Listen For the Laughter

About the Book

Blackbird Nuns and Boarding Houses: Time: the early 20's, place: L.A. Cast: my grandmother Nana, her 2 daughters. Scene: cheap downtown boarding houses, Nana cooking, daughter Betty a ‘water girl’in an eatery where she is seduced by a rising young City Hall lawyer. Pregnant, she hastily maneuvers a Mexican WWI vet into marrying her. I am to be aborted--but my high-spirited mama changes her mind and I make my first entrance, blue-eyed and blonde. Alviso realizes he’s been had, scoops me up, turns me over to Nuns in a Catholic orphanage, and flees, never to be seen again. Betty manages to locate me--but after more misadventures the authorities step in--and more orphanages follow. Nana, finding me half-starved, takes me to her very own boarding house, The Gables, but in time Betty, newly (bigamously) remarried, reclaims me. I spend loving but hungry years in cheap rentals around LA. When Betty and her Don Finch move to Nevada, I return to Nana--and her ample food. But on a visit to Betty and Don, I blow up the small town’s communal outhouse--and am taken in charge by C-, owner of the gold mine. Sold at Eleven: For two glorious years C- coddles me. The best doctors, the finest clothes, the choicest restaurants, movie star introductions. My starving eyes are opened to art, museums, theatre, luxury. My missing father! But no way. When I turn 13 he forces me into the sexual abuse that goes on for 5 years. Of course he pays well for it: Don and Betty are transferred to a good life in Alaska; Nana’s mortgage on The Gables is paid off. He will marry me at 18, he says, and builds a house for me on La Habra Heights in the suburbs. He buys my way, at 13, into the Chouinard Art Institute where I fall in love with art. And in time with fellow student Carl, tall, laconic, skeptical. 2 weeks before my 18th birthday, he persuades me to ditch C-. War and Peace: But Pearl Harbor happened, and Carl was soon in uniform, soon fighting in the Pacific. Determined to stay faithful to him, I moved to Santa Barbara, worked for the US Employment Service until, impulsively, I joined the WAAC’s. Glamorous! They used me as a poster girl: She joined, why not you? But someone found out I hadn’t had Basic Training. After a steaming hot Iowa summer, I ended up back in California, in Santa Monica, facing more big-time male abuse from a prototype chauvinist pig--until the day I collapsed into a catatonic state, and found myself in the cuckoo’s nest for the duration. Nightmare city. The War over, I gained release, staggered back to Nana’s licking my wounds--when Carl came home. Courtship! Sex! Wedding plans! But enroute to get the license, he bolted--and when I caught up, confessed he wanted out. What to do? New York, New York! Thank God for the GI Bill. It got me The Art Students League. New York in 1946 was paradise for young comers, crackling with creativity, dizzy with promise. I studied under great artists like Will Barnet, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Morris Kantor, lived in Hell’s Kitchen in a $17 a month cold-water flat, modelled, made Best of Class year after year--and tried to kill myself. Wake-up call! My dear Dr. Needleman, a psychiatrist selected by chance, saved my life. I turned down study in Paris under Leger and, while in daily life I indulged in sex, sex, sex, this patient, probing, tenacious, wise man slowly, relentlessly helped me put my emotional house in order. By now I worked at the League in charge of models--and met another veteran, gentle Ted Claus Silvers, an escapee from Germany and fashions illustrator, infinitely understanding, infinitely persistent, sadly asexual. He moved in, we prospered, we married. Finch to Silvers. Ted and The City. Hell’s Kitchen to the Village. Ted free-lanced, I continued at the League until we opened our own Fashion School. Life was sweet--with first nights, great restaurants, a circle of fashionable friends, Ted’s sure touch making me one of them. Paradise--until, at Ted’s

About the Author

Illegitimate, often hungry during the Great Depression, raised in the shadow of the famous Los Angeles HOLLYWOOD sign, Jo deBeauchamp was sold at 11 and suffered years of sexual abuse by a rich City and Film angel before escaping. She had a rough stretch in the WACS in WWII, then made it to New York’s Art Students League where her talent blossomed while she lived in a cold-water flat in Hell’s Kitchen and underwent years of psychoanalysis to be ‘born again’ as a free woman at 28. But two mismatched marriages followed--after which, with two prized children, she returned to L.A. where she survived with wit and laughter as a single Mom.