My mother’s name was Miriam Spiegelman. My grandparents named her after Miriam, Moses’s sister in the Bible. Spiegelman was her father’s name, meaning “Mirror Man” in German. The name should tip you off-we are Jews from Poland and Russia as far back as Abraham.
Her stage name was Paula Morgan. She was a Broadway, film & tv actor who studied with Sandy Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City. Later, with her high cheekbones and piercing blue eyes, my mother was under contract at Paramount Studios, appearing in “The 10 Commandments” and at Twentieth Century Fox, playing the adulteress in “David and Bathsheba.” The Bible followed her!
I also became an actress/dancer/singer. She began giving me notes on my performances beginning in the seventh grade at the Westlake School for Girls. I was cast as the Demon of Insincerity (hmmm?) in “The Phantom Tollbooth.” For the next thirty years, from adolescence to professional acting, she repeated one refrain, a famous quote from Sandy Meisner, “You can never be too specific!”
You can imagine the pressure-you can understand my need to prove myself to her and to me. When I was cast as Katherine of Aragon in Henry VIII, I went over the edge.
How could I play Katherine’s Catholicism? Her submission to Henry and to God? Katherine’s parents, Isabella, and Ferdinand, the Spanish Inquisition architects-I call them the Latin Nazis - married her off to Henry VIII, making Katherine Queen of England.
Pretending was not good enough.
So, I drove to the Church of the Good Shepard in Beverly Hills, and I went to Confession.
At noon on a Wednesday at the Church of the Good Shepard, six confessors waited in line for a number, like at the Deli! I was number six, so I slid into a smooth walnut bench, feeling like a criminal. I looked at a plaster fountain of cherubs and fruit-drip, drip, drip. Did the other sinners know I was Jewish?
Four people went in and out of this tiny room tucked into the back corner. The fifth man bounced out the door, free to sin again.
I had seen the Godfather & Moonstruck-I expected a tiny dark room with a black wrought iron screen.
In shiny Beverly Hills, the confession room was a back office facing the sun. Light poured in through a six-foot-high stained-glass window of Mary. The size of her figure in the window was meant to intimidate me…but to a Jew raised on the parting of the Red Sea, plagues of boils, frogs, and locusts well, this coy Mary was ……Wendy from Peter Pan.
Inside, the Irish priest in the white caftan hid behind a plastic divider on a secretary’s desk that must have come from Office Depot.
I was not prepared with a backstory. But my years of acting kicked in. I knew how to lie.
There was no chair on the other side of the desk, so I kneeled …. (to the audience). I saw it in the Godfather.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” -out came the line from a million movies….
“How long since your last confession?” He asked.
“One month,” I answered.
A sheet of directions on praying for contrition was scotch taped to the desk:
I recited:
“My God, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart. In choosing to do wrong and failing to do good, I have sinned against You, Whom I should love above all things.”
The Irish priest responded by mumbling something…it was oddly familiar. Orthodox Jews also mumble when they daven or pray.
Then there was silence.
I took it as my cue to confess my made-up sin. “I’ve been having an affair with a married man,” I told my veiled Irishman.
“Are you single?” he said
“Yes.”, I replied.
“I suggest you don’t put yourself in that situation.” He spoke.
Then he said, “Say five Our Fathers.”
I assumed this was homework-I knew what he was talking about. I had dated an Italian Catholic, but I didn’t know the prayer-
But what difference did it make? I was failing a fake confession as a fake Catholic. Would this send me to Hell?
“Is there anything else?” the priest asked.
I said, “Don’t you think that is enough?”
We laughed at the same time, and I broke character.
Behind the laughter, I started to feel guilty. My heart raced, sweat broke out on my temples and neck. I imagined my deceased Polish relatives staring down at me with dark eyes, tribal and old school.
I felt shaky, like I had just shoplifted in Beverly Hills, wondering if anyone was going to follow me into the parking lot and arrest me for stealing the Irish priest’s grace.
I headed for my car, oddly triumphant and ravenously hungry.
The Bagel Nosh on Little Santa Monica was only a few blocks away. I could get a bowl of matzo ball soup there and an onion bagel toasted with lox and cream cheese, with red onion and tomato and chocolate chip rugelach and a large seltzer…. you can never be too specific…