Love, Ellen: A Mother/Daughter Journey by Betty Degeneres

Chapter One

The Importance of Being Different

FIRST OF ALL, WHEN you think about it, we're all stuck here on this planet while it hurtles through space in its orbit. If you imagine yourself free of gravity and floating off in the distance, you get a whole different perspective on us. I imagine us all looking exactly the same—like little ants, but full of self-importance. We're pretty good at dividing. And we're not bad at multiplying, either. (Sorry, I couldn't resist that. I am Ellen's mom, after all.)

    How laughable we would seem from that far-off vantage point—self-obsessed busy-bodies divided by turf and custom and color and you name it. We're divided by everything from what we eat to whom we worship as God and what name we call Him/Her. We're not just divided by our religious differences: we've gone to war because of them; we've actually killed in the name of God. I'm certain that's not what He/She intended when we were first created and put on this good earth to live and thrive together.

    When it comes to embracing diversity, I tend to think of myself as a relatively "average," "regular" person, not endowed with traits that would make me any more accepting than you or your neighbors. There wasn't anything in my upbringing that caused me to be more tolerant than the next person. If anything shaped that inclination, it is the fact that I became a mother. But I'm certainly not supermom. Rather, I'm probably more of an Everymom, with the same dream that most parents have for their kids—a live-and-let-live world where all the antscan celebrate individuality and diversity, yet still recognize each other as part of a larger family.

    There's nothing new or radical about this image of ants. In fact, it's really just a spin on what is more commonly called the golden rule, something I was taught at the beginning of my education as Everygirl.

    That part of my story starts in the depths of the Great Depression: on May 20, 1930, when I was born Betty Jane Pfeffer at home in a rented half of a double house on Dante Street in New Orleans, Louisiana. Despite the Depression and their own poverty, my parents—my father, William Dick Pfeffer, of German descent; and my mother, Mildred Morrill Pfeffer, of Irish descent—were happily anticipating my arrival and were planning for me to be the first of their three children to be born in a hospital. But I came too soon, and Mother gave birth at home, as she had with my sister Helen, seven years my senior, and my sister Audrey, five years my senior. So much for that plan. I've often wondered if it was my early entrance into the world that set the pattern of impulsiveness in my life, a pattern that has persisted to this day.

    In any event, I am quite sure that being the third-born and the baby of the family shaped my early personality. Where Helen, the eldest, was serious, intelligent, and always thoughtful, and Audrey in the middle was fun-loving and vivacious, I was known as the "littlest," and—with my thick golden curls and my apple-red cheeks—I was spoiled rotten, and notorious for never taking no for an answer. I was tenacious. Still am. I consider tenacity one of my great strengths and one of my great weaknesses.

    My earliest memories are from about the age of four. What I remember most about myself was how irrepressibly curious I was about everything. By now we were living in a slightly larger rental, not far from where I was born, a raised half of a double on Apricot Street. This house had a tiny backyard with a dirt plot maybe three feet by six feet. To this day, I can still see myself planting nasturtium seeds there and—with time passing ever so slowly, as it does for the very young—watching the green stalks inch from the ground, the flowers eventually bursting into bloom.

    Some years later, being an impulsive and curious child, when I saw an ad on a bus for cotton seeds, I wrote down the address and sent for them.

    A month later, as we were sitting down to dinner one night, Helen and Audrey began to laugh. Mother and Daddy asked them what was so funny.

    Audrey began, "Have you seen the backyard? She ..."

    "She? Who is she?" Mother said sternly. Mother thought it was extremely rude to refer to someone present as "she" or "her." Otherwise, Mother said, Audrey could have been referring to the cat—or the cat's grandmother. We were taught to refer to company present by name.

    Audrey continued, "Betty Jane is growing cotton in the backyard."

    That was correct. When the seeds arrived I had planted them on my own, per instructions, and I soon had a small but nice cotton crop.

    Mother and Daddy must have thought it a little unusual. But they acted proud. That's how they were whenever I tried new things. The lesson was simple—it's OK to be curious. Over the years, this quality has endured and may be why I've always had quite a collection of hobbies and creative pursuits. And, even more relevant to the work I do now, being naturally curious has always made me open to meeting different kinds of people.

    Of course, growing up in New Orleans—a real melting pot—meant that there were many kinds of people to meet. In later years, everyone started calling my hometown "the Big Easy," to contrast it with the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple and to emphasize its slow southern charm. As I recall, there was genuine ease in the way that the many ethnic groups—including French, Italian, German, Irish, Cajun, Creole, black, and white communities—lived together.

    People had pride in their own culture and individuality, and pride in the city itself. New Orleans has a distinctive kind of beauty, with its streets lined by huge, moss-draped live oaks. When I was little we used to pretend the moss was silver fox fur and drape it over our shoulders. The muddy Mississippi is majestic, and the architecture of the French Quarter and the Garden District is truly distinct and wonderful.

    The place was easier and the pace was easier. We had to take it slow and easy—it was so hot and humid most of the time. Goodness. Looking back, I don't know how we managed without air-conditioning, but we did. The house on Apricot Street had a sleeping porch as the last room, and every afternoon in the summer we had to take a nap, or at least lie down and rest. Afterward, we'd have a bath and put on fresh clothes and sit out on the front steps waiting for Daddy to come home from work.

    Many evenings Mother would have a picnic supper prepared, and when Daddy got home we'd all go to Lake Pontchartrain for a swim. Then we'd drive to City Park and have our supper there, sometimes meeting other family members or friends. What I remember most about those picnics was Mother's iced tea, with lots of sugar, lemon, and ice—the best in the world.

    Many years later, after my move to California, after my retirement, I took a poetry course and paid homage to those times with the following, one of my first efforts:

How did we survive with only
fans—electric and little
cardboard ones on sticks?

How did we survive the muggy south Louisiana summers—
summers that lasted half a year?

With lots of lemonade and iced tea
and cool baths and talcum powder.
And without complaining.

    Back then, there didn't seem to be so much meanness in the world. Maybe it was the times I grew up in. Maybe we really were kinder and gentler.

    Or maybe we were the same divisive ants that we seem to have become today. It's hard to know how much we have really changed. What I do know is that our current divisiveness does not become us. Instead of embracing those who are different from us as part of our human family, more and more we regard them with suspicion, fear, even hate. These divisions only weaken all of us. And what's more, I believe, they don't reflect what most commonsense, fair-minded people actually believe—that at our core, we're all the same; that no human is inferior and no human is superior.

    So where does all the suspicion come from?

    There is a song called "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" from the musical South Pacific, which I have always remembered. The song says:

You've got to be taught, before it's too late.
Before you are six or seven or eight.
To hate all the people your relatives hate.
You've got to be carefully taught.

    Isn't it true? Somewhere along the way, we were taught that being different was a bad and fearsome thing. Now it's got to be our job to teach a different lesson—that intolerance is unacceptable.

    I got my first lesson about that from Mother when I was five years old.

    Around the corner from our house was a little mom-and-pop grocery owned by Mr. and Mrs. Blanda, Italian-Americans and neighborhood acquaintances who had kids of about our ages. The family lived next door in rooms attached to the store. Every now and then, Mother would let me go to the store by myself for bread or some other item she needed. I'd always see Mrs. Blanda at the cash register in the front and Mr. Blanda in the back, where he ran the meat market.

    One afternoon I was out playing when a few of my little friends dared me to run to the grocery store, put my head in the screen door, and yell out a certain derogatory name for people of Italian descent. It sounded like a reasonable dare to me. Obviously I was not a very bright child.

    I took off, rounded the corner to the Blandas' store, threw open the screen door, and stuck my golden, curly head in, and yelled, "You old dagos!"

    As I ran away, all I could think about was how impressed my little friends were going to be. Oh, and they were.

    But my glory was short-lived. Mrs. Blanda did the right thing—she promptly went to Mother and told her what had happened. And very soon, I caught hell. Mother let me know that what I had done was shameful and stupid. The spanking wasn't the worst of it. The hardest part was having to go to the store and apologize.

    I never forgot that lesson and never repeated a verbal act of intolerance. Mother taught me very young: Derogatory names are unacceptable. That is something we don't do.

Mildred Morrill Pfeffer was right sixty-three years ago, and she would be right today. If more and more parents made the conscious choice to teach their children to accept diversity, I can foresee a day when discrimination and prejudice will be made extinct.

    Mother's lesson is not a sophisticated superprogressive notion. It's simple. It's what the Bible teaches us: Love thy neighbor.

    And yet, these days, when it comes to loving our gay neighbors, we hear derision and hate from some people who claim to follow the Bible. They say things like, "I don't hate gay people; I hate their lifestyle." To me, that's only semantics. Hate is hate.

    I will never forget a heartbreaking story I heard when I spoke to a university group in Ohio. After the speech there was a reception and, to my amazement, more than three hundred students lined up to have me sign their programs or have their picture taken with me. Then it was the turn of a young man who had waited patiently in line. He said simply, "I don't want an autograph and I don't want a picture. I want a hug." Of course, he got one. He explained, "My mom rejected me when I told her I was gay. Now, I'm HIV-positive, and she says I got what I deserve." Then he got another long, long hug.

    What on earth could have made that mother so hateful? How could she have commited such an act of hatred toward her own child?

    Others do not express their hatred so bluntly. They say, "You have the right to be gay, but I don't want to know about it." What they're saying is, "Stay in the closet." That message, in effect, was the one I saw being given to Ellen over the years that she was developing her career. Hide the truth, she was told, cover up, pretend you're someone else. What is it about being gay that is so threatening that others would have a whole segment of society live in hiding? It's the same thing as telling African-Americans to hide their blackness or telling ethnic and religious minorities not to be who they are. Can you imagine anybody telling the Blandas to deny their Italian heritage?

    Of course, at the time when I was growing up, gays and lesbians were in the closet so much that I had no idea they even existed until I went off to college. And even then, my exposure was limited to innuendo and rumor. So although I was not predisposed to be prejudiced, I was totally ignorant. That's why, years later, Ellen wrote to me in her anguished letter, "I know you can't understand—you probably never will.... You were brought up totally different—lifestyle, generation, surroundings, people, environment."

    Well, El was wrong in saying I would never understand. But she was right to recognize how those various aspects of my upbringing would make my process of understanding more difficult.

    The Pfeffer household was almost textbook conservative—white, Christian, working-class, traditional all the way.

    Daddy was the typical male role model who went on to become a working-class American success story. He was the son of a businessman who lost his hardware store to drink. Handsome and hardy, young Dick Pfeffer—he was known to everyone as Dick, never William—started out as a stenographer at Pan American Life Insurance Company and worked there forty-seven and a half years, ultimately rising through the ranks to become a vice president.

    As if it were yesterday, I can still see Daddy sitting alone during the Depression years and later World War II at our big dining room table at night after dinner, with his record books and bills spread out before him, deciding how to make ends meet. I marvel to this day that with his salary stretched as far as it could go, he was able to raise three daughters and later send us all to college.

    Daddy's girl that I was, I also remember doing my version of ballet in the living room while he was paying bills—to get his attention and to cheer him up, but also to avoid Mother's call from the kitchen, "Bets, it's your turn to help with the dishes."

    Then I thought of another ruse: "But, Mother, I have to practice the piano."

    What a scam artist I was! It generally worked—except for a time when Helen brought home some popular sheet music and I taught myself to play and sing a song called "It's a Sin to Tell a Lie." Mother was horrified. She didn't want me playing it because of the words "sin" and "lie."

    While my father exemplified the male role of being the one and only breadwinner and head of the house, Mother was very much a woman of her time: a homemaker and caretaker, proficiently doing everything possible to economize and run the house on what was most certainly a meager budget. Somehow she managed to turn our limited food supplies into meals that, though not fancy, were ample and filling.

    "Waste not, want not," was Mother's credo. Leftovers appeared in every imaginable form. And this idea that being wasteful was nothing short of criminal stayed with her the rest of her life.

    In addition to all that stretching of food, Mother scrimped and saved, crimped and cut, and sewed all our clothes. Following her example, all three girls took up various forms of handiwork later on. But at the time, I hardly appreciated her efforts, especially since the clothes she made for Helen and Audrey became hand-me-downs for me.

    We were like many families of our time, striving to better our lot, all of us playing our rather well-defined roles and doing our part to get ahead.

    Home, family, security—this was the shelter in which I grew up, and I loved it more than anything. The worst day of my young life was having to leave that cocoon and go to kindergarten.

    "But I don't want to go!" I protested daily to Mother, crying every time the topic was raised. "I want to stay home with you!"

    When the day arrived, Mother saw no other recourse than to put me out on the front porch, go back inside, lock the door, and pray. Her prayers, apparently, were answered. After my terrible suffering, I adjusted well to grammar school. Then, at age twelve, when I had a chance to go to summer camp, I went through the whole process all over again.

    By this point, after many long years of striving, we had finally been able to buy a house of our own at 9121 Nelson Street. Finding the right house for what we could afford hadn't been easy.

    Since Helen and Audrey were in their late teens and busy with their own activities, that left me to accompany Daddy and Mother to go look at the various houses, some of them large, some in nicer neighborhoods.

    Daddy had been certified as a real estate appraiser, so whenever we went to see a house for sale he knew just what to look for. He would crawl under the house with an ice pick looking for termites while Mother and I stood outside and prayed that he wouldn't find any.

    Number 9121 Nelson Street was not one of the bigger houses, and not in one of the better neighborhoods, but it had no termites and it turned out to be our house. It had a relatively big backyard with a productive fig tree and Daddy soon built a fish pond and a brick patio. Inside it had two bedrooms and one bath, for a family of five, and no air-conditioning—in New Orleans, yet! Even so, we were definitely moving up in the world. We were achieving the American dream: home ownership.

    Again, the lessons I learned were not unusual. Through my family's example, I was taught that as long as we worked hard and had a positive attitude, all Americans could have the same chance at that dream.

    Maybe that's why, today, I have such a hard time understanding those who don't support laws to protect the rights of gay citizens on the job and their right to live safely where they choose, without the fear of being fired or evicted simply because they're gay.

    When people call these "special" rights, I have only to think of the segregated neighborhood half a block away from us on Nelson Street and the laws that became necessary to provide these very rights for our black citizens.

    In fact, one reason we were able to afford our house was its proximity to this section where the black families lived. There were no visible boundaries, but it was as though we lived in separate cities. Their ramshackle houses made our little house and those around it seem palatial by contrast. Our black neighbors sat on their front porches and steps. Now and then, they passed by our houses. And yet it was as if they were invisible. We just didn't see them. I don't even know where their children went to school. That's how segregated we were.

    Strangely, and sadly, I had forgotten this example of injustice until only recently. But now I remember that time when others were made invisible because of the color of their skin. It wasn't right then, and it isn't right now.

As you might expect, my sisters and I were raised with very traditional ideas about marriage and family. The message was that nice, pretty girls like us grew up and married nice young men who would provide and look out for them and their children. Just like Mother and Daddy.

    Mildred Morrill—"Miss Millie" as Daddy called her—was only seventeen when she became Mrs. Dick Pfeffer, and he was only twenty-one. Imagine—a wife and mother while still a child herself, suddenly thrown into child-rearing and other wifely duties.

    We never tired of hearing the story about our parents' romance. "Was it love at first sight?" I, the romantic, would ask Daddy.

    "Bets!" Mother would quiet me before he could answer. That question was much too personal.

    Audrey, always sunny, giggled. Helen gave me a knowing, thoughtful look as if to say of course it was love at first sight. How could it not be? Mother was very pretty with her pale Irish coloring and slim figure, even though she never seemed to realize how cute she really was.

    Daddy was notoriously impatient—something I inherited in a big way—and he jumped in, "For crying out loud, do you want to hear the story or not? I was making ..."

    "Your father was making ninety dollars a month," Mother interrupted, "and he got a ten-dollar raise, thought he was rich, and proposed." She smiled, deferring to Daddy, the boss, as always, "Right, hon?"

    "That's right, Miss Millie," he said.

    Though Daddy always had the last word, he knew better than to argue or hurt Mother's sensitive feelings. That was how, in her own quiet, deferential way, she wielded a good deal of control in our family.

    "After that," I concluded, "you lived happily ever after."

    Their story to me was just like all the fairy tales that shaped my early consciousness. Like Cinderella and Prince Charming. Then, later on, I learned about love from the movies—all the different versions of Girl Meets Boy. I loved going to the movies. I grew up at our neighborhood theater, Ashton's. Once a week Mother and Daddy and I would walk the eight blocks there, sometimes stopping beforehand for a seafood dinner of delicious fried oysters and fried shrimp.

    The stars I loved most were strong, sensitive young women like Jeanne Crain, Jane Powell, and Elizabeth Taylor; later on I liked Ida Lupino's acting and Anne Baxter in The Razor's Edge. Watching these heroines, I remember being completely carried away. On the way home with Mother and Daddy, I'd always walk half a block ahead of them, in my own world—pretending that I was that beautiful young girl on the screen with the storybook life.

    I remember one of Ida Lupino's speeches in a heartbreaking farewell scene that stayed with me long into adulthood: "All of us are standing in the mud, but some of us are looking at the stars."

    In our sheltered household and with all the love stories that filled my head from the books I read and those I saw in the movies or heard on radio, never once did I encounter the kind of love stories that have, in reality, been happening since the beginning of written history—Girl Meets Girl and Boy Meets Boy.

    No wonder Ellen thought I would have trouble understanding her sexual orientation. In many ways, I really was brought up in the dark. Or, as my sister Helen's kids like to say, in the Dark Ages.

So, how did I get past all those damaging myths? Very slowly, unfortunately. But the point is that I did get past them. And the fact is that as human beings we all have the potential to grow and heal and evolve.

    I recently heard an inspiring example from a young man in the South whom I'll call "Joe." Joe came out to a straight friend who was also a coworker. "I thought he knew," Joe told me. "He seemed to be dropping hints, you know." But the friend looked down and after a moment said, "My coach was right—you should all be put in a stadium and an atom bomb dropped on you." The friend said he no longer wanted Joe to see his wife or children, and warned Joe not to tell the wife—who was pregnant—why, or "She might have a miscarriage." The inspiring part of the story is that over time the friend went from complete rejection to complete acceptance. The friendship has grown even closer and, yes, Joe is also close to his friend's wife and children—proving absolutely that love is always more powerful than hate, ignorance, and fear.

Not long ago, a caller to a radio show on which I was speaking asked if my Christian Science background had made me more readily accepting of diversity. My answer was that it did, to some extent. Christian Science teaches that God created man in his image and likeness. That makes each and every one of us God's perfect child—and that's the way we strive to see our fellow humans.

    Our family journey into Christian Science was interesting. For most of my life, I always thought that it was Daddy, who was raised Protestant, who insisted on Christian Science and that Mother, raised Irish Catholic, just went along with him. As it turned out, although Daddy was attracted to Christian Science as a way to help his severe hay fever, Mother had another reason for breaking with the Catholic church—an argument with the priest over birth control. Mother wanted to use it. She had seen what having eight kids had done to her mother and had decided three were enough for her. Having me was the last straw!

    Birth control? That was forbidden, the priest informed her. So she left the Catholic church. Mousy or not, Mother could sometimes put her foot down and leave it there.

    Christian Science, as you may know, was founded by Mary Baker Eddy in the mid 1800s in New England as a system of healing based on prayer; she insisted that prayer was scientific. She thought the churches would embrace the idea. When they didn't, she started the Churches of Christ, Scientist. There are no ministers. Instead, there are practitioners who pray specifically for others when asked and charge a fee for doing so. In church on Sundays, a First and Second Reader conduct the services. There are also Wednesday night prayer meetings when those attending can stand and give their testimonies of healing.

    Christian Science eschews all "materia medica" and stimulants such as alcohol and cigarettes. But Christian Scientists, as a rule, go to dentists and also have babies in hospitals, using obstetricians. I believe Mary Baker Eddy approved of having a broken bone set by a physician. People over the age of twenty who are attending church on a regular basis, and who wish to become members, go before a committee and are questioned about their knowledge and sincerity.

    Through childhood and into my high school years we attended regularly but didn't join. We would call a practitioner for help, but we still used medicine and took vitamins—something devout, dedicated Christian Scientists don't do. At a later juncture, Mother joined the church, as did I in my college years. But Daddy—who smoked regularly and drank on occasion—never became a member.

(Continues...)