The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(7)
Dad was a quiet, low-key person. But Mom, when she met him, somehow saw in this innocent farm boy’s eyes a fire to match her own. Jean Speegle was a free-spirited child of the 1940s. Much of the war effort was powered by women on the home front, which proved liberating to girls like her. She had the brassy, bold spirit of Rosie the Riveter or the Andrews Sisters executing the intricate harmonies and tight choreography of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Mom was a natural leader at Duncan High School even though she wasn’t a good student. I’ve seen her old report cards and they’re terrible—lots of D’s. Still, she was voted president of her class. When I asked Mom how a D student managed to achieve this, she gave me a wry smile. “I got along with everybody,” she said, eyes twinkling. I see a lot of her in my eldest daughter, Bryce: people are magnetically drawn to her, and she assumes the mantle of chief taskmaster organically.
The University of Oklahoma was not Mom’s first stop after she graduated from high school. She persuaded her parents to let her apply to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, a storied acting school whose alumni included Lauren Bacall, Hume Cronyn, Grace Kelly, and Kirk Douglas. Duncan–to–New York was not a common trajectory for a seventeen-year-old girl from the middle of the country, but Mom had drive and proved herself worthy—she aced her audition and moved east.
For the few months that Mom studied at the Academy, she thrived. She fell in love with New York City, the start of a lifelong affair. But early one morning back in Duncan, her mother, our grandma Louise, sat bolt upright in her bed and said to our grandfather, “Butch! Something has happened to Jean!” Whether this was a sign of her oracular powers or an indication that mothers are always in a panic about their teenage daughters, Louise was right. Mom had been hit by a truck while crossing the street, shattering her pelvis. She was in a coma for ten days.
Against all odds, Mom healed up, and she and her family received a sizable insurance settlement. But the accident put a temporary hold on her acting dreams. Mom came home to recuperate and attended a junior college for a year before finally attending OU.
Jean Speegle arrived at college hungry, keen to make up for lost time, yet also vulnerable; she was rusty from her time spent on the disabled list. Just as she electrified Dad with her charisma and very presence, so did the attentions of this handsome young Harold fella give her a much-needed boost. Meeting Dad rejuvenated Mom’s acting ambitions and joie de vivre. She had found her partner in crime.
Dad never knew what hit him. He soon discovered that Mom was a frisky, rambunctious girl who fell in love fast and hard. She revealed to him that she’d had two or three fiancés before they met. Mom used the term “fiancé” more loosely and impetuously than most people did. Still, these fiancés were more than just casual boyfriends. Dad actually met one of them, a fellow actor named Bill Curran, who paid them a visit at their first New York apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
CLINT
We need to come clean about our parents here. The story they told us for most of our lives was that they first went to New York together after their wedding. Nope. In the 1990s, Dad finally ’fessed up that they had moved into an apartment with a bunch of other young actors before they got married. Yes, these two lovebirds were messing around.
When they first ran off from college, they went to Nashville, where one of their friends had made it as an actor in that city’s small theater scene. Mom and Dad struck out there. Their next stop was New York, Mom’s happy place. The gig with the traveling children’s-theater troupe began there, administered by a Manhattan-based outfit called Penthouse Productions. One other thing: before they set out on that tour, Dad found out that one of Mom’s engagements was still semipending!
While she was back home in Duncan after her accident, she fell for an Italian American soldier stationed at Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma, about thirty miles away. This fellow, whose last name was D’Angelo, was from the New York City area. The brash young Jean Speegle, even as she was living in sin with Rance, called D’Angelo to let him know that she was in his neck of the woods. She accepted an invitation to a dinner at D’Angelo’s parents’ home in the outer boroughs, a subway ride away. At dinner, she noticed that her old flame wasn’t saying much. Finally, D’Angelo’s little sister could keep her secret pent up no more. “He’s engaged to marry another girl!” she blurted out.
The table went quiet until Mom calmly replied, “Well, we’ll just have to have some more potatoes on that, won’t we?” Everyone laughed in relief and continued eating. But probably no one was more relieved than Dad when Mom came home and told him what had happened.
RON
Dad later told me that part of his urgency in proposing to Mom when he was only nineteen years old was that he wanted to get the other guys—or “contenders,” as he called them—out of the way. His proposal was accepted. This proved to be, fortunately for Clint and me, Mom’s final engagement.
As they toured with the children’s-theater troupe during the summer of ’48, their desire to marry as quickly as possible grew ever more urgent. Dad revealed to me in my adulthood that he and Mom had no moral issue with living together unmarried, but society still frowned on couples who cohabitated without a wedding certificate. To my parents’ frustration, they discovered that in most of the states that they visited, marriage required that both parties take a blood test and then endure a three-day waiting period. That wouldn’t work—the troupe never stayed in any state for as long as three days. But as summer turned to fall, fortune smiled upon the young couple. At a diner in Ohio, a nosy but friendly waiter happened to hear Mom and Dad discussing their plight and butted in: Kentucky, the waiter said, had no such waiting-period policy. Eagerly, Mom and Dad checked the schedule: their next show was in the town of Winchester, Kentucky. Perfect. They could get hitched right away!