was more practical than that. We talked for a while about moving back east, but Don was a real Californian. He wouldn’t hear of it. I remember we went back one Christmas, early on.” She leaned her head back, as though the past were just behind her somewhere and she could see it clearly if only she looked.
“It must have been ‘71. I remember it was Don’s first time on an airplane. We got to Boston and he thought that was alright. But when we drove out into the country all Don could say was, ‘I can’t believe how many people there are. It’s way too crowded.’ Funny, coming from an LA boy.”
She paused for a second, and then added, “It was probably 1970 because I remember Dad making all these remarks about how Kent State taught all the hippies that they shouldn’t mess with America. I could tell Don hated my dad, but he was being nice for my sake. My dad kept telling Don he should move back to Boston. He could get him into one of the law schools and he’d hire him into the firm. Don wasn’t interested. He wanted to work in movies. Boston wasn’t going to cut it.”
“So how’d your parents react to your marrying him and staying out here?”
“They didn’t,” she said, reaching for her glass. “They were killed in a plane crash in Mexico that following spring.”
“That’s terrible,” I said. What else do you say to something like that?
“Yes,” she said. “It is. But it was a long time ago. And, it left me alone in the world, in California, where my only uncle lived. So I stayed, eventually married Don, and the rest is history.”
“When did Don get involved in,” I wasn’t sure how to say it, and then I realized I was being silly, “pornography.”
“When he couldn’t make it in real movies.”
“He tried to get work at the studios?”
“Oh, he worked there. My uncle got him some jobs with NBC, where my uncle worked, and then Don did different things with the major studios.”
“What kind of things?”
“It was all very menial, low-end stuff. He was in his early twenties and had no experience. They were all entry-level positions as grips, or some kind of assistant to an assistant. He was very frustrated. He expected to get promoted fast and actually be a producer or director or something. So he would get fed up and quit and move on to a different job.”
“What were you doing?”
“For awhile I just stayed home.” She laughed as she thought about it. “I had very traditional notions of what women were supposed to do, I guess. It was my upbringing. That lasted until about 1975 or ‘76. By that time I could see the pattern. Don would get a new job, be excited about the opportunity, and after three or four months he’d quit, claiming they didn’t know what they were doing or they were idiots and he couldn’t work for people like that.”
“That made you concerned?”
“Yeah, it was very unstable. At first, it was okay. I still had a little of the money I’d inherited from my parents, so when things got tight I dipped into it. Don liked to live well. After a few years, it was nearly gone. That worried me.”
I finished my second glass of tea and started to worry about having to go to the bathroom. She leaned over and refilled my glass. As she did, she said, “Don was very smart, very ambitious, but also very impatient. He felt that he should be successful right away. He never seemed to accept the fact that you had to work a long time to get there.” Then she shrugged and added, “But he didn’t have any role models growing up, so I guess he didn’t really know.”
“Where did he grow up?”
“He was an orphan. His father was killed in Korea and his mother just dropped him off with the nuns one day when he was about eight and drove away. So he was raised and educated by the nuns. It got him the scholarship to Pomona. He always used to laugh about what the nuns would think if they knew what became of him.” She laughed about it too.
“So how did it come about?”
“I was getting to that. Don was drifting from job to job and I was getting nervous. So one day I see this ad for this motel out in Malibu that’s for sale. I took the rest of