Daring (45 page)

IN THE SPRING OF
1990, my Russian writer friends alerted me that Gorbachev was having a series of “emotional accidents.” They sent me translations of his lengthy public diatribes where he veered off into streams of consciousness: “Sometimes I have this crazy idea . . . that I should withdraw my candidacy.” He accused his so-called democratic deputies of trying to drive him crazy. “They want to make the leadership come off the track!”

My hunch was that we were beginning to see the disintegration of Gorbachev's inner control. Events were now rushing past him as if on some cosmic slide, scattering even his powers of improvisation into a shower of quickly extinguished sparks. Could Gorbachev change himself once more, this time liberating himself from the Communist ideal implanted in him from the age of sixteen? This story was worth a book. HarperCollins signed me to expand my stories about Gorbachev into a biography.

So I moved to Moscow for the month of March 1990 to watch firsthand the transformation of “the New Gorbachev.” This time I was prepared to approximate living within the economy like a Moscow housewife. Friends made on previous trips generously offered an apartment in the Lenin Hills, not far from Moscow University. I had packed a huge trunk full of packaged food and soups, vacuum-packed salami, cans of tuna and sardines—stuff I hated, but, hell, it would keep me fed. Before leaving the luxurious cocoon of an international jetliner, I squirrelled away airline sugar, salt, pepper, and butter. It felt as if I was “going under.”

The Lenin Hills were leafy and pretty with the pleasant energy of a university town. My apartment building was an eight-story Stalin-era redbrick block just off the most modern boulevard in Moscow: Leninsky Prospekt. When I first entered my own kitchen, it was with a shudder of dismay. Nothing helpful to a woman was made in the Soviet Union: no paper towels, aluminum foil, or plastic wrap; no napkins or toilet paper; no mops or brooms; not even sanitary napkins.

Most Soviets I met believed that their weaknesses had been engineered genetically. This belief was murderously self-fulfilling. Whenever I asked my Russian friends how long they thought it would be before they would feel truly free, the answer was deeply pessimistic. “You have to be born free to feel it.” The most optimistic predication was “Maybe for our children's children.”

Whenever I spoke about Gorbachev with my neighbor Irina Peterhov, her soft voice took on a harsher cast. “This is the question I would ask if I ever had an interview with Mr. Gorbachev. ‘Who is responsible for the wreckage of our society for the last seventy years? The Communist Party, or Mickey Mouse?'”

I had become almost obsessed with finding out what lay inside the Central Committee complex, the citadel of power in the USSR.

Finally granted an interview with the number-two Soviet power figure, Alexander Yakovlev, Gorbachev's propaganda chief, I entered the cavernous building. Hush of a vacuum. No evidence of work. No secretaries, no aides with computers, no phone banks or fax machines or printers spewing out briefing papers. Just miles of blond veneer, bare bookshelves, closed doors.

Alexander Yakovlev's massive forehead protruded as if his brain was almost too big for his skull. Deep lines flared above his eyes like lightning flashes. His skin was colorless. I asked if Gorbachev was shaken by reports that he had lost the support of the intelligentsia. It was a raw wound. “We are very respectful of the intelligentsia,” Yakovlev said defensively. “All of us can be called intelligentsia.”

I reminded Yakovlev that he had once written that ultraleftists were the curse of any revolution. Was this how he saw Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev's challenger on the far left?

“The ultraleftists must be isolated,” he said darkly.

“How?” I asked the propaganda chief.

“Moral isolation.”

After this chilling answer, I felt bold enough to ask the number-two power in the country if he worried that Gorbachev's enemies were poisoning his mind. “Are they trying to drive him crazy?” Yakovlev's answer spoke volumes about the Russian people

“We are not always stable people,” Yakovlev said.

AFTER A YEAR AND A HALF
of research and four extensive trips to the Soviet Union, I sensed that Gorbachev could be overthrown at any moment. Even though I had not met him in person, I felt I knew him, almost killing myself in the summer of 1990 to write his biography in three months. My editor impressed upon me that the manuscript's drop-dead deadline was Labor Day. Only then could they publish before December, when we anticipated that Gorbachev would win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Clay shut me in my study in East Hampton and Ella brought me lots of iced tea. I wrote six and a half days a week with breaks only to swim or eat. The morning after Labor Day, I pushed Send to my editor. Her return e-mail took my last breath away:

It almost made me sorry I'd ever written that damn book about life transitions.

In December 1990, Gorbachev was indeed awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Eight months later he was summarily overthrown. For all his courage in changing the psychology of his people, he was left in the dust by the horsemen of history. The last line of my biography of Mikhail Gorbachev cast him as a tragic figure. He was the man who changed the world but lost his country.

BOTH THATCHER AND GORBACHEV WERE
scuttled off the world stage ignominiously, both shouting their unshakable beliefs in themselves. For Thatcher, it was neither the socialists nor the communists she hated who engineered her abrupt downfall. It was a coup by her own star boys who plotted a revolt behind her back. On November 20, 1990, the “perpetual prime minister” lost her place as Conservative Party leader. She returned home from a state visit to find her nearly twelve years in power finished off by her own MPs. Rarely seen in tears, on the traumatic day that Thatcher was ushered out of her home at No. 10 after announcing her resignation, she broke down and wept. She confided to her Ronnie that she felt “betrayed.”

Reagan left office venerated around the world. He and Thatcher are the only two world leaders in modern times whose political philosophies became memorialized in “isms.” Reaganism and Thatcherism live on today. Indeed, together the two leaders set the developed world on the conservative course of free-market capitalism, including the new Russia. It would take almost twenty years before the near collapse of the American economy exposed the danger to the world of government run by rich people's political bribery and the slow starving of the middle class.

Charmed as I was by the animal magnetism between Thatcher and Gorbachev, I had been working on a play about a fantasy romance between the two leaders.
Maggie and Misha
even had a two-week workshop production off Broadway. So I had a very personal reason to be disappointed when both were sent off to political Siberia. Incurable romantic that I am, I wanted the fantasy to come true!

“
I WANT YOU TO DO THE POPE.
”

Tina Brown was deliciously cocky after seven years of growing
Vanity Fair
into the most talked-about magazine around town and actually making it profitable. By 1991, she thought we could “do” anybody.

“The pope! Jesus, Tina, I'm not even Catholic!”

I had come to her apartment on East Fifty-Seventh Street early that Saturday in January armed with an equally preposterous idea. “I want to write about menopause.”

“Excuse me?”

It took Tina an uncharacteristically long time to respond—maybe more than a minute. She had just had a baby. She was in that cotton-brained dither of hormonal chaos that overtakes the newly postpartum woman, not unlike the static in my brain brought on by menopause. We were living in alternate realities. The last thing on Tina's mind was the end of fertility. But being Tina Brown, she knew a taboo when she heard one and she liked nothing better than breaking taboos.

“Brilliant, Gail! It's the one thing nobody can talk about. You can talk all you want about sex, but menopause—I've never even heard the word spoken aloud.”

I WAS AS IGNORANT AS
anyone else when the first bombshell of the battle began. It was a Sunday evening in 1985. Snug inside our marriage, a pillow's throw away from Clay, we were both contentedly reading while jazz lapped at our ears and snow curtained the window. Every so often we looked up and congratulated ourselves on staying home in the cocoon of love and comfort we had created in what was now
our
apartment on East Fifty-Seventh Street. As I wrote then, “What was that?” I mumbled.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

It felt like a little grenade had gone off in my head. I tried to go back to reading. But some powerful switch had been thrown. I couldn't concentrate. When I looked down at the page I had just finished reading, I realized that its imprint on my brain had washed out.

A little while later, my heart began leaping against my chest like a frog caught in a jar. I lay down. But I was too agitated to sleep. In the months that followed, I sometimes felt outside of my body. My memory was as solid as Swiss cheese. Clay and I began having Thermostat Wars.

“It's freezing in here,” Clay would moan. “No, it's boiling.” “Did you turn the thermostat below fifty again?” “I'm sorry, I just have to open a window.”

It was the little crashes of fatigue that really disturbed me. Having always enjoyed abundant energy, I was furious at myself for crawling home from a day of writing and falling into bed for a “nap,” from which I had to drag myself up to make dinner. I said nothing to Clay. But it's not like he didn't notice my mood swings, which were becoming more like the arcs of a trapeze.

This couldn't be the dreaded Change, could it? But I was only forty-eight.

The first friend with whom I raised the dreaded subject was a sultry-looking woman of fifty who prided herself on her body, her tennis game, and her youthful-looking husband. I asked if she had ever talked with anyone about menopause.

“No, and I don't want to,” she said.

“Women don't bring up the subject around you?”

“One friend did,” she said sourly. “I haven't seen her since.”

The wake-up call came at a Park Avenue dinner party. It was one of those high-protocol parties where the place cards look like tracings from the Book of Kells. I was feeling especially pretty in my new black velvet suit with its white satin collar, when from nowhere, a droplet of something hit my collar. What the—was the waiter dribbling wine? Could there be a leaky ceiling behind all the beautiful wood beams? I noticed Clay's gaze from across the table turn to alarm: What horrible thing was happening to me? I put a hand to my face.

My forehead was swampy.
Oh, no, not me!
The moisture began running down my face in rivulets—plop—onto my satin collar. Should I pick up the white linen napkin and mop my forehead? I reached for the five-hundred-thread-per-inch napery, hesitated—
No, all the makeup will come off on the napkin.
Trying to pretend this wasn't happening
, I turned to the titan of industry on my right and tried smiling and mopping, chatting and fanning, laughing at his jokes and dabbing, when what I wanted most in the world was to disappear into the kitchen and tear off my clothes and open the freezer door—never mind that it was February—and just
stand there.

It was time to see my gynecologist. I had always prized him as a solid clinician. I asked if I could be in menopause.

“Not yet,” he said flatly. “You're still menstruating.”

“But I have these weird symptoms . . .”

With coaxing, he measured my hormone levels. I was very low on estrogen.

“Could I be a candidate for hormone-replacement therapy?” I asked.

“You have to be menstruation free for a year before I can give you estrogen replacement.”

Finally, shamefaced and stumbling over my words, I tried to spit out my worst fear. “I've always enjoyed a wonderful sex life with my husband, but I'm not feeling . . . you know . . . juicy.”

“Decrease in sexual response is a natural part of aging,” he said curtly. “I can't help you with that.” I had just been handed a one-way ticket to the Dumpster.
What's happening to me? Why can't I fix this? Am I the only one?
But I knew too much about passages by now to know that if I was feeling like this, probably a lot of other women around my age were too. And we weren't all crazy. I put on my research hat. It didn't take long to discover that most male gynecologists in the late '80s were woefully ignorant about the mysteries of menopause. It was only when I found a knowledgeable female gynecologist that I began learning about a passage that is universal among half the world's population.

It was Dr. Patricia Allen, an attending physician at New York Hospital, who identified what I was experiencing as perimenopause—a preliminary phase of this long transition—the three or four years leading up to the end of menstruation, which is often the most symptomatic and anxiety-provoking phase.

We hit it off from the start. She let me know that she didn't accept passive patients, only those willing to participate actively in their own health care. Fine with me. I guessed Dr. Pat's age to be early forties. From her appearance—coppery hair swept off her beautiful face, makeup applied sparingly to her delicate features, an intentional switch of her hips when she walked, and a raucous laugh—this was not a woman who would give up on sex after fifty, or probably ever.

“I believe in treating each patient as an individual,” she said. “This perimenopausal period should be a transformation,” she explained, “so that a woman gets to become—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—the best that she ever was.”