Chapter Thirty-One
In 1967, when Jerry Wexler offered to sign me as a recording artist with Atlantic, my first question was, “Can Gerry produce me?”
“Sure.”
“You know I’m a songwriter, not a performer. And I have kids, so I’m not willing to go out and promo—”
Wexler was chuckling.
“You think I don’t know that? Talk to Gerry and let me know what you want to do.”
As I drove toward the Lincoln Tunnel pondering this incentive for Gerry, I thought, What if we moved to the city? Next thing I knew I was heading down Ninth Avenue to the coolest place I knew: Greenwich Village. First I found a parking space. Then I walked among resident families with young children who appeared to be thriving. Then I began to look for a home. All I could find were cramped apartments and brownstones with concrete yards near crowded schools close to parks inhabited at night by drug dealers. Still I kept looking, hanging on to that filament, and hoping the combination of a move to the city and a producing deal could save our marriage.
It didn’t.
When Gerry told me he was going to move to California without me, I didn’t break down until he walked out the door. I didn’t know I had that many tears. Since the disintegration of my family of origin I had dreamed of that mythical man with whom I would have four beautiful, healthy children, live in a big cheery house, and spend the rest of our lives as a happily-ever-after family. I had invested Gerry, our children, and the house on Waddington Avenue with storybook dreams and a fairy-tale ending. Waves of despair crashed around me as all those hopes and dreams were dashed on the rocks of our failed marriage. But I had no time to dwell on dashed hopes and tears. For both emotional and financial reasons, I couldn’t stay in the house in West Orange. I would rent a place, if not in the Village, then somewhere in the city. I wasn’t going to be any less cool than Gerry.
I found a brownstone I liked on East 10th Street near University Place at the edge of Greenwich Village and was wondering if I could afford it when we got an offer on our house. Because the buyers wanted to move in as soon as possible, I rented a garden apartment near Waddington Avenue so the girls wouldn’t have to change schools. There was so much to do. I had furniture to dispose of and personal effects to pack. With the children at my mother’s, somehow I got through those heartbreaking tasks.
I stood in the foyer and faced my last moments alone in what used to be our home. My sadness deepened as I walked through the empty rooms and saw the bare carpets with depressions where the furniture had been and faded rectangular areas on the walls where photographs and paintings had hung. The mural on the landing upstairs was a scene of his native Italy painted by a local artist we knew only as Mr. Cellini. The mural would remain with the house, and so would the wall of built-in closets in the master bedroom and the drawers on both sides of the bed that had contained the state-of-the-art hi-fi components on which Gerry listened at earsplitting volume to the rough mixes he brought home from the studio.
As I stood on the Yves Klein Blue carpet in the master bedroom I recalled the disbelief and grief I’d felt watching reports of President Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. I remembered seeing Walter Cronkite lose control of his emotions when he delivered the news that the president had died; the shock of watching Jack Ruby shoot Kennedy’s alleged killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, live on television before millions of equally stunned viewers; and the poignancy of three-year-old John Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s flag-draped coffin as it passed slowly before him. I had been informed and entertained through the black-and-white television in its carefully measured space in the wall of closets that now held nothing belonging to my family except the history we were leaving behind. That bedroom would be my answer to the question members of my generation would ask each other for years afterwards:
“Where were you when Kennedy was shot?”
I wouldn’t miss the living room that we’d never used because the furniture was too posh to sit on, or the costly curtains and drapes that had been custom-made for the windows of that particular house. But I would miss the Thanksgiving dinners I had cooked in the kitchen and served in the dining room in an uncharacteristic annual display of culinary domesticity. I’d miss the giggles and whispers of sisterly play emanating from the girls’ rooms. I’d miss the family room, the hideous red room, and the swings and the slide that had delivered Louise, Sherry, and their friends to a safe landing in the railroad-tie sandbox.
And where was my husband, my first grown-up love, my writing partner, my daughters’ father? Where was my Gerry, who, when he was home, spent more time in the Eames chair in our bedroom than anywhere else in the house, sitting, thinking, absently stroking his beard?
I was about to open the front door to leave when I had the impulse to take one last look at the kitchen. All that remained of the Goffin family in that room were a few empty cartons on the floor where the Saarinen dining table had been. How anticlimactic, I thought with a catch in my throat. I walked through the foyer, opened the front door, stepped outside into the bright, sunny day, and immediately resented the weather for not mirroring my sense of loss. My sense of humor nudged me in the ribs.
You’re resenting the weather? That’s pathetic.
A wry smile came as I closed the door behind me. I turned and rang the doorbell. From inside the foyer came the familiar melody: do do mi mi re re re do.
Still out of rhythm.
Now I had some big decisions to make. Assuming I could afford it, the house on East 10th Street would definitely work for the girls and Willa Mae, our dog, Lika, Telemachus the cat, and me. And with Jerry Wexler’s assurance that his offer didn’t depend on Gerry producing me, all the elements seemed to be lining up in favor of my moving to Greenwich Village. But something kept holding me back from making an offer on that house. It might have been the pull of all the music and media celebrating California. It might have been because I didn’t want to be left behind. But one thing above all compelled me to turn west. With Gerry moving to Los Angeles, there was no way I would deny my daughters proximity to their father.
In March 1968, Sherry, Louise, Lika, Telemachus, and I moved to California.