by Gail Sheehy
“Daddy, I need you to help me, with Trish—”
He continued his monologue without hesitation. “You know, I should have had that job, goddamnit; Marr had promised me that job.”
“Daddy, we have to do something drastic.”
He could not hear me. He went on to describe in detail what it was like to stand on the subway platform in midafternoon, pretending to read the Post’s afternoon edition. Not wanting to go home to his wife with nothing to show for it.
“I can’t help wanting to look down at the tracks,” he said. Alarm bells went off, of course. The air grew unbearably thick with the unsaid. I knew what was coming, but I didn’t have the heart to hold him off. All at once he brightened. The old spit-and-polish salesman began laying out a new pipe dream. He was about to start his own advertising agency. He could run it out of his home. He just needed a little start-up loan.
I told him I would mail a check when I sold my next story.
“Thanks, Cookie.”
I was not just a single mother anymore. I had a sister and a father both on the verge of suicide.
ON THE MORNING OF JULY 21, 1969, my cover story in New York hit the newsstands with a shocking image by Milton Glaser. A Day-Glo snake coiled out of a drug capsule under the headline: “SPEED CITY. The Amphetamine Explosion by Gail Sheehy: An Intimate Story of the ‘Magic Vitamin’ and Its Consequences.”
At that exact moment, Trish and Nate were leaving their room at the Plaza Hotel. They picked up a copy of the magazine at the hotel newsstand. “We’re famous!” Nate chuckled. “The new Bonnie and Clyde!” Moments later, Trish and Nate were arrested for using stolen credit cards.
“That was the beginning of the end,” said my sister when she later filled in her side of the story. I saw a girl brought into the courtroom who appeared remarkably clean for having spent two nights in the infamous Women’s House of Detention. Her scowl softened when she saw me sitting in the second row. She looked scared. I petitioned to have her released into my custody. The judge agreed, provided that I and her parole officer would see to it that she entered a drug treatment program.
I found a hospital in Connecticut that would accept her for observation, but she fled within days. The next stop was a locked ward at Bellevue, a prison ward, because she had attempted suicide. I had to demand that she again be released into my custody, arguing that she wasn’t a criminal, only a drug user, and amphetamines were not illegal. The warden was only too eager to have an excuse for disposal. Her discharge card read: Bellevue Reject.
Later that month, I took my sister home with me, fed her, brushed her hair, bought her a new dress. Things went reasonably well for a few days until Nate called, homicidal over the “suspension” by law enforcement of his Grand Magic Vitamin Experiment. It wasn’t safe to have Trish living with me where Nate could find her. And I had a five-year-old to protect. Maura was going to a church day camp. I could not bear for her to see her aunt having withdrawal agonies or a panic attack.
I called Clay. He offered to arrange for me to take my sister up to Armand Erpf’s estate in a remote upstate county. Isolation was the last thing she needed. I sat my sister down and told her, gently but firmly, there was only one choice left: Encounter, the first drug treatment program designed for speed addicts. Encounter was run by counselors who were ex–speed users, a new concept at the time. From the first day Trish spent with the Encounter people, she felt safe and even happy. She attended every day, and within the first few weeks, she was on her way to being clean. Meanwhile, Nate was arrested for car theft and I had to go to court to testify against him. Damned if his mother didn’t get him out on bail. I worried that he could come to my apartment looking for Trish.
Serendipitously, my wonderful editor, Nan Talese, told me she and Gay were decamping for the summer to their Jersey Shore home. Would I like to babysit their apartment? I asked if I could put up my sister there. Bless her heart, Nan agreed.
On Saturday, August 14—only in retrospect does the notoriety of that date matter—I took Maura to her father’s for the weekend. It was early that evening when a pounding at my door made me jump. Why hadn’t my Ukrainian lookout announced the caller? Wary, I slid open the peephole. A man with a red bandanna around his forehead looked back. The eyes, glassy blue and big as saucers, belonged unmistakably to one person.
“What do you want?”
“I have some things to give you,” Nate said.
“What things?”
“Joy’s things.”
“I’m not dressed,” I lied.
“I can wait. All night if I have to.”
“You’re barking up the wrong tree. Trish isn’t here.”
“That figures. I’m not surprised. It’s you I want to see, the good girl Gail. Can you spare a Coke?”
“Only the kind that comes in a can.”
“That’s cool.”
It was the first time I’d heard that expression. I had to see this creep and warn him to stay away from Trish. I let Nate in. I brought him a Coke and we sat on the sofa.
He told me he knew where Trish was, in an apartment uptown, and he wanted the address. She needed him, bad, he said.
“She has other friends now; her sanity is returning.”
He insisted I tell him where to find her. As if playfully, he pulled off his red bandanna and tried to tie it around my forehead. “You’d look good as a hippie, just relax.” He was high, alternately laughing and threatening and flirting. I lied, “Albert will be here any minute, bringing Maura home.” Suddenly he shoved me down and threw himself on top of me.
“Just tell me the address,” he demanded. “It’s no fun to hurt someone I like.”
“You don’t like me.”
He was stuffing the bandanna in my mouth. I reached for the Coke on the coffee table and threw it in his eyes. With a rush of adrenaline strength, I managed to wrestle myself free and bolt for the door, run down a flight, and bang on the door of the cop below. His fat teenage son was sitting in front of the TV with his father’s service revolver in his lap, as usual. “Intruder in my apartment!” I said to excite him.
The boy took a long time working his half-bushel haunches out of the depths of the sofa, too long to catch an intruder. I heard Nate’s big feet clambering down the stairs. He would still be on the loose. By this time, I had little faith that law enforcement would get this menace off the streets. My strongest instinct was to collect my sister and get as far away from Nate as possible.
I’d read in the paper about a music festival upstate. A huge crowd was expected. Call it crazy, but there was great appeal in getting lost in a crowd. I called Trish at the Talese apartment. “I’m coming to get you. Pack your medicine and your sleeping bag, we’re driving to Woodstock.”
“What’s in Woodstock?”
“A whole lotta people—Nate will never find us there.”
ONCE I HAD TRISH in my little green Beetle, I stopped to pick up my Indian friend Chota Chudasama, a travel executive, to ride shotgun. Trish hid in the backseat as we lost ourselves in the tide of humanity headed for the rock festival. The more impenetrable the traffic jam, the happier I was; we were less detectable than amoebae. Darkness fell, rains came, we arrived at a mudfest. Walking around was surreal. We were the only people there who were not high, dead sober, without even a reefer among us, feeling really square, but glad of it. There was more marijuana than music, billowing clouds of it; you didn’t even have to smoke to get high.
Trish began to break out in hives.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s just my body reacting to the weed.” I’d heard the Hog Farm commune was there to help with drug problems. We found their Tripper’s Tent. Trish lay down on a cot and felt better right away. Then she took on the role of counselor and helped stoners come down.
When Joe Cocker took stage to scream “Let’s Get Stoned,” Trish looked longingly at people lighting up. Chota and I took her off to the Food for Love tent. In the background, we heard Jimi Hendrix’s w
hining guitar playing his own version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As word passed in the wee hours of Saturday morning that Joplin was finally about to appear, the three of us nudged our way close. A blue angel under the lights in her Indian jacket and bell bottoms, she was obviously feeling no pain, leaping up and down with a river of hair spilling over her face, singing in a hoarse voice “Ball & Chain” in ecstasy and agony—Nevuh nevuh nevuh. She spoke to the crowd. Did we have everything we needed? Were we staying stoned?
The beauty of it was, at that moment, my sister didn’t need to be stoned to be happy. Amid half a million people, my sister and I felt connected by music and youth. We were closer than ever before. For years afterward, we relived our hilarious escape from drugs at the biggest drugfest in the history of the world.
WHEN SHE FINISHED HER YEAR with Encounter, I finally did take Trish to Paris. She was my “researcher” for a Cosmo story on why Frenchmen make great dates. We woke up in a funky hotel room and threw open the heavy wooden shutters to see the painters setting up their easels along the Seine, and we welcomed a new stage of life. We could now be pals, not big and little sister, but soul sisters. Our relationship would probably outlast all others.
Trish never went back to drugs. She did eventually go back to college, with my help. With her third marriage, to Larry Fantl, a charming, laid-back psychologist, she got it right. I could not have been prouder when my sister, Patricia Klein, stepped up to collect her Ph.D. diploma from Fordham University and became a professor of creative writing.
CHAPTER 11
Playing House
CLAY TOOK ME TO HIS HOME for the first time on a wintry Sunday afternoon. We had met in Central Park to discuss a story. Ostensibly. The cold was shattering. It was well after his separation from Pamela and my divorce. We had been seeing each other, sub rosa, since the Kennedy piece. This was the first time he suggested we go to his apartment.
The building, not far from Sutton Place, looked like an embassy. The sleepy doorman tipped his hat. My Ukrainian seamstress was a far more formidable lookout. When the elevator opened on the seventh floor, there was only one door, his. It led into a red-carpeted foyer that floated like a parapet over a vast salon. I had never seen anything like it. We stood there, awkward, wary, two wounded soldiers of the ’60s divorce wars, suspended like a dash in the middle of an unfinished sentence.
“Would you like some hot tea?” he said.
“Can I make it?”
He told me the kitchen was downstairs, then disappeared down the long hall of his duplex to change his clothes. Left in the foyer, I leaned over the wrought-iron railing to look down on the living room and felt dizzy. The windows were two stories high, ornately draped in gold silk. A lake of buff-colored carpet lapped up to a brass fender wrapped around a baronial fireplace. Lions everywhere; they must be his avatar, I gathered. A giant oil portrait of George Washington was guarded by two white terra-cotta lions. All the tabletops were bare. Gilt sconces on the walls and museum art books stacked on the bookshelves and an oversize pinch-pleated leather sofa all suggested a fine English men’s club. Totally inanimate. Not a plant or flower or any evidence of human inhabitation. The dying light of a winter afternoon muted the room still further. It was a stage set.
I was overwhelmed by the absence of smell, sound, light, movement—the absence of life. I could not imagine how such a thunderous man who supplied the energy for so many talents survived in such a place. It was meant to be filled with people and laughter. Or late at night with two bodies, dancing in their private ballroom with all the abandon afforded by that grand space.
I ran out to the corner deli and bought two bunches of giant yellow mums and a dozen blueberry muffins. The flowers lit the room. The muffins emitted a sweet smell from the idle oven. Only then did I feel able to call to him. He asked me to come up and bring the tea.
He was a ghostly presence, sitting on the white spread of his king-size bed. A pale giant in a white shirt surrounded by a mass of white newspapers. White shades were half drawn under sheer white curtains. In one corner a white hospital scale, in the other a gumball machine. If it hadn’t been for the gumballs, I would have thought I was in the Plaza Hotel.
“Let’s go downstairs to have tea,” I said.
We sat on the leather sofa. We spoke briefly about what was most important to us. I said honesty. Learning to be honest with myself. He said it was the same for him. All at once we were enveloped in each other’s arms. It was an erotic eruption. He seemed as startled as I. His next words were prophetic:
“Who seduced whom? I don’t know if it was you or me.”
Neither did I.
WHAT FOLLOWED WAS A YEAR of furtive sleepovers. Every other weekend, when Maura was with her father, I often spent with Clay. This was not the “honeymoon phase” that women’s magazines promise. This was heaven and hell, the push-pull of attraction and withdrawal between two high-strung people scared of committing again. I remember thrilling highs, when we would dance together at a party in the Rainbow Room, and tender moments, lulls when he would dare to confide a past hurt or yearning of the heart, but these were often followed by flashes of temper. He did not like to feel vulnerable. Not infrequently, I was the one to lurch out of his bed in a primal fury over a remark, some nonchalant reference to how beautiful or smart he found another woman. I did not like to feel less than number one. I would crawl out in a drizzly dawn and walk the empty corridor of Second Avenue, feeling like a lost puppy.
One night about a year later, Clay appeared at my apartment house in the wee hours, a little tipsy, judging by the gruff dismissal he received from the Ukrainian seamstress. She didn’t want to let him up. Her frantic ringing of the intercom failed to arouse me. Suddenly, I was awakened by a loud banging on my door. I grabbed a robe and opened the peephole. There was the hulk of Clay, chesterfield blown open, black tie hanging askew, looking like big Lab who had lost his way home. I could barely get the locks undone before he uttered a loud lament:
“Come home with me!”
“What? It’s the middle of the night.”
“I can’t stand it anymore.”
“Can’t stand what?”
“Going home without you.”
“Are you crazy? I have a child.”
“I want to see more of Maura, too.”
“And the dog?”
“You don’t have a dog.”
“I know, but we were thinking—”
“Gail, I want you with me at dinner parties.” He was dead serious now. “I want your softness beside me when I go to sleep. I want to show you my favorite jazz clubs. I want to go through the papers with you over breakfast—you have so many ideas—I can’t stand this anymore—you have to move in with me!”
Of course it was absurd. I laughed, but even now, writing this, I feel a faint surge of the magnetic pull that defied all reason. The romantic obsession that had been building between Clay and me for the previous two years had elements of the Pygmalion myth. The original narrative from Ovid’s Metamorphisis depicts a sculptor who created an ivory statue of a woman so pure and realistic, he fell in love with it. Venus granted his wish to turn her into a real woman. With a kiss, the sculptor found her lips warm, and touching her breasts, he found the ivory had turned soft. They fell in love.
I liked the erotic imagery. But I wasn’t an inert piece of marble that required a man to bring me to life. I was an ambitious woman who needed to write. I think I gave Clay a brownie and milk and sent him home like a truant schoolchild. The next day I climbed his stairs, all four flights to the funky New York office. It was crammed with freelancers waiting to pitch Clay stories.
“Look who’s here!” he shouted from one end of the long hall to his office. I didn’t deserve his enthusiasm; my story wasn’t finished. I was writing a piece about the suburban dads, like my father, who commuted to New York and the “Belles of the Bar Car” who waited for them to fall out of their marriages. Clay escorted me down one flight to a boardroom used only
occasionally by Milton’s Pushpin staff. He made sure I had a working typewriter, copy paper, carbons.
“You’ll have it finished to give to fact-checking by five?”
“I’ll do my best.”
It was all very businesslike.
Sometime around four, Clay slipped into the boardroom. Not a word from him. Nor from me. As if in a stupor, we stepped through the world into another, smaller room and I was on my back on an Oriental carpet and I saw him far above me. My nipples hardened. I ached with desire. He was touching my breasts. My hands clutched at his shoulders. The innocence was gone. It was on every count utterly, shockingly, rapturously wrong.
I DIDN’T THINK ANYONE at the magazine knew that we were involved personally. And I knew for sure that he did not favor me over other writers. Whenever there was an assignment that I really wanted, he would say astringently, “Gail, when the assignment’s right for you, I’ll give it to you.” But so-and-so is better for this one, he would say. Nonetheless, moving in with him would at least keep our uncontrollable attraction aboveboard, and out of the boardroom. But here was the problem: I couldn’t picture myself living on the Upper East Side. Foreign country. I didn’t even own a proper suitcase.
The next day, a Friday, I dropped Maura off to spend the weekend with her dad. I stuffed a tote bag with a few things and shopped for a weekend’s worth of groceries. (Tom Wolfe later told me about the day he stopped by to see Clay at his Xanadu on Fifty-Seventh Street and found him putting together some income-tax data. “Look at this,” Clay exclaimed with pride as he riffled through his date book, “I only ate dinner at home eight times last year!”)
Sitting on an uptown subway with the three flimsy bags under my feet, I felt like a runaway. I must be totally mad. And I was—I was mad about this man. The uniformed elevator man looked at me dubiously but silently rode me up to the seventh floor. Clay’s door was wide open. Right away, entering the ruby-carpeted balcony, I looked over the wrought-iron railing into the sunken living room, and again, my knees went weak. Clay sat filling a big club chair by the fireplace. Buttons on the phones were blinking. The intercom was buzzing. He was talking to a guest perched on the fireplace fender while a big white phone receiver was tucked under his ear. There was no seam between the fabric of this man’s life and his work. He announced me like a headline.
