Saturday's Child (23 page)

Faith had an eagle eye. Her theme song could have been the folk ditty “Silver Dagger.” I became a jittery wreck for fear of discovery during the short period I was seeing Johnny, an alto-sax jazz musician I'd met all on my own up at Columbia. He was smart, funny, made sultry musical love to his saxophone, and never came on to me crudely—which I appreciated since I was still a nervous virgin. One morning, however, when at two o'clock I tiptoed into the bedroom I still shared with Faith, all hell broke loose. I offered the generic adolescent excuse that I'd been “just walking and thinking.” No fool she, my mother swore that at daylight she'd enlist a private detective and throw whoever I was seeing in jail. Considering where I'd just come from—dancing, in Harlem yet, with Johnny, who was African American—her threat terrified me. The next day, I told him I couldn't see him again.

The guys came and went, while the abiding connections, each with their own unacknowledged erotic undertones, remained. Jean Tafti. Father Joe. And the greatest passion of my teens—the one boiling and erupting with love, possession, hatred, rage, and obsession, the one that trivialized whatever I felt for anyone else—was with
her
.

JOURNAL ENTRY
(
age fifteen)
:

I want to write about her. She's gone to dinner with that ghastly lawyer who pronounces the word “business” as “bidness.” Hallelujah. If only she'd marry him, it might take some of the pressure off me.

To her it's so simple. She's given me her entire life, she expects only love in return. Who could be so warped as to deny her that? She only did what she thought was best for me. That's also a truth. A truth caught in the subway rush-hour of truths. Because yet another truth is: she made me. Frau Frankenstein and her Creature. She's always been a fighter, and she made
me
one. Whatever confidence I have is rooted in her belief in me. But how can it endure against the opposition of the one who created it?

It's as if Faith has no notion of her power over me. She can whine and she can thunder. She can crack me like an eggshell so that I splatter out with pity for her. I used to watch how she tried to avoid being a stage mother, a role that never overly daunted Aunt Sally, and it would break my heart. But I hated her for it, too, because it meant my own mother didn't defend me or contradict anybody who had power. In private,
there
waited the expectations, criticisms, advice to “Forget what the director said. Stand a fraction upstage but if you're caught don't say I told you to because they'll bar me from the set.”

This is so
mean
, so
petty
. I ought to put down some of the good moments. Like yesterday, when I learned that years before I was born, she'd loved a poem of William Blake's I'd just discovered in
Songs of Innocence
. Who would have imagined that? Her rare shocking miraculous
comprehension
. The way her smile can make me feel. She always manages to send me white lilacs on my birthday, and they're sure not in season in January. But she knows I love them, and I guess she orders them way in advance; I bet they're flown in from somewhere at a huge price. Oh
damn
. Why does running away from her tyranny also mean running away from her love?

If she were to read this! She'd be so hurt it would kill her. She'd never speak to me again. She'd throw me out. She'd cry till her eyes bulged and then, still sobbing but icy as the Arctic, she'd turn on me and say, “You are a vile, inhuman, uncompassionate, spoiled brat. You've accepted everything and preened yourself and had the world's adoration while I lived in your shadow. You've played into every bit of what you claim to detest, and enjoyed it. And for this I've given you my entire existence—which you've destroyed.”

And she'd be right about that, too.

From the time I was fourteen on, the war intensified. I would lose on the college front, and I would eventually lose the Tafti tutorial. I would also lose the battle to stop working: it was during this period that I did many of the one-shot television dramas, as well as cut the two Columbia records and play summer stock. The bane of doing benefits continued, but later in my teens I won a skirmish on that front—the right to decide some of the “worthy causes” myself. By age sixteen, I'd become an avid newspaper reader, and Jean Tafti's influence encouraged a sense of outrage at social injustice. Capital punishment and civil rights were beginning to surface as issues of the time. So I appeared at the various vigils that appealed for more stays of execution for Caryl Chessman (who was finally killed by California in 1960). One clipping reminds me that I played Desdemona to Robert Earl Jones's Othello in a benefit performance to raise money for Bayard Rustin's early attempts at organizing for integration in the South. I also took pride in having manipulated my hapless fan clubs into becoming support chapters for the work of the United Nations; doubtless bewildered as to why they were being urged to hold bake sales and get newspaper routes to raise money for UNICEF, the loyal fans did what their idol asked of them.

It's lucky I didn't turn completely schizoid, considering the abyss between the political message of such actions and the molasses content in my press coverage during this period. My salvation was to heighten a sense of irony and develop an affection for bitter humor.

There I'd be in the magazine interviews: the perfect 1950s junior miss, described as “unspoiled,” “courteous,” “fresh-faced,” “bubbly,” and “completely natural.” As one writer admiringly put it, “No rock 'n' roll fan with violent outbursts of antagonism against established society, Robin is the ideal girl-next-door.” (Little did the poor reporter know that he was describing a future Beatles addict, Deadhead, Police fan, Nirvana lover, and mother-to-be of a rock musician. As for violent antagonism against established society, we'll deal with the Weather Underground period in later chapters.) Photo spreads showed me baking pies, doing an arabesque
en pointe
in a leotard, brushing my waist-length hair, shopping for “a prom dress” (
what
prom?), and peering thoughtfully at a typewriter to compose a “teen advice” column for
TV StarParade
magazine. The copy, complete with “good grooming tips” for skin care, manicures, and light makeup, certainly
would have made the future editor in chief of
Ms
. gag. On boys: “Bone up on his interests. Always be sweet and feminine. And no dungarees. Boys like girls to look like girls!”

No wonder I had a reality problem. In print, “Most of all, teens should trust the wisdom of their parents. I don't know what I'd do without my wonderful mother.” In real life, “Mommie, I can't
breathe
. Can't you understand? I'm growing
up
. I need to find out who I
am!
” In public, “I rely on the three P's: Patience, Perseverance, and Prayer.” In private, only perseverance felt relevant. I sometimes tried to speak in code, albeit with a sappy-happy spin to the sub-rosa message; one interview quotes me as saying, “I'm glad I began my career at an early age. I don't have to start out as a starry-eyed girl in show business. I got the glossy, tinsely ideas of show business out of my mind as a child.” But whenever I'd let the mask slip, Faith would be there to do her part in fostering the image. In public, “Robin has a whole crowd of girlfriends her age, and they do crazy things like old-fashioned taffy pulls and getting it in their hair. She fills up the apartment so with kids I don't know where to go.” In private, no girlfriends, never pulled taffy in my life, didn't know enough kids to fill a walk-in closet.

I began to feel that with every interview, every appearance, I was collaborating in the hypocrisy, and I blamed and despised myself for it. But things came to a head when my agents, then MCA, began negotiating a TV network deal for a teenage series along the lines of
Kiss and Tell
, starring young miss vivacious herself. Faith and I had a monumental fight over my having added seven pounds to my ninety-six-pound weight (my height—such as it is—had stabilized at five feet one inch by age fifteen). I knew I'd been snacking a lot, and I certainly knew I was miserable. So, having read my Jung, Freud, and—bless her!—Karen Horney, I decided I must be eating from depression. But it was my mother who unwittingly handed me the tool of rebellion when she screeched,

“You
know
the camera adds ten pounds! You better drop that weight
fast
, kiddo, or we could lose the MCA deal!”

There it was. The route to freedom.

I could
eat
my way out of the business.

And so I did, turning depression into revolt, sneaking food into my mouth whenever she wasn't looking, cutting dance classes, discovering
the delights of candy bars and pizza, deliberately developing my own version of an eating disorder before I'd ever heard the phrase. But it worked. In six months, despite all the enforced diets and raging arguments, I gained thirty-five pounds. The MCA deal fell through. Audition after audition turned me down, and after a while my agents called less frequently. I'd managed to make myself virtually uncastable. (Unfortunately, there were still radio jobs to pay the bills.) But there was a personal price to pay, in body-loathing. Nor was there yet any feminist movement to put that self-contempt into context.

JOURNAL ENTRY
(
age sixteen)
:

It's very hard being a teenager, because you think and feel everything strongly and at the same time everyone is telling you that you only
believe
you're in love, only
think
you're depressed, only
imagine
you're confused. (This feels like Charles Boyer secretly turning the gas lights up and down in order to drive Ingrid Bergman daffy.) Also, you'd give anything in your life not to be a sophomoric “teenager.” Which in fact you are. Disgusting state.

I'd love to peel me off myself like Faith peels herself out from a corset. I wish my body was removable like those custom-made braces I could take out before a show so they wouldn't flash in the lights when I smiled. It's creepy that I came out of her body. I don't feel as if I'm in
mine
, but I know I was in
hers
.

Where I really live is inside my head. Well, there's one thing I
do
do in my body: masturbate. Of course, never having had a damned room of my own, even here in the promised holy land of a Sutton Place apartment, I learned long ago how to develop speed while hidden in the bathroom. I must be the swiftest hand in the East. Door locked, sink-faucet running, zip bang whoosh three minutes flat: Ta
Da
! Then flush as if you'd used the toilet, and emerge not even breathing heavily before she growls Why is the door locked Why are you taking so long Don't you know reading on the toilet will give you piles.

Somehow it's all connected to the way I feel about my body. Short, short-waisted, small-boned, tending toward the plump—like hers, dammit—and currently
way
overplump. Yet I lack her good features,
her pale skin, large eyes. My breasts? Ample (have been since I was thirteen; they had to use binders to flatten them for certain roles so I could look younger). Nose too large. Eyes too small. Hair thin and given to oiliness—and I'm still fighting the Battle of the Blond to get her to let me return to my own color, which, judging by the roots, is probably a revolting mousey brown. But I'm stuck with the principle of the thing.

I make me sick.

Given the immediacy of adolescence, no precocity could have comforted me that I would ever feel better about my body. Yet after a year or so—once the casting directors seemed to have given up on the pudgy teen who hadn't made “the transition” after all—to my amazement and my mother's exasperation, the weight melted away.

Not only did I not need protective poundage anymore, but romance had entered my life. Not with boys this time. There was a man—in fact, two of them. They even overlapped.

Petter Juel-Larsen was a handsome, talented, concert pianist in his early twenties. The hair was wavy dark blond, the body was tall and muscular, the Chopin “Ballades” were to swoon over. Petter (aptly named, but pronounced “Peter”) was the son of a well-to-do Massachusetts family presided over by a concert-mother version of a stage mother, so he knew the drill and was smart enough to go out of his way to charm
my
mother. She had him over for frequent dinners, and on occasion, when he stayed late talking or playing a private concert for us, she actually encouraged him to sleep over on the sofa or, in warm weather, on the double lounge on our apartment's small back terrace. She knew I'd tiptoe out to him the moment I thought her asleep, so I can only surmise that she must have decided what she couldn't stop she would control: any heavy petting would happen under her supervision. For almost a year, these foreplay-for-its-own-sake sleep-overs took place in between dinners, etudes, and conversations about art, literature, and music. I fancied myself in love with Petter and played it for Melodrama Center Stage. When his family finally sent him off to England for advanced conservatory study, I was crushed. But at least I was now only technically a virgin, and the Ideal American Girl had practiced enough five-finger exercises to develop jack-off artistry.

Then there was Ron Fieve. He was a bit older, in his mid-twenties, a Harvard medical school graduate, a psychiatric resident at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, a shrink-in-training. He was not as tall as Petter and not as picture-book pretty, but he had his own rakishly handsome attractiveness, a voice like a cello, and a Thunderbird convertible—so as Petter faded, Ron brightened into focus. With him, there were fascinating conversations about dreams and the unconscious, realms of exploration particularly appealing to a prematurely sophisticated and narcissistic adolescent girl. With Ron I continued my erotic education about (almost) everything sexual except actual intercourse. (I seem to have presaged the Clintonian prohibition on
that
, as well as the self-deluding defense that nothing else was “real sex.”) I had fun with Ron. We went for long drives with the convertible top down, went dancing, picnicking, to movies and plays. He brought me to hospital social events as “his girl,” which felt delectably grown-up. Since he regularly did volunteer medical work at clinics in Bedford Stuyvesant and Harlem, he seemed to have no problems with my nascent politics. About my writing he seemed agnostic, neither particularly supportive nor opposed, and I think he genuinely loved me. So I talked myself into falling in love with him.