My Mother, The Heroine

A couple of days ago now, in my trawl through my daily catch of emails, like so many small fish demonstrating an apparent eagerness to be singled out - Me!  Me!  Read me!  Over here! - I came to a site that had an ‘ad’ (for wont of a better word for those human-interest eye-catching sites that are fetchingly made to lure us into ad-land) for the skinny on a few things that no one ever knew about Olivia de Havilland.  I forgot to go back and click on it, caught up with the catch that I had already made (or that had ‘made’ me); but I know something about Olivia de Havilland that even these people don’t know about.  And thereby hangs a blog.   

A moment to pay a personal homage, before the storyline that we are all in changes dramatically.  As storylines are wont to do.  And not just in Hollywood screenplays.

-

You’ve heard of the ‘Girl With a Pearl Earring,’ and ‘The Woman with the Alabaster Jar’?  Meet The Woman with the Mona Lisa Smile:

My mother.

I never knew my mother.  Well, she apparently didn’t know me, either.  A number of times while growing up, I would find her calling me by the name of my brother.  Who was three years older than I.  Hardly an easily mistaken match.  Especially for a parent to confuse the two.

And it extended, from my last days in high school/beginning of my university days, back to near the very beginning of our little family unit.  When she died - that’s over forty years ago, now.  (Of breast cancer.  Somewhat a propos, that; for an aspiring Hollywood starlet, who never made it) -  her third husband sent me a shoebox containing her last extremely personal items in life - items of jewelry; that sort of thing - among which was a small old newspaper cutting containing an extremely personal story for her: how one Rita Case had managed to trace down her children who had been kidnapped by their father and taken to a different state.  “The children, Duane, 6, and DeVon, 3, …” - what??!!   She couldn’t tell us apart even at that time???!  

What kind of a mother was this??  And woman???

The kind of a mother that she was can perhaps be fairly well considered by how she couldn’t even tell her children apart, even with a three-year age difference going for the challenge: rather distant, rather hands-offish.  (That would describe the specific situation very well.)1  The kind of woman she was can perhaps best be described in a word or two as ‘driven’.  Ambitious.  As the following story will unfold for you, dear reader, who is interested enough in this telling of a personal tale to have stayed with the telling this far, at least.  

(In for a penny, eh???…)

This story has to do, at least in part, with me, albeit before I have any recollection of the events.  The setting for this one: They were living in little-town Provo, Utah, the home of Brigham Young University, which our father was attending (to better himself, obviously, for him and his family), leaving our mother to work at and run a small cafe associated with a small gas station.  With another little kid in diapers (‘Oh no - that chore again!’) and a big resentment, this time in her life about having to work while our dad was having himself a good ol’ time at the U.  One fine day - as the story goes; which I got from my paternal grandmother, well into my adulthood, and asking some questions about those early days - a guy, or guys, that she was serving in the cafe got to talking with her, about how she looked “like that Hollywood star, what’s her name.  The one with the highfalutin’ name.  De Havilland - that’s it.  Olivia de Havilland.”  And that was it, enough for her: Off she took - leaving me still in diapers, my paternal grandmother said, a bit resentfully, even after all those years later - for Hollywood, to try her luck in ‘the movies’.  This was the mid-Thirties, when ‘the movies’ were just beginning to reach their stride as Talkies too, I understand, and were wildly popular.             

I never knew anything about that time of hers, down in Hollywood, or at least its environs.  Mom never talked about it, and I knew, by then, that it was off-limits as a subject.2 

In any event: No such door opened for her down in Hollywood, and back she came; but nothing ventured, nothing gained:  She divorced our father, all the way into a Temple divorce (they were both from Mormon stock, and had dutifully been ‘sealed’ ‘for time and all eternity,’ as I understand the Temple proceedings),3 traced us kids down (and never speaking to our paternal grandmother again from that time, for not telling her where our dad had parked us; the first time that we had been ‘kidnapped’ in this ’screenplay’), and took us with her as she went up to live in the capital of Idaho, Boise, to attend secretarial school, and pursue her dreams from that independent base in life.  We kids being insurance for her, for her old age, I became aware of, much later in life.4

And after a few years there, when my bother and I were parked with an old couple for taking care of us while our mother was going to secretarial school, off we went with her again, when she remarried, to a smaller town in Idaho, where the man was the co-owner of the local Ford dealership, and living a nice, comfortable life.  Until a woman of unnoticeable ambition entered his life, and used him as a vehicle for her to make her way back to shooting range of Hollywood.  To a ‘bedroom community’ thereof, in Long Beach; where somehow she knew, from her earlier foray into that neck of the Success woods (in still Great Depression-era America), that, with the advent of Pearl Harbor, there would be good money to be made in either the shipyards there or the aircraft factory.  

Ah: Douglas Aircraft.  Where I would spend a couple of my summers during my university days, earning some additional money, to carry me through my school year, in addition to the tuition-and-board scholarship that I was attending Stanford U on…

But this reminiscence isn’t about me, or supposed to be about me. This is meant to be something of a song about my mother.  Which, in summary, could well go something quite like this:

‘Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you

You’re so like the lady with the mystic smile

Is it only ‘cause you’re lonely they have blamed you

For that Mona Lisa strangeness in your smile?

Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa

Or is this your way to hide a broken heart?

Many dreams have been bought to your doorstep

They just lie there, and they die there

Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa

Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art.”   

The Woman with the Mona Lisa Smile......

P.S. And I happened to see today, intriguingly enough, that Olivia de Havilland - still living; still kicking, at the ripe and white-haired old age of 101, and well-kempt, t least at the time that the photo of her accompanying the article was taken - is back in the limelight (via an unbecoming legal fracas regarding her depiction in a docudrama). Five years older than my mother would have been, had she hung around, waiting - or actually, more likely doing all that she could, up to the very last minute - for her big chance in this lifetime.

     So, the life of an image is all about, to the very end - an image.5

     So it may not have amounted to much after all, Mom.  

     Rest in peace.

     Or enjoy your new life.

     Whatever.  And wherever.

     Your soul has taken you.  For your next part.  In the Grand Theatre of Life. 

—

footnotes:

1 I think what it came down to was a circumstantial indifference.  As I understand the matter - from the paternal side of my family (I never knew her side very well, although I met two of her brothers over the years) was that our father named us after friends of his.  So: Machts nichts to her.  Anything to get out of life on a dumb farm.

   Yes, she was a farm girl.  But it served her well in later life on one front of life/of life’s little challenges: She shared once that as a young girl she always hated, or at least resented, having to cook the meals for a big bunch of farmhands, but that it served her well in the sense that later on she was able to cook for large groups with relative ease.  So she acknowledged that ‘silver lining’ about her life as a farm girl.

    As for her patience with children, and ‘having’ them, i.e., being responsible for them: My brother told me the story once about a time when he was still in diapers (and these were days WELL before Pampers, ladies.  Some of you will understand what I mean).  A story about when he was still in diapers?  that he could remember things that early on in his life??  That’s an indication of how powerful this experience was for him.  The setting: They were living then next to a creek.  One fine day he dirtied his diapers again - as was his custom, as a child - when it was all finally too much for Mom, who had had enough of that part of the deal, and she took him down to the creek - a very cold creek, I was told; years and years, and years, later - and sat him in it, to be cleaned off with the help of Mother Nature, and told him never to do that again.  And as far as he could remember that part of the story, he never did.  

   Our mother was given in later life to talking like a momma bird: When it was time for the chicks to leave the nest: Out.  I’ve done my job, boys and girls.  It’s time for you to do yours: learn to fly.

   But to continue.

2 How did I know that?  From, for example: 

   Once when I was still in junior high (Middle School, these days.  For whatever the reason for the change), and it was just me and Mom at home (she having a) divorced the man who became her ticket back to southern California, and by then b) kicked out my brother some time before, to go upstate and live with our father, for having become too much for her to handle, in his rambunctious high school years, and into ‘girls’; all another part of the story), I came back from having been shipped off to two weeks at the ‘Y’ summer camp  (she had bought me a membership at the YMCA; for just this sort of reason, for all I know) to find a young woman friend of my mom’s at the house, to look after me until Mom got back from her vacation.  When she did, and I casually asked her where she had been - as one might well do - she said, simply, “Well, it’s none of your business.”  

   Such was our relationship made up of.  And  to note, that I didn’t think much of it, all.  I was quite happy to be pretty much on my own, in life.  And hadn’t even realized, some years later, when I was graduating from high school, and preparing for ‘all that,’ and she said to me one day, in a bit of a shocked tone (having found out some way or other that I never found out about; because, you will have realized by now, we didn’t talk to each other much about our lives): “You didn’t tell me that you were student body president!”.

   And where did you spend your summer vacations, Mom, while I was shipped off to ‘Y’ camp??  

   (I was to find out later, somehow, that she had cultivated a relationship with somebody somewhat attached to ‘Hollywood,’ and would spend time around swimming pools, hoping to be seen, as by the guy back at the cafe in Provo, and ’discovered,’ for the real woman that she was.  Not just a woman who could cook up a mean meal.  Or change kids’ diapers. She was - somebody.

   Somebody who also looked like the Mona Lisa.  A print of which was hanging in our front room.  Along with a small, well-mounted print of Mom; both with the same enigmatic smile, and the latter image with her braided signature hair wound on the top of her head.  Like a diadem.  Or crown, even.

   She had very long hair.  Which she lost years later.  To the chemotherapy for her breast cancer.  Which she wouldn’t listen to me regarding alternative treatments for, because I “never went to medical school”.  Having dropped out of university - and thus having forsaken going on into Med School; to which I had been admitted, to start the following year of school (of, to say, my former schooling) - to start out on my lifelong quest for answers, to the big questions of life; like What Is It All About? 

   Sometimes - I have discovered, here towards the end of my current journey -  it is all about acknowledging the sacrifices that your parents make for you, along the way.  Regardless of specific circumstances.

   But I still had to learn that.  Having looked out solely for myself, all those years.  And actually having liked doing so.

   But not to lose track of the chronological order of things, in this telling.  

   Of two lives.  

   One.  Of My Mother, The Heroine.

   And the other, of little old me.  Here, near the end of my saunter.  Through this same strange neck of the woods, of the All of Life.

   Where our little lives are just footnotes to

   the Real Thing.   

3 As for this Temple business, and the Mormon religion itself, in relation to my mother:

   a) Her trip down to Hollywood apparently opened her starstruck eyes to something more fundamental: that the Mormon Church’s temple rituals are based on Freemasonry rituals, she told me once later on in our life together: and

   b) Apparently part of the divorce terms was that she would raise us kids in The Church.  Which she dutifully sent off us to, on Sundays; though she never went or got involved herself.

   I never thought about it all much.  It was just the way things were.  At ‘home'.  

   And parenthetically, I had an on-again, off-again relationship with The Church through many years.  I stopped going when I was still in high school (not for any eureka reason; just got bored with it all), and, instead of getting off at the bus stop to walk over to Church (which for a long time was held in a Masonic Lodge building, interestingly enough, until we had built our own Ward building), I would stay on the bus and ride it down all the way to town, and walk on down from there to The Pike, on the beach, where there was a cinema open on Sunday mornings, and watch the week’s short - usually a Flash Gordon serial - and then whatever was showing.  (Watched ‘Great Expectations’ there once, I remember… )  But when I had my ‘spiritual experience’ at university (which I have already talked about in these pages), and began looking at all these sorts of questions in earnest, I ended up reading my way back in to The Church at some point, and then out of it, and then back in, and then back out, as the last stop on that bus.   (It all had to do mostly with Joseph Smith’s background on the one hand, and a large stone found by the Smithsonian Institution down in Central America in the 1940-’41 period of time with a depiction carved in it of a dream scene straight out of the Book of Mormon.  Absent a couple of Mormon missionaries sent to the area going to the trouble of carving it themselves, it was of major significance, both anthropologically and religiously speaking.  But there was too much other information by then that my poor mind took in, to close that door for me, once and for all.

   But still…………

   As my eldest nephew would say: ‘Yikes jikes!’)        

4 I never understood those sorts of things, as a child, and even into my twenties  Until my mother, in remonstrating with me for having dropped out of my schooling, and potential career in medicine, finally blurted out the awful truth.  “You son of a bitch,” she said, in her restrained, casual way.  And then, perhaps realizing what she had just said, literally, moved on, in telling me that I would have to move on; that I couldn’t live ‘there’ anymore, ‘there’ being home.   

   Not that I was going to, anyway.  I planned then on going to ‘the largest public library in the Western world,’ which I had figured must be in New York City, to engage in some serious study regarding the best that humanity had come up with regarding the big questions of and about life.  In the meantime, I stood, stunned, from the slow-acting venom of her tongue-lashing, realizing - finally really ‘getting’ - that we children are insurance for our parents, for their old age.  That, contrary to my simple assumption that my life was my own, to live as I would, I had a ‘duty’ to my mother.  Not just for her to be able to be proud of ‘my son, the doctor’.  But to observe the unspoken but apparently implied responsibility, to take care of her, if she couldn’t manage to take care of herself in her old age.  

   Which she managed to do.  Via her third husband in life (plus being the mistress to her longtime boss; but who died on her, and left her out of his will. To her implied disgust); who turned out to be a very nice guy (whom she met in a bar.  Well; a cocktail lounge, that she frequented, near our ‘home,’ such as it was).  But there I stood, with an Aha! of a different sort to contend with, in life.  Not about the big matters.  But the ‘little’ matters, of, like, self-sustenance.  

   Insurance…

   …and so, that was why parents in Third World countries had a lot of babies, I realized instantly.  Not as fruit of their love for each other.  But as insurance for their old age; that enough of them would live long enough to take care of their familial responsibility towards their parents.  

   And so, once their living situations could be cleaned up, and they could count on more of their children dutifully surviving for them, they could, would have fewer children.  And just so, would the overpopulation genie be stuffed back into the bottle……

   This business of growing up was beginning to make a lot of things more clear, I was beginning to understand.  Not just about the eternal questions.

5 “To deny Miss de Havilland her right to a jury trial…would be a sea change in the law governing the rights of a celebrity to control commercial use of her name and identity and to protect against deliberate fabrications,” pleads her lawyer.

   Commercial use of her name and identity??  

   Identity????…...