Possessed (3 page)

But her terpsichorean aspirations were interrupted by a painful mishap that summer. Either jumping on purpose or falling by accident, Billie fell from her front porch onto shards of a broken glass bottle. Bleeding profusely, she was gallantly carried inside and comforted by a teenage boy until a doctor arrived. The role of this impromptu Prince Valiant was assumed by a seventeen-year-old high school boy named Don Blanding; he, too, had artistic ambitions, later realized when he became a successful poet, journalist and author of a dozen books. When they next met, twenty years later in Hollywood, Blanding celebrated the childhood incident in a lyric he wrote in honor of the dancer who had become a star.

She was just the little girl who lived across the street,
All legs and curls and great big eyes and restless dancing feet,
As vivid as a humming bird, as bright and swift and gay,
A child who played at make-believe throughout the livelong day.
With tattered old lace curtains and a battered feather fan,
She swept and preened, an actress with grubby snub-nosed clan
Of neighborhood kids for audience enchanted with the play,
A prairie Bernhardt for a while. And then she went away.
We missed her on the little street, her laughter and her fun
Until the dull years blurred her name as years have ever done.
A great premiere in Hollywood… the light, the crowds,
the cars, The frenzied noise of greeting to the famous movie stars,
The jewels, the lace, the ermine coats,
the ballyhoo and cries,
The peacock women’s promenade, the bright mascaraed eyes,
The swift excited whisper as a limousine draws near,
“Oh, look! It’s Joan. It’s Joan. It’s Joan!” On every side I hear
The chatter, gossip, envy, sighs, conjectures, wonder, praise,
As memory races quickly back to early prairie days …
The little girl across the street, the funny child I knew
Who dared to dream her splendid dreams and make her dreams come true.

THE HEALING OF THE
injured foot required a long recuperation, a protracted break from dancing and an absence from elementary school. But Anna disallowed any childish indolence, and soon Billie was literally a working girl—"scrubbing floors for money to help my mother. I didn’t have much education, and for years I had an inferiority complex about my background. Maybe that’s why I had such a need to accomplish something.” The added income from Billie’s work was even more necessary when Henry Cassin—perhaps overwhelmed by financial obligations that could not be covered by his wages from the opera house—was accused of embezzlement. He was acquitted in court, but not in the eyes of Lawton’s upright citizens, who boycotted the opera house, cold-shouldered him and Anna and forbade their children to consort with Hal and Billie, whose earliest memories were of social ostracism.

By the time the girl was ten, the Cassin household had relocated to Kansas City, where Henry found a less interesting job, managing the New Midland, a shabby residential hotel in a squalid neighborhood. Anna went to work at a laundry service, where she also introduced her daughter to the exacting routine of a drudge. Hal, on the other hand, did not have to work or earn his keep: always his mother’s pet, he ignored school with impunity, preferring another pastime—drinking homemade liquor with his buddies.

Irregularly, Billie attended classes—first at a public grade school and then at St. Agnes Academy, where the nuns took pity on the unhappy child whose family did not have the money for full tuition, and offered Billie free classes in exchange for duties such as serving meals to the students and cleaningthe rooms of the boarders. Like them, Billie lived at the convent school from Monday to Friday and returned home on weekends, a routine that endured from 1916 to 1919.

The unfortunate result of her teachers’ good intentions was to alienate Billie from her classmates, who treated her as did her mother—like hired help. “I agree with whoever said that a miserable childhood is the ideal launching pad for success,” she later reflected. But she was also remarkably frank in assessing the times when she behaved imprudently:

I never had any close chums. Instead of being pretty, I was “different” {because} my mother wasn’t a very good seamstress, so my dresses were always too long or too short. I kept thinking I might be popular if I stood out more, so I did three things—I walked around looking as though I was self-assured, but I came off brassy. I did little things to mother’s dresses to make me look different, but I came off {like} a freak. And I worked my ass off learning how to dance, but I became an exhibitionist… I was lonely at home and lonely at school, but a lot of it was sheer stubbornness and perverseness. I guess maybe I didn’t want to conform, and I paid the price for that.

So when I decided I was going to be a dancer, it was for three reasons: I wanted to be famous, just to make the kids who had laughed at me feel foolish. I wanted to be rich, so I’d never have to do the awful work my mother did and live at the bottom of the barrel—ever. And I wanted to be a dancer because I loved to dance … I always knew, whether I was in school or working in some dime store, that I’d make it. Funny, but I never had any ambition whatsoever to be an actress.

During her time at St. Agnes, the Cassin marriage became progressively more troubled. The exact cause of the final rupture is impossible to determine, but one weekend Billie returned home from school to find that Daddy Cassin had simply departed—an event, she recalled, that made her feel “as though the world had ended.” After one chance meeting with Billie a fewmonths later, he never saw her again. Henry Cassin died, at about the age of fifty-five, on October 25, 1922, and was buried in Lawton. Bitter, lonely and overworked, the now twice-abandoned Anna subsequently had little good to say about men—an attitude she communicated to her daughter. You had to be careful … you couldn’t trust any man … you had to hide your purse or he’d steal from you … you shouldn’t believe anything they say, they’re all liars …

Anna took the children to live in the only place she could find work—in another laundry. “She made arrangements for herself and the two children to live in one unused room behind the laundry,” her granddaughter recalled, “[where] it was hot in the summer, freezing in winter. There was no cooking stove, no proper bathroom, and there were three people living in just one room.”

Such was their life until Anna took up with yet another man, this time a dissolute character named Harry Hough, who apparently took liberties with young Billie and was caught by Anna in the act of fondling the girl. With that, Lucille was sent off to the nearby Rockingham Academy, where she worked under even more unpleasant conditions than she had known at St. Agnes. The headmistress at Rockingham evidently believed that young girls were best disciplined by corporal punishment. “I was the only working student, and I had to take care of a fourteen-room house, cook, make beds and wash dishes for thirty other boys and girls. The headmistress was really a cruel tyrant, and there was so much work to do that no time remained for studying or learning. I don’t remember going to classes more than two or three times a year. But I do remember the broomstick applied to my legs or backside for reasons I don’t remember. I was a drudge there the way I was at home, and sometimes I had the feeling that the headmistress was just making an example of me—if the students did something bad, this was what would happen to them.”

After Lucille repeatedly begged her mother to bring her home, Anna relented—only to put her back into slave labor, working for long hours as a laundress. Years later, she recalled that there was a complete absence of communication with her mother—a coldness exacerbated by Anna’s habit of smacking her daughter’s face or arms or legs for any reason or no reason. Hence thetwo women who most influenced her early years—her mother and the school principal—demonstrated only stern discipline and no positive reinforcement. Lucille’s brother, meanwhile, was neither corrected nor punished.

There are numerous accounts of Lucille’s schooling. Most chroniclers have stated that she completed the traditional twelve years of elementary and high school and then briefly attended college, from which she withdrew after one term. This wildly overstates the extent of her education, about which she herself was far more honest. “Moving pictures have given me all the education I ever had,” she often said. “I never went beyond the fifth grade—I had no formal education whatsoever. When I read scripts, I had to look up words in the dictionary—how to pronounce them and what they meant—in order to learn the lines properly.”

After the fifth grade, she was essentially hired to work, and although she had the right to attend classes, there was no time for that. Therefore she quite accurately said that she had “no formal education.” Indeed, that lack of schooling was part of the inferiority complex to which she often referred, and for which she tried to compensate during her entire life. Fans provided some endorsement; her awareness of some good performances gave another. But she always felt inadequate, and people who feel inadequate often demand extravagant forms of approval to meet their limitless needs.

Never satisfied with what she had accomplished, Billie pressed forward to what she might achieve in the future. Always attracted to intelligent and creative people (not merely bookish academics), she later embarked on a lifelong program of self-improvement—to which her husbands and friends bore witness; some were even appointed as
de facto
pedagogues.

DURING HER TEEN YEARS
, Billie became quite popular because she loved to dance and knew how to flirt. A few miles south of downtown Kansas City is Westport, the heart of the region’s nightlife. Built along the Santa Fe Trail, the area always had an abundance of diners, cafés and dance halls that attracted crowds of young people, especially on weekends. By the time she was fifteen, Billie was frequently seen at the Jack-o'-Lantern Dance Hall in Westport.
⁴
Full of energy and motivated by a desire to forget her dull routine, she danced the nights away whenever possible.

On one evening at the Jack-o'-Lantern in 1919, Billie met a handsome young trumpeter named Ray Thayer Sterling. Three years older and a senior at Northeast High School, Ray was earnest, bright, witty—and, as his classmates said, “sensitive,” the code word for “gay.” Because she had initially thought of him as potentially her first love (if not her true love), Billie was at first disappointed. But she was eager for friendship, and so Ray became a confidant, encouraging her ambition to be a dancer and aspire to a better life. “Ray was the one I called when anything went wrong,” she said long after he died, “and I loved him with my whole fourteen-year-old heart. He wanted me to go out and get my dreams. Once I was in the process of realizing them, I lost him.” They maintained an uncomplicated friendship until she left for Hollywood.

In the late spring of 1922, when Billie was sixteen, her mother was offered employment as a dormitory housemaid at Stephens College, a school for women in Columbia, Missouri—120 miles from both Kansas City (to the west) and Saint Louis (to the east). After some fiddling with the details of her previous education, Anna and Billie submitted an application for the girl to enter Stephens that autumn. Once again, it was arranged that she would earn her tuition by waiting on tables in the college dining room.

The work-study deal did not turn out to be the problem, but Billie’s complete lack of preparation for university studies did. With nothing more than elementary school in her academic past, she was not an ideal candidate for college courses. “I was simply not equipped,” she recalled. “No one could help me, and I was in dire need.” Fearful and embarrassed, she packed her suitcase and headed for the railway station. As if on cue, the president of Stephens College, James Madison Wood, also arrived at the station, on his way to a lecture engagement. “I don’t belong
here,”
she said when he asked her destination.

As she spelled out her dilemma, he did not try to convince her to return to college courses: that would have been absurd advice. Instead, he encouraged Billie to develop a realistic sense of her talents and, when possible, always to stay with a project. Although it seemed unlikely, that evening marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship, later maintained by earnest correspondence until his death in 1963. Daddy Wood, as she called him—the father figure who succeeded Daddy Cassin—always followed her career with affectionate enthusiasm.

“In that little talk at the train station at Columbia,” she said years later, “Daddy Wood gave me more to benefit me through life, more human education than all the hours in the classroom put together. He’d be surprised to learn the places where I have heard him repeating his words—while I was a member of a cheap road show, while I was kicking in the chorus on Broadway, in cabarets and Hollywood dance halls. I could always hear him say, ‘Don’t run away; let your record do you justice.’ And I’ve always tried to obey him.” They exchanged news and greetings, and once he sent her a signed photograph of himself: “A friend of the Billie who was—and the Joan who now is—and is yet to be.” It was among the few personal framed pictures still in her possession when she died.