Daring (29 page)

A great part of the book's appeal was Milton Glaser's cover design. A staircase of assorted colors had brightly colored block letters marching diagonally up the steps to spell PASSAGES. Delicious as a pack of Lifesavers, it also conveyed the promise of adult life as a progressive ascent, rather than a decline.

Most authors I asked about book tours told me they were hell. Nobody has time to read your book. You're always worried that your hair won't dry so you can look good on TV at 7
A.M.
God forbid the makeup lady doesn't show up. I learned fast how to “make the eyes pop” and warm up my oatmeal-fair skin with bronzer. But once the makeup lady takes over, your eyes and lips no longer belong to you. They are her creation. When you catch a glimpse on the monitor of hooker-heavy eyelids or chimp lips, it's too late to cry, “That's not me!”

You move across country on an invisible conveyor belt, appearing every morning on a facsimile of the
Today
show. A pair of hosts who look identical to yesterday's hosts apparently move along the time zones just ahead of you. They always seem to be called Sandy and Dave. After engaging in essentially the same patter from Philadelphia to Dallas, I once dozed off during a commercial break.

I decided that the best way to approach this new role was like an actress opening out of town. Two great costume changes and a spiral notebook full of my best anecdotes would make me feel like a pro. Oh, yes, and I would remember to lie to the makeup lady that I had a cold sore on my lips, don't touch. When my tour hit Los Angeles, Clay happened to be there on business. He took me to a boutique on Rodeo Drive. I picked out two fitted silk shirts, one pale pink, one baby blue, with matching scarves, and an orange wraparound skirt to wake up the interviewers. My “show wardrobe” cost $500, the most I'd ever spent on anything that I couldn't live in.

My first lecture about
Passages
was in a prime venue: Marin County. This was the City Arts and Lectures crowd, superhip culture vultures raised on Allen Ginsberg and Joan Didion. Roughly three hundred people were stacked in bleachers to hear me enlighten them about the “Predictable Crises of Adult Life.” I was scared to death. My voice faltered. When I couldn't be heard, people started climbing down from the top rows of the bleachers and walking out. I dropped my note cards.

Finally, I noticed in the front row the wife of a man I'd written about in the book, in a chapter called “Living Out the Fantasy.” Her husband had left her to live high on a commune in Mexico with a Latin dancer. Notwithstanding, she looked strong and radiant. I took strength from her and belted out the remainder of my speech. The half of the audience too polite to walk out did applaud.

I called my friend Lesley Stahl to tell her how poorly I performed. She urged me to see her speech coach. Dorothy Sarnoff was a former singer and Broadway star who had incorporated the positive reinforcement strategies of the human potential movement. “I don't criticize,” Miss Sarnoff told me off the bat. “I'll give you loving suggestions.” She had me stand behind a lectern. “Stay on both feet, no shifting weight. Lock on my eyes; ninety percent is eye contact. Nice smile, but don't overuse it. Animate. That's it. You LOVE being here. Now give me the vibe of authority.”

Then she turned on the TV camera and recorded me. Just cleaning up the “ums” and “uhs” and “you knows” was like learning English all over again. But after three sessions, I began enjoying the experience of talking through the camera to an imagined audience of one person in her living room, engaging her, persuading her, making her laugh and think. The secret was all in one's imagination.

Once the official book tour launched, I began enjoying it. Media heroines of mine, such as Susan Stamberg on National Public Radio and Nancy Dickerson at the Washington, D.C., public TV station, were such smart interviewers, they made me sound good. Milt Rosenberg was a fixture on WGN in Chicago, where I was paired with the
Washington Post
's gossip columnist, Sally Quinn, for two hours of small talk masquerading as social psychology.

However, some interviews were endurance contests. Newspapermen in their twenties wanted to play Woodward and Bernstein and find the smoking gun. Men as smart as Ken Emerson interviewing me for the
Boston Phoenix
just couldn't imagine that any passages described by men over thirty would be relevant to them. They had life all figured out. I decided this is the way the young male psyche is built, which is why so many can be sent off to war without considering the possible side effects. My debates with these younger men could stretch up to two hours. The only argument I could not use was to state the obvious: That's all right . . . it's just the stage you're in.

BY JULY, THE BOOK HAD RECEIVED
a very good notice in the
New York Times Sunday Book Review
and a rave in the
Washington Post
. Interview requests from notable journalists were piling up. I was sure the bubble was about to burst. This could not really be happening.

Was it fear of failure? Every writer has it. What we write is so much of who we are. To be rejected for who you are is about the worst fate one can imagine.

Fear of success? Foolish as it may sound, I suffered from it. Success is much more devious than failure. Success is the whole object of the American dream. But do people love you for it? I was fortunate in that the man in my life was totally behind my aspirations and benefited from my success as a writer. But the prospect of achieving what I most wanted—that is, to be taken seriously—could also open me to unexpected consequences.

What if, based on the observations I made in my book, people risked dramatic changes in their lives? Like divorce. What if women struck out to finish their college degrees in their forties, overshadowing their husbands, and their marriages fell apart? What if some guy quit a safe job to try a bold new career path and wiped out? Or the opposite: one man told me when he read about the Catch-30 transition, he gave up the illusion of rock stardom and was much happier as a record producer. So change could go either way. Nonetheless, I had periodic attacks of the what-ifs. What if a few years down the road, the doorbell rang and there was a line around the block of people shaking my book at me, saying: “I want my old life back! My new life stinks!”

It was time to get out of Dodge.

I COULDN
'
T BELIEVE MY GOOD FORTUNE
when
Paris Match
offered me an expense-paid trip to France to write a comic story about how the French behave on the northern beaches of Brittany. It was a wonderful chance to take a break with Maura and have fun. We stayed in a small auberge and followed the parade of vacationers as they trudged to the beach, rain or shine, outfitted with umbrellas, short pants, striped socks, pipes, and maybe a homburg. Like Jacques Tati playing Monsieur Hulot, they moved as if in a migratory pattern essential to long life.

Back in Paris, we had a short stay at the Hotel L'Abbaye while I worked with an editor on my story. I took Maura to the Piscine Deligny. She loved doing cartwheels off the diving board as the pool rocked on its barge at the side of the Seine. I remember feeling that this was like rocking on a cloud over the peak of life.

Then it was time to drop out entirely. We pushed on to Italy to connect with my best childhood friend and her children for a holiday weekend in Venice, planning to wind up in Florence to meet Clay and steep ourselves in Renaissance art. I swore not to give
Passages
another thought.

Susan Schmedes Dando picked us up at the Venice Marco Polo Airport in her little red Fiat. Crammed in with her nearly six-foot-tall daughter, Holly, Maura's age, and her towheaded son, Evan, we had a hilarious drive to Venice. We sang along with Evan who was already writing music at age nine, songs destined to make him a rock star with his band, the Lemonheads. We caught a vaporetto across the Venetian lagoon to the island of Lido and planted ourselves by the pool of the fabulous Excelsior Hotel. For two days we alternated between watching the children swim in the pool and in the sea while Susie and I talked ourselves back to our reckless childhood selves. The burden of the book and fears of success were dissolved.

Then came a late-night call from Clay. Would I accept? Dreading the worst news, I closed my eyes as he began to speak: “You better be ready to pick up the
International Herald Tribune
tomorrow.”

I knew it, another nasty review.

“You're numero uno in the
New York Times Book Review
!” he said.

I was dumbstruck. Number one? This was beyond my wildest dreams. I had expected
Passages
to sink with little trace. It wasn't written by an academic with an alphabet of letters after his name. I had thought the pleasure of research and completion of writing would be my reward.

That night Susie, the kids, and I put on fancy dress and Venetian masks and found a friendly trattoria where we could celebrate. Italian patrons were curious when they heard these boisterous Americans singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” They chimed in on
tangerine trees and marmalade skies.
What was the occasion? In my best Berlitz Italian I explained that I was a
scrivere
whose book was number one in the United States. I bought Prosecco for the house. The title was passed around. A chorus of “
Passagi!
” rang out and was incorporated into a chorus from Verdi's
Rigoletto
. This is what I most love about Italians. Any excuse to turn life into opera.

THE EXCITEMENT OF PUBLIC SUCCESS
was accompanied by a disequilibrium in the privacy of my soul. The more I looked into the blind eye of a TV camera, the more I began to understand why Native Americans distrusted photographers, believing them to be voyeurs who robbed them of their spiritual identity. Although I was thrilled that the book was received as breaking new and positive ground, I hadn't figured on losing my privacy. That is to say, my normalcy. Most authors, even household names, couldn't be picked out of a lineup. The more I looked into the face of TV cameras, the more I was complicit in my transmogrification into a different life-form—a quasi celebrity.

Every one of my relationships was distorted by my new status as a bestselling author. Writer friends now saw me as competition; if I was on the bestseller list, I had stolen their rightful slot. My father now turned to me as an ATM machine. He wanted me to take out a second mortgage on his house. It would be for only a few years, he promised, until he built his own advertising business. I wanted so badly to believe him, to help him believe in himself. I could not say no. What's more, to have money for the first time in my life made me nervous. Knowing nothing about how to manage money, I was sure I would let it slip through my fingers.

These were luxury problems, of course. But I prayed for help in getting my feet back on the ground. I did not feel my uncertainties to be unique. I was a woman, like any other woman of my time, who had to discover how to make her way in a world constructed by and for men. My lot was not much different from all women and men. We have the same longings, the same fears and frustrations, the same fleeting successes and inconsolable losses, the same secret shame and muted self-doubts. I believe that if and when we face our flawed likeness, and find the courage to change what we can, we may be able to accept being merely human.

The softcover edition of
Passages
was published in 1977 by Bantam Books, the king of quality paperbacks, when that house was run by the triumvirate of Mark Jaffe, editor in chief, Oscar Dystel, president, and Esther Margolis, a publicist so clever I believe she could have outsold the Bible with
Lady Chatterley's Lover
. She booked me for feature interviews in every major and minor newspaper. Word of mouth kept spreading like wildfire. People couldn't wait to read about what stage or passage they were facing. Curiously, they rarely read
ahead
of their age; they didn't want to know. TV interviewers almost inevitably began asking about their own stage. Except for Johnny Carson. I was warned, “Don't get personal with Johnny. He'll cut you dead.”

Esther suggested we go with the fun of a guessing game with Carson. “Give him a few characteristics of three major passages and let him guess which one he's in,” she advised. We knew he'd want to be as young as they come, so we front-loaded the choices with the Trying Twenties. He went for it and made jokes about trying out a new identity every night, on air. I was amazed at being able to forget myself and enjoy playing the game with a genius of comedy.

“
I
'
VE FOUND YOUR HOUSE!
” It was my friend Margaret Ginna.

“My house? I'm not looking for a house.”

“Yes you are.” Her confidence resided in a Zen sensibility. “You hate leaving the Hamptons every fall. And now you don't have to. You've worked hard for this.”

It was Labor Day weekend. I was bemoaning summer's end as I packed up the linens and pots to vacate our rented cottage.
Passages
had only been out in softcover for three months.

Clay took a look at the hundred-year-old farmhouse with Margaret and urged me to take her advice. Within a matter of minutes of seeing the secluded house and grounds, I fell in love. It was a ramble of cozy bedrooms with fireplaces, a study, and a big barn of a living room with two window walls that looked out on a rolling lawn and lots of places to plant a garden.

It was a relief to dig a hole in the sand and imagine stuffing the
Passages
money beneath a house and forgetting about it before I blew it. Who knew how long the book sales would remain strong? Besides, how could I qualify for a mortgage? I had no credit history. My friend Ted Kheel, the renowned labor lawyer, offered to vouchsafe to Chase Bank that I was not a deadbeat. The owner of the house, a Broadway producer, Fred Coe, agreed to sell me seven beds and a starter set of early-American antiques. The closing was accelerated in hopes that I could take occupancy before Thanksgiving.