By Shawn Keehne:
Mollie Miller (March 22, 1929–November 3, 2023)
Mollie Miller's career began at Western Costume Company, where she worked in wardrobe and costume her whole life. She made the scarf for Mary Poppins and the Bird Woman’s shawl for the 1964 movie. She also made the sea-grass samurai headdresses for the film Big Trouble In Little China, which came out in 1986. Skilled at macramé, weaving, knitting, crochet, drawing, woodcarving—my mom was a "go-to" person in Hollywood when someone needed something and they weren't sure how to make it.
Growing up, it wasn’t unusual to see famous people in our house because this or that needed mending. She was in her 80s when Ret Turner asked her to make a new hatband for Cher. When he presented it to her, Ret told my mom that Cher was delighted and asked if the same woman made it who made her belts from all those years ago; she had. After my mom and dad divorced, my mom started working at NBC Studios. She worked there until she was forced to retire at 80 years old when Jay Leno left The Tonight Show (the first time). She worked at the studio for 35 years.
A little bit about my mom. She was born in Hollywood in 1929. One of the first things that I think about when I think about her is the number of things that she must have seen and experienced by the time she passed away at nearly 95 years old; the thought of it is quite extraordinary. It's a nice counterbalance to the actual act of coming back to this home where she lived for the last fifty years. It's very sad when somebody dies, but when that person has lived to be 94, it's like . . . oh my God, you had an amazing run. You can't not be grateful for the longevity that they had. Also, there is the fact that my mom had severe dementia. That changes one’s perspective on death.
Things got really bad during the pandemic. I don’t think any of us realized how dependent we were on our social circles until we were isolated from them. For my mom, it made things so much worse.
For the last two years, she had to have 24-hour live-in care. In that time, there was a constant refrain from her that she was "ready to go," that she was done, that she did not know why she was still here. She was the last of her family, outliving her siblings and so many of her friends, and all that went with it. It’s a specific hopelessness I don’t think you can fully comprehend until you live it—when someone you love doesn’t want to be alive anymore. They know what is happening to them, and there isn’t anything you can do to make it stop. You can make sure they have care, that they are safe, but even spending time with them—the moment you leave, it’s like it didn’t happen.
One of the nice things about coming back into this house and going through her things is that it reminds me of when she was so much younger. She was 36 when she had me (my dad was 45), so I always had older parents. Going through her clothes and other items reconnects me with memories from the 70s, from the 80s, from who she was before dementia—when she was still going to parties, when she was still doing things that made her feel vibrant and vital. It's actually a nice experience, because so much of the last 12 months, and 6 months, and 2 months has been about a truly sad decline—when she couldn't get out of bed without help, couldn't take care of herself . . . didn't want to be here.
It's interesting how the things we collect and the things that we wear and the decisions we make about how we are comfortable and present ourselves to the world and how we feel comfortable in our skin truly represent who we are. Not only is it how we connect with ourselves, it's also how people connect with us. This is one of the many things that gets stripped away when someone is in a care situation. My mom stopped wearing her turquoise jewelry, she forgot it was her trademark. Jeans and boots weren’t practical. I had to change how she did her hair. Clothes became based on texture and practicality for someone to provide care.
The clothes are a nice reminder of a life when she was fully her own person.
My mom was born Mollie Joan Palmer, but she hated her middle name, so I don't usually use it. She grew up in Hollywood at the time of the stock market crash. She had two older sisters and an older brother. Her mother died when she was about 11 or 12. She didn't really have a mom growing up. Her eldest sister was 13 years older than her; she was her mother figure. That was Adele Palmer, the head of costuming for Republic Studios for decades. Mom was very much an athlete in school. She lettered in swimming at Hollywood High. I think when she went to junior college, she was on the synchronized swim team and was a lifeguard. She loved being in the water and loved going to the beach. She and her two good friends, Darlene and Margaret, were a trio who did everything together. Darlene grew up to became a judge, Darlene McNair—the judge on the Robert Blake trial. That was one of my mom's oldest friends.
My mom would have a big Christmas party every year. When I was four, in 1969, she and my dad divorced. That was the first Christmas after the divorce, and Mom was sad. There was nobody to decorate the tree with (besides four-year-old me), so she had a tree-trimming party. She continued to have that party every single year for probably the next 45 years . . . and it got bigger and bigger. I think in its heyday, she would easily have 60, 70 people over to the house decorating the tree. I remember one year Darlene was working on some kind of Yakuza trial, and she was here with two bodyguards. There was one bodyguard outside patrolling, while the other bodyguard was in the house helping hang ornaments—and then the bodyguards would switch.
My mom loved to entertain, and she was a great cook—a really good baker. She loved everything that had to do with Christmas. There are several cookies that I will make for the rest of my life that will remind me of her at Christmas time. One of them is called a Sandbakkel—a Scandinavian kind of a shortbread cookie that looks like a little shell. And my God, her rum balls were 300 proof! Before we were married, my wife came over for a Christmas party and ate two rum balls. She said, "Dude, I can't drive." Mom's cheese fondue always had a lot of Kirschwasser (Kirsch) in it—a cherry liqueur. I thought it was the grossest thing ever, but boy did her old lady friends love it!
I was surrounded by so much art when I was growing up. I’d wander around the work rooms where either my mom or dad worked and see the craftsmanship of sketch artists, cutter-fitters, tailors, makeup and hair stylists. At home she would macramé, knit, crochet, weave, draw—every year we made our own Christmas cards by silkscreening the print. My uncle Chuck (on my dad’s side) was the head of costumes for Disney Studios, and when they were making Mary Poppins, they wanted her to wear a scarf that would “flutter” in Mary’s opening scene. My mom made several prototypes, knit—crochet—those things don’t flutter. She did another design with macramé of silk thread, and that is the iconic scarf you see in the movie. She also made the Bird Woman’s shawl for that film too. She made the samurai head dresses for the film Big Trouble in Little China and created a whole series of art necklaces for Tony Duquette.
Art was the constant growing up. My mom really valued it. That's why I gravitated toward the arts.
She was never concerned with my math or history grades. I was a fairly good student, but the question at the end of the day was always, “How was art class?”
I don't think that's how most people grow up. I am grateful that art was something we could share to some extent. She was amazing at any handicraft—weaving, knitting, crochet, macramé, cooking, drawing, woodcarving, silk-screening. I studied two-dimensional art in college, so we could communicate about that. Then I studied graphic design and photography. When my medium shifted away from analog tools to the computer, that's where we had a disconnect.
To be frank and for context, my mom was a narcissist and an alcoholic. I think that she did the best she could as a parent, considering that she really didn’t have a mom growing up. I think that the things she valued most about me were the parts of me that mirrored her. Where we were different, she had a hard time relating. She did not hide her annoyance that I’ve never been a drinker.
I don’t doubt that her growing up was incredibly hard. Her older sister was very strict, plus she grew up during the Depression. They did okay because they had a little house with an apartment on the back that they rented out. Her father, Jack Palmer, worked for Fox Studios. He became a changed man when my maternal grandmother died. When Rena passed away around 1940, he became much more strict, less joyful. He remarried, and I know my mom didn’t get along with her stepmother.
My dad (John Keehne) used to tell me that he felt that I raised myself. When I was younger, I thought he was overreacting; I mean, I wasn’t raised by wolves in the forest. I lived with my mom and her husband. Now that I’m older, I can see where he was coming from. My parents did not get along at all after the divorce. They tried to be as good as they could about not bad-mouthing the other, but they were human. I think that almost every kid who comes from divorced parents feels like they are carrying a burden, trying to balance the relationship between their parents. My stepmother was perfectly fine, but my stepfather was definitely not. He was awful, easily the worst person I’ve ever met.
Mom instilled a lot of great things in me, but there was also a lot that I've had to overcome and deal with. I believe that the bad things that happen to us, more than the good things, make us who we are. How we choose to deal with the traumatic and difficult things that happen to us, I think that’s where we get forged. I'm certainly happy with how I have ended up, and in part I need to definitely credit my mom for that.
I would describe my relationship with my mom as having more quantity than quality. I was very much a fixture in her life. I moved out when I was 24, but I still saw her regularly. She started playing racquetball at the age of 62, and we'd play racquetball a couple times a week. My stepfather died in 2000, and once he died, I had dinner with my mom every week. When she got older and didn't feel comfortable driving at night or on the freeway, I took her to her car club meetings twice a month. Then it progressed to me taking her to grocery shop and Costco. We spent a lot of time together, but I would never say we were really close. I wouldn't confide in her. I wouldn't tell her something that would make me feel emotionally vulnerable. I could talk to her about superficial things, make her laugh, and often she would confide in me. All of that is fine, but I regret that I didn't have the level of trust in her that I needed to truly tell her who I was. It’s something I imagine most people hope to have with their mom.
I lived in a glass closet where I'm sure she knew I was gay for a long time, but it was nothing that we discussed. When I finally did come out to her, she was fine about it. She was like, “Oh, I've totally known.” And I thought, Okay, you could have let me know that you knew. When you get used to walling off and compartmentalizing yourself, it almost feels weird not to, and that's just how it was.
As for my mom’s loom. It was a Cartercraft Floor Loom made in the early 1940s. I believe the wood is ash. The loom is double beamed, but she generally wove with one of the beams in use. As to process, my mom would often spin her own yarn from wool on her spinning wheel; that’s the chunkier yarn. For the pieces that have a finer yarn, she’d set up the warp using a warping rack and thread it through the eyes on the heddles and then use a motor her father made for her in the 1940s to spin the yarn onto bobbins. The bobbins would be put into a shuttle and thrown back and forth across the beater to make the weft. She began weaving in high school, it was an available class if you can believe it. So she probably started weaving between 1943 and 1946. She worked as a professional weaver for the Robert Crowder Studio in Hollywood for a number of years, and at one point ran his workshop. She’s also done a number of freelance commissions on the loom as well.
As the dementia set in, she went through a period of rage and toxicity. I think a person who is beginning to understand what is happening to them feels that rage, and the only place it can go is to the people closest to them. When you’re an only child, you get all of it. Then you get past that stage. At that point, when she succumbed to the dementia, she was very clear to tell me that she loved me and that she loved seeing me. There was a nice closeness at that point. She didn’t remember any of the fights, any of the awful things she’d said. It’s the person without dementia who has to put that aside and, like their loved one, just live in the moment. But on the next day’s visit, she’d tell me again that she loved me and how happy she was that I visited and that she wished it wasn’t so long between visits, even though it had been less than 24 hours. It’s been a very interesting journey.
My mom was really into cars. I think for most guys, she was probably the dream girl. We'd be driving down the street and she'd say, “That's a '56 Chevy.” She told me that she knew that because of the headlights or some other detail. It all sounded Greek to me. Sometime in the late 1950s, she decided to join a car club. She had an MG at the time and went to a meeting of MG folks. She thought they were okay, but then she met the Morgan people and thought they were a lot of fun, so she joined the Morgan club. She could only be an associate member until she eventually bought her own Morgan.
Her car club friends were the same friends that she had for decades. They would get together twice a month—a regular meeting and a social meeting at somebody's house. The regular meeting would be at a pizza place or a restaurant, and they'd all bring their cars. They’d have race events—the Concord, or there might be a slalom, or there might be a rally. Growing up, there were annual trips to a ranch in the Sierras, and later she took annual trips with the club to Cambria. It was the central part of their social life. I was never into any of it. I think in part it was my way of rebelling, but I've always been incredibly disinterested in cars, much to her dismay. I remember when I got my first car at 16; it was a used Mustang that she bought for me. The first car that I bought myself was a Nissan, and she was furious because it was an import. I'd ask, "And what part of the United States do they make Morgans?” And she'd say, “Oh, no, that doesn't count!”
Growing up around this club of adults, I found it incredibly boring. There's nothing at a rally that's going to be interesting to a 10- or 12-year-old. Absolutely nothing. I certainly feel like her Morgan was my elder sibling that she liked better than me. In fact, she was pregnant with me when she bought the car but didn’t tell Dad because he might not have wanted her to buy a British sports car while pregnant. Once she had the car, she sprang the news. She liked to tell a story about driving with me in the back compartment of the Morgan. It wasn’t a seat; I rested my head on the crossbeam as I looked out the front window. She hit a bump, and my tooth went through my lip. The problem was that I then bled all over the inside of her car—not the fact that her only child was injured and bleeding. I had had the audacity to bleed on her Morgan! Both the car and I survived. A lot of people thought I might want to inherit a vintage British sports car, but I’m quite happy never learning how to drive a stick shift. When she died, I gave it to one her friends.
I don’t exactly know why she gravitated to cars. I know that her brother, Stormy, had a cool car. He worked at Disney Studios. He was married, and his wife needed the car during the day so my mom, as a teenager, would drive him to the lot and then take the car back to the wife at home. For doing that all week, she got to have the car on Friday nights. She could work on cars, too. One of her earliest jobs was helping out a boyfriend at the gas station where he worked. I remember as a kid, it was raining and streets were flooding, and she went through a flooded intersection and her car stalled out. She got out of the car, opened the hood, did something, closed the hood, and away we went. "What was that about?" I asked. She said, “Oh, water got in the distributor cap, and I needed to dry it off.” To me that was wizardry.
My mom was a part of the Morgan Plus 4 Club until the day she died. Even during Covid, they had their meetings online. She didn’t own a computer, so I’d pick her up, take her to my house, fix dinner, and set her up at my computer so she could see her friends via Zoom. When the dementia became worse those last couple of years, I became more protective of her in social situations, but up until that point, she always participated in the meetings. It made me sad that post pandemic there was only maybe one couple in her car club that came to see her a few times. After knowing all of these people for decades, nobody called to check in with me about how she was doing, nobody came by to visit her. She was by far the eldest member of the club, having joined in 1959.
They will all be here for the memorial on the ninth, but they didn’t check on her when they could have. They’ll be telling themselves and each other how much they adored her, but I feel like they abandoned her.
I think it's a lot more important to express to the people you love that you love them while they can appreciate that you love them.
The same thing happened when my dad passed away. I had called my stepsister and said if you want to see him, do not delay. She was busy and couldn't do it, and couldn't do this, and couldn't do that. Once he died, she absolutely wanted to come to the funeral. That kind of thing just baffles me, but that might speak to the way we treat age and illness in this country. People are a lot more preoccupied about what makes them uncomfortable as opposed to what seeing them might do for somebody else.
Like any other major life event, this is something I’ve learned from, and it certainly has fostered growth. Now that I'm approaching sixty, I can’t help but be more mindful of the people in my world who are older, who may need help, who may need a visit. I try not to put off the opportunity to be there for someone or even to let them know how much I appreciate them.
It’s also been an opportunity to grow with respect to material things. I’ve tried to serve her memory well by giving her belongings to her friends and finding ways to donate the rest. That is why I am so happy to see her handwoven textiles living on in new and creative ways. I hope they are enjoyed and appreciated by others. It’s like her own little slice of immortality, leaving something behind that makes someone else happy. I can’t think of a better achievement than that.
Visit the Flapper Press Shop for your very own Mollie Miller design!
Shawn Keehne is a photographer/graphic designer and educator who lives with her wife, Heather, and dogs, Mando, Leia, and Waylon, in North Hollywood, California. Waylon, a small terrier, had been Shawn's mother’s dog and joined the household of two German Shepherds when she died. It took one day for them to become a happy pack. She enjoys travel, playing guitar, and collecting tiki mugs. www.shawnkeehne.com
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