Read My Lips

by Sally Kellerman

  While in Germany I got news of another job: Magee and the Lady, a television movie, in which I’d star alongside The French Connection’s Tony Lo Bianco. It was set to shoot for two months in Australia. And this time I’d get to bring along Claire and my mom as well.

  We landed in Sydney and it was heaven, worth every minute of the sixteen-hour flight. We enrolled Claire in school, where she made great friends. My mom shifted into classic Edith Kellerman mode, quickly finding a bridge group and going on tours and joining a local lawn bowling league to keep herself occupied during the day. I worked six days a week and was in every shot. It was such a blessing to have Mom with me, both for moral support and to help with Claire.

  The minute we landed in Australia I had raced to the nearest candy counter to see what kind of sweets they had that I had never tried before. That’s when it hit me: I had a real sugar problem. So I decided I would use the time away from home to try to give up sugar. The cooks on the set made me whipped cream without sugar, scones without sugar, and jams without sugar. Oh, and my poor mother. My experiment with living life without sugar meant that the minute I returned home from shooting, I would storm into the apartment and start yelling, “Mother! Mother! Where’s my diabetic chocolate bar? Where are the raisins?!”

  On Sunday, my day off, I would treat myself to honey on my pancakes and take Claire on a ferry ride. Tony Lo Bianco and I didn’t exactly turn out to be Hepburn and Tracy, but we had a lot of fun. I’ve never seen the finished film. Maybe it was better than I imagined. Maybe not.

  WHEN WE GOT BACK TO LA THINGS ALMOST SEEMED TO BE finally starting to fall into place. Claire was happy at school, and I was working with people I liked. But Paul Mazursky’s snub on that bus in Tehran reminded me that I had burned more than my share of bridges. The roles I was getting offered weren’t what they used to be. I didn’t have Stuart to rely on, and I was now a very unprepared single mother to my sister’s child. However, I was concerned about the “single” as well as the “unprepared.”

  Jennifer Jones Simon, my fairy godmother, had recently told me, “If you ever have any trouble with men, call Milton Wexler.”

  Milton was her therapist. I was no stranger to psychotherapy, of course, and had recently stopped seeing my latest therapist. I wasn’t quite ready to dive in again.

  No, not me. First I needed one more misguided affair. This one was with Warren Hoge, an editor at the New York Times who had the reputation of being the East Coast Warren Beatty—maybe not as good looking, but close. You’ll recall that I actually knew the original Warren Beatty in his single-man heyday. I can attest to the fact that “Warren II” had a similar love for the ladies. I would fly in to visit him in New York or see him if I was performing there. A month or two might pass between our encounters. But there were always pictures of his other girlfriends on prominent display in his apartment. Maybe this was a not-so-subtle hint that he never intended to get serious with anyone—or at least not with me.

  But Warren was smart and charming, and our time together was fun, interesting, and passionate. During one of my trips to New York he threw a dinner party with people like the journalist Carl Bernstein, gossip columnist Liz Smith, and my friend Brooke Hayward, who was seeing the pianist and bandleader Peter Duchin. (Brooke and Peter later married.) Those were stimulating evenings.

  But after about six months of seeing Warren, I arrived at his apartment for a visit with all my bags in tow. Normally, I couldn’t get past the front hall of Warren’s apartment before we were both in some state of undress. But this time was different.

  “I’m not attracted to you anymore,” he said.

  I laughed. But that was it—the defining moment. I left, found the nearest phone, and called the number Jennifer had given me for Milton Wexler. Warren Hoge might have been the final straw, but life had been leading me to Milton for a long time.

  “Come in and see me,” Milton said over the phone. “I will tell you some things about yourself that people are afraid to tell you.”

  “Why would I want to do that?” I asked.

  Maybe I was a masochist, but I couldn’t wait. People telling me what I wanted to hear hadn’t really been working out anyway.

  CHAPTER 13

  Love and Therapy

  IN MY VERY FIRST SESSION WITH MILTON HE SAID, “GET RID of the self-pity. It is ruining your life.”

  That was just one of so many things he told me that smacked of truth. I’d always been a crier, which I assumed meant that I was emotional and sensitive. So the idea that I felt sorry for myself threw me. The first thing I had learned in Jeff Corey’s class was that audiences don’t want to watch self-pity.

  Should I spend another thirty-nine years figuring out why I had the self-pity? Or should I just get rid of it?

  “Get rid of it,” Milton said.

  Milton blew my mind, and he made me laugh. His observations were the complete opposite of what any other shrink had ever said to me, when Jeff Corey first sent me off to therapy so many years before.

  I may have had a sense of spirituality, but I didn’t have any real understanding of myself. I had gone to a therapist at UCLA because I didn’t want to be fat. At one point in 1969 I was going to therapy five days a week. But Milton was different. He was a genius and also kind. He was very real.

  “Get down to forty,” he said, referring to my tendency to operate at around 100 to 110 on the spirit and fervor scale. “Enthusiasts are bores. No one likes a punster.”

  “But my mother always said, ‘In Theo!’ One with God!” I told him. “I thought God loved enthusiasm.” Milton assured me he didn’t mean I had to become lifeless; I just had to dial it down to forty. He then described seeing me at a couple parties before we had officially met.

  “Sit down and let people come to you,” he said.

  That was a little embarrassing to hear. I would go strutting up to guys I liked or to important people I thought I should know, beaming a big ol’ “Hi!” Here I was, working in the career I loved, nominated for an Academy Award, and I was still acting needy. Studio heads, directors, even other successful actors, intimidated me, so I overcompensated with enthusiasm. But when you don’t like yourself, people can smell it. Milton saw through my act. And he let me know that, even if they didn’t let on, other people could see through it too.

  “When you pretend you feel good about yourself, people know it,” he explained.

  That first hour with him was mind blowing. I had work to do.

  PARIS!

  Before I could really get down to work with Milton, I had to focus on my day job—acting. As an actor, you do a lot of location shoots, usually in pretty unremarkable places. This was certainly true for me. But the great director George Roy Hill, who had given us movies like The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, was shooting his latest film, A Little Romance, in Paris. I was cast as the disapproving mother of Diane Lane, who was making her film debut as an American ingénue who falls for a French boy while in Paris. Sir Laurence Olivier played the gentleman who befriends the young couple. Diane was adorable, around fourteen years old and just learning to put on makeup. Having worked with her at that young age, I can say that I am not at all surprised that she has grown into such a tremendous—and stunning—actress.

  I would be in Paris for two months, and Claire would join me for the second one. The hotel they booked for the cast was right off the Champs-Élysées. This can’t be Paris, I thought. I wanted what felt like the “real” Paris, the more soulful, atmospheric Left Bank. Before Claire arrived I resolved to find a little out-of-the-way apartment or bed and breakfast there so she could have more of a true Parisian experience.

  My trip started off with just that. My first night there, my costar, David Dukes, and I went to a little hole-in-the-wall Left Bank café and drank two bottles of red wine. (I’m not even a drinker. But I’ve played one on TV.)

  Working with George Roy Hill was a joy. He was the complete opposite of Bob Altman, whom I admired in an entirely
different way. Bob was improvisational, whereas George’s direction was more hands on, more specific. Still, I found him encouraging. We shot our first scene in a gorgeous historic building just outside the city. After the first rehearsal take I asked him if I was working in the right direction.

  “A little less of this,” he said to me, batting his eyes, “and I think we’ve got it.”

  My other favorite piece of direction came while I was shooting a scene sitting at a table with David Dukes.

  “Sally,” George said, “can you raise your voice?”

  Take two.

  “Sally,” George said, “can you raise your voice and lower your arms?”

  The tone of his voice made me giggle throughout the shooting of the entire film. George was another great artist with a very personal directing style. Even when he sounded stern, he never killed your spirit.

  The first day I met Sir Laurence Olivier he was sitting at his desk in his trailer. Before he’d arrived he had sent a letter to the production to let the cast and crew know that they should please call him “Larry.” Along with Marlon Brando, Sir Laurence Olivier was one of the biggest idols of my acting generation. It was hard to think of him as “Larry.”

  We had already been shooting for a month when he arrived to do his scenes. I had had a day off and had just returned from strolling Paris when my makeup artist came up to me.

  “Larry is here, and he would love to meet you!”

  I followed him to Olivier’s trailer, where my makeup artist practically shoved me in the door.

  “Who’s there?” came Olivier’s lovely voice.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry, Larry. It’s Sally Kellerman.”

  “Oh, my dear beauty!” he gushed. “Now I shall sleep like a dear boy having met you.”

  Talk about charm. I staggered, speechless, out of the trailer. The closest I came to having a scene with Larry was a shot in which I was standing across the road. I whined to Larry how disappointed I was not to get to actually act with him.

  “Just being across the street from you is more than an actor of my character could hope for,” he said.

  He was so effusive and generous and humble, worrying George didn’t like his accent.

  I told “Larry” not to worry. He was irresistible.

  Before Claire arrived I found the perfect hotel for us on the Left Bank. We had a little two-story flat, big as a postage stamp, looking out over the rooftops. There was no room service, just café au lait and croissants in the morning, and every night we went to a different bistro for dinner. We were really in Paris.

  I always swim laps when I’m on location, and while at lunch with Peter Ustinov’s wife, Helene, she suggested that I sneak into a health club she frequented on Fauborg St-Honoré, an exclusive street packed with high-end boutiques and embassies. I did sneak in, and it was gorgeous.

  Then one day while waiting for a taxi, my ego got the better of me, and I started making conversation with one of the nicer-looking attendants. The next day, midstroke, I heard a voice as my head bobbed out of the water.

  “Madame! Excusez-moi, MADAME!”

  I came to the surface and grabbed onto the side of the pool, looking up at the club manager with all the innocence I could muster.

  “I’m sorry, madame, but you will have to leave,” he said curtly.

  Dammit, I thought.

  “But, why?” I protested, in an effort to keep my favorite luxury Parisian swimming hole.

  His answer was simple, to the point, and had nothing to do with the fact that I wasn’t a member.

  “We do not want any actresses in here.”

  So I took up walking.

  ALL IN ALL THE TRIP WAS HEAVENLY FOR BOTH CLAIRE AND ME. But then you get back to Los Angeles, and guess what? Life is just how you left it. Not bad, but definitely not Paris.

  I started seeing Milton in earnest. “Why are you people so devastated when you see there’s something you need to work on in yourself?” he once said to me. “Why aren’t you fascinated?” I never left Milton’s office without learning something, and I always left feeling better than I did when I arrived. Of course, that didn’t mean I didn’t cry.

  In many of our sessions together I talked about my relationship with marijuana. I began to connect a lot of my unhappiness to the fact that I smoked, even though I enjoyed it with friends in the moment and never smoked when I was working. Still, I always felt guilty. When I could next smoke a joint was always in the back of my mind. I’d think, “Okay, I’m working the next two weeks, but then I’m off for a week. So I can smoke that Sunday night.” I know it’s popular to say that marijuana is not addictive, but for me it was.

  Milton never said much about my marijuana use. Then one day he turned to me in our session and said, “What if I told you, hypothetically, that if you lived a disciplined life for a year, you could have just about everything you wanted?”

  I quit smoking marijuana that day.

  Milton made another suggestion: Try group therapy.

  Group was mind boggling for me. I was blown away by how much I could absorb just sitting there in Milton’s office with a group of strangers. But it wasn’t without some knocks.

  Milton wanted new members to tell their story, get the group’s impression, and give their own. Being an actress, I jumped right on this. Boy, when they hear my story, they are really gonna love me, I thought. So my first day in group I told the dozen or so group members that I had fallen hard for a married man and that it wasn’t working out. I told everyone about Stuart, my guiding light and my rock, and how he had always promised to take care of Claire and me, no matter what. That now he was gone.

  Sharing was never a problem for me. Neither was crying. I just put it all out there, adding a modicum of charm to the tears, laughing here and there as I told my story. After I finished pouring out my heart, I waited.

  “Lady,” one of the group members said, “I don’t know you, but you’re so full of self-pity, I could’ve hit you.”

  “I felt exactly the same way,” someone else chimed in.

  Ouch.

  Then a third guy spoke up, saying, “I thought she was charming.” Sadly, he never returned to the group. My only fan never came back for an encore performance. But that taught me, once and for all, that people really don’t love you for your tragic tales. I also came to see that people’s first days in the group were often the most revealing.

  The members of our group were fascinating and included enough industry types that we could have seceded from Hollywood. Actors, painters, directors, landowners, and lawyers were drawn to Milton. Along with my darling Jennifer Jones, Milton’s group welcomed Robert Loggia, Donna O’Neill (whose family owned half of Orange County), agent Ira Barmak, the spectacular architect Frank Gehry, Jean Coleman, and Joanne Linville along with a couple of civilians just to keep it real. Luana, Morgan, and my friend Anjanette Comer came for a little while. Director Blake Edwards offered Dudley Moore his famous role in 10 in the hall outside of one of our group sessions.

  I began to see how much I got in my own way. For example, because I knew Blake had hired Dudley to be in 10—and I was not yet the evolved woman I hoped to be—whenever Blake came into the room, I could feel myself sit up straight and fluff my hair, hoping I’d be the next group member chosen for a part in one of his films. I had originally met Blake in London years before. He had sent me the loveliest letter after I locked horns with Ross Hunter on the set of Lost Horizon and Ross expressed some not-so-nice opinions about me in the press. Blake wrote,

  The trouble with you, Sally, is that you are just not Doris Day for all the Ross Hunters in the world and there is no chance you ever will be. But cheer up. There will always be some grubby, second-rate, noncommercial director like Bob Altman, Stanley Kubrick, Bertolucci, Visconti, Bogdanovich, Lean, Zinnemann, Bergman, Kurasawa, Godard, or Fellini, for a grubby, second-rate, very special lady named Kellerman.

  I had no idea I had ever met Blake before group! I didn’t remember the l
etter! I only found it when I started working on the book. Think of it, I wouldn’t have had to be nervous around him if I knew he liked me that much. But in group therapy I felt nervous around Blake, conscious of trying to impress him. But because he wore thick, dark glasses, I could never tell what he was thinking.

  We were in group, after all, so I had to be honest with Blake and everyone else. I confessed my uneasiness to the whole room.

  “Don’t worry what I’m thinking of you,” Blake said. “I’m too busy worrying about what people are thinking of me.”

  And Jennifer: Now the thing about my beautiful, adorable Jennifer was that she had her hair done every day of her life. The way that most of us would brush our teeth, Jennifer would have a set-and-style from her favorite hairdresser. One night Milton suggested to Jennifer that maybe, just maybe, if she were more relaxed about her appearance, she might have more opportunities for intimacy in her friendships. Well, Jennifer—the Jennifer of Duel in the Sun—did not like that idea one bit. Gesturing angrily to me, sitting on the floor in my ripped jeans with my legs spread and not a trace of makeup, she snapped, “Oh fine, then. I suppose you want me to look like Sally.” “You don’t have to look that bad,” I said, laughing. Ah, Jennifer, my second mom. She tickled me so.

  Everyone was drawn to Milton in part because he was more than a therapist; the way he lived his own life was an inspiration. He was legally blind, and his eyesight grew worse over time. This meant that he couldn’t read or write, but that never stopped him from learning. When I would arrive at his office door for my appointment, I would hear audiotapes playing—literature, scientific studies, all sorts of stuff. He seemed to keep up with the latest developments in his field.

  In 1974 Milton started the Hereditary Disease Foundation, which focuses on finding a cure for Huntington’s chorea, the degenerative brain disease. Milton’s ex-wife had three brothers with the disease, and when she herself developed it, Milton took care of her even though they were no longer married. Eventually his daughter Nancy would head up the foundation. Milton’s remarkable talent at leading groups like ours to psychological breakthroughs carried over to his foundation work, as he encouraged scientists researching Huntington’s to brainstorm together. Years later, when he died, the Los Angeles Times called Milton “a visionary who led the genetic revolution.”