I couldn’t believe it. I had prepared for a protracted negotiation. I had my reasons all outlined in my head. I was willing to go to the mat to fight for the right to move to New York. But no one even objected. It was a replay of when I had been asked to go to Paris with Woody Allen. I looked around to see if I was in the middle of a Candid Camera skit, but there was no one hiding behind the couch. It was simpler than that. Yet again, I had overestimated my parents’ capacity for being engaged in my life.
And so, a month later, my father and I packed my life into a U-Haul—my bed, my clothes, some pots and pans—and headed for New York.
* * *
SARA STILL HAD TO FINISH up high school, so for months I was in the apartment by myself. I had some friends in Manhattan, mostly from Manhattan. The hair and makeup director, who lived downstairs, had cats, and I got one too. At first, we got along great, the cat and I. I could snuggle with the cat or talk to the cat or take care of the cat. But it was a studio apartment with wood floors and only a little bit of furniture, so every time the cat found a penny or a pebble it was like an echo chamber in there. I was so frustrated that I started leaving the windows open. “Go on,” I told the cat. “Don’t you want freedom?” But all he did was play with the blinds or, occasionally, slap something out onto the street. I finally got some throw rugs to muffle the sound.
I didn’t do much acting work at that time, though I dabbled in theater and occasionally read scripts. While I waited for my Manhattan money to come through, I did odd jobs, including walking a dog that belonged to Bryan Bantry, a friend of mine who was a rep for makeup artists and photographers. It was a year of cats and dogs.
My romance with the city that had started during the filming of Woody’s movie continued. I loved to go to diners by myself, order some food, watch people. I loved standing in the middle of Central Park and looking at the tops of buildings in the distance. Mostly I just walked and walked. The city had a specific effect: you could feel so lonely and so taken care of at the same time. I got recognized fairly often—mostly by cabdrivers and construction workers, it seemed. But they were polite enough. “Hey look,” they said. “It’s that girl from that movie.”
Part of the reason that I didn’t mind the cabdrivers and construction workers was that they made me feel less lonely. When I left Ketchum to come back to New York, I assumed that the camaraderie from the Manhattan set would continue. At first, it did, a bit. I ran into Michael Murphy, who had played Yale in the movie. I hung out with the Salad Sisters, Fern and Romaine, who did hair and makeup. But then I wasn’t running into Michael as often, and the Salad Sisters and I drifted apart. Sara came to rescue me from solitude, but within about a month, she had a serious boyfriend and slept over at his place all the time.
I had family in the city, of course, but that didn’t fix things. In some ways it made it worse. Margaux didn’t look out for me or protect me or even spend much time with me. After Lipstick and the way she had been treated in reviews, you could tell she was off the rails. She wasn’t doing as much work—the professional life span of a model was so short—and she was casting around for the next thing. Now and again, she would call me. “Let’s have dinner,” she would say, or “I’ll meet you in the park and we can walk around and look in store windows.” She was quiet with me and seemed unsure of herself. But then I would see her on a TV talk show acting like things were grand, and it would upset me. I understood that she wanted to create a positive impression for the audience, but I could see right through her. And I assumed, at some level, that everyone else watching on TV could see through her and thought the same thing. Once, she was on The Mike Douglas Show, and she didn’t seem coherent. Had she been drinking? Then she got up off the couch to go sing with the band, and I was mortified. Why was she doing that?
I reacted to Party Margaux the same way I reacted to Chaotic Home or Heavy Muffet. I went the other way. I became extremely careful, mostly kept to myself, limited all risk and exposure. The idea of staying home and doing my own thing was nice in theory, but then the night came and it was just me and an empty apartment, with only the cat’s claws on the floor to remind me that I wasn’t alone in the world.
When I managed to get dressed up and go to parties, I couldn’t work up the ego that was necessary to flirt, or pick up a boy, or hold court. At those parties, I thought mostly about the high school experiences I was missing. Sometimes I even talked to people about that other version of myself and what she would be doing if I hadn’t come to New York. “If I was home, I’d be skiing,” I’d say. Or “If I was at home, I’d be at a school dance.” I pictured all the kids back home crowded into a basement, smoking cigarettes and talking about what a fool I had been to leave. It takes years of experience to realize that nobody else thinks about you quite as much as you fear they do. I had none of that experience. “Did I make a mistake?” I asked the cat. The cat jumped off the couch without answering.
8
THE NAME IN THE CREDITS
“THAT LOOKS RIDICULOUS,” I SAID. I pointed at the TV. A friend of mine was over at my apartment, and we were watching a movie. In it, a handsome actor was pretending to be a skier. He looked dashing in his goggles and his hat, but whenever the movie showed him on the slopes, it cut to a wide shot where it was beyond obvious that someone else was doing the skiing. The stuntman was a completely different build, and though the actor was blond, you could see the stuntman’s dark hair peeking out from under the hat. “Can you believe it?” I asked.
My friend shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. “It’s just a movie. No one thinks that the skiing is real.”
“But it should be,” I said. “It could be.”
“What do you mean?”
“Imagine a movie where the actor actually knows how to do physical things,” I said. I had done something more than just imagine it. I had sent my agent in search of it. “I want a part where there’s some athletic work,” I said. “I think it could be great.”
Scripts came and went, and soon one came and stayed. It was a project called Personal Best that had been written by Robert Towne, who had also written some of the best movies of the past decade—The Last Detail, Shampoo, and, of course, Chinatown. Personal Best was going to be his directorial debut. The film was about a female hurdler and her intimate relationships both with her track coach and with a fellow female athlete. I loved it when I read it. “Tell everyone I’m interested,” I told my agent. “I want that part.” When a week went by and I heard nothing, I called back and was even clearer. “I don’t want anyone else to get that part,” I said. A meeting was arranged.
When I met with Towne, though, he was skeptical. He was committed to hiring only world-class athletes. They had already cast Patrice Donnelly, who had competed in the 1976 Olympics. That only made me want the part more. “Give me a chance,” I said. “I’ll train harder than anyone to get in shape.” I persisted, and I insisted, and eventually I got the part. Scott Glenn, who had just broken out in Urban Cowboy, would play the track coach. I was so excited. It was an adult role, finally, and proof that I could extend my career beyond Manhattan.
More to the point, it was another dramatic role—specifically, a dramatic role about a character struggling with issues of identity and self-confidence. Movies back then were like that. They focused on human relationships, first and foremost. That had a benefit for the audience, I think, though I was more aware of the benefit for me as an actress. In the course of understanding a character, in the course of preparing for a role, you were forced to sort out your own issues. Movies became a complex and satisfying endeavor: both a replacement for my family and a kind of staging ground where I could work my way through my own sense of things and ask questions that were otherwise too difficult.
The clarifying power of drama was one thing, but even before I got to that, I had promised that I would train, and that’s what I did. They worked us out at the UCLA track and also at Santa Monica College. The regimen was very hard. I didn’t like hurdling at
all. It scared me. It was one thing to clear the hurdles and another thing to do it while looking good. The girls who figured it out were amazing, but many of us looked like we were leaping into the sky, and it came off as silly and awkward, not graceful and powerful like it needed to be. One of the actresses couldn’t run at all—her mechanics were bizarre—and I worried that I would end up like that and either lose the part or, worse, end up on film looking like some kind of gawky freak. Even worse, after a few months, the training started bulking me up. I was terrified of that, because in my mind I associated it with getting fat. To me, that was like punching me in the face. Most days I would end up back at home, frustrated almost to tears by my inability to figure out hurdling. But I also took my own tears as proof that I had picked the right project.
* * *
THE PHONE WOKE ME UP. “Hello?” I said. I checked the clock. It was early, which meant that the call was important. Was it good news or bad news? Maybe something bad had happened to Muffet. I tensed up.
“Mariel?” The voice was vaguely familiar.
“Yes,” I said. “Hello?”
“I have good news.” I relaxed. It was my agent, calling to tell me that I had been nominated for an Academy Award for my performance in Manhattan. “That’s great,” I said, and hung up.
When I woke up for good an hour later, the news had grown inside my head. An Academy Award? I didn’t know exactly what that meant. We didn’t watch the ceremony regularly when I was growing up, and I didn’t have a clear sense of the categories or how nominations worked. Seeing my name in the credits for Manhattan had been thrilling enough. Was this an even bigger deal? I called my agent back, and it was quickly explained to me that it was. I was nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category, and my competition included Jane Alexander and Meryl Streep, both from Kramer vs. Kramer; Barbara Barrie from Breaking Away; and Candice Bergen from Starting Over. Manhattan was also nominated for one other award: Best Original Screenplay. And so, a few months later, I was at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the longtime home of the awards ceremony, waiting to see if I would take home a statuette.
My Oscars date was Scott Glenn, my costar in Personal Best. Scott was a guy’s guy, very easy to get along with and old enough to be safe, though I also had a little crush on him. Years later, I found out that his wife was angry that I took him to the awards. I can see her point, I suppose: I dressed up fancy, in an antique dress that was white and made me look like a bride.
But it wasn’t a wedding. It was a competition. Not that there was really any competition. During Oscars week, I was at a dinner party with some other actors, and a man pointed down the table. “She’s amazing,” he said. “She has the award wrapped up already.” He was pointing at Meryl Streep, who had been nominated the year before as well, for The Deer Hunter.
I shrugged. “She would totally deserve it,” I said to the man. “She’s great. I’m happy either way.” I wasn’t just saying that to protect my feelings. I was completely serious. I was nineteen years old, with two films and a TV movie under my belt. Manhattan had been one of the greatest experiences of my life, whether or not I won.
At the ceremony, the Academy seated people according to some complicated master plan. The nominees for Best Actor and Best Actress were really close to the stage, to minimize the travel time required for the winner. The Supporting Actor and Actress nominees were right behind them. I was sitting really close to Jack Nicholson; The Shining was about a month away from coming out, and posters had already started to appear, the creepy yellow one with the face inside the capital T. I had met Jack once or twice before through Robert Towne, who was part of that whole Hollywood playboy scene, and during that Oscars week I also met Warren Beatty, who was nice but completely lived up to his reputation as a compulsively flirtatious person. Hollywood had its craziness then as always, and when you went to parties you saw plenty of sex and drugs, but it was also a kind of club. People weren’t as handled then as they are now. There weren’t layers and layers of managers and agents. You were able to see the big stars as real people, warts and all. The show was hosted by Johnny Carson, who always hosted in those days. Kermit the Frog sang “Rainbow Connection.” Dustin Hoffman presented a lifetime achievement award to Alec Guinness. Farrah Fawcett handed out the Best Visual Effects trophy. And there was no upset: Meryl won Best Supporting Actress, gracefully accepting the award from Jack Lemmon and Cloris Leachman.
* * *
“COME OVER,” MARGAUX SAID. It was about two weeks before we were set to start shooting Personal Best. I hadn’t seen her for months, though we had spoken on the telephone a few times. She was out in Los Angeles, doing some modeling work, and she wanted me to visit her at the Westwood Marquis. “You can stay the night,” she said. She met me at the door. “How are you?” she said.
“Good,” I said. I told her about training, about how I had to both run and jump and think about how I looked while I ran and jumped. I told her about how I was screaming in front of the mirror so that I’d have a rougher voice, different from the chipmunk sound that came out every time I spoke.
“Uh huh,” she said. “Uh huh.” As a test, I didn’t say anything for a little while. “Uh huh,” she said.
Clearly, she had something else on her mind. “What’s up?”
“Well,” she said, “I need you to help me.”
“With what?”
She clucked her tongue impatiently. “With my acting.” She had an audition for a role, and she wanted me to go through her lines with her. She handed me the script, went to the other side of the room, and started. From the first word, I knew that we were in trouble. The problem was that her line readings weren’t working. For starters, she had a hard time with the simple act of reading. She had a learning disability, probably severe dyslexia. But it wasn’t only that. She couldn’t read the lines in anything approaching a naturalistic manner. Her voice would shift into an unnatural register. Her posture would stiffen. She was acting with a capital A. I didn’t know what to say. If I praised her effusively, she would have accused me of being insincere, and she would have been right. If I said anything negative, she would have felt terrible. If I said nothing, it would have seemed dismissive. I tried to find a gentle way to go at the issue. I explained to her that acting was no different than the two of us sitting there talking. “Just imagine,” I said, “that you are a different person saying these words, but for all the same reasons, and with all the same ideas and emotions.” I was trying to make things as clear as possible, but she couldn’t make the jump. Whenever she went back to the script, it would all happen again: that voice, that posture, that capital A.
My attempt at treading lightly didn’t work. Margaux could read my expression, or at the very least read my attempt to suppress my expression. She was demoralized. We stopped running lines. “Stay here with me tonight,” she said. “I have to go down and meet someone, but I’ll be back.” Not too long after she left, I fell asleep. During training, it was hard to stay awake past ten or so. When I woke up, the room was pitch black. Margaux was back, and she had her hands around my throat. “You think you’re better,” she said. “You think you’re better at this. But you’re just the little sister.” She was drunk, and she wasn’t tightening her grip, but it was still terrifying. I got her off me and pushed her onto her bed. She wasn’t completely there. Maybe it was a blackout situation. In a minute, she was asleep. I sat up and felt my throat where she had put her hands and knew that I would never get back to sleep. And then a heaviness settled on me. I felt every ounce of the weight of Margaux’s disappointment with the way that her acting career had gone, and every ounce of the fear of where it might go. I didn’t know what to do for her, or if there was anything I could do.
* * *
PERSONAL BEST WAS A PROTRACTED SHOOT, the longest moviemaking experience of my career. There was the training, for starters, and then the set was shut down because of a Writers Guild strike. No sooner had we started production than we were shut down a
gain because David Geffen, who had put his own money into the project to finish it, got mad at Robert Towne. Robert was doing a ton of cocaine and rewriting scenes as we went, and that meant that a six-week shoot turned into twelve weeks, and then six months. The cast and crew would spend days on the set playing Frisbee, waiting for an assistant director to come tell us what to do.
If it was strange when we weren’t working, it was equally strange when we were working. Robert was married, but he and his wife were having time apart, probably because he had gotten involved with Patrice Donnelly, who played Tory, the other main female character. Robert and Patrice left together at night and arrived together in the morning, and while no one really minded that—on-set romances weren’t uncommon—we were all struck by the way Patrice looked. When she came to set with Robert, she looked haunted and emotionally drained. It was different from her normal personality, which was that of a focused athlete, but it helped her when it came to playing Tory.
It wasn’t until later in the shoot that it started to occur to me that Robert was upsetting Patrice on purpose, for the movie’s benefit—that he was directing her, in a sense, while they were at home. As an actress, Patrice was sort of like Margaux; when the camera started rolling, she became unbearably formal and actress-like. She somehow believed that acting a role was a process of becoming someone else. Robert must have felt at some level that he needed to engage in some emotional manipulation to get her back to acting natural and extract the best performance from her.
Watching Patrice, thinking about Margaux, I started to develop some of my own ideas about acting. I have always felt like it was grandiose when actors talked about their philosophy. For me, the only way to play a role was to find the part of myself that was the most like that character. To do that, I had to recognize that I had parts of dozens of different personality traits, many contradictory. I had a little cowardice and a little bravery, a little fear and a little lust and a little heroism and a little evil. Whenever I encountered a scene that called for any of those emotions, I just had to access them. The rest was just a matter of fidelity to the story being told. Personal Best brought up issues of competition and inadequacy that were central to my personality, and the issues of confusion were familiar enough—it didn’t matter that my character experienced them as sexual confusion.
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