my sister became putty in Mother’s hands and did all she could to be helpful.
That’s how we ended up in that crowded public school near Reverend Walters’s church.
One night in ’63 when it suddenly hit me that Mother was the reason I could dance but couldn’t spell, I tried to stab her.
Those were the days when mothers were getting blamed for everybody’s neuroses, but that wasn’t the only reason that I suddenly saw her as Satan. She thought I had gone crazy.
One of the most humiliating things about my supposed suicide wasn’t just the photo of me naked, ten pounds overweight, it was the suicide note that I’d supposedly written, which made me sound like a pea brain. Somebody had mastered my handwriting, which I’d hidden from fans after my husband had made fun of it: ‘Irene writes worse than my granny, who never finished fourth grade.’
Neither did I really.
Sure I made it back and forth to school for a day here and a day there, but I was always behind and grew shrewd at hiding that I knew less than the other kids, whereas Lilian … her extra years with the nuns stood her in good stead for life.
I told Charlie that only she would have gone to all that trouble with my suicide note but he couldn’t figure out her motive.
In Hollywood to be forty-two, unbankable and bankrupt was a reason for suicide, so somebody guessed that I was a suitable case, and I guess I was sort of addicted to sleepers, like most stars I knew in the 60s. If we didn’t want to deal with life, it was natural to want to sleep for fourteen, fifteen hours at a stretch. But Charlie refused to bring sleepers into the house.
Marijuana, yes. LSD, yes. Morphine, even. But sleeping pills, no.
Louise Taylor’s Saturday-morning tap-dancing class was held in the room behind her father’s bar and grill, sadly bulldozed after the war in a rezoning scheme. Mr Taylor’s brother, Derville, also had his shoeshine stand there, so it was a busy corner. Sociable. Where people who didn’t go to church could meet. Laugh and gossip and show off their week’s pay in some loud Saturday-night togs.
Louise, who we all called Miss Taylor, had been a chorine at the Cotton Club in Harlem the year before, but I didn’t know that was something for her students to brag about. I didn’t know that the Cotton Club was the night spot where New York’s arty set, like Carl van Vechten and F. Scott Fitzgerald, went to rub shoulders with what they called the Darktown Strutters, and it would be years before I discovered that real Harlemites turned their noses up at the Cotton Club …
Miss Taylor was all of eighteen, though her flapper’s bob made her look older, especially the first time I saw her in that deep-rose sack dress. Her pockmarked skin, a pale olive colour, wasn’t the sole reason she could have passed for white; she also had straggly light brown hair and a completely flat backside.
Inching my way into the shabby back room for my first tap lesson, my head was as full of fantasies as the other eight girls. Including Lil. I’m sure we all imagined that we would emerge from day one like the sophisticate that Miss Taylor was. (I didn’t think she was gawky like my sister claimed. In fact, I saw Louise as stylish and graceful. Her flat chest and boyish hips suited the Jazz-Age clothes she wore, and her long, sure stride was sort of elegant. Although it’s true that in those days it was considered unfortunate for a girl to be so tall.)
I loved Miss Taylor for having such lean, muscular calves, because for the first time my own seemed less pitiful. They were the thinnest in her class but she’d remind us all, ‘Bless the Lord for your legs, and oil those feet!’
She couldn’t afford a pianist so she produced rhythms for us to dance to with a long baton that she beat against a wooden mallet. Class lasted forty minutes and we knew it was nearly over when she clapped her hands and wiped the moustache of perspiration from her top lip. That was the signal for us to close our eyes and listen to her dance, before we put on our street shoes for home. To have us hear the rhythm of her feet rather than watch them move was her own progressive idea … Her steps were as rhythmic as a typist reeling off sixty words a minute. Clack-clack-clickety-clack-clack. Clack-click-clackety-clack-click. The syncopation was like fireworks and got under my skin so, I couldn’t wait to imitate the sound with my own feet.
I didn’t have what they call a natural talent, but I tried to make up for it in sheer determination. It was during Miss Taylor’s fourth session that I discovered that by concentrating on my rhythm, I could manipulate her smile. To get her to glance at me was like eating Mack’s caramels at the bottom of the stairs. I didn’t want to share her attention … Had Mother known, she would have whipped me without my understanding why. She would have said that I had to share everything with Lil, but that’s not quite how the showing-off thing works. So I kept the admiration that I’d spotted in Miss Taylor’s eyes to myself.
I’ve since seen men study me with that glance, those starry eyes that soon go hand-in-glove with infatuation. Whereas Louise’s seemed to say something like, ‘When you try, I find you adorable.’
I did everything to get her undivided attention, and what started as a game became a compulsion. Some of her girls wanted to be dancers, but little Irene wanted to be noticed. So, wherever and whenever I could, I’d slip on my tap dancing shoes to practise … Clack-clack-clickety, clack-clack-clack. It’s a wonder that Mother didn’t go mad.
Los Angeles erased my vaguest need to return to Camden. Especially after Mother got us a ride to Venice Beach to celebrate my eighth birthday. I smelled the ocean before I heard it, and heard it before I saw it; the Pacific gets credit for being my first glimpse of what other people refer to as ‘Nature’. The waves. The vastness. I squealed louder than a baby gull when I saw the way that water spread out to meet the sky. It was a clear November day and I threw my arms out to spin ’round and ’round.
Like this display of stars tonight, the ocean made me feel that I was everything and nothing.
The day I turned eight, had anybody told Mother that twenty-six years on she’d be waiting backstage with me at the Oscars to hear if my name was called for best supporting actress, she would never have believed it. Because in 1930 all I seemed destined to be was another little nappy-headed child; Negroes had as much hope of taking on Hollywood as a roach. In fact, on my eighth birthday, Mother couldn’t believe that we were allowed to take our shoes off and walk the beach that Armistice Day. So we didn’t.
After Lil and I had been taking tap for several weeks, it was the Saturday before Thanksgiving, Miss Taylor brought a short but imposing-looking friend to watch our class. I noticed the woman eyeing me, so I sensed that something was up, and sure enough, after class, Louise called me aside and said, ‘Would you and your big sister like to split a sweet potato in Daddy’s place?’
Not a slice of cake or pie.
A sweet potato. And how lucky we were to get the offer.
We may have been taking tap, but food was still a treat and hard to come by.
That occasion marked the first time Lil and I went to an eating place, and as Louise led us to the booth which her father had motioned her to take, I couldn’t have been more nervous had I been asked to take communion at a high mass. I dared not look at Lilian for fear of giggling.
