Chapter 5 - LAST YEARS:

MARJORIE GUTHRIE CAN BEST DESCRIBE the events of those final years. What should have been a period of consolidation and reward turned into a time of progressive decline.

What confused me, and Woody himself, in the early stage of the illness, was that by nature he was a rather moody person. As early as 1948, we began to notice that he was more reflective, and often depressed by trivial things.

Woody decided that it would be better for him to work away from home. He rented a store around the corner and we helped him cart books and typewriter, in Cathy's four-wheeler wagon. We bought a hot plate so he could make coffee, and made shelves out of orange crates. Woody stayed only a few days and then gradually moved his belongings back to the house. We rented five such places, with the same frustrating result.

Such were the beginnings of Woody's illness, as observed by his family. Woody himself was very distressed:

... I was absolutely so unable to work [at home] that, well, I had to walk around there and rent me some little workroom, cellars you know, to do my workings in; and each little workingroom turned out to be more of a flophouse where I stumbled and fell down amongst my songs and papers dogdrunk deaddrunk and so messed up in general that-well, I got some few things done, I guess but not one-sixteenth thing of what I had cravened to get done; so I got to feeling so much like a guilty failure that I felt worse than some kind of a raper or a killer or a raving madman. ... I was afraid to look any earthly human in the face, and more afraid to look them in the eye.

Finally the Guthries moved to a more expensive apartment in Beach Haven. A young runaway (and future folk singer) named Jack Elliott wandered in and stayed, helping with the children and becoming Woody's close companion. He was one of many young people who found their way to the Guthrie door, knocked, and asked, "Where's Woody?" In later years their numbers included a couple of kids named Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan; the Guthries always had room for them.

By this time the symptoms of the disease had become more obvious. Woody developed a peculiar lopsided walk and his speech became explosive. He would take a deep sigh before breathing out the words. The moods and depressions became more exaggerated and more frequent.

Time was running out and Woody sensed it:

I don't choose nor want to make any more sadder mistakes than I've already made around this map of ours. . . . I'm not the great, great, hero of the masses that many minds have drempt me to be; but I'm sure not the rubbout, deadlygone failure that many others say I have been. I am somewhere just in between all of this and these guesses, hunches, and opinions. I know the full value of the gifts and talents I can make to the labor movement . . . but I am quick to admit and to know that I've got to play now for keeps and for fast, and to go for broke; I have to protect my works now because they are at longlast turning into things that (like any factory job) make money; and I don't choose if I can steer clear of it to chase out on wild drunken sprees and loud verbal sprees and to waste away all these things I've been mudbuilding now for such long seasons of times and tides.

Despite his condition he continued to make plans for the future: a new singing group, not polished like the Weavers, but acceptable to city audiences. The dream was never realized.

Marjorie never forgot the first attack:

One night in 1952 Woody had a violent outburst and foamed at the mouth. Something was going wrong and we were alarmed. At six o'clock that morning I called Earl Robinson, and he drove us to Brooklyn State Hospital. It was barely light when we got there.

Despite his physical ailment he was the same old fighting Woody. On entering, he was asked his religion.

"All," replied Woody firmly.

"Mr. Guthrie, we must know which religion to list you as."

"All."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Guthrie, it must be one or another."

"All or none," said Woody.

Woody stayed in the hospital for three weeks.

"They think I'm an alcoholic," he said, when I came to visit him, "maybe it's alcoholic depression." When he came home, he took out every book on alcoholism from the library. Then we called the A.A. (Alcoholics Anonymous) and they sent two very nice guys to visit him. Really, it was funny! They simply did not understand him, although he understood them all too well. We agreed that the A.A. was not for him.

About a week later, he took a room on West 14th Street in the same building where I had lived when we first met. He didn't want the children to see him in another attack. A few nights later I had a call from him-another violent seizure. I knew that he was completely distraught. I rushed to him as fast as I could and took him to Bellevue Hospital, a short distance away.

He stayed there for three months. For a few weeks everything went well; he had made friends with everyone in the ward and they all loved him. But then more attacks came and Woody was confined to a locked ward as a precaution for himself and others.

One day the telephone rang; Woody was calling from the hospital. For a moment I thought he had escaped.

"I'm downstairs," he said, "and the doctor told me to go home."

"Do you have money for the subway?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Then come home!"

Meanwhile, I called the doctor at Bellevue.

"Is it possible," I said, "that you have released my husband without a diagnosis, without even letting me know?" I have not forgotten his exact words: "Mrs. Guthrie, your husband is a very sick man, and we don't know what to do with him."

Woody stayed home a short while. He would lie on the bed for days, hardly saying a word to anyone. Even the children hesitated before speaking to him. He was steadily getting worse. A solution had to be found. He would go to California. California was warm and he had friends there, he could stay with Will Geer, who was then on the West Coast.

In actuality, this California trip was the beginning of the end. Woody went back and forth across the country during the next few years. By this time he and Marjorie had agreed to part: they both knew that he faced years in the hospital, that the costs would be astronomical, and that Marjorie, as his wife, would be liable for them. Perplexed, they turned to a lawyer friend, who advised them in all seriousness to get a divorce. At the time, they regarded it as a purely legal step that would free Marjorie-who had three children to support -of an intolerable financial burden. But as the divorce papers were drawn up, they mused on the irony of the situation.

For a while Woody traveled with Jack Elliott, who sang, as Woody put it, more like him than he did himself. Together they made their way toward California and the new folk song center at Topango Canyon, north of Santa Monica. There, at Will Geer's house. Woody met a young girl he called Annie, who returned to New York with him. The divorce from Marjorie went through, and Annie became Woody's wife. It was a brief, unhappy marriage; Woody's young friend had not realized the extent of his illness and was ill-equipped to care for a sick man.

By now the disease was making rapid strides. Woody found it increasingly difficult to control his movements, appearing to be drunk even when he wasn't drinking. Friends watched with apprehension as he dived into traffic oblivious of danger, Chaplin-like, warding off each car as it sped toward him. Sometimes he hung around the office of the Stinson Recording Company, a pioneer producer of folk music in downtown New York, listening to young people as they sang his songs. Occasionally he would appear, bearded and long-haired, playing a mandolin to Jack Elliotfs guitar at the fountain in Washington Square Park, the mecca for young folk singers in New York.

On the surface it appeared that Woody was floating and drifting through life in those years. Still the idol of politically oriented audiences, he was making contact with the younger people who were to become the "Beat Generation." Writers like Jack Kerouac and poet Allan Ginsberg knew of him. Kerouac, whose early writings resembled Woody's, rejected him arrogantly. In a conversation with John Cohen of The New Lost City Ramblers, he said, "Woody is just a folk singer. I am a poet like Rimbaud and Verlaine." On the other hand, Ginsberg liked Woody's spirit, honesty and frankness.

Ironically, as Woody's illness deepened, he became the idol of the younger generation, not as a folk hero, but for the way he lived, for his frank language, his disregard for established conventions. Even the physical characteristics of his disease - the jerkiness and halting speech - were imitated by his young followers. But in this case they misunderstood him: their idol was sick and they copied the manifestations of his illness.

Then one day Annie came to Marjorie for help. Woody's condition had deteriorated to the point where she could no longer take care of him at home. It was left to Marjorie to take him back to Brooklyn State Hospital on what must have been the blackest day of her life. From that time on, she remained by Woody's side until the very end. Some time later, Annie obtained a divorce and returned to California.

Woody was brought back to the hospital for the last time, running a temperature of 103 degrees.

"I'm here because I have to be here," he told Dr. Abe Glenn, who had admitted him four years earlier. "I know it, and I'm going to stay now."

Marjorie pressed Dr. Glenn, who had become a family friend. 'This has been going on for four years," she cried. "Can't somebody tell us what's wrong with Woody?" Dr. Glenn promised to find out. A few months later, a young doctor came up with the truth — Woody had Huntington's Disease. Marjorie remembers holding Woody's hand as the doctor told them the news:

"What do we do now?" I said.

"Well," said Woody, "I stay here and you raise the children."

And that's the way it remained. It was 1956, and Woody was only forty-four years old.

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