THE SUN RISES GOLDEN OVER THE APPALACHIANS. AS WE PASS THROUGH LOYALSOCK (YES, HONEST) THE GRASS IN INDIAN PARK IS FROSTED WHITE. WE ARE SLIDING ALONG THE BANKS OF THE SUSQUEHANNA, THE RIVER THAT IN 1935 FLOODED the foyer of the theater we have just left. Five feet of water in the auditorium. Now that’s a tough audience.
We are heading east toward the rising sun, sliding between the long ridges of the Appalachians. Pale barley spears of dry corn catch the golden light. Round balls of pumpkins dot the fields like some recently abandoned game. Deer stand alert among the white rime of the fields. Scattered whitewood homesteads appear occasionally through the trees. Patches of wrecked cars. The roadside plants stiffened by frost. Farms and outbuildings and tall silvery spacecraft water towers slide by. There are farm machinery sales with shiny green tractors. This is Amish country, and there’s a local fight about whether their buggies should have taillights: they’re not in the Bible.
“Some people feel that ‘The Penis Song’ is a little sexist….”
“Well, that ’ s right, Eric, but people do forget that there are more than four billion inches of penis on this planet at any one moment. ”
The landscape here is deeply scarred and wrinkled along a northeast angle. We head north for a while. We’re in western Pennsylvania heading back to Jersey for the last of five shows in a row. We are a fighting unit. We can roll out the show, set up, play, and move on. Our two ships trained and ready. Our crew, under Skip, our ever buoyant Number One, always one jump ahead of the problems. Our tech staff, led by Gilli, who strides about where Teamsters fear to tread. Scott, on guitars, ever loyal, ever encouraging—“Have a great show, Boss.” Tom, our merch guy, tattooed and dome-headed with his trailer packed with brown parcels, always counting. Larry Mah, quietly smiling and ever efficient as he wires us for sound and adjusts the balance in an empty theater. Larry sits out front. He is our eyes and ears. We rely on him not only for sound but to tell us what the audience is thinking and feeling. Then there is my magnificent cast: John, the stalwart, seated onstage all night with his handcrafted organ; Peter, the sneering, loud and always dependable; and Jennifer, the unflappable flapper.
As we drive through the fall colors this morning I’m thinking of my mother’s death. Perhaps it’s the time of year, almost Halloween, when she came for her final visit to our old (1929) Spanish-style home in Hollywood. Like all northern mums she was very proud of what I had achieved and damned if she’d say anything about it to me. She lived in Shakespeare’s Stratford, a pleasant town. This time she would come out for a few weeks and see Lily in the Halloween parade and then fly home. She was eighty-three, though sprightly, and it was good to see the way the fine October sunshine and the warm Jacuzzi brought a glow of health to her. We were getting on extremely well, and she was having a very good time, not always the case with our Norah, who could lapse into a gloom thicker than a northern fog.
I remember the day only too well. There had been some rain, and I took her arm as we took a little walk in the garden. Suddenly she slipped, and I turned and caught her, but not before she dashed her leg against the wooden railroad ties that formed the garden steps. It seemed to be so little, but when I looked down I was horrified. She was pouring blood, and I could see bone. Jesus. I lifted her bodily and carried her up to the lawn and sat her on a chair, grabbing towels to stanch the flow of blood, which was everywhere. She was losing consciousness, and I held her until she came back, and then I said, “Hang on,” and went to dial 911. The emergency services responded instantly, and I heard the wail of the siren approaching from just down the road. They ran to her, and the paramedics stopped the bleeding. They lifted her up in a stretcher and carried her out of the garden to an ambulance. I followed in my car to St. Joseph’s in the Valley, where she was patched up and bandaged and was soon comfortable in a pleasant room with a window and a little view of Disney. Next day I was booked on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno next door at NBC, and Jay was very kind about my mum and wished her well and sent her an enormous basket of goodies. (A very kindly man, Jay.) It seemed to be just a scare, but for one worrying thing: her skin was so old and thin the surgeon was worried about how to stitch her up. They were talking of a skin graft. Perhaps it was the anxiety; perhaps it was the stress; but a day later I got to the hospital, and things had got a lot worse. She was back in emergency.
“She’s had a minor heart attack,” I was told. “She is in discomfort, but we can’t operate. She is just too old. We’ve given her something to help her heart.”
The something was a painful bladder thing that she hated. Couldn’t they operate? In the end it was Norah who decided. She was tired of the incessant medical procedures, the discomfort, the pain. She would call me in the middle of the night and beg me to ask them to give her something to finish her off.
“Please, luvvie, ask them to put me out of my misery.”
“I’m not going to do that, Mum.”
“Please, Eric, I can’t take any more like this.”
“Mum, it’s a Catholic hospital. They’re not going to switch you off.”
And I’d drive over and hold her hand and ask for more painkillers.
I still remember the white-faced doctor, weary with exhaustion, telling me there was nothing they could do.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we can make her comfortable, but she is going to die.”
“What?? When?”
“A week or two.”
They must see so much grief, these poor guys. Working night and day with death as a companion. We are a remarkable species, you know. I was, of course, overcome, but my family rallied, Tania, Lily, and our lovely nanny, Wee; little Lily bravely entertained her beloved Gran with pictures and drawings. We decided that since there was nothing to be done we would get her out of the hospital and at least let her die at home. St. Joe’s have a very good hospice service and soon we had a hospital bed downstairs and an IV and a trained nurse to come in once a day, and Norah had morphine and we put on all her favorite music, The Mikado, songs of the thirties, “Pennies from Heaven.” We would watch by her deathbed. She would go out surrounded by her loved ones. My son, Carey, flew in from Australia and by extreme good fortune, not only is he a Buddhist, but he had been working with the terminally ill. So he held her hand and sat with her, and she said all the things to me you could ever wish for. How she loved us all, how she was proud of us and thankful for everything—all the things she had trouble expressing in her life she now said. It was moving, and heartrending and wonderful because we all knew she was dying, and we even had Holy Grail badges saying I’M NOT DEAD YET. She died suddenly one morning. It was Tania’s birthday. We had gone out for a quick walk, and when we came back Carey said simply, “She’s gone.”
We had a little ceremony in the garden to give thanks and say good-bye. No funerals. I hate funerals. Who would come? All her friends were in Stratford, and her family scattered in the U.K. and Canada. So we chose instead to gather in the garden and hold hands and say a few words from our hearts. It was touching and simple. Norah, born in South Shields, died in Hollywood. She would have liked that. And for me, well, it was blessed. She might have keeled over on her own in her flat in Stratford and not been found for days. I might never have seen her or ever experienced the joy of the things she said to me at the end. She made her dying one of the best things she ever did in her life. I was proud of her. She departed with dignity, at home, surrounded by her loved ones. She wanted me to sing “Always Look on the Bright Side.” But I couldn’t do that. I’d never get through it.