Just One Catch (59 page)

Mario Puzo once said Joe was “so concerned about controlling his life, he can't have fun. Actually, I can … see him changing into a wild man, but it would be in a very controlled sort of way.” In 1981—Joe was fifty-eight years old—the “wild man” emerged.

The person sitting in the summer sunlight had estranged himself from his family and many of the people closest to him for decades. He had behaved recklessly in his professional affairs, impulsively and carelessly in his personal life. What, on its face, might be tagged a midlife crisis appeared to have several complex sources: a sense that nothing had turned out the way he wanted (“Nothing fails like success,” his King David says); the knowledge that time was getting short and the feeling that he had
earned
a little fun; a conviction that his wife didn't love him enough, his children and publisher didn't love him enough—he couldn't
get enough love,
damn it. Therapy sessions had awakened anxieties as well as insights. Anxiety accompanied the mixed signals he received about his writing: complaints from critics, rumors that his talent had abated. And yet the sales were enormous. He had money, celebrity. Who was he, really?
What
was there to love?

“The older I get, the less interest I take in … everything. Who gives a damn?” says Joe's king. But then he admits that more than anything, “I would rather have my wife [right now]”—she “does not care about me and probably never did.”

When Joe returned to New York for what he thought would be a brief interlude, he insisted to gossip columnists that he was not really part of the New York “party circuit,” in spite of being one of the world's highest-paid novelists. “What would send me into incipient alcoholism is giving the impression that we're all enjoying ourselves tremendously,” he said. “When I go out to give lectures, all these people look at me with envy because they see me photographed at parties talking with other writers or an actress or editor, and they imagine I'm having a great time when I'm not. Often, when my picture is taken, what I'm saying to someone is, ‘What are we doing here?' I mean, the only reason I go to these literary parties is out of obligation.”

His boasting sounded even more disingenuous when placed against items such as this from the
New York Post's
Page Six, printed October 1, 1981:

Joseph (
Catch-22
) Heller expressed a real writer's curiosity during the opening of Russell Chatham's show at the Central Falls Gallery in SoHo the other night, but it wasn't art that caught his fancy. Heller was taken with the black boots worn by an unidentified young lady. “They're vinyl, I can tell,” he said as he bent to feel the girl's ankle. She insisted they were leather, but Heller's stroking persisted. “Leather has natural wrinkles. Where are the creases?” he asked. At this point, the young woman placed one foot on a table and Heller invited his friends to touch. Real thing, they decided. Earlier, Heller had a long discussion with Dr. Alan Marlis, who's hard at work on a book which he says will reveal Abraham Lincoln was a witch. The evidence: Lincoln's warty face, his love for cats and for Shakespeare's
Macbeth.

Joe told another reporter he was eager to try new things, maybe even Plato's Retreat, a trendy Manhattan sex club. But then he backtracked and said he'd have to overcome a lifetime of inhibitions to go to Plato's Retreat.

In
No Laughing Matter,
published in 1986, Joe said he “earnestly believe[d]” neither he nor Shirley wanted a divorce, despite their tensions. He claimed he was forced to file a divorce motion only because he needed a place to live following his illness. Such a motion was his only hope of securing the East Hampton residence. He swore he did not seek the divorce until June 3, 1982. However, on November 1, 1981, the
New York Times
quoted him as saying, “I eat only in restaurants these days except on the days when I'm taking cooking lessons, learning to poach eggs. Why? I'm living alone because I'm getting a divorce. First my mother cared for me, then the Army cared for me, then my wife cared for me. I don't know how to cook.”

This declaration followed a hearing, on October 27, in the family court of the state of New York, presided over by the Honorable Jack Turret, in which Shirley's lawyer, Norman M. Sheresky, accused Joe of “raping” the East Hampton house. Sheresky told the court, “[Heller] announced [to his estranged wife] … any time whether you like it or not … I will be coming around. I won't tell you when I am coming to remove whatever it is that I want to.… [In short] he … raped that place.”

The parties had gathered in court to agree on terms of a marital separation. As he walked into the courtroom, Joe noticed “interpreters” in the lobby speaking Spanish, Yiddish, Chinese, “assisting people [in trouble who were] unable to understand English and even, perhaps, to afford attorneys.” He wondered how the hell he and Shirley had ended up here. Wasn't family court for small claims? What had happened? He suspected Shirley's lawyer was trying to jack them both for as much money as he could get.

His lawyer, Jeffrey Cohen, said Joe had taken only two pieces of furniture out of over one hundred from the East Hampton house. “Rape,” he said, was a “mischaracterization.” He described Joe as “a decent man, and a sensitive man who wants to approach this in a civilized way.” Cohen's client was prepared to write a “maintenance check” of three thousand dollars to his wife, to tide her over for a month until matters could be settled. The court scheduled another hearing for December 16.

But then on Sunday, December 13, Morty Bader, convinced Joe was exhibiting symptoms of Guillain-Barré syndrome, drove him to Mount Sinai Hospital, along with a neurologist, Dr. Walter Sencer, who concurred with the diagnosis. As the men helped Joe toward the hospital's emergency entrance, his knee buckled and he nearly fell to the sidewalk. At the admissions desk, he forked over his Blue Cross card. A nurse asked for his clothing and valuables. Who should the hospital contact in case of an emergency? “My wife,” Joe said.

*   *   *

PATIENT HELLER
“[e]xpressed concern over ability to return to normal life and ability to perform activities of daily life without assistance,” according to a medical resident's notes dated 12/17/81.

12/19/81: “Inordinately depressed.”

12/21/81: “Complained of feeling need to leave ICU. Having feelings of inability to cope with illness. Discussed seeing a psychiatrist. Has become agitated, depressed.”

12/22/81: “Patient tries not to look at clock in ICU.”

12/31/81: “Experienced anxiety re: falling asleep and therefore stopping breathing, hence dying.… Has had bad dreams related to ‘not breathing.'”

1/3/82: “147.12 pounds.”

These notes contradict the blithe and cheerful demeanor Joe later reported exhibiting at the time, though he did admit in
No Laughing Matter
that fears of not breathing led to the worst experiences of his life, even more frightening than the mission over Avignon. At one point, Jeffrey Cohen, Joe's divorce lawyer, said he thought Joe was “going crazy” in the hospital.

On December 17, 1981, the
New York Post
got wind of Joe's illness. On its gossipy Page Six, the paper said that, after what was first reported as a “sudden attack of something called polyneuritis,” Joseph Heller was partially paralyzed and in serious but stable condition. “Jesus Christ! How am I going to make a deal with a publisher when this gets out?” Joe complained to Speed Vogel. His dispute with Simon & Schuster had not been resolved.

Day by day, Joe could see his “respiratory parameters … deteriorating,” he said. “I had only to watch the needle on the gauge and hear the numbers spoken by the nurse each time I filled my lungs to my maximum and emptied them … with all the force I could muster from a tube whose opposite end had been stopped up by a thumb.” The nurses gave him this test every three hours. “In the beginning I faced [it] with an attitude of competitive excitement,” he wrote. “[I]t was a spirit that carried me back in memory to those trifling games of skill in the penny arcades of Coney Island.” But when the numbers slipped from the thirties to the low twenties, and then to the teens, he ceased being “combative.” His capacity to breathe had diminished by more than half. Doctors continued to consider a tracheotomy. Joe wasn't sure what they were talking about, but he trusted them to do the right thing. “I was agreeing to have my throat cut,” he realized later.

His kids were “absolutely shocked” to see him incapacitated: “They thought I was immortal and invulnerable and ageless.” As it turned out, Joe's father-in-law, Barney, had also been admitted to Mount Sinai Hospital with a heart condition. He had undergone surgery. Joe's kids had a grim time of it, visiting their father and grandfather. Joe was aware that his “wife was … on the premises almost every day.”

Bob Towbin, whom the Hellers had befriended in East Hampton, says, “I went to Shirley and I said, ‘Listen, Joe is in the hospital. He's really sick. You gotta go see him.' It was out of place for me to say that, really, but I felt I had to. She said, ‘Why should I go see him?' I said, ‘Shirley, don't ask me why. I'm not the one who was married to him for however many years. I'm just telling you. For one thing, I know he'd love to see you.' None of their friends knew what to do when they broke up. It upset me for Shirley and it upset me for Joe.”

Dutifully, Erica told Joe that Shirley would like to visit him. “What was she going to say?” Joe pondered. “She's sorry I was sick?” Prideful, humiliated, angry, he wouldn't let his wife come near—a stubbornness he knew would have “deep-felt emotional cost to both” of them. In truth, he said later, “I missed my mother and my brother and my sister, and I missed my wife and my mother-in-law and my father-in-law. I wished that I still had a home and a family life to which to return, and I knew that the wish was hopeless.” He had blown out of his life, and would not now, even under these circumstances, show the weakness implied by an inclination to look back.

In his King David novel, he had written—in the voice of the king—that his wife really did love him, but “in the only way she knew how, with acrimony, injury, envy, and disdain.… We [had] kissed goodbye.”

One night, alone with Speed in the ICU, Joe confessed that, like his embittered patriarch, wanting to speak to a silent God, he had prayed once or twice since his medical ordeal had begun. The prayers were not about recovery, writing, or lawsuits. Speed asked what they were about. “Someday in this life,” Joe said, “I would like to eat another baked lobster, like the one at the old New Sun.”

*   *   *

SPEED WAS LIVING
now in Joe's Eighth Avenue apartment, paying Joe's bills (his artist's skills came in handy whenever he had to forge Joe's name on a check), tending to his correspondence (occasionally faking an autograph to a fan), and answering phone messages. “[T]he décor happened to be exactly to my taste, since I was the one who had been commissioned to design it,” Speed said. He also took advantage of the Eddie Bauer coats Joe had ordered, since Joe was not able to wear them. “I had more or less assumed his identity,” Speed said.

One day, he discovered on the phone machine a message from Joe's North Carolina friend. She still occupied the apartment in Santa Fe and expected Joe to return. “Joe, why haven't I heard from you? You dead or something?” she said. Speed called and told her what had happened. He urged her not to come to New York, as a visit might only upset Joe.

Nevertheless, one or two people reported seeing the woman standing silently in the ICU, sizing up the situation and slipping away. They never saw or heard about her again.

Joe's breathing improved and he avoided a tracheotomy. He survived a bout of pneumonia in the lower lobe of his left lung. Perhaps the Angel of Death wouldn't visit after all. At moments, his bedside was almost cheerful, with the appearance of old friends, among them Joe Stein, Julius Green, Barbara Gelb, Murray Schisgal, Joe's nephew Paul, Jerry McQueen, and George Mandel (“What're you doing here again?” Joe snapped amiably at Mandel one morning).

Unexpectedly, Mel Brooks showed up one day. Joe had not known he was in town. “Tell me honestly,” Brooks said, “did it begin with numbness or tingling in your feet and work its way up along the peripheral nerves of the spine and into your cranial nerves to affect your pharynx and face?” He had memorized the entry for Guillain-Barré syndrome in the medical dictionary he kept at home, fearing that even hearing about the disease might make him susceptible to it.

He “tongue-lashed the resident on duty … when he learned I was unable to sleep,” Joe said. Brooks told the young man to forget Valium. “Give him tryptophan. It's mother's milk to him. You can get it in any health food store. I'll send up a bottle of tablets tomorrow. Pulverize them in the blender and put them down his Levin tube. Do I have to tell you people everything? And give him a clean Yankaur tube. That one's filthy. I don't like the color of those secretions.”

On another occasion, Mario Puzo dropped by, despite his horror of hospitals. With him was his longtime companion, Carol Gino, a former nurse. Joe kidded her: She was like “a hooker returning to the brothel,” he said. “[A]ll [you] want … to do is schmooze with the nurses about the hottest news in intensive care.” He saw how solicitous she was of Puzo—Gino was his private nurse—as he stood by the wall, pale and unsteady on his feet. He had been asking friends if Joe was going to “croak.” “If I was in his spot,” he confessed to Speed, “you'd have to shoot me.” To Joe, he said, “I gotta come clean with you. It may be a sacrilege to say so, but I really believe you've come back from the dead.”