His Bright Light

by Danielle Steel

  In fact, we had such a good time together in Hawaii that we started having weekly lunches with each other, and we always had a great time together. The older he got, the more alike we were. We were similarly sensitive, compassionate, generous, foolish, and naive at times, we had soft hearts, quick minds, and the same sense of humor. Life had been tough at various times for both of us, and we had each developed a real appreciation for it when times were easy. But best of all, we had a powerful bond to each other and knew it.

  I found I could talk to him about anything and everything. I confided in him about things that worried me in the family, problems I had with John, my work, and even my love life. He was still crazy about Tom and happy for me that things were going well. And I warned him about the pitfalls of celebrity, certain that one day he would have to face them. He was startled by the people who were already envious of him and at the same time trying to take advantage of him. We had a lot of wisdom to offer each other. We saw things from a similar point of view, which amused us both. And he had some astoundingly profound insights about people. It was extraordinary how close we were. How understanding and wise he was. And most of all, I was always so touched by how much he cared about me, appreciated me, and wanted me to be happy. I would never have imagined it years before, but he had grown up to be a man I loved, respected, and knew I could count on, a rarity in my life. And he knew I was always there for him, and always would be. We counted on each other to be there, and never disappointed each other. Nick was someone I could count on and sometimes even lean on, which amazed me. It was a rare gift he gave me, which I treasured.

  We had lunch together about once a week, more often when we could, and between rehearsals and appointments, he’d stop by the house, sit in my office, and just chat. We made fun of people we disliked, or who took themselves too seriously, told each other bad jokes, and there was always a certain innocence about both of us, we trusted people, “not enough, and too much,” as Nick said. We had so damn much in common, so much we not only loved, but liked and admired about each other.

  After the wedding, we were all going our separate ways for a while. I was taking the kids to Europe for six weeks. Nick was going on tour for ten weeks, and was really excited about it. I was happy for him, and not even worried. His attendants were going with him, as they always did, and Julie was flying out every week to wherever he was to check on him. She had already made arrangements with hospitals along the way, to check his lithium levels. We had thought of everything, and he was intent on his music. He had never seemed in better shape, saner, or stronger. And at the very end of May, we all turned our attention to Beatie’s wedding.

  There was a rehearsal dinner the night before, fraught with whoopee cushions, which enchanted Nicky. Beatie looked exquisite in a lavender satin gown, and Nick looked sensational in a black suit and leopard creepers. He’d just had a terrific haircut, his hair was shiny black, and he was looking very handsome. We all had a great time, and the next day, we all posed for pictures before the wedding. Nick looked incredible in a new tuxedo.

  His behavior at the ceremony was exemplary. No sign of poor impulse control anywhere, and as he promised, he walked me down the aisle, very circumspectly. And as we started down, he tucked my hand into his arm and melted my heart by telling me how much he loved me. There is a lovely photograph of us at precisely that moment. I remember when they took it.

  I told him I loved him too, and that every child is a gift to their mother, but he had not only been a gift to me, but he was extra special because he had been a gift to me so many times. “You have to be good to yourself now, Nick,” I said softly. “I love you,” I whispered. I was nervous about walking down the aisle, and he knew it, and patted my hand. And then he said he loved me again, kissed me, left me at my pew, and went up to the altar to join the other ushers. He had never looked or seemed better to me.

  (photo credit 1.29)

  At Beatie’s rehearsal dinner, May 23, 1997

  (The ring Nick is wearing in this photograph is one he wore every day for many years. It was given to me when he died, and I have worn it every day since then. I had it copied for the rest of the family, and now all his siblings, John, Nick’s biological father, Bill, Sammy the Mick, Thea, and the Campbells all wear it. It’s a bright, shining star, as he was.)

  Going down the aisle at Grace Cathedral

  Nick, DS

  Victoria, Nick, DS

  Maxx, Trevor, Sam, Todd, DS, Mike, Beatie, Nick, Vanessa, Victoria, Zara

  He danced with me a number of times that night, but maintained his usual reputation as a Casanova. At the very end, he left the reception with one of the prettiest women there. She was thirty years old, and looked spectacular, particularly on Nick’s arm as they left the party with Cody to drive them. Nick had never learned to drive, never wanted to, and knew that it was not something he was up to. He really didn’t need to, since there was always someone with him. And Nick’s problems with impulse control would have been lethal on the freeway.

  It was a beautiful wedding, and one of the happiest events of our lives. It was wonderful to see the family all together. Everyone looked beautiful and had a great time and we were all happy for Beatie.

  Two weeks later, after another of our lunches where we laughed all afternoon, Nick left on tour with the band, and the children and I left for Europe. I promised to call him in the van from Europe. I was going to be a lot easier to reach than he was. I was going to Paris, and the South of France, London, and a weekend at a country house in England. And Nick was going to be driving across the country, and back, wowing his audiences and adding new fans. He was so excited about it, and I was happy for him. I knew it was going to be a great summer.

  18

  Disastrous Summer

  Just before Nick left on tour, he hurt his back. He had an inflamed disk, which worried him, given the athletic challenges of his onstage performance. He jumped, he leapt, he writhed, he twisted, not an easy thing to do if your back is hurting. Somehow he thought the tour had been booked so they would be driving no more than four or five hours a day. But Nick’s notions about time had never been perfect. As it turned out, they were facing twelve to fifteen hours of driving daily between the towns and cities they were playing. Sitting in a crowded van, with nine other guys, for fifteen hours a day was going to be hard for him and he knew it. I told him to ice his back, and lie down whenever possible. And not wanting to complicate his chemistry, he didn’t want to take pain medication, but he said the back was, at times, excruciating.

  The musical and performance aspects of the tour went well at first but the boys were young, and strains between them were inevitable. Trapped in a van for a dozen hours a day, crowded, often hot and tired after late night performances and little sleep, they began to squabble, which surprised no one. The tour was a lot harder than any of them had expected. But Nick felt it was important for their future, and pressed onward. Sometimes, when they didn’t like what was happening, they blamed him, because he managed the group, and was responsible for everything they did, and all of them, including Nick, were vocal about their displeasures and discomforts.

  But I learned afterwards, from Julie, how much the other boys complaining to him upset him. It made him feel that they didn’t appreciate him, or his tireless efforts. Nick felt the responsibility of the band rested almost entirely on his shoulders. And as he was the one organizing everything, working with the booking agents and concerts halls, making endless phone calls, as well as writing songs, performing, and organizing rehearsals, he wasn’t mistaken.

  Now, in retrospect, it is easier to see that the potential was there for the tour to be disastrous for Nick. But at the time, it seemed important to all of us to let him do it. Touring with the band meant everything to him, it was the culmination of all his work, and it was what the band needed to do, if it was going to be successful. Nick himself had dropped out of junior college seven months before, because he felt that being in a potentially successful ban
d was an opportunity that might not come his way again, and he figured he could always go back to college later. Two of the others had dropped out of college too, another band member had left high school to go on independent study. They had all made major sacrifices for it, and committed themselves entirely to it. And for them, the summer tour was only the beginning. They were planning to tour for a year, off and on. Eleven weeks that summer, possibly Europe in the fall, if the U.S. tour went well, and Japan after Christmas. They had a lot resting on it, and it was going to be a proving ground for Link 80.

  My heart trembled a little bit when I thought of Nick touring, as did Julie’s, but we all knew how much it meant to him. And if we hadn’t let him do it, he might have walked out on us, and done it anyway, without our blessing and protection. And we were encouraged by the fact that he seemed healthier and saner than he ever had. It seemed the perfect time for him to do it. So, we set it up in the best way we could, to safeguard his health and protect him. An intricate schedule was set up for both Cody and Paul, his attendants, to tour with him alternately. And Julie was planning to fly and meet them once a week, travel with them for several days, and make sure Nick was holding up to the physical and psychological pressures. We thought, when they set out in June, that we had all bases covered. Julie even had a list of hospitals along the way, where he was going to be taken to have his lithium levels tested.

  (photo credit 1.30)

  Nick at eighteen (photo credit 1.31, 1.32)

  Usually, it was Julie who fought for independence for him. It was she who had encouraged him in his passion for the band in the first place, while I was always a little bit more hesitant, more cautious, more skeptical, and more worried. But she understood even better than I how important it was for him to have a sense of accomplishment and freedom. If I could have, I would have kept him wrapped in cotton wool all his life. But he was “my baby.” And I knew she was right in at least giving him the illusion of independence. If he was going to live with an illness all his life, the goal for all of us was to help him lead a normal life, or as normal as possible. And the tour was part of helping him to do that. And most of all, it was what Nick so desperately wanted, and what he had worked so hard for. But as though she feared for him this time, for once Julie was more anxious than I was. I was the one this time who was sure that he could do it. And as usual, we provided a good balance. We had the same kinds of conversations about Nick’s cottage.

  I thought he needed to be more closely observed than he could be in a separate house, sleeping alone. His nurses left him late at night, and only returned in the morning. But Julie felt he needed privacy and freedom. He needed to feel like a grown-up. He was so surrounded and protected and so closely watched that it was oppressive for him at times, and rare for us to be able to give him the illusion of adulthood. The freestanding mother-in-law unit only inches from her front door helped foster that illusion. And he just loved it. Sometimes she was right about what she wanted for him, and sometimes I was to give in to what Nick called my “paranoia.” He had attempted suicide once there, in the cottage, but he had done it right in Julie’s house as well. And in the locked ward of a hospital. So we were both right, he needed a sense of independence, as closely as we could fashion it for him, and he also needed observation. It was always a fine line, a balancing act on the high wire with Nicky.

  But it was Julie who had always been supportive of his music career, even when I wasn’t. In the early days, I paid little attention to it, thinking it was a passing fad for him, and worrying that it drew him into a milieu that was unsavory and he couldn’t handle. But Julie was entirely right on that one. It was the life force that kept him going, brought him into his best years, and that he lived for. I was always grateful that she had prevailed, and so was Nicky.

  In any case, as he set out that summer on tour, I think Julie and I both had mixed feelings, and reservations. But for once, I was almost completely convinced he could do it. And by the time he left, so was Julie. Nick had never been better.

  Cody reported in several times a day, and told us that all was going well, although the boys were complaining about the heat, the van, the food, the long drives, the usual discomforts of a road tour. Nothing seemed unusual to any of us. But ten days into the trip, Julie called me in Europe. We had already spoken several times before that, and pretty much checked in with each other on a daily basis, if not more often. It was rare for a day to go by, even when he was at home, without several phone calls between us, either confirming that things were going well, or to make adjustments, or intervene when they weren’t.

  When Julie called this time, she sounded worried. Nick had been sounding stressed, and was upset by some of the band members complaining to him about how things were going. But she surprised me when she said she thought the tour was too much for him, and talked about the possibility of canceling the tour and bringing him home early. But when I asked if something specific had happened to make her feel that way, it seemed to be more of an uneasy feeling on her part. And I trusted her instincts.

  By the next day, Nick had actually confided to her that he was feeling stressed, and depressed, and he himself was beginning to think he couldn’t do it. And listening to her, I was worried. But I also knew how mercurial his moods were. He was perfectly capable of saying he wanted out at one minute, and fighting like a cat to stay, five minutes later. I somehow thought that if we did bring him home, the full impact of what it meant to his fledgling career would hit him later, and it might destroy him. For once, I was the one who thought he should stick with it, and believed he could do it. I was afraid that if he left, he would feel like a failure and an invalid forever. It was hard to assess the potential risks of either decision.

  He had asked her to come out and meet them a few days earlier than planned, and told her he was going to tell the band he was leaving. Julie flew out to meet him that night. But before she did, she made Nick promise that he would say nothing to the other band members about his thoughts of leaving until she got there. And of course, Nick promised. She wanted to help him break the news to them, if he was serious about leaving.

  But the inevitable lack of impulse control made the promise, like most he made, worthless. Before her plane had taken off, he had taken matters into his own hands. And rather than exposing his illness to them, which he never did, he guarded it as a secret he shared with no one. Instead he told them that he was fed up with them, didn’t like them anymore, and was leaving. And, predictably, they went ballistic. Julie had been planning to discuss it at length with Nick, and if necessary, help him to make a diplomatic and graceful exit. He would have had the perfect excuse for it, as his first suicide attempt nine months before had been so physically devastating for him that he needed continuing tests afterwards, and there had been a question just before he left as to whether he had affected his heart, and he was being tested regularly for it, right up until the day before they left, and he was scheduled for another test on the road. And so far, the tests had been normal, but Julie had been planning to announce that he had a problem with his heart, if Nick needed a graceful exit. But he never gave her the chance to do that. Instead, he insulted everyone, made them furious with him, and by the time Julie arrived, the boys had been in an eight-hour debacle, telling Nick what a creep he was for wanting to desert them. They couldn’t understand his reasons, and he responded with criticism and insults.

  The problem for Nick was that he wanted no one to know about his manic depression, let alone the severity of it. The boys he worked with had no idea about the daily struggle he was engaged in, the seriousness of the medications he was on, the extent to which he was dependent on them, or that Cody and Paul were in fact psychiatric attendants. He told everyone they were bodyguards, provided by his famous and very overprotective mother. And I’m not sure what they thought of Julie.

  But Julie found them all in heated argument when she arrived, and Nick privately confessed to her that he hadn’t known what or how to tell them, o
r how to cope with his own sense of failure. It was the first time that he had actually admitted it when he didn’t feel right, or had asked for help. And after the three suicide attempts of the months before, it seemed an important step in taking responsibility for managing his illness. Knowing that he was in fact upset, and talking about going home, Julie thought that it was wise for him to do so.

  But without Nick, there was no tour, no band, no immediate future for Link 80. He was the central focus, the lead singer, the star, the magnet that drew the crowds and groupies, the scouts and the press agents, the reps from the major labels. They couldn’t go on without him at that point, and they knew it.

  But Nick was even more profoundly depressed by what they were saying to him, and he and Julie talked at length about what he should do about it. He was feeling deeply wounded by what the others had said to him, but on the other hand, he had handled it all very badly. Telling them they were jerks and he hated them was hardly a tack that was going to win their support or admiration, let alone their compassion. And they knew nothing of his illness. He was acting like a spoiled brat, to cover his own fears, and they were understandably upset about it.

  Julie got everyone to calm down for the night, and the next day when Nick was asleep, she spent five hours talking to the other boys to try and explain the situation to them. It was time, she knew, to come out of the closet with Nick’s illness. And she told them about Nick’s manic depression. But understandably, the implications of it, and the severity of it, and the potentially disastrous risks to him, were more than they could fathom. And who could blame them? If we, after years of dealing with it, didn’t fully understand how lethal it could be to him, how could they? But despite Nick’s wish for the illusion of normalcy, she nonetheless told them that if things got out of hand for Nick on the trip, and got to be too much for him, it was possible that he might take drugs to alleviate his pain, or worse, attempt suicide again. It was an awesome burden. And I suspect that they thought Julie was being paranoid and overstating the case, to make excuses for him. They were teenagers, and naive, and she was describing an illness to them that, for most people, is ephemeral and confusing. They wanted him to stay in spite of it, and felt he owed it to them, and they promised to call her if Nick seemed out of sorts, or developed any problems they were aware of.