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By Root 1009 0

and laundresses. Our mother had household help too, but she was different: she worked. “You’ll just have to tell them your mother can’t be there because she has to work.” My mother uttered that sentence several times a year; it was meant to get her off the hook for PTA meetings and such, but it was also meant to make us understand that she was a cut above the other mothers. She was even a cut above the other career women—there were a few in the business, including the costume designer Edith Head, whom my mother once took me to lunch with, but none of them had careers and children. My mother did. Also, she served delicious food, which was another way she liked to rub it in. And she could keep help. What’s more, she dressed beautifully.

This was long before the concept of having it all, but my mother had it all. And then she ruined the narrative by becoming a crazy drunk. But that came later.

Every day my parents came home from work, and we all gathered in the den. My parents had drinks and there were crudités for us—although they were not called crudités at the time, they were called carrots and celery. Then we had dinner in the dining room. The plates were heated, and there were butter balls made with wooden paddles. There was an appetizer, a main course, and dessert. We thought everyone lived like this.

At our dinner table, we discussed politics and what we were reading. We told cheerful stories of what had happened in school that day. We played charades. My mother, once a camp counselor, would lead us in song. “Under the spreading chestnut tree,” we would sing, and we would spread our arms and bang our chests. Or we would sing, “The bells they all go tingalingaling,” and we’d clink our spoons against our glasses. We learned to believe in Lucy Stone, the New Deal, Norman Thomas, and Edward R. Murrow. We were taught that organized religion was the root of all evil and that Adlai Stevenson was God. We were indoctrinated in my mother’s rules: Never buy a red coat. Red meat keeps your hair from turning gray. You can leave the table but you may not leave the table. Girdles ruin your stomach muscles. The means and the end are the same.

And there were stories, the stories we grew up on. How my parents met and fell in love. How they ran away from the camp where they were counselors and got married so they could sleep in the same tent. How my mother’s aunt Minnie became the first woman dentist in the history of the world. And finally—and this is where this is all leading—how my mother threw Lillian Ross out of our house.

This was not just a story, it was a legend.

It seemed that Lillian Ross had come to one of my parents’ parties. About once a year they had a big sit-down dinner for about forty people, with tables and chairs from Abbey Rents. They served their delicious food cooked by their longtime housekeeper, and my mother wore a Galanos dress bought for the occasion. All their friends were invited—Julius J. Epstein (Casablanca), Richard Maibaum (The Big Clock and, eventually, the Bond movies), Richard Breen (Dragnet), Charles Brackett (Ninotchka, Sunset Boulevard), and Albert Hackett and his wife, Frances Goodrich, who had the greatest credits of all (The Thin Man, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Diary of Anne Frank). I would stand on the second floor and look over the banister down at the parties, and listen to Herbie Baker (The Girl Can’t Help It) play the piano after dinner. Once I caught a glimpse of Shelley Winters, who was dating Liam O’Brien (Young at Heart), and once Marge and Gower Champion turned up. That was as starry as it ever got.

One night, St. Clair McKelway was invited to one of my parents’ parties. McKelway was a well-known New Yorker magazine writer who’d written a couple of movies. He called beforehand to ask if he could bring a friend, Lillian Ross. Did my mother know who she was? he asked. My mother certainly knew who she was. The New Yorker arrived by mail every week. Along with the Sunday New York Times and The Saturday Review of Literature, it was required reading