The Dakota Winters, page 26
40
When Buddy died of cancer in 2011 we were close again, speaking by phone three times a week. In that last year he and my mother stayed with us in California, and we took walks and went out to dinner, and reminisced about Friday Nights with Buddy Winter, which as it turned out wasn’t the end for him. In 1982 he began a six-year run on PBS where on each half-hour show he focused on a single guest, and in the case of a few geniuses (Sir John Gielgud, George Balanchine) let those interviews go for several nights. He played in tennis tournaments into his seventies. He narrated a documentary on the early days of TV, and then another on the golden age of talk shows. He appeared again on The Love Boat, this time with my mother. They got to be strangers who fell for each other and their improvised lines were the best ever spoken on that ridiculous show.
For years, things were strained with my father, because I needed to find a separate path and because he felt I’d abandoned him, that I had, as my mother suggested, stopped listening. When he died, I longed for my old role, and for the nights after work when we’d take over a bar and the talk would be electric, because it always was back then; wherever we went was the center of the universe.
I’ve been thinking of Buddy these days as I’ve emerged from my own breakdown, or whatever else you want to call it. I overworked and slept too little, and like him years back, worried about the wrong things. And then I went into intensive therapy with a dauntlessly wise man named Morris at his office in Santa Monica. I felt numb the first few meetings and lost in the hours after. I then had my own version of a primal, and in those sessions talked not just about Buddy but about everything—my fluctuating relationships over the years with my mother; and Rachel, who married Randy (who wrote and produced a successful police procedural show, The Precinct) and worked her way up to become the first female principal at Coolidge; and Kip, who became a Buddhist and lives up in Seattle, has three kids, and still plays tennis, and who told me a while back that I needed to move up there for my sanity. I have my sanity, though, and a fetching and empathetic California-born wife (who left me once, but only for a month), and two kids who have no interest in working around celebrities.
I attended the second Obama inauguration and actually had a conversation with the First Lady about growing up on a talk show. My life has worked out largely the way I would have wanted, with a few exceptions. I’ve thought often about what might have happened for us had John not been shot, had someone gotten to that twisted soul before, and had the Beatles shocked the world on Buddy’s stage. We’d have survived another two years, maybe more, but who knows? It’s easy to say the Beatles would have saved us, and maybe they would have, maybe a lot of things. It was a year of comebacks that never materialized, and I guess they rarely do in the way we hope.
Those weeks after Thanksgiving in 1980 feel to me now like a dream. The show was coming together, John had emerged from hiding and with Yoko was holding interviews with everyone it seemed, a big one with Playboy, and another with Newsweek. He had so many plans! He and Yoko would tour with their band, and he had a play he’d written, and traveling he wanted to do, especially to Tahiti. After their reunion, my thought was that John and Paul might write some songs together again, and they’d be ones for the ages. As of December 3, Ringo had signed on to being on the show, and George was the lone holdout, but wouldn’t be for long. Not with the other three pulling for this. It would be as I pitched it—the second half of the forty-two-minute concert on the roof at Savile Row that had ended because the police broke it up, and we wouldn’t do a big windup for it. The network would know and the affiliates, but it would be the biggest and best secret everyone kept.
I remember a cab trip I took downtown with John on one of those perfect fall days, and his saying the best part about coming on Buddy’s show would be that no one would ever ask him again when the band was getting back together.
“What I want is to outlive Elvis. To survive,” he said.
“You have,” I said.
“Isn’t it all so fuckin’ grand?” he said. “A year ago you were dying of malaria in a rancid hospital bed. Now look at you. I’ve sprinkled you with Beatle dust.”
He said something vaguely fatherly as I left, which was lost in the din of traffic.
I went out with Olive the night of December 8 to hear music at a new club in the Village, the Ritz, which had a cavernous dance floor, and everyone dressed in black, a lot of them wearing chains and motorcycle boots, and we all slammed into one another listening to the Flying Lizards. We left the club before the news broke out, but we could feel it everywhere around us, in the tears of strangers and the howl from down the street and in the silence from the places where music would have streamed out. Something terrible had happened, and we would never be the same again.
41
The world wept outside our building that night, wave after wave of mourners in down coats and wool ponchos and fringed denim jackets and sweatshirts, a handful in robes and slippers, old and young, faces you recognized and more you didn’t from all over New York and soon from everywhere, and a few TV crews set up cameras, and a man in a wheelchair sang Beatles songs, and people embraced one another, or stood there in shock. Blood speckled the ground at the entryway. He’d been shot four times. The young surgeon at Roosevelt Hospital had opened him up and held his heart in his hand, trying to massage it back to life, but John had lost too much blood, and it was too late. At our front gate were yellow and red roses and wildflowers and photos and drawings, and messages of love and pain written out on notebook paper or posters. No one knew how close they’d been to seeing the four of them, that the shock they were meant to receive was the band back together again, which was in part my making. I’d seen it in my mind’s eye, had already dreamt of it, the first of many times I would over the years.
Things we know about that last day: John got his hair cut. He did a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz for Rolling Stone, the one where he was naked hugging a clothed Yoko. A reporter interviewed him for three hours for RKO Radio. When John’s driver didn’t show, the reporter gave him a ride to the record studio on his way to the airport.
When he left the building he signed a record for the man who killed him.
If I think of those last days I see Mark David Chapman everywhere, walking out of Central Park, entering the McBurney Y where he stayed. I see him standing outside our building in that coat and that scarf, dead inside and full of pointless rage. I can’t avoid feeling that I could have done something, beat the shit out of him, or talked him out of it, or called the cops, but a lot of people feel that way.
It was startling how personally they experienced John’s death, as though they’d lost an intimate friend, or brother, or lover. But they knew nothing about him. It made me think of Olive’s riff on the misplaced emotions people feel toward stars they never met. What drove them to our front gate in anguish in a way ended his life. We love them, then we kill them, my mother said when I shared this thought with her.
Buddy’s show in the following weeks found its stride. His monologues were heroically crisp and funny; we had great guests, but it had the feel of a goodbye tour, the sort athletes have in their final season. We’d meant for it to be a rebirth, not the end of the road. What made it frustrating was that we heard different things every week. A network suit would tell us we’d weathered the storm and might soon be heading toward five nights a week, and then we’d lose another affiliate, and the numbers would drop, and Elliot would warn us our days were numbered. It was like being with a girlfriend, he said, who had one foot out the door.
I suffered headaches during that period and anxiety attacks, believing it was my fault for raising our hopes.
“I can’t stand the thought that he has to go through this again,” I said to Rachel as we walked in the park, Buddy and my mother twenty yards ahead, on our way to the boathouse. It was close to the end.
“Go through what?”
“Losing his show again. Falling out of favor. He’ll be right back where he was.”
“He isn’t, and you aren’t.”
“How so?”
“Look at him,” she said, and at that moment Buddy turned and glanced warmly back at us.
“He’ll be fine. You made it so. No one else would have done what you did. I certainly wouldn’t have. And he made it back. He didn’t want the life he had before.”
“No, I guess I did,” I said.
“I did too a little,” Rachel said. “I just never said it.”
I remember wandering the neighborhood and seeing the borderline businesses close and a pricey boutique opening and feeling that the city I’d known would be gone soon, or a lot of it, and I went about taking mental photographs—Grossingers Home Bakery, specializing in European-style cookies; the Avocado Tree, where I bought rolling papers and my first bong; the magazine shop where I bought egg creams; the little barbershop that had an old-fashioned bikini calendar on the wall; the gift shop where I saw a couple try to set the Guinness World Record for longest kiss, their lips swelling to the size of sausages in their fortieth hour; the Ansonia, inside which we took ballroom-dancing classes; the Claremont riding stables, where Rachel spent all day on Saturdays and came home smelling of hay. It would all change soon, yuppie bond traders buying up apartments in converted SROs, the young and wealthy filling the best tables at Victor’s, Ruelles, or the Red Baron, and browsing for designer chocolates and two-hundred-dollar pairs of jeans. And where did the old people, the crazy people, the drunks and the prostitutes, the chess-playing socialists go? The preachers and amateur politicians, the guy outside the Dublin House selling magic tricks and jokes? The West Side of our growing up had the whole world within, not just the pretty parts.
I flew out in early April, after the show ended, to Los Angeles and found a studio apartment in Venice, three blocks from Will, and we started writing together, and thinking up projects and taking meetings, which I’d become pretty good at. He was a force, like Buddy in many ways, and much sharper than he’d been in college. We were good for each other, and I thought ridiculously of John and Paul in Hamburg, writing songs together from opposing bunk beds. I spoke to Olive once a week on the phone, and then nearly every night.
I had a dream in my new home about the storm at sea, and when I woke up I was very happy, and then upset. And then I wrote for the whole day, and took a long walk along the Pacific Ocean. I wondered what Buddy was up to, and I pictured him at a movie with Harry, grabbing dinner after and sketching out a new life. It was my birthday tomorrow, I thought, and then I realized it was today, and there were messages on my phone, and I felt far away from everything then, from all I’d ever known.
Acknowledgments
This book owes much to the Upper West Side of my childhood; to my parents, Heather and Joe Barbash, who moved us there just after Nixon was elected and introduced us to Revolver and Rubber Soul. Thanks to writer friends Justin Cronin, Jim Sullivan, Jason Roberts, David Mitchell, Anika Stretifeld, Dave Eggers, Jess Walter, and Eric Puchner, who encouraged me and offered wise counsel when needed.
My sister, Lisa, was a primary source of experience and wisdom, as was my stepmother, Carol Lamberg, and my godmother, Joy Boyum. David Berman, Mark Weiner, Kerstin Nash, John Swomley, and Rex Miller were able sounding boards.
Dan Chaon helped pull me from more than a few narrative ditches and has for years been a continuous source of inspiration. Joshua Blum, Ann Terry, and John Martin taught me valuable things about the world of television and talk shows in particular. Captain Hank Halsted shared some of his experiences at sea with John Lennon in two long phone conversations, though I certainly took artistic license. Joshua Wolf Shenk lent his insights on Paul and John. Steffi and Bob Berne and novelist Nina Solomon shared their thoughts on living in the Dakota and invited me inside to ride the elevators, walk the hallways, and sit in their living rooms sharing stories. Fred Seaman’s book about working for John Lennon was elucidating, as were The John Lennon Letters, Stephen Birmingham’s Life at the Dakota, Katharine Hepburn’s The Making of The African Queen, and Henry Bushkin’s book about his client Johnny Carson. Grant Dorsey and Brenna Wear educated me on malaria, and David Dodson and Max Mulhern taught me crucial things about sailing in the open sea. Thanks to the MacDowell Colony, Martin Lauber, and Simon Blattner, who offered me a room of my own within which to work, and to my students and colleagues at CCA who continue to inspire me.
Much gratitude to Lee Boudreaux and Dan Halpern, for first believing in the book; to Emma Dries, who helped keep me on course; to Trent Duffy, the gold standard of copy editors; and to my patient and brilliant editor Megan Lynch, for her wise and forthright counsel. Ellen Levine has been a constant force in my writing life, wise and warm, and always there. And finally to Hilary and James, who fill my life with joy and wonder.
About the Author
TOM BARBASH is the author of the novel The Last Good Chance, winner of the California Book Award, and the short story collection Stay Up with Me, which was a national bestseller and was nominated for the Folio Prize. His nonfiction book, On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11; A Story of Loss and Renewal, was a New York Times bestseller. He is an associate professor of writing at California College of the Arts.
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Also by Tom Barbash
THE LAST GOOD CHANCE
STAY UP WITH ME
ON TOP OF THE WORLD: CANTOR FITZGERALD, HOWARD LUTNICK, AND 9/11; A STORY OF LOSS AND RENEWAL
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
THE DAKOTA WINTERS. Copyright © 2018 by Tom Barbash. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Cover photo: ferrantraite/Getty Images
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available upon request.
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Barbash, Tom, author.
Title: The Dakota Winters : a novel / by Tom Barbash.
Description: First edition. | New York : Ecco, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018000168 (print) | LCCN 2018004926 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062258236 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062258199 | ISBN 9780062258212
Subjects: LCSH: Families—Fiction. | Domestic fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3602.A757 (ebook) | LCC PS3602.A757 D35 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000168
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Digital Edition DECEMBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-225823-6
ISBN: 978-1-4434-2036-5 (Canada)
Version 10102018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-225819-9 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1-4434-2034-1 (Canada)
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Tom Barbash, The Dakota Winters
