Still Talking (37 page)

From the hotel he telephoned Dorothy at home to ask whether she had reconfirmed his flights and the limos. It was typical, routine behavior for Edgar. Melissa called Edgar at the hotel at about eight o’clock and was relieved that he sounded fine-and did not call him back because she knew he had to get up early to catch a plane home.

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Now we know that in the hotel room after dinner Edgar tape-recorded three messages-one to me, one to Melissa, and one to Tom. As he recorded Tom’s message at tenthirty, Tom himself, acting on a premonition, called to ask, “Are you okay?” Edgar said, “I’m fine. I’ll see you for breakfast. ” He promised again not to do anything foolish. His psychiatrist telephoned from Los Angeles, and Edgar confirmed that he was returning the next day for extensive therapy.

He put the tapes into three hotel envelopes. In other envelopes he left tips for the restaurant maitre d’, the luggage boy, the maid. He addressed a manila envelope to Joan Rivers, then crumpled it and threw it under the desk. On another he wrote Joan Rosenberg. In it he put business papers and instructions. In Melissa’s envelope he put his Rolex watch, which she had always admired, and his gold money clip, the only keepsake he had from his mother. He marked each envelope with three kisses, X X X.

He placed these envelopes on a small rack at the end of the bed, along with a note indicating where they should be sent. At the bottom of the note he wrote, Mr. Pileggi will arrange to get three suitcases to the above address in Los Angeles. A second note neatly listed the people to be notified of his death, including all his doctors with their office and home telephone numbers. At the top of both notes he wrote Aug 13, 1987 Midnight. He meticulously packed his bags and unlocked the door. Against the bedside lamp he leaned an unframed picture of me and one of Melissa.

Then he swallowed the bottles of Valium and Librium he had been saving.

Next, completing the combination he knew had killed the columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, he removed the miniature scotch and brandy bottles from the courtesy bar and methodically drank them from a tumbler.

17

…

THE reality of death is very hard to absorb. Melissa told me she did not believe her father was dead. 1 did not believe her father was dead. Yet, in the midst of all the pain, the symbols of the past brought a kind of comfort. I kept Edgar’s office desk untouched, the files of investments, the family pictures, the border of name cards under the edge of the blotter, his copy of my schedule book kept up to date. The top of his bureau was sacrosanct. Melissa, too, wanted to keep Edgar alive through his imprint, make shrines of his areas. She felt that no one should ever sit in his chair, and nothing should ever be taken from his closets. She told me, “I could make lunch every day and put it on his desk. I would love that.

“I’ve accepted the fact that he is not around,” she added, “but every time I get off a plane or walk into a restaurant, I look for him. ” In early September I took her back to college at the University of Pennsylvania, within blocks of the Philadelphia hotel where Edgar had committed suicide.

This trip was extremely difficult; both of us were still grieving, and I didn’t want to let her go. Still, I was trying to be upbeat until the car pulled up in front of a row of dilapidated mansions half a block from the McDonald’s where the police arrested a man who had been burying women in his basement. Students had been destroying this house for the past fifteen years. We climbed three broken steps onto a porch where the furniture was old automobile seats. Inside, there was nothing but a broken-down table where one leg was missing.

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Melissa’s room was a hovel. There was no closet, just racks and hooks. The common bathroom was-well, better to wear rubber pants. When my daughter turned to me and said, “Isn’t it great, Mother?” I said, “Melissa, I’m glad your father’s dead. If he saw this, he would kill himself again.”

We laughed. It was our first healing moment.

My mourning process pretty well fit the classic pattern. For three months I was, for all intents and purposes, insane. Week after week, I was racked by wild highs and deep, deep lows-hyperactive, crazed, too angry, too much the life of the party. I would be hit by crying jags out of nowhere and people would stand by helplessly as I sobbed. Melissa told me I was like a top spinning out of control.

Everything that had been my normal routine probed my loss, stirred up my pain. Mentally I was operating on sixteen nutty levels at once. I now understand what had seemed a bizarre experience in 1985, when I visited Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme after their son Michael died suddenly. His death changed Steve and Eydie’s life forever; they are still grieving for him. That day Eydie was sitting on a couch looking 185 years old, surrounded by people weeping. We put our arms around each other and had a quiet moment together. During our conversation her eyes strayed to my collar, and out of nowhere she asked me, “Where did you get that necklace?”

The next day her secretary called to get the name of the store. I was in shock. But that’s how cuckoo you can get in grief.

Like Eydie, I was a feather in the wind. I had always been a survivor and a coper, but now I was frightened because I could not deal with the house, the people, the situations, my daughter, and the decisions that come each day in life-and most of all, I could not handle myself.

Every part of my life, no matter how minor, overwhelmed me. I did not know how to work the burglar alarm or the VCR. I did not know where to find the key to the freezer, did not know which key fitted the car. I was nibbling all day long, chocolates, pasta, cookies.

But I cleverly figured out a solution to the overeating. I

went into the bathroom, put my finger with its pretty little $4.50 nail down my throat, and threw everything up. Afterward, I felt thin, my stomach flat, okay again in my clothes, and thrilled that I would not be a fat slob, that I had found a way to literally have my cake and eat it, too.

I did that once every ten days, and it felt so good that I upped the vomiting to once a week, denying to myself that this was sick behavior. I thought, What a great way to diet. Then, after telling myself I would only do it once a week, I decided it was okay to do it twice a week, then three times a week. That went on for two months until one day I found myself in a public toilet vomiting my head off. Dear God, I thought, I’m in trouble.

I finally admitted to myself that this was an addiction, that I was bulimic. I needed months before I finally stopped-with help from my therapist, who explained that I felt helpless about everything in my life, and this was the one area of control left to me.

And I was helpless everywhere else in my life. When I met with my agent, he said there was little interest in me around the country. I asked, “What about Pittsburgh?” “They’re not interested.” “What about Puerto Rico?” “No.”

Nobody wanted a loser.

My accountant explained that most of my money, including the Fox settlement, was tied up in real estate. I must cut my huge overhead immediately. But how could I? Let the gardener go? Francisco had been with me for ten years, and I knew his mother and his wife. His daughter was ill and his boy hoped to go to college next year. Fire Sabrina Lott, my lovely secretary? She who worked three jobs, had just signed up for night college, was a girl who lived by herself and supported her mother and sent money to her sister in Baltimore? All the staff were extended family. How could I say to them, “Tough-o. Too bad.”

My accountant also warned that I might have to sell the house, sell the one stable thing in our lives, sell the exciting part of our marriage-the conquering, becoming a star, coming home in our laurel wreaths-sell Melissa in Hal-

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loween costumes and birthday parties and six kids in sleeping bags on the floor. The house and my memories were my roots now. I clung to what I had.

Selling the house, my trophy, cutting my standard of living, would mean I had given up.

Edgar’s role in our partnership had now fallen to me. One day four contracts with Caesars Palace, sixty pages each, waited on Edgar’s desk.

The lawyer’s note asked me to read them carefully, because they were taking perks away from me and he wanted my comments. My comment was, “I don’t know what the hell I’m reading.” I felt I was fifteen and back in trigonometry and couldn’t get it. I was lost and frightened when faced with “Read. Sign.

Co-sign. “

But you cannot let anybody know you are ignorant because you are dealing in huge sums. I was being told, “That bank transfer goes there, and this one goes to that, and this is this, and we’ve grandfathered that, and that’s why you’re okay, but you still owe the bank.” How the hell could I know what was going on, know whether somebody was slipping thousands of dollars into his pockets? Every time I signed something, I felt I was signing away my rooms and my food. I was furious at Edgar for leaving me buried under this mess and so totally untrusting.

The fears churning in my head kept me up at night. Should we sell the house? Or get a smaller one? Should we move to New York? What staff must I let go? Can I go back to work? Will the insurance companies find a way to not pay? Will Tom Pileggi continue to be my friend? What will all this do to Melissa? Is it my fault? What will become of us? I wrote that question again and again in my diary: “What will become of us?”

One day my frustration and helplessness exploded. I kicked his desk and almost broke my toe.

Looking back, I see that the inevitable anger after suicide was, in fact, my best friend. It kept me from falling back into selfpity, kept the adrenaline pumping, energized me to lash out at the grief and sweet memories that can unhealthily hold you back from a new life. Anger helped me

over the first giant hurdle after Edgar’s death, removing his possessions, his imprint, our shrine, from the housea first step into a new life.

This process started with a major breakthrough. In the office trying to concentrate on a bank statement, I was furious that I was running eighteen hours a day doing Edgar’s chores, not doing my job, which was creating new jokes and bringing in money. I said to myself, “Enough with keeping his desk as a memorial,” and sat down in his chair and pulled out the name cards stuck in the side of his blotter and tossed them out. Each day there was one less folder with his handwriting on it, one less sharpened pencil.

I felt like a rebellious little girl defying a parent, the way I did when I went into my mother’s living room, which was off-limits except when there were guests. Sitting in Edgar’s chair, I was surprised that my feet touched the floor.

Yet one does go on maintaining shrines as a sort of tribute. I kept the desk drawers undisturbed, even when the desk itself later went into storage.

One afternoon I was rearranging the garage and stumbled upon Edgar’s collection of free carry-on bags from airlines no longer in existence, his ancient luggage shot to hell, all the useless things he had collected, all his hedges against want. This is ridiculous, I thought, and soon Jacob, my houseman, and I were hauling everything out.

When it was all down in the garbage, guilt-which seems to go hand-in-hand with rage at these momentsmade me ask Jacob to bring it all back. As long as his possessions remained in place, Edgar was not dead.

I kept his pajamas hanging on the closet door for a long, long time, kept his shirts and ties in place, the shoes lined up waiting for him. But slowly his things took on the invisible dusting of age. Edgar’s books were increasingly out-of-date. On the piano were pictures of people he had never met, pictures of Melissa in a dress he had never seen. The newspaper kept on his desk was yellowing. The pajamas were no longer fresh and crisp. When they finally seemed like souvenirs, I gave away most of his clothes to charity.

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I now realize that I did not have to force myself so much to make changes.

That simple passage of time wears down the cutting edge of sorrow.

We had a new guard dog and blackly joked that if Edgar ever came up the driveway, the dog would bite him. But what had been a joke suddenly became a macabre possibility. One night we heard Spike barking upstairs. When I went up, nothing was there, but still he went on barking, until I had to bodily carry him away. This performance became almost routine. Meanwhile, every night at ten of seven, Edgar’s alarm clock would ring, and nobody could shut it off. We would turn up the temperature on the air conditioner and come back to find it down to ice-cold, the way Edgar liked it.

Then one day Kathleen White, our bookkeeper, casually mentioned, “I was pouring coffee, and Mr. Rosenberg walked through the kitchen dressed in his pink shirt and beige pants.” A few days later Marcia Tysseling, my assistant, announced she saw Edgar in the same outfit, passing by the doorway on his way upstairs. I was furious. Why hadn’t he shown himself to me?

I was also frightened the way a child is scared of ghosts, but at the same time I thought how wonderful it would be to see him. I do not entirely believe in psychics; if they could reach the dead and foretell the future, we would all be doing just fine. But I do believe that spirits can come back, and just in case, I called a psychic I had met during the Fox show.

She told me to carry a tape recorder, and if Edgar appeared, it would pick up his voice. I carried that recorder with me for days.

More psychics kept calling me with bulletins from the beyond. One said she had spoken with Edgar, and he was happy. One phoned from Houston to say she was a channeler and her spirit, Benton, had messages for me: Edgar was filled with joy on a higher plane, but I was going to get sick unless she came to California and allowed him to fill me up with his energy. This was all funny, yet given my precarious emotional state, I was becoming alarmed.