Stories From Candyland (4 page)

We arrived at a white house surrounded by beautiful flowers at the top of a hill in Hollywood. I started shaking. Were we having an earthquake? Oh no. Not tonight. Please.

It wasn’t an earthquake. It was my nerves.

We walked in, and every one of the stars whose photos and lives I had studied and admired in my movie magazines appeared before my eyes. Someone snapped our picture. And then, suddenly, there he was. Rock Hudson! He was tall, dark, and handsome, just like the magazines said he was. He was smiling. Wait. He was smiling at Aaron and me. He was walking toward us. Rock Hudson was just feet away from my feet.

Then my feet took me to Rock Hudson’s bathroom, and that’s where I stayed the entire night. I was so nervous, so scared, so overwhelmed—so of course the answer was to lock myself in Rock Hudson’s bathroom and hope no one would need to use it.

I remember all three of the sentences I said to guests at that party that evening. “It’s occupied. You can’t come in. Go away.” Anyone who tried the door, knocked, stomped, or asked if anyone was in there got one or all of my three phrases.

I also remember what people were saying. Many of the voices were familiar. I found out that celebrities talk about their kids, the weather, vacations, cars, clothes, and all the other things normal adults do.

Aaron’s voice was always in the distance. He had this Texas accent that gave him a very distinctive sound. He’s a playboy. He’ll find someone else to hang around with tonight, I remember thinking. He won’t even miss me.

I’m not sure how long I was locked in the bathroom, but soon I was jolted by the realization that the person knocking on the door was my date, Aaron.

“Candy. Is that you in there? Are you sick? What’s the matter? We have to leave. The party is ending. Candy?”

I froze right there on the toilet seat in Rock Hudson’s bathroom. I had been discovered. I hadn’t really thought this through. I hadn’t realized I’d have to leave the bathroom eventually.

Okay. I had taken ballroom dancing lessons, gone to etiquette class, studied movie star habits, and had very polite relatives, so I could do this right.

I casually strolled out of the bathroom, took Aaron’s hand, and we walked quickly out the front door.

“What in the world happened? Why were you in the bathroom all night?”

“Aaron, I was so scared. You know how shy I am. I’ve wanted to meet Rock Hudson all my life. And when it was time, I knew I’d have nothing to say or I’d sound stupid, and that I shouldn’t be with those kinds of people, and I just ended up in the bathroom.”

Aaron took my hand and laughed. And laughed.

I remember thinking that this suave, popular playboy wouldn’t be asking Candy the social misfit out again.

I was wrong. We had a third date, although it was very unconventional. Aaron spent our entire third date tutoring me. We worked on looking at each other right in the eye. We
shook each other’s hands over and over. We practiced small talk. He trained me for future dates. He said I had passed. We had a fourth date, a fifth, sixth . . .

We didn’t go to a lot of Hollywood parties on the next few dates. We went to the Cocoanut Grove nightclub and heard dreamy Eddie Fisher sing. We went backstage after the show, and I played with his puppy while he and Aaron spoke. We would go the popular local clubs, the Daisy, the Factory, or the Candy Store. Aaron was a great dancer, and I wasn’t too shy about my dancing. None of our succeeding dates involved Rock Hudson.

I did finally get to meet Grace Kelly many times in later years. But better still, Rock and I became great friends, and he even later appeared in Aaron’s series
Dynasty
. I don’t know if he ever remembered that I was the perfectly coiffed young woman who had occupied his bathroom for hours. He was such a nice man. If he did remember, he would probably have been too polite to mention it. I liked thinking that he didn’t know it was me.

Aaron and I had a very happy marriage for thirty-eight years. We loved the time we spent laughing with Rock and his friends. I never told Rock any of my stories about my infatuation for him and my plans for when I grew up. I probably would have locked myself in the bathroom in embarrassment if he had ever found out.

But I have kept many of the magazine stories about him all these years.

Chapter 2
Dr. Spock or Mr. Spock:
Did We Really Listen to
These Guys?

I
’ve lost count of how many e-mails I’ve received about how we baby boomers grew up to be such independent people because we rode our bikes without helmets, were herded into cars without seat belts, car seats, or air bags, lived in homes painted in pretty lead-based colors, filled up on white bread and butter, drank tap water, got Band-Aids instead of trips to the emergency room for cuts and scrapes, played outdoors after dark, and engaged in all kinds of
now-primitive-sounding activities. The punch line is that, by today’s standards, it’s a miracle we survived.

I think we had more fun. We had more freedom, were encouraged to be creative and less structured, and learned those good old values and work ethics. (No, I’m not running for office.)

And all this despite all the parenting experts who, like us, were breathing lead-based paint fumes and risking their lives in station wagons and on scooters.

I wonder how many more virtues we could give ourselves if we and our parents hadn’t spent so much time listening to people like Dr. Spock and Mr. Spock.

Sometimes, when I try to figure out what my mother was thinking during her child-rearing years, I remember the copy of
Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care
that never seemed to be too far out of her reach.

My mother wasn’t the only Spock devotee. I recognized his child care manual at all my friends’ houses, too. The book was published the year I was born, and I bought the updated versions of the “timeless bestseller” when Tori and Randy were born. I wanted to be as knowledgeable as the mothers before me.

I don’t think Dr. Spock helped my mother or me very much.

In between advice and thoughts on everything from diaper use to proper diet, from crying to reading, from the
limits of love to raising children in a troubled society, from colic to body development, Dr. Spock wrote:

In many ways, we have lost our faith in the meaning of life and our confidence to understand our world and our society. My point here is that you are raising your children in the context of very confusing and rapidly changing times. Your goals and aspirations for your child are going to be greatly influenced by these times and the prevailing ideals and beliefs.

That’s not a very positive message. Then I discovered more of his uplifting words:

Parenting is an ideal guilt-generating business, and labor often delivers the first volley.. . . The “perfect” parent has yet to see the light of day.

All right. That explains some of my mother’s attitudes, I guess.

By the time my kids were born, I had two Spocks to consult. Dr. Spock kept updating his book, and Mr. Spock of
Star Trek
was among pop culture’s most quoted figures. If Dr. Spock was right about the times influencing our beliefs as they related to child-rearing, I thought I might as well use the other Spock to check in on what people were thinking and believing. Most people I knew in the 1970s didn’t know
that Dr. Spock and Mr. Spock weren’t the same person anyway. Both pontificated.

Mr. Spock’s deep thoughts included:

If there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them. Mine can be no worse than someone else’s.

It is curious how often you humans manage to obtain that which you do not want.

I am endeavoring, ma’am, to construct a mnemonic circuit using stone knives and bearskins.

Nowhere am I so desperately needed as among a shipload of illogical humans.

I really couldn’t relate to either of the Spocks. So I decided to investigate what other resources my mother had when my brother and I were growing up.

I remember my first book of
Nursery Rhymes
(which I still have) and my mother reading:

                     
Little Polly Flinders sat among the cinders,
Warming her pretty little toes!

Mother would pause here to tell me I had pretty little toes, too.

Her mother came and caught her,
And whipped her little daughter,
For spoiling her nice new clothes
.

Lesson learned. I never sat in cinders and spoiled nice new clothes.

The
Reader’s Digest
from my birth month featured “So You Think You’ve Got Rationing Troubles,” and warned of “butter-berserk housewives,” “soprano voices demanding beef,” and “improvident housewives.”

My mother was none of the above, but she collected multiples of everything, and encouraged me to do the same. I don’t remember my parents ever running out of anything. I bought my kids two of everything “just in case.” I think I still have some of those obsolete toys and long-out-of-fashion clothes in my attic.

Another
Reader’s Digest
story challenged parents to adopt the new post-World War II role of the United States in the “community of nations” with “service and leadership.” My family was the first on our block to have a fully stocked bomb shelter in the 1950s. I guess that made us leaders.

One of my mother’s favorite magazines was
Country Gentleman
, even though she was a native of Los Angeles and a lady. The advice the month I was born was, “Don’t raise hogs for pets.” We only had one dog—briefly—and never did get a hog.

Her issue of
The Woman
magazine had a sad story: “My
Sons Had Polio.” Whenever I complained about anything, from eating peas to too much homework, my mother would say, “At least you don’t have polio.” She was right. I was very lucky.

The
Life
magazine that was on the stands when I was born (with a victorious General Douglas MacArthur on the cover) provided much parenting and life advice.

If my mother brushed my teeth with Ipana, I would never have “pink toothbrush.” (I think I always had pretty pink toothbrushes in my bathroom.) She shampooed my hair with Kreml shampoo, the only shampoo used by “Lovely Powers Models” (and she later encouraged me to become a lovely John Robert Powers model myself). She kept a bottle of the drug
Atropa belladonna
handy in case I developed “deadly nightshade” or anything else that could be cured by the drug that “relieves much human suffering.”

Her magazines helped educate me, too. The importance of the alphabet was stressed in ads for her favorite cigarette. “Your ABC for more smoking pleasure,” the ad in
Life
told her.

Let the first three letters of the alphabet remind you why Chesterfield gives you all the benefits of smoking pleasure . . . Always Buy Chesterfield . . . Always milder; Better tasting; Cooler smoking.” ABCDEFG . . . HIJK LMNO-Puff that cigarette.

I guess my mother was a student of the culture, and that’s how she brought me up.