Independent Days
“Oh God!” says Wyers from her hospital bed. “Can you believe it? I’m not independent anymore. I’ve gotta just simply be at their mercy. There comes to be a situation where you have to give up regardless. So how can you give up? You just have to give up! That’s all. That’s it.”
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The talent agent Shirley Hamilton invited Wyers to a New Year’s Eve party to meet other actors and models. Soon after, Hamilton got her an audition for a Bed Mart commercial, which she nailed. For the next year and a half, her face was on billboards all over Chicago. She was in several commercials and at 95 she became a minor celebrity.
The first week of October 1997, just after her 102nd birthday, Wyers made a doctor’s appointment. She’d been losing weight and having trouble swallowing. Her friend Ramon Fermin, an anesthesiologist, was with her when the doctor told her she had an esophageal tumor that had already spread to her liver and lungs. The cancer was incurable.
But George grew on her. “He comes in and he sits there and talks a little bit, or maybe he’ll sing a little bit for me. In the meantime, I’ll let him do it. There’s no harm to the man. I just let him go ahead and do what he wants to do. After all, this is his life and this is what he wants to do. This is what he has to live with.” Now George and Martha get along fine, to the extent that she refers to him as her “boyfriend.” She believes, only half kidding, that her husband George, with whom she didn’t have the soundest of relationships, has sent this more bizarre George as a kind of revenge from beyond. It’s probably for the best, Cleator says, that Wyers can’t hear very well these days. When George is in one of his foul tempers, he wheels into her room and shouts “Fuck you!” Wyers just laughs.
She’s coming round the mountain
Coming round the mountain
