Saturday's Child (22 page)

Only gradually did I learn how unspecial I was. I found out about the others. Lots of others, all of them pre-pubertal kittens and princesses. Father Joe was paternal surrogate or uncle stand-in or father confessor to a whole stable of girls, including a pair of twins he'd actually nicknamed Candy and Cake. The pattern was constant: he lost interest in a girl when she showed signs of adult womanhood—budding breasts, first blood. Father Joe, it seems, had the emotional version of his father's physical perversion: nympholeptic lust.

I mourned the loss of him and suffered an intense but private jealousy; I didn't share what I'd discovered with my mother, wanting to protect him from what I suspected would be her rage. I let her think we had just drifted apart. When I turned sixteen, he resurfaced, sending me a sterling-silver charm in the shape of a tiny carousel for my birthday. I took it as the final farewell gesture to a “sweet sixteen” grown girl, but I called to thank him, anyway; the conversation was polite and cool.

About fifteen years later, married and newly a mother, I picked up the phone one afternoon to hear his voice whispering hoarsely, “Hey there, Kitten. How's my special girl?” He said he was in a monastery hospital in New England, gravely ill with cancer, that he weighed less than ninety pounds, had only days left to live, and could receive no visitors. He said he'd called to ask my forgiveness. I gave it, quickly—though neither of us mentioned for what—and I refrained from asking if he was making contrition calls to every one of us. The goodbyes were restrained. Then I hung up the phone and wept.

During my adolescence, I again tried to keep a journal, despite my fears that if Faith discovered it, I might as well step in front of an onrushing camera and end it all. But I needed a place to confide what had become a crushing weight of self-consciousness, an eerie feeling that unless observed by others, I barely existed. Some of this was classic adolescent hormonal angst, but some was unique to the surreality of the child actor's experience. In one poignant entry, at age thirteen, I wrote,

It's as if anything that
would
be the real me is transparent, one of those clear plastic sheets you write on but when you pull it up from the treated slate beneath, the words vanish. As if, when I passed in front of a mirror, I would show myself no reflection. People once thought that meant you had no soul.

Preoccupied with trying to find out if I could feel anything real, I spent quite a bit of time in churches. Catholic churches (yes, Father Joe's influence), but also Episcopal, Greek Orthodox, Methodist, whatever—and synagogues when open. Since I had no room of my own, a church provided a space to myself—the same reason, it turns out, women all over the world tend to compose the majority of the devout. I even made sporadic attempts to pray. But my studies on comparative religion got in the way of faith, as did my atheism (this had made for some lively arguments with Father Joe). I remember being quite little when I first realized there was no god, which I didn't find particularly disturbing. I was, however, willing to explore the concept of a pantheon—Greek, Roman, Norse, Hindu, Wiccan deities. But since there already were constellations, planets, the ocean, and life greening up right out of the ground, there seemed quite enough miracle in the universe to suffice.

Still, probably the main reason I couldn't concentrate on praying, meditating, or much of anything else done in solitude was that same exhausting self-consciousness a character in
Present Laughter
by Noel Coward (himself a survived child actor) described with lethal accuracy: “I'm always acting, watching myself go by.” Later, Alice Miller would write about this as the narcissism imposed on a gifted child. I wrote about it to try and get free of it.

JOURNAL ENTRY
(
age fourteen)
:

Jean does her Socrates act with me, trying to help, and asks, “Do you agree that all the world's a stage? Then what
is
real?” She's right. Are Faith and I a “family”—a widow and her half-orphan? Is age real? Not only can I act older or younger, I can
feel
older or younger, depending on the situation. Is ethnicity real? Apostate Jews that we are, is it hypocritical that Faith plans a seder every Pesach (
boredom
-producing annual event attended by her broker, my agent, a few of
her “girlfriends,” and helpless me)? And are Jews a race or religion? If nonobservant, am I a Jew? At fourteen, am I a girl or a woman? An actress or writer? A daughter like Goneril or Cordelia? Or stark raving mad?

Sure, I know everyone's always acting: lawyers, politicians, businessmen, spies. And clergymen and soldiers in their different costumes, like Virginia Woolf wrote. But they seem able to do it at
will
, while I feel
trapped
, noticing the noticing, like mirrors that reflect each other's image into infinity, until I'd do anything to stop the wheels inside my brain. I've asked Mommie if I could see a therapist. But since that might involve insight, it makes her uneasy. Her reply? “Trust me. I do not have a crazy for a daughter. It would be a waste of money.”

Faith and I began to have fights, major screaming bouts that left both of us debilitated for a whole day afterward, red-eyed and puffy-faced with crying. I didn't want to do any more benefits. I didn't want to go on any more auditions. I was convinced that Portia's “quality of mercy” speech, or Shaw's Saint Joan bleating about the little lambs in the green grass would stick in my memory until I died. But refusals got me nowhere (“You have a responsibility to your talent, Robin. You can't just abandon that.”). So I began getting clever, making just enough subtle small errors to screw up an audition.

I had no idea how deeply angry I was. Nor would I find out for a long time to come.

JOURNAL ENTRY
(
age fifteen)
:

She keeps saying I'm “in a difficult transition” from child stardom to adult stardom. Yesterday, I told her again that this is not just a temporary “slump.” I want
out
of the business.
Permanently
. Big Fight # 7,643.

I've already decided that I want to be a writer. I've tried to tell her that. But whenever I say I want to write, she says, “Write what?” Which makes no sense and isn't the point and I can't answer.

Certainly she knows I've scribbled stories and poems since I learned to hold a pencil, but she merely takes that as another sign of
The Baby's multi-talented sickening little self. Like her arranging for one of the poems I wrote when I was nine to be sealed in a time capsule with city documents and newspapers during the Mount Vernon Centennial Festivities. I know she meant well, but it was
awful
. Cutesy gumdrop poem plus publicity shot of The Baby. To be opened 100 years from now.
Mortifying
. I do
not
want to be remembered like that.

I don't know what to do. As an actress, all you can be certain of is that you're something other than you are. (I always suspect I'm really someplace else.) You're sure you can be everything, but not sure you can be
one
thing thoroughly. All you know is you have to overachieve at whatever you're doing even if you don't know what you're doing to begin with.

A few nights ago I dreamt I had absolute power, like an empress or goddess. I had them all lined up—the agents and managers and PR reps, the old
Mama
company, the casting directors and photographers, the wardrobe fitters sticking you with pins, the school kids who hated my guts and gave me Indian burns and liked each
other
, the old singing and swimming and accents coaches—and there, at the end of the line, standing apart by herself: Faith. They were all taller than me, as if I were still a child. But small as I was in the dream, I went down that line carrying an armful of sharp stakes. I drove a stake deep into each of their hearts, and as I did it I curtseyed and smiled to each one, “Thank you very much.” But when I came to Faith, she was crying. Then I saw why. She already was riddled with stakes—a pincushion, a female Saint Sebastian. There wasn't one inch of room for me to hurt her more. So I gave up and tried to embrace her instead. But as I pressed myself against her, my embrace drove the stakes deeper into her. Then the stakes turned double-edged, so I was also impaling myself. She and I both screamed at the same time, and I woke up with my heart banging.

Conflicts about my career spawned arguments about my going to college, which spawned quarrels about my future, which spawned battles about marriage, which spawned fights about boys. In my mother's plans, I
would soon become a prize fit to be the bride of the young Aga Khan or of Britain's Prince Charles (“Royalty
like
actresses, you know! These days, even to marry!”). Or a billionaire industrialist. Or at
least
a
doctor
.

In the interim, while awaiting my coronations, I had crushes and tried to date boys.

My crushes weren't restricted to real-life people; I fantasized about such fictional characters as Brontë's Heathcliffe, Scott's Ivanhoe, Andersen's Little Robber Girl, and even Kipling's sensual jungle panther, Bagheera. There was also the human-but-tragically-dead-artist category:
I
could've saved Chopin where Sand failed. As for living heartthrobs—with the exception of yens for Cliff Robertson and James Lipton (both grownup actors with whom I'd worked) and one young boy with red hair whose name is now forever lost, who'd also studied piano with Mr. Jones—my crushes, like those of most teenage girls, centered on movie stars.

My taste was certainly eclectic, ranging from Paul Henreid to Dorothy Dandridge, from Richard Greene (specifically in
Robin Hood
), to Ingrid Bergman (especially as Joan of Arc), from Dirk Bogarde to Harpo Marx, and from Sidney Poitier to Laurence Olivier. I was the only girl I knew who fantasized about both Yves Montand
and
Simone Signoret, and who tottered away from multiple viewings of
Gone with the Wind
longing not for Clark Gable but for Leslie Howard. The most formative movies of my life come from this period. One was
The Seventh Veil
, with silken-voiced James Mason alternating between cruelty and tenderness as the Svengaliesque guardian of Ann Todd, playing his ward, a neurotic young concert pianist (no mystery as to whom I identified with
there
). Another was
The Red Shoes
, with flame-haired Moira Shearer torn between loving her composer husband and her career as a ballerina, where she was in turn manipulated by Anton Walbrook, playing a charismatic Diaghilev figure who alternated between cruelty and tenderness as the Svenagli-esque … you get the point. Romantic masochism—one theme, many variations. It was the central erotic message to girls and women until fairly recently. But at least the suffering heroines with whom I identified had artistic careers. And there
were
other films I relished, in which the women dared to fight back:
His Girl Friday
, with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant parrying thrusts of fast-paced dialogue in Howard Hawk's remounting of the
Hecht-MacArthur play
The Front Page;
virtually everything Katharine Hepburn did on screen (and off); even A
Star Is Born
, which seemed radical, because it reversed
The Red Shoes
: he died, she survived.

The crushes were easy and many, compared to the real boys. Being privately tutored, I had no classmates. But clippings from this period remind me that by the time I was fifteen, in order to smooth my “transition” to adult stardom, my press agent had already begun placing discreet items about dates that had been deliberately constructed for the purpose of the item. So there just happened to be photographers present when I “dated” Sal Mineo—who was pleasant enough, though I was well aware he was considerably older, totally uninterested in me, and gay (which, in that tightly closeted time, was probably the reason
his
press agent agreed to the item).

I did become friends with Warren Lyons, one of the four sons of the New
York Post
columnist Leonard Lyons and his wife, Sylvia. The “romance” had been arranged at first, but turned into a real friendship, and I liked visiting the cheerful chaos of the Lyons household at The Beresford apartments on the Upper West Side, where the toddler, Jeffrey—today a film critic—would run around laughing, half-naked, while his older brothers played indoor basketball. My name appeared frequently in Lyons's column during these years, which might be why my mother so approved of the Saturday afternoon “dates” I had with Warren—tea dances, movies, rowing in Central Park, matinees, Scrabble matches. Then there was Ronnie Welsh, who had briefly played Dagmar's first date on
Mama
and had become my sole kid-actor pal. Our mothers loathed one another, but Ronnie and I spent many happy hours acting sophisticated, fancying ourselves as blase characters from a Noel Coward play—preferably
Private Lives
—and we managed to stay in touch even as adults, until his untimely death in the early 1990s.

There were other so-called dates, organized by my mother throughout my teens. God knows where she found these guys—some were sons of men at the brokerage firm where she went to play the market. One of them was a Harvard medical student she liked. He had the unfortunate name of Floyd, but he did introduce me to the pleasures of paella. He was unhappy about my being an actress but relieved when I told him I planned to stop. However, when I added (rather haughtily, I'm sure) that I intended to be a writer, he mulled that over, then offered his unsolicited reassurances
with a wink: “I guess that would be okay. Every young wife should have a hobby. Some women do ceramics.” That was it for Floyd. Back home, Faith and I had a screamer over how I should cultivate him for his “potential.” I remember yelling, “
Why
should I cultivate him, Mommie? He's a med student, not a garden!”

There was also Tony, a quiet young man from a wealthy Boston family Faith found acceptable, whom I liked for other reasons: he waltzed divinely and was (secretly from his parents) a Quaker. But when he and I started to
be
friends, my mother changed. Whenever I saw him, she'd ask, “girlfriend to girlfriend,” how it was going, what had we done and talked about. Since I no longer would tell her every detail, that was the kiss of death to my seeing Tony.