I met RoseMarie in 1996, when I became friends with Candy. I never remembered Frank Zappa talking much about his parents. About the only thing I seem to recall him saying about them was that they watched a lot of TV. Of course it’s only natural for rebellious people to repudiate their parents; I’ve done it myself and probably you have too. It’s necessary to do it if we’re to forge our own identities. But in the process of breaking free from our folks, we often, ironically, wind up destroying that part of ourselves that comes from them, “throwing the baby out with the bath water,” to use a quaint phrase. In the case of RoseMarie, it was immediately apparent that Frank had inherited his famous wry sense of humor directly from her. Although her tiny, fragile form was nearly swallowed up by her armchair, her blue eyes sparkled, and her repartee was as sharp as a knife.
RoseMarie was also a good psychologist, much like her son had been. A native of Baltimore, she still had traces of a Southern drawl, and her observations were keen. Her witticisms were delivered in a soft, ladylike voice that was barely pitched above a whisper. At the same time, she used her sense of humor to hold people somewhat at arm’s length; by making wry, offhanded comments and not addressing the situation directly, she maintained a decorous distance between herself and others.
Talking to RoseMarie in her immaculate, sparsely furnished living room with the large TV set tuned to an afternoon game show, I understood many things about Frank, and could see where they had originated: his wit, his charm, the strange delicacy he himself had seemed embarrassed by, his playful, creative spirit. RoseMarie had been a housewife nearly all her life, with a brief stint as a librarian when her kids were mostly grown, but from what Candy told me, she had always had a creative streak -- in her dress, her cooking, her decoration of the house, and above all in her conversation. For me, anyway, it seemed evident that Frank had inherited many of his “good” qualities from his mother. Was that, possibly, the unconscious reason he had named his band the “Mothers”? He always claimed it was derived from the term “motherfuckers,” as in “those musicians are real motherfuckers,” but that sounded like a throwaway line, a flip way of dismissing the subject and avoiding the deeper issue entirely.
Eric and I always visited RoseMarie with Candy whenever we were in Los Angeles. I wouldn’t venture to say we were her closest friends, but I got the impression she liked us. She didn’t seem to have many visitors, and I think she was sometimes lonely, although Candy lived just up the street from her and saw her every day. Her son Carl also lived in the apartment with her. Mostly she missed her husband Frank Senior, who had died of a heart attack in 1973. She hadn’t seen much of Frank Junior in the last few years he was alive; as she and Candy explained, there was “a problem with the in-laws.”
On one of our visits when we were still living in L.A., Eric noticed that there was an empty flowerbox outside RoseMarie's front window. The next time we visited, we went to the nursery on the corner and picked up some flowers and planting soil, and Eric arranged them in the flowerbox so that she could see them without getting out of her chair. (She had limited mobility even before undergoing the replacement of her hip, and always walked with a walker or a cane. It was really touching to see her accompany Candy to one of Candy’s book signing appearances in the past year; leaning on her walker, she would sit smiling proudly from the front row as Candy talked about the family.) Planting the flowers for RoseMarie took all of fifteen minutes; as a botanist and avid gardener, Eric loved working with plants, so it was a pleasure for him. But without being effusive, RoseMarie managed to make us feel as if we had done her a monumental favor. Her appreciation for the flowers was enormous and she expressed it with exquisite graciousness.
Graciousness. Now there’s a word people who didn’t know Frank Zappa would probably never associate with him. Yet it was a characteristic he often exhibited. I am very glad to have had the chance to know RoseMarie Zappa, however briefly, and learn the source of that grace. It's a pity that it has passed from the world.
