Tree a Reminder of a Life, a Death and Love

A slender tree trembles gently in the wind behind the baseball diamond at Westland School, high above the city on Mulholland Drive. Mornings are cool up here, and the yellow-blossoming senna seems to feel the chill.

The tree stands as a reminder of the way a single person’s love can embrace an entire community, and how a single death can illuminate it.

It is Michael Rosen’s tree. And this is his story.

His wife, Nina, tells it best. Sitting on a toddler’s chair at a North Hollywood preschool that she helps to direct, Nina laughs easily when she talks about Michael. She cries easily too.

She met Michael, she says, at the late Cock and Bull restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, the kind of glorious old-Hollywood hangout where fading character actors would drink for hours, and have their mail delivered. She worked there as a floor manager while studying for a master’s degree in education. He ran a talent agency nearby, and lunched there regularly.

She noticed Michael wasn’t like a lot of the more brash patrons of the restaurant. “No ‘Hey babe’ and that kind of thing,” she says. For a first date, the divorced father invited her to the beach with his children. His love for them impressed her. “There was something about the way he said ‘with the kids’ that made me . . . “

She stops. Memories are hard.

Their first date ultimately turned out to be a James Bond film trilogy at a Melrose revival theater. Dinner afterward: Pioneer chicken. Dessert: Winchell’s doughnuts. The kids’ favorites.

“He was very down to earth and so in love with his boys,” Nina says. “He said he’d never marry and have kids again because it was too hard to give them up.”

But he did get married again, and he did have two more children.

Little Lynsey and Nicolas became even more a focus of Michael Rosen’s life than his older children. He switched to representing writers instead of actors--and moved his business into his home--so he could spend more time with them.

Nina watched his values change, and his life bloom anew. “Maybe it’s the typical story of a man with a second family,” she says. “The first time, you’re so busy trying to make money and grow your business. The next time, you slow down. You stop to smell the roses.”

Better than that, Michael planted the roses.

He became head of the grounds committee at Westland, the private elementary school his children attended, and spent much of his spare time there tending its gardens. Nina, meanwhile, became president of the school’s board of trustees. “It became his place as well as my place as well as the kids’ place,” says Nina.

Soon, in sorrow, each would learn just how deeply rooted there they had become.

The news came late on a Friday afternoon.

The manager of a racquetball club burst into the Maggy Haves School, where Nina worked, to report that Michael had suffered a heart attack on the court. Her husband swatted balls and lifted weights at the club every day, Nina says, to counterbalance the vast quantities of red meat he loved to eat. An ambulance had rushed him to a local hospital’s emergency room.

“They told me it was a mild heart attack and they would let his heart cool off over the weekend before they did an angiogram on Monday,” Nina says, her voice trailing away. “On Monday!”

Monday never came.

Instinctively, she recalls with regret, she knew he was in the wrong place. A family doctor, though, told her Michael was being treated correctly with blood thinners, and that it would be “bad public relations” to demand a move.

The next morning Nina found Michael uncomfortable--”thrashing around.” He told the kids that he loved them, and that he would be OK, but Nina still ordered an ambulance to rush him to a cardiac ward at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Burbank. Nicolas reminded his mother to send along a picture he had painted to hang next to his father’s bed.

A few hours later, a second heart attack rocked Michael’s body. Emergency surgery revealed a dissected aorta. The blood thinners had caused irrepressible internal bleeding. Soon after midnight, before his children or wife could hug him goodby, Michael died at age 53.

*

In a city that can be cold and heartless, what happened next could be called a miracle.

Nina, who paid little attention to family finances, learned that Michael had cashed in his life insurance policy to pay for his children’s expensive private-school education.

“I was afraid we were going to be on the street--living in our car,” she says.

Without her assistance or request, though, the community that had sprouted around the Rosens at Westland and Maggy Haves School, rushed to the rescue.

Cooking sign-up sheets were nailed to doors at both schools; Nina didn’t have to make dinner for two months. Someone started a trust fund for the children’s education; the father of one of Nina’s preschool students, a comedian, organized and hosted a charity event at the Improv to seed the fund with thousands of dollars. Westland offered its auditorium for Michael’s memorial service; more than 350 people jammed the hall.

And the tree? Michael’s friends planted it--a lasting symbol of the shade he provided to them, his family, and his community, in life.

“There are no words to thank people for what they’ve done,” says Nina.

Perhaps. But the tree trembles gently in the wind, as if trying.