The Art of Men [I Prefer Mine al Dente]

by Kirstie Alley

  In 1992 we adopted our first child—William True Parker. We called him True.

  In 1994 we welcomed our daughter, Lillie Price Parker. The “Price” part was the surname of his mother’s side of the family, and I was mad for his grandmother Granny Price. She was delicate and strong at once—just like our Lillie seemed.

  In 1996 I took the kids to Italy. I was restless, again. It seemed I could only withstand a 14-year stint before I would experience the heebie-jeebies of marriage. But at least I’d done better than the first time I was married; that time I’d only lasted four years.

  When I was married to Parker, life seemed to go along smoothly. Then BAM!! I’d meet some handsome temptation, and I was off the rails for a few months. Then I’d sort it all out and go at the marriage again for another four years. And so it went. Until the last time.

  I never cheated on Parker but I called my marriage quits in 1997. The way I handled it was not ideal by any means, and I can say the same for him. It got a little nasty. We were both jerks. I’ve since tried to make up the damage I caused. Just because I didn’t want to be married to him any longer didn’t mean I stopped loving him. The picture of our life that I painted intentionally has the gray side omitted. Hell, we never got that dark to begin with. And it’s a good policy to never speak unkindly of your children’s other parent. I know divorced couples can end up despising each other during or after a divorce, and they can also end up being friends and laying down their arms. It’s now been 15 years since Parker and I divorced, and I’m sure we’ve both learned a lot about ourselves. What I learned, FINALLY, from my life with Parker is to knock off flirting with men while I’m attached and to stop dramatizing being the victim of an unfaithful mate. We ALL make mistakes. NONE of us is perfect. And forgiveness and understanding are key. I’m not my father. I believe that marriages can be reconciled if infidelity has transpired. But I am like my father in realizing that infidelity is calculated and premeditated. Dicks don’t magically fall into vaginas. There is an evolution.

  Since my breakup with Parker, I’m proud to say I’ve achieved the ability to be in a relationship without flirting with other men and without having one bag packed and my foot out the door.

  And my greatest dream, for our kids’ sake, is that some year down the road we can have a big old-fashioned Christmas together. All of us.

  MAGGIE

  Oh, I’m more determined than you think. I’ll win alright.

  BRICK POLLITT

  Win what? What is, uh, the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?

  MAGGIE

  Just stayin’ on it, I guess. As long as she can.

  —TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,

  CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF

  The Art of Art

  I COULDN’T GET a meeting with the late, great theater director José Quintero for the life of me. My then-agent couldn’t even get me in the door. José was casting Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and I was hell-bent on playing the lead role of Maggie, even though I’d never acted in the theater. The play was to be performed at the renowned Mark Taper Forum in LA. The role of Maggie was coveted by every 25- to 35-year-old actress in the world.

  José Quintero was born on October 15, 1924, in Panama City, Panama, and he directed his first play in 1949. He was a founder of the Off Broadway theater Circle in the Square, where he directed regularly from 1950, establishing the house as a major center for serious theater. He was best known for his productions of 20th-century plays, especially those of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. José was virtually responsible for the success of many Eugene O’Neill plays that had flopped in their first Broadway productions. Among them were The Iceman Cometh, A Touch of the Poet, and A Moon for the Misbegotten, and all of them starred the acclaimed actor Jason Robards Jr.

  José knew and worked with acting greats such as Colleen Dewhurst, Vivian Leigh, Geraldine Page, Jane Fonda, Ingrid Bergman, Warren Beatty, and Dolores del Rio. José was the quintessential actor’s director. The quintessential director, period.

  José battled alcoholism, and with the help of his life partner, Nicholas Tsacrios, he was able to defeat his addictions in the 1970s.

  Okay, phew! So that’s part of José’s bio. I want you to see how ludicrous it was for me, a girl who’d never done a play except for playing the sun in the first grade and forgetting my lines, to think I could not only get in the room with the great Mr. Quintero but think I could land the role of Maggie and become a theater star.

  So this agent just couldn’t get me a meeting. And hell, I actually knew this play. I’d seen the movie, for god’s sake! Seriously, I was desperate to play this role that all actresses dream of playing. I’d even heard actresses talking about the damn play in odd locations; Lesley Ann Warren was sitting behind me on a plane discussing with someone how much she wanted to play Maggie.

  But I couldn’t even get a flippin’ interview. One night when Parker and I were at dinner with his agent, Chris Barrett, I was lamenting, “God, my agent can’t even get me in the door for this Cat on a Hot Tin Roof thing.” Chris said to me, “I can get you in the room, I represent José Quintero.”

  What?!! What?!!! What?!!

  “However,” tricky Chris continued, “if I DO get you in the room with José, I’d like you to consider letting me represent you. You don’t have to say yes right now, I just want you to consider having me as your agent. If you decide not to, I will of course still get you in the meeting, in fact, I’ll get you the meeting first, and then you can decide about me down the road.”

  Wow! How cool was that? This was all after Star Trek and during filming a not-so-great ABC-TV series called Masquerade with Greg Evigan and Rod Taylor. It was a fairly dumb show, with us running around in disguise when we were actually CIA agents.

  So it meant if I got the role, which everyone except me knew I wouldn’t, I would have to be doing the play simultaneously with shooting the series.

  Chris called the next day to schedule my meeting with José Quintero. It was pretty obvious that José was just doing Chris a favor by seeing me, but this happens every day in Hollywood. People call in favors, and if you’re the unlucky end of the favor, the director, producer, or casting people just go through the motions with you, never intending to give you a shot, simply carrying out their obligation to see you.

  What I wore to this meeting was very significant to Mr. Quintero’s first impression of me. I wore white leather pants with white high-heeled boots, a white turtleneck sweater, and a white leather jacket with lots of zippers. In short, I looked like a very white Hells Angel. José, being Panamanian, looked and sounded very exotic. He was an exceptionally deep and emotional person, and he was kind but appeared sophisticated and a bit erudite. I was married to Parker, so erudite men didn’t scare me.

  He asked me to tell him a little about myself and my “body of work.” I told him about Star Trek and briefly about the movie I’d recently done in Greece. It was one of the worst movies ever made, and I can’t really talk about it or the director will sue me. But it was simply awful!! José didn’t need to hear how awful it was, though, he simply needed to hear “feature film in Greece,” which sounds fairly impressive from the biker in white.

  “And theater?” He gently smiled. “What have you done in theater?”

  Gulp—the answer was “played the sun in first grade” but I knew that would never do with an icon of José’s status.

  “Why, Mr. Quintero, I’ve done everything Elizabeth Taylor has done.” (Elizabeth Taylor was the star of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—the movie.) He smiled and was probably fucking with me.

  “Oh really? Excellent. What Elizabeth Taylor plays have you done?”

  “Oh you know,” I prattled on, “Suddenly Last Summer, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and . . . umm . . . Butterfield 8.”

  “Oh my . . . that’s quite a lot, and so you’ve already played Maggie? That’s quite impressive.”

  Yes, it was quite impressive. I could tell he was very impressed indeed!


  He then had me read for the role of Maggie the Cat, and I felt I did a bang-up job of it. Being from Kansas, that faint Southern lilt is pretty easy for us.

  He thanked me, and I thanked him.

  What actors must have and are dying to get after meetings is feedback. If you are really lucky, they call your people. If you’re not really lucky, your people have to call them and pry the information out of them.

  Well, they didn’t call Chris. He had to call José and ask, “How was she?” The actress is never sitting in the catbird seat when the agent has to make the call, so Chris is on the phone relaying this data to me. “He said you were very good but he was afraid of you—did you wear some motorcycle getup to this meeting?”

  “Yes!” I protested, “But it wasn’t black, it was white and it was really soft kid leather!”

  “Well, José thinks you are very tough and scary.”

  Oh jeez, I’d blown it because I’d looked like Easy White Rider? Oh, for god’s sake, why was I so stupid?

  “However,” Chris went on, “because he thinks you are an interesting actress, he’d like to see you again tomorrow afternoon.” And as I started whooping and hollering he added, “Wait, wait, I’m not finished, when you go in there tomorrow he would like you to wear something feminine and soft. Something a lady would wear.”

  I wore a soft voile pastel flowered dress, dainty little T-strapped pale pink high heels. My makeup was 1950s style to look like Maggie’s, as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was set in the South in the ’50s. My hair was more styled than I usually wore it, and I didn’t chitchat with José when I walked into the room. I just read with an actor he had in the office.

  I didn’t chitchat on the way out either. I just said, “Thank you, Mr. Quintero, for the second opportunity.” I seemed to have the slightest hint of a Southern accent in my voice. It was sweet, ladylike, feminine, and soft.

  The next day we didn’t have to call them. They wanted me to try out on the stage of the Mark Taper Forum, not so that they could see if I could act but to see if they could hear me, since ALL of them actually knew I’d never done theater.

  Before I began to read, José whispered to me in his low, sultry Latino, Antonio Banderas voice, “You see that man standing at the back of the theater?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That is Gordon Davidson. This is his theater. Speak to him. Make sure all of your lines can be heard by him. But do them exactly as you did them for me.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered back.

  That night I got the call from them. “José loves you, Gordon likes you a lot, too, but says you’re not a big name.” I interrupted, as usual, “But I will be a big name after I do this and blah, blah, blah.”

  “Let me finish,” as Chris always had to say to me, “but José championed you. He told Gordon he would not do the play unless Gordon hired you as Maggie . . . so you have the role.”

  I wept like a baby for an hour, half excited for getting the opportunity to play this once-in-a-lifetime role and half because I couldn’t believe the courage and conviction of a director to actually back out of a very publicized production if he didn’t get the leading lady of his choice. I was dumbfounded. So was Chris. So was every big-named agent and actress in town. HE CHAMPIONED ME!!!

  I kept thinking, How have I gotten so lucky in my life to have two champions fight so hard for me when I didn’t seem like the girl they should be fighting for? First Nicholas Meyer on Star Trek, and now the great José Quintero in the theater. I cried for a few more hours.

  When I showed up for the first day of rehearsal, José met me with open arms and whispered, “There was no other person to play this role—you were born for it.” Then he taught me something very particular. He said, with a glint in his eye, “Although you have done all of the same plays as Elizabeth Taylor, it’s important you take voice lessons so that you don’t blow your voice out during the run of the play.”

  I smiled and said, “Yes, that’s a very good idea, Mr. Quintero.”

  “Please only call me José,” he said.

  “Thank you, José, I’ll begin voice lessons right away.”

  My Brick was played by the exceptionally talented actor James Morrison. He was dreamy and the perfect person to play the troubled ex–football hero. Pat Hingle played Big Daddy and Alice Ghostley played Big Mama. I was blessed to be in the company of such legendary actors.

  The play was a tremendous success with valentine reviews. We couldn’t have written them better ourselves. After opening night José presented me with a gift, which was an original poster from the 1950s of Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I cherish it. But even more amazing was the friendship and love José and I developed. He was an extraordinary director, precise and emotional. He didn’t tell you how to act, he radiated emotions out of his soul to express his feelings. You could feel it as surely as you could feel someone punch you in the face. The best single word I know of to describe José is “exquisite.” His eyes were black and mysterious. His skin was dark and his face chiseled like an Italian or Spanish aristocrat. He was deeply intelligent and tortured, always somehow tortured by his own demons. His humor was dry, yet dramatic. He could mimic anyone, especially women, so he was funny in a unique way that separated him from all other people.

  He was a homosexual man, brought up for decades in a world that would not tolerate homosexuals. His friends were Truman Capote and Vivian Leigh. He loved his partner of many decades, and Nick took good care of José until the very end. When José died in 1999, Nick lost the love of his life. I lost my best friend.

  José was a haunting person. When I think of him I think of the emotion, the angst, the magnitude of feelings he had toward people and life. His eyes were haunting, and at the same time seductive, then sparkly.

  The entire world is a better place because of José. The world of theater lost one of its brightest lights, and all actors should know José’s name and be thankful he did the groundbreaking for the theater and for homosexuals.

  His name was José Quintero, and I’d like to take this moment to whisper to him, wherever he is, “You see that man up there in the last row of the theater? That’s you. I hope you can hear all my lines. I tell you I love you every day. Oh, and PS . . . I’m doing a new Elizabeth Taylor play at the Mark Taper Forum . . . National Velvet.”

  It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal, and perhaps there is no possible explanation.

  —JOSEPH CONRAD

  The Art of

  Temptation

  THIS ONE is a tough one to speak about.

  I was in love with him while we were both married. I had never fallen in love with a married man, nor had I ever had a crush on a married man or a date with one. I considered it taboo, and I still do.

  This man and I never had sex or did sexual things, but I consider what we did more dangerous and more of a betrayal to our spouses. I got used to not being with him, but I never stopped loving him.

  We had all been summoned for a huge cast table reading in 1984. The cast truly was enormous, as we were about to embark on a six-month journey through a miniseries called North and South. It was as comparable in magnitude as its predecessor miniseries, Roots. So in the first reading, there we were, actors, actresses, producers, directors, writers, and TV execs all gathered around an endless conference table.

  Maybe I was dreaming, but I felt something pulling me to look to my left, just a “look over here” kind of pull. I looked to my left but didn’t see anyone looking at me. Then I leaned in to see my script, and there it was again, someone wanted my attention. I looked to my left again, and there he was, Patrick, just sort of grinning at me. He was at the opposite end of the table, so it was clear he had a powerful ability to pull one’s attention. I turned back for a brief moment, but quickly looked away. I didn’t peer at him again throughout the lengthy script reading.

 
When we were finished and everyone was getting up to leave, Patrick walked by me and said, “I admire your work. I look forward to filming with you.” This is the standard line most actors say to most actors when they embark on a project together. But the way he said it, in his low-slurred-mumbly kind of James Dean/Elvis–speak . . . Ooh la la.

  Whoa, Kirstie, make a note. Do not get silly about this one, this one is dangerous. This one is married. This one’s trouble, stay clear of this one.

  And that’s how Patrick Swayze and I began our relationship.

  • • •

  North and South and later, North and South, Book II, was the saga of the Civil War and its relationship to two families. I played Virgilia Hazard, of the Philadelphia Hazard Ironworks family. I was dying to play this character. She was not only from an affluent Northern family, she was an abolitionist. She also denounced her family, ran away, and married a black slave. Hot stuff for TV back in 1986! Patrick played the son of a Southern plantation family. He became besties with my brother George Hazard. Their North-South relationship as friends worked beautifully until the Civil War began. Thus the conflict. Then all hell broke loose.