The other game changer came nine months later where my terror dawned in earnest: One spring day before the end of my second kindergarten year, the music appreciation teacher told our class a ghost story about a little dead girl who’d haunted Franz Schubert. Until this time I doubt I knew what death was and was not interested in Death and the Maiden on any level. Having just learned that people died, then possibly came back, I ran home gripped with fear. I needed to find either parent to fix this situation for me. Explain somehow my teacher had been mistaken. I frantically searched from room to room until I came upon my father in his study where he’d sit fully dressed in suit and tie. He sat behind a mahogany desk, deep was in thought, writing the next issue of Indicator Digest, the tip sheet he published. I ran up to his desk, “Daddy, are there such thing as ghosts?” I blurted with heart-pounding intensity. My father was a man who never lied, or even exaggerated, and I expected his answer to bring relief,
“Yes, you had a brother Barton who died, but his ghost lives in the house with us.” Barton’s photos as a five year old boy holding a model boat—the boat he was making when he was killed—lined my father’s study.
His response was matter of fact and sure of itself, another turn of the screw. I’d not known of Barton’s death, nor the life preceding it, and while I’d wanted a little brother, I’d have preferred one who’d not resolved into a dew. Now Barton is a story that would become a life long search of my own. But that’s for another day.
My mother would come home later to a deep fried kid. She explained that Barton was the child of my father and his first wife, and he’d been hit and killed by a car. This had all happened when my father was only 26 and living in Hollywood writing songs for movie musicals at Paramount. 30 years before I was born. As far as the ghost in the house went, she’d bought into my father’s delusion. Upping the ante, she told me she knew Barton was around because she too had spoken to him on a Ouija board. If Sam and Fran weren’t performing at parties, they were holding séances with friends and speaking to dead children. Though I didn’t keep a diary at six, I’m guessing an increase in my pill popping began right about now.
We left this town for a stately pleasure dome of a house my father was building on Palm Island in Miami designed by famous Miami architect, Rufus Nims. It was a sweeping, free-form structure with no corners and 30 foot peaked ceilings--all designed to accommodate Sam’s claustrophobia. The move was ill-timed. My father, having sold his business, was not someone who handled retirement well. Without the stock market to focus on, he honed in on his health and the minutiae of his autonomic nervous system which took the form of constant pulse taking and an inability to walk more than a few steps. I fared no better, stricken at having to start a new school mid semester of fifth grade. It was left to Fran to deal with the two of us—basket cases—ramping up her already frantic disposition tenfold and shoving tranquilizers down both our throats.
It would be a short time after I took that first pill Kathy gave me before that I’d pass out in school and have to be carried out of art class. My mortified parents summoned to gather a limp stoner, strung out on downs, from the school office. Then there were the car accidents on the Island. Then the summer before I would leave for freshman year at Sarah Lawrence, I would go unconscious—out cold—I’d taken too many Quaaludes. And a date, not wanting his father to see me, put me in my car and sent me off barely functioning. I crashed on Collins Avenue, one of Miami’s busiest streets. Hit a pole in front of the Fountainbleau the biggest hotel there. I came to in a downtown Miami Jail. I awoke on a gurney in a “hospital like” room, but within the jail. I should have been in a hospital, but I guess the cops thought my being under arrest superseded my need for medical care.
My parents had left Miami now-- I was down visiting a high school friend. My father had uprooted us yet again. Moving back up to New York City and closer to where I’d be going to college. He’d gotten rid of another home I loved, and at a time I needed a home base to touch; my mother left my dog behind as well, the beloved Yorkie I’d had since five that she’d named Blossom Dearie after the jazz singer. While I’ve forgiven my parents everything, the giving away my dog still sticks.
They moved into a suite at the Lombardy hotel while searching for an apartment in a building without self-service elevators. Not an easy thing to find since the 1950’s. As Sam felt less in control, his anxieties increased and were no longer turned inward but outward—expressed in tics and deep breaths—now we were getting the full on Ben-Hur version of his neurosis: “I’m dying!!!” he’d yell. “Don’t either of you care???!!!!” He’d faint in airport terminals unable to board the planes he’d just stopped being too scared to fly in. At this point my mother took to always traveling with large bottles of tranquilizers and one or two close girlfriends. Sam had become a two-woman job. But I was my mother’s main support and I was away at college. Her solution to my leaving home was to buy a house on the Sarah Lawrence Campus. I could wave to my parents from my dorm.
Drugs were my oxygen through college but I’m assuming you got that.
I got through college at Sarah Lawrence, and a year of graduate school—an acting program. Acting was something I hated but entertainment was the family business. It was a torturous year, that year in acting school. Having to act and wanting to die. Hamlet’s dilemma with cocaine and alcohol. I alienated myself from the rest of the students. No one would spend time with me. I got through school, barely. Mainly by not dying. My father died that year. My mother’s dependence on me heightened and to establish the distance I so needed, I moved to Los Angeles.
The next years were a contradiction, my twin desires to thrive and destroy myself battled it out. I had times of relative sobriety in which I did exceedingly well; I found a way to accomplish the show business goals. I became a casting director. Eventually becoming head of Carsey/Werner where I was well liked, rewarded, nominated for an Emmy. I don’t know if I succeeded because of my strengths or in spite of my weaknesses, but when I finally got everything I wanted, my addiction showed up again, just to remind me who was driving the car. I lost it all.
No sooner did I get the Carsey/Werner job than my mother moved out to Los Angeles. A few blocks from where I was living I’m sure this doesn’t surprise you. But this time she was dying. At the end of my mother’s life I made a very bad suggestion: “Don’t take Darvon mom, take Vicodin, they’re better. Here try one of mine.”
She became rapidly addicted to hydrocodone, the active ingredient in Vicodin. Now we were both physically addicted. And a symmetry shaped our ends. I offered my mother a pharmaceutical solution at the end of her life as she’d offered me one at the beginning of mine.
And I watched my mother die for two years from end stage heart disease, undiagnosed due to a misinterpreted treadmill test. That my mother was my best friend-- beyond and separate from our addictions and dependence on each other--didn’t stop me from foisting a deadly drug on her. Even as I prayed she wouldn’t die. I fought her death frantically in searching for a treatable condition. When her memory went, I had the neurologist work her up for Alzheimer’s. My friend Julia arrived after the test to visit her as she lay in the telemetry ward hooked up to monitors.
“How are you Fran?” Julia asked
“I’m fine darling,” my mother said as she lay in the bed in high-heeled slippers, hair and nails done perfectly, “. . .though my daughter thinks I have Alzheimer’s Julia… you are Julia aren’t you?” It wasn’t Alzheimer’s.
She would die one week later. The saddest parting for us both. In the week leading up to her death I’d cross that last unambiguous boundary: the one that separated me from pond scum. I stole the pills I’d gotten her addicted to as she lay in the hospital, pills she needed to take or go into withdrawal. In my mind my needs trumped hers--the woman who’d do anything for me.
My mother didn’t live to see me sober, but she died at the peak of my success in Hollywood. Not as rewarding but close.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
A Woman of Substances
Thank you
Thank you Carmel