Brian May : The Dark Side of Survival: Polio Victim Outlasts Money Meant for a ‘Lifetime’ of Care

‘What I did was, mostly it was very little, it was amazingly little. I listened to the radio. To go to the bathroom or to get bathed in any way was like a life risk, because you stop breathing.

As much as he can sense the ocean’s presence from his cottage atop the Malibu bluff, Brian John May is unable to look upon it from his aging steel hospital bed.

As morning creeps in through his windows, Brian knows that he cannot, on his own power, rise to meet the day. He waits for Lupe Mariscal, who has shared his life for six years, to pull the plastic hose from the hole in his throat and insert a catheter to clear it out.

It is she who pumps blood to the muscles in his lifeless legs by pushing them back and forth; it is she who cooks when there is any food and who spoons the food into his mouth. It is she who bathes him, washes his dark, curly hair, trims his beard and then dresses his overweight, 5-foot-1 frame in the black Western shirt, black trousers, black leather vest and brown cowboy boots that are his wardrobe. Although he can feel every movement of her hands, he is powerless to help.

It is a long, tortuous ritual that in one form or another has been played out since that horrible spring in 1955 when, for the mothers and fathers of 5-year-old Brian and 78 other children across the country, a parent’s worst nightmare came true.

The children were among thousands inoculated with the new miracle vaccine against polio developed by Dr. Jonas Salk. But these shots came from a batch of improperly manufactured vaccine that spread the poliomyelitis virus. Of the children who lived, Brian May was the most severely damaged, say attorneys involved in lawsuits that resulted.

The vaccine manufacturer, Cutter Laboratories of Berkeley, paid Brian for the mistake. After doctors said Brian would live for 15 years, the laboratory in 1962 awarded Brian and his mother what was then the largest personal injury settlement in the United States.

But Brian outlived the prediction and the money.

These days, while he lies awake awaiting his morning routine, Brian May reflects on the twists of fate that have left him unable to support himself and physically helpless in the midst of Malibu’s wealth.

“Polio Takes Third Heavi est U.S. Toll. 1954 Sec ond Worst Polio Year for L.A. County. Sister Kenny Polio Hospital Treating 113. Polio Takes 3 Lives in Less Than 24 Hours.”

Today, the scare headlines of 1954 seem unreal reminders of a long-forgotten plague. But the plague was real--and horrifying. In 1954, 1,865 people in Los Angeles County alone caught polio; across the nation, more than 38,000 were stricken.

Out of fear, parents canceled trips to the Saturday matinee, banned splashes in the neighborhood pool, forbade weekends at camp. Children were under order to avoid exposure to anyone who might have the paralyzing virus.

At first it seemed no worse than a bad cold--fever, aches, perhaps chills. But within a day or two, many babies could no longer crawl. Older children found it impossible to walk or raise their arms. Sometimes breathing would become painful--or impossible.

A parent could do little but pray. With luck, a child might recover without suffering permanent damage. Worse cases often meant a heavy metal leg brace, or crutches, or perhaps a wheelchair. The most horrifying image associated with polio was that of the iron lung, a stainless-steel cylinder in which youngsters whose breathing muscles had been paralyzed might lie on their backs for the rest of their lives.

Of the thousands who worried about polio, few were more concerned than a 35-year-old music teacher named Norma Marie May. She lived in a neat, middle-class neighborhood in Pacific Palisades with her husband, Frank, an accountant with General Telephone Co. The couple had three children--Christopher, Theresa and Brian.

It was with great relief that the Mays heard of the public distribution of the new Salk vaccine, whose key ingredient, dead polio virus, tricked the body into producing polio antibodies.

“I couldn’t wait to go,” Norma May said. “At that time so many people were dying.”

Got Shots on 2nd Day

On April 16, 1955, the second day that the polio vaccine manufactured by Cutter Laboratories was available in Los Angeles, Norma took the children to the Santa Monica office of Dr. Robert M. Dostal, the family pediatrician.

“It was a really sunny day, and I remember the smell of the doctor’s office,” Brian recalled nearly 30 years later. “I remember being extremely--of course it wasn’t because I was clairvoyant or had any foresight--just that I was extremely scared, typical of childhood, scared of the vaccination.”

In less than a week, Brian began running a fever. At first, Frank and Norma thought he had a cold. But his temperature kept rising. Soon, Brian could not swallow. Then his legs began to ache.

“I remember falling,” Brian said. “It happened repeatedly. It was a terribly weak feeling, like the kind of feeling you get when you’re having a nightmare and you’re running and your feet become like lead, it was that kind of sensation. I remember vomiting violently. I kept seeing these really light, bright colors in my eyes.”

That week, Norma heard a radio news report that the Public Health Service had ordered officials to stop dispensing vaccine manufactured by Cutter Laboratories. Nine children, six in California, had developed polio after injections of Cutter vaccine.

Because of the news, the Mays took Brian, who was having trouble breathing, to Los Angeles County General Hospital (now Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center). He began to slip into unconsciousness. The hospital’s diagnosis: acute poliomyelitis. Brian lapsed into a coma.

To keep him alive, Brian’s doctors put him in an iron lung. A compressor sucked air out of the steel cylinder, forcing the patient to take air in. Brian could no longer keep his windpipe free of mucus, so doctors cut a hole in his throat to insert a catheter.

Distorted View of World

Brian regained consciousness but was almost completely paralyzed. There was slight movement, very slight, in two fingers on his right hand. Lying flat on his back in the iron lung, Brian’s view of the world was distorted, reversed in the mirror that hung over his head at a 45-degree angle. The only thing that he could see without the mirror was the ceiling.

“I remember the immediate realization that I was paralyzed took place when I came out of the coma and I felt like I wanted to be home with my family,” Brian recalled. “I wanted to get up and run away. I remember this extremely strong feeling of struggle, trying to jerk my body. It was like being chained down.”

Poliomyelitis--also known as infantile paralysis and later as polio--attacks spinal cord cells that fire off the brain’s orders to the muscles. It leaves intact cells that receive messages of heat, cold, pain or pleasure.

In the following days, more children who had received the Cutter vaccine contracted polio; the count eventually rose to 79.

After four months, the Public Health Service confirmed that six batches of the supposedly “dead virus” vaccine manufactured by Cutter had somehow, inexplicably, contained live poliomyelitis virus. The Public Health Service’s report blamed the government’s testing procedures, not Cutter. The tests for live virus were revised.

But for Brian May, the damage was done.

“It’s almost as if, really, the world had stopped,” said Edna Sheriffs, Norma May’s sister. “I remember when mother and I would go out after that, . . . we would walk along in Westwood almost like zombies. . . . It was absolutely devastating.”

A month after he had been vaccinated, Brian was taken to Rancho Los Amigos Hospital in Downey. He stayed there, lying in an iron lung, for 16 months.

Established in 1888 as the county poor farm, Rancho Los Amigos later became a county-operated nursing home for indigents. During the 1940s, when polio began striking in epidemic proportions, the hospital was restructured to provide long-term care for polio patients.

“There were three wards of patients, there were so many polio cases,” recalled Dr. Donna M. Barros, who has worked with children at Rancho Los Amigos since the mid-1950s. “The wards down there were six beds to each side. It seems to me there were somewhere around 35 patients or so to a ward.”

The doctors tried to wean the patients from their iron lungs, from the “rocking beds,” that artificially moved their diaphragms or from positive-pressure respirators that pumped air into their lungs through plastic hoses inserted in their mouths or throats. In place of the mechanical devices, doctors tried to teach the youngsters glossal pharyngeal or “frog” breathing, in which they used their neck muscles to force air into their lungs. It is a technique that Brian uses today when he is not connected to the portable respirator that sits beside his bed.

Frank and Norma May visited regularly, bringing toys that Brian could admire but never could use, and sometimes food. Brian grew so thin that Norma said she began smuggling in sandwiches.

“I remember seeing him in this big mirror that was hanging over the iron lung,” Brian’s sister Theresa said, “and we talked to him that way. The only thing that was exposed was his face, and there was this rubber thing that went around his neck.”

On special occasions, nurses would roll perhaps 100 iron lungs, each containing a child, into an auditorium on the hospital grounds to receive visits from Hollywood stars. One nurse keeps a disquieting photograph, a black and white picture of dozens of small faces peering skyward together from inside their oversized steel cocoons.

Depressing Days

Brian remembers the days at Rancho Los Amigos as among his most depressing.

“It was like being in oblivion,” he said. “ . . . I remember a really deep lonely sensation, extreme loneliness. . . . Very few people talked to each other. They were all in iron lungs, like I was.

“What I did was, mostly it was very little, it was amazingly little. I listened to the radio. To go to the bathroom or to get bathed in any way was like a life risk, because you stop breathing. The way they handled that was, eventually, to have me breathe trach (tracheotomy) air, to have an air hose hooked up to my neck.”

Brian did begin learning to read.

“The volunteers at the hospital, they would hold magazines and books up to the mirror,” Brian said, “but the problem was the print appeared backwards. I had to learn how to read backward, and I did.”

The Mays eventually received permission to take Brian home on weekends, packing his bed and a cumbersome respirator operated by car battery into their station wagon. In October, 1956, Brian came home for good.

For a time, Brian stayed in the living room in an iron lung that the county provided. Norma slept nearby. Surrounding them were other county-supplied machines--a large, wheezing respirator that fed air to his lungs when he emerged from his steel cylinder, and an aspirator that his mother and attendants used to keep mucus from choking his bronchial tubes. The house had to be rewired to accommodate the machines.

Months passed and Brian spent more time outside the iron lung, lying on his bed, hooked to the respirator. Gradually, he began learning to breathe for a few minutes on his own.

Brian’s illness had taken a heavy toll on his father, Edna Sheriffs said. Now, Frank’s own health began to fail. The doctors diagnosed Frank’s illness as leukemia. He worked less and less until he finally quit. The Mays moved to a much smaller home.

On Nov. 22, 1957, Frank died. His death hit Norma hard.

“After the shock of (Brian’s) illness, the shock of losing her husband was incredible, just incredible,” Christopher May, the eldest child, recalled. “She was mentally and physically devastated.”

No Immediate Money Worries

Frank was insured, so the Mays had no immediate financial worries, even though Norma was paying attendants to help Brian. But by late 1958, Brian had a new set of health problems.

No longer confined to the iron lung, Brian had begun to sit up and occasionally get into a wheelchair. Under the weight of his limp body, Brian’s spine slowly began to bow.

The curvature, called “scoliosis,” forced Brian’s ribs to bear down on his heart and lungs. Once, the affliction would have been fatal. Now the doctors were able to perform a series of spinal fusions, inserting bone between vertebrae, to make the spine rigid.

To perform the surgery, doctors encased Brian in a full-length plaster body cast. They fixed a metal “halo” around his head with screws set into his skull to prevent him from moving. The “halo” was secured to the body cast with metal rods embedded in the plaster.

And so, at 9, Brian’s spine stopped growing.

After a second operation, Brian was discharged. He was returned to the hospital a year later for similar surgery that set his ankles and feet in place. He remained in the body cast for nearly a year.

“It was like a nightmare,” Brian said. “I felt very depressed and I remember having an extreme desire to scratch. I got bad body sores, especially on my back and on my legs.” While he was in the body cast, Brian caught chicken pox.

Regarded as Different

When Brian returned home, he had the first of many experiences that were to teach him in the harshest of ways that the world, even at its kindest, regarded him as different. It was Halloween, 1959. Two neighborhood children had come to the May home for treats. When they saw Brian in his body cast, they ran from the house, crying. “They thought I was dead,” Brian said.

If others thought something was terribly wrong with Brian, his little sister Theresa, then 8, did not.

“You know, I really didn’t realize it for a long time,” she remembered. “I thought it was all very normal. I used to put tracheotomies in my dolls, I used to put holes (in their throats) and roll up Band-Aids (as air hoses). It wasn’t a super-abnormal thing for me.”

Theresa liked having her brother at home. “I used to sit with him and talk to him. He’s a super person to talk to. He’s got a mind like a tack,” she said.

Brian’s older brother Christopher also enjoyed a newly found relationship with his brother.

“Around the time I was 13, we both started getting into music, folk music, and I started playing the guitar,” Chris said.

With some of Frank’s insurance money, Norma made a down payment on a new home overlooking the ocean. Despite the family’s problems, or perhaps because of them, Norma said she wanted her children, especially Brian, to live in the most beautiful environment possible.

After learning that families of other stricken children had sued for damages, Norma consulted a lawyer. In the end, she hired Melvin M. Belli, even then a well-known personal-injury attorney, whose law firm eventually sued Cutter Laboratories on behalf of more than 40 injured children, including Brian May.

The May suit did not come to trial in Los Angeles until May, 1961, after Belli had won damage awards in Oakland for two other families. Belli based his damage claims on a legal point that he had won more than 10 years earlier--the principle of implied warranty. It holds that manufacturers have an absolute obligation to stand behind their products--and pay damages if someone is injured--even if there is no specific contract with those who use those products. Now, Belli argued, that principle should be expanded to apply to drugs as well as to food.

During the Oakland trial, Cutter admitted that live virus had somehow crept into the vaccine, but the company contended that it had been an unforeseeable accident, not negligence.

The jury held that Cutter was not guilty of negligence. But, the jury foreman added: “We feel that we have no alternative but to conclude that Cutter Laboratories came to market a lot of vaccine which, when given to the plaintiffs, caused them to come down with poliomyelitis, this resulting in a breach of warranty. And for this cause we find in favor of the plaintiffs.” In a finding that some legal scholars regard as the beginning of a new chapter in consumer law, the jury awarded $131,500 to one family and $15,800 to the other.

For the May trial, Belli abandoned the negligence argument and focused solely on the issue of warranty. He produced a 16-millimeter movie entitled, “A Day in the Life of Brian May,” which documented for the jury the daily care that Brian required.

“That was really horrible,” Brian recalled. “I remember they had to shoot everything that had to be done to me, including the bathroom, it was just really bad.”

Brian, then 11, appeared in court twice during the trial, lying on his back on a stretcher, an air hose running from the hole in his throat to a portable respirator.

A doctor called by Belli testified that Brian could not reasonably expect to live for more than another 15 years--until mid-1976. His assessment was based on the myriad medical problems that Brian faced--his spine, his susceptibility to infection, his inability to remain off the respirator for long periods of time and the likelihood that his kidneys would one day fail.

Cutter produced a doctor who suggested that Brian actually had been crippled by some disease other than polio.

On June 26, after deliberating for two days, the jury voted 11 to 1 to award Brian $600,000 and to give Norma $75,000 more. Both Belli and attorneys for Cutter described the award as the largest judgment ever granted in a personal injury case.

Norma was ecstatic. Finally, it seemed, fate had dealt her family a fair hand.

With what seemed like a huge cash settlement from Cutter, Norma May set out to rebuild the life of her family.

She had given up teaching when her husband died and his life insurance money came in. With the Cutter settlement, she felt she would not have to return to work and could continue her full-time care for Brian.

She hired tutors to instruct Brian in grammar, spelling, mathematics, science, philosophy and German. She paid for two attendants, who also taught Brian Spanish. The tutors were supplemented by a one-way telephone connection to classrooms at the Palisades Elementary School. Brian could hear the teacher, but he could not participate.

In 1964, Brian began high school. With a telephone hook-up that functioned something like a conference call, Brian took courses--long distance--at Joaquin Miller High School in Reseda, a school for handicapped youngsters.

In early 1963, Norma bought a new home on North Amalfi Drive in Pacific Palisades, one large and open enough for Brian to move his wheelchair from room to room. In the rear were a pool and views of Rustic Canyon and the ocean.

The money for household expenses, including a $402 monthly mortgage payment, came from Brian’s award.

But that settlement money soon began to run short.

The Mays never did receive the full $675,000 awarded by the jury. In late 1961, Cutter had agreed to drop its appeal and end the legal battle--for a price. The settlement cost the Mays $160,000, but they were eager for the money and agreed to accept the reduced award.

Brian himself received $289,295. Another $167,527--a third of the total settlement--went to Belli and to pay other fees. Norma May spent much of the $57,250 she received by paying off debts.

Within eight months, Norma turned over the task of managing the money to Security First National Bank (which later became Security Pacific). Within a year, she was back in court, asking for an increase in the family’s $2,000 monthly allowance, a request the court granted.

By the time Brian was ready to enter UCLA in the fall of 1968, more than $187,000 had been spent. But because of interest there was still slightly more than $141,000 in the account.

Brian had worries that seemed more pressing than money.

UCLA would be his introduction to a world beyond his neatly manicured backyard. His greatest fear, he said, was what people would think of his appearance.

He rode to Westwood in a new Dodge van driven by his mother. Norma had to ask passing students to help wrest Brian and his heavy, battery-powered wheelchair onto the sidewalk. Brian used a mouthpiece to control its speed and direction.

“I remember going into the classroom and feeling like a real jerk, here I was wrapped in a blanket and my head was reclined . . . with a mouthpiece in my mouth,” Brian said.

As one of the first severely handicapped individuals to attend UCLA as a regular student, Brian felt stares even from those who were sympathetic.

“People did react,” said Christopher May, who was two classes ahead. “You could see the person was uncomfortable. . . . Of course, there was a great deal of pity involved, which is something that Brian, of course, hates.”

Physical barriers were overwhelming. There were no restrooms for the handicapped, no sunken curbs, few ramps, even fewer elevators.

Unable to take notes, Brian brought a tape recorder to lectures. He listened to the tapes at home, or had someone transcribe them. Sometimes Christopher or Theresa would attend a class and take notes. Often, the task fell to Norma.

Rather than write papers, Brian met with professors to discuss his studies. He also dictated his thoughts onto tape in a home recording studio he was beginning to assemble.

“He was such a good student, incredibly bright,” Theresa recalled. “Most of those professors just knew he was ‘A’ material. Even sometimes he would get sick and he couldn’t show up, or there was something wrong with the van or there was something wrong with him physically or something wrong with the wheelchair, and he would miss a lot of classes. But it didn’t seem to really hurt his grades any.”

Because of his health and, more importantly, his schedule (it took hours for Brian’s attendants to bathe and dress him for school), Brian took only a few classes at a time. He finally received his bachelor’s degree in 1975, in Spanish and Italian. He immediately went to work on a master’s degree but dropped out just before he finished the program.

As he studied, Brian began considering what he would do with his life. He thought about becoming an interpreter or perhaps going into radio. What he wanted most was a life of his own.

As time passed, that goal seemed less and less attainable. It was clouded by an increasingly tense relationship with his mother, unrelenting financial problems and, in the end, a desperate search for employment that never seemed to pay off.

Brian had always depended heavily on his mother, literally, to keep him alive. Norma did little to discourage that dependence. With adulthood, Brian hungered for freedom.

At the same time, Christopher said, Norma May had to deal with her own problems. “My mother, I think, down deep inside blames Brian for not allowing her to have a normal life,” he said. “And, of course, my brother blames my mother for giving him the vaccine. These are all very deep-seated things. These things play off of one another between the two and it makes for a very, very complicated relationship.”

That relationship was further clouded in 1971 when Norma hired a new attendant for Brian.

“She had a wondrous body,” Brian recalled, grinning. “And she had thick black hair and wide lips and she was dark, and she was from Mexico.” Her name, Brian said, was “Evangelina, like the poem.”

“She started taking care of me, and started caring about me, caring for me, caring how I felt and caring for my health, caring about, you know, if I was OK,” Brian said. “ . . . Then in the next year, in ‘72, I was the one who approached her with the way I felt inside for her, and then I found out right away, she told me she felt the same way about me.

“It was wonderful. It’s tough to tell you right now,” Brian said, “but she loved me like a man without caring about the way I looked. It changed my life.”

Eva and Brian stayed together until 1976, when she met another man.

Two years later, Brian met Lupe Mariscal, a Mexican woman who was willing to take the demanding, low-paying attendant’s job. Lupe moved in with the Mays--they were in another new home, one of several that Norma either bought or rented after the family’s dwindling resources forced the sale of the large house on Amalfi Drive. Within months, tensions developed again between Brian and Norma.

This time, Brian decided that when Lupe left, he would leave with her.

For a time, they lived with friends and in motel rooms, always with some risk to Brian’s health. Eventually, the debts piled too high and the money they had saved, borrowed and begged ran out. So they returned to Norma, who also had serious financial problems.

As early as 1970, Norma realized that the Cutter settlement money was fast slipping away. She sued Security Pacific, charging that it had mismanaged Brian’s estate. In its reply, the bank pointed out that Norma had spent $275,000 since 1962. “The fact that the estate still has assets approximating $83,000 belies any allegation of mismanagement,” the bank’s lawyers wrote. The case was dismissed.

By the mid-1970s, all the settlement money was gone, including the portion that officially had become Brian’s when he turned 21.

“Brian was very unaware of how money worked in general,” said Theresa, his sister. “He never had the opportunity to go into a supermarket or know what the dollar could buy or couldn’t buy.

‘Overprotected by Mom’

“We were very overprotected by mom. She didn’t mean to do it, it wasn’t an intentional thing because she wanted to keep us back. She was trying to make up for what happened, losing our father, Brian’s polio. And maybe she overdid it.”

“It’s my fault I did not teach him money,” Norma May agreed. “I spoiled him so badly. But in the back of my mind, I didn’t know how long he would live. . . . How can you not spoil a man who cannot do anything for himself?”

Brian’s Social Security benefits and the housekeeping allotment Lupe received from Los Angeles County did not cover their household expenses. Norma was again teaching piano, but her earnings could not cover her debts. Norma asked Brian to help pay rent, and telephone and electric bills. Brian told his mother he had no money to give her.

With tensions in the house high, Brian and Lupe moved into a small apartment near Venice High School in 1982. When they could not make ends meet, friends and relatives pitched in. For a time, Steve Porter, a San Franciso lawyer whose wife had befriended Brian at UCLA, took over the rental payments. Norma occasionally contributed money, sometimes hundreds of dollars, to keep Brian’s van running. But the strained relations continued.

Once it was clear that he would outlive the doctor’s prediction, finding a job proved elusive.

Radio had intrigued Brian since his days at Rancho Los Amigos. Radio meant communication and independence, breaking through the walls of hospitals and bedrooms that had kept him prisoner for much of his life.

For years, Brian used the makeshift recording studio in his bedroom to tape folk and bluegrass songs performed by his brother Christopher and friends. Brian taught his attendants to mix microphone levels and adjust recording volumes until they captured just the sound that Brian wanted. In the late 1970s, the hobby took on an urgency, and Brian began seeking out singer-songwriters to tape interviews and music with the hope of talking a radio station into airing the programs.

Brian spent months on the telephone, trying to persuade programming directors to broadcast his shows. He mailed out scores of tapes, and showed up unannounced at station offices trying to sell himself and his material. He wanted no money, just air time.

Finally, KXLU, the student station at Loyola Marymount in Westchester, agreed to broadcast a tape, a decision that eventually led to an unpaid job at the student radio station at Cerritos College in Norwalk.

With Lupe acting as his hands in the control booth, Brian found half a dozen Los Angeles-area radio stations, many college-affiliated, where he could broadcast.

Most were short-term, part-time internships. Some were set up especially for those with handicaps. Brian, for example, was hired by station KLAC in 1981, the year designated by the U.N. General Assembly as the International Year of Disabled Persons, to produce a music and interview show called “Focus on Country.” When the Year of Disabled Persons was over, so was Brian’s employment.

Few jobs paid. Those that did pay did not pay enough. In fact, Brian usually lost money because he frequently had to pay a driver to wait for hours while he was working.

With his friend Steve Porter, the San Francisco attorney, Brian tried to map a strategy to land a lasting job in broadcasting or interpreting. Precarious finances and health concerns kept Brian’s job search local.

Companies that provide translators told Brian that they give first preference to native speakers. Brian passed the test for court translators, Porter said, but attorneys told him they would be reluctant to have someone as handicapped as Brian appear before juries.

For much of that time, he continued to broadcast his folk music show at Loyola Marymount. In September, 1983, the student programming directors there decided that folk music was out. The Brian May Show had to go.

Being pulled from the air was a serious blow, even though Brian had not been paid. Being on the air had been a liberating experience, each week giving him a goal and a task. Brian said the job was important because “it’s being able to be in touch with people, knowing that there’s a communication.” Now that was gone.

While he doesn’t offer it as an excuse, Brian believes he was turned down by many potential employers because of the way he looks.

Brian did call the Westside Center for Independent Living, the Polio Survivors Foundation, the California Assn. for the Physically Handicapped and other similar organizations. Some were helpful. But, Brian said, he found that most of the employment programs were geared to those whose handicaps are less severe than his, paraplegics who are not dependent on respirators, for example.

He also confessed, almost reluctantly, that he finds it hard to involve himself with groups that crusade for the rights of the handicapped--not because he does not believe in the value of the work, but because he is so anxious to keep people from focusing on his own disability.

Brian and Lupe made it through last winter in the Venice apartment largely through the help of Porter, who paid the rent. By last summer, the Porters could no longer help. The landlord ordered Brian to move out.

For Brian and his mother, the crisis seemed to be the occasion for a tentative new beginning. Norma began looking for a place where Lupe and Brian could live.

Through the parents of a piano student, Norma heard of an empty guest house in Malibu, just east of Corral-Solstice Beach. The owners were friends of Peter Yarrow, the folk singer and songwriter, who had befriended Brian after Yarrow had appeared on one of Brian’s radio shows. From time to time, Yarrow had helped Brian and his mother financially.

The guest house, behind a much larger home on the bluff, was nearly twice as big as the Venice apartment and much more open. Brian could move his wheelchair from room to room and maneuver it onto the porch and into the sun. There was more space for the respirator and the emergency generator.

With Yarrow’s help, Brian and Norma struck a deal with the landlord. Norma would pay $400 of the monthly $650 rent. Brian and Lupe would make up the difference.

Norma’s teaching career had grown to the point that she could afford to pitch in. And Brian, in the meantime, had found another job.

In a position funded by the City of Los Angeles’ office for the handicapped, Brian went to work, with Lupe’s help, cataloguing audio-tape archives of Pacifica Foundation, a broadcasting organization.

On the surface, life seemed finally to have shined on Brian May. Still, he was worried. Brian was grateful for the chance for a new start in a new home, but he began to feel vaguely uncomfortable in the Malibu cottage, as if he did not belong there.

In a sense, he was more dependent on his mother than ever. He still was not making his own way in the world. And, he wondered, what would happen to him if either he or his mother could no longer keep up the rent payments? At times, the bright sunshine, the sea air and the expanse of the ocean began to feel more depressing than liberating, Brian said--as if they belonged to someone else.

In the middle of last summer, Brian made a disturbing discovery. City funds for the Pacifica Foundation job, which paid between $450 and $600 a month, had ended. Yarrow had secretly agreed to personally finance the position, through the foundation, for a final three months. At the end of September, Brian May found himself unemployed, forced to dip into Lupe’s county housekeeping allotment to make ends meet.

And once again, in Brian’s mind, a gnawing fear surfaced, a fear so profound that he will talk about it in only the most private of moments. Brian is afraid that if, finally, he cannot make it on his own, if he cannot find a job that will allow him to support himself and Lupe, he will be committed to a county hospital for the rest of his life.

“It would kill him,” Brian’s aunt, Edna Sheriffs, believes.

What can Brian May expect from the future?

In the eyes of the law, Cutter Laboratories long ago fulfilled its responsibilities. The jurors who heard Brian’s case more than 20 years ago in their good consciences believed they had provided for his comfort and support for the rest of his life.

But instead of the Cutter settlement, Brian depends on the county for the $575 a month it pays Lupe for housekeeping, and on the Social Security Administration for the $438 monthly check it sends to him. Along the way, he occasionally received money from the state for transportation or college fees. Those payments stopped long ago.

In a sense, Brian May is an anachronism, a man who by the force of his will survived a catastrophe, only to live beyond the time that society had allotted to him. It is an irony of which Brian and his family are acutely aware.

Still, “there is an incredible strength in there,” said Christopher May, “an approach to life that, even with all of this devastation, he is still able to gain happiness by observing and participating in the world. . . .

“To this day, when I feel my problems are overwhelming, I just think about Brian’s situation and how well he’s coped with it, and where he’s going and all his strength. It’s just incredible.”