One afternoon after an entire day of taping Hollywood Squares, Fannie hopped into her slugmobile. I’d been shopping at the farmers’ market and met her in CBS’s parking lot.
“I’ll bet you five hundred dollars you won’t drive from CBS to the Beverly Wilshire with your shirt and bra off.”
“Deal.” She shook my hand.
“I’ll follow you to make sure you don’t cheat.”
“This will be the easiest five hundred dollars I’ve ever made.” She beamed as she peeled off her shirt.
She waited until she had passed the guard house on her way out of the parking lot before unhitching her bra. Exposing her full glories to natural light, she drove to Wilshire, turned west and merrily rolled along.
How I stayed on the road I don’t know, because I laughed until the tears rolled down my cheeks. What was even funnier was the fact that no one noticed. Every person in the opposing lanes was so intent on reaching their destination that they peered ahead—pure tunnel vision. She reached the venerable hotel and turned left, pulling over to the curb across from the cafe in the hotel. She hastily threw on her shirt.
“I want my money now.” She rolled down her window.
“Go to the Saks parking lot and I’ll write you a check.”
We rendezvoused at Saks. I wrote her a check. She promptly spent it.
Saks Fifth Avenue had been the scene of a unique escapade for Baby Jesus. A year and a half before Fannie’s excellent adventure, I was staying in a small apartment behind Saks. One warm afternoon I opened the door and Baby Jesus scooted out, a-hellin’ toward the store. Flying across the parking lot, she aimed her gray self at the back door, which, being continually opened and closed, was child’s play for Miss Jesus. She zipped in like a hardened shopper.
The cosmetics counters at that time faced the back door, as that was the door most in use. The cat considered the merits of perfumes, listened to a few remarks from the exquisitely made-up ladies behind the various counters, then continued on her way.
Men’s clothing held little appeal for her. She found the back stairway and marched right up. She settled herself in the leather handbags and small luggage, which then was at the top of the stairs.
By the time I reached Baby, a crowd of shoppers and salespeople had gathered around to admire or admonish her. When she saw me she gave out that wondrous cackle that cats give when prey is in sight. She considered this audience her due.
The best part was that the manager had a sense of humor and issued a Saks card to B. J. Brown. It couldn’t really be used but it was fun nonetheless, and Baby Jesus always traveled with her Saks Fifth Avenue credit card, which was a tasteful dark chocolate with white lettering.
Unpredictable, game and ever ready to pop the balloon of a windbag egotist, Fannie reminded me of Mom. Like Mom, she had to be the center of attention, and like Mom, she kept you laughing. Mother wasn’t good about money but Fannie was even worse. If I didn’t grab her paycheck, she’d spend it before paying the rent, the utilities and the grocery bill that month. But she handed over the money cheerfully. I’d subtract the required amounts and she’d joyously squander the rest. Or maybe she didn’t squander it. How can you put a price on fun? She extracted the maximum of pleasure from every penny. Nor was she unwilling to invest, but she needed to see the investment. Stocks and bonds held little allure for her. She was bold enough to buy that house in Montecito with Kate. She wasn’t a coward on any level except her own homosexuality and she had plenty of people joining her on that one.
Fannie surprised me by being a good athlete. She doesn’t much like sports but she’s well coordinated and can learn to do anything. We joined no clubs together. She wanted to keep her public distance. Once Kate took us to her country club at an off time. Country club dues shoot through the roof in California. I don’t know how anyone can afford to belong to anything.
Once we played tennis on the Spanish-style grade school’s old courts. The late afternoon shadows bisected the worn surface. Fannie ran, giggled and whacked the ball back over the net. When we finished she jumped the net even though I’d won. That’s one of my fondest memories of her, the silly, spontaneous line of chatter and her willingness to do something important to me.
When she was at the bungalow we’d walk at sundown. About a half mile down the road, heading toward Carpentaria, sat thirty unspoiled acres filled with golden poppies, the remains of an old played-out grove, and a few eucalyptus trees whose scent floated over the meadows. I’d tell Fannie where the stable should be built, the house sited. What a beautiful piece of land it was. Of course, it’s developed now, filled with tastefully expensive houses owned by people who think they’re in the country because they own two acres.
California and Florida make an excellent case for environmental control and curbs on development. If I witnessed the destruction of California farmland from the early seventies to today, imagine the sorrow of someone much older who knew paradise, now lost.
Once good soil is built over, it stays built over. The land is lost forever.
Hollywood attracts talent, then destroys it. The endless cycle of actors, writers and directors chewed up and spit out by the system wasn’t going to stop with me. Whether it was D. W. Griffith, Orson Welles, Mabel Normand or Rita Hayworth, precious few escape unscathed. Even the ebullient Douglas Fairbanks Sr. sickened of it, walking away toward the end of his life.
Fannie managed to keep her creativity intact by living on the fringes of the system. Hollywood Squares, a game show, utilized the tiniest part of her resources, but it paid the bills, leaving her free for other pursuits. Trained as an actor, she believed that was where she’d make her contribution. But Hollywood has trouble with beautiful, comedic women even though film and TV seem to be a women’s medium—it’s so easy to reproduce “reality” in them. Women fare much better, artistically, in reality than they do in fantasy or thrillers. This is just a hunch, not a real theory. Once comedic actresses dominated film. Then came television in the fifties. Not that television was easy, but the demand for product opened the net wide enough for more women to create more characters. Also, in the beginnings of any industry, it’s freer—women had a chance.
Starting with Marie Dressier, a gargantuan talent in figure and expression, the rule has been that a funny woman must be an unattractive woman. Marie started in silents and made the transition to sound, a rara avis! Mabel Normand and Mary Pickford were beautiful but they were silent stars. Once talkies arrived, a different type moved forward. Jean Harlow could be funny but she played the dumb blonde; she wasn’t intelligently funny. Jean Arthur was. Myrna Loy was in The Thin Man. Carole Lombard was close to divine. If you think about it, you can count the witty, beautiful ones on your fingers.
Fanny could have been one of the witty, intelligent ones, but she came of age when the prevailing film fashion was gruesomely humorless except for television. She was just perfect for a sitcom, but a perfect sitcom never found her.
Like Bea Lillie, she was so original that no one, at that time, was original enough to make something for her.
Heartbreak goes with the territory. Fannie, shrewd and tough, never gave her heart to the business. I learned from her to do likewise. You can hire my brain, my experience, my calm demeanor, and I’ll write you a very good piece. If the gods smile on me, I’ll write a great piece. But no one in Hollywood will ever buy my heart. If I hadn’t learned it from Fannie, and by example from Kate, I would have eventually absorbed the lesson from film history.
I’m starting to believe there’s a direct ratio between contempt and talent. The more talent you have, the greater the contempt you are held in. Even the stars big enough to find their own vehicles and get them financed are despised secretly.
In the earliest days of film, the producers at Biograph refused to list the names of the players, fearing that if the public knew them, they’d be forced to pay them bigger salaries. As it was, they paid them little enough. When Mary Pickford and the Gish sisters broke that mold, the business changed forever, but the administration’s hatred of the stars hasn’t changed. Producers’ initial fear of salary demands was prophetic.
The whole point is to get you cheap, use you up and throw you out, then go find another cheap one since there’s a steady supply of talent. This applies to any above-the-line talent, which means writers, directors, actors. The writer, always short-sheeted in the money process, is now beginning to have her/his day.
The underlying assumption of this crass misuse of people is that talent is interchangeable. It is not. Sure, there are eleven thousand writers in the Writers Guild of America, but Writer A excels on different territory than Writer B.
Same for actresses. D. W. Griffith found this out when, hoping to put Mary Pickford in her place, he tried to invent a new star, Mae Marsh. He was lucky. Mae made good pictures and the public liked her, but not in the way they worshipped Mary. Woke up Griffith, though.
While contempt is the surface emotion, fear is the underlying one. The money boys need us. If they could act, direct and write, they probably would. Since they can’t (even if they won’t admit they can’t), they are dependent upon those who can. Instead of seeing this as an opportunity to create, the talent is viewed as another mouth to feed. The talent, in return, hates the money men. Since the dynamic is over seventy-five years old, it will take more than Fannie or myself to change it.
And we don’t want to be administrators or film revolutionaries. We want to act and write.
Fannie finally knew that age would bring her acting career to a screeching halt. Why not learn another craft before that dreary day?
Writing is close to acting in that both disciplines require one to create character. The Grand Canyon separates them after that, for on one side is a primary art, writing, and on the other side is an interpretive art, acting.
The actor, director, conductor or dancer starts with a piece of work. The writer, composer or painter literally makes something out of nothing, brings temporary order to chaos.
For Fannie to master the discipline needed for this transformation was going to be a genuine leap over the Grand Canyon.
She was willing to put her heart in it. That gave her wings.
Her first novel, which took three drafts, was published as Coming Attractions. Wendy Weil, my agent, took her on. Fannie was in business.
Fannie gave me no public credit for the help I had given her. Again, she was frightened of being openly associated with me. And the final rewrite, which she did for her publishers, was strictly hers.
Exhausted by burning the candle at both ends and by the adversarial nature of the industry, I wanted to go home. I figured I could mail my screenplays in, and if Hollywood needed to see my face, I’d endure that long flight to Los Angeles.
More than anything, I didn’t want to become an embittered person endlessly reciting stories of how I was screwed in Hollywood. Even Heidi Fleiss got screwed in Hollywood.
The one thing I must protect in this life is my talent. Imagination is exotic; it needs shelter. All the more so since we live in a nonfiction age, duller than dishwater.
I told Fannie I had to go home.
“Where’s home?”
“Maryland or Virginia. My people are from those places.”
“Well, mine are from Alabama.”
“Do you want to go to Alabama?”
“When I’m rich I want to live in Gulf Shores.”
Baby Jesus, high in a lemon tree, listened. I was trying to get her down. An old greenhouse, its glass broken, squatted in the middle of the abandoned grove, and I didn’t want Her Highness to run in there. She’d been out for two hours. Even Cazzie and Frip had come in, lured by tuna treats.
Baby Jesus preferred trees. Pecan trees would have pleased her as much as mighty oaks.
“Why don’t we look in Virginia first?” I pleaded.
We did. We ran the Virginia realtors, Bill Leach and Chris Georges, ragged. Fannie worried that Virginia was too far north for a sunshine girl, but at least it wasn’t Maryland, even farther north and a border state to boot.
Then a simple Federal farmhouse caught our eye. Situated on a scant thirty-four acres, it had a garage and a little gardening shed, and best of all a cow barn that could be converted into a stable. The sheep pens were falling down, though, the fields needed a heavy dose of fertilizer and the fences had long ago rotted away. The house, in decent condition, was large enough for Fannie to have her private quarters and me mine.
On the way back to Los Angeles, we fretted because we weren’t sure we had the money. The property cost about $350,000.
Finally, somewhere over Palm Springs, Fannie said, “I’ll give you my money. When I need it back you give it back with whatever the place is worth at the time. You’re good with money. I know you’ll make me money.”
She kept her apartment in the Flats but agreed to spend as much time as she could in Virginia.
We sent in the deposit. I don’t know who was more scared, Fannie or I. Probably I was because I had to make her some money.
I moved everything to Virginia. Fannie stayed back in L.A.
The first night in that old house I rolled up in blankets just like I used to do in my cold-water flat in New York. Baby Jesus slept next to my head, Cazzie at my feet. Frip had died before we left. She didn’t survive a dental operation.
Baby Jesus, who pretended that Frip was a pain in the butt, missed her terribly. But by the time we reached the house framed by huge trees, she was ready for adventure.
The electricity hadn’t been turned on. I had no water and no heat. It was early fall and the nights were cool. Despite sending in the required deposits and making numerous cross-country phone calls, this simple procedure proved too much for the power company. I had to go down in person. Had to do it for the phone company, too.
At the end of that week an old car rolled up in the driveway. A petite woman emerged. She marched up to knock on the front door.
“Hi.” I stuck my head out the upstairs window. I was trying to put together the bed I’d bought.
“Hey. I’m Betty Burns. Chris Georges said you needed help.”
“Help? I need a miracle.”
Betty Burns was that miracle. We’ve worked together ever since. We’re growing old together. She cleans, repairs my torn clothes since she knows I rarely shop, and every now and then she brings me food. Betty is a good cook. I don’t know what’s better, her cabbage or her fried chicken, which is as good as Mom’s.
Betty always says to me, “If anyone taped what we talked about, we’d be in big trouble.”
True. We talk about everything together: husbands, children, lovers, money, football, the latest scandal. Fortunately, central Virginia abounds in scandals, most of them of a sexual nature. I’m in my element. Started with Jefferson, of course.
With Betty working inside, I spruced up the outside.
By the time Fannie arrived for her first visit it looked as if someone lived there. She wanted a room devoted to ducks. We took the pretty back room overlooking the gardens—the previous owner had been a first-rate gardener—and hung duck curtains, found duck chairs, scrounged for decoys. The room did everything but quack.
The handsome young fellow down the lane, Dannie McLaughlin, built stalls in the cow barn, among other tasks. Danny’s a doer, not a talker, but I’d elicit a few tidbits from him. He used to make me laugh because the girls chased after him something awful.
Fannie’d say, “That boy’s going to hide up here and some girl’ll be showing up with a rifle.”
Baby Jesus preferred my workroom, a big room on the south side of the house. It was the prettiest workroom I’ve had and I miss it.
Fannie’s workroom was upstairs. Even she couldn’t work in the duck room, but she liked sleeping in there, as the breeze kept the curtains dancing.
Fannie rarely stayed for longer than two weeks but I cherished our time because, more than anything in the world, she made me laugh. Usually I was the sparkplug. How refreshing to be entertained.
The two of us would have been better sisters than lovers. I’m not a romantic person. Fannie needs a great deal of attention. I think she loved me. I know I loved her. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Fannie.
Her life was somewhere else. She needed the excitement of L.A. and she needed Alabama. The reserve that is so Virginia, friendly but correct, irritated her.
“These people are about as bad as Yankees,” she’d grumble.
Then, too, she liked horses but they weren’t her passion. I had my stable filled with boarders even before I had my bed put together. I did all the work: mucking, grooming, medications. I loved it. I love physical labor.
“You’re wasting your time. Pay someone else to do it.”
But I wasn’t wasting my time. I get some of my best ideas picking hooves, bush-hogging on the tractor, tying up sweet peas.
I missed Kate. I hoped she’d visit.
Few people visited because Fannie didn’t want them to know we lived together. She had some friends in New York whom she didn’t mind knowing. When we went to the city, we’d see them, but most of the time she kept people far away.
One crystal clear October morning we walked outside and saw that a banana spider had spun a web as big as a dishtowel between two English boxwoods. Covered with dew, it caught the sun’s rising rays and turned from silver to gold to blood red.
Transfixed, we watched until the banana spider popped out from the boxwood. She was a major spider. When bananas get pissed off they sit in the middle of their web and make it sway like a trampoline. I thought she would fly off her web, she was so incensed. We were keeping her prey away, so we left her to catch her breakfast.
As time went by it became more and more obvious that Fannie wasn’t happy with me. She loved me but I wasn’t what she wanted or needed.
I don’t know if she had affairs in Los Angeles. I never asked. It was none of my business. She was good to me and that’s what mattered.
She never promised me a lifetime commitment or even one of two months’ duration. I had no room to criticize her. Apart from her homophobia, I had nothing to criticize. When she drank, she could be a bad girl. Other than that, Fannie was perfect.
That Christmas she appeared in Old Acquaintances, at the Town and Gown Theater in Birmingham, Alabama. The play was about old friends and rivals and it was just right for Fannie. Fannie played the woman who winds up writing the commercial successes, while soap opera star Susan Flannery played the “literary writer.” At one point they overdid the fight scene, falling into the orchestra pit. The audience, thinking it was part of the show, applauded wildly. Fannie and Susan, rolling around in the pit, cussed each other a blue streak. When they finally crawled back on the stage the audience was in convulsions. They cracked up, too.
Birmingham, a great city, kept us busy. At Christmas we shopped and visited Tallulah Bankhead’s wardrobe, displayed in the basement of the Town and Gown. Tallulah was a childhood heroine of mine.
Fannie drove me out to the Iron Cafe, frequented by the railroad workers. Bill Neal’s sister, Iggy, having battled the bottle herself (ran in the family), helped the railroad drunks dry out. She lived with another woman. The two women were kind but tough. Fanny always believed her aunt was a lesbian. As the good woman and her companion had been dead many years, I had no opportunity to form my own opinion.
We poked, prodded and talked about how to frame the story. Fannie didn’t want to write a lesbian book. What a surprise. But her aunt’s story was a great story. I told her she could soft-pedal it. Just write the women as she remembered them. I helped her with the structure.
This was the novel that eventually became Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.
Fannie doesn’t need my help anymore. I’m very proud of her.
Riding back to Charlottesville on the train from Birmingham, we flattened our noses, pressing against the cold window, to view Christmas decorations in tiny towns across Dixie.
I knew I was losing Fannie. Somehow that made every second precious.
No blowup occurred. She just came to Virginia less and less. The following summer, 1978, I met Martina Navratilova and her young girlfriend in Richmond. Martina had won her first Wimbledon that year, defeating Chris Evert, and I’d seen her in person when she was fifteen, which I think was the first rime she played in the States. As round as she was tall, she had tremendous talent even back then.
I was writing Southern Discomfort, which has a minor Czech character in it. Research, important to me, brought me to Martina through a mutual friend.
I met her for lunch. She was twenty-one, sweet, and wrapped up in her girlfriend, who was two years younger.
I kept in contact with her after that, usually by letter. I genuinely liked her.
Her romance unraveled the following January. She began calling constantly. I told Fannie. She wasn’t thrilled but she was big enough to recognize she’d consigned me to the shadows.
I planned to meet Martina in Kansas City at a tournament. She was three weeks on the road, one week off. I drove to National Airport, that little corridor of hell, and called Fannie in L.A.
To my surprise she begged me not to go, said she’d fly right in. I then called Martina and made my apologies, saying I owed Fannie a sit-down talk, which she was now finally willing to have.
Although disappointed, Martina didn’t carry on. I turned around and drove two and a half hours back home in pouring rain.
When Fannie came home she gave me a postcard of two draft horses pulling a plow. On the back she’d written, “Don’t break up the team.”
She loved me. I know she loved me and I loved her. But we’d gone along for over two years rarely being in the same place at the same time. I would have moved to Alabama, but she didn’t want to be a farmer, and for me that’s life, real life. I survived the cities. I flourished in the country.
We needed different things even though we needed each other. We hadn’t a clue as to how to resolve our dilemma, to know what neuroses we inflicted on each other and to clearly see if we had a future.
Fannie trusted no one, which hurt me. It meant she didn’t trust me either. My remoteness hurt her, as did the fact that I communicated through deeds, not words. She used to tell me I loved the cats more than I loved her.
“Close,” I’d say.
I thought we might work it out. I wasn’t sure. I felt terrible and I knew that she felt terrible. When I got up the next morning there was a note on the refrigerator. She’d left and she asked me to leave her alone. I did but it hurt.
Years later we were sitting in the Jockey Club in New York and Fannie said, “Why didn’t you come after me?”
“You told me not to.”
“Rita Mae, you don’t know anything about women.”
I laughed and wondered if that was true or if I just didn’t know enough about Fannie.
I kept my promise, though. I made her a little money. When she needed her investment back I sent it to her at the going rate. It wasn’t a bloody fortune but it was, as Mom always said, “thankful increase.”
As for Fannie, I will love her until the day I die.