Sue passed away in 2011, but she remains legendary, one of the most powerful agents of the last half of the twentieth century. She had started out as a receptionist at MCA, the mammoth agency that grew into Universal Studios. (There’s still a little white colonial building in Santa Monica, where MCA was once housed.) Sue’s client list was like a Hollywood walk of fame, including Marlon Brando, George Burns, Michael Caine, Cher, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Barbra Streisand, Gore Vidal, Ali MacGraw, and Warren Beatty, to name just a few.
Sue’s sense of humor was famously acerbic. Whenever I was with her in a group setting or at one of her parties, I was always afraid to go to the bathroom. I was sure that the minute I stood up to leave she would rip a hole in me big enough to drive a Mack truck through. People loved her evil humor, though; the truth always came out when she was around.
Sue’s patience with me was wearing thin. She was furious that, just when my film career was thriving, I was turning down a movie and disappearing for three months to tour. I could easily have done a movie, then gone on the road for a bit, then continued to alternate acting and singing. But I wanted soul. I wanted to earn my stripes in the music world, just as I had as an actress. I wanted the Billie Holliday story but without the drugs—well, maybe a little grass every now and then.
I was getting to the point when no one could tell me anything, not even people who had my best interests at heart. Part of the problem was that I had begun to believe my own press. I went from feeling like a nobody to seeming arrogant. Arrogance is often just the flip side of low self-esteem. If you ever meet an arrogant asshole, chances are there’s a big mess of unresolved, low self-esteem lurking beneath the surface.
Worse yet, I had no comprehension of how the film business worked. For example, after M*A*S*H came out, Fox wanted to make a picture deal with me. To my mind, that meant a seven-year deal, the kind they used to make at places like Universal, when you’d get $750 a week and they owned you. Please! I was too big for a seven-year deal. I would be trapped! Only when it was too late did I grasp that they were offering me a deal to make films, not a weekly retainer. Oops.
Then there were films I turned down:
The Poseidon Adventure: pass. Why? From the script, it didn’t seem that I’d have enough to do in the picture. Poseidon apparently was good enough for Gene Hackman, one of my acting heroes, and for Shelley Winters, whom I adored, but it was not good enough for me. The studio kept offering me more and more—more money, back-end profits—and I just kept saying no. Don’t get me wrong—it’s okay to turn things down. But if you’re going to build a career, you have to say yes sometimes. And I was becoming very stubborn.
I didn’t realize what a hit the film would be—no one can predict that. You can have the greatest talent in the world and still not have a hit. But hits make you more viable, more bankable.
Perhaps one of the most painful mistakes I ever made was turning down the man who gave me a career: Robert Altman.
I had just finished filming Last of the Red Hot Lovers when Bob called me one day at home.
“Sally, do you want to be in my picture after next?” he asked.
“Only if it’s a good part,” I said.
He hung up on me.
Bob was as stubborn and arrogant as I was at the time, but the sad thing is that I cheated myself out of working with someone I loved so much, someone who made acting both fun and easy and who trusted his actors. Bob loved actors. Stars would line up to work for nothing for Bob Altman.
Life is all about choices. There isn’t necessarily a right or wrong about choices, but there is living with the consequences. It is never bad to make unpopular decisions or to go against the grain, but what is important is that you make those decisions from the right place. Trust your judgment, trust the writing, listen. Look, there isn’t an actor in town who hasn’t turned down some fabulous thing. There was just too much of that in my case. My choices weren’t made from a place of any real confidence but rather mostly from fear.
Oh, the Altman film I turned down? Nashville. In that part I would have been able to sing. Bad choice.
WHEN STUART SAW HOW STRONGLY I FELT ABOUT GOING ON tour, he got behind me all the way. In fact, Rudi Altobelli was going to come on the road with me. All the arrangements and preparations would be done by Bob Esty, a man I’ve been musically codependent on for about forty years now—and one of my dearest friends—who happened be living in Rudi’s guest house at the time. An amazing arranger and producer, Bob has worked with people like Cher, Barbra Streisand, and Donna Summer, and I had him for musical director of my first-ever tour.
My dress designer and friend Donfeld stepped up once again, this time teaching me how to pack. A couple of black-and-white boas and I was good to go on a three-month tour.
I’d be touring with a band of five guys, plus a group of three backup singers, called Gotham. Stuart begged me to get rid of Gotham. The money was too much, he said. The band, three backup singers, me and Rudi, and our road manager—I’d be paying for all of them. Furthermore, Stuart pointed out, a big group onstage could look awkward if the clubs weren’t packed. I didn’t listen.
Sue made one final plea before I got the show on the road.
“You believe in magic?!” she yelled. “You think all of this will still be here when you get back?!”
Stuart and I looked at each other, smiled, and said, “Yeah, we do.”
And that was that. I was off.
I WAS SLATED TO DO THREE SHOWS A NIGHT. THAT PROVED more exhausting than I had imagined—and sometimes demoralizing to boot. There were often more people in the band than in the audience. (So Stuart was right: if I had traveled without a band, it might not have looked so damning.) In Denver that particular problem solved itself: Gotham wanted to sing more in the act, and one of its members threw a fit with the road manager about it. A few punches flew, and the next thing I knew, Gotham had quit, taking their sparkly costumes with them. The next night I went on faced with the challenge of covering as many different parts as I could while still appearing to be the lead singer. We needed emergency rearrangements for the music. And I needed to get to know that road manager better.
In Denver the sound engineer offered me a piece of advice: “Sing to the mic,” he said. “Talk to the mic, not the audience.” That suggestion made a big difference at the time. Every little bit helped. I was learning.
Every town had its tale. In El Paso we played the opening of some hotel. My hotel room was red, and there was a trapeze above the bed. I was tempted to use it, but I resisted. The hotel did not appear to be finished—there was a large, dirty plastic dome over the outdoor venue where they wanted me to sing. When I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror that night, I looked like the Bride of Dracula. I had really overdone it on the makeup. The crowd didn’t seem to care, although I thought if I heard, “Where’s Hot Lips?!” one more time, I would call it a night and retire to my trapeze.
In Atlanta we had a run at the Playboy Club, which was in a dicey part of town. The management advised us that leaving the hotel after dark was not a great idea. Luckily, we could enter the venue through a rear entrance of our hotel, sidestepping the little piles of rat feces on the stairs. Our mecca was the coffee shop in the hotel lobby. We practically lived there—between shows, before shows, after shows. Bob Esty had joined us in Atlanta, and he and Rudi were practically stools at the counter in there. One night, after we’d finished the second show, we headed to the coffee shop to get a snack.
“Wait! Wait!” someone shouted. “Don’t go in there! There’s been a murder. The cook and one of the customers were just shot!”
For the rest of the stay I ordered pizza and smoked a joint in my room.
I was excited to play New Orleans, not just for my shows but also to soak up the scene, the food, and some of the other music in town. For our performances at the Blue Room in New Orleans Bob decided to use a full orchestra. I was blowing through money, using all my movie earnings, but I felt I had to.
If I was going to crash and burn, I was going to crash and burn with a string section.
I never thought a hurricane would upstage me.
The warning came: batten down the hatches, seal the shutters, tape the windows, and fill the bathtub. I waited in my hotel room, hoping that the storm would pass us by. Then the booker came up to ask if I would please go down and sing for all the tourists, who were so nervous about the hurricane. So down I went to perform for a panicked audience, trying to think of what to say to ease their fears. The words, “Don’t worry about the hurricane,” actually came out of my mouth and, needless to say, were little comfort. Hot Lips Sings! the posters for my shows announced. No one cared. The wind howled outside, the rain began, shingles shook loose, and traffic lights swayed like they were made of papier-mâché. In the end we all came through fine, but I put on a terrible show.
When I was leaving on tour, my then-boyfriend, producer and director Chuck Shyer, had said to me, “Fool around, but don’t fall in love.” That wasn’t the way I wanted a man to feel about me. It was a nice offer—very freeing, as I soon discovered—but didn’t suggest the kind of committed relationship I would be interested in. However, because it was on the table, by the time I got to New Orleans I had taken Chuck up on his offer and was having a full-on affair with the gorgeous road manager.
New Orleans proved to be a lot of fun. We would wander around the French Quarter late at night after shows. One night we ended up at some house party full of spectacular drag queens. “Sally!” everyone yelled, racing up to me. I reveled in the attention until a guy nearly threw up on me.
Another night we wound up in the French Quarter, a wonderful maze of courtyards and alleys and little secret hidden nooks and crannies. Suddenly someone pulled out a ball of coke the size of my head. Never my thing, cocaine, thank God; I have enough trouble sitting still. But whether or not I was going to take it was beside the point. I was scared. I thought, If anyone sees us with this bowling ball of drugs, we’ll all go to jail for the rest of our lives.
Music poured out of every doorway. So did drunks. One night we went to see a great horn band we’d heard about. Joe Cocker was lying on the floor of the club with a crowd of people standing over him saying, “Have another drink, Joe!” It was like a Tennessee Williams play. Happily, the last time I saw Joe perform, he was sober and brilliant.
My room in New Orleans was next to Rudi’s. He was a devil and a lot of fun. I’d drop in on him while I was wearing my trusty pink nightgown, and Rudi would stop by my room draped in just a towel. Neither of us would think twice about giving press interviews dressed that way. Then there the nights I spent smoking grass and eating pizza in bed with the road manager. I was having the time of my life.
But I was getting exhausted. So one night Rudi and I called Stuart.
“Stuart,” I said. “I can’t do three shows a night anymore. It’s too hard.”
Stuart was brief and to the point.
“Sally, if you don’t do a third show, you’ll never work in this town again.”
I did three shows.
New York City, mercifully, was a two-shows-a-night town. We were booked for two weeks at the Rainbow Grill above Rockefeller Center—a great gig. It was packed every night, mostly with foreign visitors who came to take in the fabulous city views, but I didn’t care. I loved the place.
I opened with what I now consider an unsingable song called, “Dear Friend.” It had no melody or rhythm. We had three new backup singers flown out from LA, as we’d lost Gotham. Because I knew so little about running a music tour, it hadn’t occurred to me that I needed a show director and a lighting designer for a venue as sophisticated as the Rainbow Grill. Before I left LA, Chuck had me do a show in front of Garry Marshall, Jerry Belson, and Harvey Miller. They were all brilliant and gave me some funny things to say between songs. But that was now two and a half months ago, and not much of it had stuck with me. I still hadn’t learned to take notes.
So there we were at the Rainbow Grill, me strutting around in pants, a white halter top from Holly’s Harp on Sunset that was practically falling off me, and a feather boa, backed by three new singers, performing a show with no director, no lighting design, and no writing. However, my two-week run garnered me some wonderful reviews.
The tour had been bleeding money. After New York City Stuart called to say that if I was willing to go to a couple more towns, I could possibly break even. He emphasized the word “possibly.” I banged my head against the wall, and off we went.
One of the last gigs I remember was in Pennsylvania at a place called Host Farms. The word “farms” made it sound like my kind of place: I pictured trees, meadows, horses. I called Chuck and asked my mom to bring Claire, telling them all it was a farm and we could have Thanksgiving together. No one could come.
The motel was one of the strangest I’d ever seen. It was practically underground. There was a little tiny patio and one window. There was a ping-pong table in the lobby. And we’d be there for a week, maybe two.
I was depressed and lonely. I had been on the road for three months—my own doing, of course. I called Stuart to whine; I called the shrink to sob. I begged anyone—everyone—to please come visit. Performances didn’t do much to lift my mood because the audience sat stone faced as I sang.
I spent most of my downtime in my room, miserable. When I finally opened my door, there was the band, doing laundry, goofing around, and chatting out in the hall. I felt like I’d been hibernating. I was almost amazed to see everyone alive and well. Beyond the ping-pong table and a trip to Amish country, there wasn’t much going on in that town. But today I would know better how to cope. I would make my own fun—some books, a ping-pong tournament organized by yours truly, or at least a good nap without tears.
When we got held over at Host Farms, I called Stuart to protest. “There is hardly anybody here!” I wailed. “This is so humiliating.”
“Listen,” Stuart said. “If you’re not happy doing it just for yourself and the waiters, then it’s all bullshit.”
He was right. All I hoped to accomplish from this tour was to become a singer. If it was hard—and at times it was—then so be it. Hard knocks were good for the spirit. Let’s face it: I wanted soul.
After the tour ended I went to record again, this time at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the Hit Recording Capital of the World. Everyone recorded there, from local bluegrass legends to the Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin. I was thrilled. In 1974 there wasn’t much to see of Muscle Shoals except the recording studio, a motel, and a long stretch of empty highway leading to a coffee shop that served biscuits and gravy. But that was enough for me. It was a tremendously valuable experience to work with producers Terry Woodford and Clayton Ivy. We’d record until five in the morning, then play basketball. Their support helped keep my singing ambition alive. I think about them even today as I record, nearly forty years later.
The hard knocks kept on coming: For starters, I came back to Los Angeles $50,000 in the hole. That was a lot of money in 1974 and roughly equivalent to four times that or more today. Then, with perfect timing, the IRS called and said I owed $20,000 in back taxes. Now, my own debt I could deal with, but owing the IRS did not sound like a good idea. I did what I so often did in times of crisis: I called my mother. She loaned me the money. I paid her back.
Oh yes, and there was one more little hard knock: shortly after I returned from the tour I did a show at the Backlot in Los Angeles. I invited Neil Diamond, the man who had urged me to go on the road if I wanted to “be taken seriously” as a singer, to come see it.
Granted, it wasn’t my best show, not by a long shot. But it was still me; it was still my voice. I sang. He listened. After the show Neil said he wanted to take me to lunch the next day.
At lunch Neil looked me dead in the eyes and said, in all sincerity, “You should never sing again. It’s not your thing. You really can’t do it.”
I was again on the receiving end of more advice from someone who knew be
tter than me. And guess what? I had ignored my business manager. I had ignored Sue when she told me not to leave town for months on end. I ignored everyone who told me repeatedly to take The Poseidon Adventure. I ignored Stuart when he said not to bring such a large band on the road. And here and now, I was going to ignore Neil Diamond and keep on chasing my dream to sing.
Only this time I was sure I was making the right choice.
CHAPTER 11
Reaching Down, Reaching Out
AROUND THE TIME OF MY MUSIC TOUR, MY HOME LIFE WAS going through serious changes—some wonderful, some trying, and some tragic.
As luck would have it, when I left the house in Malibu where I stayed during Lost Horizon, I got to move back into the Cape Cod house I loved, where I had lived with Rick. One phone call and $60,000 later and I was the owner of a house and yard, pool, and badminton court in the Hollywood Hills. Buying the house was one of the happiest days of my life. I still live there today.
With a place of my own now, I kept telling Ian I wanted to help him raise Claire. By now it was clear that Ian had Parkinson’s disease. He slept all day, and he couldn’t do much when he was awake.
“Let her stay with me,” I would say.
“No,” he’d insist. “She’s all I’ve got.”
I offered to help him find a place closer to me so I could cook breakfast for them in the mornings and help out after dinner. “No,” he said. He had people in his building looking out for Claire, like the woman across the hall with agoraphobia.
I tried to help him locate a suitable nanny, placing ads with agencies and in the papers. Anyone we hired would work out for a bit. The first one, very loving and nurturing, wanted to be a nurse. She soon became a nurse. The second one, a darling young thing, seemed perfect: she played with Claire and was sweet with Ian, but she left after a few weeks to get married. Another girl was a health food cook. Great, I thought. Then Claire called: “Sally, Jan’s in my bed naked.” By the time I got there, Jan was gone.
Read My Lips Page 16