Apparently there were co.., p.1
Apparently There Were Complaints, page 1
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For the men in my life—
my husband, Barney Rosenzweig
and my brothers, Michael Gless and Aric Gless
I could always knock Michael over with a feather.
Introduction
Eight years old at Beverly Jacks and Jills summertime day camp in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles.
This is my favorite photo of me as a child, taken at summer day camp in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. I am eight years old.
I wasn’t sent to camp looking like this, my French braids askew and coming loose, my shorts twisted to the side, sloppy. My legs are scuffed with dirt. There is a long chocolate ice cream stain running down the front of my white Bluebird blouse, which is only half tucked in. It matches the chocolate moustache above my lip, topping my ear-to-ear grin. Every time I look at this photo, I think, “That is the happiest kid in the world.”
Being happy has always been my goal. I’ve been defined with many labels over the years, some great, others not. I’ve been called the poor relative, a rich kid, a spinster, impudent, naïve, funny, darling, boring, fat, perfect, unusual, forgettable, and unforgettable. I’ve heard too sexy, too unsuitable, too angry, too dykey, and the blonde, the bitch, worst ever, best ever, Emmy loser, and Emmy winner. In the press, I’ve been called a gay icon, a political liberal, a home-wrecker, a sack of potatoes, and a drunk.
A more tough-skinned person would have ignored all these labels. I’m many things, but tough-skinned isn’t one of them. I was a sensitive little girl who became a perceptive and vulnerable big girl. I wouldn’t change that.
It’s good to remember myself as happy, the way I am in this camp photo. Left to my own devices, I was usually a happy child.
Yet rarely is anything left to its own devices, not even cherished photographs. A couple of years ago, I took my small camp photo to be enlarged and framed. It now hangs in the entryway of my Studio City home. The photo editor, trying to correct what was wrong with me, airbrushed out all the chocolate stains on my blouse and on my face.
Apparently, there are still many things about me that others think need fixing.
I am seventy-eight years old now. Fuck ’em.
One Bubbles
“If you ever have another drink again, don’t call me. I don’t do suicides.”
Jesus.
The hotshot Miami doctor’s tone was dismissive. He closed my file. He had better things to do.
I was seventy years old and had come to see this big-deal gastroenterologist for my debilitating stomach pain. After spending the previous week in the hospital, I had been advised to stay completely away from alcohol. I did. For about thirty-six hours.
I blamed a bag of crispy chocolate chip cookies for the first bout of major stomach pain that sent me to the emergency room. I had been watching late-night TV and eating cookies in bed, chewing quietly so as not to wake my husband. Barney can’t bear crumbs in the sheets. An hour later, my stomach began to hurt.
I waited for the pain to go away. It didn’t. I considered my options. Going to the emergency room would involve me getting up and putting on clothing. That seemed like way too much effort for 1:30 a.m. I decided to ignore the sharp stabbing in my stomach. My attempt only lasted the length of a MyPillow commercial. The pain was undeniably getting much worse. I hid the empty cookie bag and woke up Barney. He drove me to the emergency room.
The pain spread rapidly to my back. After multiple tests, the ER doctors were still stumped about the cause. My regular internist was called in. He couldn’t figure it out either.
I begged him, “Please! Just give me morphine. Anything to stop this pain!”
My internist thought I might need surgery for gallstones. Pain drugs were out of the question until they knew the exact cause.
After five hours of MRIs, scopes, and blood tests, they had a diagnosis. Acute pancreatitis. They had figured out the culprit. It was martinis.
Martinis?!? Well, that had to be wrong!
I did look forward to a Hendrick’s martini or two. Sometimes three. Every night. Starting at 5 p.m., the respectable happy hour. They made me feel happy.
I thought, “Why couldn’t the pain have been caused by something that I would never miss, like exercise? Couldn’t it have been a bad reaction to the lap pool? Perhaps it’s a transdermal overdose of chlorine.”
The only treatment for pancreatitis was to stay in the hospital, be medicated, and wait it out. I spent the next five days there on really good pain meds. I don’t remember a thing about those days.
I was released, feeling fine, free to go home with my printed-out instructions on how to prevent another attack. At the top of the list was “No alcoholic beverages.”
Right.
I’m not great with instructions. I don’t have the patience for them. If the remote doesn’t make my TV turn on when I press the green button, I call someone to come over to fix it.
The next evening, while at a restaurant with a friend, I decided to test the waters and ordered one of those pink, fizzy cocktails that comes with a paper parasol.
I never go for those sissy drinks, but I thought it seemed safe enough. It wasn’t a martini, after all. An hour later, I was doubled over in pain. Pastel-colored fruity libations are not to be trusted.
Dr. Gastroenterologist concluded I must have a death wish. He had nothing else to say to me. My bottom lip started quivering. My eyes filled with tears.
He barked, “You’re not gonna get all weepy on me now, are ya? I thought you were the tough one.”
He was referring to my portrayal of police detective Christine Cagney in my TV show from the 1980s, Cagney & Lacey.
How dare he speak to me that way! I defended myself. “They paid me to be tough. You’re not paying me.”
The doctor stood over me. He was physically imposing, a retired general in the army. I wasn’t sure if I was angry or developing a bit of a crush.
Either way, I followed his orders. I haven’t had a drink since May 8, 2015. And I miss my Hendrick’s dry martini, stirred not shaken. Every single night. Still.
* * *
I spent the first six weeks of my life in a hospital. I was born premature.
On May 28, my mother went into labor. I was supposed to be an end-of-June baby. After my mother had been in labor for seventy-four hours, the doctor said, “This baby wants to be born today.” It was May 31, 1943.
They wheeled my mother into surgery, knocked her out, and performed a C-section. She was sent to recovery, and I was rushed into an incubator in the nursery, weighing less than three pounds.
After spending a week in a different ward of the hospital, unable to see or hold me, my mother scored a wheelchair from the hallway and managed to roll through the corridors to the nursery. She was certain she would be told that I had died.
But when she made her way over to the incubator, she saw I was alive. Though, according to her, I looked like a pound of butter, like she could hold me in the palm of her hand.
The nurse unwrapped the blanket to show her my tiny body, which my mother also described as “just perfect.”
The next day, my mother was sent home from the hospital for a month of bed rest. She had no choice but to leave me behind, unnamed.
One of the nurses began to call me Bubbles.
My father would stop in to see me on his way home from work. He placed a tiny bottle of holy water, blessed by the pope, in the corner of the incubator.
My mother did not return. She was physically fragile and probably petrified of the possibility of losing another daughter.
Four years earlier, the year before my older brother, Michael, was born, my mother gave birth to a girl she named for her mother, Marguerite. The nuns at the hospital baptized the curly-haired baby when, after twenty-four hours, it became obvious she wasn’t going to make it. Little Marguerite was laid to rest in an infant-size coffin before my mother was even released from the hospital.
No doctor ever gave my mother a reason for Marguerite’s death. In the 1930s and ’40s, the medical community never connected the ways smoking and drinking could affect a fetus. My mother started smoking cigarettes at age sixteen and enjoyed daily libations once she was an adult. Pregnancy pamphlets from that era encouraged women to not give up smoking or social drinking, as it kept “the expectant mother’s nerves calm.”
After a normal pregnancy and delivery of Michael, my mother felt a renewed sense of optimism while expecting me.
There was one other aspect that made this pregnancy different. A tea-leaf reader named me.
In the 1940s, my mother did a lot of volunteer work with the Assistance League of Los Angeles, a charitable organization of “society” women. After their events, the women would go to the adjoining Attic Tea Room, where a tea-leaf reader was often on hand to read fortunes as entertainment for the diners.
The fortune-teller looked into the bottom of my mother’s cup and said, “Your life is going to change.”
“Well, I am pregnant,” my mother admitt ed.
After studying the pattern of the tea leaves once more, the fortune-teller said, “It will be a very special child.” (I love that part of the story!) “May I name this baby?”
My mother was caught off guard by the request, but, as conservative as she was, she took the fortune-teller’s phone number and agreed to call her after I was born.
In my baby book is an envelope that my mother had used to write down the fortune-teller’s suggestions. Karen, Hillary, and Sharon were the three choices. Sharon had been circled in pencil. And so, five weeks after I was born, I became Sharon Marguerite Gless.
Good thing. I don’t think “Bubbles Gless” would have worked in the Cagney & Lacey credits.
Two Miss Gless Is About to Perform
I did not linger long in the three-pound-premature-infant category. I’m sure those first six weeks of my life were the one and only time anyone ever suggested that I gain weight.
I looked like Winston Churchill in my first baby photo. I had a fat face, a double chin, and wisps of white-blonde hair on my mostly bald head. It almost looks like I led the Allied coalition to victory in 1943.
As a little girl growing up in Southern California, I played softball, tetherball, danced, wrestled my brother Michael, and swam all day long. There was no opportunity for a fat cell to stick to me. That changed between fifth and sixth grade, when I went into puberty. I rapidly became rounder. All over. My mother never made mention of it.
I could sense the first complaint about my weight coming my way one summer morning, at Union Station in downtown LA, with every step my grandmother took along the train platform toward me.
My mother and I watched as weary passengers in wrinkled clothes stumbled out of various railcars until we finally spotted Grimmy (the grandchildren’s name for Grandmother McCarthy). Even after a three-day train trip, she had emerged from the parlor car at the very end of the train looking fresh and dignified in her tailored light blue suit, using her thinly wrapped umbrella as a walking stick. I watched her with rapt attention as she approached, thrusting the umbrella before every determined stride. She had such power. She was extraordinary. It seemed like other passengers stepped out of her pathway. No one dared cross her.
Grimmy eyed me from head to toe, turned to my mother, and said, “She’s getting fat, Marjorie.”
She made this proclamation as if I weren’t standing right there. My mother didn’t offer up a word in my defense. She was afraid of her own mother, which was understandable. Grimmy scared the shit out of me, too.
Grimmy would extend her cheek toward me to be kissed whenever she visited. There was never a kiss offered in return. She did, however, offer plenty of emphatic opinions about how I should live my life and conduct myself.
She was regal and stern, with a no-nonsense tone. She always had the answers about the correct way to do everything, and she never held back her thoughts when it came to me, her first blonde look-alike granddaughter. She had a plan in place for me: a direction and a map for how I was to advance through life. It included attending grade school and Bluebirds in the upscale Hancock Park area of Los Angeles, being trained in social decorum and ballroom dancing at cotillion, attending the elite all-girl Marlborough School, as my mother and her sisters had, and then making my debut to society at the Las Madrinas Ball at age eighteen. By age twenty-two, I would hopefully have attracted and married an ambitious young attorney, set up a home in Los Angeles, be doing charity work with the ladies of the Junior League and playing bridge, golf, or tennis, and be on my way to having fabulous children who would also grow up to be attorneys or the wife of one. Being fat had no place in the plan. On that train platform, I got my first verbal warning.
Grimmy held the family purse strings, so she was the boss. Every opportunity I was afforded, from ballet lessons to boarding school, happened because she financed it. Her approval was everything to me. And it was scarce.
Grimmy was from the era where children were to be “seen and not heard.” She had raised her three daughters and one son with that philosophy.
My mother and her siblings had grown up in a large home on Muirfield Road in Hancock Park. The showcase house was designed by and furnished with my grandmother’s impeccable taste and built from the earnings of her husband, my grandfather, Neil S. McCarthy.
Grandpa was the most famous and powerful entertainment attorney in Los Angeles during the Golden Age of Hollywood. He represented Howard Hughes, Cecil B. DeMille, Mary Pickford, and Katharine Hepburn, along with other stars and major motion picture interests. He would often meet with his celebrity clients at the famous Beverly Hills Hotel in the Polo Lounge, where he went for lunch every weekday. A waiter would remove the white netting that kept a reserved table on the patio clean and ready for Grandpa and his guests. The most popular item on the menu was, and still is today, the famous McCarthy chopped salad, named for my grandfather. His caricature was on the wall of the famous Brown Derby restaurant on Vine Street in Hollywood.
Louis B. Mayer, Ava Gardner, and Lana Turner were also on Grandpa’s extensive client list. Howard Hughes was a neighbor on Muirfield Road and would often show up, unannounced, at Grandpa’s front door, for both financial and personal advice.
The McCarthys’ lifestyle appeared to be charmed and impressive, but it didn’t spare their marriage. After my mother and her three siblings had grown, married, and had homes of their own, my grandfather, who had fallen in love with another woman, requested a divorce.
At that time, a wife could still contest a divorce and Grimmy did just that. She had faithfully supported my grandfather’s goals through his college years, his early career, and the raising of their children. She had helped him go from being the poor son of an alcoholic stagecoach driver to a powerful and wealthy lawyer.
“I’m much better off being the present Mrs. McCarthy,” was her response to his divorce request.
“Who told you that?” Grandpa asked.
“The finest attorney I know,” she replied.
“And, that would be?”
“You.”
Grimmy’s wise strategy was based on stories Grandpa had brought home over the decades. He would tell his female clients to never accept divorce, warning them that it would play out in the man’s favor, and they could end up with nothing. Grimmy always remembered that. She was not about to give up being Mrs. McCarthy, especially since she was still in love with Mr. McCarthy.
He moved out nonetheless, though he remained legally married to my grandmother for the rest of her life. Grimmy moved away to Hillsboro, New Hampshire. She renovated an old 1700s structure that had once been a stagecoach post into a wonderful home. She then devoted her time to writing cookbooks, one of which became a national bestseller. Everything Grimmy put her hand to became a success, except the one thing that mattered most: her marriage. Now, on her own, she was determined to not lose her influence over other areas of her life. I was at the top of her list.
Since Grimmy no longer lived in Los Angeles full-time, she invited my mother and father to move from their tiny home in LA’s Carthay Circle to the huge Muirfield house. There were specific instructions attached to the invitation. We were to occupy “the children’s quarters.” My mother and father used what was once my mother’s childhood bedroom as the master bedroom. Michael was given my uncle’s childhood bedroom and, at age three, I was in the nursery. We all shared one bathroom, though the house had at least eight more. Happily, the swimming pool and badminton court were not off-limits.
My father readily acclimated to the upgrade. He would host impressive cocktail parties and backyard barbecues.
Grimmy kept her own private wing of the Muirfield house, which was beyond a closed door, past the children’s quarters. My brothers and I were not allowed to go in. Around age six, I began to defy that order, but only if Grimmy wasn’t visiting Los Angeles. Her quarters had the prettiest dressing room and bathroom, both wallpapered in light gray felt, and a built-in, wall-to-wall mirrored table, with her lotions, perfumes, and powders on top. I made sure I didn’t leave my fingerprints behind as evidence. There was a fireplace in her bedroom with a chaise longue upholstered in pale pink brocade, with a cashmere throw perfectly folded at the bottom.
