two
There was never a time when I didn’t know I was adopted, but neither was there a time when my parents sat me down and said, “We have something to tell you.” I just always knew.
I have a book called The Chosen Baby that my mother used to read to me. It’s about a couple who adopt a little boy and then a little girl. My mother, a gifted artist, crossed out all of their names and put all of our names in it. She changed the little boy’s name to Melissa and drew bows and ribbons on him to make him look like me, and made a sailor hat and shorts on the little girl to make her look like my brother, Jonathan, who my parents adopted a month before my fourth birthday. So not only did I know that I was adopted, I thought it was pretty special that someone had written a book about it.
Again, more fairy dust.
My earliest memory is of myself, at two and a half or so, standing on a chair in the back of a nightclub, watching my father doing his standup act. I was doing his act along with him. I adored my father. I wanted to be just like him.
I always say that I was born to perform, but he was literally born into performing. His father was an Irish vaudevillian, and his mother was a French aerialist. He was their only child. They lived together in Philadelphia, and then, at the age of eight or nine, he was shipped off to Buenos Aires and raised by a family of circus performers, who were aerialists like his mother. His parents died when he was in his teens. On his own in the world, he became an acrobat and traveled in a circus with his surrogate family. At eighteen, he fell from a trapeze, and although he survived, it ended his career in the circus. He returned to the United States and studied music and acting until World War II, then enlisted in the navy.
While in the military, he appeared in the George Cukor–directed war film Winged Victory, the upbeat story of young men joining the air force in the hope of becoming pilots. It was kind of like Top Gun, only the 1944 version. Edmond O’Brien, Judy Holliday, Lee J. Cobb, and Red Buttons were among the many stars appearing in the film. My dad’s part was very small, but I have a hunch he was much better suited to acting than soldiering.
During my first term as president of the Screen Actors Guild, I received a letter from a man who’d served with my father. He said their job was to patrol the California coast. He reminded me this was not long after Pearl Harbor and people were pretty sure California was going to be hit next, either by another surprise air attack or by torpedoes fired from submarines. Everyone was on edge.
He and my father were on patrol one night when my father, looking off in the distance, saw something on the beach move in an unusual manner. They watched for a moment. My father was sure it was moving toward them. He raised his machine gun, opened fire, and…killed a cow.
Luckily for all the livestock in the state, after the navy, my dad went straight into show business. Which brings up an interesting sidenote about him: Paul Gilbert wasn’t his actual name. When he went to join the Screen Actors Guild he was told there was already another member with his same name, Ed McMahon. I don’t know where he came up with Paul or Gilbert, but it became his name and now it is mine. He was in a lot of movies, appeared on some very early TV shows, and performed on The Ed Sullivan Show playing a French horn and doing his comedy. He tap-danced and incorporated acrobatics into his act. In his nightclub act, he walked out onstage, tripped on his way to the microphone, did a front flip, landed on his back, and then got up and did his thing.
He costarred in So This Is Paris, a 1955 film with Tony Curtis and Gene Nelson about three sailors on leave in Paris and looking for women, or rather, looking for dames. It’s one of Nick Clooney’s favorite movies. Nick’s son, George, is an actor like me. Well, not like me—he’s a big movie star and I’m…well…not. But I digress. In it, my dad has a fantastic solo number called “I Can’t Do a Single, but I’ll Try.” He dances and he sings. He was more than a triple threat; he sang, danced, acted, played five instruments, and juggled. In his forties, he made 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt, a silly comedy about three crazies who flee the nuthouse. I love the title of that movie.
At a certain point, he graduated from film and TV to touring full-time, taking his brand of entertainment on the road until the end of his life in 1976, when he passed away at age fifty-seven. I was eleven years old when he died. I learned most of what I know about him from reading the back of his record albums and hearing stories other people told me.
Here’s one of the more interesting facts: my father was married thirteen times. Even he knew he exchanged I-do’s a ridiculous number of times. In his act, he used to joke, “It’s true I have had a number of wives. I don’t believe in premarital sex.”
My mother was born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, to a brilliant but struggling stand-up comic, Harry Crane, and his former Miss Brooklyn artist wife, Julia Crane. Extremely poor, they had one more child, another girl, my aunt Stephanie, before separating acrimoniously. I don’t think my grandparents were ever in the same room together after that.
Growing up, we never spoke about my grandfather in front of my grandmother, which was difficult given his exciting life. And mention of my grandmother in the company of my grandfather was almost like a hanging offense. It wasn’t done.
Following the split, my grandmother moved to Florida with my aunt Stephanie, and my grandfather and mother moved to Hollywood, where he began a legendary career as a comedy writer, first in the movies and then in television. Profoundly funny, prolific, and in demand, he wrote a movie for Laurel and Hardy, cocreated Jackie Gleason’s classic TV series The Honeymooners, and worked with a who’s who of stars, including the Marx Brothers, Red Skelton, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Joey Bishop, Frank Sinatra, and even Robert Kennedy.
My mother was eighteen when they moved to L.A. She had her sights set on a career as an actress. She arrived in town looking to be a combination of Natalie Wood, Sophia Loren, and Merle Oberon. She moved into the Studio Club, an apartment building for young women, mostly actresses. There she met my future godmother, Mitzi McCall, who briefly dated James Dean. They ran with a cool crowd—funny, young, sexy, and talented.
My mom worked at Mannis Furs in Hollywood. Every day on her way in and out of the salon, she walked over my father’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, not knowing, obviously, that one day she would marry him. My mother was in her early twenties, acting in some Roger Corman movies (Sorority Girl and Unwed Mothers) and engaged to comedian Don Rickles when my father stole her away. He swept her off her feet and away with him to a gig in Houston, where they married.
Afterward, my mother called my grandfather and said, “Dad, I want to tell you that I just got married.”
He asked to whom.
“Paul Gilbert,” she said.
Without missing a beat and knowing my dad, he quipped, “Take a sweater.” I’m not sure if that was because my dad was on the road so much or because it wouldn’t be long before my dad moved on to the next wife. Either way, it’s a damn funny line!
I understand her attraction to my father. He was a seriously handsome man. I have photos of him throughout my house, but two of them, which I keep on the wall beside my vanity, stand out as rather extraordinary. In one, he’s on a beach someplace in Mexico, dressed in rolled-up khaki pants, no shirt, and standing next to a gigantic swordfish that he’s just caught. In the other, he’s in swim trunks, with scuba gear on his back, holding a spear gun that has a huge manta ray at the end.
He was the quintessential man’s man adventurer, with a real movie-star style and elegance about him. You know those photos of men in the fifties and sixties that always feature a really handsome guy in a tux with the bow tie (a real one) untied, shirt unbuttoned, cigarette in one hand, drink in the other? That was my daddy. He had such panache, such style! He was particular about his clothes, from the way he organized them neatly and by color, to having his shirts, cuff links, and shoes monogrammed. He built furniture in his spare time. Even the work suits he wore in his shop were monogrammed.
He and my mother made a great-looking, dashing couple. He was twenty years older; she was radiant. They settled in a one-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood, which was where they lived when I arrived.
Old photos in my mother’s albums show me in a bright wicker bassinet with hand-sewn lace and ribbon. I was dressed in adorable baby clothes. According to my mother, I never spit up or had even a crumb of food in the corners of my mouth. I was perfect. Everything was perfect.
Everything but the suddenness and surprise of the way I entered the scene. It didn’t sit well with me. It was like a puzzle someone finished by forcing pieces to fit. The picture was nice, but the edges were off. My mother is not a spur-of-the-moment person. She plans and calculates. Like her artist mother, she treats life as a lump of clay she can shape and sculpt to suit her vision. Little is left to chance. So the revelation following my stepfather’s death rattled me. So did the revelation that came soon after—that my dad had been stepping out on her.
I didn’t know what to make of this new twist. Nothing was out of the realm of possibility. Years earlier I had gone through the process of finding my alleged biological family, and this latest wrinkle sent me scrambling for my phone book. I called my alleged biological older half sister, Bonné, the daughter of my alleged birth father, David, and stepdaughter of my alleged birth mother, Cathy, and through her, I found out that David and Cathy had split for a spell in 1963. When they got back together in early 1964, Cathy was pregnant. A few months later, her baby was gone.
During the period Cathy and David weren’t together she may have met my father, gotten pregnant by him, and then arranged to have him adopt me. Considering the man was married thirteen times during his life, it’s plausible. If it still doesn’t make sense, though, all I can say is welcome to my life.
My personal “big bang” mystery aside, I was loved. That I know—and knew—without any doubt. My mother and father were entranced by the new addition to their lives. My mother was especially enchanted, and why not? I was pretty cute—chubby and freckly with the perfect little swirl of red Kewpie doll hair on top of my very round head. She would come home after a night out with my dad, wake me up, and play with me as if I were a doll, even changing my clothes, and then put me back to bed without hearing a whimper of complaint from me.
For the first three years of my life, I was the center of everyone’s universe. I went shopping with my mom and I rehearsed with my dad. When people came to the house, I sang and danced for them, then bathed in their compliments about my red curls and freckles. My nickname was Wissy-do. I had a beagle named Sir Saul of Wissy, Saulie for short. It was all really very precious. Idyllic, even.
Not much time passed before I entered show business, which was like the family business. I was just two years old when I landed the first job I went out for, Carter’s baby clothes. It was 1966, and my mom took me to the audition, where I met the director, who like many commercial directors of that era looked like an upscale hippie or artist, with long hair and a beard, which might have frightened most little children. Not me. The story goes that I ran straight up to the hirsute director, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor, climbed right into his lap, threw my arms around him, kissed him, and started singing songs and telling stories.
My mother was appalled at what she saw me do and heard me say. She feared the people in the room and the other mothers waiting with their little girls would think she’d told me to do that, but the truth was, she didn’t coach me one bit. It was all me, my predisposition for the spotlight presenting itself in an irrepressible gust of enthusiasm and blur of red curls. I saw that my excitement was infectious. So, in later auditions, whatever the product was, I told the director it was my favorite thing in the whole world. I loved whatever brand of mustard they were selling! I only ate McDonald’s! My daddy used that deodorant!
At home, life was like a giant nightclub date. My parents had parties all the time, filling the house with talented, funny people. I remember sneaking onto the stairs in my nightgown, my legs dangling through the railing, and watching the grown-ups downstairs as they sang and danced, played charades, told jokes, and regaled one another with great stories.
One time I was sound asleep when my mother came into my room and woke me up, urging me to follow her downstairs. It wasn’t “do you want to come downstairs?” It was “you have to come downstairs now!” She’d been to the ballet and Rudolf Nureyev and Dame Margot Fonteyn, two of the greatest dancers ever, were in the living room. A few years ago, I told that story to my godsister, Jenny Brill. She responded, “Ruth Buzzi slapped me once.”
I became a big sister when I was almost four years old. Jonathan arrived to great fanfare and to my even greater annoyance. I had no idea how my parents got him, where they got him, or, more important, why they got him. As far as I was concerned, he was an interloper relegating me, the headliner, to opening-act status.
Apparently I was pissed. According to my mother, we were in a rented house in Reno about a year later (my father had an engagement), and she set my brother up in a playpen and went to sit down nearby with my father while I ran around, seemingly content and happy. Moments later, she heard my brother screaming hysterically. She sprinted around the corner and found me standing beside the playpen, slapping Jonathan across the face. Right hand. Left hand. Right hand. Left hand. Just like I’d seen on the Three Stooges.
She yanked me out and yelled at me to stop, which I did immediately. Hey, I was a good girl.
My mom couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on or why her precious little daughter would do such a thing. I think one can safely wager I was jealous of Jonathan and wanted to get rid of him.
As a little kid, I spent a lot of time riding in the backseat of the station wagon we traveled in when we accompanied my dad on the road, which we seemed to do frequently. I have quite a few memories of late nights on long stretches, headlights, and falling asleep with my head against the car window. It was always a delicious feeling to be carried from the car to bed, where I’d fall back into a deep, comfortable sleep, even if it was a new motel. It was the comfort that came from knowing a bed was waiting and both of my parents were there in case I woke up and found monsters in the closet. I felt safe and secure, like all was right in the world.
Even now I have a hard time with long drives at night because the lights lull me to sleep. My mother drove a white Cadillac Eldorado, with white interior. She got a new version of it every few years. Triple white. A cloud on wheels. By rolling up the windows, she could close herself off from the outside world. It was like being sealed in a luxurious living room.
So there I was one day, sealed in that living room, along with my brother, when my mother said something to the effect of “Your father is not going to be living with us anymore.” I don’t know about my brother, but my first thought was It’s no big deal, he’s on the road again, and we can’t go with him because we’re in school.
Then I realized what my mom had actually said—that he wouldn’t be living with us anymore. I asked what she meant. She explained he was moving into a different house, adding as reassuringly as possible that it would be close by and that we didn’t have to worry because “nothing is going to change.”
What?
“It’s going to be exactly the same,” she said. “He’ll be there when you get home from school. He’ll stay to tuck you into bed. He’ll be with us on all the holidays. It won’t be any different.”
And that was it. There was no hysteria, no crying, no grieving or even griping about the loss of what I believed was our cozy family unit. The pillars that held up my little world were splitting, but it was presented as something I shouldn’t be upset or concerned about, so I wasn’t. Which was weird. Because it was something to get upset about. Except I never did. My mother drove us home and life went on.
That was the emergence of the porcelain doll, the little girl who did and said everything she was told, didn’t complain, and would learn to tell others that everyone in her life, whether at home or on a TV set, loved one another even when there were serious problems. The porcelain doll would wear outfits made of wool even though they gave her a rash. She would always smile, always have a perfect hairdo, and always say the right things no matter what else was going on in her life.
I still have no idea why my parents’ marriage ended. It stayed between them. To their credit, they kept their promise. Family life was as close as possible to the way it had always been. If my dad wasn’t on the road, he was at my mother’s home, greeting us when we came back from school. We lived in a relatively new area in the hills above Studio City, and he moved nearby. We spent every other weekend at his house. He stayed with us when my mom traveled with her friends. At night, I still threw my arms around him and let him put me to bed. The lights went off and he or my mom said good night. I still knew I was loved. But it wasn’t the same as before. All of us knew it, too. We just didn’t acknowledge it.