Blue Genes (16 page)

Just after his twenty-fifth birthday, Tony told me the long wait was over. The army would give him early release to work on the gubernatorial race in Massachusetts.

In June, he took a three-week leave in “the hinterlands” of Japan, promising to bring me a silk kimono if he could get to L.A. With the prospect both of release and of vacation, the tone of the letter was much lighter. He bantered about my appearance in
LIFE
magazine a few months before, as part of a cover story about
Lassie
. (There was no mention of the fact that by then I’d been laid off from the show because the producer’s wife wanted to do my job herself!)

I struggled to find work in the television industry, using the few contacts I had made. I wrote outlines for shows, submitted them, and counted the rejection letters.

In Boston, where he settled after the army, Tony was making strides. He had found “a terrific girl and apartment,” as well as a job on a political campaign, but added, “I’m more alive and more depressed than in years.”

This statement reveals a great deal about Tony. He is “alive” because he sees possibilities in this political work to catapult him onto a newspaper like the
Washington Post
or the
Christian Science Monitor
or maybe even the
Baltimore Sun
. But because he isn’t there yet, he finds this a depressing time. So much to hope for, but so much unsettled. And so much impatience. He ends, “Maybe I’ll have to go back to the
Post-Dispatch
,” the same newspaper that was so impressed by Tony that it offered him a permanent job during his junior year at Harvard, but was now too low a prize for him to contemplate.

In the meantime, I had entered a serious regime of psychoanalysis. My physical symptoms had not diminished, even though the paregoric worked most of the time. And my depression kept getting worse, especially when I contemplated continuing to live way out in the valley, subsisting on unemployment benefits, and seeing nothing coming my way.

Soon, Tony wrote that he had again been depressed, “very depressed,” and attributed it to his inability to get a rise out of any major newspaper.

I DON’T KNOW
when I stopped thinking of the word “depressed” as a general description of sadness or disappointment and started thinking of it clinically. Or when I realized it was a medical term that applied to Tony—and to me. When he wrote that letter in 1958, Tony was not suggesting that he had a mental disorder. In fact, I’m not sure that he
ever
thought so. “Depressed” and “depression” were figures of speech, more like “sad” or “disappointed.”

I
should have known better. Not only had I studied psychology and knew the distinction between sadness and depression, but I was all too aware of my own mental instability. Since the fall of 1955, my senior year of college, I surely
knew
what depression was and what it could do to the body and the mind.

Due to my current analysis I was knowledgeable enough to realize that what had been labeled “neurasthenia” was more likely a combination of an anxiety disorder, psychogenic stomach disorder, and dysthymia—or cyclical depression. I was confident that psychotherapy would work. I just had to enter into it full throttle.

When Tony wrote that he was “depressed,” however, I wasn’t connecting the dots. I thought I was the only one in the family who had serious psychological problems—serious enough to inhibit my career path, my social life, and my sense of enjoyment, though not so serious as to require close supervision or to keep me from occasional moments of pleasure. In short, I was like millions of Americans—troubled but not mentally ill.

I figured Tony was just looking for his place in the world after the army, and that takes time and effort. Of course he’ll be unhappy from time to time, I thought, but he’s strong.

In late 1958, from the heavens came a bid from the Baltimore
Sun
. Tony was thrilled because it was in a city he knew had “culture,” a city where Mencken spent many productive years. With the
Sun
job, he reported, he would be up and running into the future. But he also said he was tired of dragging all over the place, tired of not having someone to love him (“I’ll take the first sweet thing who comes along”), and, most important, “I’m fearful of letting anyone else know just how unsure I am of myself and my ability. I am too concerned with showing my best face, even if it means painting a false one.”

Tony’s lack of elation revealed a pattern that I can understand: we both could work extremely hard for our achievements, but once they were accomplished, we could equally express despair that they weren’t greater or that people weren’t noticing how well we were doing, weren’t applauding us. For both of us, there was constant devaluation of our achievements.

Over the next year, ups and downs persisted. Tony would complain bitterly that he was on the “lobster shift,” where “not enough writing will come my way.” He could not understand why once again he had to undergo apprenticeship. As a twenty-six-year-old reporter who had seen service in the army, at the
Harvard Crimson
, and at two other newspapers, he was infuriated at being forced to show his mettle once again.

Later, his mood would switch. “In the past two months I’ve been doing more writing than I ever thought possible on a paper this size and it’s all been getting in. From my contacts . . . I gather that it’s been well received and that the city editor likes my style.” He had gotten two bylines (“almost unheard-of for a new man”), and it’s clear that the reporter Tony is to become had already begun to show itself. He even admitted that he was getting a good “education” in the basics of journalism—forgoing the hubris of his remarks only a few months earlier.

Understandably, he relates that with all this work he has no time for a social life—no dates, no girls. He has even had no time to read books. He’s lonely. He wishes he could come to California to see me—we’ve seen each other only five days in the past four years—but he’s too busy writing.

In September, I decided to join Tony back east for Missy’s seventy-fifth birthday. The trip reunited Dad, Tony, and me for the first time in two or three years. It was not without its tribulation (I was fired from the trucking company I had been working for because I overstayed my leave), but it was good to hear how Tony was doing on the
Sun
, and we took the time to attend some theater together. On leaving, we promised to be in closer touch by mail.

In December, back in L.A., I got a call from Bob Maxwell, who had bought the rights to MGM’s
National Velvet
to make a television series. Would I like to come along as associate producer?

Tony congratulated me, but complained, “This is the most unimaginative, dull and uncreative city desk you can imagine.” He’s depressed, but can’t fight it off. Nothing looks right to him, not his present “woman” or the job, from which freshness and spontaneity have evaporated. He says he’s looking for a position either at the
Washington Post
or the
Herald Tribune
in New York. At the end, he apologizes for his “sour note for a sour feeling.”

I wonder if Tony was not simply a depressive but subject to the waves of affect that characterize bipolar disorder. If so, it might explain the intense irritability that preceded his depressive episodes and the bursts of enthusiasm that occasionally accompanied his work.

My own life—like that of anyone trying to get a break in a tough industry—had its ups and downs. While I was very active, I had terrible problems with my so-called love life. I found myself in an on-again, off-again relationship with a young architecture student that proved difficult to stay in and difficult to terminate.

I didn’t know whether she loved me or never wanted to see me again. She found it difficult to articulate her feelings. During our phone calls, there were often long, unbearable silences between us. I felt adrift, uncertain about my ability to be loved, uncertain about her feelings.

My psychoanalyst kept asking me why I felt so much rejection and sorrow when this woman couldn’t respond to me. Was it, perhaps, an echo of the silence of my mother? I wasn’t prepared—at that time—to countenance any such Freudian interpretation.

But one thing is certain: I was not equipped to deal with a romance in which I got less than 100 percent. Sadness and anger surged through me. Why didn’t this woman care for me as much as I cared for her? My psychoanalyst asked me why I had
chosen
her, suggesting that the fault might lie not with her but with my choice of potential mates. Was I perhaps picking women who
couldn’t
love? Was I playing over and over again the broken record of the death of my mother? In years to come, this phantom would sabotage me.

Meanwhile, I decided I needed to get away for a while. I would take a vacation. I asked Tony to join me.

IN A LUSH GARDEN
on the grounds of the María Cristina, an inexpensive colonial-era hotel in the heart of Mexico City, my brother sits and reads the
New York Times
. For years, this is how each day will start. No matter where he is, he has to read that paper. And even though he is still working for the
Sun
, he has to know what Scotty Reston is saying. Later, Susan and I made it a matter of speculation whenever Tony visited us to see how far he would travel and how long it might take to get the paper for his morning read. In Mexico, he had only to travel down to the Paseo de la Re-forma, where the Hilton sold the
Times
.

While the paper was being read, everything else came to a halt. No one was allowed to interrupt; no crisis, excluding an earth-quake, might shake Tony from finishing the sports and foreign desk sections. It was a ritual of enormous consequence.

Since the trip to Mexico was our first vacation together in almost ten years, I was impatient to get on to the business of pleasure. But Tony instructed me in the importance of his morning read, and I came to respect and tolerate it, no matter how long it lasted. I had borrowed a 35 mm camera to capture interesting moments on the trip—my first effort at taking still pictures—and somewhere there is a slide of Tony in his cordovan shoes, J. Press button-down shirt, and crewneck sweater from his Harvard days reading the
Times
in the María Cristina’s garden on that sunny morning in May 1960. We laugh at it, my wife and I, for the absurdity of the image—all those northern clothes, that concentration on
news
in the midst of southern beauty and southern climate—but we also admire it for the image of Tony’s dedication to dreams of glory.

The Mexico trip was not only the first expanse of time we spent together after adolescence but the last before I got married. As such, it had then, and has now, an aura of “golden time” about it—that important hour at the end of the day when filmmakers wait until the sun’s glow is just perfect for capturing life not as it is but as we wish it to be. As a nascent photographer and wannabe in the film industry, I knew about golden time. The term would reverberate with multiple meanings for my entire life.

Originally, Tony had wanted to join me for my birthday in March, but he was working hard at the
Sun
and couldn’t get away. I, on the other hand, was having my own busy time—completing the
Velvet
pilot, which seemed to take forever. Then we got the idea we could take a vacation together while Maxwell waited to hear whether the
Velvet
series would be picked up for production; Tony had accrued vacation time. Hey, we could go somewhere with each other. We decided on two and a half weeks in Mexico.

Living in Los Angeles made Mexico a perfect choice for me. It was close, the airfare was low, I loved Mexican food and Mexican music. Tony readily agreed. Mexico and its beaches seemed a wonderful option after a rough Maryland winter, and it turned out several acquaintances in Baltimore had friends or restaurants to suggest in Mexico. I started studying Spanish. I knew Tony wouldn’t know a word of it, since he was resistant to the study of languages unless he was paid to do it. But I hated to travel without some knowledge of a country’s language. By the time I left for Mexico City a month later, I had acquired a good working knowledge of the basic verbs and grammar. Enough, at least, to get us through our travels.

The plan was that I would fly to Mexico City on May 4, wait in our hotel for him to arrive the next day, and then we would spend two and a half weeks exploring. I used the patron saint of guide-books—Kate Simon’s
Mexico: Places and Pleasures
—to plan our holiday, but I must have missed the section on fiestas, because I arrived just before Cinco de Mayo, a day of jubilant celebration in Mexico, a fanfare for an exhilarating nineteenth-century victory over colonialism. Tony would not see it, but my memory of our trip together is forever colored by the experience of that first night. Shortly after I returned to California, I tried to convey in writing my love affair with Mexico through that first night’s experience:

This was a romanticized version. I didn’t actually dance and revel in the cacophony. In fact, I was frightened by the noise and the strange customs. At the age of twenty-six, I had not yet conquered my childhood fear of being alone. Sent away to camp at the age of six, learning that my mother had died, that my father would go away to a hospital, and that I, too, must go away, had left me with a host of residual anxieties that surfaced at times like this.

In adolescence, Tony and I had gone everywhere together, and I was able to bear up even when we were robbed by those toughs in Bloomingdale’s
because
Tony was with me. But when I was alone, even in my adult years, the fears of being abandoned and left behind in some forbidding place often came back. Tony thrived on new places; I learned how to make film and sat in the safety of an editing room. It was a striking contrast, and not until I married and traveled extensively did the fear of abandonment in foreign environments begin to leave me.

In the morning, with the sunshine, I was a new man. Refreshed, I breakfasted on huevos rancheros and strong coffee. In those days the María Cristina was already a rarity: it had enough real estate to set the pleasing hotel onto the grounds of that large garden—at a moderate cost. There was no air-conditioning, but the thick walls of the hundred-year-old building made that unnecessary. The rooms were small, but who spends time in rooms in Mexico? The restaurant served a delicious breakfast of eggs, tortillas, and fresh papaya; a little bar off the garden boasted a guitar trio that serenaded all night long. We were in paradise.

For those few days in Mexico City, Tony and I were fellow travelers on an equal footing, something that had never been true before. I had read up on the country and its offerings; I spoke Spanish. Tony was without any of the language, and he hadn’t had time to learn anything of the country’s history. For once, I had done the research; he had not.

We took the tourist trail recommended by Kate Simon. We ate at the restaurants she suggested—Danubio, in the downtown area, Hamburgo 76, in the Zona Rosa. We looked through the old Museum of Anthropology, where glyphs and stelae mingled with jade masks and stone images of Coatlicue—the goddess of death. History was Tony’s passion, and he enjoyed this look into the pre-Columbian era.

We went to the huge square—the zocalo—where an immense cathedral stood on the former site of an Aztec temple. We stood in awe of the thousands of people crowding public streets. On the Paseo de la Reforma, we took the
peseros
, gypsy cabs that plied only that route, charging but one peso for a group ride.

We were entranced by all of it—the cuisine, the ancient myths, the artifacts. We sneezed our way through dusty hallways in search of Rivera and Orozco murals, stopped at midday to dine on
langostinos al mojo de ajo
—succulent crawfish with a crisp garlic sauce. We listened to mariachis as they serenaded lovers in raunchy Plaza Garibaldi and heard the marimbas play through the night in the Zona Rosa near our hotel.

The second night in the city, we took a cab to the Frontón México, the country’s paean to jai alai. The atmosphere inside was more like that at a prizefight or a play. Spectators sat in the dark. Players were in a brightly lit arena, separated from us by a huge rope net that hung from ceiling to floor. They slung the pelota at hundred-mile-an-hour speeds from their rattan
canastas
, white flannel pants gleaming in the luminescence. During lulls between shots or games, bookies cried their odds, and bettors in the audience caught a tennis ball into which a slit had been cut—permitting them to insert pesos, then toss it back to the tout, who remembered everyone’s bet. At the end of play, which could last from a few minutes to a breathtaking half hour, one team—Rojo or Azul—had won, and winnings could be collected. Tony and I watched enthralled, but didn’t wager. We couldn’t understand the odds.

Three days later, we went back to the airport and flew by DC-3 to Oaxaca. It was an early morning trip, so we skipped breakfast.

This, too, was on Kate Simon’s trail, though she hadn’t warned of the creaky old World War II warplane that flew the route—so drafty that during the entire flight a hiss of cold air came into the cabin from a break in one of the windows. The landing in Oaxaca was bumpy; skimpy brakes sent us skidding to the very edge of the runway. We would have to take the same plane to Acapulco two days later.

As we traveled the short distance into that city of ten thousand people, to the Marques del Valle hotel, I saw for the first time what Mexico would evoke for me the rest of my life: old men with brooms made of straw, or of thin tree branches, sweeping the pathways full of bougainvillea blossoms that had fallen in perfect circles—like painted skirts around the mother vines; young girls, on hands and knees, black tresses tied up in braids behind their heads, washing endless miles of marble corridors. Later, it would also mean guitar trios on the beach in Acapulco, the blind guitarists of the zocalo in Oaxaca, the sad marimbas; stelae and pyramids, standing in fields of broken stone, mute against the harsh light. Pomegranates, dripping from the trees; police whistles like birdcalls; women in endless poverty; mescal, tequila, and exquisite dark sauces with sharp and subtle tastes.

We checked into our room and went immediately to the lobby to seek Victor, a tour guide who had been recommended to me in L.A. Victor put us in a tired car and drove to Monte Albán, the first of the two great ruins in Oaxaca. We were tired, hungry, and discombobulated by the dust and heat. Tony had spent two years in Baltimore and seemed to be able to sweat his way through humid days without discomfort; I found the heat unnerving. Unlike the pyramids outside of Mexico City, no structures at these Zapotec and Mixtec sites were above a few feet tall. And while Victor made much of the “Greek key” motifs on the low walls, my mind kept wandering to cool patios and a lunch of guacamole. On the way back to Oaxaca, we stopped at a local jewelry store. Jaguars made of onyx and jade stared out at us from the floor-to-ceiling shelves. Next door was a bar. Victor poured us a couple of shots of mescal, our first taste of the stuff. By the time we reached our hotel, mid-afternoon, food was the last thing on our minds. I badly needed a siesta.