(wicked stepmothers really do exist)
It was a lovely afternoon that day in Los Angeles when I stopped by the place where my father lived along with his girlfriend, Ildiko. The front door of their pad was open so I stepped inside and there they were – my father looked very nervous, probably because Ildiko was holding a small pistol to his head, actually making contact with his left temple.
Although I was living up in Laurel Canyon with David Carradine and Barbara Hershey at the time, I was hanging around quite a bit at those little fantasy cottages on Formosa Avenue between Fountain and De Longpre in West Hollywood where Dad and Ildiko lived. Ildiko would later become the mother of my half-sister, Drew. I was there nearly every day. Whenever I showed up, if they weren’t fighting, they were fucking.
I met Ildiko just a few days after she and my father had met. The two of them had been hanging out for a few days but I don’t think they had done the deed yet. Ildiko Jaid was the name I was given though some time later my father told me her real name was Mako (like the shark). She’s Jaid Barrymore now and I’ll get to that before long but for the moment just let me say that she’ll always be Ildiko as far as I’m concerned. What I do know is that Ildiko is a pretty common girl’s name in Hungary. She was a petite brunette, almost birdlike. She had a lightning fast wit, she laughed often and she had a William F. Buckley Jr. sized vocabulary, and used it. Dad introduced the two of us then walked off, I suppose so she and I could get acquainted. The moment we were alone she looked me in the eye and said, “Shall I seduce you?”
My father was only twenty-two years old when I was born. Ildiko is eleven years older than I, so she was exactly between us in age. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, Ildiko had a plan, she just hadn’t picked out her John Barrymore yet. At least with me there wouldn’t have been broken bones.
Well before very long the two of them were an item and they were living in her place on Formosa. There were several of these cottages surrounding a common courtyard and they looked like dwellings that elves, or dwarfs (or in this case maybe evil witches) might live in. They were originally built as dressing rooms or offsite offices for the Charlie Chaplin Studios (later A&M Records and after that the Jim Henson Studios) located two blocks east of the cottages on La Brea Avenue, half a block south of Sunset Blvd. The landlady was Frances Hyde; everyone called her “Heidi” and the rumor was that she came into possession of the property because she was one of Charlie Chaplin’s mistresses. I never asked her about the veracity of that rumor but she did tell me she was in possession my great uncle Lionel’s oboe, but that it had cracked after sitting around and drying out from neglect over a few decades. It was just as well; I can barely play the clarinet – double reed instruments like oboe and bassoon are a bitch.
I can only describe the relationship between my father and Ildiko as ‘intense but chaotic’ to borrow a phrase frequently used in the DSM-IV. In the beginning and for a while things were definitely looking up for him. She got him off all the drugs except for coffee and cigarettes. David Carradine got him hired as a guest star for an episode of Kung-Fu and with Ildiko’s help, high maintenance though he was, he managed to actually get through a week’s work without telling everyone to fuck off and walking off the job. It was the last acting gig he ever actually completed and he was goddamned good in it too.
Naturally, it didn’t last. Once the episode aired people started offering him parts. He landed a feature film and they flew him to the Philippines. He and Ildiko were back so fast I was amazed they even had time to make the round trip flight. They must have spent less than half a day on the ground. He had simply left, he didn’t even tell the film company he was quitting until he was back in L.A.
Well now that things had returned to status quo with my father’s career and he was in no longer in any danger of making a living, he returned to form in his personal life as well, characterized as it was by whatever illicit drugs he could score from the best dope dealers in Hollywood, whatever prescription drugs (there were still great prescription drugs out there in those days) he could talk doctors into giving him, the ever present half pint of Jose Cuervo Gold Tequila in his hip pocket and the personality that no sane person would ever want in a romantic partner. His relationship with Ildiko got really weird, and really violent.
Eventually he had broken both of her arms (one at a time, of course), but the really weird part about it was that she not only kept coming back for more, but in fact it seemed to me that she kept intentionally instigating these episodes. One time while he was out she went and took a prescription bottle of his containing 100 Obetrol pills and flushed them down the toilet, over my very strong objections and warnings regarding the likely consequences of that action. When she finished flushing them I said, “You’re on your own, Ildiko.” and got the hell out of there myself.
This state of affairs quite naturally led to the moment where I began this narrative, Ildiko holding a gun to my father’s head. If she had put a couple of rounds into his brain case right there and then he would have had it coming. Nevertheless, having walked into this scene I felt it was my responsibility to do my best to defuse the situation.
“Give me the gun, Ildiko” I said, as calmly and with as much authority as I could muster under the circumstances. She ignored me, at least she tried to, but I could tell that my presence was distracting her because now she looked nervous as well.
I just kept repeating, “Give me the gun, Ildiko.” in that same calm, confident tone of voice. I was anything but calm or confident but I must have done a decent job of concealing it because eventually she put the safety on and handed me the gun, butt first. Obviously this wasn’t the first time she’d ever held a semi-automatic pistol.
I ejected the clip and pulled back the slide. Yep, there was a round in the chamber, so when I had walked in she’d had it loaded and cocked with the safety off and ready to fire, all she would have had to do was to squeeze the trigger.
The gun was a piece of shit, a Jennings .25 caliber, the kind of gun often bought anonymously for a throwaway; the kind a cop could plant on an otherwise unarmed suspect that the officer had accidentally (or not accidentally) killed. The only way you’d have a decent chance of killing someone with it was to shoot them a couple of times right in the temple. Of course that’s exactly where Ildiko had been holding it when I showed up at their door. I wonder if she knew she was pregnant yet.
As well as I can remember she never even asked for it back, I think she knew that once she handed it over to me it was gone for good. I assured her it would be properly disposed of. Dad and I went up to Red Dog’s and I traded him the piece for an ounce of medium quality weed.
Some years later I ran into Ildiko at Dan Tana’s. She and Dad had broken up years earlier but I guess she was still a little nervous about her safety (she was after all still a single, attractive woman who barely weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet) because she showed me the contents of her purse. Now instead of a piece of shit Jennings .25 caliber automatic she was carrying a Smith & Wesson Chief Special, a .38 caliber revolver with a five shot cylinder for a slimmer profile when concealed - very reliable with plenty of stopping power. I wondered if Peter Mayer had schooled her on the finer points of gun ownership once she and my father were no longer an item.
Well the incident with the gun was pretty close to the end of their relationship; they had a few more big fights and she moved out; I’m pretty sure she did know she was pregnant by the time she was ready to go.
After Ildiko left my father turned all four of the stove’s burners on high and left. He later claimed that burning the place down was an accident, that he was drunk at the time. He rarely admitted to being impaired from drinking, even though he was nearly every minute he was awake during his drinking years, but I think he didn’t want the word ‘arson’ to cross anyone’s mind.
From the time my father and Ildiko first started dating (read: fucking), he always had this thing, this insistence that the two of us, Ildiko and I, must never get together that way; sexually, I mean. The truth was although she was sort of my type (I’ve always had a thing for petite brunettes, especially ones with small tits and big brains), as soon as she and my father were together in my mind she was family; I never thought about her as anything else; certainly not as a potential lover. In fact the day we met when she had contemplated aloud the idea of seducing me I had found it disturbing, probably in part because at that time I was in still in fact an eighteen year old virgin. I had sex for the first time more than a year later, just a few days shy of my twentieth birthday, after Drew was born as it turned out. My stepfather had offered to get me laid when I was fifteen but I had declined his offer. I had sex when I was ready to have it and I would say it worked out well for me; I skipped adolescent sex entirely and went straight to adult sex.
But Dad kept bringing it up, the entire time the two of them were together and then for long after they had split up, for six or seven years after, even during those first few years after Drew was born when Ildiko and I had absolutely no contact with each other. I’m sure the thought of the two of us fucking each other would never have crossed either of our minds if Dad hadn’t put the idea in there, then kept preventing either of us from forgetting about it. In that context he always used the phrase ‘mixing the light’ and I figured it was another of those whacked ideas of his. On a day to day basis he could seem perfectly sane but he was crazy in some big ways, I mean he had some crazy ideas. One of those ideas was that one human being could have two biological fathers, he called it the ‘drip down theory.’ He wasn’t exactly a science guy.
Well eventually I did reconnect with Ildiko and Drew. I honestly can’t recall how or where but it could have been at Dan Tana’s, I hung out there a lot back in those days. And for the next couple of years we were in each others’ lives in a way that I mistakenly thought at the time was important. We took three trips to New York City together – I can’t remember the order but one trip was to attend a multi-day John Barrymore film festival at the Carnegie Theater. I met Garson Kanin there with his wife Ruth Gordon. He had directed my grandfather in ‘The Great Man Votes’ in 1939 and coaxed granddad into giving one of his last really good performances. Garson looked great and I told him so.
He said, “Son, there are three stages in life. First you’re young, and then you’re old, and then you’re looking great. Me, I’m in the looking great stage.” (as of the time of this writing I now myself am in the looking great stage—no one gets out of this thing alive).
Another of the New York trips was when the US Post Office unveiled the Barrymore stamp on its first day of issue, it was part of a series of performing arts stamps. So through these events and several others back in L.A. where we were all living, Drew’s father being completely absent (and mostly non compos mentis) I was the guy who would clean up, put on a suit and show up with her. Since I’m 20 years older than Drew, that led to a whole lot of photos of the two of us (many in which I’m holding her in my arms or on my shoulders) winding up in various photo agencies labeled, “Drew Barrymore with her father,” or something equivalent. Those photos show up on television talk and tabloid shows to haunt both of us to this day, but for a couple of years there I was sort of a surrogate father, at least in public.
I can’t remember why we were in NYC when Ildiko and I actually did the deed, but I do know we both did it for the same reason – to burn my father. We were each pissed at him for something, I can’t really recall why I was, it might have been that bait & switch he did on me with the Book of Hours – I’d sent it to Christie’s in London to auction to get the best price for it. He had gotten on Beverly Coburn’s telex, the same telex I had used to set up the deal, and had it sent back, then sold it to some dealer on La Cienega for a fraction of its value, cutting me out totally. I can’t remember if that was the reason I fucked Ildiko or if it was something else, the sequence in which things happened are fuzzy in my memory. Anyway we, Ildiko, Drew and I were staying in a suite at the Iroquois Hotel, we always stayed there. For whatever reason, Ildiko and I spent the night having sex. I can’t say that it was any kind of surprise, my father made such a thing about it that if anything he had made it inevitable.
When we got back from New York, we both told everyone we knew, just to make sure it would get back to him. When he confronted me about it I said, “Well Dad, you’re the one who always says that a grudge fuck beats a mercy fuck any day of the week. Guess what? You were right!” Then just to rub a little salt into the wound I said, “Not only that, but I’m getting really tired of hearing how much better I am than you in the sack.”
That last bit was bullshit, as far as I knew at that point Ildiko was the only one woman we had in common, although she would turn out to not be the only one in the long run, there would be at least three; the other two didn’t feel compelled to tell me they had fucked him until after they had fucked me as well.
Well it wasn’t until after my father had been dead several years that I learned for the first time something that theater historians apparently already knew. My grandfather John Barrymore, my father’s father, had lost his virginity to his own stepmother at age thirteen. Once I learned that fact I understood Dad’s ‘thing’ about me and Ildiko never hooking up and if my father had been the one to inform me of that little piece of family history I’m fairly sure I would have respected it. But he didn’t tell me, instead he kept hammering away with that crazy metaphysical bullshit about ‘mixing the light.’
I’m an iconoclast, I’ve always been an iconoclast, I was one for at least thirty years before I ever heard the word ‘iconoclast’ or learned its meaning. Try and dissuade me from doing something simply because it’s frowned upon by social convention and I’ll be on that shit like white on rice.
Well we, all three of us, Dad, Ildiko and I, got past that event. My father and I did some fucked up shit to each other but we never lied to each other, about those actions or about anything else.
Sometime toward the end of 1980, or maybe it was early 1981, Ildiko got it into her head that she wanted my father to marry her. Seeing as how they hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in years this struck me as pointless. When I asked her why, Ildiko said it was because she never wanted Drew’s legitimacy to be questioned.
I said, “Ildiko, there’s no such thing as an illegitimate child in the State of California, that status does not exist in the law. His name is on her birth certificate, he’s never contested it, and every time I went over to your house I had to wait outside because the two of you were fucking. Drew is my sister and everybody knows it.”
Nevertheless Ildiko was pretty focused on this marriage thing so in light of that fact I asked her that if I helped make it happen (purely as a business deal, mind you), exactly what would she be willing to put up to make it worth doing from my father’s POV; what was in it for him? And so I, along with some help from Peter Mayer and John Desko, negotiated a deal between Ildiko and Dad. They would marry, then she (actually Drew, since that’s where the money would be coming from) would pay Dad’s rent for a year, and when that year had passed they would get a quiet divorce.
The wedding took place in the judge’s chambers in Beverly Hills. Dad was up for his third and final DUI. Somehow his attorney, Peter Knecht, had managed to get him a deal where he wouldn’t go to jail. On his third DUI. He swore to the judge that he would never drive again, sober or drunk (I had often said to him over the years that, “In your case, Dad, it’s don’t drink OR drive.”) and in the end he actually kept that promise, except for that golf cart he used to drive around Pioneer Town while he was living up there. He even drove that thing recklessly.
So in the interest of killing two birds with one stone, since he had to be in the Beverly Hills Court that day anyway, the same judge who had just ruled on his DUI case conducted the marriage in his chambers, March 3, 1981. Drew had just turned seven years old a couple weeks earlier and she wasn’t present for the wedding. John Desko and I were the witnesses.
Well they only paid Dad’s rent for one month, instead of the agreed upon year, and shortly after that Ildiko cut me out of both of their lives, along with a lot of her own friends. She started calling herself Jaid Barrymore shortly after that, and that’s really what this marriage thing had all been about from the get-go, it had fuck all to do with Drew or her ‘legitimacy.’
Ildiko had played both of us, Dad and me, for the long con over an eight year period and she had done it brilliantly, like in a David Mamet play. It was two years after the fact before I figured out the degree to which we had been conned. Ildiko’s sense of timing was pretty good as well, since seven years of age is, for most people, right when childhood amnesia comes to an end and the continuous narrative memory of a person’s existence really begins.
Ildiko had grown up in a displaced person’s camp in Hungary after World War II. In many ways, even to this day, I admire her – much the same way that the android Ashe’s decapitated head had admired the Alien in the first film of that series: “I admire its purity.”
Afterword
It has come to my attention that Drew is under the impression that sometime around thirty-five years ago I was trying to sell a story to the National Enquirer that she isn’t my sister. This is not true, it’s a conflation of two truths into a big lie and Ildiko’s fingerprints are all over this one too.
Some weeks to months after Ildiko had welshed on the deal and stopped paying Dad’s rent, I tried to give (not sell) the story of the negotiated business deal surrounding the marriage to the National Enquirer as a way to pressure Ildiko into keeping her end of the bargain. The “she isn’t really my sister” story, that was my mother, Cara Williams. She and I met with some reporters from the Enquirer at Chaya on Robertson.
I assumed from the get-go that we were being recorded, or that one way or another everything said that night would get back to Ildiko because Drew (under Ildiko and her publicist’s guidance) has always cooperated with the paper; not for money but to shape and retain some control over the story. It was an Enquirer reporter, Todd Gold, that wrote Drew’s first book with her. For the record, I have done exactly the same thing, cooperated with them not for money but to influence the story and I have done so several times; always when the story was about my father, myself or both of us.
So I assumed everything said that evening would get back to Ildiko. Every time my mother said that she wasn’t my sister I said something like, “Ildiko had a plan, she wasn’t going to make a mistake like that and every time I went over there to visit them (Dad and Ildiko) on Formosa I had to wait for them because they were fucking. He’s got three other kids, we know he doesn’t shoot blanks. Drew is his daughter and my sister.”
My father had said several times Drew wasn’t his daughter, but that was just bitterness on his part that he wasn’t getting a big enough payout from her, combined with the fact that Drew has brown eyes and all his other kids’ eyes are blue, as were his own eyes. This is perfectly normal since Ildiko has brown eyes which is a dominant trait, blue eyes are recessive; my father didn’t understand how recessive and dominant genes work and my attempts to explain it to him fell on deaf ears. As I said earlier he wasn’t exactly a science guy.
Anyway I think it probably suited Ildiko’s purpose to tell Drew and later her own friends the modified version of that conversation with the Enquirer reporters, to further alienate Drew from me, I assume. Obviously it worked.
When I was young, maybe ten or twelve years old, Norman Abbot, creator of the TV series wanted me to play Eddie Munster in the The Munsters. I was already jaded about show business; when I hung around on the set of one of my mother’s sitcoms acting seemed like such a silly way to make a living; if you slammed a door too hard the whole wall shook because the sets were all temporary and flimsy. I usually just hung out with the sound guys or some other team behind the camera. So when Norman voiced his desire for me to play Eddie, I was interested in it only for the money. My mother wouldn’t let me do it. She and I have never exactly been like peanut butter and jelly, but she got one or two really important things right, and sparing me the experience of being a kid on a TV series was one of those things. I told her as much a few decades later and thanked her for making the right call on that one.
Drew, by contrast, never had a choice. Ildiko had her working before she was even one year old. I have no anger or resentment for Drew, in fact I admire her for not merely surviving, but thriving. I do feel sorry for her because if anything she’s a victim and her mother is the villain in the piece, and it’s a shame because that’s an area (malicious, manipulative, and wickedly intelligent mothers) where Drew and I would find common ground, if only she wasn’t terrified of everyone she’s related to, particularly yours truly (probably because I at this point in my life I strongly resemble our mutual father).
