Living in the Shadows : ...

Don’t worry about Joanna--she’ll be warm tonight. She’ll park in her old neighborhood, on a street with no security patrol and tall hedges in front of the houses, so no one will notice her car.

She’ll open the window a crack, lock the doors, curl up in warm clothes beneath blankets.

Tomorrow she’ll do the Beverly Center. Or maybe Westside Pavilion. She’ll wash her hair and underwear in Nordstrom’s ladies’ room, dry them under the hand blower, apply makeup from testers at the cosmetic counter downstairs.

She’ll nibble her way through Vons, her cart piled with items useless to a woman with no home in which to use them. While pretending to shop she’ll munch roast beef, potato logs and salad from the deli counter--then abandon the cart before she checks out with only two apples, which is all she can afford.

You won’t know her if you see her. She looks and acts the well-heeled woman. She knows the Westside ropes. It’s where she can survive--someone the census never counts, the regulars never notice. Not even her children, now in college, know she has no home. She will get back on her feet by herself, she says--or die in the attempt.

One recent afternoon, Joanna and Sarah (not their real names) sipped coffee at the Boulangerie in Venice. They were invited by Marjorie Bard, who works with the homeless, to meet a reporter who couldn’t quite believe such women exist. Certainly not in such residential areas as Beverly Hills, Pacific Palisades, Brentwood and Malibu.

Everyone knows about the homeless who camp out on the streets. And about isolated celebrity cases like TV newscaster Jackie King, who lost her job and wound up living in her car.

But Bard, says there are thousands of hidden homeless--middle-class people who once had fine homes and jobs, who are educated, energetic, capable--but who now have no money for shelter or food.

They are proud, resourceful people, she says, who have already imposed on family and friends as much as they dare. They view their cars as being more dignified, safe and private temporary shelters than anything the social services system could provide.

Bard, who works only with women, found that the hidden homeless survive by staying in the neighborhoods where they used to live and by frequenting familiar places: Department stores and markets, libraries and museums. Places that offer food, hygiene facilities, or simply the sense of cultural enrichment and well-being to which they were accustomed.

Bard said she has met about 1,000 women nationwide and recorded their oral histories. In fact, she said she used to be one of them herself.

She became an “overnight indigent,” she says, when she was forced from her Maryland house by her husband 15 years ago. With no money for basic necessities, let alone for lawyers to fight for her financial rights, she began looking for a job.

Bard, now in her 50s, had a bachelor’s degree and had taught elementary school in Los Angeles before she married. In Maryland, she was a a community activist who taught jewelry making at a college. “But when I went to look for jobs,” she recalled, “they said ‘you’re overqualified,’ ‘you’re under-experienced,’ ‘you don’t know the computer,’ things like that. They were really saying I didn’t fit in anywhere, anymore. I couldn’t get a decent job.”

In desperation, she stashed clothes and jewelry-making tools in her car, which she used as home base for the next three years while selling jewelry to support herself. Then she started the drive West, toward her mother’s home in Beverly Hills.

“At first I thought I was alone,” she recalls. “But in each city, I spotted women doing the same things I was doing. We had what you might call similar tricks of the trade.”

She would, for example, befriend hotel maids, who would let her use just-vacated rooms so she could shower, wash her hair and catch some sleep before the rooms had to be cleaned.

After a month on the road, Bard reached Beverly Hills, moved into the house of her ailing mother, and began tracing the hidden homeless population of the Westside. She entered graduate school at UCLA, supported by grants, and received her Ph.D. in 1988. She did her doctoral dissertation on homelessness.

She wrote a book, “Shadow Women” (Sheed & Ward, 1990), which documents stories of women who “mingle with polite society during the day, but sleep in their cars at night; women who may have been wealthy but are suddenly unable to support themselves.”

These women don’t want handouts, welfare, or to sleep in shelters, she says. They want to fend for themselves, and are willing to live “in hiding” until they can get back on their feet.

Joanna and Sarah are among these women.

Sarah hasn’t had a home for four years. For 13 years before that, she was married to a lawyer, whom she put through school by “typing dissertations day and night, while caring for two babies.” He got his degree and started a practice. They bought a house in Brentwood with walk-in closets and a live-in maid. Sarah left the marriage when she realized her husband would not allow her to have a career.

“I got very little from the sale of the house, which he had highly mortgaged,” she says, “and I was advised by his lawyer to take no alimony, only child support.”

But she wasn’t worried. An educated woman then in her 40s, with high energy and many skills, she thought she’d earn a good living.

“I rented a place in the same neighborhood, so the children could continue at school,” she recalls. “I established credit for myself and got a job at the school where my children went. I never bought anything for which I didn’t have the money. When we needed a car, I was able to buy it on credit.”

She was proud of herself, and the pride still lingers in her voice as she tells the story. But her job didn’t pay enough. Bills piled up--insurance, car payments, rent, all the extras for the kids--and she fell behind.

Soon there wasn’t enough extra money even to take the kids out to a movie and a pizza. Her ex-husband, meanwhile, was luring them with his lavish lifestyle. “It’s the Santa Claus papa syndrome,” she says. And it worked. The children liked being with him better than with their tense, anxious, penny-pinching mother.

“My husband thought he would have to fight me for custody of our children. But I told our children ‘I want you to be happy. I want you to be where it will feel best for you.’ We all went into therapy. After a year’s time, I felt the children knew enough so that they could make a decision. They decided to live with him. I knew he really loved them and would give them what they’d need.” And, of course, she thought it would be temporary.

But as soon as he got the children, he sold his practice and moved with them out of the area. She couldn’t afford to fly and visit them, let alone offer to send them tickets to visit her. Without alimony, there was no money coming in except the salary from her school job.

She was determined to change things. She left her job and put all her efforts into finding a better one. But she couldn’t. She was “in mourning” for her children. Her savings were dwindling. The rent was too high. She made car payments late, and then not at all. Heartbroken and determined to conserve what little she had left, she put most of her belongings in storage, the rest in her hatchback mini-wagon.

She worked at any jobs she could get, all low-paying. “I was cashier at a delicatessen, among dozens of other things,” she says. “But minimum wage was not enough to even begin to get me out of debt. I was educated, willing. But there was no way to get back on my feet. I soon couldn’t even pay the monthly storage bills, so I sold my possessions.

“Now, everything I have is in my car, which the repo man is looking for. If he finds me, he’ll take the car with everything I own. He won’t wait for me to empty it.”

She does not sound bitter. Or even sad. Her voice is strong, her clean hair shines in the late-day sunlight, her eyes blaze with determination.

“I do not have sour grape stories about how the system screwed me,” Sarah says. “That is not how I feel. But for a person like me, who fell through the slats because of circumstance, there ought to be a way to get back up. And there doesn’t seem to be. I cannot get enough money together for first and last month’s rent plus a month’s security.

“When I get a good job I will still live in my car, saving to pay it off so that I do not lose the car plus the $6,000 I’ve already paid for it. I do not want handouts, charity, welfare. I would not sleep in shelters. I do not want you to print my name. I will get out of this, never speak of it again, and no one will ever know.”

Actually, she admits, some of her best friends do know about her condition. “But if you tell too much, too often, you lose your friends. You ‘wear them out.’ They don’t want to hear this. They love you and it’s very sad and they can’t help. So they tend to avoid you. And you learn to pretend everything is OK when you talk to them.”

She says her children are not old enough to help her, and she does not want to burden them by telling them she’s homeless. She keeps in touch with them by phone, and has an answering machine at a friend’s house so they can reach her.

When Sarah could not tolerate sleeping in her car one more night, she asked if she could sleep in the West L.A. office of an acquaintance. He gave her keys to the building, the elevator, his suite--where she spent a few nights. But the stress of worrying that she’d oversleep and be discovered was too much for her, she says. She returned to the discomfort of her car--keeping his keys in case of emergency.

Then her back gave out. “It was a direct result of sleeping in the car, on a mattress made of all my neatly folded clothes,” she says. She was in horrible pain, almost paralyzed. “And with no health insurance, there’s no way to see a doctor.” She could possibly get public assistance, but there would be a three-month wait, she was told.

An artist since the age of 7, Sarah said that a friend told her about a doctor who might like her paintings. The doctor did, and offered to treat her in exchange for her works. “She’s given me medical treatment ever since--sometimes seeing me four times a week when I need it. If it weren’t for her willingness to barter her work for mine, I couldn’t be here today. I wouldn’t be well enough to sit up.”

Sarah says the reason she survived is that “I’ve been a loner, out on my own.

“There are many thousands of us out there, but we have to be invisible in order to survive.”

If Bard’s mother’s home hadn’t been available, she says, she might still be out on the streets.

She says most hidden homeless usually stay with friends after they discover they’re running out of money. Soon, they’re too embarrassed to impose any more. So they say goodby, pretending they’ve found a temporary place to stay. In some instances, friends will store possessions for them or offer to take phone calls. Often, the women eventually must sell their possessions to get needed cash and they cut off contact with most friends, planning to renew relationships as soon as they get settled.

“I’m dealing mainly with women over 40--so many of them have kids,” Bard says. “But the kids are away in college or graduate school and unable to help their mothers.”

These women have a great sense of dignity and the goal of getting on their feet, Bard explains. They are mostly like Sarah. They will not apply for welfare, stay in a public shelter or let themselves go to seed if they can help it.

They know there is a social-service system but they also know that, for them, it doesn’t work. For instance, most of the women would have to give up their cars in order to qualify for public assistance. Other restrictions leave them in similar Catch-22s.

Bard says she has a solution: Ignore the welfare system entirely and start working person-to-person. She spends much of her time showing homeless women how to remodel their cars so they can sleep more comfortably and by helping them find sources of food, shelter and work. She would like to start a nationwide computerized church-based network to match people offering jobs with those in need.

These hidden homeless are a different kind of homeless than society is used to, Bard continues, “and with the economic situation worsening, there will be more than there are now.

“Other women will lose their living space due to illness, sudden loss of a job . . . death of a spouse--all kinds of catastrophes that might leave a woman with little or no money in reserve and nowhere to go,” Bard says.

Then, they use their knowledge of their old neighborhoods to survive. “They know where everything is because they’ve lived here so long. They literally know--and I hate to say this--where to steal in order to get what they need.”

Sarah breaks into the conversation to say goodby. She is going to a job interview.

Joanna has spoken little until now.

She is tall, slim, a Jacqueline Bisset look-alike with a boarding school accent.

Until a few years ago, she says, she ran a small clothing-design business from the Malibu house she shared with her husband and children.

Her story is long and painful: Her husband divorced her, fought her for the children and beat her up when she tried to fight back in court, sending her to the hospital with fractured ribs and a punctured lung.

He was found guilty in court, she says. But she requested probation because putting him in jail “would be horrible for the children.”

After her divorce, Joanna got her real estate license and worked two jobs, selling houses by day and doing office work at night. She rented a house for herself and the children, but after two years of struggling to pay the bills and keep the family afloat, she was a “financial, physical and emotional wreck.”

Two years ago, she allowed the children to stay with her ex-husband for what she thought would be a year. She wanted to cut expenses, work double shifts, and save enough to get out of debt so she could live decently with the children.

She moved into an inexpensive apartment. But she was attacked there by an intruder and severely injured one leg while trying to escape. She used every cent she’d saved to pay her medical bills.

She began living in her car, stopped working at night and kept trying to sell houses. One month ago she lost her job when the real estate firm closed.

“It was my last chance to get back up to normalcy,” she said. “I am now considering a position as a domestic. At least that would give me a place to live and a chance to save a little bit of money. Of course I’d rather not be a maid if I can help it.”

Bard says most hidden homeless know their riches-to-rags stories sound like fiction. “Even they find it difficult to assimilate what has happened to them,” she says. “So they carry the proof. Along with whatever else they own, they carry documents that prove who they are, where they’ve lived and worked, anything to explain that they are in this homeless position due to no fault of their own.”

Joanna was no exception. She carried a worn Manila folder, which she opened as she spoke, pulling out documents to confirm her story.

“I cannot believe this is happening to me; I simply cannot believe it,” Joanna moans. Then, worried that the reporter might not believe it either, she offers to give names of former neighbors in Malibu, “people whose children played with my children, people who knew me well.”

The group of women had begun talking at 11:30 a.m. It was now 8:30 p.m. It was dark and getting cold. The restaurant would soon close.

Bard had a short drive back to her mother’s house; the reporter’s family was waiting at home.

Joanna left to spend the cold, lonely night in her car.

Sarah phoned the reporter a few days after their meeting to say that she had landed a job as a domestic companion. The job offered “good living accommodations and relatively low pay. But within a year I can have my car payments up to date.”

She spent her last day of homelessness in what she called “symbolic acts”:

She returned the office keys to the man who had lent them to her, and anonymously left a copy of Bard’s book in the Santa Monica public library, where she used to spend much of her time. She inscribed her gift “with love and appreciation” to the place where she had spent so many safe and peaceful hours.