The Girls from Winnetka

By Marcia Chellis

Five women, who come of age in the Fifties, tell how and why their lives change decade after decade to the present. In the Fifties, as part of a group of high school friends, they are programmed to please, to be perfect, and to be virgins until marriage. The scripts for their lives are written. They will marry the June they graduate from college, have children, and live happily-ever-after on the North Shore of Chicago. Their parents do not urge them to prepare for a profession because they are expected to depend on a man for their identity and support.
But the girls have other ideas. While many of their friends gladly follow traditional paths, these women adapt deeply ingrained standards to what is happening around them. They take flight from their predestined lives to lives of self-reliance and independence. And, along with the other women of their generation who hold similar visions, they leave a legacy of choices to the next generation of young women.
After opening their hearts and revealing their secrets and life storieswhich they describe as a powerful and rewarding experiencethey encourage readers to journal about exceptional or significant moments in their lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 17, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450227254

Marcia Chellis

A New York Times bestselling author, Marcia Chellis has written two successful nonfiction books about women: Living with the Kennedys: The Joan Kennedy Story and Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives. She has been a guest on The Today Show, Larry King, Inside Edition, and numerous other television and radio shows.

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The Girls from Winnetka

Copyright © 2010 by

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-2724-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-2726-1 (dj)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-2725-4 (ebook)

iUniverse rev. date: 11/01/2010

Contents

Foreword

A Note to the Reader from the Author

Notes to the Author from The Girls

The Girls

TURNING FIFTY

A Celebration

Friday Afternoon

The Next Morning

That Night

THE FIFTIES

Cashmere, Chastity, and Convertibles

Paper Doll Cutouts

The All Points Bulletin

Grasshoppers and Cigarettes

Elvis

Rebels Without a Cause

An Unchaperoned Affair

Family Secrets

A Slumber Party

The Yankee

Selective Hearing

Graduation

Summer Love

THE SIXTIES

Love and Marriage

College Co-eds

Ingénues on Parade

The Country in Free Fall

THE SEVENTIES

Carpools and Couples

New Worlds, New Starts

Taking Stock

THE EIGHTIES

An Empty Nest and Another Chance

Prime Time

Conforming to a Different Drummer

Coming Apart—and Together—at the Seams

THE NINETIES

A New Generation

Facing the Bottom Line

A Time to Mourn

THE 21st CENTURY

Full Circle

Rhyme or Reason

Choices

EPILOGUE

EXPLORING FURTHER

Book Group Discussion Guide

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Isak Dinesen, who wrote Out of Africa, once said, All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them.

Ever since I first read that line, Sue Monk Kidd, the author of The Secret Life of Bees, said, I’ve carried it with me. When women bond together in a community in such a way that sisterhood is created, it gives them an accepting and intimate forum to tell their stories and have them heard and validated by others. The community not only helps to heal their circumstance, but encourages them to grow into their larger destiny.

To The Girls

whose openness and sharing

made this book possible.

Foreword

by Ann-Margret

From the time I was four, I knew I wanted to be a singer and a performer. I was fortunate. My parents supported my dreams of a career because that’s what I wanted. But they were also afraid for me.

In the 1950s, when I was seventeen, I got a job singing in a nightclub on Rush Street in Chicago. You had to go downstairs to get there. A really small place. It was me and Scott Smith, a piano player, and we did duets together. I was standing behind the bar, next to the bartender, and could hear ice cubes clinking into glasses. I’d be singing through that. That’s when the owner came over to me and said, You’re such a nice girl. Why don’t you just go back home, get married, and have babies?

That was then …

I didn’t want to give in to cultural expectations for young women at that time. Nor did the girls in this book. Each moved forward in her own way through the next five decades—observing what was going on around her, considering its impact, and taking steps not only to follow the prescribed guidelines we’d all been given, but also to push through to new and different ones. To their roles as wives and mothers, they added working. They dared to seek a voice of their own. Despite being told their husbands would support them, they too became breadwinners.

Marcia has captured the essence of their struggles, losses, and victories. Two classes behind the girls at New Trier High School, I was right there with them.

I am in awe of Marcia’s brilliant portrayal of these five women who, just as I did, began with 1950s’ values. And we all know what those were. Being virgins until we married. Pleasing everyone. Being perfect in every way. Conforming. Being patriotic. Achieving in our own right, but then yielding to a man after marriage. Depending on a husband for our identity. Not working, unless something happened to our husbands or marriage. Quite a list of rules for good behavior. And they all went along with it. I did, too. But always, deep inside, I wanted to perform, be myself, and have a career.

Marcia has told the girls’ intimate stories in a way that readers can see and follow. How they managed to accomplish what they did, how they become the women they are today. Though my own story is different, because I was rushed off to Hollywood when I was a sophomore in college and a sorority sister of Marcia’s and Annie’s, I can relate to and appreciate each one of these women’s journeys. I love this book.

A Note to the Reader from the Author

While growing up outside of Boston, I never imagined my family would move to the North Shore of Chicago. But at age fourteen, I was the new girl my sophomore year at New Trier, one of the largest and most renowned high schools in the country.

I soon learned that friendships there began as early as kindergarten and groups were well established. I didn’t know where to begin or how to make friends in a class of nearly eight hundred students. And I never expected I would be included in one of the most admired cliques.

I don’t remember whether it was in the lunchroom or in a classroom when Judy, leader of the popular group, came up to me. Because her family had moved every few years, she knew how it felt to be new. She took me under her wing and introduced me to her friends:

Annie and I connected right away. I had a little ham in me, could dance and do accents, but she had remarkable singing and dancing talent. She was always the star of the school’s musicals. That is, until Ann-Margret came on the scene and on the stage, and then Annie graciously shared the limelight.

Laura and I both tried out for the lead in Sabrina. Neither of us made it as Sabrina, but we both got parts. During rehearsals, a bond developed between us. We talked, laughed, and joked outside the nucleus of the cast.

Brooke was attractive and beautifully dressed. But I felt sorry for her. She had so much conflict with her mother that she went to her friends for sympathy. She especially relied on Judy, whom she called her second mother.

Judy liked being the leader and the mother of the group. She wanted anyone with problems to confide in her. And we did.

Barbie’s concerns were considered family secrets; they were subjects we’d been taught not to talk about. So none of us did. She and I became close when we were both chosen to serve on the Girls Club Board. Barbie was head of freshmen and I was in charge of publicity. Judy was also on the board as chair of charity.

Judy and I remained close through senior year at New Trier and during the next four years at college. I couldn’t foresee then how enduring my friendship with her and this group of girls would be.

After I graduated from Northwestern, and Judy from Smith, we shared an apartment in Cambridge. We were both dating med school students. I was at our apartment the Saturday morning she returned from her Friday night date. She’d never stayed out all night before. But I knew, from the grin on her face, what had happened. She sat right down at the table where I was paying bills and told me what it was like to lose her virginity. A subject I was very curious about.

Not only Judy and I, but all of us stayed connected over the years. The year we turned fifty, we met at Barbie’s summerhouse on Cape Cod to celebrate our birthdays. We spent two remarkable days and nights laughing, reminiscing, crying, swimming, and sailing.

All of us were mothers, which, of course, was part of our parents’ programming. But we were also working, which was not. On our last treasured night together, while balancing plates of birthday cake and glasses of champagne on our laps, we were sitting in green rockers on the porch overlooking Buzzards Bay. Judy looked up at everyone and asked, Did we make history or did history make us?

Barbie set aside her plate, stood, and waved both arms. There should be a book. About us. About our generation.

After a lot of discussion, they decided to tell their stories, and I agreed to write the book. Since then, we have met often for me to read manuscript pages aloud. Anything they wanted to add or change, I did. All but one wanted to use their own names. And, unfortunately, when we approached the eighties, one of the girls decided she couldn’t, for the sake of her family, finish telling her story.

During the years that followed, we were caring, close, and loving friends who consoled each other through several tragedies: the death of a daughter, the suicide of a husband, the death of one of us, and the death of my husband.

Recently, I lost one of my brothers and four days later my best friend, both to cancer. Though I now live in Palm Beach, and the girls are as far away as three thousand miles, they were there for me.

Notes to the Author from The Girls

When I asked my son about how much I should reveal, he said, ‘Tell the truth.’

I am asking you to bear with me. More of my feelings are allowing themselves up into my consciousness. They are a little less painful now, a little less humiliating, or they are more willing to be seen.

If you could see me some early mornings here with a blanket around my shoulders and my laptop on my lap. Sometimes I’m laughing, sometimes tears just flow.

I have been depressed going back into my young years, high school, etc. I always hid my feelings. It’s not easy to dig into things that hurt.

I have been working through the darkest, most difficult chapter in my life. I want to help others who have faced, lived through, and gained strength from a similar nightmare. I want you to know writing about it has been healing for me.

I am back writing again. I wrote something today that was difficult. Something I don’t think I’ve told anyone. I am trying to give you as much as I dare and can live with. I think about the five of us all the time.

I am spellbound by the explosions of happiness, ideas, effort, and will that come from working together.

We have paved the way for young women today. They can stand on our shoulders because of what we endured.

I have had the company of this book for, it seems, a long time now, and I like the company.

This is really something. This process. This creation of a book. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything!

I am going to love your quilt. I am going to wrap up in it, in all the wonderful squares of our lives.

Thank you for believing in me and taking me on this journey.

The Girls

Annie, a talented singer and dancer, gives up her career on Broadway for marriage. Yet while flying jets in Vietnam, her husband leaves her for another woman and Annie is suddenly cast in the unanticipated role of single mother. Struggling to support her daughter, she works at trade shows hawking everything from sedans to sewer pipes. When she lands a job as host of her own TV talk show in San Francisco, she doesn’t know how much her life will change.

Judy graduates with honors from Smith. Determined to stay single, she sets out on her quest to have a big city career. But marriage takes her to a small town in the Midwest, motherhood, and drugs. True to her nurturing nature, she continues to collect and help women with problems, whom her husband calls the Wobblies. When she and her husband begin a consulting business together, her enduring ambition strains their marriage.

Barbie, a sailor, watches from shore as her father buys the Brigantine Yankee to take amateur crews around the world and, unpredictably, sinks his family’s resources. Her only consolation is meeting and marrying her father’s first mate. They work as a team to support and raise two talented children. But their teamwork is sorely tested, more than once.

Brooke feels resentment after the birth of her daughter, when her husband insists she return to work. Their marriage begins to flounder and they divorce. She falls in love with a charismatic man and discovers a passion she’s never known. Yet her rollercoaster second marriage abruptly ends. In her mid-sixties, she meets a man whose caring, loyalty, and devotion help her to recover and she marries for a third time.

Laura, born in Virginia but raised in Winnetka, wants to resolve whether she’s a Southerner or a Northerner. She attends college in the south and marches with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the north. With three sons, she works throughout her marriage—including the eight years the family lives in Caracas. Now financially and emotionally independent, she questions the purpose and validity of her long marriage.

TURNING FIFTY

A Celebration

Did we make history or did history make us?

—Judy

Friday Afternoon

It is a hot and humid August day in Boston, the year the girls turn fifty.

Cradling two, chilled bottles of champagne, a gift from the stewardess on her cross-country flight, Annie gets into the black limousine waiting for them at Logan. Laura, Judy, and Brooke follow.

The women have left husbands or lovers and flown from the West Coast, Midwest, and East Coast to celebrate their birthdays at Barbie’s summerhouse on Cape Cod. They feel as much anticipation as anxiety about what will happen this weekend.

At first glance, it doesn’t seem as if anyone has changed from the days when they were part of a high school group in Winnetka, Illinois. But, in their hearts, they know each one has.

As soon as the car pulls away from the curb, Annie pops the cork and fills everyone’s glass. In jeans and a navy blazer, and still a strawberry blonde, she raises her glass. To us! And turning fifty!

Annie’s voice is heard daily by thousands who watch her live television talk show. She appears confident. For as long as the women have known her, she has been an entertainer, a comedienne. But so far, only she knows if performing is masking heartache.

Brooke tosses her signature platinum hair. I’m so nervous. You’re all so accomplished, and I don’t think I’ll measure up. We haven’t been together since our last New Trier class reunion!

Still holding up her glass, Annie says, Now we can talk without husbands or old boyfriends hovering. We’re still fun! I can already see it. Were we the last generation to have fun?

Glasses poised in midair, the women study their longtime friend, now a celebrity. And wait to hear what she means.

You know. It was as if we lived in a bubble.

Everyone nods and takes a sip of champagne.

No such thing as a date rape number to call. We weren’t aware of people who had nothing.

And, ya’ll, there were no protest marches. Tall and slender with long, light red hair, Laura speaks with a hint of a Southern accent. In Chicago in the sixties, she was one of only a few white women who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr.

And we had no fear of AIDS, Annie says solemnly. She lives with her producer in San Francisco and they deliver meals to young men who are alone, afraid, and dying.

A lot’s happened, Laura adds. "I wonder sometimes if we were the ones who abandoned the American family."

We didn’t mean to, Brooke says, wanting to contribute. In the past, she has been open about her fear of not being included. She fingers her single strand of perfect pearls and looks down at her tailored, white linen pantsuit.

But weren’t we the last generation to come from families who ate dinner together? Laura asks. As a teenager, she worried about her height and wore flats. But today she is wearing camel-leather heels with black ties that twist up and around her ankles.

Brooke nods. If she still harbors self-doubt, it is not apparent to the others. But before leaving the house that morning with her mother’s words to always look good echoing in her ears, she checked the triple-mirror on her dressing table several times—to be sure her face and hair would hold up to any clandestine comparisons. More than once on the way to the airport, her second husband had to say, Stop worrying. You look fine!

In the backseat of the limousine, Laura takes a small notebook from her purse. A competent professional working in New York City and the mother of three boys, she wonders how much she and the others will reveal this weekend. Seeking the sanctuary of silence and her own thoughts, she reads one of her poems.

Love, of course, dies

Painful deaths.

Drawn out deaths

And quick

Vicious deaths.

Even idiots know

It dies.

But still the little

Cinderella hopefuls

Dress up in beautiful glass shoes.

Laura glances at Judy sitting beside her, the classmate she still considers her nemesis. Although she has never told anyone, she suspects her feelings are not a secret.

Judy is blissfully unaware of Laura’s thoughts. She wears her short, brown hair with very short bangs just as she did in high school. She is not sure her friends realize how sick she is, in part because she can’t accept it herself. But she tells herself that this weekend is about celebrating each other and not projecting into the future. Hers or anyone else’s.

She continues the conversation. We expected traditional marriages until the Pill and the women’s movement. That’s when I decided to be single and have a career.

Laura is apprehensive sitting next to Judy, whom she admires for her intelligence and academic achievements. But she still can’t forgive Judy for taking over her role as leader of their group.

Brooke swings her platinum pageboy and holds out her glass. "We knew what to do and when, because we were told."

Annie refills Brooke’s glass. Up till the sixties, we knew. That’s when they took away the wrapping, leaving us with no role models.

Laura nods.

Or any way to deal with our institutions breaking down, Judy says softly. Without them, there was confusion. Always the reader, the thinker, she had graduated Phi Beta Kappa in philosophy.

At the summerhouse, while waiting for the limousine, Barbie opens the refrigerator to check on her mother’s do-ahead casseroles. Always eager to please, she may be the one who is living her life closest to the way she was expected. At the same time, she is widely respected as a leader in her community.

When she goes upstairs to hang fresh towels on old wooden rods, she wonders what they will talk about and what they will think of her. She’s always been praised for her natural beauty—high cheek bones, a rosy glow, curly hair, and never needing makeup. But in the last few years, she has gained weight, and her short curls have turned white.

As the car crosses the Bourne Bridge onto Cape Cod, the women look down at gray, swirling currents in Buzzard’s Bay. The driver tells them they will arrive at Barbie’s house in about fifteen minutes.

Over the years, the women stayed in touch, writing long letters or talking on long-distance calls. They feel up to date on some things, but not on everything. They know Annie hosts