All We Knew But Couldn't Say

by Joanne Vannicola

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “I KNOW WHO YOU ARE, but you have to wear some lipstick, try a little harder.”

  I sat in a chair in a brightly lit office in Los Angeles, opposite a beautiful woman — a talent agent. I understood the code, the words she didn’t say about my being a lesbian. I wore ripped, faded jeans and a leather jacket. I was, however, wearing makeup and wondered why she hadn’t noticed. Even this face-painting effort hadn’t won her over.

  It was my Hollywood expedition, post–Emmy win. I was on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, and according to industry types, was on my way.

  “Hang on,” she said as she lifted the receiver of the phone on her desk. “Hi, Marcia … I’ve got a new actress I want you to meet, a cross between Angelina Jolie and Jodie Foster. Tomorrow?” She smiled at me, nodding. “Perfect. Send the script over and I’ll give it to her before she leaves … Joanne Vannicola. Okay, talk later.” She hung up. “Okay, tomorrow you are going to 20th Century studios for an audition I lined up. Call me, and stay close to a phone so you can check in. And check your voice mail often.”

  We walked out of her office and into a room where the script was being printed off for me, complete with binders and notes. This was not Toronto.

  “I’ll be calling you in a couple of hours after you settle. Where are you at again?”

  “Oh … it’s near muscle beach, Santa Monica.”

  “Be prepared to drive a lot.”

  She ushered me through the reception area, where posters from her clients’ movies — Wesley Snipes and others — were hung, and out double doors the size of walls. I nervously said goodbye and made my way to the rental car, clutching my folder.

  Driving out of the traffic of Hollywood to the ocean was a great way to escape. At night I would rent a bicycle to ride along the paths, wearing my helmet and long pants — the perfect Canadian, safety first — as I pedalled along the concrete pathways of the pier. I rode the Ferris wheel, trying to figure out why I wanted to be an actor, and wondered how I would fit my feminist lesbian identity into this mix.

  Auditions piled up. Every day there were scene pages and scripts and calls from the agent. The other women in the waiting rooms were feminine, beautiful actors sizing me up. Everyone checked each other out, sideways looks and ears wide open trying to hear the others practising. Fierce competitors.

  After three days I started having panic attacks. I tried to put on more makeup, bright red lipstick to go with my jeans and tees, but it didn’t make much of a difference. I still stood out, and not in the way that Hollywood embraced. I was auditioning for a movie being directed by Oliver Stone and couldn’t find myself in the characters I was asked to read for. Not that actors needed to find themselves, but I was so far from the characters in every way that I should have just auditioned for boy parts, might have had more luck. I cried my way to the car, didn’t know what to say to the agent in LA. I didn’t have the language for what I was experiencing — a reaction to homophobic undercurrents and extreme sexism, not just in the town, but also in the scripts. Everywhere.

  “I was nervous. The giant billboards of Marilyn Monroe in the studios and old famous movie stars … it got to me,” I said to my agent on the phone, trying to give her a reason for choking at my last audition.

  “That’s interesting,” she said.

  What did that mean, interesting?

  I hopped in my car on a Friday and didn’t call her. I bought a map and charted my route to San Francisco. I left, driving through Big Sur and Monterey, looking at sea lions and otters and touching the earth, seeing pelicans and gulls and a large pod of dolphins off a tourist boat meant for whale watching. Hundreds of dolphins chased the boat with such joy. For the first time in California, I had fun, away from women in heels and with implants and men with cameras and wandering eyeballs. The natural world could cure my panic, keeping me in the moment without thinking back into the past or too far ahead into the future. The natural world demanded I stay present so I wouldn’t miss one second as the dolphins jumped into the air and kept pace with the boat. I never felt a stronger love than when I was with animals or in nature.

  I was running away from LA, and I found the nearest Goodwill, where I bought a pair of male slacks. I cut my hair and contemplated a tattoo, but didn’t know what to brand myself with. A dolphin? A turtle? A woman symbol? I finally decided against it.

  The ride along the Pacific Coast Highway was good medicine. I was going to San Francisco, to Osentos, a women’s bathhouse where I’d sit in hot tubs with women like me. When I got there, I saw women with pixie cuts and eyeglasses, women with big breasts and little ones, with bellies that hung out over their pubic hair, women who seemed at home in their bodies. I sat in an outdoor sauna the size of a mini-trailer for two, with showers, under the stars and fenced in with vines and leaves. Women spoke to each other in loving ways and held hands or lay on the floor inside, meditating on mats and filling their lungs.

  There were bars with poetry readings and gatherings of gay people openly displaying affection for each other on the sidewalks and in the markets of the Castro District and beyond. I ate and thought about more important things than self-obsession or judgment of bodies or the definition of feminine. There was art, politics, activism. This was the home of Harvey Milk, of my LGBT ancestors.

  Standing outside a gallery a few blocks from my motel room, I saw eulogies in one-by-one-foot square patches for the AIDS quilt. I checked my messages and heard a frantic voice mail, so I called from the pay phone across the street from the gallery.

  “Where are you? I’ve been looking for you. No one knew where you were,” the LA agent said to me.

  “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to disappear, just needed to get away,” I said, not knowing how to tell her how trivial and small it all seemed in comparison to the thousands of messages to the dead on the quilt.

  “You can’t just take off to San Francisco when there are auditions happening. You didn’t even leave a phone number where you could be reached!”

  That was on purpose.

  “I know, sorry. I’ll call you when I’m back.” I hung up before she could carry on, gathered my backpack and notepad, and went to the nearest café. Before returning to my room, I stopped by the gallery again, and the AIDS quilt:

  Sister X, died 1988.

  James from Akron, died age 29.

  Keith, he walked through our lives.

  In memory of all the teens who died of AIDS.

  There were patches with images of Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse, hand-drawn hands and rainbows; messages from lovers and friends and family — “You will live on in our hearts” and “Gone too young.”

  Awakenings arrived at different times, and this was one of them. I knew I could not choose LA. There were no reflections of my people there. They may have wanted the Emmy Award–winning girl they saw in a show, but they didn’t want the young woman they saw before them. They didn’t want me. I was ahead of my time, culturally, and there was no space for queers.

  No matter how hard it was to be a lesbian or a woman in the film business, it was not harder than the lives of children everywhere dying from war, famine, hunger, drought, or AIDS. But it was my life, and while the path would be difficult, I would have to find my way with determination, like many before me. No matter how hard the struggle for equity, I would take the harder route.

  I flew home.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  I WENT AWAY to a cabin near Bancroft, a few hours north of Toronto. The lake swished against the rocks. I swam close enough to the loons that I could see their dotted feathers and watch them dunk below the surface of the water. It took an hour to inch myself closer to a pair not far from an island in the middle of the lake where their nest of eggs lay waiting. My canoe was resting on the rocks, tied to an old tree with torn-up roots. The tree had fallen on its side, creating a wall that stood ten feet high.

  Raindrops started to fall, slowly hitting the surface of the lake until the individual
drops turned into sheets of rain ripping and dancing on the face of the water. The loons knew to get out, and they called out the melancholy sound that only loons make. I pulled myself out of the water, too, and took shelter under the canoe, tipping it over and leaning it against the tree for support, climbing under it to wait out the storm before I could paddle back to shore. The sky darkened and there was a huge crack of thunder as lightning lit up the clouds. I was mesmerized by the fury of the storm and by the deep musky smell that rose from the earth as the water pelted it.

  When the sky began to clear again, I crept out from under the canoe and opened my mouth to catch the drops on my tongue. Clouds shifted in the wind, the birds emerged from the leafy treetops, and the light of the sun rebounded off the lake. I opened my pack and fed myself — carrots and dip, nuts — and drank some water. I ate just enough to give me the energy needed to paddle back to shore, something I would never have done so many years before. I would have paddled on air with nothing in me.

  I could have died, was glad I hadn’t. Dying was for those whose time had come, who didn’t have it in them to live another day, or whose lives were taken by others.

  People thought of me as a horrible daughter who had abandoned her own mother. And the anti-violence movement was hard for me to be in because I didn’t know how to convince large groups that child abuse can happen from people of either gender, that it was not just fathers.

  It was my mother.

  No one knew the depth of her obsession with me, how little of me existed when in her shadow, how she tried to live my life for me as if she literally could crawl into my body and make it hers. She tried, and the only thing I could do was to get as far away from her as possible. I couldn’t explain it, and couldn’t imagine seeing her ever again. I wasn’t sure how I would cope when the day came that she would die, but I decided I wouldn’t see her, that I would just say goodbye in my own way. It would probably be the only way to manage so I wouldn’t lose myself. I had just come to know who I was, was just accepting all of me — actor, lesbian, activist. I wanted more, knew there was more, but had always been defined by other people. I needed to allow myself to exist on my own terms — through feminism, the rise of the LGBT rights movements, social dialogue, marches, sit-ins, and finding ways outside of the characters I played as an actor, learning to know who I was. Maybe I would be an activist or a healer, or maybe even a writer someday; maybe people would understand, but for now what I needed was myself.

  A chipmunk appeared in front of me. I threw it a nut from my bag. It approached me and then bit my baby toe, running away when I screeched in surprise and laughed. Does a baby toe look like a nut to a chipmunk? I threw the remaining nuts onto the soil and prepared the canoe for the short journey back to the cabin. I had an audition the following day with the famous Québécois filmmaker Denys Arcand, and the character was lesbian. I was nervous, but for the first time in a long time my body felt like my own. I wasn’t sure if I would mature into the craft well or not. Maybe acting was like opera or wine. I hoped to one day be able to walk into an audition and not bring every problem of my life, and just be. Just be.

  I sat inside a room in the same building where I had fallen in love with Carla, where I sang to her that night with the Pretenders blaring from the speakers. I laughed at the irony of auditioning for a part as a lesbian in this very room, which had now been converted into a more formal space with tables and chairs, though the windows were uncovered, revealing the trees, bushes, flowers, and small waterfall of the large gardens in the background.

  Monsieur Arcand had an ease about him and a smile that never left his face — likeable, friendly. It was an omen.

  Instead of trying to charm him, I banged a metaphorical gavel in a rant filled with everything I ever wanted to say about the film business and the men who worked in it — the sexist men, the lack of roles for women, the homophobia, and the impact on gay people.

  Deirdre Bowen, the casting agent who sat with us, was aghast.

  “There are no parts for women. We are supposed to want to hang off the arms of men and starve ourselves to near death, for what? The role of the no-name girlfriend or the prostitute? Really?” I sat up tall while M. Arcand engaged me with an “Ah yes, of course.”

  “And another thing … why are there more and more roles with women taking their clothes off? I’m not one of those women.”

  I rambled while Deirdre seemed to turn a different shade of white, forcing a smile so as not to kill me. I could see she wanted to shut me up, but there was no stopping me.

  “There’s no reason girls and women should take off their clothes in movies. How does it advance a story? Tell me!”

  Big mouth. Keeping an acting career was going to be hard.

  Denys smiled, nodded.

  He hired me anyway, and I took off my clothes anyway.

  “You know, Deirdre was appalled and apologized profusely for your rant,” Denys giggled. “She said, ‘But I assure you she’s a good actress.’ And I said to Deirdre, ‘I’m pretty sure of it. I’ll take her,’ and that was it, you got the part. You do know that most other women would be throwing themselves at me for a chance to be in my movie, but not you.”

  And just like with Al Waxman and the arguments around gender and work that led to an Emmy nomination, I would be nominated for a Genie for Love and Human Remains, as would Denys. Maybe these gender arguments were working after all? No. It was just sheer luck coupled with hard work, and in spite of my very big mouth.

  Miracles did happen sometimes.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  MY TORONTO INTERNATIONAL Film Festival debut was in 1993 with Denys. We arrived at the Elgin Theatre arm in arm. I was dressed in a white shirt and black tie, tailored black tuxedo jacket with tails, finished off with suspenders and shiny new black shoes — perfect butch attire. I’d prepared for the evening only hours before, anxiously wondering how the film would be received. It was, after all, my first love scene, and the first movie in which I’d ever taken off all my clothes.

  That day on the set many months back, I had sat for the makeup artist, or stood, depending on which part of my body she was applying foundation to, having decided a layer of foundation would help me feel like I had a second skin while naked on set. I looked like a fool standing on a tall, cushy black makeup chair, trying to balance like a surfer so it wouldn’t swivel and bending slightly as the makeup was applied to crevices and areas of my body that no one had seen from those angles before. To say that I was embarrassed was an understatement, but I bent over and pretended that she was merely applying a layer to my arm or neck, not the inside of my butt cheeks or close to my vagina.

  At the theatre, we waved from inside the limo at fans lining the streets, their tickets in hand to see our film. Denys was always suave, charming, and level-headed. He had been through these openings many times, been nominated for Academy Awards, won Genies, and received accolades for years. He was a seasoned professional, humble. I truly loved him, which wasn’t something I would say about most male film directors.

  “Joanne, you look like a boy. A nicely dressed and beautiful boy,” he said when he saw my outfit. He giggled, as he often did. We giggled together endlessly like schoolchildren.

  I was grateful to find a director who was more interested in my friendship than in sleeping with me, though we were both hopeless flirts, adoring the safety of our secrets, our well-placed boundaries. I was a lesbian after all, and this was my big coming-out role; playing a lesbian for the first time and opening the Toronto International Film Festival really felt like a giant coming-out event.

  “Why are you so nervous, Joanne?” Denys asked.

  “I’ve never had a film opening … and I’m just … I take my clothes off, if you don’t remember.”

  “Of course I remember.” He smirked.

  Before we filmed that love scene, I had put on my robe and drunk a glass of vodka at seven in the morning. I flipped my robe off and kept it off, with my layer of makeup as a s
ubstitute for clothes. I convinced myself that this was some sort of rite of passage, just something I told myself to make it through the day. It wasn’t a rite of passage as a female actor. That was simply a myth. It wasn’t a bat mitzvah or a master’s degree — just plain old nudity with a camera.

  “Okay, here we are. Smile and enjoy it, Joanne.” Denys stood outside the car door, lending me his arm. I climbed out in my flat-heeled leather shoes, tuxedo, and tie, and smiled and waved as photographers snapped pictures. We squiggled some autographs and entered the theatre. This was the most exciting and important time in my career, and it was such a prestigious evening, opening the festival. The occasion was something that would change my life forever, and not necessarily for the good, but nonetheless monumental.

  It was the 1990s. South Africa was still under apartheid law. AIDS was still seen as a gay disease. Bill Clinton was the president of the United States. The twin towers of New York were still standing. And there were no lesbian role models in film and television — not even Ellen DeGeneres had come out yet — so playing a lesbian in a large movie with such publicity and with such a grand entrance really did feel like a massive coming out, a moment, like a shift in time.

  It was.

  “What’s it like to play the part of a lesbian? How did you prepare for it?” a woman who sat at the round table at the after-party asked me. I was sitting with one of the leads in the film, who knew I was a lesbian, and she squeezed my leg under the table in a show of support.

  “Why? It’s not like playing a killer or someone with an accent. It’s just like playing any role, or … it’s human, nothing to prep for …”

  I was anxious, uncertain what her intention was.

  “I mean, surely you had to get inside the mind of a lesbian, think about how to do a love scene … and … well, it is different.”