Part of our “honesty” as a family is that we acknowledged the gamesmanship of our taking advantage of Hollywood. Becky and her husband Rawdon, in the famously titled chapter, show us “how to live well on nothing a year.” In our family’s case there were no bill collectors pounding at the door, but we were no less engaged in a scam. “We weren’t millionaires,” said my mother, looking back on it all, “but we lived like millionaires.” Lunches and dinners at the Beverly Brown Derby, at Trader Vic’s, and Chasen’s, and then when we started traveling, in all the best restaurants of New York, Paris, London, and Rome were always free. By the time I was in college and our family had moved to New York, the game was winding down. Still, we could count on dinner every Sunday at Luchow’s—a staple of sauerbraten and red cabbage or maybe wiener schnitzel –and at the beginning of every new season—fall, winter, summer, spring—a meal for the three of us along with maybe a couple of awed, grateful friends at The Four Seasons. The maitre d’ would glide obsequiously to my mother’s table—always a good table or she would get it changed. “Tell me who’s been here lately,” she would ask. “Ah, last week Marlene Dietrich . . .” he would begin as my mother, keeping pace with him, would scribble in her little spiral notebook. At the end came the anticipated reckoning. “The check, please” my mother would propose, her voice at once firm and uncertain. “Oh no, Miss Graham, please, it’s on the house.” We enjoyed this little ritual immensely.
While we were still in California, there were also the getaway weekends. In Palms Springs, Ojai, and Santa Barbara, a range of hotels—which if not the best at least had swimming pools—offered us either low rates or free accommodations. Also, beginning in the mid ’50s, as more movies were made on location abroad, there were the free plane trips and hotel stays in Europe, or in New York, all the way through the ’60s, a pair of free tickets to every Broadway opening. When my mother wasn’t in town, I would take a friend. I attended hits and busts, the 1958 opening of Camelot and long-forgotten plays that closed almost the night they opened. It was a scam, a game, a performance, perhaps all the more zestfully fraudulent for me since I derived its benefits without even putting in my mother’s labor.
My mother showed me the zest of calculated performance in an imperfect world, the same lesson taught by Becky Sharp, and it’s hard for me not to conflate the two of them. Being equal to the moment at hand. Knowing what to say when threatened. Becky knows how to humiliate Miss Pinkerton by speaking to her in French or to rebuke the prying Mrs. Bute by her “honest” admission that she was never a Montmorency. When my mother, in the late ’30s, encountered Constance Bennet on a studio set and Bennet accosted her—“At last I get to meet the biggest bitch in Hollywood!”—my mother was equal to the occasion and retorted with barely a pause, “Not the biggest bitch, Connie, the second biggest bitch!” We also loved her guile and gusto, when threatened with a lawsuit by Jane Wyman, in making a radio show “retraction” that managed to repeat the offending item. “It is not true that Jane Wyman wears long sleeves and high collars to cover up hives.” Poor Jane Wyman! But such were the family stories we thrilled to as children. How could I not adore Thackeray’s witty, embattled character?
And also make her my own model. Despite my avowed dislike for masks and disguises, I find that much that I have done and sought to do has been conceived in terms of performance. In seventh grade I had to give an oral book report on a Dorothy Parker short story. Standing before the class and talking from my index cards, I managed to keep everyone laughing throughout the presentation. That was the beginning of my aspiration to panache.
In college and a bit afterwards, I acted in plays—largely Shakespeare, a bit of Shaw and Christopher Fry—and thought I might like to be an actress. My mother asked if I were willing to starve. I said no. Choosing, instead, to teach, I entered a sober profession but also one that is theatrical. Even participating in department meetings can seem so. Making the right comment at the right moment. Entering the play, assuming a role, as much caught up in the zest of the occasion as concerned with its purpose or content. And always a bit detached. When I was a college dean, another job people take seriously, I think I kept signaling that I held myself at an ironic distance from the role. That may be why, ultimately, I was fired. But no matter. The performer looks to new roles, new opportunities. Losing my job as dean meant a twenty-five-thousand-dollar salary decrease. Within months I had a book contract to write a family memoir. The book advance I received offset the drop in salary. My mother had recently died, but I imagined she would have been proud of my resourcefulness. It was in the mode of Becky Sharp: scrambling to stay on top of things yet viewing any set of circumstances as a drama which could ultimately run to its end; engaged in events but also impervious to them; feeling oneself inextinguishable because there is no essence of self to extinguish—only one role after another, and one’s abiding energy to keep playing them.
But having said all this, I must pause to remember my mother’s remark. Becky Sharp is “somewhat like me,” she wrote. The qualifying “somewhat” is important, and all the more so if I think of Becky as myself.
