It was obvious to me even as a child that my mother’s dreams went beyond being the Ourisman Chevrolet girl. She was going to make it out of York, Pennsylvania, one way or the other. It was just a question of when. And with whom . . . because my dad had no intention of leaving his hometown.
Mine was a very happy early childhood, but at the same time it also had more than its share of chaos. We knew to go home when the streetlights came on, but that was about the extent of our monitoring. Disagreements at school were settled with ass-kickings when the teachers weren’t around—girls, boys, it didn’t matter; there was no such thing as “processing” or “talking it out.” In my own home, my sister and I were pretty much left to our own devices, rattling around in our enormous mansion. Because my father had two law practices and my mom did dinner theater, we were largely cared for by Nana, my mother’s mother. This was a little problematic, because although we loved her dearly, Nana was mentally ill. Something had happened to her when my mother was fifteen—some combination of manic depression and schizophrenia, the doctors said—and when she took her medications, she was fine. When she didn’t, she ended up in the hospital. We were never filled in on the details, but I do remember her throwing away a bunch of my father’s belongings, and at one point she became convinced that the wiring in the house was making her teeth hurt, so she went into the basement and tore it out. Wiring had always been a problem for her; earlier in her life she felt her home wiring was sending her malevolent messages, so she called the FBI. We loved Nana, but she was not the most stable person you’d ever meet.
I was a smart and independent little kid, more aware than most of what was going on in the world, and desperate to learn. My sister took a picture of me holding up a sign when I was three that said I WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL, because I would cry that I couldn’t yet read.
I skipped kindergarten, and once I got to school I got good grades without working too hard, but still I wasn’t too happy. Being smart—particularly being a smart girl—didn’t go down well in a factory town. And while later I would become perhaps too much of a people-pleaser, in the early days I wasn’t good with rules and follow-through—and that’s what school is. I faked a lot of stomachaches—had a lot of stomachaches—and given my mother’s laissez-faire attitude, let’s just say I didn’t get an A for attendance. I never thought of myself as a child, and neither did anyone in my family. Treating me like one often backfired. I did want to please people—but even when young I had a fairly good bullshit detector. When I was four, for example, my preschool teacher alerted my mother that perhaps I had emotional problems because I liked drawing with black crayon. That’s all I needed to hear. My drawings became even more determinedly gothic.
I was a tomboy who geeked out with the guys: Spider-Man comics, Star Trek, leaping from garage roof to roof. I had no patience for girly-girls and their Easy-Bake Ovens. (Then again, I was never in doubt about my romantic interests: Donny Osmond was my man and I would stare at his poster in my bedroom, convinced his eyes were following me around the room.)
Many little girls fantasize about becoming actresses. In the early years I didn’t—but then again, I think my mother dreamed that dream for me. She didn’t try to get me out of my overalls and sneakers and into frilly things. Maybe that wasn’t necessary, as I resembled Tatum O’Neal, who was a huge (and tomboyish) child star at the time. Mom was constantly taking pictures of us girls. She tried to get my sister an agent when she was seventeen, and she got me my first modeling job—for those Astroturf daisy doormats—when I was ten.
But ten was a memorable year for reasons other than the occasional modeling job. One day, my girlfriend Ann and I were playing in the alley behind my house when a man pulled up, said he was a cop, and asked us to go for a ride. I was skeptical. Where was his uniform? Why did he need us to come with him? But my friend wasn’t able to question the authority of a grown-up. I told her to come with me. She wouldn’t. I was too short to reach the latch over the back gate to get safely back into my yard, so I told her to stay put, I’d go through the front yard and unlatch the door for us. Why didn’t I demand she come with me? Why didn’t she just come? I don’t know.
By the time I got back, she was gone. The man grabbed her, put her in the car, took her into the woods, and raped her. Then he left her, naked and shivering. She made it to someone’s house, and the residents wrapped her up and called the cops.
This all happened quite quickly, and she was found later that day. But right after it happened I was warned: you don’t talk about these things, you don’t mention it at school, you don’t let anyone know it was her or say what happened or just . . . anything. Of course, this was my friend, and one day I couldn’t help asking. He hurt her, she said, and she bled. And that was it. We never mentioned it again, and within a year she moved to New York and I never saw her again.
Why wasn’t I traumatized by this at the time? I think coming from the town I did, I just accepted that bad things happened and you got over it. I remember hearing about how Aunt Jane’s car was stripped. I remember my mother telling me she was mugged in New York City—a knife to her neck, the mugger screaming, “Shut up or I’ll cut your fucking face!” (They never caught the guy, and a few weeks later an airline stewardess had her throat slit in the same neighborhood.) One of my friends was conceived as a result of rape; another was raped in an alley by an acquaintance about six months after what happened to me.
So in later years, if you asked me what rape was—and I was asked, over and over—this was it: it was being abducted by a stranger. Being taken to the woods, to a dark alley. It was quick and brutal and anonymous. There was no room for seduction or gentleness, even gentle coercion, in my definition.
CHAPTER 2
It was around this time, I think, that my parents began to fight a little more frequently. Nothing out of the ordinary. It’s just that my mother was doing more and more dinner theater around Pennsylvania and Maryland, and my dad did not like her being away that much. When I was ten or eleven my mother won the part of Adelaide in Guys and Dolls—and my father forbade her from taking it. He called the director and told him he wouldn’t let her do it because it would take too much of her time.
He “allowed” her to do other theater after that, but that moment seemed a turning point. When I was ten, Mom moved to New York City—which, frankly, was not so different than her living at home, because she was gone so much. My parents were still married—but not for long.
In New York my mother met Bob Nesbitt, a fellow cast member in the off-Broadway play Room Service, which they were doing with Shelley Berman. Bob was tall and handsome with a great laugh—the kind of man who was easy for women to love. My mother was no exception. Soon after they met she returned to York to break the news to my dad. He was devastated—and furious. I was torn. I think a lot of kids would have hated the upheaval, hated this charming interloper, but I was never one to see things in black-and-white. I wanted my dad, but Bob was a great man. He treated me like a person, not a child. And he made my mother happy.
It was 1974. The divorce rate in the United States had doubled over ten years, and newspapers were reporting how divorcing couples were going to court for the privilege of not keeping their children. A California psychologist quoted in the New York Times declared the American family was no longer “the basic unit of our society.”
I got to be an expert in traveling on my own. During the week, while Mom was in New York auditioning, I’d be back at Edgar Fahs Smith Junior High in York. Then, every other Friday I’d take the train from Baltimore to New York City’s Grand Central Terminal and stay with her for the weekend in Brooklyn Heights, often crossing the bridge to explore Manhattan. New York City in 1974 was in the midst of the worst fiscal crisis in its history. It was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, drug crime was rampant, and you couldn’t even drive your car in Manhattan without being accosted by the squeegee guys with their filthy rags and outstretched hands. This was before Disney annexed Forty-Second Str
eet; back then hookers with rainbow Afros still had the run of Times Square.
Not surprisingly, my mom didn’t stay in New York long. She was getting commercial work, which paid the bills but wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind when she moved there. She had also gotten me an agent. I became increasingly ambivalent about the whole thing, so much so that as I got a little older, I’d blow off auditions. When I bothered to show up, things often went well. I got two callbacks for the starring role of the daughter in Freaky Friday, which ultimately went to Jodie Foster. Everyone was really excited about this, with the possible exception of me.
My mother’s career still wasn’t taking off, but now she was with a man who shared her ambition: to go to Hollywood and find the lives they knew they were meant to have.
In the summer of 1975, after seventh grade, Mom and Bob packed up their Ford Fairlane with me, Kim, and our dog Rocky, and headed west to Los Angeles. They’d be staying there. But for me, this was just supposed to be a summer jaunt. I’d be going home afterward to live with my father.
It didn’t work out that way. At the end of the summer I flew home to live with Dad, which is where I wanted to be. But a few months later I was given a choice, or more precisely, told I had a choice: I could stay there or leave York and live with Mom in California if I wanted to. I did not. I was a daddy’s girl, and besides, how many kids want to leave home and head for the unknown? My father must have thought that giving me the illusion of control over the choice would make me happy. But then I learned the truth.
He took me to a local sandwich shop, where I told him my choice was to stay with him. He said, “Look, you really are only staying here because you want to be with your friends. You have to go live with your mom.” I sobbed. I could see he was glad I cried, because he didn’t want me to go, either. Maybe he would have kept me, I don’t know. But I think for all his progressiveness, he still felt a girl had to be with her mother. Besides, he had already moved on—he was dating, trying to make a new life. Living with an increasingly moody tween wasn’t part of his plan.
That January of 1976, the first time Dad drove me to the airport, I still remember how lost I felt knowing I’d never live in York again. I couldn’t stop thinking about it as I stuffed my pet rat, Odin, into my carry-on. (I was quite a good smuggler at thirteen.)
Grim as it was, York was home—and the Pacific Palisades section of Los Angeles most certainly was not. It was beautiful, sure; I lived right near the beach where, a few years later, Baywatch would be filmed. But to be living in a beach bungalow covered in vines—when I moved in, one sprung out of the closet, making me scream—was a shock after the solidity of York.
More shocking, of course, was the California culture. I arrived at just about the same time as the Eagles dropped Hotel California. (“Cool wind in my hair / warm smell of colitas rising up through the air”). I was Aerosmith and Queen; this was Joni, the Doobie Brothers, surfers and skateboarders, and a whole lot of drugs as a path to self-discovery. But with all the peace, love, and rock and roll, there was also this brooding undercurrent of violence. California, like much of the country, saw an enormous leap in violent crimes in the mid-to late 1970s. Serial killers like Herbert Mullin and Edmund Kemper, the so-called Co-ed Killer, were still fresh in everyone’s mind. They would be replaced in less than a year by the even more horrific Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, aka the Hillside Strangler. In ninth grade, we were all terrified.
Mom and Bob continued to audition for acting gigs, but by the time we moved out to the San Fernando Valley in the fall of 1976, to make ends meet Bob had taken a job selling advertising at a new magazine called Marijuana Monthly. He and Mom smoked every night in their room—secretly, they thought—for the seven years they were together, and Mom’s way of finally quitting was as quintessentially 1970s as the weed smoking itself. She was on a rafting trip in the Grand Canyon and met an English doctor who was a disciple of a swami; he came up to her and said, “You’re searching, aren’t you?” She replied, “Yes,” and he said, “I’ll give you a mantra, if you will stop smoking.” Her mantra, she tells me, was “om a ram a hum madhu ram ham”—or at least she thinks that’s what it was—and she repeated it while she paddled, all the way home, on the bus ride, on the plane—and swears it was the mantra that allowed her to quit.
Moving in with them after Christmas of 1975, I could not have felt more of an outsider, an antisocial freak in this well-to-do beach town of surfer dudes and blond bikini kittens and all their fake drama. (Pacific Palisades fight: “If you want to be friends with me, you can’t be friends with her.” York fight: “I’m going to beat your ass.” Which is more genuine?) It was like being on a permanent pot-infused vacation.
I don’t think I can overstate the shift in attitudes toward sex in the mid-to late 1970s versus ten or even five years before. The Joy of Sex, published in 1972, held a place of honor in my mother’s bedroom. (She never knew I read it, but naturally I did, cover to cover.) Young girls are eroticized to some extent in every culture, and at this point in time in our own culture that eroticization had become almost mainstream. Brooke Shields had posed nude for pictures when she was ten, and then, at twelve, she was starring in Pretty Baby, a movie about a child prostitute that probably couldn’t be made today. Just one year before, Jodie Foster had raised eyebrows with her portrayal of a teenage prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Manhattan was Woody Allen’s homage not just to New York City, but to a middle-aged man’s longing for a young teenager. And of course there was that famous 1974 film where a young girl has an incestuous relationship with her father. That was Chinatown, directed by Roman Polanski.
The bathrooms of junior high school were filled with cigarette smoke. When we visited the homes of our friends, their parents would offer us a beer. Cocaine was just beginning to become popular, but really, that wasn’t yet the drug for the kicked-back Los Angeles vibe. Like the Eagles were telling us, it was all about taking it easy, not letting the sound of our own voices drive us crazy.
I had been deeply relieved when we relocated to the Valley, a grittier place where actual people with actual jobs lived. The Valley had its celebrities, of course—in the 1940s and ’50s Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz lived out there, and Clark Gable and Carole Lombard had a love nest—but it was never known for its glamour. It was more like the prototypical sparkling suburb. The Brady Bunch allegedly lived there. And later, the Kardashians. It would be a few years before the Valley Girl would become the iconic American symbol for girls addicted to shopping, long nails, and fame.
Gradually I’d become more interested in acting: When you’re a kid living in Los Angeles, being an actor seems like a perfectly reasonable career goal, shared by half the people you know. My little room was papered with posters of Marilyn Monroe (plan A) and Bette Midler (plan B). At home in York my father’s influence prevailed, and I was going to be a brainiac of some sort, perhaps an attorney. Here in Southern California, none of that mattered much. I was cute. I had the head shots. I was going out on auditions and some callbacks. My mother drove me east on the 101 to an office building in West Hollywood. A casting agent would ask me to give off a look—perky! fresh!—and I’d try to oblige. (Carroll O’Connor from All in the Family noticed me in a hallway one day wearing a short top. He poked me in my middle and teased, “Nice belly button.”)
I wanted to be cheerful about the auditions and the acting classes and all the work that seemed to go into chasing the brass ring. But I was still quite unhappy. I felt entirely unmoored. My parents let me entertain the illusion that I was in control of my life, when in fact I controlled nothing. I was just marking time at Hughes Junior High in Woodland Hills. When I wasn’t gathered with my girlfriends trying to suss out which teachers were drunk or high (“Did you smell his breath?” “Did you see her eyes?”) I’d be daydreaming about change: that Mom would land a big part, or that all the acting and gym and dance classes she drove me to in our big ol’ ugly brown Nissan Maxima would lead somewhere. Did
I have what it takes to make it in show business? Probably not. I liked the idea of fame much more than the idea of work.
So I was not a pleasant teen. I mean, I tried, I really did. But the message I conveyed to my family in every look and deed was “Why did you make me come here? I hate this place, and I hate you.” On the other hand—well, the writer J. B. Priestley had a good point: “Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.”
CHAPTER 3
One day, Roman Polanski appeared at our door.
Okay, it wasn’t exactly like that. But close. What really happened was this: My sister, Kim, was dating a guy named Henri Sera, a minor film producer who’d visited the house a few times. He knew my mother was in the business, and invited her to a party at Top of the Rocks, a watering hole on Sunset Boulevard. It was an impressive gathering: Diana Ross was there, and Warren Beatty. Mom said hello to Roman, chatted a bit; he made a slightly off-color joke involving sex and tiger balm, and she laughed politely. That was it. A few weeks later, Henri called to say Roman was interviewing young American girls for a photo shoot that he was in the process of doing for Vogue Paris. I was asked if he could come and see me, and I said yes. I never thought about dressing up, and my mom didn’t make me. I was in jeans, sneakers, an unmemorable shirt, and a baseball cap—with my pet cockatiel perched on it. That was his favorite spot.
In a few years, I would get to know a great deal about this brooding, pursed-lip little man. There was, of course, his horrific childhood. He was born Rajmund Roman Thierry Polański, in Paris in 1933 to Polish Jews, and in 1937 his parents made the tragic mistake of moving back to Poland, shortly before World War II began. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, they were sent to the Krakow ghetto, and his parents were ultimately sent to concentration camps—his mother to Auschwitz, where she was killed, and his father to Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria, where he survived. Roman saw his father captured and marched off to the camp. When he tried to catch up with him, his father, frightened his son would be captured, shouted at him to “shove off.” Polanski managed to escape the ghetto himself at eight through a hole in the fence. Because he didn’t look Jewish, he was sometimes sheltered by Catholic families, sometimes tossed out to wander the countryside. On several occasions he was beaten; he still has a metal plate in his head from his skull being broken. He often had to steal his own food. That was his life until he was twelve, when he was miraculously reunited with his father after the war. His father had remarried, a woman who at first resented Roman, and they lived uneasily together until he was accepted at film school. His relationship with his father never completely recovered.
The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski Page 2