I believe I can offer some interesting answers to those questions.
Thirty-one years ago, on March 5, 1982, Saturday Night Live and
Animal House star John Belushi died of a drug overdose at the Chateau
Marmont in Los Angeles—which, bear with me a moment, has more to do with the
current coverage of the budget sequester than you might initially
think.*
Two years after Belushi died, Bob Woodward published Wired:
The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi. While the Watergate sleuth
might seem an odd choice to tackle such a subject, the book came about because
both he and Belushi grew up in the same small town of Wheaton, Ill. They had
friends in common. Belushi, who despised Richard Nixon, was a big Woodward fan,
and after he died, his widow, Judy Belushi, approached Woodward in his role as a
reporter for the Washington Post. She had questions about the LAPD’s handling of
Belushi’s death and asked Woodward to look into it. He took the access she
offered and used it to write a scathing, lurid account of Belushi’s drug use and
death.
When Wired came out, many of Belushi’s friends and family denounced it
as biased and riddled with factual errors. “Exploitative, pulp trash,” in the
words of Dan Aykroyd. Wired was so wrong, Belushi’s manager said, it made you
think Nixon might be innocent. Woodward insisted the book was balanced and
accurate. “I reported this story thoroughly,” he told Rolling Stone. Of the
book’s critics, he said, “I think they wish I had created a portrait of someone
who was larger than life, larger than he was, and that, somehow, this portrait
would all come out different. But that’s a fantasy, not journalism.” Woodward
being Woodward, he was given the benefit of the doubt. Belushi’s reputation
never recovered.
Twenty years later, in 2004, Judy Belushi hired me, then an aspiring
comedy writer, to help her with a new biography of John, this one titled
Belushi: A Biography. As her coauthor, I handled most of the legwork,
including all of the interviews and most of the research. What started as a fun
project turned out to be a rather fascinating and unique experiment. Over the
course of a year, page by page, source by source, I re-reported and rewrote one
of Bob Woodward’s books. As far as I know, it’s the only time that’s ever been
done.
Wired is an anomaly in the Woodward catalog, the only book
he’s ever written about a subject other than Washington. As such, it’s rarely
cited by his critics. But Wired’s outlier status is the very thing that makes it
such a fascinating piece of Woodwardology. Because he was forced to work outside
of his comfort zone, his strengths and his weaknesses can be seen in sharper
relief. In Hollywood, his sources weren’t top secret and confidential. They were
some of the most famous people in America. The methodology behind the book is
right out there in the open, waiting for someone to do exactly what I did: take
it apart and see how Woodward does what he does.
Wired is an infuriating piece of work. There’s a reason Woodward’s
critics consistently come off as hysterical ninnies: He doesn’t make Jonah
Lehrer–level mistakes. There’s never a smoking gun like an outright falsehood or
a brazen ethical breach. And yet, in the final product, a lot of what Woodward
writes comes off as being not quite right—some of it to the point where it can
feel quite wrong. There’s no question that he frequently ferrets out information
that other reporters don’t. But getting the scoop is only part of the equation.
Once you have the facts, you have to present those facts in context and in
proportion to other facts in order to accurately reflect reality. It’s here that
Woodward fails.
Over and over during the course of my reporting I’d hear a story that
conflicted with Woodward’s account in Wired. I’d say, “Aha! I’ve got him!” I’d
run back to Woodward’s index, look up the offending passage, and realize that,
well, no, he’d put down the mechanics of the story more or less as they’d
happened. But he’d so mangled the meaning and the context that his version had
nothing to do with what I concluded had actually transpired. Take the filming of
the famous cafeteria scene from Animal House, which Belushi totally improvised
on set with no rehearsal. What you see in the film is the first and last time he
ever performed that scene. Here’s the story as recounted by Belushi’s co-star
James Widdoes:
One of the things that was so spectacular to watch during the
filming was the incredible connection that [Belushi] and Landis had. During the
scene on the cafeteria line, Landis was talking to Belushi all the way through
it, and Belushi was just taking it one step further. What started out as Landis
saying, “Okay, now grab the sandwich,” became, in John’s hands, taking the
sandwich, squeezing and bending it until it popped out of the cellophane,
sucking it into his mouth, and then putting half the sandwich back. He would
just go a little further each time.
Co-star Tim Matheson remembered that John “did the entire cafeteria
line scene in one take. I just stood by the camera, mesmerized.” Other witnesses
agree. Every person who recounted that incident to me used it as an example of
Belushi’s virtuoso talent and his great relationship with his director. Landis
could whisper suggestions to Belushi on the fly, and he’d spin it into comedy
gold.
Now here it is as Woodward presents it:
Landis quickly discovered that John could be lazy and undisciplined.
They were rehearsing a cafeteria scene, a perfect vehicle to set up Bluto’s
insatiable cravings. Landis wanted John to walk down the cafeteria line and load
his tray until it was a physical burden. As the camera started, Landis stood to
one side shouting: “Take that! Put that in your pocket! Pile that on the tray!
Eat that now, right there!”
John followed each order, loading his pockets and tray, stuffing
his mouth with a plate of Jello in one motion.
First off, Woodward wrongly calls the cafeteria scene a rehearsal, when
half the point of the story is that Belushi pulled it off without ever
rehearsing it once. Also, there’s actually nothing in the anecdote to indicate
laziness or lack of discipline on Belushi’s part, yet Woodward chooses to
establish the scene using those words. The implication is that Belushi was so
unfocused and unprepared that he couldn’t make it through the scene without the
director beside him telling him what to do, which is not what took place. When I
interviewed him, Landis disputed that he ever referred to Belushi as lazy or
undisciplined. “The greatest crime of that book,” Landis says of Wired, “is that
if you read it and you’d just assume that John was a pig and an asshole, and he
was anything but. He could be abrupt and unpleasant, but most of the time he was
totally charming and people adored him.”
The wrongness in Woodward’s reporting is always ever so subtle. SNL
writer Michael O'Donoghue—who died before I started the book but who videotaped
an interview with Judy years before—told this story about how Belushi loved to
mess with him:
I am very anal-retentive, and John used to come over and just move
things around, just move things a couple of inches, drop a paper on the floor,
miss an ashtray a little bit until finally he could see me just tensing up. That
was his idea of a fine joke. Another joke he used to do was to sit on
me.
When put through the Woodward filter, this becomes:
A compulsively neat person, O’Donoghue was always picking up and
straightening his office. Frequently, John came in and destroyed the order in a
minute, shifting papers, furniture or pencils or dropping cigarette
ashes.
Again, Woodward’s account is not wrong. It’s just … wrong. In his
version, Belushi is not a prankster but a jerk.
Then there’s an anecdote related to me by Blair Brown, Belushi’s
co-star in Continental Divide. In that movie, Belushi was cast as Ernie
Souchack, a straight-man role in a romantic comedy. On the day they were to film
the movie’s love scene, Belushi, not known for his matinee good looks, was
terribly nervous. Here’s what happened, in Brown’s words:
If you’ve ever been a part of one of these movie love scenes,
they’re just deeply peculiar. … You’re wearing this robe, and all you’ve got
under that is this little bitty underwear that you’re going to still be wearing
when you do the scene.
I don’t think John had ever done a love scene before, and he was
clearly nervous about doing it. He just lay there in bed trying to think up all
the funny names for penis that he could: the Hose of Horror … Mr. Wiggly. … We
were weeping with laughter it was so funny. It was just like watching a little
kid stalling because he doesn’t want to eat his vegetables. “Oh, oh, wait—you
know what else? Here’s another one …”
After a while we finally had to say, “Okay, okay, John. Now you
have to do the love scene.” He was just stalling and stalling and stalling
because he was so nervous.
Here’s the scene as written in Wired:
The script called for a love scene, in bed, in a hotel room. They
were to be nude under the covers. John was very nervous preparing for the
shooting and kept making jokes, trying to get them to remember all the known
names for the male sex organ. They came up with many—“the hose of horror,” “Mr.
Wiggly’s dick,” and “one-eyed snake in a turtleneck.” Brown didn’t mind the
conversation, but she thought it was an inappropriate prelude to a love
scene.
Twenty years later, when Brown told me about the love scene, she was
still upset at how Woodward had portrayed it in Wired. “It was my first
experience of getting tricked by a journalist,” she said. “Woodward appeared as
if he really wanted to know what went on, and I actually had marvelous times
with Belushi. But the thing that was depressing when I read the book was that he
had taken the facts that I told him, and put an attitude to them that was not
remotely right.”
Wired is like that throughout. Like a funhouse mirror, Woodward’s prose
distorts what it purports to reflect. Moments of tearful drama are rendered as
tersely as an accounting of Belushi’s car-service receipts. Friendly jokes are
stripped of their humor and turned into boorish annoyances. And when Woodward
fails to convey the subtleties of those little moments, he misses the bigger
picture. Belushi’s nervousness about doing that love scene in Continental Divide
was an important detail. When that movie came out, it tanked at the box office.
After months of fighting to stay clean, Belushi fell off the wagon and started
using heavily again. Six months later he was dead. Woodward missed the real
meaning of what went on.
Woodward also makes peculiar decisions about what facts he uses as
evidence. His detractors like to say that he’s little more than a
stenographer—and they’re right. In Wired, he takes what he is told and simply
puts it down in chronological order with no sense of proportionality, nuance, or
understanding.
John Belushi was a recreational drug user for roughly one-third of his
33 years, and he was a hard-core addict for the last five or six, from which you
can subtract one solid year of sobriety. Yet in Wired, which has 403 pages of
narrative text, the total number of pages that make some reference to drugs is
something like 295, or nearly 75 percent. Belushi’s drug use is surely a key
part of his life—drugs are what ended it, after all—but shouldn’t a writer also
be interested in what led his subject to this substance abuse in the first
place? If you want to know why someone was a cocaine addict for the last six
years of his life, the answer is probably hiding somewhere in the first 27
years. But Woodward chooses to largely ignore that period, and in doing so he
again misses the point. In terms of illuminating its subject, Wired is about as
useful as a biography of Buddy Holly that only covers time he spent on
airplanes.
Of all the people I interviewed, SNL writer and current Sen. Al
Franken, referencing his late comedy partner Tom Davis, offered the most apt
description of Woodward’s one-sided approach to the drug use in Belushi’s story:
“Tom Davis said the best thing about Wired,” Franken told me. “He said it’s as
if someone wrote a book about your college years and called it Puked. And all it
was about was who puked, when they puked, what they ate before they puked and
what they puked up. No one read Dostoevsky, no one studied math, no one fell in
love, and nothing happened but people puking.”
To get a sense of what Franken’s getting at, here’s a couple of sample
entries from Wired’s index:
Belushi, John:
as Blues Brother, 16, 22, 89, 139-42,
146-47, 161-62, 181-82, 186, 206, 334-35
Belushi, John:
cocaine habit of, 15, 17-33, 64-65, 76, 81, 93-94, 100, 103-05, 110, 128,
142-43, 145, 155-56, 159-60, 163-65, 170, 187-89, 193, 205-6, 218-19, 221,
243-44, 247-50, 262, 273, 297, 298, 301, 303, 306-8, 310-11, 316-53, 359,
361-65, 372-74, 385-89, 392-93, 395-400, 413-14, 422
That’s just the coke. It goes on to include “marijuana smoked by,”
“mescaline taken by,” and “mushrooms (psilocybin) eaten by.” And those are just
the drugs that start with the letter “M.”
Of course, John Belushi did do all of those drugs, and there’s little
doubt that the drug stories Woodward uses actually happened. But he just goes
around piling up these stories with no regard for what is actually relevant.
Just to compare and contrast: At one point, Woodward stops the narrative cold to
document a single 24-hour coke binge for the better part of eight pages. Nothing
much happens in these eight pages except for Belushi going around L.A. doing a
bunch of coke; it’s not a key moment in Belushi’s life, but it takes on an
outsized weight in Wired’s narrative simply because Woodward happened to find
the limo driver who drove Belushi around and witnessed the whole thing,
providing him with a lot of juicy if not particularly important information.
Meanwhile, the funeral of Belushi’s grandmother—which was the pivotal moment
when he hit bottom, resolved to get clean, and kicked off his year of
hard-fought sobriety—that event is glossed over in a mere 42 words, and a
quarter of those words are dedicated to the cost of the plane tickets to fly to
the funeral ($4,066, per Woodward, as if it matters to the story).
Whenever people ask me about John Belushi and the subject of Wired
comes up, I say it’s like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which
all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that
Michael Jordan wasn’t very good at playing basketball.
It’s not that Woodward is a manipulator with a partisan agenda. He
doesn’t alter key evidence in order to serve a particular thesis.
Inconsequential details about rehearsing movie dialogue are rendered just as
ham-handedly as critical facts about Belushi’s cocaine addiction. Woodward has
an unmatched skill for digging up information, but he doesn’t know what to do
with that information once he finds it.
All of which helps explain the recent Sperling affair. What did
Woodward do? He took a comment from a source, missed or misinterpreted the
subtext of what was being said, and went on to characterize it in a way that
bore no resemblance to reality. What’s damning about the Sperling emails—and
Wired—is that we can go back to the source and see the meaning and subtext for
ourselves; normally with Woodward’s confidential reporting, we can’t.
After Wired was published, Woodward said to Rolling Stone that
there was some warmth to Belushi that he “didn’t capture,” but he also passed
the buck to his sources, saying he tried to get them to “talk about the good
times” but kept getting horrible drug stories or stories that didn’t in his
estimation reflect the true Belushi. “When you do something like this,” he told
Rolling Stone, “you have to learn that people can’t see reality, especially in
Hollywood.”
I spoke to almost all of those same sources myself. Not only did Belushi’s
contemporaries from Saturday Night Live and Hollywood offer colorful tales of a
beloved if troubled and complicated man, they themselves are some of the
greatest writers, performers, and storytellers of the last quarter-century. They
tell good stories. The problem was the filter those stories were put
through.
Granted, I wasn’t working from the same notes and transcripts as
Woodward. People’s memories change. Stories evolve over 20 years of telling.
Surely there were people who were mad at Belushi in 1983 who prefer to look back
on him fondly today. And if it were one or two people disputing Woodward’s
characterizations, you might chalk it up to rose-tinted glasses. You might do
the same if it were nine or 10 people. But when it’s practically everyone, when
person after person sits down across from you and remembers, specifically, as
Blair Brown did, this is what Woodward mischaracterized and this is really what
happened, a pretty clear pattern begins to emerge.
It’s also easy to discount Wired by saying that Woodward just
doesn’t have a sense of humor and was out of his depth writing about a comedian.
And that’s true as far as it goes. But the stories from Animal House
and Continental Divide aren’t really about comedy so much as they’re
about human beings interacting, which is a lot of what goes on at the White
House, too. The simple truth of Wired is that Bob Woodward, deploying all of the
talent and resources for which he is famous, produced something that is a
failure as journalism. And when you imagine Woodward using the same approach to
cover secret meetings about drone strikes and the budget sequester and other
issues of vital national importance, well, you have to stop and shudder.
++
*Correction, March 13, 2013: This article originally stated that
John Belushi died of a "cocaine overdose"; Belushi had taken a speedball, a
combination of cocaine and heroin, the night he died, and the coroner's report
concluded that either drug may have been ultimately responsible for his
death
At 10 p.m. on a Friday night in a private room on the 14th Floor of
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital on 68th and York Avenue, my mother was lying in
her bed hallucinating, in that dream space people go on their way to being gone.
She spoke of seeing trees, possibly a forest. And she mentioned to Nick,
my stepfather, that she had been to the theater where her play was showing and
that the audience was full. In reality, she had not left the hospital in a
month, and the play, “Lucky Guy,” was nearly a year away from opening.
My brother, Max, and I stood there in disbelief. Though it had been weeks
since her blood count showed any sign of improvement, the gravity of the
situation had crept up on us. Mom’s housekeeper, Linda Diaz, who had worked for
her for 25 years, was in the corner sobbing.
At some point, a team of doctors and nurses arrived to assess the
situation, and Mom became slightly more lucid.
“Can you tell me your name?” one of them asked.
“Nora Ephron,” she said, nodding.
“Can you tell me where you are?”
“New York Hospital.”
“Who is the president of the United States?”
At this point, my mother looked annoyed, gave a roll of the eyes and
refused to answer the question, which later on was the source of some debate
between Max and me about whether her sarcasm and humor remained even as her
memory and focus faded or whether she was simply irritated at being treated like
an infant.
A few hours later, after falling asleep for a short time, she woke up, ate
ice cream with Max and me and was able to talk with some coherence about Jerry
Sandusky’s conviction earlier that day.
When Max said, “Mom, I’m going to miss you so much,” she said: “Miss me?
Well, I’m not dead yet.”
For most of the next three days, before she entered a coma and died, she
was sort of herself, asking for the papers and doing the crossword. On Sunday,
one of the nurses arrived to give her medication and innocently asked if she was
planning on writing about what was happening to her. My mother simply said,
“No.”
I took this more or less at face value until after her death, as plans
moved forward with her play “Lucky Guy,” and it occurred to me that part of what
she was trying to do by writing about someone else’s death was to understand her
own.
Illness, and how a person handles it, was not the first thing on my mom’s
mind when she began writing “Lucky Guy” back in 1999. At that point, she wasn’t
even sick.
Based on real events, “Lucky Guy” is about a tabloid journalist named Mike
McAlary. In the early ’90s, he became one of the highest-paid newspaper
columnists in the country. Crime was still rampant in New York, and the Internet
had not yet destroyed the economics of the newspaper business. My mother said
that she saw his career as “the end of something,” a bookend to a time when
reporters could still believe there was power in the job; when Elaine’s was
still one of the city’s most glamorous rooms; when much of Times Square still
belonged to prostitutes and drug dealers; and when the West Village had not yet
been taken over by hedge-fund magnates and Russian oligarchs.
My mother knew a lot about McAlary’s world. She dreamed of being a
newspaper reporter from the time she was in high school, and wound up spending
much of her 20s working at The New York Post. Moreover, McAlary was what she
liked to call “a problematic human being.” And after a decade of writing and
directing romantic comedies, a lead character who wasn’t entirely likable seemed
like a good way to keep herself from getting boxed in.
The project, however, kept getting sidelined. There was a movie,
“Bewitched.” And a play Off Broadway, “Love, Loss, and What I Wore,” which she
wrote with her sister Delia. Then another movie, as well as two anthologies of
her essays. Another problem she kept running into: She’d conceived “Lucky Guy”
(then called “Stories About McAlary”) as a film for HBO, but the structure was
unconventional, relying largely on the other characters to tell their versions
of what happened to him, essentially breaking the fourth wall. And everyone,
including her, was unsure of how it was going to work on-screen.
Then in 2008, Colin Callender, the man guiding the development of “Lucky
Guy” at HBO, left the network.
Callender had taken a personal interest in the
project because he’d known McAlary. Shortly after striking out on his own as an
independent producer, he called my mother with a new idea: What if her script
was not a movie but a play, where characters regularly talk to the audience?
Two weeks later, she handed him a new draft. By this time, there was
something else pulling her toward McAlary as well.
McAlary got the scoop of his life just nine months after receiving a
diagnosis of advanced colon cancer. In 1997, he wrote the story of a Haitian
immigrant named Abner Louima who was brutally assaulted by a New York City
police officer. In the spring of 1998, McAlary won the Pulitzer Prize for his
work. On Christmas of that same year, he died at 41. Shortly before his death,
he was quoted as saying: “If you are a doctor or a lawyer, you take the case. If
you’re a reporter, you write the story. I didn’t think about being sick.”
When Mom returned to working on the script in 2008, this was something she
knew all about, though it was a secret confined to a tiny group of people: my
stepfather, my brother, her sisters, a couple of close friends and me.
In late 2005, my mother went to see her doctor because she had been
feeling, as she later told me, “punky.” She had always been a little anemic, but
now, she appeared to be getting worse, with fevers and inexplicable infections.
After years of seeing a trainer two to three times a week and being pretty fit
for a woman in her mid-60s, she found herself dreading having to climb stairs.
She eventually made her way to J. Gregory Mears, a hematologist at Columbia
University, who quickly gave her a diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndrome, an
aggressive blood disorder that destroys the body’s ability to make healthy blood
cells and ward off infections. The only known cure for it is a stem-cell
transplant, but stem-cell transplants are especially difficult in older
patients. Among other potential complications, the body may reject the donor
cells or develop graft-versus-host disease, in which the transplanted cells can
attack the patient.
This is what happened to Susan Sontag, who also died of
acute myeloid leukemia brought on by MDS, and had many of the same doctors as my
mother. Discussing the aftermath of her unsuccessful transplant in an article
for this magazine in 2005, Sontag’s son, David Rieff, wrote, “To me ‘torture’ is
not too strong or hyperbolic a word.”
My mother had seen her closest friend, Judy Corman, go through a series of
increasingly painful treatments that didn’t do much but extend her suffering
from the cancer that eventually killed her. Between watching this and reading
about what happened to Sontag, Mom became unambiguous in her opposition to
testing fate, to gambling away comfort for the remote possibility of being
cured. She was determined to have a “good death.”
I’m not sure what would have happened had a stem-cell transplant been a
viable option — if her sisters had been a match, for instance — but
thankfully, it didn’t come to that. Soon after my mother went to see Mears,
Jerome Groopman, a doctor at Harvard with extensive experience in treating
cancer, was called in for a second opinion. After running a series of tests, he
concluded that she quite likely had an unusual variant of MDS, which could be
treated with less drastic measures.
Over time, the worry I felt when she first told me about the disease began
to fade. We knew the statistics, but statistics — as Alice McAlary recounted to
Mom about her husband, Mike — get you only so far. Besides, my mother had never
been ordinary.
A moderate dose of prednisone helped stabilize her blood count for a couple
of years. When the prednisone stopped working, she went to see Stephen Nimer at
Memorial Sloan-Kettering. He put her on Vidaza, a low-dose form of chemotherapy
with few side effects. Along with monthly blood transfusions, it effectively
controlled the disease for two years.
Then while on a trip in the South of France in 2010, she went swimming and
felt something stab her arm. She believed she had been stung by a jellyfish but
was not sure. A few weeks later, she wound up in a hospital in Los Angeles with
an inexplicable bacterial infection that led to a bump on her arm the size of a
tangerine.
Miraculously, when she got out, she was transfusion-independent. Her
doctors had no idea what had happened, except to speculate that her bone marrow
responded to a threat in an unusually dramatic way and was now producing healthy
blood cells and platelets. My mother was not one to go in for superstition or
miracles — godlessness was for her a form of religion, a belief in
self-sufficiency above all else — but she was near certain her recovery had
something to do with the jellyfish.
At various points over the years, she considered coming clean to her
friends and colleagues about her illness. But she knew the effect it could have
on her career. Certainly, she could continue writing books and essays. But
getting a movie made would be impossible, because no insurance company would
sign off on it. Arguably, she could do a play, but bringing it to Broadway would
be difficult, given that the development process takes years. Beyond that, what
my mother didn’t want was to have her illness define her, turning every
conversation into a series of “how are you?”s.
All her life, she subscribed to the belief that “everything is copy,” a
phrase her mother, Phoebe, used to say. In fact, when Phoebe was on her
deathbed, she told my mother, “Take notes.” She did. What both of them believed
was that writing has the power to turn the bad things that happen to you into
art (although “art” was a word she hated). “When you slip on a banana peel,
people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s
your laugh,” she wrote in her anthology “I Feel Bad About My Neck.” “So you
become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.”
And she applied that maxim everywhere. She wrote a magazine article about
The New York Post and her former boss there, Dorothy Schiff (“It is a terrible
newspaper. The reason it is, of course, is Dorothy Schiff”); her breasts (“If I
had them I would have been a completely different person”); even getting fat
injections in her lips (“I looked like a Ubangi, so I never did it again”).
There was also an entire book and movie devoted to her divorce from my father.
(But never mind that.)
The thing is, you can’t really turn a fatal illness into a joke. It is
almost the only disclosure that turns you into the victim rather than the hero
of your story. For her, tragedy was a pit of clichés. So she stayed quiet,
though clues were sprinkled through much of what she wrote during the six years
she was sick.
They were there in “I Feel Bad About My Neck”: “Death is a sniper. It
strikes people you love, people you like, people you know, it’s everywhere. You
could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again you could be.”
They were there in “I Remember Nothing”: “The realization that I may have
only a few good years remaining has hit me with real force, and I have done a
lot of thinking as a result. I would like to have come up with something
profound, but I haven’t. I try to figure out what I really want to do every day,
I try to say to myself, If this is one of the last days of my life, am I doing
exactly what I want to be doing? I am low. My idea of a perfect day is a frozen
custard from Shake Shack and a walk in the park. (Followed by a Lactaid).”
And they were there in her last edits of “Lucky Guy,” the final piece of
work she completed.
My mother didn’t know Mike McAlary personally, but she
was certainly familiar with his kind. And what details she didn’t know were
quickly filled in by his friends, colleagues and relatives, almost all of whom
she interviewed.
McAlary was born in Oahu, Hawaii, and he grew up in Goffstown, N.H. After
graduating from Syracuse University, he went to work at The Boston Herald
American, covering sports, then eventually scored a job at New York Newsday.
There, he made a name for himself as a particularly aggressive reporter,
covering crime and police corruption. After that he began to bounce back and
forth between The New York Daily News and The New York Post, getting bigger and
better contracts each time he made a move.
In 1993, he broke his contract with The Daily News to become the
highest paid reporter at The Post, with a salary of $945,750 over three years.
The Daily News was granted a preliminary injunction that prevented him from
making the move, and McAlary wound up with too much time on his hands. After a
night out at a Yankees game, he totaled his car on the F.D.R. Drive. His
injuries were so serious that he spent several days in a coma and a month in the
hospital. Rupert Murdoch, who hired him at The Post, never called or came to see
him. But Mort Zuckerman, who owned The News, did. So he stayed at The News.
Not long after McAlary returned to work, he made a career-killing
mistake. A woman in Prospect Park had reported being raped, but McAlary’s
sources had doubts. He was told that the results of the rape kit had come back
negative for sperm, that it was only a matter of time before she was found out.
But the most crucial points in McAlary’s stories turned out to be wrong. The
woman had been raped. What the source didn’t realize was that no sperm didn’t
necessarily mean no semen. McAlary had made no attempt to speak with the victim
herself, an act of laziness that his supporters believed was partially
attributable to his accident.
The News reduced the frequency of his column. The official explanation
was that he was writing his novel. It was around this time that he began to get
sick. He was jaundiced and losing weight. In conversations, he seemed dazed.
“He still had these symptoms,” said his widow, Alice, when I went to
see her last month. “You have to remember, they put him all back together again.
So when he started having issues with his colon, his stomach, all that stuff, we
attributed them to the accident.”
By the time McAlary got his diagnosis of
colon cancer, it had already progressed to an advanced stage.
“It was a desperate situation,” said Ed Hayes, one of McAlary’s closest
friends and the man who negotiated all of his contracts. “The nurse took one
look and said: ‘Forget this guy. He’s a dead man. There’s no hope for him.’ ”
Nevertheless, he underwent surgery to remove as much of the cancer as
possible, then started chemotherapy in 1997. He was hooked up to the chemo drip
when he received a tip that a man had been severely assaulted by a police
officer. He drove from his treatment to see Abner Louima in the hospital. He was
the first reporter to interview the victim. In horrifying detail, Louima told
him how he’d been wrongfully arrested outside a nightclub and taken back to a
police station, where one of the cops raped him with a plunger.
In a series
of articles, he not only exposed a monstrous incident of police brutality but
started the earliest debate about the Giuliani-era approach to law enforcement.
In short order, McAlary’s career was rehabilitated.
In the play my mother wrote, there’s a scene toward the end, in which
McAlary, sick with cancer, goes to the Poconos to visit his friend Jim Dwyer,
then a columnist at The Daily News. It’s a glorious summer day, and McAlary’s
12-year-old son, Ryan, wants to do a flip off the diving board, but he gets
scared and can’t do it. So McAlary takes off his shirt, walks to the edge of the
diving board and says to him: “When you do these things, you can’t be nervous.
If you think about what can go wrong, if you think about the belly flop, that’s
what’ll happen.”
And then McAlary does the flip himself and makes a perfect landing.
It’s a metaphor, obviously, for his view about life. And I’ve come to
think it might as well have been about my mother. The point is that you don’t
let fear invade your psyche. Because then you might as well be dead.
As she saw him, McAlary was a role model not so much in life, but in
death, in the way that he used writing to maintain his sense of purpose and find
release from his illness. In the six years my mother had MDS, she wrote 100 blog
posts, two books and two plays and directed a movie. There was nothing she could
do about her death but to keep going in the face of it. Work was its own kind of
medicine, even if it could not save her when her MDS came roaring back.
“I’m having a little health crisis.”
That’s how she put it when she called me shortly before Memorial Day
weekend.
I dropped everything, got into a cab and headed up to see her at
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. While I was en route, the phone rang; it was Max,
who told me that Mom’s MDS had turned into leukemia. I think I already knew,
even though I hadn’t asked her for specifics. For six months, Mom’s blasts — the
bad guys that make it difficult for people with MDS and leukemia to produce
healthy platelets and white blood cells — had been creeping back up, indicating
that she was developing a resistance to her medication. Now she would need a
brutal form of chemotherapy if she hoped to survive. Max and his girlfriend,
Rachel, were getting on a plane from L.A.
When I arrived in her room, my mother was crying. She cried a lot that
first night, and then, the next day, she cried some more because she was certain
Christopher Hitchens had done no such thing, and she was devastated at the
thought that she might not be as brave as him about death.
It terrified me to see her cry like that. She loved me, showered me with
gifts, e-mailed or called every time I wrote something that made her proud. But
even after all the weekly meals, the shared vacations, the conversations about
movies and journalism and the debt ceiling and Edith Wharton, I still viewed her
with a mix of awe and intimidation. It wasn’t often that I caught a glimpse of
her vulnerability.
Now there she was, in her Chanel flats and her cream-colored pants and
her black-and-white-striped blouse, looking so pretty and so fragile as she
dabbed her eyes with a Kleenex; and I finally understood what she meant when she
said she was a bird — that she wasn’t just talking about her looks but something
inside as well.
As she explained it that first night, the odds of the chemo working
were below 50 percent, and even if it did, it would probably not buy her more
than a year and a half or so. “I want to live to be 100,” she said. “I want to
see how things turn out for you and Max.” But she wasn’t sure the chemo was
worth doing for such a limited upside.
I told her that I hoped she would reconsider, that a year and a half is
a lot of time during which something else may emerge as a viable treatment.
Still, I said I would respect whatever she wished to do, that it was her body,
her life, her choice. I think this is what she needed to hear, that we wanted
her to live more than anything but that she was still in control. Because within
minutes, she seemed resigned to the idea that she was going to be nuked, as she
put it.
Forty-eight hours later, she was hooked up to an IV. Her sadness seemed
to lift, and her humor returned. The side effects of the chemo wouldn’t kick in
for at least a week, so she spent her days with Delia powering through a TV
pilot they were writing for Scott Rudin. At night, Nick brought in Shake Shack
or Cuban-Chinese, and we watched episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Binky Urban
(Mom’s book agent and one of her closest friends) and Ken Auletta (a writer for
The New Yorker) were there frequently as well. So was Richard Cohen, the
Washington Post columnist and one of her oldest friends. Because of my mother’s
tremendous sense of will and a modest dose of steroids, the script was finished
before the chemo was.
At first, there were some encouraging signs. She wasn’t in remission,
but the blasts were below 20 percent, which is considered the threshold for
being fully leukemic. Then, about a week and a half later, she got pneumonia. As
her doctors explained it, the body often takes three weeks or so to begin
producing neutrophils after chemotherapy of this type. And neutrophils are the
good guys that defend the body from infections. One day, she would seem to be
getting better; the next, worse. At night she was experiencing heart
palpitations. It was confusing to all of us, including my mother.
So we waited.
We waited as she went on and off oxygen. We waited as her appetite left
her. We waited as she lost her hair, and this I remember vividly, because I did
not see her cry at all. Crying, I believe, is a sign that there’s still hope.
Instead, she seemed sort of numb.
My mother loved looking good. She had her hair blown out weekly. She
wore makeup. She had a closet filled with Prada and Armani. When she realized
that she might be too old to wear a very expensive dress by Azzedine Alaïa that
she bought in Paris, it was like a little arrow to the heart.
She had fallen in love with and married a man who was as fastidious
about presentation as she was. Even in the hospital, day after day, Nick arrived
looking impeccable in his fancy slacks and his beautiful loafers, because
getting dressed up was a way to say to her that things were still normal, that
he hadn’t lost hope. All sorts of men had rejected her when she was younger as
cute but not beautiful. She wrote about it, turned it into a comic riff —
everything is copy — but privately, it was heartbreaking for her until this
noble man came along and made her feel that she was as fabulous to look at as
she was to talk to.
And now, here she was without her hair, confined to a bed, using a
nurse to help her go to the bathroom. It was the beginning of her losing her
dignity. It was the beginning of a bad death.
In the days that followed, conversation became harder, and the silences
grew longer. People who live thousands of miles from their parents often express
regret at not being able to say goodbye, or about having spent too little time
with them during their final days. But being there every day, as I was, produced
its own kind of sorrow. It wasn’t just the big things we were avoiding saying
(although there were certainly some of those). It was the sadness of having run
out of news to deliver, gossip to report, new books and movies to discuss. I
actually believe that had Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes announced their separation
a week earlier, we might have kept her smiling one more night.
On June 18, four weeks after my mother went into the hospital, the
Public Theater held its annual benefit to raise money for Shakespeare in the
Park. For more than a decade, my mother attended the gala every year,
considering it the unofficial beginning of summer. Often it would start to rain
in the middle of the show, and everyone would pull out their umbrellas and wait
for it to pass. But it didn’t matter. It was an evening when her favorite park
in her favorite city turned into an enchanted forest.
The night before the benefit, my mother was able to get out of her
hospital bed, but she couldn’t really speak. She wrote down the names of all the
people she had invited to sit at her table that year and organized the seating
arrangement for me. When I got to Central Park the next evening, it was a mess:
two of her guests had canceled; others knew she was in the hospital but not why;
some appeared not to have been told anything at all and looked puzzled when I
informed them that she and Nick weren’t going to make it.
I was too discombobulated to ask a waiter to please remove the two
empty chairs from the table. I just sat there helplessly, hands clasped
underneath the table, trying to avoid the concerned looks of nearly a dozen
people who suddenly knew that something was rotten in the state of Denmark but
were too polite to say it.
After I got home, this admittedly trivial detail gnawed at me. How
useless I was, how incompetent. I spent nearly 34 years at the foot of one of
New York’s best hostesses and I could not even figure out how to ask a waiter to
take away two chairs. I had failed to pay adequate attention all those years,
and could not even be trusted to do this one small thing for my mother as she
neared the end.
Did she know she was dying that final week, that she was not ever going to
leave the hospital?
Richard Cohen, who spent much of the final weeks in the hospital with
us, says: “She knew. There wasn’t a moment of confusion. I’m certain of that.”
I go back and forth.
Absolutely, she planned for it. She redid her will earlier in the
spring when her blood counts were going the wrong way, typed an exit letter on
her computer, spelling out what she wanted after she died: a party in the
apartment with Champagne and cucumber sandwiches from William Poll; a memorial
held days after. “Get it over with” was the gist of her instructions. She even
supplied the speaker list.
Nevertheless, as she ran out of time, she chose not to acknowledge, at
least explicitly, what was happening to her. One of the last e-mails she sent
went out five days before she died. It was addressed to her film agent, Bryan
Lourd. “I am as sad as you can imagine to report that I have leukemia. Early
reports are not particularly hopeful but not hopeless either.”
The weekend
before she went into a coma, Jerry Groopman called her from Boston. If she
wanted to know, he was prepared to tell her that she had entered the terminal
phase of her illness. She chose not to call him back.
And then there was that conversation with Max, the one in which she
said, “I’m not dead yet.”
In “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” my mother wrote of turning 60: “Denial
has been a way of life for me for many years. I actually believe in denial. It
seemed to me that the only way to deal with a birthday of this sort was to do
everything possible to push it from my mind.”
Some part of me would like to believe this is what she was doing at the
end as well, because it would indicate that her hope remained as she left the
world. But it’s just as likely that she felt too sad to have this conversation
with me. Or that I was too sad to have it with her.
Sunday, June 24, was a
pretty good day. The sun was shining, and Mom spent most of the afternoon on a
couch in the front of her room, doing the crossword puzzle with Max. Binky was
there, as was Richard Cohen and his companion, Mona. Amy stopped by with her
husband, Alan. “We’re going to the Guggenheim,” Amy said. “Do you want anything
from the outside world?”
“Sure,” my mother said. “A de Kooning.”
Another thing she requested was a pineapple milkshake, so Max brought
one from Emack and Bolio’s, made from fresh pineapple. But as far as my mother
was concerned, a milkshake is one thing that’s actually better with crushed
pineapple. Dole.
“When I get out of the hospital, I’m going to go home and I’m going to
make a pineapple milkshake with crushed pineapple, pineapple juice and vanilla
ice cream, and I’m going to drink it and I’m going to die,” she said, savoring
the last word. “It’s going to be great.”
On this day, I told her some things. After she moved to her bed, I said
that sometimes, I thought of the possibility of her not being around and
wondered if I’d ever be able to write again. If I’d even want to. And she told
me that I would, that I would find it within me, and that whatever happened, she
hoped my brother and I would lead the kind of lives where we did stuff big
enough to occasionally say, “Wow, I wish Mom was around for this.”
We stared out at the 59th Street Bridge and tried to remember all the
others that connect Manhattan to the rest of the world. The Brooklyn Bridge. The
Williamsburg Bridge, the Queensboro Bridge, the Triboro Bridge. We got about
halfway before she began to doze off.
On Monday, Nick called to say she’d had another tough night. I got to the
hospital, and there was more blood work, none of it good. The blasts were
everywhere. She didn’t have a single neutrophil.
Hours later, she began to drift in and out of consciousness. We took
turns holding her hand. Delia would come, then Max, then me, then Amy, then
Binky, then Richard. Nick sat beside her and wept.
“In, out, in, out,” she said, waving her hands at the windows. Also:
“This is it,” which she said in a tone that seemed to be half-question,
half-declaration. It occurred to me later that it might have been the first
uncertain moment she’d had in her entire life.
I started calling her friends to explain what was going on, that she was
shutting down, that we were sorry for not having told them sooner. They were
startled and confused, but gracious.
I told several of them that they would be speaking at her memorial,
that she actually requested it in writing and that she’d also requested that
they try to keep it to under five minutes.
Over and over again, they said to me, “This must be so hard for you.” But
making those calls wasn’t. It was strangely beautiful. The people I called told
me stories about great advice she’d given them; e-mails she’d sent that they’d
loved; and occasionally, what a total pain she could be. Those were funny to
hear. They were real.
While I did phone duty, Max relaxed and took off his button-down shirt.
Two sleeves of tattoos ran down his arms. Mom had seen one of them years before
and had not reacted favorably, so when he went in to get the other arm done, he
decided that she would never see it. Never again did he wear a short-sleeve
shirt in her presence.
“Wow, Max, look at those tattoos,” Binky said.
“Shh!” he said, flashing her a smile.
My mother’s eyes popped open.
“Mom, I’m so sorry about my tattoos.”
“You. Aren’t. Really,” she said, her eyebrows raised in a kind of
resigned indignation. And then she fell back asleep. ++
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have
the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger
than evil triumphant.”
~ The Reverend Martin Luther King