Cloris. Cloris Leachman
sisters, and it always frightened me. I would say, “Don’t hit me, Daddy!” as I ran up the stairs to get away from him. It was always a frightening experience, and I hated it.
Often when I was practicing the piano, Daddy would be in the next room, the sunroom, reading the paper after he came home from work, and Mama would be in the kitchen, preparing dinner. That was the daily routine. I tried to attract Daddy’s attention through my piano playing. While I was practicing, I’d look over at him to see if he was noticing me. He wasn’t, he’d be focused on his newspaper. That would spur me on. I’d play something more dramatic, more complex, something that demanded agile fingering, an arpeggio with dazzling quickness, something that demanded substantial skill.
When I’d completed it, I’d say, “Daddy, how was that?”
“Fine, girl. That’s fine,” he’d reply.
He wouldn’t even look over at me. I had heard that Vaslav Nijinsky, the famous Russian dancer, when asked how he made such extraordinary jumps, said, “You have to leap, and when you are at the top, you have only to pause for a moment.” I would keep that image in my mind when I played the arpeggio again—up the scale, pause, then down, like running water. I could not, I would not, accept that Daddy wouldn’t some time notice how I was playing and be impressed by it.
Then I’d say it again. “How was that, Daddy?”
And he’d reply, with the same apparent lack of emotion, “Excellent, dear.”
Pounding on a dramatic piece to draw Daddy’s attention to me increased my discipline and persistence, which were vital to every performing art I later pursued, acting, singing, dancing. I was determined that the audience, whether it was one person or thousands, would watch and listen to what I was doing.
My piano playing didn’t bring me closer to Daddy, so I looked for another way to gain his interest. He loved to hunt, and twice a year, during duck hunting season, he and his friends would go to Arkansas. Knowing that, when I was fifteen, I went down to the armory in Des Moines and enrolled in a marksmanship course. I went to the firing range every Saturday for the entire winter. I hated the smell of guns and gunpowder and I hated to be cold and wet, and all of those things were around me at the armory. But those were his smells, the smells that were with him when he went hunting, so I finished the course. I still remember some of what I was taught, you don’t pull the trigger, you squeeze it. I never went hunting with my father. I never killed anything with a gun. I couldn’t; I wouldn’t. I don’t remember knowing any marksmen; I was just at the armory doing my duty. At the end of the course, I graduated as a qualified marksman. It did nothing to bring me closer to Daddy.
Still bent on getting him to look my way and love me, I tried something else. He was a lumberman, and there was a statewide contest to see who among the entrants could build the best miniature house. I got the lumber together and built one and sent it in. I won first prize. That was a victory. Yes, I earned a victory in building a miniature house, but I came up empty in my efforts to bring Daddy and me closer together.
The worst thing happened one night when I was seventeen. Tommy’s parents—he was my then boyfriend—were away, and Tommy asked me to spend the night with him, he didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want him to be lonely, so I said I would. We weren’t going to do anything intimate, and I felt it would also be an assertion of my independence. I slept on the rumble seat of his car, while he slept inside it. It ranks as the worst night of my life, because I had terrible hay fever, and between the hay fever and the mosquitoes, which were out in attack mode, I never slept a wink.
When I came home in the morning, Mama and Daddy were at breakfast. I ran past them and dashed upstairs to get dressed. I had to go to my job at the radio station. I didn’t explain where I’d been or what I’d been doing. When I came home that night, I went up to my room and prepared to take a bath. I was naked in the bathroom, about to step into the bath, when Daddy came in. He’d taken his belt off, and he stood there staring at me, white with anger. Then he started beating me with the belt, not just on the buttocks, but all over my body. I screamed. I was terrified. My hysteria billowed through the house, and my sisters started screaming, too. Then my mother realized what was happening, and tortured screams came out of her. The hysteria in all four of us made Daddy stop. A frenzied look still on his face, he turned around and left the bathroom, went down to the kitchen, took a bottle of whiskey, got in his car, and drove off.
The next day I was emotionally broken. I said to Mama, “I hate him. I hate him. Why did you marry him?”
She said, “Oh, he’s so proud of you.”
I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, what she was talking about. whatever it was, it had no meaning to me. I wanted him to be proud of me, but most of all, above everything else, I wanted him to love me. There was no aftermath. Not a word was spoken nor a look exchanged between Daddy and me about the incident.
When I was seventeen, the garden of my life came into full bloom. Cornelia turned more of her students over to me, seventeen of them. I was working for the Des Moines Register and Tribune Company, where my job was pretty nonspecific. I was to do what was needed, typing, filing, that sort of thing. There was a woman working near me who could type, it seemed to me, a hundred and fifty words a second. Watching her, I realized this wasn’t going to be an area of major achievement for me.
I was getting ready to quit the Des Moines Register when a man from the radio station, which was two floors above us, came down to talk to me. His name was Mr. Samuels. I’d met him before, when I’d tried to get a job at the radio station, but they’d had no openings. Mr. Samuels asked if I was still interested in working for them.
Yup, uh-huh, I am. Let’s go right now, were the words backing up in front of my mind. We went upstairs, and Mr. Samuels explained what I was to do—follow the ticker tape that came through the office, carrying news, advertisements and general information, and select and assemble all items relevant to women. Then, on the radio, I would read these different items. I took the job.
One piece of advice I passed on to women was that we all should empty our purses every night. It was good advice. I still follow it today. The idea was to review what you’d done that day, particularly how much you’d spent and where, to determine whether you had the right make-up, and then to sort through it all and put everything back so you’d be ready for the next day.
After dinner I’d start typing the content of the radio show for tomorrow’s broadcast. And almost every night Mama would come out of her bedroom, stand there in her floor-length white nightgown, her long dark hair touching her shoulders, watching me, and saying nothing. Then she’d shake her head and go back to the bedroom.
I said the garden of my life was in full bloom when I was seventeen. Truly it was. That year I was also modeling at Younkers Department Store. Getting that job turned out to be simple. When I went to the store and asked if they needed a salesperson, the woman I was talking to looked me up and down and said, “We don’t need you in sales. You’re going to be a model.”
My job as a model was to drift through the store, wearing Younkers’ most splendid feminine apparel. Women would stop me, wanting to touch the material or ask questions. For instance, they would ask me if the jacket I was wearing was comfortable, or if I felt pretty wearing it. One time I was modeling an ensemble that featured the colors red and purple, colors you wouldn’t, at least I wouldn’t, normally think of combining. But the ensemble was really striking, so now when I wear red and purple together, I think about being introduced to that color combination when I was a teenager at Younkers.
I enjoyed the conversations with those women who wanted to know what I was modeling. I enjoyed their appraising looks. And, just between you and me, modeling at Younkers was the easiest job I ever had.
Another activity I created for myself made my late teen years a super busy time. Several nights a week, I’d have three dates. We were in the middle of World War II, and a lot of boys in uniforms, ones I knew in high school, were coming home on leave; they wanted to see me, so I’d bunch them into layers of three, one after the other. It was an extraordinary experience. I was fascinated to hear them describe where they’d been