Swoosie Kurtz Writes a Love Letter to Her Parents

If you’re looking for a last-minute Mother’s Day gift or planning ahead for Father’s Day — or just want a very enjoyable read for yourself — you can’t go wrong if you pick up the new memoir by acclaimed actress and LGBT ally Swoosie Kurtz.

Part Swan, Part Goose: An Uncommon Memoir of Womanhood, Work and Family is indeed uncommon. Unlike some show business memoirs, it’s neither a scandalous tell-all, nor an exercise in self-aggrandizement. Instead, it’s a candid, engaging look at Kurtz’s life and work, and especially her relationship with the two most important people in her life: her parents, Frank and Margo Kurtz.

“I just want to shout to the world, ‘These two people gave me the world,’” says the actress, who admits the book is in many ways a love letter to them. Along with Kurtz’s remembrances, it includes excerpts from her mother’s World War II memoir, My Rival, the Sky, about her life on the home front while Frank Kurtz was off becoming a decorated military hero.

The book also deals with Swoosie’s experiences of caring for her mother, who is now 98 years old (Frank Kurtz died in 1996) and suffering from dementia. They share a home in Los Angeles, where a top-notch team of professionals assists in Margo’s care. It’s impossible not to be moved while reading the account of their current life together — or, really, any passages about the actress’s bond with her parents.

In an interview, Kurtz calls her parents “the two most extraordinary people,” and her book provides ample evidence of this. At age 10, Frank ran away from home, where he had suffered physical abuse, and did whatever he could to survive, on the way to becoming an aquacade performer (something echoed by his daughter’s role in Pushing Daisies), an Olympic medalist for diving, a heroic WWII flyer, and eventually a business executive and motivational speaker.

Margo, although a gifted writer, did not pursue work outside the home after motherhood, but she was far from a conventional mid-century housewife. For one thing, she took the lead in managing the family’s finances, getting investment advice from no less than Warren Buffett, a relative by marriage. Also, the way she became a mother was unconventional for the time. Frustrated at her inability to conceive, she sought out a fertility specialist, something few women did in the 1940s. She became pregnant just before Frank left to fly missions in Europe, and in September 1944, Swoosie was born.

“When I arrived, it was like the second coming,” she says now, reflecting on the joys of being very much a wanted child. She was named for a plane her father flew during the war, the Swoose, cobbled together from the wreckage of other aircraft, which itself had been named for a popular song about a bird who was part swan and part goose.

Her parents, she recalls, gave her discipline along with a lot of unconditional love and support, and when she decided to pursue an acting career, they were all for it because they could see how strong her desire was. “It was so clear that this was what I wanted to do in life,” she recalls. Her determination to be an actress, she says, was like her father’s obsessive love for flying and diving. “I think they recognized that was what I felt,” she says.

She also credits her parents, especially her mother, for imbuing her with an open and accepting attitude toward all sorts of people, including the many LGBT luminaries she’s worked with in the theater, film, and television.

“I think that came from my mother,” she says. “She’s just so open to everyone, whether she’s having lunch with Warren Buffett in Omaha or whether it’s a New York cabbie. She loves life and she loves all people. She was really ahead of her time.”

Those LGBT artists she’s worked with include Lanford Wilson, author of Fifth of July, for which she won a Tony; Paula Vogel, who wrote The Mineola Twins, another stage hit for Kurtz; Michael Bennett, whose illness, which was eventually revealed to be AIDS, forced the cancellation of a musical called Scandal, in which she was to star; plus director Joe Mantello, Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller, actress Cherry Jones, and many more.

Kurtz has also between involved with several gay and lesbian portrayals in the media; the straight actress has played lesbian characters in such notable projects as Nurse Jackie and Citizen Ruth, and in the early 1980s, she was cast in a TV show that became an example of just how far the industry had to go in accepting gay protagonists.

That was Love, Sidney, an NBC sitcom in which she played a young single mother forming an unconventional family with a middle-aged gay man, Sidney, portrayed by Tony Randall. But management at local NBC affiliates panicked even before the first episode aired, and the network’s “gods of Standards and Practices,” as Kurtz calls them in her book, descended to make sure that Sidney was effectively de-gayed.

Of the progress made in LGBT visibility in television since then, Kurtz says, “It’s just been amazing. To go from that to what we’ve accomplished in the past few years has just been astounding.”

And that’s true of portrayals of women’s sexuality as well. In her book Kurtz recalls a discussion of multiple orgasms being cut from the pilot of Sisters in 1991; it was later restored, but it’s tame compared to what TV can depict in the 21st century. “When I think of them taking out the word ‘orgasm’ from Sisters [compared] to what I say now as Joyce on Mike & Molly, it’s amazing,” she says. “It’s all good, I think.”

She loves playing Joyce, Molly’s bawdy, no-holds-barred mother, on the CBS sitcom; Joyce, she says, could be the love child of Holly Golightly and Groucho Marx. She’s happy the show has been picked up for a fifth season. “I didn’t think I could love it any more, but this past season, the show hit some kind of high,” she says.

She counts the cast and crew as dear friends, and she’s grateful that the Mike & Molly studio is only a five-minute drive from her home — and Margo. She the rest of and her mother’s care team aim to assure that the rest of Margo’s life is truly lived. And with her parents having always been there for her, Kurtz says, “when they needed me, I had to be there for them.”

Part Swan, Part Goose: An Uncommon Memoir of Womanhood, Work and Family, written by Swoosie Kurtz with Joni Rodgers, is in stores now.