Still Talking (3 page)

Edgar was not there to enjoy the gaiety, enjoy his pride in this place we had built together, enjoy the white-gloved waiters serving from silver trays, enjoy the people who came.

But there were also the people who came through the receiving line and put their arms around me and said, “Are you all right?”-and I wanted to put a knife in their chests because these were the ones who had sneered at Edgar behind his back. But that was how I kept going, the anger pumping adrenaline through me as I played the role of dignified widow.

I remember Jill Eikenberry, Michael Tucker, Dom DeLuise, Dolly Parton, Barbara Walters, Allan Carr, Mariette Hartley, Rona Barrett, Anne and Kirk Douglas, Sandy Gallin, Pamela Mason, Elton John, Florence Henderson. I was amazed that I never heard a syllable from Johnny Carson. Forgetting that Hollywood is purely a business town, I thought he would have, for a moment, remembered that he had known Edgar even before I did, and let bygones be bygones. But dozens of people did arrive from the past, from years ago in New York. They looked to me as though they had put lines in their face and grayed their hair-as though they were going from the shivah-the Jewish ritual of mourning-to rehearsals of Our Town.

Insane things happen when you are a celebrity. Virtual strangers arrived to console the star. When my mother died, a rabbi and his daughter came to all seven days of shivah before I discovered they were complete strangers. Now, the same rabbi called from the East and wanted to come out with his daughter to Edgar’s shivah. The mother of one of Melissa’s nursery-school friends, a woman I had met three times, flew out unasked and was angry that others were monopolizing me. A girl who had been a friend in my sophomore year at Connecticut College did the same thing. After the funeral, she hired a taxi and followed the cars to the house for the reception. Late in the afternoon she erupted to Dorothy Melvin, furious and feeling slighted because I was not taking advantage of her comforting shoulder.

During those evening ceremonies when the rabbi came

STILL TALKING 15

and spoke-and I was playing the brave widow-I felt like an utter hypocrite.

I am sure that this is part of the first months of mourning-every lousy thing you ever did comes flooding back. I would think, Don’t you all know?

He killed himself because of me. We’re playing this game, and I wish you’d all go home. In my craziness I was half waiting for the police to come in and arrest me for murder, come up to me and say, “Mrs. Rosenberg, can we talk to you for a minute? We have this witness-you said to your husband, `You can’t come home.’ “

The best therapy for me would have been to go right from the mortuary onto a stage, but my advisers agreed it would be unseemly. We decided I would reappear in public as a presenter on the Emmy Awards September 30 and return as a performer in mid-November. In any case, my agent said, since the Fox firing, booking me was extremely hard, and Caesars Palace was cutting me from fourteen to ten shows a week, which almost halved the money.

Additionally I was fearful that any audience, including television viewers, might not accept a new widow trying to be funny. If you are in deep mourning and People magazine has just given you a cover and you’re on every CNN newscast in black, people don’t want you coming out and saying, “My boobies are so low, I can nurse China from my bedroom.” They will not understand that by saying it, you are keeping the door locked to sorrow. I could imagine people thinking, Look at her. She must be some piece of change. No wonder he killed himself.

Then there was the question, “What should the act be?” No longer could I come out as a married woman. Nobody wanted to hear about problems on my wedding night. I would have to find a new persona. What could I joke about?

Finally having all that closet space?

I was terrified of crying the first time I walked onstage, but did not want a sympathy audience. I did not want a warm hand on my shoulder. I felt like Bea Lillie, who went back onstage in a London play the night after her son was killed in World War II. She had a sign posted

backstage-DARLINGS, I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE THINKING. BUT PLEASE DO NOT TELL ME.

On Wednesday we received the envelopes Edgar had left behind. My manila envelope contained estate-planning papers, lists of the contents of the house, insurance-policy numbers, bank-account numbers-and all the keys in his key case. The police had had his farewell tapes transcribed to be sure his death was suicide. Melissa and I read our transcripts in the kitchen, and she bravely went upstairs to listen to her tape. Afterward, she told me, “It’s very hard to hear his voice because he sounds so tired and so strained and so upset-he kept clicking the machine off and on.”

I could not bring myself to play Edgar’s farewell tape. I was still feeling too guilty. According to the transcript of the tape, he told me, “I cannot bear to be shunted aside and be a fifth wheel. I know this is not your fault. This is all my doing. I had the heart attack, and I’m a changed person. But believe me, when I fought, I always fought for you. The anger is something I have not been able to control since the heart attack, so forgive me for that. That people are angry at me … well, sometimes I’m proud of the enemies I made. If somebody had not been the bastard, you might have been cut up like a salami. “

He told me to trust only Tom Pileggi. He told me the financial provisions he had made, told me to keep thrashing around and I would land on my feet because I am a survivor, told me not to reduce my life insurance. He told me, “I cannot in effect institutionalize myself for an indefinite period.

I have spent too much of my life, more than you really know, the years and years and years, in TB sanatoriums in South Africa. I cannot see myself lying more weeks and months in hospitals. I’m tired. I ache mentally and physically. I’ve had it.” Then he said, “It’s very hard for me to show emotion because I was not brought up that way, but you made those twenty-two years a heaven for me. I miss you desperately, and I love you.”

The sadness of his words, of his defeat, of his capitulation, was just too much to bear.

STILL TALKING 17

On the last Friday of shivah I went to temple for the little ceremony to remove my mourning ribbon. On the way into the service our friend David Chasman stopped me and said Barry Diller had called, asking his advice about sending a condolence card. Too late. I cried through the service-that man had started the whole chain of events.

The shivah cushioned the first week of shock, and I was terrified of the day it would be over. I decided we all needed a little time of escape, a gap in reality, a time to postpone thinking and heal a little. I decided to take my support group on a two-week cruise among the Greek islands. My accountant said I could not afford it. I told him we were going anyway. I was crazy.

On that first Sunday after Edgar’s death, I left with Melissa and Spike and Tommy Corcoran for an overnight in New York-traveling business class to save money. We checked into the Westbury Hotel, and I had a long dinner with Tom Pileggi. I felt a rush of affection for this man who had wandered into our lives as a business partner and stayed to become our friend and my salvation. Amid all the disaster and despair, my one good fortune was his presence, his brilliant financial mind when I was on the ropes, his absolute integrity when 1 could trust nobody else, his love for Edgar when I clung to those who shared my grief. More than anybody, Tom had forgiven Edgar his faults and treasured his virtues.

When I returned to my room in the Westbury Hotel Melissa was in bed asleep, and I lay next to her, lost and lonely and aching with guilt. I opened a book, always a sure solace and distraction, but at the end of the first page had no idea what the hell I had read.

How could I have missed the signs? … Edgar had married his murderess .

… If I had been nicer to him, would he be alive now? … How smug and sure of myself I had been … . Would Melissa ever get over this?

The next morning I went across the street into the Madison Avenue Bookshop to get reading for the trip. I bought books Edgar would have chosen-Tip O’Neill’s autobiography and one on Harold Macmillan. I had to educate

myself, fill the gaps left by Edgar. The French history books I liked did not count. They were boudoir history.

Next I drove out to Larchmont and prayed at the graves of my parents and then Edgar’s parents, because I thought he would want me to do that.

Standing there, I prayed that he was with these people who really loved him.

The graves were unkempt, and I cleaned them, thinking, “This is what my life is all about now-loss, loss, loss. ” Weeping onto my hands as I pulled weeds and talked to my mother, I told her, “Some mess, this is. How am I going to get through it?”

How was I going to get through it?

2

LOOKING back, I think Edgar and I were, from the beginning, headed for tragedy. We were two people obsessed with success, obsessed with my career.

Show business is a tar baby. If you touch it, you cannot let go. Ask anybody-the group called the Singing Lawyers, who once sent me a tape to get on my show-Henry Kissinger, who once appeared as the TV weatherman on CBS

This Morning-even Princess Di, who once danced in London with an English ballet company.

Show business is the ultimate wish fulfillment, the dream of being eternally beautiful, eternally talented, eternally loved and wealthy. It’s the fairy princess gliding through the streets while everybody waves. It’s Madonna in white satin. It’s Julia Roberts getting her handsome prince.

Show business can be an addiction. That’s what kept me going in the beginning of my career, what surely keeps Jay Leno on the road most of his life. An audience would laugh at me one night, and I would chase that high for another three months. One night in Philadelphia recently, the audience hated me, and I walked offstage swearing I’d get out of this business. The next night they loved me, and I fell back into their arms like a baby.

The ultimate high, the ultimate happiness, is when the audience is standing up at the end of the show and they won’t let you go and you love them and they love you and you put your arms out to them and they love you more and you walk off and you’ve got to go back, and you say to them, “I love you,”

and they call out, “We love you,

19

Joan!” Once you’ve had that, you spend the rest of your life trying to keep it coming.

Edgar was hooked into that high when I met him. He was producing five movies for the United Nations and was Mr. Big-called Monsieur Le Patron on the movie set in France, telephoned by the likes of Cary Grant, Ava Gard-ner, Sean Connery, and Joe Mankiewicz. Edgar was launched into production at the top, and he chased that feeling for the rest of his life. The bigger I became, the more power he, as my husband, wielded behind the scenes.

My career became us. Success in life equaled success in my career, and Edgar and I knew how to build my career. But we arrived at our heights in the grip of our pasts. Edgar was driven by his need to prove himself a major player. I was driven by my insecurity, my need to be loved, my easily hurt feelings, my obsession with loyalty, and my need to win. We were united by the anger that waited in both of us, the rage at accumulated, halfremembered injuries that set us side by side against the world.

Ultimately we fell off our high wire, and took the wire with us.

A few months after Edgar’s suicide, I cleaned out the garage and found the small black metal box he had brought out to impress me the first night I met him in June of 1965. It was a device that would let people join in TV

quiz shows from their living rooms. He thought it would make him a fortune.

Holding it, I felt again, the excitement of that time-felt the glamour he had, the expectations 1 had.

Edgar was working then for Anna Rosenberg Associates. (No relation to Edgar.) She was the queen mother of public-relations consultants, advising tycoons and presidents on a personal level-sitting with President Roosevelt when he received a wire from Russian ambassador Averell Harriman saying that Stalin was breaking his Yalta commitments.

Edgar was Anna Rosenberg’s public-relations emissary. His accounts were the Rockefeller brothers, Jack Heinz of H. J. Heinz Company, companies like the Encyclopxdia Britannica and, particularly, American Machine & Foun-

STILL TALKING 21

dry. Their automatic pin-setting machine had turned bowling into an American family sport, and Edgar had the idea of promoting it by using the endorsements of celebrities and society figures such as Lady Bird Johnson and Princess Grace of Monaco. Edgar sold AMF on the first simultaneous two-city stockholders’ meeting, linking New York and Chicago with closed-circuit TV.

Hooked on show business, he convinced the Today show to do on-location broadcasts-in the Mediterranean with Cousteau diving with AMF scuba gear, in Puerto Rico with Sam Snead using a client’s golf gear.

When anti-United Nations hysteria was sweeping the country, Edgar had the idea of a series of television movies dramatizing the UN’s good works and received the enthusiastic support of Anna and her husband, Paul Hoffman-former CEO of American Motors, now managing director of the UN

Special Fund-and U Thant, the UN secretary general, and the ABC network. He persuaded Xerox to sponsor the films to the tune of 4 million 1965 dollars.

Anna represented the Motion Picture Association of America, and had powerful personal connections in both Hollywood and the White House. Using these, Edgar enlisted names like Peter Sellers, Maria Schell, Edward G.

Robinson, Alan Bates, Sam Spiegel, Eva Marie Saint, Yul Brynner, Rita Hayworth, Marcello Mastroianni-and they all worked for scale.

Under the umbrella of Anna Rosenberg Associates, he formed a production company called Telsun Foundation, Inc. Through Telsun, Edgar became friends with Peter Sellers, who asked him to help develop a movie about a traveling clown. The script needed a rewrite, and Edgar asked The Tonight Show to recommend a comedy writer. They suggested he watch my next appearance with Carson.