Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (29 page)

She actually thought she could find true love with these men, and my mom’s definition of true love never included bisexuality.
Contrary to what’s been written, my mother neither understood nor accepted her lovers’ often ambivalent sexuality. I remember all too clearly the screaming accusations that filled our house in the middle of the night when she encountered one of her lovers’ “indiscretions.” I didn’t hear the word “fag” from the kids at school. I heard it from my mother. When she was overmedicated and wanted to hurt me, she’d tell me that a boy I liked was a fag, too. To her, homosexuality was a kind of betrayal.

My mother’s attitude wasn’t simple homophobia. Perhaps the reality of my mom’s attraction to these men, and of her sense of betrayal when confronted with their lifestyle, went much deeper than she ever acknowledged. She had powerful emotional ties to some gay and bisexual men. It is no coincidence that several of her relationships were with gay men. Some of their appeal was obvious. Many gay men offer a sensitivity, an artistic passion, and an emotional openness that can be hard to find in straight men. Also, gay men have always been drawn to the arts, so my mother had been surrounded by gay men all her life. Part of their attraction for her later in her life was simply their availability and the common interests they shared with her.

Another factor may have been her closeness to her beloved mentor, Roger Edens, who was already living a discreet gay life by the time my mother met him. Roger was an extraordinarily gifted musician, and the only man who ever came close to qualifying as a second father to my mom. He came into her life when she was only thirteen and remained in it until the day she died. Roger had my grandfather’s handsome charm, soft southern accent, and great warmth. After my grandfather died, Roger was the only person in my mother’s life that Mama completely trusted. Some of my happiest childhood memories are of Roger sweeping me up into his arms at social gatherings. Small wonder then that for my mother, some gay men became symbols of love and trust.

Of course, the catch was that it’s one thing to have a gay man for a father figure or best friend, and another thing entirely to try
to make one into a husband. It took a long time for Liza to figure that out. My mother never figured it out, and the results were inevitably disastrous.

It was at about this time that I got sick again. It wasn’t just exhaustion, though; I kept getting strep throat, and I couldn’t seem to get well. I was sick all the time, and I kept getting sicker. My dad was taking me to see Lester Coleman, my godfather, who was also a well-known ear, nose, and throat specialist. Lester kept telling me that I would never get well until I had my tonsils out, because they were seriously inflamed, but I steadfastly refused to have it done. I still had nightmare flashbacks of Dr. Duval’s needles and of my bout with appendicitis in England. Finally Lester refused to see me again unless I had the surgery, so my dad sat me down and talked to me until I reluctantly agreed.

When he took me to the hospital for the procedure, Lester met us there, and he was wonderful with me. He’d written a popular children’s book about going to the hospital, and he was a strong believer in making kids feel involved in the medical process, so he did everything he could to make me comfortable. After I put on the hospital gown for the surgery, he took me by the hand and led me down the corridor to the operating room himself, hand in hand with me all the way. Then, still holding my hand, he led me around the operating room and showed me everything there, explaining exactly how they would do the procedure and what to expect. And when the technician came to give me the ether, he held my hand and talked to me while they put the mask over my face and I slowly drifted off.

So far, so good. It was a huge improvement over my appendectomy. But then I woke up. I’ll never forget the sensation. I was alone in the recovery room, and the pain in my head and neck was overwhelming. I was shocked; no one had prepared me for that level of pain. My father was gone; my mother had had another of her crises, and he’d gone back to the hotel to take care of her. Lester was gone. It was just me. There was a child screaming down
the hall, and when a nurse finally came to check on me, I whispered to ask what was wrong with the child. She said he’d just had his tonsils out. Then she explained that the reason I felt so bad was that I was fifteen, much older than the average tonsillectomy patient, and that the pain was just that much worse as a result. I was so hurt that Lester and my dad hadn’t told me what to expect. They’d kept telling me that I would be fine, that it wouldn’t hurt very much. I felt betrayed.

When they took me back to my dad’s hotel four days later to recuperate, I continued to feel abandoned. Someone checked on me regularly, but everyone was too busy with my mom’s latest crisis to pay very much attention to me. I remembered the way my parents had cared for me when I’d had the operation in England, and I bitterly reflected that getting older was a pretty lousy deal. The only funny part of the experience was that
Laugh In
was on TV my first night out of the hospital. I’d never seen anything like it, and in my half-drugged state I thought I was really losing it as I watched the actors popping their heads in and out of boxes while some silly blonde giggled. It was all very confusing. The only good thing about the operation was that I got to sleep most of the time for two weeks. Sleep, blessed sleep. Most teenagers beg to stay out all night. I begged to go to bed. When I’d recovered completely, I reluctantly returned home to my mother.

In June 1968, five days before my mother’s forty-sixth birthday, the world fell apart again. Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy, who died the next day. Joe and I had gone down to Boston for my mother’s concert, so we were with her when we found out. I remember my mom waking me up and saying, “Bobby passed away. He died.” It was like Jack Kennedy all over again. I remembered Hyannis Port, and I thought, “Poor Ethel. Ten children and one on the way. What will they do?” My mother was beside herself with grief and with anger. She couldn’t understand it. Why were people shooting all the Kennedys? Had the country gone mad? This time it was even worse for her because she was so unwell. I
was worried sick about her reaction to this death. I couldn’t help thinking, “This is going to be bad, really bad. I’m going to be up for days. There won’t be any sleep.”

I had no way of knowing that little more than one year from that day, my mother would be dead, too.

There is a time of reckoning in all our lives, and for me the time had come to begin facing facts. The situation at home had become intolerable. I no longer had a home in the true sense of the word. We couldn’t go on much longer the way we were. Even my mother knew that, at some level. Not long after Bobby Kennedy’s death, she began to talk about going into a hospital to get well, if she could only get the money together. Mickey Rooney and some of her other friends started trying to raise enough money to help her. Mickey had been horrified by how bad she looked. She was only forty-six, but her body was wearing out.

It was around this time that she checked herself into the Peter Bent Brigham hospital in Boston after a series of disastrous concerts at the Garden State Arts Center in New Jersey. But she had to check out after a few weeks to fulfill prearranged concert dates.

My dad was trying to find a way to make sure Joe and I would be okay while things were being worked out. He’d decided by then that the best thing for him to do would be to move back to California with Patti, but he was broke, too, and he didn’t have a home to take me and Joe to. My sister had recently come back to New York from a tour of Australia, so he asked her if Joe and I could stay with her and Peter for a while until he could work out something more permanent. They were glad to help, so Joe and I moved in with them while my mom made plans to go to the hospital and Dad tried to settle matters in the East. I still had a little hope left that if my mom just went into the hospital and stayed for a while, she would get better. After all, she had gotten better so many times before, even when everyone thought it was impossible. So I kept hoping. We all did.

That particular hope didn’t last long. My mother never stayed
in the hospital. Instead she moved in with various friends for a while, signed yet another team of managers, and tried to carry on.

Shortly after that my dad and Patti moved back to California. Joe went with him. Much as he loved our mother, he simply couldn’t take it anymore. It had come to a head for him late one night when he was alone with my mom. I don’t remember why I wasn’t there. Joe, who was thirteen at the time, was sitting in the living room in his pajama bottoms, longing to go to bed, when Mama flew into one of her rages. She went way over the edge this time, and since Joe was the only one there, he became the target. She started chasing him around the apartment until, terrified, he bolted for the front door and out into the hall. Once there he raced for the stairs leading down to the lower stories. As he neared the landing, he glanced back and saw my mother standing in the doorway with a butcher knife. When she raised her arm, Joe instinctively threw himself flat onto the landing. As he hit the ground, he felt the knife blade graze the top of his hair before it landed quivering in the wall next to him. Not pausing to look back, he hurtled down the remaining stairs and out into the night. It was three A.M., winter in New York, and he wasn’t wearing a shirt or shoes. Shaking with cold and shock, he picked his way barefoot through the snow to the hotel where our father was staying. It was only three or four blocks, but Joe said they were the longest three or four blocks of his life. Once there, Dad let him in without asking any questions. Joe didn’t tell him why he’d come. The safety and warmth of Dad’s room were all he wanted.

Joey was our mother’s precious son. For most of his life my mother would have killed anyone who hurt a hair on his head. That night, she’d almost killed him herself, but she didn’t know what she was doing. I don’t think she even knew the phantom she was chasing that night was Joe. By then her brain was so seriously damaged that she lived part of the time in a nightmare where nothing made sense to her anymore.

I didn’t go with my dad and Joe. I knew my mother would be
coming back to the East, and she would need someone to take care of her. I kept thinking, “In case she comes back to New York, in case she needs me here, I have to stay.” I couldn’t leave her by herself. So I stayed in New York alone, the sole survivor of our battered little family group. Even my father had given up, consumed by migraine headaches and crippling neuralgia. He’d taken his son and gone back to California to make a new home for us all. But I wasn’t ready to go. Not quite yet.

My mom returned to the East, though not to New York, and did another concert. Remarkably enough, she had pulled herself together one more time and managed to give one or two more truly remarkable performances. None of this meant much to me by then, though. I was simply trying to survive.

I decided to move in with a friend on Long Island named Joan Lee. She was a friend of mine from the Professional Children’s School, a very sweet person with a wonderful family, and her mother and father (the famous Marvel Comics artist Stan Lee) said I would be welcome to stay with them so I could have a little stability until I decided what to do next. My dad got me settled in with Joan, and for a few weeks I got to live the life of a normal teenager. Joan’s mother cooked our meals, and I ate and slept on a regular schedule. It had been years since I’d had anything like a structured family life. Except for brief stayovers at the Englund house with Cloris Leachman on Rockingham, I hadn’t been part of a normal family since I was nine. It felt luxurious to keep regular hours, be free of the constant fear and chaos, and just act like a kid. I no longer jumped every time the phone rang. I could go to bed and sleep straight through the night. Those weeks at Joan’s house were a real eye-opener. I’d forgotten what it was like to live like a normal person. I knew it wouldn’t last forever, but I tried not to think about it. My moment of decision would come soon enough.

In a sense, my mother forced that decision on me herself. She didn’t come back to New York; instead she called me at Joan’s house one night and told me she wanted me to come up to Boston
and be with her there. She was in bad shape on the phone, drugged and abusive. And somehow, the sound of her voice on the phone that day made something in me snap. I’d had nearly two months of food and sleep and peace, and when I heard that familiar voice raging at me over the phone, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t face it one more time—the rage, the fear, the chaos, the exhaustion. I couldn’t do it. Something inside of me just shut down, and for the first time in my life, I said no to my mother. No, Mama, I’m not coming. No, Mama, I can’t do it. Not this time. Not anymore. No, Mama. No.

My mother was beside herself with rage. She kept screaming and screaming at me, and I just stood there and held the phone, sobbing and shaking. Finally Mrs. Lee, who had come in and was standing next to me, couldn’t take it any longer. She took the phone away from me and said to my mother, “Please don’t scream at this child anymore. She’s having a real tough time. Leave her alone.” She stood up for me. God knows I needed someone to stand up for me at that moment.

Mrs. Lee hung up the phone, and as soon as she did, I called my dad in California and said, “Dad, I have to come live with you in California. I have to come with you right now, today, tonight. Please, Dad. Please send me a ticket. I have to come right now.” I was crying so hard I could hardly talk. I was terrified and guilty about leaving my mom; but something deep inside, some survival instinct, told me that I had to leave, and I had to leave
now,
or I wasn’t going to make it. I had to be with my dad and my brother, and I had to be safe. My father was wonderful; he kept trying to calm me down and said, “Of course, baby, of course you can live with me. I’ll send you a ticket tonight. I’ll have them leave it at Kennedy Airport. Mrs. Lee can take you to the plane, and I’ll pick you up when you get here. You can come home tonight.” So in the middle of a hot August night, Mrs. Lee drove me to the airport and put me on a plane for Los Angeles. On the way to the airport, I
begged Mrs. Lee, “Please don’t tell my mother where I am. Promise me you won’t tell her.” She promised.