Daddy (James Lawless) as Sir Toby- Laird Williamson’s Twelfth Night- Denver Center (1990).
My father, who died in 2000, was always a great presence in my life even when he was absent. He was an actor and some of my earliest memories of him are on stage and he is pretending to be someone else. I describe, in Chanel Bonfire, a summer spent in North Carolina when he and to a lesser extent, my mother, Georgann, were in Summer Stock. It was an outdoor theater and they would put my sister Robbie and I to bed in the way back of the station wagon with the seats folded down. If we woke up, we could just lift our heads and see them on stage. When I was separated from him for ten years it was often him playing someone else that I remembered most. When I started acting, simply being in a theater made me feel closer to him. Later, after I’d found him again, we almost always lived in different cities and he was still and forever pretending to be someone else. He was of the first and probably last generation of great American Regional Theater actors working full-time, year round in repertory companies. Visits with him were wonderful — half watching him on stage, half hanging out with him at home or, later in his life, in actors’ housing in Baltimore or Washington or Tucson. But even just hanging out retained qualities of pretending and theatrical experience. Entrances and exits at airports or more specifically at bars at airports. Roles of father and daughter that were half-lived but also half-learned.
Our old school in London, ASL (The American School in London). The school was started in the 50s but this building, where Robbie and I went was begun in 1968 and finished in 1970. The cornerstone was laid by Ambassador Walter Annenberg and The Rt. Hon. Margaret Thatcher, MP, then secretary of state for education and science (aka at that time, Margaret Thatcher Milk Snatcher) spoke at the dedication.
The campus is in St. John’s Wood. I’m guessing the fortress-like street presence was developed to counter terrorist threats. In the early 70s, for us, it was the IRA who called in a couple of bomb threats to the school. We were happy there amongst the army, oil, CIA and State Department brats. We were the swinging divorcee brats and got to see Elton John and do our first acting.
I kissed Sam Robards in my first play — strictly a stage kiss. And was seen by Alan Parker and asked to audition for a movie he was making: Bugsy Malone. I didn’t get it; Jodie Foster did.
But I wasn’t disappointed. With Mother happy and occupied by new people and parties and songwriting, Robbie and I were free and for a couple of teenagers in 70s London, that was easily as much fun as making a movie.
Sometimes, for the sake of narrative flow, style, character–any number of reasons–a writer has to cut passages in order to make a better book. As Faulkner said, “Kill your darlings.” In memoir your darlings are not simply scenes you made up, they are part of your life, part of you. This passage had to be cut from Chanel and I think it’s a better book for its absence but it doesn’t make it less meaningful for me. Thanks to the modern miracle of blogging (like the extras section of film dvds) I can share it with you.
Moccasins of Shame
The hospital was bright and clean inside and smelled like a swimming pool. Mother’s room was all bleached white and glowing with sunlight. Her blond hair was pulled back in a bun. Looking at her in the skinny hospital bed, I didn’t think she looked sick at all. She looked beautiful, like a fairy princess.
Mother laughed and smiled and was so happy to see us. Daddy stood against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, as we climbed up onto the bed to hug her and kiss her. She told us that she got to eat her breakfast in bed and that most nights they showed movies in the dining room after dinner. She told us about a woman she’d met there who had been a famous Olympic diver, but had then dived into a swimming pool with no water in it and now she had problems thinking straight. I wondered aloud why someone would jump into an empty swimming pool in the first place, but Mother said it had been an accident.
Before we left, she gave us each a little pair of moccasins that she had made for us during recreation. I asked what that was, and she said it was a time when everyone at the hospital got to make something with their hands—baskets or pot holders, for example—and that she had decided to make something for us. The moccasins were brown suede and had little beads sewn onto the tops of them—they were so pretty. I told her I loved them. Then a nurse came in and said that visiting hours were over and we kissed Mother good-bye.
“I’ll be home soon,” she promised.
I rode home in the car smiling the whole way with my moccasins on my lap. I told my father that I planned to wear them to school the next day to show everyone. My father said nothing; he just looked out at the road over the steering wheel.
The next day, I pranced into my classroom wearing the moccasins to show everyone how clever my mother was and how much she loved me.
“Look! See?” I said to anyone who would listen.
“Gee,” said Carol Rulnick as I modeled them for her.
“My mom made me these pretty Pocahontas shoes!” I sang.
“Those are nice,” said Tommy Flatto.
“Is your mom an Indian?” asked Phillip Braxton. He was so dumb.
“Can I try them on?” asked Carol but I pretended I didn’t hear her. I was crazy in love with those shoes; there was no way I was going to let her.
I basked in the attention of my classmates and struck a few dramatic foot poses to show my moccasins off to their best advantage.
“Wendy Lawless, you come here this instant,” said my first grade teacher Miss Entus.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said skipping up to her. I figured she just wanted a better look at my beautiful shoes and maybe to ask me where I got them. But she didn’t. She took her glasses off and stuck her hands on her hips.
“Wendy, I am appalled that your parents would allow you to wear bedroom slippers to school.” She looked down at me sternly.
“But…” I said.
Until this moment I had loved Miss Entus with all my heart. She was thin and blonde like my mother and she gave us lollipops during the spelling test.
“I’m afraid that it’s against school rules,” she said folding her arms across her chest.
I wanted to tell her that they weren’t bedroom slippers and that my mom had made them for me, that she had sewn the little beads on herself.
“You go to the office right now and you tell them that you are to be sent home,” Miss Entus said.
“But…” I tried again.
She pointed to the door. I looked down at my feet, heartbroken. There was hush as I walked out of the classroom and down to the office to wait for my father.
Apparently no one had told Miss Entus that my moccasins had been hand-made by my crazy mom during her recreation period at the loony bin.
Mother and Robbie in we think maybe Canada but it could be a state park in Missouri we’re not sure.
As you can tell by her chic movie star bathing suit, she was already dressing for Saint Tropez. It would be a few years and another marriage before she made it there. But she did.
Flower Children: Striking a pose next to Daddy’s Mustang convertible.
One summer, before Mother took us away to London, Daddy had some time off from the Guthrie and rented a little place in Wisconsin. He’d drive along the back roads at what felt like a hundred miles an hour with the top down and Robbie and I jumping up and down in the back seat as the wind blew back our hair and rushed through our fingers. I still get that feeling of freedom sometimes on a long drive.
I had a wonderful time at my old school, Beaver Country Day in Boston, talking to a number of classes of students in the theater and then reading and signing books for alumni in the afternoon.
People who knew me then frequently say that they had no idea what kind of craziness was going on in my life (although my mother’s arrest at my sister’s Beaver graduation kind of opened a window). Mostly that was because I was afraid to let anyone know. As I say in the book, covering it up was my full-time job. But kids like the students I met at Beaver are eager to know and ask lots of questions about how I survived — I suspect because some of them are going through their own difficult times. One of the reasons I wrote the book was that I was hoping young people would read it and know that they’re not alone and don’t have to be alone.
With my incredibly brave sister, Robin, co-heroine of Chanel making her first return to Beaver since the cops showed up.
Ticket to the Elton John concert in the gym at The American School in London, where Robin and I were students. We ran outside to the back door afterwards to try for an autograph, but I only succeeded in tripping him. Sigh.
