Michael had family in Minneapolis, where my brother Brian and his wife and kids lived, so we'd often go there to see them too. Brian often referred to Michael as Mr. Big Big Big because of how he'd go to the local market and bring home HUGE porterhouse steaks for ten or fifteen people at dinner--a couple of hundred dollars just for the meat. His need to appear generous and effusive overrode any of my objections.
What was harder was what felt like a growing irrationality on Michael's part. We stopped going to after-meeting dinners with friends because I'd become so uncomfortable with his behavior. There'd be about ten of us at a table and when the sizable check came, Michael would grab it, plopping down his credit card, saying, "It's on me; I just got a residual." No he didn't. I was paying for that meal. He lied, even when he knew I knew the truth.
It didn't seem to bother him that people knew he lied. He seemed kind of proud of it. I once went with him to our little local branch of Union Bank, where he had an account, and the manager greeted him with a warm hug. He was cashing a check. It was made out to a fictitious name for $600. He told the pretty cashier, who also seemed to know him, that the payee had done some writing research for him but wasn't able to get to a bank; could they please cash it and Michael would get the money to him. She seemed to know the routine and didn't hesitate; he signed the phony name on the back, she handed him the cash. He passed a $100 bill to her as he pocketed the rest, saying, "Thanks for your help, honey." It all felt slippery but I wasn't clear it was illegal. A couple of years later I learned that this was called check kiting.
In 1998 at the Revlon/UCLA Breast Center, I was diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS, in my right breast. My DCIS was at zero stage, caught early through my regular mammogram. DCIS, the most common type of noninvasive breast cancer, occurs when the cells that line the milk ducts calcify, become cancerous, and overproliferate. I was having none of it--I was very much in denial and was determined to find some alternative to the surgery they were suggesting. I mean, it's stage zero! I figured if I didn't give it any credibility, I could get away with just being annoyed. However, my daughter Kate, then a student at Yale, was the research queen, and she determined I had no alternative but to proceed with the needle core biopsy the doctors recommended. I capitulated.
Michael, on the other hand, started flipping out. Michael was a breast man. He really valued my breasts. He was afraid that he was going to lose my breast, or that I might be misshapen, which would be calamitous for him. The doctors assured him that the object was to remove the disease but leave my breast intact. Which they did, but they couldn't get clean margins, so I had a second surgery. In total, they removed the equivalent of a medium-sized cupcake from my inner right breast.
During the course of this Michael became so panic-stricken that he scheduled an appointment with the doctor and insisted that if she would remove only the tiniest amount possible he would make a big donation to the hospital. Of course she removed as little as possible, as she would have even without his extravagant overture. I sent ten thousand dollars to UCLA to fulfill his promise, but I was resentful and agitated by his behavior. I had been in touch with my old friend Suzanne Benoit all through this and she had to remind me, "You are not your breasts." I had lost sight of my value; my husband was measuring me by my bra cup.
I got another movie, Wednesday Woman, being shot in Vancouver, and I was enormously grateful for a break from that cancer scene. Luckily, I needed neither chemo nor radiation, so I was free to go film in Canada. Michael now came to all of my location jobs, traveling to Toronto, Vancouver, Arizona twice, and North Carolina twice, and he was having growing discomfort with scenes that called for me to be physical with another man in any way. Fortunately, most of the movies were simple stories where romance never figured. However, doing Holy Joe, in North Carolina about six months before, he'd started grinding me about simply hugging John Ritter, who played my pastor-husband, in a benign scene that called for me to hug him.
Well, Wednesday Woman presented more of a challenge for him, because in it I was married to John Heard and having a heated affair with Peter Coyote. Michael had ideas. He's say, "Instead of going into this big clinch with Coyote, and kissing him, have them put the camera at this angle and then just hug him and they won't see the difference. You're the star; you can make them do this." This was making me crazy. He had no business butting into my work. This kind of interference, coming from someone who supposedly understood show business, was ridiculous and astoundingly immature. I felt invaded, disrespected, and bullied. I made none of the adjustments he wanted, which infuriated him.
I didn't always know what to expect from him. One day I came home from work and he was nowhere to be found. Hours later he showed up, dragging himself in, acting dopey and looking terribly sunburned. He had gone out to write in the park and had fallen asleep. He'd written nothing, but he never did, no matter how much "work" he seemed to bring with him.
Michael had a walking, brooding resentment against me even when I had harmless scenes with the men; I could feel the tension even on days I wasn't working. We were in Frazier Park one afternoon and he told me he was thinking of writing a movie about lap dancing. "I think I'd better go try out some lap dances just to see what it's about. Don't you think? I have to do my research. What do you think about that?"
So this threat was quid pro quo? He was equating his fucking around with my doing my job? He was threatening me with this? I was terribly upset by the inference and the verbal aggression. He might be able to receive a lap dance, but I knew he wasn't capable of writing anything anymore.
Back home, a good friend in the program who'd been acting as sponsor to Michael for a while, told me that his downhill slide began during my cancer scare and picked up speed. I had to admit, I'd known it had started years before. When Michael first moved into my house, along with his clothes came a shallow cardboard box full of about twenty different yellow and clear pill bottles. I looked at them and found many of the labels torn half off. I immediately suspected he was trying to hide the drugs' names but no ... the drug was clearly visible. They were mainly painkillers and tranquilizers, Roxiprin, which seemed to be his favorite, Ativan, Percocet, Klonopin, Xanax, and others. The pharmacy, doctor, and patient names were missing, which I much later learned was a method used when playing the pharmacies by getting prescriptions under fake names or fake doctors, both of which he was doing. I had asked what all the pills were for and he said, "Oh ... I get migraines ... from the accident," referring to a bad collision he'd had some years before.
Pretending was easier than questioning, because what would I do with the answers? I didn't want to know what was going on.
Then came the behavior that was difficult to ignore. We'd go to parties, and Michael rarely let me out of his sight. Or he'd disappear and later on I'd find him passed out in a bedroom. Once, during an event appearance in Daytona Beach, I found him all alone down by the ocean, vomiting into a towel, fighting withdrawal.
Elizabeth and I tried to monitor Michael when we were home because he couldn't tell when he'd had too much. Then Mollie and Peter were telling me stories about what happened when Michael had picked them up at school. Coming home, he would stop at an intersection, forget what he was doing, and let the car slowly roll into oncoming traffic while they screamed in terror from the backseat. That was the end of that. I never let him drive them again.
I started feeling crazy. I was trying to manage him and it made me nuts. I'd hear the rattle of pills in my sleep and be up like a shot to find him with pills stuck on his mouth or chasing them through the air, his fingers plucking at nothing. His behavior became so erratic and unmanageable that I began attending 12-step meetings meant for the friends and relatives of alcoholics. I needed counsel and direction. While I was there I bumped into a man who knew Michael very early in his sobriety and I filled him in about what was going on. He told me, "You need to get him out of your house."
I was looking for permission. I was so grateful to
be told what to do because I was at a loss.
As soon as I got home, I started calling around trying to find a bed at a rehab center. The closest one I could find that also had a medical facility was the Rehabilitation Center at Scripps Memorial Hospital Encinitas. But when I told Michael he had to go there, he refused.
I told him I didn't care where he went; he just had to pack up and leave. Immediately.
Thank goodness the drugs had rendered Michael malleable as opposed to belligerent. But drugged or not, he chose the high life; for the next week, Michael lived in a $600-a-night room at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica.
One morning he called me and said he was in trouble; he was having difficulty standing.
"Are you ready?" I asked him. "I'll only come to take you to rehab now."
He said okay and I told him to be ready downstairs; I called and made arrangements at Scripps, got to Shutters and somehow wrestled him into my car, and we made the two-hour drive to Encinitas, a town near San Diego. He kept passing out on the drive. A couple of times, I thought he was dead.
When I came home from dropping Michael off, Elizabeth sat me down and said there were things she'd been afraid to tell me for some time. She said that Michael's behavior had been getting more bizarre over the years and he'd approached her frequently, quite possibly while he was drugged, and the instances had been hair-raising: Michael offering her money in exchange for oral sex; Michael quietly asking her to show him her breasts for money, often when I was right there in the room or on the phone; Michael coming downstairs, high and waving a loaded handgun; offering the cleaning lady money to find the jar of Roxoprin he'd hidden but then could not find. Elizabeth told me that she'd kept all this secret because she worried the information would be devastating to me. She was also afraid I might not believe her and she'd lose her job. She was feeling lost and abandoned as well.
The weight of this new information, combined with having denied all that I knew for so long, was crippling.
He called that night, sounding steadier, but I could hardly speak to him. He said, "You know why I started using, don't you? That fucking prenuptial agreement." What?
I asked him, "Are you going to stay in rehab?"
"If I stay, are you going to be there when I come back?"
I said, "No."
He said, "I'm outta here." He hung up, called a limo company, and got a ride back up from San Diego.
I called my lawyer.
Chapter 14
My mother, Broad Beach, Malibu.
Now I was moving Michael out of my life. I sat on the sofa in my living room and just howled with grief. What was I doing with myself? I was fifty-three and even with all I had been through it appeared that I'd learned nothing. I was in the same place as with David, just over a decade ago, except this time the divorce was going to be twice as expensive. I had earned a lot of money during the marriage but so much had been spent. The legal fees were higher; Michael was going to get $11,000 a month in support, plus, because I was more well known, he was getting a huge chunk of cash for something called "personal good will," a misnomer if ever there was one.
In divorcing Michael I felt nothing but relief. However, it was very difficult for Peter and Mollie, who'd had none of the issues with Michael that I did and consequently, although they'd been aware of some bad behavior, in no way did it color their affection and regard for him. All they knew was that this vibrant, exciting man was gone from their lives, it was my fault, and I never asked how they felt about it but I could tell they were very angry with me. I felt like I was in a tough position. Although I knew they loved him, I felt if they were going to understand why I'd made him leave, I'd have to give them the litany of behaviors that made his staying untenable. Which would be crushing to them. So I said nothing. I had such a huge ax to grind, I selfishly could only take in feelings that matched mine; I had no room for their missing him.
Right around this time I went to my regular Thursday-morning women's meeting to mark my anniversary of being sober for ten years. I stood up and started weeping, haltingly revealing where I was on that day. With ten years I'd have hoped to have more solutions, more serenity in my life, but I had none. At the end of the meeting, a friend came up and suggested that I might benefit from counseling and gave me the names of three therapists. She said, "Make an appointment with each of these therapists. Tell your story to each one and see who you respond to. Then pick one and start going." And she said, "Michael is not the wound; he is only the sword in the wound," the meaning of which eluded me for some time but I understand it today.
For the first time in the history of my sobriety, I did exactly as I was directed because I had no solutions. There was something about one of the therapists--Sarah--who made me feel like she really listened to me. I had thought my pain was so huge I wouldn't find someone to help me contain it all. I felt Sarah could do that. I've been seeing her ever since.
While I was fumbling my way to stability through divorce and therapy, Whitney was in the middle of a horrible couple of years. It began with a simple bit of clumsiness and went downhill from there. In 2001, she and Allan were at their Malibu home working when my mother tripped outside of her office and couldn't get up. Allan found her lying flat on the ground, immobilized by what turned out to be a broken right ankle and torn ligaments in the left. She spent nine months in a wheelchair, sleeping in a hospital bed in their living room, with Allan doing his best to nurse her. Whitney had always been a tough woman, but I think this was when she started to soften a bit and really learned to appreciate Allan and the loving way he tended to her.
When 2002 rolled around, we wanted to help my mother put that painful year behind her, so Dick, Allan, my mother, and I all met at The Lobster in Santa Monica on February 20, 2002, to celebrate her seventy-sixth birthday. Over coffee, she mentioned that she'd been diagnosed with esophageal cancer. She talked about it so lightly as in, "I don't think it will be a big thing. I'll have to do this and have treatment for that ..." But it got my attention enough that I went home and, after I called all the kids, I did a Google search. There are two kinds of esophageal cancer and hers, squamous cell carcinoma, was the more serious variety. A bit later, Kate called me; she'd found some more technical online medical sites and they all indicated that few people with squamous cell esophageal cancer survive beyond two years.
For the next several months, Whitney and Allan crisscrossed the country--to the Mayo Clinic, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, anywhere they could think of--looking for clinical trials my mother might participate in. When they were in Los Angeles I would drive her to the doctor's appointments, which afforded us some time together. These were usually quiet, nonchatty drives, punctuated with her moans of discomfort. Whitney's health began to deteriorate, but she was not without her humor. Once when they were at Brigham and Williams hospital in Boston, a nurse said to a thin, white-haired Whitney, "And this is your son?" and pointed at my lean, bearded, broad-shouldered stepfather, who had a couple of years on her. Allan froze, terrified that Whitney would be insulted. But instead my mother just burst out laughing. There was always relief when Whitney laughed.
There weren't a lot of bright spots, though. Mostly she was in pain, with difficulty swallowing due to the tumor in her esophagus. She had to spend several nights at Cedar-Sinai Hospital and Allan, Brian, and I took turns sleeping on a cot by her bedside. For the first time in years my mother and I had some quiet time together. I was still tentative around her, unsure of my moves, so I decided to just get her talking; ask her anything. We talked about her childhood and when she started acting; she was quite animated and warmed to the topic, but she tired quickly and would just get quiet.
She said that at times it felt like she was getting ready to let go, even though this was only three months after she'd been diagnosed. She talked about acceptance. She said that stimuli seemed to come from a very narrow source and she was trying not to look outside that source. And that is how I experienced her: a very slow shutting down, s
eemingly lost to interaction for long stretches at a time. Then she'd give a start, awakening to having been awake but gone--she was so often disoriented.
Allan told me his worst moment was telling Whitney he was planning on hiring hospice care for her because that was when she finally grasped that she wasn't going to get better. Allan did his best to persuade her that the care workers would only be there so they could help him out, but she didn't believe him.
Kate, Ted, and his wife, Cheryl, were at the Vineyard with Allan many times over my mother's last weeks. Kate had told me of one afternoon trying to change the bed linens with Allan while Whitney was still in the bed. She was floating in and out of sleep and was connected to humming medical equipment, so she was no help, obviously. Kate peeled back blankets, and Allan gave a tug on a sheet and fell backward, stepping on the cord of Whitney's oxygen apparatus. The room sank to immediate silence and Kate and Allan looked at each other in shock, wide-eyed, aghast. Kate gasped, "You pulled the plug!" And they fell about laughing so hard, desperate to dispel the weight of the moment as they hastened to plug the machine in again. I love my family so much for their black, macabre humor. Nothing and no one is too precious to preclude being a target, particularly when the need to laugh is great, even if it's at my dying mother.
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