Midway through my junior year, the teacher, Mr. Kulp, called me to his office, not to praise me for my efforts but to ask if I would please be more sensitive to the other students. I remember feeling stunned, ashamed to see myself as being blindly ambitious and hungry, embarrassed as though I’d been caught with my hand in the cookie jar. After that, I started doing scenes with more than one character, but even though I tried to be friendly and appreciative of the other students, my gnawing appetite kept me at the head of the class table. And like it or not, my reign continued. I wanted to do theater in the round, so we did theater in the round. I wanted to do children’s theater and we did that too. The auditorium was my spot. It’s where I went for lunch, during every break or free period, and often when I should have been in another class, like Algebra.
At the beginning of my senior year, the school counselor informed me that if I didn’t go to night school to make up for the classes I’d either missed or done too poorly in to be counted, I wouldn’t be graduating in June with the rest of my class. That was all he said. He had never called me to his office in the eleventh grade to suggest I take the SAT, never inquired if I was planning to go to college or helped me to see what options I might have, and through my foggy brain the thought never penetrated. Certainly, it wasn’t a topic of conversation around the family dinner table, where the ongoing drama had nothing to do with continuing my education and everything to do with finding the money to put food on the table. Jocko had been cast in two back-to-back Tarzan movies, no longer playing the bad guy but now portraying the ape man himself. In 1962 there was Tarzan Goes to India and in 1963 Tarzan’s Three Challenges, which was shot in Thailand—a harrowing location where Jocko almost died. But despite a case of dengue fever and dysentery, losing over fifty pounds and looking like a hairless cat, he kept shooting, breathing through an oxygen mask between takes, which was either heroic or stupid. Or maybe the man was fighting to hold on to his career the only way he knew how.
Whatever money he’d made from those movies couldn’t have been much because the endless anxiety over how to make ends meet never seemed to ease and much of the time the proverbial cupboards were bare—literally. I remember looking for something to eat one morning before driving my mother’s car to school and finding nothing but a white Styrofoam box containing half of a sandwich that Jocko had brought back from the Screen Actors Guild board meeting, where Ronald Reagan was the president—not of the USA but of the SAG. I cut the half in half again and shared it with Princess, who then walked to the corner where the school bus would pick her up.
In all this family stress and scramble, I felt slightly separate, safe because I had someone to talk to, someone to take me to the movies or to get a hamburger when there was nothing in the house, many times bringing Princess along. Steve had graduated from Birmingham the same year as Ricky, and by the time I was a senior he’d finished a year at Pierce Junior College and received a scholarship of his own, a track scholarship to USC. But even with classes and workouts, he somehow managed to spend more time at my house than I did. He was woven into my family, everyone’s confidant, aware of every argument and all the problems.
But he wasn’t there for them. He was there because of me, because of the bond we had with each other. From the beginning the sexuality between us had felt both exhilarating and frightening. But as the sensations grew, I could feel myself pulling back, hanging on the shore, disconnected but performing, as if I were repeating the pattern I’d learned with my stepfather. Steve could feel my hesitance and thought it was simply who I was. Slightly asexual. I didn’t know that some part of me, some important part, would not allow herself to be seen. She simply never showed up in Steve’s presence, and since I’d never been on a date with anyone else, I was not aware of her existence either. My body was out of my reach as well.
Then, in the middle of the twelfth grade, something inside me began to simmer, eventually coming to a boil in the last weeks of high school when I abruptly pushed Steve away, told him I needed to break up, maybe see other people even. After that, for very short, shocking bits of time, someone completely new would be standing in my shoes. I’d find a boy I barely knew, a boy who wouldn’t notice the drastic difference between the reticent, sexually passive girl I had always been with Steve and the playful, if not downright aggressive, person I became. Nowhere in sight was the careful part of me with her cautionary advice. Maybe that’s how every adolescent brain works. Maybe. But I’ve never been able to remember these episodes clearly, only a distinct feeling of changing gears. After they occurred, I felt so ashamed I’d force them out of my head, lock them out of sight in my brain’s attic, like Rochester’s mad wife. Slowly I would lose the memories, and with them the opportunity to get any distance, maybe even a little perspective from which to look at this young, sexual side of myself. I was afraid of my “madwoman in the attic.” The pinched face of my grandmother, wordless messages from my mother, and the constant shadow of my stepfather had built a maze around my healthy sexuality, which was lost somewhere in the center. But there was more to it than that and at the time, I couldn’t see what it was.
As if I were imitating the gobbledygook going on in my head, I put together a slapstick performance of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass for the senior assembly. My best friend, Lynn, whom I’d convinced to join the drama department, played Alice, while another theater student and I waddled around the stage, falling and smacking into each other playing Tweedledee and Tweedledum. As a result, I was named “Funniest in the Class” in the 1964 Tomahawk, the school yearbook.
But when the curtain came down and the pom-poms were dumped in the trash, when the last notes of “Pomp and Circumstance” faded away into that June day, the reality of what lay ahead of me began to penetrate the fog. I had no stage. Without that I didn’t exist. I had to find a place where I could act.
The Film Industry Workshop was a small organization located on the lot of what was then Columbia Pictures, in the heart of Hollywood, and one night a week the group was allowed to hold classes on a soundstage. FIW was not well known in the acting community and I can’t imagine it was well regarded. Its classes primarily focused on teaching students how to hit their mark, which was a piece of colored tape stuck to the floor. You were expected to find that smidgen of tape without looking down to see where it was located, while at the same time performing in front of a make-believe camera, simulating close-ups and over-shoulder shots. The scenes were handed out at the beginning of each class, material taken from an episode of one of last season’s television shows. Not exactly Ibsen.
I’d never heard of the workshop but then I hadn’t heard of anything. It was Jocko who stepped up, saying that he knew someone who knew someone, which was enough for him to tout the workshop, suggesting I audition to see if they’d accept me. Unfortunately, the workshop charged a twenty-five-dollar fee for the opportunity to perform in front of its panel of experts, and that was twenty-five dollars which Baa didn’t have. This meant that I either had to give up the idea or force myself to call and ask my father—whom I was still visiting, though less frequently. For all of Dick’s shortcomings, he had always found a way to show up for an evening performance of my term plays, sometimes driving an hour to get there. And when I surprised him with my request, he surprised me by immediately sending a check.