One Man’s Heroic Optimism Against Devastation of AIDS

This year was supposed to have special significance in the lives of Robert Marsh and Crawford Hartley.

“This is the year we were going to retire,” Marsh said. “We were planning on Crawford’s 50th birthday to retire and live in Hawaii half the year. We really wanted to hit that 50 mark: to do it on our own at 50 and still look good enough and have enough energy to be able to travel and see some things and do some things.

“But all that got blown to hell.”

Two and a half years ago, at the age of 47, Crawford Hartley died from complications of AIDS, acquired immune-deficiency syndrome.

And with his death ended an intimate 22-year relationship, one that began in 1961 when Hartley and Marsh met in Laguna Beach.

“When Crawford died, it was probably the most devastating thing that’s ever happened to my life,” said Marsh, 47, seated in the sun room of his home in Laguna Niguel, where he moved from Laguna Beach after Hartley’s death.

Hartley, who was general manager and co-owner of the Coast Inn, a Laguna Beach gay hotel-restaurant-bar complex, was diagnosed with AIDS in November, 1982. Recalled Marsh: “I took him to the hospital on Dec. 28, and he died Jan. 19. I mean, it was very quick.”

Indeed, the one thing that stands out most vividly in Marsh’s memory is a small detail: Hartley’s clothes. He remembers seeing them strewn on the sofa in their bedroom, right where Hartley had left them the night before he went to the hospital.

“It’s like he went to work and never came home,” said Marsh. “He wasn’t that sick the morning I took him to the hospital. . . .”

Marsh paused, fixing his gaze on his visitor.

“It was just the shock that he never came back,” he said quietly. “People ask me how did I feel about myself and I said I wasn’t concerned with myself. I was trying to deal with the loss.”

Marsh, however, has ample reason to be concerned with himself: He, too, has AIDS.

In fact, Marsh was diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare skin cancer that is associated with AIDS, in early 1981--a year and a half before Hartley was diagnosed and a year before a name had even been given to the disease, which destroys the body’s immune system and for which there is no known cure.

Marsh is one of 137 Orange County residents and one of more than 12,400 people nationwide who have been diagnosed with AIDS, which has been described as the nation’s worst public health problem, one that has baffled medical experts and one--until the highly publicized revelation last month that actor Rock Hudson has AIDS--to which most Americans have paid scant attention.

What angers Marsh the most, he said, “is that they always refer to AIDS as the ‘fatal deadly disease’ and that they don’t know anyone who has ever lived, yet I go back to 1980 and I’m doing pretty well.

‘Everybody Doesn’t Die’

“I feel everybody doesn’t die, and this aspect seems to go undocumented: anything for sensationalism instead of getting to the point that it is a human disease that strikes many people.”

Half of the more than 12,400 reported cases of AIDS have resulted in death and, medical authorities say, most AIDS patients die within two or three years of being diagnosed. Marsh is one of 258 patients diagnosed in 1981 with the syndrome later named AIDS; only 40 of those patients are still alive, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta.

Marsh himself has known at least 50 people who have died from AIDS in the past year alone. “I have known more people who have died than my mother, who is 73, has known who have died in her entire life,” Marsh said. “That’s awfully hard to deal with.”

Although his skin cancer has progressed, Marsh said, it hasn’t been aggressive, and he hasn’t developed any other problems associated with the disease. (Of the 2,434 cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma alone--those without any of the other infections associated with AIDS--879, or 36%, have died thus far, according to the CDC.)

Marsh considers himself “lucky.”

“I have my problems, but they haven’t been as drastic as so many people’s,” he said.

“I do go through fatigue, but as my doctor laughed and said, ‘Remember Robert, you’re not 20 anymore,’ ” Marsh said, adding with a laugh, “and it’s true.”

A medium-built man with close-cropped brown hair, a trim beard and a penchant for wearing gold jewelry, Marsh admitted to having occasional emotional low points. But he has retained his sense of humor, he said. And his optimism.

“I have never from the beginning felt that I would die,” said Marsh, dressed casually in jeans and a brown T-shirt that revealed purplish lesions on his arms, signs of the cancer for which he receives regular chemotherapy.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time I’m optimistic, and when dealing with a disease like this, it certainly helps to be an optimist. The people I’ve seen who have died the fastest have been those who have been negative people. They looked for the worst in everything. They felt everything they saw was going to kill them. They didn’t have a chance before they started.”

Speaks Without Bitterness

When Marsh speaks about his disease and the events of the past several years, he does so without bitterness.

“I’d be bitter if I contracted it today,” he acknowledged. “When I contracted this, it (AIDS) was unknown. I don’t feel I was given a choice. I feel the people today are given a choice: to learn about it, to practice ‘safe sex,’ and eventually there will be an answer and the worry will be over.

“No, I’m not bitter, not at all. I am a little disappointed that it played havoc with my life at such an early age because I feel that everything was on schedule and on target. That’s been really hard to deal with. When you hear people talk about, ‘Oh, we’re leaving tomorrow on vacation,’ and you know that you’re not leaving on vacation, it brings back a lot of old memories. . . . It creates more sadness than bitterness.”

In telling Marsh’s story, it is impossible not to also tell the story of Crawford Hartley, so intertwined were their lives for more than two decades.

As Marsh said, their relationship spanned “all my adult life. . . . It was the only life I knew.”

‘Dedicated Relationship’

And it was, he said, “a very close, very dedicated relationship. I could always depend on him. He was always there when I needed him, and I think that was vice versa.”

It wasn’t until after Hartley died that Marsh learned from friends just how much Hartley depended on him.

“He never said it to me, but he said he couldn’t deal with me dying,” Marsh said. “He preferred it would be him and not me, and on a couple of occasions he broke down and cried.”

Visible reminders of Marsh and Hartley’s 22-year relationship are evident throughout Marsh’s three-bedroom house, which is filled with the furniture, antiques and collectibles they accumulated over the years, including Hartley’s extensive collection of stuffed birds.

“I haven’t really gotten rid of anything,” observed Marsh, who wears a gold chain around his neck laden with charms--his horoscope sign, a Porsche emblem, a pineapple and other objects.

‘The Stuff of Our Life’

“It’s all the stuff of our life,” he explained, fingering the necklace. “Crawford gave them to me, is what they all are.”

A native of Dayton, Ohio, Marsh said he has “always been gay. It was something that from my earliest ages I knew I was, and I dealt with it, and I never had any problems with it.”

But in 1960, at age 21, Marsh left Ohio “so I wouldn’t have to live in a closet” and moved to Laguna Beach, a place where, he said, “I could live the way I felt I wanted to live.”

A year later, while Marsh was commuting to Los Angeles, where he worked as an accountant for Ford Motor Co., he met Crawford Hartley, a butcher for a Laguna Beach market. “He used to refer to it as a bovine dissecting engineer,” Marsh recalled, chuckling at the memory. “He was an intelligent man.”

Marsh went on to become a hairdresser and later owned his own salon for eight years. In 1970, Marsh and Hartley bought and moved into a large, two-story Laguna Beach house that had been built in the 1920s by a silent film star and that had later been converted into apartments. About the same time they also purchased a 40-acre ranch in Northern California where they grew apricots, plums and walnuts.

“It was a full-time job,” recalled Marsh, who commuted between Laguna and Northern California the first year while Hartley ran the ranch. “We didn’t have a lot of money in those days. We changed the water pipes ourselves, helped pick the fruit and drove it to market in San Francisco at 4 o’clock in the morning. It was fun, it really was.”

Marsh and Hartley continued to consider Laguna Beach their home, however, and when they sold the ranch in 1973 they returned to Laguna. About a year later, a friend who tended bar at the Coast Inn asked if either of them would fill in for him while he was gone for the summer.

“I said I wasn’t interested, but Crawford was,” Marsh recalled. “Crawford always wanted to be a mixologist. He always wanted to be one of everything.”

Hartley eventually became manager of the Coast Inn, and when the opportunity arose to buy into the business, “we decided to go for it,” said Marsh, who had taken over as bartender.

“We were both doing pretty well by that time,” he noted, adding with a smile that “Crawford’s father never accepted his being gay until he met me. His comment was, ‘You guys ought to do OK, pulling down two men’s salaries.’ ”

In 1980, about the time Marsh and Hartley were beginning to look forward to Hartley’s 50th birthday and early retirement, Marsh quit work for health reasons.

‘Couldn’t Understand Problem’

“I wasn’t feeling good, and I couldn’t understand what the problem was, and Crawford wasn’t feeling good either,” he said. “I went to the doctor really to find out possibly what was wrong with Crawford and was there a possibility we were doing something, giving each other colds--these little incidental things you couldn’t pinpoint. Either he didn’t feel good or I didn’t feel good.”

During the office visit, Marsh’s doctor showed him an article in the Advocate, the national gay newspaper, about an unusual new ailment striking previously healthy young homosexual men.

A biopsy of a tiny spot on Marsh’s leg showed that he had Kaposi’s sarcoma, an uncommon, slow-growing cancer associated with this new disease. But Marsh was not shocked by the diagnosis because, he said, “there was so little known (about the disease), there was no hype. I thought, ‘Oh, well I have a spot on my leg, they’ll take it off.’

“And Crawford was so supportive through the whole thing I never once thought I was going to die. I just thought this was a setback, like when someone develops a small skin cancer.”

First Heard Term AIDS

It wasn’t until the summer of 1982, while they were on a trip to Florida in their motor home, that Marsh and Hartley first heard the term AIDS.

“I picked up a newspaper and it said, ‘Gay-related Illness Receives Name from National Institutes of Health,’ ” he recalled. “Up until then I really hadn’t had any fears. I never had any fear of this illness until it killed Crawford so rapidly.”

About three weeks after being admitted to the hospital with a high fever, Crawford Hartley died as a result of a severe form of pneumonia associated with AIDS. Hartley, an outspoken member of Laguna’s gay community who had served as a liaison between gays and the chief of police, was the second person in Orange County to die of AIDS.

About 300 friends turned out for his funeral at Pacific View Memorial Park in Corona del Mar.

“They closed the Coast Inn so everyone could go to Crawford’s funeral,” Marsh said. “There were so many people they couldn’t even get them in the chapel.”

Maintained Composure

During the funeral services, Marsh recalled, “Crawford’s mother leaned over to me and said, ‘Bob, I can’t get over how many women are here. Why are there so many?’ I can remember laughing. I said, ‘Nora, we love them, we’re just not interested in them sexually. Other than that, they’re all just friends.’ ”

Throughout the funeral, Marsh managed to maintain his composure.

“I felt I couldn’t let myself go emotionally because everybody else was,” he said. “I mean, all of Crawford’s friends, they fell apart because it (his death) was so quick. I felt I really had a duty I had to complete and when it was over, then my time would come.”

At the suggestion of a friend a few months after Hartley died, Marsh began seeing a psychologist. “That was probably the best thing I did: to seek the right kind of help and find out how to come to grips with what my situation was.”

Not only had Hartley’s death made Marsh realize that AIDS can indeed kill but it also struck him with the realization that he was on his own for the first time in a long time.

Spent Adult Life Together

“All my adult life I had spent with this person, and all of a sudden I was going to have to make decisions on my own,” Marsh said. “We always had a 50-50 relationship. We never did anything without talking it over.”

After taking over Hartley’s job managing the Coast Inn for six months until the position could be filled, Marsh quit working again, this time for good.

“I could probably work now, but I felt if I’m going to die I certainly don’t want to work up to my last day,” he said. “I want to enjoy my friends and enjoy life a little bit.”

Marsh, who sold the Laguna Beach house he and Hartley shared and moved to Laguna Niguel in 1983, lives primarily off of various investments.

“I’m very fortunate I’m able to manage on my own,” he acknowledged. “Most of the people struck by this are so young that they have not been able to prepare for the future, and they have nothing.”

Every two weeks Marsh drives to his doctor in Encino, where he receives an injection of Belvan, the lightest form of chemotherapy. He usually makes a three-day trip out of it and stays with friends, he said. The day after he receives his chemotherapy, he noted, “I usually plan on not feeling well. It makes you real nauseated.”

For the past two years, Marsh has served on the advisory committee for the AIDS Response Program in Orange County, a nonprofit agency offering education and support to AIDS patients and those affected by the disease. To date, the program has worked with about 60 AIDS patients.

“They try to assign every person who contacts the program a support person who will clean house, grocery shop, take them to the doctor--any time you need to have something done they’ll do it for you,” Marsh said.

“We try to get people (AIDS patients) who feel that they’re alone and just let them know that they’re not the only ones out there. The publicity has been so bad so long. That’s why I’m so glad Rock Hudson has come forward. I basically admire the man because he could have kept it quiet up to the end, but he didn’t.”

Educate the Public

Marsh believes that the increased attention focused on the disease as a result of Hudson’s disclosure that he has AIDS is not only helping educate the public about AIDS but also helping efforts to raise money for research.

“Something’s got to be done,” Marsh said. “There shouldn’t be lines drawn--people should not be left to die because they’re gay, and straight people helped to live because they’re straight. We’re all people.”

Marsh devotes part of each day on the telephone talking to AIDS patients.

“I have a group of about eight people I talk to on a daily basis,” he said. “If I can offer other people something, that gives me satisfaction. The hard part is when I lose somebody. Right now, I have two people in the hospital.”

Marsh also receives regular phone calls from an AIDS Response Program volunteer. He and the volunteer, a woman, have become good friends, he said, and occasionally go out to dinner or to the movies together. Noting that the woman is “straight,” Marsh explained that “she had a friend who died of AIDS, and she made a commitment to the program.”

‘Really Sad’

As for himself, Marsh said: “I feel like right now I’ve got a few years, if things continue for me the way they have been. So far things are going really well for me. I know a lot of people who have been diagnosed only in the last year and won’t do well at all. I find it really sad.

“I’ve seen people suffer really bad. I saw a 23-year-old kid who was probably one of the most buoyant, upbeat people I have ever seen in my life. He developed KS (Kaposi’s sarcoma) of the lung and he died in two weeks. It was pitiful watching him die. He suffered so much.”

Despite his own relative optimism, Marsh is admittedly not without his fears--the fear that “all of a sudden a cancer will become rampant inside of me, and if I cough, is there ever blood? There never is, but the fear is still there.”

Randy Pesqueira, director of the AIDS Response Program, has known Marsh for 2 1/2 years and has watched Marsh deal with the progression of his disease: “I’ve seen him go through this with as much dignity and pride as anyone I think could muster. It’s amazing. It teaches me so much.”

Changed by Events

Marsh acknowledged that he has been changed by the events of the past four years.

“I’ve done a complete turn-around in regard to my friends, in appreciating people, in enjoying things, in not being so hedonistic. You know, it’s a good feeling when I can help somebody else.”

Unlike many AIDS patients who have been shunned by friends and even family members, Marsh considers himself fortunate. “I have yet to lose a friend. All my friends have stayed by me from the beginning.”

Still, he acknowledged, it’s not the same without Crawford Hartley at his side. “It really is easier when you have someone there supporting you constantly, mentally and emotionally.”

Occasionally, Marsh wakes up in the middle of the night, overwhelmed by a sense of being alone.

“It’s a very lonely feeling,” he said. “It’s something, especially after that many years, that you build up such security and you feel nothing can touch you. I know it’s not true, but we had built that up.”

His friends, Marsh observed, “have also had to deal with learning to know me as a single person. It (Hartley’s death) was very difficult for them to deal with.

“Now people are finally getting around to where they do use Crawford’s name, and people find it a lot easier to ask me now, how am I doing? Am I settled in now? Do I like my new house? They’re not as fearful as they have been in the past. They didn’t know exactly how to broach it before.

“There’s a definite difference when you’re dealing with an old-age death and (with) someone who has just up and died. It’s very difficult for people to deal with that, and I know that there are some friends who still haven’t come to grips with it.”

Has he?

“Oh yeah,” Marsh said softly. “I’ve learned he’s not coming back. That’s probably the hardest part.”