My First Five Husbands (33 page)

We were careful not to change the more obvious gifts, since I knew The Greek would remember certain ones, and there were quite a few I didn’t need or particularly like from my side of the aisle, which I magnamimously donated to him.

“A garden fountain shaped like the Statue of Liberty,” said Lette, raising her wineglass to the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

“Definitely not from any friend of mine. He can have it.”

“Cuisinart food processor?”

“Mine. From Norman Lear.”

“Hand-painted five-foot wooden screen of Mohammed’s life, huge plastic salad bowl, and a bronze eagle to go over the fireplace?” said Lette. “To the asshole?”

“Oh, yeah!” I raised a toast to her.

I had personally selected all the dinnerware at the wedding shop, but most of it had come from his friends, so I had to let go of the lovely twelve-setting dinnerware ensemble.

“Hey, wait a minute, Baby Rue. He ended up with fourteen plates,” tallied Lette.

“Credit the two extras to my aunt Wenonah Sue!” I told her. “Hell, I shopped till I dropped for that pattern.”

Lette and I got shnockered on red wine and laughed till we ached.

And I still have those two plates.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

O
nce when Lette was out of town, she asked me to guard her little trunk with her birth certificate and other papers. She was hardly out the door before I rushed to check her birth date. I knew she was a Taurus and was tickled to see that we were born the same year.

“I have a confession to make,” I told her years later. “I peeked.”

Astonished, she said, “Why, Baby Rue, I would
never
have done that!”

But my feeling was “What red-blooded best friend could possibly resist?”

By that time, Lette and I had shared plenty of drama and comedy, onstage and off. But she hadn’t told me her age. And she didn’t tell me she’d discovered a lump in her breast. Returning to L.A. from a brief trip to New York, I was stunned to learn that she’d had a mastectomy and was still in the hospital.

“Hey, Baby Rue.” She waved from her bed, blond and smiling, sitting up, sassy, “Surprise!”

She soon went into remission and kept performing, singing as powerfully as ever. She left The Jolly Cocksucker for a much better gig at Maldonado’s, a popular Pasadena restaurant. I went to hear her perform, and she was invariably hilarious. When she and Jack moved to a North Hollywood apartment she called “The Piss Pit,” she had to sell her grand piano, which she’d painted fire-engine red, so I bought it and had it refinished in mahogany. She gave me voice lessons, and I got her to go to French classes with me. Later, she started chemotherapy and we girlfriends took turns taking her to the hospital, where she sometimes stayed for a week or two. I visited, confused. The nurses behaved as if she would soon be out for good. I never asked Jack or anyone else what her prognosis was. I assumed she was going to get over it, and she seemed to think so, too.

I
wasn’t doing much interesting acting work. Guest shots on one series and another.
Love Boat, Fantasy Island,
that sort of thing. Then, in 1981, I was cast in
Mama’s Family,
a spin-off of a
Carol Burnett Show
sketch. Vicki Lawrence played the bossy, brash Mama, with Ken Berry as her weakling son. I was to be her nemesis, Aunt Fran, a fireball who matched Mama insult for insult. What fun! I love playing spitfires. But when the pilot script arrived, Aunt Fran had been rewritten as a mousy, uptight minor character. The producers had seen an actress they loved on the soap
All My Children
and decided Mama’s nemesis should be the white-trash floozy wife of Mama’s spineless son.

Well, poop. The pilot got picked up, and we made shows throughout the summer. Not the standard sitcom schedule.

That fall, I played Karl Malden’s wife in
Word of Honor,
the true story of a lawyer wrongfully sent to prison. The producers were appreciative of my talent, which was heartening, and the marvelous cast included Ron Silver and some young Detroit and Chicago actors. John Malkovich, one of the founders of Chicago’s new Steppenwolf Theater, played my son-in-law and kept me in stitches every day during lunch. On a day off, Gary Sinise came and drove us to Chicago, where I stayed with John and his girlfriend, Glenne Headly, and went to an excellently acted and directed Steppenwolf production. It was wonderful to watch John and Gary go on to huge success. And Glenne Headly gave a perfectly crafted performance in the movie
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
. She’s aces. Our
Word of Honor
played on TV the other night and holds up quite well, I’m happy to say. Lord, my butt was trim.

Meanwhile, a tall, handsome émigré from Yugoslavia moved in next door to Norman Hartweg. Drago Zdenko had been an award-winning film actor in Eastern Europe before moving to the United States three years earlier with aspirations to be a director. He married his mother’s cousin so he could stay in the States and learned English from watching television. Drago was sexy beyond words, intelligent and amusing, and his apartment was neat and orderly, in contrast to Norm’s, which always looked as if hordes of gypsies had pitched camp.

Growing up in post–World War II Belgrade, Drago and his mother and sister had to share a one-bedroom apartment with another family. His mother chose the bedroom and bathroom for their half, leaving the other family the living room and kitchen. She figured cooking in the john was less off-putting than doing daily ablutions in the kitchen. Consequently, her son developed a decidedly cavalier attitude toward home cooking and an even more nonchalant open-door policy toward bathroom privacy. Mercy! (Talk about being caught with your pants down.)

Linda had sold The Castle to our friend, Ronnie Claire Edwards, the parsimonious Corabeth on
The Waltons,
whom Lette called Ron Éclair, and I took Drago to a party there one night. Ronnie never served supper before eleven, following an extended cocktail hour, but around nine-thirty, Drago wandered into the kitchen, loudly inquiring, “VEN DO VE EAT?” with ever-increasing volume until Ronnie Claire suggested I not bring him to her next soiree. Or ever again. He was full of more bravado than a Veterans Day parade. In the two years I knew him, he never paid a traffic ticket; he always went to court and argued, and always got off. His ego was a tad overweening (and by “tad” I mean…“boatload”), but he was engrossing, full of original ideas. It had been a while since I’d been with a man, and Drago and I had immediate sexual rapport. At thirty-three, the energy surged.

Rating? I have to credit him with an A. Or a
yat,
in Serbo-Croatian.

“It is best and proper I must to move in vith you,” he informed me, but I insisted he keep his own place. I did allow him to install a toothbrush and other sundries at my house, however, and over time, he pretty much settled in to stay, driving to his place for mail once in a while.

That December, I was invited to join a celebrity group in Colorado for a film premiere and took Drago along as my guest. One lovely consequence of the trip was getting to be friends with writer Bob Parnell and his wife, actress Marsha Hunt, who had both been chewed up and spit out by the McCarthy witch-hunt blacklisting scourge, having refused to testify against friends under investigation. I don’t recall who else was on the top-heavy plane other than the beautiful and charming Joan Hackett, a popular actress who’d done guest shots from
Dr. Kildare
to
The Love Boat
. That night in Colorado, we all attended the film and ate a late supper, then I went to the room assigned to Drago and me. But he never showed up.

He’d spent the night with Ms. Hackett. Well, hooray for Belgrade.

“I am conzoomed with pazhion for her!” he told me when we got back to L.A.

“Zvell,”
I said. “Move out!”

But he wouldn’t go. For three excruciating days, he continued to hang out at my house, spending the nights at Joan’s place in Beverly Hills.

One night, Joan called me and said, “Rue, does this strange creature belong to you?”

“No,” I told her. “He does not. In fact, I’m trying to get him to leave.”

She said, “I can
feel
him calling to me over the mountains. He has a strange connection with me I can’t explain.”

“You’re welcome to him,” I assured her, and a day or so later, he finally left—for good.

This split with Drago had an unexpectedly disastrous effect on me. Once again, I was crippled by panic. I couldn’t understand it, because I wasn’t in love with him. The rejection felt like a stone thrown at a wasp’s nest. The old fears swarmed out and overwhelmed me. Mark had moved out earlier that year and was living with roommates in Van Nuys, so he knew nothing of what I was going through. For several nights, unable to bear the agony, I slept on the floor at Norman’s, doubled up on a pallet behind his TV set. I had no pride about it. Dear Norm talked me to sleep. He didn’t indulge or patronize me. He simply made small talk, speaking evenly about this and that until I could stand to close my eyes.

S
hortly after
Mama’s Family
began shooting in July of 1982, the pain in my side, which I’d had since I was pregnant with Mark, grew worse. During rehearsal one day, the stabbing pain was suddenly more acute than ever before.

“Sounds like gallbladder trouble,” said my doctor in Studio City. “Go home, eat two pieces of bread covered with butter, and call me if the pain gets noticeably worse.”

I ate the buttered bread and within minutes was writhing on the floor. I was rushed to Sherman Oaks Hospital, and after three days of tests went off to surgery. When I woke up—minus my gallbladder and a portion of my liver—I felt relatively okay but couldn’t draw a regular breath. The best I could manage were fast little pants.

“It’s the psychological trauma,” said the doctor. “Do you have a therapist?”

“It’s not psycho—logical—trauma,”
I gasped.
“I—can’t—breathe!”

They finally tumbled to the fact that I had adult respiratory distress syndrome, a condition that sometimes follows major surgery, and my chances for survival were not good. Not good at all. They whisked me to intensive care, trying to intubate me.

“Rue!” said the doctor. “I need you to cough. C’mon, Rue! Cough for me!”

Cough?
I thought. Where do you
cough
? I tried to find the muscles, the apparatus for
cough,
but everything felt paralyzed. I finally willed myself to cough, and the doctor said, “You just saved your life.” But I wasn’t out of the woods. Intubated, I spent the next four days under heavy sedation, only briefly awake enough now and then to scribble in a wobbly hand on a large tablet.

Am I dying?

My doctor answered, “Not if I can help it, Rue.”

Is there anything I can do to help?

“Just stay strong.” She smiled down at me. “Hang in there.”

I scrawled in large letters:
Please keep Drago Zdenko out of here!

Drago was annoying the hell out of me. He had moved on from Joan Hackett to live with a volatile French woman and, having heard from Norman that I was seriously ill, insisted on visiting, striding into the ICU every day, cheerfully bubbling, “Don’t vorry! Everything is juzt vine!” Everything was not
juzt vine
! I was quite possibly dying. Poor Mark was scared out of his mind, and my doctor was frantically consulting the
New England Journal of Medicine
for a clue. It was terrifying. And yet…fascinating.

Alone inside my brain, I felt myself enter a single cell, observing all the machinations and chemical reactions, and as I watched its machinery buzzing along like a little robot, I thought,
Well, you little dickens. How primitive. How marvelously organized. Tootling along your appointed rounds, without an ounce of compassion. You don’t give a damn if I live or die. But I do! And I’ll lay you eight to four I win this contest, you unemotional little dick-head.

The doctor called my dad and urged him to get to Los Angeles as soon as possible if he hoped to see me alive, but Marie didn’t like to fly, so the two of them
drove
to L.A., and by the time they arrived, much to everyone’s surprise, my prognosis was much better. I was moved from the ICU back to my room, and there Marie shared the happy news that they’d gotten married without telling any of us. I don’t know exactly when. The doctors had been rather hasty during the emergency intubation, so I couldn’t speak. I could only croak tepid congratulations.