Saturday's Child (18 page)

⁷
As Kisseloff has pointed out, blacklisting persisted, especially at CBS, into the Sixties, marking Lee Grant, Jack Gilford, and Pete Seeger, among others, as unhirable. As late as 1963, when the writer Reginald Rose, creator of the CBS series
The Defenders
, approached network executives to propose doing a show about racism, they refused—but he at least won the right to do a show about blacklisting. Yet when Ernie Kinoy finished writing the script, CBS's program-practices department insisted the plot be shifted from television blacklisting to the movies, denying there had been much of a blacklist in TV. Then, in a perverse twist, the same program-practices people demanded that a cast list be submitted to them—for
clearance
. John Randolph was one of the actors being considered, and he hung twisting in the wind for days. It was only because Rose and Kinoy insisted it was madness to do a show denouncing the blacklist while still engaging in the practice that Randolph was finally hired.

⁸
I was contractually bound to renew so long as the show was telecast live. But in 1956 Carol Irwin decided to join the trend toward taping, which meant that all contracts had to be renegotiated. By then, I wanted out of the business entirely, but taking such a stand got me nowhere. So I adopted a step-at-a-time strategy I knew would work with Faith: urging that we not renegotiate so I could do movies or plays instead. It worked. Ralph Nelson left at the same time, Frank Gabrielson wasn't writing for the show anymore and, after eight years at the top of the TV series heap,
Mama
's days were numbered. There were only thirteen taped episodes with Toni Campbell, a young girl who had the unenviable task of being the replacement Dagmar, before the series folded.

⁹
Even Kathryn Forbes, who'd written the book on which all the
I Remember Mama
spin-offs were based, invented her perfect family. She was actually a neglected only child of divorced parents, raised by a mother and three critical aunts. Presenting her book,
Mama's Bank Account
, as fact instead of fiction, however, intensified the heartwarming factor.

¹⁰
Dick, also present that day, spoke proudly of his grown, firstborn son, named Nels after his character on
Mama
. Back when Nels was named, I remember thinking, “If I ever have a child and it's a girl, I'll
never
name her Dagmar.”

SIX

A Little Learning …

Only in darkness is thy shadow clear
.

—H
ART
C
RANE
, “T
HE
B
RIDGE
”

Leaving aside atoms, bacteria, sugar and spice and puppy-dogs' tails, electricity, and 90 percent water, just how much is each of us more than the sum of our parts? I write this early in the year 2000, as conventional wisdom, affected by recent leaps forward in genetic research, tends toward crediting heredity with more influence than environment in shaping who we are. The pendulum swings; the reverse was thought true as I was growing up. Anyway, since I know more about my formative environment than my formative genetics, practicality tilts me in that direction.

Environment is complicated enough.

A sense of place shapes us, for one thing. Alice Walker's rural American South, Willa Cather's Midwest prairies, Henry James's (old and New) England(s). Location, location, location—what Toni Morrison calls “the site of memory.” For me, that place of influence is New York City, by which I mean—no doubt unfairly, but too bad about that—the island borough of Manhattan. I happily lack the capacity for patriotism, preferring by temperament as well as politics to dance in step with Virginia Woolf's
anti-pledge of non-allegiance: “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I need no country. As a woman, my country is the world.” Furthermore, once I took advantage of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain my files from the U.S. government in the 1970s, any patriotic remnants I might have retained were buried under the avalanche of paper—from the FBI, CIA, National Security Council, Secret Service, and even the U.S. Air Force. So much for claiming my identity as an American. But being a New Yorker, that's different. Were Manhattan to secede from the USA, I'd grab my fife and drum in a New York minute.

Until I turned twelve, my remembered childhood home was Mount Vernon, but most of the color, excitement, and rewards—from Air Days to special treats—took place in what was called the City, which seemed, like its Emerald cousin, bright with enchantment. This part of my childhood
was
highly privileged—and it was unadulterated pleasure.

I grew up going to the Central Park Zoo, including the old Children's Zoo, which, while not as biodiversity conscious and educational as the lovely new one, was still charming, replete with nursery-rhyme statuary. I loved being taken for a browse through the massive FAO Schwartz toy store, enjoyed sliding a nickel into the slot for Aunt Sally's coffee at various now nonexistent Horn & Hardart automats, and relished visiting the elegant but also now extinct Rumplemeyer's Cafe on Central Park South, where they served the coziest hot chocolate and cinnamon toast imaginable on a wintery day, surrounded by a decor consisting of life-size stuffed zebras, giraffes, lions, and gorillas. Enthralled, I watched skaters twirl across the Rockefeller Center ice rink (where I skidded around on skates atrociously a few times but was photographed frequently, posed in front of the golden, floating god Mercury, my ankles bowed in and my stance wobbly, but my smile intact). At Coney Island I devoured my first Nathan's hot dogs and survived the only two roller-coaster rides of my life—one as a young teenager, the other as an adult, both terrifying. I became a familiar at the Waldorf Astoria, the Pierre, and the Plaza, because fashion shows and benefit appearances at which I appeared were often held at those chic hotels; at the Plaza's Palm Court, the maître d' knew me so well he nicknamed me “the real-life Eloise.” Various cast members, producers, and friends of my mother's took me to ballets at the old City Center and to operas at the original (pre-Lincoln Center) Metropolitan Opera House.
At the latter, I heard so many performances of
Die Fledermaus, The Magic Flute
, and
Carmen
that I knew certain arias by heart before age fourteen (these were the three operas somehow thought appropriate for a child, although how
Carmen
quite fit into this category eludes me); in my teens I got to hear a wider repertoire: a memorable Callas (and also Tebaldi) singing
Tosca
(with such a sexy, velvet-throated George London as Scarpia that I've utterly forgotten the tepid tenor who sang Cavaradossi), Callas's
Norma
, Sutherland's
Lucia di Lammermoor
, Tebaldi's
Madama Butterfly
, and her Violetta in
La Traviata
(I didn't encounter Wagner, Strauss, Berg, Poulenc, or contemporaries like Menotti or Barber until my late teens and early twenties). I saw Martha Graham dance, and Nora Kaye, and Tanaquil Le Clercq; I was thrilled by Maria Tallchief's electric
Firebird
, by the newly defected Nureyev partnering Margot Fonteyn in their lyrical
Romeo and Juliet
, and, some years after, by another new defector, Baryshnikov, first soaring across the stage in
La Bayadère
. By age nine, I'd learned the constellations not from the night sky but from the planetarium at the Museum of Natural History, and during my adolescence I spent hours alone, roaming the Metropolitan Museum, the Frick, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and the Morgan Library (secretly pretending it belonged to distant relatives but knowing better).

It was pure glee to pass along such a New York City childhood to my son, Blake—that rarity, a Manhattan-born
real
New Yorker—when he was little. This city's offerings, many of them free, make for a magical, healthy context in which to grow, one not only of splendor but of depth, width, and texture: I'll take Shakespeare-in-the-Park, the Bronx Botanical Garden, the trash-talking Knicks and dysfunctional Mets, all-night restaurants and movie theaters and delis, street fairs, street foods, and street smarts any day over the prospect of growing up in the plasticine picket-fence blandness of suburbia. By now, since I've lived all over Manhattan, certain sections of it have come to represent different periods of my life to me, entire neighborhoods functioning as sense memories: East 57th Street and its Sutton Place environs (to which Faith and I moved from Mount Vernon) makes me think of my adolescent rebellion; the Upper West Side stands for my days haunting Columbia University; the Lower East Side (fatuously euphemized by some as “the East Village”) is redolent of my elopement, my twenty years of married life with Kenneth Pitchford,
“summers of love” and subsequent hippie hells, and Blake's birth and childhood; the Upper East Side represents my “diaspora”—many months of staying with friends after the marriage broke apart in the early 1980s; the Brooklyn Bridge will always resonate for me with the recollection of walking across it with Kenneth as he shouted Hart Crane's great poem “The Bridge” into the wind; the narrow, winding, tree-lined streets of Greenwich Village—where I longed to live for most of my life—are what I now finally call home. …

I didn't always grasp this sense of place in myself, partly because I confused it with that loathsome patriotism but mostly because I refuse to be sentimental about New York in a mawkish, Liza Minnelli way. This city is noisy and crowded; it can be maddening, smelly, costly, and scary; and it's a perfect place to live if you don't trust air you can't see. Moreover, I can imagine living in the country, and contentedly spent many months on a fairly isolate farm in New Zealand, itself a fairly isolate country. But for cities, there is simply no equal to New York, certainly not in the United States, much as San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and New Orleans—nice enough places—preen themselves trying. (We won't even
discuss
Los Angeles, conceived by Dante on a slow day and executed by Bosch when his eyesight was failing.) There really
is
a reason—reasons, in fact—why New York is called the capital of the world, and it's not only because of the United Nations.

I noticed this the more I traveled abroad, especially in Europe, as I felt an odd sense of displacement on ordinary streets. Part of it was pace: my characteristic impatience, which around more leisurely people can make me feel like a ball-bearing spinning to escape being drowned in a bowl of Jell-O. But there was something else I couldn't quite grasp. The feeling intensified in Copenhagen once, following a visit to Oslo—although I adored the former's Tivoli Gardens and the latter's Munch Museum. Finally I recognized what the unease was: everyone on the street was so terminally
white
I felt in danger of going snow-blind. They were all tall and blond, with lemon-yellow eyelashes. Where was the palette of patinas—blueblack, walnut, bronze, amber, olive, teak, cocoa, ginger, saffron, ocher—that brandishes its glorious spectrum along New York streets, in parks, in subways? Where were the towering Kikuyu descendants, or the diminutive Asians who made me (at five feet one inch) feel statuesque? In
Copenhagen and Oslo, conversations of passersby sounded like mellifluous tracks from an Ingmar Bergman movie (with no subtitles), but where was the counterpoint of Spanish and Chinese, Arabic and Italian and Korean and Greek, where was an English transformed by Yiddishisms, mixed with a Jamaican lilt, a Philippine twang, a Haitian patois, an Indo-Pakistani singsong percussion?

As a woman I need no country. As a New Yorker, my city is the world.

Where we set our roots forms us, yes. And certainly we're formed by what we're taught, although what we're
not
taught affects us as much or perhaps more. Lessons come in many guises and images. When I was a child, air travel was just becoming commonplace, so we journeyed to other cities largely on trains with sleeping cars (which I fancied greatly), attended by elderly gentleman porters, all of them black; I didn't know then about the organizing history of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, but travel delivered clear if unstated lessons about race, sex, age, and class. I came to adulthood, like everyone, staggering under a million such subliminal messages. Being a European-American child, I was cooed over especially for my golden curls and peachy-cream skin, and there were further lessons: Aunt Jemima's pancake mix, Uncle Ben's rice, radio's Amos 'n' Andy and Jack Benny's valet Rochester, pink “flesh-colored” Band-Aids, Eddie Cantor singing “Mammy” in blackface—all popular, all unquestioned. My mother labeled whomever she considered vulgar as “white trash,” and Aunt Sally described independence in a then conventional phrase, as being “free, white, and twenty-one.”

If our education came only from those persons formally called “teachers,” that would exclude the people responsible for our earliest, deepest, most enduring imprints. As, for example, when I was ten years old, and my mother decided to enlighten me about menstruation. After explaining the physical process, she spoke emphatically about how there was
nothing
shameful in menstruating, how I should
never
let anyone make me feel embarrassed about my body or its functions, how reproduction was a miracle and sex a joy, how neither was unclean or sinful, and how I should strongly repudiate any philosophy or attitude that attempted to make me think so. Such rational, healthy support! It would take years of bafflement and six months of feminist consciousness-raising in my late twenties to figure out how I had nevertheless fallen prey, albeit secretly, to believing
the stereotype of the unclean female, when my mother had tried so valiantly to free me from it. It was a revelation when at last I remembered that Faith, Diva of the Double Message, had delivered her entire peroration—even after making sure we were alone—in a whisper.