5 
“THE STRONGEST INFLUENCE IN MY LIFE”
Sisters.
Jackie was the source of love and empathy, embarrassment and guilt. Even, at times, hatred.
When Barbara wrote her memoir in 2008, she considered calling it Sister, though she settled on Audition as the title instead. Still, the first paragraph in the prologue is just that one word: “Sister.” Jackie, she said, “was unwittingly the strongest influence in my life.” Her sister’s limitations often defined her own.
When Barbara would invite friends over or go out on a date, her mother would urge her to include her older sister, who had no friends of her own. The result was less to integrate Jackie than to isolate Barbara, not yet confident enough in her own skin to stand up for a sibling who was so different. It reinforced her sense of being an outsider herself. It was because of Jackie and the complications she posed, Barbara said, that she didn’t host birthday parties or join the Girl Scouts.
She would always have mixed feelings about her. Jackie gave her “a compassion and an understanding of people” that she might never have had, she said, and she would name her only child after her. But Jackie’s disability also embarrassed Barbara. Then she would feel guilty about being ashamed of her.
“I loved my sister,” Barbara said late in life, years after Jackie had died in 1985 of ovarian cancer. “She was sweet and affectionate and she was, after all, my sister. But there were times I hated her, too. For being different. For making me feel different. For the restraints she put on my life. I didn’t like that hatred, but there’s no denying that I felt it.” She wondered if people would be “horrified” by that admission, but she said those who had a disabled sibling would understand.
Barbara’s earliest memory of her sister was a painful one. She was perhaps three; Jackie was six. After hearing her stutter, some boys in their Brookline neighborhood made fun of her and pulled at her skirt. Their ridicule was humiliating; the two girls ran into their house in tears. A few years later, when the girls were taking tap dance lessons, their mother dressed them in identical costumes for a local talent show. But Jackie panicked onstage, forgetting her steps, staring in desperation at Barbara. Someone in the audience began to boo.
Almost as piercing for Barbara was this memory: One of the happiest times of her childhood was a brief stretch when Jackie was away, enrolled in a boarding school in Pennsylvania for children with special needs. The family had just moved to Miami Beach from Boston. “This meant I had my parents all to myself,” Barbara said, thrilled with the focus on her. Her mother’s mood brightened, too.
But Jackie was desperately unhappy. She came home six months later, never to be sent away again.
Backstage at her father’s nightclubs, the chorus girls would fuss over Jackie. Some of the stars would, too, Frank Sinatra among them. Broadway legend Carol Channing, the daughter of a leader in the Christian Science church, had grown up in a household that had welcomed people with developmental disabilities. She invited Jackie to her shows and would call and visit her, forging a friendship that was genuine.
Singer Johnnie Ray, a pioneer in rock-and-roll, called her “Jackie darling” and sent her birthday cards and autographed pictures when he was on tour. His own childhood may have made him especially sensitive to her isolation. He was a budding musician when he lost hearing in his left ear at age thirteen in a Boy Scout accident, an injury that went unrecognized for a time and prompted him to withdraw from others.
That experience gave him a stronger need to connect with other people, he said, and contributed to his trademark emotional displays onstage. His biggest hits were “Cry” and “The Little White Cloud That Cried”; he became known as “The Prince of Wails” and “The Million Dollar Teardrop.”
Jackie had a crush on him, and in her innocence believed he felt the same way about her. Her diary was laced with his name. “Johnnie is working in Chicago. Hope he calls me,” she wrote. And again, “Johnnie is in Dallas. Someday I will marry him.”
At age seven or eight, Barbara began complaining about constant stomach pains—not because she had them, but because it meant her mother would leave Jackie with Dotey, an elderly woman and the only babysitter she trusted, and take Barbara to a round of doctors. After the examinations and the tests, for a treat, they would stop at a restaurant and she could order a plate of spaghetti. “Bliss,” Barbara recalled, both for her favorite meal and for the time alone with her mother.
A diagnosis of her phantom pains naturally proved elusive; the best prescription would have been the attention she yearned to get. No one seemed to suspect she was faking her complaints. “Finally one bewildered doctor said I should have my appendix taken out,” she recalled.
This was, it would seem, an extreme remedy. But Barbara embraced it. “It seemed the only choice,” she said. “So I did, happily. More attention.”
She spent almost a week in the hospital. Each day, her mother would take the streetcar from Brookline to Boston, then walk ten blocks to see her. One night, when Barbara heard someone entering her room, she feigned sleep until the visitor, presumably a nurse, had left. “I finally opened my eyes and saw at the foot of my bed my favorite doll,” she recalled. “My mother, worried that I would feel alone, had taken the streetcar at night to visit me one more time.”
The memory stayed with her. “It makes me so sad for her,” she said.
As an adult, Barbara related her experience in a matter-of-fact tone, as if it were just another childhood anecdote. But it was more than that. Children often fake stomachaches for some psychological need—because they want more attention, as she did, or because they’re anxious about going to school. But it’s rare for that to lead all the way to a risky and unnecessary surgery. If her pretenses had persisted, it might have suggested a mental illness psychiatrists diagnose as factitious disorder. The effort to gain emotional support, sometimes deliberate and sometimes unconscious, is often associated with childhood trauma. Even short of that, the episode is shocking, most of all because of what it revealed about her family. How is it possible that neither her mother nor her father nor any of her doctors recognized what was at the heart of a little girl’s mysterious pain?
Barbara seemed to suffer no long-term repercussions from the loss of her appendix, and she apparently never carried out a similar untruth about her health again. Instead, she would find other, more acceptable ways to command the attention of her family and the world.
She was a solitary child and a diligent student. “A very serious pupil,” Mildred Gillis, her fifth-grade teacher at the Lawrence School, would say years later. Miss Gillis was usually “stingy” with As, she said, but she gave them to Barbara. The child was “delightful” and a “good writer.” But she didn’t seem to have any playmates, Miss Gillis recalled. “I don’t remember Barbara as being social. School was a place of business for her.”
Not by choice.
“I desperately wanted playmates, to have friends over to my house, to belong instead of always feeling like an outsider,” Barbara said. She didn’t boast about her father’s glamorous profession; she was chagrined about it. While some in Brookline admired the glitz, others didn’t consider a nightclub that featured nearly nude showgirls and risqué comics as entirely respectable. “To other people, to have a father who owned a nightclub: Hey, wasn’t that great?” she said. “But I wanted him to come home every night, and not just Friday nights. I wanted him not to sleep until 2:00 in the afternoon. I guess I wanted my father to be a dentist.”
She wanted to be just like the others in her class. Not to stand out. To fit in.
“When I was about seven years old, the school put on a little performance for adoring parents,” she remembered. “It featured a robin redbreast as the lead and a chorus of little brown-costumed chirpers. I was assigned the leading role of the robin. But here’s the thing: I didn’t want to be the star. I wanted to be in the chorus, to be like all the other kids.” Her mother, a skilled seamstress, made her a robin costume with a red belly and wings. When Barbara tried it on, she burst into tears. She explained why to her bewildered mother.
The next day, Dena went to school with her and talked to the teacher. At the performance, Barbara was, happily, a chirper in the chorus. Just like nearly everyone else.
Later, of course, Barbara would decide she didn’t want to be a chirper in the chorus.
As a girl, she would get glimpses of a more traditional life when they visited her uncle, Harry Walters, a leading citizen in the seaside town of Asbury Park, New Jersey, about an hour from Manhattan. Uncle Harry and Aunt Minna had a happy marriage, three healthy daughters, and a successful dry-goods store. Harry was the patriarch of the Walters clan. “He was handsome, easygoing, sweet, and, I guess, predictable,” Barbara said. “His older brother, Lou, my father, was adventurous, a gambler, an artist in his way, and definitely not a family man.”
At times, she envied her three cousins. She was the one who didn’t have “the most normal” childhood or the happiest one.
And yet.
“[W]hen we grew up—forgive me for saying this—my life was so much more interesting than theirs,” she said of her cousins from Asbury Park. “Not necessarily better, but much more interesting. And for better or worse, I came to value ‘interesting’ far more than ‘normal.’ ” She would choose interesting over normal, ambition over three marriages, an interview with a big newsmaker over a planned holiday with her daughter. She would choose power and prominence and fortune, the chance to be the robin redbreast at center stage rather than a chirper in the chorus.
For better or worse, she would decide to take the shiny paper over the plain, as she once put it, any day of the week. Just like her father.