The Harder They Fall (23 page)

(actor)

I come from a highly creative community: Westport/Weston, Connecticut, before it was gentrified and made fancy. Before Banana Republic … B.B.R.! I grew up in the forties. It was a very artistic, hard-drinking, alcoholic community. I didn’t know of many families that didn’t drink, and those that didn’t were boring, so I never wanted to go over to their houses. Drinking was a desirable life-style that books, movies, and advertising romanticized. Getting blotto on the 5:31 [commuter train] was the source of myriad
New Yorker
cartoons.

I was kind of a typical kid living in the waters of extraordinary dysfunction without being aware of it until much later on. It’s like being a fish and being used to where you’re living. Until you jump out of the tank, you don’t really get to look at how muddy the water is. I have a brother, a wonderful brother, Tony, fifteen months younger than me, and I had two parents who fell down a lot. Martinis were the thing, and my father was caught in the morass of that. Absolutely stuck.

In those days, that’s what everybody did. They drank their lunches, and you’d sober up if you could in the club car coming back home. Dad’s drinking began a slow but steady escalation when he began the Westport–New York commute around 1946. As I look back on it, I guess Dad was pretty high every time he came home from the city. Advertising men were not only famed for their martini lunch, they were also notorious for infiltrating the bar on the 5:31, the commuter special, the traveling cocktail lounge. And we would come and meet my father singing “here come my Daddy now” in our little Dr. Dentons, in the old Buick. It was like missing two people, because Mother by this time would have started drinking. She was a buddy drinker. And of course, we weren’t aware of any of this. It was just not part of our vocabulary.

My brother and I used to sit at the top of the stairs in this wonderful farmhouse we used to live in, and people would arrive at the famous
Hartley parties. My dad made the best martinis in town, and I’d watch people gradually fall over as the night wore on. It was a daily occurrence. Not necessarily with my parents, but with guests that would come. I remember watching a woman just fall over completely backwards once. Watching my father fall off … slide off of a sofa as we were watching television. He had delirium tremens and was foaming at the mouth. It became a devastating rescue a great deal of the time. And again, I didn’t understand what it was, which is why education is so important for me now.

It wasn’t until much, much later when I started working in the mental health community that I realized that both of my parents were mentally ill, and that alcohol was their way of handling that. My father was a manic-depressive who was painting horrible manic-depressive paintings before he died. My mother was either the same as my dad or clinically depressed—I was never quite sure. When you are the child of two alcoholics who are also mentally ill, you’re defending against their defense. It’s a quagmire. So much of my recovery has been posing the question “What is the reality and what is the fantasy?”

Breakfasts were odd for me because it was always as if nothing had happened the night before, so I hadn’t seen my mother curled up in the forsythia bushes the night before. I hadn’t carried her home or helped her into the house. I hadn’t seen what I had seen: the rages, the fights. I didn’t know what a blackout was. I just knew you didn’t talk. In the unconscious, it was a blackout. And I grew up believing their mythology, which was a mythology of silence: “Don’t tell.” Blackouts were big in my family, particularly with my mother. Nothing was ever discussed. The family started disintegrating even more when I was in high school.

I started drinking when I was fourteen because my boyfriend drank. He was also an alcoholic, or alcohol dependent—I can’t really call him an alcoholic unless he calls himself that. Because I had so much shame and guilt, which I felt on some level I was born with. I had sexual feelings at an early age. I describe myself as a ripe peach in a family of dried up bananas. There was this feeling I was the juicy one, and an outsider. I had these feelings and didn’t know where to put them, and my mother greeted me with this extraordinary silence. In that silence, there is this sense of extraordinary
shame. Not only do I have these feelings, but I’m leading little boys down the block into hell! … “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.” I think what my mother ultimately tried to do—and she said this—this is a very Waspy thing, I think, because they drank: She was drinking with me one night, heavily, and she said, “You know, the only way I thought I could control you was through guilt.” What does that leave a little child with but that “my feelings and needs are too big, I’m too tall, I’m too everything.” If I was going to be sexual during high school, which was something I was kind of being pushed into, the only way I could do it was to drink. You see, I couldn’t deal with the shame. Also, it kind of loosened me up and I had less resistance. I was incredibly resistant.

An example of my denying my physical body and my internal wounds was when I was nineteen and involved in an abusive relationship, and had jumped from the frying pan to the fire. I was a married teenager, doing the play
St. Joan
. I’d just come back from the library where I’d written down her whole trial for witchcraft and heresy. I’d copied it word-for-word. It had taken days. We had written the piece for CBS. My husband and I were driving in the car and he started to hit me, and I could see his hand coming at me. In order to avoid the hit—and this is how my brain was and how it had been trained—I jumped out of the car. We were going thirty miles an hour! My whole right side hit the curb, yet it never occurred to me to get help or see a doctor. It wasn’t talked about. This seems an astonishing reflex to me now.

When I tested pregnant, it was Christmas Eve, and again I was working. I was on tour here in Los Angeles. My mother said to me, “Well, you’re going for an abortion, aren’t you?” And I wanted that child. I was devastated. It may have turned out for the best, whoever knows? But all I said was, “Well, I hadn’t planned on that.”

Christmas Eve I was still performing. We went down to Mexico, had the abortion on a kitchen table, came back, and had Christmas dinner with my aunt and uncle in Pasadena, and it was never mentioned. And I went on stage that night! You can see how thoroughly I learned not to tell family secrets, not to reveal. I’m working on a one-woman show, and it’s like “How can I say these things without blame? But it’s not to blame, it’s like
painting.” In my father’s terms, we painted ourselves with guardedness. Even the wonderful things in my growing up had an edge of negativity of judgment. And the big voice in my head wasn’t my dad’s. He was mushy and adored me—there was that whole wonderful, unspoken feeling that he and I got each other creatively. It was my mother’s, without understanding. So often those people who don’t give us what we need, it’s from their limitation rather than ours. But when you’re the fish in this tank asking for food or whatever growing up, you don’t know that.

We children know not to ask for things, not to tell people directly what we wanted or needed because someone, usually my mother, would have a terrible reaction. My brother would come home from a fair or the park, and he would have ice cream all over his mouth. She would get physically ill. There was a sense of physical messiness being sin.

I work with young women who have been brutally abused. Some come from cults whose families would threaten to kill them if they didn’t do what they were told. “Don’t talk. Don’t talk.” The young women say, “I can’t talk about that.” They are used to a kind of abuse where they don’t see and verbalize it. I was taught that nothing I did counted. You get sober—you’ve got to because this mythology you received isn’t working anymore. You burst out and show your candle, not keep it under a barrel, really show it. And you know the only way you can do that is to stop anesthetizing any of that stuff and look at it, as terrifying as it may be. How do you walk away from this kind of family mythology, when that’s what you know? Instead, you begin to abuse yourself and do shameful things because you can’t win. It’s taken me years to uncover these scars.

It’s funny, I hear so many people say they loved drinking, they just loved it. I never loved drinking. I always knew that I was betraying some promise that I wouldn’t drink, which is what ultimately got me into recovery. I was never a falling-down drunk, although when I drank by myself after my dad’s death, I was in a vortex towards hell that I wouldn’t wish on anybody. It was never fun for me. It was a necessity on some level, but unconsciously I knew that I was somehow obeying a family myth again. That was the way to anesthetize pain. I watched it happen in my family ever since I was born, so I chose to swim in that sea.

Not happily though, never happily. I was never one of those “rah, rah, yea, yea, let’s go out and get drunk” people because I had too much shame about it. I was more of a closet drinker. I never went to bars; it was not my style. To be alone was the only way for me.

I was involved in a hideously brutal marriage, which to this day I’ve never totally understood. It was like going from the frying pan into the fire, in the sense that I had lived in an extremely permissive household, and what this man promised me was that I would gain morality. My boyfriend in high school didn’t marry me, and this man said he would. He picked me up, and presto, in three weeks we were married. I was nineteen years old. It was a marriage full of domestic violence and excruciating brutality. I was drinking as much as I could to get away from the pain.

I was working all during this time. I came out to Hollywood and did Sam Peckinpah’s first film,
Guns in the Afternoon
, in 1962. That was the beginning of a realization that I had to get a divorce. I was so terrified of my first husband because he was such a frightening man. Finally my parents came out to be with me, and we three lived together in a little apartment in Brentwood.

It was a house full of guns. We had guns everyplace in the house, we always did. My dad was a hunter. He was a farm boy from Missouri. My mother’s father was a very famous behavioral psychologist, a man named John B. Watson, who believed that children should not be touched or held. They should be kissed lightly on the forehead before saying good night, if anything. My grandfather thought boys were basically raised to be homosexuals and girls were basically raised, because of pajama parties and things, to be lesbians. There was an extraordinary kind of sexualizing in my family. My mother, how can I say this, she was deeply in love with her father. She doted on him. It was very much like the father of the professor’s wife in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Her father represented everything that my father wasn’t, and his presence was in the eaves of our family house. My grandfather was a huge cloud to whom my father was compared constantly. I was too when I wanted to nurse my children, which was revolting to my mother. And a lot of that was because my grandfather kept saying, “It’s going to destroy your breasts, Polly. I won’t let it happen.” He lived right
around the corner from us too, so we were constantly visiting him. He was a pretty terrific grandfather until he French-kissed me one night when I was twelve. Needless to say, it was a very confusing family.