Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (51 page)

As I listened to the stories from the people around me, I kept thinking how alike we all were. The stories were funny and sad and tragic, but they all had a common thread. Every one of us was an accomplished liar. “Miss Garland isn’t feeling well tonight. She has the flu. . . . My sister is just tired. She’ll be all right for tonight’s performance. . . . Jake can’t go to work this morning. He has food poisoning. . . . Oh, no, I don’t have a drug problem. I just like to have fun at parties with my friends.” And on and on and on.

I thought about all the lies we’d told my mother, Sid and Joe and I. We don’t want to hurt Mama’s feelings. We don’t want to make Mama angry. And later it became, “Jake isn’t an alcoholic. Of course not. . . . I don’t have a problem. Don’t be silly.” Once you start lying, you never stop. It takes over your whole life.

I wasn’t the only actor in that room; we were all actors, and our lives were one long performance.

I also began acquiring a whole new vocabulary at the center. It was there I learned what words like “intervention,” “codependent,” and “enabler” meant. The counselors carefully and clearly explained the part that each family member plays in the addictive cycle. At first I really resisted the concept that by my behavior, I was enabling family members to continue their addiction, but there are so many ways we enable those around us to keep using. One is to cover up for them, protect them from the consequences of their own actions. I’d done that for my mother, and I was still doing it for Jake. Another way is to scream and yell at them constantly about what they’re doing. It only makes them want to use more, and it sets up a conflict that makes solving the problem impossible. That had become the story of my life with Jake. And finally, you can enable an alcoholic to keep using by simply pretending the problem doesn’t exist.
Problem? What problem?
That was what I’d been doing with Liza. She could be bouncing off the ceiling with cocaine or popping pills on my couch, but I’d never said a word. I’d just gone about my business as if nothing was happening.

Difficult as it was to accept the concept of enabling, accepting the idea of “detachment” was even harder. The counselors explained that when we were talking to an alcoholic under the influence, we weren’t talking to a person at all; we were talking to a chemical. We were having a conversation with a bottle of gin or a line of cocaine, not a human being. Reasoning with a chemical was out of the question. Trying to “fix” a chemical was equally impossible. Consequently, they told us, it was our responsibility to “detach” from a loved one in that condition until they were sober again. In other words, if your loved one comes home dead drunk, don’t undress him and put him to bed. Let him pass out on the couch, and leave him there. If he vomits and passes out on the bed, don’t clean it up. Let him wake up in it. Sleep in the other room. Turn on the television. Step over him and go to a movie with a
friend. Let the
alcoholic
deal with it. We were only responsible for taking care of ourselves, and that was what we should do, just as it was the alcoholic’s responsibility to take care of himself.

I was stunned by this piece of advice. What do you mean, step over him and go to a movie? What happened when he woke up and was furious about the mess left behind? What happened when he got fired? Sick? Run over? One woman in my group expressed exactly what I was feeling: “What do you mean, don’t pay my son’s rent? He’ll get
evicted?’
When the counselor replied, “Let him,” she looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.

That was the hardest part for me, the concept of letting go. I simply couldn’t comprehend it. Over and over I would ask about my sister: “What should I do when she gets out? What should I do if she starts using again? How can I stop her if she gets out of control?” And over and over the counselors kept saying to me, “It’s not your responsibility. It’s her responsibility. Don’t do anything. Don’t help her. Let her help herself.” I couldn’t get that. It was incomprehensible to me. I finally voiced what all of us were thinking: “But she could
die.”
When the counselor said that was her choice, I thought he was insane. Didn’t he understand? I couldn’t let that happen. I had to prevent it. It was my responsibility, just as it had been my responsibility to take care of my mother. From the day my father had taught me to monitor my mother’s pill intake, I had been taking care of an alcoholic. I was very good at it; I knew where to look for the pills, what lies to tell other people, how to get medical help discreetly, how to administer first aid if they needed it. I was an expert. How could this counselor look me in the face and tell me just to walk away?

I’d walked away from my mother. That last year, I’d walked away and left her to take care of herself. And she’d died. She’d goddamn died.
Didn’t they understand that?

That’s what I wrestled with the hardest that week. For fifteen years my mother’s ghost had haunted me, the ghost of my own guilt. “I could have saved her,” I’d thought over and over again.
“I could have saved her. I should have stayed with her at the end.” But there in that conference room in Palm Springs, I finally confronted that ghost. The counselor looked me in the eye and said, “Do you really believe that, Lorna? Your mother died. Do you honestly believe you could have saved her?” That night, and for several nights after that, I lay awake and asked myself that question: Could I really have saved her? Countless books and articles have been written about my mother, about how she could have been saved if someone had really cared enough. I believed it myself. But there in that hotel room, I finally faced the hard truth: there was nothing I could have done to save her. There was nothing anybody could have done. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t even Mickey Dean’s fault. If she hadn’t overdosed that night, it would have been the next. Or the one after that. Sooner or later it would have happened, and none of us could have stopped it.

I lay there in the hotel and I would cry for my mother, and for all those other mothers and fathers and grandparents who had died because nobody understood the disease that had taken them. I saw the pain in the faces of the people surrounding me there at the center, and I knew it was the same pain I’d carried for so many years. I wondered how different my mother’s life might have been if they had understood addiction when she was young, if there had been a Betty Ford Center to send her to during those last, agonizing years. And for the first time I truly understood that what had taken my mother from me was a disease, and for the first time, I was able to forgive her—forgive her for the pain in our home, forgive her for the anger and the terror, and, most of all, forgive her for dying and leaving me all alone when I needed her so much. And I looked at my baby son sleeping there next to me and thought, thank God. Thank God it doesn’t have to go on another generation.

As my ten days at the center drew to a close, I received a message saying Liza had requested a meeting with me before I left at the end of the program. I’d seen her two or three times already since the day we checked her in. She was allowed a limited number
of visitors; her father had been to see her, my father had been there, and a couple of her closest friends had been there, too. When I’d been to see her earlier, I’d already told her that I’d seen Elizabeth Taylor, and that she had been wonderfully helpful. Liza’s reaction startled me. Her head had whipped around, and she’d said, “What? What do you mean, you saw her?” There was a great deal of anger and resentment on her face as she said it, and I remember a little bell had gone off in my head. Uh-oh. Maybe this was what Elizabeth had meant. But my sister has always been very possessive about her friends, and I thought maybe she considered Elizabeth her friend, not mine. I chalked it up to possessiveness and didn’t connect it with her stay at the center.

So when I walked into the one-on-one counseling session at the end of the Family Program, I had no expectation that anything unpleasant would occur. I was still overwhelmed by the power of the new discoveries I’d been making day by day. But the minute I sat down, it was clear that Liza was angry with me. She began to pour out her resentment about all kinds of things I’d never known she even thought about. There were two areas she talked about the most; one was what she called my judgmental attitude. She thought I was constantly judging her and her friends, looking down on their behavior. Things that I thought of as expressions of caring and concern, she thought of as criticism. The other source of her resentment was Mark. She was very angry about my obvious dislike of Mark. When I tried to tell her that I didn’t like him because I thought he was hurting her and because I didn’t like his lifestyle, she told me it was none of my business. I was very surprised by the way she felt, and very hurt. I tried to explain why I’d acted as I had, but it didn’t seem to make any difference to her. She was too filled with resentment to care about my point of view. I was stunned. I hadn’t expected her reaction. I should have, especially after my conversation with Elizabeth Taylor, but I didn’t.

Then I got angry. When the counselor asked me what I wanted to say to Liza, I told her I was very unhappy with her
behavior, too—all the insanity, all the deception. I told her that the thing I resented the most about her was the constant lying. She could never seem to tell me the truth about anything; either she’d avoid the subject or make up something to get herself off the hook. Even when I called, she’d often pretend not to be there or have someone say, “She’s in the shower.” I’d think, “God, how clean must she be by now? The woman takes more showers than anyone I’ve heard of.” I told her I’d rather she just say it was a bad time, that she’d call me back when she could. Instead I always ended up feeling stupid, like the dumb little sister, and I wouldn’t want to call her the next time. “Why do you have to lie to me about everything?” I asked her. By then I was in tears of anger and pain. She didn’t seem to have anything good to say to me, even about getting her help. I didn’t want credit, from her or anyone else; I just wanted her to understand that I’d taken a big risk because I loved her.

By the time it was all over, we were both in tears. Everybody said the right things, and the session ended in a friendly manner. But I was deeply disturbed by what had happened. Even when we hugged at the end, I thought to myself, “I wonder if this is for real, or if it’s just another performance.” Like our mother, Liza didn’t get that Academy Award for nothing. The whole experience reminded me of moments with my mom years before. I couldn’t be sure whether Liza was expressing her real feelings or just giving another performance. The lying was so deeply ingrained in her that I wasn’t sure she could quit. I understood that; all of us—me, Liza, Joey, and Sid—had become expert liars as a way to survive with my mother, who was only willing to hear what she wanted us to say. Joe and I had struggled long and hard to develop honest relationships with people. But with Liza, it went much deeper. The line between truth and performance had blurred with her as it had with our mother, and the question that disturbed me the most was whether Liza, though finally sober, was still doing it. It had been different with my mom; Mama’s “performances” were a product of her advancing disease, of the chemicals working on her mind. Liza,
on the other hand, was now stone-cold sober and had just finished a lengthy process of education and introspection. If the Ford Center hadn’t changed her, what would? I wrestled with my doubts all night after my conference with her, and for a long time after that I continued to struggle with it. Was Liza well now? I just didn’t know.

Two weeks after the Family Program ended, Liza came out of the Ford Center. She rented a house in Beverly Hills and started giving interviews. The press agents were all over her for a statement. She gave a long interview to
People
magazine about her experience at the center, and for a long time the press was flooded with articles about her experience. Her story was always the same: she’d realized she had a problem and decided to check herself into the Ford Center because they had such an excellent program there.

In all the interviews she gave the impression that she had taken the initiative herself every step of the way. She never mentioned her mental disintegration in the hospital in New York, and she certainly never mentioned the role played by the people around her who had done everything short of kidnapping her to get her to the center where she could be helped. On the contrary, she presented herself as if the entire program had been her own idea from the start.

People close to the situation would say to me, “She never mentions you, all you went through to get her there. Doesn’t that bother you?” It really didn’t. I knew what I’d done, but I also knew it was Liza’s style to dramatize things and make herself the center of attention. It was her coping mechanism, a way to protect herself from the humiliation she would have felt if she’d told the press what had really happened. I didn’t mind that she didn’t mention me. She hadn’t mentioned Roni or anyone else who’d helped her, either.

The important thing was that she was healthy and sober and alive. I’d come too close to losing her to worry about who got the credit for her recovery.

B
esides, I had my own family to worry about. With a three-month old baby and a career change in the works, it was time to turn my attention back to my own life. I left the Ford Center Family Program excited, rejuvenated, brimming over with new information that I hoped to carry into my daily life.

But first things first. For one thing, I needed to find a place to live.

By this time Jake had picked up the rest of our belongings in New York, leased our apartment, and flown out to California to meet me and Jesse. We needed a place to stay, so Jack Haley offered to let us stay with him until we could find a place of our own. I had remained on good terms with Jack after Liza’s divorce and still considered him a friend, so Jake and I moved in for a few weeks as Jack’s houseguests. Jack was very happy about what I had done in getting Liza to the Ford Center, and he was very kind to us. Of course, he was still drinking like a fish himself, but the poor man seemed oblivious to the irony. I’d talk about what I’d learned at the center, and he’d express his warm support while sipping another mug of vodka. What could I say?