Watch Me: A Memoir (10 page)

*  *  *

In the fall of 1977, Dad’s doctors discovered that he had an abdominal aortic aneurysm, the same condition that had killed his father, Walter, one day after his sixty-sixth birthday.
Ironically, Dad learned the news while staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Walter had suffered his deadly stroke. Dad called and asked us to come see him, and Tony, Allegra, Danny, and I followed the smell of Havana cigars to his room, where he told us the grim news. Soon afterward, there were the visits to Cedars-Sinai, appointments with the doctors, and efforts to have Dad cut down on his intake of tobacco.

At first Dad’s doctors were worried that his lung capacity was too compromised for him to survive surgery, but they determined to see how much they could improve his thoracic function by keeping him off cigars for a week. Dad was basically surviving on one lung. He would need to be transferred to a respirator for the operation, and it was more than possible that he would not be able to transfer back to his own damaged respiratory system. We all knew Dad would rather be dead than hooked up to a breathing machine permanently. Bad enough that he relied so much on the ubiquitous canisters of oxygen. Amazingly, giving up cigars for a week produced an improvement of more than fifty percent, and the doctors decided they could go ahead with the operation.

The night before surgery, I walked in on Dad attempting to hide under the mattress a stack of girlie magazines that the producer Ray Stark had brought over to the hospital to make him laugh. The next morning found his children clustered around his bed as he waited for his medical team to come talk to him, and for the nurses’ aides to transfer him to the gurney to go down to the operating theater. Finally, they came to his room—his heart doctor and internist, Dr. Gary Sugarman, and his lung specialist, Dr. Rhea Snider.

“Well, helloo, Gary,” Dad greeted Dr. Sugarman warmly. I almost expected Dad to offer him a drink. Then, smiling
broadly at the assembled doctors, aides, and interns, with the lightest note of challenge in his voice, Dad said, “Well, gentlemen, let’s get this under way—my life is in your hands.” He was transferred to a gurney and wheeled out of the room.

Nine hours after the operation, I visited Dad in the intensive care unit. He was alive, alert, off the breathing machine, and writing messages on a chalkboard. The next day he was already out of the ICU and in a private room on the eighth floor; when I walked in, he was in a marvelous mood. “Well, it looks like I made it after all.”

I returned to the hospital after lunch to find him doubled over at the foot of his bed. “Something’s wrong, honey. I survived the surgery, but now I’ve got the worst bellyache.”

By that afternoon, he was hooked up to a machine that had taken over the function of his stomach. Impossibly, a nurse had offered him shredded wheat on the morning following surgery, which had caused severe intestinal blockage. As a result, we had to hire private nurses to watch him every moment. One morning about three weeks into this purgatory, they came to me and suggested that I insist on surgery. They said that Dad was dying. It was true that his skin had fallen away from his bones. I could see the outline of his skeleton on the pillow. And so the doctors operated again; having cut him from breastbone to groin, they now cut him again from side to side.

If I could have sacrificed a part of my own body to help my father, I would have without question. To watch him undergo the often painful indignities of the various medical procedures was horrendous. One morning I walked into the ICU as the doctors were suctioning his chest. The panic in Dad’s eyes stopped me short in the hallway outside his room, and I felt my own heart constrict at the sight of it.

When Dad came off the feeding tube, we worked hard on getting him to eat. His appetite was almost nonexistent anyway. When I went to his hospital room the first morning, they were allowing him to drink fluids after a full three weeks without any food or beverage. A slow-moving nurse was stirring liquid in a plastic cup. “What’s that?” I asked.

“I’m just stirring the bubbles out of the 7Up,” she said. From that moment, I set up a virtual juice bar in his room. It is extraordinary to me that the importance of nutrition is still so largely unaddressed in hospitals in America.

One day my voice joined the chorus of others, and I said, “You have to eat, Dad.”

He stopped me cold. “Anjel,” he said, “please don’t ask me again. The consistency of the jelly is unflinching.” After that, I prepared some fresh fruit jelly to take to him for lunch; they had told me he was not yet ready for solid foods.

When he was finally allowed to get out of bed, Dad would make us walk up and down the corridors at Cedars, assessing the donor art. It is strange for me to think that so many years before I met the sculptor Robert Graham, Dad was, even then, absorbing his drawings on the walls of the hospital.

After Dad was on the road to recovery, all of his astute characteristics came back into play. He would be in a penetrating, inquiring state of mind, which always threw me into apprehension, because I would have to tell him what I was thinking and what I was up to. I always felt put on the spot. I’d talked to a therapist about my inability to calm my fears when I went to visit Dad, and she said, “Why don’t you just go in and say nothing until he does? See what happens.” Although I was nervous, it seemed like a good idea.

I sat by his hospital bed, and he told me stories. I hadn’t
come in with my whole defense on my lips, and surprisingly, it felt great. After this, I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll ask him about the time he confronted me about dancing suggestively—doing what he called ‘the bumps.’ ” So I said, “Remember the bumps, Dad?”

“The bumps?” he said. “What do you mean?”

And I said, “Yes, Dad, remember the bumps, when I was fourteen and you slapped me in the face?”

He said, “Honey. That wasn’t the bumps. That was about you being belligerent because you didn’t want to go to l’École du Louvre.” He’d entirely rewritten the scenario.

A few years earlier, I had cut out a picture of First Lady Betty Ford at the Republican National Convention, with the caption “
BETTY BUMP
—Mrs. Ford dancing the bump with TV personality Tony Orlando at Uptown Theater in Kansas City.” I kept that picture forever, but I never had the courage to show it to Dad.

Danny and I were seated on either side of Dad’s hospital bed one evening. Dad was lying back on the pillows, inhaling oxygen through a green plastic tube. We were exhausted after another weeklong intensive fight for his survival but relieved that he still had the will to go on. The room was quiet and dark but for the sound of his labored, vaporous breathing.

Dad broke the silence. “When I was your age, I was just like both of you. I could stay up all night, and the following day I could go longer and harder than anyone. But there is a certain vulgarity in thinking you can get away with smoking. It got me in the end, and it will get you, too, if you continue.” Danny’s eyes met my own.

The sound of the oxygen pump filled the room, and Dad drifted into sleep. Minutes later found Danny and me on the
roof of the hospital, inhaling Marlboro Reds for all we were worth, in full and accurate knowledge of how fleeting and precious this thing was that we were getting away with.

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Before the doctors would release Dad from the hospital, they generally pumped up his system with a blood transfusion as we heaved a collective sigh of relief and packed up his room. Then we’d go down in the elevator, through the lobby and the sliding glass doors, and out onto the pavement in the hard light of day, with Maricela pushing Dad in a wheelchair attached to a large canister of oxygen. At first he might stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel or out at the beach house of his friend the actor Burgess Meredith, in the colony off Malibu Canyon Road. Even though Dad was in such poor health, I think they shared some good times there, he and Buzz. On one occasion, Dad rented the main house and moved into the master bedroom and had a fine view of the Pacific Ocean as it rolled over the pale Malibu sand outside the windows. Buzz took up temporary residence in a little guesthouse next door, often dropping in with a fine vintage from his wine collection for them to share and enjoy.

Soon Jack offered his ranch house in Ventura, and we moved Dad out there. The property was remote, however, and proved too far from the hospital. Allegra was stalked by someone following her car in the canyon one night, so we decided to rent a place for Dad in Beverly Hills. On subsequent occasions, Gladys and Maricela rented houses and apartments for Dad in the area, in order to be close to his doctors until he regained his strength and could return to Mexico.

Gladys was spending more time in Puerto Vallarta, having adopted a baby, Marisol. She stayed there to take care of
the business of Dad’s houses, his work, his correspondence, his many obligations, plans, appearances, dependents, and friends. Maricela had been doing all the traveling with Dad and was with him at all times when he was in the hospital—that is, until someone she didn’t like would enter the room. Danny’s beautiful mother, Zoë, was a frequent visitor, and when she arrived Maricela usually disappeared.

On one occasion after Dad had come out of the hospital and was installed in a rented home in Beverly Hills, an attractive Irish nurse came to look after him. Maricela took to sleeping on a hall bench outside his bedroom with a loaded shotgun in her lap and Diego, their Rottweiler, by her side. She suspected the nurse was taking advantage of “Papi.” Maricela seemed utterly devoted to Dad and he to her.

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Dad’s life was constantly moving, even when he was not. After every health crisis, the painful efforts to reclaim life followed. Filled with drugs, unable to sleep, with no appetite, he always held on to his regal bearing. On one occasion, having narrowly escaped death and hovering on the brink for five days in the respiratory intensive care unit of Cedars-Sinai, he awoke asking for beluga caviar and a glass of very cold Château d’Yquem.

Later that same day, Dad’s agent, Paul Kohner, came to see him in the ICU. Paul, at this point, must have been eighty-five—almost blind, walking with a cane, and his skin had the quality of a mille-feuille. He had to be assisted over to Dad’s bedside by aides on either elbow. Tears were running down his cheeks as he beheld his old friend and client. “John!” he exclaimed in a whisper, close to Dad’s ear. “John, it’s Paul!”

Dad opened his eyes and fixed Paul with a cold stare. “You sold out,” he responded weakly from the pillow.

As a wave of wonderment and shock crossed his already stricken expression, Paul asked if Dad would repeat that statement.

“I told you I wanted Sam Shepard for
Revenge
,” Dad continued, “but you went and agreed to another plan with Ray Stark.” He was on his back but clearly on the attack.

By now poor Paul was apoplectic. “I was led to believe you were dead, John!”

“Well, I’m not dead yet, and you can tell that to Ray, the son of a bitch.”

Contrary to Dad’s wish to cast Sam Shepard, Ray had sent the script to Kevin Costner. Dad was angry; he’d been in a life-or-death situation just hours before, but he was damned if he would let them think they could get away with disrespecting him. When he eventually got out of the hospital, he allowed Ray to send Kevin Costner to see him. As I’ve heard the story told, Dad just gazed out the window and whistled throughout the meeting. He never really forgave Ray afterward. Dad didn’t like that Ray had doubted he would live. Later, when Dad got seriously sick in Fall River, Massachusetts, he asked Ray to get him Nancy Reagan’s plane to fly him back to his doctors at Cedars-Sinai. This was a steep request even for Ray, and he wouldn’t or couldn’t come through, but it was as if Dad knew that and wanted him to feel bad. Theirs was a complicated relationship to the end.

Dad went on to make seven more movies. Because of his emphysema, the insurance companies refused to allow the studios to continue hiring him for films—a sad state of affairs and a very depressing moment in his creative life, given that at this point he was one of America’s most celebrated and esteemed veteran filmmakers. But soon he would meet a
couple of young producers, Michael Fitzgerald and Wieland Schulz-Keil, who would provide him the means to make the small-budget but vital films that described his new trajectory—films like
Wise Blood
,
Under the Volcano
, and
The Dead.
He also had another friend and admirer in the producer John Foreman, who, having completed
The Man Who Would Be King
with Dad to great success, went on to produce
Prizzi’s Honor.

CHAPTER 10

M
y friend Jane Buffett and I had gone on holiday to Hawaii for several weeks in August 1978 and were staying in Kipahulu in a cabin on the Lindbergh estate. When I returned to L.A., the phone was ringing—it was Joan Buck, encouraging me to go to London to be with Jack, who had started work on Stanley Kubrick’s
The Shining
at Pinewood Studios. I took her advice and flew to England. Entering the house Jack had rented on Cheyne Walk felt like stepping into the interior of a box of Turkish delight—an odd combination of remodeled Regency and Arabic. The dining room, in the basement, had a monolithic refectory table and medieval benches, church pews with straight backs—like something out of a Bela Lugosi movie. Upstairs, Jack lay supine on a bed of balsa wood. The explanation was that for several days in a row, he had accidentally left his keys inside and had been forced to scale the fourteen-foot wall surrounding the property to get back in the house. The last time, he had landed on his heels in a manner that had jammed his spine and slipped his discs, resulting in major back trauma. He had been in consultation with Her Majesty the Queen’s back doctor and had been recommended absolute rest on a plank. Jack looked terribly depressed as I entered the bedroom, a riot of red velvet
curtains and gold-and-black-embossed wallpaper. A couple was standing sympathetically by his side.

“Hello, Tutti!” the woman greeted me effusively with a British accent. She had a tumbling mane of red curls and was wearing a purple leather pantsuit with eye shadow to match.