The Geographical Cure

IT MAKES ME so happy to hold this little book in my hands—for of all the stories I’ve ever written, this one is dearest to me, capturing the essence of my own childhood—the kind of unruly, spoiled only child I was; the sweetness of my troubled parents; and the magical essence of Key West, one of my favorite places in the world ever since January 1959, when these events actually occurred.

Or did they? Well, not all of them, because this is autobiographical fiction, actually, with the emphasis on fiction.

So what’s the difference? Let me explain. During a lifetime of writing, I have always felt that I can tell the truth better in fiction than nonfiction. Real life is often chaotic, mysterious, unfathomable. But in fiction, you can change the order of events, emphasize or alter certain aspects of the characters—you can even create new people or take real people away in an instant. That means you can instill some sort of order to create meaning, so that the story will make sense—where real life so often does not. Fiction is also a heightened reality—you “up the ante” in order to grab the reader’s attention and hold it, increasing or emphasizing the conflict, adjusting the pace of the story accordingly, often making it conform to the old tried and truly satisfying plot sequence of beginning, middle, end.

So this story is fiction, okay?

My own father, Ernest Smith of Grundy, Virginia, did not have an affair with Carroll Byrd or anybody else that I know of. Carroll Byrd, the “other woman” in this story, is pure fiction, just a type I admired and wanted to be as a girl and was not: artistic, unconventional. My sweet daddy, a workaholic storekeeper, was “kindly nervous,” as he put it, his own euphemistic term for bipolar illness, or “manic depression” as it was then called. But the manic phase was no fun for him—no elation, no wild sprees—instead he just worked harder than ever at his dimestore until these weeks of intense activity led inevitably to a downward spiral. He’d talk less and less, stay in bed more and more, finally “going off” someplace to get treatment—such as Highland Hospital in Asheville, N.C., or Silver Hill in New Canaan, Ct., where he had been hospitalized for about six months in 1958 when this story begins.

My beautiful mother, Virginia Marshall Smith, “kindly nervous” herself, was simultaneously being treated for anxiety and depression at the University of Virginia hospital in Charlottesville. So I was sent to stay with my Aunt Millie and Uncle Bob in Maryland—but let me assure you that my sophisticated Aunt Millie (Martinis! League of Women Voters!) was not Cousin Glenda in this story; in fact she was the polar opposite of Cousin Glenda. I just made Glenda up, feeling that I needed some humor at this point and using some of the tropes of the time such as car coats, bomb shelters, “What would Jesus think?” and “Get a grip!”

But it is true that our own nervous little nuclear family was indeed separated for many months during 1958; and it is also true that upon discharge my father’s physician at Silver Hill Hospital prescribed not only lithium for him but also a Geographical Cure for their Marriage, now apparently “troubled” in some way that nobody would explain to me, though I would participate in this Geographical Cure—a big long trip! Daddy chose Key West, Florida, for the Geographical Cure because he had been stationed there in the Navy and loved it. He and Mama had apparently been back to Key West once before (before I was born! I couldn’t even imagine this—life without me! It gave me a sick headache; I had to take a Goody Powder and go right to bed).

But the Geographical Cure did not seem to be working as my father drove our big white fishtail Buick endlessly down the eastern seaboard that January of 1959, seldom speaking except for things like Mama saying, “Lee, will you please tell your daddy to stop for more cigarettes?” which I would dutifully repeat even though he was sitting right there, or me screaming “Can’t we go to Weeki Wachee Springs? Please please please!” as the billboard flashed past, for I planned to be a professional mermaid when I grew up. Nothing doing. We pressed on in the smoke-filled car. I felt like the Marriage was a fourth passenger, sitting glumly next to me in the back seat.

Each night in the series of little tourist cottages was grim, with Mama and me in one bed and Daddy in the other, and several times I awakened to see his bent shadow outside the window, pacing back and forth. What if he had another breakdown? What if the marriage couldn’t be cured?

But I loved that final part of the drive, with the luminous sea and sky surrounding us and the Keys with their wonderful names: Key Largo, Cudjoe, Sugarleaf, Saddlebunch, Raccoon.

“We’re almost there,” Daddy said.

Mama reapplied her lipstick, Revlon Fire and Ice.

And finally we were in Key West—the scruffiest, wildest place I had ever seen, a bright buzz of noise and color. We turned left off Truman Avenue onto Duval Street, and now I could glimpse a shining patch of ocean. Daddy pulled into a motel named the Blue Marlin with a huge fish on its sign. Mama and I waited in the car while he headed for the office. The motel was made of blue concrete, two stories in a U-shape around a good-size pool with a diving board and a slide. Perfect for a mermaid.

Finally Daddy got back in the car with a funny look on his face. “Girls, you’re not going to believe this,” he said slowly.

“What? What is it? Is it bad news from home?” Mama’s pretty face was an instant mask of alarm.

“Oh no, nothing like that.” Daddy really smiled for the first time on the trip. “It appears that this entire motel has been taken over by the cast and crew of a movie that they are shooting on location right now in Key West, over at the Navy Yard. There are only four rooms that they’re not occupying, and now we’ve got two of them. They asked me a lot of questions. I had to swear that we weren’t journalists or photographers in order to stay here. And Lee,” he added in a no-nonsense voice, “I promised that you would not bother the stars. Do you hear me? Or the crew, or anybody else.”

“Which stars?” Mama hardly breathed. She was already in heaven.

“Well, there’s Dina Merrill,” Daddy said, “and Tony Curtis.”

“Tony Curtis!” Mama and I squealed together. We pored over the National Enquirer, the Midnight Star, and countless other movie magazines that we read cover to cover. Every week when the movie changed at the Lynwood Theater downtown, we were right there in our favorite seats, tenth-row aisle, clutching our Baby Ruths.

“And that’s not all,” Daddy said.

“Who?” we shrieked.

“Cary Grant.”

“Cary Grant!” We couldn’t believe it. The most gorgeous, the most elegant, the biggest star in Hollywood. “The man at the desk says he’s a real gentleman,” Daddy said. I was not so sure of that, thinking of his recent love affair with Sophia Loren. Mama and I knew everything.

Thus it began, though most of this book is my own creation.

As for the movie itself, Operation Petticoat featured a real pink submarine, anchored out in the ocean off Key West. Its flimsy plot involves a navy lieutenant commander (Cary Grant) and his con man executive officer (Tony Curtis) who must take the fictional damaged sub USS Sea Tiger into a seedy dockyard for repair during World War II, rescuing a crew of stranded army nurses on the way. The only available paint for repair is red and white (hence the sub’s pink color), and the only available bunks for the nurses are down in the submarine’s tight quarters (wink, wink). The film takes place during the Battle of the Philippines in the opening days of the United States involvement in World War II. Some elements of the screenplay were taken from actual incidents that happened with some of the Pacific Fleet’s submarines during the war, though points of historical accuracy are few. Most filming was done in and around Naval Station Key West, now known as the Truman Annex of Naval Air Station Key West.

Operation Petticoat was a huge box-office hit, the #3 moneymaker of 1960, earning $6,800,000—just behind #1 Psycho and #2 Ben-Hur. The review in Variety was typical: “Operation Petticoat has no more weight than a sackful of feathers, but it has a lot of laughs. Cary Grant and Tony Curtis are excellent, and the film is directed by Blake Edwards with a slam-bang pace.” Cary Grant’s residuals topped $3 million, making it his most profitable film to date. The film was the basis for a TV series in 1977.

The Geographical Cure worked. Mama and Daddy would go home refreshed, and stay married for the rest of their lives. He would run his dimestore for thirty-three more years. Surrounded by the stars in Key West, Mama pepped right up and was soon wearing high-heel sandals and a pink hibiscus in her hair. Daddy went deep-sea fishing with a guy named Captain Tony and played poker with the film crew. Every night at 7:00 p.m., Mama and I seated ourselves on a rattan love seat in the lobby of the Blue Marlin pretending to read newspapers while we eavesdropped on Tony Curtis’s daily call from the public telephone to Janet Leigh back in Hollywood, which always ended with Tony’s words, “God bless you, my darling!” We rattled our newspapers emotionally. One day at the pool, Tony Curtis offered me a package of cheese nabs; I would save it for decades. Near the end of the second week, one of the directors asked our family if we would like to be in the movie. “You bet!” I cried out. “Oh, brother,” Daddy said. But there we were, and there we still are to this day in the giant crowd on the Key West dock when the pink submarine comes into port at the end of the movie, cheering and waving hello.

Lee Smith
January 10, 2020