was working so hard that she hardly even had time to stop and think about the assassination of John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963. While Americans wept in the streets of Knoxville, Connie just got on with her life. JFK may have seemed half messiah, half movie star to the young all over the free world, but this teenager’s priority was keeping a roof over herself and her young son. Mourning the President’s death wasn’t going to pay the rent.
‘I didn’t have time to worry about those sort of things,’ she recalls. ‘We had to survive and there wasn’t a waking moment in every day when I didn’t put that at the front of my mind.’
Not surprisingly, Connie’s mother felt enormous guilt over her young daughter’s lonely and gruelling existence. However, Connie steadfastly refused to involve her mother in the life of her baby son.
But by the time Quentin was a year old, Connie’s mother seemed to have turned over a new leaf. She convinced her daughter that she had conquered her drink problem and pleaded to be allowed to look after little Quentin.
Connie – extremely suspicious of her mother’s motives – put her to the test by letting her look after the child at her home on a number of occasions. She actually did a fine job and there was no sign of any alcohol in the house either. Connie began to believe that perhaps her mother was a reformed person. With her work commitments at the hospital increasing, Connie allowed her mother to look after Quentin full time at her mother’s mobile home on a trailer park.
For the next year and a half, Connie should have been able to lead a fairly normal teenager’s life, as she spent at least five days each week as a single person. But her low wages and exhausting work schedule forced her to flop in front of the television on her rare nights off. She did not even have enough spare cash to make it to the movie theatre to watch her idol Elvis doing his thing in classics like Viva Las Vegas. Connie would have loved to see the film, as she particularly adored the idea of a sports-car racer having fun in the gambling capital of the world.
‘It was a strange existence, I guess,’ she explains. ‘I had few friends and my life was wrapped around Quint and work when I should have been out having fun.’
On her days off, Connie would change buses twice to get to her mother’s home 30 miles away. The bus trip there and back would take practically all day, but it was worth it to spend a few hours with baby Quentin in the back yard of the rundown trailer.
Connie read books occasionally, but she was almost addicted to superhero comics. She would sit and flick through them for hours before falling asleep. Spiderman was her favourite. Why couldn’t she find a man who was the perfect combination of Spiderman and Quint from Gunsmoke? But not many guys were likely to come knocking at the door of a quiet, shy teenage girl, with a baby in tow.
‘I guess Quint and I grew up together in more ways than most mothers and sons,’ she goes on. ‘Comics were as much an escape for me as they were later for Quint. I didn’t have much else in those days.’
The fact was that Connie enjoyed spending time imagining a fantasy life with one of her fictional heroes. In real life, up to that time, men always seemed to have betrayed and abandoned her. Her father had left her by dying, and her adopted father had made her life miserable by failing to curb her mother’s excesses. The heroes of television and comic books didn’t drink or neglect their children. They were kind, thoughtful and brave.
Connie kept thinking about California where she had spent her three happiest years living with Aunt Sadie, in Pico Rivera. In California, the sun shone most days, there was a feeling of optimism, and heroes like Quint and Elvis seemed to grow on trees.
‘I call him the boy with the ice-creamvface’
Emile Meyer, about Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success, 1957
PIANO BAR, MONROVIA, SAN GABRIEL VALLEY, NEAR LOS ANGELES. SUMMER 1965
Curtis Arnold Zastoupil – 23 years old, prematurely balding, five foot ten, with a penchant for goatee beards and archery – charmed his way into the lives of Connie and Quentin like a latter-day Robin Hood. Zastoupil was a versatile musician who played regularly at small clubs and Ramada Inns. Connie first set eyes on him when he performed a solo gig at My Old Kentucky Home, a piano bar in Monrovia. With his laid-back attitude and warm smile, Curt reassured Connie – now 19 – that good men actually did exist in the real world.
Connie had travelled to California earlier that summer after she’d qualified as a registered nurse. Tennessee had proved a depressing place to try and bring up a child single-handed and she genuinely felt that Los Angeles might provide more opportunities.
Connie left Quentin with her mother and, once in California, had even briefly linked up again with Quentin’s father, Tony Tarantino, who had returned to the state to work. They dated a couple of times after she told him he had a child back in Tennessee. But the romance did not re-ignite and both rapidly decided it would be better if they went their separate ways. Connie never once asked Tarantino to play the role of father and he showed little or no interest in the child. She was used to coping on her own, so what difference did it make?
Curt Zastoupil and Connie fell in love within weeks of being introduced at the piano bar and she decided it was time to make a life for herself in California and bring little Quentin back from Tennessee. Connie was so taken by Curt’s close family that she even recruited his brother Cliff to drive with her back to Knoxville to collect the child and their belongings.
On the three-day drive back from Tennessee, two-and-a-half-year-old Quentin tried to read every billboard and advertisement they passed. ‘He even recognised logos. It was a real pain, but I guess it showed what way he was heading,’ explains Connie. The drive was also her first chance to get to know her young child. She soon discovered that Quentin would not eat anything except hamburgers and hot dogs, and she had to call every item of food by those two names in order to get him to eat.
Once they arrived in California, Curt Zastoupil took the young Quentin under his wing and provided the boy with a genuine father figure for the first time.
Connie and Curt married later that same year. It seemed like the beginning of a real life for Connie. Curt introduced her to a world that was a million miles from Tennessee. He took her to jazz and folk clubs and restaurants in the racially mixed downtown area of Los Angeles. He brought her out of her private world that had – until that point – revolved around Elvis, comic books and Gunsmoke.
The couple purchased their own hunting falcons and went horse-riding in the nearby San Bernadino mountains with their birds, which were kept at a friend’s ranch. Other weekends they would find deserted, open spaces, set up their archery targets and play Robin Hood and Maid Marian for hours. They even took up fencing, but ended up being kicked out of their first apartment when they decided to have a sword fight on the balcony.
For a short time Connie worked as a fully qualified nurse, but then decided to seek a more traditional nine-to-five career as a manager in the healthcare industry. She was still so young that she got her first management job by lying about her age on the application form.
Curt was Cool with a capital C. Nothing bothered him. When the family moved to a larger rented house in Alhambra (a bedroom community on the edge of the South Bay in the San Gabriel Valley), Connie announced that her kid brother Roger was going to come and live with them because their mother had taken to the bottle once more. Curt’s only response was, ‘Sure. No problem.’ He was that kind of guy.
Roger was 13 at the time and seemed destined to end up home-hopping just as his sister had done before him. But for Quentin, Uncle Roger’s appearance was a marvellous development.