by Gore Vidal
Next he developed pneumonia and Edward, a Russian nurse—actually an M.D. but not allowed to practice in the United States except as a nurse (disgusted, he went to an American law school and gave up medicine for law)—would come at dawn to plug Howard into antibiotics. One morning Howard announced to me in near-pentameter, “At first light the angel of death, all in white, arrived with the sun.”
Montaigne would now want to know how he looked. He had good color. An excellent appetite. A television set was almost always on—for Leto. Howard was ranking the commercials according to which ones he most hated.
A sort of swinging cage had been set up above his hospital bed and he was lifted in it as Leto cranked until he was able to swing him from bed to an armchair where he could sit and look out the window at tall trees as well as at a datura bush growing on the next property; he also had a view of the Italianate tile roof of the garage apartment opposite.
Each midnight he would start to sing. Leto, who had been a piano prodigy in Manila, would accompany him on the downstairs piano. He pronounced Howard’s voice better than Andy Williams’s, which it was. Howard had sung professionally until he realized, sadly, that he was a minor latecomer to that golden age of male singers, headed by Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Unlike most of the great stars higher up the list, Howard never lost his voice though emphysema was reducing volume. He had worked in advertising before we met, putting himself through New York University by working eight years at Walgreens drugstore next to the Paramount Theater in Times Square. He still sang; he had a repertoire of several hundred songs and despite all the recent surgeries and hallucinations he never forgot a lyric. Cole Porter, Sondheim, and his favorite “Our Love Is Here to Stay” echoed through the house at the end. Also, in Ravello, when he couldn’t sleep, he would play Barbra Streisand’s final concert which she had invited us to London to attend. He always felt that he had somehow invented her because he’d seen her with me on The Tonight Show when she was unknown: she had sung Arlen’s “A Sleeping Bee.” Not long after her first Carson appearance, we gave a small dinner party in New York to celebrate Paul Newman’s fortieth birthday. Howard invited Streisand and we introduced her to Beluga caviar. She never looked back. How did she start her day? interviewers would ask. “With five thousand eggs,” she’d reply. We toasted Paul’s birthday. “I guess,” said Howard, “forty must seem very old to you.” “Yes,” said the practical Streisand, “it does.” So, as Howard was dying he listened over and over again to her last album.
Near the end he asked me, “How old am I?” I told him he was seventy-four. He frowned. “That’s when people die, isn’t it?” I said that I hadn’t and so far he hadn’t. I was sitting beside his armchair looking out over the tile roof opposite. For a moment he looked puzzled; then he said: “Didn’t it go by awfully fast?” Of course it had. We had been too happy and the gods cannot bear the happiness of mortals. Montaigne paid for his wisdom with agonizing kidney stones.
Several times I asked Leto to wake me when Howard began to sing but Leto never did. I suppose, at the end, Howard wanted to do a benefit for himself alone. I can understand this, sadly, because I loved his singing. One winter at the Bamboo Bar in Bangkok’s Oriental Hotel he sang regularly at popular request. It seemed all of young Bangkok wanted to hear this heir to Tony Bennett. Then there was a memorable session with the band at Brasilia airport, wonderful musicians who cheered him on as did a crowd of Brazilian parliamentarians, waiting for the weekend plane to take them home to Rio de Janeiro, far from Brasilia, their truly ugly jungle capital.
Leto never did wake me at concert time. With the aid of Valium I was sleeping too heavily, or so he said. Heavy sleep is my own natural response to the unbearable and yet, for most of this time, I had convinced myself that Howard was going to survive indefinitely due to the magic of radiation. But then “Denial,” as Bill Clinton once so neatly put it, “is not just another river in Egypt.”
During the days we talked of usual matters. Particularly, the presidential threats of war in the Middle East. Howard regretted that in all the years we had spent living outside the United States we had continued to pay, as law required, full income tax to a federal government plainly gone berserk. One of the last public occasions he had been able to attend was my speech at UCLA’s Royce Hall where I talked to a thousand people against the coming wars.
At these times, during such an illness, the mind keeps finding new reasons for hope—at least mine did and I think that his did, too; not long before the end he had a serious workout with a physical therapist who found him unexpectedly strong, physically and even more so mentally as he drove himself to rebuild his body.
Logistically, I had a difficult time being alone with him. There was always something Leto had to do—swinging him from armchair to bed and back again, changing the uncomfortable diapers he was obliged to wear. The hospital bed also had a railing around it and one could barely poke a hand through in order to hold his hand. Since we usually watched the evening news together I decided one night that he should stay in his armchair and I’d sit next to him and so we watched together, talking to the screen as much as to each other. When the news was off, he was silent. Leto was out of the room. “Don’t you want to talk?” I asked. There was a long silence, then he shook his head.
“Why not?”
“Because,” he said, “there’s too much to say.”
The next morning Edward gave him his intravenous antibiotics. The coughing was still bad from an ominous bout with pneumonia but, as he noted triumphantly, “Green to beige.” I was too slow to get this. Exasperated, he said, “What I’ve been coughing up was green—poison—now it’s a beige color, almost healthy.” We celebrated “green to beige.” The next day the physiotherapist would be back and I vowed that I would not take Valium and so be able to listen to the midnight concert. Leto arrived with his supper which he put on a table in front of the armchair. I went downstairs to get a sandwich. A few minutes later Leto shouted, “Mr. Auster has stopped breathing!” I ran upstairs. He was still in the armchair, facing the window. He had eaten most of his dinner. In front of him was a tin of some vitamin concoction that he liked. Leto said, “He just drank that drink and took a deep breath and then he—stopped.” I sat in the chair opposite and did all the things that we have learned from movies to determine death. I passed a hand in front of his mouth and nose. Nothing stirred. Montaigne requires that I describe more how he looked—rather than how I felt. The eyes were open and very clear. I’d forgotten what a beautiful gray they were—illness and medicine had regularly glazed them over; now they were bright and attentive and he was watching me, consciously, through long lashes. Lungs, heart may have stopped but the optic nerves were still sending messages to a brain which, those who should know tell us, does not immediately shut down. So we stared at each other at the end. He had been sitting straight up when I came in the room but now, very slightly he slumped to the left in his chair. Leto had gone to ring 911. “Can you hear me?” I asked him. “I know you can see me.” Although there was no breath for speech, he now had a sort of wry wiseguy from the Bronx expression on his face which said clearly to me who knew all his expressions, “So this is the big fucking deal everyone goes on about.” In my general state of confusion I was oddly comforted that in death he was in perfect easy character much as he would have been that evening if he had lived to sing “New York,” the song the people in Ravello often begged him to sing fortissimo.
Jim Carney who works for us at times kept me company while the newly arrived team from 911 hurled him onto the wood floor time and again. If he’d had a spark of life, all that pummeling would have extinguished it. When they finally finished, I thought they were going to take him to whatever hospital they had come from, so I said, “Could you take him instead to Cedars-Sinai, that’s his regular hospital.” One of the medics said, “He’s not going to a hospital, he’s going to the mortuary.”
Then Jim and I were left with Howard on the floor between us cove
red by a sheet, black socks on his feet. Leto wept. I envied him—the WASP glacier had closed over my head. It took over an hour for the ambulance to come take him away. During the wait, I pulled back the sheet for one last look at those clear gray eyes—could they still see?—but the substance of the eyeballs had collapsed and two gelatinous streaks of the sort snails make had coursed down his cheeks. I would not see him in any corporal form again until the ashes at Rock Creek Cemetery.
But, curiously, last night I finally saw him clearly in a dream—a frustration dream. We were in a side street in Rome where the entrance to our old flat should have been but was nowhere to be found. Yet everything else was as it should have been, including a greengrocer whom we knew. Howard had grabbed a handful of fava beans and started to shell them. For what it is worth the fava bean itself resembles a miniature fetus and the Pythagorean cult believed that each bean contains the soul of someone dead, ready to be reborn. In the dream Howard was eating these forbidden fetuses—preparing for rebirth?
SEVENTEEN
Just as I decided that I was done with obituaries the Pope and Saul Bellow die. The mourning for the Pope seems weirdly irreal. Much is made of the conversions that he is given credit for on the African continent where his stern prohibition of contraceptives has crowded the Catholic heaven with African angels. Meanwhile the media in the United States, as always off the mark, treats him rather the way they did Marlon Brando, another superstar who was also never, as they say, not on.
If Thomas Jefferson had found nothing at all useful in grief, I found it weirdly energizing. Certainly, the aftermath of a death in today’s United States brings one into contact with all sorts of strangers: lawyers, accountants, morticians, insurance claimants, not to mention old friends in their thinning ranks and new acquaintances in their thickening ones.
Although I have played parts in a number of films I was never an actual actor and so, except for a school performance of The Comedy of Errors, I had never acted on a stage anywhere until some New York producers offered me the lead in Trumbo, a play based on the letters of the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. The producers were rotating the part of Trumbo among a number of actors ranging from Richard Dreyfuss to Nathan Lane. After the storm of bureaucratic activity in the wake of Howard’s death, all I could think of was flight, in every sense. Work of any kind had always been my best refuge. Why not appear onstage for a week or two at the Westside Theater? I could never memorize in youth but Trumbo is a series of letters that he wrote, often to his son played onstage by Gordon MacDonald. There was, happily, no director by then, only an excellent stage manager and a workable set where I would make my entrance in near-fatal darkness back of screens showing film footage of the various disturbances of the 1940s when Dalton Trumbo fell afoul of congressional Red hunters with his sharp responses to their deeply un-American catechisms. For a long time while Trumbo was officially blacklisted by the Hollywood establishment, he wrote scripts under pseudonyms as well as many letters which I enjoyed performing. I had known Trumbo slightly in Rome where he had invited me to his splendid apartment overlooking the Tiber: he wanted to talk to me about the Byzantine Empire: the background to a movie he was writing for an Italian producer. He was obviously being well paid and I thought of the pluses of not having one’s name on a script particularly in an era like today’s when “focus groups” examine one’s every line for inadvertent lack of political correctness or its somber incubator unwanted originality. In the end I had the impression that Trumbo was enjoying his well-paid martyrdom not to mention special status since, as he liked to point out, nearly every distinguished film covertly made abroad was credited to him while the disasters—some of his own making—remained parentless. Finally, he was white-listed again and the Oscar awarded to one of his pseudonyms was finally presented to him. All in all a curious time. Whatever his talents as a dramatist he was a marvelous letter writer as I discovered reading them to appreciative audiences: he was witty, often wise, and sometimes moving. I played him seated at center stage. To my left were, always for some reason, the heavy laughers, to my right the more subdued listeners. Performance after performance the laughers found their preordained seats and the others theirs. Early on I had problems with one speech: a letter to the mother of a young man who dies in the war: Trumbo had been in the Pacific theater with him. He writes the mother a letter which, invariably, brought me to tears whenever I read it. Since the first law of acting is let the audience not the actor do the weeping, what to do? I finally got a pin so that whenever my voice quavered during the reading of the letter, I would stick it in my thigh and thus, distracted, betrayed nothing until the night when the audience to my right, always so reliably attentive, was silent: Had I lost them? A large woman on the front row started up the aisle. Were they leaving? Mild panic. Afterward, I asked the stage manager, “What went wrong?” He told me that the lady who had gone up the aisle was one of the producers who had seen half a dozen actors play Trumbo and she was sobbing. So was much of the right-hand side of the audience. As a hardened public speaker I knew how to make an audience laugh. But never before or since had I made one weep.
On the night when many of the actors in town come to see a play, I saw most of the cast of the recent revival of The Best Man as well as Elaine May and her gentleman friend Stanley Donen whom I knew from our days at MGM. Afterward, Elaine at her most Mayish, said: “I didn’t know you could do this.” “You never asked,” I was modestly precise. Stanley who had been making musicals at MGM for years before, during, and after the blacklist summed it up: “What you’ve done is prove that you can act, but the big surprise is that Trumbo could write.” There we were, freezing backstage, marooned in 2003 and it was like the great studio was still functioning and all was right with the world and, presently, Arthur Freed will find a musical for Donen to do and Elaine is still doing comic impressions with Mike Nichols while I…There are these strange slips in time, away from bleak present to a past present where everyone is suddenly what they were and the dead live.
EIGHTEEN
In Rome I usually found the Jesuits not only congenial but often wise. Not long after Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Kraców, was raised by the Holy Spirit to the See of Peter as John Paul II, the Jesuits were ready with a joke. The new Pope addresses God: “Almighty, will there be a married clergy in my time?” “No, my son, not in your time.” “Almighty, will there be women priests in my time?” “No, my son, not in your time.” “Almighty, will there be another Polish Pope?” And God bellows: “Not in my time!” The Jesuits had done their homework. All the potential reforms that had come out of Vatican II were sternly undone by a fourteenth-century Prince-Bishop from Poland primarily interested, like Pius IX before him, in papal authority based on the most literal illiberal readings of Scripture. The result has been a serious shortage of priests in the United States with ever fewer would-be priests on the horizon while the parishioners pick and choose which of the Pope’s commands to obey and which to ignore; meanwhile, Brazil’s huge Catholic majority is splintering off into strange protestant evangelical groupings.
But watching the crowds in Saint Peter’s Square night after night was for me a nostalgic trip in time. I first set foot in the piazza in the summer of 1939. The heat was Washingtonian. The Pope then was Pius XII, now generally thought to have been too accepting of the Hitler regime. Years later when Howard and I were living in Rome’s Via Giulia, Pius XII (real name Pacelli) finally died. Apparently, he was something of a faddist when it came to medicine. The ultimate fad proved to be his embalmment by what seems to have been an amateur taxidermist. As a result, while he lay in state in the basilica, he turned, according to one viewer, “emerald green.” Then, in response to the summer heat, he suddenly exploded. This was kept from the world for a long time until someone (a Jesuit?) passed on the information. It is also reported that many sturdy Swiss guardsmen fainted during this holy combustion.
Although an absolute nonbeliever I saw the church as a fascinating shado
w of imperial Rome with its curia so like the Roman Senate whose building is still pretty much intact in the Forum.
NINETEEN
From time to time, Saul Bellow would appear in Rome, usually alone. He had, by the end, five wives, I think, and since they were all so alike I never put their names to memory. Each had a tendency to nag him for trivial lapses; “I told you not to forget the yogurt when you went into Red Hook,” our common village. At one point he shared a house with Ralph Ellison between Edgewater where I lived and Bard College. I don’t recall which of his wives was in residence while Ralph’s brilliant wife lived in New York City and visited on weekends. Of contemporary American novelists only Saul was, properly speaking, an intellectual with a wide knowledge of philosophy and that small amount of history he felt connected to. It was always a relief to talk to him about many things as opposed to such dead-end subjects as academic tenure, bestsellerdom, and, inevitably, adultery, a major theme in the postwar novel. I was fascinated by Saul’s Herzog, none of which, as far as I could tell, was invented, including the villainous Valentine based on one Jack Ludwig, a sort of primitive Iago never quite at home on the Hudson or in those groves of Academe where Mary McCarthy had also served time at Bard, giving rise to a brilliant satire of the world of Bard and what Terry Southern liked to call Quality Lit. The novel Pictures from an Institution was Randall Jarrell’s response to Mary whom he calls Gertrude. “Although,” he wrote, “Gertrude was not much of a novelist, she was a marvelous liar.” What feuds there were in those days when Partisan Review ruled the roost and Delmore Schwartz was the great poet of the second Jewish generation! But Delmore’s reign ended with the appearance of Robert Lowell who proved to be a far more brilliant careerist than the rest of the field despite occasional bouts of madness from which Delmore also suffered. In the end, Lowell was king of the castle while Delmore ended up as the protagonist in one of Saul’s most generous novels, Humboldt’s Gift. As I write these lines I find myself suddenly in the Gotham Book Mart, the bookstore that Frances Steloff had made a center of the “New York School” of the forties.