Whatever mixed feelings I had about the critics, the movie changed my life at least a little bit. I felt pretty good about myself for a while, and even when other kids were mean to me, I had a silent response at the ready: “Oh, well I don’t see that you’ve made a movie.” I probably got more attention from boys my age, but it never even registered. One thing that I did notice was that it suddenly felt like old men were interested in me—and by “old men” I mean anyone older than twenty. I could hold conversations with them, and I had begun to collect some more interesting life experiences, and that was ultimately more comfortable for me than trying to have normal conversations with boys my own age, which would inevitably end with my clamming up or, more likely, giggling uncontrollably.
* * *
WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN, I got another acting job, a TV movie called I Want to Keep My Baby. I was Sue Ann Cunningham, a high school girl who has to reassess her life when she gets pregnant. We filmed in Boulder, Colorado, and I was fifteen playing sixteen, outfitted at first with a fake belly and then with a padded bra so that I would look more full-figured. The movie was easier than Lipstick, and just as fun. I started to expand my emotional range as an actress. All that meant, really, was that I learned more ways to map memories onto actions. Want me to show sadness? Just let me imagine Mr. Bubba, and I’ll be in tears. The character couldn’t have been less like me, which made it a challenge and also a vacation from self-absorption. I could pretend to be something I wasn’t and would never be: the popular girl with the cute jock boyfriend.
I was also reminded of how much I liked being on set. The people there were tremendously supportive, from the director down to the makeup and hair people. Everyone had a job that they took pride in, and that made me proud of my job. Just as before, the crew came to be a temporary family, which was superior to my real family in that it was all of the proximity with none of the problems. Even better, it had a defined end: after the shoot, I waved good-bye and hopped on a plane, well in advance of that inevitable moment when everyone’s bad traits would surface. Even then, I was learning to live through a series of temporary, intense experiences, setting up a rhythm of change.
While the set was similar to Lipstick, the release of the movie was completely different. I didn’t have to wait a year: it was out within a matter of months. And people in Ketchum didn’t have to go to the theater to see it—it just showed up on their television set one night. I was proud of the movie, proud that I was in another one, but it was also embarrassing. I worried that everyone in town—my classmates, my teachers, store owners, neighbors—would see through the superficial physical transformation and know that I was just faking.
They didn’t know. They praised me—not lavishly, but enough that my confidence and sense of my own competence bloomed again. Maybe I wasn’t great in school. Maybe I was too shy and self-conscious to absorb enough information, or to arrange it in the way that the teachers wanted. But here was something else that I appeared to be good at, and it was enough to know that something like that existed. For the first time, too, I started to notice that there were other actresses around my age doing the same kind of thing that I was doing: Tatum O’Neal had done Paper Moon in 1973, and Jodie Foster had done the TV version of Paper Moon, then Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and she was just about to break big with Taxi Driver, Bugsy Malone, and Freaky Friday. I started to set career goals, which were really personal goals. When I saw Tatum O’Neal, I thought she was terrible: not the actual girl, but the image that people had of her. She seemed spoiled and misbehaving, attention-seeking in all the wrong ways. In my mind, I leaned more toward the Jodie Foster side of things. She seemed quiet and really smart, as if she had everything under control. I was in awe of her and a little bit jealous.
One of the best things about acting was that it kept me out of normal school. On set, I had a tutor, which was great. You never did anything worse than anyone else, and there was no class to stand up in front of, blushing uncontrollably. When I went back to Ketchum after the TV movie, the sense of being special lasted about a week, and then I was the same old Mariel. That made me miserable. At the time, my father had helped found a new school in town called the Community School. It started in the basement of the Episcopal church and was run like a prep school: lots of work, high expectations, better-qualified teachers. My father even taught French and Spanish. I begged my parents to let me go there, and finally they consented. From the beginning, it was a problem. The school was just too demanding, though I wasn’t willing to admit it. I had done well in elementary school, but suddenly I was falling behind. We had so much reading assigned, and I had a physical reaction to it. I read so slowly that it felt like I was in quicksand, and before I knew it I would start to doze off. That was a strange turn for me, because it marked out some negative space, a zone of failure, which was something that I hadn’t exactly experienced before. More and more, being an actress seemed like the best choice.
And I was one at home: still acting like things between my parents could be okay. In some ways, things had changed greatly between when I was twelve and when I was fifteen. My parents had officially retired to their own corners of the house. They hosted fewer parties, and my father went on more fishing trips, and for longer each time. That’s not to say that when he was home it was easy. My mother would cook for him, even going to the trouble of avoiding the foods he disliked. He would eat in silence. Then, a few hours later, he would go back down to the kitchen, pour himself a glass of port, and make a snack. My mother, upstairs, would smell the burnt toast, and it would just infuriate her. “That son of a bitch,” she’d say. “He’s making a fool out of me.”
* * *
“I WAS WAITING.” It was a few days before Christmas, and I had gone to the airport to pick up Margaux. In my mind, her name was starting to be spelled the way the world saw it: the famous supermodel rather than the infamous sister. Her flight was early, though to hear her tell it, I was late. “I was waiting,” she said again.
Margaux’s star was rising. Through the late seventies, you were just as liable to see a picture of her at Studio 54 with Bianca Jagger as you were to see her on a magazine cover, and when she wasn’t there she was jet-setting. She had a place in New York and a place in LA. She went to the Alps and to the Amazon. By this point, she had already left the burger heir and was married to Bernard Fauchier, a Venezuelan photographer. “I’m painting,” she said. “There are things I need to say that I can only say through art.” But she wouldn’t show us her paintings and wasn’t even confident enough to discuss them. She just announced it: I’m an artist now. That was how Margaux was then. She kept a running monologue about what she was accomplishing and the surprising new directions her life was taking; she was a little hard to pin down.
Margaux was mostly about Margaux. Now, with the wisdom of the years, I can see that it was her insecurity that made her seem so selfish, but back then it was mostly irritating. We could be most of the way to the house before she asked a single question about anyone else.
Oddly, you could see her selfishness most clearly in her most generous act: giving holiday gifts. When she came into town, she came loaded down with packages, though it turned out that mostly she was just regifting all the free stuff she got as a model. “This is for you, Mom,” she’d say, and it would be a basket of lotions that clearly came from a cosmetics company. “This is for you, Dad,” and it would be some strange scarf in a color he’d never really wear. The irony was that she wanted everyone to give her very special presents, and she was upset if you didn’t hit the target perfectly. When I was little, I loved surprises, and at the holidays she used to torture me by waiting until my parents were out and then forcing me to watch as she opened all the presents. Even then, she always compared her gifts with mine and decided that mine were better, that they somehow marked me as the favorite, and later on she would try to engineer complicated trades: she might get a glimpse of Muffet’s new skirt and then follow her around the house asking her to
trade.
Margaux’s visit also gave me a chance to look at Muffet again the way a new arrival might. At that point, Muffet was heavily medicated, which was the main way that mental illness was treated then. By modern standards, she was certainly bipolar, with periods of mania, though the word “schizophrenia” was also used. My father explained it to me as a matter of brain chemistry: If your brain could be stabilized by lithium, it made sense to take it, the same way that an anemic needed to take iron pills. But the side effects included severe bloating, and then sometimes she would go away during the year for electroshock treatments. She went in manic, if highly attuned to her surroundings, and came out different, with less clarity in her thoughts and some memory gaps. She dealt with those gaps by inventing elaborate stories, and she was usually the heroine of them.
Every year was the same. I would go to the airport to pick up Margaux, and the ride home would be filled with all kinds of love and generosity, a new hopefulness that old wounds might heal and old habits might change. When we came through the front door, my mother would be cooking, and she’d look up with a smile. “Hi, girls,” she’d say.
But the evening settled in. Wine was poured. People had the chance to sleep in their own beds. And in the morning, the newness had evaporated and we all went back to being the same people we were before. My mother went back to carping about my father and how he didn’t make her feel loved. My father withdrew into his version of the same complaint. Margaux fought. Muffet rambled.
I developed my own Christmas rituals. I would leave the house early, just to get away from the claustrophobia of it all, and take a long walk into town. I would spend time with whatever animals were around. And I would go through family albums obsessively. As the third child, I was the least documented, by far: there were hundreds of pictures of Muffet, dozens of Margaux, and just a few of me. That sent me into corners of the house looking for more evidence of my life, trying to fill in the gaps. I found an old school picture on a bookshelf. I found a ski picture in a drawer.
Looking for photographs over the holidays, I found a box in a closet, and an envelope in the box, and a picture in the envelope folded inside a piece of paper. The paper was yellowed at the edges, but the photo was clear: it showed a young woman alongside a smiling, handsome young man. The woman was smiling too, which is what slowed me up in recognizing my own mother.
I brought the photo to her. “What’s this?” I said, holding it out. I tried to speak as gently as possible, but her mouth tightened anyway as if she was being challenged. When she saw the photo, though, she softened. “That’s me and my first husband,” she said.
I had a hundred questions but couldn’t ask a single one.
My mother paused for an eternity and then sat down next to me. She started to speak but could not. After another equally long pause, she explained. She had been married when she was very young. “He was a fighter pilot in the war,” she said. “He was shot down after we were together only a few months. A little while after that, your father came on the scene.” As if on cue, my father appeared. He nodded at everything my mother was saying, but he had a distant look his eyes.
That night, at dinner, there was another argument. Maybe that’s an overstatement. There was a disagreement. Margaux was telling a story about a friend in town, and my mother interrupted to say that she had never trusted the girl. “You say that about everyone,” Margaux said. “You’re never satisfied.” She glared at my mother and stormed away from the table.
“Well,” my mother said. “Maybe now we can have a pleasant meal.” In bed, later, I couldn’t shake that idea: never satisfied. My mother had been a girl as full of hope as any other girl. She had found her Prince Charming, only to have him taken from her. My father arrived on the scene determined to do his best, but who could live up to the standard set by a dead hero? Everyone in my family was in an impossible shadow. Margaux was in the shadow of her perfect older sister, Muffet, who in turn was in the shadow of her own mental disarrangement. My father was in the shadow of my mother’s first love. My mother was in the shadow of her own past. All anyone wanted was to be out of those shadows, to be recognized and appreciated for what they were rather than dismissed for what they were not. As the youngest, I was trying to learn to come into my own, to come into the light, but the examples all around me were examples of failure and compromise and frustration. I got up and switched off the lamp.
7
THE DAUGHTER IN THE MOVIES
THE MOVIE WAS WEIRD. That was my first thought, and for a long time my only thought. I was at the Opera House, watching a comedy—or what people said was a comedy, at least. It starred this strange-looking guy, a skinny redhead with oversize glasses, and he kept making sex jokes, including one where he stroked this giant egg. I didn’t pay much attention to it. I was still heartbroken from Sean, but people around me were laughing, and afterward I heard some older boys repeating the lines from the movie.
A few weeks later I was at home before dinner, doing my homework, when I heard my mother calling up the stairs: “Mariel, you have a phone call.” Her tone was excited, almost girlish. She never sounded like that. I hurried down to the kitchen. My mother held out the phone. Her eyes were shining. “Mariel,” she said. “Woody Allen is on the phone for you.”
“What? Who?”
“Woody Allen,” she said. “You know.”
“I don’t know,” I said. The phone was still in her hand, with this person I didn’t know waiting on the other end of it.
“The guy who made that movie you saw a few weeks ago. The little guy with the glasses. Apparently he wants to talk to you.”
“Ew,” I thought, “the egg.”
I took the phone. The voice on the other end was immediately recognizable as the man from the movie, but he was calmer and in command. Even better, he was saying nice things about me. He told me that he had been watching my work, including Lipstick, and that he wanted to meet me in person and see if I might be good for his new movie. “All right,” I said, and that was that. When I hung up I was confused. What had I agreed to? More to the point, where had I agreed to go? I didn’t know that he was in New York, but that’s where we went.
I had never really auditioned for Lipstick. It had been me and my sister in a swimming pool. So my meeting with Woody was my first official audition. An assistant brought me into an empty theater and gave me a script. It was dark, and I couldn’t really concentrate on the pages. “You’d be Tracy,” the assistant said.
When Woody came in, he was funny: funny for me to look at, because he was short and had that hair and those glasses, and also funny to talk to, with a quirky way of looking at me while I talked. “Do you mind reading with me?” he said.
He read some lines, and then I put the script in front of my face because I was so shy and unsure of myself.
“Well,” he said, “I would like to see your face while you read.”
I pulled down the script a bit.
“Better,” he said.
I read the words on the page, but mostly I just giggled. I was so shy and embarrassed. I don’t think I understood much of what I was reading, but I tried to make it sound like I did. It was over quickly, and we went home, or rather went back to my grandfather’s apartment on Madison and 67th, in an ugly blue building. That afternoon, the call came in: Woody wanted me to be in his movie. We went back to Idaho for a few months, finished up the summer, and got back to New York for the fall. Woody loved to shoot in the fall.
The movie was Manhattan. I would be playing Tracy, the girlfriend of Woody’s character, Isaac. I don’t remember how much preparation I did. I watched Annie Hall, which I think was just out, and some of Woody’s earlier movies too. Since I was sixteen, I still needed a guardian, so my mother came to New York with me for the duration of the shoot. Her cancer had retreated—I don’t know if anyone talked formally about “remission” or “cure,” but she was better, even if she was still weak. When we arrived back in the city, shooting started quic
kly. Woody kept his set loose and fun—he would go out to lunch with some of the cast and the crew members who were close to him, and we would sit and order food or whatever while everyone told jokes. Everyone was nice to my mother, and she was as optimistic and lighthearted as I had ever seen her. And making a film in the city was the most enjoyable thing I could imagine; seeing New York through Woody’s eyes is something that has entranced generations of film audiences, and it was amazing for me too.
Playing Tracy was another matter. I prepared for the role the same way I prepared for any role, by trying to find something in it that was similar to things I had experienced, and in that sense it was easy. I had been moony-eyed over boys, and I had reacted with suspicion to others, and I had felt the pain of rejection from friends and classmates, and even gone through a little heartbreak of my own after that disastrous evening of the sleepover with Sean Peterson. Of course, there was a great distance to cover from that to actually imagining myself in the position of a seventeen-year-old dating—and, as the script made quite clear, sleeping with—a man in his forties. The real Mariel would never have gone out with Woody, not in a million years, but I could see someone like Tracy, a sophisticated New York girl, being attracted to him as part of her emotional education. Plus, much of my part called for me to laugh at his jokes, and that was easy, since I was laughing all the time anyway.
The one thing that threw me was the sexual innuendos—and sometimes they weren’t even innuendos but outright sex talk. There’s a moment in the movie when Tracy and Isaac are in bed, eating food. “Let’s do it some strange way you’ve always wanted to do but nobody would do with you,” Tracy says. Isaac is shocked by her forwardness, and then he says, “I’ll get my scuba-diving equipment and really show you.” When I ran across that line, I asked my mother what it meant, and she got a mortified look on her face. I asked again. Her expression darkened. “Don’t ask stupid questions,” she said. My mother wasn’t against the movie. It broke up the boredom of her life, and she liked being close to celebrities. I remember wondering if other women I knew, like Mary Kay or Mrs. Sherntanner, would have let their daughters act in a Hollywood movie with considerable sexual innuendo—but then I pushed it out of my mind, because I didn’t want to imagine a world where I would have been denied the experience of Manhattan.
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