Facts of Life’s Rae reveals personal upheavals in book
LOS ANGELES — In The Facts of Life, Charlotte Rae played the unflappable Mrs. Garrett, a girls’ school housemother who smoothly guided her charges through crises and comedy.
Rae says she implored the TV show’s producers to let her character “lose her temper, yell at the kids. Let her be a human being.”
They declined. But as Rae, 89, recounts in her new autobiography, her own life bore little resemblance to the sitcom-grade serenity of Edna Garrett’s, instead marked by challenges that included son Andy’s autism and her husband’s late-in-life disclosure that he was bisexual and wanted an open marriage.
The Facts of My Life paints Rae as a woman determined to face the world with grace and humour, come what may, and one dedicated to her family, friends and a career that stretched from 1950s TV to Broadway.
That’s partly why she decided to do the book, to bolster others tackling their own difficulties and dreams, Rae said in an interview.
And because her other son, Larry Strauss, a writer and teacher, said she should.
“He said, ‘Ma, I think it’s time we did your memoir. You talk to me and I’ll do it,’ ” she recalled. “He was very sensitive to what I was talking about and wonderful [writing about] his brother, very sensitive and beautiful.”
The book, to be published by BearManor Media on Sunday, opens with what’s described as a “nightmare come true,” then 16year-old Andy Strauss locked in the juvenile ward at New York’s Bellevue Hospital because he’d been deemed dangerous.
Andy’s diagnosis of autism had been long in coming at a time when there was far less understanding of or attention to the disorder, Rae said. Her son, who had other conditions including epilepsy, died in his mid-40s of a heart attack.
She saw his illness as the “most devastating thing” in her life, said Rae, who has also faced alcoholism and heart problems. Then, her husband of 25 years, composer and sound editor John Strauss, who like Rae had turned to Alcoholics Anonymous for help, was urged by his AA sponsor to be honest with himself and his wife about his sexuality.
“I felt there was something wrong with me and took it personally,” Rae said. “But I gradually realized what he was going through. My God, the poor guy, hiding it and being ashamed.”
The pair divorced, and John Strauss died in 2011.
He had found a longtime partner (the nice Jewish man of his dreams, Rae said), but she has remained single.