Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?, page 35
“You weren’t going to ever tell us, were you?”
Sarah remained silent so long Elise repeated herself.
“Do your sisters know?” Sarah said.
Elise shook her head.
“She put it on all those recordings she left?”
Elise hesitated; she didn’t trust her mother to know all the details just yet. “Something like that.”
“She would drop this bombshell and leave the questions for me to answer.”
“You could have just told us a long time ago.”
“It caused me a lot of pain finding out Kitty was my mother. Seeing how close all of you were to her, I knew how it would make you feel.” Sarah dropped her head between her palms. “I miss her so much, but her death—God, strike me down for feeling this way—it relieved me from the heaviness I’ve felt my whole life.”
Tears streaked down her bronzed cheeks. She seemed embarrassed to cry but wasn’t in control of it anymore.
In a gesture that surprised them both, Elise got up to hug her.
“How did you find out?”
“She came to the hospital when you were born, broke down crying, and just blurted it. Your grandma Nellie was furious. They started arguing, and Kitty left. Your grandma tried to tell me everything she knew but having just had you, I didn’t want to hear it. I couldn’t empathize with Kitty’s decision to give me up.”
Elise challenged this. “But you didn’t really want kids.” Her mother’s admission on a public stage had felt like betrayal, because they would have drowned in the cocoon of extremity had it not been for their grandma Nellie and Kitty who, like a fairy godmother, took the reins after Nellie’s death.
“I wasn’t itching for motherhood but, Elise, when you came into this world, you were mine.”
“You were seldom around.”
Both Nellie and Kitty had begged Sarah to work less, but neither challenged her or forced her to listen. They just continued picking up the slack with her children. Sarah ate dinner at home maybe twice a month but always returned with gifts. After a long absence, she’d pick them up early from school for a trip to Disneyland, or surprise their class with an ice cream truck. One time they went on a hot-air balloon ride. She was the perfect mother in these moments—attentive, generous, and gregarious—but they didn’t happen often and after Grandma Nellie died, never. There was cruelty in her rejection. Sarah didn’t suffer her ambivalence about motherhood in silence.
“I could have done things differently, but I think you can now understand how demanding acting can be. I was booked for years, Elise. But coming home to you and your sisters was always my greatest joy.” She paused before a bit of comedic relief. “Cut me some slack. Fuck—I labored for what felt like days to have you naturally, only to find out I couldn’t.”
Elise scrunched her face, knowing the rest. Sarah’s hip bones never adjusted for delivery; she’d had an emergency C-section and then two more, and had the keloid scars to prove it.
“So, to go through hell for none of the joy? I couldn’t understand it. I don’t see how she couldn’t have kept me.”
“What did Grandma Nellie say?” Elise sat down next to her.
“She left it alone. She understood my anger and respected my decision when I refused to see Kitty, or let her see you, until your first birthday party. She only saw you then because she crashed your party, knowing I wouldn’t make a scene.”
Picturing it, Elise emitted a sad giggle.
“She started showing up more to see Nellie. We just tried to be as polite to each other as possible.”
“You never talked about it again?”
Sarah looked regretful. “She tried several times, but I didn’t see the point. I tried to repair our relationship when my mother died, but Kitty wouldn’t leave it alone.”
Elise remembered her mother and Kitty going shopping and out to lunch in the months after Grandma Nellie died. These outings quickly drew paparazzi attention, and their sitcom, cancelled in 1979, was put back in syndication. Soon after, Sarah started another film and detached again.
“I thought we could have a relationship, but being around her always ended up making me angry.”
“You never suspected it until she told you?”
Sarah chuckled. “I’ve asked myself that many times.”
Elise had suspected something. She could never name it—and never would have guessed the truth—but had always sensed there was something more behind Nellie and Kitty’s bickering. Sometimes it was over Jeopardy! or a board game, but the underlying quarrel always centered on their dueling philosophies about raising the girls. They argued about everything: how they liked their oatmeal prepared, what their favorite books and colors were, how they liked to wear their hair. It made Elise—who, as the oldest, was the only one with an accurate pulse on her sisters’ picky and abrupt changes in preference and interest—nervous. There were many times she wanted to correct one or both of them, only to sit back, feeling their argument wasn’t about the thing they said it was.
The polarities, Sarah admitted, had inflicted an undercurrent of sadness that left her confused about her place in the world. “I had the mother who raised me and the one who gave me this incredible life that everyone dreams of. One was White and the other was Black. My Black mother was comfortable thanks to my rich White mother. When my mother died, I felt disloyal for loving Kitty so much. I wanted Kitty’s attention and to please her in a way I never felt the need to do with my own mother.”
“She was a star. You looked up to her.”
“I’ve often felt she gave me this life as an apology,” Sarah said. “As if fame and wealth would surpass any possible longing for what I missed.”
“Did it?” Elise said.
“Until I found out she was my mother.” Her tone changed. “I should be grateful. There are millions of talented Black women. Kitty gave me my start, and the sad truth is she only had the opportunity—to make things better for her kin—because she pretended to be White. So I kept Kitty’s secrets, because of what was at stake. Our livelihoods, and thus our lives, were on the line.”
Elise nodded, understanding the dilemma. Sarah pushed her plate to the side and began to swivel James’s gold wedding ring, which was on her left thumb. He always gave it to her before departing for the studio, to avoid the risk of scratching it and his equipment. When her hand began to shake, Elise reached for her.
“Mom, we don’t have to talk about this anymore. But I do have to tell you something,” she started, but Sarah stopped her.
“Let me finish. The night she died, I got this urge to go see her. I laid next to her and held her hand.” Sarah wiped her eyes. “About an hour or so later, she stopped breathing. I could feel the air leave the room.” Sarah teared again. “I should have come earlier. You were right.”
“I was so angry at you. I thought you missed it.”
“You’re always so angry at me. But don’t you remember? I woke you.”
Elise’s grief had made her forget.
“Mom, we’re going to have to tell people about Kitty.”
Sarah shook her head so hard, the horn, secured with dozens of bobby pins, finally shifted. “The safest thing is leaving her White.”
“‘Safest’? She didn’t commit a crime.”
“It could be argued that what Kitty did was fraud, and if that happens, your inheritance could be in jeopardy.”
“No one would dare make that case and open the studio up to that kind of scrutiny. They’d all look like racists. Can you imagine? The boycotts, the hashtags?”
“Elise, there are some things that are just best left unsaid, unspoken. The more things change, the more they stay the same. People don’t like to be reminded of their shame. You’ll be at the center of a controversy you can’t stop.”
“It wouldn’t be a controversy—”
“You see how they’ve been acting now! We can talk about her being my mother and your grandmother, but not that she was Black.”
Elise was puzzled. “How do we get around that?”
“We’ll say Kitty had an affair, and I’m the product of it. She gave me up for adoption, told everyone I was dead. But she can’t be Black.”
“So tarnishing her reputation is better?”
“Kitty wanted to be White. Die White.”
“She told you that?”
“Well, she didn’t give up her Whiteness for me.”
“She had to protect herself then—her money, her name.”
“And so do you. It isn’t worth gambling your Oscar over. You see Kitty didn’t.”
“I don’t care about winning.”
“You don’t mean that.”
Elise confessed that the only reason she had even entertained lobbying to win a nomination was to honor Kitty. “She thought Drag On was my best performance yet. She’s no longer here to say congratulations if I do win, so who cares?”
Her mother looked pained to hear it. “I do. Your father and I do.”
“But it wasn’t acting Kitty cared about. She only cared because of who she really was and what it meant. What it would mean, right now, for people to know the truth. It wasn’t about winning.”
“What makes you think Kitty wanted her legacy reduced to a stereotype? She’ll be painted as the tragic mulatto. I’ll be the poor little rich girl with adoption issues, and you, my dear, will be given no credit at all for who you are and what you’ve become. They’ll say you don’t deserve it, I don’t deserve it, and Kitty didn’t deserve it because she lied, ignoring the fact—which is what they won’t want to hear—that she was forced to. Kitty isn’t special. Hers is just one American story; there are countless others just like it.”
“That’s what’s important.”
“They won’t understand.”
“We should try. She wanted us to.”
“She’s dead. She doesn’t have a say.”
Elise crossed her arms. “I don’t think she wanted you to have a say. But it’s not up to either one of us anymore. That’s what I came to tell you.” Elise came to her point, knowing Sarah would be upset she hadn’t led with it. “My Vogue photographer knows about Kitty—it’s the subject of his next book.”
Sarah tapped her taupe nails on the counter. “What does he think he knows?”
“That Kitty was Black, and you are her daughter.”
“There’s no way he can prove that. There’s a record of my death; it’s been documented in interviews.”
Sarah’s cheek twitched as Elise relayed what Jasper had told her. “Jasper’s grandfather saw it.”
“He’s dead.” Sarah waved her hand. “I think you can handle Jasper.”
“Mom, it’s his story too.”
“Give him another story, Elise. There are many sides to the truth.”
“But what if Kitty wanted people to know she was Black?”
“She would have told them herself. She wouldn’t have left it up to you, my dear.”
“But she kind of did. Kitty would have explicitly requested our silence had she wanted it. She waited to tell when she would have no control over the outcome. Why?”
“Because she was dramatic.”
“I thought you weren’t mad at her anymore?”
“I’m not mad at Kitty.” Sarah clenched her teeth. “I’m mad that she had no choice but to do what she did. I’m mad that her having no choice impacted me in the ways it has. Unleashing this story exposes the White roots that burrow, snake, and choke. I don’t want to be choked. Not a word to anyone.”
Elise left the room to avoid the fight scene she knew all too well, the one that would end with Sarah crying about how her children loved Kitty (and Nellie) more than her. Elise couldn’t speak for her sisters but, in that moment, she might have asked her mother to consider how she could possibly feel otherwise.
CHAPTER 42
Kitty
Spring 1969
The new normal in the Tate house made Sarah a topic of daily conversation. Nathan loved looking at her pictures, imagining the moments they never had as a family. Some of the secrets were gone, but the truth had been romanticized and glossed over with the threat of the law. They both wanted to live as close to the fantasy as their imaginations would allow.
Nathan was always looking for parts of himself in Sarah. So Kitty indulged him in details about their daughter’s personality, the funny things she did and said that couldn’t be ascertained from a photo, like how she hated foods with a skin. “Apples?”
“Nellie has to peel them.”
She liked to swim, and at four and a half was reading at a second-grade level. Nathan bought her boxes of books, which Kitty rationed to Nellie over several months. “She doesn’t want her spoiled.”
“I’ve been thinking,” he said one night as he pulled back the bedcovers for her to climb in. “How about we reformat Daisy Lawson for television?”
Kitty groaned. “Television is brutal … I’d rather just write it.” Kitty dotted on her eye cream.
“Remember, Daisy develops a close friendship with her neighbor, the nurse, and her daughter. If we cast Sarah as the neighbor’s daughter, would you do it?”
“An interracial show?”
“We could keep her close.”
Kitty touched his cheek. “Close to you, you mean.”
“I grew up on the lot. It only seems fair that my daughter should too. Maybe she has her mother’s talent.”
“Don’t call me that.” Kitty shrugged. “We can always get her acting lessons.”
“Talk to Nellie about it.”
“I will.” Kitty opened her face cream jar.
“She can never know we’re her parents,” Nathan said.
Kitty looked over at him. “When she’s old enough, Nellie and I decided we’d tell her.”
“No. No one can know. What if it gets out? We have a business—you are a business—and I’m not sure how the FBI or the world will adjust to finding out the truth about you.”
“The FBI—they aren’t concerned anymore. Besides, telling our daughter is different than telling the world.”
“Kitty, have you ever considered how she’ll feel, learning we let the world think she was dead because she was too dark?”
His rationale hit her like a dart. She panicked, reevaluating her original assumption that she’d be able to explain, and Sarah would someday understand, as she had come to understand her own mother’s reasons. It was love, but Nathan’s perspective made it ugly. “We don’t have to make those decisions for quite some time,” Kitty said. “She wouldn’t understand now.”
“She’ll never understand,” Nathan said. “That’s the thing about lies; you have to keep them alive.”
* * *
Kitty and Nathan’s largest conspiracy, beyond the resurrection of Telescope or dodging the FBI, was the crafting of their daughter’s future. Kitty’s loyalty shifted at last from her race and, for the first time, rested solely with Nathan. His knowledge of Sarah was their secret, one she would keep from everyone—especially Nellie, who she feared would feel threatened by it.
Nellie agreed to allow Sarah to join The Daisy Lawson Show but maintained control over Sarah’s school schedule. As the show’s writer and star, Kitty gave herself a lot of camera time with Sarah, so she could help her with her acting. Sarah often found her way to Kitty’s dressing room or onto her lap during rehearsals, and Kitty indulged in her affections in those moments, but off set she was physically distant, out of respect for Nellie. Kitty deferred to Nellie in all decisions unless it affected the show and, later, Sarah’s career.
The demands of the show had ended their private home visits, but quietly, and in plain sight, Kitty and Nellie coparented. Nellie controlled the day-to-day, while Kitty told Nathan which strings to pull, aiming to secure Sarah a career.
The Daisy Lawson Show became a hit, and the cast and crew became a family. Lucy was the makeup artist, and Nellie was there every day as Sarah’s chaperone. Nathan rarely came to set, inciting rumors that he didn’t expect or want the show to last because of its interracial nature. They let people think what they wanted. Anything was better than the truth.
Kitty knew he stayed away because of Sarah, fearing that if he got too close, he’d be unable to resist smothering her with a thousand kisses.
Instead, he watched her from the hidden observation room built into the ceiling of the filming stage. At the request of Abner Tate, one of these rooms had been constructed into every sound stage on the lot. Hailed as a genius, Abner Tate had been a controlling lunatic who spied on his employees from a bird’s-eye view. It was how he knew the rumors before they started, how he kept the upper hand.
Engaging in such spying was also the best advice Nathan had ever received from his father. Nathan spent his first weeks at Telescope out of sight, giving orders by phone, watching the daily happenings go on without him, moving like a sleuth in the shadows. It was from one of these observation rooms, above stage C, that Nathan had first spotted Kitty. She was the reason he’d issued the memo encouraging staff members to attend tapings. He knew she would come. He wanted a wife. Her talent was the wild card that made it all seem meant to be.
CHAPTER 43
Elise
Wednesday morning, November 1, 2017
Minutes before the teams coming to clear out Kitty’s house were expected, the doorbell rang. Elise opened the door to find two men, one Asian and one White, dressed in suits. “Can I help you?”
They each produced a badge. “FBI agents Miller and Kim. Is there somewhere we can talk?”
Elise closed the door a bit so her voice wouldn’t carry to her sisters, eating bagels in the living room. “Actually, no. We’re in the middle of a move.”
“When would be a good time?”
“What do you want?” Elise asked.
“We have a few questions for you.”
“Contact my publicist,” Elise said. “I’ll be traveling for most of the month.”
“Would you be willing to answer some questions now, so we can get out of your hair?”
