by Jessie Close
Of course, I didn’t know any of this when I was in Tucson. Nor did I know that two common symptoms of bipolar disorder in young women are risky behavior and hypersexuality. Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, a clinical psychologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore and one of our nation’s foremost experts on bipolar disorder—an illness that she has—has shown through research that women with bipolar disorder often are promiscuous. Fifty-seven percent of young women diagnosed with bipolar disorder become hypersexual during periods of mania. Typically during mania, a person has rapid thoughts, stays up all night, takes foolish risks, and pushes the limits—all things that I was doing in Tucson between 1974 and 1975.
I was just damn lucky that my drug use, hypersexuality, and risky behavior didn’t end up with my getting a sexually transmitted disease or being arrested, imprisoned, or killed. When I was finally diagnosed, I would understand why I felt as if I were hovering above my own body at times, watching myself, helpless to intervene. I’m not trying to excuse my actions. I’ve been frank about them. I am trying to put them into context, however. And in Tucson, my untreated illness was driving the train, and I was clearly a passenger on that crazy ride.
I fled Tucson with an impressive college transcript in hand, despite my extracurricular activities. I’d gotten all As and was still determined to finish college. My first choice was New York University, partly because Glenn was living in Manhattan. I landed at my relatives’ house in Washington, DC, but immediately boarded a train for New York to visit Glenn.
She was appearing in small roles on Broadway. If I could get into NYU, the two of us could room together, I thought, although I knew my sister’s life was focused on her career, not on men, drinking, and drugs. That was a good thing, I decided. She could help me get my partying under control. So I relaxed with Glenn for a few days while waiting to be accepted at NYU. I tagged along, eating and drinking at the Joe Allen restaurant with her theater buddies. It was exciting to listen to her chat about the plays she was auditioning for. She was determined to make it, and I admired her single-minded direction.
NYU rejected me, and I didn’t take it well. I fell to my knees and sobbed. My dreams of New York living with Glenn were dashed. Instead I began applying to schools in Washington, DC, and resigned myself to living with relatives, at least until I could get back on my feet.
What none of us realized was that I was not alone. My mental illness was still hiding deep within me—undetected—and it had no intention of sparing me.
VIGNETTE NUMBER THREE
by Glenn Close
Mom and I have arrived in Los Angeles to rescue Jessie from her abusive husband, Brad. I remember the broad slabs of sand-colored sidewalk and the perfectly manicured grass between the sidewalk and the curb—Los Angeles grass, strangely tough and spiky, watered by ubiquitous sprinklers, sucking up the dwindling aquifer. I remember the apartment building, with its reddish, pebbly facade, resting on cement pillars and softened by an undulating landscape of manicured scrub and palm trees. It’s not fancy, but it looks downright grown-up for my little sister.
Upstairs in Jessie and Brad’s apartment it is another story. At first look, the apartment seemed to be a place occupied by a couple with things on their mind other than housekeeping. The living space wasn’t big, but it seemed comfortable enough. I see white walls and not much furniture. I think this was the only time I saw one of Jessie’s apartments. She had been married to Brad for a while, but I had never seen where they lived. I had no concept of what their life together was like. I knew that in one apartment, visitors had been encouraged to add their personal graffiti to a wall. I knew that they had started a pirate radio station in a closet and had been busted by the FCC. But I think this was another apartment. It was the first time I’d been in a living space that my little sister shared with a guy.
When Mom and I arrived, tense and not knowing what to expect, we must have been shown around a bit, because I remember Jessie telling us about the mouse that lived in the stove and how she had to pound on the top before she lit a burner so the mouse wouldn’t get cooked. She always loved mice, as did I. She had a brown mouse when she was little named Elsa Baxter. She loved Beatrix Potter, especially her stories about mice. What better excuse to not learn how to cook! The mouse had his rights.
I can still remember being aware of the fact that Mom and I were there together and were actively extricating Jessie from a bad situation. It wasn’t an action on behalf of any group, condoned by committee. It was for one of us, a family member, who needed help. Jessie had been left to fend for herself much too early. Even though the scene was unhappy and fraught, Mom being there was hugely significant and made me happy.
Brad was skinny, with long, dark, dirty-looking hair, wearing baggy jeans and a faded T-shirt. When he realized that Jessie was serious about leaving him and that Mom and I were serious about taking her away, he started getting more and more agitated and verbally abusive. We tried to ignore him, because there was no use reasoning with him, and anyway the case was closed. As Jessie hastily threw some things into a bag, Mom and I tried to keep Brad at bay. He was saying terrible things, but there didn’t seem to be any danger of his getting physical. He ended up propping himself against the doorjamb, gathering himself for another aggressive verbal assault.
The image that is frozen in my memory is of our mother standing squarely on her feet, as if ready to take a punch. She is facing Brad, who suddenly lunges forward and screams, right into Mom’s face, “All you Close women are fucking cunts!”
Now my image of Mom unfreezes. She pulls herself up to her full five-foot-nine-inch height—making her taller than Brad—plants herself directly in front of him, and, like a lioness defending her cub, says in a voice that makes my hair stand on end, “Don’t you EVER say that to me again or you will REGRET IT!” Brad was practically blown backwards and looked as if he’d been slapped, stunned into silence by her raw ferocity. He abruptly left the room and never reappeared. To this day I can still feel how astounded I was by Mom—stunned and then positively elated. I believe she would have taken blows for Jessie. She was saving her, protecting her, breaking Brad’s hold over her. It was incredible. Somehow she had found a voice I had never heard before and had used it to defend her child, and that voice seemed to rebalance the world.
Mom and I got Jessie safely back to Wyoming and up into the foothills of the Wyoming Range, which edges the southwestern side of the Green River Valley. In 1974, Mom and Pop had bought what had been a rustic dude ranch, and it had become a haven for our family. It ended up being an impractical place to live year-round because the elevation meant that it was snowed in until June, but at the time I’m writing about it was summer, and the ranch was the first private family-owned gathering place we’d had in more than thirty years.
That night Brad called Jessie and told her that he was going to kill himself if she didn’t come back. He was like a virtuoso, playing Jessie like a violin until she started screaming. She screamed so loudly and for so long that a friend who was staying in one of the adjacent guest cottages came sprinting over in his boxers, thinking she was being attacked by a bear. It was incredibly upsetting to see Jessie so distraught, caught up in such a destructive relationship. We calmed her down as best we could. I was happy that she was out of Los Angeles and living in a place with vast, stunning vistas and cool, clean air.
One day all of us went on a picnic-hike up into the mountains behind the ranch. We quickly discovered that Jessie wasn’t able to walk any appreciable distance without getting completely exhausted, so the going was slow. I’m sure the elevation didn’t help. Pop loved to fly-fish, so we made our way to a beautiful mountain stream and found a perfect place to spend the day. With Pop happily fishing, Mom, Tina, Jessie, and I thought it would be fun to wander downstream to a place where we could strip naked and take a dip—back-to-nature girls. We found a picturesque little pool and stripped down together—a first for all of us. We had visions of lolling in th
e water under the hot, high-summer sun, but when we stuck our toes into the swiftly running stream all three of us gasped and screamed in unison. The water was glacial, unimaginably cold! It was impossible to even put a toe in it for more than a second. We suddenly realized that of course there was still snow in the mountains, so we’d just stuck our toes into melted ice. It was hilarious and made us feel like ridiculous tenderfoots. So much for our dream of being carefree mountain nymphs!
Alarmed at Jessie’s pallid skin and lack of energy, Pop had her blood tested at the clinic in town and discovered that she was malnourished and dangerously anemic. She confessed that she had only eaten at Jack in the Box for the previous year. She looked scrawny and unwashed and had let all her body hair grow. In a family where wearing suede was considered revolutionary, hairy legs and underarms were blatant signs of outright rebellion. But she was back with family for now, and we were concerned for her.
Thinking back, I realize that even though Jessie had tried to kill herself twice, and even though she seemed to have no control over her sexuality and had gotten herself into an abusive relationship and was doing drugs to cope, in spite of all that, none of us ever thought that she might be suffering from a mental disorder. The possibility simply wasn’t in our consciousness and was never part of any conversation. From our perspective, she was living on the edge, unfocused and out of control. She had made all the wrong choices. She was basically uneducated, having walked out of high school in tenth grade and never gone back. Her impending divorce would be a recurring behavioral pattern in the years to come. In our ignorance, the family consensus was that she either had to get an education or get a job.
Little did I know at the time how the events of that summer would change my life. I had just graduated from college and had suffered through several series of national theater auditions. I hadn’t been offered anything. The phone service up in the mountains was nonexistent, so on a grocery run into Big Piney one day I called Grandmother Moore’s house, where I was based at the time, to see if I’d gotten any messages. Suza, the cook, said that someone from the New Phoenix Repertory Company in New York had called for me. The message was a week old! I returned the call and was told that they wanted me to come in to audition for their fall season of three plays to be produced on Broadway. I flew back to New York a few days later, auditioned, got the job, and began my professional career.
I left Jessie that summer in Wyoming hoping that she would come to some kind of understanding with Mom and Pop, hoping that she would be able to make a viable plan for the next stage in her life. Little did I know how infrequently we would see each other in the years to come. We didn’t have a tradition of close contact as a family. People didn’t call each other as much back then. Cell phones and the Internet didn’t exist. So it was easy to go for weeks, even months, without making contact. Jessie became a peripheral figure in my life. I vaguely knew what she was doing and rarely saw her. It was two more years until Mom and Pop moved back from Africa for good. They settled in Big Piney, and Pop revived and ran the Marbleton–Big Piney Clinic. Our lives veered away from each other. Now it seems inconceivable that I was so cut off from my siblings, but that is the way it was. They all eventually gravitated to Wyoming or Montana, initially to be nearer to our parents, but I was rooted in New York theater and soon had the beginnings of a movie career. Family was not on my mind.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mount Vernon College for Women in Washington, DC, had just been accredited as a four-year college and was trying to expand, so it accepted me as a student despite my on-again, off-again attempts to complete my education.
Although I had planned on living with my relatives when I’d fled Tucson, I used my trust money to rent a one-bedroom apartment in an old building across from the Washington National Cathedral in northwest DC. I enjoyed visiting the giant church. Sometimes I would wander around in its catacombs in jeans and a sweater, causing churchgoers to look at me strangely—or at least I thought they were looking at me strangely. My apartment was a ground-floor unit with bars on the windows. There was a garden out back, but there were too many trees to let in the light, so there were no flowers and only a few blades of grass. The apartment was cell-like, so I bought a calico kitten to keep me company, but she insisted on climbing my body with her needlelike claws, always ending up on my head, which made it difficult to study. I took her back. I felt very alone.
An English teacher at Mount Vernon was impressed with my writing and told me that a friend of hers, a reporter named Kandy Stroud, needed an assistant. I drove to Georgetown to meet her.
Kandy was one of a handful of young, attractive female reporters making names for themselves in the 1970s in journalism circles. A profile she’d written of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger was typical of the New Journalism sweeping the country—a style known for the personal remarks that reporters would often include in their stories.
“What are you trying to do? Seduce me?” Kandy quoted Kissinger as saying when they met for an interview. “You know I like these hot pants very much,” he reportedly added, referring to the skintight shorts that Kandy was wearing. She then delivered her trademark knife into Kissinger’s back by writing, “One cannot help wonder if the movie stars [whom Kissinger dated] mind that the ankle socks of Washington’s greatest swinger are falling down, that his wiry chestnut hair, which flashes golden in the intense white sunlight, is too close-cropped to run their fingers through or that at least 10 of his 178 pounds protrude over his thin black belt, somehow shortening his 5 feet 9 inches.”
Kandy was writing a book about Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign, and she hired me as a typist and researcher. One afternoon she sent me to cover a speech that Rosalynn Carter was giving in a hotel ballroom swarming with reporters, all dutifully scribbling down Rosalynn’s every word. I started taking notes, and then the absurdity of the scene hit me.
“This is kind of stupid,” I whispered to a reporter next to me. “I mean, one of us should just write this down and give it to everyone else. It would save a lot of time.”
The reporter glanced up from her notes long enough to glare at me. “This is how we make our livings,” she said.
Kandy was pleased with my reluctant note-taking, but I was beginning to question whether being a reporter was something I’d want to do. Not long after that, Kandy asked me to join her at the 1976 Democratic convention, being held that July in New York’s Madison Square Garden. I jumped at the chance. The Democratic and Republican conventions had always seemed riveting on television, especially when Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley unleashed his police on demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic convention.
Kandy got us credentials that enabled me to sit in an area reserved for the media and to interview delegates at ten-minute intervals on the convention floor while she stuck close to Carter and his entourage. My enthusiasm quickly waned. Everyone knew Carter already had locked up more than enough delegates to capture the nomination, so there wasn’t much real news happening.
By day two, Kandy was beginning to get annoyed with my cynical comments and note-taking. Most of what I was seeing was meaningless fluff orchestrated for television. I didn’t like crowds, so I avoided actually going on the convention floor. When a band struck up “Dixie,” I groaned.
I also felt uncomfortable in the press box because the male reporters working around me were incredibly sexist. A well-known ABC political reporter grabbed the back of my knit dress, causing the clinging material to pull snug around my figure. Laughing, he made a comment about my breasts. The women reporters were just as obnoxious. Helen Thomas, the legendary UPI reporter and White House correspondent, noticed that I was taking notes about what she was saying one afternoon. Without warning, she grabbed my writing tablet and hissed, “Don’t you ever write anything about us!”
I needed a break from the droning convention speeches, so I slipped away to visit Glenn, who was having dinner at a friend’s apartment. Glenn had just finished appearing in
Rex, a Broadway musical about the life of King Henry VIII, with songs by Richard Rodgers. It had opened and closed in less than two months, after only forty-nine shows. Months earlier, Glenn had invited me to a rehearsal, and Rodgers had asked me what I thought of the show.
“It’s coming along,” I replied truthfully.
Glenn had been mortified.
Reviewers had loved Glenn’s portrayal of Princess Mary Tudor, which marked her first musical role on Broadway.
When I arrived at the apartment where Glenn was having dinner, I noticed a little Baggie of cocaine with a mirror and razor next to it in the living room. I certainly knew the coke wasn’t Glenn’s, because she never did drugs. As soon as she and her friend went into the kitchen to fix dinner, I took a snort. Actually, I took several, and before I knew it, all the coke had gone up my nose. I licked the mirror clean of any white dust. Still not satisfied, I helped myself to a bottle of tequila that was innocently sitting there. I was in such a rush that I didn’t bother to pour it. I simply began chugging.
Glenn was angry when she returned and saw me. Our host wasn’t too thrilled, either. I was asked to leave.
Still not wanting to be at the convention, I hailed a cab and had the driver take me to a party that Rolling Stone magazine was throwing. It was mobbed, and admittance was by invitation only, but I pushed my way to the door and flashed my press credentials. The beefy guard there wasn’t impressed.