Both of Us (14 page)

And it’s Griffin who rings the bell for the next round. It’s December and I’ve just arrived at the courthouse for his sentencing. I want to offer my moral support. Remember I told you he was arrested again? It was for firing shots at his ex-girlfriend’s unoccupied car. Moral support? That’s like putting spit on an amputation, but I had to keep trying with Griffin. I’m not sure whether it was love or guilt that compelled me to keep giving him another chance, but he was my son, and back then I could no more turn my back on him than my dad, Blackie, could have turned his on me. I won’t
always feel that way. If you’re wondering what happened to the wife from the wedding I paid for in Vegas, they had a child, then a scandalous divorce. I find out that right before I arrive at the courthouse, my ex-wife Joanna, who had just been there to wish her son luck, rolled her car over four times on the freeway. While the judge was handing down Griffin’s sentence, his mother was being cut out of the wreckage. She had two fingers severed and had to undergo emergency surgery. She was fortunate to be alive. But that woman had been cheating death since I’d known her. When we were first married, I came home one night to find her passed out in a bathtub with an open bottle of barbiturates and a tumbler of wine on the side of the tub. It took me more than an hour to wake her. Joanna was the worst decision I ever made, but I bear her no ill will. I was a kid when we got hitched and back then no one understood much about addiction. Her accident shakes me. It could just as easily have been Griffin. I remember thinking at the time that Tatum may have been a challenge, but thank God she wasn’t throwing away her life like her mother and her brother were.

When I get home that night, I wear my anxiety like a vest, expecting Farrah to gently remove it and make me presentable again. But she’s dealing with her own demons. Another headache, another spotty period, another dark mood. Everything annoys her. There’s too much traffic on the PCH. The fog isn’t burning off until noon. Anything I suggest to cheer her she rejects, convinced it will just make matters
worse. I offer a sentimental journey to the Pierre Hotel in New York. I even book the same room we had in the early days when I was introducing Farrah to the city. It’s where we became a couple and began to think of ourselves as a unit, inseparable, joined together not only as lovers but as partners. We’d made a pact. And we believed in it back then. The Pierre’s neighborhood, Fifth Avenue at Sixty-first Street, the storied Plaza Hotel across the way, and the fountain where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald once danced are still eternal New York. Maybe we can, as the jazzman once said, get our mojo back. Good memories remain, enough to soften the bad ones. Andy Warhol’s gone six years now and Studio 54 was shuttered a couple of summers ago, but Central Park is just across the street and the stores on Madison Avenue begin a block east. We’ll sneak back to the attic if it hasn’t been converted to apartments. There may be a cherub left, one more for luck. She says the last thing she wants to do is get on an airplane. I go upstairs and reluctantly call our hotel in New York. I can hear the Pierre manager’s disappointment. “I’m sorry too,” I say. “More than you know.” As the weeks turn to months, we struggle to find our footing. It’s as if Farrah and I are entwined in a dance with no choreography.

I’m sitting here reading through my journal entries for 1993. Professionally, I don’t see much. There’s a singsong quality to these pages. I go to the gym; I coach Redmond’s Little League team; he misses a pop-up; he catches a pop-up; he does his homework; he doesn’t do his homework;
he mouths off; he’s good as gold; Davey Dog needs biscuits; I pay my taxes; I lament my knees. Then … wait a minute, this can’t be right.

When did she start getting migraines every week?

I don’t remember Farrah’s being so sick that we needed her mom to stay and help.

I must have been in another world. It was right there staring at me and I kept on going about my daily routines as if everything was copacetic. Now it’s coming back to me. Pauline and Jimbo had come for the holidays, as they did most years. But Farrah was poorly and so Pauline decided to stay on and help out. And I remember now how much she missed Jimbo. She never would have stayed that long unless she was concerned for her daughter. But did I ever ask her why she was worried about Farrah? Did I ask her whether I should be just as worried? All those years I resented my mother-in-law’s intrusion in our lives when I should have been working with her to help the girl we both loved so desperately. Pauline, if you can hear me, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.

And then the journal entries stop. Maybe the rest of that year is somewhere here at the beach house and I haven’t found it yet. Or maybe things got so much worse that I couldn’t write about them anymore. I’m not sure. I remember that year in bits and pieces. Don’t believe what the New Age gurus tell you. Enlightenment doesn’t stomp in; it comes on tiptoes.

All I remember next is the earthquake …

T
he earthquake of 1994 that splintered West LA felt like the ground was speaking in tongues, telling all of us who lived and worked there that maybe the jig was up, that the greed and hubris, the atavistic culture—that wellspring for innumerable movies, television shows, mediocre books, and submediocre plays that had come to define much of Southern California in its glory years—were over. The earth roared and swallowed people’s homes, their businesses, their golf courses, their closets full of shoes. It was as if God were telling us off. The quake struck LA at 4:30 a.m. on January 17. It may have been a natural disaster, but it would become a preternatural metaphor for what was happening to Farrah and me.

Seismic shifting.

Tremors beneath the surface.

A cracking foundation.

It’s something out of a movie. I wake up to a bookcase crashing onto the bed. The third volume of the 1960
Britannica
struck me square on the forehead. Redmond is in his room at the other end of the hall. Farrah’s away at a New Age retreat. It’s pitch-black. I hear a deep low rumbling and
the rattle of lamps and knickknacks shaking on the tabletops and the thud of boxes tumbling off the shelves in Farrah’s massive walk-in closet. I grab the flashlight I keep in the bed stand and make my way to Redmond. I’m stepping through broken glass. There are pictures of Farrah strewn across the floor. The frames have broken. I see Redmond standing in the corner with his hand on his heart. “Burglar, burglar!” he cries. He doesn’t realize it’s me. “No, Redmond, it’s Dad.” I tell him there’s been an earthquake. “Are there going to be aftershaves?” he asks.

Together we gingerly make our way down the hall. The house is collapsing around us. Paintings that hung on the walls appear as if they’re flinging themselves out of harm’s way, just as someone might jump out of a window in a burning building. Everything is moving. When we get to the living room, that’s when we see it, the fissure that starts at the front entryway and goes through the kitchen, out the back door, through the alley, and into our neighbor’s tennis court. I point the flashlight down, and Redmond and I follow it like the yellow brick road to hell. It’s wide enough that you could fall through the crack and when you look into it, there’s no bottom, no Emerald City. As I’m snapping Polaroids, an aftershock hits that knocks Redmond and me off our feet. We head for the car. Wilt Chamberlain lives next door and I watch as the enormous leaded windows that frame the entire front of his home explode onto his lawn. Then I see his large silhouette pulling open the gates to his driveway because the
electricity is out. Everything’s out. He slides into his car and revs the engine. He wants to flee. But there’s a leaking gas line. He’s about to drive over it. I frantically wave my hands, shouting that it’s too dangerous. I tell him to turn off his engine, which he does, and Redmond and I push him safely to the other side of the street. He drives off without a word.

Redmond and I wait for the “aftershaves” to pass. (Don’t worry, Davey Dog was safe and sound at the beach house with friends.) By daybreak, we’re on the road to San Diego to pick up Farrah, who’s been caught up in the spiritual growth movement, which in 1994 was rampaging. She’s a seeker. She’s bought into a lingo that preaches everyone has a destiny and a purpose and it’s possible to find it. I’m skeptical.

Driving through the epicenter, the scene unfolding before us resembles some prehistoric apocalypse. When we arrive at Deepak Chopra’s retreat where Farrah has spent the week, she can’t understand why we’ve come. I try to tell her that the house on Antelo is destroyed, but she doesn’t quite believe me. I show her the Polaroids. “It doesn’t look that bad to me,” she says. But when Redmond and I finish describing what we’d just witnessed, Farrah is convinced.

Farrah’s beloved house on Antelo is red tagged, declared unlivable. The street had collapsed and the house had slipped off its moorings, half of it sliding to the hillside below. It will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to set the wounded structure on new pilings and bring the building up
to code. The insurance company officially cites the cause of destruction as a “prehistoric landslide,” which somehow isn’t covered under her policy. Farrah is devastated. That house on Antelo was more to Farrah than mere brick and mortar. It represented her survival of an unhappy marriage; her rebirth as an independent woman; her safe place; her proof that no man got the best of her—not Lee Majors, not me at my best or at my worst—proof that she was her own master. When the house crumbled, it was as if her independence, her strength and resolve, even her resiliency, crumbled with it. As neighbors combed through the wreckage of what were once their homes, Farrah was sifting through the wreckage inside her self, her spirit as severed as the pilings.

We decide to move into the smaller house next door, which we had bought several years earlier as a guesthouse, and which remarkably had withstood the earthquake. We lease a place in Coldwater Canyon while it’s being remodeled. What neither of us realizes is that the fissure that split the Antelo house in two won’t be the only structural crack we can’t fix, that soon Farrah and I will find ourselves trying to rebuild a relationship across a widening chasm equally as deep. By the time spring arrives, Farrah and I are both teetering on the edge of falling in, but instead of reaching out hands to offer support, we’re giving each other little shoves.

We disagree about when the plumber was supposed to arrive, who forgot to buy the kiwi, or who left the prescriptions at the pharmacy. She blames me when Redmond
receives a D on a spelling quiz because it was my turn to help him study. I ask how it is possible she didn’t remember to turn on the Jacuzzi. She yells at me for rushing her. I get sarcastic when she takes too long to get ready. On and on it goes, a dreadful call and response that transforms the innocuous into the inescapable.

There’s a legend that famous couples never quarrel over such plebeian concerns as whose turn it is to fire the housekeeper. While it’s true some celebrities can be self-indulgent, most of us lead lives that are more like yours than you think. And we’re no more immune than you from getting stuck for hours waiting for the cable guy or confusing the day we’re scheduled to take the dog to the vet. The public’s misconceptions about celebrity have always amused me. I was at the market the other day (yes, I buy my own groceries) standing in line at the checkout counter, and I began thumbing through one of those personality magazines and came across an article titled “They’re Just Like Us.” It featured a photo of a disheveled Cameron Diaz gulping down a cup of coffee, and a sweaty Jennifer Aniston, damp hair pasted to her forehead, exiting the gym. I think they ran a shot of Farrah and me playing Frisbee several years back. So many of the people who read these rags fantasize about living the life of a star, never realizing that some celebrities wish they could change places with them. Farrah told me that she had dreams about what it would be like to lead a life without the frenzy of renown, to share a home with a stable husband and
be a regular mom, active in the local community, a member of the PTA. “In my dreams there are all these white picket fences,” she once said. “Sometimes they’re chasing me down a suburban street and I’m frightened. Other times they surround me and I feel safe and secure. I’m waiting for somebody. I think it’s you.”