I

GROWING UP


Klamath Falls

The Pelican Theatre, Klamath Falls, Oregon1

My First Movie, Age Five

I grew up in Klamath Falls, Oregon, a very western lumber and cattle-ranching town. In 1933, when I was five, there were two theaters showing first-run films, the Pelican and the Pine Tree, and two more playing second-runs, the Rainbow and the Vox. The Vox showed cowboy films exclusively and stood at the far end of Main Street, which the nice people avoided if they could. At the other end, next to the town’s biggest bank, stood the new resplendent Pelican, an ornate motion picture palace in the Spanish Renaissance style with, as I remember, a gilded and carved proscenium arch around the screen, as if enclosing a high altar. This was the theater which played the biggest Hollywood hits, and this was where my parents took me one spring Sunday afternoon, to see my first movie.

It happened like this: we had been to someone’s house on top of the hill that lay between our neighborhood and the downtown section of Klamath Falls for the midday meal. Roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy must have been served, because I had spotted my fresh white shirt with gravy, right on the front, and I was very conscious of this brown stain as we were riding back home in our car. Then I heard my parents debating:

Father: What do you think?

Mother: I think he’s big enough. What’s playing?

We abruptly changed course and headed back to Main Street and the Pelican Theatre. Once there, I would have been too excited to worry much about the gravy spot.

I remember nothing whatsoever of the main feature I saw that afternoon. Years later my parents told me it had starred Janet Gaynor. I remember sitting in the dark, thrilled, amid silent spectators, on a plush seat my father had to push down, enveloped in a constantly shifting light above my head, while huge white faces on the screen spoke to one another. What they were saying I have no memory of. What I do have the clearest, sharpest memory of is the newsreel. There was an arresting shot in it that I can see to this day: civil war was raging somewhere in what must have been a Latin city. There were rioters in the street amid a lot of smoke. The year 1933 was too early for the Spanish Civil War, so perhaps the newsreel showed a South American city under some sort of siege. The newsreel camera had been placed high up in a window and was aimed out onto an avenue lined with imposing buildings. Immediately, to camera left, looters or demonstrators were smashing up an office or apartment. They were tossing things over the railing of a balcony right in front of the camera. Two men brought out a large bronze statue that resembled the Oscar statuette and stood it on the railing, where it tottered for a moment before being tipped over into the street, into which it dropped headfirst. Was this the figure of a deposed king or dictator, or just an ornament? Were patriotic citizens toppling it down onto the mob? I got the impression, even at that early age, of a house being looted, and that seems to go along with the pleasure I took as a child in seeing burned-down houses and wrecked cars, making my father drive out of his way so I could view them: anarchic upheaval in which domestic things got smashed to bits. Watching the heavy statue of the dictator—if that’s what he was—being tipped over onto the heads of a mob was the first action sequence I can recall seeing on any screen, and I wonder if I acquired my love of disaster movies, with all their disorder, physical destruction, and mass annihilation, from this long-ago newsreel image.

Janet Gaynor in Tess of the Storm Country (1932)

Do I remember my first movie mainly because of the spot on my shirt? Because they are linked events in my memory suggesting each other? Tumultuous rioting in a foreign city in which houses got looted, and the inherent disorder of an eye-catching food stain on my fresh Sunday shirt?

Assembling Ancestors

When I was ten, my maternal grandmother De Loney told me about a relative named Mrs. Clarke. She told me two stories about Mrs. Clarke, which didn’t—or couldn’t—jibe: either she had succumbed in a New Orleans cholera epidemic in the 1850s, or she had cut up her fabulous ball gowns to make bandages for injured Confederate soldiers during our Civil War ten years later. My grandmother had a daguerreotype of Mrs. Clarke, which she gave to me. It had lost its case, and there was only the plate itself surrounded by an oval of pressed and gilt metal. The image is of a plain woman, her dark hair flat on her head and parted in the middle, wearing a black silk full-skirted gown. At her neck there is a dab of gold to represent her brooch, which the photographer had added.

Because I was adopted by my parents when I was a baby, I have never known who my true antecedents were. And so I became interested in my adopted ancestors, and began collecting cased images like that of Mrs. Clarke, later buying them from a dealer in Savannah, assembling a group of virtual ancestors. I preferred family groups of well-dressed people—pretty girls with lively, intelligent faces (these were often English; American girls in the 1850s too often looked blank and repressed, almost unknowable); and handsome, waistcoated young gentlemen in stiff collars. I have to admit I was also on the lookout for a spirited “Mammy,” like the large-hearted Hattie McDaniel in the film Gone with the Wind. My cousin Mary De Loney in Austin inherited a daguerreotype of a family slave of our great-grandfather John Hailey. She wore a white headcloth like Hattie McDaniel’s. But I never found an image resembling the Oscar-winning McDaniel.

My grandmother De Loney told me these and other stories as she lay in bed in my uncle Randolph’s house in Port Arthur, Texas. She could provide five generations of family names: her married name, De Loney; her maiden name, Hailey (she was Hallie Hailey); and Hammett, Locke, and Randolph, taking me right back to the eighteenth century. But she never spoke once of her husband, Isaac Fox De Loney, my grandfather, or of his family, who were descended from the Brodnax family of the early Virginia colony at Jamestown.

Albert De Loney, 1918

In that house in Port Arthur he was persona non grata. In time, as I grew older, I learned about him from his children—first from my mother, another Hallie, who couldn’t speak of her father, whom she adored, without weeping; from mother’s tougher sister, Evelyn; and from their other brother, Albert, or “Ab.” Both daughters claimed their father had looks and charm. His sons, however, had other memories, and the elder, Randolph, grew to hate him. His father would drop out every so often, leaving his growing family to cope somehow in Bogalusa, Louisiana. Months later, he would reappear. At each of these reappearances my grandmother became pregnant. When she died in 1942—she had been born in 1863—my uncle Randolph wouldn’t put her married name on her tombstone and inscribed her maiden name instead: Hailey.

I thought of this interesting-sounding grandfather as a kind of riverboat gambler, with glossy black hair and a dashing mustache, who somehow lived by his wits, and I wanted to know more about him. My uncle Ab must have been the one who told me that my De Loney grandfather had been murdered by a gang of Black workers manning a levee on the Mississippi River during a flood, and that his body had been thrown into the water. He had been an exceptionally cruel taskmaster, Uncle Ab said. But there is an alternative version of how Isaac De Loney died. The year is certain—1933—and it took place in “whereabouts unknown.” His was a watery grave in both versions, but, according to another set of De Loney descendants in Texas, their grandfather had been an insatiable gambler, and he was thrown overboard from a riverboat by other disgruntled gamblers. As he was born in 1858, he was seventy-five in 1933—rather too old, I think, to have been bossing a gang of Black people during a flood. The riverboat version of his dramatic end was described with humor by my Texas cousins, and is the more likely one. In either case he died, as he had mostly lived, and was punished, because of his bad behavior.

Hallie De Loney, my mother, at age seventeen, Bogalusa, Louisiana

Perhaps later on, his two sons each preferred one version of how he died for different reasons. The elder, Randolph, stern and unforgiving, may have thought being tossed overboard by his fellow gamblers was the more appropriate death for his father, who was his enemy. And Albert—Uncle Ab—not very much liking all indiscreet talk of out-of-control gambling, preferred to blame the gang of Black workers.

These stories—or all of the stories that I’ve heard—fed my imagination; at one time I thought of making a film about him and my other grandfather, John—my Ivory grandfather—who, in upstate New York in the 1880s, not long after emigrating from Ireland, became a labor organizer in the hammer factory where he worked. He incited the other men to strike. Their strike was broken, of course, and so was he. He could never get another job in the town of Norwich, being considered a dangerous rabble-rouser. I wanted to call my film something like “My Romantic Grandfathers.”

Grandmother De Loney, circa 1925

I was seven when my grandmother De Loney came all the way from Texas to visit us in Klamath Falls. She descended from her train with the complaint that her berth had been right over a pair of wheels of the sleeping car. “Darlin’, I was almost rattled to death,” she told my father. In Oregon she always felt cold, even sitting out in the sun wrapped up in a blanket. She had brought a little cruet with her—or my mother supplied it—containing tiny hot green chilies in vinegar, which she doused her food with at the table. My memories of her then stand out because of another, stronger memory of her stay: I had been caught by my mother with another little boy named Eddy, who lived across the street from us, during one of those exploratory sexual acts children so like. My father had made me a playhouse from the big wooden case in which our Victorian square piano had been shipped. Standing it on its side, he cut a little door through which Eddy and I could enter, and a little window. One day Eddy and I were in there, trying out putting our penises into each other’s mouths. I don’t know whose idea that was, but I made clear that Eddy’s dick must not touch my lips or tongue, nor the inside of my mouth. I had learned all about germs at school by then. Eddy went first, and I can still exactly see him doing it. I can also remember his acrid odor as he carried out my instructions and I took charge, guiding his little white wormlike penis myself. Then it was my turn, and he opened his mouth wide. I could make a drawing to this day of where we sat, and stood, as we performed. Just then my mother opened the door of the playhouse. She dragged me away from Eddy and pulled me out. He was sent home, and, taking me by the hand, she walked with me to our house. All my mother said to me then was how upset and disappointed Grandmother would be if she knew what Eddy and I had been doing in my playhouse.

I doubt my mother said anything about it to my father (he never spoke of it to me), because I know that for her it would have been unthinkable. If she had told him about Eddy, he would have been relieved to know that I wasn’t just interested in other boys: when I was seven, I also loved exploring with Jeanne Marie, my best friend. We would play doctor down in her basement whenever her parents were away, the details of which are just as vivid today in my memory as those of my one session with Eddy.

Someone from North Carolina told me once that family surnames were often given to Southern boys as middle names at their christening in order to establish some grander family connection. To show where the money was, or the political power. Uncle Ab’s middle name was Fox. Albert Fox De Loney. I never asked who the Foxes were, but that name came into the family with Margaret Bonner Fox, a Virginian, born in 1793. She married Edward Brodnax Walker De Loney—two ringing surnames bestowed as given names—who was my uncle Ab’s great-grandfather. Fox can be a Jewish name, and I thought of the Twentieth Century–Fox Studios in Hollywood. But if the Foxes being memorialized by my Louisiana grandparents had been Jewish, my grandfather De Loney might have nixed that name at once.

When Uncle Ab was about twenty-three, and World War I began, he volunteered to join the Lafayette Escadrille, hoping to become a fighter pilot. The Lafayette Escadrille was an American military unit that had been formed to fight against the Germans in France. Its recruits were generally “boys of good family.” Many were from the South, with fiery temperaments. But my fiery grandfather De Loney was adamant: his younger boy was not to go to that slaughterhouse. He had already lost one son, Bruce, who died from diphtheria in his youth. My uncle Ab disobeyed his father, and went off to France, where he reconnected with my father, a lieutenant in a cavalry regiment whom he had met before the war in Louisiana. Both Uncle Ab and my father were posted far from the front. Uncle Ab never learned to fly, and my father never rode into battle on horseback. Cavalry charges had become a thing of the past, something from the Civil War.

John Hailey, my maternal great-grandfather, circa 1850s

And what about our Civil War? My great-grandfather John Hailey broke his leg in a battle, when his horse was shot out from under him. I know very little about him, what he did, who he was. He was a slave owner, but apparently not a slave driver out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, like his son-in-law, Isaac, whose body was maybe tossed into the Mississippi River. John’s daughter, Hallie, my grandmother, grew up during Reconstruction. She told me the Hailey family lived on a ruinous plantation, and she had a terrible story about a trusted family employee who killed his old parents by driving nails into their skulls. And she spoke to me, lying in bed in Port Arthur half a century later, of a big house making ghostly sounds as winds blew through closed-off, empty rooms. As much Southern gothic as anyone could want. From that house—or maybe another one down there—I have two large silver soupspoons (the kind that butlers all over the South hid in their masters’ tree trunks, so that Yankee soldiers wouldn’t get them), and a pressed-glass saltcellar that we use every day in my house in Claverack, New York.

Both my great-grandfather—John Hailey—and his wife, Sarah (Sallie) Hailey (née Hammett), my great-grandmother, lived on until the early 1900s. Their granddaughter Evelyn, my aunt, remembered seeing them on a wide porch in Louisiana. Because of the pain from his war injury, John Hailey, seeking comfort, would turn a straight-backed chair upside down and lean it against the wall, and then rest himself against it, while stretching his legs out on the porch floor. When his wife died, he “turned his face to the wall,” refusing food, as described in so many lovelorn, romantic tales, and died, inconsolable. He is a middle-aged man in the daguerreotype on the previous page, most likely made in the 1850s, so he would have been born in the early 1820s.

My father, Edward Patrick Ivory, 1917

The strike at the hammer factory in Norwich, New York, that my paternal grandfather led was such an affront to the town, home of Norwich Pharmaceuticals, the maker of Unguentine. It had been a brave thing for him to do: a young man from Cork—of the “Irish Need Not Apply” variety—who had walked off the boat from Ireland and turned one of the town’s main industries on its head after having been given a much-coveted job there.

One of his sons—I think not my father—described his disillusioned state afterward, and how he sat in the back of a relative’s shop, useless, for years. But he helped raise his six sons and a daughter, saw them educated and some of them married, before he died in 1912. They all did well—three of them, including my father, very well, founding flourishing businesses and becoming leaders in their communities. But when my father became a mill owner himself, he never let his workers unionize, perhaps seeing in that the seeds of future disruption.

The Ivory boys—Jim, John, Will, Dave, Pat (my father), and Tom—had a large carriage block of stone, suitable for a mansion, with the name Ivory carved on it, placed in front of their modest house on Adelaide Street, where they grew up. Adelaide Street, I discovered when my father took me to Norwich once when I was in my thirties, was definitely on the wrong side of the tracks. We drove up to his old family home, to which Dad had arranged to gain entrance, and he invited me to go inside with him. But in one of those loutish moments sons everywhere seem to have sooner or later with sentimental parents, I refused, and sat in the car looking at the huge carriage block.

The De Loney house, Bogalusa, Louisiana

Years after he was gone, when I was installed in my own big house in Claverack, built by a Van Rensselaer no less, with plenty of rooms through which other winds blow, I tried to buy that carriage block. But there were distant cousins in Norwich, whose surname wasn’t even Ivory, who wanted to keep the stone for their annual family reunions, of the kind we had in Port Arthur when I was a child, so that members attending could sit, or stand, on it, and be photographed.

My father had little interest in his Irish roots. He never visited Ireland; he could easily have done so twice in his life—after his time in the army, when he chose to stay in Europe for a year, and again toward the end of his life, when he met me and Ismail Merchant in Rome in 1963. He traveled to Vienna then, and afterward returned to France, where he looked up the old friends he’d corresponded with since the Armistice of 1918. Ireland did not excite his imagination as Italy and France did. When he was growing up, he and his brothers and sister must have been acutely aware of the dislike and social disdain for Irish immigrants. Surely he’d heard of, and maybe as a boy had seen, HELP WANTED signs in Yankee businesses that added NO IRISH NEED APPLY. He had a distant and garrulous cousin named Dennis O’Sullivan who used to visit us when we lived in California. Dennis would talk endlessly of the delights of “the Old Sod,” as he called Ireland. My father was too polite ever to let himself seem bored by Dennis, and made sure I was equally polite to him as he went on and on about the glories of Ireland and the Irish. Dennis was my introduction to life’s boring adult conversations. Whenever my mother heard Dennis was coming, she hid herself in the bedroom until Dad made her come out and greet him.


Copyright © 2021 by James Ivory