Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty

by Diane Keaton

  Sleeper and Love and Death, two early Woody Allen movies, were a lot of fun. It was second nature for me to play birdbrains and spoiled brats. Woody’s humor in those movies revolved around sex, a bodily function that leads to a release, just like laughter. So were these movies low comedy, or did the witty dialogue set them apart? In Sleeper my character, Luna, asks Woody’s character, Miles, if he would like to perform sex.

  MILES: Perform sex? Uh, uh, I don’t think I’m up to a performance, but I’ll rehearse with you, if you like.

  LUNA: Okay. I just thought you might want to; they have a machine here.

  MILES: Machine? I’m not getting into that thing. I, I’m strictly a hand operator; you know, I, I … I don’t like anything with moving parts that are not my own.

  Later in the movie Luna says, “It’s hard to believe that you haven’t had sex for two hundred years.” Miles responds with, “Two hundred four, if you count my marriage.”

  In Love and Death, my character, Sonja, complains to Boris (Woody) that she’s unhappy.

  BORIS: Oh, I wish you weren’t.

  SONJA: Voskovec and I quarrel frequently. I’ve become a scandal.

  BORIS: Poor Sonja.

  SONJA: For the past weeks, I’ve visited Seretski in his room.

  BORIS: Why? What’s in his room? Oh!!

  SONJA: And before Seretski, Aleksei, and before Aleksei, Alegorian, and before Alegorian, Asimov, and—

  BORIS: OKAY!!!

  SONJA: Wait, I’m still on the A’s.

  BORIS: How many lovers do you have?

  SONJA: In the midtown area?

  It’s true, both Love and Death and Sleeper were set in worlds where complex situations were hashed over among articulate people. But the primary topic, sex, was delivered by a couple of dimwits. Did that make Woody’s early movies high or low comedy? Does anyone care? Not really. And anyway, comedy is not a science. It’s an art. As soon as you try to analyze it, the funniness disappears. All I can say is, I wish I had made more comedies.

  On the drive home, I forgot about my throbbing toe. I forgot I was a broken-down privileged white woman of a certain age with a crabby attitude. What difference did it make if Chancellor Block and his wife had walked out on “God Bless America” in a nightmare? Sure, the alarm going off at three in the morning was worse than the nightmare, any nightmare. Yes, Dexter was annoying with her first fender bender. And, of course, I needed to work on Duke’s creepy-ass cracker language skills. No, I had not been able to charm the police officer. Yes, I was the kind of idiot who chose to walk backward barefoot only to fall and break her toe for the fourth time.… But—and it’s a big but—at the end of the day, I had to get down on my knees, praise the Lord, and thank Grown Ups 2 for reversing a possible (and, I admit, self-imposed) mental breakdown with the quickest of fixes. Laughter. It had been a rough day. But wasn’t it ironic that I would find myself in a theater watching a movie about grown-ups where the gag was that grown-ups were anything but grown-up?

  None of this, not one bit, downgrades the beauty of a smile. Not at all. It’s one thing to see a smile like Barack Obama’s. It’s another to feel it. A smile is appreciation, and empathy, and wonder. But laughter is release. Laughter is letting go. Babies laugh three hundred times a day. Adults twenty, if we’re lucky. What is it with being an adult? Does growing up—and, in my case, growing old—have to be characterized by increased seriousness and less laughter? I intend to join the babies of the world and laugh more. Especially since—and this is a fact—laughter leads to less stress. It just does. So while smiling is lovely … laughing is beautiful.

  I appeared to be a nice girl. I obeyed my mother, who said, “Diane is a lot of fun to be with. She does her chores without any complaints.” I had a sun-filled life. Our family vacations took us to national parks like Yosemite and Bryce Canyon. We went to drive-in theaters and saw movies like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I sang in the church choirs and ate Cheerios for breakfast. I was an innocent girl living in Southern California when the specter of starless nights came calling.

  I can’t pinpoint when dark became beautiful. At first it was shadows hiding bloodthirsty ghouls, who would break into our home by smashing the windows with mallets and then kill us all. Dark was the sound of rats scrabbling on the floor in the middle of the night, ready to leap into my bed and eat me alive. Dark meant something else, too. It meant tiptoeing into the kitchen after Mom and Dad were asleep to sneak a plateful of chocolate chip cookies. The only time to accomplish this “mission impossible” was in the quiet dark of Night.

  I was ten years old on the day I flipped through the pages of Life magazine and found a photograph of Sophia Loren. She sat on a stack of newspapers wearing a bathing suit and a pair of black patent leather stilettos. Her face had a sultry “take me” look. She was not sunny. There was something else, too. She appeared to have a long black line between her breasts. Later I learned that it had a name. Cleavage. Sophia Loren had lots of cleavage. I told no one of my new interest. Not Jesus in my prayers, or his father, God. Not Mom. Not Dad. No one. What I did was begin to hunt down other Life magazines, in search of more cleavage.

  A year later, my cousin Charlie Rupert took me to see a matinee of the movie Kiss Me Deadly. It was about a serial killer who kissed his victims, put a gun to their heads, and pulled the trigger. They were called women of the night. Like Sophia Loren, they had cleavage, but theirs jostled around inside V-neck sweaters worn over tight skirts. Later, Mom told me women of the night were sad because they sold their bodies. I told Mom I would never sell mine if it meant getting shot in the head. But I did want to know what sort of services were provided in the body-selling business. “Something not nice,” Mom said. “Something not nice.”

  Grammy Hall’s fixation on the death of Johnny Stompanato wasn’t nice, either. One tabloid suggested that the movie star Lana Turner found Mr. Stompanato in bed with her fourteen-year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane. Distraught, she grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed him to death. That was one story. The Herald Examiner’s was different. Cheryl heard screams, ran into her mother’s bedroom, saw Johnny Stompanato choking her, rushed for a knife, and plunged it into his heart. After a lengthy trial, the jury convicted Cheryl of justifiable homicide. She was made a ward of the state of California and sent to a home for problem girls; she escaped from that home in 1960.

  I’d never heard of a girl killing a man, or a man in bed with a girl, or a movie star nearly choked to death by a gigolo. The death of Johnny Stompanato was a Hollywood morality tale driven by a fading movie star’s unbalanced longing for a man of questionable character with swarthy appeal. At the center of the story was a teenage problem girl only two years older than me. Tabloid photographs showed an enigmatic Cheryl Crane being taken away in handcuffs. At Cheryl’s age, I was not an enigma, or a murderess. But I did want something about me to be alluring, even dangerous. I wanted to wear black stockings with black seams. Anything with a hint of shadow. A black belt over a black skirt, a gunmetal-gray wallet with a midnight-blue change purse. You get the drift. I began to understand the beauty of a little light mixed with dark. You could have both. Black and white. Dark and light. Good times and bad. Pain with pleasure.

  I was a junior in high school when Marilyn Monroe committed suicide. Somewhere in the darkest reaches of my mind, I understood that her breathless insecurity not only held the weight of her appeal but may have caused her death. My girlfriend Tammy said it was because she was getting old and her personal life wasn’t so hot. Plus, she had no children. I wasn’t so sure.

  I lingered over a picture in the paper of a black-haired man clinging to his scrapbook as a tornado approached. Watching Channel 13’s local news, I cried when I saw the broken Barbie doll a little girl grasped as the floodwaters rose. They seemed to be holding on to mementos of the dreams they’d lost on the way. Were my dreams going to get lost, too? I knew that roses faded, but I didn’t understand the thing about how when you reach “the peak of perfection”
you also “begin to wither.” I hadn’t clocked in beauty as a “time’s up” trick played on all of us.

  By that time I had my very own cleavage and I was a high school musical comedy star, applauded in particular for my antics. Boys thought I was marriage material. Girls thought I was fun. But underneath my affable veneer, I was beginning to spread a little dark into my light. At Santa Ana Junior College, I smoked marijuana with my friend Leslie, in my dad’s VW van. Was I bad? Were questionable choices overshadowing my lily-white reputation?

  I was twenty-two when I landed a role in the Broadway production of Hair. As soon as it became a giant hit, the entire cast went on a trip to Fire Island and took peyote. Me included. I swallowed a pill called MDA with a young man I dated; he laughed when I told him I saw a witch fly across his face on a broom. A few seconds later, his eyes became thousands of crisscrossing spiderwebs. I stuck my finger in one and it disappeared into a wall of thick black goo. Was I compiling a mountain of ominous secrets that would reveal the real Diane?

  I wasn’t prepared for Al Pacino. We’d been cast in The Godfather. Neither of us had a clue that we were going to make a movie that would go on to be considered one of the greatest films in American cinema. Try to picture this: We met in a bar in New York. I was awkward, and Al? Al was as mysterious as the love I felt for him the moment I saw his face. I didn’t want to be friendly—“Hi, I’m Diane”—or go through the “Nice to meet you, Diane” bit, either. There was nothing nice about my thoughts. His face, his nose, and what about those eyes? I kept trying to figure out what I could do to make them mine. They never were. That was the lure of Al. He was never mine. For the next twenty years I kept losing a man I’d never had. After Al, I began building a wall around my vulnerability. More hats. Long-sleeved everything. Coats in the summer. Boots with knee socks and wool suits with scarves at the beach. Woody said it best in a phone message: “I’m standing in front of your house, 820 Roxbury. It’s very beautiful. I’d like to get in, but I don’t have a hammer.”

  My friend Daniel Wolf advised me to “want what you have.” Want what I have? Oh, Daniel. He didn’t get it. Of all the beauties I’ve shared a bed with, Al’s blacker-than-midnight version was unmatchable. Even before he quit the bottle, Al was the kind of drinker who played out his nights at Joe Allen’s bar reading Shakespeare to a group of like-minded actors. It was his love of language. It was the sound of his voice. It was his continuously evolving face. That was the miracle of his beauty. Evolution. As we got more familiar, I took every opportunity to make him marriage material. My project did not work. All my failed efforts only increased my obsession. What did I learn? Never fall in love with the Godfather. Never stumble over a dark knight with shadowy beauty and deep talent.

  Eventually Al became a father to twins, with Beverly D’Angelo. In 2010 I was a mother to Duke, age nine, and Dexter, age fourteen. My movie Morning Glory was a failure at the box office, and Al Pacino was broke, or so it was suggested on the CNN interview I caught at my brother Randy’s new home in the retirement community of Belmont Village. Maybe Al had been hit by the recession. Whatever it was, he seemed to have changed for the better. Maybe those twins of his made him happy. Was I jealous? I don’t know; all I know is that as soon as I allowed myself to register those old feelings, I got queasy, and I threw up in Randy’s bathroom. When I came out, Randy asked if I was pregnant. Pregnant in my mid-sixties? “Pregnant, Randy?” I asked, dumbfounded. What world was he living in? The world of dreams? The world of phantasmagoric possibilities?

  Not the world of another Diane; oh no, not in the world of Diane von Furstenberg and media mogul Barry Diller. You can be sure that Diane wasn’t thinking about how to introduce the new version of her old black-and-white wrap dress when an interviewer said, “I think there’s a lot of curiosity about your marriage to Barry Diller.” This was her response: “I don’t understand what there is to understand. This man has been my lover, my friend, and now he’s my husband. I’ve been with him for thirty-five years. At times we were separated, at times we were only friends, at times we were lovers, at times we’re husband and wife. That’s our life.” That’s their life, but mine? I will never marry. Do I envy their ability to weather the storm and stick with the deal they struck? Yes. I do, but my love of the impossible far overshadowed the rewards of longevity. I fell for the beauty of a broken bird. The ecstasy of failure. It was the only marriage I could make with a man. Black with a little white. Pain mixed with pleasure.

  Diana Vreeland was not born with less. She was born with more—more ugliness than most women in the world of fashion and beauty could bear. The black–as–Grecian Formula hair slicked behind her ears and the cigarette dangling from her cherry-red lips were mere background material for the schnozzola sitting stage center in the wreckage of a face that defied compliance. Early on, she must have figured it was better to embrace the bad news and go with it. That’s exactly what she did. She paraded her flamboyant style while turning beauty toward the light of publication. As in the title of the documentary about her The Eye Has to Travel, her eyes traveled. They traveled when she worked at Harper’s Bazaar. They traveled when she was editor in chief of Vogue magazine. When she established herself as the premiere curator for the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her eyes took her on trips that gave the public some of the most extraordinary exhibitions in the history of the Met.

  Diana Vreeland was a walking, talking master class on beauty. She did not tighten her face. She did not lift it. She did not chop off her unsightly nose or pull up her failing neck. She was a woman in the precarious world of fashion who embellished her flaws with a religious zeal that made her beautiful. Her black hair was still lacquered when the “elegant Crane picking her way out of a swamp,” as Cecil Beaton described her, died of a heart attack in her eighties.

  I admired her gumption. Her face did not interfere with her mission. She was not swept up with regret. For Diana Vreeland, flaunting her flaws embellished the empire of beauty she created. I don’t wear the truth on my face. I’ve hidden my dark side with a smile.

  This summer, on the last day of filming And So It Goes, I shot the final scene by myself. Leah, a sixty-five-year-old wannabe lounge singer, had fallen in love with Oren, played by Michael Douglas. They’d flirted. They’d kissed. They’d had sex. Feeling pressured, Oren had abandoned Leah. To get back in her good graces, he’d managed to secure an audition for her at a nightclub called Victors. Leah had landed the job. They’d gotten closer. Leah felt hopeful, only to learn Oren had unexpectedly sold his house and was moving away.

  The crew members were saying goodbye to each other as they set up the shot. The rest of the cast was gone, even Michael. I knew I had to break down, but I was filled with anxiety, and told Rob Reiner, the director. He shrugged his shoulders. What could he do? It was my job. Before “Action” he had one direction: “Cry.”

  Suddenly I was sitting on a bar stool at Victors, speaking into a microphone: “The next song has a special meaning for me. I was seventeen, and this song was playing when I realized I was in love for the first time. That first time is so powerful you can’t imagine ever having those feelings for anyone else. But sometimes life outlives love. I never thought I’d love again, but here I am, still singing this song, still dreaming of love.” With that I nodded to my accompanist, played by Rob, and began singing: “The shadow of your smile when you are gone will color all my dreams and light the dawn.” When I got to “Our wistful little star was far too high. A teardrop kissed your lips and so did I,” I forgot I was making a movie in Stamford, Connecticut. I forgot the camera was pushing in on my face. I forgot about the audience of extras feigning interest, and I don’t know why, but I began to cry. “Now when I remember spring, and all the joy that love can bring, I will be remembering the shadow of your smile.” Only later did I realize that it was the music that had affected me. It was the recognition that sometimes life does outlive love. It was the regret of thinking I’d never love again, or
see the color of my dreams light the dawn, but it was also knowing that in spite of everything, to still be singing a song, and still dreaming of love, was enough for me.

  My father and mother lived with the dream of love for fifty years. It didn’t matter how often the army of darkness approached. When Dad was dying, he still sang his song to Mom. He sang it from the mystery of his journey. Mom wrote it down. I found what she wrote about it. I wrote that down, too.

  “We took a shower together on Sunday. We both had a feeling of closeness even though he was not the same. I scrubbed him good, and washed his hair. We kissed and hugged for a long time and said tender things to one another. I got to feel his body which I’ve loved for so many years. I’ll never forget these moments we have together. The grasping for one another’s hand; the squeeze. The long looks, he with his good eye, I with my owl glasses bumping him in the face as I lean in to kiss him. Tonight our kisses were long and open; our special kind. Our intimacy was the same as it was when we first met, forty-seven years ago. I told him about when I saw him at the door for our first date. His eyes were risky, direct, and light blue. I loved his eyes from the first moment I looked at him. As I held on tight with a long gaze, Jack told me he was climbing down off the ladder of steps that he was holding up with one hand.”

  Mother and Father gave me their beauty, part silhouette, part shadow box. Part cleavage. Part Cheryl Crane. Part anger and remorse. Part failure. Part admiration of Diana Vreeland’s will to redefine beauty. Part beaten-up Barbie doll. Part Al. Part sex, drugs, and Marilyn Monroe. I carry their beauty inside the very soul of my being. Dark, with shades of gray. Light, with storm clouds in the distance. Because of Dad and Mom, I’m not afraid to dream of dark victories and black beauty. I’m not afraid to be in love with the night.