grown-ups around me just watched the action in front of them and were all highly amused.
WALLACE BERMAN / Loree Foxx, 1955
Unhappily, though perhaps fortunately for some, Loree died in a prison cell in 1972 while having an asthma attack. Throughout her life, Loree suffered from asthma. The guards gave her medicine that she was allergic to, and she died right there on the spot, in her cell. Her niece Suzy, also a friend of my parents (and featured on the cover of Semina 2), went to the jail unit to identify the body. She went not out of courtesy, love, or family duty, but out of fear that Loree might be still alive and faking her death. But alas, Loree Foxx, artist, ex-girlfriend to my father and Uncle Donald, and master thief, was sincerely dead.
Shirley / chapter 3
My mother is the daughter of Roudolph and Martha Morand. My grandmother, born Martha Jensen, came from Hamburg, Germany. My most vivid memory of her is as a butcher at the Hollywood Ranch Market on Vine Street. It always struck me as a weird occupation for a woman, but there was something very practical about her ability to cut up a side of meat. Of our family, she impressed me as the most hands-on. Way before America and her career as a butcher, she had been a teenage cabaret performer in Hamburg. No wonder I weep whenever I hear Lotte Lenya sing the cabaret theater songs by her husband Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, even though I don’t know my grandmother’s repertoire. She left the German port town sometime in the 1920s to become part of a traveling circus called 101 Ranch Wild West Show.
Martha’s traveling circus took her from Oklahoma to Cuba and then to California, where she quit to escape her first marriage to a cowboy trick rider by the name of Hank Durnell. Durnell was a stunt rider for the famous Tom Mix. Mix is legendary now as one of the first great cowboy movie stars. His horse “Tony” was as famous as he was. Mix and Tony were a big part of the 101 Ranch Wild West Show, which over the years also featured the talents of Buffalo Bill Cody, as well as the great Will Rogers. Martha and Durnell had a child by the name of Marcela, but the marriage ran aground when Durnell’s drinking got out of hand. Martha left the circus, and she eventually married Roudolph Morand, better known to his family and friends as “Dodo.”
At the time they met, Dodo resembled a young Cary Grant and was an iceman serving customers in the Hollywood area. He supplied ice to Mae West, who once gave him a car. This seems like an excessive gift for an iceman’s service, but, as I say, he was quite handsome. As a tot, I knew him to be entirely lovable, but he apparently had a temper and a touch of cruelty. For me, he was the perfect grandfather. When I knew him, he kept odd hours because he was a security guard for Howard Hughes’s plane. Since he worked the nightshift, he saw Hughes many times. Howard was very responsive to my grandfather. Dodo watched over the H-4 Hercules, better known as The Spruce Goose, which was Hughes’s huge plane made of birch wood. Commissioned by the government in 1942 during the Second World War, the plane was a failure, even though Hughes worked on it obsessively and went way over budget and time; he was still struggling with it up to 1947, well after the war’s end. Hughes kept the plane in a giant hangar until his death in 1976. My granddad once told me he was in the hangar in the middle of the night when Hughes came in unannounced. He wanted to fire up the plane to see how it was running. Hughes asked my grandfather to go to the right wing to see if the engine was working properly. The wingspan is 320 feet long. Once Dodo reached the precise spot, he signaled Hughes to start the motor. Instead of turning on the right side engine, he turned on the left. My grandfather told me that this was typical of Hughes’s sense of humor.
I have an early memory of my mom’s parents living very close to the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. They eventually moved to Topanga and lived in the Fernwood section of that haunted canyon. Like our house on Crater Lane in Beverly Glen, their house was a shack, but still a very comfortable two-story cabin with a newly built swimming pool and bar. I loved playing in the wet bar area, because it seemed so grown up, and there was something aesthetically pleasing about having an outdoor bar with stools and water faucets. I never saw a water faucet in a backyard before, so to me, that was a complete novelty. Also, the whole area smelled like a forest. A lot of trees brought a fresh scent as the year went on, and their house was a perfect location for Christmas Day and family gatherings. I was never big on nature unless it was a controlled environment. But having a bar, three or four bar stools, and a swimming pool seemed to me like a divine version of nature.
Martha, Tosh’s maternal grandmother
Wallace would often play an extended version of gin rummy with Martha, who like my father had a great love for card games. Also like my dad, she was a very experienced player and quite competitive. Her manner in the game was serious, even when she played with me. My grandmother had a determined look on her face whenever she was playing, and when she won (which was often), she would give a charming, brief smile all of a sudden. Martha played to win, and not to pass the time. She and Wallace got along extremely well. Famously, there’s supposed to be tension between the son-in-law and the wife’s parents, but I never heard or saw any bad vibes between Wallace and my mother’s parents. Like my parents and my uncle, they were totally accepting of almost any social group, and very undemanding but supportive people.
My mom went to Hollywood High School with David Nelson of Ozzie & Harriet, the big brother of Ricky, and with Carol Burnett. Shirley and Uncle Don were truly part of the romantic Hollywood neighborhood years. Somewhere on their block lived the Robert Mitchum family with its various kids. There were plenty of children in her community, and in some ways, it must have been like a 1940s Hollywood family film. Unlike in the movies, however, my grandfather checked out of the household to live with another woman. He eventually came back to the family, after being with a pair of women (separately, as far as I know) named Virginia and Georgia. When he reappeared, my uncle asked if he’d run out of states.
As a child, until she was a teenager, my mom was interested in expressing herself through dance. She studied ballet under Michel Panaieff, who was the principal dancer for the Belgrade Opera and a member of the original Ballets Russes. He eventually settled in Los Angeles during the Second World War. Panaieff opened a dance studio in Hollywood, where my mother, through a large window facing Hollywood Boulevard, saw the first two major loves in her life. One was a boy name Fergie, who saw her dancing through the front window, and the second, some time after Fergie, was my dad, looking through that same window. Eventually, she landed on her foot the wrong way, which caused permanent damage to her ankle. She could walk easily but couldn’t dance anymore. The injury was a major disappointment, and it seems to have been a goodbye to having a creative life under her name. I don’t believe she had a Plan B, and the marriage angle was a natural progression to exiting the family home.
WALLACE BERMAN / Roudoulph Morand (“Dodo”), Tosh’s maternal grandfather
I can’t speak for Fergie because I never met him, but Wallace—although very gentle, and even an artistic genius (as he was in life, as well)—was very much an American male of that era. He required a woman who would support his one-way route to art-life and not put restrictions on his time and his need for attention. If I’d been her, I wouldn’t have married him, which might seem to be an odd thing for the offspring of that relationship to say. But the women of that era had a bad deal in terms of gender equality. It was almost an act of cruelty in that one could see a window of opportunity opening up for them. But the counterculture itself was no better than the previous generation. At best, women were expected to be the backup in case the male fell apart. In the world of the beats, if you were a woman, and not an artist or writer, you tended to be treated as an individual who supported the male author/artist. You were supposed to keep the home intact, as well as clean up after the artist, and cook the meals. And, God forbid, if you had a child, you pretty much had to take care of that as well, due to the artist or writer spending long hours in the studio focusing on his art, and preoccupied with the thought of the female as Muse. Every artist needed one to encourage the work.