Then Again. Diane Keaton
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determined they’d grow bigger.
A few years later, my best friend, Leslie Morgan, and I slunk through the hallways of Santa Ana High School like dark smudges in a universe of red, white, and blue. Unrecognizable in our white lipstick and black eyeliner, we tried to be pretty by renouncing normalcy. At the beginning of every month, we’d sneak over to Sav-on drugstore in Honer Plaza to see if the new Vogue was out. We loved Penelope Tree; her bangs were so long they almost covered her face. I decided to cut bangs too—long ones. They hid my forehead, but they didn’t solve the problem. The problem was my fixation with pretty. Mom gave no guidance with regard to my face. Sometimes I thought she didn’t have much hope for me in that department. But she had plenty of ideas about style. In fact, it might have been better if she had given me a little less freedom of expression in the fashion department.
But, hey, I thought we were a pretty good team. By the time I was fifteen, I designed most of my clothes and Mom sewed them. When I say designed, I mean I played around with the patterns we bought by changing details. The basic shape remained the same. Mom was a big proponent of the “walk-away” dress. It was so easy to make you could “start it after breakfast … walk away in it for lunch!” Fabric was essential. Everything available at Woolworth’s or Penney’s was entirely too predictable. Mom and I branched out and hit the Goodwill thrift shop, where we found a treasure trove of search-and-rescue items waiting for us in polka dots, stripes, and English plaids. We cut up men’s old tweed jackets and made patchwork miniskirts. Of course, Mom carried the heavy load. I had no interest in learning how to sew. God, no. Results were all that mattered—quick results and The Look.
I was unaware that Mother had questions about my “appearance” until I found something she wrote in 1962. Under the heading “Diane,” she observed: Diane’s hair is ratted at least four inches high. Her skirts are three inches above the knees, and while we all kid her to death on this, the total effect is pretty cute, I guess. To us here at home, she looks her best at night, when all the rats are out and she is in her comfortable pants with no eye makeup. She is quite a girl, in this junior year of high school. She has an independent way about her. She shows a set of values she has figured out for herself. She is strong on this point. A sure way to lose an argument with Diane is to tell her what she should do or think. She has to decide for herself.
And I did, thanks to her. My all-time favorite outfit was this little getup we put together for my high school graduation ceremony in 1963. After I redesigned the Simplicity pattern of a minidress Mom bought at Newberry’s, where I worked in the ladies’ bra department, we hit the Goodwill and found the perfect black-and-white polka-dot fabric from an old shirtwaist dress with a wide skirt. Then we splurged and bought an expensive pair of white straw high heels with pointed toes and black pom-poms. I found some black seamed stockings to go with it so I could look more mod. I even had a theory: If I hid my face, if I framed it to highlight my best feature, which I figured was my smile, I would get more attention. But then something happened that changed my life. I was browsing around our other favorite store, the Salvation Army thrift shop, when I found the answer: a hat, a man’s old bowler hat. I put it on my head—and that was it!
For the first time, Mom put her foot down. “I love it, but not for this occasion, Diane.”
When I showed up at graduation, I still achieved the effect I wanted. My smile stood out, and I got a lot of attention. It didn’t matter if I looked ridiculous; I beat the odds of being plain old average Diane. And Mom was right about the hat. Better to save it for later.
2
JACK
Not in the Cards
When I was little, I didn’t get my dad. He did nothing but remind me to turn off the lights, shut the refrigerator door, and eat what Mom cooked or I’d have to sleep in the garage. He wore the same gray jacket and striped tie to the Department of Water and Power every day. He said, “Drink all your milk; it gives you strong bones,” “Be sure to say please and thank you,” and, always, “Ask questions.” Why was he like that? Over and over I would ask Mom. Over and over she would say he was busy and had a lot of important things on his mind. He had things on his mind? What were they? She didn’t help me understand my father at all. The only clue lived a few miles away, but everyone was afraid of her, and I was no exception.
It wasn’t Grammy Keaton; oh, no, it was all five feet ten inches of stern-faced brown-haired Grammy Hall. She used to say she didn’t cotton to dressing up in a lot of gay colors, ’cause she “occupied a lot of space” and wanted everybody to see her “plain.” Grammy Keaton said the reason Dad had rickets was because Mrs. Hall hadn’t fed him the kind of nutritious food that would have made his legs straight; instead, they bowed backward, like a sailboat. She wasn’t wrong.
Even though Grammy Hall lived close to Grammy Keaton, they did not become friends. It was easy to see why. Grammy Hall’s face was lined with skepticism, while Grammy Keaton’s was filled with faith. Every Sunday, Grammy Keaton baked angel food cake with seven-minute frosting, served with homemade ice cream and lemonade in tall glasses. Once a year, Grammy Hall made devil’s food cake from a mix. Grammy Keaton was a God-fearing Christian woman. Grammy Hall was a devout Catholic. Grammy Keaton believed in heaven. Grammy Hall thought it was “a lot of bunk.”
After her husband disappeared in the 1920s, Mary Alice Hall drove from Nebraska to California with her son, Jack, and her sister Sadie beside her. It couldn’t have been easy being a boy without a father in the twenties. Mary Hall offered no explanations. There’s still some question whether Dad was a bastard or if in fact, as Mary claimed, Chester had died before Jack was born. Whatever the truth, Mary, a tough, no-nonsense Irish Catholic, picked herself up and waved goodbye to her eleven brothers and sisters, her mother, her father, and the broken-down family farm in Nebraska. She didn’t look back.
Nobody knows where she got the money to buy a two-unit Spanish duplex just a few blocks north of the new 110 freeway, but she did. Mary leased out the bottom floor to her sister Sadie, Sadie’s husband, Eddie, and their change-of-life son, Cousin Charlie. Mary shared the second floor with George Olsen, who rented the bedroom at the end of the hallway, next to Dad’s room. It wasn’t clear what George meant to Mary. No one asked. Grammy did not invite questions about her personal life.
Mary lived at 5223 Range View Avenue until she died in the dining room, the same dining room Mom and Dad dragged us to every Thanksgiving. One year I snuck down the hall, went into her bedroom, carefully opened her chest of drawers, and found a bunch of quarters shoved into several pairs of old socks. I was so excited I even told Cousin Charlie, who couldn’t be bothered with me since we’d had a fight over his stupid Catholic God. He said I was an idiot and a bunch of quarters was chicken feed compared to the sacks of hundred-dollar bills he’d found stuffed under the floor-boards in her coat closet.
Grammy was more man than woman, and looked it. She loved to describe herself as a self-made businesswoman who took in boarders. “What interests me is the world of commerce. I like to make a lot of money and make it quick.” In fact, Mary Alice Hall was a loan shark, who shamelessly went around the neighborhood collecting currency at high interest rates from people who were down on their luck. She had one goal in life: the acquisition and retention of cash, lots of it. This “make no bones about it” attitude applied to her choice of a newspaper as well. She proudly subscribed to the Herald Express, “a paper aimed at the underside of the community, the kind of people who wanted to know about murders and UFOs and sports results.” She wasn’t highfalutin. She understood people who disappeared into the thin air of a lousy marriage, a failed bank account, or a petty crime. Why wouldn’t she want to read about the plethora of commonplace sad stories that made up most people’s lives?
Mary’s idea of motherhood was simple: If Jack misbehaved, she locked him in the closet and walked away. Nothing more. Nothing less. When her good-for-nothing card-shark brother Emmet was down on his luck, she made little Jackie share a room with him. She must have figured, what the hell, she could use the extra money. According to Dad, Emmet was immoral. Right before Dad enrolled at USC, Emmet cheated him out of a hundred dollars. They didn’t speak for two years, even though they continued to share the same room. Dad hated Emmet, but their forced alliance produced