“What do you mean?” I asked, wondering what he was really thinking.
“Because I’m too tall.”
With that, he took my elbow and eased me across the room, opened the door, and guided me out onto a crowded intersection. I felt as though I were in the arms of a master choreographer but didn’t know the steps.
I tried to be debonair and offhanded when I said nervously, “So tell me about Marilyn, for goodness’ sake. How was all that?”
He didn’t blanch or give me any indication that I had invaded his privacy. He waved his hands in the air.
“It was an adventure,” he said, echoing his comment to the press. “A sweet adventure.”
“Simone was so dignified during the whole thing,” I said, trying to make amends. “We all watched what she’d do when Marilyn’s limo met your plane in New York and she was inside it with champagne.”
Montand stopped and looked right through me. “Simone has great dignity,” he said. “And Marilyn was insecure about her beauty, her acting, and herself.”
Montand then took me over to a bench and motioned that we should sit down. “She was never late in the morning,” he told me. “In fact she arrived hours before the rest. But after her beauty makeup and hair styling, she felt unworthy of being a star. She felt she had not much talent and was ashamed. What people called her tardiness and temperament was really her humiliation. I tried to help her.”
I felt so silly. My questions had been intrusive and insensitive. Sometimes when I was nervous I regarded celebrities in show business as though they weren’t real, vulnerable human souls with needs and contradictions like the rest of the human race.
Montand went on to talk about Marilyn as though he had been her confidant and counselor as well as her lover.
Years later, I read his more in-depth account of his affair. He claimed in his book that if Simone had left him over Marilyn, he would have married her. He said their relationship had all the earmarks of a combination that was made to last, and that he and Marilyn had been moving toward a lasting commitment. Yet to me, on the bench that day, he reiterated that their affair was amusing and pleasant, but nothing serious.
The contradictions in him were confusing, and I found that unattractive, yet he seemed genuinely concerned that people be understood and dealt with compassionately. I didn’t know how to handle him.
Fortunately I didn’t need to worry about that for a while. The rest of the cast arrived on location and our little Hollywood movie family gradually became accustomed to the xenophobia of the Japanese culture. We were known to them because they loved our movies, but we remained gaijins—outsiders.
Edward G. Robinson and Robert Cummings had their wives with them, as did our English director, Jack Cardiff.
Because Steve knew Japan very well, he arranged sight-seeing excursions and made everyone as comfortable as possible as we moved to locations all over Japan, from Tokyo to Yokohama to Kyoto to Nara, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and back to Tokyo. But he was not around much.
The script by Norman Krasna, who had written Let’s Make Love for Montand and Monroe, was based on The Guardsman, a French comedy of disguised identity. I played an American movie actress who disguises herself as a geisha in order to be with her director husband (Montand) on location in Japan.
A convincing makeup was the most difficult problem of our preproduction. How could Frank Westmore make me look Japanese without being obvious? The script simply said she disguises herself as Japanese, but no one told us how.
At first we used complicated prosthetic eyepieces, but every time I blinked or closed my eyes, the separation between my lids and the plastic was visible. It looked ridiculous, and the tests were awful. Being away on location, we didn’t have the benefit of a prosthetic makeup laboratory, and the Japanese makeup people had obviously never run into this problem.
It seemed as though we might not have a picture. If the audience couldn’t believe I was a geisha, how could my husband? We could disguise my height by choosing the correct camera angles. I could use brown contact lenses to cover the blue of my eyes. I could use rice makeup to cover my freckles. But how could I succeed in making the shape of my eyes Japanese? It was Westmore who cleverly solved the problem. He dug into his pockets and pulled out a few condoms. Because the rubber was soft and pliable, he cut out an almond shape and glued it to my eyelids. Applying makeup over the rubber disguised the lines of demarcation. I found that I could blink and even close my eyes without the camera picking up what we had used. Westmore made the supreme sacrifice … safe sex for his art.
While sitting long hours in the makeup chair, Montand and I went over our dialogue, rehearsing lines and studying our script together. In between rehearsals we spoke of life, had meals together, and in general got to know one another.
Actors and actresses share deep and personal secrets in the company of makeup and hair artists. Sometimes, when we are attracted to each other, it’s easier to tell the truth in the presence of others. We know that they are discreet and nothing is repeated. In fact, the makeup trailer is where the National Enquirer should plant a microphone, except that almost no one in the trailer can be bought off. They know they’d never work again.
It was during makeup that Montand told me much about his life, that he was really an Italian and had been brought up in a poverty-stricken communist family. He told me about the Americans refusing him and his wife visas because they were seen as a threat to national security. I was touched and wondered if there was more to the story.
He spoke of his love for the theater and the quiet terror he felt before every stage performance as he anticipated instant public humiliation. There’s nothing more attractive than a man who reveals his fear to me. Little things haunted him. A slight constriction in his voice, a small noncoordination of his hat and cane, the color of a band member’s shirt. He spoke of his fright and his joy as if they were intertwined. He said he understood why Jacques Brel vomited before every show, and couldn’t understand why Maurice Chevalier couldn’t wait to get out there. He spoke of his identification with the underdog, his political consciousness, and why he still believed that the communist system would help people.
I told him of my middle-class American values, my ballet years, my love of spontaneous theater, my observations about moviemaking, and my growing left-wing beliefs.
We rehearsed together as he tried to explore the values underlying each scene. He was diligent, he worked hard, he was professional, and he was graceful to his coworkers. But soon I realized there was a subtext in his personal approach. He seemed to have a need to experience intimacy in complicated circumstances. He talked about close working relationships on a film leading inevitably to personal closeness, particularly on location. I wondered if he meant us. He gave me a nickname, Big Bird, because of my long-armed “wing span,” and I called him Montand-san. He laughed at all my jokes and was patient and coddling about my makeup problems. I found him irresistible. Yet I couldn’t understand what my real feelings were. They were running ahead of me. I loved the provocative flirtation that I found myself indulging in, but I couldn’t decipher how “close” we were really becoming. The relationship was mysterious and evasive and teasing and I lapped up every second of it.
I adored the way Montand treated my daughter, Sachi, who was then five. He would scoop her up into his arms and call her “princess.” He had discussions with her about “getting up in the middle of the night when your parents are asleep to eat bread.” He admired her party dress and told her she was beautiful.
He was relaxed and funny around the crew. He was also extremely comfortable with some of the gay men on the crew, which is always a test, an important criterion for me. A straight man who is threatened or put off by gay men suffers from something I can’t reconcile. Montand didn’t tease or flirt with them. On the contrary, he respected them and considered them equals in every way.
He was a serious actor, finding elements and dimensions in the script that had not
been fleshed out, and he never stopped the improvement process.
Sometimes, because we shot all over Japan, Frank Westmore and I would board a train at six in the morning, and he was expected to apply the intricate prosthetic Japanese makeup while the train sped along at eighty miles an hour, lurching from side to side like an out-of-control speedboat. Montand sat watching the process, understanding the seriousness of what it would mean if my face was on sideways when it was projected sixty feet wide on the screen.
The sting of the dark brown contact lenses stuffed into my eyes for hours, and the weight of the katsura (a high Japanese wig) gave me pounding headaches all day long. Montand brought me cold shiburi towels. The kimono’s undergarments were wrapped so ceremoniously tight around me that I felt I couldn’t breathe, my misery relieved every now and then by the comedy of going to the bathroom in my full regalia. It was a Marx Brothers sketch.
The Japanese toilets were placed in the floor. So I had to lift the many layers of the kimono above my knees in order to squat down on the floor. Since Japanese people are so much smaller than Westerners, the space in the cubicle is about half of what we need. I’d squat, but if I leaned forward in any way, I’d bump the top of my katsura against the wall in front of me and knock it askew. Once, when that happened, the force of it was so strong that one of my brown contacts popped out of my eye and plopped into the toilet. There was no way I could retrieve it because there was no room for me to turn around and find it. It was gone for good, and we had only one extra pair—in those days contacts were hard to make and very expensive.
Montand would tease me with a twinkle, understanding the absurdity of my playing a geisha in the first place, and call me his “Big Bird.”
As rehearsals and shooting progressed, Steve was never around. He always seemed to be busy, which was understandable on one hand and guilt producing on the other—it left me time to freely know Montand better, but I was getting myself in deeper and deeper. We went to dinner, took Sachi for side trips, and in general, enjoyed being with each other. At that point, the relationship was completely platonic. He rarely spoke of either Simone or Marilyn and didn’t seem to be interested in geisha houses or teahouse activity. He was focused entirely on me, yet in some subtle way I felt he was biding his time. I liked that.
I knew it would be relatively easy for me to have an intimate affair with Montand without causing much of a stir or upsetting the emotional balance of the cast and crew. I could see the crew was in and out of each other’s hotel rooms all the time anyway. The hours were crazy, and intimacy just for R&R was a foregone conclusion.
Locations in those days, before AIDS, were a byword for sexual freedom. In the words of the witty actress Margaret Leighton, “When you’re on the road, fucking doesn’t count.” As soon as the crews arrived on location, they bolted from their assigned rooms and acted like kids sprung from reform school. Early in my career, I was shocked. As time passed I became amused. Sometimes their antics were hilarious. Most of them had secure and long-term marriages, but monogamy was not the accepted rule of the day (God knows what their other halves were doing back home). It was a kind of experimental swapping of working partners for the duration of the film. The energy required came from a primordial need. The first six weeks of a shoot are fairly healthy. Loss of sleep, stress, and pressure from work are at a tolerable level. But heading into the seventh week and all the weeks thereafter, it’s a miracle a film ever reaches fruition.
Perhaps love affairs provide an extra inspiration.
In the old days, the crews were mostly men, so they paired off with wardrobe, secretaries, and other women they “inherited” on the location site. Today, there are many more women to mingle with. I sometimes love to speculate who is with whom as I sit under the lights, seeming to go over my dialogue in my head, as if unaware of my surroundings. Crew members have a way of attending to their own chores with extreme concentration when they are truly diverted by a fling. Being basically a gossipy adolescent, sometimes I give in and have some fun with what I “see” going on; other times I do what they expect, which is to pull rank, be aloof, not concern myself with their “lower-echelon duties.” In many ways the crew prefers that the star not notice them. That way they are outside our orbit—and vice versa. They do appreciate your calling them by name, but not so often that others might accuse them of currying favor.
The way to cause real trouble on a set is to have an affair with one of the crew when you’re the star. “Class” crossover is usually verboten, but once, on location, I found myself attracted to one of the grips. He was a Latin with black eyes and hair and an all-knowing quality that covered up an inferiority complex.
The contradiction appealed to me, and before long we were living together.
I couldn’t have been happier with him. His colleagues teased him, though, and eventually I learned a disappointing but necessary lesson: a man who doesn’t feel he deserves you can be very cruel. After that I stayed on my side of “the line.”
In a foreign location such as Japan, there was a significant chasm between the Western stars and the Japanese crew. Each of us had our own way of working and interrelating. The common language, though, was the understanding of light. A foreign crew is somehow incredulous that Americans, who have been in the movie business awhile, understand a key light from a fill light.
Technology is the common denominator, and the technology of light brought us together. Our Japanese crew knew that our director, Jack Cardiff, used to be England’s finest cameraman. So our Japanese cinematographer was respectful and solicitous of any help Cardiff could provide.
Our days were composed of traveling, makeup, finding hidden value in the scenes, and contending with the various complaints of people who felt they weren’t being given pecking-order respect. Sometimes the wives of our male stars were a bigger problem with their temperament than the stars themselves. Wives on location are continually searching for thrills to keep them occupied. They subconsciously feel left out of the emotional mix (they are) and need reassurance and attention to prove that they are as important as the people making the picture, which is also the truth.
Husbands of female stars rarely come to visit, and if they do it’s not for long. It’s too hard on the male ego, and besides, most of them have jobs themselves, which they can’t leave. Moviemaking brings out everyone’s need to be acknowledged. The continual waiting around promotes reflection as to what and who you are. That’s why costars are moved to communicate with one another deeply. The time together conspires to inspire. That’s what happened to both Montand and myself. We were having a good time, yet we were lonely and wanted more of each other. I felt reluctant because Steve was, after all, the producer of the picture, even though I rarely saw him and was beginning to wonder why he was always so busy. We were seeing no more of each other than when we had an ocean between us. When Montand wasn’t with me, he was alone. I never saw him with a friend who might have alleviated this loneliness. I had my house and my daughter. I admired Montand for maintaining a disciplined centeredness. He told me he couldn’t really sleep well, not only because the languages he dreamed in were jumbled—he was coping with both English and Japanese—but also because of his thoughts of me. He said he was a man in transition, I wasn’t sure what he meant. He didn’t elaborate. Perhaps it was a professional transition.
Because he had the experience of directing his own one-man show, Montand’s awareness of filmmaking encompassed more than just acting.
He’d prowl around the set, touching cables and inspecting the cameras and lenses. He wanted to learn about the soundboard and how to make his voice different according to the distance between himself and the boom man.
He wanted to learn the rules of the game, how the machines worked. He didn’t see himself as a mere actor; he couldn’t because he had been trained, as part of his stagecraft, to learn and understand everyone’s job and contribution.
Although he never had the tendency to place himself at the center o
f the movie operation, as he would have onstage, his concentration emanated outward, so that he was aware of much more than himself. He never felt the need to control what others were doing, but he was vitally interested in the artistic mechanics of it all.
Because he was a music-hall performer, he was used to being himself in his skin. He’d come on stage in his own selected costume, sing his own songs, having chosen his own musicians and controlled his own lights. To win over his audience he had to be certainly and centeredly himself.
Now he was in a strange milieu, using a foreign language in front of a camera. He knew he’d have to allow his character to take over his body, his heart and mind, and his responses would be the character’s now. He jumped in with both feet and committed to his role completely. As the filming progressed and our relationship deepened I realized that Montand, being a romantic Mediterranean man, would probably fall in love if his character fell in love. Was this what had happened with Marilyn and now was it happening with me? And was I responding with the same “in-character” impulses?
He was so forthcoming with his fears and anxieties, and I loved that. He was more of a sensitive Italian peasant than a French stage and screen star. His real self seemed to be a man of the streets with an exquisite sense of survival. Whenever we went anywhere, a luxury hotel for dinner, a theater, he’d immediately clock the emergency exit. He said it was because, as a man raised in poverty, his reflex was to escape quickly, if necessary. This applied not only to buildings, but to people.
He spoke of Simone as though she were a protector to him. She soothed him and admonished him for his own good. He depended on her, in a world of uncertain and unpredictable cruelty, to save him, yet he resented the fact that he relied on her so much, that she had made herself indispensable in his life. It was as though he would rebel against this matron-mother by exploring other women any way he wished.
His demeanor on the set was humorous and high-spirited. He was never moody or dark-spirited, as most people are sometimes. I wondered if there was a hidden reservoir of secret contempt and coldness that he covered with likability and a well-developed personal charisma. Certainly there was something profound in him that was withheld. This was one area Simone must have understood. I couldn’t.
My Lucky Stars Page 29