Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art (24 page)

On the day that her ultrasound showed that she had matured enough eggs, I gave Gilda another injection to induce ovulation. The next morning I drove her to the hospital and watched the attendants wheel her into surgery to aspirate her eggs.

Then, as Gilda put it,
my
foreplay began. I was sent to the basement and put in a washroom, which had a scrub bucket, a mop, and five or six
Playboy
and
Penthouse
magazines to help me masturbate into a sterile plastic container. The pictures in the magazines almost put me off my job completely. I’ve always hated those color photographs of naked women in those stupid positions that are supposed to turn men on. I never felt that there was anything sexy about them. Alfred Hitchcock believed that what was really sexy was a woman in a long Victorian dress bending down to pick up a hanky and showing just a little bit of ankle and leg. I don’t know about the long Victorian dress part, but otherwise I feel the same as Hitch.

For nineteen days after that I had to keep giving Gilda progesterone
injections. On the twentieth day they gave her a blood test. It was negative. No baby. In February she booked herself for major surgery to have her tubes opened. She had the operation and recovered in a week. Her tubes were open, and she could now have a baby. All we had to do was have sex at just the right time of the month—exactly at the time she was ovulating.

Meanwhile, I had an idea for a film. I used to love watching
Creature Features
on television, with Katie and Jo, when Katie was afraid to watch those old horror films by herself. We all laughed at the scary parts. When I was a kid, I loved comedy/mysteries—especially Bob Hope in
The Cat and the Canary
and
Ghost Breakers
. The movie idea I had was to make my own comedy/horror film, but using the same techniques for visual effects that they used in the 1930s—where every visual effect was done
in the camera
, not at some visual effects plant, which cost a fortune and would ruin the concept.

One evening, Dom DeLuise came to my house for dinner and did his imitation of Ethel Barrymore, which made me laugh so much—because it was funny, of course, but also because it was so accurate. I asked Dom if he would play my aunt, doing his Ethel Barrymore, if I ever made a 1930s comedy/horror film. He said he would. The title I gave to the idea was
Haunted Honeymoon
.

Terry Marsh had recently written a film with Ronny Graham, and I wanted him to write
Haunted Honeymoon
with me, not only because I loved his humor but also because so much depended on what could and could not be done visually—an area in which he was an expert and I was almost ignorant. Orion Pictures said that they would give it a “go”
if
we did the film in England, because of the weakness of the English pound at the time.

Gilda dwelled on the fact that if I traveled without her, she would miss an ovulation cycle. She swore that I was the only person
she ever slept with to get a part in a movie, and even though she wasn’t right for the part in
Haunted Honeymoon
—whatever Lola wants she usually gets. Besides, Paulette Goddard was too old for the part.

Gilda did get pregnant while we were in England—for a week—and then had a miscarriage. But now she knew that she
could
get pregnant, and that made her happy. We finished filming in November of 1985 and came back to Los Angeles in time for Christmas. On January 6 she had her first symptom of ovarian cancer.

Gilda went to more internists, gynecologists, holistic doctors, and gastroenterologists than Carter has Little Liver Pills. She always asked the same questions: “Is it cancer?” The answer from all of them was the same: “No, no no . . . she just a highly strung woman.” “She has Epstein-Barr virus.” “Not serious—it’s just
mittelschmerz
.” “She’s a very nervous girl” “Depression, stress, anxiety.”

After ten months of no diagnoses or incorrect diagnoses—with her tummy distended as if she were hiding a small balloon under her dress—she finally heard it: “You have stage four ovarian cancer.”

Gilda grabbed my face in her hands and sobbed, “No more bad news, no more bad news. I don’t want any more bad news.”

While Gilda was receiving chemotherapy, I received a script called
See No Evil, Hear No Evil
. Wonderful concept—terrible script. I turned it down.

Six months later, when Gilda was almost finished with her nine sessions of chemo, my agent sent me
See No Evil, Hear No Evil
again. “Are you crazy?” I asked. “I turned this script down six months ago.”

A few months later, my
new
agent, Marty Baum, called: “I want you to meet the people at Tri Star about a script called
See No Evil, Hear No Evil
.”

I started to laugh. “Marty, I’ve turned this script down twice already. It’s a great idea for a film, but it’s a rotten script.”

“I don’t care—I want you to meet the people at Tri Star.”

I went to Tri Star and told them exactly what I thought, including the fact that the script was pissing on the blind and the deaf, because whoever wrote it didn’t know anything about either. They said, “We agree with you. We thought you might like to write it for yourself and Richard Pryor.”

I told Tri Star that I would write twenty pages—starting over, but using the same concept. If they didn’t like what I wrote, we would part friends and they wouldn’t owe me a penny. If they did like what I wrote, I’d continue writing. Everyone agreed. Arthur Hiller was hired to direct.

*  *  *

Between her chemotherapy treatments, in the hospital in California, Gilda would come home and try to lead as normal a life as possible, but the first few days were always exhausting because she was so hyped up from steroids. Sparkle would spend day and night lying in bed at Gilda’s feet, except when she was let out in the backyard to relieve herself. Occasionally she would whimper for Gilda to play with her, and if Gilda didn’t respond, Sparkle would continue whimpering, until, going crazy from the steroids and rage at her condition, Gilda would sit up and pound the bed with her fists—as if she were pounding the cancer—and scream at Sparkle, “STOP IT! STOP IT!” At those times the little dog couldn’t understand what was happening and she’d run to me to hold her. Gilda couldn’t understand it either. I often felt the way that I imagined Sparkle felt—wanting to touch her, to smell her, and know that she was there, alive, and that she still loved us. Every once in awhile, when she was ready to go to sleep, she would pull the covers up around her head, like a little girl, and look at me with those huge brown eyes, and plead—as if I were her father—“Help me. . . . Please help me. . . . I don’t know what to do.”

I rarely got angry with Gilda, but when the kettle started to boil, I had to let some steam out, or I would have burst. At those times
I was the one who was pleading with her for help: “Gilda, for God’s sake, try to think about something besides yourself. You’re
not
a baby! You pretend to be—when you go to bed at night and you’re frightened and I ask what’s the matter and you say, ‘What if I forget to breathe when I fall asleep?’—but you’re not a baby—you’re a grown woman! Think about Sparkle, think about me, think about all of the friends you have who love you—
just get off of yourself!
I don’t know how to help you anymore than I’m doing. You treat me like shit all day, no matter how hard I try to please you, and then at night you want me to make everything all right . . . but I can’t! I want to, but I can’t!”

The odd part is that when I did have such an outburst, it made her feel better. She’d kiss me and point her finger at me like a schoolteacher and say, “I know you. . . . You wouldn’t get angry with me if you thought I was going to die. Thank you, darling.”

Then, when I calmed down, I’d say, “Gilda, you treat every stranger in the world with respect, no matter how much pain you’re in. All I want is for you to treat me the way you would a stranger.”

“But you’re my husband—don’t you understand? You’re the only one I
can
yell at.”

I heard through my sister that Katie had been in a hospital in New York with a terrible case of endometriosis and had just had an operation. I was so engrossed with Gilda’s illness that I let contact with Katie go by the wayside. When I called Jo, I was told that the operation had been a nightmare, but that Katie was at her own apartment now. I tried to call Katie several times, but no answer. I wrote to her, but she didn’t respond. After a week I called again . .  . still no answer. Then I wrote again, hoping that she might actually read my letter: “If I’ve done something that hurt you, just tell me what it was, honey, please. If you don’t tell me what’s wrong, I can’t fix it.” She never answered.

My nephew, Jordan—who was a few years younger than Katie but had always been close to her—let me know how serious my problem with Katie was. He said that the last time he saw her, she told him he would have to choose: “Either your uncle or me.”

Jordan, who has always been like a son to me, told Katie that he couldn’t make that kind of choice. He’s never seen her or talked with her since. I called Jo and asked her if she knew why Katie wouldn’t talk to me. Jo said, “You mean you don’t know?” I said, “No, that’s why I’m asking you.” “Well, if you don’t know, I can’t tell you,” she said. Within those few words, I thought, was the kernel of why I left Jo and Katie years before. The only clue to Katie’s behavior is something she said to Jordan . . . that when she was ill, she wanted me to take care of her the way I was taking care of Gilda. That may or may not be true—I have no idea, but if it is I can understand it.

I went to see Margie to ask her opinion. She said that she thought Katie was so filled with anger at her biological father—whom she had never met and who had abandoned her—that the best way to get back at him was to get back at her “father.”

How could such an unhappy thing have come about? My intuition tells me that if she ever did tell me what I had done, I might give her some simple explanation—about how ill Gilda was—or I might just apologize for hurting her and ask her to forgive me. But then she might lose her anger, and I think—for reasons she’s probably not aware of—that she needs to hold on to her anger. I know that I may never see Katie again. I hope that the little girl I loved and adopted will be able to let go of that anger one day.

During this time, two messengers from Heaven were sent to Gilda and me. The first was a gastroenterologist named Edward Feldman, whom we met when he was brought in to oversee Gilda’s first operation. He would come to my house in Los Angeles, two or
three times a week, after a long day of work, just to look in on Gilda. Very often, on his day off, he would bring his wife, Jane, and we’d all talk about silly things that would make Gilda laugh. My friendship with Ed Feldman was to play an unexpected role in my life.

The second messenger was a cancer therapist named Joanna Bull, whom Gilda found through the Wellness Community, in nearby Santa Monica. Joanna came to the house each week and would talk with Gilda for an hour. Whatever they talked about was working. I could see that Gilda was starting to get control of her life, and also starting to enjoy life again. Still no sex for me—that went out months earlier—but I never wanted to burden Gilda with a request for relief, by hand or mouth, and Gilda never mentioned the subject. In the meantime, the major blood test that indicated tumor activity, called CA-125, was returning to normal.

The gynecological oncologist in charge of Gilda’s case was a gentle man. Before each chemotherapy session he’d sit with us for an hour, in Gilda’s hospital room, talking and joking, and especially listening. After Gilda finished her last chemotherapy, she was given her second-look operation, where the doctor took tissue samples to see if there were any cancer cells observable. Two tissue samples were tainted; the rest were pink and clear. I kept telling her that the news was wonderful . . . only two out of forty-one . . . and I believed it. Gilda felt wonderful, but her doctor said he wanted her to have some radiation now. “Belt and suspenders,” he would say. So she had her entire abdomen radiated.

When she was finished with the radiation, we went back to her house in Connecticut, “cancer-free,” she used to say . . . and so we thought. But after three weeks—when she went to a local oncologist for her routine blood test—she was told that her CA-125 had gone up, quite high. She had to start chemotherapy again. She thought that the oncologist who told her this had death in his
eyes. She even referred to him as Dr. Death, and she wouldn’t see him again.

When we were in France, the spring before we were married—staying at Chateau St. Martin—we played tennis with a New York oncologist and his wife. His name was Ezra Greenspan. Ezra was a kind man, and he always managed to make Gilda laugh. When she found out that she had to start chemo again, she asked me to call Dr. Greenspan.

We went to New York to see Ezra, and, after looking at her records and tissue samples, he gave her a spurt of new life in the form of hope.