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169 C H a P t e r e l e v e n “Not an Ounce” of Romance mary jaCkson, tHe CHaraCter aCtress best known as miss emily Baldwin from The฀Waltons, invited Mary to a small dinner party at her Hollywood Hills home in the early 1970s. The actor Kendall Clark, who lived a few doors away on Whitley Terrace, phoned Jackson to explain he would be running late. Because Clark had earlier offered to pick Mary up, Jackson now phoned Mary to suggest that she come over by herself, as it seemed unlikely Clark would have time to go from Hollywood to Century City and back during rush hour. “I expected her to say, ‘Well, I’ll be by early and help you make the sauce’ or something. But instead she suddenly got all ‘proper’ on me. She said she wouldn’t come unless Kendall picked her up. She could have driven so easily, but she said, ‘Mary, it’s only proper that we have an escort after dark. It’s time we taught these boys a lesson. A lady should not be seen outside of her house alone.’ Not because she was afraid of anything—because she wasn’t—but just because it was ‘proper.’ And Kendall, who’d been working all day, had to leave here, go all the way to pick her up in Century City and back ‘to teach the boys a lesson.’ It was bossy,” Jackson says. But Jackson was not really angered by Mary’s cranky response. “It was done with such integrity. And from the standpoint of Victorian propriety , she was right, of course.” Victorian propriety, indeed. Mary led her life according to a rigid set of standards that often frustrated—and sometimes amused—those around her. And her Victorian approach to life was never more evident than in her attitude toward romance. Mary’s insistence that Clark pick her up may seem reasonable if one understands that she perceived him to be her date. They had spent much time in each other’s company since their days at the Berkshire Playhouse in the 1930s, and he was clearly a favorite of Mary’s. Jackson always suspected Mary was romantically interested in Clark, though Mary never told her so. “ n o t a n o u n C e ” o f r o m a n C e 170 Never courted by men who were interested in her sexually, Mary nonetheless spent most of her time in the company of male friends. Most of these men were gay, a significant fact Mary did not realize. From the very beginning of Mary’s career, those who showed greatest interest in her company—including Clark, Bill Roerick, Max Showalter, and Bob Thomsen—were gay men. Given her limited experience dating, Mary thought of some of them as suitors far longer than a young woman might today. “Oh, I think that’s very true. She was a very, very Victorian-like woman who thought of men as possible beaus or gentleman callers or whatever. All of those men were the hope of possible marriage. Kendall and Bill would never have revealed their orientation or talk[ed] about anything like that—people just did not talk about it in those years,” says actor Bill Swan, a friend of all three. “I know she loved Kendall very much. When I say she loved฀him, I mean he was one of her best friends: ‘Mary and I are doing this,’ ‘Mary and I are going to the premiere tomorrow night.’ I think she really thought one day he would ask her to marry him.” Mary and Clark, a former World War II Army captain, once co-wrote a teleplay about a strong-willed girl who tries to save a home for under-privileged boys from closure. It did not sell. Whether it was with Clark or someone else, Mary did think about marriage on occasion, such as the time she was sitting on a beach in Los Angeles with New York-based writer John Patrick. In the 1950s, Patrick came to the West Coast frequently during the filming of his screenplays, such as Three฀Coins฀in฀the฀Fountain, High฀Society, and Love฀is฀a฀Many฀Splendored ฀Thing. During a conversation one day, out of the blue, Mary turned to him and said, “Pat, I think I’m going to get married.” Caught off guard by this declaration, Patrick asked her if she was engaged or going...

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