In and Out of Hollywood: A Biographer’s Memoir

Chapter 20

20
Adecision to take leave from writing books was precipitated by a personal crisis. Richard, who all his life had enjoyed seemingly excellent health, working long hours at double shifts in hospitals, including his own Kaiser Permanente, because he had no interest in sharing my active social life or sitting alone at home at night waiting for me to return, had gradually, and with the characteristic self-neglect of people in the medical profession, unwittingly become ill. He was diagnosed with diabetes and now, untreated for years, was faced with end-stage kidney failure. He had to retire and spend days in the gray limbo of a dialysis room, a tiny television set suspended from the corner of the ceiling, surrounded by unhappy patients, his blood slowly and uncomfortably exchanged. It was painful to visit him there, to take him there each day and pick him up, to anticipate waiting years for a kidney transplant. One night I returned from the San Fernando Valley to find him lying on his bedroom floor, his face the color of wax, his breath almost imperceptible. It was clear that he was dying. I called the local fire station to send the paramedics. They should have taken only five minutes to arrive; they took twenty. By a shocking coincidence , another man had collapsed similarly, just down the street, and with fire victims in our tinderbox city, only one ambulance was available. It would be melodramatic to say those were the longest twenty minutes of my life. It would also be accurate. By the time the paramedics walked into Richard’s room, he was in what doctors call Code Blue. He was, in a technical sense, dead. His heart had stopped beating; he wasn’t breathing. 260 261 By thumping his chest and applying a resuscitator, the team brought him back to life; I was too grateful even to speak. They took him to Kaiser, where he had a slow but sure recovery, marooned in an emergency room where I found him surrounded by bleeding accident victims, men and women in bandages after household abuse, and a black actor with a gunshot wound. The noise all night was almost unendurable ; then at last Richard was able to come home. I asked him if he remembered anything from Code Blue. He replied that he had felt himself leaving his body and standing near it, where a tall man in a black suit was waiting for him. Behind the man there was a large door; it was partly ajar and through it streamed a brilliant light. The man told him it wasn’t his time yet and pushed him back into his body. Years before, in the pragmatic pages of New York magazine, I had read a similar story, of a youth in New York, seemingly killed by a motorcycle gang, whose brother had also been knifed to death; in Code Blue, the younger brother saw his sibling floating above his head telling him to return to the world of the living; rough, strong hands pushed him back into his body. I remembered, too, how an actress friend of mine had fallen on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley, her glasses driven into her head as her face hit the sidewalk; she had been rushed to Tarzana Hospital, where an operation saved her; she had experienced Code Blue in the private ward. And in that state, she had felt herself rise floor after floor through ceilings to the roof, where she saw pigeons and scraps of what seemed to be iron; she descended to a room next to the operating theater, where she saw a mess of dirty paper plates and Styrofoam cups strewn about after a party. When she described all this to her doctors afterward, they told her it was a fantasy, but she could see from the way they looked at each other that she had described everything she couldn’t possibly have seen with mortal eyes. I had heard of dialysis at sea, a treatment that was available on certain cruise ships. Voyages in the Caribbean were Richard’s greatest pleasure, especially because of his shopping sprees in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas. I took him aboard the Veendam, of the Holland American Line, sailing from Fort Lauderdale, and at first he seemed to be doing well. But the dialysis room was cramped and uncomfortable and the treatment suddenly stopped being effective; he collapsed late one night after a cabaret show, and began...