But the writing was on the wall, in this case a padded wall back east, in a lock-up building where Norman had been held for a long time before I even heard about it. It was at a brunch at the home of Joel and Sally, the couple who introduced me to Norman, that I got the news. I’d already decided that I wasn’t going to go to the brunch, and I left the invitation sitting on my desk for weeks before I called to R.S.V.P. because I was afraid Norman was invited, too, and I’d have to see him there and face the discomfort.
He had handled our breakup in such a cavalier way that even though I’d wished for months to somehow get the nerve to do it myself, when Norman did it first, I was devastated. We were at his house one morning, it was summer, and Rogie was at sleep-away camp, so I got to be at what Norman jokingly called “grown-up sleep-away camp.”
We’d had a so-so night before, and Norman was blowing his hair dry while I put on makeup at the bathroom counter next to him. And out of nowhere, with the dryer’s screaming noise filling the air around us, Norman said, without ever taking his eyes from his own reflection, “Ellen, I’ve been thinking a lot about the two of us, and I’ve decided I’m going to have to pass.”
“Pardon?” I said, dropping my Fabulash mascara wand, and noticing in horror when I grabbed it up from the ecru sisal bathroom rug that it had left a little line of dark brown fibers next to my foot.
“I mean, we can still go to dinner tonight, but as far as the future goes, I’m giving it the Marty Robbins,” he said.
“Who?” I asked, putting my foot on the mascara spot so Norman wouldn’t see it, probably forcing the makeup so deep into the pile that it would never come out.
“Marty Robbins,” he said, “Get it? El Paso.”
I didn’t get it until I was driving home. Giving it the Marty Robbins? Marty Robbins sang “El Paso.” Pass. He was passing on having a relationship with me. The cleverness made me want to throw up. Made me sick that I’d ever spoken to a putz like Norman Braverman, let alone been intimate with a man who ends a relationship by telling you he’s giving you the Marty Robbins.
Sally swore to me when I finally called to R.S.V.P. that there was no chance that Norman Braverman would show up at the brunch, so while Roger went to a movie with a few of his friends, I went to the brunch. Who knew that the reason Norman wouldn’t be there was that he was in occupational therapy, making a trivet out of popsicle sticks? That news came later.
It was a pretty, sunny Sunday morning at Sally and Joel’s, and I was chatting with some of the other guests over the poached salmon, which I hadn’t touched because I was certain it had to be going bad in the sun. When the ice in my glass of Evian melted, I went inside to get some more. Just as I was heading back outside, I saw Joel hurry down from upstairs. When he spotted me, he walked purposefully over and pulled me into a corner of the living room.
“I guess you’ve heard about Norman?” he asked.
Heard about Norman. Oh no, I thought. By the look on Joel’s face I could tell that he was about to break some real bad news. He’s going to tell me Norman’s getting married to someone else, was my first neurotic thought. That some other woman had accomplished what I couldn’t.
“He’s in a hospital,” Joel told me confidentially. In a hospital, I thought. Well, that’s good news! Great news for me because it means he’s definitely not coming to this party. I guess he’s giving it the old Marty Robbins. Ha, ha! The schmuck.
“And it’s very serious,” Joel said. His face was pale. Oh, God, I thought, my elation busted. Very serious is ominous, and now terror tightened my throat. Very serious had to mean Norman had a communicable disease, which because of our close association, I was about to learn that I had, too.
“Mental ward,” Joel said, putting a smile on his face, in spite of the chilling words he was offering, so that the couple walking by us, an agent from CAA and his actress client, wouldn’t guess that Joel was telling me something horrifying about someone those two people both knew. Of course, at that moment, to me, Joel’s last two words felt like the best ones I’d ever heard, because they meant that whatever Norman had wasn’t contagious.
“The poor son of a bitch,” Joel said, and I had to laugh to myself that “poor son of a bitch” was a long way from the description of a man who, only a brief few months before, in the days when Joel and Sally wanted to fix me up with him, was described as “a real upstanding fabulous guy. A great catch!”
“He calls me every few days from the pay phone in that place,” Joel said with sadness in his eyes, and for a fleeting instant, I was sure a joke was going to come next. That I was the dummy who had fallen for the old mental-ward set-up, and that any minute I’d have to laugh at myself over it. But then Joel pointed to a telephone in the living room, where the hold light was blinking. “He called me a few minutes ago, and while we were talking I mentioned that we were having a party today, and that you were here and, Ellen… he wants to talk to you very much.”
“He does?” I said. And I was really flattered. “Really?” Now the important question here should be, why did it thrill me to hear that a lunatic wanted to talk to me from the pay phone at the fruitcake factory? Why was my heart pounding as if I’d just been informed I’d won the Oscar for my last picture? Why was I panicked about what I was going to say to the little bozo who had dumped me in such a shitty way?
“You can take it upstairs,” Joel said, walking me to the bottom of the steps.
I walked slowly up the stairs, and when I arrived at the top I scouted around for a place where I could sit and talk to Norman privately. I picked Joel and Sally’s cool white bedroom, an idyllic-looking spot with one of those damask duvet covers on a big marshmallowy-looking comforter, and what seemed like a dozen huge white square pillows across the head of the bed.
I was having performance anxiety worse than I ever have when I go in to meet with the biggest stars, or talk story with the biggest writers. So I sat down and tried to collect myself while I stared at the flickering light on the hold button calling to me from the phone on the glass bedside table.
What does it look like at the other end of this call? I wondered. Is Norman in a straitjacket, while a big impatient male orderly who looks like Lurch on “The Addams Family” holds the receiver of a pay phone to his ear? I glanced around the room at the photos of Joel and Sally and their three daughters. Family pictures of the kind of family I actually thought for one desperate moment I might have when my son gave me away to Norman Braverman. Which might have worked if I could have kept Norman hard and/or off the phone with his mother. The phone.
I put my hand nervously on this one, then picked up the receiver, harboring the hope that maybe crazy Norman had only been allowed three minutes per call, and because I’d walked upstairs too slowly, he was now being dragged back to his room by the orderly, who would not be dissuaded by the offer Norman was probably making to represent him and get him a part in a major motion picture. “A second lead,” I imagined Norman shrieking, “with your name above the title.”
“Hello?” I said.
“Hello, gorgeous,” Norman said back. And you want to know who’s really crazy? When he said that, I had an inexplicable rush of feeling. A sorrow that made me instantly lose all memory of the passionless sex, the smoking, the drinking, and did I already mention his mother? Somehow at that moment, which must have been a very lonely and low one for me, I could only remember every good thing about him. The sweet way he kissed, the gentle way he dealt with his temperamental clients, the funny stories he used to like to sit and tell me at the end of his long work days. The way he promised he’d be a great father for Roger.
“I hope I’m not spoiling the party for you,” he said. “It’s just that when Joel told me you were there, I realized how much I wanted to hear your voice and tell you, probably too late, how sorry I am if I hurt you.”
“Well, thank you for that, Norman,” I said, wondering if he knew that I knew where he was calling from, or if Joel was supposed to have kept that part a
secret. I was trying to decide if I should tell him that I knew he was in the cracker mill or not, when he said, “I guess you know where I am,” putting an end to that dilemma.
“I do.”
“Did Joel tell you that I’m in James Taylor’s old room?” he asked, in what had to be the ultimate in Hollywood kitsch. Name-dropping the guy who inhabited the room in the booby hatch before you did. I think I countered with, “How nice. And how long will you be staying?” in the same way the desk clerk at Brown’s Hotel asked me last summer when I checked in.
“Hard to say, gorgeous, hard to say,” Norman answered in a sweet, sorrowful voice. “I could be in here for a long, long time. I’m in real bad shape. If I wasn’t, do you think I could have ever walked out on a gem of a girl like you?”
Well, if you didn’t notice before what a fool I am, this ought to clinch it, because the minute Norman said that, I forgave him not only for giving me the Marty Robbins, but for every injustice during our romance. I actually felt better about everything that had happened between us, even though I suspected that only minutes earlier, this same person probably told his therapy group that he was Louis the fucking Fourteenth. The flattery made me feel so okay about everything that when he asked me the next question, I immediately said, “Of course.”
“Would it be all right if I called you from here now and then? When you’re at home? So we can really talk? Maybe I can explain away some of the awful things I did to you, and if you’ll let me, I’d like to talk to Roger. I loved Roger, and I know I must have hurt him, too, when I broke up with you.”
“Oh, Norman. He understood. But he misses you too,” I heard myself lying. My son didn’t even look up from his Legos when I told him Norman Braverman and I were through. “And of course you can call me at home. Any time!” What was I thinking?
At the risk of having you call the casa de pistachios to tell them to warm up the James Taylor suite for me, because this is as nutso as I ever got or ever hope to get, I will admit that what I was thinking was that I could save Norman Braverman. That I would be the one to pull him out of this terrible state of mind, of which impotence must have surely been a temporary symptom, and turn him into a new man.
I would have my mother fly out from Florida to stay with my son, and I would rush to the cuckoos’ nest, bring Norman treats, read to him through the bars or the barbed wire or whatever they put him behind. And soon they would take my darling Normie out of the jacket with the very long sleeves and send him home under my aegis, the picture of mental health.
By the time I left the brunch, I was a woman with a mission. My plan was clear. After Norman and I got back to Los Angeles, I would have a restraining order slapped on his mother and change the phone number, and soon we’d be making plans to get married, making fiery love, and maybe even making a little sister or brother for my Roger.
But when two or three weeks went by, and Norman hadn’t called even once from the pay phone at the wacko ward, my Florence Nightingale complex cooled, and I began welcoming fix-ups from yet another couple with yet another alleged great guy.
At the same time I was trying to get any job I could, but the work situation was dismal. My bank account was getting so low, I was afraid my son and I were going to have to move to Miami Beach and live in the old folks apartment building with my mother. It was another dateless Saturday night, and I was in my sweats, watching television and feeling sorry for myself, when the phone rang.
“Hi, gorgeous,” Norman said. This time my heart didn’t skip a beat, it just thudded a little.
“Norman, how nice to hear from you,” I said, leaving off the word finally. “You sound good.” And he did. Probably a hell of a lot better than I did that night.
“Yeah, I feel great, even though I’m still here,” he said, sounding as chipper as if “here” meant a luxury hotel in the Caribbean. “People have been writing to me and sending me things, and I really feel as if a lot of folks out there care about me.”
“That’s great,” I said, thinking I should have sent him some baked goods. Maybe something appropriate. Like a box of nut bars. I also felt very much like I wanted to get off the phone. Norman wasn’t my boyfriend. He wasn’t even my friend. He was a guy who gave me the Marty Robbins and who was probably only calling me now because everyone else he tried first was out on a Saturday night.
“In fact, you want to hear the cutest?” he went on. “Yesterday I got chicken soup delivered in dry ice from Barbara.”
Barbara? Did he mean Walters? If only I knew how he was spelling it. Maybe it was Barbra Streisand.
“Very cute,” I said, wishing I hadn’t let Roger spend the night at a friend’s, because when he was at home at least I had a Scrabble opponent.
“I’ve also had two or three really long conversations with Bob over these last weeks. In fact,” Norman told me, “just between us, there’s a very good chance that when I get out of here, I’m going to close a deal with him.”
“Bob?” I asked absently.
“Redford,” he said, “and maybe Paul Newman, too. He actually stopped by here on Tuesday. He lives in Connecticut, you know, and it’s so close he figured we’d take a meeting instead of talk on the phone, but they told him I wasn’t allowed to have any visitors. The nurses were so thrilled to meet him, they’re still talking about it.”
“Oh my God,” I thought, sitting up straight and startling the cat off my lap as I really took in what Norman just said. This was worse than I imagined. This man was having agent’s madness. It made sense. When an agent cracked, lost his marbles, went around the old proverbial bend, wouldn’t he have delusions that big stars were seeking him out and trying to sign with him?
This poor man. I was aching with sympathy for him now, realizing how far gone he really was. Poor baby, I thought, poor thing. This was someone I had once really cared for. Maybe my reasons for being with him had all been wrong, but we had shared intimacy, and time, and hopes for the future. And now this unfortunate creature was losing his grip, a casualty of the pressures of show business.
“And how are you doing, Ellen?” he asked, but I knew it was just to be polite. Well, I thought, at least his madness has left him with a sense of civility.
“Me?” What could I say? I wasn’t going to complain to a man who was probably phoning me between shock treatments that I was worried about being unemployed. Somehow, I came up with enough small talk to fill a few minutes. News about Roger’s soccer team, movies I’d seen, the weather. I was relieved when he finally said, “Call you again,” as his sign-off, but judging from what I now knew was his condition, I didn’t think he’d be calling again.
“I look forward to it, Norman,” I said, and I put the phone down, feeling devastated for him.
The next morning, when I had just said good-bye to the real estate broker who was coming to take a look at my house, which I’d decided I’d better sell, Bill Harber from CAA called and said there was a great job opening for me at Worldwide Pictures. “Go take a meeting there with the senior V.P., Peter Goldman. He’ll love you.”
Worldwide Pictures had a great reputation as a forward-looking company, and they hired a lot of women. I knew a few of the women executives, and I thought I’d fit in well there. I was feeling hopeful. Maybe I’d saved the house. I hustled my ass into that meeting, and I knew right away Peter Goldman and I were on the same wavelength. We loved all the same films, we had similar ideas for future projects, he had a great sense of humor, and when I left I felt confident.
I called Bill Haber when I got home. “Goldman loved you,” he said, “but he still has a few more people to see, and then he’ll send his top two picks to meet with Harvey Springer. Springer will be the one who decides.”
Weeks went by. I still didn’t hear. Just as I sat writing checks that I thought were going to deplete everything I had left, I got a call from the real estate lady asking if she could show the house, and I realized I’d been praying that nobody would want it. In full-out depression, I was about
to set a time with her when my call waiting beeped, and I told her I’d call her back.
“Hi, gorgeous,” Norman said. “So what’s happening?” I remember marveling that he sounded a hell of a lot better than I was feeling. I remember also resenting the fact the garden-variety neurotics like me were painfully in touch with reality, and lucky psychotics like him got to live in the ether, where it must be nice.
“Not much is happening here,” I said, not mentioning that my heart was aching because it looked like I’d have to sell my sweet little house. “I’m still hanging in, and I’ve had a few meetings around town trying to get a job. Right now my best prospect is over at Worldwide. I had a preliminary meeting with Roger Goldman, and now I’m waiting to see Harvey Springer.”
“Well, I’m sorry to say this, Ellen,” Norman said, “but that’s not going to happen.” And then he was quiet. What did he mean? What wasn’t going to happen? Did he mean I wasn’t going to get the job at Worldwide Pictures? Had his voices told him?
“What isn’t going to happen, Norman?” I asked, trying to sound patient and not patronizing. Why, I wondered, did I ever tell Norman Braverman it was all right to call me? Why was I having this bizarre telephone relationship with someone who was now going to insult me, when I was feeling rotten enough already?
“The job at Worldwide isn’t going to happen,” Norman said. “I mean it’s nothing personal, Ellen. You’d be good in that job, it’s just that there are too many women in that department already. And Peter Goldman can’t make a decision because he won’t even be there next month, and neither will Harvey Springer.”
“How on earth would you know that?” I asked him, and I almost laughed as I did, because I knew this conversation was in the same category as the one about chicken soup from Barbara or Barbra, and Bob Redford calling, and Paul Newman coming to visit him. It was part of the psychosis, the colossal ego that accompanies that kind of illness, that makes everything anyone else says or does somehow revolve around the patient. Now Norman believed that my potential job was something he was controlling.
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