Free We Are Still Married by Garrison Keillor Page A

balls of her feet. “Liberal,” she said. “I’m going to liberate you boys from ignorance or die in the attempt.” She took three long deep breaths, and sprang like a tiger, her hairy arms outstretched, her eyes burning bright red, and the sound she made deep in her throat was one they had never ever heard before.

HOLLYWOOD IN THE FIFTIES
    Q: I understand that the frankest book yet about life in Hollywood has been written by someone named Mark Van Doren. Who is he? What is the title of his book?—K.L., LITTLE ROCK, ARK.
    A: Mark Van Doren (1894–1972) was a famous poet, literary critic, and professor of English at Columbia University. You undoubtedly are confusing him with Mamie Van Doren, 56, a singer-actress fairly well known in the Hollywood of the 1950s and ’60s.
    â€”“Walter Scott’s Personality Parade,” in Parade.
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    F OR MARK VAN DOREN, famous poet and literary critic, the fifties in Hollywood were a confusing time, especially after he met Mamie at the home of his friends Donna and John Reed. Mark had just left RKO to go with Columbia after scripting Donna’s It’s a Wonderful Life (based on John’s Ten Days That Shook the World ) , he was exhausted and disillusioned, and the buxom young star of Untamed Youth and Born Reckless clearly offered something powerful and natural and free.
    â€œShow me things. Tell me. Touch me. You know so much, you’re a poet. I’m a child in the body of a woman. Show me,” she said, as they sat on the railing, looking out across the merciless sunbaked valley toward the Pacific Ocean shimmering like a blue-green afterlife beyond the used-car lots. Just then Donna called from the kitchen, “Do you want a slice of lemon in your nectar?” John was gone—who knew where? The moody hazel-eyed revolutionary had never lived by other people’s rules, not even after marrying Donna. And he hated Mark, after what Mark had done to his manifesto. He vowed to punch Mark in the nose if he ever saw him.
    You all know Donna Reed. Well, she was like that, except more so—the World’s Most Nearly Perfect Wife and Mother. She set her clock by her son, Rex, and after he ran away with Vanessa Williams, Ted and Esther’s girl, Donna grieved openly. Her pain hung around her like an old black bathrobe.
    Ted’s uncle, William Carlos Williams, could sense Donna’s need to be loved, but he was in town to adapt his epic Paterson for Twentieth Century-Fox, and was writing a large body of water into the script so that Esther, a swimming actress, could be featured. The poet was crazy about his ballplayer nephew’s gorgeous wife. He hung his cap for her. The sun rose and set on her. Whenever Ted was in Boston, W.C. flew to L.A. Esther liked him as a close confidant, but he wanted to be more, much more, to her, so his sudden boyish desire for Donna confused him.
    â€œI’m bad news for any woman I touch,” he told Jeanette and Dwight Macdonald. The former Trotskyite, author of The Root of Man, tugged at his beard as the famous poet stood poised on the tip of the diving board. Burt and Debbie Reynolds looked up at him and so did Carlos and Carroll Baker. Williams held his arms over his gray head, his knees slightly bent. He didn’t notice Lassie and Malcolm Cowley, who had just returned from a walk and stood half shielded by a clump of sumac. “Blouaghhhhh!” W.C. cried as he dove, splitting the water like a fork.
    It troubled Mark that Mamie couldn’t swim an inch. He watched gloomily as Esther Williams plowed up and down the length of the pool, just as she did in Williams’ poem “The Singing Swimmer” (“the row of maidens/beside the cool water/and the splashing fountains when/suddenly you/sing in your democratic American voice and plunge/deep below the surface, your white mermaid arms held out to me”).
    â€œEsther swims, why not you?” Mark whispered,