My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (14 page)

Another wonderful Broadway tradition is that many nights just before curtain, the stage managers of all the plays walk the stars’ children to different stage doors so they can watch other shows. I got to see everything. Judy Garland was on Broadway that summer, and I crossed paths with her daughter, Liza Minnelli.

I fell in love with the theater, but I still wasn’t interested in acting. For starters, I’d had that unfortunate high school theater experience, and I didn’t want to embarrass Rip and Gerry if I turned out to be as terrible as my teacher had suggested. Music was what I knew, and that’s where I probably had the best chance of succeeding. Making it as a singer/songwriter was a dream. Both Gerry and Rip were supportive. I’d bring my guitar to Gerry’s dressing room and play for her while she dressed for the show. She was sensitive and sweet, and sometimes my songs would make her cry. There was one she liked so much, she had me play it over and over, and she would weep every time.

Today, for the life of me, I can’t remember a word or a note of it.

Once I got accustomed to the city, I started to venture off on my own. I was warned to stay away from the subways, which could be dangerous, but the buses were fine, so I would take the bus to explore different neighborhoods. New York was so different and exciting that sometimes it overwhelmed my senses. One day I stepped out of a city bus into the middle of a summer downpour. I can still smell the rain on hot concrete, and the exhaust of the bus, and the musky smell of wet clothes and perfume as everybody tried to huddle under one awning until the storm passed. I looked over and right beside me was the most beautiful girl. She wore gads of makeup and had Twiggy eyelashes painted on her lids, like little black starbursts. I thought,
If I could be just like her…
I ran straight to the nearest drugstore and bought eyeliner and false eyelashes.

There were so many things I could be. And I had all the time in the world.

Dear Robbie
,

In Greenwich Village one can have their picture drawn in ten minutes! It’s really amazing.... The Village is great. I’ve met all sorts of people there—hippies, thousands of them! They gather at Washington Square on Sundays and play their guitars.

Love, Sissy

Dear Mom and Dad and Robbie
,

I get in free to all the Broadway shows. Neat! Anyway I was in Gerry’s dressing room playing my guitar when in walked Jordan Christopher. He’s the guy from England who married Sybil Burton. He’s so cute! Anyway. He and two friends—Bobby somebody and Billy something—have just formed a record company and he wants me to make the first record. He said that the whole group could get together this Monday and they’d try to write a song that I would like and we’d record in a couple of weeks. But in the meantime I have another audition Tuesday with another outfit, and since I know so little about this, Gerry called Rip in California to see whether I should get an agent, but he said to wait on that, so that I could be sure to get the best deal. All of this is not for sure yet. But things look good. Jordan is really a go-getter with lots of money and very cute. He was really excited over me and said that my name and the Texas bit would go over big. He also owns and operates a very swanky nightclub in New York.

Also I’m happy to report that I have approximately $188 left.

Love
,

Sissy

Jordan Christopher, whom I’ve learned was actually from Ohio, was a very glamorous figure in New York. He was an actor in the cast of Gerry’s play, but he was even better known as the young husband of Sybil Burton, who had been married to Richard Burton until he left her for Elizabeth Taylor on the set of
Cleopatra.
Sybil had moved to New York and opened Arthur, an incredibly hip club on West 54th Street. (It was named for George Harrison’s famous line: When a reporter sarcastically asked the mop-topped Beatle what he called “that haircut” he wore, George replied, “I call it Arthur.”) Jordan met Sybil when his band, the Wild Ones, played in her nightclub. I’m glad to say that Jordan and Sybil remained happily married for the rest of their lives together.

I must have had kind of a crush on him. I don’t think we ever tried to write any songs together, but my encounter with him was typical of the sort of life I was leading that summer. Rip and Gerry took me everywhere with them, to restaurants and discotheques all over New York City. I couldn’t tell you who I met that summer because I didn’t know enough to even realize who I was meeting. It was a bit like casting pearls before swine! Mostly I just sat there and listened to them talk, wishing and hoping that one day I might be part of the conversation. That’s all I ever wanted—not fame or glory, just a seat at the table and something worthwhile to say.

One night in the private back room at some fabulous club where Rip and Gerry had taken me, Gerry asked me to play my guitar for a group of their friends. I sang a song I had written about Robbie, with the lyric “I feel a soft touch while I’m sleeping, I hear his voice everywhere.” When I was finished, a disheveled older man with thick glasses named Terry came over and asked me if I was a virgin. When I got over the shock of being asked such a question, I sputtered, “I don’t think that’s any of your business.” I didn’t know at the time that Terry Southern was a famous novelist and screenwriter, who had cowritten
Candy
, about a naive eighteen-year-old girl’s sexual misadventures. At the time he was researching another book and would soon write the screenplay for
Easy Rider.
He kept asking me all these questions about my sexual experiences. He was convinced that the words to my song proved that I was sexually active. Gerry was reclining on a chaise lounge, listening to all of this with her eyes closed, when calmly, and without ever opening her eyes, she said, “Terry, darling. You don’t have to stomp grapes to know how wine tastes!” She was so brilliant.

Because people were taking an interest in my songs, Rip decided I should talk to an agent, and he arranged an audition at the William Morris Agency. It was so exciting that I made a long-distance call to Texas to tell my parents. Daddy picked up the phone, and I heard him shout the news to my mother.

“Gin! Sissy’s gonna sing for William Morris!”

“Oh, isn’t that grand,” I heard her say. “Who’s William Morris?”

When it came time for the audition, I was ushered into a conference room in a very tall building. Five men in suits walked in and sat down. After I sang my songs, they stood up and filed back out. A short time later, one of them popped his head back into the room and said, “We think you should go home to Texas, lose the accent, and come back when you’re older.”

My brother Ed, who had just graduated from college and was working for Decca Records in Dallas, set up an audition for me at their New York offices.
This time
, I thought,
I’ll wear my lucky socks and sing every song I know.
But it turned out to be a lot like the William Morris meeting. Men wearing dark suits filed in, listened, then filed back out. The A&R guy said he liked my music, but Decca already had somebody on their roster who sounded very much like me. She was a country singer named Loretta Lynn. I said, “Loretta
who
?” I had never heard of her, and I was sure that whoever she was, I didn’t sound like her.

I wasn’t going to let a few rejections get me down. I knew now that I wanted to be a musician, and I was so in love with New York that I didn’t even want to go back to finish high school. I could have stayed forever. But I also knew that this was only for the summer, and the news from home was not good. Robbie was not improving. His letters to me from Houston were usually upbeat and newsy, telling me about the Austin Healey that always seemed to be in the shop for repairs, or needling me for not writing more often (“Sissy, thanks for all the letters I haven’t got yet!”). But one letter just about killed me.

Dear Sissy
,

How is my little sister doing?

My temperature is still not just right, it goes up and down every day so we don’t know what’s happening, The treatment still hasn’t worked, so they are just waiting to see what is happening on that problem too. They will have to give me another treatment and I am kind of scared because it hasn’t worked, and I want to get out of the hospital and come see you Sissy. I really miss you and I am worried about my counts and if I can get out, but the way it looks now I will probably be here a month or so because of the treatment not working. I am really worried, Sissy, because I haven’t seen anybody, just hospital people since you left and that has been a long time. I want to get out of this place and I can’t stand being in this place not seeing any kids or friends its terrible. You and Ed are doing just great probably both have what you want for the rest of your life, but I was the black sheep getting sick and everything, I feel like I will never get to do anything like you are doing—just stay with Mother and Dad probably for the rest of my life, how long that is probably not long.

I just hope you and Ed don’t get anything wrong like me, and have to ruin your whole life. I don’t know what I am going to do Sissy—I can’t be with Mother and Dad all my life. I am so much of a problem now that I have Leukemia and I just hope that I will be cured some day that’s all I want in life is to be healthy nothing else.

Love, Rob

(Write me every day. Really Sissy
, please.
)

And I did.

Then one day late in August, Rip came into my room and said, “Your parents called, Sissy, and they want you to come home. They need you there.” I flew back to Texas the next day.

By the time I arrived in Houston, Robbie’s condition was much worse. He had developed an infection that the doctors were trying to fight with massive antibiotics. My parents and I sat with him every day as he faded in and out of consciousness.

While I was in New York, I’d been in suspended animation. Robbie wasn’t sick anymore, and none of this was happening. Things were good. We made plans for the future. We’d share a place in Manhattan, we’d ride the subways, we’d go dancing and laugh off bad auditions. But I was back home now, in Texas, sitting in my brother’s hospital room. Robbie was gravely ill. I couldn’t pretend anymore or wish it away. It was real.

We never gave up hope that he might somehow pull through this crisis, even after he developed septicemia. The school year had already begun, so I had to make a decision. My parents and I agreed that I should attend school in Houston so that we could all be there together. Moments after I’d gotten back from enrolling in the school, Mother called. Robbie was gone. I looked at the date: September 19, 1967.

It was strange, but we’d fought so long and so hard to hang on to Robbie, that I’d never even considered how life would be without him. I felt a huge void. I was lost.

… 7 …

The next few days were surreal. I met my parents at the hospital, and then we went back to the apartment to pack our bags. Within hours, I was driving my brother’s Austin Healey back to Quitman, while Mother and Daddy followed in their car. Ed was coming from Dallas to meet us at home. I had the strangest, haunting feeling as I rolled down the highway, like we’d forgotten something. But of course, it was Robbie we had left behind.

I recall almost nothing of the three-hundred-mile trip home; it evaporated like a dream. But I remember arriving in Quitman, and seeing cars parked up and down the highway in front of our house. My first thought was
Oh my God, something terrible has happened!
Then I remembered. I felt like I was floating.

News had spread quickly, and dozens and dozens of friends and relatives were waiting for us at the house. Flowers, covered dishes, and trays of cold cuts arrived with them. I’ve never seen so many casseroles in my life, or had so many hugs. We felt cradled by our little town, like babies—they held us and fed us, cared for us and loved us. I was so happy to see everybody after being gone all summer that I was crying and laughing at the same time, bursting with news between bouts of grief.

It was a comfort to know that our good friend Gaston Cain, the undertaker, the mayor, the fire chief, and the father of two of my closest friends, Pam and Debra, had driven to Houston and brought Robbie’s body back to Quitman. Once he arrived, I felt better somehow. He was back home now, among people who loved him.

I had grown up playing in that funeral home. When I was little, I’d spend the night with Pam and Debra, and we’d play in the garage where they kept all the caskets for sale. We’d poke around in them, looking into their beautiful velvet interiors and at their shiny polished wood. And we’d play in the large wooden crates that they were shipped in and make forts and playhouses.

It felt strange to think that Robbie was gone. I kept waiting for him to walk in the door. They laid him out in a casket, but it wasn’t Robbie who was there. Once someone’s spirit has left their body, it isn’t them anymore. It’s like the figures in a wax museum or after a cicada crawls out of its shell.

The whole town came to Robbie’s funeral. It was the first time I ever saw my father wear sunglasses in church. Then we all gathered back home after the service. Everyone told stories about Robbie, laughing and crying about the time he caught the jackrabbit, about the time he lit the cigar in the family room. Robbie was still very much alive in our household. His photographs were everywhere, and his track trophies and medals still had their place of honor.

He hasn’t been forgotten, and rarely a day goes by that I don’t think about him. Whenever our family gets together, we still talk about him. Not too long ago, my nephew, Stephen, asked, “Did I know Robbie? I knew Robbie, didn’t I?”