Michael Graves Read online

  For a time, he started to favor the latter option—he just wanted it to be over. Again and again he recalled crying out, “I don’t want to hold on anymore!” until by the end he was screaming it. Or at least he felt he was screaming it: his longtime senior partner, Karen Nichols, who was there with his lawyer, Susan Howard, sat with him the whole night, and could not recall him crying out anything coherent, except to complain that his feet and legs were deathly cold.

  Somehow, in the early morning hours, the storm died down and Michael fell asleep.

  When he awoke, he found that the pain had subsided enough for him to speak and think at least halfway clearly. He hadn’t managed to get back to the bathroom and was aware, however dimly, that he should probably do so. Susan Howard called in a urologist, and when he came in he told Michael he was going to have to put in a catheter. “But don’t worry,” he said. “You won’t feel a thing.”

  Something about the urologist’s particular choice of words struck Michael as suspicious. “Do you mean,” he asked, in a small voice, “that one does not feel it, or that I won’t feel it?”

  The doctor flashed a sad, sympathetic half smile. “I mean that you won’t, Michael.”

  His meaning was clear enough. For any normal patient, having a catheter inserted is an uncomfortable experience, to put it mildly. Michael wouldn’t feel it because he could no longer feel anything below his rib cage.

  Overnight, his entire body had changed. The void of feeling that had swept over the lower half of him made it feel like he was adrift—perhaps on the same sea where he’d borne out the storm—with only his head and arms bobbing above the waves. It was maddening, he recalled, feeling he should have some sensation in his feet, his legs, somewhere, and expecting every moment for it to come back. It did not.

  Nor was that all. Even into his sedentary middle age, Michael had remained in good enough shape to fit into the fashionable clothes that were among his favorite extravagances. But that morning in the hospital in Princeton, he looked down the length of the bed in disbelief: his stomach had swelled grotesquely, as though he’d put on weight in his sleep. A doctor later explained that the muscles in his abdomen had lost all their strength, leaving his midsection to simply spill out. Even if he were starving to death, he would still bulge at the belly.

  And then there was the fact that he wasn’t able to move. He had the use of his arms and hands, and could turn his head, but that was all he could manage. He couldn’t even roll over in bed, obliging the hospital staff to do it for him—mostly in order to prevent bedsores, which can be fatal (and which he, of course, would no longer be able to feel). Unable to shift his weight, Michael found he had forgotten how to sleep, only dozing lightly when he was too exhausted to keep his eyes open any longer.

  But worse than all that had happened was all he didn’t know. No one had any convincing medical explanation for what was going on—only that he’d had an infection and that it had spread to the rest of his body. None of the doctors could tell him when he was likely to be back on his feet and in the office again. He was frightened, naturally, but mostly the situation was too surreal, too immense, for him to even be certain how he felt.

  On the advice of an infectious disease specialist summoned by a firm associate, the Princeton hospital staff made the prudent decision to move Michael to New York-Presbyterian hospital in Manhattan, where he would have access to superior care, including another specialist who was reckoned among the country’s preeminent neurologists. Matters did not, however, improve in Manhattan: there Michael was kept for another six weeks, subjected to an unremitting regimen of tests and scans, shuttled from room to dreary room through the corridors of New York-Presbyterian. Shortly after he was admitted, it was discovered that the specialist he had hoped to consult was leaving that very day for an extended vacation. Michael’s pain had ebbed, but even after a host of other doctors descended upon him, no one could solve the underlying mystery of what had happened or what could be done about it.

  All Michael could do in the interim was lie flat on his back, brooding and surveying the dismal scene around him. Boredom and anxiety preyed on him—until finally, stretched out miserably on a gurney, waiting for yet another test, Michael decided to occupy himself by doing what he had always done, what he had done for generations of Princeton students in his graduate studio course. He began to criticize the architecture.

  The review was scathing. Everything around him was unwieldy and alien—the boxy, off-beige seating; the awkward wheelchair; the bedside table he couldn’t reach. It was an odd moment to be contemplating aesthetics, and his mind remained clouded with pain. But Michael Graves was still Michael Graves, and as much as he hated how he was, he hated where he was nearly as much.

  I can’t die here, he thought to himself. It’s too ugly.12

  STABILIZED, AND HOPING FOR some measure of improvement, Michael was transferred again, this time to the Kessler Institute, a rehabilitation hospital in West Orange, New Jersey, made famous by the actor Christopher Reeve, who underwent extensive treatment there following his own paralysis. Kessler’s course of therapy promised to help Michael adapt to, if not to overcome, his paralysis, and his old golf gloves were quickly repurposed to help him lift the hand weights the staff said would improve his upper-body strength. Soon the steady stream of visitors that had been coming to Manhattan diverted back across the Hudson: his friends Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, and Charles Gwathmey; Target executive Ron Johnson; his daughter, Sarah Stelfox.

  Michael was always careful in how he presented himself, and even those closest to him had access only to those parts of himself he chose to reveal: Eisenman never knew that his football buddy was, like him, a lifelong liberal Democrat; Meier was no less serious than Michael about painting, and even shared a studio with him in the 1950s, but they scarcely ever talked about art.13 To most of his well-wishers at Kessler, Michael presented an image of only slightly thwarted good cheer, refusing to credit the idea that his present immobility would last. “He was upset and concerned,” recalled Stelfox, “but composed. He seemed to always put a good face on things.”14

  But to one friend—one perhaps better able to stomach a darker view—Michael showed a different turn of mind. “Michael was in a state of rage,” said Fran Lebowitz. The notoriously caustic New York writer had been one of Michael’s closest intimates for twenty-five years, and there was little he could have hidden from her even if he’d wanted to. He may have made a show of “Christian optimism” to others, as Lebowitz put it. “But he wasn’t showing it to me.”15

  His frustration was kept well hidden, as his frustrations long had been, under a pile of work. The illness that had rendered walking impossible had not affected the sharpness of his mind, and with the pain now under control a new routine had been put in place at Michael Graves & Associates. Almost every day, one of his six senior partners would appear at the door of his room at Kessler, accompanied by other staff members bearing paint samples or renderings of a new project and usually cradling under one arm a contraband lunch of a quality not obtainable in the facility’s cafeteria. Surrounded by notes from former colleagues and clients (“I’m sitting in your building thinking of you—Michael Eisner”), the associates would show Michael what the team in the office was ginning up, keeping the chief abreast of all the latest developments. Hedging against a full recovery, the team began to talk about other ways of getting Michael into Manhattan for client meetings.16

  And Michael began to talk to his associates—and, perhaps more importantly, to a visiting reporter from the New York Times—about the shabby, careless, and otherwise subpar quality of design visible everywhere in the health-care space. Michael, the paper strongly implied, could do something about it because he could still draw: so long as he had that, he could still create. He retained the one skill that even his most determined critics had always admired, one that had always given him the greatest pleasure.

  His ex-girlfriend Kitty Hawks, daughter of the film director Ho
ward Hawks and herself a trained designer, came to visit Michael at Kessler and was relieved to find him sketching away, as always. “Once I knew he could still draw,” she said, “I knew he’d manage. He’d survive.”17

  On the treadmill in rehab, 2013

  SURVIVE, YES; BUT as Lebowitz saw, coming to terms with his affliction would take a great deal more time and at least a little more understanding of what the affliction really was. Despite some halting progress at Kessler, there was no breakthrough—until another old friend, the architect Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, paid a call in July 2003, five months after Michael’s harrowing first night in Princeton.18

  Plater-Zyberk, whose New Urbanist practice had helped spread Gravesian Postmodernism into the realm of town planning, hadn’t arrived expecting to play medical adviser. But as they chatted, Michael mentioned that a sense of numbness had lately begun to steal over his arms and hands—only in the early mornings, usually tapering off by afternoon. He wasn’t overly concerned: his symptoms, he had been assured, were confined to his lower body and unlikely to spread further. But Plater-Zyberk was not convinced. “He was languishing” at Kessler, she felt, and she immediately arranged for him to confer with Dr. Barth Green, a personal friend and the director of the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis at Jackson Memorial Medical Center.19 Green requested an MRI of Michael’s spinal cord as soon as possible.

  The test meant getting to leave Kessler, and that, for Michael, was reason enough to agree to it. Having carried his rehabilitation as far as they could, the doctors in West Orange gave him leave to have the test done and discharged him from their care until further notice: he was headed back to his beloved Warehouse, to all the treasures and comforts so laboriously attained and enhanced over the years. The actual MRI proved a bit of a trial—the staff at the testing center was not equipped to help Michael either onto or off of the table, and the image quality proved so poor that a second test had to be carried out in Manhattan the following week—but that was merely an afterthought. Michael was headed home, as soon as his home could made ready for him.

  The call from Green came only a few days later. The second MRI painted a grisly picture: Michael’s spinal column “looked like it was covered with barnacles, like the bottom of a sunken ship,” the doctor reported, and surgery was urgently needed to “clean those barnacles off.” Green visited Michael to urge him to come to Miami the instant he was able, and a surgery was scheduled for late August.

  And yet, just as he had done when the illness had first struck, Michael attempted to duck this latest diagnosis. Finally beginning to claw his way back to some kind of normalcy, he simply couldn’t bear to give it up to return once more to the barren, colorless world of the unwell. In any case, he’d already agreed to travel to Target headquarters in Minneapolis for a series of meetings, and he was looking forward to the trip: it would be a chance to return Ron Johnson’s kindness in coming to visit him at Kessler and to sustain what had been for both of them a very productive and lucrative partnership. The surgery could wait an extra day or two.

  In a magnanimous gesture, Target provided one of its company planes to spirit the Graves team to Minnesota. The small aircraft was not ideally suited to Michael’s new wheelchair, but it felt good to be airborne for the first time in months, a return to the architect’s usual jet-setting ways. Arriving in Minneapolis, the group checked into a hotel, and a nurse whom Michael had brought along for the trip helped him into bed for a brief nap before the meetings began. A couple of hours later, he awoke.

  The mild numbness he had described to Plater-Zyberk had completely overtaken his arms and hands. In a flash, the fever was back, and with it the pain and the delirium. The staff contacted Dr. Green, who arranged for a trusted colleague in Minneapolis to visit Michael at the hotel; no sooner had the colleague arrived than he again called Green, informing him that the situation was dire. Michael was rushed back to the airport and flown directly to Miami. Semiconscious during the flight, he recalled almost nothing until the plane touched down around midnight and was met on the tarmac by an ambulance, standing at the ready to take him to Jackson Memorial.

  For the second time in a year, his life was at stake, and all that went with it: his newborn son and grandchildren, his hard-won place in the profession, and his still-contentious place in the canon—his “competition with architecture,” as he’d once called it, begun so long ago. Yet as he was being prepped for surgery, he had only one question for the doctor: “Will I come out of this with my hands? Will I still be able to draw?” he asked.

  “You got it,” said Green.

  The first order of business was to stabilize the patient. Michael’s spinal column had filled with fluid, and a shunt had to be installed to drain it away. Up to that point, as Green later explained, the architect had been “drowning, neurologically.”20 Stress tests, scans, and blood work followed—more poking and prodding—and the constant drip of morphine to blunt the ever-present pain.

  Finally Michael was ready. The surgeon’s confidence notwithstanding, his task would not be an easy one: “The virus was ascending up his spinal cord,” Green later recalled. “We released some of the adhesions and blockages.… The infection had risen up to his neck, threatening to go to his brain.”21 The damage already inflicted to the lowermost portion of Michael’s spine, which had been the cause of his initial paralysis, could not be reversed, but the newly affected areas were still mid-infection, and the doctor concentrated his efforts there. For nearly twelve hours, Green operated.

  Michael stayed on in Miami for weeks following the procedure, remaining under the care of Green and his staff as he retraced the steps toward recuperation already undertaken at Kessler. There would be more hospitalizations over the ensuing months: minor crises, occasional setbacks. But now, having seen the images of his tattered-rope spinal column, Michael knew precisely what he was up against, and although the intelligence was in no way comforting, at least he was no longer left wondering about it. And at Jackson Memorial, in addition to all the family and colleagues who had followed him first to Manhattan, then to New Jersey, and now down to Florida, there was one more close at hand who bucked up Michael’s spirits: Michael Sebastian, who lived with his mother, Lynn Min, only a short drive from the hospital. “I think that boy was a source of pure happiness to him,” said Fran Lebowitz. “It really kept him going. Being together, that was the only time Michael really seemed like his old self.”22

  There was even one glimmer of hope on the medical horizon, albeit a dim one. During Michael’s stay in Miami, he and Green had become friends, and the doctor tipped his patient off to a promising new avenue of research then being conducted in the field of stem cell therapy. If the right variety of embryonic nerve cells could be identified and then grafted onto Michael’s spinal column, there might be a way to regenerate the ruined tissue, restoring part or all of his mobility. Sadly, politics intervened. “We didn’t know Bush was going to be elected for a second term,” said Michael, his partisan sympathies duly reinforced.23

  In fairness to the GOP, it does not now seem likely that stem cells would have cured Michael’s paralysis within his lifetime. Nerve damage of the kind he had sustained remains all but irremediable, and the only question left to most people in that state is: What now? Dr. Green had been as good as his word, and Michael still had the use of his hands. What was he going to do with them?

  FOR MONTHS FOLLOWING his illness, Michael dreamed almost nightly about walking. In one instance he imagined he was seated before a television watching a baseball game, when suddenly a commercial spot came on for a science fiction movie. “There was a superwoman with a twenty-fourth-century gun. She looked at me. I was walking. And she said, ‘The amphibian walks!’”24

  The biting humor is typical. Depending on what happened to be striking it at any given moment, the substance of Michael Graves’s temperament could give the appearance of being either extraordinary pliable or hopelessly obdurate. His rare capacity for resilience could quickly shade i
nto a self-defeating stubbornness—but it could as easily go the other way, and it did so in the case of his illness. His anger at his condition, still very real, didn’t so much undercut his determination to survive as reinforce it: he was optimistic not in spite of his frustration but because of it. A chip on the shoulder, it would seem, can be a powerful asset.

  Michael had his share of chips already, and he simply added his illness to the list. As his friend and former associate Caroline Constant put it, “People who have insecurities either fold into themselves or fold outward—and he went outward.”25 In the twelve years that remained to him following the surgery, Michael came to recognize the permanence of his condition without ever becoming truly acclimated to it. He would rebuild his practice, though he would always maintain that he might have done more had he not been stuck in a wheelchair. Alternating between bitterness and resolve, he used both to propel himself clear of the one thing that might have robbed him of the desire to keep moving, to keep working: resignation.

  Single, and with his children either too young or otherwise unable to look after him, Michael would find his independent streak put to the test. He had good friends, and plenty of them, yet his inner circle had been subject to an unusually high degree of attrition over time; charming and warm when he chose to be, he could also exhibit considerable remove, and he never minded going his own way. This had been his modus operandi for much of his career, but now it left him in the lurch—at times quite literally. Early in his treatment, he was being hoisted into his wheelchair by a device known as a Hoyer lift, a large fabric sling suspended from a metal crane. A nurse’s aide was in the middle of operating it when another member of the hospital staff came into the room, announcing that it was time for their break. With that, they left him there, dangling in midair.26