Excerpt: Lessons in Becoming Myself

Down in the basement of my house, there is a room where I store my archives: every script I’ve ever worked on, photos taken of me and photos I’ve taken, diaries, journals, appointment books, calendars, and notebooks from all the way back to my beginnings.

But that is only the outer room. There is an inner room where I store my feelings. I was blessed with a good memory. John Gielgud once said to me, “Memory is like any muscle. It must be exercised.” I have trained my memory and I exercise it often. When I need to access a particular emotion for a role, I imagine taking an elevator down to my inner archive, where I quietly flip through the files until some memory rises up and offers itself. Then I move into that event and it comes alive in me.

In ancient Greece, the goddess of memory was called Mnemosyne. She was a Titaness who married Zeus and then gave birth to the nine Muses. So memory is the mother of inspiration. I call on her every day in my work, then ride her titanic force down into the past, where sleeps my whole life waiting to be called forth.

My earliest memory:

Detroit, 1935. I’m two and a half years old. My brother Jack is five. We live with my mother and her second husband, Don Francimore, whom I call Daddy. My name is Edna Rae Gillooly. I don’t know my real father, John Austin Gillooly, very well. We are in our apartment. Something is wrong. My brother got sick and is in the hospital. My grandmother takes care of me during the day while my mother is at the hospital with Jack. My mother is very sad. My aunts and uncles have come over to see her. I’m in the bathroom. I can hear my mother telling everyone that Jack has scarlet fever. I want my mother to stop crying. I want to make her laugh. I’m naked. I take a white washcloth and put it between my legs like a sanitary napkin, holding it in place with one hand in front and one in back. I prance out of the bathroom and into the living room as though riding a hobbyhorse, chanting, “I’m Mommy, I’m Mommy.” Nobody thinks it’s funny. I get ushered back into the bathroom and into my pajamas. Everyone leaves. I’m put to bed on the couch. My grandma is in the bed I usually share with Jack. My mother sits in her rocking chair sadly knitting. I watch her for a while, but the creak of her chair and the click-click of her knitting needles lulls me to sleep. In the morning I’m in the kitchen eating my cereal. My mother comes in and tells my grandma that a bird got trapped between the walls. She could hear it flapping its wings all night.

My brother’s been in the hospital for two weeks. He has double pneumonia and a mastoid infection. My mother is crying a lot; she can’t sleep and rocks and knits all night. Every once in a while she murmurs, “That poor little bird is still trapped in the wall. I can hear it flapping.” One night she says, “The bird is getting weaker,” and she rocks faster, her knitting needles clicking and her face looking tight and strained.

The next night she comes home and tells my grandma that Jackie isn’t going to last the night. She says, “The doctor said there is a new drug that has been successful in the laboratory, but they haven’t tried it yet on people. He asked for my permission to try it out on Jackie. I said, ‘Well, if he’s not going to last the night, go ahead and try it.’ ”

My grandma tucks me in on the couch. All the lights are out except the lamp near my mother’s rocking chair. I drift off. Suddenly the chair stops creaking. I open my eyes and see my mother leaning forward, the lamp and a soft smile lighting up her face. She says in a hushed voice to the silent room, “The flapping has stopped. The bird got out. Jackie is going to be all right.”

I don’t know what kind of magic was at work there, but it was a kind my mother clearly understood. It made a deep impression on me. That drug was pretty impressive, too. It was sulfa. It cured Jack’s scarlet fever and the double pneumonia, but when it came to the mastoids, its power fell on deaf ears. My brother was hearing-impaired for life.

Continued on page 2: My mother made my clothes and dressed me up like a doll. But I wasn't a doll at all... »