Calls came and scripts arrived regularly for the first time in my career. I had become so used to hustling for every job, for every opportunity, that it was hard for me to relax and enjoy the idea that now, work would be coming to me. Or at least I hoped it would. I’d had too much experience to think that the good times would last forever. Nothing is ever as easy as it seems, and though I certainly enjoyed the professional recognition the Oscar signified, it took me a very long time to get comfortable with the idea that I was no longer an outsider. That I was now on the inside and that I’d have to contend with a whole new set of challenges and opportunities. I’d have to prepare for the challenges that would accompany this whole new world of contradictions that was opening up in front of—and within—me.
I remember shuttling back and forth to Boston a lot in 1988, especially during the months right after the Oscars, in order to help my cousin Michael, who was then governor of the state of Massachusetts. I liked being involved in his intensifying campaign. It was a great opportunity to see a true public servant such as Michael in action, and it was a great excuse to get together.
Louie and I would arrive at the Dukakis campaign headquarters and watch Michael move from the phone, to one person, to another, then back to the phone with a measured grace. He handled everyone with a high level of efficiency and respect that really impressed me. I had the great honor of introducing Michael at a number of gatherings, including the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. I remember how moved I was hearing the name “Dukakis” said over and over again. It made me want to acknowledge all the Greeks that came before this who had been a part of our lives and meant so much to us. I found myself reciting a very personal roll call of my own that day, as I invoked the names of our fathers, our grandfathers, grandmothers, aunts, and uncles. As though calling their names would reach them somehow and they could see and hear what their lives had contributed to.
Despite the fact that Michael ultimately lost the election, these were great days for us, for everyone in our family. It still astounds us all how 1988 became our “family” time to truly shine—I called it the year of the Dukakii—the moment when the Dukakis flame truly flared in recognition of all who came before us and for all those who would follow, because it wasn’t just Michael and me, children of immigrants, who broke the surface and rose to such professional prominence. It seemed as though that year we all flourished and had reached a point of excellence in our work.
One of the great highlights of that period for me was introducing Michael at the Democratic National Convention that was held in Atlanta, Georgia, just months before the November election. I had made a short film about him and that was shown first. Then I stepped out onto this gigantic platform that overlooked the convention floor. The room was a sea of bouncing placards that read DUKAKIS FOR PRESIDENT!, and Neil Diamond’s “America” was blaring from speakers that surrounded the enormous hall. Then a chant rose up—“Duke! Duke! Duke!”—and it built until I stepped up to the microphone, when it erupted into applause and cheers. To be cheered like that, for my cousin Michael, for the name we shared, was like facing all the audiences I’d ever played to all rolled into one.
It had helped me to take my mind off of my own future to turn my attention and focus on Michael’s bid for the presidency. It was also a wake-up call when my Oscar was stolen—right out of our kitchen. This little larceny also illustrates how naive I could be when it came to handling the press. I found myself reading interviews I gave and cringing when I saw my words in print and thinking, “Did I really say that?” I made a few gaffes where I neglected to thank someone or I came off sounding arrogant when I thought I was just being emphatic. But somewhere along the line, when asked where I kept my Oscar, I told the interviewer that it was still in my kitchen, where I had left it after coming home from L.A. Around the same time, our insurance broker suggested to Louie that we should have my Oscar insured. “You never know,” he said. “There could be a fire or an earthquake or something.” Louie thought about it and had a rider attached to our home-owners’ policy that insured my statuette for ten thousand dollars. About a week after the interview ran in our local paper, someone broke in and took the Oscar, but left the plaque that had my name on it! The thief, for some reason, figured it would be more valuable on the black market without being identified as belonging to me, and so had taken the time to take the plaque off and leave it on our kitchen counter. We reported the theft to the police department and then Louie rang up our insurance company. Sure enough, a check for ten thousand dollars arrived within weeks. Louie called the company that made the statues and we got a replacement—for fifty-six bucks! I screwed on the original plaque with my name, and I had my Oscar back, safe and sound.
Right after the convention I got a call from my agent about a movie called Steel Magnolias, written by Robert Harling. It was set to go into production, and Herbert Ross, the director, had one key part still to cast and he wanted to meet me.
Ross was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, so I took the Number 66 bus in from Montclair one afternoon. At the front desk I asked for Mr. Ross. Without even looking up, the concierge said, “Go right on up to his room. He’s expecting you.” “Okay,” I thought as I got into the elevator, “this isn’t so bad.” I rang the bell on Ross’s door and a voice called out, “Come on in!” I walked in to find Herb Ross naked, faceup in the middle of the floor of the suite, with only a strategically placed bath towel covering him. A Japanese masseuse was straddling him, working away with intense concentration. I just stood there, unsure of what to do, when Ross simply rolled over and said, “Oh. It’s you, Olympia. The desk said it was Lee [Radziwill, his then girlfriend]. I’ll be with you in a minute.” I looked around for a place to sit while the thought ran through my head that maybe this was yet another run-in with the “casting couch,” and I remember thinking, “Is this still how this is done, even at my age?” The thought made me laugh out loud.
When his massage was over, Ross, now wrapped in a bathrobe, and I had our meeting. I liked him immediately. He offered me the part of Clairee, a recent widow in the town of Natchitoches, Louisiana, where this true story happened. But first, he asked to hear my southern accent. “Not good enough,” he said. “You’ll have to learn a plantation accent.” He wanted me to sound like what an upper-class southern woman would sound like. Sometime in the middle of rehearsals, prior to shooting, Dolly Parton turned to me and said, “I can’t stand that accent. I’ve listened to it all my life and I can’t stand it.”
With a finalized “deal,” I looked forward to soon heading off to Natchitoches to join Shirley MacLaine, Sally Field, Darryl Hannah, Dolly Parton, and the then-unknown Julia Roberts for filming. This was a big-budget affair—six enormous Winnebagos—way beyond the scale of Moonstruck.
What I liked about Clairee was that in her quiet, subtle way, she was willing to take on life’s challenges and contradictions and be transformed by them. Though my character was no longer a young woman, and she had recently lost her husband, she was struggling to find her way back into a meaningful new life by buying a radio station and making plans to travel to New York City. Clairee had a razor-sharp sense of humor that took the truth, as she saw it, to the outer limits of decency; in some ways, she was not unlike Rose Castorini in Moonstruck. Both these women knew who they were, in a very basic and essential way, and made the commitment to honor that person. To be authentic and to not view themselves solely through the lens of male perspective that had, in their own lives, so limited them. Whenever I had the chance to play a part that went into this territory that short-circuits pretense, insecurity, and especially the limitations placed on women by the outside world, I grabbed it.
I recall feeling very at home on that set. I enjoyed and admired the women. Darryl Hannah is a bright, intuitive, aware, and politically active woman. Sally Field is probably the most disciplined film actor I’ve ever worked with. Shirley MacLaine, well, let me tell you, she’s as high-spirited and generous as
she seems. I remember sitting with her between takes one afternoon, and she looked over at Julia, and she turned to me and said, “She’s got it. The camera loves her. She’ll be a big star someday.” And Julia! She was really being put through her paces by Ross; she’d come on board the movie with absolutely no formal training and held her own with a crew of very experienced women. I admired her for hanging in there and turning in a fine performance, despite Ross’s constant needling. Dolly Parton held herself with such simple dignity and was sincerely generous with her fans. I determined that I would try to follow her example.
The only hard part of this job for me was being away from home and the theater. Whenever there was a break, I’d call Louie and the kids and they’d fill me in on what was going on back home in Montclair; they kept me posted on how my mother was faring. I’d talk with the theater staff about what was going on there and we’d brainstorm over the phone about raising money and other theater issues, but it was a little hard to try and run a theater long-distance.
Once shooting in Louisiana was over, I dove full-time into fund-raising. I was not above deceit in my quest for additional funds for the theater. I was told that a cat food company was offering celebrities five thousand dollars to allow their cats to appear in its annual cat calendar. I thought, “Hell, let’s do that.” There was one problem: we had a dog, not a cat. The woman in charge of marketing at the theater had a cat, and she offered to loan him to us for a day so that they could shoot the calendar. The morning of the photo session, we shipped our dog, Sandal, off to a neighbor’s (no, not the one right next door; even living alongside a bona fide Oscar winner hadn’t diminished his threat to sue us), and the marketing director brought her cat over. I quickly named him Baklava—the name of a Greek pastry seemed appropriate. Baklava, of course, didn’t respond when we called him, and he was understandably skittish and ill at ease, with so many strangers in such strange surroundings. He certainly wasn’t used to having so many lights and cameras focused on him, and I tried to explain to the cat company people that this kind of attention always made him, well, distracted. When we had him just about settled down, my mother happened to wander through the living room and took one look at poor Baklava and asked, “Where’d that cat come from?”
Everyone froze. The cat people looked nervously from me to Louie and back again. “She often forgets things,” Louie whispered reassuringly, as he gracefully steered my mother into her bedroom before she could make another perfectly lucid remark. We were able to shoot the commercial, and the theater saw some relief that week.
I had ridden the Oscar wave of goodwill back to Montclair and into the arms of my family, my community, and my work, but most important, I had gone home to the arms of my mother, which, for so many, many years, had seemed closed to me. Now she was living in my house and I had a chance to get to really know her, woman to woman, in a way I never had before.
When they had placed the Oscar in my hands on the stage of Shrine Auditorium, I had thought about my father because I knew exactly what his reaction would be—it would have been completely unconditional and straightforward. He would have wept for joy. My mother’s reaction, though, would be far more complicated. It would certainly mean as much to me as my father’s reaction had, but I knew her response would be more ambiguous and more emotionally loaded. It would be far too easy to say that my mother, at nearly ninety years of age, was simply weighed down by what pop psychologists like to call “emotional baggage.” My mother’s reaction would be informed by so much more than that: it would be colored and shaped by the influences of her cultural and emotional history in ways that had confounded me for most of my life. My father, who had always been much more of an optimist than my mother, would have taken my win as affirmation of everything that he believed in and aspired to. My mother, on the other hand, would not be able to enjoy my win without also fearing that there would be some kind of loss lurking behind it, that there would be, if we were not careful, a price that we would have to pay for such good luck. I was finally at a place in my life and in my relationship with her where I was beginning to understand the complexity of her reaction to me and to this kind of success. I wanted to know her, to accept her, and be able to embrace her, at last, with an open heart.
My mother was eighty-seven years old when I appeared in Moonstruck, and she had been living with Louie and me for a couple of months at that point. She and I were finally at a point where we were enjoying a relatively companionable relationship after many years of terrible, terrible tension between us. I knew that she was pleased with me, but I also knew that she’d never directly express what she was feeling, that she’d never be able to simply be happy for me. Her happiness would be tempered by a kind of foreboding, a reluctance to believe in the goodness of life that she couldn’t help but express, and it was this that I had processed as a lack of faith in me personally, that had hurt me so deeply when I was growing up. She had always been leery of what she perceived to be good luck or easy success. And though this may have been a trait shared by many Greek women, my own mother had more reason than most to expect tragedy to come in the middle of joy, even despite the fact that, by nature, she had great appetite for life. She had what Greeks refer to as the quality of kefti, the spirit of exuberant living. She could be playful, passionate, spontaneous, the life of the party. The truth be told, kefti was at the core of her being, but it was often hidden or muted as a result of the scars she carried following experiences she’d had that were tragic and devastating. It took me the better part of my own life to even begin to understand how much they affected who she was and how she coped with the world around her—especially with me.
With my Oscar win, my mother had her own moment in the spotlight, whether she wanted it or not, when she became the subject of interviews herself. Entertainment Tonight filmed her reaction to my win on Oscar night and she was interviewed by several newspapers in the days that followed. Talk about the camera loving someone! She enjoyed preparing for these appearances and she felt comfortable commenting on my success. When she was asked if she’d always known that I’d become a movie star she replied, “No. I never thought she was pretty enough!” I think this completely stunned the interviewer, but it didn’t shock or surprise me. To her way of thinking, one had to be a great beauty to be a true movie star. She was also trying (as any good Greek mother would) to ward off the “evil eye” on my behalf by tempering all that praise. Appearing in any way proud or arrogant would court disaster. The gods must not be tempted to second-guess or rescind the goodwill they had just bestowed on us all.
She took my brother, Apollo, aside and shook her finger at him, urging him to warn me: “She’ll get a big head.” She believed the gods were watching. If you dared to consider yourself on an equal footing with the gods, they would strike you down. She’d illustrate this by smacking one hand against the other—boom, they’d come down and take it all away. How you handled good fortune or success could be dangerous, and my mother wanted Apollo to remind me of that, to make sure I avoided disaster by staying humble. Here I was, fifty-seven years old, and she was almost ninety, and she was still trying to protect me.
Thanks to experience, I knew how to handle failure. I knew how to withstand it, what I could learn from it, and that it would pass. I didn’t know how to handle this kind of success. What about all those fine actors and actresses I had worked with in the theater? Why should I have this Oscar success and not them? They had paid their dues as well. As satisfying as the role of Rose Castorini was, I had played far more challenging roles—why all the recognition for a role that felt as comfortable as this one? I felt unable to enjoy this acclaim until I realized there was as much to learn from success as there was from failure.
Chapter Two
DURING THE couple of years that followed the Oscars, we were finally able to collectively let go of our breath, which we had been holding for so many years because of various setbacks, professional and personal.
In some ways, the structure of o
ur daily lives didn’t change that much: we were all busy, the children with their school and their friends, and Louie and I with our work, especially at the theater. What had changed was that now the structure of our family life was made a bit more solid, reinforced by the financial buttressing the Oscar brought us.
I was busier than ever at the theater. A couple of years earlier, I had taken on the job of producing artistic director, in what was a rather difficult and politically charged time of upheaval among the board and staff. We had always made decisions based on a shared vision of what we were trying to create. We hit a point in the 1980s, though, when this basic vision for what the Whole Theatre was, what it should be, came into question. At that time, I was artistic director, in charge of overseeing the creative side of the theater. The producing director was in charge of the business and fund-raising side of things. He wanted to stage more commercial plays on their way to Broadway. He convinced some board members that this would solve the economic problems of the theater—which were very real. However, their solution meant changing the artistic signature of the Whole Theatre. I wanted to be part of a theater that produced plays that dealt with issues important to the human condition, plays that could change the way people see their lives, plays that confront how we see ourselves and what we make of our existence.
The purpose of commercial theater is to make money. The purpose of a not-for-profit theater such as ours is to enhance the quality of life in the community—and the community consisted of the theater artists who worked there and the members of the audience. Part of serving the community meant keeping the price of the tickets affordable, which meant constantly hustling up the money to deal with the deficit, always a problem with not-for-profit. There were those who thought that we’d be able to make more money if we became a “trial run” theater for shows that aspired to make it on Broadway, who believed that positioned in this way, we could accept monies from commercial producers interested in seeing their shows developed at lower costs, and we would not have to exhaust ourselves always looking for subsidiary support. I couldn’t see us becoming some sort of a minor-league theater that would serve as a farm team to a major-league outfit that produces and mounts commercial Broadway shows. These were not the kind of productions I, and many of my colleagues, aspired to be involved with. I became the de facto leader of this side of this tense and heated debate. After many months politicking behind the scenes, the board of directors determined to protect the original vision of the theater. The current producing director was asked to vacate his position. The board of directors then decided that in order to avoid such conflict in the future, they would create a single position that would oversee both the business and the artistic sides of the company. I was asked to take on the newly created job of producing artistic director.
Ask Me Again Tomorrow Page 3