Saturday's Child (7 page)

I know nothing about the type of rewards working kid actors today ostensibly enjoy. Swimming pools, it seems. Porsches, coke snorts, and sex by age fourteen, perhaps. Vacations at Cannes or Palm Springs. I suspect it's far less glam than it sounds. For my part, I worked more in radio and television than in theater or films; this meant a New York, not California, base—something beneficent in the universe about
that
. But it meant that the money, though steadier, was less lavish. I was also the daughter and niece of women who apparently had stored in their emotional genes a vigilance that at any given moment Doom might arrive or the Cossacks thunder in (
Who knows?
)—and so were highly suspicious of swimming pools (
Careful! You could drown or catch polio!
), cars (
Why would you want to learn to drive, anyway? Someday you'll have a chauffeur! Besides, buses don't exist?
), any kind of drugs, even medicinal (
You don't want an aspirin; it'll make you groggy for days
), sex (
What?
), and certainly “vacations.”

I can remember only two vacations from my childhood. The first, when
I was very little, maybe three years old, is part memory and part inherited story from my mother and aunts. It was while we still lived in Lake Worth, Florida, where I was born, before the move back north to Mount Vernon. My mother and Aunt Sally had taken me to the Everglades, for, they told me, a family vacation. It just happened that the papers had been filled for weeks with the news that a major Hollywood movie was being filmed there,
The Yearling
, starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman, and introducing a young boy in his first acting role, Claude Jarman Jr. Hindsight focuses the motives for my mother's and aunt's choice of vacation site: I might be “discovered.” Indeed, every day they brought me to watch the filming along with the other gawkers. Apparently, however, something I'd eaten disagreed with me and caused me to lose my big chance at baby stardom; what's more, it covered us all with shame and me with something more specific. The first memory of disgrace dates from this time, when I recall Mommie kneeling beside me in the ladies' room, cleaning my legs with wet paper towels, and crying while she did it. I couldn't have helped it, yet I knew I'd let her down.

But there was a
good
vacation, too.

I must have been no more than four when I was taken for a holiday in North Carolina. The particulars of how and why we went there are hazy—something about Uncle Aham's having rented a house for the summer—but the sense of that holiday is anything but hazy.

Whatever magic North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains must have worked on us, I remember only happy moments from that trip, at least until its ending. Was it a week? A month? An entire summer? I'll never know, because those who could tell me are dead, and what I retain is a child's sense of time, which is to say a sense of timelessness. Whenever I hear Samuel Barber's poignant setting of James Agee's “Knoxville,” especially the version recorded by Eleanor Steber, it throws me back in nostalgic yearning to that vacation, as if it were a memory of my whole childhood, not one unusual occurrence.

There were early yellow mornings and long violet twilights, and in between the days were hot and slow and smelled like oranges and nobody shouted. When the dusk blued into night, I was allowed to stay up and see the stars—the first time I ever met them—and I was introduced to the Big Dipper.

My lifelong love of gardening began on this trip. That love would remain abstract until my twenties and then, for the next thirty years, be confined to window boxes, potted plants, and city-rooftop planters until it could nestle into my own real earth garden at last, only a few years ago. It was my mother who unwittingly began this gentle obsession, by sharing with me what I now realize was her sole experience with nurturing plant life, one her mother had taught
her
. On discovering that one of the sweet potatoes she'd bought at the market had already sprouted “eyes,” she showed me how to prop it with toothpicks in a glass jar half-filled with water and promised that “sweet-potato ivy” would sprout and grow. She hadn't anticipated that I'd promptly sit down to watch it happen, refusing to budge in case I might miss the moment of sprout. The sweet-potato jar of necessity became portable; otherwise, she would never have got me to the lakeside, or even out on the porch. And sprout it did, eventually. But only after we were back home, by then in Mount Vernon—and the ivy, grown long and lush, twined up and around the living-room window and remained such a delight to me that every windowsill in the small apartment held rows of differently shaped jars and glasses containing sweet potatoes in varying stages of ivyhood development.

But that vacation was also the time of the puppy—one of a neighbor's dog's litter given to me. Oh, he was a classic: a golden, silky, loose-limbed, floppy-eared, eight-week-old cocker spaniel with enormous liquid brown-amber eyes that blinked at me worshipfully. I named him Happy, which he made me very. I carried him everywhere, slept with him, talked, played, and planned with him, and knew I'd made a friend for life.

It wasn't until the neighbor was helping Mommie pack the car to leave that the two of them told me I couldn't take him with us. Mommie said we were too busy to care for him, and they both burbled the usual adult inanities that he'd be well cared for and they'd never thought I'd grow so attached to him in such a short time when all they'd meant was for me to enjoy having a pet for a while. He was pulled him out of my arms and passed to the neighbor, as both he and I howled our mutual loss.

I've never forgiven the well-meaning cruelty of that temporary gift, the unspoken lie that it was for keeps. A few years later, when I was working steadily in television, Mommie and Aunt Sally announced I could have a
pet. I requested a Happy—but was informed that walking a dog was a time-consuming nuisance, and that I wasn't old enough to have such responsibility (the irony of this was not lost on me). Instead, Aunt Sally came home one day with a small aquarium and three miniature turtles—the kind whose tiny shells some pet stores hideously painted with patterns or faces, a practice now fortunately as illegal as dyeing chicks pastel colors for sale around Easter. I had been reading about the Round Table myths in the Junior Classics series, so I named the turtles Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot. But turtles were unsatisfying; you couldn't cuddle a turtle, and gazing into its beady eyes only served to remind you it was a cold-blooded creature, a reptile.

I resented the turtles, who gave little pleasure but required work to demonstrate (again) my responsibility. Their smelly water had to be changed, and their little shells scrubbed lightly with a nail brush to remove accumulated slime. They had to be fed their turtle food plus shreds of lettuce on a regular schedule. They showed no affection in return, of course. “Their God is not my God,” D. H. Lawrence wrote of fish, which fairly describes my attitude toward those turtles, an attitude only intensified on finding, one day, that owing to my having been remiss about feeding them twice in a row, Lancelot had become impatient and eaten Arthur. Because he was so thorough, this sad fact wasn't revealed until a week or so later, during which time we searched the apartment for a theoretically escaped Arthur, to no avail. It was only when I horribly repeated my carelessness about feeding them that the awful truth emerged—because Guinevere devoured Lancelot, but daintily left part of a tiny claw and some shell shard as a clue to why she seemed so sluggish but content.

I felt like a murderer, aware for the first time how thin the tissue is that separates the power to help from the power to harm. I did care for Guinevere solicitously until the day of her death, which was of apparently natural causes. I declined the offer of replacement reptiles, and was again denied a dog. So I gave up on pets, at least as a child.

Only as a grown woman did I discover the glory of cats.

There is something missing here, in this telling of perks and rewards, however limited.

It's not the sense that one is “special”—because that can vanish pretty quickly, plummeting one's emotions to the nether side of unworthiness. I don't know if the particular reward I'm groping toward describing is a reward at all, and I don't know if it's been experienced by all or even most child actors. Somehow, I'm afraid not, or their lives might've turned out a bit saner and more fulfilling. Ultimately, I can speak only for myself. But to do so honestly means admitting the recognition (with hindsight) that there
was
one beneficent legacy—a more accurate term than reward—bequeathed me by my working childhood.

It was the idea that work could be something one loved doing
.

I don't mean by this that I loved performing. Sometimes I enjoyed it, sometimes I detested it, mostly it was just a given. But I did like being
good
at what I did—anybody does—and I was repeatedly
told
by others how good a child actor I was, and how that must mean I loved what I was doing. I would smile politely and ponder this in my little heart. Meanwhile, the notion that it was possible to love one's work lodged somewhere in me and excited me tremendously. Gradually it dawned on me that what
I
loved, in fact what I'd most loved doing as far back as I could recall—making up stories and poems, playing with the magic of words—could be a life's work.

I knew how passionately I would
love
that. And I wasn't wrong. Chosen, meaningful work has been the consistent exercise, luxury, pleasure, challenge, and regimen of my life.

Later, other legacies would surface, but not until I was ready to claim them as my own and apply them for my own purposes. A sense of self-discipline (handy for a freelance writer working mostly at home). A sense of professionalism (practical for a freelance editor). A respect for drama and for humor, a sense of timing, and a well-modulated voice with the knowledge of how to project it (valuable for poetry readings and advantageous for political speeches). Ease with reporters, microphones, cameras, and audiences (convenient for political organizing and useful for book tours).

But the process of learning that such skills were in a sense value-free was difficult. At first I refused to avail myself of any of them. To my mind,
they'd been inflicted without or against my choice, so they were painful, cheapening reminders of what felt like years in unwitting servitude.

It wasn't until I discovered that I was also infatuated with making social change—infatuation being markedly different from love but damned potent in its own right—that these skills reappeared in a more flattering light. Politics had to wait, however, until I connected with the concept of rebellion itself. For someone who never went through “the terrible two's,” because she was already busy modeling tot fashions, making that connection took time.

But once it happened, and
that
energy became linked to the love of writing, I never looked back. In this I've been extraordinarily fortunate. Finishing a poem that I know is strong and moving has been for me that high only achievable for many of my child-actor contemporaries by other, more destructive means. Helping to inoculate others with the healing virus of resistance to injustice has been for me the outlet for rebellion those colleagues could express only in car crashes and substance abuse.

Not too long ago, I found myself remembering when my defiance first broke the surface.

I had forgotten that defining moment until 1994, when I saw Robert Redford's movie
Quiz Show
, based on the TV program
The $64,000 Question
. That 1950s show—notorious in broadcasting history for its fixed answers and corruption of contestants—had been presented by Barry and Enright Productions.

Those names brought back more than a few memories. Dan Enright (in the 1940s, pre-name change, it had been Ehrenreich) had produced and directed my half-hour weekly national radio show,
Little Robin Morgan
, on WOR for two years (age four to six). “Pop Goes the Weasel” was my theme song, and I played records, told stories I'd made up, chattered on about my “adventures,” and sometimes interviewed “children from other lands,” tapping into the resource of United Nations publicists (and, friends now joke, presaging my later involvement with the global Women's Movement). I apparently did
not
appreciate being referred to as “the world's youngest
disk jockey,” because a
Chicago Tribune
clipping quotes me as firmly correcting the reporter: “I am the world's youngest
story-teller
.”

I loathed “Mr. Ehrenreich,” whose body odor, nicotine-stained fingers, and whinnying laugh seemed to be all over my life. He also produced
Juvenile Jury
, and his business partner Jack Barry (pre-nose job) was the moderator. That show, for its first year on radio, for its second on both radio and television, was the competitor of
The Quiz Kids
, and was staged before a live audience. Like that of other Barry Ehrenreich Productions (and Barry Enright Productions to come), its spontaneity was an illusion; the questions and answers were fixed beforehand.

We were a group of children ranging in age from four (I was the youngest) through eight or nine (Dickie Orlan, overplump and always hungry, Charlie Hankenson, who squeaked rather sweetly) to age fourteen (Peggy Bruder, a ladylike almost-adult with long blond corkscrew curls I coveted). We sat on studio folding chairs—my feet unable to reach the floor—behind a long counter equipped with table mikes and glasses of water. Our job was to “counsel” other children, who wrote us letters asking for advice on such matters as “My best friend's family is moving away; can we still be friends long-distance?” Some of the questions were drawn from actual letters sent in by real children, but most were devised by Barry, Ehrenreich, and their team of hack writers.

We were assembled before showtime, told what questions Mr. Barry would read on the show, and assigned our answers. Ehrenreich was shrewd enough to permit us to phrase our replies in our own words for a more natural effect, but it was clear that no one should even
think
about diverging from the substance of an assigned answer. And no one did. Ehrenreich, who always patrolled the stage behind us while we were on air, had a habit of grasping an errant child—someone who rambled on too long or talked over audience laughter—sharply by the shoulder. He had developed a singularly effective method of communicating his displeasure by digging his fingers in between the shoulder and collarbone, while his thumb gouged at the shoulder blade—a sort of Vulcan neck pinch long before Mr. Spock.