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CHAPTER TWO

Lili was named after her mother, Mariah Marie Curry Klarquist, or “Maud” as she was known in the family.¹⁹

Pasadena was a fashionable winter destination for the well-heeled in the 1930s, catering to a bustling tourist industry. With its wide boulevards and temperate weather the city was the ideal place for middle-class families to put down roots.

By at least 1929, fifty-four-year-old Maud Klarquist had rented a modest one-bedroom cottage on the pleasant treelined South Oak Street at 215.²⁰ Lili slept on a cot on the porch. Maud procured a job, working long hours in the alteration department of Peterson’s, the woman’s store for “Those not slender,”²¹ hemming and fixing dresses for an upscale clientele for owner Chester W. Peterson. With older parents and after years of a nomadic existence, no doubt daughter Lili was a solitary, shy child.

It had been a long, circuitous road from a quaint village in central Wisconsin to the citrus groves of Southern California.

Maud had been born in or about 1874 in Port Edwards, Wisconsin.²² The village was built around a sawmill and her Canadian-born father, Daniel, was a foreman/partner in a lumber mill. Mother Emily Jerome was New York born. Maud was one of seven sisters and a brother.

She would grandly claim to have been “a showgirl back in the day when Diamond Jim Brady” was about and had “traveled with a road company of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’” some sixty years prior. If that wasn’t enough yarn for the reporter, Lili’s grandmother Maud went on to claim, “I used to do a special dance to a song called ‘There’s a Longing in My Heart.’”²³

At twenty Maud married Francis Cedric Peeso in Monroe County, Wisconsin, on September 4, 1895. A year later she gave birth to the first of what would be three children: Idella; a baby, who died at birth in 1898; and son William, born in 1899. By 1900 the family was living in South Dakota renting a farm and taking in a boarder. In the census Francis was listed as a “stock raiser.” One would assume of cattle. By 1910 the family had settled in Hennepin, Minnesota.

Baby Lili

Hennepin lies among numerous lakes and hills. Originally home to the Dakota Indians, it was largely settled by Germans, Norwegians, and Swedes. The area was another town built around sawmills and that was presumably why the family settled there.

However, the marriage between Maud and Francis did not last. By 1916 Francis Peeso was listed in the Hennepin directory living with “Cecilia,” possibly his sister. Peeso then drops out of the picture and by 1918 Maud was divorced and remarried to a forty-one-year-old carpenter by the name of Ben Klarquist.²⁴ Ben had been an aging bachelor, moving often, living as a boarder in Hennepin, whose parents were Swedish born. Ben, probably born with the name Bryoguin, had blue eyes, light hair, and was of medium build. He too came from a large family with a sister and three brothers, all carpenters. There was a large contingency of Swedes by the name of Klarquist who settled in Minnesota and worked construction.

ON OCTOBER 25, 1916, MAUD’S TWENTY-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER IDELLA wed twenty-seven-year-old Edward Van Schaack, a South Dakota–born traveling “land salesman.”²⁵ The two probably met in Hennepin where they would live for the next several years while Edward worked for the First National Bank.

Edward himself was from a divorced home and had been living with his father, Frank, a proprietor of a grocery store, while his mother, Rebecca, moved in with her daughter Mabel. Edward was handsome, stood five ten and a half, with brown hair and gray eyes.

Idella soon became pregnant, giving birth to a daughter in 1917. A year later, on June 28, Van Schaack enlisted.

Idella was by all accounts a beautiful, temperamental young lady. At some point she contracted polio, either as a child (though photos show no effects) or probably around 1916, when the United States was experiencing an outbreak, and indeed President Roosevelt himself contracted it as an adult.

With a husband in the army, Idella moved on. By 1919 she married brown-eyed, dark-haired Louis Sherman Cornett Jr., born in 1896 in Crawley, Louisiana. They had a child, Bettie Lue or Bettalee (“Betty”), born (probably) in Nova Scotia in 1919. A son, Louis Cornett (Jack), followed in 1921.

In the 1919 Hennepin directory, Louis is listed as a chauffeur for an undertaker. In 1920 the Cornett family was living in Louisiana with Louis’s brother; both were listed as rice farmers. By 1923 the family had settled in Texas.

Lili with Maud and Ben Klarquist

Not surprisingly for the ambitious Idella, that marriage didn’t last either. By 1925 Cornett was living in Nebraska and had remarried. He would have three more children, becoming a real estate salesman. With Cornett gone, the pretty Idella took her third husband, John Alfred “Ian” Blackadder, a charming “black-Scotsman” from an impoverished yet noble background who resembled Errol Flynn and had lovely “aristocratic manners.”²⁶

Ian had sailed to Canada at the age of nineteen with $65 in his pocket, crossing into Minneapolis (where he listed his age as twenty-two and claimed no living relatives).

Idella and Ian were married in Grand Rapids, Wisconsin, on May 2, 1923, at age twenty-six and twenty, respectively. They were a gorgeous couple. Ian stood six feet tall, brown-haired with gray-blue eyes. He had a scar (possibly from a motorcycle accident years earlier) behind his right ear. Idella was petite and copper-haired. By the following year the two had a daughter, Idella Ruth (hereinafter “Barbara”). Fourteen months later Rosemary (hereafter “Dardy”), named after Ian’s favorite sister, was born.*

Sisters Barbara and Dardy (front) in Minneapolis

From 1924 to at least 1927, Ian was listed as a “helper” for the Minnesota Linseed Oil Co., residing at least once in Minneapolis.²⁷ The company was the major producer of flax and linseed oil in the state.

Ian struggled financially, and with four children—Betty, Jack, Barbara, and Dardy—in tow he moved his family to Pasadena, hoping to find permanent employment in the Golden State.

MEANWHILE, MAUD’S SECOND HUSBAND, BEN KLARQUIST, HAD BEEN working for J. P. Klarquist and Bro., general contractors and presumably a relation. One afternoon Ben fell two stories and, while miraculously nothing broke, he damaged his optic nerve. Lili, their daughter, was four at the time. Gradually Ben began to lose his sight and was no longer able to work. It wasn’t a time in the country to be injured and unemployed. Maud, Ben, (son William was by now an adult and does not seem to have made the move²⁸) and Lili moved to a farm in Webster, Wisconsin, where the grueling poverty soon drove them on to Seattle, Washington, where Maud’s older sister, Katherine Willis Deem, had settled with her family.²⁹

A young Marie Van Schaack

It seems after Katherine died of a heart attack in 1930 the desperate family descended south to follow Ian and Idella to Pasadena, hoping life would get easier. Lili was around twelve or thirteen, a difficult age for a girl both sensitive and awkward who hadn’t grown into her looks nor made lasting friendships due to—she claimed—attending seventeen schools in all the years the family tried to find a permanent home.

BOTH FAMILIES SETTLED NEAR EACH OTHER. IAN HAD PROCURED A JOB as a garage mechanic (Barbara was now five, Dardy four). Shortly thereafter Ian moved his family out of Pasadena to the more rural Eagle Rock, a twenty-minute car drive from Maud, Ben, and Lili. It was like leaving the city altogether. Coyotes howled at night; rabbits bounded across the dirt roads. It was perfect for Ian, who loved horses. His father had been a championship horseman, supposed “three-time winner of the Royal Military Tournament.”³⁰ With plenty of open land, Ian taught his young daughters how to ride while they were still toddlers.

The Blackadder clan was a sprawling, rambunctious family and Lili bounced between her home and Eagle Rock, occasionally sleeping upstairs in a small bedroom. Ian encouraged the children to fill the home with friends. It boomeranged with the sounds of laugher and racing feet; dogs barked and horses neighed. He proudly nailed a sign to the house: “Bedlam Manner.” Among the chaos the affable and outgoing Ian sought to escape Idella’s foul moods that often turned to dish throwing. Idella hadn’t always been so religiously unhappy. But after eight years of marriage with too many children and too little money she had hardened into a cranky despot. By the time Dardy was born, she was tired of caring for a house full of children. She was also tired of poverty, stuck at home with a leg stricken by polio. She sometimes used a cane and was self-conscious of her limp. She also wore “some sort of devices on her legs.”³¹

Idella in happier times sitting on Ian’s lap while Idella’s mother Maud sews

There were too many dishes and loads of laundry and beds to make. It was not a happy marriage. Perhaps too she was resentful of the beautiful girls she was raising who would soon tower over her.

A PORTLY WOMAN WHO WORE GLASSES AND DRESSED IN CONSERVATIVE flowered dresses, gray hair tied back in a bun, Maud was the matriarch of the disjointed family. Not a physically affectionate woman, she nonetheless professed a deep love for Lili. Maud was also overly protective, relaxing only when Lili was safely under her roof. Just shy of the age where she would get in serious trouble with boys and not yet chaffing at the reins, Lili was content to stay close to home.

From Lili’s scrapbook, 1931, Lili at age 14

Maud was a remarkable caretaker to Ben, now a semi-invalid whose eyesight had vanished within two years of his accident.

Maud would remain one of the only constants in Lili’s life. A strong-minded woman, generous, upbeat, and a hard worker. She was Lili’s world.

Though for a moment it all seemed to fall apart.

FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD LILI HAD COME HOME FROM THE LOCAL LIBRARY with an armload of books. Not a serious student by any means, they weren’t studious tomes, but fashion books with sketches of dresses that Lili wanted Maud to show her how to make. Maud was a seamstress of remarkable talent and expertise. She made all Lili’s clothes and was patient enough to teach Lili how to sew with equal skill, as what remains of Lili’s costumes today is confirmed by the sturdy and precise stitching.

Lili might not have been thinking solely about dresses this day. She had received her first kiss from Jimmy Nichols, a cute older boy and a friend of Jack’s who spent hours at Bedlam Manner underneath abandoned old cars, barely mumbling to her, covered in grease next to Jack.

It was her first romance and it sent her emotions soaring. She would become giddy by love, transported. Not knowing what to do, she pretended she was Garbo to Jimmy’s John Gilbert. She was swept up in a surge of ecstasy and experienced a previously unknown feeling of confidence and power. Jimmy looked at her completely smitten and obliging when their lips parted, like at the end of a movie when the camera closed in on the satiated faces of the two movie stars as the fade-out began to happily ever after. Lili wanted to live in that feeling forever.

As Lili stepped into her house on Oak Street, her heart was pounding and her head was in the clouds. She was quickly brought down to earth. The atmosphere in the house was heavy and electric. Briefly Lili paused at the door, troubled, trying to discern what the dark essence was. She would recall the atmosphere as “grueling.”³² Dusk had fallen and it took a minute for her eyes to adjust. On the sofa her sister, Idella, faint traces of the beauty she had once been, sat clasping her hands in her lap. Maud sat stiff-backed, her brow creased anxiously. Lili stared at the two, suddenly wishing she was elsewhere.

Lili could tell Maud was tense by the muscles in her jaw.

For a moment the three generations said nothing.

Daddy Ben wasn’t home. Unusual, as he was always in his room or on the porch.

Maud began. She admitted there was “something we should have told you years ago.” But at the time it had seemed “unnecessary.”

Idella spoke. “The time had come.” She and Maud would tell Lili the truth. Why that day is anyone’s guess.

“It was done because we love you,” Maud interjected. “What was done as it was meant to be, because we love you. We did the best we could for you. Don’t make any of this matter.”

Lili might not be so sure there was much love coming from Idella, but Maud she would never doubt.

Maud looked at Idella sternly. “Idella, you know it was done because we loved you. We love you. And you too, Lili. Me and Daddy Ben love you. Idella loves you.”

Lili was thin, hadn’t yet grown into herself, still somewhat awkward and feeling too tall, unaware of her beauty that was about to burst forth.

“Everything,” Maud emphasized, “was done because we love you. Remember that, honey. We love you.”

“We all did the best we could,” Idella said, nearly hysterical.

Maud told of a charming handsome Dutchman who had come into Idella’s life and had “whispered words of love.”

Idella explained they had met at a dance. Lili couldn’t picture that. The Idella she knew was self-conscious about her pronounced limp. So there was an Idella before the ill-tempered woman sitting before her. Lili glimpsed a different Idella, a girl who might have been carefree, maybe a girl like her who yearned to flirt and go to dances, a beauty with her pick of boys.

The two women told Lili the Dutchman disappeared “in a fog” from Milwaukee, leaving Idella “in the family way.”

Idella was very sick in the hospital and had a beautiful baby, but the baby was sick and born early and unable to leave the hospital. Idella was in agony—possibly because of the polio—and couldn’t begin to take care of the baby girl.

Maud, her face anguished, explained that Daddy Ben had wanted to marry her.

Maud said she would marry Ben if they could bring up Lili, providing a “real home” for one daughter and a second chance for the other. Maud assured Lili she was wanted.

“I was so scared for you when you were little. You needed so much protection,” Maud explained. She thought Lili was going to “die,” tiny and helpless in the incubator. The doctors predicted she would be there for months.

“I knew it was the right thing for you,” Idella whispered.

Lili was shaken. She needed to think. She stood up and walked out of the cottage, the truth whirling inside her head.

She walked up the wide boulevard where a streetcar ran down the middle, past imposing banks, a post office, Jordan’s dry goods store. All the while her thoughts a jumble. Dardy and Barbara and Jack and Betty were half-siblings, not nieces and a nephew. Idella her mother? It seemed so preposterous.

Slowly her mind began to quiet. She decided she didn’t feel deceived, she felt strangely liberated. And whether this happened over time or that night, Lili would realize that though she wasn’t who she thought she was (Marie Klarquist), she would be who she wanted to be.

Somewhere in her walking she decided that none of it mattered. This information didn’t need to alter anything. She wasn’t all of a sudden going to call Idella “mother” and move in with her. She had always loved Maud and Daddy Ben. What did it really change?

It explained so many things, like why Maud, with her stoutly figure, wrinkles, and gray hair, was so much older than most mothers, the age span between the “sisters,” Idella and Lili, so great.

She knew if she scratched beneath the thin layer of feelings and probed she would experience something decidedly not uplifting. But Lili, as she would always do, chose not to go beneath the surface. Fantasy was bearable. Truth was so often not. She would “not let it affect” her.³³ She would make her own reality. She set out to orchestrate her life as she wanted to live it, and work and romance and one day drugs would sustain the illusion.

This was a new chapter in her life. She liked new beginnings, always would. She claimed not to mind the constant moving of homes. She welcomed change that meant escape. Nothing would tie her to a place, not friends, family, or a man. Each new city held possibility, a chance for “adventure.” Pasadena bored her. She longed for something. She would reinvent herself as she went along, a new name, a new place. She would remain an itinerant gypsy most of her life.

She would also turn Maud’s and Idella’s guilt into something she could manage to her advantage. Until the end of her days, Lili would become a master manipulator.

When Lili finally crawled into her bed with an old Vogue, Maud came with dinner on a tray. Maud would always be there for her granddaughter.

“We don’t manifest our love,” Lili would one day tell a reporter, “with hugs and kisses.” It was a family that didn’t talk about their feelings. There were few outward signs of affection. “But I knew I was loved.”³⁴

Daddy Ben, equally reserved, was a minor character. He played a benign role and would quickly fade from the narrative. It was women who ruled Lili’s world. It was strong women who made the decisions. She learned from the women in her family to take care of herself and to do as she pleased. She also learned not to trust them.

Momentarily, Lili felt in peril. She was no longer Marie Klarquist. She felt as though something—she didn’t know what—had been taken from her.

She compared the two names and thought Van Schaack was more exotic, different. “I’m going to call myself Marie Van Schaack,” she declared. And indeed that would be the name she would sign for most legal papers for the rest of her years on earth.³⁵

Maud agreed. Lili wrote in her French Canadian biography Ma Vie de Stripteaseuse that Maud then dropped another bombshell. Her real name wasn’t Marie, it was Willis. But even that was not the truth. Either Lili or Maud made up the story. Clearly on Lili’s birth certificate her given name is Marie.³⁶ Perhaps Lili remembered Aunt Katherine in Seattle whose middle name was Willis and she thought that different enough to appropriate as her own. Lili would vacillate between Marie and Willis for the rest of her life.

It wasn’t enough that she was a different person, but those around her had to transform also. She could no longer call Maud “mother.”

Maud must have been devastated. She had lived for this little girl and wanted nothing more than to be her mother. Lili had been named after her. Marie.

But Lili didn’t want to punish or hurt her beloved Maud. She knew all the sacrifices Maud had made for her. She knew Maud’s life revolved around her. Maud would hold the deepest part of Lili’s heart.

Lili’s mother Idella

Lili had decided that to live the life she wanted, to deal with the shock that nothing was as it seemed, she would make them all change. (She would spend a lifetime reinventing and renaming people.) She wanted everyone to be different, not just her. Maud would now be “Alice.” Where the name came from is anyone’s guess. But it was accepted and immediately incorporated by the entire family.³⁷

Lili decided Idella was now “Adelaide.”^** It was no time for arguments and Lili got her way.

Alice knew everything would be all right with her imaginative, clever, and always adaptable Lili. It was one of Lili’s most dominant traits; she was versatile to whatever came her way. Lili would always be a survivor.

Alice stroked Lili’s forehead and left her in the dark of her room, names pinging around her head like popcorn on the stove. Marie. Van Schaack. Grandmother. Sister. Mother. She smiled.

Now Lili had something in common with her idol. After all, Garbo had been born Gustafsson.

What should have been, and probably was, seismic news, Lili quickly filed away. Or so she claimed. But what a shift it must have made. The truth of it would do nothing to instill a sense of honesty in relationships. It was okay to say and do what you wanted no matter how it might affect others. Lili would become almost pathologically incapable of telling the truth about her past.

One sure result of this revelation was that Lili began to compartmentalize people. Few knew of, let alone met, Idella or Alice or any of Lili’s half-siblings. Later, husbands would be told parents were dead. Half-truths. It was easier than explaining the abandonment, half-siblings, the messy, chaotic lies. There was underlying shame in the secrets. Lili distorted the truth and told outright fabrications. Marriages and relationships were not explained. One created the reality they wanted.

As strange as the story of Lili’s “adoption” by Alice and Ben was, it is only part of the story. Whether she was told another lie by Idella and Alice, or Lili chose to dismiss her father outright by having him conveniently go AWOL with her birth, it is fantasy. It was lies on top of lies and secrets that remained buried.

Lili’s parents were married eight months prior to her birth. How premature she was at birth is anyone guess, maybe quite premature, as she remained in the hospital and gave them all pause that she might not live.

Lili was born at 8 a.m. on June 3, 1917, in Hennepin County at Abbott Hospital. Two days later Edward Van Schaack did register, but according to the application for his military headstone he did not go into the army until June 28, 1918, a year after Lili’s birth, possibly because US troops had started landing in France by the end of June. (He would be honorably discharged as a corporal on March 7, 1919.)

Alice admitted she was desperate for another baby. If Edward remained in the picture, Lili must have lived with her parents at least in the beginning. But records show that as of 1920 Lili (or as she’s listed in the census, Birnee or Binee) was living with Alice as her daughter in Hennepin, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Either to discredit or dismiss Edward, Idella did the unthinkable and implied that Lili was “illegitimate.” Idella was capable of such cruelties, or maybe Lili thought it a better story. Lili liked stories of seduction and betrayal and she would dance them on the stage, but Idella and Edward had been married.

Was a young, excitable, and sick Idella incapable of taking care of a baby? The pair blamed Edward for abandoning Idella. It would taint Lili’s feelings about her father and men forever.

FROM THAT DAY FORWARD SHE WOULD FANATICALLY GUARD HER PRIVACY and her secrets. She seemed to want to be Lili St. Cyr, fully formed and sprouted from nothing to be presented on the stage with the seven veils of mystery protecting her true identity. No one was interested in little Marie. She wasn’t either.

* For simplicity I will refer to Barbara, Dardy, and Lili by those names

** For simplicity the author will continue to refer to Idella as such, because that is how Dardy and others referred to her. But Lili did call her mother Adelaide from that day forward.