Get away, get away, I echoed.
"Family photos show me, as a young child, happy and obviously loved. But around the age of seven or eight there was a change, and I became a somber person whom people were always telling to smile. Grammar school was a quiet, unspoken torture. Children's parties were a torture, too. In those days little girls were supposed to look like Shirley Temple, with tight curls and starched dresses. For reasons that I have never understood, I looked more like a German refugee--my mother choosing to dress me in knee socks, Oxfords and dark wools. My long hair was skinned back into two tight, unforgiving braids.
"I remember a blue bicycle with balloon tires, which I rode like a fury up and down the California hills. I remember the wonderful scrape of new roller skates on smooth pavements. The fields of wildflowers were being turned into developments, and there was always the skeleton of a house to climb....
"Then the evening came when a grownup, a friend of my parents, turned to me at the dinner table and asked the inevitable question. 'What do you want' to be when you grow up"' 'An actress,' I said without blinking, and the minute the words were out of my mouth, they had the ring of truth.
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