Out Came the Sun

by Mariel Hemingway

  I went out onto the highway—even though he wasn’t allowed to go there, he didn’t always obey the rules. I reached the road, looked around, called his name, and headed north. A few hundred yards from our driveway, there was a drainpipe where he sometimes liked to play. As I approached, I heard a scuffling noise. I couldn’t see into the pipe from the road, so I ditched my bike, slid down the shallow hill, and climbed into the large end of the pipe. Down at the other end, I saw a heap of yellow fur: it was Mr. Bubba, breathing heavily, trying to stand. I got close enough to see that something was wrong, and then close enough to see what was wrong. He had been hit by a car.

  I picked him up and ran back down toward the driveway. He was almost as big as I was, and I couldn’t quite get clearance off the ground, so as we ran his rear legs dragged. He was bleeding on my shirt. I started talking to him, faster than I had ever talked to anyone, even my Skipper doll: “Please,” I said, “please, Bubba, listen, we’ll get Daddy, he’ll take you to the vet, hold on boy, you’ll be fine, you need to be fine.”

  Halfway down the driveway, I screamed for someone to come outside, and my father appeared in his tennis shorts, shirtless. His eyes swept across the scene, and he didn’t even pause. In a second he was next to us, lifting the dog from my arms, and in another second we were all in the car, my father driving, me in the backseat holding Mr. Bubba’s head. I couldn’t see well through the tears in my eyes, but I could tell the bleeding wasn’t getting better. It was coming from his side and from his mouth.

  “I think he’s choking on the blood,” I said.

  “Your mother called ahead to the vet,” he said. “They’ll be ready for us when we get there.” The vet’s office was past Ketchum, and my father ran all the lights in town.

  At the office, a nurse in a pink dress was standing outside to take Mr. Bubba. I wanted to go in with him, but I wasn’t allowed. “He’s the best vet around,” my father said. “He’ll do everything he can.” What could I do?

  I waited with my father and listened to the cars pass by on the road and watched the sky, where hawks circled over the field across the street. My father had found a fishing vest in the car, and he was wearing that with his shorts, and he waited with me but couldn’t be still. He did some squats and fake tennis swings. When the vet came out, he was bloody too, and his head was down. He told us that Mr. Bubba had fought hard but that the cuts inside his body were too severe. The nurse directed us to the back door, to a sheet covering something that was still warm. It was Mr. Bubba, but it wasn’t Mr. Bubba anymore. Just a few hours earlier, I had been looking right into his eyes, telling him how much I loved him, watching him listen to me say it.

  “Come here,” my father said. He was standing near the car. I walked over there and felt myself crumpling. I couldn’t breathe. My father held me. I wished that I could simply feel consoled, but there was too much else going on along with it: a slight sense that I was being melodramatic, even though I was sadder than I had ever been; a twinge of regret that my parents didn’t show that kind of affection more often.

  The shirt I wore was yellow with flowers on it. I had wanted it so badly. I threw it away.

  * * *

  “INTO THE POOL, GIRLS.” The man pointed down at the water. Margaux and I got in. She splashed me and I splashed her back. We were in New York City, on a rooftop, the city stretched out in the distance.

  I had been in swimming pools before, but never in New York City, and certainly never on a rooftop. At one point, as my hand went down to scoop up more water, time hiccupped for a split second, and I forgot how I had gotten there. Then I remembered. About a month before, still riding the crest of fame as America’s premier supermodel, Margaux had been offered a role in a film. The movie, Lipstick, was about a model who was being stalked by a musician. The script also called for a second female role, the model’s little sister, and Margaux asked Johnson if he could see me in the part. She thought that it would make her entry into acting easier, more comfortable and more natural. And so, the winter I turned twelve, I flew out to New York City with my father to meet with the director, Lamont Johnson, and the producer, Dino De Laurentiis. We stayed in the Plaza Hotel, which awakened all kinds of glamorous thoughts: it was where Eloise lived, of course, in the children’s books, and there was even a big portrait of her in the lobby, leaning on a wall with her dog at her feet and a fancy dinner unfolding behind her. I woke up the next morning feeling like I had hardly slept a minute and not missing it at all. Energy was going through me like I was a live wire.

  We walked over to a tall building and took the elevator up. I imagined we’d meet in an office with some chairs and a big oak table and a picture window. I didn’t expect to come off the elevator and see a swimming pool. Margaux was there already, along with two men I had never met, one tall and the other short. The tall one introduced himself as Lamont and shook hands with my father and then with me. The short one, who I guessed was Dino, just smiled and watched. “Into the pool,” Lamont said. “Just act like sisters,” he said. Margaux and I splashed around, which was an acting job in and of itself, since we rarely played like that. Mostly, I just giggled.

  After I auditioned, such as it was, the men went off and consulted while my father took me to FAO Schwarz. Back at the hotel, my father made a call. “There’s another meeting tomorrow,” he said.

  Another morning, another day shot through with energy. We woke up early and walked across Central Park, which was crowded with people throwing baseballs and Frisbees, roller-skating and piloting little sailboats in ponds. “Look,” my father said, pointing to a statue. It was Alice in Wonderland, with the Mad Hatter on one side and the March Hare on the other. We exited the park through an opening in a big stone wall and went into another tall building with another elevator going up. There was no pool in this building, only a room with the biggest desk I had ever seen, and behind it was the short man from the pool. He looked like a little kid in a car, trying to drive when he could barely see over the steering wheel. “Dino,” my father said. In his heavy Italian accent, Dino told me that I had the part. He told me that I was going to be a big star. “It will be perfect,” he said.

  We went home, waited for a little while, and then flew off to California for the shoot, this time with my mother as chaperone. We stayed in the guesthouse of Stephanie and Efrem Zimbalist, who were friends with my father—well, she was, through fishing. The Zimbalists had a kind of mirror image of my parents’ marriage: Efrem was also the son of a famous man (his father was a concert violinist), and he and Stephanie seemed isolated from one another, though she was the one who spent time on her own taking trips into nature. Their daughter, also named Stephanie, was beautiful in pictures on shelves. She was at Julliard studying to be a musician, though later she would end up being an actress too. And what was an actress, exactly? I’m not sure that I understood what I was getting into. Acting in movies wasn’t anything I had thought about, even when I was watching movies. I wanted to be an architect, because I loved controlling spaces, or a marine biologist, because my family had visited Sea World when I was young, and it seemed like an impressive mix of science and entertainment. Acting was very abstract at that point.

  I’m also fairly certain that I understood almost nothing about the movie’s subject. Lipstick is a dark story of rape and revenge; Chris Sarandon plays the musician, Gordon, who turns out to be a monstrous villain. I didn’t know that the movie was about sex and rape. I had read the script. Maybe I had even seen the word. But the concept didn’t sink in. I was so defiantly naïve about those matters, and so put off by the darkness of the adult world, that in my mind I blocked that out. Sex in general was an unknown world for me, a source of real anxiety. Part of it was related to Margaux. Kids around Ketchum commented upon it often, and I didn’t want to be a bad girl, so I went the other way. But intimacy was also a problem. I never saw healthy affection between my parents, except maybe a peck on the cheek on Christmas Eve. Sex felt disconnected from what good people di
d. It wasn’t part of a marriage (as far as I knew), and it wasn’t part of a productive adolescence (again, as far as I knew), and when you did it, in any way, people whispered about you behind your back. I didn’t see how you could participate in it at any level and still be a good person. That was only one of the ways that the movie asked the impossible of me. There was also the matter of the film’s villain: Chris Sarandon was so nice, and it made no sense to me that he was also this horrible stalker and attacker.

  Despite this, I had to act. There were plenty of scenes in which my character, Kathy, had to show confusion or terror. Everyone on the set wanted to make sure that I wasn’t too scared, that I understood it was only make-believe. But that was a kind of paradox: If I knew that it was all fake, how could I deliver a realistic performance? Somehow, when the camera came on, I felt like I knew what I had to do. I understood the broad outlines of my job—that I was supposed to react a certain way—and I suppose I instinctively knew that the way to create emotional nuance was to imagine myself in a similar situation that I had already experienced. So I could draw on scenes of humiliation and fear in my own life, memories of peeing myself on the ski slopes or being kicked in the shins by the boys under the portico. The people watching the movie would have no idea what I was thinking; all they would see was the reaction, which would match up perfectly with what was happening with my character.

  I loved being on set, not just for the acting but for all the other aspects of the movie world. Watching the crew was a revelation: there was an entire world of support staff, all working to make this project happen. They would bring snacks, or drag cables, or pour grape juice in place of wine, or make sure that your watch didn’t jump ahead visibly in time during a scene. The actors were warm and welcoming. Chris Sarandon, as I said, was a perfect gentleman, the diametric opposite of his character, which made the scenes with him both comforting and disorienting—in one of them, I had to run while he chased me through the Pacific Design Center, an unfinished building that was a labyrinth of dark corridors and tight turns. Anne Bancroft played my lawyer, and she was nice and supportive. And even the actors playing smaller roles fell into place as sometimes more than colleagues: I hung out with some young women playing dancers, and one of them was drinking carrot juice, which looked healthy enough that I requested some for myself—actually, I request-ed it for my mother, but I ended up drinking it, and my mother chided me for my obsession with health food. For the first time in years, I felt like I had a home that wasn’t filled with various insoluble problems: alcohol, illness. I created a family for myself. When I turned fourteen, on set, I got a surprise birthday cake, the first one I really remembered since Kennedy was shot.

  The sense that the set was a safe zone was reinforced when we got back to Idaho after the shoot. We drove to Boise to check on my mother’s health, and the doctors found new cancer in her spine. I felt like at some level it was my fault, that I had created an unhealthy situation in which she wasn’t able to get enough rest—or, worse, that she sensed the ways in which I was growing accustomed to my new movie family and growing apart from her. I confessed that to my father one afternoon, during a walk, and he stopped in place. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Mommy is alive because you love her so much, not sick because you had a good time making a movie. She had a good time too. The movie made her happy.” My father pitched in then, as much as I ever remember. He cared for my mother during the days and I managed her during the nights, and scarves arrived from Margaux in Italy to cover my mother’s head, bald again from the treatments.

  * * *

  “LET’S HAVE A SLEEPOVER,” Kelly said.

  “What?” I said. I was stalling. Sean Paterson had moved back to town, and Kelly had started dating his brother Mark. They were officially a couple, and I knew that Sean still liked me, but a sleepover? With boys? What happened at those?

  “You know,” Kelly said. “A sleepover. It’s simple. We’ll just take sleeping bags out in the backyard.”

  “Your parents won’t mind?”

  She shrugged. “Come on,” she said. “I don’t see the problem.”

  I saw nothing but problems, or at least potential ones. It could end in embarrassment, shame—or even worse, some kind of sex. It was all a minefield to me. But I found myself agreeing with Kelly. “Okay,” I said.

  That night, we met Sean and Mark after dinner. The four of us pulled our sleeping bags out into the yard and then lay there looking up at the stars. After a little while, Mark and Kelly got into the same sleeping bag, and they started groping and kissing. I watched them from the corner of my eye while I tried to carry on a conversation with Sean.

  “So,” I said. “Are you going to ski this year?”

  “I guess,” he said.

  “I wonder what movie is coming to the Opera House next,” I said.

  “Not sure,” he said.

  Finally, I stopped talking long enough to let us both feel the space between us. He started to inch closer to me.

  “No way,” I said. “You’re not going to do that to me.” Then I burst into idiotic laughter: full, out-of-control giggling, to the point of breathlessness. Needless to say, nothing happened, and then later that week Sean sent me a note through someone else explaining in kind but firm language that we were pretty much finished as a couple. My heart was broken, but I couldn’t have done anything differently.

  * * *

  WHEN LIPSTICK WAS RELEASED in April 1976, I didn’t go to an official premiere. Instead, my father took me to New York and we sat and watched the movie in a theater on 42nd Street where people yelled at the screen and cheered on Margaux in every revenge scene. That’s when I realized that my parents had let me be in a movie where I got raped. It was a shock. I wouldn’t say that I felt violated all over again—that’s melodramatic, and not true at any rate—but I had a number of different emotions all at the same time: fear and surprise and a little uneasiness at the inappropriateness of it all and, deep down, in ways I couldn’t even admit to myself, maybe even a little excitement, not because of the sexual violence, but because I was being allowed into an adult world.

  It was also shocking to see how Margaux’s performance was received. On set, she was the recipient of a tremendous amount of attention. She was New York’s New Supermodel, a huge earner, the star of tomorrow. All that attention got to her, in good and bad ways; she had always been the girl who needed to fight to be noticed, the neglected middle child, and there she was being noticed at a previously unimaginable level. Throughout the shoot, she used to say that the movie was sure to be her breakthrough, that she was giving an Academy Award–caliber performance. Sometimes she stated it even more simply. “I’m an actress,” she’d say. Or “I made it.” But when it was released, the movie was roundly criticized, and Margaux more than anyone. She got nothing but horrible, mean-spirited reviews. People called her talentless. They said that it was annoying to watch her. They made fun of her voice. One of the gentler assessments came from Roger Ebert. “How does Margaux do in her acting debut?” he wrote. “Well, not terribly well. She has an interesting voice and is pleasant to look at, but she doesn’t really seem in command of her more difficult scenes.”

  Ebert wasn’t particularly mean, but the whole thing just seemed unfair. Margaux wasn’t a natural actress, it’s true. She hadn’t grown up watching other people carefully and positioning herself to react. It wasn’t her personality. She was more about her own needs and ideas. And even I could tell on set that there were certain scenes in which it was really difficult to get her to be natural. But she had nothing to hold onto, no training: she had been thrust into a movie simply because she was a famous model—and worse, it was a movie about a famous model, so critics and audiences somehow resented her more, as if she couldn’t even give a convincing performance as a character who was so similar to herself. Critics and other writers were willing to begin writing her off, even though she was still in her early twenties.

  What made matters worse was that
I got generally good reviews. Ebert again: “She has some difficult scenes and handles them like a veteran, she’s unaffected and convincing on camera and, whether she knows it or not, she can act.” And Vincent Canby, at the New York Times, said that my performance was “immensely moving” and “utterly unaffected.” That was fine, though I cringed when he went on to say that I made everything else in the movie look like “a calculated swindle.” The reviews, and particularly my good reviews, hit Margaux hard. She didn’t want to look at newspapers or hear things people were saying, even if they were being related in a supportive tone that mocked the critics. She was deflated and frustrated and also just plainly sad. It’s as if her movie career was already yesterday’s news, as if critics had decided to discard her and move on to next year’s (non)model.

  Lipstick put me in a nearly impossible position. I was proud of the work I had done. I did feel that I connected to something in the role, and that I understood how to do this strange business of realistic pretending. At the same time, I didn’t want to be used as a weapon to disappoint and dishearten my sister. She had set her sights on an acting career, and it seemed like maybe it was over before it had even really begun. I felt a tangle of emotions that ranged from gratification to shame to a kind of survivor’s guilt, and everything in between. Inside of all of it was an important lesson about movies and the way they worked—or didn’t. Films are a collaborative medium, for better or for worse. When you’re an actress, you show up on set and do whatever you can with to bring your character to life. That requires you to plumb certain emotional depths and use certain techniques to communicate those emotions to the audience. But when you’re done with your part, you have to just stand down and hope for the best. There’s nothing else you can do. The process is always a gamble.