Ernest Borgnine and Bette Davis at the end of The Catered Affair, my first screenplay under the MGM contract. Bette looks weirdly like my mother. She didn’t care for the director who screamed at the grips and whispered thrillingly to Bette while he showed her how to pour coffee from an old pot in the kitchen. “I may not,” she said, “be much of an actress, but I am marvelous with props.” She said this was her favorite movie of the final phase.
Once again, I accompanied Howard in his wheelchair along corridors that I was to know eventually by heart. He was now cheerful, a tribute to his sweetness of character since he knew that I was the one mute with dread. As the nurse opened the door to the operating room where I could not follow, Howard turned to me in his wheelchair and said, “Well, it’s been great.” Then the door closed behind him.
I waited in an area near the operating rooms. I watched the clock. One, two, three hours passed. I had a series of waking nightmares. He had died on the operating table. The inadequate lung had given out. All around me people, presumably in my situation, were nursing their own nightmares. At last the surgeon appeared. It had been a long procedure but he had got all the tumor out and much surrounding tissue.
A day later we were celebrating what was, in effect, a “cure”: that is, he was free of every sign of cancer in the lungs. One knew that cruel recurrence was the nature of the beast but at least this clean initial sweep was encouraging. We went home to Italy. The white cat and the brown cat, thirteen-year-old brothers, were waiting patiently for us at the gate and, with military precision, escorted us to the villa.
Rita, who works for us part-time, has studied nursing and was helpful as Italians tend to be whenever medical problems arise. One now arose with me. I had foolishly allowed a Roman surgeon to flush out a torn meniscus in the left knee, thus neatly crippling me. I assume the surgeon thought that I’d take the next step and allow him to install an artificial knee but I preferred to suffer pain until I was back in Cedars-Sinai land.
During that lovely last Siren Land spring, Howard fell coming out of the pool. More tests—this time in Naples. Cancer had spread to the brain. We tried to fly back to Los Angeles but were warned that the plane’s cabin pressure, at transatlantic altitude, would cause the water gathering in his skull literally to boil. A doctor friend in Rome, although officially retired, still worked at a private Roman clinic. We checked in. An MRI revealed a small dark bubble on the lobe of the brain that controls locomotion. He had also become incontinent. Several times I had to lift his deadweight off the floor until, finally, I ruptured a spinal disk. Donella, our doctor friend, arranged for a distinguished surgeon at Rome’s Villa Margherita to operate. But when the professor had studied the MRIs of Howard’s brain he said, “We must not wait.” Unfortunately a long holiday weekend was coming up and such weekends are sacred in Italy. The operation was scheduled for the next week. As I left Howard’s room, he said, “Kiss me.” I did. On the lips, something we’d not done for fifty years. When I rang the Villa Margherita the next morning, he was not in his room. The Roman team of doctors had, amazingly, ignored the holiday and he was now in surgery. I waited most of the day and some of the night in a room above the operating room. Finally, in a large elevator shaft, he arrived on a lift from the operating room below. He was naked and unconscious like a corpse in a fifteenth-century painting of the plague years. Attendants carried him into a cell where his vital signs were constantly checked, their lights blinking as intravenous tubes were placed in his arms. One nurse asked me his name and if he spoke Italian. I told him the name and assured him that Howard spoke Italian. The nurse kept calling his name until Howard finally opened his eyes; saw me; winked; went back to sleep. One of the distinguished surgeon’s aides told me what a success the operation had been. “Oh, there is still a spot or two,” and he mumbled the Italian word for metastasized. I had a sudden image of Howard on the bench in front of the Ravello post office where the old men sit in the sun. Then, when one of them dies, they all move down one place toward the main road. He was now close to the corner.
The next day, I began to negotiate for a small hospital plane to fly us to Los Angeles. Meanwhile, we went back to Ravello. Howard had recently begun to hallucinate; luckily, he knew that he was hallucinating so he’d report with some fascination on what he thought was going on about him. “Look! They have made this hospital room look exactly like my bedroom in Ravello,” he said from his bed in Ravello. “But then in Rome they also pretended that I was still in Ravello even though I could see the sea from my window. You’ve got to admit the special effects are wonderful.” Then good humor would suddenly change to anger at me. “Why is it always about you?” he began to rage apropos nothing that I had said. Worse, despite the “success” of the operation, he still could not walk.
Finally, the private plane was ready and it was time to go. In the piazza Ferdinando, owner of the bar San Domingo where Howard had sung so many nights over the last thirty years, had got up early to say farewell and to recall all those good times never to come again. Howard listened gravely; spoke briefly; Ferdinando wept.
The hospital plane was like a flying coffin with two nurses, two pilots, Howard, a general assistant from Los Angeles, and me, crippled leg bent under me. We flew to the Azores and I took a shaky walk on the steamy tarmac. Equatorial heat. Howard slept, snoring, from the Azores to Iceland to Indianapolis, as we zigzagged across the Atlantic and North America. Then back to the house in the Hollywood Hills.
More trips through the bowels of Cedars-Sinai. This time to a special radiation room. Howard’s head was bolted in place against a piece of metal as the gamma rays were zapped at his skull theoretically knocking out remnants of the original cancer which I could not help but think that the great Roman surgeon might have been tempted to excise on his first visit to the site. As always, I was struck by the euphoric good humor of the various oncologists, as cancer specialists are known. Since most of their patients will die more soon than late, they exude a depersonalized charm that is positively presidential in its effect. Howard emerged from the agony of the gamma ray room looking haggard but very much in his right mind. “I don’t think I want to do that again,” he said as we drove home.
The next few days were sunny and peaceful. He sat outside one Sunday morning reading the newspapers while I sat nearby restoring my novel Creation to its original state, undoing a deranged editor’s handiwork. “Come up,” he said. “And sit here, next to me.” I said I would in a minute but in a minute he’d gone upstairs. Then all hell broke loose. He was having heart spasms. An emergency ambulance arrived. Then back to the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai. But it was not a heart attack, only a spasm that had something to do with emphysema. He was now also permanently attached to an oxygen tank. Needless to say, when the tank was switched off, he would, somehow, find a cigarette and puff on it. I made no fuss.
We went through a squadron of nurses, mostly useless. Finally, we got Leto, a sixty-year-old grandfather who looked twenty years old. Leto agreed to a twenty-four-hour vigil sleeping on a sofa beside Howard’s hospital bed. Hallucinations were now returning. He always kept asking what day of the week it was, “Because Thursday I’m being let out of here.” He had decided that we were both in some sort of governmental hospital prison. When, he wondered, would I be let go? I said when he was. In the mornings when I’d come into his room, Leto would be tidying him up and Howard would follow me with his eyes as if trying to fix me in his memory.