Not Young, Still Restless (20 page)

Caren, my steel magnolia, was raised with two older brothers who thought she was the most precious thing they’d ever seen, a mother who couldn’t get enough of her, and a father who had no idea how to appropriately bond with a daughter. She gamely played sports with Corbin and Collin when they invited her, but rather than grow up in the shadow of the Bernsen Brothers, she began very early in life to establish her own very smart, very strong, very independent, very feminine, very compassionate, somewhat introverted identity.

After graduating from Lake Forest College near Chicago toward her goal of becoming a clinical psychologist, she began an internship with the Kennedy Foundation, counseling children. What she discovered, to her surprise, was that, as much as she loved her work and the children, she was unable to separate herself from their problems and their pain every night when she got home. It was no way to live and no way to be effective at her job, so she went to New York for a year to work in retail sales and regroup before coming back to Los Angeles to start a new career.

She traveled with me for a few years, helping me with personal appearances and merchandising. In fact, she met her husband, Jon Wilson, through a mutual friend when she accompanied me to a charity chili cook-off I was judging in Reno, and they’re now the extraordinary, involved parents of two daughters—Jon coaches their sports teams, and both Caren and Jon go out of their way to get to know every one of the girls’ teachers and participate in every aspect of their schooling, from homework to extracurricular activities. Caren’s especially sensitive to the fact that Grace’s and Sarah’s public schools can’t always afford all the necessary supplies for their students, so every year she adopts a class to help provide whatever’s needed, eliminating the necessity for teachers to spend their own money on materials they’re rarely able to afford.

She’s been with a company called Pacific Studios for the past eighteen years, a business she now manages that creates, rents, and sells backdrops for television and film projects. She’s a tough, smart, fair businesswoman, incredibly hardworking and trustworthy, approaching her career with the same integrity with which she approaches being a wife and mother.

Caren also happens to be my best friend and my favorite traveling companion. A few times a year she and I take off to Las Vegas for a girls’ weekend. We get pampered with facials and massages, we meet friends for dinner, and we lose ourselves for a few hours at a time at the slots and poker machines. Most of all, we laugh. When I look back on the longest, hardest, most convulsive laughs of my life, every one of them is with Caren—sometimes over pure silliness and sometimes over situations in which we knew better than to even glance at each other until we were alone together later.

She’s also a great pal to her brothers, adoring them and their children and running interference between them during their rare, inevitable skirmishes. When the need arises, she’s the “bridge” among us, the peacemaker and the voice of reason with the mind of a psychologist and both feet on the ground—qualities that this family does not necessarily uphold every minute of every day of the year.

There’s an old saying that goes “Crisis doesn’t build character, it reveals it.” What was revealed in my daughter through the crisis of surviving (in fact, beating the hell out of) cancer came as no surprise to me: the courage of a lioness, the compassion to carry as much of the emotional weight of it as she could for the benefit of all of us who love her, and the clarity to tell us what she needed when she needed it.

In other words, she’s my hero, and it’s nothing less than an honor to be her mother.

C
orbin and Amanda have four sons. They’re an incredibly close family who genuinely enjoy one another’s company, and the six of them have traveled all over the world together, giving the boys great memories, familiarity with other cultures, and a sense of being part of a vast global community with unlimited possibilities.

Oliver, their firstborn, went to the University of Connecticut for a year on a football scholarship after graduating from high school, but then came to the realization that he really had no desire to play football, and that he couldn’t start taking the filmmaking courses that were his passion until his junior year. So he’s moved back to Los Angeles to attend film school, has worked as an art director on several projects including his father’s, and has made several short films of his own. He’s a warm, friendly, down-to-earth young man with a wonderful sense of humor who also happens to be an incredible artist and cartoonist.

The fraternal twins, Henry and Angus, headed straight from high school to New York University. Henry’s in his sophomore year and dreams of being a professor at an Ivy League school. Angus decided it was a waste of his father’s money to continue paying tuition for a lot of classes in which Angus had absolutely no interest, so he’s seeking out a more specialized education in his area of passion, which also happens to be filmmaking. Henry and Angus share an apartment in New York, have a wide variety of friends, and are earning a living working at a Ralph Lauren store and following in their father’s and uncle’s footsteps by taking some modeling jobs. They’re genuinely interesting and interested boys, well rounded, well traveled, and well informed, although probably the most private of all of us, with that special connection and way of communicating that only twins can truly understand.

Finley is the youngest of Corbin and Amanda’s sons, born fourteen years after the twins while the family was living in England. I would say this even if he weren’t my grandson: he’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever met and has been since he was a baby. He’s also one of the most adaptable—when he’s told that the family’s headed off on yet another trip to Canada, New Mexico, France, England, New York, wherever, or that they’re moving to a new house (Corbin and Amanda love buying and remodeling houses), Finley’s invariable response is a simple “Okay” before he heads off to his room to start packing. He’s a good student and a popular one, about to enter high school. He wants to be an actor, and mark my words, he’ll be one.

C
ollin’s two sons, Weston and Harrison, were very young when their parents divorced. Their mother moved to Europe for several years, and Collin and the boys lived with me during much of that time, which was a joy for me and gave us a chance to be especially close.

Weston will be graduating from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012 with a business degree. He’s got a special talent for marketing and, among other ventures, is going into business with his father to promote some of Collin’s inventions. Their dream is for those inventions to become popular enough to require mass production and be made exclusively in America to help create as many new jobs as possible. Weston’s fairly introverted but loves to laugh, and he also loves anything involving the outdoors, from surfing to camping to hiking to skiing. He’s a hard worker with a great sense of responsibility and is very devoted to his family. He also, by the way, has manners that would make any grandmother proud.

His younger brother, Harrison, inherited his father’s brains and brawn, an excellent student who was also the captain and quarterback of his Calabasas high school team. (His football career came to a sudden, unfortunate end during a game when his leg was broken so badly in several places that it took him six months to recover.) Another similarity to his father that fascinates me is that Harrison is as devoted to Weston as Collin has always been to Corbin, to the point where, in both cases, the brothers belong as much to each other as they do to their parents. Harrison is currently in his second year at the University of California at Santa Barbara, working in an emergency room three shifts a week as part of an internship toward his goal of becoming a pediatrician.

C
aren and Jon contributed the two girls to the group, much adored by their six male cousins and able to hold their own in any and every situation. Finley and the girls, being the youngest and closest in age, spend at least one night a month at my house. If they don’t, I go into serious withdrawal.

Grace, the tall, blond, blue-eyed older sister, graduated from eighth grade with honors, at the top of her class, and is taking several accelerated courses at Notre Dame High School. She excels at everything she does, from academics to dance to sports to the short stories she’s been writing since she was a little girl. In fact, she decided when she was twelve years old that she wanted to run in the 26.2-mile L.A. Marathon and finished it in six hours and twenty-three minutes. She’s sweet, she’s generous, she’s very family oriented, and she’s incredibly empathetic, first in line to get involved in any cause aimed at helping disadvantaged children. While she’s bright, gifted, and versatile enough to pretty much take her pick of careers to pursue, at the moment she’s determined to become—forgive the predictability, and say it right along with me if you want—a forensic paleontologist. (I know. The first time I heard it I had exactly the same expression on my face that you do.)

Her younger sister, Sarah, intends to be an actress, although when she announced this news to me she added, “I just don’t want anyone to watch me.” (I think I’m making some headway in convincing her that earning a living as an actress nobody watches may be more of a challenge than she’s anticipating.) It’s worth mentioning that one of Corbin’s favorite activities at family gatherings is to direct Finley, Grace, and Sarah in an improvisational performance, and he’s amazed at Sarah’s talent and her focus at such a young age. She adores her sister, but she gets discouraged following in the footsteps of a girl who can seemingly do anything and everything and do it with ease. But she’s starting to appreciate her own talents, her own interests, and her own identity. She’s fiercely independent, fearless about expressing her opinions, and doesn’t believe in “gray areas”—in Sarah’s world, something is either right or it’s wrong, it’s either fair or it’s unfair, and when it’s unfair, either on her own behalf or on behalf of someone she loves, you can bet everyone within earshot is going to hear about it. She is, in other words, a little force of nature, and, like all eight of them, I wouldn’t have missed her for anything.

Chapter Ten

Paying It Forward

I
was driving along Sunset Boulevard one day with Caren and Collin when a terrible car crash happened right in front of us. It was obvious that there might be injuries, and I immediately pulled over.

Caren, who was nine years old at the time and very frightened, yelled, “Mom, no, keep going, let’s get out of here!”

I explained that we couldn’t keep going if someone needed our help.

At that moment she didn’t care. All she knew was that she was scared. “There are lots of other people around to help them, Mom. Why do we have to do it?”

Collin, age eleven, looked at her and said, “Because we have no choice.”

“W
e have no choice” is exactly what I believe about our responsibility as citizens of this planet. We’re all caretakers here. We’re all custodians, nothing more, nothing less, and we’re all interconnected. Every hungry child, every abused or neglected human or animal, every living thing in need of simple kindness diminishes every one of us, and I don’t want the karma of knowing I could have helped but didn’t.

I got an early start at paying attention to those around me who were struggling. As a high school student I belonged to the Junior League, which focuses on education and volunteerism, and I was a candy striper, visiting hospital patients to read to them, bring them their mail, and generally make sure they knew someone cared about them and what they had to say.

I was also a child of the Depression. That meant giving thought to every dime we spent and not even imagining buying what we couldn’t afford. It also meant watching a lot of people lose everything, through no fault of their own, that they’d worked for all their lives, teaching me the lifelong lesson to never take money or a paycheck for granted.

Believe it or not, until I was well into my twenties or maybe even my early thirties, plain old household credit cards didn’t exist. I’m sure there are those of you to whom that sounds like hell on earth, which is exactly why, from the moment I first laid eyes on them, they scared me to death. I’m no financial genius, but I knew entrapment when I saw it. What better way for banks and other corporations to entice people into spending money they didn’t have and then make a fortune charging interest on that debt as people tried to dig themselves out of these seductive new holes? And owing money you don’t have, plus interest, to a multimillion-dollar corporation that could make your life a living nightmare if you didn’t pay sounded a lot like slavery, which has never appealed to me.

Of course, before we all knew what hit us, it was raining credit cards across the United States. Those credit cards were apparently interpreted as gift certificates by many of those who received them, since even the most intelligent, well-meaning people—especially those in the middle class—began drowning in debt, selling their souls for designer wear, meals at expensive restaurants, and the very latest in electronic devices while the banks got richer and richer and richer.

So when a debt solutions organization called No2Debt approached me about doing a commercial for it, I leapt at the opportunity. I’d met its founder, Virginia Swanson, by chance one night at the House of Blues in Hollywood. The devastating Northridge earthquake of 1994 had just happened, and a group of us had gathered to share our earthquake recovery stories. In my case, I’d found myself on the receiving end of an insurance scam in the process of trying to get the cracks in my house and pool repaired. Virginia, whom I’d never met before that night, offered to help—she’d been in the insurance business for years and knew her way through all that mystifying, infuriating red tape. She was smart, she was thorough, she was effective, and she cared. In fact, it turned out, few things outraged her more than people being scammed, tricked, or seduced out of their hard-earned money by Big Business.

No2Debt was Virginia’s way of fighting back, and I’ve personally witnessed what a fierce, honest, skillful fighter she is. I didn’t stop at making just that one commercial. For several years I enjoyed being a No2Debt spokeswoman, traveling around the country helping to inspire people to cut up their credit cards and liberate themselves from the slavery—and believe me, that’s exactly what it is—of indebtedness. Suze Orman was and still is
my
inspiration when it comes to personal finances, and I was honored to be one of the standard-bearers following her mission of keeping the middle class financially healthy.

Of course, times have changed in the past few years. The economy is in trouble, which understandably creates fear, and when people are afraid they’ll do almost anything to escape their fear, if only for a few moments—they’ll resort to one of those obscene payday loans that amount to legalized loan-sharking, charging interest rates of 300 percent or more, or they’ll blow their rent money on an iPad or an Xbox because everyone else has one. I can’t tell you how much it saddens me.

I’m not qualified to give financial advice, but my gratifying years with No2Debt taught me so much about refusing to sell my soul to banks, corporations, and
things
. I won’t be owned by a closetful of designer shoes and handbags, or the latest cell phone, or the most fabulous luxury car on the road. That lesson I learned as a young girl is just as relevant today as it was during the Depression: if you can’t afford it, don’t buy it. There’s no shame in living within your means—in fact, it should be a source of pride to be smart enough to choose peace of mind over fear. What more incredible gift than that could you possibly give yourself and your family?

I can’t recommend strongly enough that you take a look at www.no2debt.com and, for that matter, www.suzeorman.com if you’re struggling these days, or even if you’re not. Let’s face it, the better informed you are the more power you have, and I don’t want you to be afraid anymore.

S
everal years ago there was an awards luncheon for some of our local CBS newswomen to honor their charitable work, and several of us CBS actors were invited to attend. It was at that luncheon that I was introduced to a dynamic woman named Carol Williams, the executive director of Interval House Crisis Shelters and Centers. She and her community education director, Janine Limas, and I talked many times over the following few weeks, and the more I learned about the work they were doing, the more impressed I was, the more I wanted to be involved, and the more Interval House became one of my passions.

Interval House, founded in 1979, is dedicated to helping victims of domestic, sexual, and dating violence. One of the many unique facets of its program is that the staff members specialize in African-American and immigrant cultures within our society, providing services in more than seventy languages, and the vast majority of employees are ethnically diverse and have been through Interval House interventions and education themselves. They embrace women and children from abusive homes, feeding, clothing, and housing them while giving them hope and teaching them to become self-sufficient. There are also programs dealing with elder abuse, substance abuse, and victims of stalkers and human trafficking.

It was a perfect opportunity for me to answer a long-standing prayer inspired a few years earlier by a visit to a children’s shelter in San Diego for at-risk children from the very young through teenage years. During the tour I noticed a tiny boy who was sitting all by himself in a chair in a corner of the room. He had on a little hat, and he was holding his head in his hands, as lost and alone as anyone I’d ever seen in my life. I asked about him and discovered that he was there because his mother was in jail on drug charges and for mercilessly beating him. He broke my heart, and I couldn’t get the image of him, and of someone laying a hand on him in anger, let alone beating such a helpless, precious child, out of my mind. That image was the inspiration for countless prayers: “Please, God, let me find an active, meaningful way to help as many precious children as I can who are as lost and helpless as that tiny little boy.”

So along came Carol Williams and Interval House, the answer to all those prayers. They were about to have their annual banquet and charity auction, and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything in the world. The Ritz-Carlton hotel donated accommodations for us out-of-town guests. Helen Reddy, Beverly Garland, Shirley Jones, and Marcia Clark were part of the festivities. It was a spectacular event, one of those amazing evenings when every single person in the room was there not out of some sense of obligation or as a meaningless publicity ploy, but simply because of a shared commitment to a truly inspired and inspiring cause.

My treasured relationship with Interval House continues to this day, and I hope you’ll read more about the organization on its website, www.intervalhouse.org. And if you or a loved one needs help, please keep its hotline numbers on hand: (562) 594-4555 and (714) 891-8121.

I
have copies of one of my favorite quotes hanging in three separate places in my house so that I can’t take more than a few steps in any direction without being reminded:

I hold that the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is

to protection by man from the cruelty of man.

—
M
AHATMA
G
ANDHI

In the first chapter I told you about my father surprising me with a puppy that woke me out of a sound sleep with a million nose kisses. I named my puppy Patrick, and my God, did I adore that little guy.

When I was nine years old, our neighbor showed up at the door with Patrick in her arms. It seems my puppy had found his way to their yard, and her husband had kicked him hard enough to break a couple of his ribs and cause internal bleeding. There wasn’t much our veterinarian could do for Patrick, so I simply stayed with him every second, including pitching a tent and sleeping with him every night, until he passed away three days later.

I’m not sure which was more overwhelming—my badly broken heart, or my rage and horror at the neighbor, or anyone, who could be cruel to a puppy, or to any other living thing. I still feel the same heartbreak, rage, and horror when I look back on it, and I vividly remember thinking, “I’m not always going to be nine years old. Someday when I have a voice I’ll find a way to do for other animals what I couldn’t do for Patrick.”

Well, I’m not nine years old anymore, and I sure as hell have a voice now, which I’ve devoted to many animal causes, most notably Humane Society International. A portion of the group’s mission statement reads, “We work to reduce suffering and to create meaningful social change for animals by advocating for sensible public policies, investigating cruelty and working to enforce existing laws, educating the public about animal issues, joining with corporations on behalf of animal-friendly policies, and conducting hands-on programs that make ours a more humane world. We are a leading disaster relief agency for animals, and we provide direct care for thousands of animals at our sanctuaries and rescue facilities, wildlife rehabilitation centers, and mobile veterinary clinics.” As if that wasn’t enough to inspire me to become one of the Humane Society’s spokeswomen and continue to be an advocate to this day, I also love another part of its mission: “extolling the human-animal bond.”

That promise manifests itself in a way that touches me deeply, that I hope will spread throughout the world, and it’s such a simple solution to a lot of loneliness. Thanks to the efforts of the Humane Society, senior citizens in many assisted-living homes in Canada are allowed to have pets. I’ve personally witnessed extraordinary transformations in so many people when they were able to wake up every morning with a little soul to care for and love and be unconditionally loved by, when they had purpose to their days again, when they weren’t alone anymore. It made a difference that was nothing short of miraculous, and God only knows how many animals have been rescued and given loving homes thanks to this beautiful program.

And for the record, yes, I do speak from experience, by the way. I live with and treasure three dogs of my own—Daisy, Bishop, and Crackerjack. They bring me more joy and laughter and love and devotion than I can ever repay, and I literally can’t imagine how empty my life would be without them.

Please visit the Humane Society’s website, www.humanesociety.org, and help if you can. Believe me, every dime of every donation makes a difference to a precious soul that has no voice of its own.

I
n 1975 I went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras with my friend Colbert “Bud” Baker. We had a spectacular time, during which Bud introduced me to his son, Tim. We talked, we laughed, we enjoyed the fabulous French Quarter, and I flew home without a clue that I’d just met a man who would become an important part of my life more than three decades later.

Tim Baker moved to Midland, Texas, in the 1980s, and in the process of making it his home he found himself compelled to get involved in the area’s “recovery community”—friends and neighbors whose lives were being ripped apart by drug and alcohol addictions. Many of them, even the most committed ones, had tried to overcome those addictions and failed, which inspired Tim to start exploring treatment methods that would maximize the odds of success. The result was an office in downtown Midland that housed a not-for-profit facility, founded by Tim and named the Springboard Center, devoted to treating chemical dependency.

Several years, grants, and private donations later, Tim was able to realize his ultimate dream for the Springboard Center: to house it in a new state-of-the-art treatment and recovery complex. He called one day to tell me about it, and the more he talked, the more excited I got. So when he asked if I would consider being the center’s national spokesperson, I answered with an immediate, emphatic, “Yes!”

I may never have been to Midland, Texas, before, but God knows I’d been a substance abuser in need of help. I knew what those clients were going through and what it would take for them to recover and be whole again, and everything Tim had described sounded like exactly what I knew to be true and workable. What a perfect way for me to honor all those people who’d been there for me during my addiction and recovery, a perfect way to “pay it forward.”