I Blame Dennis Hopper

by Illeana Douglas

  “Now dry your eyes and listen to your Uncle Roddy,” he said. “It’s so important to find joy in this business, because as the years go by, people will try to steal that joy, so that is something as an actress you must hold onto. Marilyn could not hold onto joy. All we have is the joy of the work, and if they could kill that joy, they would. Marty, or Spielberg, they are beyond feeling any happiness in the work. They know better. But that is both a blessing and a curse.”

  It was like a secret actor-to-actor pep talk. Those words, and the fact that they came from him, set me straight. It gave me a confidence that I could wear like armor to all future auditions. Here was a man who was in his sixties then, in some of the greatest movies of all time, and he told me he was still auditioning. He had no bitterness. He was a child star who went through the studio system and had many ups and downs in his career. I took his advice to heart. I was on my own path, and I didn’t need to compare my career with anyone else’s. Soon we were back to laughing and gossiping. He dropped this brilliant aside involving two actresses known for playing prim and proper ladies on-screen, one a British redhead, the other a cool blonde.

  He said knowingly, “The ones who play the virgins. They’re the ones who sleep with everyone.” Snap. Snap. Snap.

  He paused, putting his camera down again and making a Cornelius expression. “You are not going to like these pictures,” he said. “But when you are older you will.” He was right, of course. He made the sun come out for me that rainy afternoon at Hugo’s. From that day on, he became my Uncle Roddy. Always there to lend a sympathetic ear or to have a nice gossip with. When I told him I was cast in To Die For, he laughed and said, “You see now. All that worry for naught.” We started to write back and forth. We would send each other silly postcards that he would sign, “With love to I.D.” The nickname stuck. Given to me by a Hollywood legend who never stopped working.

  Roddy came to New York to be in A Christmas Carol, and it was a joy to see him onstage. He and Marty had crossed paths over the years, but they had never really met, so this was perfect. We arranged for a dinner at Marty’s townhouse. Roddy arrived with his signature Members Only jacket and a long red scarf. There was my Uncle Roddy to approve my choice of a boyfriend. He loved Marty, of course. They were both film nerds and heavily involved in film preservation. Roddy was on the board of governors for the Academy and Marty had his own organization called The Film Foundation. Roddy had been caught up in an FBI sting about copyright infringement over his vast private film collection. Marty was helping him untie the rights for a movie Roddy had directed nicknamed Tam-Lin. We would look forward to his visits. He’d show up at the townhouse with at least three cameras in hand. He took some wonderful formal pictures of us, and then what he called “snappy snaps,” just for fun. When we were out in Hollywood we would often have dinner at Roddy’s house. In the garden there was a gigantic statue of him as Cornelius from Planet of the Apes. Hysterical. These were no ordinary dinners. You would be sitting next to Maureen O’Hara, who was next to Steve Martin, who was next to Gore Vidal. Hard to know whether to eat your peas or just stare at Gregory Peck and try not to scream, but Roddy always made sure to include everyone in the conversation. He was so gracious that way. After dinner he brought out an autograph book that everyone had to sign. Marty drew a little self-portrait, signing it, “From your fan and admirer.” I wrote, “To My Dear Uncle Roddy—I could listen to your stories for all eternity.”

  Roddy had been keeping autograph books going back to when he was twelve years old. John Ford, the director of How Green Was My Valley, had given him his first one as a way for the child actor to keep out of trouble when they were shooting. It became a lifelong habit for Roddy. He took out his first autograph book to show us. It was thickly bound green leather. He read entries from John Ford himself, the entire cast of How Green Was My Valley, and his next film, Lassie Come Home, which was where he met his lifelong friend Elizabeth Taylor. We were just in awe, holding something that contained so much movie history. It was Roddy who convinced me that I had to start keeping a journal. “You’re going to meet a lot of interesting people, I.D. And I’m one of them, so start writing!” I did, and I will forever be grateful. It was Uncle Roddy, along with Gregory Peck, who sent me a letter inviting me into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences after I had come a few votes shy of an Oscar nomination for the very movie I didn’t think I was ever going to be in, To Die For.

  He was not a fair-weather friend, either. When Marty and I broke up, it was a decision Marty made, and many of his friends who had known us as a couple sadly became distant. Not Roddy. He took me by the shoulders and said, “Now listen, I.D. You know this will mean absolutely nothing as far as you and I are concerned.” It meant a lot that he reassured me in that way. But that was Uncle Roddy. Class all the way. Also, Elizabeth Taylor had been divorced seven times, so I’m sure his shoulder was used to being cried upon. I needn’t have worried. I moved to Los Angeles in 1998, and the parties at his house, the memories, the formal portraits, as well as the “snappy snaps,” continued. I was at a brunch at the home of George and Joan Axelrod, my future in-laws, and Roddy started taking pictures of me once again. I had no makeup on, there was a sleepy smile on my face, and I said, “Roddy, you’re always taking pictures of me when I’m not ready.” But he insisted, saying, “Those are the best kind.”

  Roddy was part of a circle of intimate friends, along with the Axelrods, who went on Sundays to visit the greatest movie star diva of all time: his best friend, Elizabeth Taylor. In my next book I will tell the story of how Elizabeth Taylor came to my beach house, fell in love with Gabriel Byrne, and broke her nose, but for now let me stick with Uncle Roddy. He deserves it.

  We were driving back from Elizabeth’s house in Bel Air down Benedict Canyon to Roddy’s house in the Valley. We were going pretty fast. It’s a winding and scary road, and I finally felt I knew him well enough to ask about “the accident.” He pointed to a bend in the road and said, shaking his head, “That’s where it happened.”

  I was referring to Montgomery Clift’s car accident during the shooting of Raintree County. I had certainly read enough celebrity biographies to know that Roddy had been there the night it happened. After Clift left a party at Elizabeth Taylor’s house in Benedict Canyon, his car had gone off the road in the fog and hit a telephone pole. The accident left him permanently disfigured and addicted to pain pills and eventually booze. Out of respect, I had never asked Roddy about it, but I thought it was important to know the history. He told me he had tried to help Clift many times, as others had. Roddy was a private man who kept his private life separate, but I could tell by the way he spoke about him that Roddy felt a deep love for the man he could not save.

  “He couldn’t look in a mirror. You couldn’t have a mirror anywhere around him. Once his looks were gone, he couldn’t cope. A tragic figure, because he was surely our finest actor.”

  I have always loved film history, and I thought it was important to try to get stories from all of the greats of Hollywood so that those stories remain alive, and I think Roddy knew that about me. I told him that with his permission, I would include that story in my journals. The journals he had urged me to keep.

  Beyond his memories, Roddy gave me something even more personal. It was a deeper appreciation of older actors and our responsibility to care for them. For years, before anyone was aware of it, Roddy visited elderly and mostly forgotten actors at the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills. It was a retirement home and hospital for actors, some of whom could not afford health services. Roddy started an organization called Roddy’s Girls, which was a group of seventy-five of his lady friends who built a rose garden at the Motion Picture House—I was lucky enough to become one of Roddy’s Girls. It’s not hard to imagine that Roddy had seventy-five lady friends. He probably had a hundred and seventy-five. He was a friend to all of us, making each one of us feel special and loved. He probably knew all our secrets, too. Thank God he took them to th
e grave.

  When I got married there was Uncle Roddy to give me away. My mom just fell in love with him. But that’s how he was. He took your arm and made you feel as if you had known him all of your life. It was around that time I learned he was sick. It was cancer, but he refused to admit it or discuss it. This was a man who never complained, never spoke of anything negative, and always had an optimistic outlook on life.

  “I.D., I want you to have this,” he said, putting a Tiffany vase in my hands. “I’m not leaving anyone anything; I am simply giving things to friends that I feel they will enjoy.” I did not want to admit to myself that he looked very thin in his Members Only jacket.

  The last time I spoke to him, I was in Chicago filming Stir of Echoes. The movie was going great, and we talked about that. My marriage not so much, and we talked about that, too. He got me laughing and gossiping and reminiscing about all our happy times together. He could always cheer me up telling wonderfully indiscreet stories. He could drop names like Ava, Audrey, Grace, Elizabeth, Natalie, Irene—he had an irrational love of all things Irene Dunne—and it wasn’t name-dropping. He’d been on a first-name basis with all of those amazing actresses. “And now good night, I.D.,” he said. He died in October 1998 at the age of seventy.

  Everyone needs an Uncle Roddy. He was more than my uncle. He was my angel. I like to think my angel is in heaven right now, having a nice gossip with Mata Hari or Marie Antoinette, or the French starlet who brought the clap to Hollywood.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Director To Die For

  Am in the zone, if not in a trance. Gus Van Sant instructing me to skate over Nicole Kidman’s grave on Lake Simcoe, Ontario.

  Not all that long ago, I was shooting a movie called Picture Perfect, directed by Glenn Gordon Caron, when one of my favorite experiences happened with a director—up until we met Mike Nichols together, that is. Glenn was under quite a bit of pressure. After a very long day, we had a huge setup that was going to take place in Times Square at dusk. It was summer, hot and humid, and we were shooting at rush hour with thousands of people behind barricades screaming while we tried to rehearse a scene with Jennifer Aniston, who just happened to be starring in Friends at the time.

  Glenn was trying to set up the shot, and it was so loud you couldn’t hear anything. I could tell he was getting frustrated. He just wanted this experience to be over.

  “This is a nightmare!” he said over the roar of the crowd.

  Meanwhile, I was giddy. Of all the movies I’ve done, I have to say in that moment I may have reached my personal nirvana of being exactly where I wanted to be, doing exactly what I wanted to be doing.

  I was wearing a hat, and I said, “Glenn, please let me wear my hat. I want to be like one of those actresses in a movie from the ’50s who looks up, wide-eyed, as she arrives in Times Square and is wearing a hat!”

  Glenn looked at me like I was absolutely nuts. Over the noise, this beleaguered director said, “You seem pretty excited.” I couldn’t believe that he wasn’t. I thought about the time when I was a kid staying with my grandmother in Queens. Al Pacino was shooting a scene from Dog Day Afternoon in Brooklyn. This event had been covered in the New York Post. I begged my grandmother to take me so we could watch the filming. We took the subway to Brooklyn and stood for hours behind the barricades to get a glimpse of the people making the movie. I think I might have seen the top of Al Pacino’s head—and it was still exciting.

  Now, on the set of Picture Perfect, I made Glenn Gordon Caron stop everything to take the moment in. I said, “Glenn. Look at us. We are shooting a movie. In Times Square. There are thousands of people screaming. They’re outside those barricades. They would do anything to be inside the barricades. We’re inside because we’re making a movie.”

  This look of amazement suddenly came over his face, and he said, “I want a picture of us. Right now, together. Right at this moment!” He called over the photographer, and we snapped the picture. It’s my favorite picture with any director I have ever worked for, because it truly captured the moment. That moment was joy. And I am wearing a hat.

  My first love was acting. My second love was, and still is, the director. It could have started when I read Richard Schickel’s book The Men Who Make the Movies. I found myself fascinated with the men who make the movies as much as the movies themselves. Some actresses fall for their directors of photography, because they make them beautiful. Some actresses fall for their leading men, because they start to believe the words the men are saying—“I love you; I want you; I need you”—are true.

  My first memory of a director goes back to the set of Being There, watching quietly in the shadows while Hal Ashby directed my grandfather and Peter Sellers. I was mesmerized but conflicted. Part of me wanted to dance in the light with the actors. Part of me preferred the comfort and safety of watching, in the dark, next to the director. I could hear things that no one else heard. Secrets, laughing, mumbling. Things the actors didn’t know about. The director was part god, part mad magician. But the actors were the magic trick itself. This question, of what side of the line am I on, has always been a factor in my own actress-director relationships.

  I’ve always had a theory that the need to direct is an obsession with trying to re-create and somehow make sense of your childhood. You can look at any director’s films and see that even if the stories are completely different, the themes are the same. You could tie those themes to their childhood. The most obvious example is Hitchcock. As a child, his father sent him with a note to the local police chief. The chief looked at the note and led Hitchcock to a cell and locked him in it for five minutes. Hitchcock was confused and terrified because he had done nothing wrong. When the policeman let him out he said, “That’s what we do with naughty boys.” Hitchcock claimed he was haunted by this incident, and that’s why many of his films deal with an innocent man wrongfully accused of a crime. Another common thought is that directors are voyeurs—happier to watch and control the action rather than take part in it. It was Hitchcock who said he loved Grace Kelly because of her willingness to be submissive.

  Sometimes directors are superheroes trying to save the girl. Sometimes they are the sadistic fellows trying to punish the girl. Again and again and again. I have certainly been at the hands of a director, asked repeatedly to do a scene, over and over again, only to be told that, I still didn’t have it right. It’s times like that I think to myself, Hmm, I wonder who he hates more, his mother or his father?

  Sometimes this need for control is not simply to manipulate actors and circumstances but rather to attempt to change the outcome of some event from the past. Director John Frankenheimer was one of the most intimidating people I have ever met, and I learned a lot from him about being fearless. He knew I had ambitions to direct, so he chose me to be part of a select group that saw various cuts of his films. I asked him if we could continue our conversations over lunch, and we did, always at Orsini Osteria Romana, on Pico Boulevard. The first time we had lunch, he said very loudly and very directly, “Illeana, you’re going to get much more out of this than I am, so you’re going to pick up the check.” After a screening of his TNT film George Wallace, one of the HBO executives wanted to remove fifty seconds from a cut, and he wouldn’t let them.

  “I will walk,” he said. And he meant it.

  At lunch, I asked him where he had found the bravery to say something like that, and he said, “Illeana,” and he paused for dramatic emphasis, “my life has been about seconds and inches.” Frankenheimer was both seconds and inches away from Bobby Kennedy the night he was shot at the Ambassador Hotel.

  My first professional experience working with directors was not on sets. It was working for Peggy Siegal helping to publicize some of the best films of the ’80s. For each project, Peggy would assign who would be responsible for handling each member of the cast during the press tour and release of the film. All the other girls wanted to be around the movie stars. There were bidding wars over who would get to work wi
th Kevin Costner or Andy Garcia in The Untouchables. Nobody ever wanted to work with the director—unless you enjoyed constant runs to CVS to pick up their Maalox or Xanax prescriptions.

  The glamour was being with the movie stars. Picking up their jewelry or clothes for events and premieres. Ordering champagne for their suite at the Four Seasons. Sometimes eating their untouched fruit plates after the press junkets. My absolute favorite task was spending an afternoon trying to get the supermodel Paulina Porizkova to attend the premiere of Moonstruck with Nicolas Cage because Cher’s date was going to be the band Bon Jovi. Yes, the entire band! I told you this was a dream job! Porizkova declined—or rather, “her people” declined on her behalf. She had a boyfriend at the time, Ric Ocasek. Years later I teased her about this when we worked together on Wedding Bell Blues. With the director, there were no Vanity Fair photo shoots or Premiere magazine profiles, but I learned pretty quickly that being around the director was where all the real action was.

  Working for Peggy Siegal, I probably learned more about the psychology of directors than I ever did on any film set. I understood their moods and sympathized with their pressures, and learned to duck when things went wrong and objects went flying.

  People say that directors are egotistical, and they are, but that’s also their game face. I had a director privately tell me, once a journalist left the room after reading him aloud a bad review of his film, “If you let them think you care, they will eat you alive.” The funny thing is, I never ever mentioned that I was even an actress or even had aspirations to act. I thought of myself as the director’s little helper, and it was a role I enjoyed. I also sensed that it was a relief for them be around one person who wanted absolutely nothing from them but to listen and learn.

  The directors I worked with assumed I wanted to be behind the scenes, and in some ways, I did. If I had ever said I wanted to be an actress, the relationship would have instantly changed. When I became identified as “an actress,” I lost the power I once had to communicate with directors as if we were equals. For example, after To Die For came out, my wonderful agent at the time, Jay Moloney from CAA, said to me, “Illeana, who do you want to meet? Anyone at all. I’ll make it happen!”