In My Shoes: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

confirmed my belief that all the mothers in Beverly Hills were simply out of their minds.
    My parents’ own social circle extended into the English contingent in Hollywood. Michael Caine would have us over to his house for Sunday lunch, and I remember meeting Sean Connery once at the Beverly Hills Hotel, shortly before my parents took a trip with him to Morocco.
    Because of my father’s extensive business connections, there were long stretches when they would go out to dinner every night, leaving my brothers and me to eat at home with the Mexican housekeeper. In the movies there’s always the nanny or the maid, usually a black womanbut sometimes Hispanic, who gives the lonely child all the love she’s not getting from her distant parents. Unfortunately, our domestic helpers came and went in an endless succession, and I never developed a relationship with any of them. For reasons that may appear obvious by now, none of them chose to stick around our household very long.
    One evening I brought along a friend to a restaurant called Jimmy’s, where my parents were having dinner with a group that included Phyllis Diller. My mother kept leaning over to stage-whisper in my ear, “Get that whore out of here.” For an instant I thought she was talking about the comedienne, but then I realized she was talking about my friend. I didn’t know what to do or even where to look. A little later I walked into the bathroom and there was my mother passed out on the floor. I went back to get my dad and he had to carry her out to the car. I remember he seemed very humiliated, even as he drove away in his white Rolls-Royce.
    About this time my mother took a flight somewhere by herself and got drunk on the plane. She became so unruly that she had to be taken off and searched and held by the police. In these days before cell phones, she was missing for hours and my father was in a panic because he didn’t know where she was. He was calling the airport frantically, and I remember standing there thinking why on earth would he want to look for this woman, much less find her? I know that a bit more compassion and forgiveness would reflect better on me. I will go so far as to say that I’m still working on it. But certainly those admirable qualities were not available to me as a teenager. At the time, I was barely able to process. And, of course, whenever one of these little dramas occurred, nobody ever said anything, much less offered anexplanation. So all that was available to me was my own sense of shame and humiliation, while my mind struggled to make sense of it. Essentially, I was reduced to the primitive options of fight, flight, or freeze, and I chose the latter, which was to become my default response throughout life to any unexpected act of aggression or any “shocking” situation that defied easy explanation.
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    WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN MY parents decided that I should go back to England for boarding school. Perhaps my father saw that putting a broad continent and an equally wide blue ocean between me and my mother was the only way I’d survive. Or maybe he thought getting me out of the house would make his wife easier to live with. I wanted to go to Beverly Hills High because one of my friends was going to go there, but as soon as a return to the UK was presented as an option, I saw that as a fine idea. I would have happily shipped off to join the Red Guard if that’s what it took to get away from my mother.
    Back when we’d lived in Berkshire, our local doctor also served as resident physician at Heathfield, in Ascot, the sister school to Eton. It’s very English, of course, with lots of girls with titles and double-barreled names, but that wasn’t my background at all. We were nouveau riche
with a capital N. So my father called up his friend the doctor and asked if he could help get me in. The doctor rang up the school and said there’s a girl who needs to come from California, and an interview was