The trouble with getting old is that all the people you cared about when you were growing up are gone or have the same memory problems you have. Forget gray hair, wrinkles and creaky joints. The really important stuff is what was once in your brain but is no longer accessible.
As old folks tend to do, I’ve taken to reading the obits. Grandfather Kelley did this in his later years so he could go to the wakes and chat with his old cronies. I just want to see who’s gone missing so I can feel bad about not staying in touch.
So it was last week that I saw Dennis McLellan’s splendid remembrance of Vilma Ebsen in the Los Angeles Times. With the benefit of the paper’s files and her son, Bobby Dolan, all the facts of her career as a dancer with brother Buddy Ebsen on Broadway and the one movie they made together were there. Many things I never knew and some I’d forgotten.
Vilma and her sister, Helga, were in our house in Beverly Hills often. They were Mother’s best friends. I always knew when they were there, because laughter echoed all over the house. They gossiped some, never maliciously, and I eavesdropped, drawn by their laughter to overhear things I rarely understood.
Vilma’s husband, conductor and composer Robert Emmett Dolan, was a close friend of my Dad, both having come from Broadway musical theater to work in movies. He was my godfather, regularly lecturing me about leaving Mass early. (I was usually at a horse show on Sundays, ran to church with a coat over my riding clothes and bolted after Communion.) He and Vilma moved into a house in Pacific Palisades near where Buddy and his wife were living.
Their son, who was called Little Bobby for longer than he probably liked, played a role in “The Bells of Saint Mary’s” (or was it “Going My Way”?) and I remember Vilma having some concern about him being treated as a child star. I think it was her idea to have him use his own first name in the film and to treat it like a game. It must have worked because, to my knowledge, that was his only adventure in acting.
Then there was the episode of my cat going berserk. Nobody knew what to do. When Vilma and Helga came to the rescue, he was locked in the breakfast room running up the drapes and yowling ferociously. They emerged with the cat, still growling, in a carrier and took him home. After a few days, they said the cat was fine; he just hadn’t been eating enough raw meat. They offered to keep the cat; Mother was thrilled to be rid of him. I was crushed, but Vilma comforted me, saying Helga understood cats.
When Vilma and Helga opened a dance studio in Beverly Hills, Mom sent my older sister and me to take ballet and tap. Never mind that neither of us had any talent. When your best friends start up a dancing school, you send your kids. One tone deaf, the other a klutz. No matter. My sister Judy was graceful but didn’t hear the music. I was, well, not so light on my feet with ankles weak as Jell-O. Vilma tactfully delayed my going en pointe as long as possible.
When the other ballerinas-in-training ran and leapt, they seemed to float. My footfall shook the building almost drowning out the piano chords Theresa strictly accented to keep us in time. Somehow I knew that my career, whatever it might be, would not likely include tour jeté and arabesque. But when it was time to change from ballet slippers to tap shoes I felt better. With Vilma’s encouragement, I got the rhythm and loved the crisp clatter of metal on wood. She never told me to be quiet.
They opened the Ebsen School of Dancing in Pacific Palisades the same week I suffered my first (of many) torn ligaments, which put me on crutches for two months, long enough for Vilma to suggest it might be best to concentrate on piano for awhile.
Many years later, I returned for a few classes, just enough to know that I would never include dance on a resume. Vilma graciously offered that had my ankles been stronger, I would have made a fine dancer.
What I learned from Vilma was more valuable than the time step and waltz clog. She was the first person I remember who was basically warm and kind. She never had a laugh at anyone’s expense. And if someone was a bit out of their element, she always said exactly the right thing to make them comfortable.
It took me many years to learn what came naturally to her. Some of it came back to me when I started to teach riding. Always to encourage, to say the kind thing or, if necessary, the true thing in the kindest way.
It’s sad that we lost touch. Even when I lived in Malibu and Vilma and Helga moved to Point Dume, I could have looked them up, but I never found time. Still, I’m glad to have the chance to remember while I still can.