E
dison was touchy about any suggestion that he got the idea of playing jazz piano from Caleb Fields. Me, I could never remember whether my brother started studying piano with a storied black old-timer in South Central (
not
Melrose—our driver kept Jack Washington’s hairy address a secret from our parents, and so did I) before or after the first season of
Joint Custody
aired. Travis had always believed that Edison was competing with a television character, and was still riding his firstborn for aping the ambitions of a contrivance—though the imputation was rich, since our father’s fictional children had always seemed more real to Travis himself than his actual kids.
Travis called the series a “cult show,” but if so the cult comprised exactly one person. In truth,
Joint Custody
was not one of those iconic programs like
Star Trek
that go on to distribute generous residuals. That woman at the airport, for example: she wouldn’t have been a “fan” of
Joint Custody
. She’d simply watched it. I wasn’t sentimental about most of the junk we’d parked in front of, either, although I was abashed to admit that I could still hum the theme song for
Love, American Style
and that I continued to nurse a nostalgic crush on the late Bob Crane.
Calling the concept “groundbreaking” gave the show too much credit, but the producers did do their homework. Take a look at its forerunners.
The Rifleman
: a widowed rancher struggles to bring up a boy with a Tourettesian impulse to cry “Paw!” at every opportunity.
Family Affair
: a widower raises two insufferable brats with the help of a stuffy, charmless English butler.
My Three Sons
: a widowed aeronautical engineer with three boys finally remarries after ten seasons—wedding yet another hapless victim of spousal mortality.
Flipper
: the performances of a widowed father and two sons are all overshadowed by a bottlenose dolphin.
The Andy Griffith Show
: widowed, single-parent sheriff convinces even most North Carolinians that there really is a town called Mayberry.
The Beverly Hillbillies
: widowed hick makes a bundle on
bubbling crude . . . oil, that is . . . black gold!
Bonanza
: a patriarch in Nevada ranches with three grown sons born to three different mothers, all of whom are dead.
The Brady Bunch
: a widower and (it is blithely presumed) widow with three kids apiece know
it’s much more than a hunch!
that the subsequent family show will live eternally in syndication, to Travis’s particular disgust.
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
: a querulous little boy matchmakes for his widowed dad, whose being called “Mister Eddie’s Father” by the Japanese housekeeper the scriptwriters believed would continue to seem beguiling even after being repeated eight hundred times.
Extraterrestrials who picked up the airwaves emanating from the United States in the sixties and early seventies would have concluded that our species was much like salmon, and once the females had borne their young nature had no use for them and they promptly expired. On the other hand, once you threw in the widowed women who spearheaded
The Lucy Show
,
Petticoat Junction
,
The Big Valley
,
The Partridge Family
,
Julia
, and
The Doris Day Show
, the married males weren’t exactly thriving, either.
So the producers of
Joint Custody
were on a crusade. Nearly half the marriages in America were ending in divorce, and the failure to reflect this fact on television was hypocritical. (In
The Brady Bunch
pilot the mother Carol was divorced, but the network vetoed the idea; subsequent scripts never referred to how her marriage ended. The audience opted wholesale for the industry’s default setting. Only one competing program ever had an excuse:
Eight Is Enough
, in which a newspaper columnist with eight kids loses his wife after four episodes. The actress who played the wife really and truly died after four episodes.) Worse, claimed the producers, this misportrayal did a disservice to the legions of kids whose parents had split and who deserved to watch programs that wrestled with problems arising in fractured families like their own. This is old hat now, when TV series are cramming as many gays, transvestites, half siblings, and third marriages as they can wedge into half an hour, but it was radical for 1974. Alas, convincing my father that his becoming a network TV star was doing the nation a public service did not benefit his character, and it made him proprietary. When
One Day at a Time
came along, in which actress Bonnie Franklin is unashamedly divorced, he was resentful and accused the producers of having stolen the idea. So much for his championing of social realism.
In retrospect,
Joint Custody
did form a cultural conduit between the doe-eyed sixties and the bottom-line eighties. The premise ran that the mother, Mimi (played by Joy Markle), has had enough of the hippy thing—leaving her idealistic husband, Emory Fields, reverting to her maiden name of Barnes, and going establishment with a family law practice in Portland (the show opened with a few pans of the Fremont Bridge, but it was shot in Burbank). Stuck in the past, Emory is an eco-warrior who lives in a cabin of his own construction in the Cascades, with no running water or electricity and only an outhouse; he grows organic vegetables that die. The role may seem farsightedly right-on in terms of more recent obsessions with conservation and climate change, but the scripts weren’t really sympathetic with Emory’s insistence on doing everything the hard way. Mimi despairs in one episode that his exclusive emphasis on not using up resources and not polluting the environment encouraged the children to believe that “the most they could hope to aspire to was to be harmless.”
But in the main the program is about the three kids negotiating the tricky terrain of parents who hate each other, as well as the logistical travails of shuttling between households, given the eponymous legal arrangements. Mimi is authoritarian, less concerned for her kids’ creative expression than for their career prospects. Emory espouses countercultural fulfillment, and his permissiveness often gets his kids into trouble. That might have all worked okay, except two of the three children just
had
to be prodigies.
Oh, that’s only one of the reasons we hated those two so much. Still, fictional aptitude is cheap, like athletic prowess from steroids. A scriptwriter can stuff a few token foreign phrases into the dialogue, and voilà: his character is fluent in eight languages. Sinclair Vanpelt played a precocious jazz pianist without mastering one minor seventh. As for why jazz, in 1974 every kid wanted to be a rock star, and the pilot’s development team wanted Caleb Fields to take the road less traveled. But between Caleb Fields having been conceived as super-hip and the genre itself being still halfway happening in the early 1970s, Edison may have gotten a distorted impression of jazz as a logical route to seeing your name in lights. Maybe that explained the bitterness of his diatribes about how marginalized the form had grown, and about what a farcical shard of market share he and his colleagues commanded—“most of which is Norah Jones.”
Fourteen in the first season, Caleb is the rebel of the three, who carries on a whole parallel life as a
hep cat
in dark clubs in Old Town and the Pearl District, where he has to keep his status as a minor on the QT. The oldest has no patience with either parent, and adolescent viewers identified with his driving ambition to leave them both in the dust. He wears a porkpie hat and black turtleneck, and it’s a running issue in the show that he’s started to smoke. As for Sinclair himself, he had a lanky build that resembled Edison’s own—at least back in the day—and the two of them were good-looking in a similar vein. Sinclair’s hair was brown, Edison’s dirty blond, but both mops tended to tendril, and one similarity my brother would be hard-pressed to deny: he’d styled his longish hair, which went electric in humid weather, just like Caleb Fields’s for his entire life.
Otherwise Sinclair was a supercilious snob who chummed smarmily with our father whenever Edison and I were around during rehearsals, marginalizing us into mere extras. I have one clear memory of Sinclair’s registering the fact that Travis-slash-Emory had an actual son near his age. Edison and I were loitering in the studio wings because our family was supposed to attend an NBC picnic in Griffith Park after the taping. Between takes, Edison took it upon himself to demonstrate to Sinclair how to play properly with crossed hands—at which point my brother confirmed, yes, he
did
know what he was talking about: lo, real-life son was now studying real-life jazz piano. “God,” Sinclair exclaimed, “that is—
too droll
!” The actor’s doubled-over laughter would secure Edison’s enmity forever after. But neither Sinclair’s arch condescension nor his affected world-weariness would help him much once the show was canceled and he failed to be cast again in any other major role. (He scored one guest appearance on
Family
, but being conspicuously gay didn’t convert to an advantage until the mid-1990s, by which time he was dissolute-looking and half bald.)
Teensy, the youngest, is only four in the first season, and she’s a
math
whiz. I guess it’s pretty impressive that an actor so young could rattle off all those numbers idiot-savant style, since the scriptwriters were persnickety about her human-calculator answers to multidigit equations being correct. But it would be surprising if Tiffany Kite herself had finally mastered the multiplication table by the time the show wrapped up eight years later. She had black ringlets and the soulful brown eyes of a refugee. To my personal consternation, as Tiffany grew older she only got prettier and so, of course, became more of a princess. In the show, Teensy is a perky genius but still a little girl, and they got a whole episode out of her phobic avoidance of her father’s outhouse: in Emory’s custody, Teensy refuses to go to the bathroom, and on her daughter’s return Mimi has to dose the poor kid with laxatives every time.
Then there’s Maple, the only three-dimensional character on the program—the kid always conveying messages between her warring parents and editing the content along the way (“Did your father
really
say that?” “Did your mother
really
say that?”). Since the middle child alone is not bequeathed magical powers, she’s actually likable. Sandwiched between two attention-grabbers with a high wow factor, Maple has no heaven-sent gift as a shorthand personality and no idea what she wants to be when she grows up. Accordingly, I’ve sometimes heard contemporaries thumbnail a conscientious, decent, but undistinguished woman who is roundly ignored and sometimes taken advantage of as: “You know, she’s a Maple Fields.” Both on and off camera, Floy Newport was unassumingly attractive in that way that L.A. always overlooks. Maple Fields was the one character in
Joint Custody
whom Edison almost never mentioned.
I still felt conflicted about our father’s program. Naturally Edison and I had made a lifelong sport of ridiculing the show, but external ridicule was another matter. Pressured by Tanner and Cody, I’d broken down a couple of years earlier and ordered all eight seasons on DVD. Accustomed to the slicker fare of HBO, you forget how crude, obvious, and hammy television used to be, as well as technically rinky-dink; I naturally remembered the sets as sets, but they looked like sets to Tanner and Cody as well, who couldn’t believe the show was so “lame.” I was discomfited. I tried to laugh with them, but I couldn’t, and before we’d finished the first season I put the DVDs away.
At least for me it had been a revelation to see Travis, since it’s always a revelation to see images of your parents younger than you are now. Suddenly all the surety and authority you’ve accorded them falls away, and these glimpses of outsize icons as ordinary lost people with no road map, no special access to the truth or to justice or to anything, really—well, such epiphanies are tender and sweet and frightening all at the same time. I even softened briefly, thinking maybe Edison and I had been too hard on Travis. It was hardly an outrage that he kidded himself about how handsome he still was or exaggerated his own importance like most people. Another revelation: while our father prided himself on his sophistication, it was clearly his wholesome farm-stock presence to which the casting director had taken a shine; Travis Appaloosa played it, but Hugh Halfdanarson had gotten the part. In fact, Travis had originally auditioned for
Apple’s Way
, in which a father quits the L.A. rat race for his hometown in Iowa, only to find the transition from slick to hick traumatic. But Travis didn’t have the fish-out-of-water quality they were looking for. In Iowa, as far as the producers were concerned, Travis fit right in.
The one aspect of our father’s show that I still admired was its representation of the way siblings live in a separate world from their parents, who for kids function as mere walk-ons.
Joint Custody
captures the intense, hothouse collusion between siblings, while Mimi and Emory are played for fools. Often ashamed of tugging the children’s loyalties in opposite directions, the parents fail to grasp their kids’ salvation: the children’s uppermost loyalty is to each other.
To the degree he intuited the ferocity of mutual clinging that got Edison and me through our childhoods intact, my husband resented it. I didn’t think he should have resented it on our marriage’s account; when Edison first arrived on Solomon Drive, I was still of the view that being a devoted sister made no implicit incursions into my devotions as a wife. But as an only child, Fletcher should have envied this intimacy on his own account. If you don’t have a sibling to keep the sides drawn, you’re stuck lumped in with your minders, an alliance that makes you a traitor, your own tattletale, with the schizoid psyche of a double agent. Edison and I did rat each other out from time to time, but these were isolated strategic sorties in the complex politics of the playroom about which our parents knew nothing. We used our mom and dad as weapons in the far more central relationship to one another. Certainly with Tanner and Cody I tried never to forget: children know your secrets. You do not know theirs.