As we celebrate Mother’s Day, read this extract from Getting Away With Murder, the moving, tell-all memoir from the legendary Lynda La Plante. In this passage, the Queen of Crime Drama talks about adopting her son Lorcan, the whirlwind early days of motherhood, and the battles with the rabid tabloid press that ensued.
Although I’d always been surrounded by good friends, as I neared my late fifties it did bother me more and more that I’d never had children to fill my life. Many years before, when I was still an actress and doing part-time work in a cafe in London, I remember seeing a woman park up in a blue Rolls-Royce Corniche car. A little blond-haired boy sat on the back seat. One day, I’m going to have both, I remember thinking to myself. Yet perhaps it was never meant to be? Occasionally, I walked around my UK home wondering who I would pass it all on to. I felt the same if I was ever in The Hamptons. Although I have always been proud of what I’ve built myself, through my own hard work, I sometimes questioned whether it had all been worth it.
Then one day, in the summer of 2003, I was at a friend’s home in The Hamptons. His groomed lawn stretched all the way down to Accabonac Harbor and we’d been relaxing in the late afternoon sun. Out on the water a family drifted in on their kayaks and I followed one woman as she waded through the shallow water with a child aged around eighteen months clasped to her hip. Again, the boy had luscious blond curls. All of a sudden my heart lurched. I’ll never know what it’s like to carry an infant on my hip like that, I thought.
But life happens when you least expect it. The next day I received a phone call. A baby was due to be born in Florida, a state where I was still registered for adoption.
‘You’re at the top of the list. Would you like the baby?’
I couldn’t catch my breath. My heart was thumping. I knew I had to make a decision quickly as so many other hopeful parents were on that waiting list.
‘OK,’ I said. There wasn’t a muscle in my body that didn’t think I wouldn’t be able to cope. I’ll do it, was my gut feel.
‘Can you be here in the next twenty-four hours?’
‘Of course.’
It wasn’t until I got off the phone that the doubts began to creep in.
What if I’m too old?
I remembered a conversation I’d had with my friend Pat Booth not long before. I’d confided in her that I’d still like a child and that I’d kept my name on the adoption lists in certain states.
‘Lynda, it’s what you’ve always wanted,’ she’d said, encouraging me to say yes should the opportunity arise. I should at least see if I bond with this little baby, I thought. I hadn’t even asked the child’s sex or its heritage. Whenever I’d visited adoption agencies there was a raft of questions like: Do you want a white baby? Are you happy with a Latino child? Do you want male or female? I honestly didn’t care. All I knew was that this little baby’s mother couldn’t keep her child but had no preference about whether the baby went to a couple or a single parent, so long as her medical bills were paid and the baby was looked after.
My attorney was more cautious. Filming was due to start on a season of The Commander back in the UK, and he was very thorough in guiding me through a rather complicated process. What I hadn’t appreciated is that to adopt I would need to live in the state of Florida for at least six months while the necessary paperwork was completed, in order to eventually bring the baby back home.
‘Lynda, you do realise you have a TV series starting!’ he reminded me.
‘I’ll sort something,’ I said.
It all happened so quickly that in between my nerves and excitement, I barely had a moment to think. But when I saw my son for the first time I knew it was the right decision. He did look rather like a squashed potato, but he was tiny and beautiful. Later, I was to find a small raspberry birth mark on the back of his neck in the exact same spot I have one. For me, it was a sign. Did I fall in love with Lorcan the first time I held him? No. In truth, I felt so frightened with all these people watching on. The thought that I wouldn’t be a great mother flooded me. That changed, however, when I brought him home. I called him Lorcan – an Irish name meaning fierce. As a baby he lived up to his name.
In Florida, I relied on the kindness of so many people. If ever I feel jaded, I only need to think back on that time and know that there are truly kind-hearted people in the world. Not long after I arrived, reality set in. For the first few weeks I stayed in the penthouse suite of a hotel in Boca Raton before Lorcan and I moved into a six-month let in Del Ray, on Florida’s south-east coast. But I did have a TV series starting and I would have to commute back-and-forth to the UK. I needed help, and fast.
‘Call this woman. She’s wonderful and she has six children,’ my attorney told me before slipping me the number of a woman called Jane McDonald.
She was right. Jane was unbelievably generous when I called her. ‘What do you need?’ she asked.
‘A nanny, I think.’
‘OK, well, I have one fantastic nanny called Rosemary. She’s in Cape Cod at the moment but I’ll call her and ask if she can come to you.’
Jane had three nannies looking after her children so if Rosemary wanted to she could come to me. Jane also sent cots and blankets, toys and clothes.
As soon as I heard Rosemary’s voice, a wave of calm washed over me.
‘Having some trouble here, need some help,’ I told her when we spoke.
‘That’s fine, ma’am. I’ll come right over,’ she replied in her soft Louisiana drawl.
Rosemary Scidmore appeared like an angel and the wonderful thing is she’s still with me twenty years later. Wherever I’ve travelled, she’s travelled – and when I sold my house in The Hamptons she moved permanently with me to the UK. What a remarkable woman she is. To have the safety of someone who’d helped rear Jane’s six children was the best gift I could have hoped for.
In the first few months of Lorcan’s life I had fully expected to juggle work and a baby, but the formal adoption process itself was gruelling. So many tests to see if I was physically fit: medical check-ups to test my heart, lungs and stress levels; blood tests for this, that and the other. Across my left shoulder I have a large rose tattoo and that also caused alarm. I’d had it done years before but I needed to be cleared of hepatitis.
What I hadn’t expected was a battle with the press, hot on the story of a fifty-seven-year-old adopting a child. Someone had leaked my temporary address in Del Ray to the UK tabloids and within weeks I was being hounded, reporters rummaging through my bins both in the US and at home. If I ever went out with Lorcan in his pram I had to shield it with a cloth to stop photographers stealing a picture. A complete nightmare! What’s more, I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. So what if I’d adopted a baby? Every report I read smacked of: ‘How dare she? How dare she become at single mother at her age?’ It felt unbearable. As if I hadn’t considered all of those things, and worried about them. Leave me alone, I thought.
One journalist, Daily Mail columnist Lynda Lee-Potter, did corner me.
‘If I can interview you for an exclusive, it’ll take the heat off the story,’ she persuaded me. I agreed, but regretted it soon after. The feature-length article felt horrendous. Even the headline: Who says I’m too old to be a mother? echoed that same sentiment. Lorcan was seven months old at the time – a exquisite bundle of happiness who had changed my life, yet the article kept banging on about my age. Mick Jagger had his last child aged seventy-three! Did that attract the same headlines? Absolutely not! And what about Charlie Chaplin? Still fathering children into his seventies. I hate such double standards.
Throughout Lorcan’s life, I’ve felt so incredibly protective of him, especially in the face of any criticism levelled at me. I have never wanted him to suffer as a result of my public profile and have always done my utmost to shield him from the worst of it. He will always be my beautiful son.
Incidentally, I did buy that blue Rolls-Royce Corniche and Lorcan sat with his blond curls on the back seat just as I’d dreamed of so many years before.
Lynda La Plante’s Getting Away With Murder is available now and published by Zaffre.
