The Eternal Party

by Kristina Hagman

  The next afternoon after everyone had left, there were forgotten bathing suits and sunglasses and bottles strewn everywhere. After several hours of cleaning the place up, I sought out my dad to have a talk with him alone.

  Sunset was always a good time to talk with him; and since we were alone, we had our own private gong bong, when the sun hit the horizon and was going over the edge, we took our deep breaths and, high from hyperventilating, we held hands and yelled, “Gong bong!”

  As the moon came up, I told Dad how much I loved him, how much everyone loved him, and that many of us were worried about his drinking and drugging. He listened politely but was silent. I had stated my case, and there was not much more I could do. It was his life. A few days later, I called his doctor to tell her about Dad’s substance abuse. When I got her on the phone, she yelled at me and angrily told me that she could not talk about his case due to privacy laws. I told her that I was not calling to get information—she did not have to say a word. I was just calling to tell her that he was drinking heavily and smoking a lot of weed. I also told her that Dad’s friends in Ojai had given me her number and had asked me to call and tell her what was going on in the hope that she could do something to help him. But, as had been made clear to me on many occasions, the only person who could help Dad with his drinking was Dad himself.

  After that attempt to do something about Dad’s substance abuse I stopped mentioning anything about it but I knew that he was aware that I cared for him. The one time Dad really opened up to me was when he told me about a dream he had had about me. It was about two years after the operation, and we were sitting in his new penthouse in Santa Monica that had a 180-degree view of the ocean. We were alone together. Dad was drinking again but very moderately at the time. It was about half an hour before sunset, and the sky was filling with beautiful shades of pink and orange and pale gray. As we shared a bottle of wine and looked out at the ocean, he recounted what it was like coming out of the anesthesia after sixteen hours on the operating table when he had his liver transplant. He said it was like a near-death experience and that for a long time after he was in a dream state. In the dream, he felt like he was drowning in the tumultuous water of a dark and stormy ocean. He said, “You swam next to me and held my hand. You led me to an area where there was this grotto, a place that was protected by rocks that kept out the crashing waves, where the water was multicolored and calm. Once I was safe, you smiled at me and swam away. You made sure I was safe and happy.”

  I wanted to cry; the story of the dream truly filled me with joy. I reached out and held his hand.

  Over the course of the next few years, he told me this story often, and I always felt glad that, even in his subconscious, I was able to be a comfort to him. More than two decades later, as he lay dying, I had thought of this story as I tried to comfort him again.

  19

  A Double Life and Alzheimer’s

  MY FATHER WAS DEDICATED to my mother even though he lived a double life. He was with her most of the time, but although he spoke glowingly of her to strangers and the press, when talking to people who were truly close to him, he blamed her for any relationship in their life together that went wrong. To most everyone, Dad always appeared to be the friendly, happy, welcoming one of the two, but it was Dad who often cut people from our lives suddenly or had quasi-secret relationships with strange people whom no one in the family dared ask questions about. I was often confused when a trusted family friend was gone from our lives forever without explanation. Direct questions about the disappearance of someone with whom we had been intimate were left unanswered, and if pressed, his pat answer was, “Maj just did not like them.” And that would end the conversation.

  Though there was no denying that Mom was moody. Dad used her well-known bad temper as a shield to hide his own anger or sudden distrust of people they had become close to.

  Mom’s doctor in Santa Monica seemed reluctant to diagnose her Alzheimer’s, but sometime toward the end of 2007, he said she had cognitive impairment due to some form of dementia. It wasn’t a total shock; it had become obvious to everyone that she was confused. She would get lost while driving and went on shopping trips to buy the same things she had bought just the day before.

  It was only when her disease caused her to become combative that Mom could no longer cope with her sense of abandonment when Dad went off with other women, and at that point, she began making her feelings about his affairs known in public. But well before her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease explained why she no longer had normal social inhibitions, everyone knew Mom was angry, and a lot of people were afraid of her.

  For years, her anger seemed irrational or was thought of as the behavior of a difficult drunk. As the disease progressed, he never knew what she was going to say or do anymore. She hit people. Dad could no longer leave her alone and go off to one of their other homes to be with some companion of his choice. He was in the sort of situation he had always sought to avoid: he was trapped.

  He did not know what to do about her behavior. He could not say no to her; he never had been able to say no to her. Dad’s way of dealing with her bad moods had always been to walk away and do as he pleased, but now that was not an option for him. A year after her diagnosis, he took her for a complete physical and mental evaluation to the Mayo Clinic, where it was determined that she suffered from vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s. This devastating diagnosis clearly indicated that professional help would be required. But Dad resisted professional help because he didn’t want strangers invading the intimate, complex life he had shared with her since he was twenty-three and she was twenty-seven.

  Anyone close to her could see that Mom’s bad behavior had become impossible to control. Even Dad’s very loyal secretary could no longer take the strain that my mother’s condition had brought to the household. One day when she felt she could not cope with Mom’s flashes of anger anymore, she sent me an e-mail with details of all the many tasks that she performed in her job for the two of them and asked me if I would be willing to move to Los Angeles with my family and run Dad’s office. I thought long and hard about how and when my family could move to be closer to my parents in order for me to be able to help them. There were a lot of logistics to work out. My husband was in a graduate program to become a therapist, and I felt I could not leave Seattle until my oldest daughter had graduated high school; at that point, my younger daughter would be transitioning into high school, and that would be a good time for all of us to begin this challenging new chapter in our lives.

  In the interim, I flew down to Los Angeles every three weeks. Between visits, Dad was calling me often saying Mom had been yelling at him, threatening to divorce him. He confided in me partly because I was his daughter and partly because, for eight years, I had been the primary caregiver for my mother-in-law, who had recently passed away and who had also had Alzheimer’s. I counseled Dad to not take Mom’s angry words personally, but I firmly told him that he had to take the car keys away from her. He finally did and began to bring her everywhere with him.

  It was hard to stay calm in the face of her verbal attacks, so he smoked more and more pot. He would go into his bedroom, get high, and zone out with the TV on, and while he was finding solace with his favorite drug, Mom would leave the apartment and would become lost. Dad only found out that she was missing when the police brought her home. After that had happened on a few occasions, he tried to sleep with one eye open, but after a time, his constant vigilance over her so thoroughly exhausted him that he passed out cold. While he slept, she called a taxi to drive her up to Ojai at four in the morning. He still hadn’t taken her billfold from her; he always wanted to reassure her that she had plenty of money, so she always had a few hundred bucks on her.

  The cab driver saw that she could pay for the expensive ride and did not ask any questions. When they arrived in Ojai, it was still dark; he let her out at the gate to the big house, and fortunately for Mom, the gardener had some extra help arriving early that d
ay, so she was only sitting on the cold ground for about half an hour.

  As she declined further, Dad was with her literally all the time. He did everything he could to keep her in a good mood. He bought her flowers several times a week and took her out to fine restaurants almost every day. But as she got worse, their lunchtime outings became unbearable for him. He was disgusted when she picked her teeth at the table and spit food out onto the floor. So he started cooking a bit. For the first time in his life, he was taking over responsibilities like grocery shopping and picking up the dry cleaning, and everywhere he went he took Mom with him. He began helping her care for herself, washing her hair, fixing her makeup, and picking out her clothes. He would make bubble baths for her surrounded by candles. He played her favorite music. They loved the score from Pennies from Heaven, and he would sing it to her and whistle it. They would take long drives together; it always calmed her to be going somewhere.

  He had been refusing work, but he missed it a lot. He was excited when he was offered a good gig in a few episodes of a TV show in Spain, where Dallas had been very popular. He planned how he could take Mom with him on location so that he could work. He wanted her to feel safe and comfortable, so Dad brought Sheila, who had worked as a maid in our family home for many years, to be Mom’s caregiver.

  Though Sheila knew Mom well and had real affection for her, the young woman could not handle Mom when she refused to stay in the hotel. She had no option but to bring her to watch Dad work. On the set, Mom was so disruptive that Dad had to send the two of them back home to LA.

  The flight home was a disaster. They had to change planes in France, and as soon as they disembarked from the plane, Mom confidently strode off in the wrong direction. Sheila patiently struggled with her and managed to get Mom to their connecting flight. Once on board, Mom became agitated, and soon after the plane took off, she insisted that she had to talk to her husband. She walked up and down the aisles confronting passengers and asking them to give her their phones. This was making everyone uncomfortable, and the flight attendants tried to get her to sit down, which made her even more agitated. She got it into her head that there was something wrong with the flight, and she began to shout that the pilot did not know how to fly the plane. She demanded that she be allowed into the cockpit to land it herself. She told the people trying to calm her that she was a pilot and could save them. After 9/11, this kind of behavior was no longer considered eccentric; it was seen as dangerous. Somehow Sheila, with her kind, reassuring words, got Mom to stay in her seat and stop shouting. When they got home, everyone in Ojai worked together to have Mom checked into the psych ward at UCLA Medical Center.

  I immediately came down to LA and went to the hospital every day to be with her until Dad came back from Europe. At that point, Dad had to face the facts, and he finally accepted that she needed professional attendants to keep an eye on her 24-7. At first he tried to keep her with him at their penthouse in Santa Monica. He hired caregivers to attend to her at home and give him a break, but as usual, he could not say no to Mom, and when she fired her attendants, he let them go and called the agency to find others. Dad kept trying new people. Greta seemed to be working well for a few weeks, but when Dad was at a doctor’s appointment, I got a call from her because Mom had locked her out of the apartment. She warned me that the situation was dangerous. Hearing this from the distance of almost one thousand miles, I wished I could split myself in two and be home with my kids, who needed me, while also rushing off to be with my parents, who were having such a difficult time.

  Eventually, Dad decided to move her to a facility, but he couldn’t stand the idea of her being in a public place where she was locked away with a bunch of old people. The first facility she went to was in the hills between Malibu and the San Fernando Valley. It had not been updated since the early 1980s and smelled like urine. I visited her there several times and noted that she was trying to be cheerful amid her terrible confusion. It was the first time she had no access to alcohol, but by then, she was far beyond being in an alcoholic haze. Years of substance abuse had altered her permanently; she had no idea what day it was or where she was or why she was there. I knew she was physically safe, but her sadness and her longing to be with my dad broke my heart. Dad couldn’t bear to visit her there.

  It was plain that Dad was in a decline of a different sort. Despite his initial efforts to care for Mom and take over the basic household chores, it was not something he could maintain over time. Ultimately, without Mom to take care of him, he was a mess. His clothes were falling apart, his couch was frayed, the carpets were dirty, he was eating unhealthy food and drinking a lot.

  He began working sporadically. There were guest appearances on Spanish TV; he judged beauty contests, attended autograph signings, and went on free cruises as a featured speaker. It made him happy to be active.

  Another lift to his spirits was that he was being recognized for his philanthropic work for organ donation and for promoting solar energy as he did when he went to Washington, D.C., to urge Congress to extend solar investment credits. These political activities kept him busy and made him feel useful, but he missed Dallas, and he missed working with Patrick and Linda.

  In the summer of 2010, I was finally able to move to LA and start the work of putting Dad’s life back together. I had his carpets cleaned, I took his leather coat to be fixed, and I went over the books with the accountant so I could discuss the investments with Dad and my brother. My daughter Nora and I moved into an apartment just a few blocks from Dad’s penthouse while my husband stayed to finish some course work for his doctorate in Seattle. While we were becoming familiar with living in Santa Monica, Dad kept us company by coming over to our place for dinner a few times a week. Although he took Mom out for lunch at least twice a week, he asked me to see her every day, which I did. He called me every evening, asking, “How is Maj doing today?”

  He had decided to sell the big house in Ojai; he hardly ever went there anymore now that Mom could not be there with him. Dad asked me to interview several realtors. I narrowed the field of possibilities down according to the way he wanted to market the house and introduced them to Dad for his approval. He wanted to make sure we were marketing the property to an international clientele, with beautiful pictures in magazines and on the Internet; but even with the best, most dedicated team working to sell the property, it was hard to find a buyer—after the crash of 2008—for a home that was that big and situated in such a remote place. Ultimately, it did not sell until after he died.

  The house was so huge that cleaning out all the furniture and personal effects was an ongoing process throughout the final years of Dad’s life. I would drive up to Ojai a couple of times a week while my daughter was in school and bring back small, manageable loads of things that Dad could sort through. He was a pack rat, and every object or piece of clothing seemed to have an emotional tie to his life with my mother or to an important moment in his career, so it was hard for him to let anything go.

  * * *

  Dad loved to make an event out of everything that went on in his life, and at some point in the process of going through all their belongings, he came up with the idea of what to do with their lifetime of collecting. He was going to have a grand celebrity auction, maybe even tour around the world with their stuff to the cities where Dallas had been popular, making these personal items available to his fans everywhere and staying at the best hotels while on the road, with a show made up of all the quirky and interesting things he had owned, and each object had a story that he was eager to share.

  A few years earlier, he had worked with an auctioneer named Darren Julien to sell one of his motorcycles. On another occasion Darren and his partner, Martin Nolan, an Irishman who was well connected in his native country, had arranged for Dad to make an appearance on an Irish talk show. They had become great friends, and Dad wanted to work and travel with them again.

  Dad introduced me to Darren and Martin, and we hit it off right away. They were del
ightful to work with. The three of us arranged a huge auction of many of Dad’s collections: hats, antiques, paintings, Western wear of every sort. While we were putting the auction together, Dad shot a test episode of the new Dallas and was waiting anxiously to hear if it was going to be picked up.

  The auction attracted a huge amount of attention, and at the eleventh hour, Dad came up with a brilliant idea that only he would have thought of. He decided to arrive at the auction by riding a horse down one of the major streets in Beverly Hills, Wilshire Boulevard, and to have Linda Gray riding on a horse beside him. It made for quite a spectacle. No one had ridden a horse through the center of Beverly Hills since the days of Tom Mix, the costume-loving king of the cowboy western movies from the 1920s and ’30s.