There was also the part of the house they called “the Pavilion,” which was a huge space the size of three tennis courts put together that had three large seating areas, a grand piano, and a loft with workout equipment. It included a large indoor pool with a cascading fountain flowing into it that had been inspired by one my parents had seen in Istanbul when we had all visited the last sultan’s palace, now a museum. Dad was particularly struck by the idea that the fountain where the harem had been kept was built so that secrets spoken there would be masked by the sound of the trickling water, and he wanted one of his own. Just to the side of the pool there was a cave-like Jacuzzi. The pool could be covered for big parties to create a dance floor, and just as we had in Malibu, there was a mirrored ballroom ball that spun, suspended high above with a spotlight that sent sparkles dancing all over the space when the industrially powerful sound system blasted out everything from Strauss waltzes to The Moody Blues.
The Pavilion was surrounded by giant glass doors that opened to a view of the ocean on one side and to an inner courtyard with more pools and fountains on the other. The crowning feature of this grand room was an eight-foot-by-twenty-five-foot retractable skylight. Mom had made sure that this place had everything Dad ever desired. When it was completed, he named it Heaven because it was the one kind of heaven he emphatically believed in: heaven on earth.
Mom believed you could do anything you set your mind to, and Dad tested her abilities. One morning during one of the many times in our lives when he was obsessing about being broke, he started thinking about what he would like if he were really rich. He tried to think of the most outrageous, impossible thing one could have for breakfast. Finally, he said, “I want Baked Alaska.”
Mom liked the challenge, and she sent me to the grocery store with a list of things to buy. An hour later, she served the Baked Alaska to him in bed, on a silver tray. It was a gorgeous confection: frothy golden-brown meringue on the outside with layers of ice cream and cake inside. Though Mom did not have Dad’s earning capacity, nor did she get anything even approaching the recognition he received, my father always knew that she was something of a magician when it came to making dreams come true.
The image of the Swedish sex goddess was very prevalent in the ’60s and ’70s. There was the Swedish actress Anita Ekberg from the Fellini movie La Dolce Vita and the “take it off, take it all off” blonde from the Noxzema shaving cream commercial on TV. Dad was proud to have his very own Swede. She was strong, blond, and direct. He was wildly amorous toward her for much of his life. They were very physically comfortable together, holding each other’s hands and kissing in public; he could always make her giggle. When I was still a toddler in New York, Mom was painting the walls of our apartment when Dad grabbed the brush from her and wrote in letters two feet tall, “I love you, Honey Bunny.” She never painted over it. Instead, she covered it with a curtain, and whenever she needed to cheer herself up, she would pull back the curtain and read it again or proudly show friends this giant-sized declaration of Dad’s love.
He liked her to be dressed well, and even when money was in short supply, she could sew an evening gown for herself that would rival anything seen on the Oscars’ red carpet. Dad remembered details about her dresses years after she’d worn them. He especially loved the Dior look; to him, it supplied the quintessential image of a beautiful woman. Mom was determined to please him. I once overheard a friend of the family say that she’d had a rib removed so she could wear the Dior cinched-in waists or the exaggerated hourglass look with its tight built-in corsets and voluminous skirts. She was stunning in them, and Dad was so proud of her. He always liked to walk behind her so he could see her legs in her high heels.
She was aware of her image as the woman accompanying a famous actor, and she put a lot of time into thinking about how she presented herself. She did not hesitate to do whatever it took to make herself attractive, be it in the clothes she wore, or dieting intensely to quickly get thin for a gala, or exploring anything plastic surgery could do to improve her looks.
Dad had fallen in love with her soon after she had suffered from polio and was never troubled by the way the left side of her face dropped slightly from nerve damage caused by the disease. But even after she’d had that epiphany about her face when they took acid together and she had said, “I’m beautiful,” she remained very self-conscious about her crooked mouth and tried many times to correct it with dentistry and half a dozen face-lifts over the years. Dad supported and encouraged her as she often turned to doctors to improve her body, especially during the heyday of Dallas. To her credit, Mom also did everything she could on her own to stay in shape during those years and put Dad on a workout and diet regimen; when she was fifty, she was running eight miles a day and lifting weights with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Despite all Mom’s efforts, something went wrong. The blissful marriage my folks always presented to the public had a sad, hidden side. I did not wake up to this fact until one day in the late 1980s, when my parents were living in LA and I was in New York painting. Mom called me in my studio; she was crying. She called often; we were very close and talked about everything. We loved to gossip together. In these conversations, she was often boastful, angry, or elated, but hearing her sound so miserable was very unusual. I wanted to comfort her in any way I could. When she finally caught her breath between sobs, she told me that Dad was not intimate with her anymore. I was silent for a long while. If I were there in California with her, I would have hugged her, but what could I do over the phone? I said, “Mom, maybe it’s the drinking that makes him this way.”
She said, “No, that’s not the problem; you have to say something to him.”
How could I say anything to my father about their sex life? I felt really uncomfortable saying anything to either of them. She wanted to go on telling me things about their personal life that I did not want to hear, and she was putting Dad down in very explicit terms, but as close as I was to my mother, I was not her girlfriend. As daughter to both of them, I finally said, “I cannot have this conversation with you. I really don’t want to know those kinds of details about your life together.”
After that phone call, I intentionally turned a blind eye to much of my parents’ life together. I never really wanted to look too deeply. Dad was always a flirt, but it was done with such good humor that I never took it seriously. But since his death, I’ve been confronted repeatedly with the fact that he had many affairs. Just a week ago, I was talking to a friend of Dad’s about the woman who was with him at his deathbed, and the man asked, “You mean that woman he saw every day on his way to work?” Once again, there I was, tripping over another revelation of a liaison that was altogether news to me. All I could do was pretend I already knew. I needed some time to process the information, so I just said yes and changed the subject.
After Mom developed Alzheimer’s, I found myself covering for Dad even though I did not really know what he was up to. For example, I was Dad’s date at a charity function in Dallas when a very respectable couple who were friends with both my parents asked me, “How can you put up with it?” as they gestured to a group of women that Dad often traveled with and who were, at that moment, hovering around him.
I just said, “It comes with the territory; famous people need a lot of love.” But I was not really sure what these women were to my father. It was one of those situations in which I did not want to ask too many questions. I figured Dad’s relationships were his business.
To my knowledge, the first time my mother confronted Dad about his other women was when they visited my family in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I had listened to Daniel’s counsel and continued to maintain some distance between my parents and myself. For the first time in my life, I did not feel like a member of the family entourage. I had forged a new family and become an artist in my own right. In Santa Fe, people did not care very much about the whole J. R. connection, which allowed me to live my own way. I was painting and learning the craft of printmaking alo
ngside the many kind and generous artists who lived and worked in my community. I was very happy. Daniel and I were looking forward to seeing Mom and Dad and showing the grandparents what a strong, curious, beautiful granddaughter they had.
As soon as Mom walked through the door, I could see she was distraught and that this was not going to be a kid-focused visit. Dad was unusually subdued and followed behind her quietly. They sat in our living room, ignoring their granddaughter, and through her tears, Mom told us that there had been a story in the supermarket tabloids about my father having an affair. I never saw the article and never cared to; I did not know anything about this other woman and did not feel like finding anything out, but it was all too clear that for Mom this news and the public nature of it was devastating and humiliating. Between bursts of sobbing, she said, “I need you to be family. I need us to stick together to overcome this horrible intrusion into our lives.”
Here we were again, just like the phone call I’d had with Mom a few years earlier. What could I do? Dad was Dad. The tabloids were always picking on people and poking around for dirt; this is the price that comes with fame. As we sat there listening to Mom, Dad did not say a word. I did not know what the tabloid had reported. I did not even want to look for it on the newsstands, and I had no intention of asking my father if it was true or not.
I told her, “If we don’t say anything, if we just keep quiet, it will blow over. It will be a passing thing. It’s just one moment of sensationalism. No one believes those tabloids anyway.” Dad looked at me helplessly as if he just wanted to hand Mom over to someone else. The tension was unbearable. Dad opened a bottle of wine—his answer to most tense situations—but Mom was too miserable to be consoled. I focused on my toddler, who had become agitated, sensing the atmosphere in the room.
I know he must have felt bad, but Dad just kept smiling. As the day wore on, he went out to a bar to get away and drink with the locals. He stayed out on the town for a long time, and he figured that while he was gone, Mom would have some drinks too and that things would cool down by the time he came home. He truly did love my mother, and it pained him to see her this way. He wanted to do something to distract her and change her mood. Finally, he decided on a plan that would defuse the situation and then went wandering around town looking for the ingredients he needed. First, he looked for a silly hat, one that he would soon add to his huge hat collection. Santa Fe was full of hat stores, and he found one he hoped would make my mother laugh: it was made of shearling and had two horns coming out of it like the horns of the devil. When he put it on, he looked like a creature from Maurice Sendak’s children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. He walked around the plaza wearing it, and people recognized him and asked for autographs.
Dad liked to make this kind of interaction unpredictable, and so he would ask the fans for something in return. People were stunned by his response. What could they give this big star who surely had everything he wanted and needed and then some? Dad would say, “For an autograph, you can sing to me or tell me a joke or recite a poem.” This would produce embarrassed laughter and a lot of off-key singing of “Happy Birthday” or recitations of “Humpty Dumpty” or “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” On this occasion, the songs and poems improved Dad’s mood substantially, and then he passed a newsstand where he saw a Time magazine cover with a picture of a pig’s head on the body of a man in a suit and the words: “Are Men Really That Bad?” It was as if the zeitgeist was in tune with his personal situation. Could the headline have been any more perfect?
Using the things he’d collected on his afternoon trip around Santa Fe, Dad found a unique way to apologize for the public humiliation my mother had suffered. He walked back into the house with his ever-present smile, which had looked so strained before he’d left. He was now genuinely happy. He had it all figured out, and as always, his good mood was infectious, and we wanted to help him make things better.
He got to work on his plan: after arranging the pillows on the living room couch, he stretched out on it, wearing the hat that made him look like a monster; then he got my husband to take a picture of him while he lay there grinning, holding a teddy bear in one hand and, in the other hand, the Time magazine with its cover line, “Are Men Really That Bad?”
This was Dad’s way of charming everyone and making things okay. He could turn an upsetting situation into something funny. He had the ability to be self-deprecating or silly and humorous. He would make us all laugh, and if anyone stayed mad, that person looked like a spoilsport. This tactic very often worked, even when what he did or said was outrageous, like the time he was at a PTA meeting at my high school, where many parents had been terribly upset by rumors about sex between teachers and students. Students and teachers had gone skinny-dipping on a class trip, and there were whisperings of other, more serious interactions between teachers and students. Understandably, there was a great deal of anger expressed. Because Dad was always so uncomfortable with conflict, he wanted to defuse the situation. He stood up and said, “Now if you really want to do something to protect our kids, we should make emergency packs to be stored at all the exits of the school for them in case of an earthquake.” And in the surprised silence created by his abrupt change of subject, he added, “We could even include some condoms in the packs for good measure.”
Luckily, everyone laughed. Dad had performed his usual tactic of distracting people from their serious stance, and the meeting continued without addressing the issue of sex again. Another time, at a fancy dinner in Dad’s honor, a child was scolded for talking with his mouth full. This must have reminded him of the way that Richard had always been on his case about table manners, so Dad turned to the boy’s parents, crossed his eyes, and stuck his tongue out with food all over it. Again, there was laughter. He was the king of the court jesters, and, as the famous and infamous J. R., he could get away with doing something in egregiously bad taste and no one seemed to take offense. Dad liked to knock people off their high horses and grandiose attitudes.
At one point, we spent a week in Washington, D.C., where Ganny was to be one of the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors. The whole time was filled with events lauding her and the other awardees. During a fancy brunch, Dad saw Katharine Graham turning heads as she entered the room. He came over to where I was seated to point her out to me and to explain that she was one of the most powerful women in America because she was the publisher of her highly influential family-owned paper, The Washington Post. Later that evening, he was seated next to her at dinner and, turning to her as he looked at her place card, he said, “Graham? Are you related to that preacher guy named Graham?”
She looked at him for a moment, regarding him silently, and seeing his ever-present smile, she could tell he was yanking her chain, and she had the good grace to laugh. For Dad, teasing Mrs. Graham in this way was his attempt to say, “In the end, none of us are all that important.” It was Dad’s version of speaking truth to power.
And, thinking back on that day in Santa Fe, Dad was rewriting how we would remember their visit. After having his picture taken, my mother had regained her composure and was smiling; no one talked about the article in the tabloid again. To this day, the remaining members of our family refuse to look at or talk about anything that hurts. It is a coping mechanism, but it is not a path to healing the wounds of a life spent in the eye of the public with fallible people for parents.
* * *
For a while, my mother found a way to make peace with the knowledge that Dad had other women. Though she didn’t address it directly, the way she regarded such liaisons—and rationalized them—became clear when she spoke about women who demanded divorces from their cheating husbands. She said she felt sorry for them; they were pathetic and unsophisticated. She thought they should put up with their husbands’ affairs, because if they lost their husbands, they would lose everything.
This attitude must have come from an agreement my parents came to privately, because from that time forward, Dad was more carefu
l about crossing the line. Though he didn’t stop having affairs, he conducted them in a way that would ensure that Mom was not embarrassed again by a public display of the women he hadn’t kept properly hidden. He did a special interview titled “Love in Hollywood” that included a video of them walking hand in hand on the beach while they talked about their perfect marriage and how he had been faithful to her for forty years. The whole family was interviewed about how amazing they were together, and there is no doubt that they were amazing together, they always loved each other deeply. They were a great team. He was consistent in every interview and always spoke of his devotion to his wife; he liked to make the point that he was a bad boy in all things except marriage. When he wrote his autobiography, the book was full of confessions about his drug and alcohol use. He went into detail about every law he had ever broken, but he maintained that he was a faithful and loving husband.
As long as he kept up appearances, he could do anything he wanted with other women. But to remind him not to mess up again, he kept that picture of himself lying on the couch in Santa Fe wearing the monster hat with the Time cover in his hand. In fact, he had it framed and hung in the kitchen, where everyone could see it every day while they ate breakfast.
What he really felt about his affairs is something, I suspect, that nobody knows. But the more I thought about it and the further along I got in my forensic search for who my father was, I became ever more certain that those affairs were not the reason he had asked to be forgiven.
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The Miracle of Medicine
The Eternal Party Page 20
