Read My Lips

by Sally Kellerman

  And through all this—his blindness, the sickness in his family—he sought to help others.

  “It’s all relative,” he would say to me when I talked about looks or image. “After fifty years old, character is all that matters.” Milton had character in spades.

  We all overuse words like “genius” and “brilliant.” But I remember how my friend Frank Gehry put it: “I would never have been able to achieve what I did without Milton.”

  The same was true for me. I always say that I’d met the Queen, but I didn’t have any insides until I met Milton. Without Milton I would not be in a marriage that has now lasted more than thirty years. In fact, without Milton I would never have met my husband.

  WHEN JONATHAN KRANE JOINED OUR GROUP IN AUGUST 1978, I had already been working with Milton for about a year. He was a handsome twenty-six-year-old in tight Italian pants, seething with sexuality. I was forty. I was instantly attracted to him but thought, “Oh God, I hope he’s not too sick.” According to Jonathan’s memory, I was sitting on the floor—with my shirt open, braless—and I was crying but stopped the moment I saw him. His inner dialogue went “I got that chick.”

  Milton always asked newcomers to share their first impressions of everyone else in the group. Jonathan said that he’d “never be afraid” of me. Sometimes I think I should have headed for the hills right then.

  In December I was leaving for a month to work on a film. The day I said good-bye to the group I turned to Jonathan and said, “And don’t get married.” We hadn’t yet spent one minute alone together.

  When I returned I was invited to a New Year’s Day party at Susan Spivak’s house. Jonathan was going to be there. I had since learned that he was an international tax lawyer who was instrumental in helping to develop the Wilshire Boulevard corridor. I wore my favorite high-heeled, wooden Candies and a green jumpsuit.

  I brought Claire, then about fourteen years old, along as my date. When I saw Jonathan, I pointed him out to Claire. “That’s the guy I’ve been telling you about. I think he’s so cute.”

  Claire took one look at Jonathan and said, “Mom, you don’t stand a chance.”

  Later I encountered Jonathan in Susan’s cramped little kitchen, and that’s where we spent the rest of the party. We weren’t alone. The kitchen was crowded with people shuffling in and out for drinks and snacks. But there was something that kept us there. Maybe the proximity to the London broil on the cutting board—who knows? But I couldn’t tear myself away, and neither could he.

  The day after the party I had to have one of the many dental operations I have endured throughout my life, the result of so many years of indulging in sugary treats. Whenever I had these procedures, my entire face would swell up. One of my diet gurus, Judy Mazel (of The Beverly Hills Diet) told me that yams with cayenne and butter would help me heal more quickly. Susan rang from her office, and Jonathan was with her. They were checking in on me to see how I was feeling. And the next night, as I sat, swollen from head to toe and eating yams, the doorbell rang. It was Jonathan. He was drunk.

  “I like you better like this,” Jonathan said, looking at the bit of yam dangling from the corner of my swollen mouth. “Less threatening.”

  That night, after he left, we both broke things off with the people we had been seeing and started dating each other exclusively. For the first couple weeks we took it slow, keeping the romance to just a little kissing. But then the big night arrived.

  Jonathan said, “Alright, is this something you really want to do?”

  “Yes!” I said. “Yes!”

  “Are you sure?” Jonathan kept asking.

  “Yes!”

  Getting together was not so simple because we were still in group together. We would have to go back and tell everyone that our relationship—and, therefore, the group dynamic—had changed. Jonathan wanted to be sure the group knew that deciding to take our affection to the next step had been a “shared responsibility,” as he put it. And it definitely was. Once we told the rest of the group, everyone was very supportive.

  One of the more poignant things Milton said was that we should bring every little thing that bothered us into group and talk about it.

  “You might not end up with a relationship,” he explained, “but you’ll learn a lot about yourself.”

  That advice sometimes led to some roof-raising arguments in the group. One night Milton calmly said, “You two don’t want a relationship. You’d rather be right.”

  We both jumped in, saying, “No, we don’t! We don’t have to be right!”

  Another problem was that, being an actress to the core, I was still overly eager to share. At one point Jonathan said, “If she shares one more word about her old boyfriends, I’m going to throw her out the window.”

  That first year Jonathan and I were together, we were absolutely crazy about each other. Still, the first time Jonathan said he loved me, all I could hear was Milton’s voice in my head: Don’t tell anyone you love them until you’re married for a while and then think about it. Let somebody else do the giving.

  And I had to admit that the more Jonathan liked and loved me, the more I wanted to bolt. That first year I tried to keep things as light as possible, working not to jump to love or marriage. If Jonathan ever said, “I love you,” I would say, “Oh, that’s great. Hey look! That Edith Piaf film is playing!”

  He hated her, it was snowing, and we both had colds, but off we’d go to the show. Jonathan did everything I wanted. To this day Jonathan says that was the worst year of his life, and I say it was the best year of mine.

  Jonathan is so different from anybody else I’ve known—so smart, so supportive, so encouraging—not to mention drop-dead gorgeous. He has incredible confidence, and at the risk of sounding corny, he is the wind beneath my wings. He’s always believed in me, encouraged me, and had faith in my music when no one else did.

  For example, I’ve been blessed with the best voice-over career anyone could ever ask for. But at certain points I’ve felt overly entitled. I remember once having a radio voice-over gig when it was pouring down rain.

  “Oh! I don’t want to go,” I told Jonathan. “It’s only $500, and it’s raining so hard.”

  He said, “Get your hat, get your coat, and get every dime, nickel, and penny you can until you’ve built yourself an annuity.”

  That was wise advice. I’ve had another twenty-five years of fantastic voice-overs.

  My mom used to say about me, “Darling, don’t you want someone in your corner? Your father was always in my corner.”

  Jonathan is and always has been in my corner.

  Maybe Milton was right, and my newfound, non-pot-smoking, therapy-loving discipline was paying off. I had six films coming out in 1980. And I had Jonathan.

  CHAPTER 14

  God Laughs While We Make Plans

  IN 1980 I SHOT TWO PICTURES AT THE SAME TIME. FOXES, directed by Adrian Lyne, which also starred Jodie Foster, Cherie Currie, Randy Quaid, and Scott Baio, and It Rained All Night the Day I Left, in which I worked alongside Tony Curtis and Louis Gossett. I went from playing Diane Lane’s sophisticated mother in Paris to teenaged Jodie Foster’s widowed one in Foxes, a coming-of-age story set in the San Fernando Valley. Rained was about ambushed weapons dealers (Tony and Lou) in Africa and the conniving woman—me—who hires them. It was definitely worth flying across time zones to work with that pair, and I was nominated for a Genie for Best Performance by a Foreign Actress.

  We shot Rained in the desert above Eliat, Israel. There was nothing there—not scrub, not a bush, not a rock—just the changing colors of the sky and, occasionally, a Bedouin or two with camel in tow. Sometimes the Bedouins would venture up to where the film’s horses were stabled where they would sit and make hash tea for themselves. Each day we shot till about four in the afternoon, when the light began to transform everything in sight. It was beautiful. I’d get back to the hotel by about 4:30, swim laps, take a bath, listen to the sole radio station, which only played classi
cal music, read the Herald Tribune, go to dinner with a couple friends, and then head to bed. That was my routine. I loved it.

  Because I was supposed to be a top-notch equestrian in the movie, I got a daily horseback-riding lesson from a darling Israeli. One day I looked at some of the Bedouins near the horses and thought about their hash tea. At that point I hadn’t smoked grass for nine months. But it wouldn’t be smoking if I drank some tea. So I asked my trainer to see if the Bedouins would let me try a cup—and to tell them to put lots of hash in it.

  They gave me some. But as we made our way down the hill from the desert above town, I didn’t feel a thing.

  Dammit, I thought. They didn’t put in enough hash.

  After all, if I was going to cheat, I wanted to feel something. As I headed back to my hotel room, I looked at the ocean outside the bay window at the end of hall. It began to sway, then started surging up and down. The water seemed to rise like a tsunami. I ran into my room, slammed the door behind me, and stood in front the mirror for two hours, sobbing. Then I passed out on the bed until I got a call.

  “We’re ready for your costume fitting, Ms. Kellerman.”

  Mumble, mumble, mumble.

  A second call came.

  “Hi, are you ready for dinner?”

  Blah, blah, blah . . .

  And then I passed back out.

  When I came to, I had to ask myself which was more fun: dinner and a swim or passing out after a good cry? The answer was obvious. So that was the end of my getting-high time.

  The last time I had worked with Tony Curtis was on The Boston Strangler in 1968. That had been exciting because it was only my second big movie. I’d seen Tony socially every now and then and had really been looking forward to working with him again, until the first day of shooting, that is.

  He was standing at the top of a staircase, and he suddenly began yelling, “I hate this piece of crap. I hate everyone on it!”

  Thinking I could somehow help by talking to him, I said, “Well, you don’t mean me, do you, Tony?”

  “Especially you!” he shouted.

  I stood behind a row of fake bushes to stay out of his line of sight until he calmed down.

  The next time I saw Tony we were out in the desert, and he was yelling at the top of his lungs at the director. There was no place to hide in the desert. Then one day, when were out on location, I suddenly I felt an arm slip around me. It was Tony’s.

  “Ah, Sally,” he said. “Life is really something, isn’t it?”

  This was the Tony I had first met years earlier—so sweet. And for the rest of the picture, there was no sign of Mr. Hyde. Tony remained as talented and easy to work with as ever. I guessed at the time that he had a substance abuse problem, and indeed, not long afterward I heard that he’d sought treatment. Boy, those addictions can be cunning.

  Jonathan joined me on the press junket for Foxes in Chicago, his hometown. We were in the hotel with the journalist Irv Kupcinet, Jodie Foster, and her mother. After the interview with Irv we went to dinner and some jazz clubs with him and his wife. When we got back to our hotel room, I was fidgeting around while Jonathan was sitting on the floor watching David Janssen—TV’s original Fugitive—on his new show, Harry O.

  Suddenly Jonathan asked, “Do you want to get married?”

  “No!” I screamed. “Not with Harry O. in the background!”

  So romantic, eh? Just like in the movies. I got up, walked over to the TV, and turned it off.

  “Ask me again!” I said.

  He did—and I said yes.

  The next day I called Irv to give him the news.

  “You and your wife inspired us last night, and we’re going to get married!” I said.

  “I only hope that you’ll be as happy as we might have been,” Irv replied. To this day that still makes me chuckle.

  WHEN JONATHAN AND I GOT BACK TO LA, WE TOLD THE GROUP our big news.

  “We’re getting married.”

  “At my house!” Jennifer Jones immediately said.

  Sold. We had already secretly decided that if Jennifer didn’t throw us a wedding, we would elope, because at the time we did not have a lot of money. Jonathan was a young lawyer, and I had not, shall we say, kept very good track of my finances. In fact, my new business manager announced that he would never tell me how much I had made over the previous ten years so that I wouldn’t feel so bad about where it all went. (Note to young actors: pay very close attention to what you make and how you spend it.)

  We decided on a date—May 11, 1980—and ran it by Jennifer to make sure it was okay. “Yes, that’s perfect,” she said. Only later did we realize that it was the anniversary of her daughter Mary Jennifer’s death. Mary Jennifer had committed suicide five years before by jumping from a twenty-story building. But Jennifer didn’t want to change the date.

  “It will bring light and happiness,” she said of our wedding. “And you’re like my daughter.”

  I had the two greatest moms in the world.

  My other mom, Edith, had loved Jonathan from the very first moment she had laid eyes on that handsome face. Then she found out he was a lawyer to boot. What more could a mother want? She was thrilled about our upcoming wedding.

  “Wear whatever makes you feel pretty” was the only instruction we gave our guests. For my wedding gown I bought a white off-the-shoulder dress for $35 during a weekend trip with Jonathan to Mexico, which I paired with a $250 veil I found at Holly’s Harp.

  Jennifer planned the wedding perfectly. She and her husband, Norton, had two houses on the beach, connected by a patio lined with mirrors and greenery. One was a single-story contemporary that Jennifer had bought from the director John Frankenheimer. On the day of my wedding, guests arrived at the Frankenheimer house to mill around and drink champagne. The walls were graced with artwork: a Van Gogh in the entryway and, around the corner, a Cezanne and a Henry Moore sculpture of the family. What a difference from my first wedding, when the only festive note was Diana’s scarf.

  Next door was the Frank Gehry house, which had an entirely different feel: Indian art and stucco. That’s where I was, getting dressed with my bridesmaids—my closest friends, Luana Anders, Morgan Ames, Anjanette Comer, Elizabeth Hush, Joanne Linville, as well as my housekeeper, Vivianne Carter—and my maid of honor, my daughter Claire.

  My “cousin” David Bennett, who had come out from New York, took charge of upholding the wedding etiquette. David shooed all the bridesmaids out of my room because, according to tradition, I was supposed to be left alone to reflect on my new life. Up until that moment there were so many people around that I felt like I was getting married on TV, as I had so many times in various roles over the years.

  The wedding wasn’t huge, only about a hundred people. Mark and Joanne Rydell’s children, Amy and Christopher, were, respectively, my flower girl and ring bearer. My very dear friend Bud Cort helped Jonathan pick out a tie and gave me huge bunch of calla lilies to carry, each about three feet long. Bobby Walker, Jennifer’s son, and his wife, Dawn, were there. Darling Jennifer, who had done so much work to make my wedding day perfect, resisted posing for pictures. She hated being photographed. One day when Claire and I had stopped in to visit, we had found her cutting up these giant, gorgeous images of herself. Claire and I grabbed them and put them in the trunk of my car.

  My mother read a lovely poem during the ceremony. Both my fathers—my dad and my Stuart—were gone, so Milton gave me away. As he began walking me down the aisle, I realized, Wow! I know these people! I love them! They’re not extras!

  This wedding was real.

  When David Bennett got ready to launch us on our honeymoon, we realized that he had already sent my mother off with our luggage in her trunk. So we would just have to go to Vegas dressed in our matching white suits—my idea—looking like twins. We were giddy, surrounded by people we cherished and so very happy and in love. We both wanted this. This time there was no crying the night before.

  I was about to turn fort
y-three. Jonathan was twenty-eight. I used to kid him that if he were one day older, he’d be too old for me. But I wasn’t entirely kidding when I said, “If you tell me when I’m fifty that you want kids, I’m going to kill you.”

  ONE OF THE FIRST TRIPS THAT JONATHAN AND I TOOK AS A married couple was to Monaco, to attend the film festival that had nominated me as Best Actress for my role in The Big Blonde. Part of PBS’s Great Performances series, the film was based on Dorothy Parker’s O. Henry Award–winning short story of the same name about a blonde who embarks on a desperate, alcohol-fueled search for popularity and love, faking her way through life and finally ending that life via suicide. Upbeat? Maybe not. But I loved the challenge of playing a character I could really sink my teeth into.

  When my agent, Keith Adice, first mentioned the part, I said, “Keith—that’s gotta be me.” I then proceeded to call Jack Venza, who was producing the series, to tell him the same thing.

  “Jack, I gotta do The Big Blonde.”

  “They really want a star . . .” he began.

  “Yeah? That’s why I’m calling,” I said.

  “Well,” Jack went on, “we really think of you as more of a Garbo type.”

  “Yeah, right, I know I’m too beautiful,” I replied. “But listen: I haven’t lived this long to be this big and this blond and not get this part. Don’t hire me. Just let me meet with the director.”

  So I flew to Chicago on my own dime to meet with Kirk Browning in an airport lounge. We hit it off, I got the part, and I hopped right back on a plane to fly home.