“Don’t be angry with me for waking you, honey.”
“I’m not angry with you,” I said.
“I had a panic attack,” she said. “I woke in a cold sweat and a sense that—” She didn’t finish the sentence. “I don’t know, honey, I’m a fucking wreck.”
“I think you should get a checkup. Let me book an appointment for you in the morning?” I said.
“What’s the point?” She laughed bitterly. “I had checkups last time. I had checkups coming out of my ears. They didn’t find a damn thing wrong with me. A couple of days later, bam! Strokes are as unpredictable as fucking earthquakes, honey. I was lucky I was already in hospital when they happened. I would have died if I hadn’t been where I was.” After a pause, she said: “Do you want to talk about that time?”
“Do you?” I said, hoping she didn’t. I just wanted to go back to sleep.
“We haven’t discussed it yet, and I can’t sleep,” she said. “Is it all right with you if we talk for a while?”
I switched on the tape that I now kept by my bed. “I’d better make some notes. What year are we talking about? Eighty-six?”
“Nineteen eighty-six. October 9,” she said precisely.
“You were admitted to St. John’s, Santa Monica, with double pneumonia,” I said.
“A few days later, a couple of strokes were thrown in for fun,” she said and did not stop talking for nearly an hour.
“They kept me in for three months. The irony is I’d kept fit all that year, swimming, playing a lot of tennis. I was sixty-four. I was in damn good shape for an old broad. I’d even been going to a hypnotist to help me give up smoking. It didn’t do much good, but I was trying.
“It started with a cold that wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t unusual. Everyone in London had the same thing. For two or three days you’d feel pretty good again and suddenly, bang, forget it! This went on for three or four months. Being as strong and fit as I was, I didn’t do anything about it. I wouldn’t go to bed. I just put up with it. Then something happened that really worried me.
“One morning, I took a deep breath, and felt a terrible burning pain in my chest. I’d never felt anything like it before. It frightened the hell out of me. I was still smoking like a chimney although I knew all about emphysema. I’d seen old chums die of it—my friend Nunnally Johnson. He was a wonderful writer. I knew Huston was dying of it.
“I called my doctor, he called in a specialist. We did X-rays here in the flat, a bunch of breathing tests. The specialist said I had a heavy cold. I’d get over it, he said. I told him about my fear of emphysema. ‘One thing is for sure, Miss Gardner, you’ll never have emphysema. You have extremely strong lungs. There is nothing wrong with you. You have a nasty cold, that’s all,’ he said.
“Bullshit. I knew I was sick. I knew there was something wrong with me. The next day, I got on a plane and went home to my doctor in Los Angeles. I never have a temperature; that’s one thing that runs in the family—low temperatures, even if we’re dying. On the plane my temperature just soared. They cleared some seats in the back of the plane so I could lie down. They gave me oxygen, and called ahead for an ambulance to meet the plane. I was taken straight to St. John’s.
“The next few days I was out of it. I had double pneumonia. My temperature kept rising. I think it got to one hundred and six. My brain was cooking. My arm was filled with needles and tubes of every antibiotic they could think of. They finally hit me with sixteen milligrams of cortisone. That may have saved my life, although I also think it could have caused the strokes. It’s a fucking dangerous drug, I can tell you that.
“But it did the trick. My temperature started to come down. I was still having inhalations four or five times a day but the chest pains had eased. I was moved to a private room, with a little sitting room attached. I was sitting there after dinner one evening watching a Laurel and Hardy film with my nurse when I felt the tingling sensation I told you about. Like tiny pinpricks in the palm of my left hand, on the side of my face, down the side of my nose.
“The nurse must have had a suspicion of what it might be. She called the doctor. He gave me some tests: hold your hand out, close your eyes, touch your nose. My hand was weaving all over the place. It was going here, there, and all over the place. It just made me laugh.
“I went to sleep that night. No problem. I went out like a light. Maybe they gave me something, I don’t know. The following morning, my whole left side was paralyzed: the leg, the arm, the side of my face, they had no feeling at all. I couldn’t see out of my left eye. The strange thing was, although I realized immediately I’d had a stroke, I wasn’t frightened. There was no Oh my God, I’m paralyzed moment. You’d think I’d have panicked, but I didn’t. I was perfectly calm.
“Maybe if there is such a thing as a God, maybe He saves another part of your brain to protect you from the terrible shock to your system when something like that happens to you.
“I remember I did a lot of laughing in those early days. I told you how it also hit my bladder, which meant I had no control. I giggled and laughed and wet my pants a lot. I certainly had nothing to laugh about. I didn’t realize how sick I was, or just how paralyzed I was.
“The seriousness of what had happened didn’t hit me until later. I’d been concentrating on how to walk again; I had a marvelous Egyptian therapist who got some feeling back into my leg. He literally gave me the will to walk again. I had a wonderful young woman speech therapist who got my voice back. I think she shined up my Southern drawl a little, too. Although it was still nowhere near the way it was when I first went out to Hollywood—when Mr. Schenck sent my screen test to the coast without the soundtrack because he was afraid that my North Carolina accent was too thick for anyone to understand a damn word I said.
“The tragedy is my left arm. It still doesn’t work. But because I use my right hand, and feed myself, I didn’t realize how badly it was damaged. It didn’t get as much early attention as my leg. I kept being told the arm was always the last thing to recover, and I wasn’t to worry. The arm and the face usually repaired themselves without therapy, they said. It was a dreadful thing to say because they don’t, honey. They just don’t. This is it, this is as good as it gets. And the part of the brain that feels pain and hurt and anger that’s still intact—just as that part that feels happiness is gone.”
“I hope that’s not true, Ava,” I said.
“I can’t help it. That’s the way I feel, honey,” she said.
After a silence, she said: “Anyway, enough of this.” I sensed she was close to tears. “I’m ready for bed now. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
SHE CALLED THE FOLLOWING evening, just after nine.
“What I was saying yesterday about the stroke, and the part of my brain that still feels anger and hurt—I was never daunted by it, you know. I want you to say that in the book. You must make that clear. I don’t want it to sound like one long sob story,” she said.
“It won’t, Ava,” I said.
“I don’t want to sound like old Mother Machree,” she said. I had no idea who Mother Machree was but guessed she might have been one of her father’s Irish sayings—or Mickey Rooney’s. I said she had never sounded like Mother Machree to me.
“Good,” she said with satisfaction.
“It’s going to be an extraordinary book, Ava,” I said reassuringly. “You will be proud of it.”
She hesitated. “Do you want to hear something?”
“Okay,” I said.
“I made some notes at the time. I fished them out this morning. Do you want to hear them?”