I Blame Dennis Hopper

by Illeana Douglas

  “Yeah,” I said with a sniff, “you’re not right for the part at all. He’s like a Brian Wilson, Beach Boys type. Great part, but you’re really not right for it.”

  Matt rolled it up under his arm. “Do you mind if I read it?”

  “OK,” I said, “but I really don’t think it’s for you.”

  He called me the next day from his hotel room, asking me a lot of questions about the script, which is always a good sign. The entire casting of the film seemed to fall into place like that. We had Eric Stoltz playing my first husband and songwriting partner, Howard. Our relationship had some shades of Carole King and Gerry Goffin, who was also helping with music. We had John Turturro playing my manager. He bore some characteristics of Phil Spector. Allison said, “I’m not sure what would have happened if we didn’t get John because I wrote the part entirely around him.” Now we had Matt playing my second husband, Jay Phillips. We were soon joined by two fantastic actresses: Bridget Fonda, playing a Lesley Gore–type singer named Kelly Porter, and Patsy Kensit as another songwriter, Cheryl Steed, who was based loosely on Ellie Greenwich.

  Grace of My Heart was the second movie I helped produce—Search and Destroy was the first—and it spoiled me forever. This was the height of the glory of independent filmmaking, when you could go to a studio (in our case, Universal) with a few key names attached—like John Turturro, who was coming off an amazing performance in Quiz Show—pitch the story to a studio executive (in our case, Casey Silver), and come out with a deal. We also had the strength of Marty as our executive producer behind us, vouching for us. It worked. We were thrilled to get the green light until we found out that Kevin Smith’s movie Mallrats, which was green lighted at around the same time, got a bigger budget than we did. Thrilled for Kevin—he was a friend and a talented filmmaker—but not so much for Allison. Someone explained it to us this way: “Grace of My Heart is a woman’s picture.” Allison was a woman. I was a woman. The crew had a lot of women on it. The editor was a woman. The music supervisor was a woman. But what makes it “a woman’s picture”? It’s true that Allison always had candles burning on the set. You know you’re working with a woman when you can smell the scent of Ylang Ylang candles while shooting a love scene. It’s true we did girlie things. Like, if you so desired, you could list on the call sheet your love status: Married, Single, or Looking. Yes, we’d have tarot card readings and the Norse ritual of the casting of the rune stones to seek wisdom and understanding. And yes, Allison did give me a goddess amulet in the shape of a uterus on the first day of shooting. But does that make it “a woman’s picture”?

  It was great to able to embrace our feminine side. I was brought up around a lot of men and was always taught to keep anything “womanly” private, especially your period. One day Allison had menstrual cramps, and our male producer, Daniel Hassid, got her an ice pack to help her with her pain. I remember seeing Allison up on the dolly, behind the camera, holding this ice pack across herself, looking through the viewfinder. That image of Allison, who so embraced being a woman, gave me the courage to do the same. She set a tone that at times felt so casual you felt that you never had anything to be embarrassed about. I did my first nude scene—and my second and third—maybe my fourth all in one movie, thanks to Allison. Allison made me feel like I was a beautiful woman when I did those love scenes. When a man makes you feel beautiful, that’s one thing. But when a woman makes you feel beautiful, she’s talking about your insides, too.

  As the character Denise Waverly grew as a woman, so did I. Allison made me feel it was OK to have an opinion about things. I was playing a woman going through every upheaval that happens in a woman’s life. Love vs. career, sexism, marriage, divorce, contraception, abortion, adultery, babies, death, drugs, your mother! It was daunting.

  Allison had the first on-screen depiction of a woman’s water breaking; we had big discussions about that. I had never had a baby. I mean, did people want to see that? Did people want to see me get an abortion in the middle of a fun musical about the Brill Building? What I admired so much about Allison was that we could fight passionately about something because we were always fighting to make it better, to make it more truthful. Every disagreement we had, and we didn’t have a lot, was about the interpretation of the scene. What would this woman do? What had Allison done? What had I done? The parallels of my life and Allison’s life all made it into the movie in one way or another, until I was playing one woman. I was my mother; I was Allison’s mother; I was Allison; I was Illeana. And while all that was happening, the cameras just happened to be rolling. Sometimes it felt like I was filming my own life as it flashed before my eyes. When Mick Fleetwood had to drop out of the film, Bridget Fonda’s father came in to replace him, and Peter Fonda—Captain America from Easy Rider—was cast as my hippie mentor, Guru Dave. I had blamed Dennis Hopper for making Easy Rider because it made my dad become a hippie and start a commune, and now I was a hippie shooting on a commune with Peter Fonda. When I looked at the rushes of my smoking a joint with Peter Fonda I thought, Yup. My movie life and my real life have come full circle.

  Grace of My Heart became a musical melodrama with the personal tone of a ’70s film. A love vs. career story in the vein of A Star Is Born. “Not the Barbra Streisand version!” I hear Allison saying. All right, I would be lying if I didn’t say that Grace of My Heart was, yes, an excuse for me to re-create my favorite actresses’ performances, outfits, and hairstyles all in one movie. If I did the director’s commentary, you’d hear me say, “Oh, here’s me doing Liza in New York New York; that’s Judy; that’s Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore; Goldie Hawn from Cactus Flower; there’s Audrey Hepburn’s ponytail, trench coat, flats.” I was shameless. And Allison knew it, so she would keep a strict eye on me if I veered toward camp. As in the time I tried to get away with Barbra’s Afro-permed look from A Star Is Born. I walked onto the set to do this very serious scene, and Allison took one look at me and said, “No. Illeana. This is not a Barbra Streisand movie.” I slunk back to the trailer.

  In the middle of our nice melodrama, Allison went all female Cassavetes on me! Allison wanted to see me angry, and that was a pretty scary thing. I was taught to be a nice girl. Nice girls don’t get angry. I remember getting reamed by Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse when I couldn’t slap an actor across the face. He said, “You’re either a lady or you’re an actress. Which is it?” I sat down, humiliated. Of course I had anger in me, but it was not an emotion with which I was comfortable. On Grace we were going to be shooting a scene with John Turturro in which he is disgusted with me for giving up on my career and myself. I wanted to rehearse it, but Allison and John didn’t want to talk about it; they just wanted to shoot it. John and I worked so well in the film together because Denise Waverly worshipped Joel Millner, and I worshipped John.

  Our relationship in the film was also based on Denise’s needing his approval, and I wanted John to approve of how I would act the scene, because Denise/I was going to have to get angry and Denise/I was terrified of getting angry with an actor whose approval Denise/I so desperately wanted.

  I don’t know if John knew I was just scared, but his refusal to rehearse, which felt like he was abandoning me, was the very trigger I needed to tap into the rage that Denise felt from Jay’s death. I thought, You son of a bitch, here I am, I adore you, and you won’t even help me work out this scene. Well John had absolutely no idea what I was going to do when he walked out there, but he certainly did once we began. I hit him as hard as I possibly could within the context of the scene. I let go of all the anger I had ever experienced, and let me tell you, he gave it back with everything he had. It was electric. It was what I had signed up for. I went from being a “lady” to an actress.

  There was another fight on Grace that was just as inspiring, only Allison was at its center. We had a very tight, thirty-day shooting schedule, and things had been going very well, and we had been told by one of the producers that we were going to get an extra
week of shooting time once we got to Malibu. We were so relieved, because this meant that we would have extra time to work on some of the more emotionally demanding scenes that were coming up with Matt Dillon, who had just arrived. We were in Malibu, and the feeling on the set was jubilant. We were really proud of the work we had been doing, and now we’d have two weeks to finish instead of one. Matt had arrived and was in the makeup trailer getting ready for his first day.

  I needed to get approval for an outfit so I went to Allison’s trailer and knocked. I heard someone say come in, so I stepped up, and there, sitting on the ground, was Allison, surrounded by all of the producers, and she was casting those Norse runes! The ancient stones that foretold the future. Yeah, when you go to the director’s trailer and she’s casting the runes with the producers to see how the day will turn out—maybe not a good sign. Apparently, Allison had just been told that we were not getting our extra week after all. The tension seemed pretty thick, so I said, “Why don’t I come back later?”

  I stepped out of the trailer and was about twenty feet toward the makeup trailer when the door opened and Allison’s uterus-shaped goddess amulet went sailing through the air. The producers started filing out of her trailer and down the steps, and Allison hurled her runes at them as they walked out. Then she came down the steps with her purse and started to head for her car. The female producer tried to stop her, and Allison started hitting her with her purse, and then the female producer started hitting her back with her purse. And they’re having a full-on girl fight! Meanwhile, I looked up and saw Matt Dillon—in his wig—watching the entire thing. He pulled me aside and said, “You want to tell me what’s been going on here?” I laughed and said, “Well, Matt, these things are bound to happen on a sensitive woman’s picture.”

  Everyone was OK, and pretty soon we were all hugging and forgiving again. Allison did sustain some serious damage to her goddess amulet, but that’s the passion she had for the film. She was willing to fight for it. We got those extra workdays back, by the way. She got us those days back.

  Some battles we lost. There were a couple of beautiful scenes with Eric Stoltz that were cut. One was a scene that showed the complexity of Denise’s and Howard’s personal and professional relationship as married singer-songwriters. To me, it reflected the challenges of a man loving a woman who was changing. Howard understood that for Denise to grow as an artist they would have to say goodbye. Yet the scene held out hope he would still be there and hinted at a happy ending for them. Allison even wrote a scene in which Howard comes back; he appears like a mirage, walking over a sand dune outside Denise’s beach house. Marty thought that a happy ending was a cop-out and would be too sentimental. He felt that Denise must end up alone, having made it on her own. Art winning out over happiness I guess. Maybe I’m an optimist but I would like to think a woman can have both love and a career. Of course, it didn’t work for Janet Gaynor or Judy Garland or Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born, or Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman, either, so Grace of My Heart ends with Denise alone at her piano, with no man in sight.

  It was bittersweet for me, because in many ways I thought Howard was the glue to Denise. He encouraged her metamorphosis and mine. Our scenes evoked the innocence of experiencing things together for the first time. Allison joked that the motto of the first week for me was either naked or crying. Is this Tuesday? I must be naked. Wednesday: crying. Thursday: naked again. I said to Eric, “I feel like I’m being initiated, being naked with Eric Stoltz.” All our scenes had a quiet give and take; at times it felt so natural that I wasn’t aware we were acting—or that we didn’t have clothes on! Howard was my first on-screen love. I looked into his eyes and always felt safe. I did not want to say goodbye to Howard and the wonderful actor who played him, Eric Stoltz.

  “Since I lost the power to pretend / That there could ever be a happy ending.” So sings Elvis Costello in “God Give Me Strength,” one of the wonderful songs from the memorable soundtrack of Grace of My Heart. I later asked Allison how she came up with the idea of bringing together Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach for “God Give Me Strength,” or Carol Bayer Sager and Dave Stewart, or bringing Joni Mitchell or Lesley Gore, into the mix. And she said, “I was in a hotel room, and I made a list of all the songwriters from the Brill Building and another list of all the current songwriters.” Allison’s innovation—much copied since—was to make music that sounded as if it had been written in the past. Her thought was “The era is over, but we’re going to give you a little more.” Since this was a movie about songwriters from the past, why not pair them up with songwriters of the present? She said, “When I told Karyn Rachtman, the music supervisor, this, she put her head in her hands and said, ‘Allison, that’s a great idea, and it’s going to be very hard to do.’” Not with Allison. After all, she’s a woman. She made it look easy.

  And now a real road trip story. A few years after we finished the movie, I lost touch with Allison. She was in L.A., and I moved back to New York to do some theater. It was 2002, and I was on a road trip with some friends. We decided to stop in Elko, Nevada. There was a motel that had caught my eye called the Thunderbird. I loved the giant neon winged eagle outside and said, “Oh, we have to stay here.”

  We cleaned up and decided to grab a bite at a Mexican restaurant near the motel. We walk in, and I hear this scream. It’s Allison Anders with her daughters and her mother. We couldn’t believe it. We embraced, and I said, “What the hell are you doing in Elko, Nevada?” She said she was on a road trip from Kentucky to L.A., and it was the closest restaurant near the motel where they were staying.

  I told her I was on a road trip, too. And I said, “Wait, are you at the Thunderbird?”

  “Yes,” she said. The enormous neon sign of the winged eagle had caught her eye.

  We were staying at the exact same motel, and eating at the exact same restaurant at the exact same time, on completely separate journeys. We never lost touch again, and the journey that began with Grace of My Heart continues to this day. I’m not sure about the ending of this female-road-trip movie, but the middle has been fantastic.

  They screened Grace of My Heart in 2011, many years after its initial release, at Cinefamily, in L.A.; it’s a retro movie theater where both Allison and I have a residency programming films. I thought it was a lovely gesture but feared that probably three people would show up. I decided to ride my bike there, very low-key, but as I approached the theater, I saw this long line outside. And I was thinking, What are all these people doing here? It was completely sold-out. Allison and Eric Stoltz and I did a lengthy Q&A afterward. We talked for the first time about some of the deleted scenes and the hope that someday they would be restored. Grace of My Heart has endured in a way that even I can’t explain. When people talk about it, they almost start to cry, as if it’s personally about them. That makes me so proud, because that is what we set out to do. Make a personal film, with some music, some style, some romance, maybe a man or two to cry over, which seems like it was made in the ’70s.

  In short: a woman’s picture.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  You’re a Tuning Fork

  Marty surveys the damage in the aftermath of Storm Marlon: Two A.M. at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

  I have met and worked with so many great actors. I’m always asked who my favorite is. It’s not quite a fair question because I met the greatest actor of all time. The actor who towers above all other actors because all actors imitate him in one way or another. Marlon Brando. Really, in my opinion, he invented the modern technique of film and theater acting—sometimes called The Method—which has not changed to this day. But this isn’t a story about acting. This is a story of perhaps my biggest show business regret: not having sex with Marlon Brando. Oh, and learning that I am a tuning fork.

  A few months after Grace of My Heart came out, I was in Los Angeles shooting a wonderful little independent film called Wedding Bell Blues, directed by Dana Lustig and starring Julie Warner, Paulina Porizkova, and
John Corbett. A little Wedding Bell Blues trivia: Look for the scene in which I am wearing a Mean Streets T-shirt, which was a little homage to Marty, who was my boyfriend at the time. Marty was coming to Los Angeles to receive the John Huston Award for Artists Rights, and I was wearing his T-shirt in a low-budget movie—but hey, that was our relationship. My hotel digs for Wedding Bell Blues matched our indie budget, so I was thrilled to move into Marty’s more glamorous suite at the Beverly Wilshire for a few days.

  Between changing hotels and working on the film, I was scattered. I grabbed my Cynthia Rowley dress out of my overnight bag and I had an egad moment. The dress was not suited for a black-tie event. It was microshort and sparkly. A sense of dread and insecurity washed over me. Why hadn’t I brought something more appropriate? What would Marty think? I was getting ready in one of the gigantic marble bathrooms, and Marty poked his head in to check on me, looking impeccable, of course, in his Black Label Armani. I said, “Is this cheap-looking?”

  “No,” he said. “You look cute…”

  I said, “I know I look cute. What about the dress?” He was standing there, and I could tell something was on his mind, because he didn’t laugh, and Marty is the best laugher.

  I asked again, “Are you sure this dress is all right?”

  He said, “OK. I didn’t want to tell you before I knew for certain, but Marlon Brando is coming over tomorrow to have lunch with me and talk about a project.” Actress looks in camera: Is he kidding?

  I knew from experience that Marty was not kidding. One time, back at the New York townhouse, Marty had yelled up, “Put some clothes on. Mick Jagger is here.” I thought he was kidding, but as I tiptoed down the stairs in my nightgown, there, sitting in the living room dressed like a proper English gentleman, drinking tea, was Mick Jagger. “Allo,” he said, in his distinctive East End London drawl.