Love, Ellen: A Mother/Daughter Journey (6 page)

That encouraged me to try my hand at writing, and soon I was contributing local-color stories to the
Christian Science Monitor
on subjects as diverse as pet care, family vacations, and a day at Mardi Gras with my four-year-old son dressed as a cowboy and my one-year-old daughter, my miracle child, dressed as a bunny.

Ellen was indeed a miracle. I had to beg for a second child. Elliott thought one child, whom we dearly loved, was sufficient. Nothing if not tenacious, I didn’t give up. I thank God every day that I persevered, and so does Elliott.

When we first found out that I was pregnant, we decided to tell Mother, Daddy, and Mom at the same time. A few nights later, at dinner over at my parents’ house, we announced the happy news. My parents were thrilled. Mom tried to act pleased, but I could tell in her voice that something was wrong.

We found out what it was in the car on the way home.

“No advance warning?” she said, livid. “How could you just surprise me like that?” And she went on.

The next day, still seeming out of sorts, she got busy helping with the housework. When she figured out some gadget that wasn’t working properly, I offered, “I think you’re very smart.”

“Well, I don’t think you are,” she shot back.

This wasn’t the best way to begin this pregnancy that I so wanted. But I was too happy to let her get me down for long.

Of course, once Ellen bounced into our world, Mumsy adored her, just as she did her first grandchild. Vance and El were the light of her life.

Though we told Vance that he was going to have a brother or sister, we gave him no explanation about the pregnancy or where the baby would come from. Then one day, close to my due date, when I asked him to do something that he didn’t want to do, his answer was, “No, Mrs. Fat Tummy.” Did we think he wouldn’t notice?

I was so huge, in fact, that Elliott’s mother later said she didn’t know how I could go outside.

Vance had come early, but Ellen was two weeks late. Finally, one Sunday morning after a big breakfast, the pains started and my water broke. When we got to the hospital—Ochsner Foundation Hospital in Jefferson Parish—the nurses weren’t happy to hear about the amount of food I had eaten.

In the meantime, hearing the news, Mother and Daddy rushed to the hospital to be with us. But Elliott met them downstairs and asked them to wait there until he called them. Mother later told me Elliott’s coat pockets were bulging with Christian Science literature. We did pray without ceasing.

And so God answered that day, January 26, 1958, when Ellen Lee DeGeneres was born. She weighed a whopping nine pounds, thirteen ounces. The birth was not difficult. They held her up immediately for me to see, and I just had an impression of a beautiful little blob of fatness. Later, when relatives gathered to look through the glass at the babies in the nursery, they overheard a man point to Ellen and say, “Look at that one—he’s going to be a loot-ball player.”

Mom corrected him indignantly, “That’s a girl.”

Ellen was a placid, happy baby from the start—and a pretty, chubby, cuddly, blond little toddler whose piercing blue eyes always seemed older than their years. They could twinkle mischievously one moment and fill with sensitive tears the next. As a little girl, she adored two things above all else: her baby dolls and her big brother, Vance.

As she shed her baby fat, Ellen stretched into a thin, lanky tomboyish, active, fun-loving girl, fairly athletic (like Vance, who was extremely athletic). I encouraged her to take ballet, but she wasn’t a bit interested. Still, that man was wrong about football—she wasn’t interested in that either.

Many years later, a good while after she came out to me as a lesbian, Ellen still couldn’t understand that I’d had no inkling beforehand. She would point to pictures of herself in ties and short pixie haircuts, saying, tongue in cheek, “No, of course not, there were no clues.”

I do recall one funny incident of confusion when El was about six and we went for a weekend to Gulfport, Mississippi. We stayed at the very nice Edgewater Hotel—a stay which I had won for us in some sort of Hammond organ contest. El had short straight hair and bangs at that time. Though she did wear dresses, while on vacation she mostly wore shorts and T-shirts. One morning while Elliott was in the elevator with Vance and Ellen, a hotel guest asked, “Is that a little boy or a little girl?”

In a huff, Elliott replied, “That’s a little girl.” Then, as the elevator reached its destination, without missing a beat, he turned to Ellen and said, “Come on, Albert,” as they got out. Just more of her dad’s instant humor.

E
LLIOTT AND
I felt blessed to have two very good, very sweet children. Aside from the present, this era—when Vance and Ellen were babies and growing up—was the happiest time of my life. Motherhood really seems to have been my calling.

The responsibilities of being a parent are great. As our guide, we relied on prayer for almost everything. The children never had any vaccinations or medicine. We took great care to dress them properly in cold weather. If it turned cool during the day, I would rush to school with sweaters for them. Also, I think we had the world’s first hair-dryer—a real dinosaur. In winter, we would dry their hair so they wouldn’t catch colds. I still have that hair-dryer. Isn’t it funny, the things we hang on to?

Vance and Ellen both enjoyed Sunday school and learning Bible stories and prayers. There’s a nice children’s prayer they said every night:

I still have the message Ellen scrawled not long after learning to print: “God is Love.” Once Vance was playing outside with his friends and fell but didn’t hurt himself. One of his friends said, “Oh, he’s on God’s side.” I don’t know where that came from, unless they heard their parents talk about how important prayer was in our lives. Even though today the three of us are no longer affiliated with Christian Science, we’ve taken the best, most positive aspects and incorporated them into our lives.

I do believe that giving children an early spiritual foundation is a very positive thing—particularly the message that God loves them unconditionally, just as their parents do. There are other important messages to teach your children. Most important, I think, is to let them know that they can do anything that they truly want to do in life.

That was one of the greatest gifts Mother gave me, always saying, “Bets, you can do anything”—with each sweater I made, each picture I painted, each needlepoint I sewed, each course I took.

It’s important to teach your kids that they have not only the ability and the right to achieve their dreams but the ability and the right to achieve the love they desire. And as they seek what they want, it’s important to teach them that they need to be responsible, responsible for themselves—that they can and should be assertive, which does not mean aggressive.

Though Mother gave me the positive message that I could do anything, she didn’t help me become assertive. Hearing her say all too often, “You shouldn’t feel that way,” I learned that my feelings didn’t count. That was a lesson I didn’t want to pass on to my children.

Children need to be respected, I learned. If you give them respect—not yelling at them or ignoring them—they learn to respect.

I learned daily in my journey into motherhood. I learned that it’s important to be consistent as a parent, and that parents as partners should do their best to present a united front. I learned that it’s important for a child to see parents expressing real love and affection for each other. Some of these things happened in our home, and some didn’t, but I believe they represent the ideal situation.

I learned as I went along, through trial and error. Knowing what I know now, I’d love to have another crack at certain things. Since that’s not possible, I continue, as I did along the way, to do the best I can. If there is one thing I would have done differently, it has to do with communication. The DeGeneres family simply did not excel in soul-baring.

One thing I fortunately did do, when the children were little, was spend time with them. Dinah Shore, who had a TV show then, sang a song about a child asking his mother to come out and play with him. His mother was too busy and said “later,” but later never seemed to come. That message got through to me, and I did enjoy my children when they were little. Maybe that’s why I have such happy memories of this time. Maybe that’s why we stayed so close in spite of later traumatic events which could have forced us apart.

M
OST PARENTS WOULD
probably agree with what I’ve just said. We all want the best for our kids. We want a world that is safe and full of opportunities for them to flourish. We want them to succeed in their chosen careers and to grow up to find loving life partners. We all do the best we can to impart those values, and we all make some mistakes. In these respects, I doubt that most families are very different from the DeGeneres family.

And yet, to my shock, I have found that there are people who say that the principles of loving and nurturing your child don’t apply in the case of a child who happens to be gay. During a call-in radio interview I did recently, the lines were lit up with people calling to thank Ellen and to thank me. Then a caller came on who identified herself as a mother and began by saying, “I want to tell Betty that I respect her unconditional love for her daughter, I think it’s wonderful that she supports her … unconditionally …”

There was a pause and I mouthed to the people with me at the radio station: “… But …”

This woman was more formal than that, though. She said, “However … ,” and then continued in a harsher tone, “I wanted to share with you that Ellen’s choice to be gay is …” There was another pause. I wanted to stop her there and object, but I waited as she went on, saying, “… it’s not my choice and so I am very concerned about this proactive movement infiltrating children and teens. The word of God on this issue is clear.” She added, “I’m not prepared to give you a sermon,” even though the implication was that she would be happy to cite chapter and verse.

“Well,” I responded, “I understand exactly where you’re coming from and what you want to say. And I don’t want to debate with you or change your mind. You feel strongly and I appreciate that.” I could have ended there, but when I thought of the gay sons and daughters living in her community, I felt the need to continue: “Being gay is not a choice. No one can be recruited. Absolutely not. In a lot of high schools today, there are gay-straight alliances and they’re made up of both gay and straight teenagers who support and accept each other. They’re not swapping back and forth. They are who they are.”

This mother really had a lot of conflict. She began again, saying, “I am against anyone causing pain to anyone else’s life because of whatever they choose to be …”

“Good,” I replied.

“However …” she said again. “My plumb line is the word of God. It’s not me, it’s not my choice, it’s what God has given us. And in the word of God, it is clear, it goes from Leviticus, Luke, Romans, Revelation—all the way through—on this lifestyle which comes from our innate humanness when we take our eyes off God. And I’m not hearing enough on this from people who are Christians and believers.”

I countered, “Lots and lots of gay men and women are Christians and believers.” That brought the discussion to an end. After the caller signed off, I added another observation saying, “The Bible—or rather, the interpretation of the Bible—has been used through the years for whatever purposes certain groups have had. Scripture was used to condone slavery. It was used to keep women from having the vote. And now it is being used vociferously for this purpose.”

As I continued to think about this exchange, I found it mind-boggling that those who profess to be biblical experts seem to have skipped Jesus’s admonitions: “Judge not and “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.”

It also seemed unchristian to commend another mother for loving her child unconditionally and then add “however.” “Unconditional” means no “buts,” doesn’t it?

It’s true that until Ellen came out to me, I was totally ignorant about homosexuality. Even so, I can’t imagine for one second that there would have been a “but” connected to loving her.

Knowing what I now know about how hard it is to find another person with whom you are compatible and passionate and with whom you can make a happy life, I can’t imagine begrudging your daughter or son that kind of love because it happens to be with a member of the same sex.

I can’t imagine that this basic right with which we are born should ever be denied to any person. We love who we love.

3

The Paper Doll Family

T
HE
1950
S HAD ENDED
, and a new decade was dawning. When I look back at the headlines of the 1960s—reporting major cultural, social, and political changes—it’s strange to recall how insulated I was from everything.

In 1961, for example, as the civil rights movement began to gather steam, a group known as the “Freedom Riders”—blacks and whites together championing the cause of freedom—left from Washington, D.C., on an integrated bus tour of the South. Their bus was burned, and the riders were badly beaten. At the time that was happening, I was practically oblivious. Certainly, I read the news, but protected as I was in the cocoon of normal, day-to-day family life, it had little impact. Later, as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., came to the fore, I recall being impressed by his impassioned speeches. But I didn’t yet recognize that his struggle was also mine. Little could I imagine that decades later, I would join the ongoing struggle for equal rights for all and come to speak in the same forum as Dr. King’s widow, the inspiring Coretta Scott King.

The women’s movement of the later 1960s and 1970s must have bypassed Metairie, Louisiana. At least it bypassed me, and I wouldn’t catch up until 1990. (Maybe all that bra-burning turned me off at first.)

Similarly, I didn’t feel compelled to join up with the antiwar movement as the United States deepened its involvement in Vietnam. Like many other Americans at the time, I believed at first that we were there for a good cause, to protect democracy. But as the war dragged on and so many lives were being lost, I prayed with my fellow citizens for an end to the war. Thank God that end came before the day in the mid-1970s that Vance told me he had joined the Marines.

Being a typical all-American nuclear family—as families like ours were called in those days—the DeGeneres household did not go untouched by trends in music, art, and popular culture. From the moment the Beatles emerged on the scene, Vance and Ellen were caught up in Beatlemania, and later they were caught up in Motown and other rock music. Television was another staple. We all enjoyed watching variety shows like
The Ed Sullivan Show
, Steve Allen, and Jack Paar, as well as game shows such as
What’s My Line?

Vance and Ellen watched everything—any excuse not to do homework. Elliott and I tried to limit the amount of TV they watched, but Mumsy had the set on all the time and, as small as our house was, there wasn’t much we could do to keep the kids away from it. Little did we realize that they were studying for their future professions.

It’s strange that in such a turbulent, eventful decade, our family life was outwardly so uneventful. About the most exciting thing that ever happened to us was a trip we took in 1963, when Vance was eight and Ellen five. Elliott had gone to work selling life insurance for Pan American (the same company where Daddy was about to be promoted to vice president), and having done well, he had earned a trip to the sales convention in San Francisco. Then I was asked to address the convention on what it means to be the wife of an insurance salesman.

The four of us—without Mumsy—left New Orleans on the Sunset Limited, thrilled to be going on this wonderful adventure to glamorous California. Our first stop was going to be Los Angeles. We had a sleeping car on the train with an upper and lower bunk, and we soaked up all the new sights, thoroughly enjoying the changing scenery along the way.

Ellen gazed out the window with wonderment, clutching her doll in one hand and in the other her favorite blanket, which she took everywhere and which was now little more than a scrap. Vance made witty commentary. Somewhere in the West, we passed a herd of goats grazing and he said, “The mama goat’s saying, ‘Kids, eat your greens.’ ” Pretty clever.

In Los Angeles, we were starry-eyed tourists. On a bus tour in the Hollywood Hills, we were shown a helicopter pad above a house that was said to be Frank Sinatra’s. We went to a studio lot where they were filming
Gilligan’s Island
and the director was saying, “Back up the shark one more time.” At that same studio, I said something embarrassing as we were going into the commissary and I saw Jerry Van Dyke walking out. “Oh, look,” I said, “there’s Dick Van Dyke’s brother.” Not good for Jerry’s ego, I’m sure.

The highlight of the trip was a day at Disneyland. We stayed at a motel right across the street so we could get an early start. The four of us were awestruck and delighted by everything we did and saw.

One sight that impressed me was a young woman and her children who were being given the VIP treatment. They had an escort and were chauffeured around in a Disneyesque golf cart, and they didn’t have to wait in lines. Who in the world are they to be so lucky? I wondered.

Ironically, just a few years ago, we could have been that lucky. But we never went back. The visit in 1963 was our one and only trip.

There are a few other ironies about this visit. One is my recollection of being in an amphitheater enjoying an authentic-looking Native American dance. At the end, the participants invited the children in the audience to get up and join in the dance with them. I looked around, spotting the kids who jumped from their seats to be part of the fun. Not my children. They were too bashful.

“Go on, Vance, you’re a good dancer,” I said, urging him to take Ellen too. Nothing doing. I gave Elliott a look, as if to say, “Do something.” He only shrugged. I gave up, realizing that I was the one who really wanted to be having all that freedom and fun. How interesting that my two who were too bashful would end up entertaining the world, in music, TV, movies, and stand-up.

It was also interesting, later on, to hear Ellen tell an interviewer that one of her reasons for wanting to be famous was that as a little girl she had watched her parents being impressed by celebrity and thought that was a way to win our approval. Hearing that bothered me, because we did try to give both Ellen and Vance the message that they had our unconditional love and approval no matter what. Nonetheless, upon reflection, I could see that Elliott and I were star-struck—in our own ways.

San Francisco was wonderful too. My speech at the convention was very well received. When I stood to address hundreds of life insurance salesmen and their wives, it was a foretaste of public speaking experiences that wouldn’t come for another thirty-four years. I was very proud of Elliott’s hard work and liked commending him publicly for an asset which I described as a saving grace in any household:

It’s not easy to imagine how I could so sincerely extol the virtues of selling life insurance. But I did, saying that it could at times be “deeply satisfying.”

We did more family sight-seeing, but it was hard for San Francisco to compete with all the heady stuff we’d experienced in Los Angeles. No wonder all four of us would eventually end up in southern California.

The train ride home was enjoyable as well, even though we were much more low-key, knowing that it was taking us back to our humdrum everyday lives. When we got home, we hadn’t even unpacked our bags before Ellen began to sob, “My blanket, Mama, my blanket.” She had left that old scrap on the train. We tried to locate it but couldn’t. She braved the loss well. Even at that age, she was starting to have a sense of the dramatic.

Meanwhile, other truly dramatic changes were in the works.

I
T WAS A
cold, rainy morning with a sharp wind blowing off Lake Pontchartrain. The children were at school and Elliott was at work. I was getting ready to leave for one of my part-time jobs, which then included substitute teaching and selling encyclopedias—whatever I could do to help swell our limited finances.

I went to let Mumsy know I was leaving when I found her dressed and preparing to leave herself. Ruth never went anywhere by herself.

“Mom, where are you going?” I asked in alarm.

Angry and upset, she told me, “I’m going to walk to the lake.”

We lived about three miles from Lake Pontchartrain, separated from it by fields and swamps. Not to mention that this was a woman who had never walked across the street and half a block to our little neighborhood grocery.

She insisted further, “I’m walking to the lake, I said.” Mumsy was talking incoherently. Things weren’t right, she said; she couldn’t get them straight.

I acted as if I thought she was joking and managed to talk her out of it. If this had been an isolated incident, I would have been able to brush it aside. It was, however, only one in a series of bad days. Without a medical diagnosis, we’ll never know exactly what the problem was, but she wasn’t getting better and her mental condition only went downhill.

On top of my concern was the resentment that had built up over the ten years that she had lived with us. It’s true that she was contributing a lot to the household by doing most of the cooking. But, as helpful as this was, it did nothing to improve my culinary skills or teach Vance and Ellen even rudimentary skills in the kitchen. Mom truly did have good days when she was industrious, often sewing clothes for the kids and even making slipcovers for our furniture. She paid great attention to detail and did wonderful work. In fact, before Elliott and I were married, she made slipcovers for other people and earned a little money that way.

I felt sorry for Mumsy. After a sheltered childhood, she married a man who turned out to be a hopeless alcoholic, and that wounded her deeply. This was probably the trauma from which most of her mental problems stemmed. But, although I was sympathetic, her behavior confused me and I didn’t know what to do about it.

In spite of her dependence on us, in the past she had managed to keep in touch with her few friends. That stopped, and soon she was calling her practitioner every day. Again, there wasn’t much privacy, and we had only one telephone in the house, so whatever was being said was audible to all.

Everything came to a head one day when I noticed that my mother-in-law was even more nervous and restless than usual, going to her room to read the Bible and
Science and Health,
then getting up and walking back and forth from her room to the kitchen. Vance and Ellen were both out playing, fortunately. When they were this young, I tried to keep them from thinking anything was “wrong” with Mumsy. But no matter how much you pretend that everything is normal, children have a way of picking these things up.

I started to worry even more when she went in to take a bath. I could hear her crying and muttering to herself.

“Are you all right, Mom?” I called through the door.

“I’m all right,” she replied, somewhat dubiously. When she came out she asked if I’d drive her to see the practitioner.

We lived way out in Metairie and had to go into town, almost to the Garden District on St. Charles Avenue. Calling Vance and Ellen in from playing with their friends was probably an unwelcome interruption. But to their credit neither complained. I was lucky because both Vance and El were really well-behaved. This at least simplified my life. We drove the thirty-minute route quietly, as if everything was routine.

The practitioner lived in an apartment building above a drugstore. While Mom was with her, Vance, Ellen and I had ice cream cones and wandered around the drugstore. By the time we were heading home again, I could see that the practitioner had succeeded in calming Mom down. But these incidents were wearing me down.

Somehow, no matter how incoherent she had been all day long, when Elliott got home in the evening she was completely lucid. Such was the case that night. What was different on this occasion was that once Mom was in her room and Vance and Ellen were asleep, I finally snapped.

Elliott and I were in the kitchen, and I sat down on the green-speckled linoleum tile, leaning back against the wall, and started crying uncontrollably. Between my sobs, I managed to say, “I can’t stand it anymore …”

Mom came out of her room to see what was wrong, and we sent her back in a hurry.

It was shortly after this that Elliott found her a little garden apartment nearby.

The day we helped her move, Mom made it very clear she was not a bit happy about being on her own for the first time in her life. Looking with disdain at the new place and then with reproach at us, she said, “I never thought I’d come to this.”

But it worked out well. She fixed up her apartment with attractive slipcovers for her furniture and blooming African violets. We visited back and forth a lot. The forced independence actually seemed to improve her state of mind.

Even though our household seemed to heave a collective sigh of relief, I believe the damage to our marriage was irreparable. Before this, Elliott and I had never had enough privacy for the healthy intimacy a married couple needs. Ours had been an almost completely sexless marriage, except for having two children. By the time we got privacy, our habits of relating were deeply ingrained and it was hard for both of us to know where to begin to change them.

Nonetheless, without other major eruptions, life returned to normal and we continued with our regular routine for most of the 1960s.

N
ORMAL—THAT WAS
the DeGeneres family. At least, we did a good job of keeping up that appearance. In her book
True North
, Jill Ker Conway mentions a “pretense of normality” in many families, referring to unhealthy denial. This term would aptly describe our family.

The way the pretense of normality worked in the DeGeneres household cannot be seen in what happened or what was said. It was everything that went undone and unsaid. We joked and laughed a lot. Just as I had said at the insurance convention, this was Elliott’s strong suit, and because of all our struggles with money and work, I valued his sense of humor on a day-to-day basis. In retrospect, I value it also because from the time they were little both Vance and Ellen developed their own distinctive sense of humor.