by Lorna Luft
Meanwhile, my sister had turned forty, and she decided to celebrate with a big party in London. She flew me over for the occasion, along with other family and friends, and we had the time of our lives. Whatever resentments the Ford Center had caused seemed to be over, and Liza seemed healthier than ever. It gave me a great sense of joy to see my sister happy again.
When I turned thirty-five, Liza decided we should celebrate in Paris. We flew to New York and took the Concorde to Paris for a four-day holiday. My first love and former fiancé, Philippe Lavot, met us at the airport for the occasion. He and I had kept in touch off and on over the years, and he was delighted to join in the celebration. For four days the three of us and a friend of Liza’s traveled around France together and had the vacation of a lifetime. The press didn’t bother us, so we got to do whatever we wanted. Liza and I were both cold sober, and it was good to find out we could have as much fun as ever without taking anything to give us a buzz. When it was all over, I hated to come home. But I had a baby boy waiting for me, and I wasn’t about to leave him behind.
Those were the best years of my life with my sister. I think they were some of the best years of her life, too. What I didn’t know was that the disease that had nearly destroyed her before was already rearing its head again. She had come out of the Ford Center ready to take on the world, but it hadn’t lasted long. I had gone to an opening to see her and Elizabeth Taylor, and she seemed fine to me, but only two days later Liza called me, crying, and said she was at a place called Hazelden in Minnesota. It was a rehab center, much more hardcore than the Ford Center. It turned out that her friends had caught her using the night I’d seen her at the opening, and done an intervention. Her manager, Eliot Weisman, had the guts to cancel her remaining shows and take her on the next plane to Minnesota. Hazelden was “the Big House,” as Liza called it, a place with a prisonlike atmosphere where they take addiction problems very seriously. She was going to be there for six weeks this time, and part of the therapy was to call your family one by one and tell them what you’d done. By the time she called me, she was practically hysterical.
It was a terrible conversation. She just kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and crying. I felt hurt, betrayed. “I’ve been lied to again,” I kept thinking. “All this time she’s been deceiving me. How could she do this to me?” The time at the Ford Center hadn’t only been wasted on Liza. It had been wasted on me, too.
It seemed as if all around me, my family was falling apart. Joe had been living with friends in the San Fernando Valley for years, and I knew he still struggled with the emotional fallout of our childhood. He’s such a sweet man, but I was beginning to suspect that some of the oddities in his behavior were symptoms of an abuse problem of his own. I should have expected it, but as usual, I hadn’t. Not Joey. My dad wasn’t in the best of shape, either. His marriage to Patti had fallen apart. Patti had struggled mightily to survive life with a difficult man and at least one impossible stepchild (me, as a teenager). But even Patti couldn’t survive life with a ghost, and it was clear that the other woman in Patti’s marriage was my mother. She was still alive to my father. Her photos filled his house, and he felt her presence every day of his life. He couldn’t let her go. How do you compete with a dead woman?
It’s a funny thing about the past. If you don’t watch out, it will become the present.
Children have a way of forcing you back into the present moment. My son was nearly six years old by now, the emotional center of my life, and I was about to get one of life’s unexpected bonuses. Shortly after Jesse turned six years old, I found out I was pregnant. I couldn’t have been more surprised. I wasn’t sorry to be pregnant. On the contrary, I had wanted another baby for a long time.
Jake wasn’t thrilled with the news. He wasn’t sure he wanted another child (although he was delighted when she was born). “How will we afford it?” he kept saying. “What about your career? You can’t work if you’re pregnant.”
I just told him I didn’t care, that I was having this baby, even if I had to have it alone. There was nothing Jake could do but give in. His response was to get a bigger house for the new baby, and since with Jake everything has to be “bigger and better,” that meant a million-dollar house in the Hollywood Hills. “Great,” I thought. “We can’t afford a baby, but we can afford a zillion-dollar home.” I was glad for the extra space, though, and if it made Jake more content with the situation, it was worth it.
As I nurtured the new life inside me, I was about to learn a new lesson about how precious the life of a child really is. The child who would teach me that lesson was Ryan White.
I had first met Ryan when he was twelve. I had become involved with an organization called Athletes and Entertainers for Kids, and our goal was to put together an AIDS awareness program for children struggling with the disease. I’d read about Ryan in the newspaper, and the organization flew him out to L.A. for a few days to see what we could do to help him cope with his disease. I met him at the airport, and he spent about five days in Los Angeles along with his mother, Jeanne, and his grandparents. I’d been deeply touched by Ryan’s story on the news, and we became really good friends during his visit. Afterward we kept in touch. He’d visit me when he could, and he came to see my show when I did Girl Crazy. From the beginning it was a special relationship. Ryan had that effect on people. I still carry his school pictures in my wallet.
Ryan was one of the most remarkable human beings I’ve ever known. He had absolutely no malice in his soul. He’d been treated so badly when he’d contracted HIV, even spit on in public places, but he had no bitterness about it. Instead he just enjoyed the good things life offered him. He was no plaster saint; he and his sister fought like cats and dogs, but he was truly good in a way you seldom see. His mother was heroic. She loved Ryan enough to let him be who he was. Whenever Ryan came to visit, he wanted to go to every surf shop in town. He’d bring a list of places he’d found in his surfer magazines and make me drive him all over the county, buying every surf T-shirt on the planet. One day I said to him, “Forget the disease. If I have to drive you to one more surf shop, I’m going to strangle you right here and now.” He thought that was hilarious and just broke up laughing. We went to Disneyland together, too, and had a great time.
Only once did I see Ryan really lose control. The press wanted to do an interview with him, and he agreed. He was thirteen at the time. He wanted me to stay with him, so I did, and everything was going fine when one of the women reporters said, “So how does it feel to know you can never have sex?” Ryan just lost it. He started to cry, and I went ballistic. I literally threw the press out of the room. Ryan grabbed onto me, and I sat there holding him while he cried. I was so angry that all I could think about was punching that reporter right in the face. But I didn’t say any of that. I just comforted Ryan, telling him the lady had done a terrible, hurtful thing, and that in the future he would need to make it clear that he was the one who made the rules about what was asked. Meanwhile his mother came in, and when she found out what had happened, she went after the reporters. I could hear her screaming at them from the other room, “How dare you do this to my son?” I thought, “Go, Jeannie. Maybe you can punch them out.”
I was several months pregnant with Vanessa when Ryan died. We’d all known it was coming. I was on tour on the East Coast when Elton John’s secretary called me with the news. I flew home immediately after the show and made arrangements to fly to Indianapolis for the funeral. I asked Jake to come with me, and Jesse wanted to go too. He adored Ryan, and he was grief-stricken at losing his friend, but I thought Jesse was too young at six to get through the grueling trip and media frenzy at the funeral. I remembered the hysteria at my mother’s funeral all too well, and I didn’t want him to go through that. The trip was complicated, with no direct flights and several stopovers to change planes, and it soon turned into a nightmare. We were flying over Denver when the pilot announced we were going to make an emergency landing at the Denver Airp
ort because of a mechanical problem. Once we landed, we couldn’t make the necessary connecting flights. We finally got a flight into Chicago that night, and from there we had to drive all night to get to Indiana. We arrived at six A.M. with no sleep and no luggage. With only four hours until the funeral, we slept for two hours, drove to a department store and bought everything from shoes to hats, and drove to the funeral.
It was a remarkable occasion. So many people were there, celebrities and dignitaries; Barbara Bush was there, Phil Donahue and Mario Thomas, and of course, Elton. I was okay until I saw Ryan. He was lying there in that little casket wearing his coolest sunglasses and his favorite surfer shirt—that sweet boy. His school friends wanted to do something for him, so they all gathered around Ryan and sang, “That’s What Friends Are For.” It was one of the most touching things I’ve ever seen, and it was then that I started sobbing. I think everyone did.
Afterward somebody came and took me to the family room where Jeannie was. Elton was there, and Ryan’s family. Jeannie patted my stomach and said, “How’s our little girl?” I was so touched. There I was, with this new life inside me, and Jeannie had just lost her son. To this day, whenever Jeannie calls, she says, “How’s my Vanessa?” If I ever have another child, boy or girl, the baby’s middle name will be Ryan.
Ryan’s death made my daughter’s birth even more significant for me. Vanessa’s birth was a turning point in so many ways. It had been a difficult pregnancy. My obstetrician had diagnosed me early on with gestational diabetes. It turned out that I might even have had the same problem with Jesse, but if so it hadn’t been detected at the time. That was why I had craved food so much and gained such a huge amount of weight; that was also why Jesse had been so big. The doctor impressed on me that I had to monitor my blood sugar and diet carefully, or both the baby and I could suffer serious consequences. I followed his instructions religiously, even overcoming my fear of needles to test my own blood every day. I kept my weight under control this time around, and overall, I did remarkably well. The doctor kept telling me he wasn’t going to let this baby go full term, because given Jesse’s size at birth, this second child could weigh eleven pounds. Eleven pounds! I remembered my broken tailbone at Jesse’s birth and tried not to think about it.
Six months into my pregnancy, Jake had scheduled a singing date for me in Bermuda. It was for quite a lot of money, so I was planning to keep the date. But a few days before I was scheduled to leave, I suddenly went into labor. I told Jake to get me to the hospital, right away. It was too soon to have this baby. Jake took me to the hospital, and they put me on an IV drip for several hours to stop the labor. Finally they sent me home, with orders to stay in a bed for several days. But as soon as we got home, Jake started saying, “You can’t stay in bed all week. What about Bermuda? You’ve got to go to work.”
I didn’t know what to say to him, but he just kept saying, “You can’t back out of this date. It’s too much money. You’ve got to go to Bermuda.” Finally I told him to call Ed Liu, my doctor, and talk to him. He did.
A few minutes later I could hear them arguing over the phone. Jake hung up, and then Ed called me. “Stay in bed,” he told me. Dr. Ed Liu, my mild-mannered obstetrician and gynecologist, had said to him, “Jake, you care more about the fucking money than you do about Lorna and the baby.” Then Ed said to me, “Stay put!”
I did, for a few days. And then I packed up my son and flew to Bermuda. I rested as much as I could, and I checked in with a Bermudan doctor every day, but I went. I was just too weak and intimidated to say no to Jake’s bullying. I was desperate to get away from him by that point, but I just didn’t have the strength.
Three months later, the doctor put me in Cedars Sinai Hospital and induced labor. For three days I lay there soaking up medicine, and nothing happened. But on the third day, just as the doctor was about to give up and do a cesarean section, I went into labor. No sooner did the real pain hit than they gave me an epidural, and shortly after that, Vanessa just popped out. Compared to Jesse’s birth, it was easy, clean, and painless. Vanessa weighed eight pounds, pink and healthy, with big blue eyes and dark hair with blond frosting. She was beautiful, and I was thrilled. Jesse had his baby sister, and I had my little girl.
Why do we always expect a new baby to solve all of life’s problems? They never do, of course. All through my pregnancy with Vanessa, I kept hoping that somehow, mystically, this new child would bring new life to our marriage. Of course, she didn’t. No child could. The inevitable ending of our relationship was rapidly approaching.
Things had come to a head once again several months before Vanessa’s birth. One evening Jake had gone to a friend’s house to watch a boxing match on TV, and I had fallen asleep early. When I woke up at six the next morning, Jake wasn’t home. When I went to check for him, I saw the Mercedes he’d taken the night before parked haphazardly in front of the house, and I noticed my Jeep was gone. Apparently Jake had taken it.
I panicked. I began calling around, but nobody knew where he was. I was scared to death; I didn’t know if he was in a hospital, or dead, or what. He’d always come home by morning. I had to be on the set by ten A.M. to shoot a segment of Murder, She Wrote I was doing, but I was a wreck. I called a friend of mine, who was an Al-Anon member, and bless her, she said, “Get down on your knees right this minute and say the Serenity Prayer. You know it; I told you about it. And then you go straight to an Al-Anon meeting. There will be one on the lot somewhere. Ask around. Someone will know.” Then she asked me if I was okay to drive to work.
I said, “Yeah, I’m okay.”
Then she told me that if Jake hadn’t shown up by that afternoon, I should call the police. She reassured me once again. I hung up, told Maria, “Please, just stay with Jesse,” and went to work. When I got there, I went into the makeup trailer, and the artist said, “Are you all right?” She could see I’d been crying. I burst into tears and went into my trailer. The actor who’d been in the chair next to me followed me in and asked what was wrong. I said, “My husband’s missing. He’s an alcoholic.”
The actor just walked over to me, took my hands, and said, “So am I. I’ve been in the program for twenty-five years. Let me take you to a meeting.” I was stunned. It was like a little miracle. I’d taken my first tiny step forward, and here was this man, standing in front of me, an answer to a prayer. At the lunch break, he took me to my first Al-Anon meeting, right there on the Universal lot. That meeting changed my life. It was the first of many.
Shortly after we got back from the meeting, the phone rang. It was Jake. My dad had been calling all over looking for him, and Jake had turned out to be in jail. They’d just released him. The police had found him weaving all over Sunset Boulevard in my car and arrested him. They’d thrown him in the drunk tank with all the other drunks Jake said he wasn’t like. In Jake’s mind, he wore an Armani jacket and they didn’t. So he wasn’t like them. With my hand shaking so hard I could hardly hold the phone, I said, “You call everyone and tell them. You have to call my sister, and my dad, and all our friends. They’re worried about you. Tell them where you’ve been. I’m not doing it for you anymore.”
Jake said, “I think I have a problem. I think I’m an alcoholic.” It was the first time he’d said it. It was a beginning.
For Jake, it didn’t last. He went to meetings for a while, and he behaved himself because he wanted his driver’s license back. But I kept going to those meetings. All the things they’d told me at the Ford Center six years before were finally beginning to sink in.
How do you unlearn a lifetime of responses? How do you contain all that anger, that frustration, that embarrassment? Most of all, how do you let go? How do you stop trying to save someone you love? How do you walk away and leave them with that terrible disease? Liza didn’t think I had the strength to do it. Neither did anyone else. Neither did I. But I was trying.
Before I could let go, though, there would be one last battle with an old enemy. Jake hadn’t drunk in f
ront of me for weeks, but I knew something was wrong. I could sense it in his behavior. He wasn’t drunk, but he wasn’t sober, either. There was something familiar about it all. It was then it began to dawn on me. Of course. It was my mother all over again. And like the well-qualified little detective I was, I swung into action.
I knew exactly how to search. I began to systematically go through the house—the drawers, the closets, the hems of his pants, the seams. I knew that he wouldn’t keep it at the office, so it had to be in the house. Then I started on the bathroom, and I found his toiletry bag under the sink. I emptied out the contents; nothing; but then I noticed something on the bottom, and I turned the bag over. On the bottom, beneath the zipper compartment, I reached under and found a hidden compartment inside. I ripped it open. There it was: a whole cache of tranquilizers hidden inside.
I hit the ceiling. The minute Jake walked in the door, I confronted him. “Tell me if you’re using.” He swore he wasn’t using anything. Then I said something I now regret. Shaking with rage, I said, “Swear on Jesse’s life.” He swore on Jesse’s life. The minute he did, I pulled out the leather bag, opened it, and threw the pills at him, screaming, “Then what the fuck are these?” And I continued to scream at him. It was exactly the wrong thing to do, and I knew it, but I was out of control.
Jake, cornered, stayed relatively calm and continued to invent excuses for the pills, saying I was making something out of nothing, that the pills barely affected him. When it was all over, I’d done nothing but make things worse. As I lay in bed sleepless that night, I kept thinking, “What am I going to do? I’ve got a baby and a seven-year-old son. What am I going to do?”
