Carmelina Avenue (Early’50s)
When I was six, I made up a game which I played almost every day: I would drive my bike out from our family’s estate to a hidden spot between a wall of eucalyptus trees and a neighbor’s ivy-covered fence. There, among the spiderwebs, I created an imaginary family, acting out all the parts; I was the father, I kissed my “wife” and “kids” goodbye as I drove to “work” in the morning, then quickly turned around in the “evening” to be greeted by my family, who showered me with unconditional love, and I them. It was my approximation of what a real family should be.
Countless children around the world have played versions of this game. I was raised in an upper-class white American family, so my circumstances pale in comparison to the realities of those who live in poor, genuinely neglectful or abusive families. But that doesn’t change the fact that I had good reason to play this game. Even though I was priveleged on many levels, I had an emotionally abusive father and an absent, checked out mother. They both drank heavily every night.
The most real affection I got was from the live-in household staff, a collection of colorful characters—Solveig, Ruth, and Astrid, the warm, young and pretty Scandanavian maids; Jim and Johnson, a pair of older (married) butlers; and Etta, the perilously heavy female cook—who all gladly took me in even though I was banned from the kitchen (my father said we boys would “get in their way,” which I realized even then was code for them being “second-class” citizens). This made me feel even closer to them, and when he would poke his head into the pantry upon arriving home each evening to give the night’s orders, they would hide me, crouched behind the central prep island or behind their dresses. He never caught on.
A second memory of my sixth year was the hiring of a new governess, Miss Edna Brown, who was brought in to raise my youngest brother, Steven, when he was born. A foul, chain-smoking 40 year-old woman with thick, hairy legs and a pockmark-scarred face, she rivaled Nurse Ratched in temperament. We lived in “The Nursery,” a wing of the three-story mansion set apart from our parents so they could have their privacy. She ran a reign of terror over Lawrence, my middle brother, and me, favoring Steven as her own baby, which he virtually was, since my mom was off shooting movies during much of his first two years. Miss Brown ran the household staff with the same brutal efficiency that she ran the Nursery, but hid it so well that my parents were never aware of it until after their divorce, when my mom moved into a normal-sized house—with no staff—and realized what she was really about. The final straw was when she forged a letter from one of my mom’s jilted suitors who she favored.
My father’s first love was his thoroughbred horses, on whom he squandered vast sums with few winners to show for it. The Sadim touch, as my brothers and I later called it. But it made him feel powerful, sitting in the owner’s box at Santa Anita or in Saratoga, New York, with his gorgeous movie star wife beside him. Every evening he’d have a copy of The Racing Form delivered by one of the butlers (Jim and Johnson could have doubled for Abbott and Costello), and he would demand absolute silence from my brother and me, who had to ask permission to visit them in their sitting room each evening. Then he would light a cigar and drink his Scotch as he tore the pages open and pored over the stats. If one of us even whispered he would look up with a fierce expression that shut us down cold. Once finished reading he would give us a verbal numbers game that we would have to compute in our heads; it was the closest thing to affection we shared, and we were thrilled to come up with the right answers. All this time our mother would be drinking bourbon old fashioneds, brought up from the kitchen in a steady stream.
Why a witty, highly intelligent movie star would marry and stay with a petulant, spoiled scion who she knew was cheating on her by their fifth year of marriage has always been beyond me. She had been brought out to California from Virginia at age 17 by Howard Hughes, the most powerful man in Hollywood (if batshit crazy). He groomed her to be a star, and she became his lover until she briefly married the crooner Rudy Vallee (also 25 years her senior). My father entered the picture a few years later and wooed her away from Hughes, who had counted on marrying her. He was so incensed that he stopped her career in its tracks. Not until several years later did my father use his new law degree to sue for her release, but by then she was no longer in demand. Her career limped along for several more years as she gave birth to me and my brothers, never to reach the same lofty heights again.
Look her up. Her name was Jane Greer, and she starred in one of the best noir films ever made, “Out of the Past,” directed by Jacques Tourneur, co-starring Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas.