DIFFERENCES THAT UNITE US

Karen Black was in my cohort at Northwestern University School of Speech.  Not for the whole time, because she disappeared.  At the time I had no idea why -- some people may have known.  Some of us assumed it was because Alvina Krause didn’t like her.  Maybe AK didn’t like Robert Benedetti, her roommate at the time, either, but he was a big smart guy no one pushed around and he found a way around AK.  He was just the kind of man she always tried to press into heroic parts, but he resisted and some thought that was why she resisted Karen Black.

Sometimes you can find more insight into someone through their dislikes than their likes.  There’s a great deal of information about Karen out there now because of her recent death, and that includes the memorial in Hollywood which can be seen in compilation at this link: http://vimeo.com/75189301   The best parts of the video are the beginning, which is a montage of clips from ALL her movies (quite different from each other) and the end, which is a montage of still photos from birth to death, some of them shocking and most of them seductive.  

I was fascinated to see Karen’s sister, who looks much like her.  You get a pretty good idea of a well-loved extravagant sweet non-intellectual child-woman who loved sex, cats, and -- well, long walks on country roads, sunsets, kittens, and . . . other corny stuff.  She could sing and compose.  She wrote plays.  She also very shrewdly played scary roles in horror films and was often funny.  There’s a good deal of intelligence behind that, which would exasperate some people.  It’s hard to know how much she was watching herself.

My basic theory is that AK didn’t like Karen because Karen scared her:  she was a person who had abandoned all caution, while AK had staked her life on prudence and discretion in relationships, academic life, and  -- well, she wasn’t always cautious when she taught acting.  In some ways she was as instinctive and as able to pick up on undertow and subtext as KB was, and everyone says KB was an ace at it.  But KB always supported and appreciated those inner springs, while AK wanted to analyze and shape them, which is what she understood to be the task of the actor, especially a traditional realistic proscenium stage actor trained to address tragedy and heroism.  Big ideas, subtly expressed.

Personally, AK had to have respectability because that was her safety.  She was a small, ambitious woman who grew up the youngest in a big family on a Mid-West farm and survived with a sonorous voice, a vigorous erect body, and the singlemindedness of a sword.  If she had been labeled a lesbian, her career would have ended.  She never risked acting professionally.   It would be going too far to say that she had a German northern temperament while Karen Black had a Mediterranean Jewish soul.  But not much.

Karen was a voluptuous, generously sensuous, man-loving person whose salvation was innocence.  She didn’t cling or demand or try to prove anything.  So far the only complaint I’ve seen her make is that she was treated badly on the set of “Day of the Locust.”  It’s a bitter, punishing piece of madness and somehow that got attached to her.

The career of Benedetti was quite different.  I haven’t had anything to do with either of them until recently and then only read Benedetti’s books, watched his movies, emailed a bit.  KB is on Twitter. The two lives went in quite different directions and yet stayed together in friendship, which was always KB’s policy.  Karen’s husband released the story of why she suddenly disappeared from our cohort and why she and Bene stayed such close friends: they conceived a child together at Northwestern.  http://karenblackactress.blogspot.com  Both biological parents have embraced this woman, who is an artist with family.

It’s hard to imagine either one of her bio-parents considering abortion and in those days it was probably illegal if not life-threatening.  The stigma, lack of social support, and theatre dreams of both youngsters made raising a child alone impossible.  The two families were local, proud, and who knows how they felt?  Or whether they knew.   Adoption in those days was rigidly private -- the government SWORE it would be forever hidden information.  

There’s no such thing.  

The State of Illinois has opened their adoption records so that the child made right under our noses -- I suppose some of us might have known, including AK -- found her bioparents, Karen and Bene.  No doubt results are mixed and such an enterprise is not always well-advised, but in this case all three had known about each other and tried to find each other.  It turned out just fine.  The Benedetti family, generous and warm Italians that they are, pulled her in -- along with her children and grandchildren.  She and Karen painted together towards the end and she helped with Karen’s care.  KB refused morphine as much as she could bear so as to absorb this happiness.

Benedetti has a strong social conscience with a special concern for African Americans in the South.  Karen was more of a “mom” who took care of everyone, regardless of who they were.  Whether the social constriction the two shared as the price of love was part of creating their ethic or whether their natural character saw them through the ordeal, I see it as a triumph in the end.  Integrity.

I suspect that when KB looked at AK, she saw a path she could never take and wouldn’t want to.  All that caution, all that self-discipline and self-denial would have been impossible for her.  Conversely, I suspect that when AK looked at KB she saw a life she could never lead: all restraints dropped, all goals surrendered to fate and hard work.  I sat in the back of Annie May Swift auditorium, watching, and was more like AK than KB, but appreciated KB anyway.  Do we have to make choices? 

In some ways, AK’s choice betrayed her, because her fame and the emotional pressure she put on her students to break them out of their shells scared the corporate managers of the university apparatus so that they eased her out a little early.  She was wise to have the backup of Eagles Mere and then Bloomsberg where all the calls were her own and a certain amount of abandonment was part of the regime, so long as you got to rehearsals on time.  She and Lucy spent wonderful summer Sundays out in a little boat (it had to have been pea green) with big hats against sunburn. AK scribbled on a notepad, thinking furiously about the playwrights’ knots to untie for an increasingly savvy audience.  All the while Lucy in her faithful, rather stout way, rowed quietly along on the mirroring water.  KB’s idea of such intimacy might have meant stripping and plunging in, which would have ended local affection.  Except for the stalwarts who would heroically swim out to save her.

A writer’s game -- watching, making word pictures, passing judgment on people many have loved -- is a risky business.  Maybe more immoral that sharing physical pleasure when the opportunity arises.  Maybe more immoral than pressing youngsters against their own psychic thorns in hopes of awakening them.

In a way AK probably had something to do with KB’s development but I don’t know whether anyone ever asked either of them.  Sometimes it’s the people who wave us on who teach us most.  Like, not to waste our time on a fate that’s not ours.  Karen didn’t need Eagles Mere -- she was a natural film personality, not a stage presence, though she did well in New York.  It was the California climate that let her bloom, and we are grateful.

"LOST BIRDS," "SPLIT FEATHERS" AND ROOTS

This was evidently “roots” week, as I had three threads on the subject going all week!

First was a query from a man in Norway trying to find Bob’s brother’s wife’s descendants.  That would be my ex-niece and former student, Laurel.  But she was on vacation and her cousin is a nurse who works odd hours, and this man was getting more and more frustrated so he was sending me more and more messages.

Second was a re-contact with Trace De Meyer, a woman of mixed genetic heritage who had been adopted out of a Native American family into a white family that turned out to be abusive (sexually and emotionally).  She recognized me because she had been on some of the same NA “talking lists” and is now keeping a blog for “Split Feathers” or “Lost Birds,” the many many Indian children adopted to white families for several decades.  Many vital issues to discuss.  She has published a book which I’ll review later. "One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects."

Third was Bob Scriver’s first wife’s seventh child, who was adopted and whose existence was only known to a few family members who kept it secret.  That wife, Alice Prestmo Scriver Skogen Stainbrook (three husbands) died soon after the birth of Karen, who was adopted to a successful family and cherished, but always curious about her birth family.  Clearly the way we once handled adoptions --  denial and sentimentality entwined -- doesn’t work, but the trouble is in part that no one “way” is successful in every case anyhow. 

In this specific case, there is Gardner’s Syndrome in the genome -- a proclivity for intestinal polyps that can develop into colon cancer.  That was the cause of death for Karen’s mother and grandmother and her half-sister and half-brother, who were Bob Scriver’s children.  It’s possible that Bob had a recessive version of the troublesome gene.  This mutation was also denied and suppressed by the people who could have told Karen.

Both Trace and Karen (as well as Amy) are achievers, but restless, uneasy in relationships until many years of wrestling yielded enough of their unknown stories to give them a little confidence and let them reach out.  Trace has the more dramatic story and is a journalist quite capable of telling it.  Karen is an artist.  What’s remarkable is how many times the three of us have lived in the same places and crossed trails without knowing it.  (I am not adopted and have a LOT of genealogical info.)  Karen’s third husband was close friends with the son of Bob Scriver’s best friend, Ace Powell, and her husband knows several of my good friends on the Blackfeet reservation.  These women are in their forties, about the daughter-age for me.

The man from Norway is in a slightly different situation.  He’s middle-aged, has no immediate family, does IT work for a living so spends a lot of time alone.  Such a man has a little proving to do when contacting female relatives, to assure us that he’s not just cruising, but he did have a body of information to share.  I DID emphasize to him that his branch in this country has had a long struggle with depression/alcoholism/Alzheimer’s (not uncommon in northern Europe) so he might look into his own genome.  That cooled his jets a little. 

For both Karen and Trace there was no happy mother pleased to see them -- both women died before they could be met -- but sibs and others were curious and pleased.  Adoptions can arise from unhappy or nonexistent marriages, so there are always hints of sexual nonconformity, somebody not playing by the rules, which can even threaten present relationships, both for the mother and the daughter.  Each situation is unique, but there are major social constructs about such things as adoption, especially when romantic cultures like Native Americans are involved.  There was real trauma and injustice.

My impulse is to work at two levels: the most personal and specific and then in the background the most universal and scientific.  What are the great human universals in regards to children and identity?  Are they considered possessions (all too often!) actually owned by the father, along with their mother?  Are they legal access to wealth, either by inheritance from blood parents or by entitlement to membership in a specially compensated group (tribe)?  Is a person’s identity determined by pedigree (the acknowledged ancestors) or genome (no two people have the same genome) or by how the physical body and brain have been developed over years of experience and skill-building?  What special vulnerabilities or talents have been carried from one generation to another?

What status does parentage bestow?  What are the relationships, legal and emotional, between blood parents and adopting parents, to say nothing of children created in a petri dish, implanted with eight ova (some of which were deliberately snuffed to save the others), fathered by frozen sperm from an unknown donor, carried to term by a surrogate mother, raised by an adoptive mother or even by a genetic mother who delegated all care (including nursing) to a hired servant or a slave.  When these practices are broadly shared, a kind of class of person is created, like Southern children raised by slave nannies or British boys raised by the equivalent of religious boarding schools for Native Americans with discipline just as harsh.  I expect there to be some rather powerful groups to eventually form out of the many female Chinese babies adopted in this country.  I call them the Little Empresses, because those I’ve met have strong personalities.

Nineteenth Century people strategizing about the Native American “problem” were dealing with Nineteenth Century cultures still mostly intact and functional, but they had no awareness nor respect for “other” cultures, so they tied entitlement to provenance, figuring that intermarriage with whites would gradually dilute the gene pool into assimilation.  But then they put children at the pairing age together in government boarding schools, so now there’s a generation of multi-tribe people who are “all Indian” but don’t have enough tribal percentage to gain entitlement in any of them.  Eisenhower, who wanted to get rid of reservations as inefficient, thought,  “Oh, we’ll send them all to the cities and that will break up the symbiosis with place.”  But the government, in its usual half-hearted way, didn’t fund or guide relocation enough to keep people out of the ghettoes, so now the NA’s are mixed with blacks, Asians, Polynesians, Maori, Hispanic, Irish, etc.  I call them Tomorrow’s People.  Many of them are on the Pacific coast where people gathered during WWII for wartime manufacturing.

But Trace is aware of the irony in her situation because the more she traced her heritage, the more she found very early European immigrants.  In fact, I once heard an expert suggest that any family with roots that go back more than a couple of hundred years is bound to include Native Americans.  But at the same time the tribal relatives she found were a great source of satisfaction on both sides.  I think joyful and forgiving perseverance is the way to go.  Check out Trace at www.splitfeathers.blogspot.com