Still Talking (25 page)

Of course 1 wanted his first words to be, “Joan, I love you. ” But the first time he could really talk, I asked, “Okay, what would you have done differently in your life?” He said, “Nothing much.” I was thrilled.

In a few days Edgar was moved to an ICU transition room. When he learned we had installed an electric seat to carry him up the back stairs, he picked up the phone by his bed and called his accountant, Michael Karlin, to be sure that if somebody was hurt using it, we were covered by insurance. That cheered me up. Edgar was himself again.

I felt excited, but not on the tremendous high I would have expected. I had somewhere in those weeks stopped allowing myself the luxury of hope.

Whenever the doctors said Edgar was out of the woods, he was not out of the woods. When you are on that roller coaster of hope and laughter, despair and horror, lifting yourself back up becomes harder and harder.

After six weeks, he came home. Our room was full of flowers. The best linens were on the bed. He sat down on the bed and said, “It’s good to be here. ” On his table were his books and magazines. On his pillow was a sign made by Melissa with dozens of colored Magic Markers, saying, WELCOME HOME, DADDY. I felt a great calmness. We had come through. Everything was going to be back the way it was and should be.

One night during the hospital ordeal, I had talked to a woman outside the ICU door whose husband was back in the hospital after a second heart attack. She told me, “Get ready. This is not the worst. The worst is when he comes home and his personality is changed. ” Of course, I thought, Not in my case. I’ll bring him around.

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How naive I was. The man lying on the bed, twentyfive pounds thinner, moving gingerly about the house, looked like my husband, but Edgar was no longer inside that body. He was like a jigsaw puzzle, painfully put together, but at the end one piece was missing in the head.

I rented him Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose, and Edgar hardly smiled.

Depressions plagued him, and he retreated to his bed for hours-or he was swept by mood swings. Some emotional governor was missing. The rage that reached back to his childhood was now on a hair trigger-and almost encouraged by a psychiatrist Edgar saw to pacify his doctor. This man, a South African all too happy to sit around discussing books and the old country, told Edgar the cause of the heart attack was his habit of locking up emotions. He must start speaking his mind, start unloading his stress.

Melissa and I would even encourage him, saying, “Tell us, tell us. Don’t hold it in.” Melissa, looking back years later, wisely said to me, “Daddy thought if he didn’t let everything out, he’d just explode. But once somebody gets used to blowing up, it must be very hard to put things back in check again-and his whole life got sort of crazy. “

So the cap was off the bottle. He became agitated over nothing-“Get the dogs out of the bedroom”-“This soup is cold”-raging if his suit was not back from the cleaner. He could not concentrate and changed TV channels incessantly with the clicker-and was furious if I wanted one show and he didn’t.

He tried to take charge of the business right away, so the accountant brought him checks to sign. He came down to the office to go through his mail-and was upset when he found a clean desk, found that the accountant and Dorothy Melvin and Billy Sammeth and I had done very well without him, found that the water had closed over and the flow continued.

Part of his anger was at himself, a rage of frustration. Before the attack Edgar’s mind was an immediately accessible card file. He matter-of-factly remembered every name, every date, could tell you the author and publisher

of every book he had read, knew what each person in a meeting had said, knew every comma in a contract.

He came out of the hospital with his mind muddled, distracted and forgetful. I still think his brain might have been damaged during those episodes when he was brought back from death. He had trouble grasping complexities and remembering details. His memory was so undependable, he carried his own phone number in his wallet. When he did stumble mentally, his embarrassment and selfdisgust were profound.

I have been told-and believe it-that anger is not a basic emotion. It is a symptom, a way of cloaking and expressing feelings too awful to experience directly-hurt, bitterness, grief, and most of all, fear. For both of us death was now a palpable presence, waiting just out of sight.

Edgar was frightened to be alone, particularly at night. For a year he kept a nurse with us twenty-four hours, hiring the pretty young girls from the hospital ICU during their off-duty hours. He had never exercised in his life, but he began a program with a treadmill. He ended his four-pack-a-day smoking habit-and I told him if he started again, I would pull out pictures I took of him in the ICU with his 185 tubes and bags of urine and pus and plasma.

He had always been the stoic British type about his health, never a hypochondriac. Now, he worried about every little pain and went to doctors constantly. I think the only moments he felt truly safe were the four times a day when the nurse was taking his pulse and blood pressure.

But there were two Edgars, one that frightened child, scared that any ripple in his life might signal another attack, and a second Edgar asserting his independence, fighting to prove that he was as good as ever, that he could still perform, could still be the keeper of my flame.

He began defying us all. The doctor told him not to drive for six months, and he got right behind the wheel. I refused to drive with him, and we had awful fights about that. When I performed in Lake Tahoe, the doctor told him not to go with me; the air was too thin. He went anyway. At the time I thought it was a death wish. But I think now he was in part, like so many other invalids,

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using illness as a power play-“You better watch out for me very carefully.

Put me at the center of your life.” I was a patsy for that ploy.

Soon after Edgar returned from the hospital, we began living by unspoken rules. All of us were careful not to upset him and cause another heart attack, careful to walk on eggs and keep him calm-do what he wanted the way he wanted. When we broke those rules, Edgar found ways to remind us. When I snapped, when I could no longer stuff my feelings of anger, when we had a fight-Edgar twice checked into a hospital.

I think that under the pressure of a life-altering crisis, a husband and wife revert to type, each losing the small conscious stratagems that have kept them in balance: My need to be the nurturer took over, Edgar was another baby to take care of, and I was the little mother-cheering him up, making sure he received perfect care and was getting better.

The keystone of Edgar’s character was the need to keep himself and the world around him in control. So any loss of control-helplessness-left him vulnerable and terrified, put him in a downward spiral. His sense of impo-tency fed his fear, which increased his frustration-which came out as anger-which increased his loss of controlwhich multiplied the fear and anger-which made people avoid him-which made him even more isolated, and angry. He was driving himself crazy-and driving everybody around him crazy, too.

The one element that gave him a sense of power, even manhood, was money. He had gone into partnership with Tom Pileggi on several housing developments and made several million dollars. Now, convinced that he did not have long to live, he acted out his dream of wealth.

Edgar redid the house lavishly and bought an eighteenthcentury breakfront for over $100,000. The antique Oriental rug cost more than our governess made in a year. He bought all new luggage from Louis Vuitton, one suitcase just for shoes. He sat in our study bidding by phone against Malcolm Forbes for a Faberge frame. When we went to London, he went to Wartski’s jewelers and bought

me a pearl choker with a big black diamond in it-and Marie of Romania’s necklace of Faberge eggs. When you are buying Faberge pieces five at a clip, the clerks are on their knees to you.

He came back to the hotel with boxes of Faberge animals and set them out on the desk and asked me to help him decide which to buy. I never asked the price, but made my stock speech: “This is nuts, why are we doing this? It’s stupid”-and then picked the pig and the rooster.

Of course, I enjoyed money and buying-that was one of the bonds with Edgar.

But I never, never wanted to spend big money. Part of me has always been my father the doctor, who pinched every penny and taught me to be terrified of poverty. However, there was no way I could control Edgar-nor did I want to have that battle. He was already emasculated by his condition, and I was still terrified of the effects of a major fight. And there was a second side of me that watered down my resolve, the part that took after my mother, who wanted to live like a duchess on no money and prayed for whooping-cough epidemics. So I went along with Edgar-and once the money was spent took pleasure in the luxuries I had always denied myself.

Edgar bought me a Fabergd pin once owned by the czar’s sister. He just handed it to me-“This is for you.” I screamed, “Take it back! Take it back!

Are you crazy?” He said, “If you don’t want it, I’ll never buy you another thing.” I thought, Well, wait a minute. He said, “Wear it. Put it on. You work so hard. You deserve it.” It was madness.

When we were in Atlantic City, he would take a helicopter up to Bucks County in Pennsylvania to see Tom Pileggi, who teased him, called him “Onassis.” When we were in London, we stayed in the Royal Suite at Claridges-which I loved-and he had a car and driver waiting for him all day at the curb. He spent days at his London tailor, and clothes were delivered by the dozens. He wanted the respect he no longer received and he got it by playing the rich man.

This man, fighting for his sanity, still searching for a

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source of ego and self-respect, was the husband who would soon be leading us into the jungle of the Fox Broadcasting Network, a place populated by men able and willing to kill us.

I had taken the reins of my life during his illness and did not release them for two years. He was a man too unstable to be the “rock” in command of my impulses, persuading me with pros and cons and practical conse-quences. His natural caution had increased to paranoia, and his priorities were reversed, details becoming more important than fundamental issues.

After he had talked to the agents and lawyers and the manager, I would call them privately and secondguess him-tell the agent, “Just get the best money you can, and I’ll take it”-all the while trying to give Edgar back his selfesteem, his feeling of importance in my life, without really giving him control. And Tom Pileggi was there to keep me from making mistakes.

My independence from Edgar was not entirely a lack of trust. After running my own affairs for a while, I was feeling my oats. I was beginning to trust myself, feeling terrific on a new level of confidence. Everything was being handled just fine.

But of course Edgar knew he was being shunted aside, and sometimes we had to tell him the truth-that a contract was wrong or somebody had tried to cheat us-and I was terrified that such incidents would bring on another attack. And, indeed, often during a moment of pressure, he would feel a pain in his chest and go upstairs and lie down.

We no longer had totally happy moments, none of the highs we once had shared. The one exception was at Melissa’s coming-out cotillion. Edgar escorted her in the processionalwhile I sat sobbing because after all our despair, against all odds, there he was, his daughter on his arm.

What helped me survive this life-threatening blow to our marriage was constructive denial. I made myself believe that this horror would pass, and we would come out the other side stronger than ever. I had this romantic image

of us-two old crocks laughing at the absurdity of these times.

But in the spring of 1985 I was performing in Virginia, as usual without Edgar, who was frightened of making long flights. I was with my little entourage of Billy Sammeth, Ann Pierce, and Jason Dyl. We had a free day and visited the reconstructed Colonial town at Williamsburg. The weather was poor, Williamsburg was deserted, and we felt in Colonial times-in a time capsule, not tourists, because there were no other tourists.

Our guide was an elderly, thin-lipped DAR type who treated us like children. She said she had seen me once before and didn’t like me much, and disapproved of Jason, who was wearing a woman’s colonial mobcap that we had bought at a souvenir stand. Ann and I did not have warm clothes, so we borrowed coats from the limo driver’s wife. Ms. DAR refused to take us on the tour until we had watched a little movie about the town. So four grown-ups sat in a row on a bench and then were tested to see whether we had paid attention to our Colonial history. She thought we were the dregs of show business and hated taking us around-and we thought it was hilarious.

During the day I realized how silly and loose I felt, and for the first time since the heart attack I consciously thought, I’m having fun. And I’m having fun because I’m away from Edgar.

After twenty years of marriage I was happy because I was not with my husband. That is a terrible, terrible truth to admit to yourself; I was barely able to face it and felt guilty and frightened, and pushed away the thought because there was nothing I felt I could do to change the situation.

I understood then that my life was the last place he belonged. It was too hectic, too pressured, too fastforward. I was doing The Tonight Show and Hollywood Squares, Las Vegas, and weekend concerts around the country, I had begun to write my book Enter Talking. I was living the life Edgar used to love, used to describe as an Italian opera. But now he craved calm and companionship. He needed somebody with a picnic basket.

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I also understood-selfishly perhaps-that for selfpreservation I needed something to balance all the intensity. I craved free moments filled with air bubbles, with silliness and giddiness. When I had an hour of my own, I wanted to drop water bombs.