A Ticket to the Circus (29 page)

When we got to the emergency room, the receptionist asked me if we were married, and I honestly said “No,” not realizing they wouldn’t allow me to go back with him to the doctor’s office. I decided right then that there are times it might be necessary to lie. I sat outside in the waiting room and tried to read an old
Reader’s Digest
for a couple of hours, not knowing what was happening to him behind the doors, until finally he came out with his hand in a cast. He had cut the tendon almost in two, and it was just luck that he hadn’t cut the whole thumb off. Thank God it wasn’t his writing hand.

“The first thing I thought when I first cut the hand was, ‘I’ve blown the train trip,’” he said. “The second thing was, ‘I’ve blown the lecture,’ and the third thing was, ‘I’ve blown the thumb!’” He was wan and exhausted. They had put his hand under a running stream of cold water for about an hour, which had been excruciating, then they had sewn it up and put it into a cast.

“You’re going home and going to bed,” I said, totally wrung out myself. I’d called and canceled my little booking, which upset everyone, but it couldn’t be helped.

“No. I promised I’d go to Harvard and do this lecture for the Advocate, and we’re going. We’ll take a plane.” And we went. He was weak from the blood loss, a little peaked and shaky, but once he was onstage, he was the old performer. He waved the cast around and made a joke of it. It healed and he had complete use of the thumb, but he had a scar, and half his thumb was numb for the rest of his life; still, he didn’t take any time off. He went back to writing the next day, pushing himself, by force of will, to take the discomfort and pour it into the writing.

T
he tall ships came to the harbor of New York in July 1976, the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence. We had an afternoon party at Norman’s apartment, and watched the ships from the roof terrace while eating ham and baked beans and coleslaw, Norman’s favorite party foods. Dotson Rader was there. He was a friend of Norman’s who was a writer, a young radical in the sixties, and someone who had lived with Tennessee Williams for fifteen years or more. He was cute and funny, and from the moment I met him, he became my surrogate brother. His father was a traveling evangelist, and Dotson, his twin sister, Michelle, and his family had lived the life of nomads, moving all over the country, setting up a tent and having revival meetings, something I knew a lot about. We used to sing gospel songs whenever we got together, and he is still one of my dearest friends. At the tall ship party, he was regaling everyone with stories of the healing services his father used to hold, and he grabbed Betsy, who was the closest to him, to demonstrate his father’s technique.

“Here’s what he would do, Betsy,” he said. “You look at me right in the eyes, then we pray to God for healing, and then I tap you on the forehead with the heel of my hand and… In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, BE HEALED!” He smacked her maybe a little too hard on the forehead, and she lost her balance and fell down onto the floor. “Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry! Betsy, are you all right?” It was a most dramatic display of the power of prayer, and I’m quite sure Betsy was healed if there was anything in her that needed healing. That party was a memorable one.

Norman loved parties, and we soon became famous for them. Our apartment could comfortably hold about fifty people, but I know there were times when we had two hundred or more. The first time I helped give one, I had only been in New York for a few months and we were just becoming known as a couple. Norman told me that he had a recipe for coleslaw that was like nectar and ambrosia. Everyone just ate it until they were sick. I had a hard time believing that.
Coleslaw?
But I guessed
he knew what he was talking about. I told him I could make a good ham and baked beans and corn muffins to go with it, so that was the menu. We did the shopping, and he piled the cart with twelve heads of cabbage. I would have bought two, maybe three at the most, but he said, “No, no, no. We need
twelve
,” that people would bring people and you never wanted to run out of coleslaw.

“Norman, how many people are coming? Are you sure everyone will eat this much food at ten o’clock at night? Won’t they have had dinner already?”

“Of course they’ll eat it. It’s famous. And by the time they get here and have a couple of drinks, they’ll be hungry again.”

I was unsure, but then New York social life was not exactly like Russellville social life, so we began chopping. It took us the better part of the day, as we did it all manually with a big sharp knife, and it included carrots and onions and red peppers as well as cabbage. “You have to slice it
thin
,” he said, and demonstrated. “Thin like paper. And throw out the chunks that are too thick near the stem. It has to be almost transparent in order for the dressing to soak in.” He always had a special way of doing everything. His mantra in the kitchen was, “Here, let me show you a little trick.” He had me cut away all the white parts in the center of the red peppers, too. That part was bitter. The carrots had to be peeled and sliced in thin, long strings until the carrot was a skinny stick, and then that had to be peeled into nothing. Onions were chopped into tiny bits, not too much. The dressing was a secret, chiefly because he never wrote it down and it was different every time, but it included mayonnaise, teriyaki sauce, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, and some other ingredients that are too secret to put down here (and too secret for me to remember). Obviously, we didn’t have a bowl big enough for it all, so we mixed it up in our biggest cooking pots, and then distributed it into several of our largest bowls. It took up most of the fridge. I put the bulk of it in a huge decorative antique footed urn from the living room that looked like it had been unearthed in Rome or Greece, and centered it on the dining table.

The party was for our friends Doris Kearns and Richard Goodwin, who had just gotten married. Doris had been an assistant to President Lyndon Johnson and was writing a book about him that would be called
Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.
Doris has always been
one of my favorite people in the world, and her husband, Dick, was a speechwriter and adviser to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, among other things. He has a swarthy complexion and long curly black hair, and the kids called him “the pirate” behind his back.

As Charlotte Curtis later wrote in
The New York Times
, I was wearing “little wisps of white silk,” and it seemed like half of Manhattan was there. (I couldn’t believe a
Times
reporter had actually written about the party. It was the first time I’d come in contact with the press, and I didn’t like it. I remembered from reading
Marilyn
that she once said about reporters that she supposed they thought they were talking to her clothing, and that seems to be the case. They sure weren’t thinking about anybody’s feelings. It was something I never got used to.) Anyhow, I was wearing a white silk top and pants, and I kept introducing myself to people as the hostess. The room was so packed that nobody could move. Drinks were passed overhead through the crowd, and the guests had to link arms to get their drinks to their mouths. I met so many people that night, some who became friends and some who became social friends—some I never saw again. Arthur and Alexandra Schlesinger were there, as was Gianni Agnelli, Ali MacGraw, Pat Lawford, and Allen Ginsberg. Bob Dylan came with Joni Mitchell and an entourage. Jackie Onassis came and we never even knew, it was so crowded. Woody Allen, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jill Krementz were there. I can’t remember everyone. People told me for years afterward they were at that party, and I had no idea.

As far as I could tell, the coleslaw remained untouched. A bit of the ham was picked over, but the beans and corn muffins weren’t eaten, either. The bar was going great guns, though, and at about one o’clock I sneaked into my room to sit at my dressing table, regroup, and refurbish my lipstick. I looked longingly at my bed, heaped with coats, wishing I could get into it and forget the hordes on the other side of the door. But I went back out, with fresh red lips, and carried on.

At about four, the last person left and Norman, who was nicely oiled, fell into bed, but I, tidy compulsive that I am, decided to put away the food so I wouldn’t have to look at it when I got up a few hours later. I picked up the bowl of coleslaw and… I still cringe as I write this… dropped it on the floor. The bowl smashed and the contents quickly soaked into the rug. The whole thing, maybe eight
or ten of the twelve cabbage heads, lay on our Oriental rug, among the broken pieces of the (possibly) priceless Greek or whatever bowl. I scraped up coleslaw and pottery and cried. I tried to wash the greasy dressing out of the rug, but it wouldn’t come up. I was so tired that I was practically hallucinating. My bits of silk were stained with teriyaki mayonnaise.

It was about six by the time I finally got to bed, sliding in next to Norman, who was blissfully snoozing away, unaware that nobody ate any of his coleslaw. I was just drifting into unconsciousness when the doorbell rang. It was Hunter Thompson. He had left late, and in fact had been one of the last to go, so I was going to politely tell him the party was over, but he was feeling pretty rough and hungover and asked if I could make him some bacon and eggs. The way he looked, I thought his very life hinged on those eggs and bacon. I can’t believe I was compos mentis enough to do it, but I staggered into the kitchen and made him bacon and eggs plus toast and coffee. Then he climbed up the ladder and flopped into the hammock that was slung over the crevasse under the skylight, and fell asleep. I worried for a minute that he would fall out and get a concussion, but figured his head had had worse things done to it, so I went back to bed.

When I emerged a few hours later, he was still up there. Finally, about three in the afternoon, he woke up, flipped out of the hammock, hung by his hands from the ropes, and dropped to the floor. He said “Thanks for a great party, Norris” and walked out the door, just like it was the most normal thing in the world.

My parents came to visit and took Matt back to Arkansas for the first part of the summer of 1976. They stayed at my apartment, and I tried my best to show them the wonders of New York so they could see why I loved it so much. I made them climb the Statue of Liberty, up into the torch, and we went to the top of the World Trade towers and the Empire State Building, which made my mother and me dizzy with vertigo. We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. I dragged them around the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History until they begged me to just let them stay home and rest one day. We took them to our favorite restaurant, Nicola’s, on Eighty-fourth Street, and Sammy, the waiter, reeled off a long list of delicious specials. My father turned to me and whispered, “What language is he
speaking?” I’m sure Sammy didn’t understand my father’s thick Southern accent any better.

They stayed four days and then with thin excuses said they had to leave. New York was just too much for them. I hated to see Matt go, but they were thrilled to have him back home again, and his father wanted to see him, too. Matt knew he was coming back in August to go with us to the Cape, so he wasn’t so worried.

I kept on doing a bit of modeling, and then in July, I got a call from my mother saying that Matt had somehow contracted salmonella poisoning and was in the hospital. My heart started pounding and I got on a plane as fast as I could, praying with every mile that he would be okay. As far as the doctors could tell, he might have eaten an egg that was bad, or chicken that wasn’t quite cooked. Nobody knew for sure how he got it, but he was pretty sick. I was in the throes of guilt, thinking if he had been with me this wouldn’t have happened. I slept on the floor beside his bed at the hospital for a week.

By the time we brought him home, he was over it, but washed out from the experience. He needed a rest, not a long flight back East, but we had rented a house in Wellfleet on Lieutenant Island for August and part of September, and Norman and the kids had been up there for more than a week without me. Matt wanted to go as much as I did. It was our first big summer together, and it meant a lot to everyone. Norman and I spoke on the phone every day, of course, and he was anxious for us to come home. The girls—Betsy, Danielle, and Kate—declared they were old enough to hold down the fort, but cooking and taking care of the family was a huge job, and I know they needed us to get there.

Finally, Matt was much better, and on August 9, he and I flew back and went to the Wellfleet house in the marshes of Lieutenant Island. Although we were all still getting to know one another, it also seemed like Matt’s and my addition to the family was welcome and seamless. Norman was like our drill sergeant, organizing the day’s activities. When we were on vacation, he hardly worked. It was his time to be with the kids, and he threw himself into it. We started off the day jogging in the mornings. (He’d wake everyone up with a cheery ditty he’d learned in the army, “Drop your cocks and grab your socks! Out of your fart-sacks, you bastards!”) Oy. Matt and Maggie were too young to jog, and Betsy, Kate, and I always brought up the rear, while
Norman, Danielle, and the boys led the pack. I was secretly jealous of Danielle’s athletic prowess, and tried to pretend I was much more of an athlete than I was. In reality I hated everything about jogging. I think it is bad for a woman to have her insides and her breasts jostled up and down like that. It can only lead to trouble down the road, when age and gravity helps pull everything earthward. While I can’t wholeheartedly blame the jogging I did, everything of mine has certainly gone south, and I like to think that has to be a part of it.

We also canoed among the marsh grass and found horseshoe crabs, went swimming, took long hikes in the dunes, and had picnics. We biked on the bike trail and walked the two miles to the pizza parlor on the highway. Our family car was the old silver Porsche, believe it or not, the one with the duct tape Band-Aids and dents all over it, and one night eight of us piled into the car and went to Provincetown to pick up Bob Lucid, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a dear friend of Norman’s, who was coming for the weekend. Lieutenant Island was only an island at high tide. The road became dry at low tide, and we had to time our trips in and out accordingly.