In Memory of Lucy Saroyan Growing up amid glamor, volatility, and the gravitational pull of famous parents.
—D.H. Lawrence, The Lovely Lady
The intervention took place in San Francisco one evening in 1994. My cousin Annie made contact with Lucy by phone and went to the narrow railroad flat on California Street where she lived and from there brought her to the Stanford Court, where my mother had booked a suite.
Entering the hotel room at the age of 48, Lucy was the most devastated human I’ve ever seen alive. She must have weighed about 80 pounds, and there were sores and abscesses wherever her skin was exposed. Although she was animated as she greeted me and the others, her face had the engraved gravitas of a death mask.
The forces that had shaped our family—celebrity, wealth, divorce, books, drugs, and movies—had combined to render each of us, in widely different ways, exceptions to the rule. While the intervention succeeded in getting Lucy off intravenous drugs, the pull of the romance of our parents’ lives was another story.
ORIGINS
Our parents had fallen for each other like two stars in a big American movie. It was such a volatile union that by the time I was eight, they had married and divorced twice. During the short-lived second marriage—which lasted just six months—we lived in a small mansion with an orange-tiled roof on North Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, just down the street from Gene Kelly’s home.
One night, Lucy, five years old, and I, seven or eight, were eating dinner at the little table in the kitchen. Ray, our watchful caretaker, was standing nearby when we heard a scream from the living room. “Run!” she told us, which we both knew meant “See what’s going on.” When we got there, we saw Bill and Carol standing in the center of the room, Bill with both his hands around Carol’s neck. He looked at the two of us and stopped.
Our parents were first-generation Americans, the children of immigrant minorities, and both had been orphaned in their early childhoods. When things went bad for them, as two self-invented Americans, it seemed more ruinous than in most divorces. As if their failure called into question the dream they had each honored in their self-creations.
“No foundation. All the way down the line,” my father had written presciently at 30 in his play The Time of Your Life. The famously ebullient William Saroyan, gifted with vocation and great discipline in its application, was, like my mother, rather charmingly half-socialized. An artist of genius, he may not have quite cleared the threshold of adulthood. My mother, Carol, young enough at the end of their relationship to regather her forces, made the strongest showing of her life in the years between her separation from Bill and her next marriage, to Walter Matthau, at the time a leading man on Broadway.
Carol liked to tell a story about how, having decided that there was simply no way she could ever save their marriage, she determined to ruin his life. The way she could do it, she said, was to become the perfect woman—temperamentally, sexually, and in every other way—so that no other woman would ever be able to replace her after she left him. Since he never remarried, the story carried a certain empirical weight, but it seems just as likely that Bill recognized he was a dyed-in-the-wool loner and stepped back for the good of us all.
At the beginning, Carol had managed to succeed with Bill where virtually every other woman he’d known had failed: She captured his attention. “I fell in love with your mother’s past,” he once told me in a sober mood long after the marriage had ended. I thought he meant the foster child she’d been, a beginning that echoed his own childhood.
When Bill was dying in 1981, Carol told me, “When I met your father, he looked exactly—I mean exactly—like Al Pacino in The Godfather.”
Walter eventually entered our lives with a different yet not so different story. Born on the Lower East Side in 1920, he had been raised by his mother after his father abandoned her and Walter and his older brother, Henry. As a boy, he worked as an usher in the celebrated Yiddish theater, absorbing the stage from the wings. After serving in the army during World War II, he studied acting on the GI Bill at the Dramatic Workshop at the New School, where the émigré director Erwin Piscator once mused about him in a heavy German accent: “Matthau…possibility comedy.”
By the time Lucy and I were in our 20s, Walter had moved from Broadway to Hollywood, where, steadily advancing in a series of character parts, he became an unlikely movie star. Meanwhile, I was putting down roots with my wife, Gailyn, in Bolinas, the Northern California bohemian enclave. Here we were, ’60s kids, two beginning artists, a painter and a writer, both of us from the upper end of the middle class, facing off in a society that we knew—from Vietnam to Bob Dylan, from George Wallace to Martin Luther King Jr.—wasn’t doing what it was supposed to be doing. It took us nearly a decade to realize how poor we were.
On the other hand, while Walter seemed to take his own ascent in stride, the magnitude of the change was hard to miss. When we visited the pink stucco house in Pacific Palisades where he and Carol lived, Gailyn and I would arrive from our unscrubbed country house with three small children who regarded a trip to their grandmother’s—with its pool, guesthouse, and domestic team—as a trip to Shangri-la.
But the glamorous surface of both Carol’s and Bill’s lives had a logic of its own, and Lucy and I discovered that we occupied an ambiguous place in it.
Was it mere coincidence that both our father and our mother eventually disinherited Lucy and me? As Bill and Carol approached the ends of their lives, it seemed to dawn on each of them that they did not want their children to inherit their estates, as if by disinheriting us, they could cut each other off at the pass one last time. My father left most of his estate to the William Saroyan Foundation. My mother left nearly the entirety of hers to her son with Walter, Charlie Matthau.
By announcing the contents of her will more than a decade before either Walter’s or her own death, Carol inducted Gailyn and me into a kind of psychological malaise—a kind of “cloning” mechanism. “Well,” she said when I protested, “now you see that I’m not, and never have been, the lady of the house.” It was a cop-out: I can’t do a thing about this. And it was also a declaration that enforced a psychological parallel between our lives and hers: Now you see what it feels like to be an orphan and an interloper.
CONSEQUENCE
For Lucy and me, the consequences of that logic unfolded slowly. It occurs to me that what I was seeing during the years of Walter’s rise and the Matthaus’ acceptance onto the town’s A-list involved unspoken and perhaps only half-conscious disappointment. When a film Walter made received so-so reviews, he smiled and said, “Now we’re going to have to be nice to people again.”
Carol had become a town legend with her clown-white makeup and faux-naïf persona that also had its gangsta side. Her entrance into Hermès or Pierre Deux on Rodeo Drive was enough to create an electric charge in the available sales staff. She was known to drop a bundle in an afternoon, and a saleslady would soon be trained on her, ready to jump at her whim.
But her bountiful table wasn’t so bountiful where Lucy and I sat. She’d shoot down a fool in the extended family: Lucy or me; Jenny or David, Walter’s two children from his previous marriage; her mother, Rosheen; her sister, Elinor. And as she homed in on 60, her conversation became so repetitious—but then, for all I knew, that may have been part of a game. Best to keep a straight face and act like you were having a normal conversation. Still, while the salespeople working on commission had good reason to indulge their Hollywood wife, Lucy and I weren’t in sales.
Alas, I never had any of those conversations with her, because at the slightest hint of them, she would let me know that she preferred the Matthau table to sitting with me.
Eventually, we decamped to Ridgefield, Connecticut, and then to Thousand Oaks, our children now in adolescence. Lucy, then living in Manhattan, where Carol was paying the rent on her apartment, wrote to me that she thought Carol was going to stop paying because I’d raised the issue of the will. It was while we were in Thousand Oaks that Carol had disclosed its contents to Gailyn.
What motive did Carol have for telling us? It was her gangsta side, I think. Disabused of any notion that I could clear things up, I wrote a letter to Carol on Lucy’s behalf. Then I spoke with my 25-year-old half brother, Charlie. A week later, Carol sent Lucy and me a letter disowning us and her grandchildren, telling us she never wanted to see or hear from any of us ever again.
I should have been paying closer attention. Carol’s health and looks were no longer what they’d been, and I think she felt lonely and neglected. She was also suffering from osteoarthritis and taking a daily cornucopia of medications in addition to the Dexedrine she’d been on for decades. Was the blanket dismissal also about Walter’s stock as a movie star being in a slip (from which it would recover with the Grumpy Old Men movies with his longtime comedic partner Jack Lemmon)?
Carol’s life circumstances had rescued her twice: taking her from a foster home to Park Avenue as an eight-year-old and then from single mom to Hollywood wife. Other than the work she did in the theater during the ’50s, she never held a regular job and once surprised me by saying with pride that she’d never worked after her marriage to Walter.
I thought that the violence of her behavior toward us was a kind of defense mechanism, since she’d never learned how to navigate the routine rough-and-tumble of family life, hadn’t cultivated the social skills not to be socially violent within her intimate circle. Walter’s passivity as Carol wreaked havoc—even among his own grown children—was disappointing. As he grew older and more distant from her, he became a de facto accomplice, not even raising an eyebrow when she went off on a tear.
Before the intervention, Lucy began keeping a journal while trying to get off drugs. In one passage, she writes:
My 3 years with these friends have actually been the “happiest” I’ve ever known. I dropped the good girl bullshit and I do what is fun for me. And characteristically I’ve found several new taboos to slash and run with. My man is penniless and 20 years younger than me. My kept boy at worst—my salvation at best. And my habit is heroin and cocaine administered by needles. My income is from selling Papa’s rare papers and books, and pawn shop loans. My appearance is ravaged and unkempt.… Using junk necessitates lying—me to my family and friends—Peter to me—all 3 of us to each other and worse yet all 3 of us to ourselves relentlessly.
My cousin Annie found Lucy’s journal among her belongings in the California Street flat. After the intervention, Lucy spent a couple of years on the East Coast in various levels of a recovery program and then went to Dallas, where Peter’s family lived. Eventually, she got a job in a bookstore, and I would hear from her now and then after Gailyn and I moved to Santa Monica. I couldn’t help feeling heartened by what was going on. She sounded as engaged and energetic as I’d ever heard her.
We would talk about her new life with Peter, but inevitably, she would inquire about Carol. She was writing to her, she said, working toward mending their relationship, and wasn’t getting replies. I tried to be brief, alluding to Carol getting older and not having the energy to deal with difficulties past a certain point.
During the summer of 1997, while Gailyn and I were in England on a house exchange, Lucy arrived in Los Angeles, having been summoned at last by Carol, who bought her a car to drive from Texas and paid for a motel for her and Peter while they got settled and found new jobs. I knew she would immerse herself with the Matthaus now. She would enter the household in her ebullient way and take pleasure in the incidental perks, which included attending the Oscars with Walter, who introduced her cordially to the world on the red carpet: “Do you know Lucy Saroyan of Book Soup?”
And Carol would bask in Lucy’s attention.
Predictably at intervals of every six months or so, something would happen. Lucy would get presumptuous and rub Carol the wrong way—and she would be sent into exile. She would be angry for a few weeks but then start working to get back into Carol’s good graces. After Walter died at 79 in 2000, as Carol put together a plan to move to Manhattan, Lucy lived with her, while Peter remained in the small apartment they rented in Santa Monica.
There were more than the usual number of rifts during this period, and by the time Carol left for New York, they were no longer speaking. In the meantime, Lucy lost her job at Book Soup and was in a financial crisis. Before Carol left for New York, she gave Lucy a check for $10,000, and Lucy tore it up in front of her. Lucy told me she was upset about the way Carol was treating Peter.
Carol told me she’d offered to take Lucy with her to New York: She only had to give up her cats—and Peter.
By the summer of 2002, Lucy was back in San Francisco, where Peter later joined her. Eventually, for some reason I never got, the two moved to a motel in Thousand Oaks, where we had been living when I’d first learned of the disinheritance, after Gailyn hung up the phone.
LOSS
In the early-morning hours of Saturday, April 12, 2003, I got a call from my son, Armenak, who then lived in Newbury Park, around the corner from Thousand Oaks. He reported that the police had come to his house to tell him that his aunt had died around 10 the evening before. The cause of death was heart and kidney failure due to complications of cirrhosis.
Peter told me that while living in San Francisco again, Lucy had become addicted to OxyContin. The night of her death, she felt very ill, he said, and tried to throw up but was unable to. Eventually, Peter called for an ambulance, and Lucy died en route to Los Robles Regional Medical Center. She was 57.
In July 2003, Carol died at 78 of a brain aneurysm in her apartment at the new Trump World Tower on United Nations Plaza.
Carol’s own death, only three months after Lucy predeceased her, underscored their helpless entanglement, Lucy the lamb and Carol the lion who grew sick after devouring her closest relation.
EMERGENCE
During my childhood, the actions of other people that I considered wrong affected me in a personal way—as if on some level it fell to me to straighten the matter out. What was I thinking? And this powerful delusion persisted well into adulthood, maybe a legacy of my heritage.
It was in Bolinas, where Gailyn and I lived our La Bohème scenario, that I found relief from my parents’ magnetic field. There was an upholstered chair in our back bedroom, and one evening I realized how much I enjoyed sitting in it for an hour or so at the end of the day—reading something interesting. A homely moment of quiet happiness. And voilà, the pull of the legend was no longer on board.
Aram Saroyan is the author of Still Night in L.A.: A Detective Novel and many other books of prose and poetry. His Complete Minimal Poems received the 2008 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His memoir Before I Forget was published in 2026.
