Then Again.
by Diane Keaton.
I always say my life is this family, and that"s the truth.
Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall.
THINK.
Mom loved adages, quotes, slogans. There were always little reminders pasted on the kitchen wall. For example, the word THINK. I found THINK thumbtacked on a bulletin board in her darkroom. I saw it Scotch-taped on a pencil box she"d collaged. I even found a pamphlet t.i.tled THINK on her bedside table. Mom liked to THINK. In a notebook she wrote, I"m reading Tom Robbins"s book Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The pa.s.sage about marriage ties in with women"s struggle for accomplishment. I"m writing this down for future THINKING ... She followed with a Robbins quote: "For most poor dumb brainwashed women marriage is the climactic experience. For men, marriage is a matter of efficient logistics: the male gets his food, bed, laundry, TV ... offspring and creature comforts all under one roof.... But for a woman, marriage is surrender. Marriage is when a girl gives up the fight ... and from then on leaves the truly interesting and significant action to her husband, who has bargained to "take care" of her.... Women live longer than men because they really haven"t been living." Mom liked to THINK about life, especially the experience of being a woman. She liked to write about it too.
In the mid-seventies on a visit home, I was printing some photographs I"d taken of Atlantic City in Mother"s darkroom when I found something I"d never seen. It was some kind of, I don"t know, sketchbook. On the cover was a collage she"d made out of family photographs with the words It"s the Journey That Counts, Not the Arrival. I picked it up and flipped through the pages. Although it included several collages made from snapshots and magazine cutouts, it was filled with page after page of writing.
Had a productive day at Hunter"s Bookstore. We rearranged the art section and discovered many interesting books hidden away. It"s been two weeks since I was hired. I make 3 dollars and thirty-five cents an hour. Today I got paid 89 dollars in total.
This wasn"t one of Mom"s typical sc.r.a.pbooks, with the usual napkins from Clifton"s Cafeteria, old black-and-white photographs, and my less-than-thrilling report cards. This was a journal.
An entry dated August 2, 1976, read: WATCH OUT ON THIS PAGE. For you, the possible reader in the future, this takes courage. I"m speaking of what is on my mind. I am angry. Target-Jack-bad names, those he has flung at me-NOT forgotten and that is undoubtedly the problem-"You frigin" b.a.s.t.a.r.d"-all said-all felt. G.o.d, who the h.e.l.l does he think he is?
That was it for me. This was raw, too raw. I didn"t want to know about an aspect of Mother and Father"s life that could shatter my perception of their love. I put it down, walked out of the darkroom, and did not open another one of her eighty-five journals until she died some thirty years later. But, of course, no matter how hard I tried to deny their presence, I couldn"t help but see them resting on bookshelves, or placed underneath the telephone, or even staring up at me from inside a kitchen drawer. One time I began looking through Mom"s new Georgia O"Keeffe One Hundred Flowers picture book on the coffee table, only to find a journal t.i.tled Who Says You Haven"t Got a Chance? lying underneath. It was as if they were conspiring, "Pick us up, Diane. Pick us up." Forget it. There was no way I was going to go through that experience again. But I was impressed with Mom"s tenacity. How could she keep writing without an audience, not even her own family? She just did.
She wrote about going back to school at age forty. She wrote about being a teacher. She wrote about every stray cat she rescued. When her sister Marti got skin cancer and lost most of her nose, she wrote about that too. She wrote about her frustrations with aging. When Dad got sick in 1990, her journal raged at the injustice of the cancer that attacked his brain. The doc.u.mentation of his pa.s.sing proved to be some of Mom"s finest reporting. It was as if taking care of Jack made her love him in a way that helped her become the person she always wished she could have been.
I was trying to get Jack to eat today. But he couldn"t. After a while, I took off my gla.s.ses. I put my head close to his, and I told him, I whispered to him, that I missed him. I started to cry. I didn"t want him to see, so I turned my head away. And Jack, with what little strength remained in that d.a.m.n body of his, took a napkin from my pocket and slowly, as with everything he did, slowly, so slowly, he looked at me with those piercing blue eyes and wiped the tears away from my face. "We"ll make it through this, Dorothy."
He didn"t. In the end, Mom took care of Dad, just as she had taken care of Randy, Robin, Dorrie, and me-all our lives. But who was there for her when she wrote in a shaky hand: June 1993. This is the day I heard I have the beginning of Alzheimer"s disease. Scary. Thus began a fifteen-year battle against the loss of memory.
She kept writing. When she could no longer write paragraphs, she wrote sentences like Would we hurt each other less if we touched each other more? and Honor thyself. And short questions and statements like Quick. What"s today"s date? Or odd things like My head is taking a turn. When she couldn"t write sentences, she wrote words: RENT. CALL. FLOWERS. CAR. And even her favorite word, THINK. When she ran out of words, she wrote numbers, until she couldn"t write anymore.
Dorothy Deanne Keaton was born in Winfield, Kansas, in 1921. Her parents, Beulah and Roy, drifted into California before she was three. They were heartlanders in search of the big dream. It dumped them into the hills of Pasadena. Mom played the piano and sang in a trio called Two Dots and a Dash at her high school. She was sixteen when her father drove off, leaving Beulah and her three daughters to fend for themselves. It was hard times for the Keaton girls in the late thirties. Beulah, who"d never worked a day in her life, had to find a job. Dorothy gave up her college dreams in order to help around the house until Beulah finally found work as a janitor.
I have a photograph of sixteen-year-old Dorothy standing next to her father, Roy Keaton. Why did he leave his favorite daughter, his look-alike; why? How could he have driven away knowing he would forever break some part of her heart?
Everything changed when Dorothy met Jack Hall on a basketball court at Los Angeles Pacific College in Highland Park. Mom loved to recall how this handsome black-haired, blue-eyed young man had come to meet her sister Martha but only had eyes for her. She would laugh and say, "It was love at first sight." And it must have been, because not long after that, they eloped in Las Vegas at the Stardust Hotel.
Mother never told me of her dreams for herself. There were hints though. She was president of the PTA as well as the Arroyo Vista Ladies Club. She was a Sunday-school teacher at our Free Methodist church. She entered every contest on the back of every cereal box. She loved game shows. Our favorite was Queen for a Day, emceed by Jack Bailey, who began each episode, five days a week, with "Would YOU like to be ... QUEEN ... FOR ... A ... DAY?" The game went like this: Bailey interviewed four women; whoever was in the worst shape-a.s.sessed by the audience applause meter-was crowned Queen for a Day. With "Pomp and Circ.u.mstance" playing, he would wrap the winner in a velvet cape with a white fur collar, place a sparkling tiara on her head, and give her four dozen red coronation roses from Carl"s of Hollywood. Mom and Auntie Martha wrote their sad stories on the application sheet more than once. She almost made the cut when she wrote, "My husband needs a lung." When pressed for details, Mom told the truth-well, sort of. Jack Hall, an ardent skin diver, needed to dive deeper in order to put more food on his family"s plates. Mom was eliminated.
One morning I woke up to a group of strangers walking around our house examining every room. Mom hadn"t bothered to tell us she had entered the Mrs. America contest at our local level. Mrs. America was a pageant devoted to finding the ideal homemaker. Later she informed us kids it was a compet.i.tion of skills that included table-setting, floral-arranging, bed-making, and cooking, as well as managing the family budget and excelling in personal grooming. All we could think was WOW.
I was nine, so that made me old enough to sit in the audience of the movie theater on Figueroa Street when she was crowned Mrs. Highland Park. Suddenly my mother, the new greatest homemaker in Highland Park, stood high above me on a vast stage in front of a huge red velvet curtain. When the drapery opened to reveal an RCA Victor Shelby television, a Philco washer and dryer, a set of Samsonite luggage, a fashion wardrobe from Ivers Department Store, and six cobalt-blue flasks filled with Evening in Paris perfume, I wasn"t sure what I was looking at. What was I seeing? Why was Mom standing in the spotlight like she was some sort of movie star? This was terribly exciting yet extremely unpleasant at the same time. Something had happened, a kind of betrayal. Mom had abandoned me, but, even worse, much worse, I secretly wished it would have been me on that stage, not her.
Six months later Dorothy Hall was crowned again, this time as Mrs. Los Angeles by Art Linkletter at the Amba.s.sador Hotel. My brother, Randy, and I watched on the new RCA Victor Shelby television. Her duties as Mrs. Los Angeles included making local appearances at supermarkets, department stores, and ladies" clubs all over Los Angeles County. She wasn"t home much, and when she was, she was busy baking the same German chocolate cake with walnuts over and over, in hopes she would be crowned Mrs. California. Dad got sick of the whole ordeal and made it known. When she lost the coveted t.i.tle of Mrs. California, she appeared to accept her failure as easily as she resumed her normal household duties, but things were different, at least for me.
Sometimes I wonder how our lives might have changed if Mother had been chosen Mrs. America. Would she have become a TV personality like Bess Myerson, or a spokesperson for Philco appliances, or a columnist for McCall"s magazine? What would have happened to my dreams of being in the spotlight if hers had been realized? Another mother took her opportunity away, but I didn"t care; I was glad I didn"t have to share her with a larger world.
Mom believed her kids would have brilliant futures. After all, I was funny. Randy wrote poems. Robin sang, and Dorrie was smart. By the time I was in junior high school, enough C-minuses had acc.u.mulated to prove I wasn"t going to be a student with a brilliant future. Like the rest of the nation, I was tested for my intelligence in 1957. The results were not surprising. There was one exception, something called Abstract Reasoning. I couldn"t wait to run home and tell Mom about this Abstract Reasoning thing. What was it? Excited by any accomplishment, she told me abstract reasoning was the ability to a.n.a.lyze information and solve problems on a complex, thought-based level. No matter how hard I"ve tried to figure out answers to problems by thinking them through, I still don"t exactly understand what abstract reasoning means.
In 1959 our family"s cultural outlook changed when the Bastendorfs moved next door. Bill was a psychologist, with a PhD. Dad, in particular, didn"t trust "headshrinkers." But he couldn"t help liking Bill and his wife, Laurel, who caused a stir in the community because they let their children run around naked. On our street of look-alike tract homes framed with nicely mowed lawns, the neighbors did not take to the Bastendorfs" jungle or their walls filled with posters of works by Pica.s.so and Braque and Miro too. Sometimes Laurel would drive Mom to the only beatnik cafe in Santa Ana. Once there, they drank espresso coffee and talked about the latest Sunset magazine article on trendsetters like Charles Eames or Cliff May-something like that. All I know is, Mom ate it up, especially when Laurel showed her how to make sh.e.l.lboards. She was so inspired, she created her own hybrid-the Rockboard. Soon they were all over our house. The one I remember most was at least three by five feet and weighed so much that some of the rocks started to fall off. Even though most people saw Dorothy as a housewife, I saw an artist struggling to find a medium.
Inspired by the Bastendorfs" example, in 1961 Mom piled us kids into the family station wagon and drove all the way to New York City to see the Art of a.s.semblage exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. We were bowled over by Joseph Cornell and how he navigated an imaginary world through his boxes and collages. As soon as we got home, I decided to collage my entire bedroom wall. Mom was way into it, adding pictures from magazines she thought I might like, such as James Dean standing in Times Square. Soon she was collaging almost anything, including collage trash cans and collage storage boxes made with lumpy papier-mache; she even collaged the inside of all the kitchen cabinets. (Don"t ask.) Randy took it to a new level by becoming an actual collage artist. Even today, literally hundreds of his current series, "Stymied by a Woman"s Face," are stacked in the oven, where he claims they"re safe. I guess you could say collecting and reworking images, reorganizing the familiar into unexpected patterns in hopes of discovering something new, became one of our shared beliefs. Collage, like abstract reasoning, was a visual process for a.n.a.lyzing information. "Right?" as I always asked Mom when I was young. For sure she thought I was right.
I was fourteen when I started lugging around a memory I"ll never let go. Mom and Dad were dancing in the moonlight on a hill in Ensenada, Mexico. A mariachi band played. I watched from the sidelines, as they kissed with a depth of feeling that should have been embarra.s.sing for a teenage daughter. Instead, it filled me with awe. It even gave me something else to believe in. Their love. By lodging myself in the arms of Mother and Father"s romance, I knew there would be no goodbyes.
On the last page of my teenage diary, I wrote: "To whom it may concern. When I get married I want my husband and I to talk serious matters over together. No emotional breakdowns in front of the kids. No swearing. I don"t want my husband to smoke, but he can enjoy a good drink now and then. I want my children to go to Sunday school every Sunday. They will also get spankings, since I believe in them. In fact, I want my husband and I to run the household the same way Mom and Dad do right now."
"To whom it may concern"? Who was I kidding? And why was I trying to be such a good girl when what I really felt had nothing to do with pretend rules on a subject I was terrified of? This is what I didn"t write down but have never forgotten. Dave Garland and I were pa.s.sing notes in Mrs. Hopkins"s ninth-grade algebra cla.s.s one day. Dave was "really neat," but he "couldn"t stand me." He ended our exchange with six words: "You"ll make a good wife someday." A wife? I didn"t want to be a wife. I wanted to be a hot date, someone to make out with. I wanted to be Barbra Streisand singing, "Never, never will I marry; born to wander till I"m dead." I never did marry. I never "went steady" either. While I dutifully continued to please my parents, my head was in the clouds, kissing unattainable greats like Dave Garland. I figured the only way to realize my number-one dream of becoming an actual Broadway musical comedy star was to remain an adoring daughter. Loving a man, and becoming a wife, would have to be put aside. So I continued to pursue unattainable greats.
The names changed, from Dave to Woody, then Warren, and finally Al. Could I have made a lasting commitment to them? Hard to say. Subconsciously I must have known it could never work, and because of this they"d never get in the way of my achieving my dreams. You see, I was looking for bigger fish to fry. I was looking for an audience. Any audience. So what did I do? I auditioned for everything available while mastering nothing in particular. I was in the church choir and the school chorus. I tried out for cheerleader and pom-pom girl. I auditioned for every talent show and every play, including The Taming of the Shrew, which I didn"t understand. I was a cla.s.s debater and editor of the YWCA"s newsletter. I ran for ninth-grade secretary. I even begged Mom to please help get me into Job"s Daughters, a Masonic-sponsored secret club where girls in a pageantlike atmosphere paraded around in long gowns. I wanted to be adored, so I chose to stay safe in the arms of Jack and Dorothy; at least, that"s what I thought.
Now that I"m in my sixties, I want to understand more about what it felt like to be the beautiful wife of Jack Hall, raising four children in sunny California. I want to know why Mother continually forgot to remember how wonderful she was. I wish she would have taken pride in how much fun it was for us to hear her play "My Mammy" on the piano and sing, "The sun shines east, the sun shines west, I know where the sun shines best-Mammy." I don"t know why she didn"t appreciate how unusual it was when she took me to a room in a museum where a marble lion was missing the right side of his face; he also had no feet. The towering G.o.ddess in the other room had no arms. Mom was oohing and aahing, "Diane, isn"t it beautiful?"
"But everything"s lost. They don"t have their parts," I said.
"But don"t you see? Even without all their parts, look how magnificent they are." She was teaching me how to see. Yet she never took credit for anything. I wonder if her lack of self-esteem was an early symptom of forgetting. Was it really Alzheimer"s that stole her memory, or was it a crippling sense of insecurity?
For fifteen years Mother kept saying goodbye: goodbye to names of places; goodbye to her famous tuna ca.s.seroles; goodbye to the BMW Dad bought her on her sixty-first birthday; goodbye to recognizing me as her daughter. h.e.l.lo to Purina cat food molding on paper plates in her medicine chest; h.e.l.lo to caregivers; h.e.l.lo to the wheelchair guiding her to her favorite show-Barney-every morning on PBS; h.e.l.lo to the blank stare. Somewhere in the middle of the horrible h.e.l.los and tragic goodbyes, I adopted a baby girl. I was fifty. After a lifetime of avoiding intimacy, suddenly I got intimate in a big way. As Mother struggled to complete sentences, I watched Dexter, my daughter, and a few years later little Duke, my son, begin to form words as a means to capture the wonder of their developing minds.
The state of being a woman in between two loves-one as a daughter, the other as a mother-has changed me. It"s been a challenge to witness the betrayal of such a cruel disease while learning to give love with the promise of stability. If my mother was the most important person to me, if I am who and how I am largely due to who and how she was, what then does that say about my impact on Duke and Dexter? Abstract reasoning is no help.
At the beginning of her last year, Dorothy"s small circle of devoted friends had all but fallen away. The people who loved her could be counted on one hand. It was hard to recognize the woman we had known. But then, am I recognizable as the same person I was when Annie Hall opened almost thirty-five years ago? I remember people coming up to me on the street, saying, "Don"t ever change. Just don"t ever change." Even Mom once said, "Don"t grow old, Diane." I didn"t like those words then, and I don"t like them now. The exhausting effort to control time by altering the effects of age doesn"t bring happiness. There"s a word for you: happiness. Why is happiness something I thought I was ent.i.tled to? What is happiness anyway? Insensitivity. That"s what Tennessee Williams said.
Mom"s last word was no. No to the endless prodding. No to the unasked-for invasions. No to "Dinner, Dorothy?" "Time for your pills. Open your mouth." "We"re going to roll you over, Mamacita." "NO!" "There, doesn"t that feel good?" "NO!!" "Do you want to watch TV? Lucy"s on." "Let me get you a straw. Let me get you a fork." "NO." "Let me rub your shoulders." "No, no, no, no, NO!!!!" If she could, Mom would have said, "Leave me and my body alone, for G.o.d"s sake. Don"t touch me. This is my life. This is my ending." It wasn"t that the activities were administered without affection and care; that wasn"t the issue. The issue was independence. When I was a kid Mom would retreat to any unoccupied room with a longing that overshadowed her all-encompa.s.sing love for us. Once there, she would put aside the role of devoted mother, loving wife, and take refuge in her thoughts. In the end, no was all that was left of Dorothy"s desire to have her wishes respected.
"Finally freed from the constraints of this life, Mom has joined Dad-just as she has joined her sisters, Orpha and Martha; her mother, Beulah; and all her dear cats, starting with Charcoal, ending with Cyrus. I promise to take care of her thoughts and words. I promise to THINK. And I promise to carry the legacy of beautiful, beautiful Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall from Kansas, born on October thirty-first, 1921-my mother."
I spoke these words at her memorial service in November 2008. Mom continues to be the most important, influential person in my life. From the outside looking in, we lived completely different lives. She was a housewife and mother who dreamed of success; I am an actress whose life has been-in some respects-beyond my wildest dreams. Comparing two women with big dreams who shared many of the same conflicts and also happened to be mother and daughter is partially a story of what"s lost in success contrasted with what"s gained in accepting an ordinary life. I was an ordinary girl who became an ordinary woman, with one exception: Mother gave me extraordinary will. It didn"t come free. But, then, life wasn"t a free ride for Mother either.
So why did I write a memoir? Because Mom lingers; because she tried to save our family"s history through her words; because it took decades before I recognized that her most alluring trait was her complexity; because I don"t want her to disappear even though she has. So many reasons, but the best answer comes from a pa.s.sage she wrote using those fine abstract-reasoning capabilities she pa.s.sed on to me. The year was 1980. She was fifty-nine.
Every living person should be forced to write an autobiography. They should have to go back and unravel and disclose all the stuff that was packed into their lives. Finding the unusual way authors put ideas into words gives me a very satisfying knowledge that I could do this too if I focused on it. It might help me release the pressure I feel from stored up memories that are affecting me now. But I do something terribly wrong. I tell myself I"m too controlled by my past habits. I really want to write about my life, the close friends I knew, the family life we had, but I hold back. If I would be totally honest, I think I could reach a point where I"d begin seeing ME in a more understandable light. Now I"m jumpy in my recollected thought, yet I know it would be nothing but good for me to do this.
I wish she had. And, because she didn"t, I"ve written not my memoir but ours. The story of a girl whose wishes came true because of her mother is not new, but it"s mine. The profound love and grat.i.tude I feel now that she"s left has compelled me to try to "unravel" the mystery of her journey. In so doing I hoped to find the meaning of our relationship and understand why realized dreams are such a strange burden. What I"ve done is create a book that combines my own memories and stories with Mom"s notebooks and journals. Thinking back to her sc.r.a.pbooks and our mutual love of collage, I"ve placed her words beside mine, along with letters, clippings, and other materials that doc.u.ment not just our lives but our bond. I want to hold my life up alongside hers in order to, as she wrote, reach a point where I begin to see me-and her-in a more understandable light.
PART ONE.
1.
DOROTHY.
Extraordinary.
Dorothy"s commitment to writing began with a letter to Ensign Jack Hall, who was stationed with the Navy in Boston. It was just after the end of World War II. She was resting in the Queen of Angels Hospital after having given birth to me. All alone with a seven-pound, seven-ounce baby, she began a correspondence that would develop into a different kind of pa.s.sion. At that time, Mom"s words were influenced by the few movies Beulah had allowed her to see, like 1938"s Broadway Melody. Harmless fluff pieces with dialogue out of the mouth of Judy Garland. Mom"s "I sure do love you more than anything in the world" and her use of "swell" and "No one could ever make me happier than you" mirrored the American worldview of life and its expectations during the 1940s. For Dorothy, more than anything, it was love. It was Jack. It was Diane, and it was swell.
Mom wrote her first "h.e.l.lo, Honey" letter when I was eight days old. Fifty years later I met my daughter, Dexter, and held her in my arms when she was eight days old. She was a cheerful baby. Contrary to my long-held belief, I was not a cheerful baby or even very cute. Mother"s concern about my appearance was defined by a bad photograph. Photography was already telling people how to see me. I didn"t pa.s.s Dad"s pretty-picture test, or Mom"s for that matter. Holed up in Grammy Keaton"s little bungalow on Monterey Road in Highland Park, Dorothy had no choice. Through her twenty-four-year-old eyes she wanted to believe I was extraordinary. I had to be. She pa.s.sed this kind of hope on to a baby girl who got caught up in its force. Our six months alone together sealed the deal. Everything for Dorothy became heightened because she was exploding with the joy, pain, fear, and empathy of being a first-time mother.
January 13, 1946 Dearest Jack, You should be just about getting into Boston, and I"ll bet you are pretty worn out from the trip. It"s hard to realize it could be so cold there when it"s so nice here. I"m sorry I acted the way I did when you left. I sure didn"t want to, but the thought of you leaving got me so upset. I tried awfully hard to stop crying, because I knew it wasn"t good for Diane.
It"s 8:00 p.m., and your daughter"s asleep. She"s getting prettier every day and by the time you see her you may decide to have her for your "favorite dish." That"s not fair, honey-I saw you first, so I should be first choice in your harem, don"t you think? Chiquita and Lois came over today. They agreed she was swell, even though she has one bad habit-whenever anyone comes to look at her she looks back at them cross-eyed.
Well, honey, I think I"ll wake little "Angel Face" up. We"ve certainly got a prize, no fooling. Every time I look at her I think I can"t wait until you can see her, and we can be by ourselves.
Good night, my love, Dorothy January 18, 1946 h.e.l.lo, Honey, I wish I wasn"t such a crybaby. I don"t understand me. Until I was married you couldn"t make me cry over anything. I thought I couldn"t cry-but now all I have to do is think of you and how swell you are and I miss you so much before I know it I"m bawling just like Diane. I sure do love you more than you could know, honey. Even if I don"t tell you very often when I see you, I"m always thinking it.
Diane & I had our picture taken-just small cheap ones. I"m afraid they can"t be too good of her-she"s so tiny-and naturally they won"t be good of me, but that"s to be expected. I hope you can at least see what she looks like a little bit. The photographer said she was very good for a baby her size & age. She"s not fat like her mother used to be. Incidentally I"m still on the plump side = darn it. She weighs over 9 lbs. and, as I say in every letter-gets cuter everyday. I think that"s a nice idea of yours, sending her $2.00 bills. I"m putting them away for her. It"s adding up. Maybe pretty soon we could start a savings account for her. Good night, my Honey.
Love, Dorothy February 21, 1946 h.e.l.lo, Honey, I"m so disappointed. Those pictures are just as I expected-awful. Diane looks kind of funny. I"m not going to send them cause you"ll think I"ve been kidding you about how cute she is.
You said in your letter today that you wish we could relive those good old days again. I sure look back and dream about how swell they were. We don"t want to ever change, do we? Even though we have a family and more responsibilities, I don"t think that"s any reason to act older and not have the fun we used to.
Right?!
Good night, Darling Jack, Your Dorothy March 31, 1946 Dear Jack, Right now I"m so mad at you I could really tell you off if you were here. I don"t know whatever gave you the crazy idea that I might have changed and "start liking someone else." You aren"t the only person that believes in making a success of their marriage-it means just as much to me as it does you, and if you think I go around looking for someone that might suit me a little better, you don"t think too much of me. Don"t you think I take being married seriously? You ought to know how much I love you-so why in the world would I try and find someone else? You said you wanted me to be happy-well, believe me, you couldn"t make me any more unhappy if you tried. If you would just have a little confidence in me and trust me more you wouldn"t think such things. You don"t have to keep reminding me of the fact that we promised to tell each other first if things had changed. That applies to you too. Would you like it if I kept telling you I didn"t think it would last long and you would soon find someone else? Well, I sure don"t like it one bit so please don"t write like that again.
I probably shouldn"t send this but the more I think about it the madder I get! But no matter how mad I get, honey-I love you as much as I can and if I looked the whole world over I couldn"t see anyone but you because no one could ever make me any happier than you always have and always will. I feel better now-not mad anymore, but I"ll be really mad if you ever write that way again-don"t forget.
Love, Dorothy P.S. I"ve decided to send you our photographs after all.
April 25, 1946 h.e.l.lo, Honey, So you didn"t like the pictures, huh? Please don"t think your daughter looks like that because I a.s.sure you she doesn"t. And even if she wasn"t cute, she would be darling just from her personality alone. She has one already-very definitely. I think I"ll wait awhile before I have her picture taken again.
You know, of course, that we have a very remarkable and intelligent daughter. I was reading my baby book about what a 4-month-old baby should be doing and she was doing everything they mentioned when she was 2 months, really. She tries her hardest to sit up, and they don"t do that until they are 5 or 6 months. She really does take after you in every way-looks, smartness, and personality. Don"t worry, she will surely be a beauty.
Well, honey, only 38 more days until that wonderful day when I see you again. Diane said, "Whoopee!"
Well, anyway, she smiled- Bye, honey, Love, Dorothy Looking West My first memory is of shadows creating patterns on a wall. Inside my crib, I saw the silhouette of a woman with long hair move across the bars. Even as she picked me up and held me, my mother was a mystery. It was almost as if I knew the world, and life in it, would be unfamiliar yet charged with an alluring, permanent, and questioning romance. As if I would spend the rest of my life trying to understand her. Is this memory real? I don"t know.
Certain things stand out: the snowstorm in Los Angeles when I was three; the Quonset hut we lived in until I was five. It had a wonderful shape. I"ve loved arches ever since. One night, Mr. Eigner, our next-door neighbor, caught me singing "Over the Rainbow" on Daddy"s newly paved driveway. I thought I was going to get into trouble. Instead, he told me I was a "mighty talented young lady." Daddy worked at the Department of Water and Power in downtown Los Angeles. I"d go visit him at his office when I was five. There was something about looking west from the Angels Flight trolley car that mesmerized me. Tall buildings like City Hall peeked over the hill. I loved Clifton"s Cafeteria and the Broadway department store. Everything was condensed and concrete and angled and bustling with activity. Downtown was perfect. I thought heaven must look like Los Angeles. But nothing compared to the joy of tugging on Mom"s arm, telling her to "Look! Look, Mom." We both loved looking.
It was hard to know what Mom loved more, looking or writing. Her sc.r.a.pbooks, at least when I was a little girl, were ruined by endless explanations underneath the photographs. As I got older, I avoided the unwanted envelopes with her "Letters to Diane" like the plague. Who cared about letters? I just wanted pictures. After my incident in the darkroom with Mother"s journal, that was it for me. But when I made the decision to write a memoir at age sixty-three, I began to read Mother"s journals in no particular order. In the middle of this process, I came across what must have been an attempt at her own memoir. Embossed in gold at the top of the cover was 1980. That meant she began to write it when she was fifty-nine. Each entry was dated. Sometimes Mom would start an excerpt, then stop, leaving dozens of pages empty. Or she would write a paragraph on an incident one year, only to return to it a couple of years later, only to restart with yet another approach months after. Over the course of five years, she skipped in and out of her childhood events almost as if she was free-a.s.sociating. For the most part Dorothy"s tone was forgiving, sweet, and sometimes elegiac. But sometimes it wasn"t. She must have been taking stock of her life by dredging up memories of those days in the thirties when she was sandwiched between the harsh rules laid down by the Free Methodist church and the lure of life outside Beulah"s constraints. I hate to believe it"s true, but life threw Dorothy some punches she didn"t recover from.
Family Feelings My father, Roy Keaton, nicknamed me Perkins when I was very young, maybe three or four years old. He used it when he had "family feelings." When he felt estranged, he called me Dorothy. Daddy made it clear with all three of Mother"s pregnancies that he wanted a boy. As we girls grew, it became obvious that I was the one he wished had been the boy of his dreams. I was the tomboy, a quiet girl who gave no one trouble. I don"t know why Dad favored me over my sisters. Sometimes he confided thoughts he didn"t even share with Mother. I always listened wordlessly. When he finished he would say, "Isn"t that right, Perkins, huh? Huh?" He knew I would always agree. I think he also knew I always agreed with Mother too.
We moved a lot. When I was 4 we lived in an old two-story frame house on Walnut St. in Pasadena. The house sat right on the sidewalk. But we had a huge yard that backed up to the railroad tracks, which carried the new Super Chief Santa Fe train. No fence, or wall, or anything separated our yard from the track. I saw pa.s.sengers" faces as they looked into our kitchen. Today this would not be permissible but no one cared back then. Dad"s German shepherd, Grumpy, would sleep on the tracks, but he always ambled off just in time.
We always had cats. I was still just a kid when we moved to a cheaper rental house on top of a hill in Highland Park. It was set on a half acre of loose dirt, with a small patch of gra.s.s. We didn"t have neighbors. Very few people cared to climb the steep public stairway from the street. It was a perfect setting for cats. Mom let me have all I wanted. 13. Dad couldn"t have cared less. He was seldom there anyway. Money was scarce. Somehow these little furry creatures got fed every day along with the five of us. I found Pretty Boy, Cakes, Yeller, and Alex in one week. One particular cat though dominates my memory. Her name was Baby. She was a dull gray thing, with skinny legs, and eyes that made up most of her head, and a broken tail that hung crooked. The strangest thing was she made no sounds; no meows; no hisses and no purrs. Baby was a genetic failure to everyone but me. I loved her. One day, she gave birth to a litter of four kittens. To my great sorrow, though, Baby was never the same. She died not long after. Orpha didn"t care that much. She already had boyfriends she didn"t tell Mother about, so she was constantly sneaking out in the middle of the night. Marti was just a little girl, so she didn"t pay attention to them, but to me, the cats were the dearest things in the whole wide world. Mother always said being the middle sister made me the most sensitive. I don"t know about that, but it made me sad we couldn"t share how special they were. I never told them about my dream of owning a big cat farm where I could save every orphan cat I ever saw, broken down or not.
Firstborn Being firstborn had its advantages. I had Mom and Dad all to myself. Then Randy arrived, my junior by a couple of years. Randy was sensitive-too sensitive. As president and creator of the Beaver Club, I made Randy, the treasurer, come with me to the public stairway near the arroyo to look for money. Our number-one mission was to buy c.o.o.nskin caps like Davy Crockett"s. They cost a dollar and ninety-eight cents apiece. We were beside ourselves when Randy spotted an actual honest-to-G.o.d fifty-cent piece. Wow. Since I was president of the Beaver Club, it was my self-appointed responsibility to handle all finances, so I picked it up and held it in my hand for one perfect instant before Randy started screaming. I looked up and saw an airplane gliding across the sky in slow motion. Big deal. But Randy was so terrified I couldn"t stop him from running home in tears and hiding under our bunk bed. Even Mom couldn"t convince him it was only an airplane. After that, Randy became seriously hesitant about the outside world, especially about flying objects. In his teens it was almost impossible to pry him out of his room down the hall. Robin was convinced he was disappearing, and he was: He was disappearing into Frank Zappa, whose lyrics to songs like "Zomby Woof" became his mantra.
Mom and Dad worried about him right from the get-go. I made use of their concern by willing myself to be everything Randy wasn"t. Big mistake. What I didn"t understand was that his sensitivity allowed him to perceive the world with intensity and insight.
It was almost too easy to manipulate him out of items like his one and only green Duncan Tournament Yo-Yo, or the Big Hunk candy bar he saved from Halloween, or one of his very special cat"s-eye marbles he hid under the bunk bed. Sure, he was more unique and intuitive, but what did I care as long as I got what I wanted?
When Robin came along three years after Randy, I was beside myself with envy. A girl? How was that possible? Surely there was some mistake. She must have been adopted. Of course, she turned out pretty and she had a better singing voice than I did, but, worse than all that, she was Daddy"s favorite. Many years later, it drove me nuts when Warren Beatty referred to Robin as the "pretty, s.e.xy sister."
Dorrie came as an "unexpected surprise." I was seven years older, so she could do no wrong. Her face was a miniature replica of Dorothy"s. She was the brightest, most intellectually gifted of the Hall kids. In fact, she was the only one of us who ever presented Mom and Dad with a report card of straight A"s. She loved to read biographies of inspirational women like Simone de Beauvoir and Anais Nin. She read A Spy in the House of Love because it was a good "message" book. She said it instilled in her an optimistic outlook toward the future. She thought I might find some tidbits to apply to my philosophy on "love." I didn"t have a philosophy on love. That"s what hooked me on Dorrie; she was full of contradictions. It must have been part of the terms of being our only "intellectual."
We spent all weekends and every vacation at the seash.o.r.e. In 1952, Huntington Beach still gave permission for families to pitch tents on the water"s edge for a month at a time. Ours rose out of the sand like a black cube. That was the summer I read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Adventures of Perrine. I was nine. It seemed like life would always be imbued with black words on white pages, framed by white waves and black nights. Mom put zinc oxide on my nose every morning before Randy and I collected pop bottles, stacked them into borrowed shopping carts, and deposited them at the A&P supermarket for two cents apiece. With money in our pockets, we were able to buy our way into the famous heated salt.w.a.ter swimming pool. A few years later, Dad took us farther south and a.s.sembled our tent at Doheny Beach, where we caught waves on six-foot Hobie surfboards and sang songs like "Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley" around the campfire. Sometimes we"d drive up to Rincon, where we set up camp at the side of the Pacific Coast Highway. But it was Divers Cove in Laguna Beach that had Daddy"s heart. He and his best friend, Bob Blandin, would slip into their wet suits and disappear under the ocean"s surface for hours at a time while we kids played on the sh.o.r.e. Mom packed bologna sandwiches with mayonnaise. Willie, Bob"s wife, wore Chinese red lipstick and smoked, which Mom said was really bad. I remember the cliffs. At night they looked like dinosaurs ready to attack us. During the day we climbed them to the top and looked out over our beloved Laguna Beach. If you had seen us from the beach below, you would"ve thought we were the picture-perfect average California family in the fifties.
One Man"s Family The radio played a big part in our life. The one I remember most was a tall cabinet model made by Philco. We bought it on time, as we did with everything of value. Sundays were Radio Day. One Man"s Family was on at 3. It was my favorite. My sisters and I hurried home from church in order to follow the plot of Father Barber and his perfectly neat family. There just couldn"t be anyone as good, or wise, or understanding as Father Barber. I thought it unfair that I couldn"t have a father who would give big hugs and talk and laugh with his daughter. I always wondered how come my dad wasn"t like that, all warm and patient and loving and ... well, he just wasn"t, that"s all!! "If only" he would just say, "Come over here, Perkins, and give your dad a kiss." If only Mom would say, "Hurry up, I know how exciting the next episode of the Barber family is for you."
The only thing our family had in common with the serials was Mom and Dad were always looking for a better life. I thought it was unfair. And when I grew up I wasn"t going to live the way we did. My family would be perfect. I would see to that; always and forever happy, smiling, and beautiful.
Unanswered Questions When I was six, television gave me a gift. Gale Storm. Not Lucille Ball. Gale Storm in My Little Margie. She was everything I wanted to be-clever, fearless, and always up to wacky antics that invariably got her into big trouble with her father. She was funny but fragile. I liked that. I Love Lucy was television"s number-one highest-rated sitcom. Gale Storm"s knockoff was number two, but not to me. Gale and I were kindred spirits, or so I thought. After 126 episodes, My Little Margie was canceled. It was a sad day.
Fifteen years later, when I was a student at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, Phil Bonnell, the son of Gale Storm, was one of my cla.s.smates. On Christmas break he invited me to his mother"s home in Beverly Hills. This is what I remember. It was noon. Gale Storm was nowhere to be found. Phil told me she slept late. I thought everyone"s mother was up at six A.M. with hot Cream of Wheat and the voice of Bob Crane, the King of the Los Angeles Airwaves, blaring on the radio. There was no radio playing at the Bonnells" house, an uncomfortable, rambling ranch-style affair. When Gale finally came out, she wasn"t lively, and there were no antics. Later, Phil told me she drank a lot. Gale Storm drank? That"s when it dawned on me: Everything wasn"t perfect for Gale Storm, even though it seemed her dreams had come true.
I found my next hero in high school: Gregory Peck. Well, Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. His una.s.suming, quiet approach to solving the moral dilemmas of life inspired me. My worship for him was even greater than my teen crush on Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Gra.s.s.
I always told Mom everything-well, everything except my feelings about intercourse and movie stars like Warren Beatty. Gregory Peck, however, was discussed over and over. If only there was a way to meet him. Mom had to understand how he alone could teach me to be the kind of person I wanted to be, a hero in my own right. Under his guidance, I would have the courage to rescue people from the injustice of a racist community or even put my life on the line for what I believed.
Always encouraging, Mom let me roam through some pretty undeveloped thoughts. One time I told her about how frustrating Dad was. According to him, I never did anything right. He was always saying, "Don"t sit too close to the TV or you"ll go blind," or "Finish the food on your plate; there"s starving people in China," and, my least favorite, "Don"t chew with your mouth open unless you want to catch flies." Was there something about being a civil engineer that made him that way? Was that the reason he never thought I did things right? Mom was different. She didn"t judge me or try to tell me what to think. She let me think.
Grandfather Keaton The word came late one February night. It was a long-distance phone call from Oklahoma. An emergency. Had to be. There was no other reason for calling in 1937. Daddy took the call. "Come get your father. We can"t keep him any longer."
Dad couldn"t possibly leave work, so it was decided that Mother and I would bring Grandpa to live out his days with us. I would unfortunately have to miss two weeks of school. I pretended "answering the call of an emergency" was a duty I was obliged to fulfill. Secretly I was thrilled.
We set out with 25 dollars in cash, two gas credit cards, our California clothes, and a 1936 Buick Sedan. We took Route 66 through Kingman, Flagstaff, and Gallup on through to Oklahoma. When we arrived at our relatives" home, Grandpa was ready. All his worldly possessions were in a small worn suitcase. His hair was unkempt, but he smiled at us with tears in his eyes. We were told he was incapable of expressing a thought.
Grandfather Keaton had been a lazy if good-hearted man. Roy"s mother, Anna, bore the burden. Eventually she had to go to work. When she insisted the marriage end, unheard of in those days, Grandpa began roaming the country in a red Model T Ford truck accompanied by his dog "Buddy." Over time things deteriorated, and Grandpa came back home. Anna took him in until she became so frustrated she called us in the dead of winter to come take him away.
On our trip back home, Grandpa seemed happy. He no sooner stepped into the backseat of the Buick before he leaned forward and handed Mother a huge wad of bills. Our trip home was full of many more comforts than the trip going, but we paid for it. Dressing Grandpa in the morning was impossible. He put his pants on backwards. He couldn"t get his arms in his jacket. He didn"t know how to tie his shoes. He refused to wear socks. He didn"t have any table manners, or teeth, for that matter. His baggy trousers were damp all the time. He was incontinent. This annoyed Mother to no end. We put in long, long hours driving in order to make it back in three and a half days.
Needless to say it was a whole new life with Grandpa occupying one of our 3 bedrooms. Dad refused to partic.i.p.ate in his father"s care at all. That was Mother"s job. The details were unbelievable. Grandpa would sneak out of the house and run away at least twice a week. Mother had to go looking for him all over the neighborhood. Finally, we locked him in his room. He would pound on the door so loud he caused the neighbors to complain. When his bowels became impacted, Mom forced Dad to give him an enema. The results were so awful the toilet plugged up. It didn"t take long for us to decide that Grandpa"s condition was beyond home care. Arrangements were made to transfer him to the veterans hospital on Sawtelle in Los Angeles. Dad drug his feet on this, but Mother insisted.
The last time I saw Grandpa he was waving goodbye from a car driving him to the old soldiers" section of the veterans hospital. Dad never forgave Mother, even though he never bothered to lift a finger to help. I"m ashamed to say, Martha and I gave Mother no help either. We were teenage girls, and Grandpa was an embarra.s.sment. Later I found out that while Mom was burdened with the hardship of caring for Grandpa, Dad was seeing another woman. It wasn"t long after this he drove off, never to return.
The Sea of White Crosses Five days a week for the past four years, I"ve taken a shortcut through the very same veterans hospital off San Vicente near Sawtelle. On the north side of the complex is the graveyard Duke refers to as "the Sea of White Crosses." Sometimes I tell him about all the soldiers who lived and died to help keep our country safe. He always wants to know if they looked like the green plastic soldiers we buy at Target.
Until I read Mother"s words, I didn"t know the story of an incontinent, wandering Keaton fellow who shared a house with his young granddaughter Dorothy, who was on the eve of meeting a certain Jack Newton Hall, who would become my father. How is it possible that I could have driven by Duke"s Sea of White Crosses for so many years without knowing my great-grandfather Lemuel W. Keaton Jr."s cross was so close to home?
Sermons All sermons were always about the resurrection of the living Christ Jesus of Nazareth, born to save mankind from the threat of an eternity in h.e.l.l. The catch was you had to be born again. I played it safe. I read my Bible and proclaimed in testimony at prayer meetings that I indeed was saved, sanctified, and born again. Whenever I had the courage to stand up and state my memorized pa.s.sage, the entire congregation smiled. I never understood what my declaration meant. I just wanted church to be colorful. I just wanted beautiful music like Handel"s Messiah and Copland"s Appalachian Spring. I didn"t want to hear about Blood and Death. Yet this was the ritual you couldn"t avoid. Blood. Sin. Guilt. Tears. Death. Shroud. Tomb. It was nothing more than a relinquishing of our free will to a philosophy that all men are born in sin and must be forgiven and saved from themselves in order to qualify for eternal and everlasting peace. It has taken all my 60 years to straighten out my thinking on all this, and believe me I am finally unburdened. I am free of the fear instilled in me, free from the angry G.o.d, the straight and narrow path to Heaven, and the fiery anguish of living in h.e.l.l. I am grateful to whatever force in the universe there is that has removed me of all the ugliness imposed on me by false ideas about what life should be. And when I"m through with my time in the scheme of it all, I"m not afraid of what comes after. Amen.