Cloris. Cloris Leachman
Something else came into focus with razor sharpness, that everything I’m going to write about, every minor event, every major accomplishment, took place in the past. As I absorb that thought, I see I am in a softly lit world. My mother’s voice speaks behind me…Music from my twenties starts over there…In the middle distance, a piano solo begins, Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” Emotions rise in me, because piano music has filled my life since I was seven years old…Now an odor, alien and foreign, oh yes, gunpowder, from when I took that course in marksmanship at the armory to get Daddy’s attention.
There I am with Mama, carrying buckets of water from the well because we don’t have enough water at home for wash day…Laughter erupts. There I am as Nurse Diesel in High Anxiety, with those conical breasts…and, oh, remember, there I am at nineteen, holding the trophy I won as Miss Chicago.
I could start my book with any of these memories…but I think I won’t. I think I’ll start where I didn’t think I would start, at the beginning.
In April 1926, Cloris and Buck Leachman were about to have their first child. Buck was in the early stages of building his business, the Leachman Lumber Company, and there was no extra money. Nevertheless, when their first offspring was about to enter the world, they wanted to make a proud announcement. Daddy decided he’d send a telegram. That was a huge notion, because telegrams were costly. You paid by the word. Mama really didn’t think they should go that far, but Daddy was heady and reckless. He went out the door like a riverboat gambler and sent a telegram announcement to his sister, who lived in another part of the state. GIRL was the entire message. That fanfare played me onto the stage of life.
Our house sat in an area called Lone Tree, three miles outside the Des Moines city limits, on Route 6, a two-lane highway. There were places for other houses, but only a few had been built, so there was a lot of space in which I could roam. We had a huge vegetable garden and some animals—a pig, sheep, ducks, and geese.
Mama had an inventive streak, sometimes we made our own soap out of bacon grease. We didn’t have to. Mama just wanted to experiment. And, my younger sisters, Mary and Claiborne, and I were always wearing strange-looking dresses because Mama made them from Vogue patterns, and the fashions hadn’t reached the Midwest yet.
Some of the ways Mama and Daddy interacted with each other sculpted the way I see the world. Memories of how they were together come back to me now with great clarity. There was never a cross word between them. Somewhere, sometime they had worked out a system of dealing with their differences. When they felt an argument was imminent, they would sit down, and Daddy would stay silent while Mama reenacted the incident, playing both their roles. She would begin by stating Daddy’s position in her version of his masculine voice. Then she would recite her view in her own voice. Then she’d respond in his voice to what she’d said in her voice. Somehow things got worked out in the end. Maybe Daddy was sedated by the process.
On a lighter note, Mama and Daddy would sometimes argue about how a word was pronounced, and they had a system to handle that. They’d each put up ten dollars, and then Mama would go to the dictionary and read out loud which syllable of the word was to be emphasized. The loser paid up.
The family sat down at the same time every night for dinner, and each of the girls had a dinnertime job. Mine was to set the table. I remember how I did it one particular night. I put a little green lettuce cup on each of our five plates, then added half a pear. I put some cottage cheese next to the pear and an English walnut on top. To finish, as Mama had taught me, I put the forks to the left and the knives and spoons to the right of the plates.
I hated to get my hands dirty in the kitchen, so I was happy to set the table, which I considered the most sanitary way to be helpful. I remember thinking that when I got married, I’d wear rubber gloves so I’d never be touched by anything. Want to know about crazy, want to know about upside-down thinking? My other job was to clean the bathroom. I thought that was a nice, tidy thing to do.
Daddy and my two sisters did the dishes after dinner, and I practiced the piano. I felt guilty about not helping, but I just couldn’t put my hands in dishwater and there were plenty of wipers, and we had very little water, anyway, so, okay, Cloris will practice the piano.
In the winter we’d go from the freezing cold outside to the freezing cold inside our house. Daddy would put the coal in the furnace and get it going, and Mama would start getting dinner ready. Usually she had put something on ‘pre-bake’ in the morning and she heat it to the finish when we got home. If we’d all been out in the car, we’d be singing all the way home. Mama would sing with us, but Daddy didn’t. Daddy didn’t nurture his relationship with us, we had no kind of physical contact with him. There were no hugs or cheek kisses or pats on the back. He’d get up in the morning, shave, take a bath, put on his Mennen aftershave lotion, comb his hair, part it, and go to work in his black, four-door Buick. When he came home, he’d say hello to all of us, then sit down and read his newspaper.
Generally, I saw Daddy at the end of the day. After I’d finished my lessons, I’d take the streetcar out to the lumber company, and we’d drive home from there. It sticks in my mind that when Daddy got out of the car, one shoulder was always lower than the other. I don’t think it was due to an injury. Maybe all he needed was to go to the chiropractor. I just watched him. I didn’t know my father.
When I was a little girl, I didn’t know anything about Mama and Daddy’s courtship, but one time when Mary and Claiborne and I were up in our attic, we saw this little valise, which we hadn’t noticed before. We opened it, inside there was a beautiful dark blue dress. I asked Mama about it, and she said that she got married to Daddy in that dress. Apparently, she’d been pregnant with me at the time, but I didn’t learn that until years later.
I think I was twelve when I looked through that valise again. I felt something underneath the photographs and jackets and pulled it out. It was a beautiful silver tray, and on it was inscribed: NOVEMBER TWELFTH, NINETEEN HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE. ON THIS DATE CLORIS WALLACE MARRIED PAUL WHITE. Oh my god, I thought. My mother was married to someone else before Daddy, and she never told me. I’m not Daddy’s daughter. I’m Paul White’s daughter. That was an unmanageable drama, and I was crying when I spoke to Mama about it.
“Who am I related to?” I asked. “Who do I belong to?”
Mama told me right away that I was Daddy’s daughter. She said that when she was nineteen and at Drake University, she’d gotten married to a darling guy who was president of his fraternity. They’d lived in an apartment, but then, suddenly, they’d had to move. Mama hadn’t known why, but she’d thought that the problem was financial. Right after that, her new husband disappeared. And right after that, movers came and took their furniture away. Mama’s father brought her home and got her a divorce.
Daddy and Mama met when she went back to Drake. Daddy began his college career there, but his father contracted what we now call Alzheimer’s, so Daddy had to quit college and support the family. Right after he and Mama got married, Mama was in a very unhappy state because Grandma Leachman was totally against the marriage. She said that Buck had married a divorced woman. That was close to being a capital sin in Des Moines, Iowa, in those days, so Mama was deeply concerned and deeply hurt. But, crazily, it turned out that Grandma Leachman came to love Mama and became closer to her than anyone else in Daddy’s family.
Mama was completely different from Daddy. She’d read a story to us, and her voice would be so interesting: she would become all the characters. She’d make them come alive for us. Mama always made dinnertime fun. She’d ask, “What was the worst thing that happened to you today?” Then we would all recount whatever terrible thing we could think of that had happened. Then she’d say, “What was the best thing that happened today?” It made us think. We’d all take a moment to come up with our answers.
Every day, when I came home from school, Mama would tell me something to let me know she had been thinking of me. She would advise me to do this or that. And I’d think to myself, Oh my goodness. She’s been thinking of me. It was usually a good little idea, one that eventually helped in some way to build my career.
Mama was funny, too. She liked to tell this