My father was hurt, his life had fallen apart. He sat my brothers and me down in the living room and said very seriously, “When I leave, you’re never going to see me again.” We all started crying like crazy. The last day my father lived with us, my mother was away from the house, and he was in a state of turmoil and despair, just pacing, pacing, pacing. I think there was nothing for him to set fire to.īy 1953, after about ten years, my parent’s marriage was on its last legs and Whitney filed for divorce. My father said that he quit the business in the fifties when radio and television went to tape because it ceased to be fun. So, midrecording, my father would quietly enter the actor’s sound booth and set fire to the top of the single page being read, which would initiate a kind of race for the actor to calmly read his lines before the paper burned up the text, while not betraying any tension to the listening audience. When that page is finished, it is allowed to waft silently to the floor and the reader continues with the next page. This was my favorite story: Because the rustle of papers is to be avoided in radio, anyone reading from a script typically holds the script pages in the left hand, separates the page to be read with the right, and holds that page next to the microphone, speaking directly into the mike. He loved to tell about the pranks he pulled that invariably involved compromising the actors while they were recording. He sat in front of a large window, through which he could watch the actors read from their scripts in the sound booth. He would sit in his booth with a bank of electronic equipment in front of him, monitoring whatever show was on the air. My father supported his rapidly growing family as an engineer with the Southern Pacific Railroad and later as a sound engineer specializing in live radio and television.Ī couple of times, when I was very young, I visited my dad’s studio at the ABC Radio Center on Vine Street in Hollywood. Just after Whitney turned eighteen, she got her high school diploma, she and Tom got married, and Whitney was finally able to move away from her mother. Whitney attended the lower division of Pasadena City College, a sort of accelerated high school program for students interested in the performing arts, and she helped out at the college radio station, which was where she met my father, Tom Baxter. My mother was so intent on becoming an actress that eventually even Memaw got on board and told her that after she graduated from high school, she’d support her financially for one year. They really shaped me I had a strong sense of having been abandoned by her, that she didn’t want me, that she didn’t want to be my mother. ![]() He says, “Well, she did the best she could.” But I think Brian and I took her actions more personally. My brother Dick, the eldest, is very philosophical about her. Dick, Brian, and I didn’t talk about it much we just lived it. So in a way, Whitney’s maternal model was someone who put her ambition ahead of her maternal responsibilities, and that’s how she was with us. Whitney said that the nearest thing she had to a real family when she was growing up were the casts of the plays that she appeared in. From that day forward, Whitney realized that no matter what school she was in, the drama department would become home until Memaw announced it was time to pull up stakes and move again. It wasn’t until the fifth grade that Whitney discovered drama class, when the boy who was supposed to play Oberon in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream came down with a case of stage fright and she took over the role. Just as often, Memaw would leave her kids behind, once with a couple of former missionaries and another time with her elementary school teacher. Sometimes they’d drag Whitney and her younger brother, Buddy, along. ![]() He and Memaw would drift from oil field to oil field around the country. One of her stepfathers, Al, patented a fitting for oil rigs - his last name was Wells, ironically. Memaw’s replacement husbands came at such a clip that Whitney never formed much of an attachment to any of them. Whitney, a Secret Service man who guarded President Woodrow Wilson, died from alcoholism. Whitney was only six when her real dad, Harry C. She kept burying husbands (and sometimes I think there should be some exhumations to find out why). Memaw was from Arkansas and married five times over the course of her life.
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