My First Five Husbands Page 3

  At the start of the seventh grade, my friend Don Knight was at my house one afternoon, and I revealed my long-held crush on Ben. Don jumped on his bike and bounded away, to return twenty minutes later with Ben in tow. Luckily, Ben was also smitten with me. Tall, with an understated, dry wit, Ben took me for rides on his horse, walking the stolid mare along with me sitting close behind him, my hands on his waist. Joy sublime? You better believe it.

  One evening, Ben and I were sitting in Mother’s Chevy in the front yard and he said, “Eddi-Rue, remember I told you I’d kiss you when you least expected it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, do you expect it now?”

  The outcome lay squarely in my lap. I took a breath and innocently said, “No.”

  And…oh, Lord…he kissed me.

  That piece of acting ranks right up there with winning the Emmy.

  After serving in the Army and dancing in ballet choruses in New York City, a certain Newcomb Rice returned to his hometown of Durant with his Scottish wife, Kitty, to settle down, have children, and establish the Oklahoma Dancing Academy. He was an excellent teacher, schooled in the Russian ballet system. Mother enrolled me in his classes in the fall of 1946, and I was enchanted from the get-go. Every Saturday morning, I walked up North Fifth Street to Southeastern College for a glorious hour of ballet instruction on the basketball court. (Basketball and ballet became forever entwined for me.) After a year, we were moved up to pink toe shoes. I found the technique difficult but the soul of dancing natural. Newcomb used to say we were “Pygmalion and Galatea,” like the Greek legend about a statue brought to life by her mentor.

  All through the seventh and eighth grades, we had wonderful parties at my house. We danced—and I mean to tell you, we danced! Mother had taught Melinda and me to jitterbug, Charleston, “sugar,” foxtrot, and waltz, and many of the boys were good dancers. (Sadly, Ben was not among them, but maybe that would have made him too perfect.) We played Spin the Bottle and Post Office and other kissing games. In Go Fish, a girl was blindfolded and all the boys lined up and walked around her. Whomever was in front of her when she said, “Stop!”—well, she had to walk around the block with him.

  Holding hands.

  But who wants to walk around the block holding hands with some twerp? Ben and I worked out secret signals, a carefully timed sneeze, a little cough. He and I shared a sense of humor and a special romantic rapport. Moonlit Oklahoma nights, balmy or brisk, holding hands with Ben—sheer heaven! We went steady for two years, ages twelve to fourteen, with only one week off when we agreed to trade partners for a week with another steady couple, Tawana Lou Clark and Carol Roberts. Both Tawana Lou and Carol were awfully good-looking, but I didn’t really have much to say to Carol, so when the week was up, Ben and I were both eager to change back. (Hey, maybe if married couples could take a week off and try another flavor…but then again, maybe not. It didn’t work wonders with me and Husband #2.)

  What a wonderful time junior high school was! Hayrides out at Joe Walter Colclazier’s house, playing Kick the Can and Red Rover at my house after school, getting Miss McKinney back for our seventh-and eighth-grade homeroom teacher. All those shows she put on—even Ben joined the chorus. And—can you believe it?—I was elected cheerleader in the eighth grade, along with Tawana Lou Clark, who had the cutest figure in junior high. I was floored. I didn’t think of myself as the cheerleading type. Of course, I was. A flat-chested cheerleading type.

  But casting a shadow over those happy years was that deep, underlying panic I felt, along with the knowledge that we would be moving the summer after eighth grade. When Bill got back from the war, instead of settling in Durant or Houston, he went to Ardmore, Oklahoma, and hooked up with Mr. Leonard Hurst as Hurst and McClanahan, General Contractors, buying five acres north of town on which to start building our house, which he designed himself. Years later, I asked him why he chose to move us to Ardmore instead of back to Houston, which had obvious professional and cultural advantages, and he said, “Oh, honey, your mother’s hay fever was so awful in Houston. I had to find a place where she’d be more comfortable.”

  He’d given up advancement in Houston so Mother would be more comfortable? Mother has always maintained that Bill had gotten a better offer from Mr. Hurst. Who knows what really happened? I do understand, however, knowing my father, why he chose to buy land outside town and build his own unique house, instead of competing with the Ardmore millionaires. Our house was truly one of a kind, not as expensive as the millionaires’ swanky digs but ahead of them in many other ways. My father wasn’t rich, but he more than made up for it in talent and ingenuity, a trait that runs in our family. (Cough, cough.)

  We drove over every few weeks to see the house as it was a-building, practically by Bill’s labors alone, assisted by his wonderful foreman, Lee. (Many’s the time I heard Bill say, “Lee is the best Negra man I’ve ever met.”) Walking over the floors of the house with more and more framework up was exciting. I didn’t want to move away from my friends in Durant, but I was bursting with pride at what Bill was creating—a large, modern house unlike anything in Ardmore. Two stories, flat-roofed, with a door opening out onto the lower roof and a ladder (which we weren’t supposed to climb, but did) to the top roof. There was an intercom system, a stairway with vertical silver poles instead of a regular banister, a secret panel in the fireplace where he kept a special bottle of booze. The second floor was one large rumpus room with a real soda fountain, big round mirrors on the ceiling, and a tiled floor designed like a shuffleboard. Later, he bought a used jukebox—a real one that played 78 records. Wow, huh?

  It took until June of 1948 to get four rooms more or less finished and insulated: Bill and Mother’s bedroom, the kitchen, the breakfast nook, and one bathroom. Melinda and I slept in the breakfast nook, barely big enough to hold a double bed. By fall, Bill had finished our bedroom and the hallway. He built in all the beds, with headboards balanced to swing forward so private things could be stored behind them. Over the years, he was always adding new rooms, changing the interior, building, building, building. We ended up with four bathrooms. Mother’s had an artfully designed mosaic floor, which Bill hand-laid himself. All this while building dozens of houses and public buildings in town.

  Sketch made of me in Greenwich Village, 1949. I didn’t like it then. Love it now.

  Our house was situated “thirteen telephone poles past the standpipe north of town,” as I used to instruct my high school dates, on a five-acre meadowland that my dad worked on incessantly, planting trees and flowers and raising large vegetable gardens of organic, composted, gorgeous produce. I spent my high school years exploring the wide meadow and the woods beyond, finding fossils and bleached-white tortoise shells, looking at the sky, gazing always northeast, dreaming of going to New York to make it big in show business.

  The summer of 1949, Bill had driven us all to New York City for a week’s vacation. On the way, we stopped at Four Corners, Illinois, to drop Grandmother Fannie at Wenonah and Earl’s house, pulling in around eleven that night. The strangest feeling came over me as I got out of the car. I felt encased in an impenetrable glass cylinder. My cousin Sue and her friend were talking a blue streak, but I felt removed, isolated. It lasted until I went to sleep and was very scary. A most alarming state to be in. When we arrived in New York, however, we left our car in New Jersey and took a subway to Manhattan, and as I emerged from underground onto Forty-second Street, I felt with enormous joy and clarity: This is home!

  We saw Joe DiMaggio hit a homer in a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium, climbed the Statue of Liberty, looked down from the top of the Empire State Building, ate at the Automat, walked through Greenwich Village (I still have the sketch of me made by a sidewalk artist). And then—oh, the pièce de résistance—we went to see Ray Bolger in a matinee of Where’s Charley? on Broadway! I’d grown up loving the movies, knowing since sixth grade that performing was in my blood, but there in that balcony on Broadway, soaking up every second, I k
new, “I have to do this. And I have to do it here—in New York.” In Four Corners, I’d been shut off from the outside world. In Manhattan, I was part of it. This was my world, no bout a-doubt it!

  I’ve felt that way about New York ever since.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “It’s a shame that youth is wasted on the young.”

  —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

  I sang second soprano in the chorus at Ardmore High, led by Mr. Elmo Pankratz, who told us that when he had knee surgery he brought home a bone fragment with some meat on it, which he fried up and ate. Said it tasted like chicken. Eccentrics are a rich natural resource below the Mason-Dixon line. Colorful idioms grow like kudzu. If you’re not tighter than Dick’s hatband, you’re poor as Job’s turkey. If you’re not traipsing through town like Cox’s army, you’re awkward as a pig on ice, or so bucktoothed, you could eat corn through a picket fence. According to conventional Southern wisdom, a cow can be led up stairs but not down, and if you make your bed, you “lay” in it. Growing up with the eccentricities of Southerners prepared me for the eccentricities of theatre folk. The word “culture” means something very different down Oklahoma way.

  God love my mother! She went out of her way to keep her country chicks informed in the arts. She joined a series presenting musical artists three times a winter (whee!) in Denton, Texas, and drove me sixty miles to Durant every Saturday morning to continue my ballet lessons. All through high school, I consumed dance magazines and biographies of Pavlova and Nijinsky, and my copy of The Marx Brothers was fingered to shreds.

  Ardmore was very different from Durant. Uppity, cliquish. I was scared to death of those highfalutin kids, suffering the pangs of hell being outside the popular crowd. After six months, when my fifteenth birthday rolled around at the end of February, I summoned all my courage and told Mother, “I want to invite everyone to a picnic at Devil’s Den.”

  I delivered handwritten invitations, and, to my astonishment, everyone accepted! Devil’s Den is a great geological upheaval thirty miles east of Ardmore near Tishomingo. We piled into parents’ cars and jammed into the back of Bill’s pickup under a tarp, and the drizzly February day was a roaring success. I was accepted, one of the gang. They still thought I was a little offbeat, a bit of an outsider; I was the only ballet dancer for miles, and since our house was two miles north of town, I couldn’t go for ice cream after school or drop in to kids’ houses. Living in the country had its advantages, however. My classmates loved coming out to parties, especially slumber parties when we girls slept on the roof under the dazzling Oklahoma night skies. A friend gave me an astronomy book, and I learned to identify many constellations. I still have it, but the night sky over Manhattan does not easily reveal Orion and the Big Dipper.

  Most of the gang were A students, ambitious and competitive. Some were funny. Several were kids of local millionaires. Ardmore’s exclusive section was rampant with ranchers, oil moguls, old money. But most of the kids were from working middle-class families like mine. Carol Ann Bristow was pretty, petite, peppy, and made her own clothes. Gwynne Hann was beautiful, brainy, and a talented artist. Kenna Hudson’s father was seriously insane, and Kenna was a bit odd herself, but in an endearing way, one of the few kids besides me who didn’t cheat on tests in algebra II. Hilarious Lynn Pebbles kept us in stitches. I had a crush on basketball stars Al Ringer and Johnny Brooks, but neither gave me the time of day, so I was part of a terrific bunch but didn’t get asked out by anyone interesting.

  Then one day before class, our teacher said, “Give us a song, Sheridan.”

  Reluctantly, Sheridan Kinkade got to his feet and self-consciously started to sing.

  “Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes the pipes are calling…”

  Sheridan was a gorgeous thing with curly brown hair, a Botticelli angel face, and a lovely tenor voice, but he was terribly awkward socially. His father had been killed, leaving his mom and a gaggle of little ones in poverty. By the end of the haunting Irish melody, I was titillated by this strange creature. I let him take me to a Sea Scout cookout, at which he whipped up a pot of mulligan stew. Standing on my front stoop later, he offered a perfunctory goodnight, but I decided, “It’s about time this guy started kissing.” So I stepped up and kissed him, and he fled to his car.

  Tom Keel, on the other hand, blew into the tenth grade at Ardmore High and was “in” right away, easy as pie. Keel rode a motorbike, wore a brown leather bomber jacket, smoked cigarettes—oh, I mean to tell you. A spunky stack of muscular libido; outgoing, handsome—yummy! But I was far too bashful to let on. Until one fateful night in October. At a home football game. Oh, autumn in Oklahoma! Small Southern towns are all about football. The crowds in the stands, the glare of the lights, the night air so fresh, so alive with promise! Well, by halftime no promises had come true, so I was headed home. As I left, Keel sauntered by.

  “Hi!” Huge grin, pretty brown hair, laughing eyes. He radiated energy. “Leaving early?”

  “Yep, that I am,” I said, strolling backward, looking at him.

  “Why don’t you stay?”

  “Aw, no, I better go. It’s dangerous around here. You’re too cute!” I laughed and walked away. That statement had taken all my courage. I’d gone about eight steps when I heard, “Hey, Eddi-Rue!” I turned to see Keel standing in the middle of the dirt walk.

  “What you said before,” he asked, “did you mean that?”

  I took a breath and with a big smile said, “Every word.” Then I turned and walked away.

  “I just want you to know one thing, Eddi-Rue, I’m not a sex fiend.”

  “A sex fiend?”

  Our first date. On our way to a neighboring town for a football game. The bus was dark.

  “You don’t have to worry,” Keel told me. “I won’t take advantage of you.”

  I smiled to myself in the dark bus. Although I was only fifteen, I thought he was quaint. At the same time, I liked him for being quaint. And at the same time, I was pretty quaint myself, because I totally believed him, totally trusted him, and I guess the times must have been pretty quaint, because it turned out he totally meant it. We had a beautiful, sensual, off-and-on relationship for three years; he taught me a lot about the male sex, and I was still a virgin for years to come.

  Newcomb Rice was now teaching in Ardmore twice a week, with me as class demonstrator. During my junior year, he moved to Borger, for God’s sake, so I taught all the Ardmore classes and got half the profits. The previous summer, I had attended a seminar for dance teachers in Dallas led by Adolph Bolm, one of the elderly stars of the Ballet Russe, whom I’d read about in Vaslav Nijinsky’s biography. Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballet Russe and Nijinsky’s lover, made Nijinsky the most famous dancer of the 1920s, eclipsing Mr. Bolm’s career. I was thrilled to meet and study with Bolm—second only to Nijinsky! Well-built, leathery-faced Mr. Bolm taught in casual clothes and sneakers, showing his superior technique, his beautiful movement. And he was God only knows how old. Ancient, I thought. He was probably pushing sixty.

  My beloved car, Dynamite.

  “What was it like to dance with Nijinsky?” I asked him, to which he shrugged and huffed, “Oh, Nijinsky—puh!”

  The next summer, Maria Tallchief was our teacher. In her prime, this prima ballerina had formed what would become the New York City Ballet with her husband, George Balanchine. She was half Osage, half Scottish, honored with the title Wa-Xthe-Thomba, meaning “Woman of Two Worlds.” (I know how that feels.)

  During my senior year, I became the proud owner of the Oklahoma Dancing Academy at Ardmore, teaching kids from age three to eighteen. That year, I choreographed an ambitious recital piece, set to Gershwin’s An American in Paris. Melinda danced the principal role: a country girl who comes to the fair, falls in love, has her heart broken by some glamour pusses, and does one hell of a lot of dancing. That same year, Gwynne Hann and I codirected The Red Feather Frontier Frolics, an evening of comedy, song, and dance, featuring our talented classmates. I was const
antly on the go, tooling around in “Dynamite,” my black 1930 Chevy, painted with the kids’ names and quotes like “Twenty-three Skidoo!” and other scintillating witticisms. My grades were down from straight As, but I really didn’t care anymore. I was doing what I loved, about to graduate and get the hell out of Ardmore. I began plotting my course and decided to major in drama at the University of Tulsa.

  At the end of my senior year, I was voted “Most Likely to Succeed.”

  Jacob’s Pillow was a prestigious summer dance camp outside Lee, Massachusetts. After graduation, Mother—God love her!—sent me there for six glorious weeks. It was quite primitive, bunking five or six girls in each unheated cabin. I told my cabin mates I was sixteen, not eighteen, figuring they’d undoubtedly be ahead of me in technique. They enthralled me with their accents from Europe and New York, pushy and brash. We had group showers in cold water, and a mess hall where I tasted (and hated) mutton stew for the first time. I trained and trained for six weeks in the woods, learning castanets and Spanish heel work and basic Indian dance with its side-to-side neck movement, rib undulations, and sixteen positions of the eye. Myra Craske, ballet mistress of the Metropolitan School of Ballet in Manhattan, taught ballet. After the first day of lessons, I could barely hobble but reported for ballet barre the next morning.

  The guru of Jacob’s Pillow, Ted Shawn of the famed Denishawn dance team, appeared to be in his sixties but was still performing his famous “Whirling Dervish” presentation. Mr. Shawn liked me. Coming from the wilds of Oklahoma, I was different, a little blond anomaly. Each week, we saw famous dancers who no longer appeared professionally. Mia Slavenska, who could hold an on-point arabesque for impossible eons. Breathtaking Marina Svetlova, Antony Tudor, Danilova—still on point at sixty! I was lucky to experience the early years of Jacob’s Pillow, the declining years of Ted Shawn, and I’m proud to be an alumna of that remarkable place.