Читать книгу Quentin Tarantino - The Man, The Myths and the Movies - Wensley Clarkson - Страница 12

KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE, 27 MARCH 1963

Connie Tarantino, a pretty, young trainee nurse at the Tennessee State University Hospital, hurried out into the cold rain from her tiny, one-bedroom apartment on the edge of town to the waiting ambulance. She was worried. The pains in her stomach indicated that her pregnancy might end prematurely. She wanted to have her baby like all the other mothers she had attended during her training. But life never seemed to go smoothly for Connie. Here she was, pregnant at 16 and abandoned by her actor husband, who had jumped ship within a couple of months of their wedding, not even aware that she was expecting a baby.

No one in Connie’s family had seemed all that surprised when she had announced her marriage at 15, and then that she was pregnant two weeks before her 16th birthday.

Connie was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the mid-1940s, when her mother was just 17. (Connie did not want the specific year of her birth made public: ‘The day and the month are September 3 – a gentleman shouldn’t ask a woman her age.’) Her father died when she was a baby and at the age of two she was adopted by the man who married her mother. Her stepfather took the family to Ohio from Tennessee, but Connie’s relationship with her stepfather and mother rapidly disintegrated until, at the age of 12, she moved in with her Aunt Sadie in Pico Rivera, California. Aunt Sadie had no children of her own and provided her young niece with more encouragement and support than she received from her parents. Connie has specifically requested that none of her immediate family should be named in this book because she is estranged from her mother and says, ‘I do not want any of my relatives to find me. I don’t want them to know about Quentin.’

The root of the problems between mother and daughter lay in her mother’s penchant for alcohol. She would go on enormous drinking sprees during which she would lose all sense of parental responsibility. She blamed much of that alcohol abuse on something that Connie was very proud of – her family’s Cherokee and Irish ancestry. By an odd coincidence, Connie’s maternal grandfather had been full blooded-Cherokee married to an Irish woman and her paternal grandmother was Irish, married to a Cherokee.

From the age of ten, Connie had been like a mother to her mother. She continually found herself mopping up the chaos and distress that went with the Bourbon her mother kept drinking. At the age of ten Connie moved in with her grandmother in Ravenna, near Cleveland, in Ohio. Two years later she decided to flee her entire family to head for California. At her aunt’s home in Pico Rivera, Connie had to work from her early teens to pay her way through school. At one stage she worked at an Orange Julius fast-food joint, but anything was better than being back with her parents.

Connie had only just turned 15 when she met 21-year-old matinee idol lookalike Tony Tarantino while taking horse-riding lessons near her home. Tarantino – a part-time actor and law student – was appearing on stage at the Pasadena Playhouse, near Los Angeles, at the time. He was entranced by this half-Cherokee Indian, half-Irish girl. Connie was unusually tall, with long, dark, flowing hair, large, deep, brown eyes and a trim figure. She also looked at least three years older than she really was. Tarantino, with his Italian features, neat buzz cut and liking for well-fitting clothes, cut a smart figure.

Connie – who had graduated from high school at just 15 with a major in microbiology – had been seriously considering going to pre-med school to train as a doctor. When she met Tarantino she decided to do a nursing course first, with the intention of going on to pre-med school later.

To Connie – ever the daydreamer – the marriage and her subsequent pregnancy seemed to offer the perfect escape route from her mundane existence. By marrying Tarantino she immediately gained emancipated minor status, which meant her parents no longer had any legal authority over her. ‘I don’t know if I ever truly fell in love with Tony. It’s difficult to tell because I was so young,’ says Connie now. She pauses, then adds, ‘I guess I still don’t know what love means.’

Connie and Tony’s marriage in Los Angeles in the summer of 1961 actually provided nothing more than a brief respite from drudgery. Connie’s family saw the wedding as an ideal way to get her off their hands. In their eyes, she was a troublemaker who had constantly skipped school and been sullen and unhelpful. In her eyes, she was the neglected and abandoned child who had always played second fiddle to a bottle of booze. Her mother even told Connie she was relieved that she appeared to be settling down to raise a family.

But, as usual, Connie’s happiness was short-lived. Tony Tarantino moved to Tennessee with Connie when she enrolled to train as a registered nurse in Knoxville. But, after failing to get a job, he departed for his home state of New York. Connie had not even discovered that she was carrying his baby. They had been together less than three months and she was still only 15 years of age.

Now, six months later at 16, she refused to let her mother help look after the child she was expecting, even though she intended to continue working after the birth. So it was that Connie found herself working 16-hour double shifts as part of her gruelling training to be an angel of mercy back in Knoxville. Now all those incredibly long hours were threatening to turn her pregnancy into a disaster.

The day before Connie went into premature labour, she had worked yet another double shift at the hospital. In many ways, the relentless grind helped her avoid thinking about her situation: all alone, about to become a mother at a ludicrously young age, and barely able to survive on her salary of a dollar and a quarter per hour. Her pride prevented her from moving into her mother’s trailer home, thirty miles north of Knoxville. Nothing was going to faze her. She would make it on her own.

Yet even as the ambulance pushed through the suburbs of the city towards the hospital, Connie felt no fear. ‘I was completely alone. I had no one to turn to and I was too young to really know how serious it was to bring a child into the world. There was no choice for me: I had to just get on with my life.’

The hospital was like a home from home for Connie, who had spent more of the previous three mouths there than at her cramped apartment. As she was wheeled through to the maternity wing, doctors and nurses greeted her. It felt reassuring to the 16-year-old. It was almost like being famous. The people in that hospital truly cared for Connie, which was more than could be said for most of her family.

The birth itself was remarkably easy, but then the child did weigh less than five pounds because he was so early. Connie really did not give it much thought. She’d got married, got pregnant and now she’d had a baby. It was no big deal. It went on all around her during her working hours, so why should it be any different for her?

‘It’s a boy!’ announced the midwife, holding up the tiny infant with his mop of black hair. ‘What you going to call him?’

Connie looked up bleary-eyed, and forced a smile. ‘Oh, I’ll think of something.’

In fact she had thought it through very carefully during those endless, lonely evenings watching television at her apartment. She didn’t do much else except eat, and that was usually in front of the TV.Connie had few friends. Girls of her own age had very different interests and older women tended to disapprove of a virtual schoolgirl getting pregnant.

During those solitary evenings at home, Connie would let her imagination take over while she tuned into different television programmes. She had a particular penchant for a Western series called Gunsmoke.

Her all-time favourite heart-throb was a young, rugged, half-breed cowhand called Quint Asper, played by handsome stud Burt Reynolds. Connie would swoon every time he came on the small, flickering black-and-white screen of her secondhand TV. Sometimes she would dream about riding off into the sunset with Quint. Her real life cowboy, Tony Tarantino, had ridden off into the sunset by himself, so Quint seemed a safer option. Fantasy figures never abandoned their loved ones.

Connie’s other important influence in choosing a name for her son was one of her favourite books, The Sound and the Fury. One of the characters, Quentin, was the progeny of an ill-advised seduction and a hasty, loveless marriage: a clear parallel with her own situation.

The nurses in attendance at the hospital were concerned that mother and child should bond instantly. Adoptions were not as common in those days. When a woman – however young – had a baby, she was expected to keep it.

But, as Connie lay there recovering from the birth of her premature son, she found herself feeling incredibly detached from everything that had just occurred. It was as if all those dramatic events had happened to someone else. Initially, it was impossible to see the tiny creature who had popped out into the world as her child. It wasn’t until the baby started crying and the nurses showed Connie how to feed him, that it actually dawned on her that he was her baby. She had long since blotted Tony Tarantino out of her mind, and here was a reminder of Tony. Perhaps that was why it took her a little time to accept him as her flesh and blood. But Connie was determined to raise him herself. She had no father for him, so she thought back to Gunsmoke, the show she had so frequently watched in her lonely apartment.

‘I’m gonna call him Quentin,’ Connie proudly announced to the nurse. And so Quentin Jerome Tarantino was named.

Connie later insisted that, besides her interest in the two Quints, she wanted to ensure that her son’s name would fill up an entire screen. ‘A multi-syllabic name, Quen-tin Ta-ran-ti-no. It’s a big name and I expected him to be important. Why would I want to have an unimportant baby?’

Connie had no time for post-natal depression. She did not even have an opportunity to breastfeed her child. He went straight on to formula because she had to get back to work to keep them both. Connie was all alone with a baby to bring up. By the time she left hospital, with tiny milky-white Quentin wrapped in a blanket in her arms, she had worked out a game plan. This child was going to be her inspiration. He would spur her on to succeed in life.

Soon after the birth, Connie was back working 16-hour days at the hospital and attending classes in between. She took Quentin over to an English nanny called Mrs Breeden, who looked after a number of children of working parents in Knoxville. For the first year of his life, Quentin spent more time under the watchful, caring eye of Mrs Breeden than in the company of his mother.

Connie had reluctantly decided that she had to make work her priority if they were to survive financially. She would drop her baby son at Mrs Breeden’s one-storey house on a quiet, tree-lined street a few blocks from her apartment, then take the bus to work every Monday morning. Quentin would not see his mother again until Friday evening.

Connie was working so hard that she hardly even had time to stop and think about the assassination of John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963. While Americans wept in the streets of Knoxville, Connie just got on with her life. JFK may have seemed half messiah, half movie star to the young all over the free world, but this teenager’s priority was keeping a roof over herself and her young son. Mourning the President’s death wasn’t going to pay the rent.

‘I didn’t have time to worry about those sort of things,’ she recalls. ‘We had to survive and there wasn’t a waking moment in every day when I didn’t put that at the front of my mind.’

Not surprisingly, Connie’s mother felt enormous guilt over her young daughter’s lonely and gruelling existence. However, Connie steadfastly refused to involve her mother in the life of her baby son.

But by the time Quentin was a year old, Connie’s mother seemed to have turned over a new leaf. She convinced her daughter that she had conquered her drink problem and pleaded to be allowed to look after little Quentin.

Connie – extremely suspicious of her mother’s motives – put her to the test by letting her look after the child at her home on a number of occasions. She actually did a fine job and there was no sign of any alcohol in the house either. Connie began to believe that perhaps her mother was a reformed person. With her work commitments at the hospital increasing, Connie allowed her mother to look after Quentin full time at her mother’s mobile home on a trailer park.

For the next year and a half, Connie should have been able to lead a fairly normal teenager’s life, as she spent at least five days each week as a single person. But her low wages and exhausting work schedule forced her to flop in front of the television on her rare nights off. She did not even have enough spare cash to make it to the movie theatre to watch her idol Elvis doing his thing in classics like Viva Las Vegas. Connie would have loved to see the film, as she particularly adored the idea of a sports-car racer having fun in the gambling capital of the world.

‘It was a strange existence, I guess,’ she explains. ‘I had few friends and my life was wrapped around Quint and work when I should have been out having fun.’

On her days off, Connie would change buses twice to get to her mother’s home 30 miles away. The bus trip there and back would take practically all day, but it was worth it to spend a few hours with baby Quentin in the back yard of the rundown trailer.

Connie read books occasionally, but she was almost addicted to superhero comics. She would sit and flick through them for hours before falling asleep. Spiderman was her favourite. Why couldn’t she find a man who was the perfect combination of Spiderman and Quint from Gunsmoke? But not many guys were likely to come knocking at the door of a quiet, shy teenage girl, with a baby in tow.

‘I guess Quint and I grew up together in more ways than most mothers and sons,’ she goes on. ‘Comics were as much an escape for me as they were later for Quint. I didn’t have much else in those days.’

The fact was that Connie enjoyed spending time imagining a fantasy life with one of her fictional heroes. In real life, up to that time, men always seemed to have betrayed and abandoned her. Her father had left her by dying, and her adopted father had made her life miserable by failing to curb her mother’s excesses. The heroes of television and comic books didn’t drink or neglect their children. They were kind, thoughtful and brave.

Connie kept thinking about California where she had spent her three happiest years living with Aunt Sadie, in Pico Rivera. In California, the sun shone most days, there was a feeling of optimism, and heroes like Quint and Elvis seemed to grow on trees.