In 2004, I received a large manila envelope from my manager, Judy Hofflund, with a note saying: This was sent to me in hopes that I would send it on to you. You probably don’t know this person but he says he knows you and wanted you to have them… so I’m sending it on just in case. Thinking it was nothing, I casually ripped it open, dumped out the contents, and immediately felt as if I’d jumped into an icy pool while holding exposed electrical wires. It was filled with letters written by a seventeen-year-old me to a boy I’d met that summer, and all these years later he was sending them back. A very kind thing to do. I looked at the letters from my young self and did what I have done my whole life—I hid them in a plastic box out of my sight. But again, I didn’t throw them away. I have to admit I still haven’t read them, don’t know that I ever will.
That summer was the first time—though not the last—that my life went into spin cycle. Things began to come at me all at once, situations I couldn’t see until they flew into my face, until I was overwhelmed with events. Sometime shortly after graduation, right before I started the Film Industry Workshop and when Steve was out of the picture, I met a boy who was a few years older than me. And although I remember precisely what the Screen Gems lobby looked like, I can’t remember where I met this young man, can’t even see his face in my mind. But that summer, in ’64, as I was going from meeting to meeting at Screen Gems, each audition more important than the last, I was also spending time with him. Most of it I don’t remember; some of it I will never forget.
I remember sitting in the back seat of a car, blankly watching the landscape of Los Angeles roll by, then San Diego, though I felt no movement at all. We must have been in that car many hours, but I had no sense of time. I didn’t know where we were going and I didn’t ask. I just sat—suspended—with my mother by my side. We didn’t touch. I never met her eyes.
Directly in front of me sat Patti, with her short curly hair, dark but not black like Baa’s. And next to her, in the driver’s seat, sat Dr. Duke, her mega-masculine husband, silently driving his new state-of-the-art baby-blue Cadillac. Duke and Patti were family friends, or at least friends of my stepfather. Baa didn’t seem to be truly close to anyone who came to the occasional gatherings they had, evenings when four or five couples would sit crammed together on the big purple-and-green sectional, plunging cubes of bread into the bubbling cheese fondue and constantly refilling their drinks.
I had only seen Dr. Duke outside of my own house twice. Once, in the eleventh grade, I had gone to his office in Tarzana to have him painfully remove the plantar warts from my right foot. Then, in September of 1964, just as I was waiting anxiously to hear the final decision from Screen Gems, I sat in his office as he told me I was pregnant.
I couldn’t look at him when he announced the urinalysis results or when he gave me the first injection, with clear instructions to come back for another the following day, and then one more the day after that. I just numbly nodded my head as he said maybe this would solve the problem and maybe it wouldn’t. The only thing I felt was the glare of the summer sun bouncing off the parked cars, slapping me in the face as I walked toward the roasting interior of my mother’s blue Corvair, which I had borrowed under some false pretense. But this trusted family doctor had neglected to tell me that in approximately five minutes, while I was driving cautiously on the Ventura freeway, my vision would blur, or that by the time I miraculously drove the car safely into our driveway, my tongue would become so swollen, it would be difficult to talk. He also forgot to inform me that my whole body would then convulse. It took all the concentration I could muster to somehow get from the car, past my mother, and into my room without allowing her to register my condition or without collapsing in a total panic. And that was day one.
After each of the panic-laced injections, I held my breath and waited, even prayed… but there was no change in my condition. I couldn’t lie or invent another world or push it out of my mind, couldn’t run away because I had nowhere to go. I was locked into a nightmare and couldn’t wake up. The life-changing ramifications of my situation were painful enough, but my deepest dread was in the knowledge that I’d have to explain my disgrace to Jocko.
Even now, I wonder why I didn’t just pull my mother aside to talk to her alone, but I didn’t, and one evening I asked if I could talk to them together. As if it were yesterday, I remember sitting on the purple shag rug with my legs folded beneath me, staring at my shaking hands, unable to speak as tears dripped into my lap. I can still hear my mother’s voice, usually so unchangingly sweet, now sounding panicked and shrill as she sat on the sofa next to Jocko. “What? What is it? Jock, what’s happened? What?” she kept repeating over and over until he sternly commanded her to shut up, taking over like it was the helm of the Caine and only he could steer the ship out of the storm. I couldn’t look at him as he began talking to me softly, saying, “I know, Sal, I know. Doodle, I know. You don’t have to say anything.” Was he telling me that I didn’t have to utter the words? Was I being rescued, airlifted off the battlefield? He motioned for me to move to his big lap with a “Come here, baby.”
I’d been “called to him” countless times since he first entered my life thirteen years earlier, but I hadn’t stepped into my stepfather’s shirtless embrace since I was fourteen, and we’d been locked in battle ever since. Feeling the familiar clawing on my insides, I climbed into his arms, hiding my face in the musky smell of his neck. And more than anything, I wanted my mother, wanted her to talk to me from under the closet door, wanted to be held by her, not by him. Why did I have to go through Jocko to have my mother?
I don’t know what words I was able to get out, but he knew, somehow he knew and started cooing, “It’s okay, baby. Don’t talk. I’m going to make it okay, my little Doodle. Your ol’ Jock is here.” I didn’t want to hear, couldn’t stand his imperceptible note of triumph. If he’d been hoping for my downfall, and I felt sure he had, then this was it. I wasn’t aware of anything else but that. No right or wrong, no other living being involved in this catastrophe, only me and defeat.
When I got up the next morning he was gone—a casually mentioned personal appearance somewhere. Maybe that’s how he got the money. I’ll never know.
Less than a week later, I sat in the back seat of Duke’s hermetically sealed four-door with my mind safely tucked in a blank fog. Eventually, the Cadillac pulled over on the edge of a roughly paved, treeless road. Instantly, Patti’s incessant chatter stopped and my mother’s eyes went to her lap. Dr. Duke hooked his arm around the back of the seat and turned to look at me, carefully explaining that he couldn’t go in, that I had to go alone. He told me that they knew I was coming and gave me a large envelope with instructions to hand it to the people at the desk. “When you’re finished, get back here to me as soon as you can. Do you understand?”