by Tom Nolan
Cooper-Clark didn’t notice anything untoward in Millar’s manner when she and her husband had dinner with the Millars. “He was what I had expected him to be,” she said, “quiet, and sort of shy, but very giving in his shyness and silences. I didn’t feel him aloof at all, I thought he was lovely. Maggie was very voluble, and they told us wonderful stories. Maggie’s hilarious. And Ken was very much the straight man. She’d say, ‘Ken, do you remember when . . . ?’ And Ken was adding to it. She had him telling us the story of this radio quiz show called Quiz Kids, in the States? With all these little genius children, who’d ask famous people to come on this show. So when W. H. Auden was on it in Michigan, the Millars were in the audience for support. And Auden came on wearing this mortarboard, right, with the tassel flopping in his face? And the kids read out a line and asked, ‘Who wrote that?’ And he was guessing: ‘Yeats? Kipling? T. S. Eliot!’ And the kids said, ‘No! You said it!’ So they told us these hilarious stories. I realized later, as long as the four of us were together, we absorbed any problems Ken might be having, because the three of us were talkers and Margaret would feed him lines; she would be taking care of him.”
The next day, interviewing Millar alone at the Coral Casino shortly after his sixty-fifth birthday, Cooper-Clark understood what Margaret had been hinting at. “This was supposed to be my dream interview,” she said. “And before we started, he too said to me, ‘My memory isn’t what it used to be.’ He knew. And within five minutes it was absolutely clear something awful was happening. He could not cope.” Questions that would have been easy a year or two earlier (“How would you define tragedy?”) had him groping for words; he had to be prompted on names like Dickens; he lost the thread of his thoughts. “It was very disjointed. He was going all over the place. At the same time we kept pushing on, and he did give me some marvelous things. There was no tension or anxiety in him; it wasn’t making him agitated. Even though he found my questions difficult, he was quite serene actually. I was the one who was upset, not him. I had tears in my eyes a lot of the time; well, I didn’t want him to notice that, so I had my head down a lot, looking up at him, that kinda thing. After about half an hour, I knew this was it: I knew he’d never give another interview. Probably never write again.
“I was awfully upset. And it went on like that for about three hours; it was a long interview. I’d done enough of these by now to know this one was a disaster. But he wanted to keep going; when I’d suggest taking a break or meeting the next day, he did not want to stop. It was almost as if he had to do it then, because he’d gotten up for it that day, and every day he’d slip a little more. . . . Yes, there was a real compulsion to continue; I mean, he really was doing the best that he could. And it was horrible to watch, because he was such a dignified man. It’s like the musician going deaf, the painter going blind. I was thinking like crazy: I’m going to have to do something to save this; needless to say, it was a massive editing job. Near the end of the interview, I said to him—this was not exactly the truth, but I said—‘Sometimes writers like to, you know, blend some of the interview with things they’ve said in the past.’ I said, ‘Do you want to do that?’ He said, ‘Oh, sure, if I’ve said it, use it.’ Certainly I didn’t take anything whole cloth, but sometimes the odd sentence from something he’d written would fit. It was the only thing I could do for him, because I wasn’t going to have him stammering and stuttering all over the page; he was so dignified, and he had so much pride.
“And at the end of these three hours, I was so upset, I asked him, ‘Are you working on another book?’ And then I felt terrible. But I didn’t want to treat him as though he had no possibility left. And he didn’t react as though it were a painful question.” Millar answered with good humor, irony, and literal truth: “I’ll write another book, if I can.”
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. . . the whole current of his recollections ran back to old times, and what a crowd of emotions were wakened up in his breast . . . a poor houseless, wandering boy without a friend to help him, or a roof to shelter his head.
—Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Millar didn’t say much to people about his troubles. “I think he might not have said anything to anyone, if he didn’t have to,” guessed Ralph Sipper. Millar only told Bob Easton what was happening when Easton asked him to vet his latest manuscript, as Millar had done for twenty years. “ ‘I’d better not,’ he said in his customary unblinking fashion,” Easton wrote. “ ‘I’m losing my memory.’ . . . But he made no claim for sympathy, no protest against fate.” It was the same when Millar broke the news to him, Sipper said: “He was very reserved, stoical, unemotional about this terrible thing that was happening to him. He didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve.”
Sipper had already sensed that something was amiss. He’d agreed in late 1980 to edit a collection of autobiographical Macdonald pieces, Self-Portrait, to be published by Noel Young’s Capra Press. When Sipper asked Ken to clarify personal details in them, Millar couldn’t: he no longer remembered those things.
But that wasn’t why Millar brought up the subject. He wanted Sipper to deal with his correspondents, let them know Ken couldn’t answer letters anymore. What should he tell them, Sipper asked. “Use your good judgment,” Millar said.
It was a while before the writers’ lunch people even realized anything was wrong. They thought Millar was simply being his quiet self, only more so, until he started acting strangely. “After the meeting one day,” Bill Gault recalled, “he said, ‘Wait for me outside, will you?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ So I wait. And I wait, and I wait. Finally Ken comes out and he says, ‘What are you waiting for?’ ”
The Millars pulled together, once more a team. “I saw them once in the supermarket,” said Gayle Lynds, “and they were the most tender people to one another. She was half-blind and couldn’t get quite around, and he was losing his—sensibilities; and they were like one person. Together they were whole, and it was quite beautiful. There was a lot of tenderness and compassion between them, and respect. All the good things that can happen with a long marriage. When they got to the checkstand she basically told him what to do, and he paid while she talked to the checker. The bag kid helped ’em, and they were able to maneuver it. They had a lotta dignity.”
Collin Wilcox was also impressed by the Millars’ mutual affection when he saw them at the Coral Casino in early 1981. “I came away inspired, really,” he said, “because I’d never got the impression of them as a warm and loving couple. I’m not saying they weren’t, but they didn’t put those things on display. But now they had this very quiet way of being so supportive of each other.” Millar told Wilcox about an operation he was going to have in May to alleviate his concentration problems. “As I understand it,” Wilcox said, “they were to put a plastic tube from his brain down into his stomach, to drain off fluid. He described it all sort of academically; he seemed to think it was really interesting, that they’d perform an operation like that.”
Easton said, “It had something to do with spinal fluid and opening up the brainpan and taking pressure off the brain—oh, a very complex thing. Margaret of course knew all the details and was very up on those things. She elected to have that happen and hoped it would help. But it didn’t help. And that upset her tremendously.”
After the operation his doctors decided what Millar actually had was “premature senility,” or, as it was now starting to be called, Alzheimer’s disease. There wasn’t any treatment. Julian Symons visited Santa Barbara in 1981 and sat through a painful lunch with Millar, who seemed, Symons wrote, “a kind of smiling shell.” He didn’t think Millar knew who he was.
Ross Macdonald’s Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly into the Past was published at the end of 1981, with an afterword by Ralph Sipper and a foreword by Eudora Welty. Some reviewers complained the collection’s twenty-one pieces were repetitious and didn’t reveal enough, but others thought the book had permanent worth. Charles Champlin in the L
A Times Book Review said it gave “as perceptive, elegantly written and illuminating an analysis of the detective story, its history, technique and value, as can be found anywhere.” In the National Review, Terry Teachout called Self-Portrait “a valuable and fascinating addition to the output of one of this country’s most consistently undervalued literary artists.”
Margaret had a book out too, the novel Mermaid, written on her special equipment in four and a half months. When it was published, she was at work on another, Banshee. “Writing keeps me sane,” she told the LA Times’s Wayne Warga in early 1982, adding with a laugh, “or as sane as I am. I’m making no great claims.”
Warga’s Times piece publicly broke the news of Millar’s plight. The journalist saw the Millars at the Coral Casino, where they still went every day. As Millar sat placidly, Margaret told Warga of the semi-non sequiturs in which they now communicated. (She: “Have you noticed how much friskier the dogs are in the morning?” He: “Yes. Currier and Ives did some of their best painting as young men.”) Warga said later, “Her attitude was wonderful; it was, ‘I’m going to get through this.’ There was about her a sense of an absolute survivor. She just kept going, no matter what. She was obviously the strength in the marriage.” Maggie was being helped with Ken by a Brooks Institute photography student, who drove Millar to the writers’ lunch and took him for daily swims. “He was very gracious, that young man,” said Warga. “One thing that amazed me about Ken: here was a man in his late sixties who had the body of a forty-year-old. He was in such good physical condition. He went out there and he swam those laps and he swam those laps, until finally it got so that somebody had to get in the pool and stay with him; but he did it. And he had this incredible build. He wasn’t muscular or anything; just the most healthy-looking man I’ve ever seen.”
Margaret told Warga, “Here we are, two people who live by books. What has happened has taken ninety percent of our lives away. I keep reminding myself of what we have left. I can’t get out of it anyway. I’ve faced my own problem pretty well. I haven’t faced his well, at least not as well as I think I should. . . . I lose my temper and then I go on guilt trips. The trips aren’t as big as they used to be, but the temper remains the same.”
Years later Margaret described the “nutsy” sort of thing that made her lose patience: “I would try to get him to put on his shoes, to get him dressed. I’d say, ‘Okay, go and put on your shoes.’ I’d point to his feet, and grab his feet, and then the shoe. So one day he went in to put on his shoes, and he was gone a long, long time, and I began to get a little suspicious. I went in, and he had taken all of his shoes—he had a weakness for shoes, always bought the same kind, very inexpensive Hush Puppies, and he always bought them too big, he had to have lots of room—and he had tied knots in all of the shoelaces. I mean, navy knots! Oh, my. And there was just no way of dealing with that, except by getting the screaming meemies.”
After a while Margaret was sure Millar no longer knew who she was: “Hadn’t the faintest.” Bill Ruehlmann (one of many who wrote or called or visited when they learned of Millar’s condition) said, “Margaret told me of one conversation where she sat down at his bedside and asked him, ‘Who am I?’ and Ken looked at her and smiled and said, ‘The boss.’ Well, at once that’s marvelously clever and marvelously sad. And marvelously true: she had taken his life over.” Yet certain ingrained impulses remained, Margaret said: “Whenever a woman would enter a room, he would always get up; and he’d always say ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ It was instinctually part of his nature, to be kind and gentle. And it was extraordinary: I could start a line of poetry, and he could recite the rest.”
As Margaret wrote on her latest novel, Ken went through work motions too. One day he found a page of an old Archer short story typescript and scrawled random words on it: “and tumbled tumbled free air into brook broken broken Trembling.” He couldn’t read books anymore, but he still liked to handle them, moving volumes from one shelf to another, rearranging by size and color. “John Ball told me,” said Ray Browne, “Margaret told him she would much rather Ross were dead than that his whole mental life consist of putting blue books with blue books and red books with red books: a sad, sort of terrifying comment.” Margaret let him open the mail for a while, until he lost some checks and contracts. Other days he puttered in the yard. “Looking after an Alzheimer’s patient is very very difficult,” Margaret said, “because you never know what the hell they’re gonna do next.” One afternoon Millar wandered away from the house with one of the dogs. A policeman found them downtown and brought them home. Ken Millar didn’t seem to know where he was: he walked up to his wife and asked, “What is your name? And would you have a bed tonight where I could sleep?”
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“What hurts the most,” said Eudora Welty, “is that Ken knew what was happening to him, I mean he had to face that; ’cause he had a brilliant mind, and this just slowly came about. It started with not being able to remember things. I had some letters from him saying, ‘It scares me, my hands can’t write, what happened?’ And how he must have suffered with all of that, and all inside. There wasn’t any way to comfort him. He was unable to write eventually. I wrote to him anyway, and Margaret said he was glad to get my letters, that he’d put ’em in his shirt pocket. I don’t know.”
Welty, half a continent away, agonized over Millar’s fate. Reynolds Price said, “I know she felt very intense grief and deeply miserable from the time she first heard Ken would not be in touch anymore. Eudora found it very difficult to believe that he really had Alzheimer’s. I think her feeling was that the illness might be a kind of reaction to domestic unhappiness, some kind of depressive withdrawal. And her sense was that she was being prevented from getting through to him, that in some sense Margaret was kind of barring the door so that Eudora could not go out there and see Ken and at least satisfy her own mind that he really was irretrievable.”
“I wanted to go back and see him,” Welty said, “but people told me he wouldn’t know me or anything. One fellow I saw in New York, who’d been to Santa Barbara, said, ‘Oh, what’s the point, he didn’t even know who I was’—kind of a brush-off, you know? That hurt me; that kind of got me. Because, how do we know? There might have been one moment when Ken recognized or knew him that would have given Ken some pleasure.”
“She asked me if I thought she should go to see him,” said Price, who was teaching at Duke. “And I said, ‘Well, I don’t think you’ll ever be satisfied until you do.’ But she seemed sort of reluctant. Finally, whenever the Knoxville, Tennessee, World’s Fair was, Eudora and I went there on opening day to be on the Today show, and she was so deeply distressed about Ken, I just said, ‘Well, I’ll go out with you, if that’ll help.’ And Eudora and I made a sort of pact that we were going out together to see him. And then suddenly a little while later, in the middle of the semester, she called me and said, ‘There’s this opening for me to go out there.’ Some occasion had presented itself, and she felt that if she didn’t go right then, that she never could go. And I couldn’t get away from school, so she went out on her own.”
The occasion was the third annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, where Ross Macdonald would be given the Robert Kirsch Award for a distinguished body of work. Kirsch, an early champion of Macdonald’s fiction, had died in 1980; the two previous Kirsch Award recipients were Wallace Stegner and Wright Morris. Macdonald wouldn’t attend the November 19, 1982, ceremony in LA, but Margaret would. And, thanks to Ralph Sipper, so would Welty; Sipper arranged for her to spend the week of the Times event in Santa Barbara.
The seventy-three-year-old Welty came unaccompanied from Jackson, Mississippi, to Santa Barbara by plane, lugging her bag between terminals when she changed flights in Denver. “She paid her own way, stayed at the Miramar Hotel, had dinner with us at night,” said Sipper. “Her whole purpose during this four- or five-day visit was to just talk to Ken.”
“They were so sweet to me,” Welty said of Sipper and his wife. �
�I couldn’t have gone if Ralph and Carol hadn’t sort of sponsored me. I felt that I had Margaret’s permission to come out. They made it all possible, they met me and took me everywhere. You know, we felt the same way about Ken.”
Welty found Millar sadly disabled, Margaret at the end of her rope, and Maggie’s sister aiding Millar with tenderness. “He was helpless as far as things that your hands know what to do,” Welty said. “Didn’t very well handle a knife and fork, someone else had to cut his meat up. That disease, that’s the way it leaves you: without knowledge of how to do anything, button something. And Margaret’s sister was so sweet, I mean, she would just quietly do this. He would go swimming, and she’d help him with his clothes. The situation was easy, since they all knew each other so well, and she was a nurse.
“He could still swim. He remembered how to swim, and he had someone to go swimming with him every day in the pool there at the club. He swam well, and it did him good. When he got out of the pool, he seemed so much more alert, you know; he would say, ‘When did you come?’ to somebody, or ‘I’m glad to see you, I’m gonna eat lunch,’ or somethin’ definite. Then it would sort of trail off. He took care always to have a good physical condition, and he had a wonderful swimmer’s body; in his bathing suit, he just looked wonderful, right at the last. All of that, it did him no good.”
Welty sat through a “horrible” lunch at the Coral Casino, she said, as Maggie blurted things Welty found appalling. “Margaret said, ‘Well, of course I had to poison the dogs.’ They had three dogs when I was there earlier, two German shepherds and one little mongrel that Ken found on the beach and brought home, a real sweet little kind of female terrier. ‘I didn’t have any time left to attend to those dogs,’ she says, ‘so they’re all gone now.’ She tells this to Ken. You know: the loves of his heart. Whether it was true or not, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter whether it was true or not, it was just—telling him that: that she had to poison ’em. I don’t understand that, I mean she just—Punishing him all the time. She loved those dogs too. It was terribly difficult, the whole situation of course, just terrible. No telling what she did go through. She was probably at her wits’ end about everything and just flew out with that, I don’t know why. I couldn’t see into her mind, at all.