Quentin Tarantino - The Man, The Myths and the Movies. Wensley Clarkson
kept drinking. At the age of ten Connie moved in with her grandmother in Ravenna, near Cleveland, in Ohio. Two years later she decided to flee her entire family to head for California. At her aunt’s home in Pico Rivera, Connie had to work from her early teens to pay her way through school. At one stage she worked at an Orange Julius fast-food joint, but anything was better than being back with her parents.
Connie had only just turned 15 when she met 21-year-old matinee idol lookalike Tony Tarantino while taking horse-riding lessons near her home. Tarantino – a part-time actor and law student – was appearing on stage at the Pasadena Playhouse, near Los Angeles, at the time. He was entranced by this half-Cherokee Indian, half-Irish girl. Connie was unusually tall, with long, dark, flowing hair, large, deep, brown eyes and a trim figure. She also looked at least three years older than she really was. Tarantino, with his Italian features, neat buzz cut and liking for well-fitting clothes, cut a smart figure.
Connie – who had graduated from high school at just 15 with a major in microbiology – had been seriously considering going to pre-med school to train as a doctor. When she met Tarantino she decided to do a nursing course first, with the intention of going on to pre-med school later.
To Connie – ever the daydreamer – the marriage and her subsequent pregnancy seemed to offer the perfect escape route from her mundane existence. By marrying Tarantino she immediately gained emancipated minor status, which meant her parents no longer had any legal authority over her. ‘I don’t know if I ever truly fell in love with Tony. It’s difficult to tell because I was so young,’ says Connie now. She pauses, then adds, ‘I guess I still don’t know what love means.’
Connie and Tony’s marriage in Los Angeles in the summer of 1961 actually provided nothing more than a brief respite from drudgery. Connie’s family saw the wedding as an ideal way to get her off their hands. In their eyes, she was a troublemaker who had constantly skipped school and been sullen and unhelpful. In her eyes, she was the neglected and abandoned child who had always played second fiddle to a bottle of booze. Her mother even told Connie she was relieved that she appeared to be settling down to raise a family.
But, as usual, Connie’s happiness was short-lived. Tony Tarantino moved to Tennessee with Connie when she enrolled to train as a registered nurse in Knoxville. But, after failing to get a job, he departed for his home state of New York. Connie had not even discovered that she was carrying his baby. They had been together less than three months and she was still only 15 years of age.
Now, six months later at 16, she refused to let her mother help look after the child she was expecting, even though she intended to continue working after the birth. So it was that Connie found herself working 16-hour double shifts as part of her gruelling training to be an angel of mercy back in Knoxville. Now all those incredibly long hours were threatening to turn her pregnancy into a disaster.
The day before Connie went into premature labour, she had worked yet another double shift at the hospital. In many ways, the relentless grind helped her avoid thinking about her situation: all alone, about to become a mother at a ludicrously young age, and barely able to survive on her salary of a dollar and a quarter per hour. Her pride prevented her from moving into her mother’s trailer home, thirty miles north of Knoxville. Nothing was going to faze her. She would make it on her own.
Yet even as the ambulance pushed through the suburbs of the city towards the hospital, Connie felt no fear. ‘I was completely alone. I had no one to turn to and I was too young to really know how serious it was to bring a child into the world. There was no choice for me: I had to just get on with my life.’
The hospital was like a home from home for Connie, who had spent more of the previous three mouths there than at her cramped apartment. As she was wheeled through to the maternity wing, doctors and nurses greeted her. It felt reassuring to the 16-year-old. It was almost like being famous. The people in that hospital truly cared for Connie, which was more than could be said for most of her family.
The birth itself was remarkably easy, but then the child did weigh less than five pounds because he was so early. Connie really did not give it much thought. She’d got married, got pregnant and now she’d had a baby. It was no big deal. It went on all around her during her working hours, so why should it be any different for her?
‘It’s a boy!’ announced the midwife, holding up the tiny infant with his mop of black hair. ‘What you going to call him?’
Connie looked up bleary-eyed, and forced a smile. ‘Oh, I’ll think of something.’
In fact she had thought it through very carefully during those endless, lonely evenings watching television at her apartment. She didn’t do much else except eat, and that was usually in front of the TV.Connie had few friends. Girls of her own age had very different interests and older women tended to disapprove of a virtual schoolgirl getting pregnant.
During those solitary evenings at home, Connie would let her imagination take over while she tuned into different television programmes. She had a particular penchant for a Western series called Gunsmoke.
Her all-time favourite heart-throb was a young, rugged, half-breed cowhand called Quint Asper, played by handsome stud Burt Reynolds. Connie would swoon every time he came on the small, flickering black-and-white screen of her secondhand TV. Sometimes she would dream about riding off into the sunset with Quint. Her real life cowboy, Tony Tarantino, had ridden off into the sunset by himself, so Quint seemed a safer option. Fantasy figures never abandoned their loved ones.
Connie’s other important influence in choosing a name for her son was one of her favourite books, The Sound and the Fury. One of the characters, Quentin, was the progeny of an ill-advised seduction and a hasty, loveless marriage: a clear parallel with her own situation.
The nurses in attendance at the hospital were concerned that mother and child should bond instantly. Adoptions were not as common in those days. When a woman – however young – had a baby, she was expected to keep it.
But, as Connie lay there recovering from the birth of her premature son, she found herself feeling incredibly detached from everything that had just occurred. It was as if all those dramatic events had happened to someone else. Initially, it was impossible to see the tiny creature who had popped out into the world as her child. It wasn’t until the baby started crying and the nurses showed Connie how to feed him, that it actually dawned on her that he was her baby. She had long since blotted Tony Tarantino out of her mind, and here was a reminder of Tony. Perhaps that was why it took her a little time to accept him as her flesh and blood. But Connie was determined to raise him herself. She had no father for him, so she thought back to Gunsmoke, the show she had so frequently watched in her lonely apartment.
‘I’m gonna call him Quentin,’ Connie proudly announced to the nurse. And so Quentin Jerome Tarantino was named.
Connie later insisted that, besides her interest in the two Quints, she wanted to ensure that her son’s name would fill up an entire screen. ‘A multi-syllabic name, Quen-tin Ta-ran-ti-no. It’s a big name and I expected him to be important. Why would I want to have an unimportant baby?’
Connie had no time for post-natal depression. She did not even have an opportunity to breastfeed her child. He went straight on to formula because she had to get back to work to keep them both. Connie was all alone with a baby to bring up. By the time she left hospital, with tiny milky-white Quentin wrapped in a blanket in her arms, she had worked out a game plan. This child was going to be her inspiration. He would spur her on to succeed in life.
Soon after the birth, Connie was back working 16-hour days at the hospital and attending classes in between. She took Quentin over to an English nanny called Mrs Breeden, who looked after a number of children of working parents in Knoxville. For the first year of his life, Quentin spent more time under the watchful, caring eye of Mrs Breeden than in the company of his mother.
Connie had reluctantly decided that she had to make work her priority if they were to survive financially. She would drop her baby son at Mrs Breeden’s one-storey house on a quiet, tree-lined street a few blocks from her apartment, then take the bus to work every Monday morning.