My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (15 page)

“No, he died before you were born,” I said. “But yes, you knew him.”

I owe it to my mother for pulling us all through such a catastrophe, and for keeping Robbie so present in our lives. She never lost sight of her positive approach to life. Norman Vincent Peale served us well. “It’s not what happens to you in life,” she’d say, “but how you respond to it.” Now we witnessed how true she was to those words. My mother was determined that something good would come from Robbie’s death, if only that his loss would strengthen us as a family and make us appreciate the time that we were given here on earth. She wanted his life to inspire us to lead full and rich ones, and it has. I try to live with no regrets. I want to know that if I get hit by a truck tomorrow, I will have returned my neighbor’s cake pan. And I’ll have told the people close to me that I love them.

Rather than making my parents overprotective, I think Robbie’s death made them more willing to let me go. For me, the grief was almost like rocket fuel. It made me fearless. And I lost interest in trivial things.

I started my senior year at Quitman High School weeks after the semester had begun. When I returned to classes, everything seemed different. Even the corridors of the high school looked smaller than I remembered. I had been a model student, but now I stopped caring much about school. Luckily my high school principal, W. T. Black, ran interference for me with my teachers. He’d tell them, hey, she’s been a straight-A student, she missed six weeks of classes, give her a pass. Most teachers were wonderful; Mr. Black took care of the ones who weren’t.

W. T. Black was an unusual principal. You could hear him laughing all the way down the hall, and when he laughed, he’d lift up his knee and slap his thigh. And that would make him laugh even more. I lived two blocks from school, but I couldn’t seem to manage to get there on time. I was usually only a minute or two late, but I’d have to drive by his office in Robbie’s Austin Healey to get to the parking lot. The muffler was so loud, I would push the clutch in as I rounded the corner by Mr. Black’s office so he wouldn’t hear my car and know I was going to be late. Most times it worked, but occasionally I would be sent to his office and he would sigh and say, “Now, Sissy. I don’t want to have to call your mother. What am I going to say to Gin? Huh? So please … just get up ten minutes earlier. Won’t you?” He was such a nice man.

Senior year is supposed to be so cool, but I had lost interest in being a majorette or going out for any of the other school activities that used to mean so much to me. I’d lost my brother, and I’d been to New York. That’s where my head was; New York was my light at the end of the tunnel. If I could make it through senior year, I could go back next summer. So I went through the motions of being a high school student. I attended the homecoming dance that fall, and I was elected homecoming queen. It was a gesture of kindness from my classmates, to let me know how much they cared. They wanted to do something for me, to try and make me feel better—and they did.

The only thing that I still felt passion for was my music. My brother Ed was a promotion man with Decca Records, someone who carried the label’s latest singles to radio stations and convinced the DJs to play them on the air. Ed would bring some of those records home when he visited, and it opened up a whole new world of music for me, from Jackie Wilson to the Doors and the Rolling Stones. I was listening to folk singers like Judy Collins and, soon, Joni Mitchell, and the Byrds, who later morphed into Crosby, Stills & Nash and other folk rock groups. I kept writing songs, mostly with sober themes, but gradually the lyrics became playful again. After sleepwalking through the first semester of senior year, I gradually returned to life. I kept the experiences of the past two years locked safely away, like the treasures in my old cigar box, and no one outside my closest family could tell the difference in me.

I don’t know why I could never master the Spanish language. I had been hearing it all my life down in the Rio Grande Valley, and when I was very young I could even speak a little Tex-Mex. But once I sat down in Spanish class, everything I knew drained out of my head and never came back. I managed to get high Bs, but it was a struggle. This annoyed my teacher, Sarah McIntosh, to no end. Miss Mac just couldn’t understand why I had trouble with something that was so easy for her. She must have thought I wasn’t trying. Or maybe she knew my friends and I were the ones who had wrapped her house with toilet paper one Halloween night. She also didn’t like the way I wore my hair, with bangs down below my eyebrows. “Why don’t you cut those bangs so you can see!” she told me in front of the other students. “And take off those glasses!” I had recently gotten glasses to correct my nearsightedness and astigmatism. Miss Mac wouldn’t let me wear them in her class. They were very fashion-forward, round tortoiseshell glasses—today we’d call them Harry Potter glasses—and for some reason she disliked them. (Really, I think it was me she didn’t like.) The only thing I liked about her class was that I was elected fire marshal by the other students. I may not have been Spanish Club president, but if the school caught on fire, I was the one who would lead them out of the building to safety—although not in Spanish.

During my senior year, the elected officers in Miss Mac’s class had the chance to attend the Spanish Club convention at the University Interscholastic League conference in Austin. I was getting excited about the four-day trip until Miss Mac broke the news that I was not going—being elected fire marshal didn’t seem to count. I was devastated, but I saw a way around her decision. There was a contest to win one slot at the convention by writing an essay—in English, thank God—about why you wanted to attend. The entries were submitted without names, just numbers. I can’t remember what I wrote, but it must have been convincing because my paper was picked. Miss Mac’s face fell when the winning number was announced and I raised my hand. She was so upset that she changed the rules to keep me from going. Still undaunted, I heard that the Interscholastic League was having a big talent show during the convention. I entered the contest and won a place in the competition. Now she couldn’t stop me from going. Miss Mac was peeved because I had defied her and beaten the system. That’s probably another reason she didn’t like me: I would never give up. So when six or seven deserving Spanish students, Miss Mac, and a couple of chaperones piled into a van for the ride to Austin, my guitar and I rode along with them.

The talent contest was in a huge auditorium at the University of Texas that held about three thousand people. Kids and teachers from all over the state were there. I was chosen to go on last in the talent lineup, and I was ready. One time when I visited Ed in Dallas, he took me to a showcase performance by a girl group called the Cake that Decca had just signed. One of them was wearing the coolest outfit—like a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, with velvet shorts, a velvet jacket, and a satin and lace blouse. I came right home and had Mother’s seamstress—by now it was Jeannie Derr, one of our neighbors—make me a copy of the design. That’s what I wore as I stepped up to the microphone with my twelve-string guitar. I played “Copper Kettle” and a couple of other songs. After I finished my repertoire, the crowd kept asking for more. I think I sang every song I knew that night. And I won first prize.

Suddenly Miss Mac loved me. And when the young man who had emceed the show invited our group back to an off-campus party at his fraternity, she not only allowed us to go, but she stayed up late to chaperone us. I’ve always appreciated that she did that for us. After the Austin trip, she was always friendly. I think my music made her see me in a new light—but it didn’t improve my Spanish grades.

There was never a question in anyone’s mind that I would go to college. My mother and my aunts on both sides of the family were fortunate to go to college back in the day when most American women were lucky to finish high school. My grades were good enough to get me into the University of Texas, where many of my friends were going. But I never would have made it that far without the help of family and friends, like Susan Merritt and my aunt Arlette Spilman, who helped me prepare the application forms and get my recommendations while my parents were with Robbie in Houston.

I was grateful when I got my acceptance letter from UT, but not particularly elated. And high school graduation was anticlimactic. All I could think about was going back to New York City for the summer. I was going to give my singing career one more try before college. While my friends were enjoying their last days of high school and writing in each other’s yearbook, I was thinking about where I would stay in New York, and trying to find clothes that wouldn’t feel too out-of-date the minute I got to the city. Since I wouldn’t be living with Rip and Geraldine this time—I could only impose for so long—my mother decided to come along. We packed our bags to spend the summer together and sublet a place on Riverside Drive from a vacationing Barnard college professor.

We had a wonderful time exploring the Upper West Side. Mother was so sweet that she would start a conversation with anybody on the street, and if she saw someone lying on the sidewalk, she’d stop to help them. I found myself saying, “Mother, you’ve got to stop talking to strangers! Look straight ahead and don’t say a word.” But she just couldn’t seem to do that. One day when we were walking together along the sidewalk, I noticed she wasn’t holding up her end of the conversation. I wheeled around and saw that a man had reached out from a phone booth and grabbed her. He was pulling her inside when I ran back and dragged her away from him, yelling, “Let go of my mother!” I think she had nodded and said hello, and he’d gotten the wrong idea.

I spent a lot of time in Greenwich Village that summer. I would take the bus all the way downtown to wander around Washington Square Park in my moccasins and play my guitar with all the hippies. Sometimes I would play in coffeehouses and clubs, like the Bitter End, during open mike nights.

I also made some new friends. One of them, a songwriter named Jack Carone, was a college student from Montclair, New Jersey, who’d already had one of his songs recorded by Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas. We hit it off right away, even though we seemed so different. He was tall, with a mass of curly black hair and a distinct New Jersey accent. Because he lived in Montclair, he always had to leave in time to make the last bus out of Manhattan at the Port Authority. But one night he missed the bus, so I insisted on taking him home to the apartment to spend the night on our sofa. Mother was as sweet as she could be to him. When he woke up the next morning, he was amazed to find his shirt ironed and draped over a chair. And breakfast was on the table.

Jack Carone took me along to some recording sessions at the legendary Brill Building and the studios at 1650 Broadway, where I sang background vocals or clapped along with the beat. I was meeting such great musicians and having so much fun that I could hardly believe it when my six weeks were up and it was time for me to go back home.

Everything was all set for college. My parents had paid for my first year’s tuition at the University of Texas, and I was going to be rooming with Jane McKnight, one of my best friends. Jane’s grandparents were a prominent couple in Quitman who had struck it rich in the oil and gas business. They had mentored my parents when they first moved to town, and the families became good friends. The McKnights were like rock stars to me. They had a plane and an exciting life hobnobbing with celebrities, but they were still down-to-earth, nice people. Jane lived with her parents in Tyler but was always coming up to Quitman. Everyone knew when she was visiting me because she pulled into town in her burgundy red Cadillac, towing a matching trailer full of fancy cutting horses. Jane was an expert on horseback and could perform amazing tricks. She could literally ride circles around me, but she wasn’t above mucking out stalls or cleaning tack. We were going to be roommates at UT, and in the same sorority, and we made all kinds of plans to have fun together in college. And face it, Austin is pretty much close to heaven. I should have been thrilled.

But when I arrived on campus for rush week, the thought of spending the next four years in school was making me queasy. I put on my sweet, college-girl dresses and pumps. I went to a few of the parties, but none of it felt right to me. I’d just spent the summer wearing moccasins and bell-bottoms. I’d played the Bitter End! I felt like if I was going to make it in the music business, I needed to be in New York, not here. I was only eighteen, but there were a lot of younger singers out there, getting deals, like Janis Ian, who wrote “Society’s Child.” The way I saw it, my life was passing me by.

I never made it to the dorm.

“Has Sissy gone and lost her
mind
?” It was my aunt Arlette on the phone, talking to my mother, a week after I left Austin without telling anybody. “She’s ruining her life!” Arlette said. “She had such a great opportunity, and now she’s throwing it away.”

Actually, I wasn’t throwing away the chance to go to college, just postponing it. The deal I made with my parents was this: Daddy was willing to support me in New York for four years, just as if I were going to the university. If I didn’t make it in show business by then, I’d go back to school and get a degree. And this time, I would be living in the city on my own.

My parents never got angry with me or tried to talk me into going back to Austin. But I doubt they would have agreed to let me go to New York alone if Robbie hadn’t gotten sick. I think my parents realized that even when you do everything right to keep your children safe, sometimes you just can’t protect them. So you have to let them live their lives and hope for the best. When Mother asked Daddy why he was willing to let me go, he said with a grin, “She’ll learn to drink and smoke just as well in New York as in college.”

My first apartment was a studio on East 44th Street, between First and Second Avenue. The building had a doorman, which was my parents’ only request. I wrote a check for the deposit and two months’ rent—the biggest I had ever written—and moved in with two guitars and a trunk full of clothes. I bought a little black-and-white TV on 42nd Street and hauled it back on the crosstown bus. I felt like a real New Yorker.