What happened? Why was the confidence of her youth so ephemeral? Why is mine? As my mother approached the end of her life, I began to feel a frantic need to know more about her. I pestered and pushed, wanting her to reveal stories and secrets as if that would somehow answer the questions I had about myself, or would heal the wound between us, a wound that only I seemed to feel and pick at. One night she told me how much she had adored her father, loved being near him and felt proud to be the apple of his eye. But when Joy had found her sitting on his lap one day, she’d been furious, wordlessly accusing the little girl of trying to steal his affections. She told me that Joy had always been angry with her because of how much Baa and her father loved each other. It was because of that, my mother continued, that she couldn’t be friends with women. Women always wanted to compete with her, she said, and she refused to compete, she wouldn’t compete anywhere, and to some extent, that had ruined her career.
These tiny slivers of information didn’t quite add up for me, and even though I was in my sixties when I heard this story, I couldn’t yet use it to connect the dots, to connect the daughters. Baa finally ended the conversation by deadening her eyes and reporting that she never thought Joy had loved her, tossing it off by saying that it was a good thing. “How,” I asked her, “could that possibly be a good thing?” And flatly she said, “Because I stopped looking for it. I just accepted it wasn’t there and moved on.” But I know that wasn’t the truth. My mother had devotedly taken care of Joy during the last, difficult years of my grandmother’s life, and I could see how much she loved her, how they loved each other through a barbed-wire fence. And all my mother’s life, she ached to be loved. We all do. But Baa would lose herself in that ache. It became bigger than the rest of her, would eclipse her creativity, her love of words, her strength, and for a time, her children.
Tossed carelessly in a box of memorabilia—treated with disregard but kept all the same—I found a few disjointed pages of a journal that my mother had written when she was newly single and I was working on the Nun. After piecing it together, I read about one tiny, intimate encounter that happened when she’d been invited to a party in Malibu. At that gathering she met a writer whose work she respected, and like a young girl, she confesses that she was in awe of him, thrilled that he had talked to her as though she had something of value to say. Because of that, she admits to feeling nervous around him and says, “I had too much to drink,” something she never would have admitted to me. When the two of them sat in the sand together, unseen in the dark, she writes, he kissed her.
I realize now that my mother at forty-six, and I at twenty-one, were separately feeling the same thing: alone.
When I was on the set every day with the people I worked with, I could be funny and capable, cocky with my position of leadership. But I had continued to push Steve away, so on the weekends if Princess wasn’t with me, I’d pace back and forth in front of the big sliding glass door of my rented house like a caged tiger, longing to have friends and to meet people, but not knowing how. I wasn’t writing in a journal at this time, disjointed or otherwise. But according to Aunt Gladys’s scrapbooks, on Memorial Day 1968, Screen Gems put together a press junket that included actors from their current shows and journalists working for various publications. We were then sent, in one large group, to Mexico City for a weekend of sightseeing and nonstop interviews. I know from the September issues of TV Radio Talk, Modern Screen, and TV Picture Life that I was besieged with idiotic questions about dating Davy Jones, or was I secretly married to him or dating my co-star Alejandro Rey: nothing that was remotely true. Ultimately, I told them that I’d just met someone, that I’d gone out with him before I left to attend the junket, and that I was looking forward to seeing him again. His name was Jimmy Webb, and he was the young songwriter who had become an overnight sensation after composing such songs as “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Up, Up and Away,” and “MacArthur Park.” When they asked me how we met, I can read the same answer in each of the publications, which leads me to think it must be true: His press agent called my press agent to ask if I would accompany Mr. Webb to a composer’s banquet. I don’t remember having a press agent at the time, so maybe it was someone in the Screen Gems publicity department, and even though I have only a dim memory of attending a banquet, I obviously agreed to go. According to one story, when Jimmy called to say hello, I told him to be prepared because I was very shy. To that he replied, “Fine, we’ll be shy together.” I vaguely recall that tidbit, but only after reading it in the crumbling tabloids.
What I remember clearly is waiting for Jimmy to call after I returned from Mexico City. If I wasn’t on the set working, then I was home waiting breathlessly, in proper girl fashion. He must have phoned me again, but if we ever went on an actual date somewhere, I don’t recall.
I have only one clear memory of us being together. Crystal clear. I was in Jimmy’s rented Hollywood house, about five miles from mine, sitting next to him on his piano stool while he played on and on. There I sat, beside that talented boy who was just as young and probably just as lonely as I was. We never spoke. I just sat there listening to him sing his songs as he smoked a joint filled with hash. I rarely smoked pot, which drained me of energy and not only reinforced my inability to speak but left me unable to remember what I wanted to say even if I could. And I had never smoked hash. At that moment I wanted to be someone I wasn’t, someone Jimmy would like, so when he handed me the joint, I smoked it.
I don’t know how long we sat there—it seemed like an eternity—but slowly the colors in the room got vibrant and bright, slightly fuzzy on the edges, and I started to feel disoriented. I stood up, asking for the bathroom, then wandered through his empty bedroom, trying to put one foot in front of the other. I found the room, locked the door, then sat down to pee—even though I wasn’t sure I had to. Suddenly, everything began to tilt, and a black dot appeared in the center of my vision, like a flashbulb had just exploded. Feeling panicky, I curled up on the cold tile floor, wishing I could go home, and passed out. When I woke up, I couldn’t remember where I was, had no idea how long I’d been facedown on the floor, and even worse, I couldn’t feel my arms and legs, couldn’t locate them on my body, couldn’t locate my body. It seemed to take a massive amount of time to finally connect with my limbs, pull myself up, gather my wits enough to move out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, where I could lie down again, perhaps snap out of this horrifying condition. I felt like the child I once was, terrified in the night and afraid to call for help. Very softly, I called out for Jimmy to please come help me, then slid into darkness again. I don’t know what signal he thought I was giving, or if he didn’t need one, or if he was in the same half-conscious dreamlike state as I was (which quite possibly was the case) but when I woke again—an undetermined amount of time later—Jimmy was no longer singing but on top of me, grinding away to another melody. Even though I was barely conscious, thoughts rolled in my head: Maybe I had asked for this by lying on his bed, maybe I hadn’t pulled my pants all the way up so what was he to think, maybe this meant he liked me. Then I couldn’t think anymore.
I woke before it was light, gathered my things but couldn’t find my shoes or my car, until I remembered that he had picked me up at my house so I had no car. With that realization, I walked home barefoot. The sun hadn’t yet warmed the asphalt streets as my feet pounded down numbly, speaking the words my mouth couldn’t, leaving the soles of my feet covered in a thick, solid blister.