He came over to where I was staying, a posh Upper West Side apartment of a wealthy woman I knew from Idaho. “Robert De Niro,” he said. “I’m here to see Mariel Hemingway.”
But he didn’t look anything like the Robert DeNiro that I was in love with. He was fat and unpleasant and talking in that thick accent. I started telling him about Star 80, and he just blank-faced me. And then, even worse, he started to hit on me. I started to see what I was dealing with, which was a guy who had no interest in the movie I was describing, who had come across town only because some young actress had invited him, who was probably thinking about getting laid.
After De Niro left, I still loved his acting, though the bloom was off the rose a little. Years later, we had another audition together, and he wasn’t very nice; and then a few years after that, we auditioned together again, and he couldn’t have been lovelier. It wasn’t until that third meeting that it hit me: Each and every time, he had been playing a role. The first time, he had been playing Jake LaMotta. The second time, his character had been an asshole, which meant that he had been an asshole too. The third time, his character had been nicer and more normal. That’s my advice if you ever want to meet Robert De Niro. Check to see what movie he’s about to make.
* * *
I WASN’T PLAYING JAKE LAMOTTA, but I was playing a real person too, and so I set about immersing myself in Dorothy’s life. I watched lots of tape to observe her mannerisms, but I wasn’t interested in mimicking her. If you’re playing a person who’s internationally famous, such as Jackie O, then the physical trappings of your performance have to be right on. It’s too distracting if your posture if wrong, or if you are constantly tilting your head up when the person in question constantly tilted her head down. But if you’re playing somebody like Dorothy, who wasn’t as well known, it’s more important to interpret her. And interpreting her was a terrifying proposition. I had talked to Bob Fosse about the dark seams of Hollywood.
Just as we were starting rehearsals, I was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and Bob came to have a drink with me in the bar downstairs. He was doing the world’s best Bob Fosse impression: talking excitedly about his vision for the movie, chain-smoking like a madman, gesticulating in ways that seemed manic but were also effortless and graceful. Every once in a while, he would dissolve into a coughing fit, and everyone would look over at us with concern. “Let’s go upstairs and have one more drink,” he said, and I went gladly. It was a relief not to have to worry if he was going to die right there in the bar.
The elevator let us off at my floor. I let us into my room. And then, for the next fifteen minutes, I ran rings around the couch while Bob Fosse chased me for purposes of sex. “I have a boyfriend,” I said. That didn’t dissuade him one bit. He started talking shit about Robert: He’s washed up. His reputation is inflated. He can’t even write that well. “Well, I’m not interested,” I said.
This stopped him for a moment. He steadied himself on the couch and looked at me. “I have never not fucked my leading lady,” he said. He paused theatrically. “No,” he said. “Wait. Once. And it was a disaster. That was Shirley MacLaine, on Sweet Charity. But there has never been a leading lady in a good film who didn’t sleep with me.”
When I spoke, my voice was at least two octaves higher than normal. “Meet the first,” I said.
“It’s going to happen,” he said.
“No, it’s not,” I said. “I don’t think I could be naked every day on this movie and then come home and be naked with you.” Fosse stood down and stopped chasing me. It was like a miracle. He went out of the room coughing, still making Fosse-like gestures.
* * *
IN LIEU OF DE NIRO (or Gere or Patinkin), the role of Paul Snider went to Eric Roberts, a young actor who had done great work in films including King of the Gypsies and Raggedy Man. Carroll Baker played Dorothy’s mother, and Cliff Robertson played Hugh Hefner.
The movie had lots of energy, most of it originating with Bob. For all of Bob Fosse’s personal flaws, his movie sets were something to behold. I loved it. I got along wonderfully with him. We understood the character in the same way. And he had a specific genius when it came to the mechanics of moviemaking. Bob had started in the theater, of course, and was completely conscious of body movements through time, which meant that he choreographed every scene as if it were a dance. In the rehersal hall, which was a huge space that had previously been a church, he got a stopwatch out and timed action down to the second: this is where Dorothy stands during the conversation, this is where Paul turns and makes his appeal, beat, beat, pivot. We were drilled on places and cues, which meant that when it came time to actually act the scene, we could concentrate on issues of emotional nuance.
Bob wasn’t just a taskmaster when it came to the physical aspects of the film. He was an emotional tyrant too. There were days when he was kind and supportive, and other days when he would look at me icily and say, “You’re such a manipulative little cunt.” He was provoking me, not entirely seriously, but he was also feeding into what he felt the film needed.
Whether he was being superficially nice or superficially mean, I always knew that he was deeply committed to making the movie work, and that made me work harder. I had a desire to make him happy so that he would shoot me well and direct me well, so that my best work would end up on film. We shot much of it in Vancouver, which was safe and calm. When we got back to Los Angeles, life was more claustrophobic and more demanding. I had Bob during the day, yelling at me, tweaking me, and Robert’s drug-fueled neuroses at night.
As the film went on, I drew as much from my sisters’ lives as from my own. Margaux, of course, had a life that was in some ways very similar to Dorothy’s: she had been singled out for her beauty, had been controlled by men who at first seemed to have her best interests at heart but who turned out to be more self-interested (though none, thankfully, in as wicked a manner as Paul Snider); she had struggled as she tried to understand if she had any talents beyond her appearance. There was even a little bit of Muffet in my characterization. Of all of us sisters, she was probably the one who had most acutely felt the pressure of the Hemingway name. She had worked in the literary world and had traded on her sophistication and elegance. Her husband had unquestionably tried to mold her, to protect her by treating her as a kind of trophy—though, again, it had been in a largely benign way. And because of Muffet’s illness, I had watched the other end of the process, they way that people abandoned her when they could no longer profit from their association with her. There was a tremendous loneliness in Dorothy that worked as a kind of paradox, because the only way she could ever have felt less lonely was to spend less time with others. She never figured that out, and she surrounded herself with people who not only eroded her sense of self but snuffed it out. It frightened me, at times. It felt too close to losing your mind, too exposed. Dorothy’s movement through Hollywood, her desperate need to be seen but her desperate lack of control over how she was seen, didn’t seem like much of a life at all; it was death in life, and then it was death.
And then there was all the actual exposure. I knew going in that nudity was a central part of the film. There was no way to avoid it if you were going to play Dorothy Stratten. I knew her life inside and out by then, and I knew how much of her identity came from being a body: how it advanced her career and attracted the attention of men, but also how it shielded her from certain emotional responsibilities and prevented people from dealing with her forthrightly. I tried hard to separate myself from the role. It wasn’t a role that I wanted to consume me completely. But it was impossible to set all of it aside: there was too much in what I was doing that bore some resemblance to what she had done, and the fact that we were creating something analytical, something that attempted to explain her life, was only a partial correction. Add to that the fact that we filmed some of the scenes in the same house where Dorothy Stratten and Paul Snider had lived, the same house where Dorothy had died. I was a victim for months, and then the
last two weeks of filmimg I had an exploded face from where Paul had shot me, so I had to wear this gross prosthetic on my jaw. I tried to walk around like a normal person, but it was nothing close to normal from inside that thing. I saw how people looked at me, the disgust and pity, and still, underneath that, the glimmer of attraction—the face may have been blasted, but what about that body? It was my body, but it was a new body that I had taken on, in part, to become Dorothy’s body. Was it our body? Was it anyone’s? Sometime during Star 80, that body took a short, strange trip back into the past. We were on a brief break, and I got word that we needed to do some last reshoots for Personal Best. I had to bind my chest so that my implants wouldn’t be too conspicuous.
Star 80 was grueling in every way. I had never played a movie opposite someone whose character was going to murder mine. The closest experience I had was Lipstick, and that had been difficult because of how much I had liked Chris Sarandon, because of how kind and decent he had been to me between takes. Eric Roberts started out that way. He was a dream during rehearsals.
Just before we started to shoot our first scenes, he asked me to go out with him. I said no. I didn’t say it brusquely or cruelly. I just told him that I thought we were both about to pass through one of the most grueling experiences of our lives, and I couldn’t imagine how claustrophobic it would be to double down on that with a personal relationship—not to mention that I had a boyfriend. I thought it was a perfectly valid explanation, but it turned him into a monster. He wouldn’t look at me until cameras started, or he would stomp down on my toes just before a close-up. He even spit in my face once, and I let it happen because I knew that his character was all about freakish possessiveness and moments of petulance. But it was exhausting, and more so because he also clashed with Bob Fosse. Fosse’s intricate setups and choreography were hard for Eric. At one point, we were trying for a scene for what seemed like hours, and Fosse just exploded with exasperation. “God damn it,” he said to Eric. “You can’t even go down an escalator without tripping.”
Eric wore me out every day. He made a difficult movie more difficult. And then, like magic, his personality switched back. We were at some end-of-shoot event, and he put his arm around me, fraternal at most, and beamed. “Didn’t we have a wonderful time?” he said. I remember being on set for one of the final days of shooting and looking around at all of them: at Bob, at Eric, at the crew that was supporting their vision, at the other actors who may have been at a later stage in their career, or who may have just been starting up the Hollywood ladder. Everyone’s ego was on display and also at risk. Everyone’s appearance was on display and also at risk. There was drinking and there were drugs and there was sex and there were all kinds of psychological games. Once again, I had worked my way into a crazy on-set family that made my own family—and me especially—look sane by comparison.
* * *
CHRISTMAS AGAIN meant home again. Home again meant family again. Family again meant habits again.
“How was your movie?” Margaux would ask, and I didn’t know how to answer. Her acting career was in limbo at best. She had done a movie called Killer Fish with Lee Majors and Karen Black, and Karen Black had a kid on set who was four years old and still nursing. “Tit, Mom,” the kid would say. I had gone from Lipstick to an Oscar nomination. She had gone from Lipstick to Killer Fish. I didn’t know how to answer, but I knew that any answer would be unkind.
“You’re wearing that dress?” my mother would ask, and I didn’t know what to do. She was stronger than when the chemo had been at its worst, but that just meant that she had more energy to be critical. When she trained her gaze on you, the next thing out her mouth was likely to be negative. I didn’t know what to do, so I smiled tightly and made sure the house was clean.
“I’m going fishing,” my father would say, and I didn’t know when he’d be back. Though he was less tormented during those years, his peace of mind seemed to be directly related to the fact that he was spending less and less time with the rest of us. He withdrew from the family as a survival strategy. When he was out in the river or on the mountain, he found his bearings. I didn’t know when he’d be back, so I went for a walk myself.
“I’m going to meet some friends,” Muffet would say, and I didn’t know where to look. She was home, fulfilling the caretaker role that had fallen to me earlier, and the more it became clear that her own life was disappearing inside my parents’ house, the more elaborate her stories became. She would spin an incredible tale about meeting friends at a restaurant, maybe going away for a week. I didn’t know where to look, so I looked down.
Around that time, a wrinkle appeared under my right eye. I was standing in front of a small hallway mirror near my childhood bedroom, thinking about how my face had always looked the same to me, and that’s when I saw the wrinkle. I had never seen anything on my face that didn’t make me look like I was a little girl. Did that mean that I was an adult? I was taking care of my own career, paying my own way in the world. I had built a house for myself. But if time was passing, if things were changing, why did it also feel that everything would always be the same? Big questions for a small mirror.
I touched the wrinkle once, quickly, and went off to sleep.
10
THE FACE IN THE MIRROR
SNIP.
I closed the scissors and a lock of hair fell to the ground. I was in Salmon, in the house I had built, sitting cross-legged in front of the mirror. I squinted at my reflection. The left side of my hair was shorter than the right.
Snip.
Now the right was too short. I went on like that, cutting on the left, then the right, then the left. It was like balancing a wobbly table—or, more to the point, failing to balance it.
Snip.
When my hair got short enough that I could see my ears, I forced myself to stop. The face in the mirror was frowning.
By the early eighties, I had been a professional actress for more than half a decade. Over that time, I had learned the rhythm of a movie, how it consumed you for months while you were shooting it, and then how you left it behind when the shoot drew to a close. But that didn’t happen with Star 80. It got into my head and stayed there. Dorothy Stratten was a character I played, but she was a real woman also, a woman who had lived sadly and died suddenly. She had been trapped, and playing her made me think about the other women who were trapped too.
I thought about my mother, how her true love was taken from her by the war and how she had to marry again, to a man who she may or may not have loved, to satisfy society’s expectations of her. She couldn’t quite bear the weight of those expectations. I thought about Muffet and how men—from my father to her husband—had always regulated her life, in theory because it protected her from herself, but with more problematic consequences too, reminding her that she was a person who couldn’t exist in a world without extremely rigid rules and patterns. I thought about Margaux and how she lived in a world like Dorothy’s world, where a woman’s value was determined largely by how she looked and how she pleased the men around her.
Dorothy had been trapped, and playing her made me wonder if I was trapped too. By that point, I had been with Robert Towne for two years or so, and while the first year had its appeal, the second year was dominated by an increasing sense of how wrong everything felt. I realized that I suited him, that he liked having a young girlfriend—for cosmetic reasons, ego reasons, social reasons—but that he didn’t suit me at all. When I would go back to Ketchum for summers or Christmas and run into other girls from high school, they would have normal lives, normal boyfriends. They’d be worrying about whether or not they should break up, or make a more serious commitment, or start a family, or take a trip, or have more conversations, or have fewer conversations. Their lives were predictable in some ways, but they seemed organic, legitimate. I just felt so out of step, as if I were spending my time performing a role that might never end. The pressure built. I worried about it when Robert and I were eating dinner, when we we
re in bed, when we were walking together outside. I couldn’t focus on anything other than the overwhelming sense that I was in the wrong place, romantically and psychologically. Did I want to end up like Dorothy? It was a melodramatic question but a relevant one. Star 80 didn’t quite push me toward a breakdown, but it definitely pushed me toward a breakup.
Robert and I went up to Idaho for a vacation: we didn’t stay with my parents or in my place in Salmon but rented a condo instead. Robert had a cold, and he wasn’t especially happy during our first day there. He went to bed early to try to get his strength back. The next thing he saw was me, hovering over him in the middle of the night, making my stand. “I can’t do this anymore,” I said. “I need to end this.” It was like a replay of the scene with Woody Allen in Ketchum, except that I was getting out of an uncomfortable relationship rather than out of an uncomfortable offer to travel. I don’t think that was an accident. Idaho was a safe zone for me, a place where I felt shielded by both anonymity and familiarity. It was my home, as opposed to Los Angeles or New York—places where I was trying, fitfully, to become an adult, with all the trial and error that the process demanded. “I want out,” I told Robert. He didn’t say anything at first, so I kept going. I listed the reasons we weren’t right for each other. I listed the things I needed to do with my life. I had even picked my replacement, a woman who owned a restaurant in Hollywood. “She loves you,” I told Robert. “She can be there for you in ways that I can’t.”
When Robert finally emerged from the haze of sleep and sickness, he was angry. He was being dumped, and he went after me. “Oh,” he said, “so we’re not right for each other? Well, let me tell you about you.” And then he opened the floodgates. “You’re not who you think you are. You aren’t talented. You look strange. I didn’t even want you for Personal Best. You should probably pick a second career now, because you’re not going to make it in this business. And that’s just professional. Personally, it’s even worse—do you know how sick and twisted your relationship with your mother is?” It was a deluge of insult and invective, and as it came at me, I found myself agreeing with it. Maybe I was just trying to avoid conflict, but there was also a sense in which he was preying on the most vulnerable parts of a young woman and succeeding. Maybe my relationship with my mother was sick. Maybe I was a terrible actress. The angrier Robert got, the less he seemed like a spurned boyfriend and the more he seemed like that experienced writer and director who had dressed me down on the set of Personal Best. I blinked and composed myself long enough to tell him that I would drive him to the airport.
Out Came the Sun Page 13