by Sachi Parker
That night Mom put another one of her Academy screeners into the DVD player: Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. I was a little concerned. “Mom, do you think this is appropriate for children? I heard it was pretty violent.” Mom was dismissive: “Oh please. It’s fine.”
We gathered in the living room and watched as the ancient Mayans beheaded one another, conducted human sacrifices, cut out still-beating hearts, and practiced two hours’ worth of bloodthirsty mayhem. Frank and Frankie, being manly men, enjoyed all the savagery. Arin, seven years old, sat through it politely, although she buried her head in my lap most of the time. When it was over, she enthused, “That was great, Ganny!” She had terrible nightmares all night.
The next day, the snow finally stopped coming down, but we were buried under three-plus feet of it. The incredibly long driveway would be impossible to shovel. Frank wanted to call in a plow to clear it. Suppose there was an emergency, and we had to get the kids to the hospital?
Mom just laughed. “They’re not going to come out here to clear our driveway. Don’t you think they have better things to do? Look at him, he’s so worried about the kids, he’s such a big dad. Ooh, what do you think is gonna happen?” she teased, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “The kids’ll be fine.”
I think the combination of the lethal drinks, the lack of food, and the hopelessness of the situation was responsible for my disastrous swerve into drunken sentimentality. We had just watched a screener of The Departed, the kids were in bed having sweet dreams of Mob violence, and Mom and I were both staring numbly at the fire.
“You know, Mom,” I said, “I wish I knew you better.”
She groaned. “Don’t start that again.”
“It’s true. I don’t feel close to you. And we should be close. You need someone you can trust.”
“I work in Los Angeles. I don’t trust anyone.”
“I don’t blame you for keeping everybody at a distance. You’ve been wounded in life. I know how tough your childhood must have been…”
I had inadvertently tripped a land mine. Mom exploded. “You have no fucking idea about my childhood! And don’t ever assume that you do! My childhood is mine. I lived through it, not you! And I don’t want to hear about it ever again!”
I waited for the dust to settle before I continued. “I’m sorry. I just want to know you. You’re my mom, and I don’t know you at all. And you don’t know me.”
“You’re my daughter. What else do I need to know?”
“Exactly—you think I’m nothing. You spend your whole life reaching out everywhere, into the past, into the future, into the farthest reaches of the fucking universe, but you never reach out to me. Why? Why can’t we be closer? Why do you have to live so far away from us?”
“Because this is my home. I love it here. Nobody bothers me.” She added pointedly: “Except on holidays.”
“But think, if you moved to Greenwich, I could see you all the time, and you could be a real grandmother to the kids. You can join my workshop, and then we can go together every week and work on scenes, and act together.”
“Sounds thrilling,” she dead-panned.
“But wouldn’t it be great?”
“No,” she said, leveling a cold eye at me. “No.” Discussion over.
The driveway was finally cleared, but we still had two days left before our flight home. That was two days too many for me. I got on the phone and desperately tried to find an earlier flight. My mantra was “Forget the cost; just get me out of here!” Unfortunately, everything was booked. We would have to wait it out till the bitter end.
The night before we were going home, I said to Mom, “See you in the morning.” She gave me a noncommittal look and went to bed. Now, we had to leave at 6:00 A.M. to catch our flight, and I knew Mom was a late sleeper, so in a way, this was a test. If she set her alarm clock and woke up early to see us off, I’d know that she really cared about us. Everything would be back to normal; all would be well.
I waited by the door until 6:15. I stalled, pretended I’d forgotten my comb, had to use the bathroom. I gave her every opportunity. No Mom. She was sleeping in.
We piled into the rental car and drove away. It recalled to me the time Mom came down to San Diego and rescued me from Dr. Jeffrey, and how she and I roared off in a cloud of dust, leaving the horror behind and looking forward to a new life. We couldn’t peel out on this icy driveway, but the mood was similar, except now I was escaping her.
We landed in Hartford, and on the drive back to Greenwich, I remember saying to Frank, with an eerie, self-possessed calm, “That’s it. It’s over. I will never visit her again. Never, never, never.”
After a quiet moment, he asked, “Never?”
“Never.”
• • •
THE Witch of the West Is Dead has nothing to do with The Wizard of Oz. It’s the title of a popular Japanese children’s novel, written by Kaho Nashiki, a quiet, meditative tale about a teenage girl who goes off to the country one summer to live with her seventy-five-year-old grandmother. They were planning to make the film version in Japan, and the filmmakers were after my mother to play “Granny”—the British-born character who speaks Japanese—but Mom wasn’t interested.
When she mentioned the part to me in December of 2006 (just before our Santa Fe Christmas), I was definitely interested. Hell, if she wasn’t going to take it, I would! So I got in touch with the casting director and flew out to Los Angeles to audition for the producers and the director, Shunichi Nagasaki. Leaving nothing to chance, I walked into the room dressed as “Granny,” wearing a white wig and an old dress. I did the audition, and they took me out afterward to wine and dine me.
A month later they called from Tokyo to offer me the role.
Shooting of The Witch of the West Is Dead started in spring of 2007, in a village called Kiyosato, high up in the Japan Alps. The company stayed at a rustic lodge located on the site of a natural hot spring. Every morning, I would wake up and bathe in the rotenburo, the open-air hot spring bath. The powerful rotten-egg smell of sulfur would fill the air, but the steaming water would loosen up my muscles and get me ready for the day.
The set was down the street, on the other side of a forest patch. Most of the crew would take a shuttle down to the set, but I liked to walk through the forest, wearing the grandmother’s outfit; it helped me get into character, much as I had walked the length of Inishmaan to prepare for Riders to the Sea. The grandmother was a tough role to get a handle on at first, until one day, when I found leather laces for her boots, and that’s the moment I suddenly knew who she was.
The days on the shoot were long and unrelenting. The director, I discovered, was not only king in Japan; he was dictator. Mr. Nagasaki’s decisions were unilateral, and they were final. He did not have time for questions or discussions. If he didn’t like a take, he would say, “One more time,” but he wouldn’t give a reason why.
I would ask, “What was wrong? You didn’t like what I did? Should I try something else?”
He would reply, “One more time.”
So I would do another take, in a totally different way, and he would say, “One more time.” And so it went. Since there were no unions, we would work twelve- to fourteen-hour days in the freezing Alps. Sometimes we’d go to 3:00 A.M., and then have to get up three hours later for the next day’s shoot.
After a long day on the set we would all go back to the lodge and relax in the rotenburo, the hot spring bath—all of us, actors, producers, crew. Drinking sake, discussing the shoot—all completely naked. For me this was just a little weird. I was used to communal bathing since childhood, and there was obviously nothing sexual going on; we were all soaking our muscles and relaxing in an atmosphere of complete professionalism. Still, to see the producers and the director, our symbols of total authority, climbing naked into the bath with us was an image difficult to reconcile with our daytime reality. Like mollusks, they had ventured out of their hard shells and exposed their soft, fleshy bodies to the nig
ht air. Tomorrow they would be armored and imperious again.
My trials on the set went on for two weeks. Then something very interesting happened: Nagasaki and I connected. I don’t know how or why, but it was like telepathy; I became one with him, and I knew exactly what he was thinking. I never had to ask him what he wanted in a scene; it was already clear to me. After that, filming became a breeze: everything was done in one take, and the shooting schedule was cut in half.
Something else happened that made the shooting of The Witch of the West Is Dead a truly transformative experience for me. I became reacquainted with natto. Natto is a Japanese dish consisting of fermented soybeans. You eat it with steamed rice, a raw egg on top, and chopped-up seaweed and scallions. Mix it up in a bowl, bring the bowl to your mouth, and slurp it up. It’s fantastic. One of my favorite foods.
I could never have eaten natto in Connecticut because the preparation of it would have stunk up the house for days afterward. My family would have been so nauseated, it would have made them throw up. So they refused to let me make it. It is a nasty smell, but I grew up with it, so I love it.
They served it three times a day on the Witch set. I was in heaven.
However, there were unintended consequences. My body had grown unaccustomed to a constant diet of fermented beans and I started collecting an excess of gas, and I had to get rid of it through the only avenue open to me.
Now, I should acknowledge here that as the only American in the cast, and the daughter of a famous star, there was an unspoken tension between me and the rest of the crew. The actors were naturally suspicious of me, figuring me for a spoiled Hollywood brat, and many of them gave me the cold shoulder. Plus, I knew the director and the producers had really wanted my mother for the role.
So I had something to prove. I tried to be as friendly and down-to-earth as possible. I always ate with everyone else at the long mess hall tables, and took whatever the cook served up. The teenage actress who played my granddaughter, Mayu Takahashi, was already well known in Japan, and she had a separate dining space, surrounded by bodyguards. I think everyone expected the same of me, but I knew that this was a trap. I wanted them to think of me as one of the guys.
That’s where the natto came in. The bean gas was constantly building up in my intestines, to the point where my stomach was hurting from the pressure, but I refused to be impolite on the set. I didn’t want to be considered a truly ugly American. So I would hold myself together for one take, and then excuse myself. I’d head out into the forest, and when I was safely alone, I’d let it rip. And it was, take my word for it, thunderous. The birds would scatter. Then I’d go back to the set for another take, and more often than not, the gas well would refill—it was like my intestines were hooked up to a bicycle pump—and I’d have to excuse myself again. It was cold up in those mountains, so each time, I would have to put on my jacket and boots just to fart.
For some reason I never made the connection between the beans and the gas. I thought my gas had something to do with the altitude, or the stress of performing. Besides, I found the natto comforting, so I kept eating it like crazy—and kept producing incredible, otherworldly gas. It reminded me of Mr. Gerard of Charter Towers and his propulsive farting. I just couldn’t stop.
Finally, I got tired of hiding it. I could barely focus on my role with my concentration divided between mind and body, so after two weeks of stealth bombing, I said, “To hell with politeness,” and let go with a blast in front of everyone. “Excuse me,” I said, both sheepish and defiant.
Well, talk about an icebreaker. Everyone laughed, and a sense of relaxation flooded the set. They were charmed and delighted by my evident humanity. “So that’s what you’ve been doing all this time!” Nobody had the slightest clue of what I’d been up to in the forest.
Except the sound man. “Don’t worry,” he said to me quietly on the side, “I’ve already heard everything.” It seems that whenever I went out in the woods to fart, I’d forgotten to turn off my body mike. So he had been privy to every rude combustible sound. More than that, I would usually accompany my farts with a heartfelt commentary, often groaning in English, “Fu-u-u-u-ck!” Then, after I was spent, I would say, “Oh, yeah!” The poor guy had been listening to my gastrointestinal struggles for the past two weeks. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked him. He shrugged. Wouldn’t have been polite.
Anyway, now that I was letting my wind go free, it endeared me to everyone. I was clearly no diva; you couldn’t get any more down-to-earth than this. I became known on the set as “The Farting Grandmother.” There was one very sweet scene I had with Mayu as the teenage girl; we were both in bed sharing a tender moment. After every take, I would lift up the bedcovers and let one go—then go back to being sweet again. I remember one of the producers thoughtfully suggesting, “Let’s just get some gaffer’s tape and stick it across her butthole.”
In addition to providing an endless source of amusement, my indisposition gave everyone else permission to fart, too. It became a very friendly, collegial atmosphere on that set.
One day, I finally figured out that it was the natto. As soon as I stopped eating it, the gas receded, and I could lead a normal life again. Still, I’d made an indelible mark on my colleagues; right to the end of the shoot, I would get the same laughing refrain at mealtime: “No more natto!”
The Witch of the West Is Dead was a huge box-office hit in Japan, and went on to win scads of awards. Beyond that, it was a revelatory experience for me. I was deeply proud of my work on that film, and working in Japan gave me my first opportunity as an adult to explore my roots, and gain an awareness of where I’d come from. I’d never realized how deeply the Japanese culture, the syntax of humility and denial and stoic acceptance, had become a part of my DNA, and informed my every thought and action, for both good and ill. Being there again, as an adult, made me understand who I was. I had come full circle to the world of my childhood, and found myself still there.
• • •
IN the fall of 2007, Dale Olson called from L.A. He was going to be passing through New York in about a week and wanted to meet with me. Dale Olson was one of the most famous publicists in Hollywood. Before he passed away in August 2012, he represented the likes of Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, Rock Hudson, Marilyn Monroe, Gene Kelly, Joan Crawford—and Shirley MacLaine. He knew where all the bodies were buried in Tinseltown, but he wasn’t one for spilling confidences and spreading gossip. He was considered by all a class act.
Dale had recently had a falling-out with my mother, which was hardly unusual. Mom was not an easy friend to maintain. She was always having little snits and kerfuffles with her buddies and business partners. I assumed that Dale wanted a sympathetic ear for his side of the story.
I had known Dale since I was a kid. He always had a smiling face and a lot of positive energy. He was an amazing cook—I especially loved his cauliflower dish, which was simply the best in the world. I always felt safe around Dale, because he made me feel that I mattered. His partner, Gene, and I also had a very special relationship, so I was really looking forward to seeing them both, and I couldn’t wait for them to meet my kids.
He and Gene arrived at the house in time for lunch. I made a nice meal, and we all sat out on the patio catching up on old times, with Frank and the kids joining us. I told Dale about the Japan shoot, and how great it had gone. He seemed thrilled for me.
At some point I mentioned how disappointed I was about not getting to act with Mom in Closing the Ring. I told him about the Canadian immigration policy, how a new law had recently been passed limiting the number of Americans in the cast, and how Mom had done everything she could short of switching her citizenship, to no avail.
Dale was quiet a moment. “Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” he finally said. “It wasn’t Immigration.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t Immigration that stopped you from doing that movie. You could have gotten around that problem easily enough.�
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“What do you mean?” I knew what he meant the moment he said it, but I convinced myself that I didn’t.
“It was your mother.”
I felt the ground drop away. “What do you mean?” I re-peated.
“Your mother didn’t want you to do the movie,” Dale replied flatly. “She sabotaged you.”
“What?” I immediately shifted into denial. “That’s not true.”
“It is true.”
“It’s not. You don’t know.”
“Yes, I do know.” And of course he did. Dale was in a position to know.
“But…” It was a panic moment. I raced back through my memory, trying to retrieve any bit of evidence that might disprove Dale’s accusation. “No,” I countered, “that doesn’t make sense. She’s the one who got me the audition in the first place. It was her idea.”
“She got you the audition because she never thought you would get the part.” He spoke evenly, laying out the information with a dry matter-of-factness. “You were almost fifty, Sachi. Why would they have let you play her daughter?”
“But I am her daughter.”
Dale shook his head. “Not on film. She wanted someone else.”
My heart started pounding. Frankie and Arin were still sitting at the table, finishing their lunch. I told them to go inside and play.
I tried to think my way through this. What Dale claimed was certainly plausible, but I wasn’t giving up just yet. There were too many instances of Mom being supportive of me. She loved my screen test. She was there when I got my eyes done. She was going to turn Canadian. She made all kinds of phone calls to important people. And when Frank offered to help, Mom stopped him because she was handling it—
Wait a minute.
If she was handling it, why had it fallen apart? Why did she stop Frank from helping? And why did she keep asking me, “What if you don’t get the part?”
Dale could see that the truth was sinking in. “I felt so bad about that movie, Sachi. I knew how much it meant to you. It wasn’t right what she did, but—that’s your mother. That’s what she does. Remember Marion Ross in The Evening Star?”