A Drinking Life (41 page)

But the Sixties were remorseless in their power. There were drugs everywhere, and my brothers were not immune. When he was sixteen, Denis came by one night and he was stoned. In tears and remorse, he explained that he’d been doing pills and reefer. I arranged for him to go to Ireland and work for a while on a farm owned by Patty Clancy of the Clancy Brothers. Driving him to the airport, I remembered his brown wounded eyes on the day I went to Spain; now those same shy eyes looked at me as he went off to a kind of exile of his own.

I’ll be good, he said. I’ll make you proud of me.

I know you will.

I’ll write you letters.

Write stories too.

Off he went. But if Denis saved his life in Ireland, when he returned, his friends were already dying, some in Vietnam, too many from drugs. In 1969, Denis, along with Brian and John, put together a group that was going to the great rock festival in Woodstock. Ramona asked me if she could go with them.

I need to have some fun, too, she said. You’ve had plenty of fun.

Where will you stay? Are there hotels or inns?

I don’t know, she said. I’ll stay where they stay.

And I stay home with the kids?

Well, yeah . . .

Okay, I said. Go ahead. You need some fun too.

So they all moved off to one of the great hedonistic festivals of the Sixties and I stayed home to mind the girls. They liked this, because I cooked each meal following recipes from a cookbook. I told them stories. I drew a lot of pictures. But while Ramona moved through the rains, drugs, and music of Woodstock, I was thinking about the grieving drizzle at the heart of our marriage. In a way, Ramona was now having the years that she’d lost when she married me at eighteen and had two children very quickly. At night, with the children asleep, I watched the television coverage of Woodstock and imagined her lost in the vast rain-drowned crowd.

After Woodstock, the sense of unravelment returned to our marriage, more powerfully than ever. She seemed to be moving through a different landscape than the one I inhabited. There were visible signs of it: the music playing steadily,
her
music, not mine; no answers to my calls from the newspaper; eyes that made no contact. More and more, I cooked dinner while the laundry piled up and beds went unmade. There was an arctic chill in the marriage bed.

I found consolation once more in the Head. The pattern resumed, the phone calls with excuses, the amiable lies. At the bar, I could believe that my life was a delight. When the talk turned to women, I assumed the mask of the stoic. Sometimes, hurting from hangover, I wondered whether my Lion’s Head friends were really my friends, whether they put up with me because of my personal qualities or because I wrote a newspaper column. The unspoken question was usually dissolved in vodka and laughter. I often got very drunk and then lurched into Sheridan Square to find a taxi that would bring me to Brooklyn, to the street where I was a boy with yellow hair. One time I came home drunk at three in the morning, made a mistake, went up the stoop of the house next door and climbed in the window. Two men were in bed together and started screaming in terror. I thought this was hilarious when I was told about it the next day. But the actual incident doesn’t exist in my memory; all I have is the version of the story told by others. That and the sense of shame that morning after when I tried to imagine what I looked like to those frightened men.

Ramona and I now had only the common ground of the children. One night, drunk again, I came home, opened the outer gate beneath the stoop and lurched into the inner door, smashing the window. In my hand I had two roses I’d bought from a flower seller in the Lion’s Head, one for Adriene, the other for Deirdre. I stepped over the broken glass and turned left into their bedroom. They’d awakened with the crash and there, suddenly, was their father. Their eyes were wide in fright or apprehension. I handed each of them a rose and told them I loved them. I did — but I’d broken too many things. It was time for me to go.

When we separated at last, I rented a basement apartment in a friend’s brownstone at the far end of Park Slope. The children could walk along the parkside to visit me; I could easily visit them. We went to Coney Island together, to block parties, to museums, as I played the new role of the Sunday father. The girls were delighted with the attention. They were baffled and confused about the fact that I was no longer living with them.

When are you coming home, Daddy? Adriene asked one day.

I don’t know, baby.

I want you to come home, Daddy.

We’ll see.

Almost all our talks ended this way. Deirdre was too young to understand; but Adriene understood very well that something terrible had happened to her life. After dropping them at home, I would walk slowly back to my place, loaded with misery. Sometimes, I walked it off. Other times, I reached for the easy solace of a bar.

In most ways, I felt an immense relief. It was no longer necessary to concoct lies if I wanted to stay up all night drinking. There were fewer evasions. The strained tension of life with Ramona was replaced with a correct civility. I realized finally that I could no longer escape to that elusive Great Good Place; it didn’t exist. I did more drinking than ever, sometimes alone, but I felt better about myself in the morning. I started reading fiction again and writing more carefully. At the Lion’s Head now, I even had the freedom to go home with women.

Then I started an affair with precisely the wrong woman for me. She was lovely, kind, smart, sensual, and rich. She was also a drinker. Soon we were parked together at the bar of the Lion’s Head. We were drinking at a table in Elaine’s (for she was an Uptown Girl). We were drinking at parties or traveling south to drink at some friend’s plantation. We got drunk a lot. And the drinking led to scenes, jealousies, anguished telephone calls, a variety of stupidities, not all of them mine. Doors were slammed. In the purple spirit of melodrama, all sudden departures were made in the dead of night.

This went on for almost a year. That year, I wrote a movie script that was filmed in Spain. We got drunk a lot in Almería, where all the spaghetti westerns were staged, and one night, coming to the defense of one drunken actor, I knocked out another actor and thought I’d killed him. My Uptown Girl had already gone home. I soon followed her, moved in for a few days, then fled to Brooklyn. There was one final angry night, both of us sodden after two days of drinking. The details are lost. But words were hurled in cruelty. There were curses and tears. And I was gone for good.

The next afternoon, I was alone in the Lion’s Head, reading the
New York Times
and sipping beer. I had no column to write and that was usually the best of days. Don Schlenck, the day bartender, was down at the far end, reading the
Post
and eating lunch. I looked up in the gloomy silence and peered out through the barred windows that opened at ground level to Christopher Street. I could see human legs going by. Two pairs of women’s legs. A man in jeans. A man in a gray suit. A man with a woman. Faceless. Without histories. Hurrying along. And then snow began to fall.

I guess God doesn’t want me to go home today, I said.

Didn’t you hear? God is dead. It says so in your own paper.

Don’t believe everything you read in a paper, Schlenck, I said.

I picked up my change and walked out into the storm. I walked downtown, block after block, as the swirling snow obliterated the edges of buildings. The snow-bright streets looked as innocent as childhood, and I wanted to walk somewhere with my girls. But I couldn’t even do that. A few months earlier, Ramona had made her own trip to Mexico, to work for a degree at the University of the Americas, and she had taken the children with her. I was in New York, alone in the snow; they were in Puebla. And I was sick of myself. Sick of drinking. Sick of the routines of my life. At City Hall, my hair and coat fat with snow, I hurried down into the subway and went home. In the basement apartment in Park Slope, I took the telephone off the hook and slept.

10

I
MET
Shirley MacLaine in Rome in 1966 at a party thrown by the producer Joe Levine. We talked and had a few laughs before she went off to another table. I saw her again during Bobby Kennedy’s last campaign in California. She was with her husband, Steve Parker, who lived in Tokyo. That night I ended up at her house in Encino, drinking whiskey at the bar in the living room with Steve and Shirley, talking politics until three in the morning. She was funny. She was intelligent. She was passionate about the problems of the world. She never talked about movies. I liked her very much.

A year after I separated from Ramona, Shirley published her first book, a charming memoir called
Don’t Fall Off the Mountain.
Reading it, I discovered that we shared one common childhood passion: Bomba the Jungle Boy. One night she came into Elaine’s with some friends and stopped at my table to say hello. I mentioned Bomba. She sat down.

The only book I could never find, I said, was
Bomba at the Giant Cataract.

He had eye trouble too? she said.

I laughed.

Do you want a drink? I said.

I’m not here to ride horses, she said.

A month later, we went to England together, where she was working on a television series, and moved into a large rented house near Windsor Castle. I kept writing my newspaper column, shipping it from various places in Europe. Before we met, I’d started writing movie scripts to supplement my newspaper habit; with her, I learned much about the craft, about putting people on stage, establishing conflict, using action to show character. But I was still drinking. I didn’t often get drunk. In her world, most people simply didn’t drink the way I’d learned to drink; they would soon be out of the business. But I did drink steadily, easing the tension created by meeting so many new people, adjusting to a relationship in which I was not the principal.

Shirley never mentioned the drinking to me. Her father was a hard drinker too, and like me she’d grown up in the hard-drinking Fifties. But there was an indirect scrutiny. Sometimes in conversation she’d dismiss an actor or director as a drunk. If she saw a scene in a movie, or read a script where a character succumbs to another because of drunkenness, she’d shake her head.
It’s a cheat,
she’d say.
It’s using the drink instead of forcing the painful choice.
As an actress she was relentless in trying to get to the core of human character and discovering human weakness.
Why does he do these things?
she’d say about a character in a script.
What hurt him? What warped him? What does he want, and what’s preventing him from getting it?

When she was off at work one morning, I was sitting at my typewriter, gazing at the gardens of England, and began applying those questions to myself. I couldn’t accept my own answers.

Back in New York, I started to work harder than ever before on movie scripts and magazine articles and columns. Necessity drove me: I needed the money. After they returned from Mexico; Ramona and I had agreed to place the girls in a boarding school, to give them some steadiness and structure while she tried to sort out her life. This arrangement wasn’t intended to be permanent; I bought a big house in Park Slope in Brooklyn, full of vague plans about getting custody of the children and having them live there with me and Shirley. This was absurd, of course; Shirley was an old Broadway gypsy, an itinerant who lived where the work was. She did help me set up the house. But she kept her apartment in Manhattan. She was never going to live among the burghers of Brooklyn.

A year went by, then another. Ramona and I were divorced in an amicable way. She found another man to live with and tried for a while to be a photographer. But the children remained in boarding school in Switzerland. Sometimes I paid for Ramona to visit them. I visited them myself three or four times during the school year, laden down with gifts, wrote them long letters, spoke to them by telephone. They came home to stay with me at Christmas and Easter and across the summers. But then it would be time for them to leave and I’d be full of sorrow and grieving guilt. I wanted them with me all the time, but Shirley made clear to me that she wasn’t going to be part of a household that included Adriene and Deirdre.

I have no talent for that, she said. I would be terrible at it. It would be a mess.

The girls resented her, blaming her for the breakup with Ramona, which wasn’t her fault at all, seeing her as the person who was keeping them from her father, which was true.

I want to come home to stay for good, Adriene said to me one evening in the big house in Brooklyn. I want to live in my own room. I want to be with you, Daddy. Please. Please.

Her words drilled into me. But I felt paralyzed. Instead of making a decision, choosing my children over a woman, I postponed the choice. Off they went again to the airport, Adriene in tears, Deirdre sullen. I went back to the empty house, choked with remorse, and drank until I slept. There were too many versions of this same scene.

In addition to vodka, I used movement and traveling to prevent too much brooding. When good parts for women began drying up in the movies, Shirley created a nightclub act, singing and dancing and cracking wise. I admired the power of her will, her refusal to simply end her career that early, the way in which she whipped herself into physical shape, driving herself harder than any athlete. I traveled a lot with the show, back and forth to California, to Las Vegas and Canada and Florida. In 1972, Shirley got involved in the presidential campaign of George McGovern, which I covered; that also put us on the road, checking in and out of hotel rooms, making long-distance calls to friends and children and family. Sometimes I would stay behind in New York and return to the Head and get drunk in the old style. Sometimes I would retreat to the Brooklyn house and get drunk in its empty rooms. Then I’d be gone again, following my star. Most of the time, when I was away, my brothers Denis and John lived in the house, watering the plants, reading the books, throwing parties. They loved the place. But it never felt like a home to me. I didn’t want to look at the rooms where the girls stayed on their holidays. I didn’t want to imagine domestic scenes that could not become real.