Out Came the Sun

by Mariel Hemingway

  Or maybe it did matter. Up until then, I had never had a serious boyfriend. More to the point: I had never had sex. It was time. I had a good friend on Personal Best, a young guy who worked on the movie. “You know what?” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “I think we should go out.”

  “When?” he said.

  “This weekend,” I said. We went for food, and I made enough eye contact to let him know that the coast was clear. “Maybe we should go back to your place,” I said, and that was that.

  Sex wasn’t earthshaking. Or rather: sex with him wasn’t. He didn’t do anything wrong. Clothes were removed. Backs were arched. But I knew immediately that we didn’t have any romantic chemistry. Unfortunately, opinions differed. “I think I’m in love with you,” he said. “We should move in together.”

  As amazingly premature as his reaction was, mine was even more amazing. “Okay,” I said. “I think you’re right.” Weeks later, we were living together. In my mind, that’s what happened after sex. My parents were together, and if they had stayed together, then any couple that got together had no real options. Sex meant partnership, meant commitment. I didn’t know what else to do. And so, not even twenty, I was all of a sudden in a serious relationship, living with my boyfriend.

  * * *

  “YOU’RE A BRAT. You’re horrible to be around.” I had seen Robert Towne frustrated. I had seen him struggle to communicate his ideas about the script. But I had never seen him this mad at an actor, not even screaming but lowering his voice until he was almost hissing. It was shocking—all the more so because I was the actor he was hissing at.

  We were in my trailer. Robert had called a private meeting. “Do you have any idea why I brought you in here?” he said. I shook my head. “It’s because of how you’ve been acting.” I shook my head again. But in the back of my mind, I knew. I’m not sure what had triggered my bad behavior. Maybe it was the way the shoot was dragging on. Maybe it was insecurity about my performance in the film. Maybe it was my discomfort with my relationship. Whatever the case, I decided that everyone was wasting my time, and I got very pissy. I gossiped with the crew, talked behind the backs of the other actors. “Did you see how Scott looked this morning?” I said. “Do you think he slept at all?”

  One day, as we were starting to do the high jump scenes, I started to unload on Patrice. “The problem with you,” I said, “is that you’re not really an actress. I don’t know why you can’t get this right. You’ve had enough extra help from Robert.” I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of my mouth. It was the first time I can remember completely losing my ability to be polite or kind or even respectful. The crew members stared at me, eyes wide. They hadn’t seen this side of me, and they weren’t sure what to think.

  Word filtered up to Robert, and the next afternoon, he ordered me into my trailer. “You’re not being nice to people,” he said. “They’re professionals too. This has been going on for a week, from what I hear, and it has to stop.”

  A week? I only remembered the one day. I kept a brave face until Robert left and then broke down and cried for four hours straight. I decided I was never going out there again. I would die in the trailer. This wasn’t what I wanted to be, some spoiled-brat star of a movie, especially with a director I respected. And to think that other people, too, were looking at me in that light—it was as if all the air had left my body. I was so shaken up and ashamed. When I finally left the trailer, I vowed never to act that way again. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me on a movie set, but also one of the most complicated. It reiterated the importance of acting well, of acting professionally, and while that was vital on the job, I think it made me even less aware of how to deal with the more problematic aspects of my own personality. Act well, always: good advice if you want others to like you, but not necessarily good advice if you want to understand yourself.

  * * *

  AFTER I FINISHED FILMING Personal Best, I built myself a house in Salmon, Idaho, a small town about a hundred miles north of Ketchum. Let me clarify: I didn’t build it. I designed it. I drew up plans for how I wanted it to look. I talked to an architect to make sure it all made sense. And then I hired a crew to make it real.

  Building began in April; Salmon was at a lower elevation than Sun Valley, so there was no snow. The crew I hired were these cute Idaho guys who did construction on the side. I asked one of them to help build my house, and he brought the rest along. My brief affair with my friend on the Personal Best set had petered out, and I went into that summer hoping that one of them would want to go out with me. Actually, I was hoping that they all would. But they were told by the head guy, Charlie, that they couldn’t fraternize with me. It was a hard and fast rule, enforced under threat of death—or, at the very least, being punched in the face by Charlie. That was chivalrous enough of him, except that no one bothered to tell me about the rule, and all summer I felt like a leper. I’d fixate on one guy, flirt as best as I knew how, get no response, and move on to the next.

  Even without romance, it was an amazing summer. We built platforms and put up teepees so that we could sleep there while the construction proceeded. Early on, my dad had someone come out to build a pond, and every morning we all went down and jumped in the cold water. We cooked together. We told jokes. We went for hikes.

  At the end of the summer, we finished building and the guys all left, so I was there by myself. It was beautiful, but it was empty. My dog Stitch was there with me, and I used to look at him and think about the half-life of wonder. You get something new, a house or a friend or an idea, and it feels electric to you. You’re charged by it in ways you’ve never been charged before. Soon enough, though, that charge dissipates, and things are normal and regular again—not bad but not magical anymore. Newness is an amazing property, an antidote to feeling tired and empty.

  When I sat in the house for a little while, when I sat in the house by myself, there was a sadness that crept up on me, especially at night. It’s almost as though I hadn’t thought the whole thing through. I created this great world, but I hadn’t populated it. There was a sense of incompleteness about the place, both psychologically and physically. When I decorated and put up curtains, I wasn’t good enough at sewing, so everything was fastened with duct tape that I had taken from a movie set. That wasn’t the only thing I used it for; if cushions ripped, I reupholstered them with the same tape. There were times at night when I’d see lights coming down the road and panic. Who was that coming toward the house? What did they want? I had a loft bedroom, so I would run down the super-steep stairs to get knives from the kitchen and sit just inside the front door, waiting.

  * * *

  WHEN I FIRST BOUGHT the Salmon lot, my dad came with me and we hiked around the land. “I’m glad you’re spending your money this way,” he said.

  The lower altitude meant that it was a little warmer, but it also meant that there were snakes around. “What do I do if I see a rattlesnake?” I asked my father.

  “Just kill it,” he said. I didn’t understand, and I said so. “You know,” he said. “Shoot it.”

  “I could never hold the gun steady.”

  “Then get a big rock and smash it to death,” he said.

  Thirty seconds later, so quickly on the heels of our conversation that I thought I was imagining it, I saw the biggest rattlesnake I had ever seen. It was moving slowly across the property, right to left. I thought I was going to faint. “Daddy,” I squeaked. “What do I do?”

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “I told you. Get that rock. Kill it. You have to kill it. Otherwise, you’ll see more and more. They’ll make a nest under the house.” I ran to the nearest big rock, lifted it with two hands, and threw it at the snake. I’m not sure if I killed it, but I killed some of my fear. After that, there were many times that I was on horseback when I spotted a rattler, and I just took the horse right around it.

  If my father made me feel better about living in Salmon, my
mother—in her own vexed way—did the same. During the entire time I had my house in Salmon, my mother never came to see it, not even once. On the one hand, it made me sad. Why wasn’t she more interested in my life? On the other hand, I was relieved. Being around her wasn’t easy, especially when it came to the way she responded to any move that took me farther away from her. I imagined her visit and how it might go. For starters, I’d have to make her comfortable, which would mean listening to endless commentary about her weakness and discomfort, getting her drinks, making sure that everything was the right temperature. Remaking the house to accommodate her would mean that, at least for a little while, it wouldn’t even feel like my house anymore. And even that wouldn’t work. She would be nice for an hour or so, and then the questions would come. “What’s your plan here, Mariel?” “Why did you waste your money building a house in the middle of nowhere?” “Are you happy here by yourself?” I was constantly asking myself those questions, so I wasn’t sure I could bear them coming from her.

  * * *

  AS WE FINISHED UP SHOOTING Personal Best, I wrote Robert Towne a letter thanking him for giving me a steady stream of challenges, for creating an environment where we were all pushed to do our best work. I told him I knew that we had done something important.

  When Robert got my letter, he invited me to discuss it in person. I figured it would be a meeting of the mutual admiration society, or at the worst a meeting of the mutual flirtation society. But the second he arrived, he sat down and fixed me with an intense look. “I know what the letter is about,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I replied.

  “You’re in love with me,” he said.

  I screwed up my face. That wasn’t what I had meant. Or was it? That was Towne’s reputation in Hollywood—that he was really good on rewrites—and he spoke my letter back to me like a master spin doctor. As his words started to pile up, I got so confused that I started to agree with him. “Right,” I said. “True.” Maybe I really was in love.

  To make a not-very-long story short, Robert and I got involved. He wasn’t with Patrice anymore, and he wasn’t going back to his wife, so he went forward into a relationship with me. Robert had a condo on Venice Beach, and I spent most of my nights there, which meant that I neglected my own place, a garage in Coldwater Canyon that had been converted into a small apartment. I spent time with him and his daughter, acting as some unholy cross between a babysitter and an older sister and a stepmother. She was four years old or so and not always an easy kid to deal with, which probably wasn’t her fault—he was the kind of dad who opted for indulgence and a lack of discipline because he didn’t get to spend very much time with her. I tried to be nice to her, or at the very least friendly, so that she wouldn’t openly resent me. But it was an unnatural situation.

  It wasn’t a good idea to get involved with Robert. That seems obvious from a distance. But it was good, maybe, to let myself make that choice—you’re supposed to learn to make your own mistakes, as they say. Partly I allowed myself to enter the relationship because I was feeling more secure professionally. I had done a series of critically and commercially viable films, and that meant that my career was on its way. “Things are going well,” I used to tell Robert. What I meant, I think, was that I had made things go well.

  This increased confidence had its benefits, but there were pitfalls too. Toward the end of making Personal Best, I had been offered The Executioner’s Song, a TV movie based on Norman Mailer’s book about the convicted killer Gary Gilmore. The producers wanted me to play Nicole Baker, the nineteen-year-old single mother who became Gilmore’s girlfriend. The darkness didn’t bother me. If anything, it appealed to me: I was looking for something adult and even a little depressing. I flew to Salt Lake City, where the film was in preproduction, for a meeting, but ultimately I turned it down. The reason was simple: I refused to do television. At the time, it wasn’t cool, especially if you had already established yourself as a film actress. It felt like a step backward. In retrospect, that was probably a prejudice that I would have been smarter to rethink. Rosanna Arquette took the role, did a great job with it, and was nominated for an Emmy.

  9

  THE NUDE IN THE FRAME

  IT WAS EASY TO TURN down projects like The Executioner’s Song, because my next movie had already appeared: a biopic of Dorothy Stratten. If Nicole Baker’s life had been dark, Dorothy Stratten’s was pitch black. Dorothy had been born in Canada, in Vancouver, and was working at a Dairy Queen there when she met a man named Paul Snider, a local nightclub promoter. The two of them became an item, and Paul began to manage Dorothy, which basically involved arranging for nude photos of her to be taken and sent to various girlie magazines. Paul thought that Dorothy would have more success if they moved closer to the action, so the two of them, then a married couple, left Vancouver and arrived in Los Angeles in 1979. Dorothy quickly became part of the Playboy empire. She was the magazine’s centerfold that August, and afterward she worked at the Playboy Club in Century City. Paul may have been content to keep her in the nude-modeling world, but Hugh Hefner and other people at Playboy wanted her to cross over to legitimate acting, which resulted in small parts in television shows like Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Fantasy Island.

  As Dorothy got more and more involved in acting, she began to drift away from Paul, especially after she was cast in the Peter Bogdanovich comedy They All Laughed and began an affair with Bogdanovich. That was the beginning of the end for Dorothy. Paul felt more and more threatened. He sensed that Dorothy was slipping away from him forever. And so, in the summer of 1980, Paul and Dorothy met at Paul’s house in West LA. Whatever tension there was between them boiled over, and Paul raped and killed Dorothy and then killed himself. The crime, brutal and spectacular, became an instant obsession for nearly everyone in Hollywood. A TV movie was rushed out, starring Jamie Lee Curtis as Dorothy. But there was a feature script circulating too, one written by Bob Fosse, whose previous movie, All That Jazz, had been one of the big dogs in the room the year I had been nominated for an Oscar for Manhattan.

  The second I heard about the project, I wanted it. Dorothy was my age, more or less. She had come to Hollywood as a young woman under very different circumstances than me, but they weren’t so different that I couldn’t imagine my way into her life. I started reading about her life immediately, researching. I was hell-bent on knowing her. My agent at the time was Bob Fosse’s agent, and he encouraged me to go after the role and convince Bob that I was right for it. Bob’s initial reaction was lukewarm, but I kept after him. I set up meetings. I sent letters. I told him that I was sure I knew Dorothy as a character and that I could do the part justice on-screen.

  At one meeting, we put it all out on the table, Bob’s reservations and my convictions. “Dorothy was a classic victim,” he said. “She let Paul control her, right up until the end. I don’t see you that way.”

  “Maybe not,” I said, “but I know everything about avoiding conflict by trying to please people.” I didn’t have a specific Svengali-type influence in my life, I explained, but my whole childhood had worked that way: avoid conflict by doing what you were asked or told, don’t rock the boat, try to be liked, allow others to mold you in exchange for whatever seemed like love.

  Bob listened carefully. He nodded. “One other thing,” he said. “You’re not a voluptuous person.”

  I had an answer for that too. In years since, everyone just assumed that I got breast implants so that I would get the role, and while it’s true that I might not have gotten the role without them, I was planning on getting them anyway. My whole adolescence, I had always felt masculine. I was too tall, too skinny, not curvy enough. Idaho was all about being a boy: being outside, being active. Even without the pressures of Hollywood’s beauty standards, I had made up my mind, though I can’t say that I was completely invulnerable to them. I had started to ask around about doctors. But when I mentioned it to Bob, he had his assistant refer me to a plastic surgeon.

/>   The doctor who did the procedure was wonderful. He tried to convince me not to do it at first, because I was so young, but I wasn’t going to be dissuaded. Back then, there were three different sizes—small, medium, and large—and I insisted on a set that was even smaller than the small size. It was exciting, not frightening at all. There’s something kind of nice about medical attention when you’re not sick. The only strange thing is that you’re completely normal, and then you wake up in pain. For months, I went around showing them to everyone: Sarah, Bryan Bantry, random photographers who would drop by the set. It was almost as if they didn’t belong to me.

  * * *

  WHEN I GOT THE ROLE, I didn’t know who else was going to be in the movie with me. Bob Fosse read tons of actors for the role of Paul Snider. Richard Gere read for it. Mandy Patinkin read for it. Fosse really wanted Robert De Niro, which I thought was a great idea. I was in love with him from The Deer Hunter. I thought he was a god: so handsome, such a good actor, such a genius at picking roles. I also thought that I would be the one to convince him to do Star 80: I would make the case about how important a film it was, about how it showed all the dark seams of the business we were in, what a great opportunity it was for him, how perfect he would be.

  I found out that De Niro was staying at a hotel in New York on the west side, and I called someone who called someone else, and all of a sudden it was Robert De Niro on the phone. He had a very thick New York accent, and he was a little brusque, but I didn’t care. I asked him if he wanted to meet, and he agreed.