Dying of Politeness Read online

  Dedication

  To Dan

  Epigraph

  “So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.”

  —William James, “The Gospel of Relaxation,” On Vital Reserves (1922)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One: My Journey to Badassery

  Chapter Two: Fingertips on Glory

  Chapter Three: Lady Fatima’s Town House for Young Ladies

  Chapter Four: It Has Hair on Its Arms

  Chapter Five: Never Sleep with Your Costars

  Chapter Six: My Bug Phase

  Chapter Seven: Eyes Like Navel Oranges

  Chapter Eight: The Blond One

  Chapter Nine: I Love When You Do That Chicken Dance

  Intermission

  Chapter Ten: I Bought a Goat to Keep the Donkey Company

  Chapter Eleven: Not for Nothing, but I Haven’t Retired

  Chapter Twelve: The Mother Gets Killed Gruesomely in the First Five Minutes

  Chapter Thirteen: Not Dying of Politeness

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  My Journey to Badassery

  I toyed with the idea of writing a book a number of years ago and started jotting down things I could include. I just went back to look at my notes and saw that the very first thing I wrote down was “Mrs. Morgan’s lawn.”

  I’ve never known a Mrs. Morgan, nor do I have any memories of her lawn. Our lawn, yes. I remember one day when I was a kid, our neighbor Mrs. Perkins called my mother to tell her there was something seriously wrong with me. My dad had set me up in the side yard with the power mower, and I was pretending the blades of grass were enemy soldiers that I was mowing down in a ferocious battle. Naturally I had to speak up above the roar of the motor as I gave orders to my troops. But to Mrs. Perkins, at least, it looked very odd to see a young girl shoving a big lawn mower around while angrily bellowing at the grass. handbreak

  Actually, there were a lot of calls to my mother to say that something must have been wrong with me.

  * * *

  I kicked ass onscreen way before I did so in real life. The roles I’ve played have taken me down paths I never could have imagined when I dreamed of becoming an actor. They have helped transform me, slowly, in fits and starts, into someone of power. As my career progressed, I went all the way from playing a soap star in her underwear in Tootsie, to a housewife-turned-road warrior in Thelma & Louise, to a baseball phenomenon in A League of Their Own, to the first female president of the United States in Commander in Chief, and more. For everything I put into each of those roles, I’ve taken away far more. Acting has changed me every single time I’ve had the great good fortune to do it.

  Some movies I’ve been in have even inspired the people watching them to feel more empowered—like, you know, Earth Girls Are Easy.

  I’ve been blessed to practice living a different life onscreen—a bolder, freer, and more authentic one than my own. And though my characters were bold before I was, that boldness rubbed off on me, and transformed me into a fledgling—then full-fledged—badass. (I figure I’m permitted to call myself that because the magazine The Mary Sue ran an article in 2013 with the headline “Geena Davis Is the Most Badass Badass to Ever Badass.”)

  For people observing my life from afar, I imagine they picture my journey to badassery climbing upward in a nice even line:

  However, this is the actual graph of my journey:

  Setbacks are part of the process on any journey, of course, but the reason my road toward claiming my power is so meandering may, in part, be a result of growing up a cripplingly polite New Englander who was much too tall to hide.

  I may be one of the few people who can honestly say they very nearly died of politeness. Two others are my parents, as you’ll see. This dangerous politeness was bequeathed to me early on. I was conditioned to think that I mustn’t ask for things, must never put anyone out; so trained to be insanely polite that I learned to have no needs at all: even if someone was handing me an already poured glass of ice water, I was to say, “No, thank you. I’m not thirsty.” Because otherwise, well, imagine what might have happened! I could have conceivably become the person who, every time she showed up, needed a freshly poured glass of fucking ice water, and who would want to be such a person?

  My polite near-death came when I was about eight years old. My ninety-nine-year-old great-uncle Jack was driving his wife, great-aunt Marion, my parents, and me back to their house after a dinner out. The lovely old fella was occasionally veering in and out of the oncoming, if blessedly empty, traffic lane. Rather than saying anything out loud, like . . . I don’t know, “FOR GOD’S SAKE PULL OVER, JACK, WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE”—my parents simply moved me to the spot between them on the back seat, thinking, I presume, that when the inevitable head-on collision occurred, I’d be killed a little less in the middle. (Never mind the fact that I was now perfectly positioned for a straight shot through the windshield.) Finally, great-uncle Jack full-on wobbled into the other lane and stayed there, straddling the yellow line—but this time a car was approaching.

  Still, not a peep from my parents.

  At the very last instant, with mere seconds before impact, Marion gently said, “A little to the right, Jack.” I still remember the distorted faces of the occupants of the other car streaking past us, inches away, as he swerved just in time. The lesson being: Even if there is death in the offing (or of the offspring), don’t say something that could possibly be perceived as impolite.

  * * *

  I think the big task of my life is to close the gap between when something happens to me and when I react authentically to it. And miraculously, the characters I’ve played have helped transform me, slowly, in fits and starts, into someone who can stand up for herself—and who on occasion knows how she feels about something right in the moment.

  It wasn’t until I played Thelma that I realized I may have wanted to become an actor so fervently because I could use acting to fill out the persona of someone confident in their abilities—someone I desperately wanted to be like in real life. You’ve heard the term “Fake it till you make it”—I would inelegantly paraphrase that as “Act like it enough and it might just rub off on you.” At the very least, people will think you’re like that in real life.

  Before Thelma & Louise, I felt plagued by the strong currents of self-effacement coursing through me, so I decided to try taking a self-defense class (with Impact, a great company offering these kinds of classes). In this class, you face up against a man in a huge padded suit, like the Michelin Man—so you can fight him as hard as you can without any fear of hurting him. The first thing the instructor did was to have us stand in a line, and one by one the padded man would walk toward us. When it felt like he was about to invade our boundaries, we were to say “Stop!” One by one he approached my fellow classmates, and the differences in when they felt he was getting too close showed how strong or weak their boundaries were.

  And when it was my turn? He ended up walking right into me, because, somehow, I couldn’t manage to say “Stop!” in time. Evidently, I thought I had no license to tell anybody to stop doing anything.

  But by the time I reached my forties I’d become a middle-aged data geek and had my own institute on gender in media—and I became a mom. I had my kids late in life—at forty-six and forty-eight!—and I thought it was wonderful that this happened after I’d become more of who I was supposed to be. I could show them what it was
like to be a strong woman and raise them to see women and men as equals.

  For example, have you ever heard this riddle?

  A father and son are in a terrible accident, and they are taken to different hospitals. When the boy is wheeled into the operating room, the surgeon exclaims, “I can’t operate on him, he’s my son!” Who is the surgeon?

  An interviewer once commented to me that if anyone would know the answer it would be my kids, and I said, “You got that right!” So later, just for fun, I told the riddle to one of my five-year-old sons, knowing he would nail it.

  He named every type of male relative that exists, then moved on to “the neighbor” before I stopped him to say it was the patient’s mother.

  “No way—women can’t be doctors!”

  Yikes.

  Another time I was with my little twin boys in the park when they saw a squirrel. Wanting to reinforce the equality between males and females, I said, “Oh, isn’t she cute?”

  They both turned to me instantly and said in near unison, “How do you know it’s a SHE??!”

  . . . but I kept at it, to the point where if we were watching a cartoon and I started to lean over to say something to one of the kids, they’d stop me by saying, “I already noticed, Mom—not enough girls in that scene.”

  I’m optimistic that our culture will finally be able to recognize the unconscious bias in all of us if we keep pointing it out. I must be an optimist. I mean, how many times do I buy kombucha thinking, “Oh yeah, kombucha! Maybe this time I’ll like it!”

  * * *

  Pretty much as soon as I learned that people had jobs, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. Lord knows where the idea of an acting career came from, and at such a young age, especially since my family was as far from showbiz as you could possibly get. I hail from Wareham, Massachusetts, which optimistically called itself “The Gateway to Cape Cod” because it was not a destination town itself—you had to drive through it to get to the Cape. It most certainly wasn’t Hollywood.

  My parents said I announced at three years old that I was going to be in movies—though I have no memory of this. I’m sure I did say it, though. Throughout my childhood, I maintained this sort of idiotic, unshakeable faith that I was going to be an actor. (By the way, I don’t use the term “actress.” I feel sure it will soon come to sound as quaint and old-fashioned as “doctoress” or “poetess.” I consider myself a former waiter who became an actor.)

  I began training for my future career early. Once when I was home with the flu, I lay on the couch for a whole week watching soap operas. I noticed that at the ends of scenes, very often one of the characters would raise one eyebrow to signal intrigue. I figured that must be a skill actors had to have—raising one eyebrow—so for three days I held one eyebrow down and raised the other as I watched TV. Then I thought, What if the camera is on the other side? So I switched, and taught myself to raise the other eyebrow, too.

  Despite their homespun ways, when I told my parents that I planned to major in acting in college, they simply said, “Oh, okay.” They reacted as if I’d told them I was going to study ophthalmology or business administration—something you could actually expect to get a job doing. But of course, my laser-like focus on acting was not news. They knew that was what I wanted to be from the beginning.

  Bill and Lucille met in Wareham, at the White Rabbit Tea Room—where my mother waitressed and my father lunched—and in chatting they realized that when he was a boy, little Bill had had his teeth fixed by a dentist up in a little town in Vermont; that dentist had been none other than my mother’s father. Turns out Bill and Lucille both came from very tiny and very adjacent towns in rural Vermont, but fate had brought them together, 250 miles south.

  My dad was a humble New Englander, an engineering genius, a machinist, a carpenter, and he held patents in surveying inventions. Whatever was broken at a neighbor’s house, be it their furnace, car, plumbing, or lawn mower, Dad was the one to fix it. Mom, likewise, worked hard and was driven: aside from raising my brother and me, she took a job at the nursing home across the street helping patients do crafts, and at the local elementary school as a teacher’s aide. She also waited tables at Ben Howe’s Chicken House.

  And she danced with a broom, singing music-hall songs.

  My brother Dan was two and a half years older than I was, and like so many siblings, we toggled between loving each other and building a wall of cereal boxes on the dining room table between us so we didn’t have to look at each other.

  * * *

  My birth certificate reads, “Virginia Elizabeth,” but on the way home from the hospital after I was born, my mom asked little Dan what he thought my nickname should be. I was named after my mom’s sister, Virginia, who went by “Ginny,” so it had to be something else. Dan said, “Geena” (or did he say “Gina”?) and my mom liked it so much that she said she wished she’d thought of it before naming me Virginia. I always thought it was funny that she didn’t know how to spell it correctly.

  We—Mom, Dad, Dan, and I—basically lived like my grandparents had back in the day, heating the house with a wood stove, kerosene lanterns always at the ready, and taking baths on Saturday nights. (We didn’t have a shower.) Dan and I had to take turns with who would get the bathwater first; there was only one bath drawn to save water, and being second always gave us the heebiejeebies.

  Dad had a collection of about five hundred antique axes that were spread all over the house, including beneath the dining room table and under my bed. Mom grew all our food—all of it, from asparagus to zucchini—in a one-acre garden. She would often start the water boiling and then say, “Go pick the corn.” It really was Little House on the Prairie, without the pinafores and gingham dresses. Or prairie.

  My folks were raised to be deeply resourceful. They came from a time when people could do anything and everything themselves—build their own house, make their own clothes. Our collection of used foil was something to marvel at. In fact, I’m not sure they ever bought a second roll.

  They were also the most deeply, profoundly polite people who ever lived. My parents would probably have been Amish, had they heard of being Amish. Their lives would have changed not a bit.

  * * *

  As I said, I chose my career very early: The Christmas when I was three, I asked Santa for sunglasses, because somehow, I already knew that movie stars wore them. (My mom said she had a hell of a time finding children’s sunglasses in December in Massachusetts.) I would wear the sunglasses whenever I watched TV.

  My skill at being no trouble to anyone also kicked in early. I was sitting on my mom’s lap during a church service, and as one-year-olds are wont, I was fussing and jerking and generally moving around a bunch. Somehow, I managed to clock my head on the pew in front of us; the bonk of my skull hitting wood was so loud everything stopped. The congregation held its collective breath to see just how much bloody murder I was prepared to scream. And then, nothing. Mom said she grabbed me and held me tightly, quietly saying, “Shhh . . . shhh . . .” This became one of her favorite stories about me, which I heard many times: “And she didn’t make a peep!” she’d say, proudly, as if I’d passed some kind of cosmic test in which I had maintained decorum and invisibility.

  I tell the pew story because it is the signature moment of my earliest formative years, and its lessons have become one of the key push-pulls of my life: being invisible while being as visible as possible; assertive yet modest; loud yet shy. Something very New England, very self-effacing, was banged into my skull that Sunday.

  * * *

  My mother experienced tragedy at a young age. Her beloved father, the dentist, had died when she was just eleven. He had been the passenger in a car during a terrible snowstorm; at one point he put his head out the window to try to see where he and his fellow dentist friend were going and was killed by a passing road sign. My mother’s family became desperately poor. My grandmother made a little money from selling homemade dinner rolls, and it was my mother’
s job to run as fast as she could with them to the customer’s house while they were still warm. They’d be rejected without payment if they arrived cold.

  My mother had only two dresses throughout high school, wearing one and washing the other every day. She worked as a nanny for a dollar a day, and she ended up putting her older sister through nursing school and her younger brother through college. Once they had jobs, though, they didn’t pay for her to go to nursing school, as promised, and for the rest of her life she felt somewhat martyred, and quite rightly.

  After Dan and me, Bill and Lucille had another son, Joel, who was stillborn. Dan and I were somehow kept completely in the dark about this, and didn’t find out about him until our mom died; Dad wanted to rebury Joel with her. In hindsight, it was utterly heartbreaking to realize that all the times when we were kids that she’d said, “If I had another son, I’d name him Joel,” she’d already had a son named Joel.

  But Mom also had a tremendous zest for life. She was a performer at home (with broom and without), and had a broad comedic style, singing music hall songs at the top of her voice:

  I’m the LONESOMEST gal in town . . .

  But I’m learning to roll my eyes,

  And someday you may be surprised,

  When,

  I steal someone’s lover man and kiss him with a smack.

  I’ll hug him and I’ll tease him,

  But I’ll never give him back . . .

  My father was the most handy, understated, modest New Englander who ever lived, but certainly no Spencer Tracy. This fact was about the only thing that disappointed my mother about Bill Davis, as she claimed Mr. Tracy was her “boyfriend.”

  My mother would frequently bemoan her looks in a selfdramatizing way. Dad may not have been a matinee idol, but his wit was drier than a pinot grigio:

  “I’m so old and ugly!” she’d say.

  Dad took a moment to consider.

  “You’re not so terrible, awful old.”

  * * *