Before Dinah went off to Lazy J Ranch in Malibu, she pulled me into the bathroom at the Red House.
“Mommy,” she sniffled, “when I am going to get breasts?”
“Oh my baby!” I hugged my thirteen-year-old little girl to my body and we swayed back and forth. “Soon, soon.”
She kissed me and held me and clung to me. Dinah was my grail, my constant; nothing and no one could get between us. Dinah and my need to support her financially, morally, viscerally, and my rage at those who had taken twelve working, acting years from my life, were what motivated me.
Summer ended and Dinah, my lovely child, was back from Lazy J Ranch camp, which had nourished her lifelong love of horses—and her breasts. She returned from camp with two big round mounds and a preference for the company of studly Malibu boys and young men, instead of her mother. Also a predilection for drugs, and a full-blown case of adolescent rebellion that would continue for fifteen years. Yes, my Dinah morphed into a Malibu teen. It hit me hard. When other parents had said, “Wait till adolescence, just wait,” I felt sorry for them. That could never happen to me. Not to my Dinah.
The example I had set for her with Joey was hardly exemplary. In 37A, the Colony house, we were given our first grass by Bobby Walker and his wife, Elly. Bobby was Jennifer Jones’s son with Robert Walker. The bodies were piled high at their beach house. Everyone ate hash brownies. The dogs ate hash brownies—and dropped where they stood. It was mellow. They were beautiful and fun. The first time we smoked grass we lay on the couches in the living room of the Pool House. It was late afternoon. Dinah was eight and sleeping over at her friend Katie’s house. Joey said, “Give me a word to spell.” “Criminal.” He spelled it. “Exemplary.” He spelled it. “Fortitude.” He spelled it, and on into the evening. The thing was, Joey was and is dyslexic. He could not spell. Cannot spell. His brain does not compute letters. Which is fine. Except that afternoon, for two or three hours, something in his brain computed. His brain took a leap of faith and something miraculous—for Joey it certainly was—something really happened. Grass was beneficial. Not being a person who does things by halves, Joey threw himself wholeheartedly into weed, then as it became an ordinary party drug, cocaine, and to wash it all down, why not a little brandy? So it was not exactly a surprise that Dinah followed her parents’ cool example.
How often had she huddled against me as a child in the backseat of the Bentley, crying, as Joey was stopped on the Pacific Coast Highway by the Malibu cops for speeding or driving erratically? They knew the car by sight; they’d given Joey so many tickets that our Malibu judge would say, “C’mon, Joey—what did they get you on now?” Good-naturedly. So no, we were not exactly a shining example.
Those were mostly scary nights for me. I did my widow’s walk up and down the length of the Red House, angry, furious at Joey for not calling, fearing him dead at the bottom of Benedict Canyon. And of course the Bentley, maroon on top, black on the bottom, and in the old square classic style, was a moving target for the cops on the Pacific Coast Highway. “Let’s get Joey!” And true to form, he would jump out of the car stomping and waving his arms like a crazy man refusing to say the alphabet, which with his dyslexia he couldn’t say right. Once he told them he had diabetes. They took him to the Malibu hospital and he was almost given a shot of insulin. That night he called and said, “I’m in jail for the night.”
I said, “Thank God,” and I slept soundly.
• • •
Dinah was a suntanned, bikini-clad, post-hippie Malibu girl. She and her girlfriends all had horses. They rode together on the beach. They rode their horses across the Pacific Coast Highway and up to the village market, where they tied them to hitching posts and hung out. They were all having sex with their high school boyfriends. They partied.
“What’s wrong with that, Mom? Huh, Mom?”
We had awful, screaming, crying fights all the time. Between the two of us. Between Dinah and Joey.
Joey and I were equally inept trying to cope with Dinah’s adolescence. We were all three at war—she rebelling in totally scary ways, we shocked and angry. The experience turned Joey into Eddie Carbone, the Italian longshoreman at the center of Arthur Miller’s play A View from the Bridge. Carbone is so protective of his orphaned niece that his hackles are raised when any other man is attracted to her physically. Joey had this innate Italian gorilla thing with all the boys that Dinah brought around who were hot for her. Joey could barely control himself from fighting them as they sat at the dining room table.
“Why’s your neck so thick?” he’d ask, watching as the boy would turn red. “No, tell me, why is your neck so thick?”
In all honesty, he had the same possessiveness with all his women: his twin sister, Phyllis, me, then Dinah. I remember sitting around the table on 6th and Lincoln, the house in Wilmington where they were raised. Rachel, their mother, ran an open house—friends dropped in and hung out at any hour, any day. Phyllis’s date was there. Joey couldn’t sit still. His hackles rose like the hair on a wolf’s back.
“Where do you live? What do you do?”
Like the head of the house interrogating a street bum who’s turned up to ask for Phyllis’s hand. He was so over-the-top that it would make me laugh, and everybody else would yell at him. You know those dogs with the low growls at whom everyone shouts, “Stop it!” But Joey’s low growl didn’t stop. We three women were his possessions.
Dinah had moved out of her bedroom to the attic opposite the front door. All of a sudden skuzzy, revolting men, not boys, were driving up to the Red House bringing drugs to Dinah’s attic. I screamed them off the property, chasing them down the hill like a banshee, like the Wicked Witch of the West’s monkeys. “No, Dinah!” I screamed.
“They’re my friends!” she screamed back.
“Then leave!” I threatened. “Leave!”
And she did. She moved in with her high school boyfriend Richard’s mother, who worked in the principal’s office. Richard was a dear boy who spoke with the pure, slow, child-of-Malibu accent. His mother was a lovely down-to-earth woman. It was such a relief. Dinah and I were killing each other, inflicting real wounds. She was trying to rebirth herself, to break away from a powerful, needy, panicked mother. I was trying to pack her back inside me.
One night, while Joey and I were having dinner at Frank Pierson’s house, I got a phone call. Our Mercedes had been in a head-on collision. Dinah and two passengers were in the Malibu Medical Center. We left Frank’s house and drove down the Pacific Coast Highway. As we neared the medical center, I recognized our Mercedes as it passed by, dangling above the tow truck. It had been totaled. I don’t need to describe my panic. We were very lucky. Dinah had a broken wrist and ankle, so broken she had to be homeschooled for the rest of the year by a teacher sent out by the school system, but she was alive. The face of the boy who’d been sitting in the passenger seat was a bloody pulp, full of glass. I don’t remember whether it was her sophomore or senior year in high school. So many of the children Dinah grew up with lost their lives in car accidents on the Pacific Coast Highway. Dinah was stoned, of course. If she hadn’t been driving our Mercedes, we would have lost her. The Mercedes was a tank.
Because of my migraines, I rarely did more than a token toot or drag of grass, and I never drank. But for some reason, I totally accepted that Joey was just one of the boys. And he was. There were guys that did less than he did and there were guys and girls that did much, much more.
Every A-list actor and director hung out at Brenda Vaccaro and Michael Douglas’s house in Benedict Canyon. You got stoned just opening the door. But great work was still being done. This was the seventies, the decade the best, the freshest, and the most daring and original American movies were ever made. Major studios took a backseat as entrepreneurial filmmakers, writers, and directors made history, and lots of money, too. And I was coming into my own.