Foxy

by Pam Grier

  My head was reeling when I finally got back to my empty room, where I tried sleeping on the floor, unsuccessfully. Charlotte was an addict to such a degree, she would pass out wherever she landed. I wanted to wake up in the morning like a drug addict would—cold and hurting. It was hard as a rock, and I had painful visions floating through my head of women and pimps and johns—a world that, before now, I’d only known about from television.

  CHAPTER 26

  Becoming Charlotte

  I spent a great deal of time thinking about who Charlotte really was on the inside. A woman who was dependent upon her pimp, she either had to bring in her quota, even when she got the flu, or risk being beaten. Her addiction to heroin had aged her well beyond her years, robbing her of her beauty and her health. I read some books on junkies, and considering the unhealthy lifestyle and the body deterioration that occurred, I realized that when I went in for the actual audition, I needed to look the opposite of wholesome. I thought back to how the hookers on the street had looked and smelled. I called a makeup artist and asked her how to create dark circles under my eyes in a few days.

  “Try eating cherry pie,” she said. “A lot of it. And don’t eat anything else. The sugar and starch will sap the color from your face and give you dark circles. Alcohol will help, too. Try getting a hangover. That’ll make you look really bad.”

  I kept myself awake for the better part of three nights on caffeine and sugar. I cut up a skirt to make it much too short, and I cinched my stockings to my garter belt. Then I did my walk in front of a mirror and slept on the floor without a pillow. I woke up each morning with a sore back, but what junkie ever complains about body pain, since they sleep wherever they fall down and wake up hungry for the next fix?

  The night before the audition, I ate a whole cherry pie and nothing else. I felt like crap as I laid out my outfit for the next morning—the wig, a halter top with a stained gray Mickey Mouse satin jacket—and I lay on the floor to sleep. I had done what I could to prepare. I felt as bad as I could imagine, and now the rest was up to the gods. If they all laughed at me, including Paul Newman, there was nothing I could do about it. If I could just remember my lines with so much fuzziness in my head!

  When I woke up, my head ached, my breath tasted like sulfur. I don’t remember ever feeling that bad and grungy before. I had not taken a shower, brushed my teeth, or washed my hair for several days, and I put on my costume, wondering what in the hell I thought I was doing. When I finally took a gander at myself in the mirror, I was afraid. I looked so much like a woman of the night, what if the cops arrested me before I ever got to the audition? I was so cheap-looking, I turned myself off. I mean, one look in the mirror and we were talking “Hos R Us!”

  I called downstairs to the doorman to warn him that the hooker he was about to see in the lobby was actually me.

  “We see hookers here all the time,” he said with an air of elegance. “You won’t be the first.”

  “Not like this,” I said. “I’m about to audition for a film, and I just need you to help me walk through the lobby and out the door so I don’t get arrested.” I took a deep breath, balanced on my stiletto heels, and got into the elevator. I was alone in there until the elevator stopped one floor down and in walked Carol Burnett, a brilliant actress and comedian whom I admired greatly. I dropped my character for a moment to exclaim, “Ms. Burnett. I absolutely love you!”

  She looked at me, frowned, and got off on the next floor. I kept riding down, and the manager at the front desk dropped his jaw when he saw me. “Hurry,” he said with his arm around my back. “Keep moving, and don’t make eye contact with anyone here in the lobby.” When he got me out of the hotel and onto the street, he whispered in my ear, “Great job. You’re going to get the part.”

  I was all Charlotte as I walked outside. Forget about showtime. It’s ho-time, I thought. My brain was acting crazy due to so much poor eating and sleep deprivation. I teetered down the Avenue of the Americas with men whistling and harassing me. I was building my character for the seven-block walk in broad daylight in my hooker gear. I was ready to turn them on, make them want to fuck me, shake me, pick me up, and drag me around. I needed to make them think I belonged in a mental hospital. I needed to make them react to Charlotte, not to Pam.

  Increasing catcalls showed me that my red garter belt was working its magic. I hobbled and stumbled, making myself believe I was too loaded to walk in a straight line. In a few minutes, a blue and white cop car pulled up and began to slowly roll along beside me as I walked. “Ma’am,” a cop said, “where do you think you’re headed?”

  “Hey, baby,” I said, sounding just like a drug addict. “I’m goin’ to audition for Paul Newman. What do you think?”

  “You got my vote,” his partner said. “What are you doing later?” They drove away laughing.

  I arrived a bit early at the Minskoff Theatre on Broadway, where the audition was being held. I walked into the production office, and the secretary looked me over suspiciously when I said in my rummy voice, “Could you tell them that Pam Grier is here to see Paul Newman and David Susskind?” Then I leaned against the wall to hold myself up. If I looked half as bad as I felt, I had achieved my goal.

  “You don’t look like Pam Grier,” she said.

  “Will you please let me get on the damned elevator?” I said.

  I was irritable while she looked at me oddly. What did she expect? Did she think Coffy or Foxy Brown would be showing up for this audition? Or how about the way I looked on the cover of Ebony magazine? She caught a whiff of me and pointed to the elevators. I got in and rode up. When I knocked on the door of David Susskind’s office, the scriptwriter, Heywood Gould, opened the door and jumped backward. First impressions were what it was all about, and I was definitely making one. Pam had done the preparation, but it was Charlotte, a drug-addicted killer, who walked in the door.

  “Hey, Pam,” said Heywood, “how ya doin’?”

  “Hey, motherfucker,” I slurred in my Charlotte voice. “Wassup?” I gazed around the room and saw Paul Newman sitting on a sofa. Charlotte didn’t give a fuck about anything or anybody. She would just as soon have seen them all dead! I was Charlotte.

  “How was your flight, Pam?” David Susskind asked.

  I frowned. “Motherfucker, I don’t need to talk no motherfuckin’ shit about airplanes,” I said. “Let’s just do this motherfuckin’ scene and do the work, dammit!”

  Heywood grabbed a script and said, “Okay, let’s read together.”

  I spontaneously grabbed his crotch like a hooker would, and his script went flying into the air. The room went silent as Heywood stooped to retrieve his papers. I squatted over him, grinding my body against his crotch.

  Flustered, he dropped his script again. “Give me a second,” he said. “I lost my place. Just hold on.”

  “Hold on?” said Charlotte, looking slightly amused. “This is my motherfuckin’ life. We ain’t doin’ no holdin’ on, motherfucker.” I started doing the rest of the scene without Heywood at all. Then I walked around the room until I shot up, collapsed against the wall, slid to the floor, and died. Nobody said a word.

  Someone got up and applauded. I looked up from where I lay on the floor and saw Paul Newman clapping his hands and smiling. “That was a great performance,” he said. “The role is yours, Charlotte.”

  I broke out into a grin and sat up. Suddenly I was Pammy from Colorado who couldn’t believe I just landed a job in a Paul Newman movie. “Can I call my mom?” I said.

  Everybody laughed. “You can call anybody you like,” said Paul Newman. “Just get some sleep. Okay?”

  Although earning the role of Charlotte was a great triumph, I had no time to celebrate. I took a long shower, I brushed my teeth, ate a decent meal, and slept on and off for the next two days. Then we started work almost immediately, and between costume fittings, makeup, hair, and rehearsals, I was busy every minute of the day. On any occasion that I wasn’t occupied or in the current scene,
I made it my business to watch the master, Paul Newman, perform his craft. I learned a great deal about how he approached his work, and I got even clearer about what I wanted to accomplish as an actor.

  I wanted the scenes to really work by creating a character who was so frightening and ominous that she would make the other actors feel uncomfortable just being in her presence. I worked hard to come off as heinous, vicious, cunning, and repugnant. At the same time, Charlotte had to be hot enough that the cops would think, “Hey, maybe we can get a piece here.” An aging hooker who watched the younger girls steal the johns out from under her, she had a subtext going that said, “Danger. Keep away.” If I didn’t feed my fellow actors that kind of energy to work off of, there would be no way to make the scene come alive.

  An actor named Miguel Piñero had been hired for the drug dealer role, and it was pretty obvious he knew his way around the streets. “Miguel,” I said to him shortly after we had met, “I need you to show me where the junkies hang out. I have to see them up close.”

  “I can do that,” he said. “I’ll take you wherever you want to go, girl, but you better get a letter from the production office. Then, if they cut us up and throw us in a ditch, they’ll know where they can send the pieces.”

  “Thanks for that,” I said. If he was trying to give me a heart attack, he was doing a great job.

  “Well,” Miguel said, “you have to see the real thing.”

  “I know how to shoot a gun,” I offered. “I’ve gone hunting, and I even ate the animals we killed.”

  “Oh, you a tough one, girl,” he said. “Not at all phony and Hollywo-o-o-od. I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”

  We headed for Avenue A, which today has been converted into condos. There, Miguel led me inside a large, dilapidated structure that served as the local crack house. Filthy mattresses were laid across the floor of a long room, and all kinds of people, including businessmen in suits carrying briefcases, lounged around in different stages of taking drugs. Some were coming back from passing out, and others’ eyes were rolling toward the backs of their heads. Here, there was no difference between rich and poor. I carefully stepped over used hypodermic needles that lay strewn on the floor.

  A wall menu, hand scrawled in black marker, offered all kinds of paraphernalia, such as pipes, lighters, and papers. For hard-core heroin users, there were syringes for sale for $1.50, and the small print under the menu said, “See Manager.”

  “I should never have brought you here,” Miguel said as we stepped over people who were lying back in a trance, nodding out. Unfortunately, it was a sign of the times: Miguel also took me to parties of the wealthy, where large glass bowls filled with cocaine stood in the entry hall for anyone who wanted it. I even visited Studio 54, an infamous nightclub in New York, where the rich gathered and did drugs. Rich or poor, addiction was a huge problem and seemed to be ruining people’s lives, even though they often considered their drug use “casual.”

  For my character, Charlotte, however, nothing was casual anymore. At twenty-nine, she was trying to get away from her abusive pimp because she was too drugged to please men anymore. I had studied the way people high on drugs moved their bodies—in a sort of rhythm that was all about finding balance on unsteady legs—while they were walking, dancing, or just talking. Charlotte was making her way around, but she had become an ineffective and inefficient hooker. Her personal hygiene had gone south, and she had no interest in taking care of herself any longer. All she wanted was to kill the johns who had made her life miserable, and deep inside she harbored thoughts of suicide. She wanted a way out of her perpetual agony, and she couldn’t find one. All that was left was to take it out on other people.

  I got so well informed about druggies, I could tell the difference between someone on coke or heroin at a glance. I understood Charlotte’s motivation when she tried to kill the men who hired her. She knew she was repugnant, and she knew that they knew. She hated them for lying to her when they said she was beautiful, which triggered her schizophrenia. As far as she could see, her only way out was drugs and murder.

  Among my nightmares and recurring dreams of things I had seen in the crack house, I often awoke in the night sweating and frightened. One morning, I was anticipating a tough scene in which I had to hide a razor blade in my mouth and eventually slit the neck of the john who was lusting after me. It reminded me of the girl gangs in Denver when I was growing up who walked around with single-edge razor blades in their mouths. I approached the scene with fear and respect. I rehearsed the moves with my partner in the scene with intense mental preparation, having trouble coming to terms with the fact that I was about to do something so ugly and heinous. Sure, it was only a movie, but the actor in the scene better believe it’s real or no one else will.

  I finished the rehearsal with a sour stomach. It was horrific to cut up another human being in the scene. We did take one, take two, and when it was done, I rushed off the set and threw up. It was a good thing they got what they needed, because there was no way I could repeat the performance. Sick and green for the rest of the day, I took comfort in the fact that it was over and that it had worked. I watched the scene once to see how it had come out, and I never watched it again. I knew it wasn’t real, I knew the blood on my victim’s neck was just a red rubber application, but to this day, I feel ill just thinking about it.

  Paul Newman’s children sometimes showed up on the set to watch him. They were as enamored with his work as the rest of us were, and his relationship with them was down-to-earth and playful. He treated everyone beautifully, and he was interested in getting to know his fellow actors. One morning he approached me and said, “Hey, Pam, I’d love to take you to lunch today. How about it?”

  I had to inhale deeply. Paul Newman, the icon, had just asked me to lunch. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Thank you so much, Mr. Newman, but not today.”

  When he looked surprised, I said, “The thing is, I’m supposed to kill someone in a scene right after lunch. I need to stay in character, and if we laugh and have a great time at lunch, I’ll lose my preparation. Can we do it later?”

  “You’re saying no?” he said, still looking surprised.

  “I am,” I said with a clarity that amazed me. “You hired me for this role, and it’s really frightening to play Charlotte. I don’t want to disappoint you, and I need to keep up my continuity and consistency.”

  “Okay,” he said, sounding impressed this time. “When we finish.”

  Like clockwork, on the day that I shot my last scene, he approached me. “Are you finished now?” he asked with a smile.

  “Yes, I am,” I said, smiling back. “As soon as I take off the wig, the makeup, and the stilettos, I’d love to have lunch with you.”

  We went to a restaurant on City Island in the Bronx, a favorite eatery of his, with his lovely daughter. We all had a great time there, laughing and sharing stories. He was a loving and devoted father who adored being a dad, and he opened up about the horror of his son having committed suicide. That was part of his motivation for doing this movie, he told me. He wanted to put out a message to young people on drugs that there was help for them.

  I had no idea if this movie would advance my career. I felt good about my performance, but the role of Charlotte had very little dialogue and she did not engage in much character interplay. She was mostly weaving, tripping over herself, speaking slowly with a slurred voice, and killing people. Rachel Ticotin, who played Isabella, Paul Newman’s love interest, did a fabulous job, but I can’t help wondering if her role might have gotten me more notice. I did the meatier role of Charlotte, but I often considered what might have happened if I had been asked to audition for the role of Paul Newman’s love interest. It would have looked great on my resume, but what’s done is done.

  Incidentally, before the release of the film, I woke up one day to find an original copy of the script of Sophie’s Choice on my doorstep. There was no card, so I never knew who left it. I supposed it was someone from Fo
rt Apache who knew how much I loved this movie. I was thrilled to have such a valuable treasure. As much money as it might have brought, I never sold it or auctioned it off. It symbolized my ability to recognize fine writing and fine acting, and it has remained an inspiration to me.

  CHAPTER 27

  Mingling with the Stars

  Now that I had made a name for myself, I started getting some very interesting invitations. For example, I was at a charity event where I was seated next to Altovise Davis, the wife of legendary performer Sammy Davis Jr. A former dancer, she was a beautiful African American woman with a reputation for taking excellent care of her famous husband and their children.

  We hit it off right away when I recognized that we shared a love of dance and fashion. When the evening was about to end, she leaned over toward me and said, “I’d like to invite you to Sammy’s birthday celebration. It’s this weekend at our home. I really hope you can make it. It’ll be a lovely event.”

  I accepted immediately, but when I got home, I wondered if I was in over my head. What would I wear, and what should I bring? I chose an Armani suit, and since I’d been taught it was bad manners to arrive at a party empty-handed, I settled on a bottle of red wine and a bouquet of spring flowers. When I arrived at the door of this massive estate, I gave my raggedy Jeep to the valet, who welcomed me and drove my car down the street to park it. When I saw the Rolls-Royces, Excaliburs, and Lamborghinis parked in the Davises’ driveway, I understood why they were hiding my junk heap as far away as possible.