Hello Darlin' (3 page)

A neighborhood cat had chewed its head off.

I was traumatized.

I’ve been “allergic” to cats ever since.

I
n 1937, my mother was in the midst of a sold-out engagement at the Trocadero nightclub
when she was discovered by the influential producer Lawrence Schwab. He offered to
pay her way to New York to star in his next big Broadway musical comedy,
Ring Out the News.
Mom had Nanny take me to Weatherford and then she and Mildred went to New York, where
they found out the play had been canceled. They stayed anyway and did well.

Mother opened in
Leave It to Me,
Cole Porter musical starring Sophie Tucker, Victor Moore, and William Gaxton, and
it turned out to be her big break. She stole the show in the second act with a risqué
striptease while singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” Her scene, set in an Eskimo
village, also featured a trio of chorus boys, including Gene Kelly in his first Broadway
show and Dan Dailey.

That summer Nanny and I visited her, and when I saw the show I was kind of embarrassed.
By today’s standards, her strip was not even a tease. She took off only her short
fur coat and her gloves, leaving her in a teddy. Still, in those days, strippers were
thought of as hookers,
and she was my mother. But later, when she asked what I thought, I told her the truth.
“You’ve got great legs.”

Others thought so too. She was such a sensation that she made the cover of
Life
magazine.

By then I was back in Texas. That fall I remember my grandparents listening to the
Mercury Theater radio drama
The War of the Worlds.
They believed every word of that legendary broadcast was true. That night my grandpa
brought me into their bed and I fell asleep with Nanny on one side and Papu on the
other. He laid his shotgun across his knees and if any aliens showed up, he was going
to give them a Texas-style welcome.

A year later, Grandpa suffered a stroke. Mother was still in the show in New York.
She flew to Weatherford on a Sunday but was back in Manhattan for Tuesday night’s
performance. Grandpa hung on only a short while longer. I heard about his death from
the woman who boarded at their house. Her name was Shipp; she was a high school teacher
who’d rented a room from my grandparents for years. I didn’t have any idea what to
do or say after she told me, so I made a joke.

“Why did Papu wear boots when he died?” I asked.

“What? What are you talking about, Larry?”

“Why did Papu wear boots when he died?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“So he wouldn’t hurt his foot when he kicked the bucket.”

She burst into tears.

I didn’t think it was a great joke but I didn’t think it would have such a dramatic
effect on her.

Before Grandpa died, an owl took up residence in one of the two large cedar trees
that stood outside the front door. According to Texas folklore, the owl was a sign
of death. There was no need for any more bad luck. My dad went outside holding Papu’s
shotgun and blasted that old bird out of the tree. I remember the echo of that shot
in the quiet of the night.

Dad came back in the house and said, “No more bad luck from that critter.”

*   *   *

Soon my mother accepted a contract from Paramount Pictures to star in movies, and
Grandma and I joined her in L.A. Nanny bought a home at 1287 Holmby Avenue, in Holmby
Hills, a pretty neighborhood between Beverly Hills and Westwood. I still remember
the address because my grandmother made me memorize it so I’d know where the heck
I lived if I ever got lost.

Mom made eleven films in just three years, including
The Great Victor Herbert.
I was enrolled in Black Fox Military Institute. Those regimented military schools
were quite popular among parents, especially showbiz parents, back in the 1930s and
1940s. Among those in my class were the sons of Bing Crosby, Edward G. Robinson, Charlie
Chaplin, and Harry Blackstone, the magician. I took to all the rules and the strict
sense of order. A year later, I won the award for the small arms drill. Unfortunately,
with America by then at war, medals were not being struck to conserve metal and I
received a certificate instead. Since the school went under in the 1960s, I never
did get my medal, which I still wish I had, and maybe that’s one of the reasons I
hoard things.

Given my mother’s rising-star status, she had many suitors, until she met Paramount
story editor Richard Halliday. They eloped to Las Vegas in 1940—just the two of them,
without Grandma this time. On November 4, 1941, she gave birth to a daughter, Heller,
so named because she kicked so much when she was inside Mother. (“Heller” is a Texas
term for a hellion.)

When Mother got her first real starring role on Broadway, in
One Touch of Venus,
the 1943 musical comedy with lyrics by Ogden Nash, music by Kurt Weill, and book
by S. J. Perelman, the three of them moved to New York.

Since I was in school in L.A. and accustomed to living with my
grandma, my mother was able to go off to her new life without feeling any guilt about
leaving the two of us behind. She was about the age when she should’ve started a family.
I don’t think she dismissed us as part of her old life, but Richard most likely did.
He wasn’t too fond of me. Nor was I a fan of his. He had to be in control of everything—an
asset to Mother’s career, but it made him a pain in the ass to be around if you weren’t
part of that little world.

And I wasn’t, which was painfully evident when Grandma took ill and I moved into their
Fifth Avenue apartment in New York City. The change happened suddenly and without
any preplanning. Nanny went into the hospital for a gallbladder operation, and I was
shipped East, shielded from the gravity of her illness. Mother and everyone else expected
her to die during surgery, or soon after if she made it through, and they were right.
Nanny died. I cried for days. She’d raised me through my first twelve years and her
death broke me up. Without her, I was truly on my own in Richard’s house.

*   *   *

A whole new life began for me. I was enrolled in Trinity, an old-fashioned prep school
that I rather liked. All the students wore a jacket and tie and flannels. They called
teachers “sir.” It reminded me of military school. Homework was as mandatory as cleaning
your locker or polishing your shoes had been in military school, and this kind of
routine was familiar to me.

The same couldn’t be said for my new Fifth Avenue home. The last time I’d lived with
my mother, Nanny was still running the show. At that point, Mother had been a rising
nightclub singer trying to make it in the movies. Now her world was completely different.
She was a star. Her name was above the marquee on a new Broadway play,
Lute Song.
She was photographed in
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar.
She and Richard regularly socialized with Oscar Hammerstein, Richard Rodgers, Jerome
Kern, and Leland Hayward—the biggest names in the New York entertainment world. It
was everything she’d dreamed
of, but none of what a kid like me found comforting, warm, or nourishing.

We didn’t spend much time together. On school days, I got up at seven and knew to
be quiet because she was still asleep. When I came home around four or five, she was
getting ready to go to the theater. Usually she’d have a light dinner with us, and
then she went to work as Richard called, “We’ve got to leave or we’ll be late.” I
was asleep when she got home. On Saturday, a matinee day, she slept till eleven, got
up and vocalized, had a light lunch, and then went to the theater. She had the “21”
Club send over dinner between shows. With no shows on Sunday, she slept till noon,
her explanation being “Mommy needs her rest,” and then we got to see her around two
if she hadn’t scheduled press or fittings.

The one time all of us did get together, for Sunday night dinner, was hell, as far
as Heller and I were concerned, thanks to Richard. By five o’clock he was shit-faced.
By six-thirty, he was shit-faced
and mean.
At the table, he would lecture us about proper manners. No elbows on the table, he’d
snap. Eat with your mouth closed. Your fork goes in your left hand, the knife in your
right. No talking at the table. Actually, we could talk—but only to answer one of
his asinine questions.
When do children speak? When they’re spoken to.

He tormented us with ridiculous head games. He would ask questions just to try to
catch us contradicting ourselves so he could berate us. He remembered everything we
ever said. It was like he wrote down every utterance in his mind. He often could not
remember what he had for breakfast, but he could recall what grade I got on a spelling
test two months earlier. He verbally beat us over the head with this crap. He was
never violent, just picky. Always picking, picking, picking—as if we were loose threads
on a sweater.

My poor, sweet sister, Heller, only four, might’ve had it worse than me. Richard always
got on her case for not eating her peas. He would watch with the demeanor of a pit
bull until she ate every single pea on her plate, and Heller hated peas!

But she got the last laugh. She’d somehow hold the peas in her mouth and, after being
excused from the table, spit them in the potted plant in the foyer. Finally, the man
who tended the plants said, “Mr. Halliday, there’s something strange growing down
there. I don’t know what it is. Look at all these moldy little green pellets.”

*   *   *

I was given the task of building fires in the fireplace during the winter, a job I
took to seriously and responsibly. In fact, my mother’s friend Judith Anderson once
showed me how to make perfect kindling by rolling up newspaper tightly and tying it
in knots, a trick she’d learned in London when the war made wood scarce, and it was
a trick that I copied.

One night, however, when Richard had told me to make a fire, we went in to dinner
and left the fire blazing unattended in the living room. Richard got a telephone call
saying the apartment above ours was filling up with smoke. We hurried into the living
room and found the switch on the electric fan controlling the flue had not been flipped
to the proper setting.

“Larry, how could you be so stupid?” he scolded.

But I’d turned it on. I knew I had. That was my job and I did it properly.

It must have been Heller who’d flipped the switch to the wrong position. It had to
have been. I’d seen her playing around the fireplace.

But Richard didn’t care. He was convinced it was my fault and he wouldn’t hear any
arguments to the contrary.

“You are a dirty boy to pass blame like that,” he said.

By then I’d had enough of him and decided to find a more pleasant life on my own.
I would run away. I’d just read the novels about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer and I decided
to head to the Mississippi and raft down the river. I packed a bag with sandwiches,
milk, and cookies, bundled myself up because it was cold, and took my Schwann bicycle
outside. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was across the street
and I rode circles around the front. Round and round. I was trying to work up the
nerve to ask someone where I could find the bridge to New Jersey.

After a few hours, the sun went down. I got very cold, went back home, and locked
up my bike.

Now’s not the time of year to run away, I said to myself. Maybe in the spring.

*   *   *

I had a lot of ideas about how to make my life more pleasant, but none as good or
as final as the one I got that spring.

My dad had given me a .22 rifle for my birthday the previous year when I was in military
school in California. The gun was my pride and joy. It had a telescopic sight, perfect
balance, and a great feel. Even after moving to New York, I still kept it polished
as if ready for a military inspection.

One night, as Richard was taking Mother to the theater, I watched from my second-floor
bedroom window as they went outside to their car. I happened to be cleaning my .22
and a thought came to me—one shot, that’s all I need. I sat down on the windowsill
and drew a bead on the back of Richard’s head. While picturing the bullet going right
between his ears, I told myself, I could shoot the son of a bitch and nobody would
think a twelve-year-old boy would do something like that.

But as I practiced my alibi, I talked myself out of actually pulling the trigger.
My story had too many holes, which in the final analysis meant one less hole in Richard’s
head. I went from thinking, What the heck are they going to do to a twelve-year-old,
to acknowledging, They just might throw my ass in jail forever. As a result, though,
I do understand why kids snap and kill someone. They’re tortured, abused, and see
no other recourse. They’re just like adults who go berserk.

Fortunately I wasn’t that bad off. I just thought I was.

In the end I chickened out.

Somehow, despite my frustration, I came to see Richard was simply a goddamned necessary
evil. Mother most likely wouldn’t have had such a brilliant career without Richard
in her life. He and I would never get along, and it prevented Mother and me from having
a real relationship until he died. But knowing I had the choice to take him out if
I desired was enough to get me through that day.

O
ne summer my mother and Richard rented a house in New Canaan, Connecticut. It was
a Roman-style villa owned by Stanton Griffith, a wealthy ambassador without portfolio.
The marvelous home had lush, spacious grounds and an Olympic-size swimming pool. Whenever
Mothers best friend, Jean Arthur, visited, she swam laps at night and I was given
the job of holding a flashlight over the water to keep an eye out for frogs and snakes.
I always looked forward to her visits, since she swam in the nude.

But the summer was not as placid as the scenery. I’d followed the war news from Europe,
as did my mother and Richard. Aside from theater gossip, it dominated conversation.
People have forgotten how the war consumed virtually every aspect of life in America.
Whether it was over cocktails or at the dinner table, the talk always got around to
the latest news about the war. I absorbed everything I heard. The Nazis had to be
defeated, and following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were godless, inhuman
ogres.