My First Five Husbands (40 page)

And being a properly raised Southern boy, President Clinton wrote me a sweetly sincere thank-you letter. Now framed.

J
ackie Mason says, “Getting old isn’t hard, you just have to find a disease you like.”

I honestly didn’t think of my father as getting old, but one night Melinda called and said, “Rue, Marie says Bill has been dragging his left foot and not using his left arm for weeks, and he doesn’t seem aware of it. I told Marie to take him in for an MRI right away.”

Now, while we all nervously pace, waiting for the test results, let me bring you up to date on my miraculous baby sister. Melinda, you will recall, married Sheridan Kinkade when she was a mere babe in arms and earned her B.A. during the five years she was birthing their four beautiful children. Once when Mark and I were visiting the Kinkades, I noticed Melinda’s biology book propped against her sewing machine so she could study while making clothes for the kids. She also baby-sat three neighbor children to earn extra money, made gingerbread houses for Christmas, cooked three meals a day, and was homeroom mother for both Marci and Brendan. She went on to earn a master’s and then a Ph.D., becoming a professor, then a dean—managing to look fabulous throughout. After Mother died, she divorced Sheridan, married a Louisiana good ol’ boy eight years her junior, eventually divorcing him. You might say we McClanahan girls are superachievers, but as of the mid-nineties, neither of us had had much luck with marriage, not to put too fine a point on it.

Okay. The test results.

“The MRI shows a large blood clot on Bill’s right brain.”

Melinda and I arranged for him to have surgery in Oklahoma City, but she had to fly on business the day before the operation. That night, I slept on a cot in Bill’s room, taking the opportunity to talk to him without the ever-present Marie. I needed to talk to him, as I’d needed him that night Melinda was born and Bill and I had stayed in the boarding house together. I decided to ask him some questions that had weighed on my heart all these years, and this time he was willing to talk with me.

“I’ve always been sad that I never got to see you much when I was a child,” I said. “Where were you all that time?”

“Oh, honey, I had to be at work in the oil fields before you were up in the morning, and didn’t get home till after you were in bed.”

“I don’t remember you playing with me, though. Even when you were home.”

“I carried you around town on my shoulders when you were a baby, showing you off to everybody! I was proud of you, Frosty!”

I had no memory of that. But it was a helpful conversation, the first time I’d ever tried to clear up the lifelong yearning for him that had fostered my dusk panics and in some ways set the stage for my notso-guido relationships with men. The next morning, while Bill underwent brain surgery, I waited with Marie, who harangued and kvetched the whole time. The operation was a resounding success, both with the safe removal of the blood clot and the fact that I had been able to sit for several hours on a sofa with Marie without killing her. Knowing Bill was going to be fine, I flew back to Los Angeles with some darling snapshots of us taken the morning I left, big grins on our faces.

While
Golden Palace
was on hiatus, I was offered the lead in
Lettice and Lovage,
to be done at the Vienna English Theatre in May.
Wow, Vienna!
I thought. The marvelous Nan Martin, who’d spent her career doing everything from Broadway to
Star Trek,
was playing the second lead, all the smaller roles to be filled by English-speaking actors living in Vienna.

Before rehearsals for
Lettice
began, I went to The Ashram, a health retreat nestled in the Santa Monica Mountains and run by the Scandinavian munchkin who inspired Shirley MacLaine’s book
Out on a Limb
. She noticed I was taking estrogen pills and demanded, “Vy are you putting dees
sheet
in your body, baby?”

“It’s to counteract the effects of menopause. Hot flashes, mood swings, and all that,” I said. (It’s been said that they call it menopause because “mad cow disease” was already taken. And frankly, “spontaneous human combustion” doesn’t do it justice.)

With unwavering assurance, she growled, “Dees is poison, baby. T’row eet away!”

She only came up to my shoulder, but she had the authority of a drill sergeant and a formidable reputation as a healer. So what did I do? T’rew deem away, baby!

I hadn’t realized The Ashram was a hiking retreat. The first day, three miles up the steep hills. Second day, nine miles. Third day, sixteen miles. Don’t even think about the next four days. My feet were a garden of blisters. Every morning after breakfast, the other lodgers and I met in the anteroom to cover our tattered feet with Vaseline before setting off up the hills. I didn’t stick around to find out how many of them made it through to the last day. This place was
way
beyond my stamina. The munchkin sent me to the Optimum Health Institute in San Diego to cleanse my system with colonics and raw food—make me strong like bull! I went. And she was right: After three days of nausea and flulike symptoms, normal for a newcomer, I experienced a surge of energy I hadn’t felt since I was thirty!

Rehearsals for
Lettice and Lovage
began in L.A., then moved to Vienna, and the afternoon we arrived there, I noticed that the ominous, heavy gray sky was hanging too low. Much too low. It made me uneasy. That night around midnight, walking through my spacious suite in an ornate nineteenth-century hotel, I suddenly found myself gripped in a vise of panic.

What in the name of God? Black terror I hadn’t experienced in years enveloped me.

I can’t do this play! I can’t learn it! I’m not capable!

It was a nutty reaction. I called my friend Jered Barclay, who helped me get a slippery handle on reality, but I was up most of the night. It was a bit easier during the day. I explored the city, enrolled in exercise and German classes, and found a Turkish café down the street, which became my supper place of choice, an alternative to the typically heavy Viennese fare. Every time I turned around, someone said, “Hef you tried our famuz Black Forest cake?” and shoved a plate in my hand, so I shopped for fresh produce on market day each week. Distracting myself on trips along the blue Danube, I could keep the terror down to a dull roar during the day, but playing the show six nights a week—mind-numbing panic. I had a new empathy for how Estelle must have felt on tape days. I’d rather have a root canal.

Lettice and Lovage
is a challenge under the best circumstances. I played a guide in an English museum, leading tour groups through long, dry seventeenth-century British history lessons that bore everyone into a stupor, until she begins sprucing up the recitation with spicier stories, growing more and more rococo and colorful. Each scene repeats some of the former dialogue, changing it just enough to challenge any actress’s memory. If I had been well, I would have delivered those scenes with gusto, but under my heavy cloud of panic, I could barely keep my balance. It wasn’t a question of acting the role well—I was fighting for basic survival.

The audience was all smiles, throwing flowers, satisfied to be seeing Blanche Devereaux in person. Nan, who is a hoot and still one of my favorite people, was also struggling with her lines, which didn’t help. I started drawing a large abstract picture—a woman on horseback on a winding path out of a gray city—and worked at it, wondering,
Will I ever get out of this hell?
My agent called the day before I flew home.

“CBS promised to pick up
Golden Palace
for another season,” she said. “Look for the announcement in three days.”

That was good news, and I expected the panic to disappear on the trip home, but when I arrived in L.A., it still gripped me.

“Maybe your estrogen-progesterone dosage needs to be altered,” my doctor suggested.

“Oh, I stopped the estrogen replacement about ten weeks ago,” I said.

“
What?
Rue, get back on it at once! You have to be weaned off hormone replacement slowly, or it’s a terrible shock to the system. No wonder you’re having panic attacks.”

I went back on the hormones and within three days was fine and dandy, wondering what on earth women did before the days of synthesized estrogen. My doctor said they often wound up in insane asylums. By then, I had been on the estrogen-progesterone pill for ten years, unaware of the havoc it could play. Apparently, mine is one of the longest menopauses in recorded history, beginning when I was forty-four and just now waning away. I’ve become unusually hot-natured. And that ain’t a joke, son. I step out in fifty-degree weather with no jacket or socks and love it.

Ah, womanhood.

Three days after I got home, CBS announced it had dropped
Golden Palace
.

Ah, television.

Within a week, I was offered the role of a tough bartender in a new Valerie Bertinelli sitcom, set in a Paris restaurant, guaranteed for a full season. I would be paid a little over a million dollars. I read the script. No creative challenge whatsoever. The bartender had eight lines. The writing wasn’t funny. Valerie Bertinelli was…Valerie Bertinelli. But I would be guaranteed over a million dollars, which meant another year in my fairy-tale house in Encino. Network salaries had started to drop. This could be my last chance to make real dough. Shall I play the bartender and run away with a mil plus? Supporting
Valerie Bertinelli
? What shall I do, behave as an artist or a businesswoman?

This struck me as a reprise of my butt-naked, two-bucks-an-hour decision.

I turned it down this time.

Good-bye, fairyland. Hello, dignity.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

B
ack in our salad days in California, Norman had once become terribly discouraged with auditioning and told me he was giving up his attempt to be an actor.

“Oh, Norm, you can’t give up!” I said, because I certainly never could have, but he shrugged and said, “What’s the point? I’ll never be anything but a warmed-over Franchot Tone.”

Franchot Tone was ahead of my time, but I’d seen him in films when I was a kid. (Those in the know pronounced it “Fran-show,” but Mother called him “Fran-shot.”) He was usually cast as the handsome leading man’s friend or rival, never getting the leading lady, but sometimes getting the other girl. He was graceful and charming and looked smashing in his tux, but rarely got cast as the big leading man. Unlike Clark Gable or Tyrone Power or other square-jawed he-men, Franchot Tone was slender and fine-featured, with a soft, sensitive jaw.

Norman and I went to see
Harry Black and the Tiger,
a movie starring the terribly square-jawed Stewart Granger as a bigger-than-life hero wrangling a man-eating beast, and later Norman said to me, half seriously, “But you know, my dear, I
am
Harry Black!”

And he proved it. In 1964, John Patrick Hayes directed a World War II movie,
Shell Shock,
in which Norman played an American soldier scaling a rocky hill. Upon reaching the top, he gets strafed with machine-gun fire and tumbles ass-over-teakettle back down over the dirt and rocks to the bottom. It was really a job for a stunt man, but Norman insisted on doing it himself. We shot it in one setup, without a rehearsal. It was quite realistic to watch, and God knows how he managed to land at the bottom without breaking several bones.

Yep. Norm had a face like Franchot Tone, but inside, he really was Harry Black!

One day not long after
Golden Palace
had been dumped, I was at Norman’s, checking in on him, bringing him groceries, taking some time to visit with him as I often did. I saw him looking across the room at me from his wheelchair, and I said, “What are you thinking?”

As he rolled away, he answered, “Trying not to wish.”

I
n October of 1993, I was offered the role of the Mother Superior, an ex–circus acrobat who’d embraced the dedicated life, in an A&E special of Danny Goggin’s hit stage musical
Nunsense
. I read the script, listened to the tape of Mother Superior’s songs, and decided to do it for one reason: a scene in which she sniffs a mysterious bottle found in a nun’s locker, and gradually gets stoned silly. What a delightful—and challenging—little bit! I played the hell out of that nun, pardon the pun, and became lifelong friends with both Danny Goggin and Terri White.

Tom Keel made a brief but spectacular guest appearance in my life that fall, inviting me to join him on a visit to a friend’s B&B in New Jersey. We hadn’t seen each other since the high school reunion, and it sounded like a lovely spot to enjoy a pleasant respite in the country. After a nice long dinner with the owner, we went up to share the only available room and both fell asleep on the spot. The next day, as we explored the area, Tom told me about Joel, the Dallas woman he was in love with. She refused to go out exclusively with him, having other beaus as well. And who could blame her? He was still doing that abstinence thing, you know.

That night a glorious rainstorm blew in. After a late dinner, I went to bed, leaving Tom and the owner drinking together downstairs in the dining room. Some while later, I was roused out of a deep sleep as someone clambered on top of me. It was Keel! Thunder roared. Lightning flashed. And the storm raged outside, too. Being drunk didn’t slow that guy down one whit. And neither did being abstinent! I was surprised, but not upset, and when it was over, we both fell asleep without a word.

The next day, never mentioning the night before, we parted on good terms and flew our separate ways. Over the years, Keel has kept in touch with me and gone out of his way to do many kindnesses for my family. In Bill’s waning years, Keel visited him regularly and equipped the house with handholds and other special needs as Bill became frail. For my money, Tom Keel is one of the most decent men walking. And he’s still as sexy as can be.

I bet you a nickel he doesn’t remember that stormy night we spent together, which is too bad, because the memory still makes me smile.

O
n January 19, 1994, at 4:19
A.M
., I was awakened by a deafening roar accompanied by violent shaking, side to side and forward and back, along with the shrill tinkling of shattering glass.

Earthquake! Get under a doorway.

I stumbled out of bed but was instantly knocked off balance, falling with my ribs against the sharp corner of my bedside table. I’d been in a few earthquakes, but nothing like the unceasing intensity and duration of this one. Stumbling for the doorway, I gripped it firmly for what seemed like forever. As the quake finally died down, I stayed where I was, expecting aftershocks, my heart pounding. Within seconds, two flashlights came through my bedroom door.

“Are you all right, Mum?”

“Yes, Celi, are you?”

“Yes, mum. I’m going to the car to listen to the radio. All our electricity is off. Alma, you help Mum see about the animals.”

My ribs stabbing at every step, we checked the cat room and dog run. All fine. All accounted for except for my favorite cat, Gracie. We gathered in the kitchen as the faint dawn rose, made tea, and listened to the portable radio. Water and gas mains were broken. Electric and phone lines were down. Businesses along Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks were shattered and flooded. Many houses had fallen. Sherman Oaks, between Studio City and Encino, fared the worst in our vicinity. My house, recently and sturdily rebuilt on Encino granite, suffered only minor damage. Furniture had traveled around, some of it perilously close to toppling over. It could have been much worse had it gone on another five or ten seconds. That Northridge earthquake measured 6.7 on the Richter scale, but ground acceleration was the highest ever recorded in an urban area. Fifty-one people were killed, almost nine thousand injured.

After the sun came up, I drove to Norm’s apartment in Studio City, taking detours to avoid the worst flooding, and found him characteristically unflappable.

“Not much I could do but lie there in bed, waiting for something to fall on me,” he said.

“Is there anything you need?” I asked. “Anything I can do for you?”

“Nah. Go find Gracie.”

There were numerous aftershocks all day. And still no Gracie. I had to fly to New Mexico the next afternoon to help Melinda, following facial surgery.

Worried sick, at
2:30
the next day, I noticed Angie and Belle, my sheepdog, pointing like statues toward a far corner of the living room, where there was a built-in bench against the wall.

“Gracie?” I called.

A meow. The poor dear had been wedged for thirty-four hours into a tiny crawl space behind the bench. Greatly relieved, I left for New Mexico. Sis and I made a dandy pair—me daubing alcohol on her stitches, she doing the cooking because I could barely move with my bruised ribs.

B
ack home, that April I went by Norman’s. He had a light flu, so I took him several half-gallons of fruit juice and other goodies.

“I’m off to Austin early tomorrow,” I said. “Tom Keel offered to help Mark with some carpentry and electrical work. Mark’s old house actually
leans
. I’m telling you, you can
move
it if you push hard enough on the outside. We’re going to build him a new front porch.” I laid my hand on Norm’s forehead. “You’re warm. Is there anything else I can get you?”

“I’m fine,” he said. And I knew the cleaning woman came twice a week and could shop for him if necessary, so I wasn’t worried.

Keel drove down from Dallas and started to work on Mark’s house, the three of us working together but Tom doing the lion’s share, bless his manly heart.

On the last day of work, Mark came outside and said, “Mother…Jerry Hartweg called. Norman died.”

There’s an Emily Dickinson poem that speaks of “the hour of lead” and the great silence that falls in a moment of profound loss. I stood without moving. Mark’s SUV was parked next to me in the driveway. The sky was clear blue up above us. The house leaned in the breeze.

And Norman was dead.

“I…I need to…to fly home,” I stammered.

Norm’s landlady let me into his empty apartment, brushing aside the coroner’s yellow “Do Not Pass” banner.

“I didn’t see him for a couple days, so I thought I’d better look in,” she said. “And he was there in bed. Looks like he’d been sick. They said he must’ve got dehydrated.”

She left me to wait for Norm’s brother and sister, and I stood in his apartment, which felt neutered and hollow without him there, like when you pierce a little hole in an eggshell and suck all the egg out. Standing by his letter file, I looked across the room, and there he sat in his wheelchair, grinning at me.

Relax,
he said.
It’s no big deal
.

First Lette, then Brad, and now, after forty years, my touchstone, my irreplaceable Norman, gone.

An era had ended.