I’m excited about producing my next musical. Tommy Tune once told me that music already on the planet, however wonderful, is not as exciting to present as new music. One takes a big financial risk to do an original musical these days, but it’s well worth it in my opinion.
*
Judy was responsible for my falling in love with entertainment, but there was one particular film responsible for my wanting to help a show. It was seeing a black-and-white movie released in 1941, Sullivan’s Travels, directed by one of our greatest film directors, Preston Sturges, and starring the hugely underrated Veronica Lake and Joel McCrea as Sullivan. I saw it in the late seventies; I was forty-two and just starting to produce.
In the movie Sullivan is a successful director of pointless comedies. He enjoys all the perks of the Hollywood rich: wine, women, and song. But he isn’t happy. He thinks his work lacks social relevance. Sadly, he’s not sure what that is. So he sets out to find it. He puts on tramp’s clothing, stows a little mad money in his shoe, and sets off on the railroads. First night out, he’s relieved of his shoes, and he legitimately joins the downtrodden poor. His life steadily deteriorates as the train carries him across the United States until one day he’s arrested and put on a chain gang in some hellish swamp in Georgia. The prisoners are taken for a little R&R on Saturday night to a black church, where a film is shown after the sermon. (Sturges’s blatant social statement here: Poor blacks are the only ones willing to give charity to those beneath them.) The movie screen is finally drawn down, and up comes a cartoon. Sullivan looks around and everyone, even he in his misery, is laughing hysterically. Sullivan now learns that his mindless comedies are a good thing. Sullivan understands that in a life where shit happens, making people laugh is a noble pursuit. Sullivan’s last line is one of my all-time favorites: “Boy, there’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. That’s all some people have in this cockeyed caravan.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
My Last Marriage
I fell deeply in love with Dave Grusin. The feelings I had for him helped me understand that I had never been in love before. I met him after Whorehouse was up and running. From my offices at Universal in New York City, I oversaw the daily business of the musical and the subsequent touring companies. In the process I got to know many of the execs on the West Coast. One of them gave me some material that had never gone forward as a film to evaluate as a book for a potential Broadway musical. I thought the writing was good, the story viable, and I set about finding a composer, somebody new and interesting.
I suddenly thought of this successful and immensely talented pianist, orchestrator, arranger, and composer of many celebrated film scores who had never worked on Broadway. I loved Grusin’s work. He was an original and his work was amazing. I called him and he told me immediately he had no interest in doing theater. He was enjoying a lot of recognition for his superb work in recordings, personal appearances, and, of course, film, and that’s where he wished to remain. He made it clear, however, that he was interested in me, and said he wanted to meet me.
David called me on his next visit to New York. I made a date with him thinking it would be my opportunity to talk him into composing this show for the studio, in spite of the fact that he had definitively rejected the idea. Either I wasn’t listening, or it was again a case of refusing to take no for an answer too easily.
Once we met, I found him very appealing. He appeared to have a soft-spoken vulnerability that made you want to take care of him. There was no question that I wanted to see him again—and again—and this no longer had anything to do with Universal.
Our relationship developed quickly. Deepened even faster, and in the fall of 1979 we became inseparable. I loved climbing into bed with this man. Didn’t want to get out of it. He was the most experienced lover I’d ever had. It was great. We were relishing each other’s company. As I got to know his friends, I discovered there were lots of other women who found him appealing and they also wanted to take care of him. They were the wives of his friends. Happily this was all platonic. I liked his friends. They were talented and recognized. Most were big-time Hollywood players whose work I admired, and it impressed me that they admired him. He introduced me to a starry Hollywood scene, different from my own.
David courted me on both coasts, generously and charmingly, and I was enjoying him immensely. He moved into my apartment on Fifth Avenue after two months, and then, after only five months, he asked me to marry him. I was extremely flattered, but I thought it was too soon. Although I liked what I knew, I didn’t yet know nearly enough. We both carried baggage. He would be my third. I would be his fourth. I hadn’t yet met his family. I already knew from experience that one learned a lot from families.
I resisted his proposal; I told him that we needed more time together, but he insisted that he didn’t want a long engagement. He threatened to walk if I didn’t marry him right away. An amber warning light started to flash. Though I saw it, I looked away from it in spite of a voice inside me crying out, trying hard to get my attention. But I didn’t want to lose him. I thought about my children, and how wonderful it would be for them to have another father figure better than their own. But had I taken the time to learn what I needed to know about his past as a father, I would have run for the hills!
I put the wedding together quickly, within a matter of weeks. We married on February 23, 1980, in Aspen, in a beautiful home on the famous ski mountain looming over the town. Aspen was a place we both enjoyed. David was born in Colorado, and as a young musician had picked up gigs playing piano in the resort when it wasn’t much more than a frontier town. He’d bought some real estate back then on the residential mountain where we would build a second home together—more than merely a vacation home, although it would never replace New York.
I’d been skiing in Aspen for more than ten years at that point and I owned a little condo. By 1980 the town had grown into a world-class ski resort with lavish megahomes, not unlike the one we rented for our wedding day and night. And now, at four in the afternoon on our wedding day, the interior of the gorgeous chalet was filled with glamorous people, many of whom had flown in from both coasts and some who had skied in after a beautiful day on the slopes.
The ceremony took place in front of the big stone fireplace with the perfect log fire, and against a backdrop of gently falling, perfect snow. It was as if a set decorator had done his best work for Town & Country magazine. My children were there, of course, ten and eleven at the time. I recall how beautiful Jenny looked in her little red and white polka-dot gown, her hair tied up with red ribbons. They were excited and so sweet to everyone. Two of David’s three children did not come, and although I found that strange, he convinced me it meant nothing and I would meet them later. I let it go in spite of knowing that his youngest lived only a few short blocks away. There was nothing to do about it in the eleventh hour. I took the vows from the local magistrate, and I gave this man my heart.
In the first room we inhabited together as man and wife, there were two doors. One was the entrance; the other was a closet. If you know what a movie prop closet is, you know that when one opens it, suddenly all its overstuffed contents come exploding out. It’s generally good for a laugh. Well, the closet in our room was stuffed to the max with skeletons, and when I cracked the door they all tumbled onto the floor, making a huge and frightening pile of horror stories. I started picking through the bones and learned things that were no laughing matter at all. I would describe my process as a due diligence that I should have done before we married. My education about my new husband began on our honeymoon.
As the first few months wore on, I discovered the problems were even more severe than I first suspected. They had accrued over many years. And I, who had always wanted a big extended family, thought that I could solve them all. That, then, was the beginning of the end of the marriage. How did my new husband react to my reaching out? Badly! I believe the guilt was too much for him to handle. I’d opened up a can of worms.
No longer my hero, he seemed embarrassed and angry by what I had unraveled, and the whole gestalt of ugly behaviors that went with his personality were manifest. He became silent and morose, a very unhappy man. Nevertheless I continued to dig in with energy and enthusiasm because I was persuaded that love and affection for his family coupled with treatment would make a difference. I will not discuss the nature of the problems because it will only cause more pain to some people about whom I once cared deeply, and a few of whom I still do. It is enough to say that what I saw broke my heart and I cried a river.
The more involved I got, the more it took a toll on me. I became clinically depressed. I couldn’t function. And the more depressed I grew, the farther away my husband drew. While I was making a difference for his family, I was wrecking everything for us. As things got better outside our apartment, they fell apart within. I am totally to blame for this, I told myself. Finally, I no longer knew how to make David happy. Everything I did was wrong. Look at all the good work I’m doing, I told myself, but it had the reverse effect. I faulted myself for the wreck the marriage had become, and as I continued along that path, I lost all my confidence and self-esteem until I was nothing but a shadow of the woman I had once been. At the very bottom of my ride into despair, I became a suicidal codependent.
He didn’t exactly tell me he was leaving. I found out when I went to the airport, uninvited, to pick him up and watched him come off the plane, arm in arm with his new lover.
Looking in the rearview mirror, I realize how utterly stupid I was. I managed to do the same dumb thing I’d already done too many times: taking an action without being informed. I was careless with my father when I signed over my mother’s estate, and again with my second husband when I signed fraudulent tax returns. Marrying this time was no different except for the size of the consequences.
There was never any excuse in my case for not being informed. Ever. And yet I married a man without knowing nearly enough about him. How stupid is stupid? You don’t need reminding, but I need to remind myself day in and day out of Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The results of my earlier mistakes were grisly enough, but this last one was devastating. This dumb mistake nearly cost me my life.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Pieces
I didn’t wake up one morning and decide David was a first-class prick, but that’s where I ended up. And it didn’t take picking through the bones of all the skeletons in his closet to convince me. It was how I found him—an angry, disconsolate man. I think he looked in the mirror and didn’t like what he saw. He was sometimes vocal about it. Or he was quiet and despairing. There was little cheer in his life. There had been little cheer in the home he came from. Doesn’t everything finally go back to one’s parents?
One day I heard the twisted tale of his childhood. No need to go into it, nor could I if I wanted to. I can only report what I was told by David, which is that his mother had an affair with another man while married to his father. They did not divorce; they simply moved to different floors in the house and never spoke to each other again. For as long as the boys remained at home, David and his brother, Don, carried messages between them. That’s enough to make any child angry. It put both young men in the position of having to choose. From the few conversations that went down between David and me about his parents, it was clear to me whom he chose. He spoke of his father, never his mother.
One of David’s favorite things to do was to go trout fishing. He loved to fish. I often thought that if he could have made a living from trout instead of from music, he would have done it. As a kid he had often fished with his father, and from time to time he would reminisce. Those were happy times. He associated no happy times with his mother. During the five years we were married, as we stood in various streams, I often thought he was there to keep that happy time in his life alive.
I also thought he had left home not liking women. This is my amateur analysis, and I told him what I thought several times over a period of three years as the marriage was disintegrating. He tried to refute it, alluding to the fact that he’d dealt with this in therapy before we even met. Well, doesn’t that mean someone might have mentioned the problem before me—like one of his three former wives, or perhaps all of them? I felt as though he didn’t like me from the day we married.
*
Not long after we wed, TBLWIT started to wind down. I had been making a fortune during its run. With multiple companies, thousands of dollars a week became tens of thousands a week. And then it was over. Suddenly I was earning nothing. The next show I produced was a flop. (No failures on Broadway, we call them flops.) My marriage did not respond well to my change of status. David grew silent. However, I saw an opportunity to try something I’d wanted to do for a while: I always thought I could write, and this was my chance.
It’s uncanny how smart the universe is. A little voice had been nagging at me for a long time to learn more about addiction. Somehow I knew I hadn’t yet learned enough about this awful disease. Indeed, what I’d gone through with Judy, with Liza, and more recently on Whorehouse made me want to know more. Given that I’d decided to write, I was looking around for a subject, and I thought addiction meaty material. I asked a rehab in Aspen if they would allow me to audit sessions there, and the manager of the clinic, after canvassing the patients, said I could sit in as long as I was mute. After the first two twenty-eight-day sessions, I was, however, allowed to ask questions. What an eye-opener! I totally recognized my dismal marriage in those sessions.
I’d started early in our marriage to believe that my husband was an alcoholic. It was his behavior that got me started. It wasn’t that he drank so much, and it wasn’t that he was ever drunk. He was functioning at a very high level. I’m talking about a man who received Grammy Awards and countless nominations for his wonderful work during the time we were married.
There was a time, he told me, when he’d smoked four to five packs of cigarettes a day. He was a workaholic. He had interchangeable addictions. When we dined out he liked to drink. Nothing unusual about that, except that I felt that he couldn’t enjoy the meal without a few drinks, some wine, and a good brandy after. He asked me if I thought he was an alcoholic, and I told him that I didn’t think so, that I thought he simply enjoyed drinking socially. I’ve since concluded that was denial on my part, plus I didn’t want to offend him. I had yet to learn that alcoholism is not a matter of how much liquid fire one pours down his or her gullet; it’s a matter of how much one depends on it in order to get through work, or the day, dinner, or just life in general. I believe he had dependence issues. And actually, in retrospect, I don’t think that anybody asks the question “Am I?” unless they already know the answer.
*
As I listened to the patients in rehab week after week, they were describing conduct that seemed to define my husband. They discussed, and their counselor discussed, a whole gestalt of alcoholic behaviors that destroy: depression, impatience, anger, rage, narcissism, control, and manipulation. These patients epitomized such behavior, and I immediately concluded I was living with someone exactly like them. I was living with a man I felt I couldn’t make happy no matter what I did, who couldn’t be happy no matter what he did. He often came home in a quiet controlled rage. The studio was too hot or too cold; the engineer wasn’t any good; the director was demanding; the producer was stupid. He didn’t need an excuse to be unhappy. His face would turn into a mask of anger, and he wouldn’t talk. We had silent dinners in which I became depressed, and that angered him even more. We went to bed angry, and I sensed he knew I was silently crying.
Perhaps he thought I was upset about my career, but the truth is that I was far less upset about it than he. I worried and wondered about restoring it in order to make him happy, but I had no solution, and in my state of mind at that moment in time, I could not have found one.
On top of this I was ministering to his children with
their problems. I think it was appalling and embarrassing to him, never mind depressing the hell out of me. I was convinced he hated me for helping them and hated that they needed help. As if it was all a reflection on him. I fell apart. How could he do this to me? I blamed him, and that made me feel worse. I didn’t yet know I was asking the wrong question. The right question was, How did I allow this to happen?
I couldn’t seem to do anything right. And the more he seemed to hate me, the more insecure I became, until I was but a pale, needy, helpless resemblance of me. I bought his favorite foods, but that didn’t matter because I couldn’t cook. I made engagements with wonderful people, but he never felt comfortable with them. Whatever I took him to see in theater, he didn’t like. I couldn’t do anything to please him no matter how I tried. Like air from a rubber tube with a hole in it, confidence seeped out of me every day until it was gone. My self-esteem vanished. I looked in the mirror and was disgusted by the person staring back at me. If I couldn’t love her, who could? Nobody, and never again! That was my answer.
This once strong, independent, tough, and intelligent person now felt gone. Sometimes I would curl up on the floor in a corner of the living room and wonder what would happen if I jumped out of the eighteenth-floor apartment window. Would I die from a coronary occlusion on the way down? Or would it take hitting the ground to kill me? I was suicidal. Tough, take-no-shit-from-anyone me!
No matter! I didn’t have the courage to jump. My two beautiful children depended on me. I had to continue to function, but all I could do all day was cry. And that’s what I did—spent all day crying. I didn’t have time to write. I knew I was having a nervous breakdown; that I was useless to myself and that I needed help. But I was not yet ready to admit any of that out loud. I couldn’t do it while he was still in the house, and oddly enough I felt I had to maintain a false front for his children, who called often from LA, Minnesota, and Aspen. I felt they depended on me emotionally.
Judy & Liza & Robert & Freddie & David & Sue & Me... Page 24