Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (23 page)

Explained Tiana, “He was seriously studying the Joseph Campbell documentaries. He got into Joseph Campbell. I believed he was on a spiritual quest. He said he was going to Buddhist retreats. I was editing my film in New York. He said, ‘you will heal America and Vietnam, and I am doing the Ho [Chi Minh], story. Maybe you will direct it and it will be the biggest thing in my career and I’ve got to find my spiritual side for this.’” She takes a long pause before saying, almost in a whisper, “He was preparing to die.”

It was after the 1992 Telluride festival, where her film was honored, that Tiana met playwright Christopher Hampton. Hampton, who had received a Tony nomination for his 1987 play
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
and the Oscar for its screenplay (as
Dangerous Liaisons,
1989), was as politically savvy and as passionate about Southeast Asia as were the Silliphants. (He later adapted Graham Greene’s
The Quiet American
[2002], which is set in Vietnam.) Tiana introduced him to her husband in Los Angeles in 1993, where Hampton’s musical adaptation of
Sunset Boulevard
was in rehearsal. It was their only meeting, but it made an impression on the younger writer, who would go on to win Tonys for
Sunset Boulevard
(1995) and for his adaptations of
Art
(1997), and
God of Carnage
(2009).
[289]

Prostate cancer is not a quick or easy death, but it is highly detectable and usually treatable if it is discovered early enough. Silliphant’s first presented as an enlarged prostate around 1976 when Tiana noticed he was getting out of bed several times a night to go to the bathroom, with no results. “We were in the house on Benedict Canyon,” she said. “He said that his brother had prostate cancer and got reamed out (was catheterized), and his father, but you never pay attention to that — an eighty-year-old guy dying of prostate. Stirling said, ‘I don’t have prostate, I’m never going for a checkup.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to.’

“We got him the best — Abe and Muriel Lipsey knew every doctor — and they got us the best urologist, a woman doctor. He went in. She said we need a biopsy. He said no. I talked him into it. Well, they did a biopsy. Then she called and said they need another one, we’re not sure. He went ballistic. He said, ‘You cut into me!’”

Before the doctor could report her findings to the Silliphants, according to Tiana, she died, and apparently left no one to take over, or even unravel, the practice. Whatever the reason, from this point on, Silliphant’s mind was closed. “After that he fled the scene and never went back to doctors again,” Tiana said. “We all went into denial. He began to hide his symptoms. He didn’t want me to know. He would sleep always turned away and said he was discovering his female side. That’s when he plotted moving to Bangkok. We had already been to Bangkok. He said the American medical system is killing me. Look at American medicine, then look at all these geezers living in Asia. He let it grow fifteen years. Stirling insisted it was bronchitis because he coughed a lot. Well, all older men cough a lot.”

It’s highly likely that he opted not to have his prostate removed because doing so would have resulted in incontinence and sexual dysfunction. He covered this by insisting that he considered this existence to be merely a transition from a past life to a future one, often telling friends, “I have come to believe that I was Thai in a previous life.”

When the pain was such that he was suffering twenty-four hours a day, he had Tiana take him to a traditional clinic in Hanoi where she translated and he received massage, acupressure, and incense. “I feel like I’m 125 years old,” he reported. “I feel feeble. I have no strength. I can’t even hold a chopstick properly. And my back is in terrible pain...what medical people call constricture
[290]
I had to roll out of bed, onto the floor, get onto my knees, and then do a push-up on my feet. I went to the hospital and she said I had to relax my muscles and she gave me Valium, which I took for two weeks and, when the muscles finally relaxed, it too me ten days at the end of the course of Valium to recover any kind of clarity of mind or focus of eyes. Really totally disoriented by a drug. That’s when I determined I was going to try Eastern medicine and herbal medicine and stop taking pills coming out of the United States, Belgium, and the United Kingdom.”
[291]

During the ordeal, he did not tell his son that he was sick. “Like most things that were secrets of his, I heard from Mom,” young Stirling said. “I graduated high school in 1994 and started college the same year. In December of ‘94 I went to Bangkok for Christmas holiday. His health had deteriorated and my Mom was there and she was really concerned. Pretty much made him go to get x-rays or see an oncologist — it was the first time he had been to a medical doctor. He had been trying all these holistic therapies, thinking that the problem was somewhere else and diagnosing himself with his
Grey’s Anatomy.
She finally forced him to go in and not only was he diagnosed with cancer, but late stage cancer. The pain that he’s complaining about, the back pain, that was actually the cancer that, by that point, had eaten the cartilage away, so his spine was just grinding against each other. He was living with it because he didn’t want to — I don’t think he was keeping a secret from us. I think he was keeping a secret from himself. He genuinely believed he did not have cancer up until that time.”

Young Stirling was attending the University of California, Santa Cruz, but quickly put his life on hold to join his father in Bangkok. “He just kind of completely went into denial. He was pissed off. He felt he was a guinea pig of the medical establishment. He always had this kind of rebellious punk rock attitude towards the institutions and whatnot. He felt like the medical institution was corrupt and incapable of telling the truth and he felt he was guinea pig and had been de-balled by them, as he put it, and he was not going to let another gloved finger near his ass or get his balls fondled again. He refused to go onto any kind of testing or screening after that.”
[292]

“You can get killed in a hospital,” Silliphant insisted. Like most of his deeply held opinions, this one was the result of research for a script, in this case a 1977 Screen Gems pilot called
A Small Step Forward.
“The third largest cause of death in America is doctors. It’s true. There’s cancer, heart, and doctors.” The show was to be the medical profession’s version of
Police Story,
the then-current series that brought new realism to cop dramas. “Doctors are human. They make mistakes; they also have been known to do things like the rest of us; they don’t know all the answers.”
[293]
The show was never produced, but Silliphant’s steeping himself in statistics may have been enough to put him off treatment.

Having refused prostate removal, his only remaining options were chemistry, radiation, and blood augmentation. He chose them all, but, by late 1995, it was clear that the disease was terminal. “The cancer never, never lets you forget it’s in there doing its thing,” Silliphant wrote from Bangkok. “I wake up one morning and test for pain. I roll over slowly and sit up in bed. Jesus, not dizzy this morning! Great! Then I get up and I feel a stab in the rib at the 10th. level. No, ho, ho, old friend, I say, there you are! Another morning — no pain. I’m planning on going back in next month and taking some more radiation, once more at that 10th. level where the initial damage was the worst, and also in the femur and lower spine. This is a kind of holding action. It doesn’t cure anything, but it does help relieve the pain.”
[294]

“With this disease there is no such thing as a ‘speedy recovery,’” he added in a letter to Tom Brown, a friend from both Thailand and the USA. “With mutating cells within one’s body, one simply fights a holding action, a delaying action, pushing back the inevitable as long as possible with every means possible — in my case a double hormonal approach. Median survival rates under this treatment appear to be currently running around thirty-six to sixth months, with some blue ribbon contenders actually logging ten years. Since I will be seventy-eight in January, these ratings are meaningless.” He advised friends to be patient, for it was his problem, not theirs. “My life as I have now ordered it is perfect for the time, the place, and my condition,” he wrote. “I do not need anything additional because I would simply not have the capacity to absorb or accept it. Please try to explain this to all concerned in a loving way. This is not rejection — this is a simple statement of the actuality of things.”
[295]

However pragmatically he might have been facing another life, he was not eager to put his current one in order, including rapprochement with his daughter. “I get really sad when I think of the story about Dayle,” reported Stirling Linh. “[Tiana] pushed for reconciliation because, being Asian, the mom is always more of the family bridge-builder. He wasn’t interested. And I don’t know if [Dayle] had gotten wind that he was sick or it was just coincidence, but it was four or five months before Dad died that she sent him a long letter, which he refused to read. I opened it and said, ‘Well, if you won’t read it, let me read it to you.’ It said, at the very least, if I can’t see you again, I’d like to know what I did to make you cut off contact with me. And he actually wept for about thirty seconds, and then promptly dried his tears and put himself back together and said, ‘Well…’”

A similar incident involved his murdered son, Loren. Novelist David Morrell recalls an evening he and his wife spent at the Silliphant home in 1988. “We had just lost our son to cancer the year before and we were still shaken by it,” Morrell recalled, “and, as we had dinner, Stirling began talking to me about his son having been shot — which I now realize was nearly twenty years earlier — and he began to weep. He was sobbing, and tears were falling into his plate. That was the last time I saw him.”
[296]

And yet Dayle was different. “He had a funny thing with women,” Stirling Linh continued. “I wouldn’t call him a retro-sexist, but he really surprised me a few times. I think it was really hard for him to have a daughter. He was never able to deal with that. The things he was going through at the time — the divorce, the death of Loren — I think poor Dayle was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t know why he took it out on her so hard.”
[297]

With Tiana traveling the festival circuit in 1996 with her film and young Stirling enrolled at the University of California in Santa Cruz, Silliphant, his health rapidly declining, fell under the care of a series of house retainers and hangers-on, including lawyers who, Tiana said, had him sign a one-page power of attorney, which was actually the last of a forty-page document that he never saw.

One day, Silliphant summoned Stirling Linh. When the boy saw his father’s condition, he called Tiana. “He said, ‘Mom you better come home.’ He put his father on the line who said, ‘Darling, I have to check into the hospital.’ He went to the hospital and they washed his blood and he felt great and had energy. But in the end it had gone to the bone. We had to find out the hard way in these three weeks of tests and he hated me again because I was the responsible wife who made him face the truth. He didn’t want to know.”

Silliphant died on April 26, 1996. He was cremated following a service in a Buddhist temple in Thailand and his ashes were given to Tiana. But he did not go gently into his final resting place. Before she left Bangkok, Tiana had asked her hotel to ship a suitcase packed with video equipment to a cinematographer she had met. It was a gift. Silliphant’s ashes were packed in a similar-looking suitcase, which she intended to take home. But the hotel sent both of them to the cinematographer. When Tiana discovered the mistake, she asked the cinematographer to return the ashes. He refused, said he had buried them in a grave in North Vietnam under a name and location he would not reveal, and demanded an excessive “reimbursement” for the information. Tiana traveled to Vietnam, turned detective, and made inquiries of local residents, using the blackmail photograph of the gravesite to identify the cemetery. At first, she encountered resistance from some of the peasants who believed that she was a counter-revolutionary, until she produced the extortion letters that proved her legitimacy. By 2009, Tiana and young Stirling had tracked down the fake grave (marked with the name Nguyen Van Ich), broke into the sepulcher, retrieved the urn, and held a proper Buddhist ceremony. They scattered his ashes into the waters of the world, the seas that he loved to sail, the oceans that did not know borders.

“I not only think about him as my dad and as a teacher but as one of the best friends I ever had,” young Stirling said. “In some ways it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be coping with everything because I was rehearsing that scenario my whole life. He was so much older than I was. When I was at El Rodeo school, I remember being conscious of other kids asking me if that was my grandfather, because he was as old as their grandparents were at the time. I was very conscious of his mortality. I didn’t think it was going to come as soon as it did. But I don’t think kids think that way.”
[298]

There was continuing discord between the Estate and the Thai lawyers who had glommed onto it. People whose connection with Silliphant had been ephemeral, at best, came forward claiming that they had been in his employ. A grieving Tiana leveled charges of malfeasance ranging from taking payroll money away from the servants to stealing Silliphant’s
In the Heat of the Night
Oscar. When she threatened to hold a public press conference to level charges at those who were supposed to be administering the Estate, the statuette was returned, along with vague threats of defamation, and were ignored.

Now Tiana found herself, for all intents and purposes, homeless. She returned to America in 1997 and stayed with Silliphant’s old military buddy, Raymond Katz, who had become a successful manager/producer. Although all the recent widow wanted was a place to stay until she could settle matters in Bangkok and rebuild her career in America, Katz had other, more personal desires, and the arrangement quickly became untenable. When she was able to gather the resources, she rented a Spartan apartment in Hollywood while her son finished college in Santa Cruz. Over time she was able to gather funding and favors from friends, find a house, and retrieve the family’s possessions from storage.