Part Swan, Part Goose: An Uncommon Memoir of Womanhood, Work, and Family

A PERIGEE BOOK

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PART SWAN, PART GOOSE

Copyright © 2014 by Swoosie Inc.

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eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-15127-7

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First edition: May 2014

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For Margo and Frankie,

who gave me the world

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1. Enter Breathing

2. Descendants of Art and Grace

3. Imaginary Friends

4. My Last First Day

5. Why I Wasn’t at Woodstock

6. Love and Squalor

7. Uncommon Women

8. Like a Beach House at the Winter Olympics

9. Singing, Dancing and Schizophrenia

10. Degrees of Separation

11. Heartbreak and Daisies

12. More Later

Acknowledgments

Credits and Permissions

Work and Awards

Index

About the Author

Photo Gallery

Poolside at the Miami Beach Aquacade in 1948. Lucky me.

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

CHAPTER ONE

Enter Breathing

There are two time-honored professions in which the first thing you do when you get to work is take off your clothes.

I’m in the other one.

Arriving backstage or on a back lot, ascending the winding staircase in a Broadway theater or climbing into my trailer at Warner Brothers, my first order of business is to shed my street clothes (my father would have called them civvies) and be delivered into the skin of whomever it is I’m getting paid to be that day. I’m surrounded by nimble artists who appraise my appearance with unforgiving technical eyes and craft me from heel to eyelash, evaluating my rear end, propping up my meager décolletage, making sure my earlobes and knuckles don’t clash, checking for knee wrinkles and hem threads.

Rarely does all this happen with any deference to my dignity. In my line of work, while humility is an asset, modesty is a bother. I’m lucky enough to have been brought up by two people who knew the difference.

My father, Frank Kurtz, was an Olympic diver in his youth. There’s not much room for modesty up there on the ten-meter platform and even less room in a pair of aerodynamically snug swim trunks. But to make that leap without humility—without respect for gravity, without remembering how applause disappears under water—that would be a terrible mistake.

My mother, Margo Rogers Kurtz, was Frankie’s foil in witty dinner table repartee and his staunch ally in every other aspect of life. She was the ever-fixed mark Shakespeare noted in sonnet, a small, brilliant pin on his private map of the world. Margo was the model wartime bride in the 1940s: industrious, beautiful, capable, the perfect combination of stiff upper lip and fire-engine red lipstick. She could pilot a small airplane, feed a small army and fit nicely into those tailored peplum skirt suits that were all the rage.

Newspapers and newsreels couldn’t help noticing her as my father flew higher and farther, collecting scars and medals. Every time he made it home in one piece, it was a stunning blow for the cause of hope, and during World War II—under the darkness and din of the air-raid sirens, as inhumanity sucked innocence into a genocidal oven—hope was highly prized. It was sought after.

I look at that photograph on a bookshelf behind my desk and see nothing but hope, hope, hope. Margo and me, September 6, 1944.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Frankie and Margo were recruited along with Hollywood stars and other celebrities for war-bond tours. These junkets were utterly purpose driven: no frills, no egos, just as many recognizable names as the organizer could cram into a train car and parade to the autograph tables. In one town after another, starstruck fans lined up to buy bonds. Even the most pampered celebrities were gung ho about these rustic excursions. I’m certain any attempts at modesty would have been laughed out of the tiny train car water closet, so Margo and Frankie fit right in. He was a hero, and she was the classy, garrulous sidekick who kept his clay feet warm.

My mother’s book, My Rival, the Sky, came into the world the same year I did. We both grew inside her while my father flew bombing runs over Italy in 1944. G. P. Putnam (the publishing magnate who was also the husband of Amelia Earhart) had taken an interest in my parents after they collaborated with W. L. White on the book Queens Die Proudly, which told the story of the great Flying Fortress bombers, including my father’s heroically cobbled together B-17D, the Swoose. A contract was proposed and accepted: Margo was to write a war memoir from the home-front perspective, title to be determined, $250 to be remitted on signing and $250 on delivery of the manuscript.

I was born in the fall of 1944, a few weeks after Nazi forces put a brutal end to Hungarian resistance, a few weeks before U.S. troops landed in the Philippines. My father was somewhere in the thick of that as my mother and day-old me were being photographed for the newspaper. People desperately needed to see this beautiful, young mother treasuring her fresh baby and believe in a God who would either bring that baby’s daddy home or send straight to Hell the scurvy tail gunner who took him out.

I look at that photograph on a bookshelf behind my desk and see nothing but hope, hope, hope. My mother’s face is filled with optimism and love. It’s hard to turn away. But it’s time.

Margo, darling? I call on my way to the car. I’m off.

No, you’re not, she says. You’re just right.

A quick hug, and I’m out the door. I drive myself to work (mechanically and metaphorically), and it doesn’t take long. Every day I’m grateful for this five-minute commute to the studio. The kismet is unbelievable. After decades of bicoastal and intercontinental commutes, almost always working more than one job at any given time, just when I needed it most, I landed a steady gig on that rarest of beasts: a television show that is a critical and commercial success. That’s something we hardly dare hope for in this business. Most people have no idea how many pilots disappear into the mosh pit, how many promising starts go the way of the pet rock before a show comes along with a genuine heart and exactly the right creative team, writers, cast and production crew. You’re more likely to find narwhal steaks on special at Ralph’s. Above and beyond that, this particular cast and crew—all souls counted—are smart, delightful, mellow, ego-light professionals who’ve become my dear friends.

When I saw the pilot script, I knew this show, Mike & Molly, had the potential to go the distance. In the back of my mind, I heard Frankie telling me the same thing he told me when I started Sisters on NBC in the early 1990s: Five years, he said with certainty. When I puffed something about not counting chickens, he smiled a confident ready-for-takeoff smile and repeated, Five years. The show lasted six more seasons. As did Frankie.

Ready to wrap our third season of Mike & Molly, I believe this one could last even longer, but every time I allow myself to speculate, I feel the urge to spit, throw salt over my shoulder and sacrifice a goat. Karma is a bitch, as they say; we all must have suffered tremendously in our previous lives to have this great job. I don’t want to jinx it.

The main characters, Mike Biggs and Molly Flynn (Billy Gardell and Melissa McCarthy) are so easy to be with, on screen and off, our merry cast and crew quickly developed a healthy chemistry. I think people truly can feel that through the screen; the show immediately attracted a large audience of loyal fans, despite the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that precious few successful sitcoms feature characters who look like real people instead of successful sitcom characters.

At first blush, the show is about a schoolteacher and a police officer who meet at Overeaters Anonymous. In their quest to lose weight, they find each other. That sweetly simple premise is injected with an impossible amalgam of highly evolved and lowbrow. The moral scruples of this show are refreshingly intolerant of cynicism. A lot of the humor is below the belly button, and the zingy dialogue is boner blunt, but it doesn’t feel crass because the relationships are so authentic, the atmosphere so unabashedly romantic and the storyline so much about love.

I’ve played broad, and I’ve played bawdy, but I’ve never inhabited a character quite like Joyce Flynn, Molly’s mother. She’s given me the opportunity to be more free-spirited and painfully candid than I could even dream of being when I’m being myself. If Holly Golightly and Groucho Marx got drunk and slept together, the unapologetic fruit of that union would be Joyce Flynn. She’s a fiercely loving mother, but she sees herself as a contemporary of her beautiful young daughters, a sensual woman in her sexual prime. She has a good soul, but her moral compass is slightly bent. (And you could count on her to jump on the word bent with a double entendre that leaves the rest of the room blushing.)

The M & M family: Nyambi Nyambi, Chuck Lorre, Melissa McCarthy, me, Katy Mixon, Billy Gardell and Reno Wilson.

UNDERWOOD/INVISION FOR THE ACADEMY OF TELEVISION ARTS AND SCIENCES/AP IMAGES

When Joyce is asked by her daughters if she was lonely while their late father was in Vietnam, Joyce quips, Lonely, no. Horny, yes. With a nostalgic sigh, she goes on to overshare that her remedy for that was sitting on the washing machine. Joyce not only inspires me to be more direct and less self-censoring, she provides me with a vehicle in which to do it with impunity on a weekly basis.

I learn something from every character I play. Each one of them bears a gift. The personal reward for doing the work of developing the character is the excavation of that gift and the sharing of it with an audience. To a large extent, that’s what the craft of acting is about: the joy of that challenge, whether you’re doing Molière or a Monday night sitcom. I noticed early in my career that almost every role I play is somewhat off-kilter—a bit dark, driven or crazy or driven crazy during the course of the show—and playing characters so utterly unlike myself is a job and a vacation at the same time; climbing into their lives, I get to leave my own reality behind for a little while. I don’t hide behind the character—quite the opposite; I’m liberated in one way or another by every character I play, hitting my marks with sternum held high. Lead with the breastbone, Michael Bennett used to say.

When I arrive on the set, Billy Gardell is sitting in the makeup chair where he and I take turns, since we share a makeup artist.

I’m afraid we’re starting to look alike, I tease him, and he laughs his big laugh.

Before we walk out in front of the cameras, he gathers us in a tight circle to pray. Usually it’s something like, Dear God, once again here we are. Help us do our best for the people who came to see us. We want to thank you for the gift of this amazing job. Please, help us remember it’s a privilege, not an entitlement. Help us keep everyone in this building employed.

I always find myself profoundly affected, enormously grateful for each of these people and just plain happy to be here with them. Sometimes I’m so moved, I have to pay another visit to the makeup chair. And I’m not the only one. Particularly tonight.

Lord, we have some troubled souls tonight, Billy says. Give us strength to do what we need to do. Help us support and love each other.

I blink, trying to preserve my mascara. Around the tight circle, we grip each other’s hands, clearing throats, swallowing hard. Reno Wilson’s mother has died, and Reno, who plays Mike’s partner, Officer Carl, has a lot of material to deliver in this episode.

The news took my breath away when I heard it. Our first week on the set, I mentioned to Reno how thrilled I was to be working a steady gig just a few minutes from the home Margo and I share. Since then, he and I have talked a lot about our moms, sharing memories, fears and funny stories. We talked about what home remedies and pharmaceuticals worked—or not—for various symptoms. Oh, stay away from that one. Margo went psycho after the first two hundred milligrams. Organic black licorice root for constipation? I wouldn’t have thought of that. Eldercare is an odd conversation in a specific language that is by turns clinical, sentimental and cringe-inducing.

All week, Reno’s sisters have kept him posted on his mother’s rapid decline. Oh, God, I kept thinking, don’t let it be this week. Having to get out there and be hilarious just a few hours after losing one’s mother takes the body slam of losing one’s mother to a whole new level. Reno is a multitalented pro who’s been doing this work since he was one of the college kids on The Cosby Show. We’re not worried about Reno’s performance; we’re just heartbroken for him. It’s one of the moments theatre elitists forget about when they say that TV acting is for sissies.

We Broadway actors are legendary troupers, famous for our show must go on work ethic. We’re tasked with nailing every scene, every time, eight shows a week—fractured ankles, broken hearts and vocal nodes be damned. On a TV show, you get do-overs. But you don’t get understudies, and your missteps are not contained in the hallowed walls of one theater for one afternoon. On the day your mother dies, not only do you go to work, you go to work in front of millions of people, and whatever you do will be available for applause and/or ridicule until YouTube perishes from Earth.

At the end of the day, Reno is completely focused and funny, while the rest of us work our butts off, determined not to let him down. The audience leaves aching from laughter. Reno departs for his mother’s funeral. Billy flies to Vegas where he burns the other end of the candle with a stand-up show. The rest of us go home emotionally exhausted. We’ll all be back in less than fifty hours to start the whole process over again.

How are you, my darling? Margo asks when I walk in the door.

Tired, I admit. But it’s a joyful tired.

I’m quoting her, but she opens her hands and collects the phrase from the air as if she’s never heard it before.

Frankie’s coming home tonight, isn’t he? she asks.

Yes, I think he is, I tell her.

Sometimes I say he’s in Japan, at the Pentagon on a mission or at his office in Washington. The lies trip from my tongue without hesitation. (I’m a professional!) The truth is, Margo was resilient and dignified when Frankie died in 1996, but no one should have to be that resilient every damn day. Can you imagine what it would be like to roll out of bed every morning and be clobbered with that? No, darling, you’re not twenty-seven, you’re ninety-seven, and that ardent lover lying beside you a few minutes ago was a dream, and now even the dream is dead. Good morning, sunshine!

I think it’s healthier—and more honest, ironically—to tell her the emotional truth: that she is loved, that she is young in spirit and enduringly beautiful and will see her great love soon. She won’t remember what I said six minutes from now anyway.

Why stand on ceremony? Margo says. Take a look at my breasts.

Oh. Okay. Let’s see.

Margo raises her soft jersey tunic, and we both look lovingly at her breasts. She nudges the one that hangs somewhat lower than the other.

They’re beautiful, I tell her, pulling her into my arms.

I could tuck this one into my waistband if I wanted to, she says, and then, distracted by the waistband of her black yoga pants, she says, Look at the color of this thread. What would make them use blue? My God, what a wonderful world we live in!

This way of looking at the world can’t be entirely put down to the dementia. The increasing seepage of non sequiturs and apparitions has made conversation a challenge, but Margo’s personality is essentially intact. I have an early memory of my Aunt Mici striding into the kitchen stark naked and smoking a cigarette. Getting ready for a bath, she’d had a thought and didn’t want to lose it. This made perfect sense to Margo. Logic over convention. Action over inhibition. This hierarchy of necessary values worked well for my mother throughout her unconventional and uninhibited life, and it’s worked well for me in mine.

Nonetheless, thinking about that moment makes me laugh now, and as if she heard the story brush by the back of my mind, Margo laughs too, pressing her palms to my cheeks as she gives me a kiss.

I relish the feeling, a stingingly sweet element in my life that has remained unchanged through every tectonic shift of fortune, fame and circumstance: my mother loves me, and I love her. We are we. Always have been. Always will be.

Joined at the heart, Margo says. I love you, you precious child.

I love you too, Mommie.

Oddly, I’ve started calling her Mommie lately, after sixty-frshashm years of calling her Margo. Perhaps I’m cherishing my last remaining moments of being someone’s precious child. Or maybe I’m occasionally taken into her world where time is no longer linear. A woman can be forty at breakfast and fifteen for dinner. At any moment, someone you loved and lost in your childhood might walk through the door. In Margo’s world, a Japanese porcelain fisherman on the credenza winks and nods. A little girl in white hangs a left at the corner of your eye and vanishes down the hallway. Sometimes I feel her holding her breath, and I know Frankie is poised on the ten-meter platform, still as a tin soldier, hands flat at his sides.

He opens his arms wide, just before he dives.

Margo lives with me in a house I bought back in the 1990s when Sisters was going strong. Frankie searched long and hard and found this place for me while I was boomeranging back and forth between my New York apartment and various movie locations and my L.A. base of operations, my parents’ home in Toluca Lake—the home Frankie and Margo bought when I was about to start high school. Typical military transients, we’d moved around a lot prior to that, but Margo thought they should find a sticking place for my teen years, and they stuck with it for the next forty years, providing my hub throughout much of my bicoastal career. I’d spent so much of my life living with them, it was a natural turn to have Margo move in with me after Frankie died.

The great architect Harwell Hamilton Harris built this house in the early 1950s. It’s a perfect exemplar of modernist sensibility, featuring the iconic angular light, open posture and floating staircase that branded postwar, pre–Mad Men martini temples and Ayn Rand–era movie sets. Margo and I have rebranded it as our own with memorabilia from our travels, books everywhere, overstuffed sofa—homey comforts Atlas could never fully shrug off.

For many years, I zealously protected the hermitage I thought I needed for my work, but I’ve come to love the quiet constancy of people in my space. I dread Margo’s inevitable departure and all the existential impact of losing her, and part of that is the thought of losing the ad hoc family we’ve gathered, our small, fond staff of trusted caregivers. Angela, a pragmatic earth mother with endless patience and broad humor. Antonio, a devastatingly handsome Brazilian with a deeply sweet heart. Cielito, a lovely Filipino gentleman with Zen to spare. Meanwhile, Konrad, my unstoppable manager, periodically blows through (on the phone or in person) with the energy, aplomb and fervent tone of a swamp-cooler, which delights Margo. Perry, my indispensible right arm, does everything from hair color to correspondence, life coaching, soul feeding—actually, it’s hard to quantify. Perry is the authentic force of nature who makes my life happen. His job title is assistant, which doesn’t begin to cover the wonder that is Perry, proof that God exists and gallantry is not dead. Konrad gets me through the sprints; Perry gets me through the marathon.

There’s an alchemy to Margo’s care; it’s taken a long time to achieve this delicate balance. Whenever she feels the need to migrate from one place to another, one of us is always walking behind her with our hands on her shoulders. At her age, tripping on a dog toy can be fatal. We refuse to let her fall. We may not be able to stop the seepage of memory or the progression of cell death, but we aim to make sure that she passes in her sleep, hips unbroken, knees unbruised. We intend to spend every day of her life being alive.

That’s been my bond with these people over the years. We compare notes on small victories, commiserate over mounting defeats, lend comfort, share clinical information, tell each other our mother stories. My heart goes bone dry when I think of Reno alone on an airplane. I know how empty and vast the sky can be, and I wonder where I’ll be when I’m orphaned. My preference, of course, would be that I’m here, holding Margo’s hand. Barring that, I selfishly hope to be at work with strong hearts and strong arms around me. I don’t dwell on the specifics of the inevitable, but I don’t deny it. We’re allowing it to lead us for the moment.

Why stand on ceremony?

These days, it’s as if Margo and I are the ones who stand with our toes at the edge of the platform. Poised. She opens her arms wide.

I wanted to tell you something, she says, but it slipped under a chair.

Time and gravity are jealous gods. We all know where this is going.

Frankie and Margo pose with the Swoose in an Air Corps PR shot in 1943. You couldn’t find better spokesmodels for war or peace.

U.S. AIR FORCE

California, 1944

Margo, says Frank, there’s a little item I wanted to talk to you about.

Okay, I answer, floating, just us, so close and free, on a smooth drifting river. I should have known, though. We never drift for long.

A book, he is saying. He wants me to write a book.

There’ve been plenty of jobs I could do all right—diving coach, and learning to fly, and helping to produce aquacades. The war bond drives, I did those, and the radio programs. You’ve told me I’m a pretty good copilot, Frank, it’s written here on the back of this little gold watch you gave me . . .

But a book—oh, Frank.

All right. I’ll write a book. And I smile because I know a little joke. I’ll write it all about him.

We never say good-by, finally, but just goodnight. It’s easier to get this word out, and when you think back and hear him saying it, it will sound better.

"I’ll be so busy all day, and at night I’ll say goodnight into the pillow. I’ll talk to you when I first