Rita Will_Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser Read online

  This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  RITA WILL

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam hardcover edition published November 1997

  Bantam trade paperback edition / January 1999

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1997 by American Artists, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 97–30829

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-57392-6

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada, Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Look Out Below

  Chapter 2: Butter Wouldn’t Melt in Her Mouth

  Chapter 3: What a Friend I Have in Jesus

  Chapter 4: Hambone

  Chapter 5: Death to Crinolines

  Chapter 6: Devil Weed

  Chapter 7: Violet Hill

  Chapter 8: The Golden Hound

  Chapter 9: The War of the Candy Apples

  Chapter 10: Silks and Sons of Bitches

  Chapter 11: The Virgin Mary Pays a Call

  Chapter 12: Bait Your Own Hook

  Chapter 13: Sleepwalker

  Chapter 14: Have Hotpad, Will Travel

  Chapter 15: The Rubber Tablecloth

  Chapter 16: Tweedledum and Tweedledee

  Chapter 17: The Glide

  Chapter 18: O Holy Night

  Chapter 19: A Slip of the Tongue

  Chapter 20: A Froth of Discontent

  Chapter 21: Bumblebees

  Chapter 22: Laundry

  Chapter 23: Valley View Elementary School

  Chapter 24: Betting on the Side

  Chapter 25: The Marrying Kind

  Chapter 26: Red Sails in the Sunset

  Chapter 27: Kumquat May

  Chapter 28: Skinks and Land Crabs

  Chapter 29: Top Dog

  Chapter 30: School Daze

  Chapter 31: Pluperfect

  Chapter 32: Double Clutch

  Chapter 33: Blue and White

  Chapter 34: Continuity

  Chapter 35: Do or Die

  Chapter 36: Boiled Peanuts

  Chapter 37: Gators

  Chapter 38: Mean as Snakeshit

  Chapter 39: Guts and No Glory

  Chapter 40: Sandspurs and X rays

  Chapter 41: Fly the Coop

  Chapter 42: Horse Shit and Greasepaint

  Chapter 43: Pea Brains and Pissants

  Chapter 44: Smart Girls

  Chapter 45: Enter, Stage Left

  Chapter 46: Footlight Parade

  Chapter 47: O Canada

  Chapter 48: Blonde Bombshell

  Chapter 49: Lazy as Sin

  Chapter 50: Equal Rights and Equal Wrongs

  Chapter 51: The Death Drill

  Chapter 52: Purdah

  Chapter 53: Assholes Anonymous

  Chapter 54: A Hop, Skip and a Jump

  Chapter 55: Dead Fathers

  Chapter 56: Two Old Bandits

  Chapter 57: 18th Century-Fox

  Chapter 58: A Rolls-Royce and Love

  Chapter 59: The Eternal Triangle

  Chapter 60: The Booby Prize

  Chapter 61: Out of the Frying Pan

  Chapter 62: Gypsyfoot

  Chapter 63: Bugjuice

  Chapter 64: The Cloisters

  Chapter 65: M Is for the Millions of Things She Gave Me

  Chapter 66: Weeping Cross

  Chapter 67: A Cat Can Look at a King

  Chapter 68: Easter Sunday

  Chapter 69: The Death Drill

  Chapter 70: The Amen Corner

  Chapter 71: A Long Goodbye

  Chapter 72: West Side Story

  Chapter 73: Rack On

  Chapter 74: Laughter Beyond the Grave

  Chapter 75: Juts’s Secret

  Chapter 76: Lovestruck

  Chapter 77: Angels Keep

  Chapter 78: Keep the Horse Between Your Legs

  Chapter 79: Sneaky Pie to the Rescue

  Chapter 80: A-list

  Chapter 81: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

  Chapter 82: Silly Girls

  Chapter 83: Wuss Patrol

  Chapter 84: The Death of Dragon Lady

  Chapter 85: Let There Be Light

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  TO THE READER;

  ENJOY YOUR BODY.

  AFTER ALL, OTHERS HAVE.

  Introduction

  The human animal measures time. Other animals seem far less concerned about it, but then again they are far less vain.

  The smarter humans and animals do learn from time. The dumb ones check out early or are untimely ripped, as Shakespeare once wrote. Then, too, if enough time passes you see the good brought down, the evil raised up, the superficial hailed as profound and the profound ignored completely. It’s absurd. I expect human society has always been this way; it’s just that each generation must discover it with a bump and a thump.

  This autobiography is about my time. I couldn’t cram my entire life into here even if I had twenty-two volumes. Neither could you. In one year’s time you and I meet more people than our grandparents met in a lifetime. The speed of our lives is astonishing but the time of our lives is invariable.

  We have no more time than our grandparents or great-great-grandparents did. Medicine may be able to tack a few years onto the end of our lives but generally the quality suffers. The human animal begins to unwind in its eighties. For some this happens earlier. No matter how bright we are, no matter how truthful or good, we can’t alter that internal clock, that original timepiece, the heart. Sooner or later, it stops.

  At this precise moment I am in the time of my life. This is the best time I’ve ever had and I know it can’t last but so long. If I’m extremely lucky and those strong genes I inherited stand me in good stead, I might even nudge up to and beyond a hundred. But will it be the best time? Won’t know until I get there.

  My publisher, Bantam Books, and my editor, Beverly Lewis, laughingly told me to write my autobiography before I forget everything. Well, I’m not that old but I’m not that young. I took their point.

  Time again. I am celebrating my twentieth year with Bantam. Twenty years of highs and lows. I learned about publishing by doing. The writing was a gift. I had to discipline it but I can’t take too much credit otherwise. But learning about publishing was and remains an adventure. It’s a window on the world just as someone working for an automobile manufacturer will view the world from that special hilltop.

  Time binds me to people and to institutions. You hold my book in your hands. I see the hands it passed through to reach yours: my editor, the publisher himself, the promotion and publicity departments, the art department, those phenomenal Bantam sales representatives and the equally blue-chip telecommunication sales department. The book has passed through readers, one ferocious copy editor, the designer, the printer, the proofreader, more galleys and more proofreading, and final
ly it’s bound and in the hands of the shipping department. From there it sometimes goes to holding pens just like cattle and other times directly to the bookstore, where yet another set of hands unpacks it, sets it up, until lastly your hands pick it up.

  Year after year this chain of hands has brought me to you and then, by post, brought you to me since so many of you write letters of thought, complaint or praise.

  The hands that have held me up even longer than those people at Bantam belong to my agent, Wendy Weil. Time forged a friendship as well as a refined business relationship. Wendy and her husband, Michael Trossman, are such a part of my life that I can’t imagine living without them.

  This is also true of Stuart Robinson, my film agent. I can’t imagine life without him. He owns a Thoroughbred and will probably own more as time goes by. This, for me, is superglue: horses and time together.

  Try to write your autobiography. You’ll surprise yourself. The trick is not to take yourself too seriously. Granted this is the only life you have but still—take it with a grain of salt.

  You may discover what I have discovered and that is that the times we’ve lived through become defining, as defining perhaps as talent and character. You are bound by that time to everyone who lived through it even if you can’t stand them.

  What you will also discover, should you publish your life story, is that libel laws are so strict that there’s a great deal you can’t say even if you witnessed it.

  It’s a strange time to be a writer because a writer is the one person in every culture, in every epoch, married to the truth. No one knows the whole truth. But each of us knows a shredded tatter of it. The writer must convey that to you or the culture begins to fray. In order for any society, culture or civilization to breathe and grow it must breathe freely. That’s my job and the job of every one of us who attempts to write. Notice I didn’t say that we were glorious or even good. Many of us haven’t a scrap of common sense and others of us are pompous asswipes. Nonetheless, we are committed to telling the truth as best we know it and as best we remember it.

  Time plays tricks on your memory and the law is playing tricks with the truth.

  Despite those handicaps, I have done the best I could.

  And I’ve done the best I could given my temperament, my talent, the pressures of daily life. I don’t think any of us can do more than that and there’s always someone who will do it better. Still, you soldier on.

  If in my past, in my present and in my future I have been able to make you laugh and make you think, I count myself a lucky and successful writer.

  The laughter worries me. I’m beginning to think that those of us with a sense of humor are an endangered species. The times, again.

  I regret I cannot name many people in my life, friend and foe. I regret the repressive climate in which we currently labor, and I deeply regret the homophobia that has kept so many people I know and even have loved frightened, embittered, shattered regardless of external fame, wealth and success.

  Bad as it is, it isn’t as bad as being pinned down on Missionary Ridge, being herded into a Gulag or being forced to watch daytime TV nonstop.

  These times, too, will change. They always do. Laughter and lightness will make a comeback. If not, I’d settle for a return of good manners for a start.

  Onward.

  1

  Look Out Below

  My mother was mucking Stalls at Hanover Shoe Farm outside of Hanover, Pennsylvania, within a shout of the Mason-Dixon line, when her water broke. Had the hospital not been nearby, I would have been born in a manger. Perhaps I came into the world knowing Jesus had already done that, and since he suffered for all of us I saw no reason to be redundant.

  So I was properly delivered in a hospital. God cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Look out below!” I arrived at 3:45 A.M. war time, which was double daylight saving time, on November 28, 1944. Truthfully, I’d have rather been with the horses.

  My natural mother conceived me without benefit of marriage. At eighteen she was in no position to care for an infant, although the family had resources. Good blood. Good money. The goodness ran out at the socially embarrassing prospect of raising an illegitimate child. Surely there must be an ASPCL—for ladies. My poor young mother, in a maternal fit, snuck away in the middle of the night from the hospital, absconding with her own baby. My natural father, inconveniently married, drove the getaway car.

  No one knew where she was or I was. The Young family, for all their commitment to corpulent emptiness and propriety, had the decency to worry.

  Two weeks later, give or take a day, Juliann Young came home by weeping cross, a southern expression meaning you’ve been hurt and humbled. She appeared at Julia Ellen Brown’s kitchen door. Before my birth, Juliann had promised Julia and Ralph Brown that since they couldn’t have children of their own, they could have me—kind of like a zygotic door prize. As it was, Juts (Julia Ellen’s nickname) and Juliann were related. In fact, the whole family was mixed up worse than a dog’s breakfast. Juts and Juliann were cousins, or rather half cousins, with twenty-two years between them. Their mothers were half sisters.

  Juts had been pitching a fit and falling in it ever since Juliann disappeared, because she wanted the baby. Although suffering at the time from pneumonia, she was formidable in her rage. Juliann confessed that she had dumped me in an orphanage in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

  Ralph Brown and Juts’s sister Mimi lost no time rounding up ration coupons. Gas, critical in war, was controlled for civilian use by Uncle Sam, who rationed plenty else as well. The Browns and Dundores had good friends. They gathered enough coupon books to reach Pittsburgh and return, a long trip on wretched roads.

  Ralph Brown put Juliann in the car. He needed her with him to release me. Twelve hours later Dad, Mimi and Juliann arrived at the Catholic orphanage—I don’t know its correct name—in the Steel City. The administration was only too happy to give me the boot. I’d been there for two weeks, I hadn’t gained a pound, and since I’d weighed only five pounds at birth I resembled a tiny skeleton. One of the nuns advised Dad not to take me. I would die. Dad said, “This baby will live”—a line my aunt Mimi, “Sis” to Juts, loved to quote.

  So many children were born out of wedlock during the war years that the orphanages and children’s homes threatened to burst at the seams. Nobody wanted us. The churches provided what succor they could, but we’ll never know how many infants and young children died for lack of proper nutrition or, truthfully, for lack of love. Not all the casualties of a war are on the battlefield.

  On the trip back to the Browns’ home in York, Pennsylvania, a snowstorm struck, ferocious and bitter. Dad put chains on the tires, then fought to keep the car on the road. Aunt Mimi, the mother of two daughters, had brought some of their old baby clothes and blankets; she never threw anything out. She held me, wrapped like a mummy, close to her chest. Juliann Young refused to hold me. Every time they spied a light at a gas station or a farmhouse. Dad rolled off the road to ask people if they could spare some milk and heat it for the baby.

  I owe my life to people I will never meet. Like Blanche DuBois, I relied upon the kindness of strangers. This wartime odyssey, with friends and strangers sacrificing some of their comforts for an infant, drives my life. I may have been born into difficulty, but I was kept alive by generosity and love. People may not always be consistently good, but they can be occasionally good, gentle and giving. I don’t think we can ask more of one another.

  Once home Dad immediately drove to old Dr. Horning’s. The doctor told Dad and Sis that I’d never make it. His glasses halfway down his nose, Dr. Horning warned Dad not to place me in Juts’s arms. She wouldn’t be able to stand losing the baby. Worse, I was so emaciated, he feared I’d contract her pneumonia.

  Ralph Clifford Brown, called Butch, was at thirty-nine a big, blond, handsome man, movie-star handsome really. He was not given to loudness or excessive emotional display. Of course, with Juts around there was rarely an opportunity
, since she had to be the star. Dad possessed a quiet strength, which occasionally surfaced, surprising people who took him for a pushover.

  My dad asked, “What do I have to do to keep this baby alive?”

  The tone of his voice must have scared Dr. Horning, because he outlined an exhausting program of feedings every three hours for the next four months. Since Juts was languishing abed, that meant Daddy had to do it. Sis fed me during the day while Dad worked, then he got up during the night for the month it took Mom (Juts is always Mom) to recover. After that, they shared the burden.

  Sometimes in the ensuing months Dad woke up when Mom did, so they’d feed me together. Their marriage careened into a few potholes over the years, what marriage doesn’t, but I think those nights were some of the happiest times they spent together.

  Not only did I live, I flourished. They fed me so much I resembled a sumo wrestler. Well coordinated, I crawled everywhere, got into everything. Mickey, the long-haired tiger cat who slept in my crib, fascinated me. I crawled after him morning, noon and night. I spoke early, too, and as luck would have it, the first word out of my mouth was “Dada.” “Mama” surely followed soon after, or Mother would have burst a blood vessel through jealousy. The next grand pronunciation was “kiddle cat.”

  As to my natural mother, Juliann, she disappeared again. A pretty young woman, she knew she had to get out of Dodge because even if everyone forgave her, no one would forget, least of all her own father, Jack Young. He wasn’t too thrilled about me, either. Then again, neither were Daddy’s parents, Caroline and Reuben Brown. In fact, Caroline was positively poisonous.

  Merrily crawling, cooing and cuddling with Mickey, I hadn’t a clue as to the controversy I’d caused.

  Juts told the tale of my beginnings many times. Aunt Mimi assisted. Surely there are other sides to this story, but I know only theirs.

  I arrived by the back door, but I arrived.

  You’ve met the irrepressible Juts if you’ve read Six of One or Bingo. You’ve also met Mimi, who is called Louise in those volumes. I called her Little Mimi or Aunt Mimi since her mother, a glorious, radiant woman, was Big Mimi. Big Mimi Buckingham was as wide as she was tall. In the novels she’s Cora.