In The Pink

Mother never liked to talk about her past. To her, everything and everyone from her youth has been evaporated, vaporized from her mind. All of it. The sweet little girl, the innocent insecure teenager, they lie, frozen in the amber of repressed memory, both hidden and stored deep in the hippocampus. Never to be seen again. Mother maintains that she was born in 1941, that is, the year she magically rose from the Earth a 20-year-old starlet. The pride and joy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, the muse of producer George Winters and the queen of Louis B. Mayer's pockets. My mother's name is Johnnie Finklea. Everyone in this house calls her Jimmie. To the world, however, my mother is the inimitable, incomparable, indomitable, Miss Vivien Grace.