quite frankly, for anything. But like a girl in an orphanage named Norma Jean, she knew she could dream bigger than most. Lili was not going to spend her life like Idella, breeding too many kids, with men that left, days a constant struggle of housework. Nor would she be like Alice who sacrificed her young-girl, hoped-for adventures to care for others. Lili vowed that her life would be about her.
With the family’s peripatetic existence Lili was never afraid of new places; in fact she embraced them. Moving would prepare her for a life on the road working theatres from coast to coast, comfortable in hotel rooms, rarely in one place long. She thrived in the gypsy’s life. “It gives me an opportunity to be someone else. To start anew,” she said. “I always made the best of it.”46 Moving also allowed Lili freedom from herself and her past.
By cutting her life into sections, like a pie, Lili maintained her secrets. They were a family of secrets, maybe ashamed of Idella’s many relationships, or the poverty, or Ian’s headaches and Idella’s limp and Betty’s scar. Survival was something Lili would become very good at. And survival, she learned, meant keeping secrets.
LILI SAT FOR HOURS GAZING CRITICALLY AT HER IMAGE IN THE MIRROR. It would remain a habit with her, later assumed to be vanity. Others didn’t understand she could not perceive her beauty—or her identity—without seeing herself. Like children who search for their being in their reflection, so did Lili. As Diana Vreeland surmised, “To look into a mirror . . . I consider it an identification of self.”47 Lili was looking for who she was. Without seeing she couldn’t feel who she was, who she was becoming. Was she attempting to make her face expressionless like Garbo? Garbo seemed impenetrable. Incapable of being hurt.
Lili described Jimmy Nichols as “fragile.” After they shared their first kiss she pressed a finger to her lips. “From now on you belong to me.” He was worshipful and they spent hours walking in the park.
One weekend, after a morning sewing and stitching, Alice shuffled home exhausted, hauling a bag of groceries. From the front porch an unexpected site greeted her.
“Alice,” Lili and Dardy yelled. “Look what we got.”48 Next to them stood a serious and dignified border collie. It was a seeing-eye dog for Ben and would be named Barry.
Lili would claim it came from a Ms. Mable, a wealthy client of Peterson’s. Ms. Mable had struck up a friendship, or rather took an interest in the kind, big-hipped woman often at her feet with pins in her mouth and a measuring tape between her chapped fingers. Ms. Mable knew where the Klarquists lived and their difficult circumstances.
Lili would write in her biography how Ms. Mable’s charitable contributions would include buying Alice a tiny cottage, hardly credible as the census records continue to list Alice at South Oak Street. It was just the sort of fairy tale Lili was hoping would transform her life.
When Alice became too restrictive, Lili would hop over to Idella’s. When Idella belittled her she would slink back to Pasadena. She learned to make the most of the two homes. And the most of her freedom. In her biography she would claim Bedlam Manner held little charm for her. She “couldn’t stand the noise and confusion.”49
Idella had a “huge chip on her shoulder.” It must have been mental agony for the former beauty with a “disfiguring disease” to watch her beauty fade.50 Emotionally distant and unaffectionate, she had a “vicious tongue” and was unafraid to use it on anyone.51
Dardy would claim Idella never learned social skills because she was isolated as a child, either because of infantile paralysis or circumstances of how she was raised, with a mother who moved often and ultimately divorced. Idella was woefully unprepared or unwilling to nurture any of her five children. Lili would be equally ill-equipped to cultivate a healthy mature relationship of almost any kind.
BEFORE DROPPING OUT OF SCHOOL LILI HALFHEARTEDLY ATTENDED the John Muir Technical High School on Walnut Street in Pasadena. She was no scholar. One of the few things she enjoyed participating in was an art class project competing in the Rose Bowl Parade. The class designed a float that was a salute to Iceland. The behemoth float of various-sized paper-mache icebergs ended up taking first prize. The students were rewarded with tickets to the usually sold-out Rose Bowl football game. Lili couldn’t have cared less about some stupid game and sold her two tickets for five bucks apiece.
On Saturday nights Ian cooked hot dogs on the grill for the strapping young football players who wanted to impress the girls. With “car-loads of suitors”52 the sisters good-naturedly competed to see who could get the most boys to show up. One wonders where Betty was and what she thought about the activity that didn’t involve her. Perhaps she had already moved out. Or did she sit alone in her room hiding her scarred face?
It was a carefree time for Lili and her sisters. Still the football players didn’t do much for Lili, who flirted while she dated Jimmy Nichols, her first kiss. The dissatisfaction she felt was palpable. Lili wanted more. Then she suffered through one of the most traumatic events of her life.
Lili found herself pregnant.
She was devastated, too ashamed to confide in anyone. And really, who was there? Her sisters were too young. She couldn’t face Alice or the wrath of Idella. Jimmy was naive. She didn’t want his reaction to confuse her.
Lili had a horror of being a young mother. She was determined to have a life of “adventure” like “Garbo.” She was meant to be rich and have affairs. To achieve it she felt she would “need a man to liberate herself.”53 She felt trapped by the awful circumstance.
Determination was a key ingredient in Lili’s makeup. Without a word to anyone she found a doctor on Third Street in downtown Los Angeles. Going alone she paid the $50 for an abortion. She was frightened. Not that she wasn’t making the right decision; she knew she was. She didn’t want, then—or ever—the life of a mother or “obedient” housewife.54 She was worried the doctor would botch the job and she would become ill or die.
It would have been a long stomach-cramping ride from Third Street back to Pasadena on her own, changing buses and trams. But as Lili would continually show, she was made of steel and grit, absolutely focused when she set a course to see it through. She allowed nothing to get in her way.
Abortions, though commonplace, were both illegal and dangerous in the 1930s. It would have been much worse to be saddled with a squalling baby and Jimmy. She was by now disillusioned with their childish romance. There was more beyond the cottages of South Oak Street and she was going to get it.
Afterward she didn’t feel well, mentally or physically. Trembling and insecure, needing assurance from someone that she would be okay, she admitted to Jimmy what she had done.
“You should have told me.”55
She felt it was her responsibility, not his.
They held hands in silence, each alone with their own thoughts, knowing something between them had irretrievably changed. It was the end of the relationship. Jimmy looked at her differently. She felt a million years more mature than him.
A short time later, Lili, still feeling unwell, was forced to tell Alice what she had done. Alice swallowed her shock and tucked her into bed, saying she would call a doctor. Lili would say Alice showed marvelous understanding despite holding back the anger that Lili read on her face.
Lili refused. No more doctors. Inside the pit of her stomach Lili felt a burning anger grow. She felt betrayed—by her body?—and she was ashamed and didn’t like feeling that way.
When Idella
