I Remember Nothing Page 3

  I loved the Post. Of course, it was a zoo. The editor was a sexual predator. The managing editor was a lunatic. Sometimes it seemed that half the staff was drunk. But I loved my job. In my first year there, I learned how to write, which I barely knew when I began. The editors and copy editors brought me along. They actually nurtured me. They assigned me short pieces at first, then longer pieces, then five-part series. I learned by doing, and after a while, I had an instinctive sense of structure. There was a brilliant copy editor, Fred McMorrow, who would walk my story back to me and explain why he was making the changes he was making. Never begin a story with a quote, he said. Never use anything but “said.” Never put anything you really care about into the last paragraph because it will undoubtedly be cut for space. There was a great features editor, Joe Rabinovich, who kept my occasional stylistic excesses in line; he saved me from woeful idiocy when Tom Wolfe began writing for the Herald Tribune and I made a pathetic attempt to write exactly like him. The executive editor, Stan Opotowsky, came up with a series of offbeat feature assignments for me. I wrote about heat waves and cold snaps; I covered the Beatles and Bobby Kennedy and the Star of India robbery.

  The Post had a bare-bones staff, but more women worked there than worked at all the other New York papers combined. The greatest of the rewrite men at the Post was a woman named Helen Dudar. Hello, sweetheart, get me rewrite. In those days, the Post published six editions a day, starting at eleven in the morning and ending with the four-thirty stock market final. When news broke, reporters in the street would phone in the details from pay phones and rewrite men would write the stories. The city room was right next to the press room, and the noise—of reporters typing, pressmen linotyping, wire machines clacking, and presses rolling—was a journalistic fantasy.

  I worked at the Post for five years. Then I became a magazine writer. I believed in journalism. I believed in truth. I believed that when people claimed they’d been misquoted, they were just having trouble dealing with the sight of their words in cold, hard print. I believed that when political activists claimed that news organizations conspired against them, they had no idea that most journalistic enterprises were far too inept to harbor conspiracy. I believed that I was temperamentally suited to journalism because of my cynicism and emotional detachment; I sometimes allowed that these were character flaws, but I didn’t really believe it.

  I married a journalist, and that didn’t work. But then I married another, and it did.

  Now I know that there’s no such thing as the truth. That people are constantly misquoted. That news organizations are full of conspiracy (and that, in any case, ineptness is a kind of conspiracy). That emotional detachment and cynicism get you only so far.

  But for many years I was in love with journalism. I loved the city room. I loved the pack. I loved smoking and drinking scotch and playing dollar poker. I didn’t know much about anything, and I was in a profession where you didn’t have to. I loved the speed. I loved the deadlines. I loved that you wrapped the fish.

  You can’t make this stuff up, I used to say.

  I’d known since I was a child that I was going to live in New York eventually, and that everything in between would be just an intermission. I’d spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live; a place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I’d be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist.

  And I’d turned out to be right.

  The Legend

  I grew up in Beverly Hills, in a Spanish house in the flats. My parents had a large group of friends, almost all of them transplanted New Yorkers who were in the business. That’s what it was known as—the business. (People who were not in the business were known as civilians.) The men were screenwriters or television writers. Their wives did nothing. They were known at the time as housewives, but none of them did housework—they all had cooks and maids and laundresses. Our mother had household help too, but she was different: she worked. “You’ll just have to tell them your mother can’t be there because she has to work.” My mother uttered that sentence several times a year; it was meant to get her off the hook for PTA meetings and such, but it was also meant to make us understand that she was a cut above the other mothers. She was even a cut above the other career women—there were a few in the business, including the costume designer Edith Head, whom my mother once took me to lunch with, but none of them had careers and children. My mother did. Also, she served delicious food, which was another way she liked to rub it in. And she could keep help. What’s more, she dressed beautifully.

  This was long before the concept of having it all, but my mother had it all. And then she ruined the narrative by becoming a crazy drunk. But that came later.

  Every day my parents came home from work, and we all gathered in the den. My parents had drinks and there were crudités for us—although they were not called crudités at the time, they were called carrots and celery. Then we had dinner in the dining room. The plates were heated, and there were butter balls made with wooden paddles. There was an appetizer, a main course, and dessert. We thought everyone lived like this.

  At our dinner table, we discussed politics and what we were reading. We told cheerful stories of what had happened in school that day. We played charades. My mother, once a camp counselor, would lead us in song. “Under the spreading chestnut tree,” we would sing, and we would spread our arms and bang our chests. Or we would sing, “The bells they all go tingalingaling,” and we’d clink our spoons against our glasses. We learned to believe in Lucy Stone, the New Deal, Norman Thomas, and Edward R. Murrow. We were taught that organized religion was the root of all evil and that Adlai Stevenson was God. We were indoctrinated in my mother’s rules: Never buy a red coat. Red meat keeps your hair from turning gray. You can leave the table but you may not leave the table. Girdles ruin your stomach muscles. The means and the end are the same.

  And there were stories, the stories we grew up on. How my parents met and fell in love. How they ran away from the camp where they were counselors and got married so they could sleep in the same tent. How my mother’s aunt Minnie became the first woman dentist in the history of the world. And finally—and this is where this is all leading—how my mother threw Lillian Ross out of our house.

  This was not just a story, it was a legend.

  It seemed that Lillian Ross had come to one of my parents’ parties. About once a year they had a big sit-down dinner for about forty people, with tables and chairs from Abbey Rents. They served their delicious food cooked by their longtime housekeeper, and my mother wore a Galanos dress bought for the occasion. All their friends were invited—Julius J. Epstein (Casablanca), Richard Maibaum (The Big Clock and, eventually, the Bond movies), Richard Breen (Dragnet), Charles Brackett (Ninotchka, Sunset Boulevard), and Albert Hackett and his wife, Frances Goodrich, who had the greatest credits of all (The Thin Man, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Diary of Anne Frank). I would stand on the second floor and look over the banister down at the parties, and listen to Herbie Baker (The Girl Can’t Help It) play the piano after dinner. Once I caught a glimpse of Shelley Winters, who was dating Liam O’Brien (Young at Heart), and once Marge and Gower Champion turned up. That was as starry as it ever got.

  One night, St. Clair McKelway was invited to one of my parents’ parties. McKelway was a well-known New Yorker magazine writer who’d written a couple of movies. He called beforehand to ask if he could bring a friend, Lillian Ross. Did my mother know who she was? he asked. My mother certainly knew who she was. The New Yorker arrived by mail every week. Along with the Sunday New York Times and The Saturday Review of Literature, it was required reading for the diaspora of smart people living in Hollywood; reading it made them feel they hadn’t lost a step, that they could move back east a
t a moment’s notice.

  Lillian Ross was young at the time, but she was already famous for her reporting in The New Yorker, and for her ability to make her subjects sound like fools. She had just published her devastating profile of Ernest Hemingway and was in Los Angeles reporting her piece on John Huston and the making of The Red Badge of Courage. My mother told St. Clair McKelway that he was welcome to bring Lillian Ross to dinner but that Ross had to agree that the party would be off the record.

  So Lillian Ross came to the party. Before dinner, she asked my mother for a tour of the house. My mother showed her around, and at a certain point, Ross came upon a picture of my three sisters and me.

  “Are these your children?” she asked my mother.

  “Yes,” my mother said.

  “Do you ever see them?” Lillian Ross asked.

  That did it.

  My mother walked Lillian Ross downstairs and back to McKelway.

  “Out,” she said.

  And Lillian Ross and St. Clair McKelway left.

  That was the legend of my mother and Lillian Ross. My mother loved to tell it. It was practically a cowboy movie. We’d been raised to believe that a woman could do everything and Lillian Ross had dared to question it. In our house. So my mother threw her out.

  I loved this story. I loved all stories that proved that my mother was right and everyone else was wrong, especially since there was a piece of me that couldn’t help wishing she was exactly like everyone else’s mother.

  It was at least ten years before I began to wonder about it. Had it ever actually happened? There are all sorts of stories you grow up with, and then you get older, and there’s just something about them that doesn’t pass the nose test. They’re somehow too perfect. And the most nagging part is the coup de grâce, the perfectly chosen last line. My father wrote a memoir once, and in it are several completely unbelievable episodes in which he tells people like Darryl Zanuck to go fuck themselves. This legend of my mother and Lillian Ross was in some way a version of those stories. It was too good to be true.

  My mother became an alcoholic when I was fifteen. It was odd. One day she wasn’t an alcoholic, and the next day she was a complete lush. She drank a bottle of scotch every night. Around midnight she would come flying out of her bedroom, banging and screaming and terrorizing us all. My father drank too, but he was a sloppy, sentimental drunk, and somehow his alcoholism was more benign.

  By the time I went off to Wellesley, their movie work had dried up, but somehow they were sober enough in the daytime to collaborate; they wrote a successful play called Take Her, She’s Mine, about a Southern California family whose daughter goes off to an eastern women’s college. It quoted the letters I’d written from college, and it opened on Broadway during my senior year, starring Art Carney as the father and Elizabeth Ashley as the daughter. Everyone at Wellesley knew about it and about my remarkable mother, the writer who could do everything.

  I didn’t expect either of my parents to turn up at my graduation, but a few days before it, my mother called to say she’d decided to come. She arrived in all her stylish glory. She wore her suit, and her three-inch heels, and her clip-on earrings that matched her brooch. She slept in the dormitory, in the room next to mine, for two nights. I lay in my bed and listened through the paper-thin wall to her drunken mutterings. I was terrified that she’d burst from her room into the halls of Tower Court and mortify me in front of my classmates, that she’d stagger down the hall banging and screaming, and my friends would learn the truth.

  But what was the truth?

  I was invested in the original narrative; I was a true believer. My mother was a goddess.

  But my mother was an alcoholic.

  Alcoholic parents are so confusing. They’re your parents, so you love them; but they’re drunks, so you hate them. But you love them. But you hate them. They have moments when they’re still the people you grew up idolizing; they have moments when you can’t imagine they were ever anything but monsters. And then, after a while, they’re monsters full-time. The people they used to be have enormous power over you—it will be forty years before you buy a red coat (and even then, you will wear it only once)—but the people they’ve turned into have no power over you at all.

  For a long time before she died, I wished my mother were dead. And then she died, and it wasn’t one of those things where I thought, Why did I think that? What was wrong with me? What kind of person would wish her mother dead? No, it wasn’t one of those things at all. My mother had become a complete nightmare. She drank herself to death at the age of fifty-seven.

  I was thirty when she died. After five years as a newspaper reporter, I’d become a freelance magazine writer. I wrote for Esquire in the last days of editor Harold Hayes and for New York magazine in the first days of Clay Felker. It was a heady time. Magazines like Esquire and New York were the zeitgeist, and the (mostly) men who wrote for them were cocky and full of beans. They thought they had invented nonfiction, which they hadn’t, and they even thought they had invented hanging out together in restaurants and staying up late. It was an era when people really cared about magazines, when the arrival of a new Esquire on the newsstands was a bombshell, and it was seriously fun to be part of it. I became an Esquire writer. I wrote a column there, about women. In the world of print, the small world where I lived, I became a little bit famous.

  I had never met Lillian Ross, but I wondered about her from time to time. I’d read all her early work and admired it greatly, but she’d stopped doing bylined profiles and wrote mostly unsigned “Talk of the Town” pieces in The New Yorker. She was rumored to be having an affair with the editor of the magazine, William Shawn, and she seemed (from a distance) to have fallen under the evil spell of blandness that he’d cast over the magazine.

  At the time, there was a cold war in the magazine world, between those of us at Esquire and New York, and those of them at The New Yorker. They lived enviable lives—they had contracts and health insurance, and they could take months writing pieces; we, on the other hand, were always overextended and scrambling for dough. They were feigning modesty and disdaining success; we were self-aggrandizing and climbing the greasy pole. They were the anointed; we were pagans. They worshipped the famously reclusive “Mr. Shawn,” and they dropped his name in hushed tones as if he were the Ba‘al Shem Tov; we, on the other hand, jumped from Harold to Clay and back again. They thought we were egomaniacs; we thought they were weird.

  I was the sort of person Lillian Ross would hate, if she even knew who I was, or so it seemed to me one night in 1978 when I was pulled across a room to meet her. I was at a party at the home of Lorne Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Live. Lillian Ross had been reporting a profile of Lorne for eight years. “You two must meet,” Lorne was saying, as he brought us together. I could see in an instant that Lillian Ross did not share this imperative. “You have so much in common,” he said, as he sat us down on the sofa.

  “It’s so nice to meet you,” I said.

  “And you,” she said.

  She was a tiny woman with short curly hair and bright blue eyes, and she smiled and waited for me to begin.

  I had one goal: to find out if my mother’s story was true and to find it out without giving anything away. I didn’t want Lillian Ross to know that she was a character in our family saga, and I didn’t want to betray my mother by giving away the fact that Ross had lingered on, in our home, for so many years after her cameo appearance there. I wanted my mother to win the duel, whether or not it had actually happened.

  But how to ask the question? “Is it true my mother threw you out of the house?” seemed a little bold. “I think you once met my mother” seemed coy, especially if Ross remembered the incident.

  I couldn’t figure out what to do.

  So I began by saying that I was a huge fan. She said thank you and waited for me to say something else. I took this to mean she’d never read anything I’d written, or that she hated my work, or perhaps—I was reaching
for straws here—she had no idea that I was a writer.

  I asked her about her son and I told her about mine. It’s my experience that no one but your very close friends is truly interested in your children, but we went on pretending for a while.

  Then I asked her if she was still writing the profile of Lorne, as I’d heard. Yes, she said, she was. Another pause. It was clear that Lillian Ross was not even going to meet me halfway. I was starting to become irritated. Was it true that she was now in her eighth year of writing about Lorne, I asked. Yes, she was, she said. When do you think you’ll be done with it, I asked. I asked this in what I hoped was an innocent manner, but I didn’t fool her. She had no idea, she replied. We don’t have to rush things at The New Yorker.

  That cleared up one thing: she knew who I was.

  I plowed on: I asked her why she’d stopped writing signed profiles. I asked the question cleverly, I thought. Honey dripped from my lips. I said I had loved her long pieces so much and missed reading them and wondered why she had stopped writing them. She replied that she’d stopped writing bylined articles because she believed that too much magazine journalism these days was egotistical and self-promoting.

  I had to hand it to her: that was good.

  And then Lillian Ross answered the question I hadn’t asked.

  “I went to your house once,” she said. “I met your mother.”

  “Really?” I said, feigning absolute ignorance.

  “Didn’t see much of you though,” she said.