by Diane Keaton
After the success of Annie Hall, I bought a tower apartment on the twenty-first floor of the San Remo, on Central Park West. It was hard to believe I lived in a wraparound sky house with a 360-degree view of the city. I was in my early thirties. I’d achieved my goal. I lived in a dream house. But it wasn’t enough. I began to look at Architectural Digest, House and Garden, and The World of Interiors. My tear-sheet days had begun in earnest. I began collecting books with names like The 70s House, and Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life, His Work, His Words. Years later, after Dad got sick, I moved to Los Angeles and launched into a life of buying, selling, and living in a series of houses.
L.A., like New York, was not neighborhood-friendly. Sure, people lived in houses next door, down the block, and around the corner, but no one, not one person, rang my doorbell the way, years later, Liz did, with a plate of cookies. But who was I to talk? I never rang a doorbell welcoming a new family to the neighborhood.
It didn’t matter. I was dream-house bound, dream-house inspired, and dream-house obsessed. Today I actually sat down and counted how many apartments and houses I’ve rented, bought, and sold. Close to fifty. Even after I adopted Dex and then, five years later, Duke, it was always the next house, the next remodel, the next Spanish, the next Lloyd Wright, the next project with the next promise of what? My very own exceptionally perfect display-case model home? It never entered my mind that I might be reliving those early days with Dad’s hand in mine as we walked through model homes. It never did. I never thought about Mom and those inspirational visits to Bullocks Wilshire in downtown Los Angeles.
Last week I was at Big Daddy’s Antiques off Jefferson in Culver City, looking at a fourteen-foot dining room table to fit in the fifteenth house Dexter’s lived in during the eighteen years of her life, and the tenth house Duke’s lived in during the thirteen years of his. What am I doing? And why?
One-fourth of those eighteen years were spent in a variety of pit-stop rentals while I pursued the next Lloyd Wright (there were two), the next Wallace Neff, the next Paul Williams Spanish, or the surprise Mission Revival by Ralph Flewelling—even the Windsor Smith house in Mandeville Canyon, which fell out of escrow. Behind and in front of my back, people have called me a serial renovator, a serial flipper, even a wannabe Ellen DeGeneres.
The moves, all fifteen, centered on the dream of a beautiful life lived in a beautiful home. As with all addicts, I found that each house fell short. Sure, they were the homes of my choice—the homes of little Duke and Dexter, who would become big Duke and bigger Dexter. And even though I renewed my vows with every residence, I couldn’t beat the odds. The junkie in me prevailed. We moved.
I like to blame Dad for my inability to commit to HOME. I like to say, “Not my fault—it’s in the DNA.” I like to blame the feel of Dad’s left hand in mine as we walked through those early model homes described by D. J. Waldie in his essay on Maynard Parker, the photographer for House Beautiful, as “The Station Wagon Way of Life,” where “Pace Setter houses made suburban dreams a reality.” Subconsciously, I knew that suburban dreams of Pace Setter houses had to be in multiples. One would never be enough.
In a way, each and every house had the ultimate say. True, I bought and remodeled them. I raised the ceiling heights at Copa de Oro Road. I resurfaced the fireplaces at 820 North Roxbury. I changed the Italianate exterior to its more original Mission Revival façade, and turned the entrance into a library. But no matter what I did to each house, its essence remained intact.
With this in mind, I forgive myself for continuing the pursuit of the unattainable. I know I’m guilty of dragging my kids all over the West Side of Los Angeles as we moved from rental to new house, ad infinitum. I hope they develop their own love of the built world. Like army brats, they seem to have adjusted to life on the go every two years or so. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. But sure, I question my motives. Working on a renovation is honoring the past by including it in the future. For me, it’s the process, not the result. The result is always the same. When do I start the next one? What harm is there in cleaning them up, reusing them, only to send them on their way? I’ve given people jobs. I’ve sold the product. The houses still stand.
Every day, each and every one of us experiences a series of losses. I walk Emmie to the bluff, where I see a stranger walking his dog. We pause and smile. Our dogs chase tennis balls. I never see him or his dog again. In my car on Sunset, I notice a woman putting on lipstick as she texts on the phone while driving. She’s gone before I can honk my horn. I have a meal at Giorgio Baldi. I order that exact meal two weeks later, but it’s not the same. Nothing is ever the same. Nothing is permanent. Nothing can be trusted to be there. Nothing is safe, including home. Why lie to yourself? Every day we leave something, someone, some observation behind.
I’ve faced the truth. No dream can live up to its expectations. Ownership is brief; in fact, it’s a fiction. And beauty? Beauty is a discovery that diminishes the truth of reality. So keep looking.
THE DREAM OR THE NEIGHBORHOOD?
The point is … I’m not sure what I’m going to do. Should we move out of the neighborhood after the dream house is built? In a year Dexter will have graduated from high school, and Duke—oh my God, Duke will be in his final year of middle school. Emmie will be fourteen years old. Where does it all go? Come on, Diane, you’ve got to give up something. What’s it going to be, the Dream or the Neighborhood?
A few weeks ago, Heidi, who lives on Muskingum Place, knocked on my door to tell me that fifty-seven-year-old Michael, with the two black dogs and the twelve-year-old adopted boy, had died. He collapsed in his home. That’s it? You wake up one morning. Everything is normal. Everything is taken for granted. Your wife and son are in the kitchen eating breakfast, while you’re dying in the bedroom? The terms are incomprehensible. Enjoy the tragedy of your life, Joseph Campbell said. Do I have to? What if I die before the dream house is built? Will I regret the unbuilt dream I left behind? Or is death the end of regret? When my friend John Burnham was robbed at gunpoint in the carport of his home, one thought came to my mind: Why hadn’t he spent all his money? Life is a risky business, a now-or-never situation. The Dream or the Neighborhood?
Eventually I will have a choice. Do we live in a house on a block with proper streetlights, plenty of No Parking signs, and an alarm system banner posted outside my walled-in compound? I won’t have to worry about “Breaking News” of unfolding neighborhood dramas. No Liz. No Lucille, No Hi Neighbor, either. I’ll be able to get up and go to sleep in the presence of unobstructed beauty, or at least my idea of it. Undoubtedly a couple of years will pass, I’ll sell the dream home while in the process of building another, then another, and another, if I’m lucky. What’s wrong with that?
Several friends have advised me not to build at this age. They say I don’t need the pressure. They say, “Enjoy your life.” They say, “Calm down, Diane, you’re on the brink of becoming another Sarah Winchester.” Sleepless nights worrying over imagined change orders and repeating the word “custom” as if it were a mantra is a waking nightmare. But I’m determined to live in the result even if it turns out to be one more ridiculous “folly” lining the streets of Los Angeles. Hey, I took the tour of the infamous “Winchester Mystery House,” so I know about the crazy heiress Sarah Winchester. I heard the stories of the psychic who advised her to beware of the spirits of the people who had been killed by Winchester rifles. Sarah’s only recourse was to move west and build a house to be shared with a group of restless ghosts. Convinced that they would kill her if she completed construction, Sarah Winchester spent her entire fortune on round-the-clock construction, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, for the next 38 years. I’ll never forget walking through rooms with doors that opened into walls, staircases that led nowhere, and windows that looked onto concrete blocks. Let me just say I was impressed, not only by the will of the woman but also by her 160-room house. I mean, come on. That’s taking an idea very far.
I’m in
trigued by every screwball who built a structure that took “dream house” to the limits of possibility. Los Angeles alone has succeeded in being home to a multitude of so-called follies, built in an atmosphere free from the constraints of education and good taste. I have no doubt my house will fit into our city’s melting pot of confections. I’m not ashamed to admit I get a kick out of the thirty-thousand-square-foot McMansions I drive by in the flats of Beverly Hills. I love the Dutch Colonial Revival covered with every concrete animal God placed on Noah’s Ark in pairs. I’m inspired by building a fantasy of a fantasy fostered on a dream of a past that never was. This includes great architects as well. Think of John Lautner’s Chemosphere house. It looks like a spaceship posed on a hilltop in Hollywood. Think of Tony Duquette’s abandoned synagogue, which he restored and renamed “the Duquette Pavilion of Saint Francis.” Don’t forget the Petal House, by Eric Moss, who remodeled a tract home by adding a second story using composite shingle siding, then fooled around with the roof and peeled back four triangles, setting them at different angles so they looked like petals on a flower. Or the Struckus House, by Bruce Goff, which, swear to God, appears to be a giant-sized eighteenth-century birdcage.
I know that Los Angeles is ridiculed for creating the most deviant concoctions of what people call home. Great. I mean it. Great. I’m buying it, hook, line, and sinker, and I don’t care if my misguided obsession is frowned upon. I don’t. At least I have a dream of beauty, no matter how inappropriate. Here in Los Angeles, I have the right to pursue happiness. Homes included. My idea may not be yours—or anyone’s, for that matter—but it’s mine. After all, I’m Jack Hall’s daughter. I love figuring things out—granted, my way. I’m Dorothy Hall’s daughter, too, and I love all things HOME.
For now, Dexter, Duke, Emmie, and I live in a neighborhood. Our house with its floor-to-ceiling glass doors and jumbo-sized black numbers painted outside is an open book. Every night our neighbors can see our good times and bad times, if they choose. Every morning they can ride their bikes past our nothing-to-hide kitchen. After the rain last night, Emmie and I got up for our walk to the bluff, where we saw the Pacific, the largest of the earth’s oceanic divisions, extending from the Arctic in the north to the Antarctic Ocean in the south. The Pacific covers one-third of the earth’s surface. To me, and I’m sure Emmie, too, it is the first wonder of the world. It is not man-made. It is not a dream house; nor was it built in the likeness of God. What is it? Inexplicable beauty. After the same walk in the morning, as we turn our backs to take up the tasks of the day, I call Stephanie and leave a message: “Did you hear about the landslide last night? The houses on the rim are fine, and thank God the Aloha Courtyard Trailer Park residents are okay, too. That rim is scary. Emmie, the idiot, almost fell over the edge. But, wait a minute, I forgot—do I pick up Duke at extended day or what? Call me back.”
“What kind of house would you like to live in?” I asked Duke when he was little. “A house with people in it,” he said. “A house with people in it? Not a dream house?” “Nope. A house with people in it, Mom.”
I don’t know if it’s a good idea to pull up roots again. Maybe Wynola should be our permanent home. But then, what’s permanent? Not 905 North Wright Street, now long gone. Heartbreakingly, not Mom and Dad, either. What ever happened to Lou and her husband, Jimmy G.? What about Judy Reed? She has to be in her mid-sixties, and Bill and Laurel, where are they? Even now Duke wants to live in a house with people in it. Dexter likes the neighborhood. So do I. People make up a neighborhood. People. But people are not dream homes. People are not set in stone. They’re not brick and mortar, or board and batten. People do not have the capacity to withstand time.
Emmie and I are looking at Laurie’s new lawn when Janice, who owns a prefab in the Aloha Courtyard Trailer Park, passes me, saying she’s not worried. “The bluff will stand firm,” she tells me. At least for now. I nod and think: Risk taker—that’s what she is, a risk taker living at the edge. Aren’t we all? When I get home, I put the dog leash away, rinse out my coffee cup, and see Lucille at the door. She’s got the Pilates brochure she was talking about a few days ago. I smile my best greeter smile, not as big as hers, and think: Irreplaceable. The woman is irreplaceable. As my smile widens, I know it’s a beautiful life in the moment, especially on Wynola Street. There’s no chance we are leaving, at least not for now.
Last summer I was making a movie in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with Rob Reiner and Michael Douglas. I had the day off and decided to take the train into New York City to see my friend Kathryn.
When I got out of the shower I made the mistake of glancing in the mirror. My body, the whole “kit and caboodle,” as my Grammy Hall would have said, is falling. I’ve been aware that it was collapsing since Fiona Lewis, a fellow actress and the wife of producer Art Linson, scared the shit out of me back in the late 1980s when she confronted me at the Chateau Marmont about the way my butt had dropped. She pointed to hers, saying she was heartbroken. Not being a booty aficionado, I had no idea mine had taken a plunge, nor did I care. I was, however, concerned about my face, and decided to take my friend Candy Bergen’s advice. I went to see Janet Sartin, a renowned cosmetologist. When I opened the door to her private consultation room, I found a gurney in the middle of what looked like the set of Frankenstein, the old one, the one starring Boris Karloff, complete with microscopes, smoking jars, and chemical compounds.
It was all very unexpected, but not as unexpected as Janet Sartin, who put me on the gurney, got down to business, and gave me the bad news. I looked a little “worse for the wear”—that’s how she put it. The multitude of scars on my cheeks from basal cell carcinoma treatments didn’t help. I had dangerously dry skin, she said, and my eyes were drooping. With that, she began massaging me with jolts from some sort of wand. I didn’t remember having made an appointment for shock therapy. As if that wasn’t enough, when I left I looked just as tired as when I’d arrived.
The friendly ticket agent at the Stamford train station recognized me and smiled. I smiled, too, saying I wanted a ticket to Grand Central Terminal, and gave him a twenty. He handed me back twelve dollars, along with a senior/Medicare discount stub. Only a few days before I’d bought a ticket for Brad Pitt’s World War Z and had been given a senior discount as well. That’s two in one week. I suppose it wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but it sure did feel like it.
Standing on the platform, waiting for the express, made me nervous. What if I got on the wrong train? I was afraid to ask the woman next to me. She must have been in her late fifties. Her mouth turned down at the ends. Not exactly inviting, and her hair was bottle black. I wondered when she’d gone “hard.” When was the moment her face became set in stone like Grammy Hall’s?
I couldn’t remember a time when Grammy wasn’t old. She defied people’s perception of “over the hill,” partially because she didn’t give a hoot what anybody thought. She kept her mind on the p’s and q’s, which to her meant money. That’s the way Grammy’s life rolled, in cash: in fives and tens and twenties and fifties; in one-hundred-dollar bills stuffed under her bed in rolled-up blankets, suitcases, and lockboxes. Her kitchen shelves were decorated with jam jars filled with pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and silver dollars she won playing the slots every weekend in downtown Vegas. She claimed banking was for “ ’tards”—retards. Grammy Hall was not warm and fuzzy. In short, she was a walnut you couldn’t crack. I can’t recall a time when she hugged me, or wiped away my tears. She was independent to a fault. I admired her for sticking to her guns, man or no man. When Dad became successful as a civil engineer, she didn’t pat him on the back and say, “I’m so proud of you, son.” Oh no. There was none of that. She relentlessly compared her ability to earn money with his, pointing out that she was an unmarried woman with no education who had single-handedly made her way in the world. She insisted that he consider the setback of being born female in the late nineteenth century. According to her, these factors proved that she earned more than him b
y a walloping 15 percent. Yep, she was a ball breaker. On the other hand, Mary Hall was the reason Dad did so well in business. She knew the truth early on. Money is power. Money buys you independence. To her, what beauty there was to be extracted from this “weird old world” was green and wrinkled.
Once on the train, I took out my iPad and hit Pinterest, where I found an absolutely gorgeous portrait of Meryl Streep taken by Brigitte Lacombe. Why couldn’t I have Meryl’s patrician nose or Yale education? I was about to pin her when a couple of young women came up to me and asked to take a picture, saying how “cute” I was and how “totally adorable” I looked. I’d take anything, even “old lady,” even “doddering,” over “cute and adorable.” The last thing I want to be is innocuous or cuddly, as in “harmless”!
I used to get stopped with “Are you Sandy Dennis?” or “You’re what’s her name, Jill Clayburgh? Right?” Last summer, a maid at the Four Seasons in Maui looked at me and said in recognition, “Firecracker?”
I shook my head. “Huh?”
She pointed at me. “Firecracker?”
I shook my head again and said, “ ‘Firework’?”
“You. Fireworks?!”
“No, I’m not Katy Perry.”
Was she blind? I’m forty years older than Katy Perry. At the airport the next day, a teenage boy asked me if I was Jane Fonda. “No. No. Don’t worry about it. I’m not Jane Fonda.” Clearly I’m somebody, just not me.
As the train pulled into Grand Central, I grabbed my bag and hurried out. I had lived in New York City for twenty years, and yet Grand Central Terminal has never failed to stun me. Were it not for Jackie Kennedy, there would be no hundred-year-anniversary banners hanging on the walls because there would be no Grand Central Terminal. As I stood taking it all in, hundreds of people were rushing to catch trains, grabbing magazines, waving hello and goodbye. A middle-aged woman arm in arm with a beautiful old man in yellow shorts, a yellow shirt, and a Panama hat came up to me for a picture. I always say yes to people who ask for a picture if, and only if, they’re willing to be in it with me. What’s the point of having a picture of me without them? It has no meaning. It’s abstract, and besides, it makes me feel good to be friendly. Like Sally Field, I’m grateful that they seem to like me. Maybe they don’t, but I can’t tell. It’s a moment in time. A lovely experience. The woman was sweet, but Frank Zimmerman—that was his name—was perfection. At ninety-six he’d flown up from Boca Raton, Florida, to celebrate the birth of his seventh great-grandchild. Like Grand Central Terminal, he was a centenarian. Old, as in almost one hundred years old. Old-is-gold old.