Still Talking (23 page)

Once we realized everybody wanted to see Olympians, Edgar suggested we assemble all the winners on the show. Freddie and Peter said no because the show would have to pay them. We said, “We’ll pay them.” Freddie and Peter said, “How are you going to get them here?” We said we would pay for a bus.

Freddie and Peter said, “They can’t talk. ” Then how about opening the curtain and

showing them? No, we could not do that. Edgar suggested putting them in the audience. Finally that was okay.

Billy and Edgar got on the phone and arranged an open invitation to be posted on bulletin boards and around the UCLA campuses where the athletes were staying. About twenty young team members showed up, swimmers, gymnasts, wrestlers, basketball players, almost all Gold Medal winners. One by one these extraordinary young men and women, the cream of the country, stood and gave their names and sport. Seeing these wonderful kids, feeling so proud to be an American, I had to fight back tears.

I guess I felt that current events, what was on America’s mind, should be recognized by The Tonight Show. When the Challenger exploded, I was adamant that a comic monologue would be totally inappropriate. I pleaded with Peter to let me drop it, and he said, “You must do the monologue. That is our format.” In his head the monologue was sacred.

Freddie backed him up, of course. “What is all this shit? Of course you’re going to do a monologue. You’re contracted to do a monologue.” I told him I could not go out there and make jokes when men and women had just died in a national disaster. I was sure in my bones that right now America did not want to laugh. Peter and Freddie were just as sure that the Carson show was an entertainment show and existed to make people forget their troubles. If people wanted to hear about the Challenger, let them tune in to Ted Koppel.

I finally obeyed my inner voice, and out-and-out refused to do a monologue.

I went onstage and voiced my feelings. The reaction from the audience was that we were all the same person. That we all shared a common experience in grief. It was incredibly moving.

Though I am easily hurt, my need to think the best of people, my desire to have everything work out, is powerful. Deep disillusionment comes hard and slowly. The knowledge that Freddie and Peter did not respect my instincts was a profound blow that amplified much milder slights that would ordinarily have seemed unimportant.

STILL TALKING 161

Increasingly, reluctantly, during those last few years, Edgar and I recognized a pattern of disinterest.

In all my years as a guest host, I had never received a note or a call from Carson about a show of mine. Not thinking of me as part of the Carson “family,” the chief executive officer of NBC and chairman of the board, Grant Tinker, bought a table at a benefit dinner honoring Billy Wilder and invited the whole Carson group-except me. When I had Bill Cosby on as a guest, Brandon Tartikoff, the president of NBC-TV, sat with him in his dressing room-which was right next to mine. Brandon never bothered to step next door and knock and say hello to me. He escorted Cosby to the set and stood with him in the wings till Bill went on-and again did not bother to come over to me during a commercial and say hello.

I know this sounds silly now, but then I felt humiliated, which was stupid and sentimental, an uproar in Lilliput, but I so wanted to think of that show as a place where I belonged. Everyone told me that these were corporations, and they are cold, and I had always said, “No, no, no. This is my home base.” So the golden-haired girl was having problems! “Nothing is perfect,” I told myself. “You’ll survive the problems because the show is good.” As I entered the summer of 1984, I still thought my heart and best interests lay with Johnny Carson.

11

…

SINCE the success came from doing what I had always done, my life changed very little. I worked the same hours with the same intensity, still sat on the bathroom floor organizing my comedy, still went each night to some little club to get new material for the Carson show. There was really only one difference-my comedy lines now brought forth a tremendous reaction, and were picked up all over the country-The Orlando Sentinel quoted me about Jackie Onassis’s marriage to Aristotle Onassis: “That’s why God gave women sex, so we can shop the next day.” Or The National Enquirer was quoting me on my lack of sex appeal-“Rapists tap me on the shoulder and ask, `Have you seen any girls?’ “

On the other hand, I was being inundated with decisions about publicity, bookings, offers, investments, contracts, tax strategies-and Edgar was constitutionally unable to relinquish control, unable to trust the managers and agents who become necessary to the smooth running of a celebrity career. Proudly quoting his favorite aphorism, “God is in the detail,” he was unable to stop obsessing about the minutiae of our life.

Feeling responsible for each move, fearful of a wrong step, trying to double-check every person, Edgar was running without a stop. He would call two people at our accountants and ask for the same information and see if they had the same answer. He would assign a task to a secretary, and then, if she delayed, make the call himself. At night he woke repeatedly to make notes on a pad kept on

162

STILL TALKING 163

the bedside table. When he tried to relax, he was distracted, nervous. He completely lost his sense of humor.

In December of 1984, his fifty-ninth year, Edgar’s overextension, his stress, came to a culmination. He went to a routine meeting at the office of my career consultant, Bernie Brillstein, who told me later that Edgar was crazed, ready to explode, twitching, talking a mile a minute, pacing the room, smoking without cease.

He arrived home at around six, poised to blow skyhigh. Just at that moment Melissa came into the office and told Edgar and me she had decided not to go East to college; she wanted to enroll at UCLA a mile away and live with a California girlfriend. Both Edgar and I-especially Edgar, who was a stickler for good education-were determined that she get away from home and have the experience of an eastern education. She had been accepted at the University of Pennsylvania, so we thought this longplaying, ugly argument had been settled.

Melissa is a good fighter-a chip off both old blocksand suddenly we were in one of those operatic teenage uproars that happen in every family. Edgar and I erupted. Melissa ran upstairs to her room, and Edgar, losing all control, ran after her. In her room Melissa yelled, “Mommy’s a bitch!,” and Edgar yelled, “Don’t you call your mother that!” A random motion of his hand made her think he was going to slap her, and she yelled, “That’s it!

I’m leaving home!” -and ran down to her car-with me behind her shouting, “You’re not going anywhere!” and wrestling her in the car and grabbing the keys out of the ignition.

Dorothy Melvin, our assistant, later told me she heard Edgar calling softly, “Dorothy. Dorothy.” She went into the stairwell and found him leaning on the railing of the landing, his face a dead-man’s gray. “Please call the paramedics,” he said calmly. “I think I’m having a heart attack.

“

She ran along the hall screaming for me. While she called 911, I raced upstairs. Edgar was lying on the bed. I could not believe that this was serious. With a heart

attack nothing shows-no blood, no guts on the floor, no death in front of me-just Edgar having a pain on the bed in his nice gray-flannel slacks and his impeccably tailored Dunhill blazer. But that was classic Edgar-the English gentleman who, when told, “Well, old boy, the blighters got you this time and we’ll have to cut off your leg”answers, “Pity. “

Our marvelous houseman, Jacob Bjerre, who had been a medic in Denmark, laid Edgar on the floor, and I ripped a blanket off the bed and covered him and held his hand and kept saying over and over, “It’s all right, honey. You’re going to be fine. I love you. It’s okay.”

The paramedics arrived in minutes, hooked Edgar up to an IV, and ordered me out of the way, but I kept sneaking back through Melissa’s connecting bathroom, saying, “There’s no reason I can’t be in the room. I’m not in your way. I’m up against the wall.” I needed to be with him. “I don’t think he’s going to make it,” I heard one of the medics say. I had to let that go right past my head.

We could hear Melissa downstairs crying hysterically. “Quiet that girl,”

the paramedic said. Dorothy took her outside, but she grew even more hysterical, screaming, “I killed my daddy! Don’t die, Daddy! Don’t die.”

Finally, to shock Melissa silent, Dorothy slapped her face.

I told Edgar I was going to ride in the ambulance with him. As I left the room, I overheard a medic say, “Over my dead body.” My husband looked up from the depths of his terror and said, “You don’t know my wife.”

I climbed into that ambulance ahead of them and tied myself down with the safety belt and sat there gripping my pocketbook like a club. Nobody suggested I move. As they loaded him into the back, Edgar said, “Tell Melissa I love her.”

I sat there saying over and over to myself, “Please, God. Please, God.

Please, God,” and calling out to Edgar, “I’m right here, Edgar. Right here in front.”

Dorothy, who followed with Melissa, tells me the ambulance, its siren on, flew through the streets. In my memory the ambulance crawled, and, grasping at straws, I thought this was a good sign. They must not be very wor-

STILL TALKING 165

ried. When we arrived at the UCLA Medical Center, we rushed right past the red tape. The hospital grabbed one of the top Los Angeles heart men literally out of the elevator. That is what celebrity is all about. Anybody else, there would have been a dozen forms to fill out and the surgeon would have gone home and let his assistant take the case.

Now Melissa became very strong, stronger than I was. We were put in a small room off the emergency room, and along the wall were computer screens showing the heartbeat of the cases inside. All of the lines were jumping around, except Edgar’s. His was almost straight. He was dying in front of us, but I did not understand this then, and the ignorance was bliss. “Look how good Daddy’s line is,” I kept saying. “He’s going to be all right.”

The doctor told us the operation would not be done until the next day; he wanted Edgar to stabilize. We should go home and get some sleep-`

`Everything’s fine. No point in your staying here.” I took that to be a very good sign. In actual fact, it was the first time a doctor lied to me; I found out later he thought Edgar would not last the night.

At home I was back into my normal life, taking a bath and luxuriating in its hotness, and thought, Edgar’s going to be all right; life will continue. Melissa and I slept in my bed. I really thought the worst was over, and he would be sitting up in four days. I woke at dawn, called the hospital, and got an orderly too inexperienced to lie. He told me, “It’s touch and go.”

In the car rushing back to the hospital, my body was clammy, my fingers numb and tingling. I felt I was living underwater. I could not believe that this was happening. This was not the way it was supposed to be. 1 was the one people told, “Take care of yourself. ” And doubling the tragedy, Edgar’s death would maim the person he loved most in the world. To Melissa, beyond me, he gave his totally unselfish devotion. He adored her.

I just left the car with the keys in the ignition in front of the emergency entrance and hurried to Edgar’s bedside, where, as I arrived, he was having another heart attack.

The doctor asked him, “Tell us the pain, one to ten.” Edgar answered quietly, “Ten.”

I was torn by a bizarre, schizophrenic tension. It was inconceivable that his body was racked with pain, because I couldn’t see him suffering. When I go to a doctor for a simple tune-up, I say, “Doctor, don’t let me die.”

Here was Edgar saying conversationally, “Ten.”

I could not let him see my panic.

After the doctors pulled him through, Edgar was conscious, and I pretended that the previous night had been the dangerous one and told him, “Thank God you didn’t die last night, because I couldn’t go on without you. You are my everything.” I told him, “You’ve got to get well. No one else is going to buy me a Faberge frame.” That little joke was enough of a good-bye for me.

He knew now how precious he was in my life.

That evening the doctors told me that if they didn’t do a triple bypass immediately, there was no hope. Even then, there was only a 20 percent chance he would pull through. Melissa and I went back to Edgar and pretended he had options. “It’s up to you,” we told him. Meanwhile the surgeons were scrubbing.

He said, “I’ve been thinking-after nineteen years, we are finally gathering in the harvest.” But I was not going to indulge myself with a deathbed scene. I refused to change into Mrs. Maudlin, all weepy, so I did what I always do when I am tense: I began making jokes. Edgar agreed to the operation, but sensed the odds. He said, “I want to donate my organs.” Very sassy, I said, “Who’d want your organs? I feel sorry for the guy who gets your eyes. ” A wonderful last thing to say to your husband, right? But it meant to him that I thought he would be okay. He would not believe I was shallow enough to make jokes at his deathbed. Little did he know.

As the white-coated orderlies moved him onto the litter, he spoke to Melissa: “Take care of Mommy.” Then, trying to comfort me, telling me he was fine, he squeezed out an Edgar joke. “If I don’t make it,” he said, “give Billy Sammeth a bonus. But not too big.”

That was our way, a taproot of our deep affection-the

STILL TALKING 167

willingness, the ability, to cover pain with black, ironic humor. If you can laugh at something, that says you’re superior to it. See, I’m laughing, so it’s serious, but I’m really okay. The day of my mother’s funeral, I told the hairdresser, “Make me look good or else you’ll be doing my mother’s hair this afternoon. “

I watched the litter disappear down the hall. I had never imagined life without Edgar, had always thought I would go first. He was the one remaining companion in my little nuclear family. Melissa had one foot out of the nest. “Hi, Mom,” shed say as she changed her clothes for a date.