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  In April, on his way to Japan for active duty as a psywar specialist, Tony visited me in California. I showed him around the campus and told him that I was not happy with the psychology department at Berkeley and didn’t think I’d continue graduate studies beyond May. At Berkeley everyone seemed interested only in passing Ph.D. exams, not in the subject matter itself. What had impressed me at Swarthmore was the passion for the subject, but that was completely missing from my experience at Berkeley. I found myself more and more drawn back to the theater—to stagecraft and acting. I joined the Mask and Dagger Society, a student performance group. I began performing in their musical revues. Once again, I had found a substitute family.

  Tony and I took a grand tour of the area, driving north, then stopped in the elite little bayside town of Sausalito to take lunch at Sally Rand’s, a waterside bistro run by the former fan dancer. I remember a delicious chilled Beaulieu Vineyard Pinot Blanc, oysters, and shrimp.

  Conversation at the restaurant roamed from my studies in psychology to Tony’s dread of going to Tokyo for the army. As the wine streamed through our veins, we shared memories of past meals and warmed to each other in a way that had seldom been true during our adolescence. Perhaps, I thought, we are going to be comrades after all.

  A little later, Tony let me know that my recent change of heart about my career worried him. “Don’t jump. You may come to regret it,” he cautioned. I wrote my father:

  You are probably afraid that I am romanticizing (to use your phrase) the whole field of show business. Having watched Paul Lukas, Betty Field, Bob Maxwell, you are afraid that I feel the thrill of the business, the glamour, and the glory, without being sensible of the hard roads that must be traveled, the jobs without reward, the years without glory, and the small probability of eventual success. Sure, I’m thrilled by the big top, the lights, the makeup, the music, the elephants, the money, the gaudiness. I love applause. But I also think I have talent. You will say that I am easily discouraged by difficult enterprises; perhaps, with one disappointment, one “no” from a producer, I might give up. I’m working on that.

  “Working on that” refers, I suppose, to my ongoing psychotherapy.

  What startles me at fifty years’ remove from this letter is how calm I was. Timid to the extreme with my father, I can feel myself growing emotionally in the correspondence at this time. I am willing to share my personal feelings with him. I am willing to risk his reactions. In some ways, this was similar to what Tony did with me: using letters to expose energies and emotions we could not share in person.

  Soon, Tony was in the business of disinformation—broadcasting to the Chinese and the North Koreans what the Americans wanted them to believe. In short, after only a week in Tokyo as a psychological warfare specialist, he had decided it was okay to write propaganda, to do what his normally liberal views would never have allowed him to contemplate previously. We were both brought up to tell the truth, and in later years Tony would be horrified at anyone who justified lying, even in times of war.

  Still:

  I continue to write most of the commentaries every week. I’ve written on virtually every subject which could be of any benefit to our propaganda line . . . from the UN report on Hungary to the disarmament talks in London . . . I remind myself I’m not working for the Times. I’m writing for Psychological Warfare, which is engaged in propaganda. Here, there is no such thing as objective news.

  Five of the writers and performers from Mask and Dagger and I decided to move to Los Angeles, setting up house way out in the San Fernando Valley. I was the only one who had a job: Bob Maxwell, Dad’s old radio producer, had put me on the Lassie television program staff, as dialogue coach.

  It was a new world for me—television, film, Hollywood, palm trees, celebrities, long hours on location, technical stuff I’d never studied—and I was thrilled.

  By August 1957, Tony was anything but thrilled. He was sick of barracks life. He moved into a private room in someone’s house in Tokyo; it was small but pleasant. He removed his shoes before entering and spoke of how wonderful the light and silence were. The “only problem,” he reported, was that he couldn’t get to early morning rounds of cleanup at the barracks. Was this a coy way of saying he actually was AWOL during this mandatory work, or did he rush to the barracks at 5:30 a.m., then return to his apartment?

  I do know that he got up one morning at 5:30 to climb Mount Fuji for the joy and awe of sunrise. In a footnote to that letter, Tony vowed not to “get bitter” at the army for taking two years out of his life.

  But by January 1958, he had become desperate to get out of the army early—“at any price.” He began to look for positions on gubernatorial campaigns around the United States, thinking he might be valuable as a press aide.

  He remarked on the loneliness of a writer’s life and how I was lucky because I was “good with people.” I reflect now on this statement and feel the surprise I must have felt then. How different one’s self-image is from the perception of others. “Good with people.” I didn’t think so. I felt frightened at approaching strangers. As a newcomer to a room full of people, I crept along the edges. Everyone seemed, if not hostile, then supremely blah about my presence. I couldn’t even get up the nerve to suggest a game of tennis to a colleague, for fear of being rejected.

  Just after his twenty-fifth birthday, Tony told me the long wait was over. The army would give him early release to work on the gubernatorial race in Massachusetts.

  In June, he took a three-week leave in “the hinterlands” of Japan, promising to bring me a silk kimono if he could get to L.A. With the prospect both of release and of vacation, the tone of the letter was much lighter. He bantered about my appearance in LIFE magazine a few months before, as part of a cover story about Lassie. (There was no mention of the fact that by then I’d been laid off from the show because the producer’s wife wanted to do my job herself!)

  I struggled to find work in the television industry, using the few contacts I had made. I wrote outlines for shows, submitted them, and counted the rejection letters.

  In Boston, where he settled after the army, Tony was making strides. He had found “a terrific girl and apartment,” as well as a job on a political campaign, but added, “I’m more alive and more depressed than in years.”

  This statement reveals a great deal about Tony. He is “alive” because he sees possibilities in this political work to catapult him onto a newspaper like the Washington Post or the Christian Science Monitor or maybe even the Baltimore Sun. But because he isn’t there yet, he finds this a depressing time. So much to hope for, but so much unsettled. And so much impatience. He ends, “Maybe I’ll have to go back to the Post-Dispatch,” the same newspaper that was so impressed by Tony that it offered him a permanent job during his junior year at Harvard, but was now too low a prize for him to contemplate.

  In the meantime, I had entered a serious regime of psychoanalysis. My physical symptoms had not diminished, even though the paregoric worked most of the time. And my depression kept getting worse, especially when I contemplated continuing to live way out in the valley, subsisting on unemployment benefits, and seeing nothing coming my way.

  Soon, Tony wrote that he had again been depressed, “very depressed,” and attributed it to his inability to get a rise out of any major newspaper.

  I DON’T KNOW when I stopped thinking of the word “depressed” as a general description of sadness or disappointment and started thinking of it clinically. Or when I realized it was a medical term that applied to Tony—and to me. When he wrote that letter in 1958, Tony was not suggesting that he had a mental disorder. In fact, I’m not sure that he ever thought so. “Depressed” and “depression” were figures of speech, more like “sad” or “disappointed.”

  I should have known better. Not only had I studied psychology and knew the distinction between sadness and depression, but I was all too aware of my own mental instability. Since the fall of 1955, my senior year of college, I surely knew what
depression was and what it could do to the body and the mind.

  Due to my current analysis I was knowledgeable enough to realize that what had been labeled “neurasthenia” was more likely a combination of an anxiety disorder, psychogenic stomach disorder, and dysthymia—or cyclical depression. I was confident that psychotherapy would work. I just had to enter into it full throttle.

  When Tony wrote that he was “depressed,” however, I wasn’t connecting the dots. I thought I was the only one in the family who had serious psychological problems—serious enough to inhibit my career path, my social life, and my sense of enjoyment, though not so serious as to require close supervision or to keep me from occasional moments of pleasure. In short, I was like millions of Americans—troubled but not mentally ill.

  I figured Tony was just looking for his place in the world after the army, and that takes time and effort. Of course he’ll be unhappy from time to time, I thought, but he’s strong.

  In late 1958, from the heavens came a bid from the Baltimore Sun. Tony was thrilled because it was in a city he knew had “culture,” a city where Mencken spent many productive years. With the Sun job, he reported, he would be up and running into the future. But he also said he was tired of dragging all over the place, tired of not having someone to love him (“I’ll take the first sweet thing who comes along”), and, most important, “I’m fearful of letting anyone else know just how unsure I am of myself and my ability. I am too concerned with showing my best face, even if it means painting a false one.”

  Tony’s lack of elation revealed a pattern that I can understand: we both could work extremely hard for our achievements, but once they were accomplished, we could equally express despair that they weren’t greater or that people weren’t noticing how well we were doing, weren’t applauding us. For both of us, there was constant devaluation of our achievements.

  Over the next year, ups and downs persisted. Tony would complain bitterly that he was on the “lobster shift,” where “not enough writing will come my way.” He could not understand why once again he had to undergo apprenticeship. As a twenty-six-year-old reporter who had seen service in the army, at the Harvard Crimson, and at two other newspapers, he was infuriated at being forced to show his mettle once again.

  Later, his mood would switch. “In the past two months I’ve been doing more writing than I ever thought possible on a paper this size and it’s all been getting in. From my contacts . . . I gather that it’s been well received and that the city editor likes my style.” He had gotten two bylines (“almost unheard-of for a new man”), and it’s clear that the reporter Tony is to become had already begun to show itself. He even admitted that he was getting a good “education” in the basics of journalism—forgoing the hubris of his remarks only a few months earlier.

  Understandably, he relates that with all this work he has no time for a social life—no dates, no girls. He has even had no time to read books. He’s lonely. He wishes he could come to California to see me—we’ve seen each other only five days in the past four years—but he’s too busy writing.

  In September, I decided to join Tony back east for Missy’s seventy-fifth birthday. The trip reunited Dad, Tony, and me for the first time in two or three years. It was not without its tribulation (I was fired from the trucking company I had been working for because I overstayed my leave), but it was good to hear how Tony was doing on the Sun, and we took the time to attend some theater together. On leaving, we promised to be in closer touch by mail.

  In December, back in L.A., I got a call from Bob Maxwell, who had bought the rights to MGM’s National Velvet to make a television series. Would I like to come along as associate producer?

  Tony congratulated me, but complained, “This is the most unimaginative, dull and uncreative city desk you can imagine.” He’s depressed, but can’t fight it off. Nothing looks right to him, not his present “woman” or the job, from which freshness and spontaneity have evaporated. He says he’s looking for a position either at the Washington Post or the Herald Tribune in New York. At the end, he apologizes for his “sour note for a sour feeling.”

  I wonder if Tony was not simply a depressive but subject to the waves of affect that characterize bipolar disorder. If so, it might explain the intense irritability that preceded his depressive episodes and the bursts of enthusiasm that occasionally accompanied his work.

  My own life—like that of anyone trying to get a break in a tough industry—had its ups and downs. While I was very active, I had terrible problems with my so-called love life. I found myself in an on-again, off-again relationship with a young architecture student that proved difficult to stay in and difficult to terminate.

  I didn’t know whether she loved me or never wanted to see me again. She found it difficult to articulate her feelings. During our phone calls, there were often long, unbearable silences between us. I felt adrift, uncertain about my ability to be loved, uncertain about her feelings.

  My psychoanalyst kept asking me why I felt so much rejection and sorrow when this woman couldn’t respond to me. Was it, perhaps, an echo of the silence of my mother? I wasn’t prepared—at that time—to countenance any such Freudian interpretation.

  But one thing is certain: I was not equipped to deal with a romance in which I got less than 100 percent. Sadness and anger surged through me. Why didn’t this woman care for me as much as I cared for her? My psychoanalyst asked me why I had chosen her, suggesting that the fault might lie not with her but with my choice of potential mates. Was I perhaps picking women who couldn’t love? Was I playing over and over again the broken record of the death of my mother? In years to come, this phantom would sabotage me.

  Meanwhile, I decided I needed to get away for a while. I would take a vacation. I asked Tony to join me.

  IN A LUSH GARDEN on the grounds of the María Cristina, an inexpensive colonial-era hotel in the heart of Mexico City, my brother sits and reads the New York Times. For years, this is how each day will start. No matter where he is, he has to read that paper. And even though he is still working for the Sun, he has to know what Scotty Reston is saying. Later, Susan and I made it a matter of speculation whenever Tony visited us to see how far he would travel and how long it might take to get the paper for his morning read. In Mexico, he had only to travel down to the Paseo de la Re-forma, where the Hilton sold the Times.

  While the paper was being read, everything else came to a halt. No one was allowed to interrupt; no crisis, excluding an earth-quake, might shake Tony from finishing the sports and foreign desk sections. It was a ritual of enormous consequence.

  Since the trip to Mexico was our first vacation together in almost ten years, I was impatient to get on to the business of pleasure. But Tony instructed me in the importance of his morning read, and I came to respect and tolerate it, no matter how long it lasted. I had borrowed a 35 mm camera to capture interesting moments on the trip—my first effort at taking still pictures—and somewhere there is a slide of Tony in his cordovan shoes, J. Press button-down shirt, and crewneck sweater from his Harvard days reading the Times in the María Cristina’s garden on that sunny morning in May 1960. We laugh at it, my wife and I, for the absurdity of the image—all those northern clothes, that concentration on news in the midst of southern beauty and southern climate—but we also admire it for the image of Tony’s dedication to dreams of glory.

  The Mexico trip was not only the first expanse of time we spent together after adolescence but the last before I got married. As such, it had then, and has now, an aura of “golden time” about it—that important hour at the end of the day when filmmakers wait until the sun’s glow is just perfect for capturing life not as it is but as we wish it to be. As a nascent photographer and wannabe in the film industry, I knew about golden time. The term would reverberate with multiple meanings for my entire life.

  Originally, Tony had wanted to join me for my birthday in March, but he was working hard at the Sun and couldn’t get away. I, on the other hand, was having m
y own busy time—completing the Velvet pilot, which seemed to take forever. Then we got the idea we could take a vacation together while Maxwell waited to hear whether the Velvet series would be picked up for production; Tony had accrued vacation time. Hey, we could go somewhere with each other. We decided on two and a half weeks in Mexico.

  Living in Los Angeles made Mexico a perfect choice for me. It was close, the airfare was low, I loved Mexican food and Mexican music. Tony readily agreed. Mexico and its beaches seemed a wonderful option after a rough Maryland winter, and it turned out several acquaintances in Baltimore had friends or restaurants to suggest in Mexico. I started studying Spanish. I knew Tony wouldn’t know a word of it, since he was resistant to the study of languages unless he was paid to do it. But I hated to travel without some knowledge of a country’s language. By the time I left for Mexico City a month later, I had acquired a good working knowledge of the basic verbs and grammar. Enough, at least, to get us through our travels.

  The plan was that I would fly to Mexico City on May 4, wait in our hotel for him to arrive the next day, and then we would spend two and a half weeks exploring. I used the patron saint of guide-books—Kate Simon’s Mexico: Places and Pleasures—to plan our holiday, but I must have missed the section on fiestas, because I arrived just before Cinco de Mayo, a day of jubilant celebration in Mexico, a fanfare for an exhilarating nineteenth-century victory over colonialism. Tony would not see it, but my memory of our trip together is forever colored by the experience of that first night. Shortly after I returned to California, I tried to convey in writing my love affair with Mexico through that first night’s experience: