My stepfather Larry Storch’s success as a character actor hinged on the indeterminate ethnicity of his face: his broad forehead, defined cheekbones, slanted eyes, and that thicket of dark hair allowed him to play a range an Asian, a Mexican, or someone from the Mediterranean. Now, he wanted to be considered for a starring role. But in the Hollywood of 1964, a face of uncertain ethnicity limited his career. Hollywood casting agents said Larry didn’t look “American” enough for a leading role in a tv series. He looked “too Chinese.”
The casting directors suggested that surgery to get rid of the Mongolian fold over his eyes might help break the glass ceiling that relegated him to cartoon voices and character roles. He got the surgery, and afterwards, he looked more like his Polish father than his Kazakstani mother. And sure enough, his auditions doubled.
Grauman’s Chinese Theater November 5, 1964
Dear June – Are you in the school band yet, Larry wants to know?
He’s testing for a pilot today – may have a weekly series next season! A cowboy and Indian type thing – Keep your fingers crossed!
Love-Mom & Larry
In February of 1965, the black rotary phone rang. Picking up, I heard long distance static.
“Larry’s got the series!”
A TV series! Aunt Peggy chatted a while, then gave me back the phone. I felt as excited as my mother. “So what’s the TV series about?”
“It’s a comedy with cowboys and Indians – called F TROOP. But instead of fighting Indians they make alliances with the Indians to sell moonshine. Larry’s got second billing with Forrest Tucker – do you know him?
“No,”
“Jew-oon,” she said in the exasperated tone she used when I didn’t recognize some showbiz tidbit, “he’s a big star! He’s like John Wayne, only funnier. And Larry’s got second billing! Second billing! Isn’t that great!”
“That is great,” I replied.
By the time I hung up, dinner was ready.
“We’ll see if it lasts,” Peggy said as she served the plates. “It could all fall through tomorrow. You know how show business is: when you’re up, you’re up; and when you’re not, you’re not.”
This was Peggy’s first and final word about show business. She recited it as if giving thanks not to be in such a fickle enterprise.
Paul just grunted.
F TROOP premiered in September 1965, with Larry playing the zany Corporal Agarn. “F Troop” meant “Fucked up”; and the Indian tribe, the Hakawi, was named after the punch line to an old joke that ended “where the fuck are we?” The show was anachronistic in its stereotypical depiction of Indians, its doting females – but the white male characters were just as ridiculous: dumb, dumber and sly.
After its third week, bursting with a secret I could no longer keep, I announced to my fourth grade class that my stepfather was on tv.
None of them believed me.
Santa Monica October 6, 1964
Beautiful palm-lined Palisade Park provides a semi-tropical setting of palm trees, flowers, and lush green lawns for beautiful Santa Monica Beach in the background.
Dear June – We won’t be moving here after all! And I’m rather sorry. But Larry decided it was too far away from the studio. So we’ve rented a house nearer to his work – move in 2 weeks. This is final! No more changes! Larry starts a new movie in 2 weeks too, “That Funny Feeling” with Sandra Dee – love you very much xxx ooo Mom and Larry
We followed the saga of Mom and Larry’s house search through their postcards. Mom wanted a house with a story, a history of importance: they looked at one that Mary Pickford once lived in; one whose owner once designed costumes at Twentieth Century Fox; one with the high gate which reminded her of Sunset Boulevard.
They finally settled on a place Mom called a Bird house (bringing to mind a cockatoo in a cage, although it really was named after an architect. To this house, she and Larry brought their own story: the seller knocked twenty thousand dollars off the asking price after they agreed to adopt the cat. Aunt Peggy and Uncle Paul and I laughed at the notion that a cat could be worth twenty thousand dollars. Had my own honey-colored tabby disappeared, five strays outside were begging to take its place.
Mom called to describe the new house. It had a pool in back with a windmill, and a patio that looked down on north Hollywood.
Larry added with a sense of wonder in his voice, that on a clear day they could see the ocean. On a real clear day, Malibu, and little white dots of sailboats. Up the road, Stevie Wonder owned a house, although they hadn’t seen him yet. At dawn and at dusk, deer came to feed on the apple tree by the carport. At night, they heard coyotes howl.
They were living a life of Hollywood dreams: expensive car, big house, designer clothes, paparazzi following them down the street. Meanwhile, in Alabama and Mississippi, demonstrators trying to register to vote were set upon by police dogs and mowed down by horses. I watched on them on the brand new color tv Larry had paid for. Mom and Larry were living the life, I thought, while in Birmingham, my brothers and sisters were putting their lives on the line. I felt helpless to resolve the contradiction; all I could do was learn to live with it.
In South Central LA, just down the mountain from my mother’s new house, other black Americans watched the images of civil rights demonstrators, including children, being tossed around like beach balls by the force of fire hoses.
The pressure of their deferred dreams of would soon reach volcanic force.
I visited my mother’s new home for the first time in August of 1965. I would spend a month in Los Angeles every summer thereafter until I graduated from high school.
Mom and Larry’s new house was small by Hollywood standards. Covered by cedar shingles, a kitchen and dining area bordered by west-facing bay windows yielded to the living area, a bar, and a bedroom facing a modest, guitar-shaped pool. It overlooked the area now known as Beverly Center.
The room I would stay in faced the driveway and the ridge over which the deer came each morning.
“It’s the Moroccan room” my mother announced gaily as she led me to the southeastern corner of her new brick and shingled bungalow nestled in a craig of Nichols Canyon. Mom and Larry had named their Hollywood retreat Dittendorf. They were the Duke and Dutchess. Larry named me the Countess.
The Countess of Dittendorf had a room worthy of Sherherazade. Tucked under a sloping roof anchored by a small, round fireplace, my hideaway was not much bigger than my room in Atlantic City - but oh, what a room! It was wallpapers with a mustard paisley Indian print. One whole wall was mirrored. Candle sconces Mom had bought in Marrakesh cast patterned shadows. Inside a small, circular fireplace, a huge hukkah pipe sat like a prize trophy. I imagined lying on the Hollywood bed wearing layers of chiffon, ochre ringing my eyes, gold jewelry dangling from my ears as I regaled my court with stories.
Aunt Peggy would have been aghast at such a room for a little girl, filled as it was with the hint of fire and passion. All my life Aunt Peggy tried to squelch my sexual nature; but Mom never did. That contradiction, too, would be one that lasted into adulthood.
My days filled with leisurely rituals. At dawn and at dusk, Larry fed the deer, beckoning them with a whistle and call he had invented. Mom and I crouched like hunters behind the bamboo shades of the kitchen, watching as they ate the apples. Their large eyes fastened on the fruit; their papaya-shaped ears surveyed the canyon like radar. One move from either Mom or me and they were gone in a blink.
Ten days after I arrived in Los Angeles in August of 1965, police stopped a black motorist in Watts, tried to arrest him, and ignited a riot.
Sitting in my mother’s living room, watching the riots on tv, I had only to look west, through the glass sliding door, to see smoke rising from the valley below.
Just a year earlier in Selma, television newsmen had been on the frontlines with the demonstrators, but now, their cameras stayed behind police lines. From this safety zone, their zoom lenses shakily recorded images of looters chanting “Burn, baby, Burn!”
My mother came and stood behind me, watching the explosions of fire that followed Molotov cocktails flying through the store windows that lined 103rd Street in Watts.
“What do they want?” she asked. It was the question of the day, being asked by whites all over America, and even some Negroes. “Why are they burning down their own neighborhood?”
A lifetime of forging relationships with people who weren’t my blood relatives, of being with my mother only when she chose, of absorbing the perils of revealing our relationship, informed my answer. “They’re angry,” I said soberly, “because they’re tired of being not wanted by whites.
They’re stuck in the ghetto because whites won’t let us live anywhere else. You don’t want us around.”.
I was only eleven years old. Adults had invented this system. How could she not understand why we were angry?
She fixed me with a long stare, then turned herself and looked out of the window towards the tornado of smoke rising from Watts. High up in the Hollywood Hills, we looked out the sliding glass doors that lined the patio. I was nearly as tall as she. We stood with our arms around each other’s waists - white and black, mother and daughter, observing the smoldering city below.
Three or four nights later, I had for the first time what would become a recurrent dream, that the rioters had moved out of Watts and burned a swath down Wilshire Blvd and up Fairfax. Nichols Canyon went up in a dry heat, the flames springing from rooftop to rooftop, heralds of a new day. By the time the crowd reached my mother’s house, the shingled roof was already aflame, the pine timbers showering sparks on the pool deck.
Mom and Larry jumped in the pool, as Larry had always said we should if a fire ever got out of control in the Canyon. I stayed put, watering down the walls with a hose. Larry called out, “Forget it! Forget the house! Get in the pool!” Instead, I went out to the front driveway to wait for the mob. They wore camouflage T-shirts with scuffed jeans, jeans torn at the knees, t-shirts faded and stretched out of shape by too many washings. Their faces were dark and angry, like the face of someone beaten down, coming back for revenge. They carried baseball bats and coca-cola bottles stuffed with gasoline-soaked rags, cocktails for the nouveau riche. Their dark skins gleamed in the sunlight as they worked their way to the back of the house where I stood. Confused to see me, they stopped.
“What ‘chu doin here?” one of the men at the front demanded to know.
“She’s my mother! And he’s my stepfather!” I pleaded as if to say, 'these are good white people. Save them!'
“Well, you got to choose!” a brother at the front of the line yelled. “Them or us?”
I no longer remember what I actually said; what I remember is the sense of panic, an anxiety that I can barely capture with words: the feeling that the well-being of the house, of everything I have or will have depends on what I say, what choice I make, whether or not I can convince the rioters to believe me.
(Excerpt from Secret Daughter by June Cross and reprinted with permission from the author).
(Originally published at GoArticles and reprinted with permission from the author, June Cross).
