Growing up, Dani Shapiro always felt caught in her mother's viewfinder-until she found the strength to break free.
When I was six months old, my mother brought me from our suburban New Jersey home to a television studio in Manhattan. I was placed in a high chair, and an actress playing my mother spooned baby food into my mouth. My mother watched nervously from the wings, where two backup babies were waiting in case I spat out the food-but I didn't. I gurgled and smiled and ate the strained peaches. I was a natural, apparently. When it was over, I had become the Beech-Nut baby.
The week the commercial was due to air, my grandfather-my father's father-died suddenly in his home on Central Park West. The following day, at his funeral, my grandmother suffered a massive stroke. As the shocked, grieving family gathered in my grandmother's room at Beth Israel hospital, my mother arranged for a television to be wheeled to the foot of her bed. The scene, as I imagine it, is in black-and-white: My parents and aunts and uncles, all younger than I am now, turn to watch the last few minutes of the evening news with Walter Cronkite. Then, right on schedule, Cronkite signs off, and I appear. My round baby head fills the screen.
That's Dani! my mother says loudly into my grandmother's ear. Look, Mom, there on TV-that's your granddaughter!
A welcome diversion, no doubt. A small moment of cheer in a grim situation. A baby on television-a widow, hovering near death. My unshaven uncles, my hollow-eyed aunts, my father-the oldest son-pacing the room, wild with grief. And then there is my mother: tall and lovely, her dark hair impeccably coiffed. Almond-shaped eyes, her generous mouth outlined and blotted a deep, dark red. Look, there she is-there's Dani! She wants everyone to see: the doctors, nurses, orderlies. I am her crowning achievement, her late-in-life only child. This is the first of many times that she will ascribe to me magical powers: Someday she will tell me, in all seriousness, that the glimpse of me on television may have helped to save my grandmother's life.
The camera formed a bridge between my mother and me. It was a rickety bridge, and crossing it was often fraught with danger, but it was also our deepest, most intoxicating connection. Never did my mother love me more than when she was looking at an image of me. And never did I more powerfully feel her love. As a grown woman, sometimes I would call my mother to tell her about somewhere I had just been. An elegant party, perhaps. How did you look? my mother would ask eagerly. What did you wear? Were there pictures?
My mother didn't think much of child actors or their stage mothers. She had been an advertising executive before she married my father, and she often told the story of a child who had stamped her foot during an audition and shouted, "Mommy, there's a spot on my Mary Jane!" As with many of my mother's stories, it was hard to know what she actually felt. Her words-without exception-seemed rehearsed. She was profoundly composed: The precise way she crossed her legs, or raised an eyebrow, or tilted her head was done with a great deal of awareness. She must have told me the Mary Jane story a dozen times, and yet I was never quite sure what to make of it. She seemed to be implying that she would never let her daughter become a child actor.
How, then, to explain that a few years after the Beech-Nut commercial, I became the symbol for another iconic American brand when I was chosen to be the Kodak Christmas poster child? Just as with the Beech-Nut commercial, my mother acted a bit puzzled, as if she hadn't been the one carting me around to auditions. She preferred to make it seem as if the advertising world had been banging on our door and it would have been rude and withholding not to answer.
The Kodak billboard stretched across the width of Grand Central station, huge and illuminated, high above the heads of rush-hour commuters: me, age three-no longer a generic baby who might be replaced by another baby. Now I was fully recognizable. I was blonde, blue-eyed, quizzical; an all-American symbol of Yuletide cheer. We were observant Jews, so religious that my father's colleagues on the New York Stock Exchange had nicknamed him Rabbi. My mother often trotted out the story of the Kodak poster in a way that made me feel oddly ashamed. And there was Dani, wishing the entire world a Merry Christmas!
Reality invariably disappointed my mother. From the time that I was a little girl, I sensed the divide between how she imagined a future occasion-whether an afternoon in the park, an evening at the opera, a dinner party, a walk around the block-and how that occasion turned out. She had a tableau in her mind, a series of images, and anything that deviated from those images was a blot on her good time. But the camera-the camera could capture a moment: evidence that life was really as she fantasized it to be. See? We were happy. We were beautiful and special. We loved each other without fail.
I have a memory of my mother descending the stairs of our home, gliding as regally as a queen, holding her head high. She is dressed to go out for the evening. She is impossibly elegant, a New Jersey housewife who belongs on Fifth Avenue and never lets us forget it. (She could have married the French businessman who ran Chanel, she told me more than once.) On this night she is wearing Bonnie Cashin-a classic American designer who suits my mother's dark, rangy style. A cloud of Norell perfume drifts around her-I can smell it still. She is on her way to the theater, but before she goes, she finds her camera and hands it to the baby-sitter. "Take our picture," she commands. She stands next to me, a thin, graceful arm draped across my small shoulders. She smiles a careful, picture-perfect smile. Not too wide, just enough teeth showing. I am in pajamas-fresh-scrubbed, sweet-breathed, ready for bed. I am her pretty girl, her one-and-only. I also produce a camera-ready smile. How I look is desperately important to my mother, and I don't want to disappoint her.
Over the years of my childhood, my mother's dreams shifted and changed-perhaps self-protectively. Her vision of herself as a career girl-about-town, a cross between Marlo Thomas and Mary Tyler Moore, quickly receded behind the privet hedges of suburbia. She joined committees, did volunteer work. But always she held herself apart. She saw herself as smarter, better educated, more sophisticated than our neighbors. In truth, she may have been all these things. But she had contempt for the other women, and it showed.
She had writerly aspirations and drove into the city regularly to take fiction workshops and television-script-writing courses. She wrote a series of spec scripts for Hawaii Five-O and The Partridge Family-the sound of the keys of her Smith-Corona typewriter pounding well into the night. She sent these scripts by registered mail to Hollywood and waited for replies that never came-not even rejection slips. She didn't let her disappointment show. Instead, she turned her attention to writing a children's book, which she titled Yes, Mary Ann, the World Is Round. She hired the famous children's photographer who had done the Kodak poster to shoot the illustrations, and cast me-age five-as the angelic Mary Ann. The book was never published. The photographs remain. I am in a pale-yellow flannel nightgown, sitting up in bed, playing with dolls. I am lying flat on my back, doing my best imitation of sleep.
Eventually, the sound of the typewriter keys stopped. My mother moved on to other ventures-each more unrealistic than the last. And always, I wound up in front of a camera, posing as everything I was not: a rah-rah cheerleader, a well- adjusted, popular girl. I am standing in our driveway, an awkward adolescent, modeling a necklace from my mother's latest line of tennis jewelry. A gold ball the size of a gumdrop hangs around my neck. In the center of the ball is a small sapphire in the shape of an eye. keep your eye on the ball is the motto. Next, I am in profile, shot from the back, a small terry-cloth towel embroidered with no sweat, baby! wrapped around my neck. My mother stages an elaborate fashion show in our backyard. Dozens of neighborhood ladies sit on folding chairs in the hot summer sun and politely clap as I parade around the pool, showing off my mother's latest T-shirt line. I sense that they are all weary of her-and perhaps me, by proxy.
I was embarrassed by my mother's quixotic dreams, even as I hoped they would somehow come true. I was all knotted up in her aspirations-her vision of us as a mother-daughter winning team-and when her businesses failed, one after another, I felt as if I had failed as well.
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