It’s not clear to me who took over and brought Johnny home. At the time I was a junior at Harvard, taking pre-med courses and majoring in English, so I was busy, and wouldn’t have been the organizer anyway. Even though my father was a former patient in a similar hospital with the same diagnosis as Johnny’s, Dad would not have been involved, as he and Johnny were alienated because my dad couldn’t accept Johnny’s being gay. My mother, God bless her, would have been drinking and not up to the task, so I am pretty sure it was Duckie who took over. When I was growing up, she was the one who was always there when help was desperately needed.
Having before known only high-achiever Johnny, I was unprepared for how crazy he was. Once the arrangements were made, I went to Logan Airport with Duckie and Jamie to meet him. Johnny was so out of it I was surprised he had been able to make the flight.
In those days, I was a smoker. When we met Johnny, he saw a matchbook I had that said “King Edward” on the cover, an ad for King Edward cigars. Rather than say hello, out of nowhere Johnny snapped at me, “Oh! So you’re now the King? Edward?”
At that moment Johnny provided me with my first up-close experience of a psychotically paranoid person. Duckie calmed him down but I was totally taken aback. His eyes were flashing, he was looking all around, he was talking ragtime-speed about spies we should watch out for, and he was targeting me as his enemy.
This was not the brother I knew—not the Johnny from Camp Kabeyun, not the Johnny who wanted to take me to a Red Sox game, not the Johnny who’d debate with me the primacy of image or word in modern culture, not the Johnny who helped support Mom when he was making a good living in Hollywood.
I almost thought he was putting on an act. Maybe I hoped he was putting on an act. But no one could fake what he was doing. He was like a dog gone rabid. In years to come I’d discover how standard this kind of reaction can be among psychotic people, but right then it was anything but routine. I’d also later discover not to fear it, that it can be managed. But I knew none of that at the time. It was horrifying to see my brother change from someone I loved and who loved me back to someone who hated me and whom I simply did not know.
I marveled at how Duckie kept her cool, gently coaxing Johnny to sit down in one of the chairs in the airport waiting area. I took the hint and backed off while she and Jamie talked Johnny down, at least enough for him to ride in the car.
Johnny was admitted that day to the psych unit at Cambridge City Hospital (now Cambridge Hospital). He was started on antipsychotic medications, which later gave way to lithium, the same medication that saved my father. His first psychiatrist was a brilliant doctor named Steve Stelovich, who actually did a few sessions of family therapy with Johnny, Jamie, Duckie, Uncle Jimmy, my mother, and me. I have virtually no memory of those sessions, other than a visual of the seven of us sitting in a circle in folding chairs in a conference room on the ward. We only met once, as I recall, since it was a minor miracle that Uncle Jimmy had left Chatham to come up to Cambridge even that one time.
I wish we’d met more often. There was so much for us to talk about. But it was not to be. While as a family, we were great talkers, we were not disposed to sit down regularly with a trained professional and talk things out. Few families are.
So began Johnny’s long life as a chronic mental outpatient. He would never regain the intellectual, creative brilliance he once had, but only rarely would he display the extreme nastiness and selfishness he’d flashed during Jamie’s LA visit.
He was not as lucky as my father, who regained full function, although not as at high a level as his brainpower would have warranted before he had his psychotic break. Johnny never got back his mental fastball, or even a reasonable facsimile.
Whatever the cause, Johnny’s safari into madness left him permanently changed. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, as well as alcoholism.
As an outpatient under the care of his new doctor, Dr. Fields, Johnny joined AA, became sober, and remained sober the rest of his life. He was as devoted a member of the AA group as he had been a student of Chaucer. He learned the lines backward and forward. One day at a time. Hurt people hurt people. Live and let live. Easy does it. Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink. Count your blessings. He could recite scores more. I actually loved hearing them.
While in AA, Johnny met a woman who would become his lifelong companion. Ann was a few years older, was divorced, and had two grown children. She was thoroughly heterosexual, Johnny was thoroughly homosexual, but the two developed a bond stronger than most marriages. Although they never had sex with each other, or anything close to it, they loved each other and lived with each other in an apartment in Cambridge for decades, until they lived together in a nursing home.
It gave me the creeps to be around Ann because she was so theatrical, always insisting on being the center of attention. When I would visit them, she’d usually be lying on her bed in her nightgown. She had big hair, which Johnny helped her put up every day, and lips covered in bright red lipstick. She always insisted on a kiss. It was all I could do to bend down, put my hands on her shoulders, and kiss her cheek.
Johnny turned Ann into his star. He was utterly devoted to her. He waited on her hand and foot, literally, rubbing her feet whenever she wanted, and putting whatever she asked for into her hands. He all but fed and toileted her, and would have done that had she bidden him to. He would roll his eyes, but we could tell he loved being at her beck and call. She was a caricature of my mother.
Loving literature and the movies as much as Johnny did, Ann would ask John, as she called him, to read to her for hours on end, or rent movies. Since Johnny was a living encyclopedia of all things Hollywood, he could regale Ann with endless stories about the movie stars he knew, as well as tell her the abundant gossip he’d picked up during those years. “Paul Newman really was as good a guy as he seemed”; “Bette Davis was the same off-screen as on, and you damn well better never upstage her”; “Loretta Young had a swear box on her set. If you said ‘damn’ or ‘hell,’ you had to put a quarter in the box. One day Ethel Merman was on set and she put her hand on her hip and shouted over to Loretta, ‘How much will it cost me to say Fuck you!’ ”; “The day I backed my car over Natalie Wood’s cat and killed it, I thought she’d never talk to me again, but she came around”; “The best, kindest, most genuine person in all of Hollywood or acting anywhere is Angela Lansbury”; “People would try to pit Rex Reed and me against each other, but Rex was actually really nice to me”; “You wouldn’t believe how many famous actors started off as male hustlers”; “I don’t know why some people don’t like Barbra Streisand, I love her”; “Ella Fitzgerald was the most talented impossible interview in the world; she couldn’t put a sentence together”; and on and on. There wasn’t a star he didn’t know something about, and he could recite all the Oscar winners going back to the beginning. Had he not gone crazy, who knows what he would have done out there?
But he was happier, it seemed to all of us, living with Ann than he had been in Hollywood. He’d go to AA meetings, go to see Dr. Fields regularly, take his lithium faithfully, and never touch a drop of alcohol. He did not relapse once.
As the years went on, conversations with him became predictable to the point of being tedious. For example, no matter how many times I, or anyone else, would tell him that we liked Bette Davis, he would ask, in almost every conversation, “Do you like Bette Davis?” or “Do you like Barbra Streisand? I do.” Until the day he died, he asked virtually every visitor, “Do you like Bette Davis?”
It’s ironic, of course, because none of them cared a hoot about him. After he had his crack-up and left Hollywood, none of these stars he so cherished checked in on him—with one exception.
Up until his death, Angela Lansbury—Miss Lansbury, as Johnny called her—kept in touch, sending him notes, inviting him backstage when he’d go to New York to see her on Broadway, always asking after Ann’s as well as his own health. No year passed, rarely even six months, without Johnny�
�s hearing from Miss Lansbury. Her attention meant the world to him.
Other than alcoholism, I don’t know what Ann’s diagnosis was. Whatever it was, it fit perfectly with Johnny’s. When he came to family events, he’d have to call in and check on Ann back at their apartment every hour or two. If not, she’d call wherever he was, annoyed. Rather than get angry back, Johnny would lovingly reassure her that he’d be home before too long.
One of the problems of people who have a chronic mental illness is often poor personal hygiene. Both of them struggled with this issue. Thankfully, there were visiting caretakers who’d come bathe them as they got older.
I tried to keep my relationship with Johnny as normal as I could. I tried not to treat him as a patient but as a brother. So when he’d ask me if I liked Bette Davis, I’d reply, “Johnny, you know I do. You’ve asked me that question a thousand times, if not more. Can’t we just stipulate for the jury that I like Bette Davis so you don’t have to ask me again?”
He’d laugh. But it didn’t work. The same questions always came.
Sometimes I’d try to tap into his former brilliance. “Why was Dickens so great?”
“Characters,” Johnny said. “Except for Shakespeare, he created the greatest gallery of characters in all of literature. And his moral sense. He always took the side of the underdog. He had a profound sense of injustice.”
It was still there, although fading daily. You just had to look for it. For a number of years, after he was stabilized with the right medications, he taught writing at the Harvard Extension School. He was a beloved teacher, mainly because he regaled his students with stories of Hollywood stars.
He also knew how to teach writing. From his days at Exeter, with great teachers like George Bennett, Henry Bragdon, and Colin Irving, and then tough editors at Life magazine, Johnny knew the craft of writing well. He asked his students to write regularly, carefully going through their papers and always offering encouragement.
His decline happened over years, but Johnny’s slow slide from his peak stirred in me both pity and fear.
It was beyond sad—at least for us who loved him, I’m not sure he, himself, cared all that much—when both his physical and mental health failed to the point that he could no longer teach. Undaunted, he made his rounds from the apartment he shared with Ann on Walden Street in Cambridge to the neighborhood coffee shops and corner stores.
Having Parkinson’s disease, being mildly incontinent, being seriously overweight, and never having been terribly agile to begin with, his gait was halting. He took small steps (always had—the family made fun of him for this even when he was a teenager) and had to stop often and regroup. But unlike Ann, who had to be carried or driven everywhere, Johnny would walk. No matter how long it took, he made his rounds.
His favorite haunt was a coffee shop called Simon’s next to a video rental store called Hollywood Express. The staff there knew him well. He came in every day. He’d tell them all about the movie stars he knew. The people who worked there ate it up, until, after a couple of years, it got old, and Johnny’s personal hygiene declined to the point where he emitted a foul odor. Jamie, who sometimes accompanied Johnny, would get calls from the store asking him to do something about it.
The tables were now completely turned from the days in California when Johnny was insulting and demeaning Jamie. Now Johnny needed Jamie. Jamie, ever one to put himself down, cynically said the only reason he was helping Johnny was to take pleasure in being in the power position. But I know Jamie better than that. He was doing it mostly out of love and sympathy for Johnny. Being gay and coming out long before it was fashionable, Johnny had paved the way for Jamie. Of course, he had been cruel to him as well. But Jamie hung in there no matter what.
Lyn and Tom were far enough away down in Rehoboth, just outside Providence, that they were not on call for Johnny, although Lyn took a strong interest in him, so much so that she organized a thorough cleaning of Johnny and Ann’s apartment. True to form, she swung into action and got Tom, Jamie, and me to meet at the apartment and have at it.
This project was more an excavation than a cleaning. Literally years of dust and grime had to be all but peeled off the inside of lamp fixtures, the tops of bookcases, the areas under pieces of furniture. The inside of the refrigerator resembled a compost heap. The bathroom was not all that bad because of the visiting nurse who came regularly to bathe Johnny and Ann. But the rest of the apartment needed fumigation.
It took us all day, but, some twenty-five garbage bags, endless rolls of paper towels, and countless sponges, solvents, detergents, brooms, vacuumings, and gags later, the place looked and smelled pretty good.
Ann lay regally in bed during the entire process, offering suggestions from her throne, while Johnny scampered around trying to help but mainly just getting in the way.
Lyn was tough with him. “Go sit there,” she would command. “No, I don’t give a flying fuck about Barbra Streisand.” None of this bothered Johnny. No matter how hard Lyn came down on him, he kept on smiling. I believe he regarded her snapping at him as what a diva would do. He was used to divas.
When the cleaning was finally finished, Johnny walked us to the door. Ann requested that we all come in and kiss her goodbye, which Jamie and I did, while Tom and Lyn made a beeline outside with the trash before Ann could stop them.
Worn out, we went to a nearby bar and talked about how it can be that two people could live in such squalor, how was it possible for Johnny to love Ann as much as he did, how glad we were that the two of them had each other, and that Halley’s Comet would come before we did a clean-up job like that again.
Still, the question remained, what could be done? One cleaning wouldn’t do the trick. Lectures didn’t work. Being told by Simon’s to stay away only worked for a little while until Johnny went back. As a family, we were learning firsthand what it’s like to care for someone with a serious, chronic mental illness.
We had to remind ourselves of that fact. All of us would forget that Johnny was seriously disabled, for reasons beyond his control, and we’d blame him for being a slob, for not taking care of himself, for being a disgusting mess. It was hard for us, sometimes even for me who was in the business of knowing better, not to chastise him for being impaired, and for getting worse. Instead of giving him the credit he deserved for consistently staying sober, I often forgot and laid blame on him.
The one who didn’t was the woman I would marry, Sue, who loved Johnny as if he were her own brother and took care of him and Ann to the point of taking them shopping for clothing, making sure they got the right medical care, looking after their finances—in short, along with Jamie, doing everything I should have done but didn’t. That’s just how Sue was and is with everyone.
Johnny died on Christmas Day 2014, in the nursing home he and Ann ended up in, at the age of seventy-two. I think he chose that date to honor his great hero, Charles Dickens, and his favorite story, “A Christmas Carol.”
28.
After the divorce, my mother lived in a series of houses in Chatham before Aunt Janet found her a placement in publicly assisted housing. During school vacations I’d stay with her, or with Duckie and Uncle Jim.
I looked forward to coming home to Chatham, mainly because I’d see Jamie and Lyn. Mom, as much as I loved her, was not so easy. She wanted me to pay attention to her, but by early evening she usually had had so much to drink that it wasn’t fun to talk with her. She’d launch into a long series of complaints about her life: how Duckie was too controlling, Lyn influenced me too much, I wasn’t nice enough to her. It was not easy to listen to.
I could tell when the switch flipped, when she was no longer remotely sober. I tried to cover up for her with Lyn and Jamie, telling them she was just tired, that she hadn’t had all that much to drink, that she was doing her best. But I knew what was going on. I wanted to protect her, but even more, I wished she’d quit drinking.
She would tell me, “I can quit any time I want to.”
“Then why don’t you? We all wish you would.”
“Who do you mean, ‘we all’? If you want me to quit drinking, I am happy to.”
And then she’d go on the wagon, sometimes for as long as a month, but usually just for a few days. Those chunks of time were great. She was fun to be with, she could make us all laugh with her stories, she was the mother I loved.
The house where she lived for the longest time was on Old Harbor Road. Her room was upstairs, mine was a corner room on the first floor. Next to it was a sitting area, which led to a small kitchen and a larger living room.
During vacations from Fessenden and Exeter I developed my idiosyncratic routines. When I wasn’t at Jamie and Lyn’s house, I’d make myself a minute steak at Mom’s little house. When I worked at Bearse’s grocery store I learned about minute steaks. One of my responsibilities was to take slabs of chuck steak and feed them through pronged rollers that cross-hatched the steaks to be so thin and tender you could cook them in a minute.
I would bring a few home with me, along with some canned asparagus and store cheese, which I’d slice off the big wheel of cheddar kept atop the meat counter. My favorite meal became a couple of minute steaks, a piece of toast, canned asparagus with a spoonful of mayo on top, and a chunk of cheddar. I had a friend home from Exeter one vacation and offered to make him this meal, but he said it sounded disgusting. For whatever reason, I loved it, and I ate it whenever I was alone. It’s one of many idiosyncrasies I developed growing up that most people find weird or worse.
Christmases we’d have at Duckie and Uncle Jim’s house. Jamie, Lyn, and I would spend the entire school vacation leading up to the holiday shopping, decorating, getting into the spirit. Lyn was the cheerleader, and even though she was pretty controlling, she really did make it fun.
Because I Come from a Crazy Family Page 12