HEART OF STONE
I was born into a family of WASPs to an English mother who firmly believed in the merits of a stiff upper, well, everything. For my mother, emotions were not comfortable. Excessive celebration was impolite. Crying was flat out forbidden. My mother believed that crying meant you felt sorry for yourself, and that feeling sorry for yourself was unconscionable. My heart, I learned at a young age, was never a safe place to linger.
Shortly before she died, my mother told me a story that brilliantly illuminated the effects of her child-rearing philosophy: When I was five years old, she and my father and I were walking through an airport. A couple came up to us. This was not unusual. People were always coming up to my father. These two, however, happened to be our neighbors—though we had never met them. They lived behind our house on the top of a small hill. We could not see their house, nor they ours, which was how folks liked it in our wealthy Holmby Hills enclave.
After exchanging a few niceties with my parents, they looked down at me and said, “Oh! You must be The Screamer!”
At first both of my parents looked confused, but then the penny dropped for my mother. She was mortified. My bedroom was at the back of our 9,000-square-foot house, and when she or my nannies put me to bed, I began to cry the moment they left.
As so many parents of that era had, my mother took much of her parenting advice from Dr. Benjamin Spock, who believed that if a mother continually gives in to the cries of her infant, the infant will “realize after a while that he has his poor, tired mother under his thumb and he will become increasingly disagreeable and tyrannical in demanding this service.” So both my mother and the nannies left me to bawl and eventually scream myself to sleep. They got far enough away not to hear me, but apparently our poor neighbors did not. I imagine that their cocktail hours were rather unpleasantly accompanied by my caterwauling, which is how I became The Screamer.
In retrospect, what I find most interesting is that my mother shared the story with me at all. Did she regret her decision, or was it just a humorous tale to her? Probably a bit of both. For me, it was a clue into my early emotional life.
In infancy, I learned that crying was never going to elicit the response for which I hoped: being held, being loved, not being abandoned. The few times I was tempted to cry when I got older, my mother explained why crying made me seem spoiled, self-centered, and ungrateful. I didn’t want to be that kid. I stopped crying before I turned four. It was easier to close down my heart and not feel anything than to feel afraid and never find any human consolation.
I kept up my stoic front even when my father fell in love with his Theatre of Blood co-star, the British-Australian actress Coral Browne and I found out that my parents were getting divorced.
When my mother discovered that my father had been having an affair with Coral, she was devastated. But she was willing to do whatever it took to keep their marriage together. It was my father who asked for the divorce. That flattened my poor mother. They had been married for twenty-three years. They were more than husband and wife, they were creative partners. She later said to me, “We had always been on the same team. That’s what broke my heart.”
Nonetheless, when Ralph Edwards called my mom a few weeks after she heard the news to ask for her help in his This Is Your Life tribute to my father, she had readily agreed. My father was the love of my mother’s life. She always was and always remained his greatest advocate. So she agreed to help Edwards, and even appeared on the show herself.
My mother loathed being in front of a camera, and she hated the sound of her own voice. Yet she sat there next to the man who had been her husband of twenty-three years, and when Edwards quizzed her about who was the better cook, she replied, “Well we each have our specialties, so together we add up to be one pretty good cook.” Then, when Edwards brought me and my brother and sister-in-law out to hug my dad, she said, “We’re all very proud to be Vincent Price’s family.” I still can hardly bear to watch that video of her trying not to let anyone see her total terror of what lay ahead.
A week later, on the day before Thanksgiving, my mother sat me down to tell me that she and my father would no longer be married. I don’t remember feeling anything when she told me. But I do remember exactly what I said to her. I reached over and held her hand and said, “Don’t worry, Mom. We’ll be fine. He’s never home anyway. It won’t be that different.” In my simplistic childhood logic, I figured everything would be the same as it had always been—we’d just see less of my dad than we already did. I knew that from then on my job was to make sure that my mother would be okay. The effect my dad’s departure would have on my own life was something I never let myself feel.
In the summer between sixth and seventh grade, my mother moved us from our Beverly Hills mansion to a small apartment on the other side of Los Angeles County. I went from attending the same school with the same kids for the past nine years and having unconventional, often absent, but otherwise traditionally married parents—to being the new kid in school, living with a woman having a nervous breakdown who was so ashamed of her divorce that she asked me never to tell anyone who my father was. She was terrified and sick, her fear so palpable that it filled the dark and depressing rooms of our shag-carpeted popcorn-ceilinged new apartment. Yet I never saw her cry. Every day she got out of bed and “got on with it,” determined to do whatever it took to get over the loss of the person who had been her love, her husband, her partner, and her teammate.
I was eleven years old when I entered seventh grade that fall. Although I had always been the youngest girl in my class, I had never felt much different than the other kids. Now the other girls felt practically like grownups. I didn’t enter puberty until I was almost fifteen, so all through junior high, when I was surrounded by weepy emotional girls who seemed to cry at the drop of a hat, I had no idea what all the hormonal fuss was about.
In fact, as time wore on, I came to be regarded as the weirdo who never cried. Everyone noticed. It became a thing. We were a particularly close class, even more so after we all spent three weeks in the spring of 1976 piled into the back of five station wagons traveling from Boston to Virginia on a Bicentennial Tour. Months before our ninth-grade graduation, everyone started talking about how sad it was going to be to have to say goodbye to one another. Even the boys agreed. For me, it just felt like another door was closing, so I needed to plan for the next one opening: high school.
Those girls weren’t about to let me off the hook. “Of course you’ll cry at graduation,” they told me. Soon they had started a betting pool about whether or not I would shed tears in June. I could have told them not to waste their money. I couldn’t even imagine what would make them want to cry. Of course, I never shed a tear. Not when I graduated from ninth grade, not when my mother sent me to Germany on my own for thirteen months, not when I left for college, not when I found myself temporarily paralyzed with whiplash after a car accident during my sophomore year, not when I got dumped for the first time.
I saw my heart of stone as the rock that got me through everything that had ever felt too hard to handle.