Still Talking (38 page)

An Australian psychic I had once met phoned me at

2:00 A.M.-at her own expense-and said, “Joan, are you all right? I’ve been having terrible feelings about you for the past four days.” My heart went crazy, pounding, racing. I thought, Because of this stupid woman, I’m going to die-right now. I tried to call her back and then could not get an international line because of Edgar’s damn phone system; the operator was saying, “What system are you on?” and I didn’t know!

A psychic suggested by a former governess came to the house and said she could put me in touch with my spirit guide. His name was Harpo Marx. Great.

A mute comedian! The intermediary with Edgar was a character who did not talk. A friend went to a psychic who told her Edgar was annoyed that I would not let him rest. I wondered, Is everybody crazy?

If Edgar was there, I wanted him to come forward and talk to me or be put to rest. And though I was not a believer in ghosts, I did not want the poor man unhappily wandering the house. I called a Catholic church and asked for an exorcist. When the priest arrived, he had forgotten his holy water. I said, “It doesn’t matter-I’m Jewish.” He went from room to room with his stole and Bible, saying a little prayer, asking that peace should come back to this man’s house. I prayed for peace in Edgar’s soul.

While all that was going on, I had to come to terms with being single and self-reliant. In widowhood, your husband is there in your thoughts, in your heart, but he is not there at the kitchen table when things go wrong and decisions have to be made. When you go out socially, he is not at your side.

You have nobody to poke in the ribs and say, “Look at that portrait of the hostess; she’ll never look like that again.”

The first time I went out alone with a couple, I felt as if we were a three-legged table. I worried about talking too much to the husband, not giving enough compliments to the wife. I felt as if I had to perform and be funny to earn my dinner-which I hate to eat in any case-because I was sitting there on sufferance-” Let’s take Joan out, the poor thing. ” I swore, never again.

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Widows are like a single-digit number in a double-digit society. So you seek out other single people because with them you are a whole and they are a whole. In early October I flew to New York to meet with two screenwriters who wanted to write a comedy for me. We went for dinner at Elaine’s, but when the check came, there was no husband to pick it up just my two escorts sitting there staring at me. I told myself it was okay to pay because it was business, but I also saw the scene with acid clarity-two witty, young gay men watching the old star pick up the check. I wondered, “Is this what the rest of my life will be? “

Soon after Edgar’s death, I began to escape the house, the memories, by going to New York. There I could put grief on a Hold button by playing hard. I could not stand still. I could not finish a crossword puzzle, could not sit through an hour of Masterpiece Theatre, could not concentrate on a book. I was manic. I would have lunch with friends, visit a museum, go to an Off-Broadway show.

I took Spike with me everywhere. I’ve always been an animal person, always loved my dogs-always had big dogs-but I never had this kind of relationship with an animal. Tommy Corcoran named him “Raw Paws” because we were never still.

Spike was given to me by Melissa’s governess right after Edgar’s heart attack, when Melissa had just gone off to school. He was the runt of the litter-I could hold him in the palm of my hand-and they were going to kill him. She said, “You need someone to love.” And I did. He became the one thing that loved me. I look at him and I know what we’ve been through together: Edgar’s heart attack, the horrific days at Fox, when I had no career, through Edgar’s suicide, the move to New York. This is the dog who slept with me the night my husband killed himself. He’s a piece of history in my life. I love him so much. He’s the only one who went through it all-twenty-four hours a day. And God knows what else he’ll face.

Underneath my compulsive restlessness, my search for distraction, was panic. The panic that I would never be able to spend an evening alone without the loneliness and

sadness filling up the room, the panic of no career, no money, being single, frightened of the effects on my daughter. Melissa knew none of this, only that I was never home at night.

I have learned that everybody grieves in his own way at his own speed. Even Siamese twins will do it differently. I know Melissa wanted me to be happy-but to her, my frenetic playing meant I was just the Merry Widow.

When those closest to you do not see conventional signs of sorrow, they feel their own grief invalidated, feel misunderstood and alone. Most important, they feel you do not care.

Most of the time when Melissa visited me, we were loving and good to each other. But I was also very careful not to stir up the resentment I sensed just below the surface.

During the Jewish holidays in early October, I was in New York, and Melissa and I planned to observe the High Holy Days at Temple Emanu-El. Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish year, the time when you confess your sins and God decides your fate for the next year, the one day we had always gone to temple as a family. Melissa and I went to the 3:45 memorial service specifically so we could rise and stand with the rest of those who had lost someone that year and hear Edgar’s name read aloud this one time only.

It was raining, and because of traffic, we arrived ten minutes late. At the door we presented our tickets to the usher, an honorary position for the pillars of the temple, like a deacon of a church. This elderly man, very affluent, a big shot, told us we were late, that every seat was taken, and refused to let us in. I started to plead, “But we have assigned seats which we’ve paid for. We were caught in traffic.” He said, “I’ve given your seats away.”

I knew it was a lie, a power play to show he was unimpressed by a celebrity. Temple Emanu-El was huge, never full. He would have had to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to know we had just lost a husband and father. I thought, This is temple? This is God?

We huddled under the canopy in the pouring rain like

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two rejected waifs. My daughter just stood there, unable to pay her last respects to her father, devastated, on the brink of tears. I thought, God wants this girl to get through the day. I said, “Let’s go shopping.”

We went to Polo, where the manager is a friend, and they put us in a private dressing room and brought us white wine, and I went crazy, buying Melissa everything. We did not look at one price tag. Anything she liked-sweaters, shoes. I was spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars I could not afford.

Suddenly, in front of the saleswoman and fitters and manager, seeing myself in that lavish room instead of temple, spending, spending, spending-I began sobbing and could not stop. “Why am I doing this?” I wondered, terrified.

“We’re going under.” I felt as if we were circling the drain.

Even as my daughter put her arms around me, I felt she was thrilled to see me suffering, too.

Melissa was in her own throes of grief. She said she felt numb, detached, watching herself from a distance. She constantly studied Edgar’s picture and imagined how he would have solved the problems in her life. She used the suicide as a scapegoat: “If Daddy were alive, I wouldn’t be unhappy. If Daddy were alive, I’d be doing better on my exams, the car wouldn’t be breaking down.” She joked to me, “At least he should come back to life during an exam-Help me out, is Question Seven true?”

She woke each morning feeling there were a thousand pounds on her chest, feeling there was no way she could get out of bed and get her work done.

When she tried to read, she finished a page and had no idea what it said.

She tormented herself with “what ifs”-what if she had ended her last call from her father with her usual “Goodbye. I love you.” Would he have changed his mind? What if she had called him back that night when he was preparing his death? Her one escape was sleeping and sleeping and soothing herself with a dozen showers a day.

Of course, when you are in pain and panic, you do lash out. By November, Melissa and I, perhaps because we

trusted each other’s love, were using each other to vent anger. We were each other’s closest targets-and she knew the truth. While people were saying, “Oh, your mother was the most wonderful wife,” she knew that at the end there was no marriage.

Melissa did not know the back story that led up to the suicide, did not realize how ill Edgar had been. She had come in to see the last seven minutes of the movie where the wife is saying, “I’m leaving you unless you go into analysis,” and the husband is saying, “Better dead.”

Melissa’s therapist, to help her work through her grief, was encouraging her to act out whatever she felt at the moment. When I telephoned Melissa daily so she would know she was not alone, our phone calls sometimes disintegrated into fights, and she would pull the ultimate weapon, blaming me for her father’s death.

My psychiatrist was telling me by phone to just be there for her, be very happy that she was venting her feelings. But even the most innocent remarks played on my guilt. Once she said, “I would give up everything, all the money, the house, to spend one minute with Daddy alive.” When I told her I planned to sell Edgar’s big Mercedes, which neither of us liked to drive, she answered, incredulous, “But it’s Daddy’s car.”

Once while we were talking, Melissa was so furious at me, she threw her phone at a picture, and the glass exploded across the room. Then she called me back to say, “I don’t hate you. I was just miserable.”

I was so sad that she was being asked to grow up so suddenly. As she put it, “I went to bed one night as a college student, and all of a sudden, the next morning, had to be an adult.”

The more time I spent in New York, the more I considered moving there.

Hollywood was a company town where nothing mattered except my current low status in the business. If it had been Detroit, I would have been a car painted the wrong color. In California your achievement is the last thing you’ve done. I had been fired by Fox. I was finished. In New York, my hometown, people let me

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keep my achievements-Hello, Joan. We’ve known you for twenty years. Good luck to you. I was walking Spike when a cop jumped out of a car to get my autograph; a garbageman said, “We love you, Joanie”; a delivery boy said, “How you doin’?” and I said, “Surviving,” and was surprised to hear the word come from my mouth. God, I thought, I hope it’s true.

In New York Tommy Corcoran or Kenneth Battelle were often my companions.

They knew I was mulling over a move to New York. To entertain me, Tommy often arranged appointments to see apartments for sale, not really looking, just to distract me more than anything else. One afternoon in late October I went to see a co-op just off Fifth Avenue, and checking the view, I peered across the street and .said, “Look at that beautiful Paladian window. ” The agent said, “That apartment’s available, but it’s not right for you.”

The building turned out to be the mansion of J. P. Morgan’s daughter, and the apartment had been her two eighteen-foot-high ballrooms, separated by huge sliding doors. It had been built in 1897 and then expanded in the 1930s, beautiful, opulent, fantasy-fulfilling-sort of Fred and Ginger meet the Sun King. It was now a broken-down warren of cloakrooms, maids’ rooms, and musicians’ changing rooms, and then vast spaces of no use whatsoever.

It had been on the market for two and a half years without one bid, and by now plaster was falling from the walls, the floor was coming up. There was major water damage. Edgar never would have bought it.

I went out to dinner with Kenneth and then looked at it again by moonlight.

In the past when I looked at houses for sale, it was as a married woman with a child at home. A room for Melissa, a study for Edgar, a family room-these were important considerations. I bought homes like normal people.

Nobody in their right mind would buy this apartment. But I saw instantly how the space could workthe dining room off the front ballroom, a study next to the terrace, my bedroom above.

I love to decorate. I love to create, as we all do. What could be more fun than to take something nobody can

visualize and say, “Just you wait, guys, hang in there!” It’s like giving birth again. Creating something from nothing. What therapy, to focus on this apartment, to be happy about it every day.

At Ambazac, Edgar was totally involved in the decor, and there were compromises, which was fine, natural. But this apartment would be the first place that would be totally mine. It would be my cave, safe, a place nobody could invade or take away from me.

I would put in all the special comforts I’d always dreamed about. Growing up, one of my worst memories was the bathrooms in Larchmont. They were freezing! It was my father’s immigrant mentality-go put on a sweater if you’re cold. Today, the marble floor in my bathroom is heated.

I always wanted a fireplace in the bedroom. I always wanted a bedroom that was totally romantic-all white lace and pale satin-and I have one!

I always wanted peach walls in the dining room. Everybody looks great at night in a peach room, with candles, and silks. Women look just sensational. Now, the Elephant Man could come to dinner at my home and you’d have to think, “Well, maybe he’s not so bad after all.”

And I would have books and books and books and books. Nothing is more wonderful. And needlepoint everywhere. I started doing needlepoint when I started writing scripts. While my collaborator would wield the pen, I would wield the needle. My apartment is filled with the comfort of pillows-and the joy of knowing I created them.

I love people who know what they like and live the fantasy. Just do it.

Malcolm Forbes bought a chateau and lived in a chfiteau, in the tradition of a chateau-with all the original furniture from Brittany. You went there and there were seven ladies-in-waiting-“May I do this for you … that for you?” Incredible. And John Kluge. He once showed me around his yacht.