For Laughing Out Loud

by Ed McMahon

  By this time I was married to the former Pam Hurn, an extraordinary woman in so many different ways, and Michael came to die in our house. We turned one room into a hospital room and Claudia came out from New York to take care of her brother. Claudia was there for Michael every minute of his last few months, every minute. It was the most beautiful expression of love imaginable. She became his nurse, she took him to the hospital for chemo and radiation, she went with him to the nutritionist and made sure he ate only what he was supposed to, she administered morphine to kill the pain, she changed the electrodes attached to his back to diffuse pain when scheduled, she gave him his pills, and when necessary, she changed his diapers. At night she slept on the floor at the base of his bed in case he should need something.

  Linda was there as much as possible. She'd fly out for several days, fly back to see her children, then come right back. She hated leaving to go back because none of us knew what to expect, and she wanted to be there at the end. And Jeffrey was there whenever he could get away from work. It had been a long time since we had all been together in one place, and there was something comforting about that. I didn't know what to do. It's rare that I'm at a loss for the right words or the proper actions, but nothing in my life had ever prepared me for this.

  For a long time Michael had not been on good terms with his sisters. If he wasn't mad at Claudia, he was mad at Linda. There was no reason for it—they'd never fought—but he found reason to be angry with both of them. Even when Claudia was doing everything possible for him he would lash out at her. But in the last weeks, the kids fell back into their childhood patterns, when the girls had idolized their brother. Claudia and Linda competed to see who could please him the most. Linda would carefully fold his dinner napkins into triangles and Claudia would respond by bringing him an extra piece of chocolate, then Michael would grade them. He'd award them points for being attentive but deduct points for things like forgetting to bring a fork. Michael said he thought Linda had the edge because she was used to being a mother. It was heartwarming to see them end up as close as they had been as children, loving each other.

  Michael never stopping fighting. One afternoon we went out for lunch. By this point he had shriveled down to nothing, he was gaunt and had little energy, and without actually saying it, I implied how important it was that he enjoyed whatever time he had. And Michael responded, "Oh come on, Dad, it's not as bad as that."

  I left the next day for New York, then I was going to Washington to appear with a symphony orchestra and a chorus, reading two pieces at the dedication of the Korean War Memorial. I called Claudia from New York to ask about her brother. When she answered the phone, she started crying. She told us to come home as quickly as possible. While I was in New York I started planning Michael's funeral.

  We all gathered in the house. Alyce came from Philadelphia several times. She usually stayed in a nearby hotel, but when he started failing she stayed with us. Pam tried to make her as comfortable as possible. It was a strange situation, seeing Alyce with Pam, but so many years had passed since our divorce, and Alyce had also remarried, so although awkward, it wasn't difficult.

  Michael was in a coma and there was nothing anyone could do but wait. During the night we took turns staying in the room with him. About midnight, Linda and my stepson, Pam's son Lex, were in Michael's room and his breathing became difficult. We all gathered in his room and were with him when he died. We bowed our heads and said a prayer.

  Three or four hours later I did a car commercial. People might not understand that, but my family did. I needed to be busy, I needed to be occupied, I certainly wasn't going to be able to sleep, and I had made this commitment. All of the people involved had flown out from New York. This had been scheduled for months. Besides, I hoped that losing myself in work might make the terrible pain go away for a few seconds. I told the director, "I don't want people to know this, but I lost my son a few hours ago and anything we can do to make this go as fast as possible, I'd really appreciate." Sometimes you just keep going . . . We did it in one take, and then I went home to finish making the necessary arrangements.

  Just about the first phone call I got was from Johnny Carson. Johnny had lost his son Ricky, who was just a great, loving kid, in a car accident, so he knew exactly what I was going through. The words said at a time like this aren't really that important, but the emotional support is enormous. Steve Lawrence, who also had lost his son, called and we talked and it all helped. Once the phones started ringing, they didn't stop for days. We all tried to keep busy, keep moving.

  It seemed as if it had been just hours earlier that I had spoken at Michael's high school graduation and now I was speaking at his funeral. My hands were shaking but somehow I got through it. Alyce came back to the house with us, and I think she was as surprised as I was about how natural it all felt. When we came back from the memorial service Alyce and I and our three kids spent just a little time together in one of the bedrooms discussing some things that had to be discussed. I was lying on the bed, wearing a comfortable old pair of socks—they had big holes in them, as I've worn just about forever. And all of a sudden Alyce leaned over, grabbed one of the socks, and said, "I can't believe it. The same socks!"

  Never, never in my life have I so enjoyed the sound of laughter.

  We all wanted to memorialize Michael in some way that would help other people but be a place that said Michael in some permanent way. So, inscribed into a stone monument at the top of a hill at St. Jude's that overlooks the football field there is an etching of him with his name and the name of the facility, the Michael McMahon Memorial Sports Complex. The message on the plaque reads: "Michael Edward McMahon—April 12, 1951–July 28, 1995—ACCEPT GOD IN YOUR HEART AND HE WILL HELP GUIDE YOU IN THE GAME OF LIFE.

  I'm so proud of my children. Claudia is senior news producer at the Fox network, Linda and Peter Schmerge are the parents of three of my grandchildren, while Jeff, an executive at the National Football League, and his wife, Martha, are the parents of my fourth and youngest grandchild, Maggie McMahon.

  I wasn't there as often as I wanted to be when they were growing up, but I know that I did the best job I could. And sometimes, when I wonder how anyone ever finds the proper balance between raising a family and sustaining a career, I think back to one night in Ohio. The kids were young and I was working in summer stock; I was doing a musical on the Kenley circuit somewhere in Ohio. It was opening night and we had a full house, five thousand people. At the end of the show, as part of our contracts, the performers were required to meet the audience and sign autographs. After that we had the opening-night party.

  Alyce and the children were arriving by train late that night. As the train began pulling into the station about one o'clock in the morning, Claudia told her mother, "Don't worry if Dad isn't here. It's opening night and you know he has to sign autographs and go to the party. Somebody'll be here to pick us up and he'll be at the hotel . . ."

  Claudia was worried that her mother would be hurt if I wasn't there and was making all kinds of excuses for me. And when she finished, Alyce said matter-of-factly, "Your father will be waiting for us at the train station."

  Alyce knew me. When the train arrived I was the only person waiting on the platform. Always, I did my best to be there.

  8

  The beautiful starlets who appeared on The Tonight Show were rarely shy about showing off their charms. One night, when Eddie Murphy was a guest, a well-endowed young woman admitted that her figure had "opened a lot of doors for me."

  "Uh yeah," Johnny agreed, "I would think so."

  "I think that once you get in the door, though," she continued, "there are nine thousand other busty blonds who also got in the door."

  At that point Eddie Murphy interrupted to ask, "Where's that door at?"

  I'm very good at a lot of things, but being alone isn't one of them. I guess you might say that I'm only good at being alone when there are a lot of other people around. I had gotten married when I was tw
enty-two years old and had been married twenty-six years; I was almost fifty years old when Alyce and I separated and, for the first time in my adult life, I was single.

  I didn't know anything about dating. Fortunately, I was a fast learner. Dating, I discovered, was like riding a bicycle: you just had to keep everything in balance. Look, it wasn't very difficult for me to get dates. Instead of taking a girl dancing to Frank Sinatra's records as I'd once done, now I could take my dates to dinner with Frank and Barbara Sinatra. I also discovered an amazing fact about women: although I had aged almost thirty years since I'd last dated, most of the women with whom I was going out were still in their twenties!

  As with just about everything else in our lives, the fact that I was dating young girls became a topic of humor on the show. "Ed was a little late getting here tonight," Johnny would explain. "His date's baby-sitter didn't show up." Or, "You know, Ed was telling me just before the show about a new restaurant he'd taken his date to, and, uh, I have to admit, I was surprised. I didn't know Gerber's even had a restaurant."

  Uh-ooooooo!

  If there ever was a perfect time to be single, it was in Los Angeles in the 1970s. It was sort of the command post for the sexual revolution. People were always trying to fix me up with their friends or relatives, but I really preferred to meet people myself. I met a wide range of interesting women and encountered problems that in my wildest dreams I could never have anticipated. One lovely woman I was dating posed for Playboy, and during the shooting accidentally sat on an anthill. This was not a good thing. It was also not an area in which I had any expertise. Ask me about going down the embankment to retrieve toys, but don't ask me what to do when a naked woman sits on an anthill.

  There was no prohibition against dating people who appeared on The Tonight Show, and at times members of the staff did date guests. I wasn't really comfortable about doing it myself—until the night we had a lovely woman who had been an equestrian in the circus on the show. She was working as an actress at that time and had just made her first movie. As she moved down the couch closer to me I became more and more attracted to her. Two guests later she was sitting next to me, and I invited her to see my nightclub act later that evening. That was my first romance after my divorce. Both of us loved the circus, and although she was the first bareback rider I'd ever gone out with, I'm sure I wasn't the first clown she'd ever dated. Our relationship lasted several months, and she was the only guest on the show I ever asked out.

  I did not intend to remarry. I wasn't against it; I just never thought about it. Marriage seemed like something that was part of my past. I'd raised my family. In fact, Alyce and I were just legally separated, not divorced. And I kept thinking that way until I met Victoria Valentine in 1974, when I flew to Houston to host a party for Budweiser. She was a VIP hostess for National Airlines and met the plane when we landed. As we waited for my luggage we started talking. Looking back, if my luggage had been on time, my life would have been so different. Her name, Victoria Valentine, fascinated me; what a nice name. We discovered very quickly that her best friend was Scotty Sanders, then the wife of golfer Doug Sanders and one of the wonderful women of the world. I called Victoria the next day on the pretext that I needed help with travel arrangements and managed to get around to asking her out. Actually, "out" probably isn't accurate. I invited her to come to New Orleans, where I was doing my nightclub act at the Roosevelt Hotel.

  Scotty Sanders convinced her to go. We had our first real date after my performance, just Victoria and me and two hundred other people, including Al Hirt and Pete Fountain. After that we were on the phone every day. Four weeks later, on Valentine's Day, I told her, "You are the valentine of my life." A year later I proposed. I gave her an engagement ring and a little note that read, "Will you marry me a year from the day in a city to be announced?" You know, with my schedule I never knew where I was going to be. The night I gave her the ring we had dinner with John Wayne. As women do, she was showing it to everyone. Duke took one look at it, looked at me, then shook his head, and said, "Conservative, aren't you?"

  We were married in San Francisco by Father Ward on my fifty-third birthday, March 6, 1976. The party started that night and continued for several years. Like me, Victoria knew how to enjoy herself and we lived the Hollywood life. We went to all the parties, restaurants, and openings; wherever it was fashionable to be, that's where we would be, whether it was Swifty Lazar's Oscar night party, Chasen's, Ma Maison, or weekends at Frank and Barbara Sinatra's home in Palm Springs. It was easy to get caught up in that whirlwind and I did.

  When we were first married we built our dream house in Beverly Hills. This house was designed by my friend the great architect Carson Wright. It had four bedrooms, six bars, in which the only beer served was Budweiser, living rooms and dens, a formal dining room, a recreation room and media room, a custom-built two-hundred-bottle wine cooler with a separate temperature control for each rack, a brook stocked with beautiful Japanese koi, which ran right under the patio decking and surrounded the outdoor Jacuzzi.

  Now, I love planning surprises and I wanted to do something special for our anniversary—so I decided to have an intimate dinner with Victoria in the house. At that time the "house" had just been framed; it consisted of a foundation and a lot of two-by-fours nailed together. There were no walls, no doors, no windows, just a lot of two-by-fours. I had borrowed everything I needed from the great restaurant Ma Maison: a table with two chairs, dishes, silverware and crystal, the wine cooler, flowers—I'd even taken pictures off the walls of Ma Maison and hung them on the two-by-fours.

  When Victoria and I arrived she was stunned. We dined by candlelight—we had to because there was no electricity in the frame. As a portable radio played classical music in the background, Pepe, the legendary bartender from Chasen's, the creator of the world-famous flaming martini favored by W. C. Fields, served martinis and wine. My friend Patrick Terrier, owner of Ma Maison, served caviar and veal prepared on a Coleman stove. It was an incredibly romantic evening.

  The night was marred only by the occasional squeal of car brakes, as people driving by would glance over and see waiters in tuxedos serving dinner in the frame of this house, then stop and back up to get a better look.

  It was a wonderful house, but when we adopted Katherine Mary we needed a lot more space, so I bought a house that had been built by David O. Selznick, the legendary producer of Gone with the Wind, among many other classic movies. The house was four levels, eleven thousand square feet, and some of the great parties of Hollywood history had taken place there. It was thrilling for me to sit at the bar and realize that I was sitting right where W. C. Fields, Ronald Colman, and Errol Flynn had sat. Charlie Chaplin's house was directly across the street. It was a lifetime away from an apartment near the boardwalk in Atlantic City.

  For several years Victoria and I had a wonderful time together. We did everything possible to please each other. She dressed to please me, she made my life as comfortable as she knew how. And I did things that had never previously interested me. Victoria loved horseback riding, for example, so I bought her a horse. When she wanted me to learn how to ride I bought myself a beautiful black horse. Then I remembered—I didn't like riding horses. If God had wanted me to learn how to ride a horse He wouldn't have invented limousines. Maybe I got up on that horse once or twice, but I would always find some excuse not to ride. I was a lot better at making excuses for not riding than I ever was at riding.

  Victoria loved to ski so I took skiing lessons. We used to go to Sun Valley and I just fell in love with that place. I wasn't a very good skier, my legs weren't strong enough—I should have used that excuse for not riding. To me the best thing about skiing was that it was followed quickly by après-skiing. Eventually I figured out that if I didn't go up the mountain in the first place I didn't have to ski down the mountain to get to where I already was. So I gave my skis away and concentrated on perfecting my après-skiing style.

  It was a good marriage for a long tim
e, but we always had some problems. When we first got together, I explained to her, "The most important thing in my life are my friends and friends need nurturing. All you have in life is an accumulation of friends. I mean, you can have eighteen cars, but you can drive only one. You can have fifty pairs of shoes, but you can wear only one. But friends, you can have as many of those as you can handle." And during that marriage I don't think we nurtured some of my oldest friendships as much as we might have. I found myself seeing people I'd known and loved for many years less and less. Listen, I accepted it. It was my responsibility as much as hers.

  By far the most important thing to come out of our marriage was our little girl, Katherine Mary. For almost ten years we never even thought about having a child. It just wasn't part of our marriage. Victoria seemed very happy. And me? I already had four grown children and two grandchildren. To be honest, the prospect of starting all over again with a baby was not something that seemed appealing to me at all.

  After being me all those years, I was amazed how wrong I could be about myself.

  The whole thing started when my daughter Linda allowed Victoria and me to baby-sit for my eight-monthold granddaughter Alexandra for two weeks. Victoria and I picked up Alex in New York and brought her back to Beverly Hills. I'd long ago forgotten whatever I'd once known about taking care of a baby, but somehow we managed without any help. We did everything ourselves. We took her everywhere with us. I remember sitting on the floor in Aaron Spelling's wife's lovely gift shop changing Alex's diaper one night. We did such a good job that Linda let us do it a second time. That was all we needed; we fell so madly in love with Alex that whatever parental urges were stirring in both of us came right to the surface and we decided to try to adopt a child of our own.

  I wanted a little Irish Catholic girl, that was my dream, but the truth is we would have settled happily for any kind of baby. We just got lucky. We found an attorney in another city who made all the arrangements for us and then we waited. And we waited a little longer. We waited about a year. That was actually a good thing, because it allowed us to experience all the anticipation of a pregnancy. I think so many of the feelings that come with a natural birth are caused by the waiting. We told no one that we were doing this, not even Victoria's mother, because if we couldn't find a child we didn't want people to feel disappointed. And maybe we didn't want to jinx it.