that meant escape. Nothing would tie her to a place, not friends, family, or a man. Each new city held possibility, a chance for “adventure.” Pasadena bored her. She longed for something. She would reinvent herself as she went along, a new name, a new place. She would remain an itinerant gypsy most of her life.
She would also turn Maud’s and Idella’s guilt into something she could manage to her advantage. Until the end of her days, Lili would become a master manipulator.
When Lili finally crawled into her bed with an old Vogue, Maud came with dinner on a tray. Maud would always be there for her granddaughter.
“We don’t manifest our love,” Lili would one day tell a reporter, “with hugs and kisses.” It was a family that didn’t talk about their feelings. There were few outward signs of affection. “But I knew I was loved.”34
Daddy Ben, equally reserved, was a minor character. He played a benign role and would quickly fade from the narrative. It was women who ruled Lili’s world. It was strong women who made the decisions. She learned from the women in her family to take care of herself and to do as she pleased. She also learned not to trust them.
Momentarily, Lili felt in peril. She was no longer Marie Klarquist. She felt as though something—she didn’t know what—had been taken from her.
She compared the two names and thought Van Schaack was more exotic, different. “I’m going to call myself Marie Van Schaack,” she declared. And indeed that would be the name she would sign for most legal papers for the rest of her years on earth.35
Maud agreed. Lili wrote in her French Canadian biography Ma Vie de Stripteaseuse that Maud then dropped another bombshell. Her real name wasn’t Marie, it was Willis. But even that was not the truth. Either Lili or Maud made up the story. Clearly on Lili’s birth certificate her given name is Marie.36 Perhaps Lili remembered Aunt Katherine in Seattle whose middle name was Willis and she thought that different enough to appropriate as her own. Lili would vacillate between Marie and Willis for the rest of her life.
It wasn’t enough that she was a different person, but those around her had to transform also. She could no longer call Maud “mother.”
Maud must have been devastated. She had lived for this little girl and wanted nothing more than to be her mother. Lili had been named after her. Marie.
But Lili didn’t want to punish or hurt her beloved Maud. She knew all the sacrifices Maud had made for her. She knew Maud’s life revolved around her. Maud would hold the deepest part of Lili’s heart.
Lili’s mother Idella
Lili had decided that to live the life she wanted, to deal with the shock that nothing was as it seemed, she would make them all change. (She would spend a lifetime reinventing and renaming people.) She wanted everyone to be different, not just her. Maud would now be “Alice.” Where the name came from is anyone’s guess. But it was accepted and immediately incorporated by the entire family.37
Lili decided Idella was now “Adelaide.”** It was no time for arguments and Lili got her way.
Alice knew everything would be all right with her imaginative, clever, and always adaptable Lili. It was one of Lili’s most dominant traits; she was versatile to whatever came her way. Lili would always be a survivor.
Alice stroked Lili’s forehead and left her in the dark of her room, names pinging around her head like popcorn on the stove. Marie. Van Schaack. Grandmother. Sister. Mother. She smiled.
Now Lili had something in common with her idol. After all, Garbo had been born Gustafsson.
What should have been, and probably was, seismic news, Lili quickly filed away. Or so she claimed. But what a shift it must have made. The truth of it would do nothing to instill a sense of honesty in relationships. It was okay to say and do what you wanted no matter how it might affect others. Lili would become almost pathologically incapable of telling the truth about her past.
One sure result of this revelation was that Lili began to compartmentalize people. Few knew of, let alone met, Idella or Alice or any of Lili’s half-siblings. Later, husbands would be told parents were dead. Half-truths. It was easier than explaining the abandonment, half-siblings, the messy, chaotic lies. There was underlying shame in the secrets. Lili distorted the truth and told outright fabrications. Marriages and relationships were not explained. One created the reality they wanted.
As strange as the story of Lili’s “adoption” by Alice and Ben was, it is only part of the story. Whether she was told another lie by Idella and Alice, or Lili chose to dismiss her father outright by having him conveniently go AWOL with her birth, it is fantasy. It was lies on top of lies and secrets that remained buried.
Lili’s parents were married eight months prior to her birth. How premature she was at birth is anyone guess, maybe quite premature, as she remained in the hospital and gave them all pause that she might not live.
Lili was born at 8 a.m. on June 3, 1917, in Hennepin County at Abbott Hospital. Two days later Edward Van Schaack did register, but according to the application for his military headstone he did not go into the army until June 28, 1918, a year after Lili’s birth, possibly because US troops had started landing in France by the end of June. (He would be honorably discharged as a corporal on March 7, 1919.)
Alice admitted she was desperate for another baby. If Edward remained in the picture, Lili must have lived with her parents at least in the beginning. But records show that as of 1920 Lili (or as she’s listed in the census, Birnee or Binee) was living with Alice as her daughter in Hennepin, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Either to discredit or dismiss Edward, Idella did the unthinkable and implied that Lili was “illegitimate.” Idella was capable of such cruelties, or maybe Lili thought it a better story. Lili liked stories of seduction and betrayal and she would dance them on the stage, but Idella and Edward had been married.
Was a young, excitable, and sick Idella incapable of taking care of a baby? The pair blamed Edward for abandoning Idella. It would taint Lili’s feelings about her father and men forever.
FROM THAT DAY FORWARD SHE WOULD FANATICALLY GUARD HER PRIVACY and her secrets. She seemed to want to be Lili St. Cyr, fully formed and sprouted from nothing to be presented on the stage with the seven veils of mystery protecting her true identity. No one was interested in little Marie. She wasn’t either.
* For simplicity I will refer to Barbara, Dardy, and Lili by those names
** For simplicity the author will continue to refer to Idella as such, because that is how Dardy and others referred to her. But Lili did call her mother Adelaide from that day forward.
CHAPTER THREE
It was 1932. The three girls stood in the glassed-enclosed porch that ran along one side of the big rambling house. By spring the green jacaranda trees would explode in a generous veil of trumpet-shaped purple blossoms. Clusters of orange trees threw off heavy fragrance in the yard near the tall eucalyptus with gray bark peeling down the skinny
