New Year’s Day in many cultures is an important moment for self reflection. Secular western culture has sort of whittled this down to having a new year’s resolution. But the holiday that has always gotten to me, of course, is the Judaic Days of Awe, starting with Rosh Hashanah where one begins to examine their life in the past year, and ending with Yom Kippur, when one tries to atone for those failings revealed, make amends to those injured, and be redeemed. This idea that we should evaluate ourselves and try to do better seems to me like the best principle for a holiday ever.
That’s my dad as a crooked fence playing opposite Ray Danton and Warren Oates in the Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond. (I had never seen it before and so watched it and captured his scene when it played on TCM the other night.)
Most stories, and in fact most ethical narratives, cast folks as good or evil. His agent used to bill him as “The Heaviest Heavy in Hollywood.” And while he often played henchmen (it took me weeks in the 4th grade to live down a scene where he had kicked Lassie) he also played a lot of the jolly sidekick, occasionally, as in another scene I captured yesterday, offering some comic relief. This from a 1960 Disney TV Movie called Mooncussers. He hoots or guffaws in pretty much every scene he is in in this film, and he’s in a lot. (He worked on this for weeks, allowing me to prowl joyously around the Disney lot back in the days when all of the Disneyland attractions were build there. I spent fascinated hours watching the construction of the Tiki Room’s robot birds). We play a lot of parts in our lives, some we are proud of and some we regret. None of us ever purely good or purely evil. Personality is pretty much always a marble cake
Nesdon Sr. was a really interesting guy. He was outgoing and had lots of very devoted friends who idolized him as did my Mom and sisters. I only knew him from the perspective of a child, as he died when I was 12, but I learned a lot of difficult things about him from some of his friends after I was a parent myself. Both my parents and sister, as well as all my parents friends are now dead, so I hope it’s okay to tell this shameful and personal story about him.
He was a bohemian and an aesthete. When he and my mom met, he had just returned from India, where the Army Show he had cooked for and performed in broke up after VE Day. He spent the last months of the war running an officers’ club built by the British Raj in Calcutta. Calcutta transformed him, partly because there he met Hashish and the Kamasutra. My mom, on the other hand, was a complete innocent. She was 19, living with relatives in LA after having graduated from Stanford magna cum laude in mathematics. She had graduated HS at 14, and as a child at Stanford, she never took her nose out of a book.
She bought into his lifestyle precisely because it was as far as she could get from the suffocating fundamentalist Christian life she had known as a girl (her mom had never cut her hair, read a book other than the bible, or seen a movie when she died at the age of 103). After my mom died, I was told by a friend of hers (who was a little drunk at the time) that she had told him that when she had only known my dad a few weeks, he had given her his renowned old opium pipe filled with ganja, and then gave her head as she smoked it. Apparently she figured that since she was already going to hell, why not be down for anything, and joined him enthusiastically in their subsequent hedonistic pursuits, which included the sex, drugs, and jazz among the Hollywood swing scene.
A few years later, she had apparently complained that in addition to the sex partys that she had joined him in, if he was going to see some of these women on the side, then she wanted to see other men as well. She was too timid to pull this off on her own, so, claiming open-minded fairness, he set her up with a guy.
However, he was not as open minded as he had thought, and while she was away on her date, he got increasingly jealous and increasingly drunk. When she got home, they had a huge fight, during which he punched her and broke her jaw. Of course at the age of 6 or 7, I had no idea of these details, though I do recall, as so many kids do, of occasionally lying in bed and hearing them yelling in anger at each other. I also recall the fussy care he took of her, in the aftermath, when her jaw was wired shut.
They were surely both devastated, him with guilt and her with fear and anger. I did observe, even as a kid, that they had a very open, chatty, and egalitarian relationship. Though I have no ideas what other adjustments this may have lead to in their marital arrangements –I imagine she could have used the situation to extract all sorts of concessions from him–I do know that he never drank again, and I was never again kept awake by their shouting.
That, of course, was extremely serious spousal abuse which would and should have ended many marriages, let alone having him end up in jail. But it didn’t end theirs, in fact, it seemed to make it stronger and closer. I suppose it was a sort of rock bottom for them, from which they could either recover, or be destroyed, as so many are. I can only presume that he dug down and found ways to atone for what he had done. He did become a proud teetotaler. I saw him work hard for the rest of his life to support the recovery of some of their alcoholic friends, and, clearly, she must have found a way to forgive him. He lived for another 8 years after that, throughout which I, well as their friends, always saw their marriage as strong, loving, and committed. As much as I can condemn him for being the heavy and hurting my mom, I can also honor him for doing the work to climb back to become her jolly sidekick. Despite it all, I know she continued to love and revere him until the day she died almost 25 years after him.
We all sin, we all stumble and fall. But even when the fall is precipitous and may seem unforgivable, there is almost always a path to Redemption.
Happy Atonement, Forgiveness, and Redemption.
Happy New Year and
HOLLY DAYS 