My dad’s big break happened at fourteen, which was when he was discovered by Eddie Cantor while he was singing in the Catskills. Cantor put him on his radio show, which led to him getting a record contract with RCA. A few years later, he was drafted into the Army and served his country by entertaining the troops. (There was no way my father was gonna be caught with a gun in his hand, unless we’re talking about a chocolate-scented euphemism.)
While he was in Germany, he’d apparently seen my mother in Singing in the Rain, so when he was asked, “What’s the first thing you want when you get back to America,” he said, “I want Debbie Reynolds.” So, fast as a bullet to a bad guy, a publicist simply set it up. Arranged for them to meet at a Hollywood restaurant, and from that point—I mean really from the very first few minutes—people were watching them. On their fourth date, the publicist arranged for the two cute stars to go to Yankee Stadium. As they entered the stadium, thirty thousand people stood and cheered. And that was it—the game was ON.
My mother was twenty-two, my dad twenty-six. She was known as a good girl, so he became her adorable other half. It took a lot of years for him to be known as this womanizing, drug-addled rake. It’s hard to know if he ever really loved her. I think he did in his youthful, infatuated way. I do know that they both loved being adored by millions of people they’d never meet. Who wouldn’t? I mean, except somebody secure and sane. They just happened to be treasured as a twosome. She was this really pretty, famous girl who everyone seemed to agree was adorably fun and desirable, so you gotta figure that if everybody else wanted her, well, then, he probably did, too. Right?
Everyone just seemed to love the notion of my dad and my mom together. I mean, look at them—he had black hair, she had blond hair. He could sing, she could dance. And they both had pearly white teeth—not only pearly white, but also über straight—and to top it all off, neither one was a hunchback, which put them way ahead of a small but significant portion of the population right there. Bottom line: the two of them looked like a perfect teensy couple that could be found perched optimistically on a wedding cake.
They were good for show business, so what the hell, they just went with it. I honestly think they were just kind of swept along. I don’t think they really had any idea who the other one was. What they did know was that they had a big impact on a lot of people when they were together. They were America’s Sweethearts, they embodied the American ideal, they belonged to the fans who had invested all this energy in their unbelievably cute coupleness. So, when it all went so incredibly wrong, people felt betrayed.
I really think there was a point when one—or maybe both of them, but certainly him—kind of said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. How did we end up here! Whose idea was it to fucking get married?” But by then they’d been cast as husband and wife in the most popular early version of a reality show ever. So in a way, they kind of lost their vote in the whole thing. I’ll bet they spent more time together in front of the camera than they did when the cameras weren’t around. Certainly the time in front was probably a lot more fun.
So there you go. This was the dream, that elusive fantabulous American dream. The dream where these two little ordinary anybodies from nowhere all of a sudden had everything, demonstrating perfectly what was not only possible in America, but what was great about it! Two poor kids who had just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps meet, fall in love, have a few children, and BOOM! Happily ever after the deluge!
Cut to a million years later and now one of those two children of that couple with their wonderful life was twenty-one and living in New York, and one day she was taking this cooking class from some Yugoslavian woman who felt that it was not only necessary but important to tell her, “I hate your father. He is a not good, very very bad, mean, mean man. Your mother, she is an angel—a good woman, yes?” She shook her head emphatically and repeated, “Your father, him I hate. Also the woman who is Elizabeth Taylor, no good. You cannot trust a lady like that. A lady with the black hair.” She made a spitting sound. It was as though she wasn’t talking about real people, and certainly not real people who were related to me and who maybe it might not be appropriate to speak about like that.
You know how when people pass away they leave instructions as to what to do with what remains? I believe they’re referred to as “wills”—but then so is one of those two princes in Great Britain.
True to form, my father continued to neglect his parental duties in death as he did in life. No last will and testament, no wishes or instructions on where he wished to be buried or however else his remains or possessions should be disposed of, was found among his effects. This could be because he essentially left nothing behind, but I also think that, having never done anything that could be misconstrued for some kind of responsible act, why start now? Why begin at the end?
So without any last wishes to guide us, Eddie’s offspring—myself, Joely and Trisha (Todd having chosen not to attend the division of my father’s lack of spoils)—descended on his little Berkeley cottage overlooking the bay. The nice thing about all this was there was nothing for the three of us to fight over. Oh, there was a piano, an assortment of sheet music, a closet full of clothes that hadn’t been worn in over a decade, a watch, and the one item ultimately worth coveting—my dad’s diamond pinky ring that he’d worn for as long as any of us could remember.
This famously flashy multi-faceted diamond ring was the one and only item that any of us wanted. And I thought it only fair(ish) that, since I was the main one of us to look after him in his declining years, this ring should go to me, and then eventually to my uniquely spectacular child.
A few years prior to his final decline, I’d moved my dad from his San Francisco apartment which was located on a hill directly across the street from Grace Cathedral and reinstalled him in a little white house in the Berkeley hills with a spectacular view of the bay and bridge, all of whose charms were, alas, lost to my ailing parent, whose gaze remained faithfully fixed on the iconic vistas of CNN. Eventually I realized that I’d simply moved him from one bedroom on one side of the Bay Bridge to another bedroom on the other. But while he may not have been impressed with the view, he had become much more involved with me. Or was it me that had gotten more involved with him? The bottom line—one of the few my father failed to snort—is that we had both become increasingly involved with one another, finally and for the first time in our once strangely uninvolved lives.
Somewhere along this line I finally found that maybe I had to stop waiting around for him to give me something he probably didn’t—at least not in any conventional sense—actually have to give. But, what if that turned out to be enough! Or how about if it were more than I could have ever imagined getting—especially given how low, bordering on nonexistent, my expectations actually were. But there I was, looking after him in those last however many years. I talked to his doctors, keeping in constant contact not only with him, but with his ever-changing, reliably constant rotation of Asian caregivers who not only rolled his joints, changed his jammies, administered his medication, and fed him his meals, but also routinely scrubbed the age lines that regularly creased his pale worn skin till it seemed to return to its former appearance of being both shiny and uncommonly smooth.