Read My Lips Read online

  Not until much later in my life did I learn both my mother and father had been abandoned by their parents. My mom had lost her father to jail. He’d shot someone in a card game on a riverboat. And my father had three fathers die by the time he was nineteen years old. Father number three drank away all the money before he passed, and Daddy had to join the Marines instead of going to college. I think that made him feel less than everyone else somehow.

  My mom and dad loved each other. “Edith, you’re just going to have to stick up for yourself,” Dad would say about their fights. At one point or another we all had to endure my father’s disappointed nagging. For example, there was The Coffee Incident.

  “Edith! This coffee is not hot!” he would say.

  “Oh, dear,” Mom said. “Let me get you another cup.”

  Then, the next day: “Edith! This coffee is not hot. Can you not make a good cup of coffee?”

  “Okay, dear, I’ll get another pot.”

  Yet another day: “Edith, if you can’t make a hot cup of coffee, I’m going to have to get a divorce!”

  After about three weeks of this, of my mother rushing back and forth to the kitchen fetching coffee and my father threatening divorce, my mother finally turned on her heel and said, “Well, then, Jack dear, why don’t you get one?”

  I was terrified. I was sure that was it for my parents. DIVORCE. I raced over to my neighbor’s house.

  “My parents are getting a divorce!” I cried and told them about my dad’s coffee.

  The next day the neighbors saw me outside and, laughing, called over the fence. “Sally, are your parents divorced yet?” They thought it was hilarious.

  The neighbors knew it wasn’t serious, but I didn’t know which end was up sometimes in my house. Diana called Dad’s outbursts “flying off the handle.” I hated seeing my father act entitled and my mother placating. Daddy always apologized, but that didn’t stop him from doing the same thing again.

  My parents never divorced, and my fears about that eventually subsided.

  I WONDER WHY GOD CHOSE ME TO SEE THE WORLD THROUGH my eyes? You knew right away I was going to be an actress.

  This was the thought that popped into my head at the age of seven as I sat under the bushes in Granada Hills in the San Fernando Valley. I was in the country, often alone, except for my black cocker spaniel, Shadow. I looked up to my sister, Diana, but she didn’t want me tagging along. Her full name was Diana Dean Kellerman, but my father called her “Dinky Dean.” “Hi Dinky!” I’d always squeal. Oh, how I worshipped her. “Shut up, Stinky!” she’d respond. She was always trying to get rid of me, as older siblings often do to their younger, pesky brothers and sisters. She was always tackling me and snapping towels at my legs and behind while we were washing the dishes. She liked books and studying; I sang until it drove her crazy and wanted to wander, wanted to be outside.

  I was happy out in the world, in the groves of the valley with my pal Shadow. I would sit and look around, knowing that what appeared before my eyes—the eyes that God had chosen for me—looked different from what it would look like to any other person anywhere else in the world. To this day I am an overwhelmingly visual person, stimulated more by images than words on a page.

  Being in the country thrilled me. It still does. I lived in the real San Fernando Valley back then, not the Valley of sprawling suburbs and strip malls. It was the Valley of orange groves and pastures, of dirt roads, eucalyptus trees, and fields of flowers, and of making colorful papier-mâché creations at the old Spanish Mission. There was one store in Granada Hills, a service station with two pumps, and a Chow Dog snack shop, which was the closest thing we had to a soda fountain. When we’d get off the bus after school, we’d go to the Chow Dog. The boys in my class would pull back the lid of the freezer, take a bite from an ice cream, and put it back. I scolded them every time, but one day I was out walking by myself and it was so hot and I was so hungry that I suddenly found myself eyeing that freezer. The man who ran the shop was in the back, and I thought, Maybe just this one time if I snuck a bite it will be okay. As the cool ice cream bar headed toward my mouth, out came the shopkeeper. “So YOU’RE the one who’s been taking all the ice cream!” he shouted. I had to run all the way home to get the ten cents I owed and—worst of all—tell my parents.

  The heat will make people do all kinds of things, and the Valley was hot, hot, hot. Summers were about swimming in all the public plunges and getting our yearly haircuts.

  “Time for your haircut,” Mom would say.

  I got used to it, but it could be disconcerting for other kids. I remember Dickie Forrest moving in across the street just before my annual lopping.

  “Hey,” he said, “how come you cut your hair when I was just getting to know you?”

  Then there was the time when my beautiful cousin from New Orleans, Millidge Marie Haas, was getting married and asked me to be her flower girl. That called for a special haircut. So my mom sat me down, got out the shears, and cut my long, brown hair off all the way up to the middle of my ears. Then off we went to the beauty parlor for the finishing touch, something called a “permanent.”

  If only it had been a “temporary.”

  I sat down in the chair, the hairdresser snapped the long bib around my neck, and the next thing I knew I was sitting beneath a machine that looked like it was from outer space. They put what felt like a fifty-pound bucket on my head and plugged me into a wall.

  When I emerged I looked like Larry from the Three Stooges: my hair was flat on top with fuzzy frizz sticking out to either side. What a trauma! I was completely devastated. I wanted to hurl myself off a cliff. I was six years old and wasn’t sure I could go on.

  My mother thought I was overreacting and tried to reassure me. “You are God’s perfect child,” she told me, as always.

  MY MOTHER WAS A CHRISTIAN SCIENTIST, WHICH IS ONE OF the most misunderstood faiths going. There were no doctors or trips to the hospital, this was true. But there was a lot of calm and faith and joy, if my mom’s example was typical.

  No doctors meant that when I got sick I got Red Hots for pills and got to lay in my mom’s bed and listen to The Shadow on the radio. If I felt particularly bad, she would make me floating islands too—little bits of meringue resting on a runny vanilla custard to soothe what ailed me. Baked custards too. And if I ever came home from school crying, I got cinnamon toast with butter and a cup of cocoa. Finding candy in our house was like a game. It was stashed in the linen closet, in my father’s golf bag in the trunk of his car, even in the bottom of the dirty clothes hamper. I thought the hunt was fun. While other kids were studying, I was looking for candy in the laundry room.

  To my mind, mom’s was a spiritual, loving God. She reminded me of this and her abundant view of the world on a daily basis:

  “You are God’s perfect child.”

  “Supply is unlimited.”

  “The expectancy of good.”

  “Fear has no power, only what we give it.”

  But one of her sayings scared me a little.

  “Ingratitude is the back door through which all our blessings escape.”

  God forbid I had an ungrateful thought. I worried that every time I complained I was shooing my blessings away.

  Perhaps the one that has given me the most comfort is “Everything we need is within us.”

  I think of books today and various movements that rely on visualization or embracing gratitude and trusting that all will be revealed in the best possible way, and all I can think is that my mom was ahead of her time. She had her faith in God tested on more than one occasion, but she never, ever complained.

  “I sure wish I was taller” was about the only thing even close to a complaint that I ever heard from her lips.

  SOMETIME AROUND FIFTH GRADE WE MOVED TO SAN FERNANDO proper, to a lovely little house on Brand Boulevard two blocks in from Laurel Canyon. That’s where I trained Shadow to jump the fence. I was so proud (my father not so much). Shadow and I would wander a
round looking for adventures together. One day, while we were out walking, I saw a huge expanse of dirt in the distance. I got a little closer. They were houses, but strangely, they were all being built at the same time. They looked exactly alike. Oh no, I thought, looking at the changing Valley, I hope it doesn’t get too crowded.

  I swam like a fish throughout junior high and even won first place in All-Valley butterfly as well as third in All-City medley. But things started to change socially, and my self-image started to take a hit. I was growing—fast—and suddenly looking for reasons to feel good about myself. One of the most frustrating things about being so tall so young was that there was very little I could wear in my size that was cute. There were no clothes for big girls, for people who didn’t look like my little five-foot-two mom, all high heels and petite femininity. But feeling big made me ready to take anything that was said to me the wrong way. When one of the kids in my seventh-grade class told me I had a crooked smile, at first it hurt my feelings.

  “No,” my friend explained. “It’s sexy.”

  Sexy? What was that, exactly? I wasn’t entirely sure, but I could tell by the way he said the word that I definitely wanted to be it. So when it was time for school pictures, I tried to smile just as crooked as I could. The day we took the pictures home I showed my father the best shot.

  “That’s disgusting,” he said, and he tore it to pieces in front of me.

  He wanted my older sister, Diana, and me to be more like our mother: to wear dresses, to be more, well, demure. So the two of us occasionally found ourselves dressed in matching pinafores. He also wanted us to do well in school. Diana was a bookworm, but school was never my thing, outside of drama, choir, gym, and recess. I preferred playing in George Pupitch’s haystack to doing my homework. George called me “moo moo clarabell jersey bounce labatroite” after all his neighboring cows because I was taller than all the neighboring cows—and most of the boys. But once I returned from haystacks and walks with Shadow, my father was always checking in on me, hovering over me and my books.

  “Think!” he’d snap, when all I wanted to do was nap. I couldn’t manage to read to save my life. I’d look ahead a few pages so that if my dad quizzed me, I would have an answer. “Tom Sawyer was just getting some kids to paint a fence,” I’d tell my father.

  “Okay . . . very good,” he’d say. And the minute he was out the door I’d be asleep.

  I earned Cs, Ds, and Fs. I needed—still do—people to make things interesting for me. Sitting in a classroom with a teacher verbally instructing me put me to sleep. I just couldn’t take it in. Not until I had kids of my own would I discover I had a lifelong learning disability, the kind that wasn’t acknowledged—let alone diagnosed or medicated—in the 1950s. If you did poorly, you weren’t working hard enough, plain and simple. Even later, after millions of classes, when actors or teachers would give me books or lecture about the “spine of the character,” the words and lessons never sunk in. I need to be. I need to do.

  STILL, I MANAGED TO KEEP SCHOOL INTERESTING. IN ELEMENTARY school I’d started a Cowgirl Club. We ran around slapping our legs, pretending to be riding horses. I was a huge fan of Betty Hutton and used to paint freckles on my nose and put on my roller skates and sing songs from Annie Get Your Gun. Another highlight of my youth was joining the Bathroom Club. To belong, you had to be willing to go to the bathroom in the orange groves. I was the only girl in the club. In middle school clubs got a little clique-ier. Girls were invited to join, girls were kicked out. None of it made a whole lot of sense to me.

  When I was invited to join the Girls Club at San Fernando Junior High, my best friend, Sherry, didn’t want me to and was a little possessive of my attention. Sherry and I had known each other for years, and she didn’t like me to have other friends. When we were younger we would take snails from the garden, put them in a jar, salt them, and watch them shrivel and die. (We hadn’t heard about animal cruelty.) When we moved on to having sleepovers, Sherry told me how to masturbate. But then Sherry joined the Girls Club before me—the same one she’d insisted I not join—and kicked out the girl who had invited me to join. Then I insisted we bring her back, and they did. Then they all kicked me out. I had no idea know why, but something occurred to me: I could get myself a whole new gang. And I did.

  I was voted class clown in the ninth grade and decided to audition for the Follies with Sherry. I created our musical act: I was the star, the director, and the choreographer. I decided it would be a little bit Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, a little bit like Show Boat, with Ava Gardner, and that there’d be roller skates involved. Singing was nothing without a little extra something, and roller skates added real panache.

  My sister told me that, on skates, I looked like an elephant on a teacup. Before, when I was younger, I was too skinny; now I was an elephant. Diana had always teased me when I would gab or sing. “Shut up, big lips, with your stupid voice!” she’d say. “Big lips” always made me cry. But she was so smart and so bookish and seemed to have the answer to everything. I idolized her. I thought she looked just like Shirley MacLaine. Was she right about my Follies routine? I didn’t care. Nothing ever stopped me from performing.

  Sherry and I rehearsed and auditioned our show to be a part of the Follies. I was stunned when we our act didn’t make the cut. It was my first real performance rejection—but certainly not the last. I retired to my room and stood in front of the mirror. I looked deep into my own eyes, smiling a crooked smile.

  Someday . . . Someday . . .

  By the time I was in junior high, acting and singing were already inseparable for me. I wanted to be a movie star, and I wanted to have a huge wedding so everyone could come and see how pretty I looked. I wanted to sing. Unfortunately, I kept getting plumper as I worked my way through junior high, so admitting out loud I wanted to act began to seem like more of a stretch. I didn’t think I looked like the actresses I admired. I didn’t look like Doris Day. So I kept my desire a secret.

  With the onset of my extra pounds, our mealtimes went from the routine teasing of my mom to an ongoing interrogation from my father. He analyzed every bite that made its way from my plate to my mouth.

  “Sit up straight. Do you want to eat in the garage? That’s too much salt! That’s too much sugar!”

  He became the warden of the prison I’d made, burying myself under the weight of Twinkies and candy bars until I was ready to come out.

  There was little that my mother could do but put her usual positive spin on my weight gain. “Well, darling,” she used to say, “you’re so well proportioned.”

  Oh, Mom. To this day whenever a script hands me a “dear,” I always wish it were a “darling.”

  My weight gain was partly due to puberty and shooting skyward. But in therapy I realized that there was also probably some fallout from the unwanted attention I received from the father of a friend, “Jennifer,” whenever I spent the night at her house.

  The first time he climbed into bed with me I was around ten or eleven years old. Jennifer and I came in from outside, covered in adobe mud. We cleaned up and crawled into Jennifer’s twin beds. Jennifer’s father came in to say good night and then, instead of leaving, got into bed with me. I didn’t know what to do. I just froze.

  Maybe it was because I didn’t cry out that he kept pushing it. He kept after me, holding me and touching my chest, eventually putting his hand between my legs. He would stroll around the house naked with a huge erection while I was there. I remember wondering how it was that men ever got their pants on. Once he took Jennifer and me for a drive and parked somewhere in the woods. He began to tell us dirty stories, things I’d never heard before or even understood. Then he said, “You girls won’t be virgins when you get married.” Jennifer and I started sobbing. With every advance, I didn’t know what to say. Only once did he ever put my hand on his penis. And that was when I finally managed to speak. “Don’t you ever touch me again,” I said, and that was all it took. However, it took me a long time to
work up the courage to do it.

  I didn’t dare tell my parents. I never told anyone—except Jennifer. When I did, she just glared at me, furious, and said, “So?”

  IT TOOK ME YEARS TO UNDERSTAND THAT I HAD FINE PARENTS who simply reflected their own lifetime of pain, their own secrets. But they never, ever complained. They lived. They had fun. Still, I regarded them as products of the Victorian era. There was a right way to do things and a wrong way. There were rules, and people lived their lives according to those rules, especially proper young women. There was a lot that went unsaid in our house, things I would have liked to have known about. The foremost of these was the story of my younger sister.

  My mother waved down to Diana and me from the hospital window when the baby was born. We weren’t allowed to go up to see her for ourselves. Those were the days when doctors and nurses swept in to take your child the moment it was out of your body. A hospital room with a newborn was not the place for children.

  When my parents brought Victoria home, I thought she was the most adorable thing I had ever seen. At first she just lay there in her crib, staring off. Then, after a few months, she learned to giggle and would make eye contact. She was about eight months old when my mother left for a weekend to attend a spiritual conference. She had never left us before. Because she had to leave town, she arranged for a housekeeper to come stay to take care of Diana, me, and little Victoria.

  I remember the housekeeper standing at our old-fashioned stove the first night my mother was gone. The housekeeper was talking to me as she was stirring supper on the stove. I liked watching her cook. It was kind of mesmerizing.

  She told me about a friend of hers who was staying with a family when their baby died. Then she added, “I just don’t know what I would do if that happened to me.”

  That sounded horrible to me. She stopped talking and kept on stirring. I watched her spoon go around and around. Was this an omen?