The Kids Are All Right

  The four of us, with Berry (l–r: Dan, Amanda, Diana, Liz)

  Our parents on their wedding day

  IN MEMORY OF MOM AND DAD

  AND AUNTIE EVE

  Dan with Auntie Eve

  contents

  A Note on the Text

  Introduction

  part one

  SPRING 1982–SUMMER 1983

  part two

  FALL 1983–WINTER 1985

  part three

  WINTER 1985–WINTER 1991

  Acknowledgments

  a note on the text

  This book is a true story. Or rather it is several true stories. Really, it is a collection of memories, and in the process of writing them down, and comparing them, we have learned that memory is a tricky thing. It’s like returning to the house in which you lived as a child. The staircase you remembered as that monumental thing you crawled up slowly on your hands and knees is now something you can run up, hands free, two steps at a time. Well, you weren’t wrong then, and you aren’t wrong now. Perception may have changed, but the facts remain. Those stairs were big. Now they’re small. Go figure. In the following pages, you’ll see that we disagree about certain things, as most siblings do. Over the last few years of writing, researching, and interviewing lots of people, we have learned that truth is subjective, always. That goes for every character in the book. Our interpretations of other people’s actions are locked in a time and a place. An eight-year-old who has lost her parents sees the world in a much different way than that same girl twenty-five years later. The same is true for a sixteen-or twenty-year-old-girl and for a fourteen-year-old boy. Some people in these pages insisted on using their real names, but other names have been changed, along with identifying characteristics, to protect people’s privacy. Other than that, we have each told the truth, and each truth is our own.

  Does it feel that your life’s become a catastrophe?

  Oh, it has to be for you to grow, boy.

  —“Take the Long Way Home,” SUPERTRAMP

  introduction

  OUR MOTHER DIED three times. We have the first death on tape, recorded the day it aired in 1976: Morgan Fairchild, wearing a trench coat and pale pink lip-gloss, shot her in the back. Over the past thirty years, we’ve each watched the tape several times, pulling it from dusty cardboard moving boxes and crossing our fingers it doesn’t get eaten by the VCR. It’s our only copy.

  The scene opens with Morgan, as Jennifer Pace, hiding in a darkened hallway. Our mother, playing Eunice Wyatt on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow, is kissing actor Val Dufour good-bye at their apartment door. His square jaw and dimpled chin are powdered an orangey tan. As John Wyatt, Eunice’s cheating husband, Val is dressed conservatively in a suit and tie, but we know him as the guy who once wore a kilt and a feather boa to our parents’ annual Christmas party.

  The music swells. Commercial break.

  Back at the apartment, our mother turns away from the camera, and there is a loud bang. A tiny circle of dark red appears on the back of her pink satin robe. The next shot is a close-up. Our mother’s face fills the screen in a death snarl revealing upper teeth.

  And so our mother’s decade-long run as Eunice Gardner Twining Martin Wyatt came to an end. It was her third soap gig, and her longest. She started out in 1962 as Erica Brandt on Young Doctor Malone before making her name in 1964 as the original Dr. Maggie Fielding on The Doctors. Born in 1965, Amanda is the eldest of the four Welch children. She was introduced to soap fans in a splashy Dialing the Daytime Stars magazine spread as “The Baby Who Took Ann Williams off TV.” We still have the article, now yellowed with age, tucked away in the same manila folder where Mom stuck it more than forty years ago. When Liz was born, in 1969, Mom had been playing Eunice for three years. Instead of getting written off entirely, Eunice had a breakdown and was temporarily sent to a mental institution. By Dan’s birth in 1971, Eunice was so popular that the pregnancy was written into the show. But Mom wasn’t pregnant when Jennifer shot Eunice; rumor had it that Mary Stuart, the show’s diva and Dan’s godmother, was jealous of Mom’s fan mail. That’s what Mom told us, anyway.

  Diana was born in 1977, a year before Mom landed the role of the villainous Margo Huntington on The Edge of Night. Which brings us to our mother’s second death: Margo was bludgeoned with a fire poker off-camera in a whodunit story line that continued for weeks after her body was discovered. Margo had a lot of enemies; she was a successful businesswoman who owned the only TV station in Monticello. Her story line involved an illegitimate child, a sham marriage to an ex-cult leader, and pornography.

  During the Margo years, as part of their after-school chores, Mom enlisted Amanda and Liz to record her episodes on our VCR, one of the first, which was the size of a stuffed suitcase. At night, when she came home from her day of shooting, Mom labeled each tape with the date, show name, and episode number and placed it chronologically on a bookshelf in her study.

  Today, only five tapes remain, the labels peeling off from the dust that has weakened their glue, their images scratchy and worn. Amanda is the reason we have any tapes at all: After our mother’s third and actual death, the one that followed our father’s by three and a half years, Amanda carted those tapes around in boxes, stored them in a friend’s garage, and drove them across state lines. They have been packed up, unpacked, sent parcel post, and popped into VCRs in New York, Virginia, and Texas. They’re our family heirlooms, a fuzzy, dusty connection to the person whom waitresses at Chock full o’Nuts recognized as Eunice or Margo but whom we knew as Mom. Watching them now, we see bits of our lives on the screen. The diamond ring Eunice wears is really the one Dad gave Mom when he proposed in the early sixties, just a few months after meeting her. The red mug ringed with fat white hearts that Margo drinks out of spent the eighties stained with coffee in our kitchen sink at home in Bedford, New York. The yellow organza dress that she wore to announce her engagement to the cult leader is the one that Diana wore, fifteen years later and tripping on acid, to the junior prom. Though the ring was stolen years ago, and the mug is long gone, Amanda saved the dress, as she did the tapes, and the grandfather clocks, and the Etruscan trunk. Like Mom, she keeps the clocks wound to chime on the hour, and she fills the trunk with sheets and blankets. And, like Mom, she saved the manila folder that holds magazine clippings documenting the highlights of our mother’s career.

  “Ann Williams: ‘I Relate to Children and Animals Better Than to Adults!’” shouts a bold headline across the opening spread of a 1976 article from Day TV Gossip. It chronicles life at Twin Meadows, the fourteen-acre estate where we grew up. In it, Mom describes Amanda, then ten, as a “serious human being” who likes to ride her pony and wants to be an animal trainer someday. “Lizzie,” six, is a “backgammon whiz, you can’t beat her!” and also the “most giving of people,” one who would gladly give up her dessert so that another child wouldn’t be left wanting. Daniel, four, is a “lover” who “practices his best Clark Gable moods” on Mom. He also has a “vivid imagination” and likes to go “elephant hunting in the backyard with his Daddy,” she says. “They shoot them out of the trees.” Diana wasn’t born yet.

  In one of the photos accompanying the article, Amanda, Liz, and Dan are all piled on Mom’s lap. In another, Amanda and Dan pose with their stuffed animals. There’s one of Dad, his salt-and-pepper hair elegantly parted on the side and slicked back, like a Kennedy. He has a kind Irish face, freckled and dimpled, and smiling eyes. They described him as an investment banker. He was on TV with Mom only once, for a Newlywed-styled show called Tattletales that Amanda, Liz, and Dan remember watching when they were kids. Every time Dad got an answer wrong, Mom would swat the air, smile big, and shrug her shoulders. Diana has seen the photo
someone took of the black-and-white television set the day the show aired. Mom is sitting on Dad’s lap, biting her bottom lip. He looks nervous and serious, though in real life he was neither.

  Amanda has that picture in one of many family albums, glued beneath a thin plastic sheet alongside other images, proof of where we come from, of who we were before everything changed: our parents at fox hunts, regal in their red coats and top hats; childhood birthday parties with frosted cakes, lit candles, and paper hats; horse shows with ribbons and trophies; beach picnics and Thanksgiving dinners. Amanda also has several grainy 16-millimeter home movies that Mom and Dad made, the sounds of which have gone wobbly and deep.

  One year, as a Christmas present, Dan edited the films together and layered sad-but-funny songs like Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home” and Elvis’s “Don’t Cry Daddy” on top of their slow, distorted narration. After five long years apart, it was the eighth Christmas we had spent together as a family; our separation and subsequent reunion had reinforced the importance of childhood rituals. That Christmas Eve was spent the same as the ones before it: We prepared a dinner of Yorkshire pudding and roast beef, hung the four patchwork stockings that our mother had made, our names hand-stitched in white rickrack on each cuff. We dressed the tree with old family ornaments and placed the gold papier-mâché crèche at its base. Then, in keeping with another Welch tradition, we each opened one small present. Amanda opened one from Dan—our new home movie.

  On that Christmas Eve in 1998, we watched our father hold Amanda up in the window of their apartment in New York City so she could see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade drift down Central Park West, and we watched him hold her at her christening at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and as she sat in his lap on her first birthday and tried to eat her card. We watched our mother, puffy from giving birth, wave to the camera and smile, holding a fat newborn Liz in her arms. We watched a determined Liz tromp up a grassy hill in tights and fancy shoes, struggling to hold an Easter basket nearly as big as she was. We watched Amanda wave at the camera and pat Dan’s back as he lay belly-down in his bassinet, her mouth forming the words “Hi, Mom.” We watched Liz help Dan take off his tiny terry-cloth robe at the beach in Cape Cod before she left him sitting in the sand and ran to catch up with Amanda in the waves. We watched the three of them splash around in our pool, held up either by Styrofoam floaties or by Mom in a bikini and a big sunhat. It wasn’t until the tape finished that we realized Diana wasn’t in any of those warm, sun-splattered scenes that our parents recorded and Amanda saved and Dan edited and scored. It made sense. Those home movies recorded the idyllic times, and Diana doesn’t remember much of those.

  part one

  SPRING 1982 – SUMMER 1983

  Diana and Dad

  LIZ

  I WANTED TO be an actress just like Mom. In the fall of 1981, I came close to getting the part of Jon Voight’s daughter in the movie Table for Five, but then Ricky Schroeder was cast as the son. We were both blond, and the director wanted the daughter to be a brunette, so I was out. At least, that’s how Mom explained it to me.

  The following spring, I had another audition. This time, I was up for the part of Mariel Hemingway’s younger sister in Star 80. Mariel was playing Dorothy Stratten, the Playboy playmate killed by her jealous husband. Mom thought I had a good chance because I looked like Mariel, same blond hair and blue eyes, dark eyebrows, and square jaw. Even strangers told me so. Some said I looked like Brooke Shields, but she had brown hair and brown eyes so that never made any sense to me.

  Mom picked me up early from school to take me into Manhattan. Usually, her coming to get me would be an endless source of embarrassment. She’d barge into volleyball practice dressed in too-tight velour sweatpants tucked into gardening boots, her big dip sunglasses perched on top of the silk scarf she’d wrap around her hair instead of brushing it. Worse, she’d holler “Yoo-hoo” in a falsetto across the court, waving her arms at me as if I didn’t know she was there. She was impossible to miss. During the winter months she wore a floor-length coat that looked like a skinned dead collie turned inside out. It was mortifying.

  But that afternoon, waiting in the parking lot, she looked glamorous. Her brown hair was curled under and combed into a chic bob, her gardening outfit replaced by a silk shirtdress and burgundy knee-high boots. This was her city outfit.

  Usually Mom liked to help me prepare for my scenes during the hour-long drive into the city, but this afternoon, she had other things on her mind. “Lizzie Bits, you’ll be the decoy,” she said as we pulled out of Fox Lane Middle School’s driveway. “You’ll distract your father as I set up.”

  She was planning a surprise party for Dad’s fiftieth birthday that weekend, and she had invited old college friends from Johns Hopkins, business associates from Houston, Dad’s brothers and sisters, as well as friends from the Bedford Golf and Tennis Club and the Goldens Bridge Hounds. More than fifty people had RSVPed, but Dad had no idea. “I’ll make eggnog,” she said excitedly as we drove down Bedford’s packed dirt roads lined with stone walls and ancient oaks. “We’ll use the big punch bowl,” she added. “We’ll use all the good crystal.”

  Mom started her cut-glass collection when she married Dad in 1964, and over the last eighteen years, she had managed to fill the shelves of the butler pantry that lined the narrow hallway between our dining room and kitchen. She had cake plates and platters and champagne glasses, too, plus a dish designed specifically for celery and another for deviled eggs.

  “I’ll make lamb stew and Irish soda bread,” she continued, turning onto Interstate 684, her diamond engagement ring catching and releasing the mid afternoon sun. “And an angel food cake for dessert.”

  Angel food cake was Dad’s favorite, and mine too. For my thirteenth birthday, only one month earlier, Mom made me an angel food cake with strawberries and whipped cream.

  She wanted me to keep Dad away from the house for three hours that Saturday afternoon. I gazed out the window at the messy paintbrush stroke of pine trees. I needed to come up with a good plan. Dad was smart. He paid attention to detail. He wore pressed shirts and pants, even on weekends. Duping him would be hard.

  After several minutes of silence, I asked, “What if I ask him to take me shopping?”

  “Ehhh,” Mom made a sound like a game show buzzer. “Wrong answer. Try again.”

  Typical. Mom never wanted to take me shopping, and when she did, she’d let me buy things only if they were on sale. Dad, on the other hand, would deposit me at the Stamford Bloomingdale’s and tell me to meet him at the cash register in twenty minutes. It’s because of him that I was the first girl at Fox Lane Middle School to own Jordache jeans. On our last spree, I got the kelly-green Ralph Lauren cable-knit sweater I was wearing that day for my audition.

  “How about tennis?” I offered. “I’ll ask him to play a set.” I had been taking lessons that winter at Chestnut Ridge, an indoor tennis club in town. I could show off my new and improved overhead serve. It was the perfect ploy, Mom agreed.

  Soon we reached the outskirts of the city. Dingy buildings replaced trees along the parkway, which had doubled from two lanes to four. Suddenly, the buttery sweet scent of vanilla biscuits penetrated the diesel and gas fumes; then, minutes later, the Stella d’Oro factory whirred by.

  “Lock the doors, Lizzie,” Mom instructed as we approached the Third Avenue Bridge. She always said this here—not back in Bedford or anywhere in Westchester County, but here, as we were about to enter Manhattan through Spanish Harlem.

  After we parked the car, we passed a blind man selling pencils. “Can we buy one?” I asked.

  She shook her head and then said under her breath, “He makes more money than you do.” I wondered if that was true. Other than the five-dollar weekly allowance I got for feeding the dogs and loading the dishwasher, the only money I had ever made was one hundred twenty-five dollars in seventh grade to model for a Macy’s catalogue, and five hundred dollars for a Jell-O pudding commercial I did w
hen I was eight. I’d had to eat so many bowls of chocolate pudding that I got a stomachache. After the twelfth take, when the director said, “Action,” I looked into the camera and instead of saying, “It’s delicious!” I said, “I think I’m going to throw up.” And then I did.

  For the Star 80 audition, I had to do a sad scene. The waiting room was chaos: Young girls dabbed their lips with gloss and brushed and sprayed their hair into place while their mothers filled out call cards and handed in head shots. Mom and I found a quiet corner in the back stairwell to go over lines. She was more interested in craft than in cosmetics.

  “Never rely on your looks, Elizabeth,” she warned. “They’ll only get you to thirty.”

  People always said Mom was beautiful, and in her cast photos and head shots pinned on the wall of her study at home I could see she once was. My favorite photo was of Burt Reynolds, signed, “To the prettiest girl in all of New York, love, Burt.” Mom had guest-starred on his cop show Hawk. This was before Smokey and the Bandit made him famous, before Loni Anderson. There was the cast shot of Pajama Game, Mom in a silk nightshirt that just barely covered her tushy, and a close-up of her where she looks like a young Ingrid Bergman, the curl of her chestnut bob kissing her full lips, her big brown eyes hypnotizing the camera. In another photo, she’s in Lauren Bacall’s dressing room in Applause. Lauren is wearing a caftan and holding Mom’s hand, and they’re both laughing. But those photos were taken in Mom’s twenties—when her skin was taut, her hair a natural dark brown, her eyes sparkling and bright. Now, at forty-six, her hair had turned brittle, a lighter, unnatural shade from two decades of perms and dye jobs, her skin was puffier, like unbaked bread. Once a size six, Mom now struggled to get into a twelve and blamed her bad luck with booking jobs on being middle-aged. “I’m too young to be a grandmother and too old to be a mother,” she’d often lament. Still, it didn’t stop her from working on her craft. She went to the Actors Studio weekly to workshop scenes and often asked me to read lines with her back home. She had studied with Lee Strasberg, and she taught me what she knew. It was called Method acting. For this audition, my character had just learned that her sister had been killed. Mom asked me to imagine the most terrible thing ever.