Grace Notes: My Recollections - Softcover

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A versatile and award-winning actress, Katey Sagal is also a talented songwriter and singer. With over thirty years in show business, Katey has gained a legion of loyal fans who have followed her from Married…with Children, 8 Simple Rules, Futurama, to Sons of Anarchy, for which she won a Golden Globe. She currently resides in Los Angeles with her husband, three children, and two dogs. Follow her on Twitter @KateySagal.

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Grace Notes

The Singing Sweetheart of Cherokee County

When I was ten, my mother taught me to play the guitar. We were living in the Westwood section of Los Angeles at the time. Dark and cavernous, the house seemed to me an enormous Spanish hacienda. (I went back years later, and it was more like a casita.) Mom and I sat in the living room, the dark wooden floors and rich red tiles providing the effect of an echo chamber. My mom, as always, was dressed in her simple way, with her hair cut in a short, unstuffy style that I understood later was meant to avoid adding complications to her life.

“Darling girl!” She called me to her. “Let me show you. This is what I did at your age.”

I sat on her lap, the guitar in mine, with her arms draped around me, and we picked and strummed in tandem, like one person. My hands hurt as I stretched and pressed my fingers into the strings. She rested her hands, bird-like and delicate, on top of mine and helped to mold my fingers into chord formations with one hand while strumming with the other. If I concentrate, I can still feel her small hands touching me. I was so much bigger than her, even as a little kid. She was happy then and suntanned, memorable because it was rare that she had color. She stayed inside so much of the time.

“Down in the Valley” was the first song I learned. A traditional folk ballad my mom played every time she picked up her guitar. We sang loudly. My hands wrapped around the wide neck of Mom’s maple-colored Martin. Her nylon string acoustic guitar, the one she was given by Burl Ives. I never really knew why or how she got his guitar; that’s one of the heartbreaks of having dead parents: no one to fill in the blanks.

“Down in the valley, valley so low, hang your head over, hear the wind blow . . .”

Kent cigarettes, butts and burning, in an ashtray nearby. The smell of slept-in clothes, dirty hair, and tobacco—the smells of my mom—filling the space along with the low, rich tones of her voice. A deep alto by this time in her life, she still sang with the faint twang of the yodeler she was in her younger years. Long ago, when my mother was eleven years old, she had her own fifteen-minute daily radio show out of Gaffney, South Carolina. She was known as “the Singing Sweetheart of Cherokee County.”

I imagine Mom at eleven to have been hopeful and enthusiastic, full of promise and invigorated by life’s possibilities. But this Mom—the Mom at age thirty-five whom I sat with in our living room—her, not so much. This was years after the radio show. Much had happened in her life—and not happened.

By the time I was old enough to know my mom, she’d moved far beyond “the Singing Sweetheart of Cherokee County” to a life of darkened rooms and hushed hallways, the house’s forced stillness when she had taken to her bed. The official diagnosis was heart disease, but I’ve always thought she had a broken heart.

Mom had started working young and would continue to do so in many different forms until she married. From the radio show at eleven in Gaffney, she was discovered by NBC Radio and sent to New York to continue her show. The family lore goes that my gambling granddad, Daniel, had left my grandmother for the racetrack one day and never returned. And with my mom footing the bill with her radio show paychecks, my grandma moved herself and four kids to the Big Apple. My mom helped to support them all, while Grandma Virginia found a job, went back to school, and eventually landed the position of the dean of women at Hunter College.

In her early twenties, during World War II, my mom entertained the troops overseas on tour with the USO and later appeared on Broadway. At some point, she moved to the other side of the line, got a gig working for Norman Lear on The Martin and Lewis Show as script supervisor, and in time became the first woman assistant director in live television. She also did her share of writing.

What I remember?

Rin Tin Tin comic books and several soap operas written under an alias.

My mom had plans, and hopes; more to say and create.

However, work came to a screeching standstill when she met my dad, a Russian cab driver by day with a theater degree and an ambition to direct. She loved him. She was twenty-five years old when in 1952 she tied the knot, an age considered borderline “over the hill.” And as was expected in her generation, she gave up her career and started making babies. My sense is that parenting paled in comparison with her dreams, and she was never really at home with her role as “Mom.”

I’m the oldest of five. Soon after her second baby was born, her life became filled with bouts of depression and the occasional suicide attempt. Searching for answers, there were medications and therapists, and eventually institutions, sanitariums, and shock treatments. Maybe my mom just needed a job! I always felt she was born in the wrong generation. Things were changing slowly for women during the 1950s and 1960s, but wife and mother was still the norm, and when she tried to do what was now expected of her, it broke her heart. All of the treatments in the world couldn’t make it okay. She felt silenced.

We were living in Encino, California, the first time my mom “went away,” and my grandma came to stay. With three kids—me, my brothers David and Joey—under the age of five, my mom was institutionalized for depression and treated the electroshock therapy way. My workaholic dad neither asked for nor knew how to handle my mom’s illness with much more than hysteria and more work.

So arrived my mom’s mom, Virginia Lee Zwilling. Alabama born, ladylike and soft-spoken, a true Southern matriarch, she knew how to bring calm in the midst of crazy.

“It’s gonna be aaalright, dahlin’, don’t you worry your pretty little head,” she’d say, standing solid.

No hurdle too high.

No waters too deep.

She was unshakeable.

Virginia Lee came into our lives as the wheels were comin’ off and stealthily did what needed to be done.

I have no recollection of my mom leaving for an extended stay.

There was no discussion of “vacation” or “visiting relatives.”

She was just gone.

I have no memory of my grandmother moving in.

She was just there.

As if she’d always been there.

Virginia Lee picked up the pieces more than once when Mom was “away.” With her chicken and dumplings and Bisquick biscuits, over the years she became my teacher of all things domestic.

Each visit, she would teach me a new household skill.

She taught me how to set a table and make bed “corners.” How to sew on a button, iron and fold the laundry, get a hot meal on the table.

How to write a check.

How to mix a martini.

She knew, for me to feel safe, I’d need to grow up quickly.

And I did.

I can hear her voice in my head. Like honey, that Southern drawl, letting me know I would need to be able to take care of myself.

I basked in her organized ways.

She calmed the chaos.

She straightened our squiggly lines and helped us make sense.

Compared with the harried, distracted, conflicted energy of my mother, trying to fit into her apron...