#26 Beverley and Van

Is it today? Is it today?

Happy birthday?

It is really humbling for me to have to call you up on my own birthday.

First of all, shut your mouth.

Do you want to wish me a belated happy birthday? Because my birthday came and went no.

No.

But do you remember I left you. I left you a really heartfelt belated birthday wish? Oh, it was really something I want you.

To know about, something about me and my birthday. Yeah, my birthday is my birthday. It's not my birth week, it's not my birth month.

It's my birthday.

If you don't get me on the day, don't bother.

I don't bother.

Not interested?

Hey, can I ask you?

So?

Since it's my birthday, can I ask you a question? Do you do any celebrity impressions?

I already regret calling you to wish you a happy birthday?

Not to nitpick, but I'm the one who called you From Gimblet Media. I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is Heavyweight. Today's episode, Beverly and Van Ashley comes to me with a love story. It begins like something straight out of the movies. A young woman meets a young man. They share a first kiss, They pledge their love, but then they marry other people and live out their days apart. Then they die and the credits roll. Ashley has never stopped wondering about this couple and why they never receive

So she was a mamma.

Mamma's her name, mamma. You called her your mammon, Mammon.

We called her our mamma, like with a W at the end.

In the evenings, Mammon and Ashley watched Jeopardy together, shouting their guesses at the TV. During commercials, they pressed mute and quietly read. For Ashley, everything her grandmother did was imbued with a certain glamor.

She would roll her hair every evening, and I woke up really early as a kid, and I would help her take her pins out of her hair.

She was so cool.

I just wanted to know everything about.

Her, So they'd spend a lot of time talking about movies, the family, and boys. For Ashley, this meant sharing stories about her different crushes, but for Beverly it only ever meant talking about one person.

This man named Van. She would call him Van or my Van.

Beverly life had been a hard one. Ashley knew her as a widow, but before then she'd been trapped in an unhappy marriage, raising five kids essentially on her own. She was a serious woman, not given to sentimentality, but when she spoke Van's name, her face would light up. She met Van in New Orleans in the late nineteen thirties. The two worked at the local newspaper. Van was a salesman,

And it was clear that she had kind of set up the stories so that we would ask about him. Because you know when someone tells you a story and you know that they're really into it and they wanted to tell it more.

Yeah, she wanted to talk about him.

Yeah.

Sometimes the stories were nothing more than a choice. Dale barely an anecdote. Van had blue eyes. Van favored vests, the kind of non stories one tells when one is in love. But Beverly always insisted that she and Van wererent in love. She said they were just friends.

I mean, so, I like, I think when there's just such a there's such a disconnect, right, there's a disconnect with like how much she mentions him and then how much she protests that like they're just friends.

Ashley never bought the whole just friend's thing, and she's always wanted to prove that it was more that Beverly and Van's relationship was a great, untold romance. Ashley says that in Beverly's old age, her musings about the past became increasingly frequent. The family began to record these recollections so they'd have a record of Beverly's life, and in these recordings, the name Van pops up over and over again.

It just did.

A book time.

Amazed, that is, and offended as an audio producer by how crappy, the sound quality is. Ashley tells me the family employed the questionable interview Watergate bugging technique of hiding a dictaphone under a couch cushion. They believe that in this way, Beverly wouldn't know she was being recorded and grow self conscious. Ashley then had the tape transcribed, and then you told your grandmother. You're like, hey, surprise, Yeah, we were recording you, and we transcribed this and she

No, she hated it. Oh that we hadn't spell checked it. There were like a lot of typos.

Oh, that's what she took exception to with the fact that there was bad spelling. It wasn't that you had actually like wiretapped her personal history or anything.

Yeah. I remember her even fixing them, like circling them in like red pen.

Because the recording sounds like David Sedaris stuck in a gym locker. I asked Ashley to read the role of Beverly from her poorly spellcheck transcriptions.

So when she first introduces him, she says, Van was a salesman at the time in the display advertising department of the paper, and we've gradually became friends through encounters in the elevator halls and his frequent visits to the newsroom.

So that's how she talked. This was not written language.

No, that's how she talked.

People talked like that back then. A little copy editor in the mouth, red pan circling jibber, crossing out the jabber. Van and Beverly developed an office flirtation, and eventually Van declared his true feelings about Charlie Wicker, a sportswriter in the newsroom.

Van stopped by my desk and abruptly asked, do you date Charlie Wicker? No, why, I replied, to which he explained, I've been wanting to ask you for a date for a long time, and I couldn't bring myself to date anyone who would go out with Wicker.

With Wicker out of the picker, Beverly and Van began to date, which led to their first kiss. For Beverly all of nineteen, it was her first kiss ever. When Beverly shared the story of the kiss with Ashley, her granddaughter, took it as proof positive of their romance, but Beverly corrected her, claiming that it wasn't a romantic kiss. She only kissed Van because she was so comfortable with him,

So June eighteenth, nineteen forty four, Dearest Duck, It's about five pm here now, and I was thinking how nice it would be if I were inn for the weekend. I would be just getting up in order to get dressed and pick you up for eleven thirty Mass. We would have a whole wonderful day in front of us. Of course, the highlight of the whole affair would be just being with you. You are so close to my thoughts that it's sometimes difficult for me to realize that there

Vam Well, that really, I mean, that really sounds like a love letter.

That's a love letter.

Yeah, it's a love letter. Ashley pulls out more letters.

I might add, too, Duck that now, almost three years later, you look even prettier and I thrill as much or more every time I see. If I were there now, i'd know that soon from around the corner it would come a terribly welcome sight you and a brown or pink. It'd be too long that I'll be home again and have a toast for us forever, because I love you with all my heart as always Van.

Evidently Ashley's not the only one who didn't buy the whole platonic routine. Here she is reading from the transcripts again.

None of my friends or family could understand how two people could see so much of each other and not be a hot romance.

Everyone in the newsroom teased them constantly. Van's own mother was so eager for her son to propose to Beverly that she gave him an heirloom diamond ring to present to her, but Van never did present the ring to Beverly. He proposed to someone else. After the engagement was announced. One of Van's close friends, Dick, approached Beverly conspiratorially.

When Van became engaged to his first wife, Frances, Dick cornered me one night and told me that all I had to do was quote say the word, and the engagement would be off.

But Beverly never did say the word. Poor Dick, Beverly said, he never could understand Mayan Van's relationship. Not long afterwards, Beverly also became engaged, so.

She got a proposal from from.

Ashley struggles to remember the name, and I'm taking aback because the name is in fact that of her own grandfather, a.

Man named Llewellyn Brickin. It's funny that that's hard for me to remember. But he was from like a fancy family in Alabama. And she said, yes, growing up, I never heard stories of this guy, of my grandfather, like from my grandmother. Nothing nothing good, nothing bad, just like he was a ghost.

The grandkids grew up knowing nothing about their grandfather. But everything about Van, a man who had no role in the family. Ashley's older brother, Lloyd, remembers finding it all very confusing as a kid.

I remember her talking about Van and being like confused about whether Van was Gams my grandfather, like as if Van was Gams at a younger age, his name had been Van earlier.

It wasn't until age five that Lloyd discovered he even had a grandfather. The family never saw Llewellyn, he was always in his room. On a visit to Beverly's house, Lloyd and his younger brother spotted a figure shuffling through a dimly lid hallway, so the like, who is that man? Terrified, Lloyd tried to tell his mother what he'd seen.

My mother sat down like somberly, and she was like, that's your grandfather, Huh. Would you like to go and meet him?

Lloyd did not want to go meet him. Still, their mother ushered him and his baby brother into the bedroom where the man sat dozing in a chair. Lloyd's mother nudged Lloyd forward until he was almost up against his grandfather's knees, and she.

Touches him on the shoulder and she says, Daddy and his eyes open up, and she says, Daddy, I want you to meet your grandsons. And he he seems alone, disoriented, and he looks at us for like for some seconds, and he says, when you get older, you need to go to Argentina. The most beautiful women in the world are in Argentina. And I swear to you you like like just kind of goes back to sleep in the chair, and that was that.

Ashley has always wondered why her grandmother chose Llewellyn, a ghost who gave unsolicited travel advice, over Van, the man she was meant to be with. So I try to find.

Out, Hello, Jonathan, you're quite prompt.

This is Lloyd, and Ashley's mom knocks, and being called prompt in that Southern accent of hers makes me happier than a dead possum laying in the sunshine. While I can't say I've spent much time in the American South, I have seen a lot of foghorn leghorn cartoons, and so I try my best to respond in kind. Just try to be on time, ma'am.

Just try to be on.

Time, ma'am. I'll say, whatever this is, Marian.

I also phone up Ashley's aunt, Marian, Why do you think that in the end your mom chose your dad.

Well, you know, when she would tell us, she said he is the smartest, had the cutest personality, the most fond, just could wide up a room. You know, who knows what makes people really fall in love?

As a kid? I mean, did it seem as though it was a loving marriage.

At first?

At first? Llewellyn doated on Beverly hiring a staff of people to look after their home. At first, Llewellyn was charming, the kind of guy who never drink at parties so that he could drive everyone home. At first, it must have felt like Beverly was embarking on a wonderful life, and it must have felt terrible when it didn't last.

My father wasn't happy about being wealthy. He wanted to be super wealthy, so he did a lot of investing in a lot of not very safe companies, and his you know, his wealth disappeared very rapidly, and he wasn't able to handle that, and so he became an alcoholic and stated an alcoholic his whole life.

Llewellyn went from charming to mean.

He was exceedingly violent, toward our mother. Never was violent toward us, but he would wreck rooms.

Okay, Llewellyn lost everything, and thus so did Beverly. She went tumbling from a life of luxury to one of struggle, forced to work two jobs in order to provide for five kids and a husband who said in a room and drank all day.

Mother never threw him out. She did not believe in divorce.

You know.

She was a very strong, believing Catholic.

And she never looked back.

Oh, I don't know. She never would have told us that. She just said, you make your bed, you lie in it, and just made the best of everything.

But to quote my podcast brother Alex Baldwin, here's the thing. Through it all, Beverly still had Van. Even though they married other people and lived hundreds of miles apart. Van and Beverly remained close. Though neither Knox nor Marian ever met Van, they felt his presence all throughout their childhoods. Van's phone calls were frequent. Marian remembers how the spiral cord of the hallway phone would snake into Beverly's bedroom when he called.

We knew when Van called not to interrupt her. It was so light she was back in the good old days, like she was on a I'm not saying on a date with him, but maybe like that.

She normally talked to him at least once a month.

They would joke.

They would have conversations for hours if they wanted.

To, over a course of How long was this was this the case?

Probably forty fifty years?

Oh my goodness, many many years.

Yeah.

Mother had gone through Francis's cancer and her death and supported him.

That was his first wife. Yeah, and after when Van's wife died and your dad died, Why do you think Van and your mother didn't marry at that point?

Oh well, okay, these things did not happen at the same time.

Okay, my father didn't die.

Till mother was in her sixties. Fan had already remarried.

By the time Llewellyn died. Van had been remarried six years. Beverly, for her part, never remarried, remaining stubbornly alone. To Ashley, it seemed the couple that was meant to be had missed their moment, and after that the timing was never right. Ashley visited Beverly a few months before she died because she knew it always lifted her grandmother's spirits. She asked after Van.

She said that she hadn't heard from him in a while, and I told her that she should call him, and she refused. And her explaination to me at the time was that women don't call men.

Hmmm.

And I thought it was a joke, but she was serious. Yeah, And she never called him.

Beverly and Van never spoke again, and later that year Beverly died. So Ashley is left with the burden of her grandmother's tale of what never was, and now she wants to know if somewhere out there there were people who share that sense of loss over a thing that never existed. She wants to find out if the same way Beverly's family had a Van, Van's family had a Beverly.

I just think, like, did they hear about us? Do you know what I mean? Like, were we as important it was? Was my grandmother as important in like Van's stories or not?

What would that? What would that bring?

I think I think it would mean that that that that she meant something, you know, that her life wasn't this kind of sad struggle, but that she had had like a bigger life than the life that I saw that she was, like, really loved.

I get to work researching Van's family tree. Maybe, like Beverly, Van had a special relationship with one of his grandkids, someone he might have shared his heart with. So I phone up his grandson, but in the way of romantic Beverly stories, he doesn't have much to offer. Next, I email his granddaughter, who writes back, my interactions with my grandfather were sparse and perfunctory. I love and respect him dearly,

Hello.

Hi, is this Webby?

Yes?

Hello?

Is this Debbie?

Yes?

I decided to move up the family tree to Van's daughters, Debbie and Webby. Debbie owns her own store.

I'm in the middle of whale and then d.

And Webby works in design. Is it web design?

Interior design?

Oh? Because I thought it would be fun if you're because you do web design and your name is well, yeah. I want to know if Beverly Colomb was a presence in their lives, and so I put the question to them with an elegant economy.

Beverly, Oh, Beverly that he used to date way back then.

Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, I mean he referred to her. Also, he was crazy about Beverly, and I just know that it really really liked her. As soon as you hear the name, it just brings back, you know, a warmth.

I'm hoping to find some proof of an abiding romance that I can share with Ashley. But Webby and Debbie don't have many Beverly anecdotes. So I asked who else might be able to illuminate what Van and Beverly meant to each other?

Who is alive that would still remember that they're all gone?

Webby tells me that if Van were still alive, he'd be more than one hundred years old. His brothers, his war buddies are all gone. His youngest daughter, who he was closest with, died young. I talked to a couple of Van's sons in law, no dice, but it occurs to me that Van has one last family relation who might remember Beverly, someone in fact, who might have been in the house huttering around in the background during those marathon telephone calls. What about your stepmother?

Oh, I haven't talked to her since I split up. That ended best we don't even talk about the stepmother. Oh God, I wish it had been Beverly.

Van was married to his second wife, Barbara, for twenty five years. Towards the end of Van's life, Debbie remembers showing up one day to their home in New Orleans.

I walked in the house and she had him walking around with a diaper on with a robe open, while she had three other people playing cards, playing bridge. And that's it. That's the end, you know, I just started taking over.

I was horrified.

I mean, I quit my job, everything, I mean, because I was one of Anyway.

Van was showing signs of dementia and his health was deteriorating rapidly. After that visit, Debbie decided to move in. He was around this time, a time when Van might have most wanted to hear Beverly's voice. That he'd stopped phoning, and so for the first time in fifty years, Beverly and Van were going at life without each other, all possibly because Van had forgotten her phone number. And then came Hurricane Katrina.

Those the last months of his life worked really very tough, yeah, very very tough from Katrina. Because he died in October. The storm, of course, was in August. His wife, she moved out when he was dying.

That had to be very hard for your dad.

Very hard. She left him malone at his worst time of need. So we all gathered around him and we had three had his three girls, and he was happy enough. But you know, yeah, I say, where's my wife?

Hello?

Hi, this is Jonathan Goldstein speaking.

Oh yes, Jonathan, hold on, I'm gonna hand the fund to my mother.

It's joh Okay.

Hello, Hi, missus Bailey.

Fine, fine. I hope I can be some help, but I don't know if I can.

Van's second wife, Barbara, is now ninety three, and she experienced the end of Van's life differently than his daughter's. Around the time of Katrina, Barbara was almost eighty. She was scared and wanted to leave New Orleans, but couldn't get Van to leave with her.

Katrina was just terrible. I couldn't handle Van. He was ill and had to be helped in and out of bed and everything, and Debbie was they of doing that, and so I couldn't take him. I wanted to leave. I wanted to evacuate, and they didn't want to evacuate, and I couldn't. I couldn't take they They wouldn't go with me to my brothers, and they were just going to stay there. And of course then they got caught.

In the end, Van couldn't even be buried. All the cemeteries in New Orleans were flooded.

It was a myth, you know. There was a lot of Katrina that we wished didn't happen.

Most of Van's keepsakes were destroyed in the hurricane. So while Beverly's family has letters and photographs, Van's family has nothing. The record of his inner life is rapidly disappearing. I asked Barbara if the name Beverly means anything to her.

I remember the name, the name was very familiar, but I don't remember anything else really, And in fact, i'm thinking about it, I don't remember hearing a lot about Van's life with the paper.

Barbara married Van in nineteen eighty. Van was sixty years old. His newspaper day is far behind him.

Being a second wife, you don't talk about the old time with the other wife, you know what I'm trying to say.

Yeah, I can imagine that that would make sense. Was this a second marriage for you as well? Yes, yes, how did you guys meet?

Well, we met. My daughter Becca and his daughter Debbie were friends.

Okay.

Now I was having a party and Debbie said, would I invite her daddy? And so I did. This is my favorite story. And then at the end of the evening she said, why don't you ask miss Rutledge to dinner? And he said, which one is she? And I had been his hostess he was he was at my house and he says, which one is she?

How would you describe the courtship?

I guess you'd say low key, you know. Yeah, I don't know if your second husband is ever the great love.

You know.

What I'm trying to say, is there is there someone when when I do say like the you know, great love of your life, is there someone that comes to mind?

Well? I was in love with my first husband. Yeah, and I won't say that I didn't love Vane, but it wasn't you know, it wasn't like young love.

Yeah, he liked her a lot, but he didn't love her in the way he loved my mother.

This is Webby again. She says that like Barbara, Van's feelings for a second spouse couldn't compare with the kind of love you can feel when you're young.

It wasn't the romance of a lifetime, but he was a man and he loved her and he didn't want to be alone.

On the subject of young love and romance of a lifetime, I bring up Beverly again, presenting a theory that Van and Beverly were in love and meant to be, but that Beverly had chosen the wrong suitor. She'd refused Van until it was too late.

He was not shot down by Beverly that I know, Uh.

Huh, I mean the sense that I get from He.

Never imitated that he was in love with Beverly Cola. There was something deep between them, but it wasn't love and marriage and baby carriage.

Do you have any sense of why that was? Why they didn't end up going in that direction?

Wow?

I meant you had a friend that you're a door, but you're not in love with.

Sure.

There you have it, because if if it was not that way, they would have been married.

Even the letters Van wrote Beverly during the war are taken differently than Ashley had taken them.

I think this was all pre My mother was Beverly and Van, you know they were. That was before he met my mother.

The reason Webby and Debbie don't have much in the way of Van and Beverly anecdotes might be because they just never needed them. They're not invested in unearthing some great love story for Van because they believe he already had one with their mother, Whereas Beverly and Llewellyn had a bad marriage, Van and Francis had a good one. You've had some water, I've had some.

I've had a lot of I have a lot of coffee, and I have had a lot of coffee.

And you will have coffee should you choose to have them. Having talked to everyone, I could I get back in touch with Ashley. So we talked with Webby and Debbie, and then I spoke with I tell her that while I couldn't find anything to support a romance, that didn't mean Beverly wasn't important to Van's family. I explain how instantly everyone recognized Beverly's name, knew your grandmother's name that

Was my godmother who was Beverly.

Over the years, Van's wife, Francis, became close friends with Beverly too, and Van and Francis wanted Beverly to remain connected to their family forever.

They made her my godmother. You know, that's quite an honor to bestow upon a friend, to ask them to do that for you.

So you're first born, Oh my gosh, you didn't to know about this, right, this is news.

Yeah, I didn't know anything. I didn't know no no idea, yeah, no idea. And my grandmother was pretty Her faith was really important to her. And I am sure that that meant the world to her. I'm sure she took that really seriously.

And then there's the second thing. I learned, a small, strange thing that I'm not even sure is a thing. Throughout my conversations with Van's family, there was one oddly specific Beverly and Van's story that everyone seemed to know. In fact, it was the only story they all seemed to know. No matter who I spoke to, kids, grandkids, sons in law, it kept popping up again and again.

I just heard one story about Mickey Rooney at one of the parties. I know he was disappointed in Mickey Roone.

You remember him saying something along the line, I hate that Mickey Roney.

Every telling is slightly different, but all of the stories have one thing in common.

Currently, Mickey was a little bit on the crass side the thing.

He said something crude and lude sexually led to a woman at the park. He was making crass.

Remarks, crass remarks in the presence of Van Date for the evening one, Beverly Colom.

And my father went over there. I'm kind of pulled Hi by the collar and said, you say that again, and I'm gonna knock you out.

I do recall him saying something like I punched that guy right in the nose one time.

You know Cowarde, and my father was six feet so he was much bigger. He said he had to be restrained not to want to throw him out the window.

Do you know who Mickey Rooney is?

Oh? Yeah, my grandmother hated him.

Hi, what do you know? Why?

No?

No, every person that I spoke to, practically from Van's family, had a story that involved Van, your grandmother and Mickey Rooney.

Stop it.

No, I'm not kidding. Some some variation on it, because you know so he he was her escort and and there was a Hollywood party. I searched for newspaper coverage of this fight between Van and Mickey Rooney, and while I didn't find that exactly, I did find an article Beverly wrote about a big celebrity party in New Orleans in the fall of nineteen forty three, the exact party where she and Van would have met Mickey Rooney and where Mickey Rooney would have met Van's fist. Found some

Never?

Here?

Take a look. Yeah, oh my god. Ashley gazes down at the article cool, a big smile on her face.

Movie stars are all a twinkle as they go out to do the town.

Ooh.

If you didn't already know the mass of film fans jamming the Roosevelts soon made it plain Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland were on the scene. I mean, look, at least she reserved her personal feelings about Mickey Rooney from the paper.

Right, she was a journalist, and so am I a journalist? That is, I am too a journalist, which is why I read in its near entirety Mickey Rooney's autobiography Life is Too Short, a fun bit of wordplay. As Mickey was a scant five foot two in his stockinged feet, I search for confirmation of his having scuffled with the

I hadn't heard of that situation, but I had heard of situations where my dad had been in heated discussions.

Like it wouldn't be so out of the ordinary that perhaps your father.

Exactly exactly, you know, my dad was a force to be reckoned with, so I don't doubt that maybe he could have gotten into a ruckus with somebody.

Kelly was born well after the Van incident. Her mother was Mickey Rooney's fifth wife. He was married eight times in total. He spent his whole life hoping that the next marriage would be the one where the love would stick, but Mickey ended up spending his final years alone. By the end of his life, he'd arrived at a simple conclusion about why to be with someone that he passed on to his children. My sister said to.

Him one time, Dad, you know I'm getting divorced, And he says, well, let me ask you something.

Did you love him? And she said, yes, Daddy, I did.

I loved him, and he says, well, did you like him?

Did you like the way he treated you? Did you like the way he treated others?

And he really taught us that it's not about all the I love you babies and the sex and this and that. He said, you really have to be in.

Like his relationship with Judy Garland, that was never romantic.

No, I don't believe so. I mean, they met so young, you know. We used to ask him that, well, why didn't marry Judy? He said, well, it would have been like marrying my sister.

He said.

I was in love with her. I was in like with her.

She was my world, so I felt, I mean, he really loved her, He really loved her, and he would have done anything to have tried to save her, and did try to.

Judy Garland died at the age of forty seven from a drug overdose. And Life is Too Short, Mickey writes of Judy, it seemed as if we'd known each other forever, that we were destined to be best friends. Mickey would take Judy out for chocolate malts to cheer her up. He'd answer the phone when she called at three am. Anytime Judy he said, you call and I'll be here for you. It's always been that way. Like Judy and Mickey,

There's something really big about someone who knows you so well and continues to want to know you.

Can you imagine that?

No? I think it's really hard to stick with people through there are many iterations in life, right, It's really hard to meet somebody at sixteen and be with them as they change into a totally different person. By I mean, I'm only I'm thirty three, right, So have.

You already seen this even at thirty three?

Yeah, of course, I mean there are people that like I loved so much and we don't have much in common anymore. I think it was the biggest relationship of her life.

You know, you began this thing, imagining this great untold love story and wanting to actually learn about it.

And I don't care about the love story anymore, I really don't. I'm good good, I'm good with that multi year friendship. I'm just so happy that they had each other. How lucky these people were. Van and Bev.

Beverly's life was a struggle. She would come home exhausted after a long day of work and there would be five mouths to feed and Llewellyn drunk. But then the phone would ring, and Beverly would smile and duck into the other room, and there, reaching out from hundreds of miles away, was her Van. It was always that way.

Now that the fernentures roof, turning to its goodwill home, Now that the last month's rant is scheming, with the damage to possible, take this moment to dissolve.

If we meant him, if we talked serious but felt around for far too.

From things that accidentally talk. This episode of Heavyweight was produced by Khalila Holt and me Jonathan Goldstein, along with Stevie Lane and Ba Parker. The show is edited by Jorge just Special Thanks to Emily Condon, Alex Bloomberg, Fia Bennin, and Jackie Cohen. Bobby Lord mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson, Blue Dot Sessions, and Bobby Lord. Additional music credits can be found on

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