Watch Me: A Memoir (38 page)

“I don’t feel so good,” said Bob. He was dizzy and disoriented; his forehead was hot and damp. He said he couldn’t focus or stand up. I called the paramedics immediately. They arrived in minutes. Bob began to cry out that his back was killing him. They transported him by ambulance back to UCLA Santa Monica. Two days went by. Bob was fighting for breath. His doctors were confounded; it had become startlingly evident how little they knew about his condition.

Steven was with him one morning when the dialysis machines broke down; his blood was thickening and his body was rejecting the treatment. The ports in his arms by which they could administer intravenous drugs had blown.

*  *  *

On December 15, Bob was inducted into the California Hall of Fame. Noriko Fujinami and Steven accepted the honor on his behalf in Sacramento. Bob always described Noriko as the most intelligent and most informed studio director he had worked with; they reflected each other’s aesthetic. Her calm presence was always comforting.

On December 16, Steven stayed with Bob at the hospital, and I spent much of the day working with the photographer Terry Richardson. I hadn’t seen Terry in many years, although he had published a book on the work of his father, Bob Richardson, to which I had contributed some early pictures—mostly Polaroids that I had saved, of Terry as a child. Bob had, for the most part, lost or destroyed the original prints of many of the fashion photographs we had made together in the seventies.

I met Terry at the Chateau Marmont. It was a very emotional reunion for me. Terry was tall and thin and looked very much like his father did when we first met. The pictures we worked on that day, for the British fashion magazine
Love
, were an homage to both Bob Richardson and Bob Graham—two huge influences in my life. I’d always imagined that Bob Richardson might do something flamboyant in the end. I thought of him and our crazy, volatile relationship and, later, his sad finale in 2005, when he sat down in front of Terry’s television one evening in New York after a long drive back east from California and died quietly of a heart attack. His final pictures, from that last cross-country drive, are among the saddest images I have ever seen.

*  *  *

A few days later, I was scheduled to do a print ad for Badgley Mischka with Annie Leibovitz. It would keep me from being
at the hospital for a whole morning, which I regretted, but I hadn’t worked in the four months since Bob first got so sick. When I went to see Bob that morning at UCLA Santa Monica, he said, “Don’t go.” I told him that I would be gone for only a couple of hours and would come straight back to the hospital when I was finished.

I left his room in tears. When I got to the studio in Hollywood, I ran up to Annie. There were a group of women in the photograph. I asked Annie if there was any way she could shoot me out first so that I could rejoin Bob. “Absolutely,” she said. “I’ll have you out of here as soon as your makeup is ready.”

When I got back to the hospital, I asked Bob’s primary doctor if they were going to give him more Heparin to thin his blood.

“We were thinking of administering something like that, possibly,” said the doctor. He looked baffled.

“He’s dying, isn’t he?” I asked him.

“It seems we’ve done all we can for him.”

When I entered his room in the ICU, Bob’s eyes were closed, but he was thrashing in his bed. “I’m here,” I said. “Do you know who this is?”

“My Honita, as beautiful as ever,” he said.

I held his hand. “Shall I sing you a song?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I sang Gladys’s song to him, about the three little fishies that go over the dam, one of my favorites growing up in Ireland. He seemed to listen closely. “Shall I sing you another song?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I started to sing “Sweet Baby James.”

“No, not that,” he said. Then he asked, “Am I dying?” He asked the question like a child. There was mystification in his voice.

“No, of course not,” I replied.

He turned his cheek on the pillow and seemed to relax a little. Then he left his body. I watched his spirit go. I marveled at how beautiful he looked in his white pajamas—his artist’s hands, his caramel skin, his silver hair thrown back upon the pillow. The doctors told us that they wanted to put him on a respirator, to give him a chance to regain his strength, but it was clear to me that this was just life support.

Joan Buck flew in from New York to hold my hand. Danny and Stella came to stay over the holidays, and Yolanda brought a Christmas tree from the farm. Mitch and Kelly came, too, and I remember almost nothing else, just that gaudy little pine in the studio, all lit up and full of ornaments from the past—golden angels and dancing skeletons, a cigar made of glass. I opened a bottle of wine, Château Mouton 1982, with the label Dad had painted of a dancing goat, and we drank to Bob.

When I went to the hospital the next morning, Bob was still unconscious. He remained hooked up to the ventilator for another day. Then, with the doctor’s counsel, Steven and I made the decision to turn off the machines. We called Bob’s best friends—the artists, his ex-wives, and his staff. They all came to the hospital to say their goodbyes. On December 27, 2008, he left his life gracefully and peacefully. A pretty redheaded nurse came into his room in the hospital to detach him from the respirator that was pumping oxygen into his lungs. The room was filled with the people he loved. In its way, it was as ceremonial as a wedding—Bob’s head resting on a white cotton
pillow, his hair like mother-of-pearl, his eyebrows arched above closed eyelids, his eyelashes long and dark. When the nurse removed the oxygen mask, he wore no expression at all.

As she detached him from the machines, a last exhale blew softly through his lips, the clouds outside the window parted, and the sun glanced off the sea beyond Santa Monica, bathing him in a golden light. It was such a beautiful scene that we actually started clapping. Bob had passed.

Rafi drove me home from the hospital. He had held my hand and comforted me and prayed for Bob throughout his illness, always raising my spirits and always keeping the faith whenever I was confused or despondent. When I walked into the house, the dogs ran to greet me. I sat down on the ground in the courtyard and let them sniff me all over. Mecha was thorough and put her nose up to mine. Pootie licked the salt tears from my face. I looked up under the canopy of the coral tree. The sun was filtering through the leaves. Joan was in the kitchen. Kelly Lynch was answering the phone. Susan Forristal was coming with Susanna Moore. Allegra was flying in. The world as I knew it had ended, but I was surrounded by loving friends.

The morning after Bob died, I woke up as if some sort of decision had been reached for me in the night. I decided that, to commemorate his passage, I should take all the flowers Bob’s friends had sent to the house and place them at his public monuments, starting downtown at the Coliseum. It was there that I had first become aware of his work, when I saw the two headless bronze athletes towering above the gateway to the Olympic Games in 1984, never dreaming that we were destined to live together for the last eighteen years of his life.

Susan Forristal came with me, and with Rafi at the wheel, we drove from one end of the city to the other, laying roses at the bases of Bob’s statues and floating gardenias in the fountain at the feet of his
Source Figure
, on Bunker Hill. We went to the UCLA sculpture garden, to the cathedral and the Music Center, and to visit his silver
Torso
on Rodeo Drive, where someone had already laid flowers. In New York and Washington friends and admirers were doing the same for Bob—Boaty Boatwright, Laila’s mother Martha, and our New York driver, Paul Cuomo, all sent pictures of the statue of Duke Ellington, the base covered in lilies at 110th Street and Fifth Avenue, on the northeast corner of Central Park. In Washington, D.C., Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s lap was strewn with roses. Allegra had called Miguel Norwood, one of our old friends from Skataway, who was calling a cousin of his in Detroit to place a bouquet of blue flowers by the fist of Joe Louis.

*  *  *

On the first Sunday after Bob died, I found myself alone in the house. I walked out to the half-lot beside the kitchen where the studio used to store scrap metal, grabbed a spade, and began to dig. Three hours later, I had made a four-foot hole in the hard dirt. There I placed an avocado tree, three feet high, that Rafi had grown from seed.

When the staff arrived for work on Monday, Rafi and I went to a local nursery for mulch and grass seed and flowers. I bought two wide concrete bowls and filled them with water hyacinths and goldfish. For days afterward, Dora, Rafi, and my housekeeper, Rebeca, helped me to plant shrubs and sow grass. That was the beginning of our garden for Bob.

It was a comfort for me to dig holes in the earth, to bury
plants and watch them grow. One morning as dawn was breaking, I awakened to an unusual sound and walked downstairs. Two large ungainly seabirds were balancing on the ficus trees above the garden. They were white, the size of swans, with yellow bills and pink feet. The branches buckled under their weight. When I looked in the Audubon guide later, I was unable to identify them; it is possible that they were snowy or cattle egrets. This was their only appearance in the garden, and it felt like magic.

*  *  *

Hercules had returned from London and was staying at the Bel Age Hotel with Jeremy Thomas. He called asking if I would meet him for lunch. He needed the name of a good chiropractor. His back was killing him, he said. We met at the Lobster in Santa Monica. He tried to rise as I approached the table; he was terribly thin. He ordered a glass of water, no longer his customary beer.

“Jack’s coming to Bob’s funeral,” he announced.

“Really,” I said.

“Of course,” replied Herky. “He wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

I knew that Herky had most likely persuaded Jack to come. I was very touched. He followed me in his car back to my house. The chiropractor, Dr. Schwartz, was waiting for us. Herky went upstairs for about an hour, came downstairs, gave me a kiss, and left.

I went up to see the doctor, who said, “You know your friend only has a short time left, don’t you, Anjelica?”

“Yes,” I said. “I know.”

*  *  *

Cardinal Mahony offered to hold Bob’s funeral mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. On January 7, 2009, a large congregation gathered outside Bob’s Great Bronze Doors.

Allegra had come down from Taos with Cisco and Rafa; Danny brought Zoë and Stella. The children were so young, it was hard to see them attempt to grasp the enormity of the situation. It was hot on the plaza, and Stella’s little face was pinched. Rafa knelt on the steps outside the cathedral, pitching some pennies with Miguel Norwood.

Bob’s pallbearers were his patrons, his fellow artists, and his closest friends, Jack Quinn, Doug Wheeler, Roy Doumani, Earl McGrath, Tony Berlant, Tom Holland, and Ed Moses; his assistants and co-workers, Rafi, Juan Carlos, Noriko’s son James, and Raul; and his family, my nephew Jack, my brother Danny, and Bob’s beloved son, Steven. Joey, Steven’s mother, placed Bob’s Knight of Malta medal on the coffin; Dora, Noriko, Rebeca, and Yolanda placed roses picked from the garden I planted at Windward.

Mayor Villaraigosa, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Maria Shriver were all in attendance. Steven, Danny, and Jack Quinn read. Roy Doumani spoke; Earl McGrath talked of having introduced me to Bob; Maria described how she had brought her very Catholic mother, Eunice, to Bob’s studio when they were planning the Governor’s Medal for the Arts in California. Eunice had taken a long, doubtful look at all the beautiful bronze nudes and proclaimed, “That poor wife!” Hercules brought Jack, who was a prince and stayed by my side throughout.

People had come from all over the country—Steven’s
mother’s family, Bob’s cousins, and many friends near and far; even Bill Murray showed up. It seemed that everyone was there but Bob. I read a poem from Yeats, “He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace.”

O vanity of Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire,

The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay:

Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beat

Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast,

Drowning love’s lonely hour in deep twilight of rest,

And hiding their tossing manes and their tumultuous feet.

CHAPTER 36

B
efore Hercules left L.A. for the last time, Jeremy Thomas threw a dinner for him at the Chateau Marmont. I was sitting in a booth at the restaurant watching June Newton, herself a widow, reflected in a candlelit mirror. I was thinking about what was real and what was not, and how ephemeral were our quicksilver lives. Although the party was beautiful, it was melancholic, for some of us knew we would not see Herky again. He left the gathering early, passing along the aisle between June’s table and mine, and blew me a farewell kiss before he went upstairs.

Herky died February 21, 2009, in London, mourned by the many people who adored him, not least by almost every blonde in Britain. His passing was an inconsolable loss to his friends.

If death weren’t what it is, it would be magic, and there might be an explanation for why my mother disappeared one day in 1969 in a car wreck and why my father left his body in 1987 in that rented house in Rhode Island. Why the sun came out from behind the clouds to kiss Bob goodbye as his body lay under white sheets at UCLA hospital in Santa Monica. These ties, these blind attachments! These love affairs! Why, we ask, why must they leave us? When will we join their ranks? Is life truly meaningless? I guess not as long as
we remember the influence of the people we love: that manna that flows from the stars!

In the five months from October 2008 to February 2009, four people to whom I was deeply connected died—Bob, Katie, Sam Bottoms, and Hercules Bellville. I did not hear from my brother Tony. Our shared experiences were what Tony and I had in common, but we related to them quite differently. Whereas I was more of a people pleaser, he was perhaps more inclined to please himself, which on occasion can look selfish but in many ways is a more honest approach to life.