LEAVINGS begins with Megan’s birth in 1927. She is the love child of a Hollywood screenwriter and director, and a narcissistic married woman twenty-four years his senior. Abandoned in the hospital as a newborn and made a ward of the city of Los Angeles, twenty-one-month-old Megan lands in a stable home with strict Pentecostal foster parents who are dutiful in her care, but not loving.Â
As a young child Megan has a strong sense of not belonging—at home, at school, or even at church. She sleeps on a cot at the foot of her foster sister’s bed. She is asked to leave first grade after crying for two weeks. She never gets saved at church. Even her name comes and goes, depending on under whose care she falls.
Hers is a life marked by continual searching, and repeated leavings—being left by others and being forced to leave. We follow this odd but lovable child, adolescent, and young adult through a solitary life of acute observation and search for identity, from finding her birth father to meeting her half siblings, an early marriage, children, meeting the woman who will be the love of her life and, finally, divorce and freedom.
LEAVINGS begins with Megan’s birth in 1927. She is the love child of a Hollywood screenwriter and director, and a narcissistic married woman twenty-four years his senior. Abandoned in the hospital as a newborn and made a ward of the city of Los Angeles, twenty-one-month-old Megan lands in a stable home with strict Pentecostal foster parents who are dutiful in her care, but not loving.Â
As a young child Megan has a strong sense of not belonging—at home, at school, or even at church. She sleeps on a cot at the foot of her foster sister’s bed. She is asked to leave first grade after crying for two weeks. She never gets saved at church. Even her name comes and goes, depending on under whose care she falls.
Hers is a life marked by continual searching, and repeated leavings—being left by others and being forced to leave. We follow this odd but lovable child, adolescent, and young adult through a solitary life of acute observation and search for identity, from finding her birth father to meeting her half siblings, an early marriage, children, meeting the woman who will be the love of her life and, finally, divorce and freedom.
Hearsay
I was born September 7, 1927, in Los Angeles, California. According to Auntie, my mother’s younger sister, I spent the first eleven months of my life in the Hollywood Osteopathic Hospital where I was born. No, I was neither sick nor premature (unless one believes the gypsy who told Mother that I had been born thirty years too soon). Although my mother once told me that I had been allergic to her milk, I rather think it more likely that Mother was allergic to me.Â
Despite Mother’s own assertion that “any woman who says she wanted more than one child is lying,” I was her sixth child. In 1915, after the birth of her second, she had gone to her brother-in-law, Dr. N. A. Thompson, for birth control advice. He suggested a method of contraception, probably either a pessary or a harsh douche. Fifteen months later, she had twins, each weighing more than six pounds.Â
My Aunt Octavia who had given birth to a twelve-pound son in 1909, discovered she was pregnant again only a few months later. According to Mother, her sister went down to the creek near the “soddy” and chose a willow stick, which she peeled and whittled until it was “nice and smooth and sharp.” She was successful in aborting the fetus, but she pierced her uterus and nearly died.
My own birth was long and harrowing. I was crosswise in the uterus, presenting an arm, meaning my mother endured hours of a brutal obstetrical procedure as the physicians tried to maneuver me so they could pull me out by my feet. The alternative would have been to decapitate me. When Mother recovered from Twilight Sleep, the anesthetic she received during the final stage of labor, she said, “The baby’s dead, of course.” She could not have been overjoyed with the answer. She remained in the hospital for over two weeks following my birth. Very soon afterward, according to Juneau’s diary, Mother returned to Boulder, Colorado, to her husband and children there.
Mother remained married to Neil B. McKenzie until his death in 1934, so I was legally his child. I’m sure his choice not to deny his paternity was due more to a desire to avoid the scandal in the then small community of Boulder than to acquire some other man’s child as an heir. He did however invite his errant wife to bring me home to 809 Pine Street in Boulder. She chose not to, and I am most grateful to her for this. That was a house of sorrow.
I don’t know anything about my mother’s actual relationship with my father, Chauncey Rowland Brown, beyond knowing that Mother was crazy in love with him, and that he always seemed to be involved in concurrent affairs. His niece, Moya, thought of Mother as his secretary; possibly he did too. However, my mother thought of herself as his partner, his mistress, the one person who actually understood him and could save him from himself.Â
There is no way of confirming what either of my parents considered as a permanent solution for my care, but I’m pretty sure Mother expected my father to assume financial responsibility for me. Their temporary solution was to leave me in the hospital where I was born.Â
When Auntie first told me I had been left in the hospital for eleven months, I thought she was mistaken. I couldn’t imagine what circumstances would allow parents to leave a healthy baby in the hospital for any time at all. But I was thinking of the mid-century hospitals where my own children were born. What seems unthinkable now might have been a relatively humane practice before the development of the many social services we have become accustomed to. I don’t think it was abandonment; I think it was a last resort.
Do infants survive in iron cribs with starched nurses feeding them at arms’ length for all that time? Perhaps some soft-breasted woman, with no nurse’s badge, and no starch, picked me up and held me, thought fleetingly of adopting me. The facts don’t matter, because no one on earth remembers them, and the truth is that I survived.
By 1931, my father, Chauncey Brown, had pretty much destroyed a promising career as a director. I can’t even say whether he was motivated by high mindedness or egomania. Most commentators of the time thought it was simple temperament. Whatever it was, it apparently interfered with his feeling any obligation toward his children, his domestic partners, his employers, or the cast and crew of the films he abandoned. According to his eldest son, Rowland C. W. Brown, born in 1923, his first wife left him because he had either been unable or unwilling to pay the obstetrical bills. He had a public reputation of having walked out on more films than he directed. He often refused to sign contracts with studios, allegedly because he didn’t want to be tied to a working situation he didn’t like. Ultimately, the producers found an advantage in the lack of a contract and fired him after he had done the lion’s share of directing a film and gave the credit to another director, one, who in turn brought greater prestige to the product.Â
I remember several visits with Mrs. Maytham, my father’s mother. At the time, I had no idea who she was or what claim she had on me. At least once I stayed overnight. At bedtime, she released the braid from its coiled bun, allowing her hair to cascade in blonde waves that flowed to her waist. Her sudden transformation frightened me; it was as though she had suddenly become another person. Another time, Hannah Maytham appeared at the Woods’ on Christmas morning. If the Woods were expecting her, they didn’t tell me. She drove me across town to her apartment in the Garden of Allah. There was a man there whom I knew as Chaunce, and Jack, a boy in knickers. Jack was playing with a mechanical horse race.
I watched the tiny horses race around the track, itching to play with it but I doubt that I asked. In my mind, nothing that I had ever received for Christmas came close to those racing horses. The track is the very first thing that I imagined I wanted but didn’t get. Of course, I had no idea at all what a horse race was. (I had never been left in the car all day while my father gambled away the household money at Santa Anita as, many years later, my half-brother Steven, told me he had).
Just a few years ago I found the script for a screenplay Mother wrote in 1931 depicting an older woman and her former lover, a young screenwriter. He had a little shrine in his apartment with a picture of their child, whom he described as a pearl, a jewel. (Mother liked the term, perhaps invented it, and wrote a poem in which she asserted my flawless pearliness.) He promised that the little princess would be driven around town in her own Rolls Royce—someday. Meanwhile, he visited the adorable little creature daily in the hospital.
According to my half-sisters, Margery and Cynthia, after Mother returned to Boulder, she spent many sleepless nights, pacing the floor, smoking one cigarette after another. I, on the other hand, slept well in the foster home I lived in from the time I was twenty-one months old. Mother once told me that although my foster home was far from ideal, she knew that I was well nourished and that my foster parents were decent people.
I remember very few events before I was three years old, but I remember visiting my mother, Alwilda McKenzie, in a hotel room several times. I remember the room, but don’t know whether she remained at the same hotel or whether she moved from place to place. I remember a pull-down bed, Palmolive soap, a filmy window. Mother called me “Darling” and smoked cigarettes from a green fifty-flat box (Luckies). Once, there were two or three other women there. They were smoking and one of their cigarettes brushed my arm, burning it slightly. I was indignant. It could have been the same visit that Mother sang “Baby’s Boat’s A Silver Moon,” although she must have sung it to me many more times than once as I lay beside her in bed, because, when I had my own babies, I knew the words: “Sail baby sail/Out on that sea/Only don’t forget to sail/Back again to me.”
I don’t usually read memoirs, but Memoir of a 1920s Hollywood Love Child by Megan McClard really caught my attention when I read the synopsis. This seemed like a captivating and touching story and it was.
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The Author, Megan McClard, does a wonderful job when it comes to immersing the reader with her wonderful writing. The characters in this story are more than just characters, they are real people. This can make the reader feel more connected to the story and it adds weight to what we are reading, because the events that happen and the things that the characters go through are also real.
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The good. The bad. The pretty. The ugly. It was all true and that left me pondering of how things used to be back in the 20th century. Sometimes it feels like it was such a long time ago, but in the grand scheme of things, it was that long ago. This story reminded me of how far we have come as a society, but also, that we still have a long way to go to be better.
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This memoir was a great read, and I am glad that I got the opportunity to read it. Memoir of a 1920s Hollywood Love Child is a book that I would highly recommend this book to everyone, but especially those who are looking for something out of their comfort zone. This was definitely out of the genres I usually read, but I am happy that I gave this book a shot. I truly enjoyed it. I was nice to read something different and Megan McClard’s writing is wonderful and captivating. I know this is a book that I will be reading again, and it is also one of my favourites of this year. I truly love finding hidden gems like this book.