Gracie’s Short and Sweet--With an Attitude

It was the car that hooked me first. Somebody sent me a picture of it. It’s a ’76 Cadillac hearse, your basic pinkish-purple paint job, with a white vinyl top.

Some of the neighbors at the trailer park where it resides don’t like it, seeing as how such a vehicle tends to call attention to itself. Garish, you might call it. Outrageous.

So I investigated. It seems that one Gracie Oliver drives it, and she says sometimes people ask her why on earth.

I asked Ms. Oliver this question myself over the phone.

Of course, this was before I met said personage in the flesh, before I heard her hoots of laughter and watched her eyes moisten with tears, before I heard her engage strangers’ children in lively conversations about the Tooth Fairy and before I made acquaintance with her alter-ego, Pinkie the elf, a sensation at Christmas time.

“I tell them, ‘People are going to look at me anyway,’ ” she said in reference to her choice of automobile. “I might as well have some fun.”

This was about the time that Gracie reeled me in.

So we did lunch, on the end of the Balboa Pier. This is the place where Gracie and Richard Crandall had their first date eight years ago. They’ve been together ever since.

“He said he didn’t want someone in a wheelchair,” Gracie says. “I didn’t think of getting involved with a divorced man with two kids. But Richard and I, we have a spiritual bond.”

They met at a Little People of America convention. Gracie, a singer and entertainer, and Richard, an investor, are dwarfs. He’s 51, she, 36.

Now Gracie’s the president of the board of the Short Stature Foundation, the nonprofit Irvine agency that Richard and his ex-wife formed in 1984, in reaction to the death of their daughter, 17, a few months before. She, too, was a dwarf. “I cannot handle the life God gave me,” her suicide note read.

What Richard says he liked about Gracie right away was the way she looked at him straight in the eyes, without so much as a blink. He was tired of all the little people who looked away, or looked up through downcast eyes, people who were depressed and angry, like he was for so many years.

“I was angry at being small,” he says. It was therapy, and Alcoholics Anonymous and Gracie, that made him change.

This month, in celebration of Richard’s 10 years of sobriety and eight years with Gracie, the two of them are taking a cruise. They start out in Athens and end up in England. Gracie will entertain on board.

Then a phone rings, right here in the middle of Balboa Pier, interrupting a Gracie story about that time at the Little People convention in Mexico, when she went para-sailing. At 65 pounds, she was in danger of just blowing away, so the operator ordered a Mexican boy to attach himself to her parachute, to add weight.

“So I’m thinking, ‘Well, I can’t swim and I certainly don’t think I should be flying. . . .” Gracie is saying.

And still the phone bleats and I’m wishing that somebody would just pick it up. Then Gracie goes to do just that. It’s attached to her electric wheelchair.

“Hey, that’s pretty cool,” says a deeply tanned shirtless guy who looks like a regular around here.

“You wanna order a pizza?” Gracie asks.

The dude is definitely impressed. He starts telling Gracie about the waves and about the other day when he wiped out and started swallowing water and how, at one point, he said, “Oh, shoot!”

“No, you didn’t say shoot ,” Gracie says.

“OK, I said, ‘Oh, s---,’ he says.

“That’s what I’d say,” Gracie adds.

And, meantime , the phone is ringing off the hook.

“Hello, this is Gracie,” she says, finally, with her characteristic aplomb.

It’s a travel agent, wanting to know about reservations to Houston, where Gracie’s brother is dying of AIDS. Gracie, the only dwarf in her family, had five brothers and sisters. One brother committed suicide. Her father was an alcoholic. Her mother, a nurse, did the best that she could when her husband left.

The family depends on Gracie, for her strength. Yet when she talks about them, tears fog her sight.

“Each time I talk about it, I get stronger,” she says. “And it’s painful. But I think in sharing that, I get strength. . . . Because everybody has tragedies in their life. Mine aren’t any worse than anybody else’s.”

Gracie pauses a beat.

“I’m a dwarf, for God’s sake. I’ve got enough to deal with!” Then she gives one of her whoops of a laugh.

Even the shirtless guy, still listening in, breaks out in a smile. But, then, Gracie won him over a while ago.

“I don’t see myself as a little person,” Gracie says. “I think that is what it is. I see myself as Gracie. . . . It’s an attitude. Like Garfield. I identify with Garfield. He just takes each day. He takes his naps. He says, ‘I’m not overweight, I’m undertall.’ He is the top cat. Nothing gets in his way. He says what he means. . . .

“It works for me,” she says. “And I don’t like to hang around grumpy people.”

Because it’s life that is way too short.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.