Then Again

Then Again Diane Keaton Autobiography of the world-famous, and much-loved, actress.Best known for her role as Annie Hall in Woody Allen's film of the same name, for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress, Keaton has had a fascinating and highly successful career, with roles in ‘The Godfather’, ‘Reds’, ‘Father of the Bride’, ‘Something’s Gotta Give’ and many more. Personally Keaton has had relationships with Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, and Al Pacino – all of whom she remains in touch with today and who she will speak about in the book.Diane Keaton’s mother suffered from Alzheimer’s, and during the fifteen year long battle with this heartbreaking and debilitating disease, Diane began to reflect on both of their lives – their commonalities and their differences, the dreams they each realized and the dreams they deferred. Soon after her mother passed away last September, Diane started to write. The result is a memoir that is as touching, funny, and iconic as its author; an illumination of an ordinary girl’s journey to become an extraordinary woman – and the defining relationship that made it all possible. Diane Keaton’s Academy Award-winning career, both in front of and behind the camera, has made her a cinema legend and touchstone for a generation. Then Again Diane Keaton Dedication To my City of Women: Stephanie Heaton, Sandra Shadic, Lindsay Dwelley. Plus two men: David Ebershoff and Bill Clegg. They know why. Epigraph I always say my life is this family, and that’s the truth. Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall Contents Cover (#ulink_49cb23d2-94d9-5d7d-9080-c6b9bb352bce) Title Page Dedication Epigraph Part One 1 Dorothy 2 Jack Part Two 3 Manhattan 4 Big Year 5 The List 6 The Uphill Climb Versus the Downhill Slide 7 Di-Annie Hall 8 Something Big for a Small Family Part Three 9 Artistic 10 This Isn’t Sometimes, This is Always 11 Aftermath 12 Hello 13 The Gray Zone 14 Then Again Picture Section In Memory of Acknowledgments About the Author About the Type Copyright About the Publisher PART ONE 1 DOROTHY Extraordinary Dorothy’s commitment to writing began with a letter to Ensign Jack Hall, who was stationed with the Navy in Boston. It was just after the end of World War II. She was resting in the Queen of Angels Hospital after having given birth to me. All alone with a seven-pound, seven-ounce baby, she began a correspondence that would develop into a different kind of passion. At that time, Mom’s words were influenced by the few movies Beulah had allowed her to see, like 1938’s Broadway Melody. Harmless fluff pieces with dialogue out of the mouth of Judy Garland. Mom’s “I sure do love you more than anything in the world” and her use of “swell” and “No one could ever make me happier than you” mirrored the American worldview of life and its expectations during the 1940s. For Dorothy, more than anything, it was love. It was Jack. It was Diane, and it was swell. Mom wrote her first “Hello, Honey” letter when I was eight days old. Fifty years later I met my daughter, Dexter, and held her in my arms when she was eight days old. She was a cheerful baby. Contrary to my long-held belief, I was not a cheerful baby or even very cute. Mother’s concern about my appearance was defined by a bad photograph. Photography was already telling people how to see me. I didn’t pass Dad’s pretty-picture test, or Mom’s for that matter. Holed up in Grammy Keaton’s little bungalow on Monterey Road in Highland Park, Dorothy had no choice. Through her twenty-four-year-old eyes she wanted to believe I was extraordinary. I had to be. She passed this kind of hope on to a baby girl who got caught up in its force. Our six months alone together sealed the deal. Everything for Dorothy became heightened because she was exploding with the joy, pain, fear, and empathy of being a first-time mother. January 13, 1946 Dearest Jack, You should be just about getting into Boston, and I’ll bet you are pretty worn out from the trip. It’s hard to realize it could be so cold there when it’s so nice here. I’m sorry I acted the way I did when you left. I sure didn’t want to, but the thought of you leaving got me so upset. I tried awfully hard to stop crying, because I knew it wasn’t good for Diane. It’s 8:00 p.m., and your daughter’s asleep. She’s getting prettier every day and by the time you see her you may decide to have her for your “favorite dish.” That’s not fair, honey—I saw you first, so I should be first choice in your harem, don’t you think? Chiquita and Lois came over today. They agreed she was swell, even though she has one bad habit—whenever anyone comes to look at her she looks back at them cross-eyed. Well, honey, I think I’ll wake little “Angel Face” up. We’ve certainly got a prize, no fooling. Every time I look at her I think I can’t wait until you can see her, and we can be by ourselves. Good night, my love, Dorothy January 18, 1946 Hello, Honey, I wish I wasn’t such a crybaby. I don’t understand me. Until I was married you couldn’t make me cry over anything. I thought I couldn’t cry—but now all I have to do is think of you and how swell you are and I miss you so much before I know it I’m bawling just like Diane. I sure do love you more than you could know, honey. Even if I don’t tell you very often when I see you, I’m always thinking it. Diane & I had our picture taken—just small cheap ones. I’m afraid they can’t be too good of her—she’s so tiny—and naturally they won’t be good of me, but that’s to be expected. I hope you can at least see what she looks like a little bit. The photographer said she was very good for a baby her size & age. She’s not fat like her mother used to be. Incidentally I’m still on the plump side = darn it. She weighs over 9 lbs. and, as I say in every letter—gets cuter everyday. I think that’s a nice idea of yours, sending her $2.00 bills. I’m putting them away for her. It’s adding up. Maybe pretty soon we could start a savings account for her. Good night, my Honey. Love, Dorothy February 21, 1946 Hello, Honey, I’m so disappointed. Those pictures are just as I expected—awful. Diane looks kind of funny. I’m not going to send them cause you’ll think I’ve been kidding you about how cute she is. You said in your letter today that you wish we could relive those good old days again. I sure look back and dream about how swell they were. We don’t want to ever change, do we? Even though we have a family and more responsibilities, I don’t think that’s any reason to act older and not have the fun we used to. Right?! Good night, Darling Jack, Your Dorothy March 31, 1946 Dear Jack, Right now I’m so mad at you I could really tell you off if you were here. I don’t know whatever gave you the crazy idea that I might have changed and “start liking someone else.” You aren’t the only person that believes in making a success of their marriage—it means just as much to me as it does you, and if you think I go around looking for someone that might suit me a little better, you don’t think too much of me. Don’t you think I take being married seriously? You ought to know how much I love you—so why in the world would I try and find someone else? You said you wanted me to be happy—well, believe me, you couldn’t make me any more unhappy if you tried. If you would just have a little confidence in me and trust me more you wouldn’t think such things. You don’t have to keep reminding me of the fact that we promised to tell each other first if things had changed. That applies to you too. Would you like it if I kept telling you I didn’t think it would last long and you would soon find someone else? Well, I sure don’t like it one bit so please don’t write like that again. I probably shouldn’t send this but the more I think about it the madder I get! But no matter how mad I get, honey—I love you as much as I can and if I looked the whole world over I couldn’t see anyone but you because no one could ever make me any happier than you always have and always will. I feel better now—not mad anymore, but I’ll be really mad if you ever write that way again—don’t forget. Love, Dorothy P.S. I’ve decided to send you our photographs after all. April 25, 1946 Hello, Honey, So you didn’t like the pictures, huh? Please don’t think your daughter looks like that because I assure you she doesn’t. And even if she wasn’t cute, she would be darling just from her personality alone. She has one already—very definitely. I think I’ll wait awhile before I have her picture taken again. You know, of course, that we have a very remarkable and intelligent daughter. I was reading my baby book about what a 4-month-old baby should be doing and she was doing everything they mentioned when she was 2 months, really. She tries her hardest to sit up, and they don’t do that until they are 5 or 6 months. She really does take after you in every way—looks, smartness, and personality. Don’t worry, she will surely be a beauty. Well, honey, only 38 more days until that wonderful day when I see you again. Diane said, “Whoopee!” Well, anyway, she smiled— Bye, honey, Love, Dorothy Looking West My first memory is of shadows creating patterns on a wall. Inside my crib, I saw the silhouette of a woman with long hair move across the bars. Even as she picked me up and held me, my mother was a mystery. It was almost as if I knew the world, and life in it, would be unfamiliar yet charged with an alluring, permanent, and questioning romance. As if I would spend the rest of my life trying to understand her. Is this memory real? I don’t know. Certain things stand out: the snowstorm in Los Angeles when I was three; the Quonset hut we lived in until I was five. It had a wonderful shape. I’ve loved arches ever since. One night, Mr. Eigner, our next-door neighbor, caught me singing “Over the Rainbow” on Daddy’s newly paved driveway. I thought I was going to get into trouble. Instead, he told me I was a “mighty talented young lady.” Daddy worked at the Department of Water and Power in downtown Los Angeles. I’d go visit him at his office when I was five. There was something about looking west from the Angels Flight trolley car that mesmerized me. Tall buildings like City Hall peeked over the hill. I loved Clifton’s Cafeteria and the Broadway department store. Everything was condensed and concrete and angled and bustling with activity. Downtown was perfect. I thought heaven must look like Los Angeles. But nothing compared to the joy of tugging on Mom’s arm, telling her to “Look! Look, Mom.” We both loved looking. It was hard to know what Mom loved more, looking or writing. Her scrapbooks, at least when I was a little girl, were ruined by endless explanations underneath the photographs. As I got older, I avoided the unwanted envelopes with her “Letters to Diane” like the plague. Who cared about letters? I just wanted pictures. After my incident in the darkroom with Mother’s journal, that was it for me. But when I made the decision to write a memoir at age sixty-three, I began to read Mother’s journals in no particular order. In the middle of this process, I came across what must have been an attempt at her own memoir. Embossed in gold at the top of the cover was 1980. That meant she began to write it when she was fifty-nine. Each entry was dated. Sometimes Mom would start an excerpt, then stop, leaving dozens of pages empty. Or she would write a paragraph on an incident one year, only to return to it a couple of years later, only to restart with yet another approach months after. Over the course of five years, she skipped in and out of her childhood events almost as if she was free-associating. For the most part Dorothy’s tone was forgiving, sweet, and sometimes elegiac. But sometimes it wasn’t. She must have been taking stock of her life by dredging up memories of those days in the thirties when she was sandwiched between the harsh rules laid down by the Free Methodist church and the lure of life outside Beulah’s constraints. I hate to believe it’s true, but life threw Dorothy some punches she didn’t recover from. Family Feelings My father, Roy Keaton, nicknamed me Perkins when I was very young, maybe three or four years old. He used it when he had “family feelings.” When he felt estranged, he called me Dorothy. Daddy made it clear with all three of Mother’s pregnancies that he wanted a boy. As we girls grew, it became obvious that I was the one he wished had been the boy of his dreams. I was the tomboy, a quiet girl who gave no one trouble. I don’t know why Dad favored me over my sisters. Sometimes he confided thoughts he didn’t even share with Mother. I always listened wordlessly. When he finished he would say, “Isn’t that right, Perkins, huh? Huh?” He knew I would always agree. I think he also knew I always agreed with Mother too. We moved a lot. When I was 4 we lived in an old two-story frame house on Walnut St. in Pasadena. The house sat right on the sidewalk. But we had a huge yard that backed up to the railroad tracks, which carried the new Super Chief Santa Fe train. No fence, or wall, or anything separated our yard from the track. I saw passengers’ faces as they looked into our kitchen. Today this would not be permissible but no one cared back then. Dad’s German shepherd, Grumpy, would sleep on the tracks, but he always ambled off just in time. We always had cats. I was still just a kid when we moved to a cheaper rental house on top of a hill in Highland Park. It was set on a half acre of loose dirt, with a small patch of grass. We didn’t have neighbors. Very few people cared to climb the steep public stairway from the street. It was a perfect setting for cats. Mom let me have all I wanted. 13. Dad couldn’t have cared less. He was seldom there anyway. Money was scarce. Somehow these little furry creatures got fed every day along with the five of us. I found Pretty Boy, Cakes, Yeller, and Alex in one week. One particular cat though dominates my memory. Her name was Baby. She was a dull gray thing, with skinny legs, and eyes that made up most of her head, and a broken tail that hung crooked. The strangest thing was she made no sounds; no meows; no hisses and no purrs. Baby was a genetic failure to everyone but me. I loved her. One day, she gave birth to a litter of four kittens. To my great sorrow, though, Baby was never the same. She died not long after. Orpha didn’t care that much. She already had boyfriends she didn’t tell Mother about, so she was constantly sneaking out in the middle of the night. Marti was just a little girl, so she didn’t pay attention to them, but to me, the cats were the dearest things in the whole wide world. Mother always said being the middle sister made me the most sensitive. I don’t know about that, but it made me sad we couldn’t share how special they were. I never told them about my dream of owning a big cat farm where I could save every orphan cat I ever saw, broken down or not. Firstborn Being firstborn had its advantages. I had Mom and Dad all to myself. Then Randy arrived, my junior by a couple of years. Randy was sensitive—too sensitive. As president and creator of the Beaver Club, I made Randy, the treasurer, come with me to the public stairway near the arroyo to look for money. Our number-one mission was to buy coonskin caps like Davy Crockett’s. They cost a dollar and ninety-eight cents apiece. We were beside ourselves when Randy spotted an actual honest-to-God fifty-cent piece. Wow. Since I was president of the Beaver Club, it was my self-appointed responsibility to handle all finances, so I picked it up and held it in my hand for one perfect instant before Randy started screaming. I looked up and saw an airplane gliding across the sky in slow motion. Big deal. But Randy was so terrified I couldn’t stop him from running home in tears and hiding under our bunk bed. Even Mom couldn’t convince him it was only an airplane. After that, Randy became seriously hesitant about the outside world, especially about flying objects. In his teens it was almost impossible to pry him out of his room down the hall. Robin was convinced he was disappearing, and he was: He was disappearing into Frank Zappa, whose lyrics to songs like “Zomby Woof” became his mantra. Mom and Dad worried about him right from the get-go. I made use of their concern by willing myself to be everything Randy wasn’t. Big mistake. What I didn’t understand was that his sensitivity allowed him to perceive the world with intensity and insight. It was almost too easy to manipulate him out of items like his one and only green Duncan Tournament Yo-Yo, or the Big Hunk candy bar he saved from Halloween, or one of his very special cat’s-eye marbles he hid under the bunk bed. Sure, he was more unique and intuitive, but what did I care as long as I got what I wanted? When Robin came along three years after Randy, I was beside myself with envy. A girl? How was that possible? Surely there was some mistake. She must have been adopted. Of course, she turned out pretty and she had a better singing voice than I did, but, worse than all that, she was Daddy’s favorite. Many years later, it drove me nuts when Warren Beatty referred to Robin as the “pretty, sexy sister.” Dorrie came as an “unexpected surprise.” I was seven years older, so she could do no wrong. Her face was a miniature replica of Dorothy’s. She was the brightest, most intellectually gifted of the Hall kids. In fact, she was the only one of us who ever presented Mom and Dad with a report card of straight A’s. She loved to read biographies of inspirational women like Simone de Beauvoir and Ana?s Nin. She read A Spy in the House of Love because it was a good “message” book. She said it instilled in her an optimistic outlook toward the future. She thought I might find some tidbits to apply to my philosophy on “love.” I didn’t have a philosophy on love. That’s what hooked me on Dorrie; she was full of contradictions. It must have been part of the terms of being our only “intellectual.” We spent all weekends and every vacation at the seashore. In 1955, Huntington Beach still gave permission for families to pitch tents on the water’s edge for a month at a time. Ours rose out of the sand like a black cube. That was the summer I read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Adventures of Perrine. I was nine. It seemed like life would always be imbued with black words on white pages, framed by white waves and black nights. Mom put zinc oxide on my nose every morning before Randy and I collected pop bottles, stacked them into borrowed shopping carts, and deposited them at the A&P supermarket for two cents apiece. With money in our pockets, we were able to buy our way into the famous heated saltwater swimming pool. A few years later, Dad took us farther south and assembled our tent at Doheny Beach, where we caught waves on six-foot Hobie surfboards and sang songs like “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley” around the campfire. Sometimes we’d drive up to Rincon, where we set up camp at the side of the Pacific Coast Highway. But it was Divers Cove in Laguna Beach that had Daddy’s heart. He and his best friend, Bob Blandin, would slip into their wet suits and disappear under the ocean’s surface for hours at a time while we kids played on the shore. Mom packed bologna sandwiches with mayonnaise. Willie, Bob’s wife, wore Chinese red lipstick and smoked, which Mom said was really bad. I remember the cliffs. At night they looked like dinosaurs ready to attack us. During the day we climbed them to the top and looked out over our beloved Laguna Beach. If you had seen us from the beach below, you would’ve thought we were the picture-perfect average California family in the fifties. One Man’s Family The radio played a big part in our life. The one I remember most was a tall cabinet model made by Philco. We bought it on time, as we did with everything of value. Sundays were Radio Day. One Man’s Family was on at 3. It was my favorite. My sisters and I hurried home from church in order to follow the plot of Father Barber and his perfectly neat family. There just couldn’t be anyone as good, or wise, or understanding as Father Barber. I thought it unfair that I couldn’t have a father who would give big hugs and talk and laugh with his daughter. I always wondered how come my dad wasn’t like that, all warm and patient and loving and … well, he just wasn’t, that’s all!! “If only” he would just say, “Come over here, Perkins, and give your dad a kiss.” If only Mom would say, “Hurry up, I know how exciting the next episode of the Barber family is for you.” The only thing our family had in common with the serials was Mom and Dad were always looking for a better life. I thought it was unfair. And when I grew up I wasn’t going to live the way we did. My family would be perfect. I would see to that; always and forever happy, smiling, and beautiful. Unanswered Questions When I was six, television gave me a gift. Gale Storm. Not Lucille Ball. Gale Storm in My Little Margie. She was everything I wanted to be—clever, fearless, and always up to wacky antics that invariably got her into big trouble with her father. She was funny but fragile. I liked that. I Love Lucy was television’s number-one highest-rated sitcom. Gale Storm’s knockoff was number two, but not to me. Gale and I were kindred spirits, or so I thought. After 126 episodes, My Little Margie was canceled. It was a sad day. Fifteen years later, when I was a student at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, Phil Bonnell, the son of Gale Storm, was one of my classmates. On Christmas break he invited me to his mother’s home in Beverly Hills. This is what I remember. It was noon. Gale Storm was nowhere to be found. Phil told me she slept late. I thought everyone’s mother was up at six A.M. with hot Cream of Wheat and the voice of Bob Crane, the King of the Los Angeles Airwaves, blaring on the radio. There was no radio playing at the Bonnells’ house, an uncomfortable, rambling ranch-style affair. When Gale finally came out, she wasn’t lively, and there were no antics. Later, Phil told me she drank a lot. Gale Storm drank? That’s when it dawned on me: Everything wasn’t perfect for Gale Storm, even though it seemed her dreams had come true. I found my next hero in high school: Gregory Peck. Well, Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. His unassuming, quiet approach to solving the moral dilemmas of life inspired me. My worship for him was even greater than my teen crush on Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Grass. I always told Mom everything—well, everything except my feelings about intercourse and movie stars like Warren Beatty. Gregory Peck, however, was discussed over and over. If only there was a way to meet him. Mom had to understand how he alone could teach me to be the kind of person I wanted to be, a hero in my own right. Under his guidance, I would have the courage to rescue people from the injustice of a racist community or even put my life on the line for what I believed. Always encouraging, Mom let me roam through some pretty undeveloped thoughts. One time I told her about how frustrating Dad was. According to him, I never did anything right. He was always saying, “Don’t sit too close to the TV or you’ll go blind,” or “Finish the food on your plate; there’s starving people in China,” and, my least favorite, “Don’t chew with your mouth open unless you want to catch flies.” Was there something about being a civil engineer that made him that way? Was that the reason he never thought I did things right? Mom was different. She didn’t judge me or try to tell me what to think. She let me think. Grandfather Keaton The word came late one February night. It was a long-distance phone call from Oklahoma. An emergency. Had to be. There was no other reason for calling in 1937. Daddy took the call. “Come get your father. We can’t keep him any longer.” Dad couldn’t possibly leave work, so it was decided that Mother and I would bring Grandpa to live out his days with us. I would unfortunately have to miss two weeks of school. I pretended “answering the call of an emergency” was a duty I was obliged to fulfill. Secretly I was thrilled. We set out with 25 dollars in cash, two gas credit cards, our California clothes, and a 1936 Buick Sedan. We took Route 66 through Kingman, Flagstaff, and Gallup on through to Oklahoma. When we arrived at our relatives’ home, Grandpa was ready. All his worldly possessions were in a small worn suitcase. His hair was unkempt, but he smiled at us with tears in his eyes. We were told he was incapable of expressing a thought. Grandfather Keaton had been a lazy if good-hearted man. Roy’s mother, Anna, bore the burden. Eventually she had to go to work. When she insisted the marriage end, unheard of in those days, Grandpa began roaming the country in a red Model T Ford truck accompanied by his dog “Buddy.” Over time things deteriorated, and Grandpa came back home. Anna took him in until she became so frustrated she called us in the dead of winter to come take him away. On our trip back home, Grandpa seemed happy. He no sooner stepped into the backseat of the Buick before he leaned forward and handed Mother a huge wad of bills. Our trip home was full of many more comforts than the trip going, but we paid for it. Dressing Grandpa in the morning was impossible. He put his pants on backwards. He couldn’t get his arms in his jacket. He didn’t know how to tie his shoes. He refused to wear socks. He didn’t have any table manners, or teeth, for that matter. His baggy trousers were damp all the time. He was incontinent. This annoyed Mother to no end. We put in long, long hours driving in order to make it back in three and a half days. Needless to say it was a whole new life with Grandpa occupying one of our 3 bedrooms. Dad refused to participate in his father’s care at all. That was Mother’s job. The details were unbelievable. Grandpa would sneak out of the house and run away at least twice a week. Mother had to go looking for him all over the neighborhood. Finally, we locked him in his room. He would pound on the door so loud he caused the neighbors to complain. When his bowels became impacted, Mom forced Dad to give him an enema. The results were so awful the toilet plugged up. It didn’t take long for us to decide that Grandpa’s condition was beyond home care. Arrangements were made to transfer him to the veterans hospital on Sawtelle in Los Angeles. Dad drug his feet on this, but Mother insisted. The last time I saw Grandpa he was waving goodbye from a car driving him to the old soldiers’ section of the veterans hospital. Dad never forgave Mother, even though he never bothered to lift a finger to help. I’m ashamed to say, Martha and I gave Mother no help either. We were teenage girls, and Grandpa was an embarrassment. Later I found out that while Mom was burdened with the hardship of caring for Grandpa, Dad was seeing another woman. It wasn’t long after this he drove off, never to return. The Sea of White Crosses Five days a week for the past four years, I’ve taken a shortcut through the very same veterans hospital off San Vicente near Sawtelle. On the north side of the complex is the graveyard Duke refers to as “the Sea of White Crosses.” Sometimes I tell him about all the soldiers who lived and died to help keep our country safe. He always wants to know if they looked like the green plastic soldiers we buy at Target. Until I read Mother’s words, I didn’t know the story of an incontinent, wandering Keaton fellow who shared a house with his young granddaughter Dorothy, who was on the eve of meeting a certain Jack Newton Hall, who would become my father. How is it possible that I could have driven by Duke’s Sea of White Crosses for so many years without knowing my great-grandfather Lemuel W. Keaton Jr.’s cross was so close to home? Sermons All sermons were always about the resurrection of the living Christ Jesus of Nazareth, born to save mankind from the threat of an eternity in Hell. The catch was you had to be born again. I played it safe. I read my Bible and proclaimed in testimony at prayer meetings that I indeed was saved, sanctified, and born again. Whenever I had the courage to stand up and state my memorized passage, the entire congregation smiled. I never understood what my declaration meant. I just wanted church to be colorful. I just wanted beautiful music like Handel’s Messiah and Copland’s Appalachian Spring. I didn’t want to hear about Blood and Death. Yet this was the ritual you couldn’t avoid. Blood. Sin. Guilt. Tears. Death. Shroud. Tomb. It was nothing more than a relinquishing of our free will to a philosophy that all men are born in sin and must be forgiven and saved from themselves in order to qualify for eternal and everlasting peace. It has taken all my 60 years to straighten out my thinking on all this, and believe me I am finally un-burdened. I am free of the fear instilled in me, free from the angry God, the straight and narrow path to Heaven, and the fiery anguish of living in Hell. I am grateful to whatever force in the universe there is that has removed me of all the ugliness imposed on me by false ideas about what life should be. And when I’m through with my time in the scheme of it all, I’m not afraid of what comes after. Amen. Playing with Death When I was ten we moved to Garden Grove for six months. Dad rented a house with a rock roof. The man and woman who owned it were brassy. She had bleached-blond hair, and he owned a bar. Dad called them “alcoholics.” I’d never heard that word before. It meant they drank a lot of liquor. Dad said the landlords were slobs. He was right. The house was a mess, but it had four bedrooms and two baths. It was the biggest house I’d ever seen, way bigger than the blue stucco house he had moved in a truck to Bushnell Way Road in Highland Park. The kitchen had swinging doors, like the ones in Gunsmoke, starring James Arness. Dorrie and Robin shared a bedroom. Randy, who was eight, had his own room, like me. One day Robin was playing with friends in the backyard. I wanted to join in, but nobody cared, especially Robin. I decided to take one of the ropes from our swing set, wrap it around my neck, and pretend I was hanging myself. When Robin ran past me without so much as a nod, I started to make loud choking sounds. Surely that would make her come to her senses. But, oh no, she kept on playing. So I showed her. I slumped my head over the rope even farther, gagged as loudly as I could, took a deep breath, let out a scream, and died. She never noticed. With my face knotted up in tears, I ran inside and told Mom that Robin let me die. She looked at me and asked why did it matter so much whether they played with me or not? Death, even a pretend death, was not the way to get what I wanted. It was not a game. In her face I saw what I hadn’t seen in Robin’s. Concern. The truth is, I would have done the whole stupid thing over again just to have her wrap her arms around me so tight I could feel her heart beat. Mom’s empathy was bottomless, an endless source of renewal. I can still see her sipping her afternoon cup of Folgers coffee while I sat across the kitchen counter in some form of distress. It was a scene we would relive in endless variations throughout the years. Her message was always the same. “Don’t be so sensitive, Diane. You’ll show them one day. Go for it.” And, like clockwork, even if I failed I kept going for it, not only because I longed for validation but also because I wanted to come back to her and that kitchen counter for as long as forever would last. Those days were terribly puzzling, especially when I became aware that Robin had no interest in playing the part I wrote for her or that alcoholics drank stuff that made them bad people, much worse than Willie Blandin and her bad cigarettes. But the worst, most bewildering, awful thing came the day Daddy took it upon himself to tell me I was about to become a woman soon. A woman? Was he crazy? I ran to my bedroom, slammed the door, and threw myself on the bed facedown. Mom came in a little later and said I was going to love being a grown-up girl. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but I was disgusted. I didn’t want a period, whatever that was, or breasts, or hair in my privacy area, like her. I didn’t want to be a woman. I wanted to be me—whoever that was. Bloody Sunday Easter Sunday was as important and exciting as Christmas. The beauty of the day, so big in the world of Christianity, was never given much play. Instead, we were told in long-winded sermons about the cruel crucifixion of Jesus Christ, our savior who died on the cross, shedding his blood to save us … ME. I could never grasp the meaning of this idea. Our hymns were burdened with words like: “Washed in the Blood of the lamb.” “I’m saved by the Blood of Christ.” “He shed his precious Blood for me.” Blood, the big symbol, meant absolutely nothing to me. Easter meant one thing, a complete new outfit. Mother would begin making my dress early. My favorite was a pink ankle-length gown with a deep ruffle on the bottom and at the neck. We all bought new shoes and new hats. All the ladies and young girls in their springtime finery would parade around the grounds of the old Free Methodist church. It was our version of the Easter Parade. I loved it. Save It for Later Even before I was a teenager, I realized something was wrong. Being the first of four children, I couldn’t understand why all the attractive genes had been passed on to my younger sisters, Robin and Dorrie. This incredible botch job had to be corrected. I hated my nose, so I slept with a bobby pin stuck on top, hoping the bulb would squeeze into a straight line. In Mom’s bathroom mirror I spent hours practicing a special smile, convinced it would hide my flaws. I even pried my eyes open as wide as possible for hours, 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 something positive. Jack Hall did not become a lying cheat like his stinky-cigar-smoking uncle. Dad never knew his father’s first name. As with everyone else, he didn’t ask. Mary made sure no one mentioned a man called Chester. Aunt Sadie followed her marching orders and kept her mouth shut. Mom too. The last thing Dorothy wanted was a confrontation with her mother-in-law. Stirring it up with Mary Alice Hall was not worth it. The mystery remained unsolved until I discovered a newspaper article in Mom’s file cabinet. Wife Hunts 9 Years for Husband; Asks for Insurance. Monday June 23, 1930. Positive He’s Dead, She Declares; Husband Vanished Three Months After Marriage. Somewhat like Evangeline was Mrs. Mary Hall. Only she didn’t stick it out as long as the girl of the romantic verse. She searched from coast to coast, seeking Chester N. Hall, who nine years ago left her, when she was his bride in Omaha. She never heard from him and believed him dead. “Because if he were alive he would surely come back to me,” the woman said. “Our love was a great one.” This is the story told in Mrs. Hall’s petition filed through Attorney Harry Hunt, wherein she is seeking to have Hall declared legally dead so that she may collect $1,000 in life insurance. On July 26, 1921, three months after their marriage, Hall came home to her, melancholy and depressed. He had a good job, and the wife could not understand. “About 9 o’clock, said the wife, “he took up his hat and said he was going to a movie. He never came back.” Mrs. Hall came to California with their son, Jack, 4 years ago. She said she had made every effort to locate Hall. Before Jack Newton Ignatius Hall grew up and became a civil engineer, he was Mary Hall’s little Jackie. One can only imagine what that was like. She had balls or, as my son, Duke, would say, “a big old nut sack.” Before Dad sliced and diced the land for housing developments in Orange County during the sixties and seventies, he was just a kid with his nose pressed against a window, watching his mother play poker until midnight in one of the gambling boats off Catalina. Before he spearheaded the design of curbs and gutters that kept water flowing safely to storm drains, he was also a high diver on the USC diving team. As an adult, Jack Hall took pride in severing the earth into blocks of mathematical reason. Sometimes I wonder if Dad decided to become a civil engineer because it gave him the illusion that he could change something as big and unpredictable as the earth. As a boy he learned he would never be able to change his mother. Mary Hall was never going to hold him tight, or praise him, or wipe away his tears. Closeness wasn’t in the cards. Maybe that’s why he turned his efforts to that other mother, Mother Earth. Now that I think about it, it helps me understand how Dad related, or didn’t relate, to Mom and us kids. Once in a while he would try to inject himself into Dorothy’s inner circle: us. After all, he was our father. But how was it possible to fit in with his hard-to-understand children and his high-strung, sensitive wife? Every night Dad came home to his family, and every night we’d stop what we were doing as soon as he walked through the door and present a friendly if distant wall of silence. I’m sorry to say we never extended an invitation to join us. Dad seemed to accept it, just as he’d accepted it from his mother. Three Stories Dad told us kids exactly three stories about growing up, and no more. There was the story about how when he was little he had rickets so bad he had to wear braces. There was the story about how Grammy Hall made him play the clarinet in Colonel Parker’s marching band, even though he couldn’t stand the clarinet. And there was his favorite story: the story about meeting Mom at a Los Angeles Pacific College basketball game when they were nineteen, and how he knew right then and there that she was the only woman in the world for him. Dad’s ending was always the same: “Six months later your Mudd and I eloped in Las Vegas.” And that was it. Or, as Mary would say, the past schmast. Three Memories When I was nine, Dad taught me how to open a pomegranate. He took a knife, sliced around the circumference, laid his hands on either side, and popped it open. Inside was a chestful of garnets—my birthstone. I bit into the pomegranate. Fifty red gems came crashing into my mouth all at once. It was like biting into both heaven and earth. There wasn’t a family excursion that didn’t lead to the ocean. It didn’t matter if we were camping in Guaymas, or Ensenada, or up the coast past Santa Barbara; every evening Dad would sit down and stare into his acquiescent friend, the Pacific Ocean. Evening was Dad’s designated few moments of peace. As I got older, I would join him with a glass of 7Up with ice. We would sit in silence. Then: “Your mother sure is a beauty.” “Your Mudd—God, do I love her or what?” “Di-annie, do me a favor and be sure to tell your mother what a delicious meal she made.” Compliments were Dad’s way to whitewash his guilt about Mom’s submissive role. He worried about Dorothy, just not enough to change the way he went about living with her. He never contemplated a different approach. As he stared into the ocean, he must have tossed a lifetime of apologies into its silence. Maybe he thought the tide would wash his troubles away. I thought I was dying. I couldn’t breathe. Asthma was bad enough, but this whooping-cough thing was way worse. When Dad turned me upside down, I got my breath back almost instantaneously. It was like a miracle. Mom was so worried, she kept me out of school for two months of my fourth-grade year. Every day she spread Vicks VapoRub on my chest, and she gave me 7Up with ice hourly. Sometimes she’d even let me watch TV. One night Dad and I saw a drama about a really old lady whose Seeing Eye dog was run over by a truck. I asked Dad why God let a dog die for nothing. He told me not to be scared. That seemed weird, because I’d heard Mom tell Auntie Martha that Dad passed out when he got pricked by a rose earlier that afternoon. I never thought of Dad as a fraidy-cat. After all, he’d saved my life. And it seemed mean of God to let the really old lady on TV lose her dog when she was going to die soon enough anyway. So I asked Dad, “Why do old people have to die just because they’re old?” He put me on his lap and said, “Old people have already had long lives, so they’re prepared for death. Don’t worry, they’re fine, Di-annie.” He gave me a kiss, put me down, and told me to get ready for bed. That night I heard Mom and Dad talking behind closed doors. Maybe Dad felt safe with Mom, safe enough to tell her about scary things like roses that made him faint, or the story of a beloved dog dying from a stupid accident, or just being old. Think Positive Dad found his version of the Bible, well, two bibles, in Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. I guess that’s why he talked in clich?s peppered with catchphrases like “think positive.” As a girl, I repeated it over and over in hopes that I would learn to think and also be positive. When I asked Dad why it didn’t seem to do any good, he’d always say, “Try again.” But what was positive? And, even more important, what was think? I wanted to know. As usual he told me to keep asking, and as usual I followed his advice. We moved into the beige board-and-batten tract home surrounded by acres and acres of orange groves at 905 North Wright Street, Santa Ana. It was 1957. The utopia Southern California held out to those of us who grew up in the fifties was irresistible. We believed happiness would come from owning a Buick station wagon, a speedboat, and a Doughboy swimming pool. It didn’t take long before the orange groves started disappearing in favor of more developments, with names like Sun Estate Homes. Leveling the Orange out of Orange County made me sad, and I told Dad. His response was concise. “That’s life, Diane, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.” In my own misbegotten way, I bought into his belief of living out the American dream, but the loss of the orange trees lingered. The move to Santa Ana was my prelude to adolescence. Not only was I going to be a young woman; Dad started telling me how pretty I’d be and how some boy would love me all up, and wouldn’t that be fun? I didn’t want any boy loving me, not at all, not for a second. I began to formulate how much better it would be if a lot of people loved me instead of one confusing, hard-to-understand boy. This barely realized notion, among others, unwittingly helped drive me toward acting. Many of Dad’s messages became justifications for seeking an audience in lieu of intimacy. Intimacy, like drinking and smoking, was something you had to watch out for. Intimacy meant only one person loved you, not thousands, not millions. It made me think of Mom on that stage at the Ambassador Hotel and Dad’s unhappiness about having to share her with others. We found our way to better conversations after I won a debate at Willard Junior High School. Thus began many nightly discourses over solutions to family problems and local politics. Dad was a Republican. He argued for lower taxes and better behavior. Mom, a determined Democrat, believed in higher taxation and more leniency with us kids. I chose to argue in her defense. What happened in the heat of our deliberations became a determining factor in my future. The more intense things became, the better I argued my point. Following my impulses did something wildly exciting; it triggered thought. Fighting for something within the safety of a formal context became my path to personal expression, but, more important, it gave me the opportunity to know Dad in a different way. He was a great debater. And fun too. It wasn’t the subject or the content of our deliberations; it was the shared experience that meant so much. I couldn’t care less if I lost. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a turning point in my relationship with my dad. I was learning how to navigate something new: Dad’s mind. C-Minus In my fourteenth year, Mom handed me “My Diary” after a parent-teacher meeting in the eighth grade. It was her way of addressing my C-minus in English. I had been put in the so-called dumbbell section, with bilingual Mexican girls, bad boys, and drifty dreamy types like me. Bound together by a lack of skills, the buxom Mexican girls and I became friends. They took prepubescent, big-personality Diane under their wing. They were kind and generous and a great audience to my pratfalls. After three years in remedial English, I still didn’t know a conjunction from a preposition or a proper noun from a common noun. In those days there were no alternative teaching methods to help kids like us. I had a lot of feelings, but I didn’t understand what we were being taught. Were we even being taught? I don’t think so. I think we were being “dumped.” Mom was not a stickler for homework. She was more comfortable addressing my aspirations. For example, it was her idea to black out my teeth when I auditioned for the talent show with “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.” When I was a Melodette, she advised me to approach Mr. Anderson, our choirmaster, about singing duets like “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better” before trying to convince him I could handle “When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin’ Along” as a solo. Mom encouraged all of my performing-based activities, but that parent-teacher meeting must have convinced her that “My Diary” would help teach me to respect the power of words. Dear Diary, I wish I had a boyfriend. Boys are never going to like me because I’m flat. Well, maybe one boy might, but I’m not sure. There’s Joe Gibbins, but he got caught sniffing glue today. Man. That’s really getting bad. I hope I never know another boy who does that. Not ever. I wish I could sing like Megan. She gets to take lessons with Kenny Akin. And she gets all the solos too. Of course everyone thinks she’s neat. I’m going to ask Mom to let me take vocal lessons with Kenny Akin too. He puts on a lot of shows in Orange County. Dear Diary, Today, I went downtown with Virginia Odenath and Pat Amthor. All they did was talk to each other. Plus Pat told Virginia I like Larry Blair. I cannot stand one thing about her or her big fat mouth. And then of course Virginia couldn’t wait to tell me Larry likes Genene Seeton. Well, he can just have her. Not only that, some person predicted the world will end tomorrow, and I got a D on my Algebra test. One good thing though, Mom said yes to the lessons. So, I’ll be singing with Megan at last. This is so neat. Dear Diary, I just don’t think it’s fair that Kenny Akin never lets me have a chance at a solo. I’m just a nothing around there. That’s for sure. Maybe my time hasn’t come yet. Oh well. Dear Diary, Today I found out that Megan is adopted, and her sister went insane and tried to kill herself. It was so sad. Why would anyone want to die? I wish no one ever had to die in the first place. It’s too scary. I pray to God that in heaven everyone is happy and can’t remember what it’s like to wish they wanted to kill themselves like Megan’s sister. Dear Diary, I finally got the nerve to ask a boy to the Girls Ask Boys dance. And he said he would go with me. Isn’t that neat? He’s in the popular crowd. He’s scads of fun. He always calls me “stupid.” Guess who it is? Ronnie McNeeley. I can’t wait to tell Mahala Hoien, my new best friend. His shirt size is 18. This is just about the neatest thing ever. The girls are supposed to make the boys a shirt that matches their blouse. Isn’t that just so cool? Dear Diary, The worst thing of all was the Girls Ask Boys dance. I thought it would be a blast. But it wasn’t. Ronnie acted like he was too good for me. He even asked Pat Amthor to dance instead of me. And he had the nerve to leave before the whole thing was over. I dispise (spell) him. He should have at least danced with me once. It’s awful. Boys just don’t like me. I’m not pretty enough. Dear Diary, For Christmas Kenny put on a production called Amahl and the Night Visitors. Megan was the lead. Boy, does everybody primp over her or what? For instance, Judy says, “Megan, are you cold?” Virginia says, “Megan, here, take my coat.” Meanwhile, I’m freezing. Do you think they’d offer me their coat? Kenny had a long talk with me today and said that he would be using me a lot next year. And that someday I’d be a great comedian. Har de har. Kenny Akin Kenny Akin was known as “Mr. Music of Orange County.” He looked like a six-foot-four version of Howdy Doody without Buffalo Bob pulling the strings. Even though I couldn’t process the meaning of my student-teacher relationship with this larger-than-life character, I must have instinctively known he was a means to an end. Besides producing and directing Kismet, Oklahoma!, and Babes in Toyland, Kenny Akin managed his own voice-and-dramatics studio and portrayed leading tenor roles in numerous productions from Los Angeles to San Bernardino County. Kenny’s prot?g?e, Megan, and I were both thirteen, but Megan was poised and attractive and had an all-out killer voice. No getting around it: Kenny thought Megan was as close to perfection as a person could be. In his eyes I was one thing only—WRONG. Thank God he never bought into my brand of appeal. His rejection gave me the will to persist long enough to find a loophole that would force him to give me a chance. As always, my loophole was Mom. Over a cup of coffee at the kitchen counter, I told her how Kenny gave all the big parts to Megan. Mom didn’t say anything; she just shook her head. But I know for a fact she had a little chat with Mr. Akin, because a few days later I saw them through a crack in his study door. All I can say is Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall could be very convincing when it came to her children. After Mother’s chat, I was assigned bit parts that led to Raggedy Ann in Babes in Toyland. I must have scored big, because Kenny started to take me more seriously. That’s when I started to take him less seriously. It wasn’t long before I told Mother I didn’t want to study with Kenny anymore. I’d learned all I needed to know from him. I couldn’t articulate my thoughts, but with enough experience under my belt, I’d learned how to hold my own at least long enough to find my way to an audience. The audience would decide my fate, not Mr. Kenny Akin. I always thought I’d be crushed by people who didn’t buy into me. But I wasn’t. There would be many Kenny Akinses who found themselves stuck with me whether they liked it or not. Applause There was no discussion with my parents on the night I sang “Mata Hari” in our Santa Ana High School production of the musical Little Mary Sunshine. Under the direction of our drama teacher, Mr. Robert Leasing, the production was worthy of Broadway—at least, that’s what it was like for me. I was Nancy Twinkle, the second lead, who loves to flirt with men. Little did I know that her big song, “Mata Hari,” would be a showstopper. I ran around the stage singing about the famous spy “who would spy and get her data by doing this and that-a,” ending with a grand finale featuring me sliding down a rope into the orchestra pit. That was when I heard the explosion. It was applause. When Mom and Dad found me backstage, their faces were beaming. Dad had tears in his eyes. I’d never seen him so excited. More than excited—surprised. That’s what it was. I could tell he was startled by his awkward daughter—the one who’d flunked algebra, smashed into his new Ford station wagon with the old Buick station wagon, and spent a half hour in the bathroom using up a whole can of Helene Curtis hairspray. For one thrilling moment I was his Seabiscuit, Audrey Hepburn, and Wonder Woman rolled into one. I was Amelia Earhart flying across the Atlantic. I was his heroine. Later, Dad would boast about my career, but it was “Mata Hari” that became our watershed moment. There were no words. It was all—every timeless second—encapsulated in his piercing light-blue eyes. The ones Mom fell in love with. There was no going back. PART TWO 3 MANHATTAN The Neighborhood Playhouse I don’t remember getting on the plane that took me three thousand miles away from home when I was nineteen. I don’t remember what I was wearing or what the flight was like. I don’t remember kissing my family goodbye. I remember the bus ride to the city. I remember the YWCA. It was on the West Side. I remember checking in to a tiny room. I remember sitting on the stoop, watching people rush past buildings. I was in the city of my dreams. Every New Year’s Eve I’d sat in front of our twenty-one-inch Philco Predicta television set and watched the ball drop in Times Square. New York was wall-to-wall mile-high buildings. It was the opposite of dinky Santa Ana or even Los Angeles. It was Times Square, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and the Chrysler Building too. But most of all it was New Year’s Eve. It was hundreds of thousands—no, millions—of people gathered together to celebrate the ringing in of a new year. I wanted to stand with them too, right there, right in front of the Broadhurst Theatre, where hits like Pal Joey, Auntie Mame, and The World of Suzie Wong played to packed houses. New York was movies too, movies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It was Audrey Hepburn with the endless cigarette holder dangling from her perfect mouth. New York was my destiny; I was going to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. I was going to be an actress. And I was ready. That’s when the doorman came over and told me not to sit in front of the Y. That’s all I remember: the city, the room, how ready I was, and “Don’t sit on the stoop.” At the Neighborhood Playhouse, it was Sandy Meisner. He wore a camel’s hair coat. He smoked and everyone said he was homosexual, even though he’d been married. I’d never heard of a married man who was gay but looked straight. He was mesmerizing and mean and the first grown man I ever thought of as sexy. I loved the ashes that were as long as the cigarette that dangled from his mouth. I loved how they fell onto his camel’s hair coat. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was the most exotic man I’d ever seen. In Mr. Meisner’s acting class, there were no accolades. Things didn’t go like that. To Sandy, acting was about reproducing honest emotional reactions. He felt that the actor’s job was to prepare for an “experiment that would take place onstage.” His approach was designed “to eliminate all intellectuality from the actor’s instrument and to make him a spontaneous responder,” which could be learned by practicing the Repetition Game. It went like this. A partner—let’s say Cricket Cohen—would make an observation about me. “Diane, you have brown hair.” I listened and repeated the sentence she spoke. “I have brown hair.” Observing some aspect of my hair, Cricket might say, “Your brown hair is also straight and thin.” I would respond with something like, “Yes, my hair is straight and thin.” She would embellish, adding, “Very thin.” I would reply, “You’re right, it is thin, very thin, but not curly like yours.” The implication being, “You got a problem, asshole?” She would respond, “At least my hair is not too thin.” Meaning something to the effect of, “Lay off, bitch. Go back to Santa Ana where you belong.” And on and on, until we both ended up expressing a variety of emotions based on our reactions to each other’s behavior. I took to the Repetition Game like a fish to water. Sandy Meisner also introduced us to the world of playing with our feelings, especially the embarrassing ones. I learned to use my suppressed anger to good effect. I could cry on a dime, explode, forgive, fall in love, fall out, all in a matter of moments. My weakness? I was “too general.” At the end of the second year, he cast me as Barbara Allen in Dark of the Moon. Rehearsals were fraught with anxiety. One day I entered stage right, singing, “A witch boy from the mountain came, a-pinin’ to be human, for he had seen the fairest gal, a gal named Barbara Allen.” Meisner yelled as only he could, “Why are you traipsing around like you’re Doris fucking Day?” Sandy taught us to respond to our partner’s behavior. End of discussion. He forced us to hang in with the truth of the moment. No questions. He made observing and listening a prelude to expression. Point-blank. He was simple and direct. Without embellishing, he gave us the freedom to chart the complex terrain of human behavior within the safety of his guidance. It made playing with fire fun. I loved exploring the shared moment, as long as Sandy was watching. There was one cardinal rule: “Respond to your partner first, and think later.” If you broke that rule, he would start laying on the one-liners. “There’s no such thing as nothing.” “In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning.” “May I say as the world’s oldest living teacher, ‘Fuck polite!’” More than anything, Sandy Meisner helped me learn to appreciate the darker side of human behavior. I always had a knack for sensing it but not yet the courage to delve into such dangerous, illuminating territory. The First Year Dear Family, The Rehearsal Club is on 53rd Street, right down the block from the Museum of Modern Art. I wish you could see it. It’s an old brownstone. All I can think of is how lucky I am to be rooming with Pam, who is also a new student at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Thank you so much for helping me out. I feel safe, and there’s a lot of other young women who live here, like Sandy Duncan, who is my age but already works professionally, I think as a dancer. All us gals share a phone down the hall. The Rockettes hog it. They have more money, I guess, or maybe they’re just lonely. I don’t know. They work hard, and look hard too. Probably because of all that makeup they wear. I wouldn’t want to be a Rockette for all the money in the world. School is intense. From 9–5 every day. Wow! I’m very pleased to be working with my partner, Cricket Cohen. She’s excellent to play off of. We practice all the time, and we seem to be doing well. I hope so anyway. By now, Dorrie’s either a Willard Junior High School cheerleader or not. I hope she got it. Why isn’t Randy dating anyone yet? What’s happening with Robin besides the fact she gave up flag twirling for homework? Wow! Oh, well, I’ve got to study my lines for this scene from Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty. Keep sending photographs. I miss you all. Love, Diane Hey, Everyone, Can’t get to sleep tonight. I feel like I’ve had 5 or 6 cups of black coffee. I got the money you sent. Thank God. Only one more month of the Rehearsal Club, and Pam. I don’t think I should say it like that; I mean, sharing a room has been a real learning experience. I just can’t wait to get home for summer. I’m really nervous about whether I’ll get asked back for the second year. What if I don’t? I’m here sitting in class doing nothing because my partner, Bernie, hasn’t learned his lines. What a waste of time. Bernie is so annoying. If Mr. Meisner thinks our scene is lousy, it’s going to hurt my chances for next year. He already got rid of Laura, who happened to be really amazing. Do you think I should ask for a new partner? Or would that make me a creep? If I lay into Bernie, it’s not going to do any good. And anyway, he’s completely nuts. How is everyone? What’s new? Has Domino still got too many fleas? Is Randy shaving yet? How are the pimples on Robin’s forehead? And what about Dorrie Bell? Everything still fit as a fiddle? Take care, Love, Diane The Second Year Dear Mom, I can’t stand it. The second year is so much harder. Mr. Meisner is really pushing us to expand into interpretation. I don’t know how to create a character. I understand the repetition exercise, but being someone else? And everyone’s so much more competitive this year. Nobody is sloughing off. It makes me nervous. Meisner keeps telling us we have to be more specific. As you know, that’s the area I have the most trouble. We’re performing singing scenes for the 1st year soon. You’ll never guess what I’m doing. MR. SNOW from Carousel. Again? I’m sick of Mr. Snow. In acting class we’re doing Restoration scenes, which is by far beyond me. See you in a month. I can’t wait to come home for Christmas. Much love, Diane Mr. and Mrs. Jack N. Hall: The Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre cordially invites you to attend Dark of the Moon, a program to demonstrate the work now in progress, February 16 and 17, 1967. Mom and Dad … Doesn’t this crack you up? They sent this to me instead of you. Get back here quick so you can come see it. I hope you like my interpretation of Barbara Allen. I sing that Joan Baez song. It’s beautiful. Richard Pinter is brilliant as the Witch Boy. I hope a lot of agents come. Love, Diane And they did. The several agents who came seemed interested, but no one signed me up. At the end of my two years at the playhouse, Sandy Meisner sent me into the world of auditions with a nod, saying, “Someday you’re going to be a good actress.” Hair After the Neighborhood Playhouse, I hung out with other second-year students who were panicked about the future. We didn’t know where we would live, much less how to become working actors. Richard Pinter, my Dark of the Moon co-star, became a very close friend. Sarah Diehl and Nola Safro were around, and so was Guy Gillette, whose band, the Roadrunners, occasionally featured me singing songs like Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” (Insane, and a complete disaster.) Luckily, Hal Baldridge from the playhouse got me a job at the Woodstock Playhouse, where I appeared in The Pajama Game and Oh! What a Lovely War. It was the Summer of Love, and somehow I met my first famous man, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary and “If I Had a Hammer” fame. He sort of took me under his wing for a couple of days. We were hanging out at his manager Albert Grossman’s place. I had no idea Peter was a political activist who organized peace festivals or that he marched with Martin Luther King. I felt awkward and uninformed with such sophisticated people and left early. He must have known I wasn’t ready for the big time, because I never heard from him again. To be so close to stardom and so far away was exciting but challenging and disappointing at the same time. When I got my Actors’ Equity card, it was the end of Diane Hall. Apparently there was a Diane Hall in good standing. I decided to use Dorrie’s name instead of Di, Danielle, or Dede Hall for the part of “Factory Worker” in The Pajama Game. Snapping out of what must have been a self-induced stupor, I realized it was ludicrous to borrow my sister’s name, so I became Cory Hall for the stellar role of “Ensemble” in Oh! What a Lovely War. Cory and Dorrie? That’s when it dawned on me I could keep it all in the family by using Mom’s maiden name. Keaton. Diane Keaton. Dear Gang, I had an audition last night for a rock musical called Hair. I go back tomorrow for the final elimination. I’ve got my fingers crossed. I really hope I get it. I’m also supposed to try out for some sort of TV pilot, which doesn’t pay unless it sells. We’ll see. I’m frantically looking for an apartment, but it’s so hard. The cheap ones go fast, even though they’re located in the worst, most rotten areas. Today I went to the Upper West Side. No luck. I’m thinking of going to a real estate broker. I know, I’ll have to pay a fee, but in the long run it’s probably better. This is more of a hassle than I expected. Dorrie and Robin, I’ve started listening to Tim Buckley and Mimi and Richard Fari?a. Are you into them? Love, Diane Hello, all you Halls, We’re in our 2nd week of rehearsal. Things are shaping up slowly, but I suppose that’s part of it. Get ready, it’s a really weird show, to put it mildly. I have three verses of a solo in a song called “Black Boys.” I’m just glad I haven’t been fired yet! Acting doesn’t seem to be a concern to the director, Tom O’Horgan. We look like hippies; we sing like hippies; we’re the turned-on youth of today. It doesn’t really appeal to me! I just wish I had more to do in the show. Anyway, I love you all. Diane Hi, Everyone, Well, I’m in a hit, we opened the 29th. No Woodstock this summer. A real job, and on Broadway. After the show tonight, Richard Avedon is photographing the whole cast for Vogue magazine. Now, is that astonishing or what? And big stars have come to see it, like Warren Beatty (remember my crush on him from Splendor in the Grass) and Julie Christie, who is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, and Liza Minnelli, and Terence Stamp, and Carol Channing. Apparently Hair is the in thing to see. People stand in lines every day to get tickets. Things are pretty much the same. I’m certainly the same. Will I ever change? I’m still the dumbest person alive. One apparently does not grow out of stupidity. Oh, also I’m on a diet. Obese is an understatement. I’ve gotten carried away with the FOOD LIFE. Dad, I hope you prepared your friend for Hair and the nudity. Is he coming soon? Love, Diane 4 BIG YEAR “Father Mother” While I was watching fellow tribe members shed their clothes onstage every night, Mom switched from letters to journals. It was 1969. She had gone from a twenty-four-year-old woman feeling the newness of two loves, to an adoring mother who reaped the so-called “rewards” of being a homemaker in the fifties, to an adult who displayed hints of defiance in the sixties. The process of learning how to explore her own unanswered questions came from the action of moving a pen across paper. How had she found time? Not while preparing the endless tuna casseroles and cheese enchiladas that became leftovers for four lunch boxes five days a week; not at the kitchen counter, with wilting Kellogg’s Corn Flakes sprinkled with wheat germ waiting to be cleared. When was she able to grab a few minutes for herself? Not after Dad was at work or we were in school; not before figuring out the best way to stretch the budget so she could buy the extras everybody always begged for. Did she have free time between the dishes and laundry, and mending our clothes, and renewing her license, and helping Dorrie with her homework? No. I have free time, time enough to have written this memoir while working on a product line for Bed Bath & Beyond and editing a book for Rizzoli Publications on modern architecture, time to leave home and act in a Larry Kasdan low-budget indie in Park City, Utah. Even though Dexter, Duke, and I carry on the Hall family tradition of sitting down to dinner every night, our “It takes a village” version of the evening meal is unrecognizable from those days at the kitchen counter on Wright Street. My role as “Father Mother” (coined by Duke) is nothing like Mom’s. I reside at the head of the table. Dexter and Duke flank me on either side. Members of Team Keaton attend, like Sandra Shadic—renamed Sance Underpants by Duke—on some nights, “La La” Lindsay Dwelley on others. Ronen Stromberg comes by too. I love our dinners, but I don’t make them. Debbie Durand does. As “Father God” (another of Duke’s terms of endearment), I begin with the high points and low points of our collective day. Duke makes a face. I pretend to ignore it and attempt to expand our sense of community spirit by injecting subjects like Heal the Bay’s annual report card on the worst beaches of Southern California. Dexter says, “At least it wasn’t Santa Monica again.” “Right, Dex. Thank God.” On the sidelines, Duke teases Dexter about her interchangeable crushes on boys with names like Max and Matthew and Tyler and Corey and Chris B. and Chris L. Dexter responds by calling Duke an “annoying pest” and ratting him out, saying Duke’s school pants got thrown into the shower after swim practice by him, not by Sawyer, as he claimed. Sandra reminds her to “give your brother a break.” I end it with “Duke Keaton! Sorry, but, guess what? Fun freeze.” Things get better when we begin the chat about Dexter’s high point, her birthday dinner. She wants fried onion rings, chicken nuggets, buttered pasta, the tuxedo cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory, and no GREEN of any kind at all whatsoever. Everyone joins in the cleanup. Dexter wants to use my iPhone. I give it to her reluctantly and begin talking about Elizabeth Edwards’s tragic ending, even quoting a sentence from the New York Times obituary about “the disparity between public image and private reality.” No one responds. Sandra, the fastest draw in the west, has put all the plates in the dishwasher before I can begin to get the milk to the refrigerator. Mother’s time opened up when I left for New York City and Randy got a job as an usher at the Broadway Movie Theater in Santa Ana. Dorrie and Robin were wrapping up their high school years as Mother sat down and began to explore her thoughts on paper. It took the beginning of an end, on the cusp of the next decade, before Dorothy found her voice. New Year’s Eve, 1968 I’m so excited for Robin; she got a job at Bullock’s as a demonstrator for cosmetic items. Dorrie is taking a ceramics class in Placentia. Jack and I have two Schwinn bikes we ride every other night to Baskin and Robbins 31 Flavors in Honer Plaza. So much fun. Randy’s writing more than ever. I’m so proud of him. Jack won the best speaker award at Toastmasters. Randy goes too and loves it. Diane’s coming home for a week. She got a break from rehearsals for Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam. Apparently she’ll be going to Hollywood for some auditions. She is now a light blond, very thin young woman. The total look is extremely GOOD! Everyone remarks about our beautiful daughters. I started painting the kitchen. Jack’s almost got the fireplace mantel finished. It makes the whole room look just the way we want it: rustic, warm, and light. I can’t believe it’s all working out so well. I finished my first paid photo assignment today: 20 shots of Judy Weinhart in a book for $35.00. I hate to admit I’m pretty pleased. But I am. I took a long ride in the industrial part of Santa Ana and had the greatest time looking at old rusty tin cans, wind-blown bottles, pitted rocks, toppled shacks, and torn signs. It was as if I could SEE the silence. Today Jack said that even if I divorced him, he would come home every night…. I loved that because that’s our story; we are infinitely tied to one another. Thank you, somebody! Everybody. Thank you, Randy, Robin, Dorrie, Diane, and Jack. Thank you, people, nature, animals, Goya, and Kernel, our cats. We have so much. I feel my life is very full of beauty and love. Lets see if 1969 can be even better. January 30, 1969 Dear Mom, I moved yesterday; what a job! I wonder what it would be like if I actually had some furniture. Thanks for the box of goodies. I love the great teapot and the photographs. They’re fantastic. There’s no real place to put them except on the windowsill, which compensates for the LOUSY original stove. At least my stereo works. I’ve been playing Nina Simone and Morgana King, my favorite. The rehearsals are going okay. Woody Allen is cute and, of course, very funny. I know Dad wanted me to write down all my ideas concerning the money I owe him. Certainly I’m in no position to pay it all back right now. The landlord informed me that I owe him 29 dollars, and the telephone bills will be coming soon. When the play opens I want to take singing and dancing lessons. But tell Dad not to worry because next month I’m going to start to send 50 dollars every month until I pay back the 500 dollars I owe him. In the meantime, here’s my list of my expenses. 1. Rent $98.32. 2. Phone $10.00. 3. Phone service $5.00. 4. Singing lessons $40 a month, I guess. (Ugh.) 5. Dancing lessons $30, about. 6. Food $100 a month (I guess). That’s a total of $283 and 32 cents. It seems like an awful lot. Love, Diane February 6, 1969 Jack and I flew all the way to New York City for the opening night of Play It Again, Sam. Jack Benny—Ed Sullivan—Walter Kerr—George Plimpton—Angela Lansbury—and other stars attended. We met Woody Allen afterwards. Oh my goodness. He was so shy and quiet, not like I expected at all. The play was very funny. Diane looked beautiful onstage—she wore a fall, which made her hair look really thick. She’s on a thing these days, always chewing a big mouthful of Dubble Bubble gum or sucking candy—or eating. I wish I knew how she stays so thin. Everyone was very kind to us. At Sardi’s we sat at a table for 10 with champagne and cheesecake. We were told that Woody Allen’s new leading lady was his new heart interest too. This gave us a real kick. February 10, 1969 We’re back home. I’m taking a class at UCI. My goal is to work HARD on writing an article and SELL IT. According to my teacher, if you want to write, write. Maybe I could work on something personal yet universal, like the way the kids are growing up so fast? I don’t know. Seeing Diane was an experience. I can’t think of how to explain her effect on people. Of course, I’m speaking as I see her and am not without total bias. She is a mystery. She is independent. At times she’s so basic, at others so wise it frightens me that I got so far in this world without the benefit of such knowledge. I miss her. February 18, 1969 Dear Mom, It seems like you were just here. How did it go by so fast? Isn’t Woody hilarious? Did you really like the play? I couldn’t exactly tell. Woody does a lot of let’s just say unusual things onstage, things you wouldn’t think a person of his stature would do. Last night, in the middle of a scene he suddenly started impersonating James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope. I tried not to laugh, but it was impossible. I think I had a date with him. We went to Frankie and Johnnie’s famous steakhouse. Everything was going well until I scraped my fork against the plate and made a normal, I stress normal, cutting noise. It must have driven him nuts, ’cause he yelped out loud. I couldn’t figure out how to cut my steak without making the same mistake, so I stopped eating and started talking about women’s status in the arts, like I know anything about women and the arts. What an idiot. The whole thing was humiliating. I doubt we’ll be having dinner together anytime soon. Today he sent me a little note. I think you’ll relate. Love, Diane From Woody Beet Head, Humans are clean slates. There are no qualities indigenous to men or women. True, there is a different biology, but all defining choices in life affect both sexes & a woman, any woman is capable of defining herself with total FREEDOM. Therefore women are anything they choose to be & frequently have chosen & defined themselves greater than men. Don’t be fooled by THE ARTS! They’re no big deal; certainly no excuse for people acting like jerks & by that I mean, so what if up till now there were very few women artists. There may have been women far deeper than, say, Mozart or Da Vinci but contributing their genius in a different socially circumscribed context. Note how I switched from pen to pencil at this moment because in Lelouch’s film, A MAN & A WOMAN, he switches from color to black & White—So I underline my point using the same symbolism—Very clever? OK, then, very stupid. Woody March 20, 1969 Diane was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress for the Tony Awards coming in April. Randy’s writing teacher read two of his poems in class. One, called “Out of the Body,” was submitted to the school yearbook. He’ll make it. Out of the Body All the voices of my past are here in this grassy clearing At the foot of the mountain. At first I thought it was the rattle of nesting birds, perhaps rocks falling from a cliff. Like bells, the words took shape. Paragraphs etched out of trees. Stories of lives hung sadly in the air, like pages of failure. I didn’t want to listen I heard my own voice on the flat face of the mountain; small, and weak. I heard the sound of myself dying in the cold, Another animal; An animal with the gift of language caught in the trap of distance. June 14, 1969 Sunday night 10 p.m. The Tony Awards. Diane lost to some other gal. She was on TV, but we couldn’t see her more than once, and it was fleeting. July 7, 1969 A letter arrived from the draft board asking for verification from Randy’s psychologist that he’s unable to serve. It felt like a threat. Grandma Hall called. She thinks Randy was scared! Well, why not? He probably was. Who wouldn’t be? “If we could learn how to prevent war, wouldn’t that be enough?” he said. These are divisive times. July 16, 1969 Department of the Army To Whom It May Concern: I have known Randy Hall for more than 15 years during which time I had the opportunity to observe the boy both as a neighbor and as a patient. Though he has never been mentally ill in the classical, clinical sense of the term he has demonstrated a prolonged condition of emotional instability which, in my opinion, would make him unfit for military service. Recent observation of the boy would cause me to have no change in that opinion, though he has managed to develop some covering behaviors which may have the impression of greater maturity and development than actually exists. As a psychologist currently working with the Department of Defense in an overseas setting I believe that this boy would not fit into the military service and would actually be a liability rather than an asset to the military community. William L. Bastendorf, PhD Associate Director Pupil Personnel Services More Positive Thinking Just in case we might have been looking for a little quick advice, Dad had several copies of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People prominently placed throughout our house on Wright Street. Part of its appeal came from clever chapter headings, categorized in sections with quick-fix nuggets. “Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking: 1. Avoid arguments. 2. Never tell someone they are wrong. 3. Start with a question the other person will answer yes to. 4. Let the other person feel the idea is his.” Dad’s letters were an homage to Carnegie’s influence. “Dear Diane, Rule 1. January 5 is one of those days that make men older. A daughter 20 years old is not really an asset to a young man like myself! Truth in government is a must, but truth in age is stupid. Starting now, you are 17 and I am 35. Love, Jack N. Hall, your father.” Next to Dale Carnegie’s book was Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. Published in 1952, it stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 186 weeks, selling more than five million copies. The country was in love with Peale’s cozy quotes. “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” “The tests of life are not meant to break you, but to make you.” “A positive mental attitude means you can overcome any kind of trouble or difficulty.” Dad ate it up. He didn’t give a damn about critics who claimed Peale was a fraud. At age forty, Jack Hall quit his job as Santa Ana City Hall’s civil engineer to become the president of Hall & Foreman, Incorporated. He gave credit where credit was due, claiming every bit of his business acumen had been enhanced 100 percent by applying Carnegie’s and Peale’s tried-and-true techniques. Mom must have been sick and tired of hearing Dad list the twelve steps he learned to be an effective leader. But guess what? Within a few years he was a self-made success. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». 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