Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty (13 page)

It was all very unexpected, but not as unexpected as Janet Sartin, who put me on the gurney, got down to business, and gave me the bad news. I looked a little “worse for the wear”—that’s how she put it. The multitude of scars on my cheeks from basal cell carcinoma treatments didn’t help. I had dangerously dry skin, she said, and my eyes were drooping. With that, she began massaging me with jolts from some sort of wand. I didn’t remember having made an appointment for shock therapy. As if that wasn’t enough, when I left I looked just as tired as when I’d arrived.

The friendly ticket agent at the Stamford train station recognized me and smiled. I smiled, too, saying I wanted a ticket to Grand Central Terminal, and gave him a twenty. He
handed me back twelve dollars, along with a senior/Medicare discount stub. Only a few days before I’d bought a ticket for Brad Pitt’s
World War Z
and had been given a senior discount as well. That’s two in one week. I suppose it wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but it sure did feel like it.

Standing on the platform, waiting for the express, made me nervous. What if I got on the wrong train? I was afraid to ask the woman next to me. She must have been in her late fifties. Her mouth turned down at the ends. Not exactly inviting, and her hair was bottle black. I wondered when she’d gone “hard.” When was the moment her face became set in stone like Grammy Hall’s?

I couldn’t remember a time when Grammy wasn’t old. She defied people’s perception of “over the hill,” partially because she didn’t give a hoot what anybody thought. She kept her mind on the p’s and q’s, which to her meant money. That’s the way Grammy’s life rolled, in cash: in fives and tens and twenties and fifties; in one-hundred-dollar bills stuffed under her bed in rolled-up blankets, suitcases, and lockboxes. Her kitchen shelves were decorated with jam jars filled with pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and silver dollars she won playing the slots every weekend in downtown Vegas. She claimed banking was for “ ’tards”—retards. Grammy Hall was not warm and fuzzy. In short, she was a walnut you couldn’t crack. I can’t recall a time when she hugged me, or wiped
away my tears. She was independent to a fault. I admired her for sticking to her guns, man or no man. When Dad became successful as a civil engineer, she didn’t pat him on the back and say, “I’m so proud of you, son.” Oh no. There was none of that. She relentlessly compared her ability to earn money with his, pointing out that she was an unmarried woman with no education who had single-handedly made her way in the world. She insisted that he consider the setback of being born female in the late nineteenth century. According to her, these factors proved that she earned more than him by a walloping 15 percent. Yep, she was a ball breaker. On the other hand, Mary Hall was the reason Dad did so well in business. She knew the truth early on. Money is power. Money buys you independence. To her, what beauty there was to be extracted from this “weird old world” was green and wrinkled.

Once on the train, I took out my iPad and hit Pinterest, where I found an absolutely gorgeous portrait of Meryl Streep taken by Brigitte Lacombe. Why couldn’t I have Meryl’s patrician nose or Yale education? I was about to pin her when a couple of young women came up to me and asked to take a picture, saying how “cute” I was and how “totally adorable” I looked. I’d take anything, even “old lady,” even “doddering,” over “cute and adorable.” The last thing I want to be is innocuous or cuddly, as in “harmless”!

I used to get stopped with “Are you Sandy Dennis?”
or “You’re what’s her name, Jill Clayburgh? Right?” Last summer, a maid at the Four Seasons in Maui looked at me and said in recognition, “Firecracker?”

I shook my head. “Huh?”

She pointed at me. “Firecracker?”

I shook my head again and said, “ ‘Firework’?”

“You. Fireworks?!”

“No, I’m not Katy Perry.”

Was she blind? I’m forty years older than Katy Perry. At the airport the next day, a teenage boy asked me if I was Jane Fonda. “No. No. Don’t worry about it. I’m not Jane Fonda.” Clearly I’m somebody, just not me.

As the train pulled into Grand Central, I grabbed my bag and hurried out. I had lived in New York City for twenty years, and yet Grand Central Terminal has never failed to stun me. Were it not for Jackie Kennedy, there would be no hundred-year-anniversary banners hanging on the walls because there would be no Grand Central Terminal. As I stood taking it all in, hundreds of people were rushing to catch trains, grabbing magazines, waving hello and goodbye. A middle-aged woman arm in arm with a beautiful old man in yellow shorts, a yellow shirt, and a Panama hat came up to me for a picture. I always say yes to people who ask for a picture if, and only if, they’re willing to be in it with me. What’s the point of having a picture of me without them? It has
no meaning. It’s abstract, and besides, it makes me feel good to be friendly. Like Sally Field, I’m grateful that they seem to like me. Maybe they don’t, but I can’t tell. It’s a moment in time. A lovely experience. The woman was sweet, but Frank Zimmerman—that was his name—was perfection. At ninety-six he’d flown up from Boca Raton, Florida, to celebrate the birth of his seventh great-grandchild. Like Grand Central Terminal, he was a centenarian. Old, as in almost one hundred years old. Old-is-gold old.

Dave Gold was old, octogenarian old, when I met him at his granddaughter Genna’s bat mitzvah. He reminded me of Walter Matthau, and Art Carney, too: the unassuming way he dressed; the way he loped along, kind of hangdog. His life was anything but hangdog. Dave dropped out of college at nineteen to run the family liquor store. He noticed that when he put a bottle of wine on sale for a dollar or ninety-eight cents, it sat on the shelves, but when he placed a ninety-nine-cent sign on the bottle, it was scooped up in no time. Ninety-nine became Dave’s magic number. So much so, he had an epiphany. What if he created a store where everything cost ninety-nine cents? Despite his family’s unanimous chorus of “that’s a ludicrous idea,” Dave stashed enough money away to launch his 99 Cents Only Stores at an age when most people are looking forward to the benefits of retirement. He was in his fifties.

Gold was the kind of guy who started work at 4
A.M.
and
finished at 7
P.M.
, his daughter Karen Schiffer said in his
Los Angeles Times
obituary. “He would come home at the end of the day and say, ‘Look at this beautiful shampoo.’ He would say, ‘We have fifty truckloads of Kleenex coming in.’ ” And his ads were as outlandish as his personality. One congratulated the Dodgers on losing ninety-nine games. Another wished Joan Rivers a “Happy 99th Facelift.”

Dave did not adopt the outward flash of a man whose 99 Cents Only dream expanded to more than three hundred stores, making him one of
Forbes
’s famous 400 richest. Hell no. He lived in the same middle-class home for five decades with Sherry, his wife of fifty-five years. I admired Dave Gold. He was an authentic eccentric who believed in his dream and stayed an original family man to boot. Last April, eighty-year-old Dave died at home, still doing business as usual. Old Grand Central. Old Frank Zimmerman. Old as gold Dave Gold.

There was nothing gold about the crumpled envelope I found in the pocket of my Marni dress this morning. It was almost as if it was waiting for me to toss it into the trash; instead I made the mistake of looking at the return address. Tim Nicholson, the Neptune Society, 4312 Woodman Avenue, Sherman Oaks, CA 91423. And guess what? Against my better judgment … I opened it.

“Dear Diane,” the letter inside began. “For a variety
of reasons, more and more people are choosing to plan for a memorialized cremation over a traditional funeral arrangement, and the numbers are increasing every year! Cremation just makes sense. If you are not interested in spending your family’s inheritance on embalming, caskets, vaults, markers, fancy funeral homes or cemetery property, then we have the answer! To learn more about the Neptune Society and our different memorialization options, simply complete and return the enclosed reply card or visit www.neptunesociety.com.”

And on and on and on. Cut to “Sincerely, Tim Nicholson.” And: “P.S. Sometimes deaths happen before you have had a chance to put plans in place. Neptune stands ready to assist at a moment’s notice should you need immediate help.” As if that wasn’t enough, Tim added, “Please accept our apologies if this letter has reached you at a time of serious illness or death in your family.”

Serious illness? Death in the family? I know the time has come for me to contemplate preparation for the end of the road, the “see you later, alligator, till we meet again” part of my life. But do I have to so soon? How about in a while, or later, a lot later, and definitely not with Mr. Tim Nicholson’s cost-cutting planned memorial cremation in mind.

That day in New York, I got into a cab and called Kathryn, who wanted to meet on the West Side at 110th Street so we
could stroll through Central Park. As we walked arm in arm past the newly refurbished Charles A. Dana Discovery Center, people greeted us with “Beautiful day!” and “Great weather, huh?” The Conservancy Garden’s roses were in bloom. On Fifth Avenue we saw the Museum of the City of New York’s red-brick Georgian building and decided to go inside, where we found ourselves in front of
A Beautiful Way to Go
, an exhibition celebrating the 175th anniversary of Green-Wood Cemetery. We looked at Hudson River School paintings and historic documents from the old cemetery. When I stopped in front of a photograph illustrating a nineteenth-century headstone that read, “Grace Ann Small. Wife of William B. Small.” Suddenly five-foot, two-inch Grace Johansen came rushing to mind. Grace was the oldest person I’ve ever known. She must have been in her mid-eighties when I first saw her parading down Hollywood Boulevard, greeting tourists in front of Musso and Frank’s restaurant. I was trying to find people to interview for a movie I was making on the subject of heaven. Over time, Grace and I became friends. We stayed friends until the day she died, at age ninety-seven. I would lay ten-to-one odds her funeral was a hell of a lot more fun than Grace Ann Small’s.

First of all, the crowd bore no resemblance to the formal gatherings pictured at Green-Wood Cemetery. There was Carol Kane, Bud Cort, Joan the pet psychologist, Dr. David
Kipper, Rhea Perlman, and Mae, Grace’s Indonesian waitress at the Holiday Inn’s coffee shop, where Grace dined every evening. Also in attendance was Mae’s co-worker Raphael, the Mexican waiter who served her apple pie with coffee every morning, Roddy McDowell’s sister, and Cameron Crowe, the director. People say Hollywood has no family, yet we were a family of friends gathered in honor of our beloved Gracie, who played a mean piano and packed a wallop with her song stylizations.

In the chapel at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the light shone on Grace’s casket as we sang “Ain’t She Sweet.” Raphael stood up and spoke extemporaneously on the details of Grace’s morning hot apple pie with coffee and cream. Mae talked about Grace’s irrational fear of earthquakes and her love of Jean Naté perfume. Carol told a couple of Grace’s favorite jokes. “What’s a Honeymoon Salad?” “I don’t know.” “Lettuce be together. We’re a peach of a pear. My heart beets for you.”

A six-minute video montage was projected onto an old-fashioned pull-up screen where a pulpit would have stood. There were snapshots, beginning with young Grace all decked out at the piano, then one on the day she married Al, her husband of fifty years, and another of her playing the slots in Las Vegas, her favorite city. Then came the photographs of Grace with her extended family … us, celebrating a series of
birthdays at the top of the Holiday Inn’s famous revolving restaurant. Toward the end, there were photographs of ninety-six-year-old Grace wearing her new black acrylic wig. The same wig she wore as she lay dying in her hospital bed at the Motion Picture Home. I remembered holding her hand. It seemed as if she was working hard to live through dying. No more Jean Naté for little Gracie. No more Jean Naté. No more Grace.

Outside the chapel, we walked behind a vintage black hearse to the mausoleum, where Grace’s simple green casket was draped with red roses. The grass was brown, the wilting palm trees slumped, and the little road winding its way through Hollywood Forever needed repaving. The mausoleum’s skylights were missing sections of stained glass, and yet … there was something compelling in the disarray. It felt like we were in a post–World War II Fellini film, gallivanting through the ruins. What is it about abandoned buildings and overgrown cemeteries? What is it about the beauty of collapse? Is it something more than meets the eye? Maybe. Is it beauty caressed by loss?

As the sun faded and Grace was laid to rest, I couldn’t help but see her face as she spoke to me before she died. This is what she said. She said she saw a miracle in the sky, a genuine miracle. Then she got serious and shook her head back and forth, saying, “I saw a cross in the sky. It was a real cross. But
nobody looks up at the sky anymore, nobody looks up at the sky.”

In honor of Grace, I make it my business to look up at the sky on occasion. To date I haven’t seen a cross. But I do think life is a miracle. At this point I’m sure of one thing, and that’s this: I know nothing. I would venture to say some of my friends would agree. At least I’m pretty sure they would concur that life is far more impenetrable than we imagined. This isn’t Disneyland. It’s Wonderland. Most of us over sixty have come to the point where we recognize that our accomplishments are diddly-squat in the grand scheme of things. I guess I have to admit that I’m in preparation for the incomprehensible end zone of life. I don’t know if I have enough courage to stare into the spectacle of the great unknown. I don’t know if I will make bold mistakes, go out in a blaze of glory unbroken by my losses, defy complacency, and refuse to face the unknown like the coward I know myself to be, but I hope so. On the way I intend to deepen my laugh lines and enjoy the underrated beauty of humor. Like Grace, I don’t want to be “afraid to crack a joke. After all, it’s only a can of people.”

Thinking of Grace, I told Kathryn I wanted to go to Café Sabarsky for a double espresso in a glass with whipped cream and some apple pie. Fifth Avenue was swarming with people. I love Los Angeles. I live there, but I miss the energy of a city that houses 8.3 million people on an island two miles wide and
thirteen and a half miles long. In front of the Guggenheim, I heard someone calling my name through the crowd. I looked over to see a stunning woman getting out of a limousine. “Diane, it’s Ricky.” “Oh my God, Ricky, you look great.” And she did. Ricky Lauren, Ralph’s wife, looked great. “No, Diane, no, you look great.” But I didn’t. I looked like a woman my age.