My First Five Husbands Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PHOTO INSERT 1

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  PHOTO INSERT 2

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  ONE MORE THING

  PHOTO PERMISSIONS AND CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  To Mark

  Acknowledgments

  “I’d like to thank everyone who helped make this award possible.

  The rest of you will be in the book.”

  —RUE MCCLANAHAN, EMMY AWARDS, 1987

  This book is about my life and experiences as I lived them, and anyone who doesn’t like it can jolly well lump it. Others may have a different perception of events. I respect their right to render totally biased and self-serving commentary about their own lives, but only if sifted through long years and a few bourbons, dipped in forgiveness and wisdom, and salted with a sense of humor—because that’s what I’ve done. But a word of caution: Writing a book is one hell of a lot of work. Let me assure you, I couldn’t have done it without the love and support of the following people:

  My erudite and sweet-smelling sixth husband, Morrow Wilson, whose advice always stopped short of interference; my beloved inimitable son, Mark Bish, and indefatigable sister, Dr. Melinda McClanahan, both of whom patiently endured uncounted phone calls to help with names and dates (and in my sister’s case, repeated warnings: “Don’t you say anything bad about him!”), as did my staunch and dear friends Andrew Greenhut, who had memories I’d forgotten, and Marty Jacobs, Curator of the Theatre Collections of the Museum of the City of New York; my friend and assistant, Kathy Salomone, who not only helped type the manuscript, but without whom I’d still be trapped in Computer Dysfunction Hell; my pal, Ed Kaczmarek, who took phone calls at his home and office in Chicago to get me out of the Computer Dysfunction Hells that even Kathy couldn’t solve; my literary agent, Wendy Sherman, who shepherded me to Broadway Books; my editor at Broadway Books, Ann Campbell, who gently, firmly advised a better format while planning her wedding and never got the two confused; my memoir guru, Joni Rodgers, who, along with Ann, devised that better format, working hand-in-hand with me with unfailing enthusiasm; the design and production team at Broadway; all my friends who have been saying excitedly to me for over two years, “Oh, I can’t wait to read it!” And finally, Saint Dymphna, patroness of insanity.

  In a few instances, I’ve chosen, in spite of temptation, to refrain from using specific names and going into exquisite detail—not so much from fear of getting sued, although I might invite several lawsuits if I let it all hang out, but because, in spite of being a legal grown-up for some fifty-ummph years, like a good Southern girl, I respect my family elders, many of whom are still hale and hearty and possessed of clear eyesight. So some details have been altered, some events condensed, and some names changed to protect the innocent (me) and to discourage a few black-hearted scalawags.

  Prologue

  “If men can be categorized for their looks on a scale of 1 to 10, they can also be graded for their sexual prowess, A to F.”

  —MARGARET THATCHER

  I’m told the Esquimaux have a charming take on lovemaking. They call it “laughing together.” Working from that premise, we could refer to the Laughing Together Quotient, or the LTQ. You could have an LTQ from “snicker” to “guffaw” right up to “belly laugh.” But as I have yet to know an Esquimau under the walrus blankets, I’ll stick to the Lower 48, and using our more familiar reference, refer herein to certain gentlemen (and a couple of the other kind) in regard to their FQ—that is, of course, as you undoubtedly surmise, their Fun in Bed Quotient, or Fun Quotient, for short.

  As every woman knows, it’s possible for a man to have an FQ of A+ and an IQ of Zip. Ah, yes, we know him well—he falls into the Smoldering Handyman or Stanley Kowalski Category. Certainly right up there at the top of my All-Time Hits List. But generally, high IQs bestow upon their owners equally high FQs, since FQ is greatly enhanced by imagination and wit. Two of the best lovers I’ve known were psychoanalysts, both brilliant.

  Loony, but brilliant.

  And FQs of A+. Rare as a day in May? Let me tell you…which I shall. This book is about men I have known, in both the platonic and biblical senses. Some I knew only slightly, some quite well. Some I’ll love always, some I no longer like very much, and there are a few I’d like to strip naked, tie to a maypole, smear with sweet syrup near a beehive, then stand back and watch. I’ll describe a goodly number of these hot dudes—and duds—keeping the nicest man for last, because—if for nothing else—I’d like to leave you, dear reader, with a good taste in your mouth, and Hubbies #3 and #4 might make you want to rush to gargle. There were times I truly wondered, Lord, will I EVER get it right? Thank God I thrive on variety.

  “Tomorrow’s assignment: Bring in five scenes depicting five reasons to get married.”

  Barney Brown’s acting class, Perry-Mansfield Dance-Drama Camp, Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Summer of 1955. I was twenty-one, my partner a year younger.

  “There’s only one reason to get married, and that’s being in love,” I told my scene partner. “I guess some people get married for money, but”—I frowned—“would you really get married for money if you weren’t in love?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t. Should we put it down anyway?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Okay, we’ve got two reasons. What else?”

  “Okay,” he said. “See, maybe someone was run over by a car or something, and to keep from going to jail, he marries the girl he ran over.”

  “Hmm.” I considered that. “No, that’s not logical. Gosh, this is hard. Okay, look, let’s say you’re getting married, okay? So why are you marrying this girl?”

  “Well,” he squirmed, “I never really thought about getting married for any reason.”

  My Lord, he’s gay.

  “Oh, brother,” I sighed. “We’re gonna flop.”

  So we brought in two reasons: marrying for love and for money. But I simply couldn’t imagine getting married without being in love, and up to that moment, my experience of love was…well, lovely! Pen is the first boy I remember being enamored of. I was five. We played house, imagining we were a married couple. In my mind, this meant “romance.” In his mind, it meant “mud pies.” (A dynamic that persists between many married couples.) My first really big heartthrob was Benny Frank Butler, from ages eight to fourteen. In junior high, Al Ringer and Johnny Brooks gave me fits of unrequited passion. And I liked my high school beau so much, I married him thirty-five years later. In college, there was dear Bill Bennett, and heck, I was still a virgin! So who’s the first man I ever slept with? That’s what everyone wants to hear. Who was first? What was it like? Let’s make a game of it: “Erotic Mystery Maze! Follow the Hidden Clues to the Virgin Encounter! Three free spins to get it right!”

  As I mad
e my way in the world, my worldly ideas of love evolved. Over the next twenty-nine years I lived out five marriages that afforded me plenty of reasons why people get married, including a raft of reasons not to. In the pages that follow, you’ll find my musings on my various attempts at the venerable institution of marriage. Each time, I believed the wedding would be the first day of a lifelong union. My suspicion that I’d possibly made a horrible mistake came later. Sometimes as late as—hmm…the honeymoon!

  I’m not very lucky with honeymoons, and some of them were even in lovely places. Or at least, decent. But all in all, I’d rather go to Hawaii with a girlfriend and, as I’m being balmed by the balmy breeze and mooned by the melon moon, sigh, Ah, if only I were here with a man in this romantic place!—instead of being out there in the moonlight with a man, thinking, Oh, no—another turd in the punch bowl. Getting past the honeymoon requires mature judgment in mate selection, as well as luck, proper planetary alignment, and most important, burying an Irish potato in the dark of a new moon. I kept getting distracted by good looks and sex appeal (and occasionally desperation) and forgetting to bury that damned potato.

  Now, every once in a while, as I float through the living room of my cozy Manhattan apartment, I run into my husband sitting there with one leg akimbo.

  “I think you’re marvelous,” I sigh.

  He looks up from his book, and says, “Why?”

  But I don’t have a list of reasons. There are too many. Or maybe I was right in the first place; there is only one reason. And it ain’t mud pies.

  “You will do foolish things,” said the great writer Colette, “but do them with enthusiasm!” And that, my darlings, I have done!

  So put your feet up, relax, and let me take you on one woman’s journey through the beguiling, bewildering wilderness of romantic encounters, replete with puppy love, Latin love, smoldering lust, star-dust, obsession, high comedy, high camp, and all manner of peccadilloes and misadventures. A rollicking, madcap ride through the wide-open countryside of love.

  Just watch out for land mines.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “How the hell did we end up here?”

  —CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

  My mother, Rheua-Nell, was five feet and one half inch tall. She always included that one half inch. (Hey, if you got it, flaunt it.) Bright and talented in music and dance, she won a Charleston contest when she was sixteen. Had she been younger, I suspect, my grandfather, Pee-Paw, would’ve soundly whipped her with his razor strop. He raised his family in a strict Southern Baptist tradition; no dancing allowed. Shortly thereafter, still sixteen, she graduated valedictorian of her high school class and went off to Dallas to study cosmetology to become a beauty operator. Four years later, she was working in Mrs. Rose’s beauty parlor on Main Street in Healdton, Oklahoma, when she met my father, Bill, who had hurt his back in the construction trade and was managing a billiards parlor a few doors down.

  Six weeks later, they married. Ten months after that—February 21, 1934—I was born. The doctor nicknamed me “Frosty” because I had a full head of white-blond hair, but when Mother saw me, she burst into tears. I’d been taken with forceps after she labored (at home, of course) for thirty-some hours, so my head was elongated and blue and apparently quite alarming to behold. I soon rounded out and pinked up to her satisfaction, however. Mother thought I was adorable and took photos like they were going out of style.

  My Choctaw great-grandfather, Running Hawk, and Big Maw-Maw, holding my grandmother, Maw-Maw. We used to say chi-hullo-li, which means “I love you” in Choctaw.

  My maternal grandparents, Ed and Allie Medaris, whom we called Pee-Paw and Maw-Maw.

  Zebbin and Fannie McClanahan, my paternal grandparents. They say I have her Copeland eyes.

  When she was pregnant, Mother had been approached by Aunt Wenonah Sue, my father’s sister, begging to let her name the baby. Mother acquiesced, but only if she could name Wenonah’s firstborn, to which Wenonah agreed. Frankly, I wouldn’t let anyone name my firstborn. But my mother was a sweet and compliant young lady of twenty, Wenonah’s junior by a couple of years, and somewhat under the thrall of this enthusiastic and insistent sister-in-law. My father’s name was William Edwin. So when, in the fullness of time, I was born, Wenonah brought forth her marvelous name: Eddi-Rue, a little composite of both my parents’ names.

  Everyone just loved it. It was so cute! It had a hyphen.

  “Eddi-Rue,” my aunt Nonie has been heard to say, “I think you have one of the prettiest names in the family.”

  Then Wenonah Sue married a fine fellow named Earl and had a daughter whom Mother dubbed Earla Sue—no hyphen—who wisely dropped the “Earla” when she was fourteen. Because of the “Eddi”—which people always misspelled “Eddie” like a boy—I was sent a man’s handkerchief as a high school graduation gift from Daube’s Department Store, along with the other male graduates. I also received a draft notice, inviting me to come down for a physical exam. I’ve always thought maybe I should’ve gone for that physical. Some childhood friends still call me “Eddi.” People who knew me as a baby call me “Frosty.” My friend Lette called me “Baby Roo,” my friend Jim Whittle called me “Rutabaga,” Betty White calls me “Roozie,” and my friend Kathy Salomone calls me “Rue-Rue.” The staff at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center call me “Mrs. Wilson.” And my husband calls me “Darling.” I like them all. Each name brings forth its own era and memories.

  When I was in my late twenties, I bought eight used dining room chairs for a dollar each (yes, a dollar!) and set about removing the old varnish. As I applied the varnish remover, a vivid visual memory flashed into my mind: I was almost eight months old, sidestepping along the front of the sofa, holding on for balance, looking up over my left shoulder at my mother and Aunt Irene standing in the doorway making vocal sounds.

  “Iddle bongingferd da wondy,” said Mother.

  “Bid gerpa twack kelzenbluck,” replied Aunt Irene.

  “Ferndock bandy,” Mother replied. “Critzputh.” And they laughed.

  I realized they were exchanging thoughts with those sounds. Oh, I thought, I’m brand new here. Soon, they’ll teach me to do that, too. What an exciting thought!

  Smells are strong memory-triggers. Mother and Irene must have been using varnish remover that day in 1934, and the odor of it in 1963 popped out this early memory, crystal clear. My next memory is of Christmas when I was ten months old: a circle of uncles and other adults winding up a little red rocket that chased me from one side of their circle to the other, everyone laughing. But I was truly terrified, running frantically from the noisy thing and wondering why they thought it was so funny.

  Mother gave me my first perm when I was eleven months old, under one of those old stand-up octopus-armed permanent wave machines. Mother was movie-struck, you see. She kept the beauty shop stocked with current movie magazines, was nuts about Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and Shirley Temple, and wanted me to have a full head of bouncy sausage curls, just like Little Miss Broadway. And I never existed without a perm until I was well into my forties.

  “Why do you keep a perm in your hair?” my beautician asked me one day.

  “Can you exist without one?” I responded, utterly amazed.

  This revolutionary concept had never occurred to me. Wouldn’t my hair just flail about wildly? Like Albert Einstein’s? I gave it a try, and from that day to this, I’ve lived quite happily without a perm. And learned that I have a natural wave to boot.

  Aunt Irene, my mother’s seventeen-year-old sister, moved in to take care of me while Mother worked in the beauty parlor, but I wanted to be downstairs in the shop. It was lonely upstairs, and boring, and Irene was hot-tempered and brusque, while Mother was jolly fun. It’s hard to remember her without a smile. I was allowed to play in the shop from time to time, as long as I sat under the counters and didn’t ask too many questions. It was fun under the counters. Legs coming and going, chatter, things happening. To help keep me quiet, I was allowed to nurse my b
ottle until I was over three. It was bolstered with Eagle brand, a thick, sweet canned milk, because I’d been born a bit scrawny and, on doctor’s orders, Mother was trying to fatten me up. She used to send me up the street to the five-and-ten store to buy my own rubber nipples. I remember standing at the cash register getting change.

  Mother had also been taking me to the movies since I was a babe in arms, wearing PJs under my street clothes. One night as I sat in the row behind her, waiting for the picture to begin, I tapped on the back of her seat, saying, “Mama?”

  She turned and said, “Eddi-Rue, you’re too old now to call me ‘Mama.’ From now on, call me ‘Mother.’”

  Ooooh. I was so chagrined to be reprimanded in front of everyone, I wanted to crawl under my seat. I never called her Mama again. Mother and Bill expected me to behave like an adult, and I was dead set not to disappoint them. I never went through a rebellious period and was terribly stricken whenever I accidentally lost or broke something. They worked so hard for their money, and I knew this, though I don’t recall being at all aware of the Depression. Mother had plenty of customers, we went to the movies every time we turned around, I had a new doll every Christmas, a new birthday dress every year, plus a birthday party. However, I do remember pinto beans every night for supper; I never ate a supper without pinto beans until I went to college, where I was astonished to learn that you didn’t have to have them on the table. I’d assumed it was some sort of rule. On the rare nights Mother was too tired to cook a meal, we had corn bread crumbled in a glass of sweet milk, which I considered a big treat.

  But it was probably because of the Depression that my father had to go off to the oil fields to get construction work. He was called “Bill” by everyone, including me. (Just in case an old girlfriend showed up, he joked.) He left before I woke in the morning, came home long after I was asleep, and didn’t toss me around like my uncles did. He wasn’t a hugger. His mother, Fanny, was the only daughter in a family of four boys, forbidden to have a doll (her father even burned a corncob dolly her mother made her, the old buzzard) or to show physical affection. She, in turn, didn’t hug her four children. Still, she made me an adorable new outfit for every birthday and taught me to sew on her big treadle sewing machine. She was a loving, kind person—just not one for hugging. So my father never learned how, I guess.