Confessions of a Prairie Bitch Read online

  He moved to Vancouver and became an actor and a producer and an entrepreneur and an “impresario”—basically, all of those things that don’t require a high school education. He did very well, because he was willing to do absolutely anything to keep the theater open. One summer, he decided to “invent” air-conditioning. Well, not really, but close enough. It was a hot, humid summer, and none of the other theaters on the same street had air-conditioning, so he saw a golden opportunity. He purchased a large block of ice and a really big fan. He positioned them in the attic of the theater, creating a primitive but effective cooling system, and proudly put out a sign: WE HAVE AIR-CONDITIONING! It was a smash. The other theater owners were terribly jealous.

  But not for long. The ice was heavy and unstable, and the theater was very old. One afternoon, during a musical rehearsal, the block of ice came crashing through the ceiling and into the expensive rented piano. It just barely missed the actor and his accompanist who were rehearsing. They were not amused.

  His “invention” of the drive-in theater went much better. The company was doing “Theater under the Stars,” major theatrical productions with well-known actors performed in the park. The audience would sit on blankets and picnic. It was very successful. In fact, it was sold out. Then during one performance, it rained, and people started demanding their money back.

  “Not on your life!” said my father. He convinced everyone to simply pull their cars up onto the grass, close to the stage. Unlike a drive-in, however, there were no speakers. People rolled down their windows and leaned out of them, straining to hear. The actors simply projected louder over the storm. Everyone thought it was a great novelty, and not a single ticket was refunded, which was a good thing, because my father, I’m sure, had already spent every penny.

  My father eventually founded his own theater, the Totem Theatre of Vancouver, with his friend Stuart Baker when one day in walked my mother. Dad and Stuart had become popular young producers in Vancouver, to the point that they were being referred to in the press as “The Gold Dust Twins.” The two of them were straight out of Mel Brooks’s The Producers. My mother showed up at the theater and announced that the two of them had no idea how to actually run a business, and that she, having just graduated from the local business college, was capable of keeping their books correctly and thus keeping them both “out of jail.” She told them she would happily keep the finances in order and run the office in exchange for the lead female role in every production. As my father said, “She made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.” So my mother became well known in Canada for her brilliant performance as Laura in Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie and in any other role she felt like having. (She sometimes let the other girls have a turn.)

  The theater eventually ceased to be as profitable as they wanted, and my parents, having worked their way romantically through the entire theater company and most of Vancouver, realized it was time to get out of town. My father proposed to my mother on a used car lot. He must have had a hell of a sales pitch, because she agreed. They were married right away, with Stuart as best man. Then the three of them moved to Toronto to get fabulous new careers in radio. Back then, a career in radio was the happening thing to have. Saying you wanted to be on TV in the ’50s would be like saying today that you wanted a show on the Internet. Interesting…but not yet profitable. My dad and Stuart were the ones with the contact; a friend had gotten them a meeting with a major producer. They only had a couple of radio credits between them, and my mother had none, but they decided to take her along to the meeting anyway, just in case. There might be a small part for her if they were lucky.

  At the meeting, my father and Stuart gave their best pitch about why they should be big stars, and the producer seemed to be buying it. Then he asked my mother, “And what do you do?”

  “I do children’s voices,” she replied without missing a beat. Stuart and my dad nearly had a seizure. They didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. Children’s voices? She’d never done any voices. The producer chatted with her politely, then told them he’d call.

  When they left, my dad really let her have it. “Children’s voices? Where in the hell did you come up with that bullshit?” He and Stuart thought she was nuts and hoped she hadn’t ruined their chances.

  The script soon arrived. They had all been hired to be in a new radio soap opera. They celebrated madly and began leafing through the script, seeing how many lines they had. My father shouted, “Look! I’m on page ten!” Stuart found his part: “I’m on page twenty and twenty-one!”

  My mother sat silently, slowly turning the pages of her script. My father asked her, “Which page are you on?”

  “All of them,” she replied calmly.

  It turned out the entire plot of the soap opera revolved around a disturbed little girl and her family’s attempt to deal with the medical and psychological crisis. She was the little girl.

  My father and Stuart soon learned to bow before her prowess in voice-over. Because she worked so much, she often had to run back and forth across the street from studio to studio in Toronto, recording several programs and commercials at the same time. My brother, Stefan, was born in Toronto in 1955, so she was doing all this while carting around a newborn.

  In the early 1960s, my mother became the voice of Gumby, the walking, talking “little green ball of clay.” At this point, they had moved to New York and had been living there for a few years. She was also a ghost, Casper the Friendly Ghost, to be exact. Known by her maiden name, Norma Macmillan, she was one of the most prominent voice-over artists of the late ’50s through the ’60s. She played everybody. She was Sweet Polly Purebred, intrepid reporter and girlfriend of Underdog. She was Davey of Davey and Goliath, absolutely the world’s most religious Claymation program ever made. (My mother used to joke, “C’mon, Goliath, let’s go outside and pray!”) With her high, childlike voice, she was also, by default, Davey’s mom, his sister, and all his friends. She was Gumby’s mom, sister, and his blue friend Goo. She was nearly everyone in Casper’s town with a voice over middle C—Nightmare, Wendy, and even Spooky. In fact, she was so many voices, that sometimes I could sit in front of the TV on Saturday mornings and hear her in every third cartoon. She was even in commercials. Before the hyperannoying Cocoa Puffs bird, there was a choo-choo train that shouted, “Cocoa Puffs, Cocoa Puffs!” She was the little girl in that.

  In 1962, while we were living in New York and shortly after I was born, she was cast in the first comedy album ever to mock a seated president, “The First Family,” about JFK and Jackie and the whole gang starring stand-up comedian Vaughn Meader. She was the voice of Caroline Kennedy and baby John-John. It sold so many copies so fast (seven and a half million, to be exact), it made the Guinness Book of World Records for fastest-selling album in history. It was played over loudspeakers in department stores and won the Grammy for Album of the Year. Even President Kennedy was said to have loved it.

  A second First Family album was recorded and set to be released Christmas 1963, but, since JFK was killed on November 22, that was the end of that. The album disappeared from the air-waves, and poor Vaughn Meader’s career never really recovered. It’s still a major collector’s item, and yes, that’s my forty-year-old mom on the cover wearing knee socks and holding a balloon.

  By the time I was in first grade, my mother was so well known in cartoons, that on the occasions she would walk me to school, the other kids would beg her to perform: “Do Gumby!” “Do Casper!” And there, in the school yard, at eight in the morning, in her coat and scarf, even on days she was fighting a hangover, she would smile bravely and say, “Hi! I’m Casper the Friendly Ghost, and I want to be your friend!” On some mornings she could even be persuaded to sing: “Where oh where has my Underdog gone? Oh where oh where can he be?” Not only were her early-morning performances impressive in quality, but I was amazed just by the fact she did them at all. I have to hand it to her; I don’t know if I could have done that before my first cup of coff
ee.

  I, of course, loved this. At that age, kids think you’re nuts when you tell them your mother is Gumby. Having her come down to the school yard in person and prove it was more than I could ever dream of. It gave me a smattering of what would pass for “street cred” in the first grade.

  My mother was very beautiful, and she had that whole ’60s style going. She had very, very dyed red hair, although I believe it was called strawberry-something. It was teased into a bouffant not unlike the hairdo of her cartoon character Sweet Polly Purebred. Because she liked to wear smart suits with three-quarter-length sleeves and black pumps, the resemblance was positively disturbing; the only difference at all was she was missing the big cartoon doggie nose. Sometimes I went with her to the hairdresser’s, where her stylist would smoke endless Benson & Hedges while spraying her and the whole room with Aqua Net. I don’t know how either of them was able to breathe. I nearly passed out.

  My mother didn’t do the usual “mommy” things. She wasn’t into all the arts and crafts activities that other mothers so enjoyed. I can just imagine the look I would have gotten had I suggested she make me a Halloween costume. Mine all came from the store, until I got older and started making them myself. It wasn’t really a problem, except for the Girl Scouts. All my school friends were in the Brownies, the lead-in to being in the Girl Scouts, and I wanted to join, too. My mother and I went to a meeting where the program directors explained the whole process, as well as their very pressing need for more den mothers.

  This is where things went south. When we got home, my mother sat me down and told me very solemnly that we needed to talk. She explained that at the meeting, they had suggested that she become a den mother. She explained that if I joined my local troop, she would be expected to join as well and fulfill the duties of a scout den mother: driving girls around, going camping, making treats for meetings, helping with arts and crafts, etc.

  She said, “I’m very sorry. I know you want to be a Brownie. But seriously, ask yourself, do you honestly see me as den mother material?” I was six, but I knew she was right. The images were horrifying: I tried to visualize her in a schoolroom, handing out little Dixie cups of Elmer’s glue and glitter with her shaky hands, and I could just see the ensuing disaster. I saw her standing around in a supermarket parking lot helping me sell cookies, with the far away, sad, deadened look of someone who’s been waiting in line at the DMV for several hours. Did I really think she was going to make lunches for a troop of twenty little girls? This was a woman who had trouble cutting the crusts off my peanut butter sandwiches, for God’s sake.

  I told her I understood. And I did. I did not join the Brownies, and I never became a Girl Scout. In retrospect, I sincerely doubt I was what they were looking for either.

  After we moved to Hollywood in 1965, Dad became a personal manager. This is like an agent, only weirder. Being an agent is simple: you have clients; you get them jobs; they pay you 10 percent. The end. The personal manager’s job is to “counsel and advise.” But personal managers are not lawyers. They are different from business managers, who handle bank accounts and investments. They do not specifically procure employment. But they get paid 15 percent instead of 10. So what the hell does a personal manager actually do? If they’re a bad one, not much at all. And if they’re a good one? Everything.

  The agent may get you the three-picture deal and negotiate for the raise and the bigger trailer. The publicist may get you the cover of People, but the manager is the one who will come in the middle of the night to bail you out of jail. The publicist might spin the story of your arrest to the press and try to make you sound innocent. But the manager will come before the cops arrive, flush the dope down the toilet, give the girl cab fare home, and wipe the prints off the gun. My father was a manager.

  Before he started his own firm and became my manager, he worked for Seymour Heller and Associates. This was how he wound up working for Liberace.

  It was 1969, so Liberace was famous by this time. Back in the ’50s, he had his own TV show (called The Liberace Show; what else?) and was now touring to packed houses. As strange as it may seem to young people now, at the time, Liberace was in fact the highest-paid entertainer in the world. I had the hilarious privilege of going to see his show when I was just eight years old.

  My parents prepared me for this by admonishing, “Now, whatever you do, don’t say anything, because no one must know that Liberace is gay.”

  “Excuse me?” I said. “I’m eight. I know he’s gay.” I thought they had to be kidding. No grown-up person really thought this guy was straight, did they?

  “No, no!” they said. “His fans are in love with him. You mustn’t say a word!”

  I agreed to behave myself, under protest. If I thought hiding Liberace’s gayness was a ludicrous proposition before I saw the show, I was absolutely in hysterics afterward. He came onstage in hot pants—spangled, gleaming, red, white, and blue hot pants covered in sequins and rhinestones. He tap-danced in this outfit and did a baton-twirling routine. He also had a floor-length cape that lit up. Really, it was wired with thousands of little bulbs. The house lights would go down, and he would blaze away like a Christmas tree. He wore elaborate makeup and gallons of hair spray. He sat at the piano and played (quite beautifully, by the way) and sang, simpering and winking and giggling the entire show. And in case anyone still didn’t get it, he raised his arms over his head, soared into the air, and flew across the stage.

  Yet there they were, his legions of female fans, mostly older women dressed in fur coats and jewels, with that well-sprayed, perfectly coifed, slightly blue hair that was considered cool at the time. I watched them in amazement at intermission as they scooped up all the merchandise. Liberace was crazy about merchandise. He was ahead of his time. People didn’t sell things at concerts as much as they do today. But old Liberace did. He had records and coffee mugs—he even had soap, for the love of God, with his picture on it. I tried to imagine who in their right mind would actually get off on bathing with Liberace. It was too icky to contemplate. Yet as the cash registers rang furiously, I began to understand why Liberace’s most famous quote was, “I cried—all the way to the bank!”

  I overheard some of the fur-coated ladies talking. They paid no attention to the eight-year-old in the frilly yellow dress and white tights hovering near them. They assumed, of course, that my mother must be nearby purchasing scads of Liberace merchandise, so I could eavesdrop with impunity. They whispered and giggled like teenagers, and I heard bits and pieces: “Oh, he IS!!” (Shriek!) “Just darling!” and finally, “You’d be safe with him!” followed by gales of laughter. THEY KNEW!

  They didn’t call it “gay,” but they knew perfectly well what it was when they saw it. If you had walked up to any one of these women and asked flat out: “Is Liberace a homosexual?” she would have slapped you soundly across the face and screamed, “How DARE you!” But if you asked something along the lines of “So, why do you think he’s not married?” she would have winked at you and said, “Oh, really, dear!” That’s how they liked it, and that’s how he gave it to them. Just as he floated over the stage, Liberace eternally hovered over the concepts of gayness and straightness, never really touching down on either side. It was genius.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE CASTLE

  NELLIE: My mother says we’re not like the rest of the children.

  The Chateau Marmont is probably not most parents’ first choice as a place to raise their family, but like most actors, it was where we landed when we came from New York in 1965. It wasn’t yet the infamous location of Belushi’s death, but it was already notorious. For those who haven’t been on the tour of Hollywood and seen it yet, the Chateau is a big, gorgeous pretend–French castle, sitting right smack in the middle of Hollywood on the Sunset Strip, surrounded by liquor stores, banks, and nightclubs. It really stands out. Built in the late ’20s, it was meant to be a fashionable, high-end apartment building for very respectable people, but it became both semiper
manent and totally transient lodging for people in show business and those who think they are in show business. It now has a fancy bar and restaurant and is frequented by many notorious, drunken, pants-dropping celebrities. This observation is not meant in a negative way or considered a sign of the Chateau’s falling from grace. It was always the home of notorious, drunken, pants-dropping celebrities.

  I, of course, loved it from the minute I set eyes on it. All little girls of four and five think they are princesses, but I was the only one I knew who could tell people she really did live in a castle. We moved in just as the 1960s were breaking right there on the Sunset Strip. We had come to California because my older brother, Stefan, was supposed to star in the movie The Singing Nun with Debbie Reynolds. I say “supposed to” because between the time he was cast and the time shooting began, he grew and was deemed much too big—and therefore replaced. He then had to settle for playing Kirk Douglas’s son in The Way West. Stefan, who’s six years older than I, had started acting when he was barely five, playing sad-eyed orphans on soap operas. This led to an article in a New York paper about “the theatrical Arngrim family: Dad’s a monk, Mom’s a ghost, and their son’s an orphan!”

  No one seemed to question the parts he got. I remember my mother proudly telling the story of how when he was very little, she had begged him to smile at an audition, to “try to look happy.” He didn’t, but when he came out of the reading, he was thrilled. “They didn’t want a happy little boy! I got the part!” He worked like crazy, playing everything from the French war orphan on the series Combat! and the embarrassing illegitimate spawn on a soap opera to the moody “disturbed child.” There was no shortage of parts for the cute boy with big, sad brown eyes, who looked like he had the whole world on his shoulders. But no one seemed to want to know why he looked that way.