McCalls
"I Don't Run Away Anymore"
May 1955
Last Updated: August 14, 1997
Formatted by: Ted Nesi
Scanned and Provided by: Garth Arrik Jensen
You know her as Ethel Mertz of "I Love Lucy." Her friends know her as a
brave woman who fought her way through nervous collapse to the peace and
wisdom of a happy life.
If you know me as Ethel Mertz, the friend and landlady of Lucille Ball
and Desi Arnaz in TV's "I Love Lucy," you may recall that I am one of
the busiest door-openers in show business. I believe we figured out once
that Ethel makes not less than five entrances a show, or roughly one
every five minutes.
I am very happy about opening those doors - more happy than
probably you could ever imagine. Not much more than two years before
"Lucy" played its first television performance I could not open a door
at all, any more than you could force yourself to enter a filled gas
chamber. It was just about that bad.
As Ethel I memorize a full speaking part each week. But in the year
1947 I would not leave my room without first writing my name and address
on a piece of paper and putting it in my bag. This was so someone would
know who I was if I went crazy, which I firmly thought I was going to
do.
As Ethel I appear every Monday night before one of the largest
single audiences in entertainment history. Yet not many months earlier,
as I count time, I could not face more than three people without severe
danger of cracking up.
Indeed, I had cracked up - had a "nervous breakdown." Psychiatrists
called it an "anxiety neurosis." To me, until my cure, there was a much
simpler if less exact definition: plain hell.
I have never told this story before. I have not wished to. The
reasons aren't difficult to understand. They have nothing to do with
vanity, or endangering my career, or even the possibility of relapse
should I open an old wound. There simply seemed no reason to tell the
story. My case, I felt, was as special as a clinical history of
beri-beri, as isolated from common problems as dengue fever, and
therefore of no conceivable general interest, let alone therapeutic
value or assistance.
But today I think I know differently. I have been informed by
authorities whose opinions I not only respect but revere that there are
millions like me - or millions, more properly, in the gray-night world
from which I have been led. And if this is so, and it must be so, I know
them and they are my friends. Not because we have met, but because of
the sympathetic bond between us. I know that their hands perspire in
strange, unidentified fears, that their stomachs contract in nausea if
the boss fails to smile at them, that they walk alone in queer, numbing
depression wherever they may be, and that always they are afraid.
But I know something else, something possibly that they do not. I
know they can be healed, as I was healed. I know they can be taken from
the shadows of what is only half-life and be restored to happiness. I know they can if they only will.
Let me say now that this is not another faith story in the strictly
religious sense. I could wish it were, and I am sure there are, those
with a faith mightier than mine was who could throw off the burden by
belief alone. But the faith I found when the nightmare finally came I'm
afraid was too little and too late. I needed other help, and I found it
in psychiatry.
There are those who say psychiatry and religion are irreconcilable,
even mortal enemies. This is not, so far as my experience is concerned,
the truth. Without religion to fortify what courage I had left, my ease
would have been hopeless. I have the word of my last psychiatrist,
herself a profoundly religious woman, on that. She told me on my first
visit that she would not so much as consult with me another time if I
did not believe that God was near me. And if I had not believed it,
nothing she could do would have helped. On the other hand, I had not the
strength by myself to meet God halfway. I needed expert mortal aid. And
I got it.
I do not for a moment want to set myself up as preacher or
analyst-without-portfolio (to my mind one of the most vicious
drawing-room dangers a sick person can be exposed to). But of this I am
doggedly convinced, probably because of the agony and terror I went
through before it was brought home to me: You cannot conquer fear until
you have learned what it is you're afraid of. The enemy is ignorance.
And if, like mine was, your faith is insufficient, then seek the help of
someone whose job it is to open doors that you are powerless to budge
alone, doors whose keys are lost to you.
I don't care how old you are. It is never too late. And perhaps
even more important, it is never too early. I had passed thirty-five
before I realized that one can no more neglect chronic unhappiness than
one can neglect an infected tooth. If misery, like a tooth, is left too
long to fester the infection spreads and deepens. This is what happened
to me.
TO PUT it bluntly, I flipped. One day I was up and around, no more or
less unhappy than usual, not conscious that for years I had been
building up to what happened. The next I was lying in bed in my hotel
room, my hands shaking helplessly, in violent nausea, weeping
hysterically from causes I did not know, unable for a long while to
move.
This was in Chicago in 1945, and I was playing in the road company
of The Voice of the Turtle, John van Druten's comedy. After a time I was
able to crawl to a telephone, literally crawl, and lift it - a
magnificent accomplishment at the moment. I knew no doctor in Chicago,
and so I called one I did know in another city. He gave me the names of
two Chicagoans, both physicians, and I summoned the strength to call on
them. One (how often I was I to hear this is the years to come) told me
brusquely that there was nothing the matter with me. The other
prescribed Vitamin B1. That was the beginning.
Naturally, it wasn't really. The beginnings of most psychiatric
difficulties go back to childhood, and mine were no different. But few
case histories can be, or should be, made fully public, because their
complexities must touch on other persons who are essentially innocent of
wrongdoing. Hence I can only say here that I was beset (this was not to
be revealed until my cure, and was never up to then a part of my
conscious knowledge) by a sense of wrongdoing, actually of sin. On the
one side I had a compulsive, an irresistible, urge to act. I could no
more have fought it than I could have willed myself not to breathe. On
the other there was the deep-set, unshakable conviction on the part of
my mother and father, splendid folk but tempered in inflexible religious
and moral dogma, that the stage was a sinful business. The conflict thus
set up within me started a neurosis that was going to be a dandy one of
these days.
IF I had had any psychiatric insight I might have recognized early
symptoms - chronic fatigue, a driving need to be first in every
activity. Normal people can accept and adjust to failure. Neurotics
cannot Any reverse, however small, crushed me. I had to be the life of
the party, and I was. But I did not have a good time at parties. I was
not aware of that then. I assumed that laughter and approbation meant I
was enjoying myself. Nothing but flamboyant triumph could overcome my
sense of inadequacy and even that, as I was to learn, did not overcome
it - it merely anesthetized.
In 1939, while I was playing opposite Ed Wynn in the musical Hooray
For What? I was the tidiest person you ever heard of. I rested every
moment I was not on my feet, but I was never refreshed. I slept ten
hours nightly and took cat naps and was still exhausted. I developed
arthritic pains in my left arm, and thereupon came across the first of
the parlor psychiatrists who were to bedevil me thereafter.
My pains, according to one of the company, were not pains at all;
they were "psychosomatic." I had never heard the word until then. I
looked it up. Strangely enough this amateur Dr. Freud was, in all
likelihood, correct. But those pains were, if not organic, as real as
any organic pain can be, as real as the incontestably physical fact that
the taste buds at the tip of my tongue burst at about the same time and
that for days on end I was unable to hold food. Yes, these upsets were
psychosomatic - but the well-meaning friend who diagnosed them as such
was playing with fire.
Amateurs have no more right to fiddle with the jargon of psychiatry
than a child has to fiddle with a disinfectant that in addition is
labeled "poison." How well I recall, the glib advice of the cocktail
party analysts I met during that period: the clarion words "If I were
you" from the advocates of the therapy of weaving little baskets and the
stern admonition, "You don't want to get well!"
Fortunately one of the if-I-were-you-ers happened to make his
pronouncement within the hearing distance of a licensed authority.
"Don't," said this doctor sharply, "ever say that to her again. If you
were she you would be exactly where she is now at exactly this moment in
exactly her condition. Who are you to effect a transference?" Nor did
basket weaving or any other physical therapy ever work - for me. And as
for wanting to get well - dear heaven, does anyone believe that a
genuinely suffering person does not wish with every nerve and pore not
to suffer, does not pray for it to be otherwise? Let me assure you, we
yearn for delivery.
My first collapse in Chicago that year was not without forewarning.
A few nights before, on stage, a piece of business called for me to pick
up an ash tray. I began to do it, and could not move. The brain ordered,
but the arm declined. It was one of the most sickening moments I have
ever gone through.
Hugh Marlowe, one of the company at the time, and today with his
wife K. T. Stevens, among our closest Hollywood friends, has since told
me a little about how I appeared to others the day I went over the edge.
My friends, it seemed, had suspected for some time I was not all I
should be, but had refrained from amateur diagnosis. I, who was
habitually neat, had for one thing let my dressing room degenerate into
a shambles. For another, I was displaying an affection for my dog that
went beyond reason, an emotional outpouring, replete with baby talk,
that had begun to shock rather than amuse onlookers.
On the morning I became desperately but rather unaccountably ill
Hugh called our producer, Alfred de Liagre, Jr., in New York to tell him
unreservedly that I would not be able to go on that night. Since there
was no understudy for my part at the time, the show did not go on that
night either.
Somehow I crawled back for the other performances. But I was
crushed by guilt over that first night, and under no circumstances would
I notify my husband, Philip Ober, who
was playing in Dear Ruth in San Francisco, that, I was in trouble. I
could not, you see, bring myself to be a burden to him or to anyone
else. In some people that is a noble reflex. In me it was just another
neurotic symptom.
At times during that seizure in Chicago I could not maintain
equilibrium too well. Some onlookers thought I was drunk. Every normal
function of my body - heart, blood, pulse - roared in my ears. I do not
mean that I thought they roared. They roared. I wept ceaselessly over
nothing. I was exhausted, but I could not sleep, I was afraid to leave
my room and afraid to stay in it. The walls grew closer. Long after
midnight, time after time, I had to leave the hotel and take endless,
aimless walks through Chicago streets, but never without carefully
noting my name and address on a piece of paper. It was here that that
began.
I was positive I was losing my mind. A long time later I was told
by an authority on such matters that if I had waited much longer,
perhaps even a few months, before throwing aside my reserve and putting
myself in other hands, I might well in grim truth have retired behind
that private door of mine never to come out again.
FOR a few weeks in Chicago I hung on, by the tips of my fingers. Then
came a second acute attack, and this time there was no use anyone's
kidding themself. Phil was summoned and flew in from San Francisco to
get me.
In San Francisco I actually rallied sufficiently to play Turtle
again for fifteen weeks. But the third relapse did it. Phil and I went
back to New York. He worked, there and on the road, and I followed him
around like a puppy. Or I waited for him. In New York I sat in the
apartment; on the road, in hotel rooms. I sat and I sat and I thought
about myself and the way I was and about nothing else, a total turning
in on self, than which there are few things more terrible.
I would look at the door and will myself to go out, but I
couldn't. I couldn't turn the knob. I couldn't touch it. Once in a
while I would make it, but not often. But even then I could not, without
Phil, walk farther than the nearest corner, hurrying back again in
terror to this psychological blanket I had pulled over myself.
I had a few good days and nights, and they were like brief
awakenings from an awful, constant dream. Then I would lose my fear of
people for a little while, and we even went to parties, where I managed
by exercise of control to behave like anyone else. My goal was no longer
to make self conspicuous!
In these two years one thing saved me. I never stopped fighting
against the terrible thing that was encroaching on me - and I clung, by
a glimmering, to my sense of humor. On an average of maybe once a day I
could look at myself and laugh at what I saw. But the thought of ever
returning to a normal existence constituted a thin hope at best, and
going back to acting, the only salvation besides Phil I could ever
really have hoped for, was inconceivable.
Naturally my friends all tried to help, and some of them did. When
Irving Berlin remarked, to music, that there's no people like show
people he may have been understating it. George Abbott, the director,
helped tremendously during one comeback I attempted by handling me with
a sort of brisk nonsympathy - that is, with neither more nor less
sympathy than he would have shown a stable person.
And my dear friend Shirley Booth, who had had more than a spot of
upset herself, would sit and try to cheer me over an endless succession
of lunches at Sardis, driving in again and again with the affirmation
that this too would pass.
And others - so many!
Then one night, during a good period of mine, we went down to
Philadelphia to a party. Seated next to me was a woman who impressed me
greatly. I learned that she was a doctor, a psychiatrist, and I asked
her permission to visit her when and if (there was not much if about it)
I went overboard the next time.
She said I could, and I did.
Four months later, and for the price of not much more than any
other surgery, I was out of psychiatry and on my way to health. My
treatment, I realize, took less time than many cases. I had one distinct
advantage. I was willing to admit how sick I was.
The first thing I said to my doctor was, "I'm not right. I might be
going crazy. It isn't the rest of the people, it's me. Please help me."
And she answered, "You know, it takes me as much as a year
sometimes to get even that much out of a patient. You're going to be all
right."
May I say once more, because it is so vital to what I am trying to
part, that it is the revelation of what is wrong that is the key? For
example, before consulting my psychiatrist I had tried, as a last
resort, that most drastic of well publicized therapies, that goes in
general: Find out what you're most afraid to do, and then do it! But it
didn't work for me. Instead it brought on a severe setback. I feel that
I failed to prove anything by this particular therapy because I
neglected to find out first why I was afraid, why I feared what I
feared.
So, if you are afflicted as I was you can face it, by forcing a
showdown, by meeting it eye to eye for what it is. But perhaps you, like
myself, can not do it alone. And if, like Vivian Vance, you can't reach
quite far enough to touch God's fingers, then why not reach for those
fingers that are within your grasp? I cannot believe He would consider
this sacrilege. Surely God must love His healers.
MY SEQUEL is brief. After psychiatry Phil and I went to Kennebunkport,
Maine, where his people have a place. We weren't there long when our
friend Mel Ferrer called from Hollywood offering me a part in a picture
It was the first of several post treatment tests. Fate wasted no time in
putting me through the jumps in my new life.
God must have nudged me then. I like to think that He always nudged
me, even when I failed to reach Him without an intermediary. I was
scared - it was a new medium - but I accepted. It worked out all right.
When it was over we went back to Kenuebunkport for another year. Then
there was a second picture to make. With that behind me, we returned to
our ranch at Albuquerque.
There, in the summer of 1950, Mel phoned again. Would I care to do
my old part in The Voice of the Turtle at the LaJolla (California)
Summer Playhouse. The Voice of the Turtle! Oh, no! Everything rushed
back at once: nausea throat constriction; abject terror. But it lasted
no more than a minute. Phil was talking to me. I might as well tackle it
all or nothing.
I did the play. In the wings, a moment before the curtain rose, I
nearly fainted. Then I spoke my first line, and knew I was all right.
One night later in the week there were three people in the audience
who were going to decide the whole direction of the rebirth of Vivian
Vance. They were Desi Arnaz, director Marc Daniels, and Jess
Oppenheimer, producer of "I Love Lucy," then seeking to cast the part of
Ethel Mertz.
I was hired. Just like that, you put something so incredible in
scope that it transforms your entire existence.
Many things have happened since, but the most wonderful is that I
grew to know and work with Lucille Ball, one of the kindest, most decent
and extraordinary personalities in show business.
Two Christmases ago Lucy gave me a present. It's a book of
clippings and snapshots, old and new, titled "This Is Your Life - Vivian
Vance." She assembled it all herself, much as Ralph Edwards does his
show on a network that will have to be nameless ("Lucy" is CBS.) It took
her weeks of sending back to my childhood home for the pictures and
momentos - little things like dance programs from high school - of
pasting and sorting and itemizing.
And when she presented it to me before the whole company, whatever
fears were still plaguing Vivian Vance were wiped away forever. I hope
something like that has happened to you. And if it never has I hope it
will.
We shoot "I Love Lucy" on film a few weeks in advance of its
television showing, but before a live audience, on Thursday nights in
Hollywood. We don't get out of the building until well after ten, but
even then it happens sometimes that some of the audience is waiting for
us, to ask for autographs or otherwise be nice. I don't run from them. I
run toward them.
In fact I don't run away from anyone any more. Even when I get
angry I get angry out loud and with people (no more repressed, secret
hostility) and that is a wonderfully luxurious freedom. I couldn't do it
before because it might have invited dislike - and, like many neurotics,
I could not afford dislike. I can sing again too - not well, but
vigorously. During the bad years my voice deserted me - or so I like to
think. Frankly, I was afraid to try. I can laugh and talk now, and love
it. And open doors? Bless you, my children - all night long if
necessary!
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