I crawled, crawled I tell you, into the butler’s pantry of the suite.
“Hello,” I answered with the angst of a love-lost swan.
Agent: “Woody wants you for the movie. They’re sending your sides [parts of a script with your lines in them] over tomorrow.”
“OH MY GOD!! What did he say exactly? Tell me everything he said exactly as he said it,” I gushed.
“He said, ‘I want her for the movie.’ ”
“He did? Oh my god, he wants me for the movie!!!!!”
I hadn’t been that exhilarated since I got my first movie. Cloud nine was just a cloud compared to how excited I was!
I took my kids to Serendipity to celebrate! Frozen hot chocolates all around!
Oh my god, I could barely sleep and couldn’t stop saying to myself or out loud, “I’m going to be in a Woody Allen movie!!”
Even I thought I was cool.
The next day I got the sides. As I began to read over the lines I realized two things. The first was that I was playing Woody Allen’s wife in a movie called Deconstructing Harry. His wife? My heart was pounding. Annie Hall, Annie Hall, Annie Hall! Here’s my Annie Hall role!
The next thing I noticed was that I was playing the role of a psychiatrist. Ugh. Oh no! Jeez, I hate psychiatrists!! Well, to be more accurate, psychiatry! Oh god, what are you doing to me? How ironic! It was like rain on my wedding day, only it was sleet.
I wouldn’t mind playing a psychotic psychiatrist or a mind-fucking psychiatrist or a really screwed-up psychiatrist, as I feel this is at least reality. But a straitlaced, role-model shrink? Never!
What was I going to do? My personal integrity was clashing with my exhilaration.
“Hello, Woody?” was my icebreaker after being given his number.
“Yeah.”
“I know this is going to sound weird, but I hate psychiatry and shrinks.”
“Yeah, so, who doesn’t?” was his reply.
I started chuckling. That was fucking funny!
“I just don’t want to glorify a shrink. Can I play her wackier than she’s written?” This was risky, as Woody is the writer of all his movies. “Can I take drugs and drink while I’m counseling the client?”
“Sure, yeah [beat, beat, beat] as long as it’s funny.”
OH MY GOD!! I was in! I get to portray a lunatic psychiatrist, but I repeat myself. And still be Mrs. Woody Allen!!!!!! (in the movie).
The first day of filming I got to see the genius of Woody Allen firsthand. He works with the same crew every movie, so they hummed like the engine of an Aston Martin.
My hair was pulled back in an ugly low-slung ponytail. I had no makeup and wore a long skirt and turtleneck. Woody wanted it that way. He wanted me to look like the average uptight Upper East Side shrink. There was lots of chatter. Not about the script. Instead it was baseball chatter. Woody is a huge fan of the sport.
I came to find out that Woody doesn’t shoot long days. On many movies the shooting drags on between 14 and 16 hours a day. The average is 12. On Deconstructing Harry the average was eight. Woody directs in a precise manner, and he knows what he wants and doesn’t waste his time or anyone else’s. Maybe because he simply wants to get out early to watch baseball, which is a valid reason in my book. He also shoots his movies in the fall because he likes that hue of autumn. Most movies are insured for rain days. His movies are insured for sun days.
I liked the way he let his actors improvise. Meaning me. He was sort of short with the other ones. The lines were all there to support driving the story line forward, and of course they were distinctly Woody Allen funny. The first day on the set I asked him if I could improvise, and his answer was “If it’s funny.” No pressure there! There are many things I’m less than confident about. Being funny is not one of them. He also allowed me to bring my own bits to the scenes. I asked for breakaway glasses to throw at him during the scene. The character he was playing was such a misguided asshole. If I had really been married to a guy like that I would have thrown highball glasses at him on a regular basis.
Woody is afraid of bridges and tunnels. How he ever made it to the set avoiding bridges and tunnels in the tristate area is beyond me. I really loved my experience working with Woody, and the hardest part of acting opposite him is not laughing. If you think he’s funny when you watch him in a movie, try standing three feet in front of him and not cracking up. He’s also weirdly sexy, and I have no idea why. Maybe it’s because he’s not trying. Maybe it’s because smart men are sexy. But I think I just made that up. It sounds good, but are we really looking for smart men? Oh, Dawn, look at that smart guy standing over by the hydrangeas, he just exudes IQ—let’s go hit on him.
The movie turned out cool. I personally got a lot of notice, which is all that matters. (It’s so hard to write things after being on Twitter using smiley faces after every sarcastic comment. I have the urge to do it constantly in this book.)
;)
Deconstructing Harry was chosen to open the Venice Film Festival. I went with an idiot boyfriend who didn’t like me getting attention, and it’s pretty hard to stroll over the Ponte Vecchio, or its equivalent, with thousands of people cheering and hundreds of lightbulbs flashing, without being noticed. Woody had personally asked me to attend the festival opening to represent Deconstructing Harry. The asshole I was with was furious because I had to do so many interviews. And he refused to go to the gala that was thrown for us after the premiere. I was a sheep by then, so I didn’t go to the gala, either.
The acting business is actually a bitch. Think about it. You’re out of work after every job. You’re basically a door-to-door salesman. So when these premieres, these grand opportunities to show off arise, the celebratory thing to do is revel in it. I was trying to revel. I was surrounded by international film stars such as Gerard Depardieu, and I was trying to revel with him. I hate the word I’m about to use but my date was being a cunt. Don’t EVER be with a man who wants to diminish your power—EVER. If he doesn’t have big enough balls to allow you to shine, he is the wrong man. Oddly enough that’s who my character was in Deconstructing Harry.
Anyhoo—it was a great privilege to be at the Venice Film Festival, and it was a life-changing honor to perform alongside Woody Allen, Robin Williams, Demi Moore, Judy Davis, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Richard Benjamin, and Billy Crystal.
After the festival I got a note from Woody. I still have it somewhere. It said something like—I’m paraphrasing here—“Thank you for coming to Venice. You were superb in the movie and thank you for all the publicity you did—although you were a bit of a cunt.”
I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.
—HARPER LEE, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
The Art of
Maks
I WAS SUPPOSED to meet him at a club in LA, but he was late, as usual. I had always wanted a tattoo, and I noticed a tattoo parlor to the left of the club. Here was my big chance. I asked the artist and proprietor to write the word “unbroken” freehand on a piece of paper. It was delicate and beautiful. As paparazzi flashed away through the windows, like they did when Britney Spears shaved her head, I suffered the electric pain of “unbroken” on the inside of my left wrist. The thought crossed my mind with each flash, Am I just as nuts as Brit? Did I want ink because HE had just started getting some on his rib cage, or was this word being burned into my virgin flesh a representation of newfound freedom? Perhaps it was a little of both.
There have been six categories of men in my life. Relatives, friends, husbands, lovers, mentors, and “guys I really love but am not in love with who are sorta like friends but sorta not who I want to shag sometimes.”
Relatives include grandfathers, uncles, fathers, brothers, and sons. Friends are men I could sleep next to in a fancy hotel room without the thought of having sex with the
m enter my mind. Husbands are men that I want to create a future with, spend the rest of my life with, envisioning children and weddings, houses, money, family, and how am I gonna pretend like I wanna have sex with them for the next 30 years. Lovers are those men whom I don’t actually love, the ones I can’t see a future with but who are charming and hot and look good after midnight and three cosmos. Mentors are the men who have changed the course of my life in business, education, and spirituality. Men of the sixth kind are strange friendlike creatures that I could not sleep next to in a fancy hotel room without wanting to shag on occasion. These men are maddening, as they really have no specific place in my life, they are just put there, apparently, to haunt me and screw with my mind for the rest of eternity. These men are a category of one . . . this is the category of Maks.
ABC told me you are not allowed to choose your dance partner but you are allowed to say who you won’t dance with. Being five foot eight narrowed the field. Most Dancing with the Stars male dancers are not tall . . . it was obvious I would not be the partner of Derek Hough, for example. I named what tall guys I would not dance with, leaving but one contender—Maks. It was clear to me after watching a few seasons of the show that Maks was either a raging psychotic or had something under that angry Russian facade that could crack my weary soul. Even after the warnings of a few of his ex-partners, a handful of excontestants who had not been his partners, and a couple of ABC execs who blatantly told me “he will destroy you,” I chose Maks. The one thing I could predict with this choice was that I would not be bored.
When I first laid eyes on him I had two thoughts. He is much more polite and charismatic in person. The next thought was Isn’t this the exact combo of every psycho I’ve ever encountered?
I’ve observed one distinct trait of charming, psychotic men: they never have “psycho” carved in their foreheads.
My perceptions are my most keen gift and curse.
I instantly perceived his disappointment that he had the task of teaching an overweight middle-aged actress to dance. Sure, he was impressed by my acting pedigree and my slew of awards and sure, he knew he had landed a bona fide “star” to prance around the ballroom with, but I could read his mind: Why the fuck can’t I get some hot bitch like Nicole Scherzinger, who has danced her whole life and makes me look like the hot piece of ass I am, to spin around on the dance floor? What the hell have you saddled me with, ABC? Do you really hate the bad boy of the ballroom this much? And how do you expect me to conquer the mirror ball with a trophy like this? I might as well pack my bags and head back to Ukraine to lick my wounds in the arms of one of my bachelor rejects. Poor, poor Maks.
• • •
After Maks and I LOST the mirror ball, while we were in New York City I threw a dinner one evening for the extended Ukraine clan, to thank them for all the love and joy they had shown me over that five-month period. By then I’d fallen for each one of the members. Jhanna, Eugene, Teddy, Nicole, Val, the other Eugene, Sergey, Alex, Sasha, Lora, and of course Maks . . . Maks announced that night that I was an honorary member of his family. Wow! In Kansas we don’t roll that way. We barely acknowledge our own family members as family members. This was foreign to me, like some Russian Corleone ritual, some Ukrainian rite of passage. I was flattered and delighted to be part of a new group of people that I’d grown so fond of, so close to, so quickly.
These Russians are tightly knit, like a 600-thread-count cashmere sweater. Hmmm, and what are my obligations as a family member? Just the normal stuff like birthdays, weddings, bar mitzvahs, sporadic visits when the north wind blew me into town? Or would I be called on for hits and such? Is my new family mob, or just immigrants that look like mob? And does this make Maks my brother, uncle, son? Hmmmm.
You see, I don’t presume to know anything about Maks. He is as mysterious to me as he is capricious, rude, thoughtless, and bossy. He is also gentle, childlike, fragile, and sensitive. He is a dancing contradiction.
The one really funny thing about Maks is that he presumes you will always love him no matter how much of an asshole he is. Unfortunately, it’s sort of true. That smile is honestly his most valuable weapon—it gets him back into good graces like a black Amex gets an ugly guy into a club. It’s truly irresistible to the point where I’ve trained myself to pretend he’s the Cheshire Cat, hopped up on opium, and I’m not allowed to listen to his gibberish.
Maks rarely says he’s sorry and he never engages in a conversation that would lead to an apology—the Artful Dodger—he moves in and out of the dialogue like a snake, slithering through a maze. If he touches on anything relevant he recoils and just continues sliding. Finally I give in, and when he says things like “I know you have drawn a line between us,” I just laugh. “I’ve drawn a line between us??!! I give up!”
Along with my relationship with Maks, I’ve inherited his fans. Of course there are the amazing, loyal, sane ones. But then there are the trolls. I’ve not inherited them as my fans—rather I should say as my antifans. They prattle on endlessly to get their vital messages through to Maks’s thick skull! “She’s older than your mother!” “She’s using you!” “She betrayed us! She led us to believe you were in a love affair.” “She’s perverted!” “If she’s going to be at your event, I’m not coming!!” “I’m trying to warn you! She’s DANGEROUS!!!!!!” To them I quote the great prophet, Kelly Clarkson: “You don’t know a thing about me.”
Now this is where Maks and I truly differ. If it were reversed and my fans were attacking him, I would come swooping in like a mighty eagle to devour them, to rip them to bloody shreds. Perhaps this trait comes from having a career that spans 30-some years. I’ve seen friends, costars, and people I love maligned, lied about, and chewed up by the press. I have zero problem publicly defending them. Suffice it to say if I had destroyed my career by coming to the aid of my comrades, I would still have intervened. Maks needs to learn how to take a stand, publicly. Not do “nothing” when his compadres are being attacked. Which is what he did with me and what I’ve seen him do with other people he loves. He needs to learn the art of defending his friends. If I were to give Maks one solid bit of advice, as his oracle, it would be to rethink sincerity, courage, loyalty, and generosity. It’s the “family” thing to do.
If I were to acknowledge his finest attributes, I would commend him on tenacity, strength, talent, ability, sweetness, perceptiveness, and intelligence. I’d also throw in a nod to humor. I would be remiss not to include the good with the bad, as Maks is a mixed bag of tricks dominated by mostly good traits. But the jury is out on which location he will finally reside in.
It amazed me that I ended up loving Maks so much—“AH HAH!!” the skeptics proclaim. “She DID fall for him!” Duh, wasn’t that pretty obvious?? The amazing part is HOW I fell for him and WHY. That part might surprise a lot of people. I did not, as most would think, fall in love with Maks. My definition of the kind of love you “fall in” has future connected to it. Like I fell in love with Parker, Bob, Jake, and a few others, with the intention of marrying them or being with them forever. That’s my definition of falling in love with someone.
Maks was not that for me. For as much as I loved him, I always knew there would be no future with him. Strangely, for me, that was not because of the 29-year age difference, although I wasn’t keen being dubbed Harold and Maude. I knew it was a moment in time, sort of a porthole punched in the universe that got me to fall for him—as I once told him.
Those moments in life are strange and magical, yet fleeting. They are gone as quickly as they arrive, but the opportunity to have loved Maks for that five-month period of my life was breathtaking. He was like oxygen to me. He woke me up.
I told him everything. He became my confidant. He confided his love problems to me and sought advice about life, women, love, and business. We have talked business for hundreds of hours. We got very close. He was my best audience. He thought I was hysterical, and I thought he was unintentionally hysterical. I’d catch him staring at me in a sor
t of awe sometimes, not as other men have in my life, but that kind of awe children have when you’ve shocked or surprised them. I felt Maks yearned for a certain freedom that perhaps he saw in me. I perceive a spiritual lostness and lack of freedom in Maks sometimes, and a struggle for a lightness of being.
We had so much fun together, yelling at each other, trying to get the upper hand and controlling each other, dancing, falling, losing our shoes, almost winning, texting each other crazy fake-love texts that weren’t really loverish at all. Freedom was going on there, freedom to communicate freely and wildly, and for me like I’ve rarely communicated with men before. I could tell him anything. Weirdly, the men I’ve actually lived with or been married to have been the opposite. They were never my confidants, and I never told them my deepest thoughts, concerns, or passions.
Poor Maks probably to this day has no idea what he truly meant to me. I think that at the end he sorta bought into the publicity view of who we were. We were not that—we were superior to friends and lovers but without the future of people who fall in love.
Before I did Dancing with the Stars with Maks there was a part of me that was so broken and so tired of loving men and then fucking it all up that I honestly had zero desire for any kind of relationship. I somehow sorted through my own demons, while dancing with a demon. Ahhh, Maks. I certainly never set out to love Maks, and it shocked me that I ended up loving him to the degree that I did.
The thing about love is that it doesn’t even exist unless it is continually created, and to continually create something you have to work at it. To this day I have no idea the role Maks will play or not play in my life. I know this: I would like to love him forever. I would like to work hard to keep him happy. I would like to be there for his wedding and the birth of his children.
I say, “would like” because as I said, one never knows for sure where you stand with the Cheshire Cat. The Dark Angel doesn’t make it easy for people to love him. He won’t agree with what I’ve written here, but then agreement has never been our forte.
The Art of Men [I Prefer Mine al Dente] Page 21