Judy & Liza & Robert & Freddie & David & Sue & Me... (33 page)

Finally, after a week, I backed off and went to only one a day for a month. Every time I left a meeting I left believing I belonged there. At the end of the first month, I was feeling better enough to seek an addiction doctor, and it was she who led me little by little to the understanding that I was addicted to pain. She never said those words, although she completely understood where I was. After all, pain—mine and everyone else's—had been a constant companion in my life for a long time, and I ministered to all of it. I was pain's handmaiden. It's not a surprise to me that I started to need it.

One day, however, while in my doctor's office, and after months of repeating the same sick phrases of feeling-sorry-for-myself garbage, I finally heard, actually
heard
, what I was saying as if for the first time. With the expert help I was getting, I was compelled to listen to myself, to really hear the maudlin crap that was coming out of my mouth, and it appalled me. The words were ridiculous, and I was disgusted and embarrassed. I stopped talking. I sat silently. The shrink sat watching me. And then, all at once, I was able to find the right words myself: “I am addicted to pain. I want it.” The moment I was able to say that out loud, I turned a corner. It was the most wonderful moment. I was a kid. I was so excited I jumped up and down like some kind of nut. Some kind of nut is what I had been.

It was going to be different going forward. Perhaps not overnight. But I was coming back. In that wonderful moment I knew that. It had taken me a year to get to that precious moment. During the following year, I never noticed my pain was disappearing, I felt my energy returning instead. I stayed at Al-Anon, attending a meeting a week, for five years.

*   *   *

Let me start here with the dictionary definition of codependency. It suited my condition so perfectly that I amuse myself by imagining it was tailored to me personally, but then I do recognize from time to time that I am not the center of the universe. Codependency is defined as “a psychological condition or a relationship in which a person is controlled or manipulated by another who is affected with a pathological condition (as an addiction to alcohol.…)” (I seemed to specialize in these.) “Codependency often involves placing a lower priority on one's own needs, while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others.” (That describes my concern for and care of David's children.) “Codependency can occur in any type of relationship, including family … and also romantic relationships. Codependency may also be characterized by denial, low self-esteem, and excessive compliance or control patterns.” This definition summed me up perfectly. Narcissists (again, one of my specialties) are considered to be natural magnets for the codependent.

I can joke about this dictionary definition being written with me in mind, but trust me, it also fit everyone I met at Al-Anon. They were mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, husbands and wives, and the grown children of all the aforementioned. I listened to all their stories and recognized me in many of their problems. I was no longer alone.

It was remarkable to me (and for a long time surprising) how I continued to find exactly the nonjudgmental help I needed. It's said that you take away from those rooms what you need and leave behind what you don't. Listening to others discuss their relationships at home, I learned a great deal about my own home, not just the one I was in, but the one I grew up in. I heard others talking about behavior like my father's, and the distress that his kind of behavior wreaks in all kinds of families. When the conversation shifted to the wives of such fathers, I thought they were talking about my mother.

Once I was able to accept that my family problems were hardly unique, I was also able to find
me
—the child who had been introduced to Judy Garland. That child was no different from so many other lonely children I heard about. I learned how to acknowledge that child, to love her, and to forgive Judy even though I might never learn to love Judy. And, having arrived in those rooms suffering a deep depression (although never as deep as Judy's, whose condition fitted the classic definition of manic-depressive), I could finally identify, at least somewhat, with how Judy felt as she valiantly tried to go forward every day.

The meetings reinforced my understanding that self-mutilation has nothing to do with love, and that Judy never needed an excuse to hurt herself. Sometimes I imagined Judy sitting next to me in those rooms. Of course that would have been impossible because of her celebrity, but I'd like to think she would have learned as much as I did.

I finally managed to say good-bye to the damage I'd allowed Liza's betrayal to cause in me. Letting go is a learned behavior, and it was hard work, but it was a great relief not to be carrying all that Liza baggage around anymore. I felt way lighter and more able to enjoy my former successes. There has always remained, however, a residue—a great sadness for Li, whose career started on a downhill slide after we parted. Liza was (and perhaps remains) every bit the codependent I was—and for good reason.

Someone in one of those rooms said, “There are two days of the week you don't have to worry about. One of them is yesterday, the other is tomorrow!” How right is that?! I've been making today count for a long time because of that lesson. Not the least of what I learned was to keep my mouth shut when someone else was talking. I'm forever grateful for the day a young man in those rooms said: “If I would only just take the cotton out of my ears and stuff it into my mouth, I'd be a whole lot better off.” Oh, what a gift! An agent hardly ever shuts up. I finally discovered how much more I could find out if I kept my mouth closed. My last husband actually told me everything I had needed to know before I married him. He didn't use words like “controlling,” “manipulative,” and “narcissistic,” but the messages were all clearly there. I didn't hear them because I wasn't really listening.

*   *   *

Sharing my own experiences in those rooms started me on the road to recovery. Finally, by the late eighties, after taking a good look at the totality of my married experiences, I was able to let all the anger and depression go, and I was then ready to go to court, which is where the legal hassling ultimately led David and me. It was nasty stuff, and the details are boring, but the finale was better than any eleventh-hour finish on Broadway.

To start with, I looked at my soon-to-be-ex-husband sitting there, and I felt nothing. I wondered how I had allowed myself to make such a poor judgment. My first instinct, which was to get to know this man better before we married, had been the right one. And now I would pay for my mistake in court. I was disgusted with myself.

The prim little (and I mean tiny) judge, who revved up his machismo by arriving clad in black leather on a huge Harley Hog, sat as tall as he was able to as he listened to my husband's lawyers tell him that it would be a shame to give me anything in the divorce. “Take it all away from her,” my husband's lawyer boomed out in a stentorian tone. “Don't let her suck on the hind tit of wealth. You will be destroying her. Take it all away,” he said. “Then, like cream rising to the top, she will do what she has to in order to succeed once again.” I couldn't believe my ears.

The judge, however, found this argument very compelling, and that's just what he did. He gave all the investments, bought with a great amount of my earnings, to David. My attorneys hardly spoke at all. I didn't understand it, and at that point there was nothing I could do about it. I might have done something later, but I was anxious to be done with it and to move on. That the judge gave the home we'd built in Aspen to David was only right because he'd owned the land before, and he'd invested the lion's share of the construction costs.

I was awarded a lousy cash settlement, which didn't come anywhere close to the money I'd invested in our different real estate ventures in Colorado. It was a sick joke. Like cream, I curdled just listening to the judge. But it was finally over, and here's the bottom line: When I came out of this dark tunnel, I was so much stronger. I don't think I know many as strong as I.

*   *   *

I am deeply grateful to all the people who inhabited those rooms. I share a silent bond with them that will never be broken because I live the lessons I learned in those rooms every day of the week. I can no longer be tested without my thoughts immediately flying back to some meeting that informed me how to react with understanding and with grace.

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

TGIF (Thank God It's Finished)!

I still find it interesting, in retrospect, to look at how my career functioned in my marriages. It was the third person in bed. In both my success and my failure!

In my first marriage I used my ambition like a steamroller to mow my husband down. I was young and stupid, thoughtless and unkind. And when I achieved a certain level of success, I dumped him. He deserved far better. I'm grateful to myself for apologizing to him.

In my second marriage my success made it difficult for my husband to stand on his own two feet once he'd lost his business. But that was his own doing, so who cares that he was never again able to measure up!

My last husband (and I love being able to say that) married a success. He was good with that. During our marriage it was my career this time that went south. The huge earnings and all the attendant glitter disappeared. He was not so okay with that. One of my opening-night flops that my husband and a friend drank their way through stands out as a particularly low moment for me—but just one of many.

So my career brought about behavior both good and bad from me and those closest to me. Had our relationships been solid enough, had the men I married had a stronger sense of self, had I been more confident and tolerant, perhaps my career would have mattered less. For sure, my career wasn't the only factor that determined the success or failure of those unions. It would be a gross oversimplification for me to lay the demise of each marriage at the feet of my profession.

However, having made all the above disclaimers, as a dedicated career woman who defines herself by her career, I need to repeat my feeling that
having it all is not possible.
Had I made good choices for myself instead of bad ones, I think I still would have had to make many more compromises than I was willing to make because I know what a career demands. I would have had to let go of a Hallmark-card version of life, a picture-perfect existence, and instead let things happen as they do in life without sweating it. I couldn't. I always wanted it to be perfect. It was far from. Some aspect of my life or someone I loved always drew the short straw. Sometimes it was one of my beautiful children, or both of them: at other times it was my husband, and very often it was me. And I dealt with it badly.

Since my last divorce, I've enjoyed affairs and relationships, but I'm no longer interested in finding the same slippers under my bed two weeks in a row, nor do I want to babysit anyone's enlarged prostate. I want to be neither a nurse nor a purse. (I love that expression.)

*   *   *

There is one life lesson I've adopted that is the most important of all. It counts with me more than listening, and more than being present, more than living in the moment. It is that I never need to be 100 percent right ever again. Just recently I was reminiscing with my daughter about a silly event that took place one morning many years ago. She remembered the incident one way, I another. My memory was so vivid; apparently so was hers, and our recollections were totally different. It was a setup for an argument. (As it proves there's no such thing as objective reality!) That long-ago morning was a seminal moment for me, because I realized exactly then that my third marriage was over. David had been out the night before with the woman who would become wife number four. We had visited friends in Santa Fe, and now we were leaving; and I was leaving my marriage behind although I would stubbornly cling in needy fashion a bit longer.

Those few awful hours are as crystal clear to me as if it were yesterday. I was fine with Jenny's memory of the moment. I didn't need to convince her that I was right, nor do I ever need to do it with anyone else. Being right is simply a way to perpetuate an argument. I can allow everyone else in my life—those I know, and strangers who are just passing through—to be right. It doesn't mean I'm wrong; it means we don't argue. I don't lose arguments anymore; I simply don't have them. I love that.

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Climbing the Mountain

Fast-forward. I am on safari in Africa, at Tarangire National Park in Tanzania to be exact. Paul Oliver, one of the greatest safari guides in East Africa, says, “Let's do something daring. I've never tried this with a client.” Okay! “Let's take some bedrolls and leave camp. We'll sleep out in the wild tonight.” I had already walked twenty miles across the savanna with Paul, who carried a rifle he wouldn't use, and Osidai, a Masai whose machete was a simple extension of his arm going back to the time he was a child. I'd wanted to get a real feel for the country, and I could think of no better way than to walk. We were sometimes in elephant grass over our heads, inhabited by poisonous snakes and every other dangerous tiny creature. In this new adventure we'd be outside the park in the dark with the elephants crashing around, and with whatever lions were prowling the night. Sleeping out sounded fully scary enough to be interesting.

We stretched out our bedrolls on a high rock because, as I had learned in Paul's camp—where elephants cruised constantly—that if you had to run from an elephant, running up a rock could save your life. Elephants don't climb rocks. Our rock that night was twenty feet high. Next to us was a rock that was at least five or six stories high. That's where the baboons went to get away from the lions that fed at night. They climbed their rock at precisely 6:00 p.m. every single night of the year, at the exact moment in equatorial Africa when the sun goes down. Paul knew that he could treat me to this amazing sight: hundreds of baboons, some with babies on their stomachs or on their backs, scaling this tower at breakneck speed to their nests above.