This business of rewriting the truth, of creating the reality we desired, is of course at the bottom of every thing. I think I was interested in Hollywood so early because I knew that every day of my life I was doing what they were doing every day of their lives up there on the screen. “Acting”—we were all acting. Only the movie actors knew how to do it best. Acting in relationships, acting within families, acting in jobs. It seemed to me that we were all acting out our lives according to what was in our own best interests. I know I learned very early to act my life according to how much in or out of control I was in any given situation. If I wanted something from my father, I would put my little feet together pigeon-toe style, tilt my head, and smile. I got what I wanted every time. If I wanted a boyfriend, I’d charm then withdraw, or even use my vulnerability to seem helpless and needy so that he could define a role for himself in our relationship. I acted my life very often according to my need to be loved. Not so different from how Hollywood works.
In my particular family, we were very aware, very early, that we needed to learn how to act in order to get attention. After all, Mother was a teacher of dramatics and a reader of poetry and an actress herself in little-theater work. And Dad was a musician, a teacher, and an actor of supremely high standing in the living room. They both had personalities like very subtle vaudevillians; therefore, finding out “how it was done” became a high priority very early in our lives. How else could we compete with them for attention?
That must be true of every child, basically. But I think Hollywood’s luminaries begin to practice the art of being loved at a very young age. I can’t say that I wasn’t loved as a child—not at all. I remember feeling temperamental, though, and ignored. I used to scream and yell and bite the back of my hand until it bled before I could get a rise out of my mother. She existed in her own world of forbearance, exuding patience and tolerance almost to the point of paralysis, it seemed. She was Canadian and not at all demonstrative with her feelings. So as I erupted from time to time in order to arouse her passion, I saw that it required ever increasing levels of drama on my part to elicit a response. This was frustrating, to say the least, until finally she quietly consulted the pediatrician, who simply recommended she turn the hose on me to calm me down. I never felt any of her come through that water though. Of course, I wanted a demonstration of love, but I would have settled for some passionate anger from her, or hysterical frustration; even sadism would have sent a tidbit of emotional spontaneity traveling through those harsh droplets of water. But there was nothing, just a forceful spray that was sometimes cold, but not much else. Just the advice from the doctor once removed.
My dad internalized most of his tumultuous emotions and suppressed them with liquor. There were some dramas with him though. Every now and then he’d come home drunk, set something on fire, leave again until the wee hours, then return and sleep till noon. But at least he was more broad stroked in his emotions. I knew what he was feeling. He’d curse at the communists and bemoan the “niggers” who ruined his lawn and often I’d see him reduced to tears in front of the television set at two o’clock in the morning while they played “The Star-spangled Banner.”
But for the most part, my childhood was painfully regular (which is to say, probably dysfunctional), a breeding ground for the emotional terrain of show business.
People in Hollywood understand that the need to be loved and to have attention paid is fundamental in their lives. We have not put these childish demands aside and “grown up.” Instead we’ve made a business out of it. A business and an art. What an impossible combination. We have forever banished ourselves from being regular. Regular people decided to grow up, or they found a safe place, like a corporation, where they still had an external structure, a mother and a father, so to some extent they never had to grow up. In either case, they became “civilians.” We reflections of the silver screen remained in the ranks of those who are emotionally needy, forever dedicated to getting attention, to being loved however and whenever we desire. We make “pretend” real and have from the beginning.
In my case I pretended that I was Rita H ay worth. God how I loved her long red, wavy hair, and her dancing, and her tempestuous ways. I had long, wavy red hair like she did. And I was a dancer too. It wasn’t such a stretch. I wanted to be alluring and vulnerable like Rita, because even though she could be difficult and was sometimes battered and bruised, she ended up being loved.
I adored Eleanor Powell’s tap dancing because my father said she was the best at it. And if I learned to whirl and tap dance too, then he would love me.
I loved Fred Astaire because he could do anything with props and I was forever juggling something when I played.
All of these stars accomplished what I longed to do. And somehow, way back then, I knew there was a science to it, a well-schooled glorification of oneself—playing in the right light, having beautifully coiffed hair, teeth that sparkled, and shoes that clicked on the pavement. The science of perfection. The gods and goddesses were perfect even in their dishevelment. They were perfect in their anguish. They were perfect in their reactions to their traumas. It wasn’t like my life, which was okay and pleasant enough, but was somehow only lived and not observed and celebrated.
So, when I first came to Hollywood, still in my teens, and shook hands with my beloved Clark Gable, and noticed that the cuffs on his shirts were frayed; or when I turned around to meet my idol, Alan Ladd, and had to lower my eyes two feet in order to see his face because he was so short; or when I met my favorite, Doris Day, and saw that her eyes were really too close together and her freckles were more prominent than the ones I hated on my own face, I began to realize that the queens and kings of my illusions were only people just like me.
I had sat mesmerized by these people for so many years. That they were actually human beings was a swift shock to my system, almost beyond my comprehension.
In the absence of spontaneously expressed feelings in our family home, I had erected fantasy perfection for my idols. They were not supposed to be regular. They were not supposed to feel, or hurt, or cry—not for real. They were perfect. So the expectations I had visited upon them were not fair. Also I came to see that they suffered from Hollywood’s most common psychological sickness … undeservability. We devote our lives and energy to being noticed and then suffer from feeling we don’t deserve it because we believe we can’t truly deliver what is expected of us.
I remember the environment of being a new star in Hollywood, full of my own anxieties about undeserved attention. I had devoted my life and energy to being noticed, only to find that I was afraid I wouldn’t live up to what was expected of me. I didn’t want to be served, so much. I didn’t want the assistants to bring me lunch or the wardrobe girls to shop for me. I was not comfortable that the state of my well-being attracted so much attention. Whether that was because I had come from the world of ballet, where everything was a private institutionalized struggle, or whether it was because I had worked so long on Broadway, where sweat and discipline were rewarded more by direct praise than by attention and pampering, or whether it was because I, personally, insisted on remaining free from being enclosed in a prison of privilege, I didn’t feel like being singled out and put on a pedestal. The height was too rarefied for breathing, the fall, when it came, too far. But as everything in our lives relates to childhood conditioning, I think I found myself in a position of finally garnering attention, and as my mother cast a weary but demanding look in my direction, I found that I feared I had wasted her time with my insistent temperament. I was afraid I basically had nothing to say.
I remember the class distinctions of the old days. On a set the makeup people, the hair people, the costume people stayed to themselves and rarely associated with “star” people. I was continually crossing over those lines, usually to be admonished by a production manager or an assistant director who, for some reason, didn’t like it. So I’d go back to my trailer confused. I needed to ask inhabitants of the real-peo
ple world about their lives. The real people were the ones I identified with. The stars were idols who possessed secrets of perfection I knew nothing about.
And I didn’t like it when the real people fell silent at a producer’s approach. Early on I perceived a subtle fear in their faces, a kind of blank-eyed expression of concern that the higher-ups, “above the line”—the director, writers, actors—might not be happy with something. It was the kind of subtle fear I had as an unrecognized child. The better part of valor would be to have no opinion rather than risk disagreement, because disagreement meant time, and time was money, and it was therefore all so wearisome. So unless a real person was willing to go to the mat and be fired out of principle, those production people usually swallowed their differences and “went along.” That didn’t mean they refrained from airing their feelings among themselves. Sometimes I overheard what they really thought of me or others, only to have to deal with their hypocrisy later on. A set at any given time could be so golden-threaded in its web of subtle deceit that Pinocchio would have felt right at home. But their personal service to a star was out of the fabled French courts, and most of the time I think they meant it. Of course they were expected to serve us, but they genuinely seemed to love and enjoy us lords and ladies of the silver screen. I, in the meantime, felt caught in the conflict between being real and being reel.
The real people could often be quite insistent about what they thought we should look like. Sometimes I felt they were changing my face, my hair, the contours of my body, just because they needed to pull a power trip. If I refused a suggestion, they’d say “fine”—and sigh with deep distaste. They’d then go to the above-the-line “reel” people and protest, with discretion of course, that I had no concept of what was right for the screen.
That was when my survival instincts surfaced. It didn’t matter to me what either set of jokers thought. I was going to do it my way. I became aware early on that rebellion and refusal were good attributes. Otherwise, I’d get lost in the conflict of other people’s perception of me. The muddled hierarchy of the gods and goddesses, of the people above and below the line, and just the whole business of contrived fantasy made me restless and impatient.
It was a very difficult experience to come from the staccato-paced, hardworking world of ballet and Broad way to the elongated time frame of a Hollywood set, with all its waiting around while your every need—emotional, cosmetic, physical, or even sexual—was attended to in detail. I was taught to come prepared completely. I was a disciplined personality because of my background. My dancing/ballet days informed my value system.
For example, the first day of my first film, The Trouble with Harry, for Hitchcock, I had learned the entire script. My lines and everyone else’s. I didn’t realize that wasn’t necessary. When the soundman asked me how far I wanted to go in the first scene, I said, “All of it.” He proceeded to lay out fifteen pages of script around his sound equipment. They made a lot of noise.
Hitch walked on the set and just laughed. He was used to filming a few lines at a time. I was schooled to be ready for anything and everything.
Therefore, I can see today with so much more clarity why some young stars who make it quickly, without having any previous training relating to personal discipline and struggle, find themselves behaving with temperamental arrogance born out of self-loathing because they are paid more tribute than they feel they’re worth.
We feel we’re commissioned with the task of being the expressers and caretakers and emulators of human emotions when we’re not even sure of what we ourselves feel. We try to identify with characters we would like to be because we’re not sure of who we are, or we play characters we’re glad we’ve escaped from being, and in the end we’ve turned ourselves inside out in our subservience to what Rodgers and Hammerstein called the “Big, Black Giant.” We know that our very souls are being judged by that collective, unseen, observing power in the darkness out there. That silent dark giant plagues our nights and shadows our days as we go through the trials of satisfying its hunger, its needs, its desires, and its prurient interests.
That Big, Black Giant is our lord and master and we never know how it will react. It is the parent from whom we never received approval. It is the jury we will testify before for the rest of our days.
We’re desperate to be noticed by them, we hunger to be acknowledged by them, yet the more they notice us, the more we feel invaded. The more we’re acknowledged, the less we feel we deserve it. The more we’re loved, the harder it is for us to accept it. The more they trust us, the more we distrust ourselves. This dance between those of us who create movies and those whom we long to please becomes a mirroring. We are them. They are us. They see themselves in us. We try to become what we see in them, until the mirroring of our common emotions becomes clear. Our secrets are exposed and we are One. The collective parent and the needy child continue the dance together.
Perhaps because I don’t want to dwell on the pain, the memories of my Hollywood come as quick and intensely flashed pictures in my brain, like a Braverman documentary telling the story of forty years in ten seconds. The DeMille gate at Paramount, the Tudor style buildings that housed the makeup and hairdressing departments, where early morning confidences were kept under wraps as we secretly quelled our fears before the nine o’clock ready-on-the-set deadline. My darling Frank Westmore, my makeup man for so many years, used to wrestle me into the chair because, out of a flippant anxiety, I couldn’t sit still. He said he’d make me look great because he’d learned everything he knew from making up a monkey’s ass. I never let him have more than twenty minutes to do his job well. I just couldn’t sit still. I still can’t. And although I knew it was important to stay in my key light on the set, I didn’t really care that much. What a delightful unconcern when you’re young. With age you are careful where you sit in a restaurant!
Frank Westmore used to tell me that would happen. Then he’d say, “Just keep movin’, baby, they’ll never notice what you look like.”
Now, as I think about Frank, I’ll never forgive myself for not taking more time to visit him in the hospital when he had his first heart attack during our location shoot for My Geisha in Japan. Should I have demanded time off to fulfill a humane obligation even though it would cost the production thousands of dollars to wait for me? It’s a dilemma I never solved in all my years in the movie business. I was schooled to be a professional regardless of what tragedy might occur. Even when my mother and father died, I worked straight through the feelings. I couldn’t bear to hold up production. It wouldn’t have been disciplined. It would have been indulgent, self-centered…. Was that really it, or did I not feel deserving of such acknowledged sorrow? Or again, did I use the work ethic to avoid the sorrow I felt?
The day my dad died I was scheduled to do thirty-five satellite interviews on television for a new movie. I flew back to Virginia to be with Mother, stayed six hours, and flew home to California.
The next day I fulfilled an obligation to conduct a seminar on metaphysics. I remember how I stopped and asked myself if I was doing the right thing.
I could hear my dad say, “Of course you are, monkey.” I remembered how impressed he had been to hear that Mary Martin went on in South Pacific even though her father had died that day.
“The show must go on,” he said to me that day. I wondered why he said that.
Now I understood that my success was vital to him because he had wanted show business for himself, but really didn’t have the courage to pursue it. He said his mother had taught him how to fear too well. So he found himself unable to dare. It was up to Warren and me to fulfill his dreams for him. This was the clear implication that I discerned early on in my life. It was an intense motivation for my driving need to express myself. I was doing it for him.
I cried later, when I had time. I returned to Virginia for the funeral and stayed with Mother as long as I could. It was harder to leave her. I could feel her settling into my presence with her, as though I
would be her new companion now that she was alone. She would wait to have her breakfast with me, asking me questions as though it were a school day and I mustn’t miss the bus. Nothing should stand in the way of my objectives in life.
Always, always she was there as a support and a reminder that I would “be somebody.” Of course she was talking about herself. She wanted to “be somebody,” so I took on her fantasy as well as my father’s. I would have the acting career she had forfeited for motherhood.
When she died I was making Guarding Tess. We were shooting on location in Baltimore. I remember saying good-bye to her in California, where she lived with me. She had had some problems that required hospitalization and was not completely well when I had to leave her. In the hospital she had talked about dying and I tried to decide whether this was different from the other times. For a few days she had an angelic expression that brought tears to my eyes. She spoke of seeing beautiful light all around her. She said she saw my heart and her heart and everyone else’s hearts beating together like one huge heart. She said there was light at the center of the earth and people lived there. She said every human being needed to understand that life should be more loving.
She spoke of seeing God in and around everything. She described love and light and God in much the same way that my dad had done when he lay dying in the hospital. So, I thought this was probably her time.
Then she came home, bouncing back the way she always did. It was wonderfully mischievous of her.
Leaning over her chair on the day I left her, I thought I’d be humorous about the emptiness I was feeling.
“Listen,” I said, “do you think you can wait and not die till I come back from shooting my movie?”
“Your movie?” she said, perking up, though her eyes were unable to focus. “Where are you going to shoot your movie?” she asked.
My Lucky Stars Page 2