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The Divorce Generation Grows Up
Grant High School's class of '82 were raised on 'The Brady Bunch'—while their own families were falling apart. These are their stories—in their words.
David J. Jefferson
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 3:33 PM ET Apr 12, 2008
I grew up in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley—the quintessential American suburb, built on the postwar fantasies of men like my father, a GI who'd trained in the California desert to fight Rommel and never forgot the first time he saw orange trees and swimming pools. For $500 down, you could buy a ranch house in one of the Valley's new tract developments and start a family—maybe even live out your dreams of Hollywood stardom. Such was the life that Joseph Jefferson hoped to create when he moved to California to study acting and married a fellow student. But Dad found acting to be a cruel mistress: he wound up spending more time tending bar than in front of the cameras. It was no way to support his wife and two kids, and his marriage was a shambles. So he found another mistress: my mom.
They met at an actors' hangout called the Masquers club, and fell in love while Dad was starring as Jesus in a Passion play. Mom had helped him land the role, having been featured a season earlier as the Woman at the Well, whom Jesus saves from a life of serial divorce and adultery (cue the ironic guffaw). Behind the scenes, the man who spent his nights carrying a cross on his back was angling for a divorce himself. And those weren't easy to get in 1960, even in Hollywood. To begin with, his wife didn't want to give him one, and even if she had she would have needed to prove "fault"—adultery, abandonment, neglect, commission of a felony. So my dad and mom moved to Las Vegas for a few months, where they lived in an apartment house populated by card sharks and showgirls while awaiting the end of dad's marriage under Nevada's lax divorce laws. On Sept. 5, 1960, they drove to a small town in the middle of the Nevada desert called Tonopah and got married by the justice of the peace.
After moving back to Los Angeles, my actor parents set off on their new life together as if nothing had ever happened. But, of course, it had. At age 4 I discovered I wasn't an only child when my dad's kids, who'd been living in Florida, came to stay with us for a year. My mom says I refused to hug her the entire time—but I remember sobbing just the same when they left. My sister and brother had it worse: they grew up without a father, and never got to develop much of a relationship with him.
Ignorant of the picket fences around our tract homes, divorce was a constant intruder in the San Fernando Valley of my youth. Although I grew up a few blocks from the "Brady Bunch" house, the similarity between that TV family's tract-rancher and the ones where my friends and I lived pretty much ended at the front door. In the real Valley of the 1970s, families weren't coming together. They were coming apart. We were the "Divorce Generation," latchkey kids raised with after-school specials about broken families and "Kramer vs. Kramer," the 1979 best-picture winner that left kids worrying that their parents would be the next to divorce. Our parents couldn't seem to make marriage stick, and neither could our pop icons: Sonny and Cher, Farrah Fawcett and Lee Majors, the saccharine Swedes from Abba, all splitsville.
The change had begun in the '60s as the myth of the nuclear family exploded, and my generation was caught in the fallout. The women's rights movement had opened workplace doors to our mothers—more than half of all American women were employed in the late '70s, compared with just 38 percent in 1960—and that, in turn, made divorce a viable option for many wives who would have stayed in lousy marriages for economic reasons. Then in 1969, the year I entered kindergarten, Gov. Ronald Reagan signed California's "no fault" divorce law, allowing couples to unilaterally end a marriage by simply declaring "irreconcilable differences."
Not since Henry VIII's breakup with the pope has divorce received such a boost: by the time my friends and I entered our senior year at Ulysses S. Grant High School, divorce rates had soared to their highest level ever, with 5.3 per 1,000 people getting divorced each year, more than double the rate in the 1950s. Just as we were old enough to wed, experts were predicting that nearly one in two marriages would end in divorce.
It's been more than a quarter century since the Grant High class of '82 donned tuxes and taffeta and danced to Styx's "Come Sail Away" at the senior prom, and nearly four decades have passed since no-fault divorce laws began spreading across the country. In our parents' generation, marriage was still the most powerful social force. In ours, it was divorce. My 44-year-old classmates and I have watched divorce morph from something shocking, even shameful, into a routine fact of American life.
But while it may be a common occurrence, divorce remains a profound experience for those who've lived through it. Researchers have churned out all sorts of depressing statistics about the impact of divorce. Each year, about 1 million children watch their parents split, triple the number in the '50s. These children are twice as likely as their peers to get divorced themselves and more likely to have mental-health problems, studies show.
While divorce rates have been dropping—off from their 1981 peak to just 3.6 per 1,000 people in 2006—marriage has also declined sharply, falling to 7.3 per 1,000 people in 2006 from 10.6 in 1970. Sociologists decry a growing "marriage gap" in which the well educated and better paid are staying married, while the poor are still getting divorced (people with college degrees are half as likely to be divorced or separated as their less-educated peers). And the younger you marry, the more likely you are to get divorced.
Yet all these statistics fail to show the very personal impact of divorce on the individual, or how those effects can change over a lifetime as children of divorce start families of their own. When we were growing up, divorce loomed as the ultimate threat to innocence, but what were my peers' feelings about it now that they were adults? What I wanted to know was how divorce had affected our class president and Miss Congeniality, the stoners and the valedictorian. Did it leave them with emotional scars that never healed, or did they go on to lead "normal" lives? Did they wind up in divorce court, or did they achieve the domestic bliss their parents had sought in suburbia? I decided to open my yearbook, pick up the phone and find out. These are their stories—or at least their side of their stories, since each breakup is perceived so differently by every family member.
Grant High School was built in 1959 to educate the first wave of the Valley's baby boomers; by the time I arrived in 1978 the school had more than 3,000 students. With its low-slung buildings and long hallways of orange-painted lockers, it's the kind of campus you've seen in a hundred movies—think "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." My best friend at Grant was Chris Kohnhorst, who, like me, was editor of the student paper, the Odyssey. I'd met Chris in fifth grade, when we bonded over our identical "Fat Albert" lunchboxes. He was the first kid I can remember encountering whose parents were divorced. His mother was a teacher and his father was an actor (to this day I rib him about his dad's guest appearance on "The Bionic Woman"). They'd separated in 1970, when Chris was in first grade. "The rift that split them eventually split up three children as well, as my older brother went to live with my father during high school and my younger sister and I stayed with our mom," Chris says. (Along with new divorce laws, custody rulings changed in the '70s—no longer was it de facto that kids would stay with their mothers—and that led to a whole new round of conflict in broken families.)
In seventh grade, Chris and I entered junior high and took an ancient-history class taught by his mother. We called her Mrs. Kohnhorst, though we wouldn't call her that for long: during the semester she married another divorced teacher and became Mrs. Hannum. Chris kept his father's last name and tried to avoid discussing the new family arrangement. Simple things, like filling out enrollment cards, "became opportunities to feel stigmatized," he says. "Every new form was another chance for me to suffer a minor psychological trauma. Scandalized, I wondered who was reading the cards and pondering why I had parents with two different last names," Chris says. "There were the questions in my mind of whom I would list as my father—my dad or my mother's new husband? Would it be an insult to my dad if I wrote down my stepfather's name?"
Shame and isolation. Those were familiar feelings to many of our friends. When Josh Gruenberg's parents separated for a time in 1977 and his mother left the house, he didn't tell anyone—not even his best friend, whose parents were divorced themselves. "I tried to keep it a secret from him because I was so embarrassed," says Josh, whose father was an English teacher at Grant and divorced his mother several years later. "It had to do with this idea that we were the perfect family, and I didn't want that to fall apart."