In Pieces(78)

Even then, at the very beginning, a sliver of me jabbed, urging me to back out of the room with his guys. I can see it written in my journal, a line here or there, questioning why I was doing this. Why didn’t I run? But those words are disregarded when I write a rebuttal, caught in an argument between me and myself. I’d emphatically state that I had feelings for him, that he had no one but me, that I was concerned about his illness, focusing on my need to heal something unknown—nursing a wound that clearly was not located in him, but in me.

Burt’s condition was nothing new. It had been going on for a while, and though everyone in his inner circle believed—with a shrug—that the episodes were related to stress or anxiety (serious conditions in themselves), I resisted accepting that as an answer because how could you know for sure? Whatever it was, the pain was real to him. As a result, during the day, when we were riding in that car—whether he was in the driver’s seat or I was—part of my attention was on his health, or his heart. Oh, let’s face it, on him. It was my job to dispense the only method he had of dealing with the agony, and whenever he’d signal with a nod of his head or a raise of his eyebrow, I’d hand him a Valium, then another and another, offset by an occasional Percodan or two. Good Christ almighty, he was zooming the car down narrow roads, barely able to see around the forest of equipment, and spouting reams of dialogue while I fed him barbiturates hand over fist. Clearly, I didn’t have my wits about me.

Burt and Hal deciding what to shoot.





Halfway through the shoot I turned into Crusader Rabbit, emphatically insisting that Burt’s health be taken seriously. He needed to know what was causing the pain, whether it was his heart or stress or some unknown condition, because only then could he accurately deal with it. Mind you, I was the girl who could barely call the operator for information—back when there was such a thing. Now I took charge, researching where to go for an examination and when in the schedule the other racing vehicles—either the one containing Jackie Gleason and Mike Henry, or the truck driven by Jerry Reed and the drooling dog—were to be photographed. During that tiny window of time, the occupants of the Trans Am, Burt and I, flew to the Miami Heart Institute with Pete the bodyguard in tow. All very hush-hush—we were to stay the night, then in the morning, under a general anesthetic, a thin tube would be inserted into Burt’s heart to check the coronary arteries and overall functioning of the vital organ. Not a risk-free procedure, but barring any complications, and if no immediate problems were discovered, then he’d be released that day. I was part guardian, part mother, and part spouse, spending the night in his room, sleeping on a chair-like futon in the corner. Early the next day, he bravely kissed me goodbye, saying with a twinkle, “Well, we’ve made it this far.” (Meaning the relationship, not the procedure.) And as they wheeled him away, I stood in the door to his room, tears actually “welling” in my eyes as though I were in a scene from Dark Victory.

I’m not sure if Burt was relieved to hear that he had a strong, healthy heart or if he would rather have heard something dire. Certainly, he wanted to feel that he had the right to be in pain, whether from blockage in a major organ or from signals sent from his brain. It’s still pain. I tried to reassure him that he didn’t need to have heart disease to die, that stress could kill him just as dead as any ol’ thrombosis—which he found oddly soothing. But when I told him that the doctor recommended he get into therapy of some kind, that he needed to learn methods to deal with his stress and anxiety, Burt balked, saying that talking to a shrink was self-delusional poppycock. After that I dropped the subject. We went back to work, back to camera mounts, to dusty roads, to driving with the pedal to the metal, and to pharmaceuticals. Did my children ever visit? No. Did I break Coulter’s heart by telling him I’d met someone else? Yes. Did it make any sense at all—then or now? That’s what I’m trying to figure out.


After the film wrapped, my life bounced back into the familiar routines: being with my kids, my mother, my sister, and finding somewhere else to live. But no matter what I was doing, no matter how important or pressing things in my own life were, I’d instantly drop everything whenever Burt called from his home in Florida—as regularly irregular as those calls might have been.

Burt always told me that he’d been born in Waycross, Georgia, and whether that’s true or not, I do know that he grew up in the Sunshine State and over the years, he had accumulated enough land to build an unpretentious, no-frills ranch for his family. The house he’d made for his parents was a simple one-story home, with an easy arrangement of well-worn furniture scattered atop the indoor/outdoor carpeting, which ran throughout, including the kitchen. To the side of this concrete block house was an awning-covered path connected to a smaller but identical version of the main structure, the only difference being that the smaller one had red-flocked wallpaper and black shag carpeting. And it was here that he had gone to recuperate after we parted in Georgia.

I think Burt always considered this rudimentary compound in West Palm Beach his real home, though he’d also owned a place in the Hollywood Hills—a kind of bachelor’s pad with a backyard guesthouse where Hal Needham had been living. Right before filming had begun on Smokey, Burt had sold that Hollywood home and purchased a hacienda-style gated estate in exclusive Holmby Hills—a beautiful, perfect place with high-vaulted ceilings, polished dark wood, and terra-cotta tile floors, a house that stayed cool in the blazing summer and was almost unheatable during the mild winters (something I loved about the house and he didn’t). When Burt finally returned to L.A. that fall, his new piece of real estate was undergoing the massive renovation he’d requested, so he decided to live in the guesthouse located behind his new four-car garage. This one-bedroom cabana had already been completely redone and decorated up the wazoo with a lavish Moroccan theme—no flocked wallpaper but lots of shag, this time off-white, not black.