In Pieces(48)

I never told anyone in production about my dissatisfaction with the show and struggled hard to keep it from showing, except when I was with Baa. If she wasn’t drunk, she was my sounding board, my pillow to scream into, patiently listening to my endless stream of frustrations. Since the first days of Gidget she was always advising me to get to know the camera, to make friends with it—which, instinctually, I had. Sometimes I felt more intimately connected with that mechanical device than with anything breathing on the set. But in that friendship, she warned me, I had better be careful of what I was feeling. She repeatedly drilled it into my head that if I was irritated or impatient or bored or just fed up with the work, the camera could and would see it, implying that those colors were unappealing and would paint me as unlikable. I scoffed at her advice, not because it wasn’t right, but because it seemed as if she was telling me to erase my true feelings, to swallow them, to settle for what I had and never want more.

I have a little square snapshot of my mother taken around 1936, when she was fourteen or fifteen. She peers over the shoulder of an unnamed young man, with an open joyous laugh on her face and a spark in her eyes like a challenge to anyone who thinks they can stop her. She’s alive and going to take a big bite out of life. Either that or a big bite out of the boy standing next to her, and maybe at that moment, they were one and the same.

Fifteen-year-old Baa with her infectious laugh.





It goes without saying that my mother’s generation had a more confining set of boundaries dictating their behavior than the one I grew up in. And she had been a bit of a renegade in her way, had challenged those parameters, behavior that must have given the women of her family some worrisome, hand-wringing moments. Before taking the career opportunity that had landed in her lap, before earning a living in the foreign world of show business, she’d spent two years in a city college, and quietly knew so much about so many things. Certainly, literature: I could hardly name a book she hadn’t read, and she remembered them all, could summarize the story and talk about the author’s other works. She had read Freud and Jung, had seen a psychiatrist in the early fifties, could spout the theories of most of the important philosophers, studied art history on her own, practiced painting with oils all her life, was proficient in quilt making, knitting, and sewing. And when I tried to learn French in my early sixties, then foolishly attempted to speak to her using my shaky skills, she maddeningly filled in all the words I couldn’t remember, using the correct and exact pronunciation.

What happened? Why was the confidence of her youth so ephemeral? Why is mine? As my mother approached the end of her life, I began to feel a frantic need to know more about her. I pestered and pushed, wanting her to reveal stories and secrets as if that would somehow answer the questions I had about myself, or would heal the wound between us, a wound that only I seemed to feel and pick at. One night she told me how much she had adored her father, loved being near him and felt proud to be the apple of his eye. But when Joy had found her sitting on his lap one day, she’d been furious, wordlessly accusing the little girl of trying to steal his affections. She told me that Joy had always been angry with her because of how much Baa and her father loved each other. It was because of that, my mother continued, that she couldn’t be friends with women. Women always wanted to compete with her, she said, and she refused to compete, she wouldn’t compete anywhere, and to some extent, that had ruined her career.

These tiny slivers of information didn’t quite add up for me, and even though I was in my sixties when I heard this story, I couldn’t yet use it to connect the dots, to connect the daughters. Baa finally ended the conversation by deadening her eyes and reporting that she never thought Joy had loved her, tossing it off by saying that it was a good thing. “How,” I asked her, “could that possibly be a good thing?” And flatly she said, “Because I stopped looking for it. I just accepted it wasn’t there and moved on.” But I know that wasn’t the truth. My mother had devotedly taken care of Joy during the last, difficult years of my grandmother’s life, and I could see how much she loved her, how they loved each other through a barbed-wire fence. And all my mother’s life, she ached to be loved. We all do. But Baa would lose herself in that ache. It became bigger than the rest of her, would eclipse her creativity, her love of words, her strength, and for a time, her children.

Tossed carelessly in a box of memorabilia—treated with disregard but kept all the same—I found a few disjointed pages of a journal that my mother had written when she was newly single and I was working on the Nun. After piecing it together, I read about one tiny, intimate encounter that happened when she’d been invited to a party in Malibu. At that gathering she met a writer whose work she respected, and like a young girl, she confesses that she was in awe of him, thrilled that he had talked to her as though she had something of value to say. Because of that, she admits to feeling nervous around him and says, “I had too much to drink,” something she never would have admitted to me. When the two of them sat in the sand together, unseen in the dark, she writes, he kissed her.

I realize now that my mother at forty-six, and I at twenty-one, were separately feeling the same thing: alone.


When I was on the set every day with the people I worked with, I could be funny and capable, cocky with my position of leadership. But I had continued to push Steve away, so on the weekends if Princess wasn’t with me, I’d pace back and forth in front of the big sliding glass door of my rented house like a caged tiger, longing to have friends and to meet people, but not knowing how. I wasn’t writing in a journal at this time, disjointed or otherwise. But according to Aunt Gladys’s scrapbooks, on Memorial Day 1968, Screen Gems put together a press junket that included actors from their current shows and journalists working for various publications. We were then sent, in one large group, to Mexico City for a weekend of sightseeing and nonstop interviews. I know from the September issues of TV Radio Talk, Modern Screen, and TV Picture Life that I was besieged with idiotic questions about dating Davy Jones, or was I secretly married to him or dating my co-star Alejandro Rey: nothing that was remotely true. Ultimately, I told them that I’d just met someone, that I’d gone out with him before I left to attend the junket, and that I was looking forward to seeing him again. His name was Jimmy Webb, and he was the young songwriter who had become an overnight sensation after composing such songs as “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Up, Up and Away,” and “MacArthur Park.” When they asked me how we met, I can read the same answer in each of the publications, which leads me to think it must be true: His press agent called my press agent to ask if I would accompany Mr. Webb to a composer’s banquet. I don’t remember having a press agent at the time, so maybe it was someone in the Screen Gems publicity department, and even though I have only a dim memory of attending a banquet, I obviously agreed to go. According to one story, when Jimmy called to say hello, I told him to be prepared because I was very shy. To that he replied, “Fine, we’ll be shy together.” I vaguely recall that tidbit, but only after reading it in the crumbling tabloids.