Not Young, Still Restless

Not Young, Still Restless

A Memoir

Jeanne Cooper

with Lindsay Harrison

Dedication

To Corbin, Collin, and Caren,

my three greatest accomplishments

Contents

Chapter One

The Obligatory Beginning

I
think Bill Cosby put it perfectly many years ago when he said, “I started out as a child.” And so naturally, that is where my story begins.

It never occurred to me at the time that there was anything unique about my childhood. Like most people, with nothing to compare it to, I assumed it was normal to move too often to make lasting friendships, to have a cow as your closest confidante for a while, to be molested a couple of times, and to know with absolute certainty by the end of eighth grade what you wanted to be when you grew up.

But since one of life’s great lessons is that there’s no such thing as “normal,” I’ll go all the way back to the beginning, into some places I haven’t explored in decades, and tell you all about it, even the parts that make me cringe. (Don’t you hate those autobiographies in which you know you’re being lied to? I always find myself wondering why the authors bothered. I intend on sharing it all, even those moments I would prefer to forget.)

I
made my first entrance on October 25, 1928, in the beautiful little oil town of Taft, California. True to family tradition, my mother’s mother, Grandma Moore, delivered me at home, with a doctor standing by. There was no great rejoicing, no congratulatory cigars being passed around to all the menfolk, just a subdued resignation that Wilma Jeanne—the unplanned third child in the family, the one my mother occasionally referred to as “the night the diaphragm didn’t work”—had arrived, healthy, loud, and eager to live whether they liked it or not.

My father, Albert Troy Cooper, was English and Cherokee Indian. My mother, Sildeth Evelyn Moore, was Irish and Cherokee Indian. They met in Oklahoma, where both families worked in the oil fields, and they were married after a fairly brief courtship. (I used to wonder if Mother was already pregnant with my brother, Jack, on her wedding day. But by the time I got married, I had no stones to throw on that subject.)

Tragically, in Oklahoma in the early 1900s, full-blooded Native Americans, many of whom worked side by side with my father and grandfather, were targets of cruel discrimination and the shameful epithet “red niggers” by too many ignorant bigots and bullies. My very proud, very regal, very “color”-blind grandma Moore wasn’t about to have her grandchildren raised in such an intolerant atmosphere, so at her insistence, the Moores and the newlywed Coopers moved to Taft, where the men could pursue their oil careers and the family could thrive in the open-minded, harmoniously integrated West.

It was such a great idea on paper. In practice, though, it was occasionally rough and scary and even life-threatening. I was too young to understand much of what was going on, but I know that my father and his business partner enraged some powerful people by being very outspoken advocates of equal pay for oil field workers of all races. I know that my father’s business partner was murdered. I know that my mother and I hid in a ditch in a cotton field one day, with Mother’s hand over my mouth to keep me quiet, while some angry men looked for my father, and that my older sister, Evelyn, and I were rushed to the school basement when I was in second grade because someone was trying to scare my father by threatening to harm us. And I know that my father and my grandpa Moore were good, brave, hardworking men who never backed down from or apologized for their beliefs, and I was proud of them.

I wish I’d known my father better. He traveled for work much more than he was home, and when he was around he seemed larger than life to me. Family vacations with him were adventures to such magnificent places as Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks, where we hiked and explored and learned to share his ancestral reverence for the land and wildlife around us, which more than made up for his complete disinterest in organized religion as far as I was concerned. He believed, and taught us to believe, that we weren’t entitled citizens of this planet, that instead we were its privileged custodians who owe it our most vigilant care and gratitude. In fact, to this day, thanks in large part to my father, I’m as diligent about feeding the birds and squirrels around my house as I am about feeding my three dogs.

I remember his free-spirited playfulness.

I remember how dapper he looked when he got dressed up.

I remember being sound asleep early one morning and feeling something wet and silly on my cheeks, and opening my eyes to see that my face was being covered with kisses by a tiny Pekingese puppy my father brought me as a surprise.

I remember discovering when I was very, very young that I could be funny, that being funny was an almost guaranteed way to get his attention, and that I loved making him laugh.

And I especially remember the one week of my life when my father and I spent time alone together. I was in high school, still recovering from my mother’s death from uterine cancer. My brother and sister had both left home with their respective spouses. I walked into the kitchen one morning to find Dad sitting alone at the table crying. It was the first and only time I ever saw him cry. If we’d been closer he might have known he could talk to me about whatever was wrong, and I might have known how to comfort him. As it was, there was nothing but silence between us while he turned away to hide his tears and collect himself. Then, out of nowhere, he said, “Let’s go visit Aunt Ellen.”

Aunt Ellen was one of Dad’s many cousins, and they’d been the best of friends since childhood. She lived in Memphis, where I’d never been before, and it took me no time at all to reply, “Okay, let’s go visit Aunt Ellen.”

We took the train to Memphis and back, drinking in every mile of this beautiful country along the way. Aunt Ellen was warm and loving, a peaceful, comforting presence I probably needed as much as Dad did. She had a car she only drove in two gears—third and reverse—and I remember she couldn’t honk the horn because honking was illegal in Memphis at the time. Most memorable of all, though, was how proud and special it made me feel that my father invited me—just me—to spend a week with him. I would have been too shy with him to tell him how much it meant to me, but I do hope I said thank you.

And then there was Mother, who was so different from Dad in so many ways. But their marriage never seemed to me like the old cliché about how opposites attract. Even as a child I never felt that they had a particularly close, loving relationship. There was a lack of chemistry between them, no intimate unspoken connection when they looked at each other. My best guess is that they hadn’t necessarily fallen in love when they met, but that they satisfied each other’s ideas of “good marriage material,” and they weren’t wrong. He was a hard worker and a responsible man who would always provide for his wife and children as best as he could, and she was a devoted mother, homemaker, and schoolteacher who never complained about her husband’s long, frequent absences.

Despite marrying a man who simply refused to set foot inside a church, she was a devoutly religious woman. I was never quite sure which denomination she embraced; I just knew it included a long list of sins that included dancing, wearing makeup, and a lot of other things that frankly matched my list of things I was looking forward to. I never understood it, and I certainly never related to it—it seemed dogmatic, arbitrary, and fear-based to me, as opposed to the joy, comfort, peace, and acceptance I believe our Creator offers. I still remember a huge family Thanksgiving dinner in Taft when I was four years old. For no reason at all other than being playful little girls who loved attention, a cousin and I decided to entertain our relatives by performing a brief, enthusiastic hula. Mother put an immediate, shrieking stop to the dance, horrified at the sight of two innocent four-year-old children “moving their hips back and forth like that!” Not for a moment did I or do I believe we’d done anything wrong, and if I’d been an adult in the room at the time, I would have loudly joined the chorus of relatives who were quick to point out, “They’re kids, for God’s sake! They’re just playing!”

Also unlike Dad, Mother was an introvert without his sense of adventure, which, through a child’s eyes, made her look just plain not as much fun as he was when he was around. A particular pet peeve of mine was that on family vacations, when Dad and Jack and Evelyn would take off to climb a mountain together, or go canoeing down a river, I was expected to stay behind and keep Mother company, because she was too afraid and/or too disinterested to try.

Come to think of it, those occasions seem to magnify a kind of running theme throughout my childhood. I know that sometimes the third-born and last child is pampered and spoiled and treated like the perpetual baby of the family. In my case, it felt more as if I’d arrived late to a dance at which everyone had already paired up. I was very different from my brother and my sister, and from my mother and my father, for that matter, and I never quite found a place among them where I felt as if I could relax, be myself, and just belong.

Dissimilarities and mutual frustrations aside, I remember Mother with love, gratitude, and respect for being the prototypical Good Woman. She was, after all, a working mother of three whose husband was gone most of the time, and she took great care of her children and her household no matter how many times Dad relocated us. We were never neglected, and we never doubted for a moment that we were loved. And during two very ugly crises in my childhood, she was my fearless, unequivocal hero.

The first one occurred when I was five years old. As usual, a group of relatives had come to visit, including Uncle John, who was actually someone’s cousin. Uncle John was fun and funny, and we kids invariably competed for his attention, so I felt like a princess when he invited just me and nobody else on a trip to the grocery store.

I’m not sure when it was during the ride that I detected a subtle change in Uncle John’s affection toward me, or when I started to feel in the pit of my stomach that something was wrong. But I have a very clear memory of my growing, sickening fear, of the car stopping far away from the store, and of Uncle John telling me what pretty legs I had while he reached over and slid his hands up my skirt and into my underpants.

I had two immediate, involuntary reactions, the second of which was a guaranteed mood breaker for Uncle John—I began to cry, and I defecated all over the front passenger seat of his car.

Needless to say, he suddenly couldn’t get me home and out of his car fast enough, and I couldn’t race into the house and find my mother fast enough. I was sobbing so hard in Mother’s arms that I barely got out the words “Uncle John tried to stick his hands up my legs where I poop.”

She didn’t question it. She didn’t accuse me of exaggerating or making it up. She didn’t make me feel as if I’d done anything wrong. She simply held me, dried my tears, and promised she would take care of it. Next thing I knew, the group of relatives, including Uncle John, was being escorted out the door, and I heard my mother say to Uncle John’s wife, in a tone that was more a promise than a threat, “Get him help or one of us is going to kill him.” I have no idea whatever happened to him, but I hope his karma was swift.

Mother was every bit as fiercely heroic when I was twelve. We were in Taft, no longer living there, just visiting still more relatives while Dad was off working God knows where. A woman who lived at the end of the block with her sixteen-year-old son earned her living by taking in laundry, and my relatives had been patrons of hers for years. So no one, including me, thought a thing about it when, one lazy, sweltering summer afternoon, her son offered to take me out for a chocolate malt.

Next thing I knew he took a wrong turn—away from the nearby malt shop, away from town—and drove into a dusty, desolate oil field in the middle of nowhere, and all the while that knot of icy fear began forming in my stomach again.

He was on top of me the instant he stopped the car, his mouth and hands everywhere. I kicked, I fought, and I screamed, knowing no one could hear me. I was so terrified that a huge rush of adrenaline flooded into me and somehow, despite the fact that he was more than twice my size, I managed to slide out from under him and jump out of the car.

Unfortunately, I had nowhere to go. There wasn’t a person or building in sight to run to, so I simply ran away from him as hard and as fast as I could. He had no trouble catching me, and his voice was calm and almost apologetic when he grabbed me. “Get in the car, Jeanne,” he said so sweetly. “I’ll take you home.” I refused, tried to pull away, and kept on fighting him while he repeated over and over again, “I’ll take you home, I promise, just get back in the car.” Finally, still scared to death, physically outmatched, and fresh out of options, I slid back into the passenger’s seat, pressed myself against the door, and gripped the handle, fully prepared to leap out of the car again if it came to that, no matter how fast it was going. But to my profound relief, he really did drive straight home without trying another thing or saying another word until he stopped in front of my relatives’ house.

“You’re not going to tell anyone about this, right?” he asked quietly.

“Of course not,” I lied. “I won’t say a word.”

I promptly flew out of that car and safely indoors, where I told my mother everything. Again, she didn’t doubt me for a moment, or make me feel one bit responsible; she just comforted me and made sure I was okay. Then she and one of my aunts marched up the street to have a talk with the boy’s mother. By the time they came home again, the entire neighborhood could hear the mother giving her son the beating he deserved.

(I should add that I owe a debt of gratitude to that ice-cold knot of fear in my stomach. I learned to listen to it, and it served me well when I got to Hollywood, saving me from a few producers, directors, and casting agents who probably thought of themselves as “ladies’ men” but who, as far as I’m concerned, were no better than those two predators who molested me as a child and made me ask myself that sadly disturbing, unanswerable question: “Why me?”)

I’ve always wondered if Mother just decided one day to loosen up a little because she damn well felt like it or if this was the result of a subconscious premonition, but when I was about to enter my teenage years, she suddenly started wearing makeup and letting her nails grow long, painting them bright, immodest shades of red. It didn’t shock me as much as it intrigued me, and I remember thinking, “Good for you.” I wish I’d said it out loud.