He
came to see her because he loved her. He wanted to talk about the project, of course, & about the flopsweat that seized hold of him in the last few weeks. The fear that he might be calling dark energy. He didn’t like the witchy feeling of superstition that of a sudden descended upon him in regards to directing & starring in a film about the death of a maverick. A maverick like him…
Though he hadn’t fully discussed it with his wife, Michael was certain he wanted her to play the Angel of Death. Still, he couldn’t put his finger on it. There was something tawdry & graspy about this posthumous-feeling, pet project of his. An element of morbid kitsch… was he jumping headlong into a lot of meretricious nonsense? He aimed to cross Fosse with Cocteau, but was he really up for that? (Was anyone?) Because whenever he had that “genius” conversation with himself, he sure as hell came out on the losing end. Would he—could he — make some kind of wild theatrical poem, some messy, perfectly imperfect masterpiece? All he had to do was close his eyes & he could hear the jangle of a critical & financial fiasco, a lampoonable death rattle.
Whatever he was going to make, he sure the fuck didn’t feel like falling on his ass. (Never did.) This wasn’t a midlife gambol, it was an act of love, or was meant to be, as much as it was a cri de coeur. But the virus of doubt had infected him, and experience had shown that was a tough bug to kill. He’d awaken in the night, at that time Dr. Calliope always called the hour of the wolf, from a dream that he was walking alongside the catafalque bearing his body; the pallbearers looked at him sideways with contempt & he felt shame that he didn’t have the courage to climb in the box. That quality of nightmare hadn’t occurred since radiation.
With each passing hour, he saw himself engineering what the Internet called an epic FAIL, a professional, personal, spiritual blunder. But there he was, taking the meetings, there he was, already out there, making plans. Producing — he’d even hired someone to do a budget. Yes, yes, it was way preliminary, but still… he was doing the act as if that All That Jazz was going to happen, that it had to. That it must. Maybe he shouldn’t be moving so fast. Maybe he should just sit with it for 6 months, even a year. He didn’t want to be like Warren either. Warren had been talking about the Howard Hughes movie since Precambrian time. I don’t have the luxury. I may not have three years. He needed a reality check. Could be he was just chickenshit, a classic case of the jitters. The trouble was, he couldn’t sort out old fears (the ones long before his cancer, childhood ones mixed up with his father) from the new. If anyone could get to the bottom of it, Dr. Calliope could. She was a deepsea diver that way, deepsea diver extraordinaire.
He was her analysand in the early 70s, during Streets. Calliope Krohn was the shrink to the stars; she knew how to navigate the celeb mindset. No one intimidated her. The celebs appreciated that, it was a special gift.
Her old patients kept in touch by phone, some just to chat and check in, others to seek informal counsel. Former clients — what they used to call marquee names—were an aging tribe of legends, & the old Krohn was their Yodagirl. They’d all been through the wars together — in one-on-ones & weekly groups that she ran out of her office in Beverly Hills — their private, deeply personal melodramas often played out for the insatiable public, a public that, with the advent of the Internet, became a rapist, a rampaging, murderous home-invader. A remarkably high percentage of the Tribe had endured, managing to hold onto their seats at the cultural table, still rich, famous and recognizable by the dullwitted man-on-the-street of China, Finland, Capetown, where have you, & for that they credited the doctor’s governance.
So they called & they called & they worried, & sent care packages: deli from Factor’s, pasta from Dante’s, takeaway from Spago’s (a nostalgic nod to a man called Swifty), platters from Bristol Farms (nostalgia again, because it sat on the land where Chasen’s used to be), cupcakes from Sprinkles, yogurt from Yogurtland, flowers from The Empty Vase. Because most were in the Academy, they sent DVDs of whatever films were up for awards that year, sometimes their own. They sent personal assistants to check up on her when they weren’t checking up on her themselves because after all she was almost 90 & steadfastly refused to employ caregivers, she barely let in the twice-a-month housekeeper, & her Tribespeople (justifiably) worried she would fall, that when she didn’t answer the phone she was in trouble, she’d fallen & couldn’t get up, or was dead. Only a month ago, two Oscar-winning actresses & a Tony/Grammy doubleheader descended upon her Trousdale home at the same time, unbeknownst to each other, because they kept getting a busy signal, keystone kopping into the house through the sliding glass backdoor that was forever unlocked, startling her in her usual plunked-down spot, half-dozing/watching TV, always one of said hundreds of DVDs, starred in, produced, directed or written by her minions (in-home festival that revolved year-round), the phone hadn’t been properly put back in its cradle, that’s all, everyone had a laugh, perfect anecdote to be neatly folded & put away until employed on the day of the eulogies.
Dr. Calliope was in excellent health for her age, sharp as a tack as they say, still cutting to the heart of a problem with unsettling speed. She was always there for him, had helped him through so many dark times… those early years when his ability to dream froze in his father’s formidable shadow; through the Oedipal crisis of Cuckoo’s Nest & Dad’s towering rage; the addictions and divorce & of late not just the cancer of course but the prison ordeal with his son… there for him in that hallucinatory time when he became Michael Douglas, walking/leading/guiding him through that obverse world of acclaim and peril. Because for an actor, sudden fame was a crucible, perilous as a slow fade to obscurity. The only fates possible for a supernova were joining a constellation or falling out of the sky.
He remembered talking to her just after the diagnosis. He was so angry at the doctors who missed it, angry that Catherine had to be so angry, for months they said it was something else, how could they miss a tumor the size of a walnut, then he was angry at God & so fatigued during the treatment, his anger turned inward and he grew depressed. Dr. Calliope had lost a son herself to cancer, Jesus, that must have been 40 years ago, she never discussed it until their recent phone calls, so poignant, moving, germane. (CK always sent lovely notes on the birthdays of the children Catherine had given him.) She was the first to tell him to divorce Diandra, years before the event finally happened. She rarely made any sort of pronouncement, not her style, not what therapy was about, never gave advice, not in that sense, in the concrete sense, she wasn’t a codependent shrink & wasn’t invasive, not too invested in the mechanics of her clients’ daily lives (not really) so when she said he should divorce her, he thought she was being dramatic (she was, but that shouldn’t have diluted the message), and in-trouble as the marriage was, that irritated him because no one, not even Dr. Calliope Krohn, told Michael Douglas what to do, or how to live his life. He was caught in a conundrum, because that’s why he was seeing her, wasn’t it? Not necessarily to be told what to do but to show him how to live, how to love, how to love himself, & how to live through things that might destroy him.