Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found (17 page)

“Let’s try it.” He moved his arm with mine, whipping it forward so hard that the momentum sent me after it. The second time, I planted my foot firmly. My back leg slammed forward into it, straight, like the snap of a scissors. I hadn’t planned that, but it felt good: strong, balanced, controlled. Anjel smiled at me. I smiled back.

I ran and leaped for the Frisbees and flung them back again, my legs scissoring like Anjel’s. It didn’t surprise me that Anjel was good at it; she was good at everything. I traded with her for the lighter ones, which were easier to throw—and some actually made it to Ryan. He gave me a nod of approval whenever I threw one well. I felt sporty, coordinated, capable, for the first time in my life. I was with Anjel in her world—and I belonged there.

The next day I woke up and couldn’t move. My brain sent messages to my legs, but they were as immobile as felled logs. I didn’t know what was the matter with me. I was frightened.

“I can’t get up,” I said to Cici. She started laughing. I was hurt. She could often be curt and practical when I was in difficulty, but I’d never felt a lack of sympathy before.

“It only shows that you don’t get enough exercise,” she said, and left me to force my legs, seized up with pain, to move.

I knew that she felt both Collin and I were too indoorsy. She didn’t like weakness, and I didn’t blame her for that. But this was something different. She was angry about where I’d been.

The previous Christmas, when Anjelica gave me an outfit of bell-sleeved blouse and bell-bottomed trousers in silky white rayon, and a pair of sandals like cat’s cradles fixed into shiny wooden platforms, Cici had contemptuously pronounced them “Tatum O’Neal clothes.” Tatum was only a year older than me, but Ryan bought her slinky dresses and took her to parties. Cici didn’t approve at all.

I didn’t dislike the Tatum O’Neal clothes: they just had nothing to do with me. I didn’t even feel right hanging them up with my other clothes. Had Anjel given them to me because she wanted me to be like Tatum, whom I still hadn’t met? I didn’t have a tenth of the confidence to carry them off. They stayed in their box on the floor of my closet.

Now I was sleeping in Tatum’s bed—actually, beds. Ryan had two houses: the Malibu house and another in Beverly Hills, on top
of a mountain across the canyon from Gloom Castle. We’d spend a few days at one, then a few days at the other, according to his moods. Tatum was in England, making
International Velvet,
but her closets were bursting with the clothes she’d left behind, all scented with Saint-Laurent Rive Gauche, which—I discovered when she came home—she sprayed directly onto them and poured into the rinse water of the washing machine.

She and her brother Griffin lived with Ryan because, I was told, their mother was crazy. Griffin was a year younger than me and small for his age, with leaf-green eyes and a freckled face like a street urchin out of Dickens. Instantly he became like another little brother to me. I felt tender toward him, protective of him. He seemed lonely.

He tried on my high-platform shoes once at the beach house, acting the clown. Anjel was fixing a Coke and lemon in the kitchen, and I saw her glance nervously at the stairs. I realized that she didn’t want Ryan to see this: his son wearing girl’s shoes, even for fun. I made my laughter less loud, and tried to get my shoes back. But Griffin kept clomping around in them, stretching out the joke, as if daring his father to come down and see him.

Ryan was filming
The Driver
that summer, and it was mostly night shoots. He’d wake up around two or three in the afternoon and head out onto the beach, Anjel and I following, for a session of Frisbee. Griffin rarely played—he liked to surf, but mostly he just stayed in his room, smoking dope. Ryan’s next-door neighbor, a white-haired man we always called Lee’s Bars Stools and Dinettes—his commercials were all over the TV—plowed through the waves some way out, parallel to us, as the sun started to sink behind the ocean.

Then we’d all have a sauna together. Soon I stopped being self-conscious about my nakedness, or about Ryan’s. I did start shaving my legs.

Once it was dark, we’d drive in the Corniche down to the dock neighborhood of San Pedro. Usually I sat on the armrest between
the two front seats, while Griffin burrowed like a little animal in the back. Ryan draped his right arm across me to rest his hand on Anjel’s thigh as he drove.

In an alleyway near the set I found a tiny cat, barely bigger than my hand, with long gray-brown fur and a perfectly triangular face. She seemed completely alone. She let me pick her up and carry her back to Ryan’s Winnebago.

“She’s probably hungry,” said Anjel. We had bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches—Ryan’s favorite food, aside from tomato soup. Her tiny teeth seemed too small to deal with bacon, so I held a tomato slice out to her. She reared up on her hind legs and batted at it with her front paws.

“She’s a boxer,” said Ryan, delighted. He loved boxing. He had a heavy bag and a speed bag hanging in his bedroom at the beach house. He’d given Anjelica boxing gloves too and taught her to punch.

We called the kitten Sugar, after Sugar Ray Leonard. Anjel said the name was street tough, which fit her. We went back to the Beverly Hills house that morning, and Sugar lived in Tatum’s white-carpeted suite with me. It was a separate building only a few feet from the master bedroom—I thought of it as sitting at the right hand of God. Griffin’s bedroom was on the far horn of the U-shaped house: a room the architect had intended for the maid.

When I got out of bed Sugar attacked my ankles—scratching and biting me, drawing tiny pricks of blood—until she realized it was me. She made a run for the door whenever I opened it, but I didn’t want to let her out in case a coyote got her, or she ran away. I felt like her jailer. Soon she did escape, and I never saw her again.

On our last night in San Pedro, a big stunt was planned. The location was a vast parking garage with a row of concrete posts down the center, and a wide trench in the floor alongside them; a car would run up a ramp on two wheels, flip over, and slide along the trench. The stuntman, Billy Burton, was a friend of Cici’s: a cowboy with
a drawl, tight jeans, and a slow smile. I’d met him once before that night, so I felt I knew him.

Even though Ryan wasn’t in the shot, we all gathered, in the small hours of the morning, to watch the stunt. Billy, wearing a padded suit, walked casually to the car.

“Roll it. Action.” The car hit the ramp and flipped over—and then, sideways, smashed into the concrete pillars, bounced off the sharp edge of the trench, and came to a dead stop. That wasn’t the plan: crushed metal, jagged thuds, a pinballing car smashing to pieces. My heart stopped. The trench in which it came to rest made the car look like it had been pounded flat by a crusher.

The last clangs echoed away into the silence. Nobody called “cut.” The cavernous space, and everyone in it, was frozen in shock. I expected people to run to the car, but nobody did. It seemed like minutes passed. Probably it was only seconds.

A hand emerged from the car window. Billy’s hand. Now people ran to pull him out. I heard them ask why he hadn’t let them know he was okay.

“Didn’t want to ruin the shot,” he said. His voice was as soft and slow as ever. “Never heard nobody say ‘cut.’”

I was shaking, and trying to hide it. Once the relief had sunk in, the set went back to normal—people hurrying this way and that with equipment, clipboards, cases. As Ryan, Anjel, Griffin, and I went back to the trailer, I caught sight of Billy, still in his padded suit, heading over to the craft-services table to get a cup of coffee. I didn’t dare look at him, fearing that somehow the pressure of my eyes would make him vanish; I still couldn’t believe he was really there. I’d seen him get smashed to pieces in a car wreck. I’d seen him come back from the dead.

Marymount High School, and its associated convent, of the order of the Sacred Heart of Mary, was in an old Spanish mission-style
building on Sunset Boulevard. Dad had filmed a commercial there. He loved nuns, and they loved him—especially Irish ones. He flirted with them in a gentlemanly sort of way. Few men, probably, treated them like ladies.

“I think I’ll send my daughter here next year.” I could hear his voice rolling the words like bonbons to be wrapped up in tissue paper and given to the nuns.

They weren’t proper nuns, in black habits and wimples, as the nuns in Loughrea had been. They wore murky pink and green polyester outfits, and you could see their legs, which were smothered in thick flesh-colored stockings. I thought that was very improper. Their only nun-mark was the big silver cross on a long chain that hung around each nun’s neck. The principal’s name was Sister Colette—unsuitable, I felt, for a nun.

Sister Charles was the Irish one. She taught sewing, and she was a big fan of Dad’s. “Such a wonderful artist, your father,” she’d say almost every time she saw me. “That fillum of his,
Ryan’s Daughter,
sure it’s the most beautiful fillum I’ve ever seen, the love of Ireland that’s in every inch of it…”

I was confused. I didn’t think Dad had made a film called
Ryan’s Daughter,
though I wasn’t a hundred percent sure; could she, somehow, mean Tatum? Ryan had made a film in Ireland recently,
Barry Lyndon,
but I didn’t think Tatum was in it. I didn’t want to correct Sister Charles, she was in such raptures over the film, and that meant she liked me. When I did finally discover that a film called
Ryan’s Daughter
existed, and that David Lean had directed it, I didn’t dare tell her in case she lost interest in Dad and me—or, worse, in case she thought I’d bamboozled her, out of a tawdry and hypocritical desire to be liked, into thinking the film was Dad’s.

I wanted the girls at school to know of my connection with Ryan, so I dropped his name whenever I could. When one of the older girls mentioned that some girls had boyfriends at Loyola, the boys’ school twinned with ours, I said, “I’ve already got
someone. Ryan. My sister’s boyfriend. Who drove me to school. Ryan O’Neal.”

She looked at me weirdly, and stopped talking to me. I knew it had come out wrong. I’d made it sound like I was sleeping with him too. I felt ridiculous. Why did I have to be a name-dropper, and then make a hash of it? Still, I was glad I’d said it. My movie-star connections made me interesting—I’d never been a popular girl, or good at sports—and if I hadn’t said it, maybe no one would notice who was at the wheel of the magenta Corniche that sometimes dropped me off or picked me up in the curving school driveway.

When I was alone with him in the car, Ryan rested his right hand on my thigh, the same way he rested it on Anjel’s when she was in the passenger seat.

“You don’t mind, do you?” he asked me once.

“No,” I said casually, though I wasn’t sure it was okay. For one thing, it didn’t seem safe for him to drive with only his left hand.

“I can’t drive any other way,” he said, and held the silence until he was sure I understood that he was telling the truth.

The Pacific Coast Highway was solid with traffic in the mornings, and Ryan would pull onto the hard shoulder and put his foot down on the gas. I watched the needle climb—50, 60, 70, 80—terrified that another driver would have the same idea and pull out in front of us, and we’d have no time to stop and no way not to crash into them. I didn’t wear my seat belt; I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone wear one. I wanted to put it on, but I was afraid Ryan would take it as an insult to his driving. I tried to relax my thigh so that tense muscles under his hand wouldn’t give me away.

Before long, I was spending most of my time with Anjelica and Ryan. I knew Cici wasn’t happy about it, but I put that down to things like no proper bedtime and the fact that Griffin was allowed to smoke dope and snort coke and maybe she thought I was doing that too, which I wasn’t.

The whole idea of taking smoke into my lungs revolted me. I didn’t
make much distinction between cigarettes and joints: Anjel seemed to smoke them pretty much interchangeably. I liked the smell of grass better than the smell of tobacco. Beyond that, I didn’t see any difference. People smoked to relax, or just because they smoked. I knew marijuana was illegal, but then so was speeding and everybody did that.

Cocaine was different. That obviously was a drug—and Anjelica had been arrested for possession of it during the Roman Polanski scandal, when the cops searched Jack’s house after Polanski took a thirteen-year-old girl there. I was twelve, but the whole thing seemed remote from anything that might happen to me. I’d seen people snorting coke: bent over a mirror with a rolled-up twenty-dollar bill or a fat silver straw stuck up their noses, their heads wobbling and their eyes crossed as they followed the white powder line. Then they sat around leaning their heads back and occasionally saying “oohhhh.” The whole thing looked idiotic. I had no interest in trying it.

After a while, Anjelica asked me if I wanted to live with her. Of course I said yes: Anjel was my sister, my goddess, everything I wanted to be. And I was, basically, living with her already. On the phone, Dad asked me formally to confirm it, and whether I agreed to have my half of the rent for a house paid out of the trust fund he’d set up for me. Anjel had found a house in Hollywood, in the shadow of the Chateau Marmont. She ordered a hazelnut-colored sofa, upholstered in fat rolls like the Michelin man. I bagged the room with the bookshelves.

Cici, in a fury, put all my stuff out on the driveway. It ended up at Gloom Castle, since Anjel wasn’t yet ready to move into the Hollywood house. In the end, she never was. We spent one night there, camping, for fun. Six months later the lease expired.

Cici and Anjelica were battling over me, and I didn’t know it. None of us can remember exactly what happened.

I’ve read Cici’s letters to Dad, and John Julius’s replies to the ones she wrote to him. She described me, more than once, as “a creature
of love and purity.” She said, again and again, how important it was to protect my innocence. She urged John Julius to take me, step in, do something. John Julius said he couldn’t do anything just then; his own family life was in upheaval. He asked whether she believed I was truly in “moral danger.” He offered her his backing—whatever that was worth—if she wanted to legally adopt me.