Out Came the Sun

by Mariel Hemingway

  That scuba-diving line came during the scene in the movie that gave me the most difficulty. It wasn’t because I had to show emotion or hold my own against more experienced performers. It was difficult because we were supposed to be eating Chinese food, and that was one of the foods on my forbidden list—the same list that had kept me away from seafood when I drove down to California with Kelly’s family. I didn’t know what was in there, what the meat was between the noodles or what the noodles were for that matter, so I put granola into my Chinese food container. That started a lifelong tradition of making trouble for myself during scenes where I was required to eat on camera.

  When I started the shoot, there were other people on set that Woody dealt with more regularly—other actors and crew members. At some point, I started to notice that he was listening to me. If we had bad weather, he would take me to a museum or art gallery. I remember one show made up entirely of tiny objects. “This scale is weird,” I said. “Does something like this make us imagine we’re small, so that we can use these things, or that we’re even bigger than we are?”

  Woody had been walking to the next room. He stopped and backed up a step. “I like that,” he said. “Maybe both are true, but that’s a great question.” His reaction was very different from what I was accustomed to in school—teachers who thought that I wasn’t smart because the essay I had written didn’t fit their idea of what a good paper should be. I’m sure that in part he was just trying to make a young actress feel comfortable, but I also felt that he was really listening. He was also a Francophile, and we talked about my trip with my father, and my grandfather’s book. “We should go to Paris, just me and you,” Woody would say, and I would laugh.

  Manhattan did wonders for my confidence—not only did it teach me that I was capable of being interesting to people I admired, but it helped strengthen my still-fragile self-image. I was still fairly certain that I was too tall and boyish, but for the first time I started to notice that it was a stylish look. It may have made me feel worthless in Ketchum, but I started to see that people in New York liked it. Maybe being too long was a good thing. I started to slouch less and make more of my height. Not incidentally, it also helped with the comedy of the movie: if I stood up straight, I had a solid half foot on Woody.

  When the movie ended, I was heartbroken. The film crew had served as a kind of surrogate family, and I had developed close friendships with people who were unlike me in every way except for the fact that we were united in a common purpose. I knew that that crew wasn’t invested in the movie in quite the same way I was. They were normal people with normal families who lived nearby. Their kindness wasn’t inauthentic by any means, but it was circumstantial—they wanted things to work as smoothly as possible so that they could go home. I sensed that, but I also found that I liked it. There was no blood-is-thicker-than-water angst, no fear that you weren’t doing what you needed to or getting the care that you deserved. You showed up, acted professionally, and developed a kind of intimacy. It was unlike my family, in the sense that it didn’t require exhausting amounts of work to maintain at a basic emotional level, and that was immensely rewarding.

  * * *

  WOODY ALLEN—Hollywood director, New York celebrity, urban neurotic extraordinaire—arrived at the small airport in Hailey, Idaho, on a private jet. It was early November, not a very pretty time in the Gem State, and when he got off the plane all he saw was a dingy, overcast landscape. There was no snow yet, and everything was gray. “Oh, my God,” he said, with perfect Woody Allen cadence. “I felt like I was landing on the moon.”

  I had been back home in Ketchum for a month, maybe more, but my head was still filled with Manhattan. I tried to get back into the rhythms of normal school life, but I couldn’t. I hated it. The time away from home had been a source of liberation but also one of guilt. When I came back, I was reminded immediately how tenuous my mom’s health was, and I worried so much about it that I couldn’t concentrate on schoolbooks. Every time I started to read, I fell asleep. I would wake up at four in the morning and try to do my homework then, when it was quiet, and that worked for a little while, until I started to get tired in the mornings also. The irony was that when there was no pressure involved, when I had time to read on my own, free of any assignments, I liked it. I took to it. But the idea of school suffocated me, and I didn’t see any way out.

  Well, there was one way out, but it wasn’t going to work. Woody’s initial joke about taking me to Paris kept resurfacing. He brought it up more and more often, to the point where I started to think that maybe he wasn’t joking. Our relationship was platonic, but I started to see that he had a kind of crush on me, though I dismissed it as the kind of thing that seemed to happen any time middle-aged men got around young women. And I encouraged the conversations and the walks because they validated me.

  Back in Ketchum, I told my parents about the Paris offer, hoping they would squash it immediately. Instead, they were impressed and even a little enthusiastic. I repeated myself, thinking that maybe they had misunderstood: he wants me to go to Paris with him. And they repeated themselves: Paris with Woody Allen, no problem, sounds interesting. I tried to raise the threat level further. I told them that that I didn’t know what the arrangement was going to be, that I wasn’t sure if I was even going to have my own room. Woody hadn’t said that. He hadn’t even hinted it. But I wanted them to put their foot down. They didn’t. They kept lightly encouraging me. I pretended to be happy that they were giving me my independence, but the truth is that I felt abandoned and angry. Weren’t parents supposed to look out for you? Weren’t they supposed to set limits? My parents didn’t, and I didn’t understand why they wouldn’t. Was it that they didn’t care enough? That night I pressed myself down in the bed again, trying to feel invisible.

  One day, Woody called. “I’m going to come see you in Idaho,” he said.

  I was so excited I clapped my hands together after I hung up the phone. I wanted him to visit. I had seen where he came from, and I wanted him to see where I came from. We had talked often about how beautiful the place was, the mountains and the lakes. The season worked against us a little bit, the November grays, but it was still majestic: mountains towering over lakes and forests. I drove him back to the house, which was maybe forty minutes away, and he asked questions about everything and listened to my answers.

  At the house, he met my parents and stashed his stuff downstairs in the guest room off my dad’s quarters. About ten minutes after that, we were sitting in the living room talking to my mother when my dad appeared in the doorway. “Get your boots on,” he said. My dad had a dog whistle, which he used to call Elsa, our Labrador, and off we went.

  Across the street from our house, there was a hiking trail, and we were headed in that direction when my father stopped. “We don’t need to go on a trail,” he said, and started bushwhacking right up the mountain. Woody looked back at me to see if we were serious, and then he followed my dad. My dad was going at a clip, whistling symphonies, using the dog whistle to keep Elsa near, and I was keeping up with him and then peeling off to go back and check on Woody, who fell behind. He was at altitude, 6,500 feet, just off the plane from New York, and he was winded and then some. He looked horrible.

  “Dad,” I said, “Maybe this isn’t a good idea.”

  “Come on,” he said. “We’re almost there. This is great. He’s got to see the view.” We finally got to the top: my dad and Elsa and I, and then, after a slight delay, Woody. We were standing there for maybe a minute when all of a sudden we were socked in by fog and then, right on its heels, a massive snowfall. It was like a quick cut from gray and cold to the biggest flakes you’ve ever seen, wet and white and heavy. I apologized to Woody, and we turned and went right back down, my dad whistling again.

  We got to the house just before dark. My mother had been cooking while we were hiking, and she met us with the news that dinner would be ready in ten minutes. Woody, wet and miserable, went to shower and change into dry
clothes, and he joined us at the dinner table for pheasant and wine. We hadn’t eaten in the dining room for years, but this was a special occasion. We sat down and started to eat, and it was fantastic. My parents were laughing and getting along and being more charming than I had ever seen them. They were a great audience for Woody, but they also held their own, telling fascinating stories and making witty observations. Woody was making a great show about how much he liked the food, as he was cutting into the pheasant, he let out a satisfied murmur. “What do you think?” my father said.

  “What do you mean?” Woody said.

  “Of the bird,” my father said. “I shot it this morning.”

  Woody’s whole face fell. In his mind, chicken came from Gristede’s. But he got over it quickly, and it was back to the conversation and the laughter. After dinner, we were sitting in the living room, and Woody clapped his hands. “So,” he said. “Now what do you do?”

  “Now?” my father replied.

  “At night, I mean,” he said. “Are there clubs?”

  I laughed. For starters, I was kind of young to go out to the clubs. And then there was the fact that there weren’t any. There were bars in town, but they were for hard-core barflies only. Most people just stayed at home and watched TV. Woody ended up in a long conversation about fly-fishing with my father, who could make it the most interesting topic in the world, and I stayed and listened for a while and then went to bed. I should have been tired from the hike, but I couldn’t sleep. I was suddenly panicking about the whole Paris trip; I had somehow pushed the invitation out of my mind, but now it flooded back in, and I started thinking through all the angles, none of which worked to my advantage. It was a great offer, and we were great friends, but were we really friends at all? Would we get our own rooms? We would, wouldn’t we? I dozed off, flailing, and woke right back up with the certain knowledge that I was an idiot. No one was going to get their own room. His plan, such as it was, involved being with me. In the middle of the night, I went downstairs to the guest room and roused him from what was probably the deepest sleep of his life. “What?” he said. “What?”

  “I’m not going to get my own room, am I?” I asked him.

  “What?” He was squinting at me like I was speaking a foreign language.

  “If we go to Paris,” I said. “I don’t get my own room, do I?” He was terribly flustered, not quite awake, not quite in focus, feeling around for his glasses. “Listen,” I said. “I just want you to know. I can’t go to Paris with you.”

  He was still pretty disoriented when I left the guest room, and the next morning he was clearly disconcerted. He called the plane to come and pick him up, and I drove him back to the airport in Hailey as cordially and casually as I could. Deep down, I was really sad. I loved him as a friend. He had made me feel important in ways that I hadn’t, up to that point, felt. But I also knew that it was an impossible situation. I had agreed to take a part in his movie where I was playing more sophisticated and more adult, and if that was confusing for me, it was also probably confusing for him. It was intimate, but it wasn’t. I couldn’t give myself over to it completely, even as an idea.

  Woody didn’t abandon me. He was more careful, but we continued to talk through the years. Right after Manhattan, he made Interiors, which was a movie about strange WASPs who lived their bizarre lives and never talked about it. He showed me an early cut and asked my opinion. I thought that it was very interesting, a legitimate investigation of these people’s damaged lives like the Ingmar Bergman films that he loved. I told him it was admirable and dark. What caught me up short, a little bit, was that at some level I thought he was romanticizing the lifestyle. He fashioned a world of gloriously wealthy WASPy people who kept things at the surface while all these passions roiled underneath. What he didn’t get to was the possibility of a kind of base ugliness. When people are trapped in an unpleasant family dynamic, when parents are at each others’ throats, they’re not wearing beautiful sweaters. Or, at least, that wasn’t the case in my house. I often wonder if he found my family disappointing, if we were too ordinary an example of dysfunctional seventies America.

  * * *

  DURING MANHATTAN, Muffet was at a point in her life when she was thin and gorgeous and happy with herself. She met a man, and the two of them decided to get married. Shortly after that, probably out of optimism, she went off her medication and went through a minor manic episode, and when the two of them visited Idaho, her fiancé was having second thoughts. He told my family that he didn’t know if he could go through with it, that Muffet might be too much to handle.

  “It’ll be fine,” I said. “She’ll be happy, and you’ll be happy.” I don’t know where I thought my authority was coming from—a teenage girl making a case for her sister’s fitness as a wife—but I wanted someone’s marriage to work. I must have made a decent argument. Muffet went back on her meds, her fiancé calmed down, and the two of them got married.

  They lived in New York, and when I visited her, I saw that she was protected, by which I mean that she was protected from herself. “I have a whole schedule,” she told me. “Everything is taken care of.” In the morning, her husband helped her pick out her clothes. Then yoga, then a short walk, then lunch at La Goulue. She was beaming. Having a life that was under control was important to her, even if it was under her husband’s control.

  A few months later, they went to Paris and stayed in the small hotel his parents owned. That time, Muffet must have gone off her medicine completely, because she had a full break. She wandered off one night and didn’t come home for a day or so, and when she finally returned, she was completely split off from reality. My father had to fly to Paris to get her and talk her husband down from the brink. The marriage was done, though. It wasn’t what her husband had bargained for, but it’s what he had feared. Muffet returned to Ketchum, to my parents’ house. At first, I’m not even sure she admitted that her marriage was over; she rationalized the move home as somehow related to my mother’s care. And she did help tremendously. She would make coffee in the morning, clean the house, sit with my mother in the kitchen, and plan the week’s worth of meals. Being forced to help run the house made Muffet entirely functional. It muted her own illness and gave her a blueprint for survival: when there were tasks in front of her, she could see them without seeing her fears or self-doubts. She could move forward without backsliding. For me, her return was a mixed blessing. I was glad to have her back. The house was less lonely with her around. But it also made me fixate more on my own moodiness, because I worried that it might turn into something more permanent and serious, something that would harden around me. Becoming like the others in my family was a powerful and constant fear. They were the people I loved the most and the people whom I was the most like, but they were also terrifying examples of how balance could be thrown off and an otherwise regulated existence could be overwhelmed by emotional blockage or mental disarrangement.

  * * *

  MY FATHER WAS BACK IN FRANCE soon enough, but it was Cannes this time rather than Paris. He took me for the premiere of Manhattan at the Cannes Film Festival. I had never been to an event like that, and it was overwhelming in every way. Photographers were lined up on both sides of the stairs, and as each actor or performer went up, they erupted with yelling and flashbulbs. I looked from side to side trying to smile but feeling like I wanted to run.

  Once the lights went down, I was calmer. The audience loved the movie. Woody was a favorite of theirs, and the film compared favorably to Annie Hall, its immediate predecessor. I didn’t mind watching myself on screen so much. There were ways in which it was an interesting process. But the enormity of the whole experience started to work on me. “Dad, I feel funny,” I said. “I don’t think I can stay.” He took one look at me and diagnosed a panic attack. We went out through of a side door, past security, back to the hotel.

  I was just as uncomfortable back in Ketchum. After Lipstick, I had some trouble readjusting to daily life, and it was worse aft
er the TV movie. But Manhattan was the breaking point. I loved Idaho, but I also started to hate it: the claustrophobia of school, the sameness of home. Being my mother’s caretaker made things seem even worse.

  I got it in my head that I wanted to quit school, and once that idea was there, it took root and grew. I became obsessed with quitting. My friend Sara, who was older than me, was leaving Idaho to go to school in New York, and I decided that I was going to move with her. I planned obsessively. On a magazine shoot to promote a movie, I had befriended a woman who worked as a hair and makeup person in the city. She lived on Park Avenue South, and when I contacted her, she told me that there was a vacant apartment in her building. “Send me pictures,” I said. The rent was $1,200 a month, maybe a little more than that, but I figured I could afford it with the money from Manhattan, which was coming to me in a few months, when I turned eighteen.

  I didn’t say anything to my parents until it was all in place, and then I convened a meeting before Wine Time. I sat down in a chair and asked them to sit down too. “I’m moving,” I said. “I’m going to New York City.” I was clutching the sides of the chair so hard I thought my fingernails would go right through the upholstery. I expected an earthquake: you’re too young; there’s no way we’re going to let you leave; you better think again, young lady.

  They looked at each other for a split second and then nodded. “I’ll be sad to see you go,” my mother said, “but I understand.”

  “I’ll drive you,” my father said. “We’ll go across the country together.”