Both of Us (22 page)

That was September 10, 2001. Her interview was at 8:30 a.m. at the World Trade Center the following morning.

It was early evening the next day in Istanbul. I’m dressing when Freddie calls saying to turn on CNN, which I do, just as the second plane hits the second tower. My first thought was for my family, all of whom I immediately tried to call, and would be dialing for hours before I would finally be able to get an open line. All the while, in my mind’s eye, I kept flashing back to an image of that girl. Freddie and I were supposed to attend a dinner party that night. I bowed out. He later told me that when he arrived, the hostess said the terrorists were Japanese, as was being reported on Turkish radio and television, not Muslims.

While the death toll in New York punctuated that year for every American, Farrah had to face one much closer to home. On October 16, her beloved older sister, Diane, died of cancer at sixty-two years old. Not a good number for the Fawcetts.

Our lives would continue to be driven by ups and downs both personally and professionally. In 2002, following her successful stint on
Spin City
, Farrah’s television career would see another resurgence with four appearances on the hit legal drama
The Guardian
. Her portrayal was of a troubled single grandmother, for which she received another
Emmy nomination, her fifth. That’s when I realized how far she’d come since the weeks and months leading to her fiftieth birthday. Before, it would have eaten at her that she was being cast as a grandma; whereas now, not only did she take it in stride, she had come to appreciate her age and had even begun to enjoy the early rewards of maturity. For me, Farrah accepting that role in
The Guardian
and inhabiting it with such aplomb was her homecoming to herself.

My career was sputtering along like that old Model T Mose drove in
Paper Moon
. Around the same time Farrah was taping
The Guardian
, I was in production for the film
People I Know
, with Al Pacino. It’s about a slick New York press agent whose actor client gets himself into a publicity mess that he has to clean up. I play the actor. Yes, I do see the irony. And no, not even Pacino was enough to save this movie when it was released in May of the following year. I’m like a homing pigeon for embarrassing footnotes to the careers of the otherwise ridiculously successful. I wonder if it’s a gypsy curse.

And my good luck would just keep on coming. The following fall, in 2004, Tatum releases her autobiography titled
A Paper Life
. A mess on paper is more like it. I didn’t read it when it came out in hardcover, and not only because my friends warned it would make me unhappy. I figured I’d heard it all before. So I can’t recommend that you buy it. Though I may seem to be making light of my daughter’s memoir, the truth is, it did hurt.

Despite whatever setbacks we were facing in any given moment, whether they were troubles with Redmond or my other children or our jobs, Farrah and I were growing stronger together, and our relationship, though still not completely healed from the wounds of years past, was becoming more elastic and able to bend without breaking. By the end of 2004, the tabloids had been hinting for more than a year of a Fawcett-O’Neal wedding. Sometimes we’d curl up on the couch at the beach house and read each other the articles.

During this period, the cable network TV Land offered Farrah a million dollars to do a day-to-day reality series called
Chasing Farrah
. This was long before reality mania, and I had reservations about unrehearsed exposure, but she was intrigued by the idea and wanted to give it a try, so I supported her decision. I even agreed to be in an episode. We taped it at the beach house. When I watch it now, I see just how remarkable Farrah and I were together. The footage of us at the beach—her sitting on my lap while I smiled and kissed her—would look to anyone who didn’t know our story as if we had never been apart.

The series ran for only seven episodes before being canceled, but it was worth it for Farrah. It established her as a dignified pioneer of an emerging television genre, and it also gave her the chance to honor her love for her mother. In March of 2005, Farrah and the crew went to Texas to tape an episode with her family. Pauline, whose health was
failing, was able to take part. She died weeks later, with Farrah knowing how proud she was of her daughter.

I lost my mother in 2005 too. She was ninety-five. I’ll never forget the year before when my brother called to tell me it was time. Mom was leaving us. She was in the hospital then and had been there for a while, never having recovered from hip replacement. After the surgery, she began to fade away and my brother and I were living in that awful limbo of “any-day-now-speak” that the doctors give you. When I arrived at her bedside, her breathing was shallow and her pulse was faint. Kevin and I kissed her hand, told her we loved her, told her what she meant to us and how important she was in our lives. Mom was in an older wing of the hospital and there was a fire exit outside her room. Kevin and I sat on the steps and we reminisced about our life with her. We laughed and told stories. Then we went back inside. I held her in my arms, and I said good-bye to my beloved mother. The next morning, I got another call from Kevin.

“She’s back,” he says.

“Who’s back?” I ask.

“Mom!” Kevin replies.

“Mom? You mean she’s still alive?”

“Yes, she’s right here,” he says. “Do you want to talk to her?”

She’d rallied. My mom had apparently decided she would live another year, so she did. It was in character. For decades she had personally answered all of Tatum’s and my
fan mail, always making sure that every person who took the time to write was given the courtesy of a thoughtful response. I still miss her.

As the year comes to a close, I’m given an uplifting surprise. The producers of
Desperate Housewives
invite me to make a guest appearance as character Lynette Scavo’s father-in-law. I happily accept. I always liked the sardonic wit of that show and who wouldn’t want to spend a day with that gorgeous cast?

The holidays are thankfully uneventful.

2006 begins innocuously. It will not end that way.

I
t’s autumn of 2006. Farrah and I are lying in bed at the beach house. I see her considering her legs. “Is one of my thighs bigger than the other?” she says. “Of course not,” I reply. She points to her right leg. “This one is larger,” she insists. Humoring her, I take the tape measure out of the dresser drawer and measure both her thighs. She’s right. One is an inch larger than the other. “Something’s wrong with me,” she says. “No, no, you’re fine,” I tell her. But she wasn’t. Her body was retaining fluid. Since the death of her mom the year before, Farrah had been feeling exhausted and was sleeping far more than usual, but we both assumed it was the grieving process and that it would eventually pass. It never occurred to either of us that she was sick. After all, I was the one with cancer. It seemed inconceivable we could both be struck by lightning.

But on September 22, Farrah is diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer and told to get her affairs in order. For the next two and a half years we will fight to save her life. And as the battle unfolds, we will be given the unexpected gift that anyone who’s ever known love often receives too late. We will learn why you must give everything
you’ve got now, this minute, because when that moment passes, so too may your chance to keep the promises you’ve spent a lifetime making. What you’re about to read are my reflections on those days as we waged war on her cancer and opened that profound gift.

As word began to spread that Farrah was sick, the press became as invasive as her disease. It would become a race to try to update family and friends on her condition before they read it in the newspapers. We wouldn’t always win that race. Making matters worse, the papers portrayed Farrah as already having relinquished hope. The front page of the
National Enquirer
read: “Farrah Begs, Let Me Die.” Eventually we will orchestrate a trap and catch the hospital employee who was feeding Farrah’s medical records to the media. Our aggressive stance will spark new legislation protecting the privacy rights of patients, and Governor Schwarzenegger will sign it into law.

In the wake of Farrah’s diagnosis in 2006, as fall turned to winter, we weren’t thinking about beating the tabloids; we were too busy trying to figure out how to destroy the malignant tumor growing inside her. We were diligent, consulting doctor after doctor, trying to cut our way through the dense foliage of medicalspeak to understand each opinion, weigh every option, and make the right decisions. Every oncologist was offering us a chalice. Which one was Farrah’s Holy Grail? While doctors didn’t always agree on the most effective course of action to eradicate her tumor, they shared a
similar opinion on her prognosis. In
Dark Victory
, a Bette Davis film about a woman who discovers she’s terminally ill at the prime of her life, there’s a scene in which Davis suspects her doctor is withholding the truth, so she sneaks a look at her test results and sees “prognosis negative.” She reads the words out loud and you can watch her trying to digest their meaning. The rest of the film is about her dying with dignity. Farrah was given the same prognosis, but for her it was all about
living
. Farrah’s determination to conquer the odds will be contagious, and it will not only inspire those closest to her; it will motivate a generation of cancer patients to never lose hope, to keep reaching for life. For thirty-three months Farrah will endure a debilitating series of treatments and procedures. She will travel back and forth to Germany for treatments not yet available in the States. She’ll work with doctors at UCLA, Saint John’s Health Center, and City of Hope. And through it all, she never stops fighting. Her desperate struggle to survive wasn’t only because she wanted to live; it was also because she
needed
to live to protect her son and to fulfill the promise of our love for each other. And in February of 2007, Farrah and I would be celebrating a report that the initial treatments had worked and that she was cancer free. I told her that we were going back to the Pierre this time for sure, two weeks at least. She remembered and smiled. “I can’t wait to get on that plane with you.”

It was February 4, two days after Farrah’s fifty-ninth birthday. We were dining with her oncologist, drinking
champagne and toasting the birthday girl’s reprieve. It was a joyous evening, full of laughter and engaging conversation. And for the first time in more than four months there was no talk of cancer. We discussed Farrah’s art and a script that she was interested in. We chatted about my new recurring role on the popular series
Bones
, marveling over the fact that the producers had cast me as a priest. But mostly we spoke of the future. It had been returned to us just hours earlier when we received the call that the tumor was gone. We were fully alive that night. Our love and our future were vibrant again, revitalized by gratitude.

Though we believed Farrah was safe, we would never make it back to the Pierre. We needed to save our son, who had become addicted to heroin. Though we’d been honest with him about Farrah’s cancer, we were protecting him from the details as much as we could because he was in such a delicate state in what we thought was recovery. We didn’t want to leave him alone that night because he wasn’t strong enough to be trusted, so I asked Griffin if he would stay with his brother while Farrah and I went out for the evening. Griffin had supposedly been clean and sober for a year. I figured that if anyone could prevent Redmond from sneaking out in search of drugs, it would be Grif, who knows every subterfuge there is. His girlfriend was pregnant and he was jubilant about having a baby. Griffin had been domesticated. He had been doing well, and I was proud of him. It had been so long since I’d felt that way toward my oldest son that I
let it blind me. When I left the beach house to meet Farrah, Redmond was sound asleep, and Griffin was watching TV with his girlfriend and their dog. A few hours later, my tranquil sanctuary would turn into a parody of a Stephen King novel. I’ll spare you all the ridiculous details and just give you the high points.

After dinner, I drop Farrah off at her condo on Wilshire and drive back to the beach. When I arrive, the scene before me is chaos spiked with insanity. The house is a disaster area. Griffin has tied and gagged Redmond to keep him from leaving in search of drugs. I tell Griffin to free his brother while I call Farrah. Tempers are igniting. I order Griffin to leave. He won’t go. I reach for a fireplace poker. At this point I’m afraid of Griffin. He yanks the poker out of my hand and swings it at my face. I duck. He swings again, hitting me in the knee. A flash of pain shoots up my leg. Incredulous, I hobble upstairs to my bedroom where I keep a licensed gun for emergencies—and this sure was an emergency. I fire a warning shot into the wall. It works the same way it does in those old cowboy movies: everyone stops screaming and is still for a moment. Then Griffin runs outside and calls 911, crying “Shots fired, shots fired.” Soon there are squad cars everywhere, the Pacific Coast Highway has been closed, and a helicopter hovers overhead. “Come out with your hands up,” someone shouts. At first I ask myself,
Is this the police or the second assistant director talking?
I’m soon disabused of the fantasy that this is only a movie. I’m frisked, handcuffed,
read my Miranda rights, put in the backseat of a police car, and while sirens scream, am taken to central booking, where an infamous mug shot is snapped that will pollute the pages of every grocery store publication except
Better Homes and Gardens
. The district attorney, who knew Griffin’s criminal history, releases me because of insufficient evidence and all charges are dropped. The arrest made headlines. My being found innocent of any wrongdoing didn’t even make the local
Penny Saver
. The next morning I do what I should have done a long time ago: I cut Griffin off for good. Really, at forty-two years old he should make his own car payments, pay his own rent, take out his own insurance. And he can buy his own paper towels.