Still Talking (41 page)

Just walking onto that stage was bliss. I felt like it was my set, my kitchen. I was not a visitor. I was being let into the castle. Seeing my name on Broadway, being part of that community, was sheer joy. On opening night the whole cast of M. Butterfly sent me a signed poster from their show. Walking down Forty-fourth Street, I often met Mandy Patinkin, who starred in Sunday in the Park with George. He would ask, “How’s it goin’?”

and I’d go, “Great, how’s it goin’?” “Great.” Every cop on the Broadway beat said hi. When I went to Sardi’s, they gave me the actors’

menu-half-price to show people.

I went to a cocktail party and stood with Michael Crawford, who was in The Phantom of the Opera when the phantom was the Phantom, and we talked about sustaining a mood when you feel ill onstage, and how one keeps going-the two of us talking actor to actor.

Broadway Bound saved my life. I was joyful about my work again. It made me remember why I was in the business. I saw, too, that I could hold peopte without making

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them laugh. In comedy people come primed to laugh, and making that happen is a high-but I had forgotten the even bigger high that comes from creating a character, an emotional environment that moves an entire audience. That is what theater is to me, a whole room in the grip of a single feeling and letting that feeling wash over you.

Edgar once said to me, “We’ll get you a dramatic part on Broadway, and then you’ll do your act the same night and show you can do everything.” So each night after Broadway Bound I put on those beads and necklaces and went to Michael’s Pub and hit them over the head with Leona Helmsley and Imelda Marcos jokes. I was going into debt about seven thousand dollars every week I was in the play, so the club money was welcome. But more, for me the act was like going to the gym. I was working out like an athlete.

We closed after a Sunday matinee on September 25, 1988. The theater was going to be taken over by another play, and the producers considered moving to another theater, but cutting the set down became too expensive. They wanted me to extend through January 1, but I had to go to Las Vegas for two weeks just to make money. I was miserable. During the scene where Kate says good-bye to her two boys, I usually hugged each of them. But I was scared that if I touched them, I’d cry. I just stood there, stiff, and they had to hug me-and then I did cry. On the last day, I found the correct performance.

The cast of a Broadway show becomes your family, your social life. We work on the weekends; public holidays are not our holidays. We must have our own Thanksgiving. The feeling is very close-knit, very tight. Anyone who ever went to summer camp knows about this-the heartbreak of absolute loss when the season is over.

Positive events seem to beget good things. I was offered a made-for-cable movie by HBO. I had the apartment now and was deep in its restoration. And my house couple, Jacob and Inger Bjerre, who had stayed on to see me through all my troubles, agreed to rearrange their lives again and settle me in New York. A life of my own was

taking shape again. My comedy bookings increased, and audiences in Las Vegas once more filled the showroom. I believe people like to see their icons humanized by suffering. Elizabeth Taylor fell off the wagon, got back on, fell off, got back on again, and now she is more beloved than ever. Because my life had gone through so many upheavals, people learned to have an affection for me not possible before. If in their eyes I could survive, then they could survive, too. By getting through one day at a time. By blustering and wearing blinders. By riding through the bad stuff and staying busy and never stopping.

I thought often of my Aunt Alice, who was married to a bank vice president and had an affair with the famous impresario Sol Hurok. My uncle, protecting his child and his career, said nothing, but quietly disinherited her. When he died, she found herself sitting alone in a Park Avenue apartment, a penniless woman of fifty-four who had never worked in her life.

“I’m too old to sell hats in Macy’s, thank you very much,” she said, and rented out rooms to Russian refugees-you would open a .closet, and there would be somebody cooking eggs. She opened an art gallery and did just fine. My mother was just as strong. On no money she kept her family afloat with style, got her girls into good colleges, and lived in Larchmont until she died.

The next step in my salvation really began one night onstage during Broadway Bound when I thought, This is terrific, but I miss interviewing people. The next day my agent called with an offer from the Tribune Corporation to host a syndicated daytime talk show. If he had called a day earlier, I would have said, “I’m finished with that. I’m an actress. Look at me, I’m wearing jeans and a pea jacket. Can’t you tell?”

When I met the Tribune people, I liked them. They were midwesterners, seemed up-front about everything, nice, straight-shooting guys who said, “We like you and want to do business with you.” But I needed a long time to really believe that. I had my lawyer check everything and confirm everything in writing. I even called Geraldo

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Rivera-whose show is syndicated by the Tribune Corporation-and asked him what I should do. Geraldo raved about them, which was lovely considering he would no longer be their only child.

I arrived angry at the creative meetings to choose the director, the staff, design the set. I remember sitting with my hands clenched under the table, and my first words were always, “What’s the matter?” They would say, “Nothing’s the matter.” I would say, “I want the set beige,” and they said, “Fine.” I was dumbfounded. We were all on the same side.

I knew the budget inside and out-it started out at $130,000 a week. These people had no subtext. When they came to me and said, “This is what we want,” that was what they wanted, no more, no less. When I said, “This is what I want,” they usually said, “Let’s try it.”

When I said, “There’s no way we can pull in what we need at this price,”

they would say, “Then increase the budget”-and we still ended with an economical show. They did not come to me with every single problem, only the ones that couldn’t be solved without me. The producer handled everything else, which is as it should be.

When we went on the air on September 5, 1989, I never knew that the president and vice presiderits of Tribune were in the control room during the first half-dozen shows. They said, “Leave her alone. She doesn’t need us secondguessing her.” Because of the Fox experience, when they did not come near me, I thought they were disappointed and angry.

In those first months, still wounded from Fox, I was scared to ask for things that had been such huge issues, like a car and a personal guard. But without my asking, they quietly gave them to me. More important, they gave me respect and returned to me my self-respect as a talkshow host.

Being happy alone, not dreading another long night of anxiety and fear and remorse, was the last goal to be reached. As late as 1989 I still did anything to kill an evening. Publicists have lists of celebrities, and I accepted

every party invitation. Cartier is having an opening? I’ll be there. A book party at the Madison Avenue Bookshop? Here I am.

I went out several times as Malcolm Forbes’s date, once to the eighty-ninth birthday party he gave for Mrs. Douglas MacArthur, a charming lady who to me is a real piece of history. I spent the Fourth of July on Donald Trump’s yacht, which was like an ocean liner. For about 150 people fifteen chefs made quail eggs Benedict, goat-cheese lasagna, rack of lamb, four kinds of lobster salad, twentyfive kinds of hors d’oeuvres, thirtyseven hot and cold dishes, and a scale model of the yacht sculpted in chocolate. I sat next to Diandra Douglas, Mrs. Michael Douglas, who asked me, “What do you think of the decoration on this yacht?” I said, “I don’t know you well enough to tell you. “

I found that recovery from grief takes place not in the head but in the gut. I think your body, not your head, knows what you need to survive. I think you should let your instincts tell you what to do, and ignore all those people so full of advice on how to behave.

Because of the hectic pace, when I did get home, I was happy to be there.

Gradually solitude became something to be desired. The social whirl had worn out my need to be in constant motion. I settled into an old life that felt like a new life. Now I found myself returning to early friends from my struggle years. And friends who were peripheral to my marriage became important in my new life.

I had known Kenneth Battelle professionally for twentythree years and did not realize there was a close, close connection there, waiting to happen.

Kenneth is the voice of reason in my life, my Jiminy Cricket who has no time for my neurotic worrying. I wear his friendship as an ornament because he gives it to so few people.

During that year some of the changes in my world were extremely painful.

Dear, funny Billy Sammeth, my friend and manager, decided not to come to New York with me. For some people California will always be home. But I was lucky. I had Dorothy Melvin to take over brilliantly.

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And no one has been so loyal, so caring. She’s grown to be a sister to me.

Jason Dyl, who had given me the confidence that I could look good, who had lifted me onto the International Best Dressed list, was being taken by AIDS. In an era when you do not live and die with your kin, the list of people with AIDS who were among my extended family was getting longer and longer. In their thirties and forties, they were like a picture in which one face after another disappears. When Lucille Ball died, I could handle that. She went out with flags flying after a great life. She had money, family, recognition. To die approaching eighty is not tragic. To die at forty is.

I haven’t had the opportunity to say good-bye to many people. Not my mother. Not Edgar. So it was truly restorative for me to be able to help Jason. I had the chance to act out my love for him. I think God should give everybody the chance to say good-bye, to close and seal those doors, because who you love is what life is all about, being there for people.

Throughout that year my daughter began finding peace by giving help. She counseled a friend whose mother decided to take her own life by stopping treatment for cancer. She advised another friend who had been holding his father’s hand as his father died of a stroke.

By 1988, when she came up to New York on weekends, we could start confiding again. Just as I had sat on the rim of my mother’s tub gossiping with her, now Melissa sat with me as I took a bath.

We still had rough times, but I was less vulnerable to guilt. I understood at last that no one killed Edgar. Edgar killed Edgar. He had the choice to change our relationship, to evolve through therapy. He decided he would rather be dead. I could now tell Melissa, “If you really still think I killed Daddy, that is your problem now, and you must go back into therapy.

She in turn was coming to see that she could love her father and still love me, too.

I have always understood that the grief process takes two years, and I think that is right. Melissa’s graduation from the University of Pennsylvania was the last gasp of my mourning-two ceremonial rites of passage that finally laid Edgar to rest.

Watching the graduation ceremony, I was thrilled by the pomp and circumstance, the professors and the Ph.D.‘s, the graduating class filing in dressed in their robes. Over that sea of robes I spotted Melissa, so pretty and full of life, so popular with her peers. When she proceeded to the stage in cap and gown and accepted her diploma, I felt this moment was the jewel in my crown. I had done something right. Edgar had done something right.

My last day in Philadelphia, I went alone with a priest to the hotel suite where Edgar had killed himself. I wanted to see where he had spent the last days of his life. In the bedroom Spike jumped onto the bed and went right to what would have been Edgar’s side and snuggled against the pillow as he always did. That’s nice, I thought, like stroking Edgar. While the priest prayed, I looked at the bedside table where my picture had stood beside Melissa’s and at the phone that he had reached for, and I stood on the spot where he had fallen. I prayed that the unhappiness that had become such a part of him could evaporate.

I left Philadelphia knowing that the human spirit is indomitable. But you must be honest with yourself and know what you want-and leave selfpity in the drawer. You must, with love, put your own needs and serenity first, because within the human spirit beats an independent, peaceful heart if you can just set it free.

Today I wake up happy with who I am and where I am. I think now I can face anything. I have learned to rely on myself, to know I can get through whatever faces me each day when I open the door. That is freedom.

And my happiness is my daughter, who is pretty and smart and laughing-and who is my friend. True friendship comes from surviving together, and Melissa and I have some backlog of “Look what we’ve come through.”

What will I be doing in five years? I’m not worried. I’d love to be single in my great apartment-or married to a wonderful man. I’d love to be still doing my television show. But nothing is secure in show business. Maybe by the time you read this, my show will have been canceled. It’s happened to me before, God knows. But the bottom I might hit would be nowhere near as deep. I have become my version of an optimist. If I can’t get through one door, I’ll go through another door-or I’ll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.

God always comes up with a third-act twist-and we won’t know until we die whether the play was a comedy or a tragedy. So you’d better be prepared for both. That’s the exhilaration of being alive. There is always another scene coming out of nowhere. God is the best dramatist.