West of Eden

by Jean Stein

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  ED MOSES: Jane hated her mother. She didn’t trust her and would treat her badly, say bad things, and not pay any attention to her. She’d just walk away from her. When Jane got weird and said, “I’d like to kill her,” the mother would get scared and run away from the house. I think Jane didn’t really want to kill her. She was just mad enough to say it, not do it.

  One day, the mother set it up for us to see the horses out at the Garlands’ ranch. Jane got some carrots and she was feeding them to the horses. Then she stuck a carrot right up in the mouth of this one horse, Sweet Marie. The horse is chomping down on it and out of the blue Jane says, “Hey, that’s not a carrot.” Just casually like that, and nothing more. Finally she let out this yell—the horse had got ahold of her thumb and had bitten it all the way down to the core. She tried to pull out her hand, but not too hard, and then I yelled out and socked the horse alongside her head and she let go. She thought her thumb was a carrot and she was trying to snap that fucking carrot in half. I don’t know shit about horses, I’m scared of them, but I whacked this horse on the side of her head the way I saw Gregory Peck do in Duel in the Sun with Jennifer Jones. That was a wild movie, a great movie. Anyway I got that fucker outta there and it was just sort of hanging by a few threads. Her thumb was all torn up. The horse made these big indentations that broke the skin right down and it bled like crazy. I mean, oh my god.

  Jane came to at that kind of funny moment, which is interesting—“That’s not a carrot.” I wrapped handkerchiefs around it and took her back to the hospital at UCLA. She’s lucky she didn’t lose her thumb. Her response to this horrendous thing that had happened was minimal. There wasn’t a sound out of her the whole time. Nothing.

  About the time of this incident, she started grabbing me on the inside of my thigh and I’d say, “Holy shit. What am I going to do now? Can’t we just be friends?” No. She was a nut. She was obsessed and she was following me around and doing stuff all the time—playing with herself while we were riding in the car. She had sexual fantasies, was always hinting around, and she’d take your hand while you were driving and put it on her leg and take her knees and go back and forth. But it was not spastic, but, you know, driven. Askew. She was definitely askew.

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  WALTER HOPPS: When somebody dropped out, they’d try out a new person with her. One poor guy came out to the house and he was just a little too sure of himself. You know what I mean? Just a little too tight, and she could pick that up in an instant. All of a sudden she said, “The rats! The rats! The rats are coming! They’re gonna get us!” She jumped up on the piano bench in her goddamned high-heeled shoes, went right up on top of the closed baby grand and pulled up her skirt and sort of danced around saying, “The rats! The rats!” So this poor slob jumped up and said, “I’ll get ’em! I’ll get ’em! I’ll drive ’em away!” Jane suddenly stopped and said something like, “You fuckhead! There are no rats!” The guy just froze, and I thought, He’s finished. You can’t play into their games. When she had some crazy notion like, “We mustn’t sit too close to those windows. The waves will get us,” or something, you’d have to say, “They won’t get us, Jane. The waves are gonna stay out there where they are.” You don’t play into people’s games like that or even their hallucinations. You reassure them. The whole point is that you’re supposed to represent reality the best you can. So this guy was reported and we never saw him again. I think, sad to say, I was the one who reported him, because Jane just wasn’t gonna relate to this guy. I reported to Jane’s regular doctor. Judd Marmor was in the background overseeing the whole case.

  I liked Jane. I actually cared about her. I think the relationship I had with her was like a cousin or something. The person she fell for was Ed Moses. He’s what used to be called a dog. Ed was a good-looking guy in a curious kind of way. He looked like a devil; he always had a devilish smile. His hair wasn’t gray then, he had dark, blackish, wavy hair. He had a way of putting his lower lip out at times. Ed used to be a real sporty dresser—most of us Southern Californian guys were.

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  ED MOSES: Jane sort of fixated on me, but I’m sure she fixated on Walter, too, because that was what she needed. There was a real heavy physical thing about her that always absolutely terrified me.

  And then Judd Marmor dropped out of the picture. He suddenly realized it was a little too sticky. Marmor said, “I’m going to give somebody else this case. I’m overbooked right now and I can’t really give it the kind of attention that it needs and besides she’s a schizophrenic and they’re very difficult.” Judd couldn’t deal with her. He would talk to her and there was no connection made. He was this rationalist who really didn’t know how to deal with an insane person. Sometimes I would go to his sessions with her. There would be some trauma and he’d say to come over and we’d talk about it. I’d stand on the side and he would talk down to Jane, like she was a little child. She hated him—oh yes, she really didn’t like him at all. I think Judd tried very hard but he wasn’t the psychiatrist for her situation. I think he realized that and dropped out. My psychologist, Milton Wexler, knew how to deal with schizophrenics because he wasn’t afraid of them. Wexler always said that they were the most difficult people to work with, but he had a certain kind of compassion for them so he did better than most. Milton said he couldn’t work with somebody unless he really liked them. I think he would have done better with Jane.

  Later on in the seventies I would see Marmor around. Once I said, “Judd, don’t you remember me?” He said, “I do, but I’d rather not discuss it.” I tried to talk to him about Jane but he wouldn’t participate, he said he never talked about his patients. He let me know that it wasn’t cricket for me to be asking, and he gave me the sly. I said, “Hey! Don’t give me the sly, let’s talk about it.” I said, “It’s long, long overdue, what the fuck do you care? Do you care about your reputation at this point in your life?” Uh-uh, he didn’t want to be cornered. He said it was a very painful and tragic situation, and it was very difficult for him because there was nothing that could be really done.

  I didn’t think Jane was gonna last. I always thought she would either kill herself or set up a situation where she would be killed. She was miserable—miserable—but she still had some will to live. You were dealing with your own disturbed demons along with this person’s. Like, “Are we just going to jump off this precipice together in fucking midair?”

  The day finally came when I decided. No more. I can’t do this, this is getting too fucking scary for me. I was on the brink several times of hoisting her skirt up and fucking the bejesus out of her. You can’t tamper in that territory—you can create an explosion that you can’t cope with. This was not the way it was supposed to be, you’re the male nurse in a sense, and you don’t fuck the nurse-ee. But at the same time, the doctor would say, “Whatever you do is okay.” Not Judd Marmor, but the other guy he’d recommended to take his place. Judd kept it fairly strict and straight up, but this doctor was a sleazeball. He was absolutely willing to play ball. I think that doctor was just bought, because he would say shit to me and I’d want to say, “Come on, pal, I don’t know that much about it but I know that’s full of shit.” But I never said anything. He was in his fifties or late forties, I would say, slightly overweight, puffy-faced, with a mustache and a syrupy manner. Slightly unctuous. I told him this was getting too heavy for me, and that’s when he approached me about marrying Jane. He said, “It would be very lucrative for you, and your children would be taken care of for the rest of their lives.” Our children? You go, “What?!” He says you’ll be taken care of handsomely, you just have to marry this mad girl and everything will be hunky-dory. Mrs. Garland was there, too—the three of us in his office in Westwood somewhere. She didn’t say anything that I remember, but she was all for it. I guess she thought that she could make some sort of alliance with me. I said, “Well, you know, that’s a very interesting suggestion and I doubt if I could do it, but let me think about it.” Of
course I wasn’t about to do it, but I was just trying to get off the hook with my life. I never talked with Walter about this, that I remember. I don’t think they approached him with the same offer. Those people were scary. When millions of dollars are involved, people do weird things. They wanted to keep her out of the hospital because she was so unhappy there, and they worried that if she went too far over the edge there would be no way to extract any money out of this situation. They were trying desperately to find a way to do it, but with somebody who was going to play ball with them.

  We were all being invited out to spend the weekends. The idea was that one of these dumb little guys would get her pregnant. I don’t know for sure, but I had that suspicion because of all the things that were offered. The mother would go to bed early and leave you with Jane, and she would start doing weird things. She kept getting weirder all the time. I was nervous. I knew I was gonna get fucked somewhere but I didn’t know which orifice was gonna be penetrated, psychic or otherwise! And being the cheap moralist that I am, I just—well, it’s not that I’m righteous or anything like that, it’s just that I’m uncomfortable. Some things are just not my shtick. I like vanilla ice cream. But it was a good part-time job, it paid three times more than anything else I might have found. I became dependent on it in a way. It was a fun adventure, but it got too heavy. It became one of those things that go bump in the night.

  On what would be my last day, Jane was standing at the head of the stairs that go down to the living room. It was about three flights down. She was wearing a little cotton dress, standing with her hands behind her back. Her feet were spread apart, she was going up and down, rocking from one foot to the other. With a sort of smile on her face, she looks at me and says, “There’s a rat in the refrigerator.” I look down and dripping between her feet are drops of blood. Drop, drop, drop, drop—making a little pool there, and of course I started thinking the worst: Holy shit. She’s jammed something up in her vagina, never dreaming what it actually was. She couldn’t just be having her period, because she’d said there were rats in the refrigerator, right? She has both of her hands behind her back and I say, “What’s in your hand, Jane?” She puts out her left hand and then puts it back again. So I said, “Let’s see your other hand.” She puts the same hand out again. “Let’s see what’s in your other hand, Jane.” She smiled and she stuck it out. She had an ice pick pitted right down through the center of her wrist, straight through to the other side.

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  WALTER HOPPS: I don’t know how Ed did it, but he had broken his arm. Jane noticed everything about him, and, despite our efforts to keep any dangerous objects away from her, she had somehow stashed an ice pick and apparently stabbed herself in the wrist, I guess it was with this ice pick. What a mess. They found her that way and had to take her to the hospital and fix her up. She ended up with a bandaged arm, she had a sling that looked just like Ed’s arm.

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  ED MOSES: I thought I was on the verge of something when she stabbed the ice pick into herself. You know, maybe I was becoming an extension of her—I guess the potential was there for her to do something terrible. We got the doctor and then I retired. I had been involved with this for something like eight months or more. Everything felt real uncomfortable; I thought that I was going to be killed. Someone interviewed me once and said, “You don’t look like you’re afraid of anything.” I said, “Well, you’re wrong and you’re right. I’m not afraid of anything, I’m terrified of everything.” So terror was my constant companion. And Jane activated that terror because I used to have dreams as a kid—primarily my mother was always trying to strangle or kill me. In real life she would get me down and strangle me and beat the hell out of me and all that kind of stuff. We all have those stories.

  Every Christmas, my mother made a big deal out of the tree. It was full of icicles coming down and the lights had to be just so. They looked beautiful. She would do a great thing in cotton underneath the base of the tree. She made a big deal picking out the tree, and she’d argue with the tree guys and try to get them down. She’d talk baby talk when she wanted things. I was so embarrassed when she was talking baby talk, trying to negotiate the price down with them, and she’d get mad when they wouldn’t negotiate.

  One Christmas when I was about eight years old, I was up on this little foot ladder putting the star at the top of the tree. I was leaning out over the very top and slipped. “Don’t get up, don’t do that, you boob,” she said, I remember. “You’re gonna fall on the tree.” “No, I’m not, I can do this.” “You can’t get up there.” So, I went up there and I slipped and fell right on top of it. She’d keep the Christmas balls year after year packed in boxes, and when I fell, everything was popping and cracking and lights were shorting out. Like lightning was going through the house. It was one of those moments. My mother totally went berserk. She cried and yelled and carried on and said the reason she did this tree every year was for me, to make me happy, and here I spoiled the whole thing. “You spoiled the whole Christmas,” she said. I tried to help her pick it up and she took whacks at me. It was a total disaster.

  I’ve noticed that people get very depressed at Christmas, all my friends and everybody I know. They find it rather grim. I asked the shrink Milton Wexler, “What is your take on that?” He said it was because people have expectations about family, gifts, toys, about families getting together and everybody loving each other. And he said it’s full of disappointments, with people arguing amongst themselves and then the gifts you get are not what you want—which is not really the point since what you really want is love and some kind of attention. But when that gets replaced with gifts, you feel unfulfilled. I know when I opened my gifts as a kid, I acted with enthusiasm, though actually I wasn’t enthused. I knew what everything was, because I’d shaken all the boxes and figured out what was in them, so I’d have to fake surprise for the gifts: a knife, a top, a yo-yo. I got a bicycle once. And skates. You know, things like that. No teddy bears, no games, no books. I never received books as a kid. Never read books.

  My mother’s life never materialized, so she had to blame somebody, and I was the thorn in her side. The only way she could get alimony from my father was to let me live with her. All these guys would come by while I was growing up—they didn’t want some woman with a little rat kid. I could have been a hermaphrodite. It was a fear when I was young because I developed so slowly that I didn’t get a beard until I was twenty or twenty-one. I wanted to be a truck driver. I was a mean little bastard, but I was always instigating other people to do the fighting.

  Anyway, there was something very ominous about Jane’s situation that totally terrified me. I couldn’t take it. But to Walter that was like fodder. He thought this incident was interesting. I think he continued on after I quit. There was also another guy for a while that they were really working on to marry her. He about freaked out when Jane set part of the house on fire.

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  WALTER HOPPS: By then I guess I had been working at the Garland house just inside a year. Christmas was a big thing for Mrs. Garland. She got a Christmas tree and it was all decked out and she gave those of us who worked there little presents. I don’t know, a necktie, god knows what. What she got for Jane turned out to be fancy lingerie and clothes that couldn’t possibly fit her. She got stuff for the sort of person she hoped her daughter would be. Oh, it was just so perverse. It turned into a nightmare. Anyway, Jane, like a little girl, gets up early on Christmas morning, around six A.M., and goes down and rips open her presents. You always slept kind of lightly there and I just had a funny feeling, or heard something, you know, and I went down to see what was going on. It was just hell from then on out, just crazy. Jane was in one of her voluminous white nightgowns that flowed to the floor, and I can see she’s obviously been weeping. She’s managed somehow to set the Christmas tree on fire and smoke is filling up the house. I got her out onto this patio, it was the closest place I could get her outside. There was a fireplace out there and there
were some cut logs, which I’d never seen used. Another guy was there, too, and we saw smoke piling up on the second floor where there were these stained-glass windows. He started trying to throw these little fireplace logs up there to break the windows and let the smoke out, and then one of the damn logs bounced off this window and came down and cut open his arm, so he’s wounded now, right? Jane’s in the worst shape we’ve ever seen her, she’s screaming and out of it. It was such a holocaust that morning, I’ll tell you. Mrs. Garland was trapped in her room, terrified. She got out, but she was just crazed and stunned. It was a nightmare. I called the fire department and I called Jane’s doctor and he said, “Get her on into the hospital.”

  The fire engine, the police all arrived at the same time. I helped Jane into the back of a police car. She was absolutely quiet and I held her in my arms as tightly as I could and the two of us rode off to Cedars-Sinai Hospital together. Later I took a taxi back to Malibu to pick up my car and drove home to the Sawtelle area of L.A. I climbed into bed fully dressed—shoes and socks, trousers, jacket—and pulled the covers over my head, just like a mummy. I was absolutely drained. I’ll never forget that day.

  The last I ever saw of Jane was when I turned her over to the doctors at the hospital. Never heard anything more except that she’d had to go back into the psychiatric ward at UCLA Hospital. I don’t know what happened to the mother. I don’t know what happened to any of them.

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  ED MOSES: I have no idea what happened to Jane. But one day about ten or fifteen years after I’d quit I thought I saw her walking through the Third Street mall in Santa Monica. I swear to god there she was wearing the same pair of red boots I’d gotten her umpteen years earlier. She didn’t look whacked out, but she didn’t look right. I think she was with some guy. I thought it was her—maybe I wanted it to be her. I did a double take—she had those little boots on but she was walking regularly. She wasn’t doing the Jane Garland shuffle. She seemed functional in terms of getting from one side of the street to the other. I don’t recall if she was talking. She just walked by and I was going in the opposite direction and I turned to look and she kept walking. Her head was the same shape but her hair was longer and she was walking normally. But she couldn’t have been normal if she still had those red boots on. I walked toward her and the person she was with to get a closer look but they dodged into a building. I thought, Well, I hope that’s her, and I walked away. I was afraid—I didn’t want to generate any associations, particularly if she was with some guy, I didn’t want her to feel disturbed. I think it was her—there was a presence. You know how you get a presence about a particular person, even if he’s in disguise? I always wanted to have a gallery opening where everyone would wear paper bags and eyeholes so you could never recognize anybody by their faces. If a person walks up, does he have a presence that you can identify? With a painting, the presence is not what it means or what it looks like or what color it is or anything like that. The presence exists somewhere between the object in the painting and the person viewing it, and there’s a kind of energy field that goes back and forth. Some people pick it up and some people don’t. You see a Rembrandt and it just resonates, you know? It vibrates with that kind of energy. I felt Jane’s presence that day in Santa Monica, let’s put it that way. I thought it was her.