Floor Sample

It’s time we go to work on Avalon,” I told an unsuspecting Emma one bright September day. We began by hauling out the boxes into which the show had been haphazardly packed after its Taos premiere. Opening the boxes to find the mess within, I kicked out suddenly and viciously in my frustration, sending one box flying across the room.

“I need all new arrangements!” I exclaimed in exasperation. “The whole show has to be redone, top to bottom.” I kicked another of the offending boxes, scooting it all the way across the room. In my mind and heart, Avalon was so beautiful. In real life Avalon was still botched. Emma was startled to see my temper and the depth of my frustration. Suddenly I turned to her. “You arrange it,” I proclaimed.

Locked alone in a room with a piano and a seemingly impossible task in front of her, Emma abruptly began to hear music. She thought of a melody line from Avalon and found herself flooded with harmony. Although she had never told me, writing music was a childhood dream of hers. The chance to arrange was a dream come true. No wonder she was seized with terror. Just as I had been, she was afraid that the music would go away. She grabbed for some paper and a pencil. Hurriedly, she began to sketch in the shape of what she was hearing. Outside the room I could hear her harmonies from beneath the door. I hugged myself in excitement. It sounded perfect to me. Over Emma’s protests, our collaboration was born.

Summer turned to fall. The trees in Central Park blazed with color. Mark arrived, bringing with him an editor and a researcher. He moved into an apartment two floors beneath me. We began creating The Artist’s Way at Work, passing chapters up and down the stairwells at the Olcott. For Mark it was a difficult birth. He had so many ideas, so much to say. He wanted to say all of it, and a book can hold only so much. I sat in my apartment, writing longhand, racing to keep up with him and his ideas. There was so much he wanted me to be excited about. He foresaw a whole new audience for The Artist’s Way.

As always, it was haunting to be with Mark. There was so much right between us—and so much wrong. Mark enjoyed the intellectual sparks that flew between us, but I was not domesticated enough to suit him. I was too headstrong, too temperamental, too volatile—and I was all of those things as we hammered the book into shape. For my part, I was accustomed now to writing books on my own, working at my own pace, without much interference or input until Jeremy Tarcher stepped in with his guiding intelligence. We had no Jeremy Tarcher on this book, no overview memo to work from. The entirety of the book was in Mark’s head, and his many ideas jostled and fought with one another as they came to the page. Add to this a bottled-up sexual attraction, and the recipe for tension was clear.

“Why is it,” I asked him, “that you always have all the right material just in the wrong order?” I found that often all I needed to do for a cohesive rewrite was to number the paragraphs so that his ideas played out in a more orderly fashion.

Despite my protestations, despite the stress and the many heated confrontations, the book did get “built.” Mark, on the whole, seemed to be pleased with it. For my part, I was pleased when Mark and his helpful entourage one more time vacated the Olcott and left me to myself. “Maybe I am turning into a spinster,” I thought.

As fall turned the corner into winter, I found myself again missing the wide western skies of Taos. Was this denial? Was Taos really a dangerous and unhappy obsession? Was craving Taos really like craving a drink? The prowler or prowlers still eluded capture, and I began to seriously consider that I should sell my house. I could always buy another one, I told myself. And a new house would not hold memories of Mark.

“Let go. Move on,” I lectured myself. “Let go and let God,” my sober mentors advised. I finally found the courage to put my house on the market. Mercifully, within days, I had a buyer who pleased me. I sold my house to friends of mine from Los Angeles. I knew they would take delight in it, and I was glad to think it had moved on to such happy owners.

Still craving horses and “country,” I took the money from the house and invested it in a small horse farm in rural Virginia. It was a good market to buy into, and I needed an escape from Manhattan. While they weren’t Taos and the Sangre de Cristos, the Blue Ridge Mountains were beautiful.

“Dear Dad, please guide me,” I would pray often. “Please help me to hold on to my money.” Without my father to advise me, I was wary of my own judgment. I wanted to keep my money bound up in real estate, because then I couldn’t spend it foolishly. Virginia was like a savings account for me. If it didn’t capture my imagination, it at least kept my assets safely frozen.

My emotions were safely frozen as well—at least that is what I told myself. Focused on my writing, I was safely single and working in my prime. Excited by the simultaneous publication of The Right to Write and The Dark Room, I abruptly realized that I was living out my childhood dream. I was a writer, a New York writer. Riding in a limousine on my way to a Dark Room book signing, I thought, “This is probably as good as it gets.” Enjoying the crowds at book signings, I basked to fine reviews—with the notable exception of one clunker in The New York Times, which disliked my “Jungian” detective Elliot Mayo.

The morning of the Times review I felt I should go outside on the Manhattan streets wearing sackcloth and ashes and a big sign: “Writer shamed.” It was astounding to me how one negative review could emotionally outweigh twenty positive ones. Then I told myself that I had joined a distinguished club: those who had survived a bad Times review. As I often did, I reminded myself that pain was a part of the creative territory, that few artists escaped unscathed. I called to mind some difficult reviews Martin had suffered. If he could survive them, so could I, I told myself firmly. Still, wasn’t there supposed to be more to life than “my brilliant career”?

We met through friends. Our affair began innocently enough with a dinner date. Peter liked sushi and so did I. Manhattan is crammed with sushi restaurants. We picked one in my neighborhood and settled down to get to know each other. Like me, Peter was a writer, although he specialized in advertising copywriting and comedy. His droll humor was irresistible—at least to me. Filled with wry, self-deprecating stories, Peter was a born raconteur. By the time we ordered dessert, he had made a conquest. Back at my house, he asked me, “What? Do I have to lawyer you into bed? You’re going to say yes sooner or later.”

Sooner seemed fine. It had been years since I’d had a lover, and Peter was both funny and ardent, a charming combination. He was filled with tales of his wild past—a past now safely behind him, he assured me. We quickly fell into a routine of several dinner dates a week.

“I am cash short,” Peter told me one night over dinner. “I’m behind on my mortgage and it looks bad. I don’t suppose you could float me a short-term loan, could you?” He named a sum. It was a handsome sum but one I knew he could afford to pay back and one I myself could afford to lose if it came to that. Because Peter made me laugh, because I liked his company, and because, without my father’s savvy, I was an easy mark, I loaned him the money. My newly acquired conservative accountants were appalled. So was Emma.

Now that he owed me money, Peter became suddenly volatile. His good humor wore thin. He acted like I was a loan shark dogging his heels. I didn’t like this turn of events. For that matter, I no longer liked Peter. What I needed, I decided, was to put time and space between us. I suggested to Emma that we take a trip out to Taos, “just to clear my emotional palette.”

Taos was beautiful, more beautiful than I’d remembered it. The high mountains were still blanketed with snow. The spring nights were cool, but the days were warm and balmy. Emma and I stayed at my favorite haunt, the El Pueblo. We took many long walks out west of town on Valverde, the high road that overlooked a large meadow and bordered a small, beautiful cemetery. My friend Larry Lonergan lived on Valverde. When I told him I was home-sick, he suggested that we look at rentals. Emma and I found a charming house right on Valverde, within walking distance to Larry and to town.

“It’s better than spending more money on Peter,” I told Emma as we paid the rent. Peter and I were talking on the phone, but the last conversation had gone badly. Peter confessed that he was back on cocaine and asked if he could one more time borrow money. This time I resisted.

With matters soured between Peter and me, I had little impulse to go back to Manhattan. With its great beauty, Taos still spoke to me. I loved the daily walks, the closeness to Larry and my other friends. “I don’t belong in the city,” I told myself, and in my final phone call to Peter, I told him the same thing.

And I was “just gone.” Officially on vacation, I had less and less inclination to go back. From Manhattan I had been talking to John Newland. Dissatisfied with Taos, he and Areta had moved back to Los Angeles. He wanted me to come to Los Angeles and do theater with him there. “It would be great,” he promised. The play he had in mind was my alcoholism play, Four Roses. He thought he could get excellent casting, and with any luck we would be reviewed by Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. Who knew where a few good reviews might lead us?

To me, Newland was the Pied Piper. I still had access to a studio apartment on the beach in Venice. I could live there while we worked. To make it even more enticing, there was a wonderful role for Domenica, who was working to make her way as an actress. It would be good for her to get some Los Angeles exposure. It would be good for me to get another thorough dousing in Los Angeles sobriety, sometimes jokingly referred to as the “Harvard of the recovery movement.” Yes, I decided, I would go.

But before I could join Newland in Los Angeles, I had a month of teaching commitments in Taos. For the better part of a year, I was now working with Nave instead of Tim, and Nave and I had planned a very special creativity camp.

Our creative elder was to be Max Showalter. Max, at eighty-two, was flying in from Connecticut to share his experience, strength, and hope with our students. I would teach mornings. A wide panoply of classes would occupy the afternoons. Many of my Taos friends would participate. Dori Vinella would be the official hostess. There would be a field trip to painter Paul Pascarella’s studio, a hands-on art class with designer Jo Dean Tipton, a drumming workshop with Rosario Carelli. Nave would teach performance poetry and Max would cap it all with a live concert. We were expecting both Larry Lonergan and Rhonda Flemming to offer participants spiritual readings. Sambhu Vaughan would provide musical evenings.

Taos seemed to me to be an ideal place to teach. Students fell in love with the beauty of the community and many went home laden with southwestern art treasures. The pueblo was nearby for anyone who cared to explore Native American culture, and the local restaurants featured savory New Mexican cuisine. My little rented house on Valverde was convenient to the campus and felt to me like another safe and lovely nest. The prowler and my former house seemed distant memories—until a burglar struck.

We came home from a day’s teaching to find that our new little house had been ransacked. Emma’s bag and wallet were missing. Clothes were awry, drawers gaped open. When we called the police, they arrived with bad news. Now Taos was undergoing a siege of robberies. “Kids on drugs” were the suspected culprits.

“It’s not safe here,” Emma declared. She had heard my stories of the sexual prowler and she didn’t like passing in front of a window at night. When the police left, she circled the house on foot, trying to gauge how easily each of our windows could be jimmied open. The news wasn’t good. Our house was long on charm and short on security. Walking the neighborhood after the robbery, we came upon Emma’s empty purse, tossed in the trash at the community library. “I don’t like it here,” Emma announced.

Even without Emma’s warnings I found myself uneasy in the little rental house. The prowler had never been caught, and now there was the robber to contend with as well. The police seemed casual at best. Hoping to forestall further catastrophe, I made a decision to let go of the rental and leave Taos as soon as creativity camp was over. I asked Erin Greenberg to pack the house for me while Emma went back to oversee our affairs in New York.

Looking for elusive stability, I was actually on the run. My life seemed to be lived anywhere and everywhere. I promised Newland that I would come to California at least for the duration of a production. I arrived in California just as spring was turning to summer. The little apartment on Venice Beach featured a small balcony and a good sea breeze. I was mere blocks from the welcoming coffee shop where sober alcoholics gathered. I was even closer than that to the shoreline and the blue Pacific waters where dolphins danced. I should have felt peaceful, but instead I lay in bed at night with my head spinning. I felt disoriented and adrift. I tried to connect with all that was familiar but I did not feel at home. I hoped that seeing Newland would make me feel more grounded. We shared a passion for work and that had always been centering for me.

For his part, John Newland was happy to have me in California. To his eye, Taos was a romantic dead end, “not a destination for healthy people.” Los Angeles, by way of contrast, had been his home for forty years. He knew where the restaurants were and didn’t mind driving his white Chevy Blazer to get to them. My apartment was a block from the Rose Café. It was there that Newland first suggested we rendezvous.

“Good to be seen!” he answered back, bending down to give me a welcoming peck. “Well, what are we going to do? I found a little playhouse over in Westwood that looks perfect for us. I thought we could start there by putting up Four Roses.” Newland was gathering a head of persuasive steam. “I think your idea that I work with your friend Rosemary Welden is a super idea. She’s a good casting agent and we’ve got six great women’s roles—five, actually, since we know we want Domenica for the young junkie. We do, don’t we?”

Getting down to business began with casting. True to her reputation, Rosemary Welden had a deluge of actresses for us to meet. Newland picked through them like a gourmet in a bonbon factory. Watching him put them through their paces, I saw again how powerful his charisma was. At eighty-two! One particularly beautiful actress took me aside and hissed to me, “I’d do him in a minute. You know what I mean?” I knew what she meant. Without much difficulty, we filled out an excellent cast. We found that Newland’s reputation was a lure and so was my own. Half of our cast had worked The Artist’s Way. The chance to work with us was a chance to say thank you.

Domenica decided that she would undertake the role of the young junkie. While I was pleased by her decision, it also meant that at rehearsals I was daily exposed to a Domenica I didn’t know—an angry, rebellious, sexualized teen. Newland took her transformation in stride. With six highly trained, highly strung actresses to work with, he was in his element. He wanted big, edgy performances from them, and that was what he was getting. By opening night he had brewed a highly combustible cocktail. Audiences were moved. The critics approved. Domenica received good notices and was immediately offered casting in another production. I felt shrewd that I had been able to help her take a step forward. Maybe we both belonged in L.A.?

More than critical approval, I enjoyed the chance to put some work up in front of my longtime friends like Julianna McCarthy and Ed Towle. Over the years they had cheered me on long distance, and now here we were all reunited again. It was very satisfying to watch them watch the proceedings onstage. They had bet on me, and now I felt their bets were paying off. Emma came out from New York to catch the play’s end. She, too, pronounced it a success.

Newland was disappointed in me. He knew that at his age he was unlikely to be chosen to direct a feature film. If he wanted to direct—and he did—then he would need to turn his energies toward theater. Why couldn’t I see it his way?

Looking back, I wonder if I didn’t have a failure of nerve. It had been hard putting work up to intense critical scrutiny. We had survived it. We had even prevailed. But it was difficult. Newland was both older and tougher than I was. I begged him to understand my hesitancy. He had no patience with it. More to the point, he had no time for it. While to me he seemed vital and ageless, he knew he wasn’t getting any younger. He found my hesitation frustrating and uncharacteristic. Was I all right? he wondered. No, I was not.

Without the routine of a production to anchor my days, I found myself feeling aimless and ill at ease. When I talked on the phone to Emma, New York seemed impossibly far away to me. How, I wondered, could I ever have imagined that I could live there? I loved the flora and fauna in Los Angeles. I loved the gentle, balmy days. I began to think that I belonged in Los Angeles, that it was good for my sobriety to be around old friends and new ideas. Newland had an idea of teaching a monologue class, could he interest me in that? he wondered. One more time I begged off. I was feeling restless and unable to focus. What I was really feeling was rootless. I had been transplanted one time too many. Although I didn’t yet see it, I wasn’t stable.

Venice Beach is named for its canals, and there is a tiny, picturesque area known as “walk streets,” where there are no cars, only walkways. It was to one such street that I found myself pulled repeatedly, and there, on a telephone pole, I saw advertised a rental cottage. I took down the number and called the landlady. I liked her immediately, and I liked the little cottage she had to show me. The street was serene and pastoral. Parrots flocked in the trees. The neighborhood seemed charming and gentle, drawn to a comforting miniature scale. “I’ll take it,” I said.

It remained to break the news to Emma. She was halfway done with arranging Avalon, and the even larger piece Magellan still lay ahead. Could she pack up New York and join me in Los Angeles? Our work would be the same. She would continue to focus on Avalon and I would return to writing books. We might do the occasional play. With any luck, I could one more time sell a movie. New York was too hard. There weren’t enough trees. Wouldn’t she please join me? Emma says that when I asked her, she experienced a distinct shudder of foreboding. Nonetheless, game and plucky, she agreed to move west.

To the casual eye, Nowita Place looked like paradise. It was a neighborhood of gardeners, and climbing roses overhung the walk. Lawns were immaculately kept and houses were freshly painted. Life looked very good to the observer. Moving into Nowita Place, anticipating a gentle life to match my environment, I quickly found myself slipping into trouble. As it had in London, nature began to be luminous for me. I would walk the length of our tiny street, passing by garden after garden, and each bower of flowers seemed to speak to me. One more time, as it had in Taos, electricity began to bother me. I doused the power in my little cottage and lit candles for every room. I was sliding into eccentricity, but in a setting so idyllic that I didn’t notice my slippage with any concern.

It fell to Emma to see the situation clearly. To her eye, I was one more time growing fragile, and even though she had missed the London breakdown, she knew the story and she began to grow alarmed. Reaching out for help, I called my friend Rosemary Welden. She came to the little cottage and listened gravely. “You’re becoming oversensitive,” she concluded. “That’s why they call people like you sensitives.” She thought what I needed was just what Nowita Place had to offer: rest and quiet. Next I called Jeremy Tarcher. He met me for lunch and pronounced, “Darling, you are not well.” Finally I called Newland. He listened acutely and then offered his bottom line: “Don’t they have some pill you can take to get back on the ground?”

The truth was that I was trying to avoid taking pills. I probably needed Navane again, but with Dr. Jones retired, I was reluctant to put drugs into my system. Unsupervised, I was perversely proud of the time I was racking up without the need for medication. I still wasn’t convinced that in some cases drugs could make me more sober, not less. Listening to Newland’s concern, I began to have doubts about my position. “I think I need a doctor,” I told Emma.

The doctor we found was a Jungian referred to us by trusted friends. He found my case fascinating and was particularly impressed by my continuous creativity. He listened to me say I was afraid of electrical power and that I was starting to be afraid to drive the car. Instead of telling me my sensitivity to electricity was a delusion, he was fascinated by the altered states I seemed to be experiencing. After a few sessions, he confessed to me that he often took drugs in order to arrive at the states of consciousness that I seemed to be arriving at naturally. He explained that he was interested by shamanic experiences. He wondered if I had experimented with a certain exotic South American drug. He and his wife had used it to approximate the very condition I was in. When I said I had not tried it, he seemed disappointed.

“I think I need a different doctor,” I told Emma. By then I was experiencing myself as increasingly ungrounded. Days ran into nights. Weeks ran into months. Everything blurred. It was all I could do to walk daily and to write. My Nowita Place neighbors began to think me eccentric. They had noticed that I seemed to live by candlelight. Meanwhile, I fought for normalcy. It was getting harder and harder to drive. This meant it was difficult to meet with my sober alcoholic friends. I tried to rely on the phone, but soon even that seemed “too electric” for me. I was becoming as isolated as I had in London. Even my relationship with my daughter suffered.

Domenica had rented a place in nearby Venice Beach. I was worried about her safety. Her charming little apartment was too close to the boardwalk. She called me in the middle of the night to say she was afraid to step over a vagrant who had found shelter in her doorway. I lobbied for Domenica to move to safer quarters. I worried about what her father would say if he knew of her dangerous circumstances. He was protective of Domenica, but she loved the beauty of the beach, and the bawdiness of her neighborhood appealed to her. “It’s like the Village,” she would try to reassure me. I was not reassured. Instead, I grew ever more apprehensive. What if something happened to her?

But faith was elusive—and genuine detachment seemed impossible. All that I could do was voice my concerns and try to stick faithfully to a sane routine. I set up a writing desk in my music room and, at the suggestion of Bernice Hill, a Jungian analyst, started each day by writing a small “animal” song. That done, I would get up from the piano, cross to the desk, and begin to write on the two books I was working on simultaneously, God Is No Laughing Matter and Supplies. I contracted my sister Libby to work as illustrator, and we sent her the essays as they unfolded.

I was working on an IBM Selectric typewriter and I loved the comforting sound of the keys trotting along. I kept separate folders for each book, and I would finish one essay and go straight to another. Sometimes I would write an essay that seemed to belong in both books. Despite my sense of disorientation, my writing seemed clear, just a little more hard-edged than usual. I didn’t recognize myself in its tone.

One more time, through friends, we located someone who thought she could help me. This time we were dealing with a New Age healer who did intuitive counseling long distance and then prescribed herbal remedies. Based in Sedona, Arizona, she consulted with me by phone. My system needed to be detoxed, she told me, as did Emma’s, and so we embarked on a cleansing fast that left us reeling with dizziness. Flat on the couch with the room spinning, I would say to Emma, “Are you sure this is helping us?” Domenica was becoming increasingly alarmed. I tried to reassure her, but I wasn’t reassured myself. Ezra came to visit me, and he was very worried by what he found. In retrospect, I would say I was having another breakdown. At the time, I was writing so productively that I didn’t think in terms of breakdowns—although my friends were beginning to use that word.

Newland was officially worried about me, as were Jeremy Tarcher and Ed Towle. Unwilling to leave my little neighborhood, I met each of these men for lunch and grew cross with them when they questioned my regime, some twenty herbal remedies prescribed by the Sedona healer. By now Emma and I had added in long daily bike rides. Our days were productive both musically and in terms of literary output. They were just terrifying emotionally. ccustomed to a network of close friends, Emma was uncomfortable in Los Angeles. She did not feel that she fit in. My sober mentors began to express alarm at my increasingly dramatic thinking. I was sober long years, but I was standing too near the abyss.

“Just don’t drink,” I lectured myself. “Just hang in one day at a time.” And one day at a time I did hang in, writing music, writing essays, and fearing more and more for my sanity. All I could manage was my little routine. My friends were near, but they seemed very far away.

Instead of taking a pill to feel better, I impulsively acquired two small puppies, a cocker spaniel and a West Highland terrier. We set up little runs for them and would sit on the lawn in the sunshine, watching their antics. Nature remained preternaturally seductive to me. The gardens of Nowita Place changed seasons, and I gloried in their beauty. Parrots flocked in the trees overhead. A raven set up sentinel on a neighboring A-frame.

And so we invited a small group of friends that included the playwright George Furth, whose longtime lover had recently, suddenly died. As we sat around chatting after dinner, George asked me what I was working on next. I told him I had an idea of writing a musical about ghosts in Manhattan.

Waking early the next morning, I found I had a head full of music. All feelings of being shaky were swept aside by its imperious flow. A beautiful song began to unfurl itself. I raced to keep up, grabbing for notebook and tape recorder.

I no sooner finished with one song than a second was waiting in the wings. Now I was on familiar territory. I knew how to just take dictation and let the music move through me. And this music was so enjoyable! Rollicking comic songs played in my head. Beautiful ballads woke me. George Furth had set off a tempest of music with his enthusiasm. Driving Emma to her viola lesson, navigating five lanes of fast-moving traffic, I suddenly “heard” an intricately rhymed comic aria. “Quick!” I said to Emma. “Take this down!” I sang it to her, and she did.

If music has charms to soothe the savage beast, it also had charms to soothe me. Rosemary Welden loved the new songs, and her enjoyment triggered still more of them. The more music I wrote, the more normal I felt. Just as Bernice Hill had predicted, my writing seemed to smooth out again. Its tone became less harsh and agitated. Good humor reappeared. Even better, a small publishing company contacted me about publishing my book of short stories, Popcorn: Hollywood Stories. Several of the stories were selected for a reading series, and I looked forward to hearing them done by good actors. Life seemed to be taking a turn toward the sunny side. Reality was stabilizing again—and then it all went tilt.

Without warning John Newland was hospitalized, the victim of a sudden savage stroke. His wife wanted him to have no visitors. And so we watched and waited, waited and watched, praying for his recovery—but he did not recover. Instead, he suffered a second, even more severe stroke, and then he died. I got the phone call just as I was leaving for the reading of Popcorn. My immediate sense was not of his absence but of his presence. John was with me, I felt, as we drove over the mountains to the theater in the valley where the reading was being held.

“You will always be able to reach me,” I remembered John promising me once when we had talked about the difference in our ages and the fact that he would in all probability die first. “Just remember that you will always be able to reach me,” he had assured me.

In the days following John’s death, I did try to reach him. I simply could not accept that he was gone. I played and replayed our last lunch together, angry with myself that we hadn’t started a new project. How could I have been so blind? Why didn’t I realize how truly old he was? I called a famed medium and asked if she could make contact. She tried, and there was John’s voice coming through. “Hello, baby,” he said clear as a bell through the ether. “Was he in show business?” the medium asked.

Areta did not want a funeral or a memorial. It fell to me to organize a small gathering for John at my house on Nowita Place. It was a crystalline evening with the January air as clear as a goblet. We sat in a circle and spoke of what John had meant to us. Everyone missed him acutely. He had seemed to us all to be larger than life, and it was difficult to picture life going on without him. “Without him” loomed so huge.