alone in my room, I’d sit in front of an old Underwood typewriter, a filched bottle of vodka under my desk, and write. Actually, what I really did was drink, and listen to the radio through my headphones. But the line about being a playwright worked. People stopped pestering me to try out for plays. For a little while, at least, I felt as though I fit in.
Because this was Kamensic, and Kamensic was theater. What the village had, and has, is actors. Real actors, Broadway actors as well as Hollywood royalty, from Tallulah Bankhead and the Lunts, D. W. Griffith and DeVayne Smith, to lesser-known survivors like Theda Austin and the Wellers. Later there would be aging rock stars and hosts of twilight television (Cap’n Jack and Officer Hap and Gore DeVal), as well as retired icons from King of the Hillbillies and Tales from the Bar Sinister.
This last was where my father made his living, as the eponymous watering hole’s cadaverous yet elegant bartender, Uncle Cosmo, affectionately known as Unk. Tales from the Bar Sinister was fabulously popular on network TV in the early 1970s and had a long and happy half-life in syndication. My father couldn’t go out for groceries without being recognized, and everyone from waiters at the Muscanth Restaurant to kids on 125th Street called him Unk. Years later, when the show was picked up by Nickelodeon, Unk became a genuine pop icon. Recalled fondly by his original fans, embraced by a new generation who loved his moldy tuxedo, his garish Cryptkeeper makeup, and Peter Lorre voice. Our magazine even ran a cover: (H)UNK! it read, beneath his kindly crepuscular face.
Back then, and like everyone else in Kamensic, I took it all for granted. My father with his horror-show garb, mother with her daytime Emmys and TV Guide Reader’s Choice Awards. In Kamensic, Unk was spoken of as respectfully as Hume Cronyn or Jason Robards. At the annual village Christmas party my mother’s reading of “A Christmas Memory” reduced everyone to tears.
“Your mother.” Hillary shook his head, staring at my mother’s slender figure perched on a stool at the front of the Town Hall, surrounded by banks of sweet-smelling pine boughs and clumps of ghostly white mistletoe. “In the old days they would’ve burned her at the stake.”
“Along with your mother.”
“Yeah.” Hillary slumped down into his seat. “Actually, they probably would’ve burned the whole fucking town. ”
If Kamensic was a strange place to grow up, I never knew it. My mother worked outside the home before most women did, but then so did everyone else’s mom, acting or dancing or singing or designing costumes. I was lucky enough to be raised by my father rather than a housekeeper or nanny. Except for the three years when Bar Sinister was being shot in California, it was Unk who got up with me every morning, Unk who made my brown bag lunches and waited for me at the bus stop, Unk who met me each afternoon. My mother of course was in the city, taping Perilous Lives. My earliest memories are of waking at four A.M. , lying in bed, and hearing her pad softly about our rambling house as she gathered her makeup bags and fashion magazines, and the more purposeful sound of my father in the kitchen, making her breakfast. Smells of coffee and scrambled eggs floating up through the chilly dark house; then the huffing of our Volkswagen squareback as my father drove my mother to the station, so that she could catch the first train to the city and make a six-thirty call.
My mother’s married name was Audrina Moylan. As a girl in London she had played all the Shakespearean ingenues, Ophelia, Cordelia, Rosalind; but it was as Audrey Gold that she created the role she inhabited for forty-some years, that of Livia Prentiss on Perilous Lives. Livia was raven-haired and raven-hearted; a suburban Medea in Bob Mackie gowns who seduced, poisoned, throttled, baited, stalked, and reproached her television clan for sixty minutes a day five days a week.