The pictures of Dad and Linda on horseback in Beverly Hills and the auction itself were featured in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Times of London all in the same week. With all the publicity and activity, it felt almost like the old days. The auction was a resounding success, and despite the ever-present sorrow he felt about my mother’s condition, Dad was back on his game again.
* * *
But then, just as he was feeling so much better, he got news that shook him hard. His doctor told him he had throat cancer. At first, he kept the information of his illness a secret that only a few of us knew as he tried to assess the fact of it and put it into the context of everything that was going on. He had just been on the cover of all those entertainment sections riding a stallion down Wilshire Boulevard. He had made sure that Mom had the best, most expensive care possible. After several rough years of being unable to work as he took care of Mom, he was free at last. Now this!
His life was definitely being subjected to a roller coaster of bad and good news because, days after his diagnosis, came the word he had been waiting and hoping for: Dallas had been picked up, and he would be reuniting with Linda and Patrick, his favorite actors and working buddies.
I went to his penthouse to talk with him about his cancer diagnosis and about what he wanted to do. I told him I would help in any way I could. When I said I would drive him to the cancer hospital in downtown LA if he wanted me to, I saw a look of desperation cross his face for just one moment. I imagined my words had caused him to envision a future during which he would be stuck in LA with me driving him to treatments and, in between treatments, visiting Mom a few times a week and watching her deteriorate. It would also mean giving up his chance to be on Dallas again.
That week he found the best cancer doctors in Texas, and he reminded me that he had beaten the odds before. He was starting his life over again, and nothing was going to stop him. Not even cancer. His determination filled me with awe.
* * *
There was no way of hiding his diagnosis, so he shared the information with the producers of Dallas. After carefully considering whether or not to let the news out to the public, Dad encouraged them to share it. For years, he had told the success story of his liver transplant, and he knew that, in so doing, he’d made a positive impact on the lives of many people who had life-threatening illnesses. The fact that he was continuing to work while getting treatment could be, he believed, an inspiration for many people facing the same frightening diagnosis.
* * *
He had not always been so forthright about his health in public. When I was writing this book, I came across a telling interview that Dad had given to a journalist from the Edinburgh Evening News. It started, as had so many of his other interviews, with Dad confessing to all sorts of bad behavior like taking drugs and playing practical jokes on the set. But then he went on to tell the two lies he customarily included in every interview after his liver transplant: that he had stopped drinking entirely, it was easy and that he had never cheated on his wife. The first lie was important for his legacy because so many people wanted to be just like him and would try to emulate many aspects of his fun-loving behavior; he wanted to perpetuate the myth that he had successfully, and without any difficulty at all, just quit drinking, when in fact the truth was that the addiction controlled every aspect of his daily life. The second lie was that he never cheated on my mom; that it was untrue had long been an open secret among his many friends, but he made sure that anything put in writing or in the media stated that he was a non-wandering husband. The fact is, though he wandered, he was also devoted; the very notion of divorce was appalling to him.
I can’t help but wonder if he had a deal with Mom that allowed him to do anything he wanted with other women as long as he told the entire world that he was faithful. I think he would have been devastated if he had found my mother in bed with another man, but I truly believe she never slept with anyone but Dad.
* * *
Though Dad spent most of his last year in Texas, he kept his penthouse apartment as a pied-à-terre in Santa Monica and rented a Spanish-style house for Mom less than a mile away, where she would be watched over day and night.
He wanted the best care money could buy for his dear Majsy. He had the house filled with her furniture and the paintings she had made as a girl in Sweden. That meant she would be surrounded by many of her favorite possessions, but some of her things were too big for this smaller house, so I went with him to buy several new things too. Bringing with us the measurements for her new sitting room, Dad picked out a perfect Persian carpet for it. We also had two matching love seats in storage that had belonged to Ganny and were covered in a yellow-patterned chintz. Yellow was Mom’s favorite color, so we went out to find a yellow carpet with other warm colors to go with them. Dad wanted everything there to be beautiful. And everything was.
He would come back to visit with me in LA and check on Mom every few months, but he was moving on with his own life. I got the sense that he knew his days were numbered, and he was going to have a ball with whatever time he had left.
* * *
I keep my iPhone on all night in case Mom’s caregivers need to reach me and so my daughters can call me no matter what time it is, day or night. I’m always on alert for these calls, and so I was immediately wakened at 4:00 A.M. one morning when a text came in. Given the hour, I was surprised to see that it was from Dad, who was in LA on a break from shooting in Dallas. He was in good spirits. The first season of the show had gone well, and the treatment he’d gotten while it was being shot had left him cancer-free.
The text began, “Ms. Fox, you are the most BEAUTIFUL woman in the world…”
Dad had never as much as mentioned anything to me about the women he had been with. This was the first time he had slipped up, and I knew right away that he had texted me by mistake. He had been so distant since receiving his frightening diagnosis and starting work on the new Dallas. I felt that this accident provided me with an opening for some kind of communication with him. I texted him immediately: “Dad, I don’t think you meant this message for me but I am OK with whoever Ms. Fox is. Maybe we should talk.” He agreed.
That night, I brought dinner over to his penthouse and told him I understood his need for intimacy. He was so relieved to have everything out in the open. He had been keeping this woman a secret from me for over a year. Now he was excited to tell me all about it. They had met while the new Dallas was being shot and he was having treatment. He said he was in love. Once he turned that corner that allowed him to go on with his life after making sure Mom was cared for, he let himself feel love, and I wanted him to find joy.
He couldn’t wait to introduce me to her, and that night, he made plans for us all to go to New York together in three weeks’ time on her private jet.
Ms. Fox turned out to be quasi–age appropriate for Dad, meaning she was a year older than I am. The trip to New York was tense. I felt like I was auditioning; this woman seemed to have a great deal of influence on Dad and how he felt about everything. I wanted to be a part of his life, so her opinion of me mattered. Ms. Fox and I shared some of the same views on politics, so that eased things a bit. Still, the only thing that mattered wasn’t what I felt or what she felt. What mattered was that Dad was happy.
Now that his love life was out in the open, he felt more comfortable with me, and this became particularly important when he had another spate of good and bad news: Dallas was picked up for another season, but then he was diagnosed with a form of leukemia. At that point, he allowed me to take him to the hospital several times a week for blood transfusions. These took many hours and gave us time to be together and to talk. He spoke a lot about his life, but nothing he said gave me the slightest sense that something was on his mind that would soon result in his begging to be forgiven.
20
Forgiveness
SOON AFTER MY FATHER’S very public memorials, I found myself alone in his apartment. Even after the au
ction, his place was amazingly full of stuff, but without Dad, it was also painfully empty. It was my job to clean out the rest of the things my parents had collected in the course of their very full lives, things that had now been distilled down to the most personal objects and photographs. I worked diligently for hours and was productive and cool and businesslike until I could no longer suppress the sadness I felt. I needed to stop and take it all in. I sat down on my father’s bed and saw, on the table beside it, the photograph he always kept there of me with my daughter Kaya in my lap. I had just turned forty; I wore no makeup and was dressed plainly. I had just cut off my hair, so it was very short. All semblance of youthful vanity was gone. I was simply a mom supporting my six-year-old child in my arms and looking lovingly at the photographer who, as I well remembered, had been Dad. He’d often told me how much he loved that picture.
I thought about myself as a mother and what that had meant to my dad. He had always been very supportive of me when I was an actress, but he much preferred it when I became an artist and a mom. Because he had suffered the consequences of having a mother whose work as a performing artist had made it impossible for her to be a mother to him, he had made it financially possible for me to be a stay-at-home mom with a studio right in my home where I could continue to paint while remaining close to my children. He always praised the way I interacted with my kids and included them in my life as an artist.
I was still in his apartment as the light faded from the room. I did not want to leave. As long as I remained there, I could soak in his presence in the midst of all his things that were just the way he had left them. Looking back at the picture again, I thought about Dad’s relationship with Ganny. There had been several big fights between my dad and his mother over the years. Most of these fights had been caused by the terrible relationship Dad had with Richard, who had also managed to alienate literally scores of people. One of them was the incredibly gifted and witty Noël Coward, who wrote a musical for Mary called Pacific 1860. During preparations for the show, Coward had to deal with Richard constantly. He wrote of the experience, saying of Richard, “He is a pathological case and is twisted with strange jealousies. I wish the silly ass were at the bottom of the sea.”
I am sure my father would have agreed with this assessment. Richard’s jealousy was especially activated by the only other man in Mary’s life: her son. Richard made a point of finding fault with everything my dad did, and Dad responded by goading him. They battled endlessly. On the surface, it often seemed that Ganny sided with Richard, and yet she constantly reached out to our family and tried to find ways to include us in her life. The animosity between the two men went on for years, but there were two fights in particular that caused both my grandmother and my father so much pain that their relationship was almost completely severed.
These fights both took place in Brazil, fourteen years apart. The first happened in 1956 when my parents were still newlyweds. Dad wanted to introduce Mom to Mary and Richard after having delighted his father in Texas with his “foreign bride” as Ben called her. They flew down to Brazil, where Mary and Richard had just bought a large ranch where they planned on relaxing between Broadway shows. It had no electricity and no telephone; at night, every room was lit with kerosene lanterns. The sounds of the jungle provided a constant, soothing hum. The battery-powered turntable played glorious classical music, and the night sky was filled with unbelievably brilliant displays of stars. It was as far away from the pressures of showbiz as anyone could get.
At first, everything went very well, and Mary and Richard were overjoyed with Dad’s choice of wife.
In their turn, Mom and Dad fell in love with the lush landscape of the ranch as intensely as Mary and Richard had just the year before. Life seemed simple and natural there so far from big-city life. For Mom, it brought back memories of working on the family farm in Sweden during the summers. She would bale hay all day, and at night, she rode her big, white gelding, Napoleon, with such wild abandon that sparks literally flew as the horse’s hooves clattered on the cobblestones. Dad was entranced by the ranch and thought it could be where his teenage dream of being a cowboy might finally come true. He’d had that dream when he arrived in Texas as a teenager, but Papa Ben had made him work on ranches, digging ditches to put up cattle fencing instead of riding freely on the range. Here in Brazil there were plenty of workers to do the grunt work and many acres of family-owned land to ride on. Seeing her son so happy, Mary suggested that they change their plans of moving to New York and stay in Brazil permanently to run the place. For a few days, my parents considered the offer. It would mean changing the entire course of the lives they had planned. Dad would not continue his acting career, and Mom would stop working as a designer so they could live a bucolic life and not have to worry about money.
But the arrangement would also mean that between shows, Mary and Richard would come to the ranch and would be the true owners. Mom and Dad would be working for them. Even in this beautiful, calm setting and despite all Mom’s effort to distract them and make happy conversation, Richard’s constant criticism of Dad made the idea of living together intolerable. They fought, and my father took his bride and left Brazil abruptly, vowing never to speak to Richard or Mary again. My parents kept to their initial plan of continuing their respective careers in New York. They were determined to establish their lives and careers without any help from Mary or her controlling husband.
About a year later, Mom became pregnant with me and realized how very far away she was from her family in Sweden, so she made an attempt to broker a détente between Dad and Mary and Richard, who were back in New York by this time.
After a long phone conversation with my mother, Ganny knew what an ally Mom would be in any disagreement, and thus began our uneasy but constant connection with Mary and Richard until the next visit to Brazil.
* * *
When I was thirteen years old, I began a regular correspondence with Ganny, who had semiretired and was again living in Brazil. In the letters, I asked her if she would just be a plain old grandma to me because I could not speak Swedish and therefore could not really talk to my mother’s mother. Ganny was overjoyed to be connected with her family again and she responded with wonderful letters. She tried to get into the spirit of being a grandmother without being too humbled by the role, she was always signing them, “Your grandmother, Mary Martin.” In these letters, she wrote about how happy and relaxed she and Richard were in Brazil, and in every letter she wrote me and my parents, she entreated us to visit. Dad was hesitant to go, and it wasn’t just his own relationship with Richard that gave him pause. He still got angry when recalling the way Richard had picked on Preston a few years earlier when my brother was only three years old. At that time, Mary and Richard had wanted to show my mother a needlepoint rug they had designed for their very elegant dining room. My mother was nervous that we kids would mess up the precious new rug, and sure enough, my brother spilled ice cream on it. Later, writing about the incident, Ganny portrayed it as a humorous scene in which she and Richard made light conversation to theatrically ignore what had happened until the French maid had cleaned it all away. Dad remembered the experience differently. He was convinced that Richard had tripped Preston so the boy could not help but drop his ice cream. He had never forgiven Richard for this, but he finally said he would bring us all to Brazil to stay with Mary and Richard.
I have magical memories of our first few days at the ranch, like the long horseback ride into a jungle filled with monkeys swaying from the trees above us and giant blue iridescent butterflies floating in the thick, humid air. After what seemed like hours, we came to an isolated village where a portable record player was incongruously playing a song by the Beatles, “Sun King,” that had one stanza in English and one in Portuguese. As we entered the village we heard the sweet lyrics: “Here comes the sun king, everybody’s laughing, everybody’s happy.”
But the enchantment was broken as drastically as it had been during my parents’
first visit to Brazil. Richard began to pick on Preston in just the same way he had tortured Dad as a child, but it was a thousand times worse for Dad because he wanted to protect his son.
Richard was drinking tumblers of gin, pretending it was water he needed for his health. This is how Dad described the Richard he encountered: “After eleven o’clock in the morning, he was impossible. Later I found out one of the reasons Richard liked Brazil so much was that you could buy almost any medication over the counter, including amphetamines.”
According to Dad, Richard was taking the drugs by the handful.
My brother, Preston, was ten years old at the time, and Richard, along with the butler, Ernest, were constantly reprimanding him and criticizing his table manners, so much so that my brother threw up his meals. One night he got up from the table because he was feeling sick again and stumbled on his way out. Just as he did this, Richard called after him, telling him he was clumsy. Dad confronted Richard, accusing him of tripping his son, just as he had years before. Dad could not stand my brother being hurt by Richard, and he was incensed that his mother remained silent. We all stared at Dad as he stood up and shoved his chair back from the table. He focused all his rage at his mother and yelled at her, saying, “You’re not my mother, and you never were!”
She and Richard stood up too, and they all went off into another room where they continued to shout at one another. Mom hustled my brother and me off to the guesthouse well away from the upset.
The next morning, we left Mary and Richard’s ranch and we were on a flight home soon after. My father must have felt he had failed my brother, and I am sure he felt deeply sorry that he had not stepped in to protect him sooner. After this incident, my father would never again be persuaded to interact with Richard, and we did not talk to or see his mother again until Richard died a year later.
The Eternal Party Page 23