Rereading now and recasting my life in terms of this link is a way of exploring the feelings as much as facts of my particular childhood—and perhaps every childhood’s poignant mix of bliss and loss. I, too, like David, lacked but hardly seemed to miss a father. I, too, lived with my pretty mother and a beloved servant, Stella. No matter that David’s mother was a silly, weak little thing and my mother a successful Hollywood gossip columnist. No matter that David’s father lay buried in the village churchyard, and mine, or at least the man I thought was my father, lived far away in London, dispatched by divorce. Or that our home also included my younger brother, Robert. I knew the prelapsarian paradise, along with its edge of anxiety, of having a mother who seemed both doting and elusive, a figure I yearningly adored but never quite possessed. I knew the reassurance of Stella’s calm Czechoslovakian presence and the pleasure of holidays spent at the homes, more modest yet cozier than mine, of her nieces Celia and Josephine and their respective sons, Leslie and Irvin. Towheaded, curly-locked Irvin was my first “boyfriend.” We played together in his backyard, and at five I planned to marry him. You might say he was my “Little Em’ly,” and his three-generation Czech immigrant family was my version of the Peggotty clan we are enchanted to meet in their wonderful beached boathouse when David goes with Peggotty to Yarmouth.
I also lived the disruption of the idyll. David’s world is shattered when his mother marries Mr. Murdstone. Mine suffered the entry of a detested stepfather, whose nickname was Bow Wow. A hulking football coach in a Southern California prison, at thirty-six, twelve years my mother’s junior, Stanley “Bow Wow” Wojtkeiwicz gained an introduction to her from the actor Glenn Ford. He sought her aid in raising money for his pet project, Bow’s Wow’s Boys Town, arriving at our house with an impressive blueprint that he spread out on our living room coffee table. BOW WOW’S BOY’S TOWN read the words in bold caps at its top. There were dormitories and classroom buildings and a refectory and playing fields. I remember his telling us the nickname Bow Wow came from the frisky way he used to play college football, and we all—my brother and I as well as our mother—were charmed by him at first.
There never would be a Bow Wow’s Boys Town, but after a six-week courtship Bow Wow and my mother married. As she later described the attraction, she had responded to his warmth and energy and to sex. Bow Wow moved into our house, as Mr. Murdstone moves into David’s. My ten-year-old self watched while seemingly endless cardboard boxes of his shoes were carried up our curving staircase into my mother’s bedroom. Later Robert and I would sit near the top of that staircase, listening to the raised angry voices audible behind the closed bedroom door. As Mr. Murdstone asserts his sway over David’s mother, imposing his will on her, inhibiting her spontaneity, so Bow Wow sought to influence my mother. Giving up his job in the prison, he became her unofficial manager, trading the running of football plays for running interference in her influential name with the studios and publicists and stars, though often my mother had to curb his zeal. He never had the power of a Mr. Murdstone—my mother was too strong for that and perhaps Bow Wow too weak, notwithstanding all his bluster as he strode around in football jerseys covering his girth. But he and I quickly assumed our battle stations of open enmity, and his very presence in my mother’s bedroom inhibited the unthinking access my brother and I had always had to her and to her room, the magnetic center of our universe before his arrival. In the mornings, especially on weekends, we had loved to climb into bed with her, one of us on each side, and make our plans. “What shall we do?” she would ask. “Shall we go to Ojai? To Palm Springs? Shall we go to Malibu and ride horses?”
I have always blamed Bow Wow for destroying our family happiness. It didn’t right the balance that after three years my mother, as she said, “kicked him out,” having discovered the diary in which he had written that I was a brat, Robert a sissy, and our mother a terrible bitch and, to her even more alarming, recorded the mortgage payments he was secretly making on our house with the aim of later claiming community property. Before they reached a settlement, he did everything he could to harm us, even calling up my school to say Sheilah Graham was a Communist and sending the ASPCA to our house to investigate a mistreated dog. “Is this a mistreated dog?” asked my mother, grandly indignant, as Tony, our Dalmatian, trotted to the door wagging his tail. It was one of her finest moments. But after Bow Wow, she was never the same. He didn’t kill her the way Mr. Murdstone kills Clara Copperfield. But he killed an essential part of her spirit. She gained weight. Her nerves were bad. She shouted and wept at the strain of the divorce, sometimes going so far as to say it was all too much for her and she should just take him back. “No!” I would cry. “No! You can’t do that!” In the end she got a tougher lawyer and they nailed Bow Wow on adultery. But getting rid of Bow Wow still came at a high cost—and money surely seemed the
