As we flew from the Atlantic Ocean to the Adriatic Sea, it was like turning a page on a whole new chapter in an enchanted fairy tale. Venice was everything that the storybooks had promised. We stepped off the plane at the Marco Polo airport and onto a gleaming mahogany boat. Someone handed us a glass of Prosecco. It tasted bouncy and tickled my tongue. Never one to stint on a good glass of bubbly, I was ready for a refill before we even left the port. Mom clutched her bag with the flower books in one hand, the sparkling wine in the other, I clutched Eulala with one arm and of course the crystal glass with the other, and Thaddaeus took film of the magical ride through the glistening canals as we glided under stone bridges and made our way to our very fancy hotel. Eulala snuck a sip of my fizzy Prosecco when I pretended not to be looking. And why not? When in Rome . . . er, Venice. Cathedral bells chimed, an accordion played somewhere in the distance, and a handsome young tenor’s beautiful voice rose to the high notes of an aria and drifted off of St. Mark’s Square, floating through the air, right into our boat. We looked at each other in amazement, giddy with smiles and dizzy with our good fortune. La dolce vita! La dolce vita! Grazie per la dolce vita!
Over the next few days I did press, and while I squeezed into my navy blue Chanel dress or cashmere sweater with the Lee Krasner scarf in my hair, Mom squeezed into her own supply of designer dresses on loan from my stylist and accompanied me. We kept saying to each other “Just pinch me!” as we floated through the water streets. On breaks we went to the Doge’s Palace, and St. Mark’s Basilica. We ate thin-crust pizza with Eulala, drank champagne and ate caviar. We took a gondola ride and flirted with the handsome gondoliers. We took a tour to the three famous islands in the Venetian Lagoon, Murano, Burano, and Torcello, to see the glass blowing and lace making. We both bought swirling glass vases for future flower arrangements.
“Oh, I’ll never forget this, Marcia. This is all just incredible. I’ve heard about Venetian glass for years, and I’ve always wanted to see this. And here I am.”
One afternoon while I did press, Mom and Eulala joined Stephanie Seymour and her husband, producer Peter Brant, for a swim at their hotel on a private Venetian island.
“OHMYGODMOM you are swimming with probably the most famous Victoria’s Secret model ever!”
“Well, I didn’t know that,” she said, “but just pinch me!”
Stephanie Seymour had had a small role in the film, and she crushed every stereotype of “shallow model” into the dust. She was smart, talented, funny, gracious, generous, a great mom, and of course, gorgeous. Somehow, she managed to make Eulala and my mom feel right at home while swimming in a Venetian palatial hotel. Go figure!
Part of our press tour was to go to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Peggy had taken on Jackson Pollock as a protégé in his early career, and she had helped usher him into the ranks of the avant-garde. To visit her museum and view a Pollock painting there was icing on the cake. Stepping back into the immaculate boat, accepting a proffered glass of ice-cold sparkling wine, I said, “This is work, Mom. This is what I actually have to do, for work. Just pinch me.”
Later that year I won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress for Pollock. It was a big deal. A really big deal. The New York critics were hugely respected, and I had just won entrance into a very elite group.
More fittings, more hair and makeup sessions, more press. I have always loved “free” anything, probably a hangover from my waitress days, and I was thrilled at all the free gift bags from various events that I could now share with my brother and sisters, nephews and nieces, and Mom. I took it all in stride. It seemed to be happening around me, not really to me. I felt like the same person inside, with the same scars from my middle school unibrow, and from being displaced in so many different schools because of my dad’s navy assignments, always being outside the “in” circle. Here I was now in the “in” circle, but still feeling like an outsider. I don’t think I changed much at all with the onset of fame, but the people around me seemed to change their view of me.
Mom, however, remained steadfast. She had always thought of all of her children as stars, and whenever any one of us got mentioned in any way, for any glory, she shared it with her garden club. The garden club was like her news pipeline; they began collecting articles just in case she hadn’t seen them, and they often knew the lineup of what different television channels were showing my interviews, even before I did.
As the year came to an end, there began to be a buzz around the film that it would be nominated for an Oscar. I knew nothing about Oscars, which was odd considering that acting was my profession, but you would be surprised at all the actors who don’t watch television, or haven’t been to the movies in years, or know nothing about campaigning for the awards shows or Oscars, or even that they need to campaign.We gathered at my mom’s for Christmas that year, and my oldest sister, Leslie, gave me a green Oscar the Grouch puppet from Sesame Street just in case I wasn’t nominated; she didn’t want me to be too disappointed. I said I probably wouldn’t be nominated, and I explained to everyone what I was just learning from my new publicist Carri McClure. “Oscars are a mysterious business,” I began. “I will have to go to lots of events, shake hands with lots of people, and make appearances. Pollock is a small film, but we have a chance to be nominated because Ed Harris is a legend, and the movie is good. I’m not super-famous and the odds are against me, plus there are a lot of good films in the making this year, but, fingers crossed, at least Ed will be nominated, and if so, I will get to attend.” Carrie thinks I have a shot, though. Just pinch me, indeed!
Over the next few days I forgot all about awards season as I caught up with family, enjoying the excesses of Christmas at my mother’s. Shopping, wrapping, divinity, fudge, popcorn garlands made with cranberries, spiked eggnog—we did it all. If you could have ripped a page out of a Norman Rockwell book, and added some Dickensian description to the picture, you would have my mother’s ideal—idea—of Christmas at her house. Idea because in reality, lurking in the corner of any family gathering are the ghosts of childhood past just waiting to reappear, and when they do, an argument usually ensues. Christmas is stressful, let’s face it! But the idea, the ideal, is what we always shoot for. It’s what we come back to year after year. It is the torch we pass down to our kids, and the ideal is what they will mimic and prepare for their children’s Christmases, with hopefully improvements of their own.
We pursued the ideal. The Christmas tree was always live (no plastic for us!) and fully adorned with cherished ornaments that had been handed down over the years. We hauled the labeled boxes into the living room, lit the fire, put the Christmas’s Greatest Hits album on the stereo, and as Bing Crosby crooned about a “White Christmaaass,” we made the hot cocoa and began decorating. There were boxes of lights, there were boxes with antique bulbs my mom had inherited from her mother, there were boxes of childlike homemade ornaments and precious delicate ornaments from our many travels. That year Mom hung a red blown-glass ornament with a green swirl inside, purchased several months earlier in Venice. Next to this I hung the walnut ornament with an angel kneeling at a crèche that my paternal grandmother had made me when I was a girl in Japan. Just above that I hung the ceramic angel ornament that had been made by my maternal grandmother that same year. Mine was red with gold trim, and they were given a prominent position on the tree. We adorned the outermost branches with silver tinsel icicles that glistened and swished as the kids ran by, or the cat batted at a swinging birdhouse ornament that had been hung just a little bit too low. And just as she had done when we were kids, Mom waited until nighttime when all the youngsters were asleep to rearrange the balls that little hands had hung on the absolute tip of the branches, being the easiest to decorate but causing the upward reaching arms to droop solemnly toward the carpet. She burrowed deep into the green, evening out colors, her hands sap sticky, pushing sparkling lights and golden balls close to the trunk to “draw the eye in.”
Mom and I
picked back up on our calendar book idea, chatting in the kitchen as she made a beautiful holiday wreath.
She began: “Of course in December we will use pine and red roses, white chrysanthemum and poinsettia, and arrange them into a holiday display.”
I took notes. “Great idea, Mom. And you can also show people how to use the cut-off branches from the Christmas tree for their mantle,” I said, “and do just what you are doing right now! Make a wreath, and show how you wind the holly and snow bells into the circle and fasten it with a big red velvet bow.”
She smiled coyly at me. “I suppose I should also show them how to make the mistletoe ball, just in case there is some unexpected kissing that needs to go on.”
There was always mistletoe hung in a doorframe for the unexpected kiss . . . if it could really be called unexpected when a child hung out under that same said doorframe for half an hour, just hoping someone would notice, and try to kiss them!
The weeks of shopping and wrapping and fudge making always ended with a Christmas Eve talent show.
We had two Christmas Eve traditions: One, Mom had started for purely practical reasons. It was the giving of one present on Christmas Eve. Since we always knew that this one present was pajamas, we ultimately got to pick out another present, so we could at least get one surprise. I loved the pajamas best, though. We were all wearing something vaguely matching and new and warm, and we were unified in our costume of sleep together. Mom started it when we lived in Japan so that we would all look cute in our Christmas photos the following morning. There is one Christmas in particular that stands out in my mind. I call it the Candy Cane Nightie Christmas, because my youngest sister Stephanie and I were both given matching flannel red-and-white candy cane nighties—I was ten, she was six—tied with a red satin bow at the bust.
That leads me to our second tradition, the Christmas Eve talent show. Rehearsals! Costumes! Programs! Popcorn! Lights out . . . and . . . lights up . . . Action! Our chosen MC announced each performance: flute playing from Leslie, guitar from both Leslie and Sheryl, a karate demonstration from Mark, and The Nutcracker Suite in matching candy cane nightgowns from Stephanie and me. I had been taking ballet classes with a local Japanese group, and I felt quite proud of the number I had choreographed to the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.” The family sat on the couch, and applauded as we deeply curtsied, and then the MC announced the big finale, a reading of ’ Twas the Night Before Christmas, by Mom.
Our talent show in the year 2000 was a real doozy! The house was full of children and parents and almost everyone performed! It was fantastic, it was the talent show that never ended! Rehearsals, popcorn, lights out—lights up! Action! I of course performed my Japanese standby “Omme omme fudee fudee,” dancing the rice dance with aplomb. There was harmonica, singing, dancing, comedy routines, karate demonstrations, Christmas carols, and an unintentionally funny reenactment of the ’ Twas the Night Before Christmas by the kids . . . we had already started cracking up by the time “not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse” was read. The Academy Award goes to . . . the mouse! The night ended with us gathered around the piano as my nephew Andrew serenaded us with classical music, Mom rocking in her red velvet–covered rocking chair.
This was the beginning of a new century, and it felt so good to be gathered in unity. We were indeed a Rockwellian-Dickensian group, creating an ideal communion of family. In truth, it is a very similar ideal that I have passed down to my own children, complete with labeled boxes and talent shows, an all-guests-welcome policy, and Christmas Eve “surprise” pajamas that are an expected tradition.
Thad, Eulala, and I left Texas and returned to our frozen lake in the New York Catskills to welcome in 2001. We lit fireworks over the ice, then bundled up in gloves and down jackets, and skated under the moonlight in a circling path, shouting kooooo iiiii and listening to it echo off the lake. Glorious last night of the old year! Glorious first dawn of the new! No matter what would unfold in the months ahead, we were grateful for what we had in that moment, under those stars.
February 13, 2001. I woke up in a hotel room in Denver, ordered coffee, and waited for my glam team and Carri to arrive so I could go do more press for Pollock, which was coming out on limited release. I had no idea that they had announced the Oscar nominees that morning. I didn’t even know that that was a thing they did! I don’t know how I thought it was done, and it never occurred to me that however it was done, it was done at the crack of dawn on national television in Los Angeles. No one told me, nobody warned me, and suddenly both my cell phone and the hotel phone started ringing off the wall. Publicist. Agents. Managers. Lawyers. Family. Friends. In one minute I had racked up fifty-two missed calls. My heart was pounding through my nightie, and I was having a hard time catching my breath, and an even harder time wiping the shit-eating grin off my face. I had never in my life experienced this level of excitement and sudden attention. I quickly learned that both Ed and I had been nominated. Unbelievable! Both of us! Me too! At some point the coffee arrived from room service, and in tears I blurted out to the waitress: “I don’t have anybody to hug, but I used to be a waitress too and I just got nominated for an Academy Award and Oh My God I can’t breathe and . . . and . . . and . . .”
She cut me off with, “Well, let’s have a hug, then!” and we stood there hugging and bouncing up and down while the phones rang, celebrating the unexpected high of the possibility of someone coming from waitress world, to land in this moment.
It’s odd how circumstances play out. In the script of my life, I would never have written that I would be alone on such a momentous day. I would never have written me, ignorant of the proceedings, groggy, while waiting for coffee in a nondescript hotel room. Instead I would have written me nervous, watching with my family and friends in Los Angeles, all cuddled up on the couch in Venice Beach, waiting impatiently and with baited breath as the nominees were announced on the living room TV.
But all I had that morning was the waitress in that hotel room, and it was a divine reminder of my steadfast journey. It was a reminder of my mother first pushing me to audition for a Little Theatre play in Alexandria, Virginia. It was a reminder of all the tables I had waited, and all the actor/waiters who had covered my shifts so that I could run down to Times Square and audition. It was a reminder of my schooling in NYC, of my teacher Ron Van Lieu, of my mother hauling boxes to help me move into the West Village. The waitress looked me in the eye and said, “Congratulations. Breakfast is on the house. You deserve it.”
There was that word again. “Deserve.” When she left, I actually sank to my knees to thank God and spent a moment in a prayer of gratitude. The phone continued to ring, but I ignored it. Sometimes, you just have to stop and be in the moment, and this was one of those times.
When the bustle settled down, I called Mom. She had just gotten a call from someone in her garden club, so she was already bubbling over with excitement.
“Congratulations, Marcia Gay! Hold on, here’s your dad!” They put me on speaker.
“Bravo!” said Dad. FANFUCKINGTASTIC! Bravo!”
“OH MY GOSH!” I screamed. “PACK THE SAMSONITE! YOU AND DAD ARE COMING TO THE OSCARS!”
Over the next few weeks, Dad tried to design my dress. Unbelievable. Navy captain turned designer. He wanted me to wear a champagne pink color, soft and gauzy, and off the shoulders. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, and it made me smile—but also, a little bit irritated—that he was trying to commandeer my dress.
“Well, Goddamnit, I want you to look elegant!” he said on the phone one day.
I didn’t feel skinny enough to wear champagne pink. At a size 8, I felt fat.
“I will look elegant, Dad! Trust me!” I said, clutching my stomach roll, and then I burst into tears.
My stylist Jessica Paster was there that day, pacing around deftly with her wild brown ringlets and her loud Valley-girl-accent-meets-New York attitude, and she took over the phone call. With the finesse of a woman who had dealt w
ith many an insecure actress before, she shushed me as she complimented my dad on his ideas about a champagne pink dress. I was aghast. Was she actually going to put me in that color? Then she smiled at me and, in so many words, she told him to leave it to her. She assured him that I would look elegant, and then asked him, “Do you approve of cleavage, Captain?” He stuttered out a “Hell, yes!” and she smacked the phone back into my hand. He may have actually met his match.
I wanted him to wear his Navy Dress Whites, with his medals, but he said he couldn’t fit into them anymore. “Too Goddamn fat!” he said.
“Now you know how it feels!” I retorted. I told him to order a new size, cummerbund and all. I would pay for it. Mom, however, needn’t worry, she too was to be taken care of by Jessica.
The famous Hollywood designer Randolph Duke and Jessica designed a sleek old-Hollywood–style scarlet dress with a long matching scarlet wrap for over my shoulders. It was a shoulderless gown, and true to her word, there was plenty of cleavage showing just above a long low curve. I had spent many long hours at the gym with my jovial but take-no-prisoners trainer Brian Gorski and was now a size 6. The waist snugly tapered in, then the dress crawled down my hips, and opened up into a long fishtail train. It was magnificent.
As the big day rolled closer, we met with the seamstress for our final fitting at a little shop on La Cienega Boulevard. The small room was crowded with bodies. There was the seamstress and her assistant, Randolph Duke and his assistant, Jessica Paster and her two assistants, my mother, my manager, and my publicist. There were also two burly VIP security guards from Harry Winston jewelers, and one equally burly security guard from Neil Lane jewelers, who between them had about ten million dollars’ worth of diamonds in that tiny little sewing room.
It was time to choose the bling!
I was told that I could have up to $500,000 worth of jewels for the Oscars, and would then be able to travel with no bodyguard. If I went over that amount, I had to have a bodyguard for the evening.
The Seasons of My Mother Page 17