Brie Larson stars in “The Glass Castle,” about a hellish childhood.
When Jeannette Walls comes to San Francisco, she always visits the Tenderloin — a neighborhood not on most tourists’ must-see list. In 1967, a 7-year-old Walls lived there in a residential hotel with her vagabond parents and three siblings.
In the middle of the night, a fire broke out in the building, and the Wallses were evacuated. “I remember sitting in a bar and watching the blaze,” she said.
Her unconventional memories of San Francisco include getting kicked out of another Tenderloin dive and sleeping on Ocean Beach. A cop awakened the family around 3 a.m to tell them they had to leave. Even after all these years, she recalls how nice he was about evicting them.
Walls, a 57-year-old former gossip columnist, had a rootless childhood shuttling from California to Arizona and Nevada, squatting in abandoned buildings or living on the streets. The closest the family had to a real home was a three-room shack in Appalachia infested with rats and lacking heat or plumbing.
A born survivor, Walls has lived to tell the tale of her hellish childhood in a 2005 memoir, “The Glass Castle,” a bestseller for an enviable five years. It has now been made into a movie of the same title (referring to a house their father planned to build for them but never did) starring Oscar winner Brie Larson (“Room”) as Walls with Naomi Watts and Woody Harrelson as her erratic parents.
“People kept telling me Hollywood would ruin my story, that it was too complicated and too subtle to be a movie,” Walls says. “So I got a little bit nervous going into it. But I went nuts over what they did with it.” She especially appreciates the care Larson took to portray her accurately. “She even got my wild cackling laugh,” Walls says, demonstrating her distinctive laugh.
Director Destin Cretton (“Short Term 12”) doesn’t blanch from showing the neglect Walls suffered or the near criminal behavior. When she was 3, her mother, a selfstyled artist, was so involved in her creation that she sent Jeannette to cook hot dogs for them on an open flame. She was set on fire. “I still have scars on my torso,” Walls says. Before she could swim, her father — a raging alcoholic who she now believes was bipolar — threw her into the deep end of a pool.
Recognizing the inability of their parents, Rex and Rose
Mary Walls, to take care of them, Jeannette, her brother and two sisters made a pact to help one another. She moved to New York at 17 to join her older sister. Armed with part-time jobs and scholarships, Walls graduated with honors from Barnard College. When she got into the gossip business, first at New York magazine and then for MSNBC.com, Walls told people her father was an electrical engineer working on a more efficient means to burn bituminous coal. Spotting her parents squatting on East Sixth Street, she didn’t stop.
The moment of truth came when Walls, who had written a negative item about Scientology, heard that the church was investigating her background in retaliation. Her response was to unveil the truth first.
“We all have a story,” Walls says. “It was ironic that I had been chasing other people’s stories while hiding my own, and that was not right.”
After her memoir was published, she considered quitting her gossip column when an actress she interviewed on the red carpet pulled her aside to thank her for her book and tell her she also had a dysfunctional upbringing.
“This was the final straw, to have this actress open up and be so vulnerable and share our bond. I had always thought of her as beautiful but shallow and flaky, but we had a lot in common. I am a big fan of truth telling, but the truth I realized can’t be put into a snarky little paragraph,” says Walls, who no longer even reads gossip.
Her life today sounds idyllic. She and her second husband, journalist John J. Taylor, live on a 205-acre farm in Virginia where she writes fiction.
After years of going hungry, Walls has a casual attitude about food. Some days she forgets to eat and has to be reminded by her husband. Walking through the hallways at five-star hotels, she can’t stop herself from eyeing food left on trays by other guests. “I have this physical reaction like ‘Wow, that looks pretty good.’ ”
In an act of admirable largesse, she moved her 83-year-old mother into a cottage on the farm. (Her father died of a heart attack in 1994.)
“I had to talk her into moving there,” Walls recalls. “She said, ‘I am not a moocher.’ She had this sense of self-esteem. The truth is I love her, and I have a better relationship with her then I ever did now that I don’t need her to take care of me.’’
Her mother, who may be bipolar like her father, hasn’t changed her ways. She’s filled up the cottage with “all this junk piling up,” her daughter says. “She is a hoarder, which I didn’t realize when we were growing up.’’ She is one of the few guests to go on “Oprah” smelling as if it were a long time between baths.
Walls, like both her sisters, has remained childless. “There is a word ‘parentified,’ which means the child takes on adult responsibilities. I’ve learned people like that are less inclined to become parents themselves, like, ‘I’ve already done that and I know how hard it is.’ ”
In the world Walls has created for herself, “I never take anything for granted. Every time I turn on a water faucet or turn on the lights or go to the grocery store and know I can buy anything I want — it’s kind of a miracle.”