Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (53 page)

The remarkable thing is, I accepted the role of child-wife in the marriage. I had grown up watching other people, including my father, manage my mother’s money for her. I’d always been surrounded by businesspeople who handled money for the performers in the family. The fact that my mother had gone broke that way never quite registered with me.

I’d like to blame Jake for the whole situation, but the truth is, I let him do it. What I was thinking, I don’t know.

I was resigned to the professional relationship, but it was getting harder and harder to ignore Jake’s drinking. The problem with getting sober yourself is that you begin to notice that half the people around you are stoned or drunk much of the time. With my new understanding, and with a small son in our home, using was no longer an acceptable way of life for me. I was still in denial
about many things in my life, but even I couldn’t ignore the fact that Jake had a serious drinking problem.

Ever since my time in the Family Program, I had been acutely aware of the fact that I had followed the family pattern in marrying an alcoholic. But I hadn’t yet faced the fact that I was continuing in the same old patterns myself, not as a drug user, but as an enabler for my husband. I kept trying to think of ways to control the situation, ways I could change Jake and make everything okay. I had completely overlooked the part about letting the alcoholic take responsibility for his own actions. I had also missed the part about attending a support group and continuing to practice day by day the new behavior I’d been taught. I hadn’t attended a single Al-Anon meeting since the Family Program. So who was I to criticize Jake? I didn’t want to change, either.

In some respects, though, my life was changing. Since the move to California, I had become close to many of the people at the Lemond/Zetter Agency. Two of them had picked up on the fact that I was in an unhealthy family situation, and one day they invited me to go to an Al-Anon meeting with them. I was very surprised; I had no idea they were involved with Al-Anon. They generously shared that information with me. Fool that I was, I told them, “Thanks, but no, really, I’m fine.” They knew that wasn’t true, of course, but they just told me that if I ever needed to talk, they were there for me.

Things were changing in my professional life, too. A year and a half after I joined the cast,
Trapper John
was canceled. Unfortunately, the television industry was also right in the middle of a terrible writers’ strike that lasted for months. The writers’ union had gone on strike, and without any scripts, there wasn’t any work. For nearly an entire television season, American stations ran nothing but reruns and old movies. What made the timing even worse for me was that Jake and I had just bought a house in Beverly Hills, and I had hefty mortgage payments to worry about. So I put some numbers together and set up some singing dates, mostly in town. I didn’t want to go back on the road again with Jesse so small. Thank
God I can sing; many of my fellow actors really suffered when the work just disappeared. It was a tough time in the profession.

It was about to get much tougher, but that had nothing to do with the writers’ strike. It was about this time that I began to notice that Bob Lemond was rarely in the office. After a while he stopped coming in completely. The odd thing was that nobody was talking about it. Things still ran smoothly at the agency; Lois brought in people to make sure it did, but I missed Bob and wondered what had happened to him. When I asked Lois, she would make up excuses, but after a while it became clear that he was sick. As time went on, I became increasingly worried, but the few people who knew what was wrong with Bob kept stonewalling me. After a while I quit asking what was wrong and just started asking, “Is Bob okay?” I could read the answer in people’s faces. Bob wasn’t okay.

Finally one day Lois called me into the office and said, “Lorna, Bob won’t be coming back to work.” When I asked her why, she simply said, “Bob’s very sick.”

“Does he have AIDS?” The words fairly flew out of my mouth. It was the mid-eighties, and I had already lost several loved ones to AIDS.

Lois simply replied, “Bob is very sick,” and left me to draw my own conclusions. I later found out that Bob was hospitalized by then, in the late stages of cancer. I was grief-stricken; we all were. Bob was one of the kindest, most gentle, most talented men I’d ever known. I badly wanted to see him, but he was refusing all visitors. He didn’t want his friends to see him in the last stages of disease. The word did spread to John Travolta, and Johnnie completely came apart when he heard. Somehow he found out what hospital Bob was in and went to see him. It was a painful but deeply healing reunion; Bob and John had suffered a breach sometime before, and John didn’t want Bob to die without their reaching an understanding. The rest of Bob’s clients, those of us who didn’t get to see him, banded together as the end drew near. We all loved him, and we turned to each other for support.

About this time I got a call to do a cruise to Alaska. I didn’t want to go; I knew Bob could die any day. I had to, though, as jobs were scarce. Jake stayed home with Jesse, and I didn’t want to go alone, so I asked Liz Derringer to go along with me for emotional support. I also left my shipboard number at the agency, telling them to call me immediately if there was any change in Bob’s condition. We left the port, and shortly after the first show, I received the wire I’d been dreading. Bob had died. I was overwhelmed by the news. In spite of the fact I’d been expecting it, losing Bob was incredibly painful. He’d not only given me a sense of security professionally; he’d been my friend, never judging me, always there to listen when I needed to talk. That night on the ship, Liz and I got a bottle of champagne and a big plate full of every dessert they had on board. Bob always loved dessert more than life itself. So we took it all to the stern of the ship, toasted Bob, saying, “This is for you, Bob,” and threw the whole thing into the ocean. Then we just stood there together and cried.

Good-bye, Bob. I still miss you.

I
n a strange way, losing Bob was the beginning of the end of my marriage. The pain of that time brought home to me how alone I really was in the relationship. Emotionally, Jake simply wasn’t there. That’s one of the things alcohol does to you; it erodes your ability to feel, to share yourself with other people. It’s terribly isolating. During the weeks before Bob’s death, I felt painfully alone. I couldn’t talk to Jake about what was happening to me because he simply didn’t care. One night, after I put Jesse to bed, I was sitting alone in the bedroom crying when Jake walked in and asked me what I was crying about. “What is the matter with you?” he asked impatiently.

“It’s Bob,” I told him.

“What about him?”

“Don’t you understand? Bob, my manager, my friend, he’s dying.”

“Oh, get over it,” Jake snapped irritably, and went in the
other room. I just sat there crying wordlessly, feeling completely alone.

For Jake, this was a golden opportunity to take over as my manager again, which I knew he’d been wanting to do for some time. I kept Lois as my manager for several months after Bob’s death, and the whole time Jake kept saying, “What are you still doing there? Lois isn’t doing anything for you.” Eventually I gave in to the pressure. Lois was very understanding about it. She didn’t like Jake any more than he liked her, and she knew what was going on. I’m sure it was no surprise to her when I told her I was leaving. She’d probably been expecting it.

So once again, it was just me and Jake, and with every day that went by, things got harder. Once again Jake was the salesman, and I was the product. I went out on the road again, on cruises, anything to get a booking. Sometimes I felt as though Jake would sell me to anyone who had a few bucks. Eventually he got me a good booking, at the Cine Grill in the Roosevelt Hotel in L.A. I put together a show I really liked with my musical director, Larry Blank, and the reviews were very good. Opening night was a real star-studded event. The only problem was Jake; that night started the pattern of him being drunk on opening night. He would get nervous when I opened, and his way of coping was to drink nonstop all day long. By the time I came offstage at the end of my act, he would be falling-down drunk, his words slurring together and his eyes half-shut. The result was that no matter how well a show went, I never got to celebrate opening night. I always had to keep Jake on his feet and get him out of there before he fell down or caused a scene.

It hadn’t always been like that. When we were younger, Jake had used mainly at home, or at a party where the main activity was taking drugs. His usual pattern would be to start drinking after dinner and eventually fall asleep, usually at home. For years his drinking came and went in spells, usually two or three weeks at a time, so it took me a while to realize how addicted he was. Looking
back, of course, it’s clear to me that he was an alcoholic when I married him. He was already dependent on alcohol as a coping mechanism. I wasn’t exactly clearheaded myself. But the difference was that Jake needed alcohol as an emotional crutch; he used it to kill the pain of things he didn’t want to deal with. And he had a lot of pain.

Jake is Jewish, though he hasn’t told many people that. He was born in Israel to Eastern European parents who were survivors of Nazi concentration camps. His mother is a deeply sad woman, and his father is a man who takes out his pain on other people. Jake was harshly treated as a child, and he never got over it. He did everything he could to put his past behind him, to pretend it never existed. He even changed his name three or four times because he didn’t want people to know where he came from. It was just too painful for him. These were things I learned gradually, in the early years of our marriage, because Jake never really talked about it, and I didn’t dare bring it up.

That was really the heart of Jake’s problem: he couldn’t talk about the pain, so he tried to drink it away. And of course, it didn’t work. The alcohol dulled it for a while, but it just kept coming back.

I wasn’t the only one trapped in a destructive family pattern. So was Jake. He never developed the coping skills he needed for a good relationship with me, although he was a good parent when things got hard. As the years went by, his anger grew, and he became harder and harder to handle.

One of the worst nights I ever spent with him, and one of the most frightening nights of my life, was at the wrap party for
Trapper John.
It was held at a Chinese restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, in Santa Monica. The whole cast was there, Tim Busfield and Pernell Roberts and dear, wonderful Madge Sinclair, and we were all so sad because we knew it was our last time together as a cast. Jake was with me, and he drank nonstop from the moment we arrived. I wanted so much to have this last evening with my friends, but
Jake got so loaded that I had to leave early and take him home. I was furious with him, and we got into a big argument about his drinking on the way to the car. Jake always denied being drunk, and when I accused him of it, he said, “I’m fine. You’re the one with the problem. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re insane.”

By the time we got to the car, we were screaming at each other, and things only got worse when I didn’t want to let him drive. He shoved me in the passenger side and got behind the wheel himself, and as we were weaving down Wilshire Boulevard, I kept trying to get him to stop. He was furious, and when I continued yelling at him, he turned toward me and hit me, so hard that I slammed against the door and fell out of the car onto the street. I was still clinging to the door handle as I fell, but instead of trying to pull myself back into the car, I let go and rolled. I was scared to death. I staggered to my feet and went running right down the street, crying hysterically, scared to death Jake would pull me back into that car and hurt me worse. He’d hurt me before, but this was the first time he’d actually hit me like that, and I didn’t know what he might do next. Thankfully, Jake roared off in the car, and I found the nearest pay phone and called my girlfriend Julie Stein, who lived nearby. She came to get me, and I spent the night at her house.

It was a long night. My face was sore and discolored, and I ached all over, but the emotional pain was the worst. Julie kept saying, “Lorna, don’t go back. You can’t go back. This is terrible.” I didn’t know what to do. Early the next morning Jake sobered up and went to my father’s house looking for me. Not long afterward I called my dad, too, and told him only that Jake and I had had a fight. I didn’t tell him what had really happened.

Sid just tried to be diplomatic, saying, “Well, now, these things happen. It’ll be all right.” It made me feel better just hearing his voice. I told him where I was, but I made him promise not to tell Jake. I needed some time to think.

I sat with Julie most of the day. Finally I said, “I have to go home, Julie. I have a son. I can’t just leave Jesse there.”

I called Jake at the office, and he was depressed and very apologetic. He kept saying, “I’m sorry. It’ll never happen again. Please come home.” I did. I thought I had to. I had a husband; I had a baby; what else could I do? Jake brought me flowers and took me out to dinner and treated me like a queen for a while. He continued to promise that his drinking days were over, that he’d never do that again.

And he didn’t—until the next time.

It would start with “just one” glass of wine with dinner (“I can have this. One won’t hurt me.”). But of course, it wouldn’t be just one, and soon he’d be drinking two bottles of wine after dinner at night and growing more belligerent with every glass. Sometimes I’d come home and my dear Spanish housekeeper, Maria, would say, “Mr. Jake come home drunk again, with very black eyes.” There was never any explanation for the black-and-blue marks on his face. He was afraid to beat me, but it was clear that he’d been in a fight with somebody else.

I continued to ignore what I’d learned at the Ford Center about my own part in the family cycle; instead I pulled on my Superman suit every day and went back to work the way I always had.