge that we would be moving the summer after eighth grade. When Bill got back from the war, instead of settling in Durant or Houston, he went to Ardmore, Oklahoma, and hooked up with Mr. Leonard Hurst as Hurst and McClanahan, General Contractors, buying five acres north of town on which to start building our house, which he designed himself. Years later, I asked him why he chose to move us to Ardmore instead of back to Houston, which had obvious professional and cultural advantages, and he said, “Oh, honey, your mother’s hay fever was so awful in Houston. I had to find a place where she’d be more comfortable.”

He’d given up advancement in Houston so Mother would be more comfortable? Mother has always maintained that Bill had gotten a better offer from Mr. Hurst. Who knows what really happened? I do understand, however, knowing my father, why he chose to buy land outside town and build his own unique house, instead of competing with the Ardmore millionaires. Our house was truly one of a kind, not as expensive as the millionaires’ swanky digs but ahead of them in many other ways. My father wasn’t rich, but he more than made up for it in talent and ingenuity, a trait that runs in our family. (Cough, cough.)

We drove over every few weeks to see the house as it was a-building, practically by Bill’s labors alone, assisted by his wonderful foreman, Lee. (Many’s the time I heard Bill say, “Lee is the best Negra man I’ve ever met.”) Walking over the floors of the house with more and more framework up was exciting. I didn’t want to move away from my friends in Durant, but I was bursting with pride at what Bill was creating—a large, modern house unlike anything in Ardmore. Two stories, flat-roofed, with a door opening out onto the lower roof and a ladder (which we weren’t supposed to climb, but did) to the top roof. There was an intercom system, a stairway with vertical silver poles instead of a regular banister, a secret panel in the fireplace where he kept a special bottle of booze. The second floor was one large rumpus room with a real soda fountain, big round mirrors on the ceiling, and a tiled floor designed like a shuffleboard. Later, he bought a used jukebox—a real one that played 78 records.
Wow
, huh?

It took until June of 1948 to get four rooms more or less finished and insulated: Bill and Mother’s bedroom, the kitchen, the breakfast nook, and one bathroom. Melinda and I slept in the breakfast nook, barely big enough to hold a double bed. By fall, Bill had finished our bedroom and the hallway. He built in all the beds, with headboards balanced to swing forward so private things could be stored behind them. Over the years, he was always adding new rooms, changing the interior, building, building, building. We ended up with four bathrooms. Mother’s had an artfully designed mosaic floor, which Bill hand-laid himself. All this while building dozens of houses and public buildings in town.

Sketch made of me in Greenwich Village, 1949. I didn’t like it then. Love it now.

Our house was situated “thirteen telephone poles past the standpipe north of town,” as I used to instruct my high school dates, on a five-acre meadowland that my dad worked on incessantly, planting trees and flowers and raising large vegetable gardens of organic, composted, gorgeous produce. I spent my high school years exploring the wide meadow and the woods beyond, finding fossils and bleached-white tortoise shells, looking at the sky, gazing always northeast, dreaming of going to New York to make it big in show business.