The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(46)

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The bottom line is, Mom needed reinforcements. The solution, for a few months anyway, was to have our dad’s mom, Grandma Ethel, come stay with us and help out. She was an altogether different sort of person than our other grandmother, Louise. Whereas Grandma Louise had been raised in material comfort in a bustling town, Ethel grew up on a farm, riding horses and tending to the family’s hogs and chickens. She had the lean, weathered face of a woman in a Walker Evans photograph. And she was reserved where Louise was talkative. The only thing that our two grandmas had in common was that they preferred to eat their meat the same way: fried and smothered in gravy.

Grandma Ethel had a confidently steely air. While she was supportive of her son’s journey westward, she still called our dad Harold and was markedly indifferent to Disneyland, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and anything to do with “the show bidness,” as the phrase came out in her flat, Oklahoman voice.

Still, she was truly impressed by the nearby desert and the mountains that surrounded us in Burbank. And by the ocean, which she got to see for the first time in her life, in her sixties. Most importantly, she was always warm toward Clint and me, in her quiet way. She got a kick out of our suburban, baby-boomer way of life, which was exotic to an Oklahoman born in 1904, and I got a rare guffaw out of her when I modeled one of my most prized possessions, a Beatle wig.

Mom had a tumultuous relationship with her own mother, but she really bonded with Grandma Ethel. Their favorite joint activity was to drive deep into the San Fernando Valley and beyond to check out the model homes in the new housing developments that were going up in the old orange groves. It’s all built-up now—Agoura Hills, Thousand Oaks, Westlake Village—but at the time, the area was wide open and the air still carried the scent of oranges. In the mid-1960s, the Ventura Freeway, the segment of Route 101 that cut through our area, ended in Calabasas, twenty miles west of Burbank. For the remainder of the ride, it was just a dinky little two-lane road. Which could make for a long ride if we got stuck behind a semi.

Did I mention that we were dragged along on these excursions, too? When Clint and Dad were around, we all piled into the Super Sport, with Dad behind the wheel. Clint and I found these outings boring as hell. But Dad was gracious and tolerant. He understood that this was an escapist release for Mom, who dreamed of a bigger, airier place than our increasingly cramped house, where we all shared a single bathroom. Given Mom and Dad’s frugality, there was no chance that they would ever pull the trigger and buy a new-build home out in Westlake Village. They didn’t believe in taking out mortgages, nor did they want to live farther away from the studios.

But Mom and Grandma Ethel liked to walk around the showpiece houses that anchored these rising developments, imagining what it would be like to live someplace so modern, so roomy, so expensive. Ethel, a pragmatic woman who knew a lot about construction, had a good eye for structural strengths and weaknesses, which Mom admired. When Ethel noted a sign of shoddy work or substandard quality—poor drainage planning, cracks forming prematurely in the walls because the houses were settling on fill dirt—it offered Mom some consolation. Yes, it would be amazing to live out here, far from the intensifying, cough-inducing L.A. smog—if only these fancy builders had any idea of what they were doing.

We were lucky to have the time with Grandma Ethel that we did. A few months after her stay with us, she passed away in Oklahoma, suffering a heart attack after making a long drive in a snowstorm to visit her sister, who was hospitalized at the time. Dad took the news stoically. We didn’t travel east for the funeral, because, as far as Dad was concerned, we couldn’t. The Andy Griffith Show was in the middle of production.





CLINT


Mom had her own serious health issues to contend with. She was in constant pain from rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disorder, which made her hands and feet swell up. Dad showed me a picture of the character actor John Carradine, whose hands were gnarled by the condition, to explain what Mom was going through. She wasn’t as bad off as Carradine, but she really struggled.

There were mornings when Ron and I found her still in bed with a heating pad, sadly looking up at us and saying, “I’ve had another attack.” Then she would somehow pull herself up to get her boys off to school or the set, suffering with every step, waiting for the aspirin to kick in. That she could participate at all in her beloved PTA shows was an act of sheer willpower. The mornings after those Tap-Dancing Mama routines were particularly brutal, with Mom blinking through the pain like a pro running back on a Monday morning. Jiminy Christmas, was she stoic.

Mom did herself no favors with her personal habits, an inheritance from the health-be-damned Speegles. She was a two-pack-a-day smoker for much of our childhoods, and she drank four or five cups of coffee in the morning. And then she’d drink more coffee still at her favorite hangout, Albin’s Drugs on the corner of Magnolia Boulevard and Hollywood Way, owned by the same family as our beloved Albin’s toy store.

The drugstore had a classic, 1940s-style, Formica-topped lunch counter and a staff of chatty, salt-of-the-earth waitresses of the same vintage. For Mom, a half hour at the counter at Albin’s was like a microdose of the escapist joy that she got from looking at the model homes in Westlake Village. One of us boys or the other often accompanied her there, kept occupied eating a hot dog or a grilled cheese while she took drags on her cigarette and gabbed with the waitresses.