The Seasons of My Mother

by Marcia Gay Harden

  “Great, Mom. Just bring the yellow gown on a hanger if you want, or better yet, leave it here. I’ve ordered you that club sandwich you wanted.”

  “No, I would rather come back dressed.”

  “Okay.”

  The boys got started on my “panel beating”—that’s a New Zealand term for beautifying a dinged-up car, and it was what we called the hair and makeup sessions. As we gossiped about the business and joked about the horrors of aging, we waited for Mom. I shared with them that she was more fragile lately, and that she had been concerned about her memory. We all dismissed it as the craziness of traveling for movie festivals and premieres. Five minutes later, she came into the room, still in her white robe, with the black dress on a hanger. The itinerary was still clutched in her hand and her soft hair was now dry, except for the damp clusters around her forehead. She seemed confused, and said she couldn’t remember if tonight was the press night or the premiere . . . and she wasn’t sure what day it was. She was embarrassed and panicky. I realized in that instant that Mom didn’t remember if we might have already gone to the press night . . . she wasn’t sure if the evening before had already passed, she wasn’t sure if she had missed it. I was stunned, but in truth I was still making excuses for her until I looked up at Collier and Richard. I knew from their grave faces that something was wrong.

  I gently walked Mom down the hall to get the yellow dress, making jokes about all the things in our lives that keep us busy and forgetful, and when we came back to the room the boys were jovial as if nothing had happened. But Richard’s nose was swollen and sniffly, and Collier’s eyes were red, and there were more Kleenex in the wastebasket than had been there before. I knew then—we all knew, and they both later agreed—that something was wrong.

  The next day before the premiere, Mom’s eyes were slightly confused, but it only lasted for a moment or two. She hadn’t remembered the yellow dress incident. She looked glorious in the long black gown, and she laughed with us as the boys flawlessly applied her makeup. Later that night, after the premiere, she comforted me when I cried with embarrassment at how much of my part had been cut out of the movie. I was devastated. Whole scenes had been cut. Entire story lines left on the editing room floor. I felt like I had seen half a character in my role, like I had told half a story. It struck me that this was what Mom’s life would be like, if it were to be confirmed that she had early onset dementia, or worse, Alzheimer’s. Just like an actor who, having performed a role full of emotions and lines and scenes and locations, finds that in the final edit, so much had been cut out. I couldn’t bear to think of her past lying dormant on the editing room floor. I couldn’t bear to think of her with Alzheimer’s. She was supposed to grow old as gracefully as she had already lived. I slept with her in her hotel room that night; I didn’t want her to be alone or confused when she woke up. Staring at her peacefully sleeping face, I couldn’t help but shed tears again at what I feared lay ahead for her. I thought of the Valentine’s Day spearmint gum, and I wanted to be a piece of gum for my mom, to stick the pieces of memory back together, to help her make sense of the events in her life, and to let her chew and chew and chew and swallow my love for her with the sticky sweet spearmint juice.

  Winter

  My mother is a Harry Winston diamond

  IT IS HUMAN NATURE TO attach the possibility of change to certain turning points on the calendar, gathering steam for new beginnings as the first of the week, or month, or year comes circling by. How many times have we heard, or even said, “On Monday, the beginning of the week, I’ll start a new diet” or “At the beginning of the month, I’ll begin my exercise program”? The first of January is famous for new resolutions and sacred oaths as a rash of bad habits are left behind. Cigarette packages are crushed and thrown away, alcohol is poured down the drain by the hands of severely hungover people, and new promises are born, new beginnings imagined. Hope is fortified like the front lines of a once-beleaguered army. No greater seismic shift may occur in a person’s lifetime than the beginning of a new century, and in the year 2000, America, and indeed the world, looked to reinvent itself. So, too, did my mom. She was about to turn sixty-three. She used the rush of the millennium to reimagine her future. She knew that this was the time to tackle the goals in her life that still beckoned. This was the time to fortify her accomplishments, to achieve her full potential. Another chance to ride on the merry-go-round: reaching for the elusive brass ring.

  The turn of the century began for me not just with a bang but with an explosion. I had wrapped up work on Space Cowboys with Clint Eastwood in the spring, and Ed Harris’s biopic picture Pollock was in its final edit by early summer, so when fall finally rolled around, I would hopefully be looking forward to all the wonderful things that happened to an actor after a film was shot. I say hopefully, because only some actors, the lead actors, are invited to join the post-production release campaign, where exotic travel, awards, gift baskets, and fancy new clothes are sure to be a part of the package. Would I be invited by Clint to join the men while they promoted Space Cowboys? Would I be invited by Ed to help promote Pollock? I tried to picture myself eating bonbons by the poolside at fancy hotels, wearing sunglasses on the red carpet, and sitting with confidence, my shoulders back, as I sold the press on what was great about each movie. In truth, I was having those familiar “less than” feelings, that insecure voice in my head that told me that somehow, I was not enough. Somehow, I didn’t quite measure up.

  Speaking of measuring, I was also a bit nervous about the inevitable fittings with stylists who could barely hide their dismay that I was not a size zero as they dressed me for various publicity appearances. If I wanted to compete for the big roles, I told myself, I would have to “measure up” by quite literally measuring down. Fortunately, however, one of my goals for the new year was to accept myself as I was, and a size zero didn’t fit into that picture. What the frig did that even mean, anyway? A size zero? That’s a size nothing! I decided I didn’t want to be a “nothing,” and I would just have to work through my body dysmorphia and insist on a size 8 for my wardrobe. Of course, I would also have to make a concerted effort not to stand next to very thin actresses on the red carpet.

  Then, unexpectedly in September, I was able to mark off a big goal on my bucket list: Pollock got accepted to the prestigious Venice International Film Festival, and I was invited to go. Bonbons, here we come! I felt like a rookie who had just made first pick to their favorite baseball team. Suddenly, I was in a whole new league, and I was excited—and scared.

  When I was growing up, we had an old wooden ruler with little Dutch children painted on the sides of it that we hung on a wall to mark our growth. Whenever I hit a new inch line, I marked it on the wall and ran to get my mother to come and look at it. I needed to see myself through her eyes; her witness of the line somehow solidified it, validated it, made it real. “Look, Mommy, I’m changing!” I would chant as a young child, waiting for her to proudly acknowledge me. So it was no surprise that when I learned of Pollock’s acceptance into the film festival, the first person I telephoned was my mother. I had hit another inch on the growth line, and I needed her to know, to make it real.

  “Mooooommm!! Pollock is being talked about for all kinds of awards, and we just got accepted into the Venice Film Festival, and guess what: I am invited to go, too!”

  She was ecstatic. “Oh, Marcia, congratulations! Oh, my—how wonderful! Be proud, sweetheart. You deserve this!”

  I paused while listening to my mom’s enthusiastic compliments and motherly pride. I didn’t think I deserved it. I didn’t know that I would ever really see myself that way: as “deserving.” I resisted that word. It seemed almost egotistical to think, “I deserve this or that,” because the inverse thought was, of course, also true: “If I deserve this or that, then since you didn’t get it, you must not have worked as hard. You must not deserve it.” Which, of course, couldn’t have been further from the truth. I feel I don’t have the right to assume I am an
y more or less deserving than the next person, because over the years I’ve worked with hundreds of diligent, talented, brilliant actors who never get rewarded with fame. I’ve worked with beautiful, educated, and creative people, yet they are still overlooked when important castings occur. Didn’t they deserve it? Whatever “it” is? Of course they did. They just weren’t at the right place at the right time. They didn’t get lucky. Luck. That great enigmatic element that carries hard work and preparation on to success.

  For Pollock, yes, I had worked hard, I had done all my research. I had met Lee Krasner’s family and practiced her sharp Brooklyn accent for hours upon end. I had even taken up painting classes in New York, hoping I would discover that deep inside Marcia Gay Harden was a real painter. But when, try as I might, I realized that I couldn’t paint worth a damn, I used my disappointment to fuel Lee Krasner’s own depression about her stagnant attempts to create art while she lived in the shadow of Pollock. In preparation for my role I had also studied avant-garde painters Warhol and de Kooning, and of course, Picasso. I had listened to musicians like Miles Davis and John Coltrane who had influenced the eruptive jazz scene of the 1950s. I had spent hours in the Museum of Modern Art attempting to absorb the philosophy and concepts of Modernism, trying to understand why a red dot in the middle of a white canvas was, actually, art. Yes, I had worked hard, but did that really mean I deserved this?

  If anyone deserved it, it was Ed Harris. He had been with the project for ten years. He had set up a painting studio in his Malibu Canyon home and had actually painted good Pollocks. He had directed and acted in the film. Also on the hard-working, deserve-it front were Michael Barker and Tom Bernard from Sony Pictures Classics, and the bevy of producers who had given time and money and thought outside the box to get the film made, names like Fred Berner, Jon Kilik, James Francis Trezza, Barbara Turner, and Peter Brant. They deserved it. The film deserved it. But me? I got lucky. I was just lucky enough that my longtime manager Maryellen Mulcahy had insisted that I audition. I was lucky enough to get cast in a role that allowed me to transform. I was lucky enough to have a director who pushed me and trusted me, and I was lucky enough to be edited in a way that showed the spark and spunk and beauty of Lee Krasner.

  It seemed to me that this good fortune was really the work of other people—that I had just shown up and done my job. I’m not saying that I didn’t want to go to Venice, or that I was just “along for the ride,” but for some reason it has always been hard for me to take ownership of my own contribution in moments of glory. Pride embarrasses me. I downplay my role in my own accomplishments. My therapist says it’s “middle child syndrome.” I call it dumbfounded gratitude.

  So it was no small coincidence that recognizing myself, seeing myself through my own eyes, was also on my New Year’s resolution list.

  Venice has been described as the most beautiful city ever built by man. It is called the City of Love, it is artistic and palatial and romantic, and as Mom went on and on about how wonderful it was that I got to go, I could hear how much she would have loved it, too. I could hear her longing for the adventure of it all, the lush travel, the new sights, the water streets, the gleaming Rialto Bridge, the gondolas and cute Italian men, the art galleries and Chardonnay sipped from cold glasses under a sidewalk umbrella. For a moment I thought of inviting her, but then decided against it. I knew people would advise me to go to the festival alone, with just my husband, and be free and romantic. They would advise me to be sensible and leave my two-year-old daughter Eulala with my nanny in New York. And they would certainly advise me not to bring my mother, who surely wouldn’t be able to keep up with us. In truth, all that sounded great, but this moment was a shifting of size and growth, and as with the childhood wooden ruler, I realized I needed Mom not to just witness it, but to be a part of the change. I wanted her to enjoy whatever ownership a mother felt at the success of her daughter. I wanted her to know that she mattered, that the endless thankless tasks of mothering she had performed over the many years were actually gifts that had not been forgotten. There are so few moments in life when we can really treat our parents to a great big “Thank you!” And this was one of them.

  “Pack the blue Samsonite, Mom. You’re going to Venice with us!”

  Mom took to modern first class like a duck to water. Sprawling in her super-large seat, she perused the menu, deciding on the salmon and a mimosa. When the flight attendant looked at his list of names and said, “Welcome, Mrs. Harden,” she smiled, and with her slight southern drawl insisted, “Oh, just call me Beverly. I’ll have the salmon,” she said, pronouncing the L in “salmon.” Examining the little complimentary travel bag and unwrapping the extra-soft eye mask, sliding her seat up and down and up and down like a child on a carnival ride, pressing the massage button every which way, and wrapping her always cold feet in the blue airplane socks, she prepared her royal cubicle for a night of comfort. “Now this is something I could get used to!”

  We raced through the distant stars, and just before bedding down for the night flight, she pressed her nose against the cold round window and stared into the charcoal sky. The crescent moon beckoned, shape-shifting just as it had done almost thirty years before when Mom first flew her family to Japan. Following the waxing moon’s lead, Mom was ready to transform once again, and she decided to reach outside of the self she knew so that she could grow to her full potential. After all, this was the century to reinvent oneself, this was the year to fortify accomplishment, this was the moment to grow past every inch line on the wooden ruler, and in doing so, to seize the brass ring.

  “Marcia,” she began, “I have been thinking for a while about creating a show that would air on one of those home channels like HGTV.”

  She paused, to gauge my reaction.

  “Go on,” I said, truly intrigued.

  “Well, we could call it Along the Flower Path, and in it, I would travel to different places in America, and interview famous people, maybe some of your celebrity friends if you think they would be willing . . .”

  She looked at me to see if I minded that she was including my friends. I didn’t.

  “And I would take the audience through their gardens, and talk about what is unique about each one. We could interview actors, artists, and potters, painters, and sculptors, and talk about their art. And maybe we would end every episode with a flower lesson . . .”

  I could tell that, though hopeful, she was a little bit embarrassed, waiting for me to tell her what a silly idea it was, or to question just who would want to see her, or to say that my friends would never do it. But I thought it was a brilliant idea. And I was so surprised, and so . . . proud, I guess, that she had imagined herself in this role.

  “Go on, Mom,” I encouraged.

  We began to discuss which of my friends might be willing to be interviewed.

  “Bette Midler, for sure,” we decided. Bette had planted lots of trees in various parks in New York, she was all about nature and beautifying the city, and I had supported her charity, New York Restoration Project, several times. She would be a great interview.

  “Camryn Manheim, definitely.” Camryn was my dearest friend, she is perhaps the most spectacular and accomplished person I have ever known, a dear and loyal friend and Mom and I both just loved her. She lived on the Venice Canals in California, and I agreed with Mom that it would be interesting to discuss which plants would grow in that environment.

  “Ellen Burstyn?” Mom asked.

  “Absolutely!” I said. Ellen lived on the Hudson River, and had once staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream in her lush Nyack garden. Ellen was one of the most interesting women I had ever met; she was my mentor, and a sort of godmother to my children. We remembered fondly the name day ceremony Ellen had created for Eulala. How spectacular that day had been! Ellen had gathered at least thirty of my friends and neighbors on the beach in Venice. While the waves crashed and the sun added warmth to our sweaters, we sat in a circle, with a painted box in the middle. Each person put a
treasure in the box, a button, a poem, a paperclip, or perhaps a marble, and then told the symbolic meaning of the object, which was also a wish for Eulala. Paperclip = practical. Marble = playful. Plastic sphere which changed shapes = curious, and so on. I reminded Mom that she had put in a willow branch, so that Eulala would be flexible, but also strong and unbreakable. Just like my mom. Ellen’s gift was the painted wooden box, so that Eulala would gather up all the love and wisdom from the people around her, and hold onto it forever. Yes, we agreed, Ellen would be an amazing interview!

  As we flew, we began to plant the seeds for her show. We talked structure and format and decided to make a rough pilot, to be shot in upstate New York on my Catskills lake. Mom wanted me to be the first interview, throwing pottery on my wheel.

  “You could throw a vase!” she exclaimed. “And then show the firing of the vase in your kiln, and then finally I would use the vase at the end of the episode for a flower arrangement!”

  “We should also do a calendar book, Mom. An arrangement for January, and then one for February, and so on.” We were on the merry-go-round, stretching, stretching, stretching, and it felt so good.

  I returned to my spacious seat and snuggled in with Thad and Eulala as the lights dimmed in first class, grateful that Thad was always so welcoming of my mom. Although many sitcoms make millions of dollars off of the “Take cover! Here comes the mother-in-law!” mentality, I have always hated it. Holding hands in the dark, I told Thad of her idea, and before I had even asked him, he said he would love to shoot it for us. Our seats slid down in tandem and we fell asleep dreaming of gardens and gondolas.