Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (27 page)

With every month that passed, she kept getting harder and harder to live with. She was broke, had no home, and was in failing health. Sid wasn’t helping her financially, and the IRS had attached her salary. The pressure made her more and more dependent on her pills. The problem with addiction, especially in that advanced stage, is that it isn’t a static condition. If you don’t get help and get better, you get worse. My mother was getting worse. More and more often, she would simply lose control of her emotions. She was taking huge amounts of ritalin and amphetamines by then, twenty or more times the maximum dose. Her brain was literally shorting out. No amount of narcotics at night could counteract such a load of stimulants, and the more she took, the more she craved. Her intake of stimulants was complicated by the fact that she drank, never in large amounts, but enough to throw another chemical into the mix. To top it all off, she was consuming huge amounts of nicotine, two or three packs of Salem menthol cigarettes a day. The combination of chemicals was explosive.

And what explosions. Daily, sometimes several times daily, she would become randomly enraged by almost anything that crossed her path. Some of the incidents were triggered by the small, normal stresses of everyday family living. If I forgot to make my bed, or just threw it together carelessly, she’d explode with fury. Something that hadn’t bothered her an hour before—or five minutes before—suddenly became intolerable to her. Anything could set her off, anything was possible when she was overdosing, and we knew it. I tried to protect Joe as much as possible, to keep him out of it if I could and absorb the brunt of her anger myself. I was older, and besides, I could take it. Joe had a gentler nature, and I worried about how it would affect him. I also think it was harder for him because he’d always been her baby boy, and she’d treated him with a special tenderness. It’s funny—the little brother I’d so bitterly resented years before had now become my partner in
survival, someone I protected against all comers, even our mother. Still, the situation was hard on both of us. Joe and I lived with tension twenty-four hours a day.

Sometimes the outbursts went far beyond the yelling and screaming that could result from a dropped jacket or an unmade bed. She would break things. She broke all the glass rods on the staircase in one outburst, and she broke just about everything else in the apartment that would break before we finally moved out. When the chemicals hit her bloodstream, she could just pick up anything within reach and throw it. She was amazingly strong under any circumstances, but when she was in the grip of an amphetamine-nicotine mix, the adrenaline rush made her even more powerful. Even at four feet eleven inches and ninety pounds, she could hurl almost anything across a room with deadly accuracy: big ashtrays, heavy books, lamps, anything handy. She was one powerful little lady. There’s a scene in
The Pirate
where she hurls most of the props in the room, including several large vases and an array of pirate weapons, ten or fifteen feet across the room at Gene Kelly. She never misses. I’ve got a pretty good idea where Vincente Minnelli got the inspiration to direct that scene. He was married to Mama at the time.

As time went by, these outbursts increasingly occurred in the middle of the night, at about three A.M., like the old night visits at Rockingham Drive. Two or three times she actually threw me and Joey out of the house. The first time it happened, I was really upset. She kept screaming at me and telling me to get out. I was afraid to leave Joe alone with her in that condition, so I took him with me. We showed up at Liza and Peter’s house at about four A.M., and they were wonderful. Thank God, Liza was just as protective of me as I was of Joe, and Peter was like my big brother. We all took care of each other. They took us in and calmed us down. But just about the time I started to feel better, my mom started calling Liza’s house demanding they bring us back home. She kept calling and calling, screaming at Liza. Finally Peter took the phone. He was
furious; it was the first time I’d ever heard him raise his voice to my mother. He shouted, “I am not bringing these children home while you’re behaving this way. Now, stop calling my house!” And he slammed down the receiver.

There was a huge silence, and we all sat there looking at each other. I knew in my gut I had to go back home. She was in bad shape and I loved her. I finally said, “Take us home, Peter.” So he did, reluctantly. When we finally got there, it was as if nothing had happened. My mother just thanked Peter for dropping us off and told us to go to bed. Later on, when she realized what she’d done and the guilt set in, she got angry at Peter. She couldn’t bear to face the way she was treating us, so she’d always look around for someone else to blame. On nights like that, it was Peter.

All in all, there were three or four of these late-night escapes to Liza and Peter’s. After the first time, I really didn’t mind. Their apartment became a place of refuge. Joe and I came to look forward to going over there, even if we had to get thrown out of the house to do it. It was so peaceful there.

I adored Peter Allen. I still do. He was one of the most gifted performers I’ve ever seen, and the best of brothers to me and Joe. I was never angry with him for marrying my sister, or for their divorce, either. I was just sad, for both of them. I don’t believe Peter intended to mislead Liza about his sexuality. I think he misled himself. Maybe he thought he could put his lifestyle behind him permanently when he married her. I admired his courage in going public about his sexuality years later. Peter truly loved my sister, but he was confused about the kind of love he felt for her.

We were all pretty confused during those years.

In those last two years of her life, my mother never seemed to sleep. How could she, with dozens of Ritalin and Benzedrine capsules in her system? If someone didn’t watch her constantly, she would wander around the house half the night like a restless spirit. One night when I couldn’t stay awake any longer, she wandered into Joey’s room. He was lying on his side, facing the door when
Mama came into his room. Joe and I were light sleepers by then. He heard her but kept his eyes closed, hoping she’d go back out and let him sleep. Peering through his closed eyelashes, he could just see her outline, eerie in the darkened room. As she bent over his still form, Joe could hear her breathing oddly. She was taking heavy, wheezing breaths—a heavy, unnatural sound in the silent room. Joe began to panic, thinking, “Oh, God, Mama’s possessed!” He lay perfectly still, scared to death something evil was going to get him. A minute or two later Mama turned and made her way back toward the open door as Joe watched. Still in the grip of an overstimulated imagination, it seemed to Joe that my mother was floating, her feet moving silently through the air a few inches above the floor. Afraid to go back to sleep, Joe lay awake all night, fearing the ghostly form would return. When he tells the story now, we both laugh at the fear that gripped his twelve-year-old’s imagination. At the time, though, it wasn’t so funny.

I tried to keep an eye on her at night, but after a while I became almost obsessed with the need for sleep. When my mother didn’t sleep, I couldn’t sleep, either. I didn’t dare. I had to make sure she was all right. As the medication took its toll on my mother’s system, it indirectly began to take its toll on my body, too. People talk about twenty-four-hour-a-day jobs; I had a seventy-two-hour-a-day job. During that year in the brownstone, and later at the St. Moritz when we moved out, I rarely slept more than every second or third night.

The nightly ritual went something like this. My mother would go to bed, usually sometime after midnight, with the TV and radio going to provide white noise in the background. At some point, if we were lucky, she’d drift off to sleep. Joe would already be in bed, but I’d still be up checking on her until she finally dozed off. When that happened, I’d go back to my own room and go to bed, hoping for the best. An hour or two later she would wake up, either excited or agitated, and needing company. She’d come into our rooms and wake up me and Joe, and we’d go back to her room and
crawl into bed with her. And she’d start talking. She’d talk and she’d talk and she’d talk, for hours at a time, with me curled up beside her and Joe dozing on the pillow next to me. For a while I’d talk with her, but after an hour or two, the best I could manage was, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” And she’d keep talking. Every now and then she’d doze for a few minutes, and when she did, I’d nudge Joe and whisper to him to go back to bed. He’d stagger back down the hall to his room in his pajamas and go back to bed while I stayed with Mama. Sometimes she’d wake up and start talking again, and sometimes she’d sleep for a few hours. Not daring to get up, and too weary to move anyway, I’d stay in the bed next to her, alternately dozing and listening as she needed me to. If I was lucky, we’d both fall asleep next to each other by dawn.

Two years later, when she died, I came to treasure some of those moments of closeness. It was usually then, in the middle of the night, that we shared our secrets the way best friends do. But at the time, it was grueling. I was fifteen by then, growing rapidly and badly in need of rest and a healthy way of living. My life at Mapleton as a little girl, with its carefully regulated hours for play, naptime, sleep, and healthy home-cooked meals—never anything from a can—seemed like a dim and distant dream.

More than anything in life, I wanted my mother to be healthy, to get well and become once again the woman I remembered from those early years. I would have done anything to make that possible. But no matter how much my heart and spirit wanted to bring that about, my body was beginning to give out under the strain.

Quite simply, I was about to burn out.

Collection of the author

Joey, Mama, and me on the town, early 1968. That’s Angie Dickinson at the table behind us.

F
ew things make me angrier, or cause me more pain, than listening to the drivel in countless books and interviews about how my mother spent her life unloved, neglected, and betrayed. Even her obituaries routinely talked about how she “never found love” or how “everyone she loved betrayed her,” leaving her alone and abandoned in her times of need. Near the end she fed that belief herself because she was too sick, too far gone, to face what was really happening. Didn’t love her? Neglected her? We, my brother and sister and I, loved her more than anything else in life. So did my father. My dad has taken so much abuse from the press over the years, but none of the people who condemn him were there to watch as he struggled to rescue a woman who was beyond rescue. There wasn’t enough love in the world, enough attention in the world, to save my mother. No one could have saved her but herself, and at the end, it was far too late even for that.

I should know. I nearly killed myself trying.

The months and eventually years of stress and physical exhaustion had begun to take their toll on me, too. From the time I’d walked through the door of that beach house in Waikiki with wet washcloths to clean up the blood three years before, I’d been
struggling to clean up my mom’s disasters. I am my father’s daughter, and when the world toppled off his shoulders, I tried to hold it up with my own skinny arms.

For five years I’d kept on trying. But I wasn’t my father; I was just a kid, and my body was trying to remind me that I had shouldered a burden far beyond my strength. When I continued to ignore what my body kept telling me, it finally took its revenge. One day, it just quit.

Most of that day is gone from my memory. The one thing I do remember clearly is walking down the staircase that afternoon. I had come down that ugly glass staircase into the living room after being up with my mother for one of our marathon nights. I don’t remember thinking about anything in particular that day; I was too tired for feeling or thought. I only remember descending the last stair, stepping into the living room, and for some unfathomable reason, looking up at the ceiling. I remember standing there for a few seconds, looking straight up, and then raising my hands overhead and beginning to spin. I spun and spun, right there by the staircase, my hands reaching for the dim recesses above my head. That’s all I remember. The next thing I knew, everything went black.