In November 1985, a male stripper dressed as a policeman was standing on a pavement in Beverly Hills when a passing motorist began screaming at him, “like he’d just recognised a celebrity”. The motorist then reversed his car and wound down the window: “Are you Jeffrey Harrison?” “Yes, that’s me. Why?” “A blond lesbian was just on TV talking about how you don’t have to have a man anymore to have a child! She said she paid you for your sperm and she just showed your picture on TV!”
The blond lesbian was Chrysta Bilton’s mother, Debra Olson, and Harrison was her father. In her jaw-dropping memoir, A Normal Family, she speculates on her father’s response to having the details of such a private transaction broadcast across the US without his permission. She pictures him sitting in the car in his stripper’s costume as his mind “exploded into paranoia and resentment”. Olson had promised to keep his sperm donation quiet, in exchange for his agreement not to donate sperm to any other women. Now she had broken her promise, Harrison decided the deal was off and headed straight for the California Cryobank fertility clinic.
If his name rings a bell today it’s because he made the front page of the New York Times in 2007, when he became the first anonymous sperm donor in history to reveal his identity and invite all of his biological children to come and meet him. Between 1985-1993, Harrison had donated sperm to the Cryobank two or three times each week, making $300-$400 per month which was enough to cover his petrol bills and marijuana habit.
“Donor 150” had a blue chip profile that made him popular with prospective parents. Doctors at the clinic told them he was kind and incredibly handsome. Both his parents had attended prestigious colleges. In his personal statement he wrote that he was musical, spiritual and loved animals. He didn’t mention his struggles with mental health and addiction, nor that he was living in his car with his dogs and a pigeon. In interviews he would remodel himself as a “soul-caller” who had communed deeply with the consciousness swimming in every donated cup.
Bilton estimates that she now has somewhere between three dozen and a few hundred half siblings, some of whom she’s come to know well over the past decade. She notes they all have the same toes and laugh, and almost all of them own multiple cats. But she and her younger sister Kaitlyn were the only ones raised with Harrison in their lives. Albeit erratically.
The superdonor dad is far from the only extraordinary aspect of Bilton’s story. Most of her book is actually about her charismatic, chaotic mother who leaps off the page like the bold, blow-dried heroine of a big budget 1980s soap opera. The daughter of an alcoholic judge, Bilton describes her as “a hedonist, yearning to overdose on everything, especially life […] she had thick blond hair, high cheekbones and a strong attractive face, which was softened by a childlike innocence and the mischief emanating from her deep brown eyes.”
Olson had counted the actor Jeff Bridges as her first serious boyfriend and Eva Gabor among her many high profile closeted girlfriends. She’d been a drug addict and sobered up. She’d done her time in new age cults and night clubs. She claimed to have hung out with the Beatles and the Stones. After she decided to have a baby, the stunningly handsome Harrison walked into the hair salon where she was getting a cut and she offered him $2,000 for a donation. Soon afterwards, the pair lay together on her bed, meditating, beside an empty turkey baster.
Although Bilton makes a pacy and witty blockbuster of her childhood, she pulls no punches about the damage caused by her parents’ erratic lifestyle. Olson was constantly swapping girlfriends (one’s a successful singer, another Lily Tomalin’s PA), upping sticks, making and losing fortunes. She’d ping pong between straight jobs in real estate and dodgy pyramid schemes. The girls lived in a $4 million mansion and squatted in an office building. A menagerie of pets came and went (along with Olson’s sobriety) while she tried to maintain the illusion of Harrison as an engaged father. Sometimes he would sleep over. At other times she would pay him to put in an appearance at parents’ evenings or birthday parties. He tried to be decent, but couldn't connect. While on drugs he poured soup into the coffee machine and once, in a rage, threw a copy of Playgirl at his daughter in which he appeared as the naked centrefold. Meanwhile Olson once got so high on cocaine she decided to sell Kaitlyn. She was so distracted on Bilton’s 16th birthday that she bought a “Happy Retirement” balloon for the party.
Inevitably, Bilton slid into addiction herself. Drink numbed the hyper-vigilance required to keep tabs on her unpredictable carers. She picked an equally unstable first boyfriend who tried to kill her. But, amazingly, it was her mother who spotted her decline and “saved me a seat at AA”. She is now, against the odds, a happily married mother of two. She lost tabs on Harrison after he inherited family money and jetted off to India with his dogs and a case full of gold bars, wearing a wig to fool the CIA. But she’s made her peace with her mum, who maintains a dynamic progress through the world and is apparently now “on first name terms with Kamala Harris”. I’m always irked by a memoir that ends with a tidy conclusion, so I was delighted with the quirky way Bilton finished her book. It’s a tale of her mother’s search for the meaning of life, across the mountain ranges of Kashmir and desert outside Jerusalem, in the 1970s. Eventually she’s directed to a holy man in India and finds him at the top of a mountain. “Why are we here?” she asks him. “No one knows,” he replies. Telling her daughter the tale, decades later, Olson agrees with him. The book ends with the sound of their laughter.
A Normal Family is published by Monoray at £16.99. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
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