by Pam Grier
I was also nominated for the SAG Awards, and I could hardly believe how these nominations triggered so many people to come out of the woodwork, claiming to suddenly be my best friend. I did so many magazine covers, interviews, and TV appearances that I was happy when it was over and I could go back to my normal life.
But Caleb seemed to enjoy the success of the film more than I did and started spending money like it was going out of style. He was also trying to get me to spend mine, luring me with frivolous items like earrings and bracelets he thought I simply had to have. I only hoped that when I got back home, his rush of spending and consuming would be over. It was a very unreal way to live. What if the movie flopped and everything went south? Would Caleb still hang in there with me? I needed enough time to find out if Caleb was really into me. I also needed a clear picture of his intentions.
When I first met him, along with his three kids, Caleb had a ten-year-old car, a modest rented house in LA, and an apartment in New York. But as I became more widely known in the world of celebrity, none of that seemed good enough for him anymore. His own music-producing career was taking off, too, and his bank account was getting fatter.
One night after I had just turned forty-seven, he invited me and a couple of his friends to dinner. We were having a nice meal, when suddenly Caleb got down on one knee and handed me a velvet box. Inside was a 2.5-carat diamond ring. He wanted us to get engaged. I tried on the sparkler. What harm would it do to say yes and keep on watching his behavior? It didn’t matter that there were no bells or whistles. I was looking for a good man I could trust. That would be the right foundation on which to build a marriage, and once we were engaged, I would see who he really was.
I called my mom to tell her. “Mom, I’m engaged. We’re going to get married.”
“Really?” she said. “Good. I know you, and you’ll pick him apart. You won’t get married unless it’s right.”
Who knew me better than Mom? I was attracted to Caleb’s calm demeanor and his familiar Colorado attitude, but it seemed that he didn’t have any particularly close friends. I paid attention to that as I started to get new movie roles. Caleb and I weren’t living together—I still called Colorado my home—but I did stay with him when I was in Los Angeles, and I was concerned. I didn’t forget the stern directive from my doctor not to live in Los Angeles, but what would that do to my relationship with Caleb?
I asked him all about his children, and he said he wanted to spend more time with them. That was important to me, now that we were engaged. I spent the next several months teaching the kids to swim, having a ball, and fantasizing about raising them to become wonderful adults. But I had to remind Caleb that in a few weeks I was starting a new film and I wouldn’t be around. “The offers are pouring in right now. I expect to be doing two to three movies a year,” I explained.
“But after we get married, you’ll slow way down, right?” he said.
“No,” I said adamantly. “I have to take care of my mom who isn’t well. And I have a nephew about to go to college.”
“We can handle it,” he tried to assure me, but I didn’t feel reassured. Gratefully, I had a respite when I got a role in Holy Smoke in 1998, a film that was shooting in Australia.
I headed down under to shoot this film about a young woman, played by Kate Winslet, who fell under the influence of a guru while she was in India. When her parents hired a deprogrammer, Harvey Keitel, who played my husband, to set her straight, a powerful struggle occurred between the young woman and the man her parents had hired to save her. We were shooting in the outback, where I stayed in a unit in a motel that was next door to Kate’s unit. She had her trainer with her, and she exercised hard in the freezing cold each day. I admired her commitment to her craft, and she was warm and personable to me. Off the set, I loved visiting the aboriginals in town. I also loved working with genius director Jane Campion and with Harvey Keitel, a fabulous actor and consummate professional.
I arrived back in Los Angeles and headed over to Caleb’s place, hoping for a happy reunion—until he proudly showed me three exotic cars in the garage: a two-seater Porsche, a Bentley, and a Lotus. My beat-up GMC Suburban truck, I noticed, had been relegated to the street.
I looked from the cars to Caleb and back to the cars again as he explained. “I got some money in from royalties, and I—”
“Where are the children’s car seats?” I interrupted. “I don’t see any.”
“We can use your truck,” he said.
“That’s fine when it’s here,” I told him, “but I’ll be driving the truck back to Colorado pretty soon. It’s too big for LA. How will you get the kids around? Why didn’t you get an SUV for them?”
“These cars are all on loan,” he said.
“Sure they are,” I retorted.
“I’m just test-driving them.”
“What if something goes wrong with one of them? You’ll be responsible.”
“So I’ll buy it,” he said. Another red flag started waving so hard it nearly hit me in the head.
I was about to head to New York for some work, when I realized that I no longer trusted him.
My career was moving too fast to risk my downfall. I had booked three movies simultaneously: one in New York, one in Luxembourg, and I would return to LA for the last one. I did my best, shooting the first two movies. I spoke to Caleb occasionally, but I felt pretty disconnected from him.
When I headed back to Los Angeles, I tried to pretend everything was fine, but Caleb could feel how emotionally removed I was. “Is everything okay with you, Pam?” he asked. “You’re not yourself. What’s up?”
“Nothing,” I lied. “I’m just tired. I’ve been working really hard.”
While he spent his days at the studio, I was slowly moving a few things out of the house each day, pleading headaches to avoid sex, and leaving enough clothes hanging in the closet to keep up the charade. One afternoon, while I was looking through some boxes in the garage, Caleb came roaring up the road in a blue Ferrari. He skidded into the garage and turned off the engine.
“Oh,” I said flatly.
He ignored me and said, “This one, I’m keeping. There’s a red one just like it in the dealership. I put it on hold for you. You’ll look really hot driving it around town. You’ll look like a star.”
“Oh, really? A red Ferrari will make me look like a star?”
This red flag wrapped around my neck and tightened. All I could think about was the patio furniture. I had bought it, and I wanted to take it with me. How would I get it out of the house? I didn’t let on what I was planning, and I had to pretend the next morning when Caleb woke up, turned to me, and suddenly said, “Let’s get married. Today.”
When he saw the shock on my face, he said, “You’re afraid to get married.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
“Because you won’t jump up and marry me in Las Vegas right now. Don’t you love me?”
When I refused to answer him, I saw that his radar was on alert. While he went to pick someone up at the airport, I wandered around the property and found a rusted, hidden back gate that led into an ivy-covered walkway, ending at the street. I called an acquaintance who sent some men to carry the patio furniture out the back gate and into my truck. Then I grabbed the last of my clothing that I’d left in the closet for show, and I drove away into a new chapter of my life.
CHAPTER 36
New Beginnings
A few months later, I pulled the thin blue blanket over my head to shut out the light in the cabin. I was on a plane from New York to Denver in the year 2000, sitting in a first-class window seat, still recovering from my breakup with Caleb. “No more heartbreak” was my mantra, as I saw a tall, handsome Caucasian man slide into the aisle seat beside me and fasten his seat belt.
I continued to doze. I’d been in New York to tape some voice-overs for a film I did for Showtime and to work with some friends to feed the homeless. The trip had gone well, but for me, a breakup is a
sure path to insomnia. I hadn’t slept much the night before, and I was ready to catch up during the flight, now that my work was over. But it appeared there was no rest for the weary. A flight attendant hovered by my seat. She and several other attendants had seen my name on the passenger roster and were excited to be serving me.
I felt a light tap on my shoulder and struggled to open my eyes. “Miss Grier,” she practically sang, “we’re so happy to have you on this flight. I absolutely loved Jackie Brown.”
I was hardly awake. My brain was fuzzy, and I realized that I needed to sound somewhat coherent. “Thank you very much,” I managed to say. I was proud to have done a film that empowered women, and I did my best to be gracious.
“Sorry to bother you, but will you be dining with us?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said. The first-class cabin was filled with wealthy businessmen like the striking, impeccably dressed man sitting beside me. I had hoped my seatmate might be someone fun to talk to, but although this man gave off a sense of quiet strength, he felt rigid and unapproachable. That was fine, since I planned to sleep the flight away. I dozed again.
When some time had passed, I felt another light tap on my arm. This time it was the man next to me. “Are you sure you don’t want to dine with the rest of us?” he said jokingly, as if the airline only served the finest cuisine. “It’s a long flight,” he added.
When I checked in with my growling stomach, I realized I hadn’t eaten all day and was starving. I smiled at him. “Maybe I’ll have a salad,” I said.
“My name is Lance,” my neighbor told me.
“I’m Pam,” I said. “Nice to meet you.” Lance had a briefcase filled with papers by his feet, and I had to go to the restroom. “Will you just excuse me a moment?” I said. “I’d like to go to the restroom before you pull out your papers and get settled.”
Having just completed a film with Danny Glover, I had blonde extensions down to my waist and I was wearing a pair of low-rise Prada slacks. When I leaned over to put on my shoes, I was aware that Lance had spotted my hand-size tattoo of a Japanese chrysanthemum that sits just above my tailbone.
While I was going through my radiation treatments for cancer, I saw a picture of the magnificent flower in a National Geographic magazine and fell in love with the mythology surrounding this beautiful pink blossom. Japanese folklore says that long, long ago, a volcano erupted and leveled an entire town. Everything was covered with ten feet of lava and volcanic ash, and when it cooled much later, a lone chrysanthemum had sprouted. (It might have grown in manure from some animal, but I’m hoping the truth behind the myth is a little more romantic than that.) In any event, the little chrysanthemum pod found a reservoir of water and nutrients and grew up out of the ashes. Out of the pain and agony of explosions, eruptions, and death came a delicate flower, and I felt it was parallel to my life at that time.
“It’s going to hurt,” my friends said when I told them I’d decided to get a tattoo.
“It can’t hurt more than what I’ve already been through,” I answered.
It did hurt, by the way, so much that I had to get the tattoo over two separate sessions. It was pink when I first got it, but it faded over the years, and it always reminds me that the worst parts of life can be transformed into beauty. In 1999, when I co-starred in Linc’s, a sitcom for Showtime, I played a woman named Eleanor, a conservative lawyer on Capitol Hill in DC. When my character started to sow her wild oats and have sex with younger men, we wrote in a segment about her getting a tattoo (my real tattoo), and it freaked everyone out since it was so out of character for Eleanor.
When I returned from the restroom and sat back down, I chatted lightly with Lance. His voice sounded Ivy League and refined, he had a calm and sensitive manner, and he was very easy on the eyes. After a few minutes, I was impressed that he seemed unaffected by the color of my skin. I was also impressed by his manners—how he placed his napkin on his lap and spoke like a man of culture. “Are you headed to Denver on business?” he asked me.
“No. I’m going home,” I said.
“You live in Denver?”
“A few hours south. I live on a farm in a rural area,” I said.
I saw his eyes widen. Was he really sitting beside a black woman with blonde extensions and a tattoo, living on a farm? “Are you in a witness protection program?” he asked.
We both laughed. “No, no,” I said. “I actually live in Colorado. My family comes from there and from Wyoming before the emancipation.”
“That’s fascinating,” he said.
We continued to chat during the flight, and I found Lance to be an interesting man with some great stories. When we were about to land in Denver, he turned to me and said, “When you come to New York the next time, call me and I’ll show you around.” He handed me his card and I gave him mine, but I figured if I called, he’d never remember who I was.
When we parted company, I headed for the outskirts. The next morning I was up at six, out in the barn and greeting my rescued horses and dogs while the sun was rising. I breathed a sigh of relief as the horses nuzzled me and I fed them carrots. My home, as isolated and rustic as it is, has always felt like paradise to me. But when Snoop Dogg came out to visit me one time, the place was so tiny he drove past it. He thought I lived in a huge mansion and was surprised when I came out the front door of my humble rustic abode to greet him. I headed back to the kitchen and put on some tea while Mom and I cooked up a big breakfast for Snoop and his entourage of twelve.
It was wonderful not to be living out of a suitcase for a change. I was sick and tired of airports, flight cabins, and restaurants.
“Where’s Pam?” a friend would ask.
“At the airport,” was the usual answer.
Now I was ready for a good, long stint at home, drinking fresh well water with no chemicals and eating garden vegetables, when the phone rang. I was stunned to hear Jerry Offsay, the president of Showtime, on the other end of the line. I’d met him when I was shooting Linc’s and I knew him to be a man of high ideals. “Jerry,” I said, “what an honor.”
“Hey, Pam,” he said, “you’re having dinner with me next week, right?”
I cringed. Had I made a dinner date with the president of Showtime and completely forgotten about it? There was nothing to do but tell the truth. “ Let me be brutally frank here, Jerry,” I said, “’cause I have no memory of the dinner date. When was it and what time? I must be getting old. Or maybe I had a mental breakdown and can’t remember anything.”
Jerry laughed. “It’s not your memory, Pam,” he said. “You’re going to be doing a series with us. That’s why we’re going to have dinner.”
“O… ka-a-a-ay,” I said. Out the window flew my long, lazy days at the ranch, riding over the land, mucking out stalls, feeding the horses, and enjoying neighborhood gatherings. But I wasn’t heading off to New York or Los Angeles. The new show was shooting in Vancouver, and I was already cast as Jennifer Beals’s half sister in a show about lesbians originally called Earthlings and later changed to The L Word.
There were no readings or auditions. It seemed that Jerry Offsay, Ilene Chaiken, and Jennifer Beals were enthusiastic about hiring me for the series. If I wanted it, I would be playing the part of Kit, a straight woman with a tarnished past. They had written her character as a leather-butch documentarian whose body was covered in tattoos depicting various love entanglements. When the series was finally picked up, they changed Kit’s character to a straight, sexually curious, and nonjudgmental recovering alcoholic. She was to be her half sister Bette’s shattered rock.
I was being offered a role in this new show, no questions asked, and I wanted to ask Jerry if this was some kind of a joke. I thought back to running into Quentin Tarantino in the street when he told me he was writing a screenplay for me. Along with plenty of tragedy, my life has had some magnificent twists and turns that came and swept me up when I was off doing something else.
Jerry Offsay was dead serious
about his offer, and he began to break down the show for me. “It’s about the lives and loves of a group of lesbian friends living in West Hollywood. It’s all about women—straight, gay, and whatever else.”
I was delighted. How courageous of Jerry, I thought, to broach such a controversial topic. “Is it a drama or a comedy?” I asked him.
“A little bit of everything,” he answered. “My people will call you to make the arrangements.”
I hung up the phone, stunned and excited. I was about to take a leap into an edgy new TV series with no audition. I needed to start sorting through my clothing for life in Vancouver. As surprised and reluctant as I felt about leaving home again, I also felt elated that I was about to take part in a project that could potentially become a milestone, both historically and politically.
CHAPTER 37
The L Word
I knew very little about the lesbian community, so when I began to work on this new series, I kept my eyes open. I refused to separate the women into categories, and I learned quickly that just like there are different kinds of heterosexual relationships, the same is true in the lesbian world. These amazing women were far more specific and dynamic than one might have imagined. I respected them as a community, with their various images and ideologies, not so different from being part of my own minorities.
Over time, I did my research and learned the different social types and classifications. For example, there were lipstick femmes—women who wore makeup and looked very feminine. There were also femmes who didn’t wear much makeup but had prominent feminine characteristics. On the polar opposite side, there were the butches, who exhibited the stronger male characteristics, among them those who wore leather and studs. I also learned about bisexuals and transsexuals (trannies), who were changing their sexuality, either male to female or female to male.