Читать книгу Cloris - Cloris Leachman - Страница 11

When I was at Drake University a few years ago to receive an honorary degree, a woman approached me after the ceremony. She was smiling and had a look that said she couldn’t wait to tell me something. The something was that she had bought at auction the crib I’d slept in when I was a baby. Immediately into my mind popped the story Mama had told me about how Daddy built that crib.

Before I was born, Mama would hear Daddy in the basement, where he would work long hours. He was, he finally told her, making a crib for the new baby. There was warmth in that image of a young father preparing for the birth of his first child. Once I arrived and was actually on the planet, though, I never felt that fervor from Daddy. I sought it throughout the first fifteen years of my life. I was sometimes nearly obsessed with wanting him to put his arms around me, to love me.

When my sisters and I were still little girls, Mama made a small gymnastics area for us in the living room. Basically, it was a puffy blanket, on the floor. After dinner we’d tumble on the blanket and have a rare old time. Almost always somebody would get hurt and start to cry. Then Daddy would look over his glasses at us and signal with his thumbs that we should get upstairs.

In the bathroom, we would start playing again, and often we’d take too long and forget that we were supposed to be getting ready for bed. Daddy would come and knock on the door hard, and that would scare us. When we came out of the bathroom, Daddy would be there, and often he would swat us on the butt as we went by him. It happened to me more than it did to my two sisters, and it always frightened me. I would say, “Don’t hit me, Daddy!” as I ran up the stairs to get away from him. It was always a frightening experience, and I hated it.

Often when I was practicing the piano, Daddy would be in the next room, the sunroom, reading the paper after he came home from work, and Mama would be in the kitchen, preparing dinner. That was the daily routine. I tried to attract Daddy’s attention through my piano playing. While I was practicing, I’d look over at him to see if he was noticing me. He wasn’t, he’d be focused on his newspaper. That would spur me on. I’d play something more dramatic, more complex, something that demanded agile fingering, an arpeggio with dazzling quickness, something that demanded substantial skill.

When I’d completed it, I’d say, “Daddy, how was that?”

“Fine, girl. That’s fine,” he’d reply.

He wouldn’t even look over at me. I had heard that Vaslav Nijinsky, the famous Russian dancer, when asked how he made such extraordinary jumps, said, “You have to leap, and when you are at the top, you have only to pause for a moment.” I would keep that image in my mind when I played the arpeggio again—up the scale, pause, then down, like running water. I could not, I would not, accept that Daddy wouldn’t some time notice how I was playing and be impressed by it.

Then I’d say it again. “How was that, Daddy?”

And he’d reply, with the same apparent lack of emotion, “Excellent, dear.”

Pounding on a dramatic piece to draw Daddy’s attention to me increased my discipline and persistence, which were vital to every performing art I later pursued, acting, singing, dancing. I was determined that the audience, whether it was one person or thousands, would watch and listen to what I was doing.

My piano playing didn’t bring me closer to Daddy, so I looked for another way to gain his interest. He loved to hunt, and twice a year, during duck hunting season, he and his friends would go to Arkansas. Knowing that, when I was fifteen, I went down to the armory in Des Moines and enrolled in a marksmanship course. I went to the firing range every Saturday for the entire winter. I hated the smell of guns and gunpowder and I hated to be cold and wet, and all of those things were around me at the armory. But those were his smells, the smells that were with him when he went hunting, so I finished the course. I still remember some of what I was taught, you don’t pull the trigger, you squeeze it. I never went hunting with my father. I never killed anything with a gun. I couldn’t; I wouldn’t. I don’t remember knowing any marksmen; I was just at the armory doing my duty. At the end of the course, I graduated as a qualified marksman. It did nothing to bring me closer to Daddy.

Still bent on getting him to look my way and love me, I tried something else. He was a lumberman, and there was a statewide contest to see who among the entrants could build the best miniature house. I got the lumber together and built one and sent it in. I won first prize. That was a victory. Yes, I earned a victory in building a miniature house, but I came up empty in my efforts to bring Daddy and me closer together.

The worst thing happened one night when I was seventeen. Tommy’s parents—he was my then boyfriend—were away, and Tommy asked me to spend the night with him, he didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want him to be lonely, so I said I would. We weren’t going to do anything intimate, and I felt it would also be an assertion of my independence. I slept on the rumble seat of his car, while he slept inside it. It ranks as the worst night of my life, because I had terrible hay fever, and between the hay fever and the mosquitoes, which were out in attack mode, I never slept a wink.

When I came home in the morning, Mama and Daddy were at breakfast. I ran past them and dashed upstairs to get dressed. I had to go to my job at the radio station. I didn’t explain where I’d been or what I’d been doing. When I came home that night, I went up to my room and prepared to take a bath. I was naked in the bathroom, about to step into the bath, when Daddy came in. He’d taken his belt off, and he stood there staring at me, white with anger. Then he started beating me with the belt, not just on the buttocks, but all over my body. I screamed. I was terrified. My hysteria billowed through the house, and my sisters started screaming, too. Then my mother realized what was happening, and tortured screams came out of her. The hysteria in all four of us made Daddy stop. A frenzied look still on his face, he turned around and left the bathroom, went down to the kitchen, took a bottle of whiskey, got in his car, and drove off.

The next day I was emotionally broken. I said to Mama, “I hate him. I hate him. Why did you marry him?”

She said, “Oh, he’s so proud of you.”

I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, what she was talking about. whatever it was, it had no meaning to me. I wanted him to be proud of me, but most of all, above everything else, I wanted him to love me. There was no aftermath. Not a word was spoken nor a look exchanged between Daddy and me about the incident.

When I was seventeen, the garden of my life came into full bloom. Cornelia turned more of her students over to me, seventeen of them. I was working for the Des Moines Register and Tribune Company, where my job was pretty nonspecific. I was to do what was needed, typing, filing, that sort of thing. There was a woman working near me who could type, it seemed to me, a hundred and fifty words a second. Watching her, I realized this wasn’t going to be an area of major achievement for me.

I was getting ready to quit the Des Moines Register when a man from the radio station, which was two floors above us, came down to talk to me. His name was Mr. Samuels. I’d met him before, when I’d tried to get a job at the radio station, but they’d had no openings. Mr. Samuels asked if I was still interested in working for them.

Yup, uh-huh, I am. Let’s go right now, were the words backing up in front of my mind. We went upstairs, and Mr. Samuels explained what I was to do—follow the ticker tape that came through the office, carrying news, advertisements and general information, and select and assemble all items relevant to women. Then, on the radio, I would read these different items. I took the job.

One piece of advice I passed on to women was that we all should empty our purses every night. It was good advice. I still follow it today. The idea was to review what you’d done that day, particularly how much you’d spent and where, to determine whether you had the right make-up, and then to sort through it all and put everything back so you’d be ready for the next day.

After dinner I’d start typing the content of the radio show for tomorrow’s broadcast. And almost every night Mama would come out of her bedroom, stand there in her floor-length white nightgown, her long dark hair touching her shoulders, watching me, and saying nothing. Then she’d shake her head and go back to the bedroom.

I said the garden of my life was in full bloom when I was seventeen. Truly it was. That year I was also modeling at Younkers Department Store. Getting that job turned out to be simple. When I went to the store and asked if they needed a salesperson, the woman I was talking to looked me up and down and said, “We don’t need you in sales. You’re going to be a model.”

My job as a model was to drift through the store, wearing Younkers’ most splendid feminine apparel. Women would stop me, wanting to touch the material or ask questions. For instance, they would ask me if the jacket I was wearing was comfortable, or if I felt pretty wearing it. One time I was modeling an ensemble that featured the colors red and purple, colors you wouldn’t, at least I wouldn’t, normally think of combining. But the ensemble was really striking, so now when I wear red and purple together, I think about being introduced to that color combination when I was a teenager at Younkers.

I enjoyed the conversations with those women who wanted to know what I was modeling. I enjoyed their appraising looks. And, just between you and me, modeling at Younkers was the easiest job I ever had.

Another activity I created for myself made my late teen years a super busy time. Several nights a week, I’d have three dates. We were in the middle of World War II, and a lot of boys in uniforms, ones I knew in high school, were coming home on leave; they wanted to see me, so I’d bunch them into layers of three, one after the other. It was an extraordinary experience. I was fascinated to hear them describe where they’d been and what they’d had to do. Some of their experiences were agonizing; some were terrifying. One night one of the boys was wearing a belt with a swastika embossed on the metal buckle. He’d taken it off the body of a German soldier he’d killed.

Those dates were fun, and they were also educational. It was on those dates that I learned what being an American is, what being a patriot means. Those fine young men—they were really still boys—were genuine patriots.

In my senior year at Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, I was awarded the Edgar Bergen Scholarship to Northwestern University. Northwestern frequently sent scouts looking for drama school candidates to Des Moines and other Midwestern cities. The scout had seen three of my high school stage productions. That, plus my success during that summer semester as a radio student at Northwestern, earned me the honor. And an honor it was, because up to that time, Edgar Bergen was Northwestern’s most famous drama school graduate. Bergen was a ventriloquist, and back in those days he and two of his dummies, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, were all international stars. It may be that today Edgar Bergen is best remembered nowadays as the father of Candice Bergen.

From the start at Northwestern, there was a pulse. I met Charlotte Rae and Paul Lynde, both of whom later had glorious careers, and very soon they and I virtually ran the drama department. We didn’t do it by intent; we didn’t take the department over in a coup d’état. The three of us were just so animated together, so full of imaginative ideas, that the rest of the drama students wanted to hang with us, be part of what we were cooking up.

In my sophomore year at Northwestern I joined a sorority, Gamma Phi Beta. I soon found I didn’t want to live there. With all the girls chatting away every night, I wouldn’t get anything done, so I moved to a girls’ dormitory, Holgate House. There I met Jan Steinkirchner, and she became my roommate. We were a matched pair. We had the same kind of humor, and we laughed ourselves silly. Jan had long and very narrow feet. We had a rabbit in our room, and it, too, had long and narrow feet, so I would put Jan’s shoes on the rabbit. It was kind of moronic, but, God, was it funny. Jan has been my lifelong friend. Not long ago, when I was trying out my one-woman show, I stayed with her in her Palm Desert home.

At Northwestern, Jan was already friends with Paul Lynde and Charlotte Rae. She introduced me to them, and from that first moment, the four of us were tied together with a mysterious brand of Velcro. Paul Lynde was naturally funny. He was as funny at Northwestern as he was later in his career. He didn’t have to learn about comedy; it was native to him. Every Saturday at Holgate House, he would come and put on an opera, and we would all sing our parts. That’s how we learned that Charlotte Rae had such a wonderful singing voice. Paul played the piano, and we made up arias. It was madhouse fun and another area of theatrical growth for me. I did a play with Paul at Northwestern, a Molière comedy, The Doctor in Spite of Himself. Molière’s humor is bawdy, perfect for both of us, and I have to say we were both hilarious.

Paul worked at a branch of the Toddle House chain of restaurants, and when we, his coterie, got hungry, we’d go to Toddle House, and he’d make anything we wanted. His specialty was superb little square potatoes. He never charged us for anything, ever. Four months after Paul started working at that Toddle House, it closed. It went bankrupt. I don’t know if Paul gets all the credit for that bankruptcy, but he certainly deserves part of it.

When I’d arrived at Northwestern, I had been real skinny, but I got my weight up to 120 pounds for a part I wanted to play in the most important school production of the year. I don’t remember the title, but I’d read the play and had the definite impression that the leading woman, the role I sought, had to be physically imposing and well developed. When I read for the teacher who was directing the play, the first thing she said was if I wanted to be seriously considered for the part, I would have to lose weight.

I didn’t argue. I didn’t say, “Whatsa matta, you? You read this play. You know this signora gotta have big gonzos.” Nope. I had no dinner that night. Immediately I started back down the weight scale. And I got the part. And as a result, I earned the annual faculty award for best actor of the year. Almost without exception, the award went to a senior. At that point, I was in my sophomore year.

I knew Paul was gay, but he did nothing to call attention to the fact. He didn’t have a companion, I never saw him in an intimate situation with another man. I don’t know if I should use the word gay, because we were at Northwestern long before the word gay supplanted the word homosexual. Paul was gay in every sense of what the word meant then, in those days. He was humorous, he was generous, he was imaginative. He brought lightness and laughter to any gathering; he brought happiness to his friends. We never talked about his homosexuality. I don’t know if it was discussed by others on campus, but it had no importance to us.

Many of my girlfriends at Northwestern were getting engaged, and the custom was you’d come to the engagement party with a five-dollar gift. I had no money, so instead of attending the engagement parties, I’d go over to the speech school and hang out with Paul. We’d improvise and do scenes. It was right around that time that I knew, without fanfare or an epiphany, that I was going to be an actress.

After we left Northwestern, Jan made sure the three of us stayed in touch. At one party we all attended later, Paul and Charlotte had both been drinking, and things turned nasty. Paul started attacking Charlotte, saying awful things about her being Jewish. He used terrible, harsh words. Charlotte got up and fled the party in tears. Jan patiently called and talked to them separately and got the rift mended.

On another occasion—this one is significant because it turned out to be near the end of Paul’s life—Jan and I were at Paul’s house, marveling at his relationship with his dog. The closest thing to Paul in this world was his poodle, and it was simply a joy to see the two of them together. That relationship, between Paul and the dog, was the subject of most of the evening’s talk. Not long after that evening, suddenly, shockingly, Paul died. I grieved for him. I was stunned and heartbroken. We’d shared so many lively, life-giving hours together, some of the most important times of our lives. It seemed so incomprehensibly wrong that his life should end so soon.

Along with my grief about Paul’s death, I couldn’t stop worrying about his dog. A memory had come back to me. At a different gathering, Paul had been drinking, and he was getting very worked up. As his emotions grew darker and his voice grew louder, the dog, who had been watching Paul, walked over and put his paw on Paul’s knee. Paul stopped his tirade and looked down at his poodle. They sat there, this loving look in both their eyes, the dog’s paw on Paul’s knee. It calmed Paul; it completely changed his mood. What I witnessed touched me to the core. I’m an animal lover—I especially love dogs—and that image of them together, the dog’s paw on Paul’s knee, lies in a special sepulchre in my memory.

Every once in a while during the time I was at Northwestern, a man named Bob Singer, who worked for an ad agency in Chicago, would come to the campus to hire one of us to do a photo session for one of their clients’ products. I was often chosen. Without my knowing it, Singer entered me in a contest to be Miss WGN. WGN was one of the big radio stations in Chicago.

Let me go sideways for a second. It was summer, and I had a room in the attic of a private home—no air-conditioning, no fan—for seven dollars a week. Almost nobody today knows what it was like to be in the Midwest in the summer with no air-conditioning. You’d take a shower and step out dripping wet, you’d towel off and still be dripping wet. You’d put on a girdle and silk stockings, still wet, getting everything you touched or that touched you wet. Mama mia, I don’t know how I lived through that.

Anyway, I didn’t know I was a contestant, let alone a finalist, in the Miss WGN contest until a telegram arrived telling me so. When Bob Singer came to the house and said we had to go to the radio station that night, I laughed. The whole thing seemed unreal. I didn’t wash my hair or do anything to make myself pretty; we just took off.

I sat in the studio, with a microphone in front of me, the judges were in the control booth, behind the large glass. They asked what talents I had, and I said I played the piano, sang, and danced, what would they like me to do. After a moment they said, “Would you take your hair down?” It was only pinned up, so I just pulled the pins out, and it fell in a lovely curl. It was really pretty. There was another pause, and then a voice behind the glass said, “Congratulations! You’re Miss WGN.” I giggled. This was the whole competition? Then I realized they were very serious, so I put on a sober look.

They gave me a lot of presents and asked me what I was going to do on Friday at the Miss Chicago contest. Huh? Say what? Miss Chicago? I found out this WGN contest was a preliminary to the Miss Chicago Pageant. There were twenty of these preliminaries around the city, and the twenty winners were the candidates to be Miss Chicago.

On the appointed day, I went to the theater where the Miss Chicago Pageant was being held. All the contestants were immediately given some training: we were shown how to stand, pose, and walk the figure eight. Later, when everybody went to an early dinner, I stayed behind and walked the figure eight about a hundred and fifty times. When they returned from dinner, the contest recommenced. Our walks and poses and figure eights were judged, and the roster was whittled down to three finalists. I was one of them.

“Would each of you say a little something?” one of the judges asked.

The first girl got up and was so tongue-tied, she couldn’t put words in a sentence. The next girl got up, and she had a whopper of a lisp.

I got up and said, “My grandmother always told me, ‘Cloris, you get out there and bring home the bacon!’”

A few moments then the voice said, “Miss Leachman, you’re the winner!”

That’s how I became Miss Chicago! Can you imagine! When Bob Singer took me to dinner the next night, I wore a darling suit and my crown, which I’d reshaped, with the help of fifteen baby orchids, into a little hat. The men around us were making fifty-dollar bets on whether the orchids were real or not.

As Miss Chicago, I was automatically a contestant in the Miss America Pageant. I was spinning from the way things were happening so I called my mother and said this is getting pretty serious, you’d better come. She flew first to Chicago and then on to Atlantic City with me. Today contestants have all kinds of people to assist them in the Miss America contest, but there was no one there to aid or guide us.

In the formal part of the contest, I wore the one evening gown I had from college. Right before I went out, Mama said, “Sparkle, Cloris!” She’d said it once before, when I was a little girl. In every part of the competition, I did my best to follow Mama’s counsel. I sparkled.

When all the segments of the pageant were completed, I was third runner-up. That was fine with me. I didn’t care about being Miss America. I much preferred winning the prize of one thousand dollars and having no further responsibilities. In all, it was a wonderful experience. My father came to Atlantic City in time to attend a lovely afternoon tea with people from all over the country. We contestants mingled with these guests, and each of us came away with a list of contacts.

The next day Daddy gave me sixty dollars to go to New York for a three-day visit. Imagine, you could stay in New York for three days and spend less than sixty dollars. It’s just a tad different from today.

I said good-bye to my parents and got on the train to New York. I remember it all so well—how I looked, what I wore, and how I felt as the train pulled into Grand Central Station. When I stepped off the train, the first thing that greeted me was the heat. In August New York has some of the hottest weather anywhere. You don’t know if you can get a breath.

In the station, I got out my contact list and called everyone on it. The only one who answered was Joe Russell, a publicity agent. He said, “Come on up to my office. I think I can get you a job.”

In the baking heat, I walked from Grand Central Station on the East Side to Forty-sixth Street and Broadway on the West Side in my beautiful little dress, straw hat, and high heels. It was quiet as death on the streets; no one was out walking, because it was so hot. Just before I got to Joe Russell’s building, I noticed an open door. It was dark inside but from the sawdust on the floor and the smell of beer, I could tell it was a saloon. There were a couple of drunks leaning on the bar and a woman standing on it, with a microphone, singing in a nonmusical voice, “I love ya soooo much, it hoits me!” This was New York.

I walked on to Joe Russell’s building, which, I found out later, had been bought by a group of press agents, so each of them had an apartment there. I went in, met Joe in his office, and right away he sent me over to where a picture titled Carnegie Hall was being filmed. The person Joe knew hired me as an extra, and I worked for three days, at thirty dollars a day. There was an irony attached to this, my first job in New York. One of the stars of Carnegie Hall was William Prince. I didn’t meet Mr. Prince while I was working on the set as an extra, but two and a half years later, in 1950, I was playing opposite him—and Katharine Hepburn—on Broadway, in As You Like It.

A few days later Joe Russell decided to go home to visit his mother, and he offered to let me stay in his apartment while he was gone. I did, for a week. He came back, and I moved to the Park Central Hotel. It was right after the war, and you could stay only five days in one particular hotel, so I was like a Plains Indian, dragging my belongings to a different hotel every five days. I remember staying at the Jefferson, where if I sat on the bed, my feet didn’t touch the floor if I wasn’t wearing shoes.

Joe and his buddies took care of me like I was Snow White, always making sure I had a place to stay and something to eat. I managed to get small jobs on TV shows, nothing important, but I earned enough to keep myself in New York.

Three months after I’d arrived in New York, I met Irving Hoffman, an executive with the Hollywood Reporter. He invited me to the opening night of a play, Mr. Peebles and Mr. Hooker. I have only a hazy memory of the play, but during the intermission, Irving introduced me to William Liebling, a prominent theatrical agent. Mr. Liebling and I chatted briefly, and then he said he thought I might be right for the lead in a new play, John Loves Mary, which was being produced on Broadway by the Theater Guild, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Irving Berlin. They were looking for someone just like me, a sincere, average American girl type. He asked if I was interested, and when I said yes, he told me that tomorrow morning I should be at the Broadhurst Theater for the first tryouts.

I showed up promptly and was the second girl to read. The producers were in the front row. I thought I did pretty well, but hadn’t done something that would cinch the part. When the next girl started to read, I sneaked up to the second balcony and watched more than twenty other girls read. I noted what I thought were their mistakes and stored what I’d learned.

Liebling and I then went to lunch at Sardi’s, the “theater people” restaurant, which is right near the Broadhurst Theater. During our lunch a lady from the production came to our table and said I was wanted back for another reading. I gobbled down two more bites, and Liebling and I returned to the Broadhurst, where I read again. I felt this third reading was not as good as my first but as I was about to leave the stage, I heard a voice from the front row say, “Leachman, stick around.”

I had the part.

And what I’d thought would be a three-day visit to New York turned out to be the beginning of a wonderful life there. Getting that role was not only a high moment in my life, but it was the commencement of my long relationship with Liebling and Wood. Bill Liebling and his wife, Audrey Wood, had one of the classiest agencies in the city. Liebling represented actors; Audrey represented authors, most particularly Tennessee Williams.

The funny part was that when I met Liebling, I didn’t know what an agent was or did. I certainly had no idea I needed one. I was totally naive. Bill and Audrey not only handled the business part of my career, they looked out for me in other departments of life as well. Liebling represented me till I moved to California.

Rehearsals of John Loves Mary were not going to start for two weeks, so I took the opportunity to go home and visit the family. My first night home we went to dinner at Babe’s, an upstairs restaurant that had a dance floor. That night Daddy asked me to dance. It was the first time he’d done so. It was sheer delight. I love to dance (don’t miss the last chapter, which tells of my experience on Dancing with the Stars), and I was an excellent dancer then. Here I was at last, dancing with my father.

While we were out on the floor, he said, “I’m glad I never broke your spirit. God knows, I tried.” I didn’t know what he meant, and I didn’t ask. We kept on dancing. I’ve never been certain what he did mean, but in that moment, some part of him was revealed that I had never seen before.

Daddy died when he was fifty-two, from lung cancer. He spent his final days in the Iowa Methodist Hospital in Des Moines, where I was born. I was in the room with him, and just before he died, I said, “I love you, Daddy.” He squeezed my hand and said, “I love you.” That has been my treasure through all the rest of my life. Through all the rest of my life, I have carried that moment with me.

What I felt at the beginning is true. Writing your autobiography is complex. Sometimes past events seem different when you’re older, different from how you’ve always remembered them. In the quiet of this night that is happening. I am looking at Daddy’s role in my life and I see it from a different perspective. I’ve always seen myself as trying to get his attention, pulling at him to bring his love and affection to me.

Not till tonight has another view arisen, not till just now have I realized that I always saw things through my eyes, that it didn’t occur to me that Daddy might have needed my love as much as I needed his. If I had realized that when I was younger, could I have behaved differently? What if I’d done more things like becoming a marksman, what if I’d left the piano and gone into the sunroom and sat beside him on the sofa and said, “Daddy, pass me the sports section, would you? I want to like what you like”?

That night he came into the bathroom and started beating me—I realize now he didn’t know whether I’d been out all night carousing and having sex. He just saw me come in while he and Mother were having breakfast the next morning. Could it have been that he cracked because of the disgrace he felt, that he had no control over his teenage daughter’s behavior? Maybe so, because in disobeying rules I am not openly defiant. My way is to be a shadow in the forest and silently cut the knots I don’t like.

I don’t want to absolve Daddy of the horror of that evening. He was the parent, and he shouldn’t have given in to those brutal impulses. Also, I don’t want to come down too hard on myself. I just feel an urge to sort through the beauty, the misunderstandings, the sadness in human relationships to see where there might be enlightenment about me and my father.

I think in my career I’ve looked for enlightenment. Different scenes have stirred memories of moments with my father. The relationship between Emile and Nellie in South Pacific has some of that redolence. Emile is older, in some ways a father figure, and when he and Nellie, in their inner dialogues, express their feelings about the other and wonder what the other is thinking about them, memories of my father and me surface.

This trip into the past has left me rueful and wondering and sad. Because in this life, I will never know the answers to those questions about Daddy and me.