Mom prided herself on her particular methods. She practically gloated at the fact that she never spanked me. She preferred controlling my mind and my emotions. She honestly believed it was a genius approach and effective in ways that quick physical punishments weren’t. She thought she was really doing the best thing for me. Simply discussing things might have been a nice change of pace. Mom also found that instilling the fear of potential punishment proved effective. I never got the belt, but she often left a wooden spoon on the kitchen counter where I could easily see it. Every now and then she would pick it up and smack the palm of her hand with it so it made a loud cracking sound. Each time I went near the spoon, I offered to put it away for her.
“I put away for Mommy?”
“Nah, that’s OK. You can leave it out.”
It was never unclear as to who held the power in my house. As I got older I sometimes wished I had been hit in order to be done with it. But I knew Mom would never hit me—she knew it would be wrong, and it wasn’t in her nature to be violent. It could be in her nature to be nasty and hurtful and to emotionally unravel—but not to be physically violent. Mom would sooner come at me wielding a butter knife than a sharp one, dramatically crying about what I had done to her. I think Mom wanted to prove her prowess as an authority by manipulating my brain, not by hurting my body. She was creating and forming me and I was dutiful.
• • •
But back on set, filming was a lot of fun, but much to my dismay, Mom did not show any signs of quitting drinking. She treated the movie like a permission slip to drink. She drank and I played pinball all the time. We worked mostly in and around Santa Cruz and then went to various locations in Texas. We traveled to Corpus Christi and heard country music (my all-time favorite at the time), and I even got to ride the mechanical bull at Gilley’s Club in Houston.
This was a great couple of months and not a great movie. I can’t say I really cared. We had had another very different experience. I returned to school in January a very different student. It turned out that tutoring was immensely positive. Not only was I ahead of my class when I returned, but my study and organization skills had improved dramatically, too. Despite the fact that Mom’s drinking didn’t get any better while we were gone, and she showed the first signs of how truly volatile she could be, I’d had a good time and we both had a better taste in our mouths concerning filmmaking. Once home, I again tried to forget how difficult it could be when Mom drank. Every shift in location seemed to give me hope. Back then I didn’t know how irrational that sort of thinking was. I just craved what I felt was the safety net and avoidance tool a movie set was.
• • •
By the spring I had another movie offer. I was called in to meet Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, who was producing a movie called King of the Gypsies. The film was a family drama about present-day Gypsies in New York and the reluctant rise to power of the eldest son. I was playing Susan Sarandon and Judd Hirsch’s daughter. Shelley Winters and Sterling Hayden were my grandparents, and Eric Roberts played my brother. The director was Frank Pierson, who had written the Oscar-winning screenplay for Dog Day Afternoon. The movie shot in New York City and I had to film only during April and May of 1978. Because of the large cast, I had a very light shooting schedule and much less pressure than had I been the star. In hindsight, this was a good next step in my career. The cast was strong. It was a big Paramount production and had a reputable Italian producer at the helm.
I was a bit surprised that both Susan and I were cast as Gypsies because we both had very light coloring and sandy hair. She was completely lovely to me during this experience and I think she actually liked me. I was a bit older this time and clearly not the star. We were not isolated on a location together, and it was a totally different experience. We also never had a one-on-one scene together like the traumatic slapping incident during Pretty Baby.
It was rather cool to cast us as mother and daughter twice, because it almost seemed as if it were true. (The craziest thing is that now I would be too old to play her daughter. I’m not sure how I caught up, but now it almost looks like it.) Susan actually dyed her hair black for the film but Mom insisted on a Roux rinse for me. It was a temporary color that washed out. Every time I stood in the shower to wash my hair, the black dye would blanket the tub. I was glad not to have to dye my hair black, and I read later that Susan resented actually changing her hair color while I was allowed to use a temporary one.
I have to admit that her hair looked much more natural than mine did, and in hindsight, I feel her choice was the better one. Here again Mom made a choice that may have protected me personally but that compromised the integrity of the piece and my portrayal. It doesn’t feel right to blame her. It frustrates me, but can I really say I’m angry now because she wouldn’t let a production team do anything they wanted to my naturally highlighted blond-brown hair? It is interesting where she chose to draw the line, however. Consistency, except in drinking, was never one of my mother’s strong points.
Shelley Winters was also fair skinned and lighter haired. She was a piece of work to navigate. I am not sure she liked me too much, but I can’t say I liked her, either. We had only a few scenes together, so I knew I would survive. However, there was one scene in which my character was skateboarding through the hallways of the hospital as my grandfather lay dying in bed. I was supposed to be eating a sandwich that Shelley was going to rip out of my hand as I skated by. She insisted I eat ham on white Wonder Bread with ketchup. Who eats ham with ketchup?
I was the one who had to eat almost all of it, and Shelley was just supposed to take it from me and have a bite. I hated ham and ketchup. But I couldn’t complain because she was an Academy Award–winning actress. Take after take I ate that disgusting sandwich, not ever being told that I could spit it out once the director yelled cut. I had not learned many of the tricks, such as asking for a bucket near you to spit in once the camera had stopped rolling. I was getting sicker and sicker each take, but Miss Winters insisted that she could not act the scene unless it was a ham-and-ketchup sandwich on untoasted white bread. Slight flashback to Pretty Baby, but at least this time I was a moving target. I vowed never to do that to somebody else when I grew up. I never let on how sick I felt but passed on lunch that day.
Something dangerous and shocking happened while filming the final scene of the film. Eric Roberts’s character saves me from my fate in the family by kidnapping me and driving away with me in his car. A wild and violent car chase ensues.
It was very late at night and the rain had just stopped. Right before we shot the scene, the stunt coordinator told me it might be a good idea to buckle my seat belt. Before Standards and Practices insisted that for legal reasons seat belts had to be shown fastened, we shot scenes unbuckled all the time. I found this recommendation from the stunt guy a bit strange but followed his advice.
We planned on driving and filming continuously down one long road. There was really no place set up for people to watch, so only the very necessary people were involved in the filming of this sequence. It was just the director, cameraman, Eric, and me in the car. The director was crouched down in the backseat to listen to the scene. The chase began and we accelerated to eighty miles per hour—easily—in just a few seconds as the other car began to gain on us and drift over to the passenger side. I have no idea if it was planned, but all of a sudden Eric wrenched the wheel to the right and slammed our car into a car speeding next to us. This happened repeatedly and on both sides of the cars. He began smashing into whatever side was closest to him. We smashed into the other car so hard each time that my side of the car dented in on me and I was bruised and terrified. We suddenly came to a halt, and our vehicle was so destroyed that the director’s door was bent shut, and to free him they needed to radio for a Jaws of Life. I was shaking and crying and begged the director not to have to do the shot over again. Well, we couldn’t even if he had wanted a second take because we had
only these two cars.
I was shocked and scared that it had happened because up until then I assumed I’d always be safe on a movie set. Eric was not a stuntman and was not supposed to have done this stunt entirely on his own. We could all have been killed, and I was hurt that it had been allowed to be so real.
Today that would have caused quite a stir and legal actions would be taken, but they all just thought the scene was amazing. Because Mom couldn’t watch the scene from anywhere, I think she must have been either back at base camp or at a bar. When I told her what had happened, I am sure she must have gotten upset, but I don’t remember if she spoke up or not. This was very different from the way she acted during Pretty Baby. She must have been drinking much more during this movie to have let this incident slide. I am surprised that she did not make a big deal out of something that had resulted in a much more dangerous situation than long workdays or cracked feet.
Mom sometimes had small roles in my movies. In King of the Gypsies Mom played a hooker who leaves a party on Eric Roberts’s arm. They stumble out of the building and stagger arm in arm down the dark street. Mom had to get drunk before she could do it. She never seemed to do anything pressured or important without drinking first. I remember thinking that Mom would have probably dated Eric. She was that sexy, boozy blond who flirted. She had a sharp wit and a provocative vocabulary. There seemed to be some guy on every set who had a crush on my mom and ended up asking her out. She managed to keep the details from me, and I never saw her be overtly romantic with anybody. I imagine she met people from the crew later after I was asleep. I hated anybody she had a crush on and she knew it.
The crash scene was one of my last on the film and I wrapped earlier than most. Soon the rest of the film was complete. We had a big wrap party at Regine’s on Park Avenue. But something even more exciting was about to happen—within days we were on our way to the Cannes Film Festival. It was to be my first trip to France.
• • •
Pretty Baby premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and received the Palme d’Or. The film created a frenzy at Cannes. One that would scar me for life. The press both ripped us apart and could not get enough of the controversial nature of the movie. Certain members of the press called it pornography. I was being called the next Lolita. The very thing that Louis wanted to avoid was rearing its ugly head.
I was shocked and overwhelmed at people’s reaction to me. The fans and press went insane. During the premiere of the film—before it won the award—the crowd was so big and disorderly that I was almost trampled. I was walking in flanked by my mother; her “companion,” Bob; and some guards. Mom was holding on tightly to my arm as we pushed through the immense crowd. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a hand and a glimmer of metal. A fan had reached out to me and grabbed a clump of my hair and was just about to cut it off with a pair of scissors. Bob karate-chopped the arm away and I escaped. In trying to block more people from actually gripping on to me to touch me and get some kind of piece of me, Bob had to stretch his arms around me like a dome. As he did this, the buttons on his tuxedo shirt all popped off. He had only the one at the top and the one at the bottom remaining. We eventually got inside the theatre, and Mom used her eyebrow pencil to draw black dots on the buttonholes where the buttons would have been. Poor Bob had to suck in his belly as far as he could and maintain perfect posture the entire evening in order not to have his hairy chest exposed. We would eventually laugh at this but it would take me twenty years to even consider returning to the Cannes Film Festival.
The frenzy surrounding Pretty Baby in Europe would never be matched in America. Europeans savored the controversy and what they saw as the titillating aura surrounding the film. Most American audiences and critics recognized the film’s artistic merits, but they still trashed it. It was called pornography, especially by people who hadn’t even seen the film. I was labeled a nymphet whose mother pushed her into inappropriate situations. Canada banned the film. It was fascinating—some of the media were disappointed that I was not more of a Lolita, while others thought the character too provocative and highly inappropriate.
I was shielded from much of the controversy, but I remember being appalled that most people did not see the film’s merits. Smart art and film journalists appreciated the film’s artistic value, but the controversy meant I had been thrust into a type of cinema purgatory.
I never read any of the reviews of my work, and my mother wanted to keep it that way. If I hinted that I had heard negative comments from the press during interviews, my mom’s response was “Fuck ’em if they can’t handle it. Are you proud of what you did?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then fuck ’em. That’s all you need to think about.”
Mom kept every single article written about me, my entire life. She had the originals and the duplicates and had them stored in hundreds of banker’s boxes. It was not until over twenty years later, as I was writing my first book, Down Came the Rain, and cleaning out my storage, that I came upon the enormous collection of reviews. I began reading them and was quickly shocked and immensely hurt. I could not believe the vile way that people wrote about my mother and me. The amount of vitriol directed at us both was devastating. My talent was skewered and my mother’s character harshly attacked. I felt relieved that I had not been privy to any of these reviews as a child. I am not sure I would have been able to handle it.
Mom had kept me in a glass case. At first I was content there. It was almost like I was Rapunzel in an enclosed tower, and just as in the fairy tale I was safe, pure, and kept away, at least in my mother’s eyes.
Back then, people noticed how naïve I was about everything and found even more to criticize as a result. The press kept asking and speculating about how my mother could allow me to play such provocative parts while keeping me so sheltered. Sometimes even during press events she could be loud or slightly disruptive if she was drinking (which she usually was). And although she was often correct in her judgments on people or situations, she handled almost everything inappropriately. She thought she was the only one in the world who knew better when it came to her daughter. Only she could guide me and give me advice, and anybody who crossed her, in any way, would get written off or not-so-subtly verbally attacked.
In reality, I know Mom was just trying to protect me, but in the long run, she may have gone too far. You can’t protect your kids so much that they have no emotional antibodies. She tried to continue to strap me to her chest my entire life. She was undeterred, and as a result many people thought the worst of her. People either decided Mom was the enemy or they appreciated her courage and her ferocity when it came to protecting her daughter.
• • •
Thankfully, the negative press did not hinder my chances of working. I did not know how bad and personal the press actually was. I just wanted to keep doing what I was doing. We needed money, of course, and I really loved making movies.
The offers continued to come in, and we now welcomed them all. We began talks with Peter Fonda about a western called Wanda Nevada. The movie would take place in Arizona and would star and be directed by Peter Fonda. I played a girl who gets won in a poker game by Peter and travels with him through the Grand Canyon in search of gold. I had to know how to ride horses and be willing to withstand the extreme temperatures of Arizona in August. I told my mom I wanted to do this movie because it was funny and it would be fun living in the Grand Canyon and the remote area of Page, Arizona, that housed the amazing man-made Lake Powell. It sounded like a great way to spend a summer.
We left hot New York City for an even hotter Arizona. We began the trip in a raft on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. Because it was summer, I had no teacher or homework. The film schedule was limited because of daylight. We spent more time traveling than we did working. It was like a vacation. There were rides through rapids and campfires and singing and ghost stories. We filmed scenes all along the river, then woul
d pack up, put life vests on, and raft down farther to camp out for the night. We climbed rocks and swam in calm sections and I had a blast. These trips often have steaks and lobsters and other delicacies included in the package. We were feeding a reduced yet still large crew and were traveling with four huge rafts.
At one point, we hit rapids so big that the boat with all the food supplies capsized and we lost all our fancier meals. The raft carrying the craft-service items remained upright, and we were forced to eat peanut butter and jelly, tuna salad, and junk food for the whole trip. Did I mention it felt like a vacation? I didn’t mind one bit. Mom was drinking throughout the trip and many of the crew members were smoking weed and doing various drugs, even though I didn’t realize the drug part at the time.
I did not mind Mom’s drinking as much here in the canyon because we were all so happy and I felt so protected by this close-knit crew. She couldn’t really get into any trouble. Morning came before sunrise and bedtime not long after dark. We were all on the same schedule, and even though Mom drank, she seemed happier and kinder to me. I don’t remember her being flirty to any crew member or nasty to me at all, so for these ten days, for a change, her drinking was the least important part of the experience.
Every night we all placed our sleeping bags under the stars and settled in. The script supervisor would tickle my back until I fell asleep. Filming in the canyon concluded and we made it to the location for our departure out.
We were met by a pack of twenty or so mules that were to take us out of the canyon and up to the ridge. We loaded up the mules with camera equipment and people and headed out. I was up toward the front of the line near Peter and the cinematographer. It was incredibly exciting, and it was on this movie that I found my real love of moviemaking. It was here that I decided I loved being a gypsy and I loved living different lives and lifestyles.
There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me Page 11