Audition (65 page)

I phoned my mother’s doctor. He also confirmed what Aunt Lena had told me. One thing was clear: My mother needed full-time care. I flew down to Florida. I took her in my arms and brought her to the same nursing home to which she had brought my father. My mother barely knew what was going on.

Could I have brought her to New York and, with nurses, kept her with me? Of course. But I didn’t. I struggled with that decision. I remembered when I was a child telling my mother that when I grew up, I would build her a house and we would all live together. That house was not a nursing home. I knew other children of aging parents were facing this kind of terrible predicament, but their dilemma didn’t help mine. Shirley also tried to make me feel better. She reminded me of what I knew, that my mother had put my father in a nursing home, and Shirley had put her own mother, my aunt Rose, in a nursing home. “She wouldn’t have gotten the level of care at home with me, the outcome would have been the same, and it would have destroyed my life,” Shirley said. “It will destroy your life, too.”

Shirley’s advice was particularly apt. My personal life had entered a new stage. I was in my early fifties and had been single for twelve years. My work was stable, and I was going out more and more with Alan “Ace” Greenberg, now the CEO of Bear Stearns. He wanted very much to marry me. He was dear to me and I felt I should take the plunge and marry him. The problem was that although he was the nicest, smartest man, I didn’t think I was in love. Then, in the summer of 1984, I unexpectedly met another man, Merv Adelson. Wham! I thought, at last this is
it.
I was really attracted to Merv and knew that if he felt the same way, my indecision would be over. It soon was.

We met on a blind date. Our Cupid was an advertising man named Leo Kelmenson, my neighbor in Westhampton, where I rented a summer house. Leo told me he had just sold his advertising agency to a very successful man from California. He was one of the founders and owners of Lorimar Productions, a television company that had a string of huge hit shows like
Dallas, Knots Landing
, and
The Waltons
. He’d also cofounded La Costa, a fabled spa and resort in Carlsbad, California.

“Merv is going to have to come to New York often now for the agency,” Leo told me. “He’s recently separated from his wife and very attractive. Would you like to meet him?”

Why not?

Merv called and we had dinner. Leo was right. He was very attractive. His hair was silver, his eyes were blue, and he had a year-round tan. He was sexy, funny and charming and, to me, very California—just the sort of man I’d seen in Vegas when my parents were living there and who didn’t have any interest in me. Nor, I’m sure, would Merv have been interested if I hadn’t become Barbara Walters. Not that he was interested in celebrities. He was after all in the television and movie business and had dozens of beautiful actresses working for him. But I was something different, not an actress, yet someone who understood his world.

No sooner had we sat down than Merv, to my surprise, launched into a confession. The money that he and his partner had used to develop La Costa, he told me, had come in part from the Teamsters Union Pension Fund. The Teamsters Union at the time had a reputation of being involved with organized crime.
Penthouse
magazine had run an article in 1975 that implied that Merv, too, was associated with the Mob. That charge was untrue, Merv insisted, and he had sued
Penthouse
for libel. He had lost the libel suit in 1982, two years before our dinner, but the judge had granted him a new trial. He wanted me to know this up front because the legal issue was not yet resolved and the rumored Mafia connection was a blot on his reputation.

All this before the main course. I appreciated his frankness. I also found it endearing that Merv was being protective of me and my reputation when his libel case didn’t really affect me. We were just having dinner, after all, a delightful dinner, which ended on a funny note.

Merv had no cash for a taxi to get back to the Pierre Hotel, so I loaned him five dollars. I guess he was so used to having his car and driver pick him up in Los Angeles that, like Queen Elizabeth II, he didn’t have to carry any money. A week later he sent my five dollars back with a cute note. And we made another date.

We began to see each other a lot over the summer, and I realized I was falling in love. It was a wonderful, rare emotional experience, and despite my family problems, I was happy. Merv seemed bigger than life. He skied, rode horses, played golf and tennis, sailed. He wore jeans and T-shirts when every man I knew in New York was wearing navy blue suits and ties. And he lived as if there were no tomorrow.

Merv had a beautiful estate in Bel Air which I visited and where, later, we would live. We spent time at his ranch, called the Lazy Z, in Aspen and his house on the beach in Malibu. He also owned an apartment in a hotel in New York, though more and more often he stayed with me. Which is the major reason I didn’t bring my mother to New York to live with me. I anguished about it but decided there was no way I could continue my new relationship with Merv and have my mother along, with round-the-clock nurses in the apartment. And what would I do with my sister?

So, in the summer of 1984, my failing mother went into the nursing home in Florida while my sister continued to live at the small residence with the social programs. I tried to find Jackie a roommate as a companion, but it proved close to impossible. I then approached the Hope School for the intellectually impaired (which they were now called), where Jackie had done some limited work years before. The school had opened a residential home where she could live in one of several two-bedroom suites and be supervised and cared for. Jackie could also resume her activities at the Hope School, filing and running errands for the assistant to the principal. That’s where Jackie went.

She didn’t like it. She wanted her own apartment in Miami Beach. “Why can’t you find me a roommate, Barbara?” she would ask over and over again. I would try to explain the difficulties, but she wouldn’t listen. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way, Barbara,” she’d tell me.

They were always on my mind, my mother and sister, but I didn’t discuss it very much with Merv. We were beginning a romance, and I didn’t want to inflict all this on him. From the little I did tell him, he was very kind and supportive. He also was developing a special relationship with my daughter. When Jackie met him, she instantly adored him. Merv was fun and hip and outdoorsy, as was she. He had three children himself, one of whom, Ellie, wasn’t too much older than Jackie. There was the possibility—dare I say it?—that we might become a family.

I had met Merv in May. That October, after I moderated the first presidential debate between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, we went on safari to Africa with another couple who were dear friends of his, JoAnne and Gil Segel. We laughed our way all through Africa. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would be camping in a tent in the African bush—for fun!—but there I was. And it was magical. Elephants, wildebeests (I’d never heard of a wildebeest before), zebras, and lions by day; vodka in our tent by night. Who wouldn’t have fallen in love?

Merv and I got engaged while walking on the beach in Malibu in June 1985, a year after we met. By this time I had eased out of my relationship with Alan Greenberg. He is now married to a terrific woman, and remains my friend to this day.

So there I was in 1985, engaged to be married, with more than a full-time job at ABC, a rebellious adolescent daughter, and an ailing mother and dissatisfied sister always on my mind.

“My stomach hurts,” my sister told me one day over the phone. I didn’t think much of it. Jackie tended to exaggerate a cold into pneumonia. Nonetheless I called the school and asked them to make sure she saw a doctor. The second call from Florida was devastating. Jackie’s test results had come back. She had advanced ovarian cancer.

I was heartsick. It had never occurred to me that Jackie might die before my mother. I flew immediately to Florida. To my relief the doctors told me that this cancer had nothing to do with her breast cancer. I don’t know how I could have borne it if it had turned out that this cancer was a result of the decision I had made when she had her lumpectomy.

Ovarian cancer is a secret killer. There are some tests you can take, but they’re often inconclusive. A woman rarely knows in advance if she has the disease. The doctor told me that he wanted to operate right away to remove Jackie’s ovaries. Her condition was that serious. I quickly called my friend Dr. Paul Marks at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. My instinct was to have my sister flown to New York to be operated on, but I was torn. The doctor who was treating her in Florida had a warm bedside manner and had established a rapport with Jackie. She would need more than medical care, and I thought she was more likely to get loving personal attention in Florida than at the large, more impersonal Sloan-Kettering. Paul Marks agreed. He knew Jackie and understood that she needed a doctor she trusted to supervise her postoperative care and the intense chemotherapy she would require. So we went with the doctor in Florida.

I stayed with Jackie for the surgery. It went well, although there was a strange side effect. I sat with her in the recovery room after the operation, and she kept repeating, “I’m so sick, I’m so sick”—but she never stuttered. Not once. The stutter had disappeared. To this day I don’t know why.

I remained with Jackie for two days after her operation. Then I had to leave for Milwaukee to make a long-scheduled speech, after which I planned to return immediately to my sister in Florida. I was backstage at the convention hall, waiting to go on, when I got a call from Jackie’s doctor.

“I have terrible news,” he said. “Your sister got out of bed to go to the bathroom and had an aneurysm. There was nothing anyone could do. She didn’t suffer at all.”

My God. Jackie was dead? It couldn’t be! She had seemed weak when I kissed her good-bye, but all the signs were that she was recovering well. I was numb with shock. And guilt. What was I doing in Milwaukee instead of staying by my sister’s side? She’d died all alone. I, too, was alone in that dreary backstage room as the waves of guilt and sorrow hit me simultaneously. I sobbed, trying not to make any noise. No one heard me. And then I dried my eyes and went onto the stage to make the speech.

What does that say about me? I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want to know. I just did my job, which seems to be what I do no matter what the circumstance. Maybe it’s the way I cope. I didn’t tell anyone in the convention hall that my sister had just died. I gave a terrible speech and was criticized for it. I didn’t give a damn.

Jackie was dead. My difficult, temperamental, tragic, loving sister who had played such a huge role in my life. I remembered all the mean thoughts I’d had about her as a child and the frustration I’d felt toward her as we grew older. Then there were the decisions I had had to make for her as we became adult women. Had I made the wrong decision having her surgery in Florida? Would she have had better treatment in New York?

Merv sent his plane to Milwaukee to take me back to Florida. We buried Jackie in the same cemetery as my father. We have a family plot there, and it is where I’ll eventually be buried as well. My cousin Selig and his wife, Marvel, flew down from New York for the graveside ceremony performed by a local rabbi. My aunt Lena came, as did my cousin Shirley, along with her two sons. A few people came from the Hope School as well. It was a very small, sad group.

I decided not to tell my mother that Jackie had died. Her mental state was confused enough, and I knew that my sister’s death would be too difficult for her to deal with. As it turned out, to my surprise, my mother rarely asked me about Jackie and when she did, I lied. I told her that Jackie was staying with Carol Channing in California. My mother, knowing that Carol had always been very kind to Jackie, accepted that and seemed satisfied. To make sure that my mother did not find out about Jackie’s death from anyone else, I told only my closest friends and asked them to keep it a secret. I was afraid the media would find out and report it, and that could lead to someone in the nursing home saying something to my mother. I gave up consolation for discretion. It was a poor substitute.

My mother’s condition continued to deteriorate, and her periods of lucidity grew shorter and shorter. I flew down to see her once a month and brought along my daughter as often as possible. Sometimes my mother knew who I was, other times she didn’t. “Who are you to me?” she’d say over and over. And I would say, “I’m your daughter. Barbara.” Somehow she always knew that Jackie was Jackie. She had a very strange kind of selective memory. Sometimes she didn’t even know who she was. “Who am I?” she would say. “Well, Grams, who do you think you are?” Jackie would lovingly tease her.

When she did recognize me, she would beg me to take her out of the nursing home and bring her back to New York. I spent hours discussing it with Shirley and finally decided, now that my sister was gone, I could do that. But I decided not to move her into my apartment. Merv and I were engaged. He was virtually living with me, and I worried about the strain on both of us if we lived with my deteriorating mother and round-the-clock nurses. Instead I took a suite for her in a hotel across the street from the apartment, staffed it with nurses, and visited her every day. But she was unhappy there.

It was a decision I still go over in my mind. I think, Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps I should have brought my mother into the apartment. These are ghosts that don’t go away.

In the midst of all this, Merv and I got married. True to form, I had twice postponed the wedding. The first time was in the fall of 1985. I began to have doubts and didn’t go through with it. Then we were supposed to get married during the Christmas holidays in Aspen. Again, I couldn’t go through with it. I had growing reservations about Merv. He was wonderful company for the most part, but he could be very moody, and that cast a cloud over our relationship. I also worried again about the instability of marrying someone in show business. I tried to convince myself that Merv was primarily a businessman, the same rationalization I had adopted before marrying Lee. But just as Lee had produced one Broadway flop after another, Merv had already branched out into making forgettable and not very successful movies. There were rumors that his company might be in trouble. How could I repeat that mistake?