I didn’t wake up one morning and decide David was a first-class prick, but that’s where I ended up. And it didn’t take picking through the bones of all the skeletons in his closet to convince me. It was how I found him—an angry, disconsolate man. I think he looked in the mirror and didn’t like what he saw. He was sometimes vocal about it. Or he was quiet and despairing. There was little cheer in his life. There had been little cheer in the home he came from. Doesn’t everything finally go back to one’s parents?
One day I heard the twisted tale of his childhood. No need to go into it, nor could I if I wanted to. I can only report what I was told by David, which is that his mother had an affair with another man while married to his father. They did not divorce; they simply moved to different floors in the house and never spoke to each other again. For as long as the boys remained at home, David and his brother, Don, carried messages between them. That’s enough to make any child angry. It put both young men in the position of having to choose. From the few conversations that went down between David and me about his parents, it was clear to me whom he chose. He spoke of his father, never his mother.
One of David’s favorite things to do was to go trout fishing. He loved to fish. I often thought that if he could have made a living from trout instead of from music, he would have done it. As a kid he had often fished with his father, and from time to time he would reminisce. Those were happy times. He associated no happy times with his mother. During the five years we were married, as we stood in various streams, I often thought he was there to keep that happy time in his life alive.
I also thought he had left home not liking women. This is my amateur analysis, and I told him what I thought several times over a period of three years as the marriage was disintegrating. He tried to refute it, alluding to the fact that he’d dealt with this in therapy before we even met. Well, doesn’t that mean someone might have mentioned the problem before me—like one of his three former wives, or perhaps all of them? I felt as though he didn’t like me from the day we married.
* * *
Not long after we wed, TBLWIT started to wind down. I had been making a fortune during its run. With multiple companies, thousands of dollars a week became tens of thousands a week. And then it was over. Suddenly I was earning nothing. The next show I produced was a flop. (No failures on Broadway, we call them flops.) My marriage did not respond well to my change of status. David grew silent. However, I saw an opportunity to try something I’d wanted to do for a while: I always thought I could write, and this was my chance.
It’s uncanny how smart the universe is. A little voice had been nagging at me for a long time to learn more about addiction. Somehow I knew I hadn’t yet learned enough about this awful disease. Indeed, what I’d gone through with Judy, with Liza, and more recently on Whorehouse made me want to know more. Given that I’d decided to write, I was looking around for a subject, and I thought addiction meaty material. I asked a rehab in Aspen if they would allow me to audit sessions there, and the manager of the clinic, after canvassing the patients, said I could sit in as long as I was mute. After the first two twenty-eight-day sessions, I was, however, allowed to ask questions. What an eye-opener! I totally recognized my dismal marriage in those sessions.
I’d started early in our marriage to believe that my husband was an alcoholic. It was his behavior that got me started. It wasn’t that he drank so much, and it wasn’t that he was ever drunk. He was functioning at a very high level. I’m talking about a man who received Grammy Awards and countless nominations for his wonderful work during the time we were married.
There was a time, he told me, when he’d smoked four to five packs of cigarettes a day. He was a workaholic. He had interchangeable addictions. When we dined out he liked to drink. Nothing unusual about that, except that I felt that he couldn’t enjoy the meal without a few drinks, some wine, and a good brandy after. He asked me if I thought he was an alcoholic, and I told him that I didn’t think so, that I thought he simply enjoyed drinking socially. I’ve since concluded that was denial on my part, plus I didn’t want to offend him. I had yet to learn that alcoholism is not a matter of how much liquid fire one pours down his or her gullet; it’s a matter of how much one depends on it in order to get through work, or the day, dinner, or just life in general. I believe he had dependence issues. And actually, in retrospect, I don’t think that anybody asks the question “Am I?” unless they already know the answer.
* * *
As I listened to the patients in rehab week after week, they were describing conduct that seemed to define my husband. They discussed, and their counselor discussed, a whole gestalt of alcoholic behaviors that destroy: depression, impatience, anger, rage, narcissism, control, and manipulation. These patients epitomized such behavior, and I immediately concluded I was living with someone exactly like them. I was living with a man I felt I couldn’t make happy no matter what I did, who couldn’t be happy no matter what he did. He often came home in a quiet controlled rage. The studio was too hot or too cold; the engineer wasn’t any good; the director was demanding; the producer was stupid. He didn’t need an excuse to be unhappy. His face would turn into a mask of anger, and he wouldn’t talk. We had silent dinners in which I became depressed, and that angered him even more. We went to bed angry, and I sensed he knew I was silently crying.
Perhaps he thought I was upset about my career, but the truth is that I was far less upset about it than he. I worried and wondered about restoring it in order to make him happy, but I had no solution, and in my state of mind at that moment in time, I could not have found one.
On top of this I was ministering to his children with their problems. I think it was appalling and embarrassing to him, never mind depressing the hell out of me. I was convinced he hated me for helping them and hated that they needed help. As if it was all a reflection on him. I fell apart. How could he do this to me? I blamed him, and that made me feel worse. I didn’t yet know I was asking the wrong question. The right question was, How did I allow this to happen?
I couldn’t seem to do anything right. And the more he seemed to hate me, the more insecure I became, until I was but a pale, needy, helpless resemblance of me. I bought his favorite foods, but that didn’t matter because I couldn’t cook. I made engagements with wonderful people, but he never felt comfortable with them. Whatever I took him to see in theater, he didn’t like. I couldn’t do anything to please him no matter how I tried. Like air from a rubber tube with a hole in it, confidence seeped out of me every day until it was gone. My self-esteem vanished. I looked in the mirror and was disgusted by the person staring back at me. If I couldn’t love her, who could? Nobody, and never again! That was my answer.
This once strong, independent, tough, and intelligent person now felt gone. Sometimes I would curl up on the floor in a corner of the living room and wonder what would happen if I jumped out of the eighteenth-floor apartment window. Would I die from a coronary occlusion on the way down? Or would it take hitting the ground to kill me? I was suicidal. Tough, take-no-shit-from-anyone me!
No matter! I didn’t have the courage to jump. My two beautiful children depended on me. I had to continue to function, but all I could do all day was cry. And that’s what I did—spent all day crying. I didn’t have time to write. I knew I was having a nervous breakdown; that I was useless to myself and that I needed help. But I was not yet ready to admit any of that out loud. I couldn’t do it while he was still in the house, and oddly enough I felt I had to maintain a false front for his children, who called often from LA, Minnesota, and Aspen. I felt they depended on me emotionally.
* * *
And then he was gone. Had I been of sound mind, I would have celebrated. In my few rational moments I knew there was nothing about him to love. But now my rational moments were few and far between. Mostly I mourned, continuing to believe I had lost the one true love of my life, and everything was my fault. I was the one responsible for the affair he was having with another woman. I found it impossible to blame him for anything. Yet I knew something was wrong with my reasoning. Why? Why did I blame myself for everything? The question grew bigger as the weeks wore on. Finally I heard a little voice say, it’s because you’re codependent!
It was a word I’d often heard at the rehab. “Codependent.” I started to think about that. I identified myself with the patients in the rehab, but most of all I identified with Judy to the extent that love and the loss of it was what mattered most to her. She was needy and dependent, and now I was also. And not only needy and dependent, I was insecure and totally lacking in enough confidence to get through the day. I thought I was offensive to everyone. I was scared to go out for fear I would do something wrong. I wanted the world to go away and take me with it. I wanted to be left alone. And I’d gotten to this most awful place without drugs or liquor. I had never been interested in either, and my despair did not drive me to the well-stocked liquor cabinet in the living room. However, even though I didn’t pop a single pill or take a drink, I now began to realize I had become an addict. I would learn in my recovery that I had become addicted to pain. I was a rampaging codependent.
* * *
And now, finally, I understood what happened to Judy. She too was in pain—probably caused early by family matters, and then exacerbated by Louis B. Mayer, whom she absolutely hated. She drank and drugged to deaden that pain, and became addicted to doing that. Truly I believe as I write this that her addiction to pain caused her addiction to drugs and liquor. Although I didn’t understand all of that when it was happening to me, I did know one thing: What happened to Judy was not going to happen to me.
The children would often come home from school and find me wearing the same bathrobe I’d been in when they’d left in the morning. How sad it was when my Jenny would come into the bedroom to tell me that smoking was bad for me. Thinking about it now is enough to bring tears to my eyes. Back then I bawled like a baby.
But I was paralyzed, and even their sweet voices urging me to come back didn’t matter. I was too depressed, but too sane to want a pill. Pills for depression in the late eighties were starting to be a hip thing. Just another fad, I thought, and anything that had to do with pills was a total turnoff. Because of Judy? More than likely, but then I’d never found the drug culture anything but disgusting.
However, I needed something to ease the pain. I was so sick. I had a record player in my head, and it played and replayed the same tapes over and over and over again. What he said, what I said, what I didn’t say. And none of it mattered anymore. The tapes were making me nauseous, and even if I didn’t eat, I still had the dry heaves and couldn’t stop them. The tapes were the worst part. I couldn’t turn the fucking tapes off. I smoked, I cried, I threw up, and I lost weight.
And one day I looked at myself in the mirror, really looked, and I was horrified. I think more than anything else that it was my vanity that took hold. I got so scared that I got dressed and went to my first meeting at Al-Anon. What did I have to lose? I remembered from the sessions I’d audited at the Aspen rehab that Al-Anon was a place to get help, and I’d heard it was a family place, for the relatives and friends of alcoholics and drug addicts.
I knew immediately, in the very first half hour, that this was where I belonged. I listened to so many people with problems that were eerily familiar. They took my mind off my own. It helped. If one meeting was good, I reasoned five a day would be better. I ran all over the city attending meetings. Meetings became my narcotic. I was grateful to be in New York where meetings take place in different neighborhoods almost around the clock, and I never had to leave Manhattan.
Finally, after a week, I backed off and went to only one a day for a month. Every time I left a meeting I left believing I belonged there. At the end of the first month, I was feeling better enough to seek an addiction doctor, and it was she who led me little by little to the understanding that I was addicted to pain. She never said those words, although she completely understood where I was. After all, pain—mine and everyone else’s—had been a constant companion in my life for a long time, and I ministered to all of it. I was pain’s handmaiden. It’s not a surprise to me that I started to need it.
One day, however, while in my doctor’s office, and after months of repeating the same sick phrases of feeling-sorry-for-myself garbage, I finally heard, actually heard, what I was saying as if for the first time. With the expert help I was getting, I was compelled to listen to myself, to really hear the maudlin crap that was coming out of my mouth, and it appalled me. The words were ridiculous, and I was disgusted and embarrassed. I stopped talking. I sat silently. The shrink sat watching me. And then, all at once, I was able to find the right words myself: “I am addicted to pain. I want it.” The moment I was able to say that out loud, I turned a corner. It was the most wonderful moment. I was a kid. I was so excited I jumped up and down like some kind of nut. Some kind of nut is what I had been.
It was going to be different going forward. Perhaps not overnight. But I was coming back. In that wonderful moment I knew that. It had taken me a year to get to that precious moment. During the following year, I never noticed my pain was disappearing, I felt my energy returning instead. I stayed at Al-Anon, attending a meeting a week, for five years.
* * *
Let me start here with the dictionary definition of codependency. It suited my condition so perfectly that I amuse myself by imagining it was tailored to me personally, but then I do recognize from time to time that I am not the center of the universe. Codependency is defined as “a psychological condition or a relationship in which a person is controlled or manipulated by another who is affected with a pathological condition (as an addiction to alcohol.…)” (I seemed to specialize in these.) “Codependency often involves placing a lower priority on one’s own needs, while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others.” (That describes my concern for and care of David’s children.) “Codependency can occur in any type of relationship, including family … and also romantic relationships. Codependency may also be characterized by denial, low self-esteem, and excessive compliance or control patterns.” This definition summed me up perfectly. Narcissists (again, one of my specialties) are considered to be natural magnets for the codependent.
I can joke about this dictionary definition being written with me in mind, but trust me, it also fit everyone I met at Al-Anon. They were mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, husbands and wives, and the grown children of all the aforementioned. I listened to all their stories and recognized me in many of their problems. I was no longer alone.
It was remarkable to me (and for a long time surprising) how I continued to find exactly the nonjudgmental help I needed. It’s said that you take away from those rooms what you need and leave behind what you don’t. Listening to others discuss their relationships at home, I learned a great deal about my own home, not just the one I was in, but the one I grew up in. I heard others talking about behavior like my father’s, and the distress that his kind of behavior wreaks in all kinds of families. When the conversation shifted to the wives of such fathers, I thought they were talking about my mother.
Once I was able to accept that my family problems were hardly unique, I was also able to find me—the child who had been introduced to Judy Garland. That child was no different from so many other lonely children I heard about. I learned how to acknowledge that child, to love her, and to forgive Judy even though I might never learn to love Judy. And, having arrived in those rooms suffering a deep depression (although never as deep as Judy’s, whose condition fitted the classic definition of manic-depressive), I could finally identify, at least somewhat, with how Judy felt as she valiantly tried to go forward every day.
The meetings reinforced my understanding that self-mutilation has nothing to do with love, and that Judy never needed an excuse to hurt herself. Sometimes I imagined Judy sitting next to me in those rooms. Of course that would have been impossible because of her celebrity, but I’d like to think she would have learned as much as I did.
I finally managed to say good-bye to the damage I’d allowed Liza’s betrayal to cause in me. Letting go is a learned behavior, and it was hard work, but it was a great relief not to be carrying all that Liza baggage around anymore. I felt way lighter and more able to enjoy my former successes. There has always remained, however, a residue—a great sadness for Li, whose career started on a downhill slide after we parted. Liza was (and perhaps remains) every bit the codependent I was—and for good reason.
Someone in one of those rooms said, “There are two days of the week you don’t have to worry about. One of them is yesterday, the other is tomorrow!” How right is that?! I’ve been making today count for a long time because of that lesson. Not the least of what I learned was to keep my mouth shut when someone else was talking. I’m forever grateful for the day a young man in those rooms said: “If I would only just take the cotton out of my ears and stuff it into my mouth, I’d be a whole lot better off.” Oh, what a gift! An agent hardly ever shuts up. I finally discovered how much more I could find out if I kept my mouth closed. My last husband actually told me everything I had needed to know before I married him. He didn’t use words like “controlling,” “manipulative,” and “narcissistic,” but the messages were all clearly there. I didn’t hear them because I wasn’t really listening.
* * *
Sharing my own experiences in those rooms started me on the road to recovery. Finally, by the late eighties, after taking a good look at the totality of my married experiences, I was able to let all the anger and depression go, and I was then ready to go to court, which is where the legal hassling ultimately led David and me. It was nasty stuff, and the details are boring, but the finale was better than any eleventh-hour finish on Broadway.
To start with, I looked at my soon-to-be-ex-husband sitting there, and I felt nothing. I wondered how I had allowed myself to make such a poor judgment. My first instinct, which was to get to know this man better before we married, had been the right one. And now I would pay for my mistake in court. I was disgusted with myself.
The prim little (and I mean tiny) judge, who revved up his machismo by arriving clad in black leather on a huge Harley Hog, sat as tall as he was able to as he listened to my husband’s lawyers tell him that it would be a shame to give me anything in the divorce. “Take it all away from her,” my husband’s lawyer boomed out in a stentorian tone. “Don’t let her suck on the hind tit of wealth. You will be destroying her. Take it all away,” he said. “Then, like cream rising to the top, she will do what she has to in order to succeed once again.” I couldn’t believe my ears.
The judge, however, found this argument very compelling, and that’s just what he did. He gave all the investments, bought with a great amount of my earnings, to David. My attorneys hardly spoke at all. I didn’t understand it, and at that point there was nothing I could do about it. I might have done something later, but I was anxious to be done with it and to move on. That the judge gave the home we’d built in Aspen to David was only right because he’d owned the land before, and he’d invested the lion’s share of the construction costs.
I was awarded a lousy cash settlement, which didn’t come anywhere close to the money I’d invested in our different real estate ventures in Colorado. It was a sick joke. Like cream, I curdled just listening to the judge. But it was finally over, and here’s the bottom line: When I came out of this dark tunnel, I was so much stronger. I don’t think I know many as strong as I.
* * *
I am deeply grateful to all the people who inhabited those rooms. I share a silent bond with them that will never be broken because I live the lessons I learned in those rooms every day of the week. I can no longer be tested without my thoughts immediately flying back to some meeting that informed me how to react with understanding and with grace.