Love Affair. The memoir of a forbidden father daughter relationship.

Leslie Kenton was the daughter of the world-famous jazz bandleader Stanley Kenton (known as Stan Kenton). In 2010, as a now world-famous woman, she surprised the world with her memoirs. They were confusing. They told of an incestuous relationship that only partially corresponded to the pattern that is otherwise considered universally valid for such relationships. Leslie repeatedly wrote of the highs and feelings of happiness that characterized the intense closeness to her father. Below an excerpt from the book.

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144 14 BLOOD ON WHITE TILES

[ In June of 1952 Leslie celebrated her eleventh birthday.]

…

It was the middle of July 1952. We were on the road in and around New England, playing lots of dates at amusement parks. I loved it when the band played ballrooms in amusement parks since I adored roller coasters.

During the previous five years, I had ridden roller coasters every chance I got – once I got tall enough to lie about my age to the guys who operated them so they would let me on…

When the [= Stanley’s] band played amusement parks, Stanley always gave me money for the rides and told me to be back in the dance hall by 10.30 p.m. He warned me never to talk to strangers. I thought this was a stupid thing for him to do, since wherever we went… everybody was a stranger…

I liked hanging out with the people I met. I liked the way when, if I did talk to ’strangers’… they let me have free throws and free rides…

All these delicious possibilities depended on my being able to talk to strangers long enough to make pals of them. In all the nights I spent by myself in nightclubs, dance halls and amusement parks while my father worked, I never met a stranger who was unkind to me.

* * *

As usual, Stanley and I slept in the same bed. We always did when I was with him.. I left curling my back up against his. He was long and broad and warm. His feet were never cold like hers. I didn’t like his snoring, but, like most kids, once I drifted off I slept like the dead. so it didn’t matter.

148 I don’t know if I ever went to sleep or not. The next thing I knew his massive body was on the top of mine. In a rough voice he started to repeat my name ‚Leslie, Leslie. Oh, Leslie.‘ His hands stroked my body in ways that frightened me. It felt like he was trying to take me with him into a strange universe – a place where I didn’t know the rules. What was he doing? What did he want? What did he expect of me? I reassured myself that it must be OK. After all he was my father. He was my pal. Didn’t we laugh together? OK, sometimes we fought, and sometimes he would take a swing at me, like when I bit my nails, but he was my protector, my friend.

Then came the pain, the sweat and the heat, the weight of his huge body on mine. Searing pain – the lining of my life being ripped apart. There was none of the moving of one body into the body of another, of getting lost in the flesh of another, lulled by heartbeats and an ecstasy of dissolution. That I would only come to know much later with other men – after I had grown up. Now there would only be a searing pain. Like the shell of an oyster, I was prised open. My soft insides spilled out everywhere. In one moment, my entire existence becomes unglued.

Out of here. I’m out of here. From the ceiling I look down at the bed, at the floor, at the bodies of the two people beneath me, twisted on each other. …

[What Leslie describes above is called dissociation in trauma therapy. This is a state of consciousness that is experienced as if one were to leave one’s own body and see oneself as a third person with whom something very bad, very painful is happening, but which one does not feel oneself, since one is decoupled from this person, from this body].].

I go further out, beyond the room, beyond the night, beyond the stars. I go to a secret place at the centre of the Milky Way. That’s where I come from. That’s my home. …

151 15 SECRETS OF FORGETTING

The Morning After….Huddling aginst the head of the bed, I pull the covers around me. I am crying.

He notices. ‚What’s wrong with you?‘

‚How could you do that to me?‘

‚What are you talking about?‘

‚Last night.‘

‚Last night?‘

‚How could you?‘

‚How could I what?‘ There is a long pause. Then he growls. ‚Don’t you come crying to me. Anything you got you asked for. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.‘

I can’t believe my father is saying these words to me… Fear takes over. My body freezes… Does he really not remember?

Days later:

156 He comes into the room and shuts he door. ‚I am mad at myself.’… ‚I love you so much, Leslie. It’s just, maybe I love you the wrong way.‘

That was all that was ever said. It would be twenty years before we would speak openly about what took place at Lake Compound and the sex that would happen between us again and again during the next three years.

This was the middle of July. The rest of the summer lay ahead. That morning – a morning of unspoken agreements and unspoken terrors – marked the beginning of a new, wild, unpredictable existence we began to live together. It marked the start of a different life in which secrets had to be so tightly held that they became secret even to ourselves.

157 16 FORBIDDEN HONEYMOON

With every day that passed our secret became hidden more deeply… The intensity of emotional exchange between us and our connection… became so all-encompassing it often felt as though Stanley and I were one another.

Breaking the taboo of incest had breached the boundaries of acceptable reality, forcing us into unknown territory. We turned our backs on the rules and regulations of the world… Even when separated by thousands of miles, the pact remained. Judging by Stanley’s communications with me – especially during the last years of his life – this was true for him as it was for me.

Apart from the months I spent away from him at school, from that time onwards we hardly left each other’s side… Now, he became obsessed with me: my physical presence, my opinions and my feelings, as well as his thoughts and feelings about me. It started with his insistence that he know about my whereabouts at every moment of the day and night.

…

159 One day followed the next. We spent them like wild children – stubborn enthusiastic, fighting, laughing, teasing…. We looked for adventure wherever we could find it.

Towards the end of July, the band had two days off near Cape Cod. One of Stanley’s fans offered him the use of a private house on the beach where we could stay.

[They arrive late at night and hang around outside until sunrise. When they go to bed…]

‚I’m tired,‘ I said, curling up against his back. I wasn’t afraid any more. Whatever had happened that was horrible was all finished for the moment. He turned his body towards me and slid his left arm under my head. I lay in the crook of it, my head against his chest. My father had little hair on his chest. But the hairs that were there were long. They tickled my nose.

165 17 CASTELS IN THE SAND

Our days at Cape Cod strenghened the connection between us – a closeness which bore little resemblance to the horror of Lake Compounce. Yet had the rape never happened, I doubt that this bond would ever have developed as it did.

[Later at dinner in a hotel…]

167 Stanley drank his Scotch and ordered two more, while I downed two more champagne cocktails… I felt proud to be treated like a woman…

The night was warm and sticky. Stanley put his arm around my shoulder. The top of my shoulder fitted perfectly underneath his armpit. I could feel the silkiness of his shirt against my check. I could smell his smell. He wanted to talk. This time it was not about music. It was about him. His voice had a dreamy quality to it – like someone in a trance who has a hard time making words…

When we got back to our room it was sweltering. There was no wind off the sea to cool down the air… When we got to bed we were both naked… The sheets covered us completely, forming a barrier between us and the outside world.

That was a world which had nothing to do with us. We were hidden inside our secret tent. Instead of curling back to back as we usually did, we met face to face. As I lay on my side with my head against his chest, he entered my body again. It hurt and I was scared.

Champagne, together with my being so tired, produced in me an anesthetized state. Somewhere in a dark corner of my heart it felt as though what was happening had to be ‚wrong‘. But I couldn’t figure it out. All I knew was that right here, right now – with this man, child, friend, father, stranger and fellow conspirator – I wanted to try my best to follow, wherever he was taking me.

When I look back on that time, it seems to me we were both children – responsible to no one, living a life unbounded by space and time… My father and I had our own unspoken pact – one that, over the years, would come to define the depth of our bond and its cost to our lives: ‚Cross your heart and hope to die‘.

171 18 MANY MANSIONS

177 I had begun to change. Repeated sex at the age of ten or eleven triggers cascades of hormones. The body tries to rise to the occasion by turning from child to woman as fast as it can.

178 During the months my father and I were away from each other, I spent night after night waiting for him to call…

I so identified with Stanley and his concern that it was as if I was becoming him…

Over the Christmas holidays we spent several days together in Catlina walking in the hills, swimming in the sea and sleeping

…

School, my worry over grades, my love for Seiko [her friend, whom she loved very much] … were all forgotten now that I was back in the intensified world Stanley and I inhabited together. …

Some nights we had sex. Now at least the pain had gone from my body

181 19 RITES OF PASSAGE

…my first flow of menstrual blood… I was becoming a woman and I loved it….

I wanted to be good enough, smart enough, beautiful enough for my father to go on loving me too. I loved my father. He was the centre of my whole life. I wanted to bring to him the love I believed he had been forced to live without.

My empathy with him became all-consuming…

When we were alone, before alcohol soaked his brain and turned him into someone else, he talked a lot about money, music, promotors who didn’t do their job and where he should go next. He would sit on the floor of our hotel room and put his head in my lap. Usually the conversations began with: ‚Shortstuff, [Stanley’s nick for Leslie] I don’t know what to do.‘ … I felt proud that he trusted me so much he thought he could tell me anything… I had become his confessor, the one he trusted, the one he turned to when he needed help.

During our weeks together that spring, the inevitable time of night would arrive when Stanley passed the point of no return and become no longer accessible to me. In this state he sometimes reached for me in bed. Then this man-turned-automaton did whatever he had to do sexually. When this happened, I shut off from him and went elsewhere, disappeared into the ether, waiting for morning to come, hoping he would return to himself again.

In a world where protocols and regulations rule people’s lives, living a forbidden life so close to someone whose blood and DNA you share can take on momentous proportions. You are breaking a taboo. Although you refuse to acknowledge this openly, somewhere in the vast ocean of the consciousness you are forced to live out the power and the terror of it.

S. 189 So long as you both remain true to what you are doing, and to each other, the bond between you can deepen in a way that transcends the sexual connection. When you share what you most love, hate, fear and long for, as well as a common ancestry, the affinity between you can become overpowering. You experience heaven and hell, not as philosophical notions but as immediate realities. One moment you live the life of the gods, the next you are plunged into terror or despair. Either way, you feel more alive than ever before. There is only one catch: turn against the bond you have forged, deny responsibility for what you are living, let fear of punishment and discovery invade that secret world, and the exhilaration will turn to horror.

190 21 CHANGING FOCUS

191 My father had always directed our relationship. It was he who decided what we did, when we had sex, what was allowed and what not. In effect, he owned me…

…

Summer came. I turned twelve. …he told me he wanted me to join him on the road as soon as my summer vacation began. I looked at his itinerary. It was full of one-nighters early in the summer… One nighters were boring since they gave us so little time to be alone together. Besides, there were boys in my life now.

…

The band played a few one-nighters then went on to Atlantic City where my father and I lay on the beach and ate delicious food. -I drank champagne. He drank J&B, We slept together.

…

I started eighth grade. But I had changed. I began to wear bright red lipstick… I not only looked differently, I behaved differently. Where once I had been obsessed with excelling academically, now all I appeared to care about was how I looked and about boys.

…

198 Sometimes at night, I would lie in bed with powerful sexual feelings surging through my body. It would feel like my flesh was on fire… That made me think of Stanley. I would wait for him to call me but his schedule on his European tour was so heavy that the calls became less frequent. I took to swimming in the pool late at night whenever the arousal in my body became so intense I couldn’t sleep.

201 Spring came late in 1954. I spent my Easter vacation at Hollyridge with Stanley… Mom had moved out, so there was just the two of us…

The night I arrived, we went to dinner at Trader Vic’s in Beverly Hills, another of our private rituals. Since the divorce, every trip I made to Hollyridge included two or three meals at Trader Vic’s… We would sit and talk for hours without being disturbed. A special table was always booked for us…

I had not yet turned thirteen but by then I was five foot eight inches tall. I guess I looked more like a woman than a child…

…

203 That night when we got home, he said, ‚Now that you’re growing up you probably want to sleep in your own room, don’t you?‘

I didn’t know how to respond. I had slept in his bed ever since my mother left. Holding back tears… I said ‚ok’…

I stayed in Los Angeles for just over a week that easter. Stanley was in a continual state of conflict. I believe he tried his best to resist touching me. Then, as usual, drowning in a sea of alcohol, he would come to my bed, only to deny the next morning that he’d been there.

…

During this period Stanley’s unpredictable behaviour grew worse than I had ever known it. I loved him. I couldn’t help but love him, but I spent every day of that time in a state of alarm. The good times we used to have together playing on the beach… seemed to have disappeared…

…near the end of June, I turned thirteen.

207 23 POINT OF NO RETURN

…that was the summer he made me the scapegoat for his fears, his self-accusations and his sense of failures. Day by day my fathers actions became more unpredictable.

Despite his dissociation, at some level I believe he must have been terrified that someone might discover the nature of our relationship…

211 What Stanley didn’t realize was that I would never have betrayed the bond between us. How could I? The sexual part of our life was, by then, hidden even from myself by the dissociation… All I consciously knew was that our relationship was very different from any other I had seen and that I felt a lot of confusion about it. But the closeness between us was the very centre of my existence. Even if I had remembered the incest, I would never have told anyone about it. To betray him would have meant betraying myself and denying my very life.

…

211 The more frantic Stanley became,the more he accused me of things I didn’t think. He began to take steps to cover himself… Years later, when the incest became known in my family, my mother was able to recount, word for word, the things he’d said to her during those phone calls.

‚I’m worried about Leslie,‘ he’d begin.

‚Why?‘ she would ask.

‚She’s become a pathological liar.‘

‚What?‘

‚She’s always lying.‘

‚Don’t be ridiculous, Stanley! Leslie’s never told a lie in her life.‘

To my own face, he told me I was ‚crazy‘. He screamed at me that I was ’sick’…

212 Obedient to his command, I always stopped crying. Then one night something broke inside me. I couldn’t stop, no matter what he did to me… I could no longer absorb his confusion, his grief, his fear or his chaos. I knew I loved him, even when I hated him most. I would always love him. Yet even that didn’t matter any more.

It was over. He had lost me. And he new it. For three years we had been too close, too trusting, too open with each other…

213 24 FROZEN

…

After all, he was the man with whom I had shared more joy, more horror, more life, than anyone I had ever known.

When you can’t allow yourself the luxury of trusting another human being, sex, instead of being a satisfying experience, can turn into something frustrating, difficult and unsatisfactory.

222 [After a bad dream, Leslie woke up and looked for her father. He didn’t seem to be at home. She went into the bathroom, took a handful from the many tins of pills of all kinds and swallowed them. She did this three times in a row because she couldn’t swallow them all at the same time. To this day, she has no idea what came over her when she took the pills. Nor does she have any idea what she took, probably anything from amphetamines to barbiturates.]

[237] [When she woke up, she was in hospital with a tube down her throat. The contents of her stomach had been sucked out – her grandmother had found her and arranged for her to be taken to hospital. She later insulted Leslie, saying that she was a wicked girl for doing such bad things to her father. It was probably her opinion that Leslie was to blame for Stanley’s progressive deterioration.]

[Leslie remained under her grandmother’s control for the time being. She had her transferred to a kind of clinic on her own authority, where she was subjected to ECT (electro-convulsive therapy = electric shock). In her book, she describes the effects of this treatment, which was still carried out without anesthesia, as disastrous. The therapy not only largely erased her memory, but also reduced her to the shell of a human being.]

237 [This action was concealed from her father. When he saw Leslie again, he found that…] “the fire that had always burned in her had gone out”. Her eyes had never focused on you again.“

243 [One morning, Leslie woke up to find that her abdomen was paralyzed. She felt severe pain. The condition lasted for several days. Gradually she was able to walk again with outside help, then the condition slowly disappeared by itself. The doctor she consulted was unable to find an explanation.}

No one ever considered examining me internally, of course. After all, I was only thirteen years old. If they had, they would have discovered I was not a virgin.

247 [When she looks back on the summer of 1954, she sees the image of a double helix in which two souls – hers and Stanley’s – are bound together in a vortex of energy. One strand is made of lies, anger and sorrow. The other is radiant – made of shared joys, allure, wonder and filial loyalty.] “Inescapably, this double helix held her father and her together. Nothing could divide them.”

250 [To understand the powerful bonds that incest creates, one must go back to its biological reality. Father and daughter share the same genes and this can be central to what the two experience.]

[Such biological connections are powerful.] “They can be too strong if the DNA matches too closely. You can share the same fascinations [with your partner] as Stanley and I did. You can be plagued by the same fears, frustrations and longings.”

If so, your bodies, your feelings, your lives can become so tightly woven together that not even rage, shame, guilt… can unravel the helix. That is what happened with my father.

Stanley once said to me: ‚There is something strange about you… You always make me feel that I exist more inside you than I do in my own body.‘

[The downside for Stanley was that he almost inevitably turned to alcohol when Leslie wasn’t available.]

[All of this explains…]

“…the intense desire to spend time alone together.”

251 “In this state the outside world doesn’t exist, only the richness of the intimacy between you. It is far beyond anything you’ve ever known – powerful, simple and enticing. But betray the loyalty, the secrecy that this union demands of you, and the Universe created by it splits wide open.”

[When Leslie was about 15 years old, the relationship seems to have straightened out:]

272 “I believe that at that time the connection between us had deepened and it was becoming something … different. Maybee, now that sex between us belonged to the forgotten past we were beginning to experience a new kind of freedom: the freedom to be together and let things be whatever they were.

[In the fall of 1967, Leslie began therapy with a psychiatrist who wanted to support the return of her memories through the use of LSD. In the book, Leslie later describes how her memories, which had been (apparently more suppressed than) erased by the dissociation and the electric shocks, came back piece by piece, accompanied at times by severe somatic complaints, and could then be reassembled. This reconstruction process was supplemented and rounded off by interviews with her mother and other witnesses, also in conversation with Stanley.]

* * *

[Stanley died in Los Angeles in 1979 as a result of years of alcohol abuse. Vd. German Wiki].

APPENDIX

S. 366 As a child, all I knew was that someting overwhelming was happening to me – something over which I could exercise neither control nor choice. I could never have articulated what it was. My body was in no way capable of handling the intensity of sexual energy being directed into it by Stanley. It had neither the hormonal nor the neurological equipment to handle it. Each time sex took place it felt as if a bolt of lightning had broken open every boundary of safety I thought I could rely on and wiped out all sense of who I was. The energetic charge in my body always continued long after penetration was over. I often felt I’d been hooked up to a power source so intense that it just kept overcharging me.

…

I tried my best to accept what was happening with Stanley; at least to live with it. Despite my dissociation, the trauma prevented my being conscious of the rage inside me. I sensed that surrender was what he was asking of me. I loved him and I did my best to comply. But I can’t describe how hard it was to give in to something so powerful and so terrifying. All this created a curious longing for annihilation in me – a wish to merge with my father, to be absorbed by him. This sense of longing is also a feature of incest documented by Shengold.

* * *

[The dedication of her book is very telling:]

“To Stanley, with all my love.”

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Lesley Kenton: Love Affair. The memoir of a forbidden father daughter relationship. London, 2010.