ammonia.
In Pasadena Lili would walk down Colorado Boulevard to the library and sit for hours flipping through Photoplay. She loved fashion and would buy Vogue, reading it until the pages were worn. Her dream was to be on a “best dressed” list.
Lili had begun waitressing at a Chinese restaurant owned by a family named Fong. It was there Lili developed a lifelong love of Asian food (that and the fact that most burlesque theatres seemed to have a Chinese joint nearby for inexpensive meals between shows). Sundays she spent at the movies with the Fongs in Chinatown watching Charlie Chan movies. She claimed she searched for opium—but never found it. Maybe she had a romantic idea of what taking drugs was like.
Lili at fifteen
Having a job meant Lili soon quit school. She never regretted it, saying, “I wanted to have money to buy things.” She turned her nose up at attempting to learn “a lot of dates in history.”43 She was more interested in making history.
While at the restaurant Lili was “discovered” by a photographer named Jack Powell, a local Pasadena resident who begged her to pose for professional photographs, promising it wouldn’t cost her a thing. Powell developed a crush on the tall skinny girl with the wide smile who served him pan-fried noodles. Lili loved the camera. She appears fearless in front of it.
LIKE MANY MODELS WHO MADE UP SCENARIOS IN THEIR HEADS TO get into the mood, Lili was adroit at make-believe. Draped in exotic fabrics Lili could let her imagination run rampant. Lili would have many insecurities about her looks but it never showed in pictures.44
Lili and Jack could laugh over the awful photos of her with her head swathed in a striped bandana. They both hoped the pictures would lead to a modeling career. It did not, despite later claims she worked steady for two years. Her first disappointment.
If Lili showed the photos to her family, Idella would have made a snide remark, Alice would have exclaimed she looked beautiful, and Dardy and Barbara would have wanted their pictures taken too. Her entire life Lili freely gave out advice to family and friends about decorating, work, relationships. She would counsel Barbara and Dardy on how to get men to do things for them. She, after all, would become expert at it. Perhaps it had started with Jack Powell and his free photographs.
“DADDY DOESN’T FEEL WELL” BARBARA AND DARDY WOULD OFTEN whisper.45 In his youth, Ian had fallen off a motorbike in Scotland and suffered migraines that over time would intensify in frequency and strength. When they struck, the girls were ushered outside. The house would be shuttered, and silence would blanket the normally boisterous household. The girls had to tiptoe when they were allowed back in. It was another accommodation of bad luck for the family.
No one had gotten over the horrible accident that Betty had suffered. In 1925, when Betty was six and still living in Minnesota, a reckless driver in a Model T hit the little girl while she played in the street. The running board sliced through her face, leaving her with an ugly scar from the top of her head across her nose, through her mouth, and down to her chin. Never as pretty as her sisters, Betty suffered both emotionally and physically. The sisters didn’t talk about Betty much. Dardy would refer to Betty only as the “smart” one. Betty and what happened to her would become a tale the family rewrote, oftentimes denying her very existence. She was never mentioned in any of the sisters’ later press.
A very rare photo taken by Jack Powell of a ravishing Lili
CHAPTER FOUR
During the worst year of the Depression, 1933, unemployment was as high as 25 percent. A loaf of bread was 7 cents and a fancy women’s hat cost upwards of $1.60. Then came the repeal of Prohibition. Audiences lined up to see Fay Wray wriggling in King Kong’s hairy palm while the country swooned to Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” and sultry Ethel Water sang about “Stormy Weather” in Harlem’s Cotton Club. FDR had just become president and food lines stretched across America.
Pasadena would see its economy fall dramatically. The city with the idyllic climate—this was years before the smog infestation of the late 1950s—was home to around seventy-seven thousand. The city would never recover its pre-Depression splendor.
Ian Blackadder was thirty-one years old. He had a hard time finding and keeping work. From garage mechanic he became a salesman for Crown City Dairy based in Pasadena. Money had never been easy to come by and things were tight for both the Blackadder and the Klarquist families. Alice sewed from dusk to dawn at Peterson’s. What beauty Alice might have had had long since worn away from hard work and squinting over piles of stitching.
That year Lili would have seen Joan Crawford shimmy with Gable in Dancing Lady. Lili loved to dance, loved her hours at the barre and in class, but barely dared hope she would end up on the stage. But the longing burned inside her.
Alice was fun-loving yet strict when it came to Lili and her safety. She didn’t like Lili out of her sight and rarely approved of the few friends Lili had made. Maybe it was because the lanky teen was turning into an extraordinary beauty.
Marriage hadn’t tamed Alice’s independent streak. She didn’t ask Daddy Ben his opinion or permission. When she decided to move to Pasadena she simply announced to Ben that was what they were doing. She was warm and generous and single-minded, all things Lili would inherit from her. Alice would give a meal to a starving soul or the last coin from the bottom of her purse. Lili loved to relate a story, whether truth or exaggeration, of Alice giving a homeless woman, crumpled in tears on the streets, a sum of money almost equal to her week’s worth of work. Lili would loathe those who were cheap.
Lili never shied away from nudity
Alice, though not a religious person and didn’t attend church, was spiritual and installed in Lili the Golden Rule. Alice’s generosity of heart was a trait Lili never regretted emulating. Alice never seemed to judge Idella nor said a harsh word about the divorces. She loved her large unconventional family. They made her feel useful. They were her pride and joy.
Alice did without many things so Lili could have her much loved dance lessons. She would sneak an extra coin in Lili’s purse when she went off by herself to the movies. Alice knew the daily deprivations affected Lili, who longed for a richer life. Lili bought yards of colored ribbons that she obsessively organized, stringing them through her hair, a small luxury.
Lili was well aware she didn’t come from a good family in one of the fancier homes in Pasadena. If other families looked down on them, she thought them hypocrites. She spent hours daydreaming about escape from Pasadena. There was nothing for her to do. She longed for grand passion.
At some point Lili posed topless (probably for Powell), except for a wreath of necklaces. She was never inhibited about her body; comfortable from dance lessons, she thought nothing of displaying her breasts.
THOUGH SHE FANTASIZED ABOUT BEING THE NEXT GARBO, SHE TOOK no steps, no training, no sending of photos
