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Judge and Mrs. Cooper, Frank’s English-born parents, who knew Myrna’s parents ( BB , 14–15).
    In Helena the solitude she had known on the ranch gave way to a community-centered life filled with other children. Afternoons she made fudge with her girlfriends, went on excursions to the turreted brick library, and devoured books she had borrowed: Little Women, Lorna Doone , Tennyson poems. Well-liked and easy to get along with, Myrna nonetheless sensed that something set her apart. “I was not your typical Helena girl. For one thing, my parents were more liberal than most people from Montana.” When a black family moved in across the street, bigoted neighbors ostracized them, but Della welcomed them, encouraging the children to play together ( BB , 18). 6
    Myrna began to think about what she might want to be when she grew up. She knew she wanted to do something distinctive. Influenced by Presbyterian aunts and uncles, and by the convent art teacher, she went through a martyr period at around age eleven, when she hoped to become “a nun or nurse and spend my life doing good works.” She soon became guilt-ridden for harboring aspirations she considered less noble: she now wanted to be a performer, perhaps a dancer or actress. From the time she could walk, she had the habit of sometimes standing on tippy-toes. 7
    As a budding actress she, along with her neighborhood friends, put on plays behind a makeshift curtain in the Williams cellar, near the neatly stored shelves of preserves in jars and as far as possible from the dank corner with the coal chute. For their production of “The Sleeping Beauty” Myrna was cast as the witch, doubling as the prince, and for the latter role wore a plumed hat and bloomers over black stockings. She stuffed the toes of a pair of oversized slippers with paper to make the toes curl up the way they did in picture-book illustrations of princes. She missed out on starring as the Sleeping Beauty because she didn’t look like a storybook princess, lacking the long, golden curls that crowned the head of her angelic looking next-door friend, Amy. “She was a lace paper valentine, I was the comic variety. The boys made a great fuss over her. I carried my own books.” Myrna saw herself as “a very plain little girl” with “carroty hair, freckles . . . and unpleasantly skinny. I was a tomboy, too. Grubby hands and knees, torn dresses.” Not realizing that teasing can signal affection, she smarted when boys would yell, “Redhead, gingerbread, five cents a loaf.” She’d run and cry, skinning her knees on the stairs. She claimed she never felt adored. “Never once did anyone ever hug me or pat my head and say, ‘What a lovely, luscious little girl.’ ” 8

Myrna and her mother played out a tug of war in which Myrna constantly turned up bruised, scraped, and torn, with smudges on her face, and the meticulous Della cleaned her up, vigorously applying washcloth, soap, and scrub brush. She braided Myrna’s unruly red hair into two tight pigtails. Eventually, Della won this battle. Myrna learned to groom herself immaculately.
    Myrna was cast more than once as a male character in her childhood amateur theatricals. When she and her friends dressed up as dolls for a living doll show, Myrna, as the Papa doll, donned a top hat and a man’s suit jacket. She submitted to this casting decision but ardently wished that she looked more like a princess and got treated more like one. “I suffered agonies in silence,” she recalled years later. “I always have been inarticulate when it comes to personal pain. I wanted, passionately, to be beautiful.” 9
    Della became seriously ill with pneumonia after young David’s birth and required home visits by nurses who supplied tanks of oxygen. With his wife still in fragile health some months postpartum, David senior encouraged Della to hasten her recovery by taking the baby and six-year-old Myrna with her to balmy Southern California rather than