Out Came the Sun

by Mariel Hemingway

  With Robert gone, I drove up to my house in Salmon. Excited, lonely, unsure of what was next, I sat down in front of the mirror, and that was when I hacked off my hair. When I was done, I looked like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, except that I was half a foot taller and the look didn’t suit me at all. But I was happy the hair was gone. It represented all the things that had accumulated that didn’t fit with my innermost self, that kept chafing against my sense of comfort and my sense of what was right and good. I was exorcising Robert and exorcising Dorothy Stratten, doing it theatrically but also sincerely, trying to locate the real Mariel underneath the movie roles and the real-life roles. Even then, there was an undercurrent of anxiety. When Muffet was at her most extreme, she would cut her own hair. The scissors were potentially a tool of liberation, but they were also a warning of where things might go if they all went wrong.

  * * *

  “BUY THE GOLD ONE,” the man said.

  I was back in New York, feeling rudderless. When I had lived there before, my social life had revolved around my best friend, Sara. We would walk around together, shopping or stopping for food, and once a week we had watched our favorite movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But Sara had gotten married quickly, after a whirlwind courtship. And so, back in the city, with my short hair and my lengthening sense of dread, I paid a kind of tribute to Sara, even in her absence—I went by myself to Tiffany to do some window shopping.

  At the time, Rolexes were the hot watch, and I bent down over the case where they were kept and imagined what life would be like if I had one. My favorite was the two-tone, silver and gold. I must have said something under my breath about how beautiful it was.

  A voice sounded at my back. “What? You should get the all-gold.”

  I turned around to see an older man. He looked like a Greek shipping magnate, all mustache and shine. “I like the two-tone,” I said. “If you like the all-gold so much, buy it for me.”

  “Okay,” he said. He didn’t even seem fazed by it. I felt certain that he recognized me, but he didn’t say anything about it.

  “No,” I said. “No, I’m kidding. Don’t buy it for me.” He insisted. He was probably there buying watches for a dozen mistresses. I put up a fight. “You know you’re not going to get anything in return,” I said.

  “I’m shocked,” he said. He wasn’t.

  “Anyway, I don’t like the all-gold one.” I left the store.

  Down the block—I don’t even think I had made it to Fifty-sixth Street yet—I heard someone calling me: “Miss! Miss!” The man who had been waiting on the Greek tycoon was walking briskly toward me, a box in his hand. “This is for you,” he said. It was the gold and silver watch.

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s all paid for,” he said. “The gentleman insisted.”

  I went on down the street feeling paranoid. Was this some kind of test? Was the clerk following me, seeing if I was actually dishonest enough to walk away with the watch? Had Candid Camera come back on the air? By the time I was home, my paranoia had faded, and all that was left was a strange glow. Life felt charmed. A stranger had done something generous for me with no expectation of anything in return.

  That lasted about an hour, and then the sense of confusion and emptiness crept back in. I sat with the cat by the window and got older.

  * * *

  IN THE SUMMER, there was a reunion party for my high school class. When I say “high school class,” I need to put the phrase in quotes. I had left school early, moved to New York with two years still to go, and I often wondered what would have happened had I stayed like a normal girl. Would I have become more confident? More popular? Who would have been my friends?

  At the same time I wondered about Idaho, Idaho wondered about me. Around the time of Personal Best, they made me an honorary graduate. Certain flyers got sent my way. Certain calls were placed. The same people who hadn’t given me a second thought in ninth or tenth grade suddenly felt as though their high school experience wouldn’t be complete without me there. And so, in that spirit, I went back to Ketchum, me and my short hair and a slightly revised attitude. I figured that if I was being invited solely because I had become famous—and that was pretty clearly the reason—that I was going to act the part. Maybe acting famous would work to my advantage.

  Even before I got to town, I was thinking of Sean. He was on my mind because he was always on my mind, ever since he came to the Sun Valley Opera House late and held my hand. I didn’t see him for the first few minutes of the party, and I panicked. I almost lost the famous-actress cool I had been practicing. But then he was there, over on the side of the room.

  I walked over. “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” he said. “How’s life?”

  “Well,” I said. “You know. It was hard to get up here with work. I just finished a movie.” I was still in character, copping a slight attitude.

  Sean just smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.” It took me a second before I realized that he was tweaking me, and that’s when I actually relaxed. I may have been putting on a show, but Sean was acting the way Sean always acted: he was completely genuine, unimpressed by the fake me and fully capable of reaching the real me.

  “I suck,” I said. “What kind of person pulls rank by talking about the movie they were just in?”

  “Let’s dance,” he said, extending his hand. I took it and followed. As soon as we got to the middle of the dance floor, I was having more fun being the normal Mariel again than I ever imagined I could have being the self-important Mariel. All my dreams about what Sean would be like as a man had come true.

  The night passed with more dancing, a long conversation outside, and then one thrilling moment where he learned over and took me by the shoulders. “You want to?” he said.

  I wanted to. I did. The sex was amazing. I had never had good sex before, not really. I was unprepared and poorly matched for the brief affair I had on the set of Personal Best, and sex with Robert always felt a little out of step and claustrophobic. Sean was awesome, comfortable and exciting and athletic, both soulful and playful in the right proportions. He was completely normal—and, as it turned out, I liked normal.

  So we were dating, or something like it. Our fling continued. The amazing feelings continued, whether they were during conversation or during sex or during the joking and laughing that bridged the two. I had a boyfriend: a bona fide, in-the-flesh, my-age-exactly boyfriend.

  When Sean and I got together, I was about to start a new film. For the first time, it hadn’t been easy to find the next part. I had read scripts that I thought were right for me but faced resistance in lining up an audition, or I had been targeted with scripts that I thought weren’t right for me at all. Again, it seemed at least partly due to the way that people were responding to Star 80. Most of the people who saw it felt that it was a powerful film, but it wasn’t an easy film to digest. It had unsettled me deeply, and it seemed to be having a similar effect on others. The movie wasn’t just a psychological portrait of one woman and her difficulties with men. It was a slap in the face of the industry, a mirror held up to the worst aspects of the movie business. Star 80 had a clear argument at its heart: if you’re a woman, the movie argued, don’t come to Hollywood and expect to make it without also expecting to give yourself away. It was, if you’ll pardon the expression, a fuck-or-die movie, and no one in Hollywood wanted to look at themselves or their profession that way. Wherever I went after Star 80, whatever I did, the movie’s tone clung to me a little bit.

  For a little while, I worried I would never work again, but then I read a script for a movie called Creator, which was based on a novel by Jeremy Leven. Creator explored some of the same themes as Star 80 but through a completely different lens. It was a comedy of ideas about a brilliant scientist who tries to clone his late wife. Along the way, he enlists the help of a quirky young female assistant—and then, just as he’s about to successfully clone his wife, he realizes that he has feelings for the young woman. Pe
ter O’Toole was going to play the scientist, and I wanted to play the young woman. I was excited about the role because I would get to show a completely different side of myself—my character was a kind of nymphomaniac, silly without being too broad, smart in unexpected ways.

  I told Sean about Creator. “Come down and see me,” I told him. “You can visit me on set. It’ll be so exciting. Pick me up and then we can spend evenings together.”

  “It’s a date,” he said. The corners of his mouth turned up just enough to let me know that he was excited too.

  I went back to Los Angeles. After a sane interval, he followed. And then, of course, when he got there, I completely ignored him. He was staying with friends, and he called me when he arrived. “Oh, hi,” I said. “I have to go do a reading for this script tonight. Can I call you tomorrow?” The next day, I waited until dinnertime. “Crazy day,” I said. “I’m worn out from this work. Can we do something tomorrow instead? Or maybe Friday is better.” I made excuse after excuse, most of which he accepted with equanimity. Eventually, he went back up to Ketchum, and our perfect little fling was perfectly over.

  Why I rejected Sean—or, at the very least, hid from him until he rejected me—required some explanation, even to myself. For weeks after Sean left, I went back through the circumstances of his trip and tried to think about what put me off, what made me duck and cover. I decided that it had something to do with the division between my personal life and my professional life, and specifically the way that I couldn’t reconcile the two sides of that divide. I couldn’t be both the shy and gawky girl who laughed at all his jokes in a high school gym in Ketchum and an up-and-coming actress who was preparing for her fourth consecutive starring role in a major motion picture.

  Or, rather, I could have, but I didn’t feel like I could. I had been diverted into this other existence, into the movie world, and that came with its own set of demands. You could see them through the pessimistic prism of Star 80 or through the optimistic prism of Creator, but they were inescapable. My career in Hollywood depended upon people noticing me in certain ways—not just men, but largely men, and not in exclusively or even overtly sexual contexts, but in ways that were related to sex. With Robert Towne, it had become actualized. With Woody, it hadn’t. With Bob Fosse, we had run in circles around the couch in the Beverly Hills Hotel until I told him in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t be both his leading lady and his girlfriend. How would Sean’s presence change that? I was embarrassed by all the attention I got but protective of it at the same time. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I felt that I had to keep myself open or at least create the impression that I was available. Weren’t young actresses hired in part so that directors could project fantasies onto them? I’m not sure how much of this I fully understood at the time. I didn’t have friends who were wise enough to help me investigate it at any depth. But it was all sensed and acted upon skittishly.

  Right after Sean left, something happened that proved my point, in both good and bad ways. During Star 80, we had to re-create a nude photo shoot that Dorothy Stratten did for Playboy magazine. It was a big part of her fame and central to her character, and so Bob hired Playboy-style photographers to come out and take pictures of me in the predictable Playboy poses. You know, naked in a white wicker rocking chair out on the lawn—the way a girl always sits around the house. Just before the movie came out, Bob leaked those photos to the actual Playboy for publication. In my mind, this was a tremendous betrayal, not to mention a confusing one. Those weren’t my nudes, not exactly—they were Dorothy’s. I had appeared in them in character, dressed (or undressed) as her, in the service of the story. To take them out of the world of Star 80 and return them to the real world, and the real Playboy, was unacceptable. But it was also par for the course for Star 80 and for the themes of the film. I may have complained to my agent or cried to friends. I may have felt private rage and public shame. But in the end, after I ground my teeth, after I cursed out Bob Fosse’s name in my head, after I worried and wondered how it would all affect my career, I realized there was nothing I could do, and I just let it happen.

  * * *

  CREATOR, BLISSFULLY, THANKFULLY, was a bit of sunlight after the cloud of Star 80. It was a light movie, a cheery and original comedy, and I was thrilled to step away from the darkness. And the brief affair with Sean, even though I wasn’t able to sustain it as a relationship, had liberated me. I was freer as an actress and as a person. Things didn’t seem so desperately important.

  My sense of freedom extended beyond work. There was an assistant director on the movie whom I liked. He was a big guy, masculine, and the two of us flirted throughout the shoot. One of the last nights of the movie, we found ourselves alone on set. “Want to get a drink?” he asked.

  “At least,” I said.

  We had a beer—I sipped at mine, mainly just to show that I was up for socializing—and then I went back to his place. It was my first one-night stand, and it was everything I needed it to be: uncomplicated, breezy, exciting. The next morning, still in bed, I found myself laughing, not as a result of the pleasure of it but for a more abstract reason. I had, almost by accident, stumbled into a decision that I hadn’t turned over obsessively in my mind. I had discovered, in myself, a previously unknown spontaneity. The night hadn’t been consequential, and that was the most consequential thing about it.

  11

  THE MAN IN THE RESTAURANT

  MY FRIEND RICHARD wanted to go to a movie. “Let’s meet early,” he said, “and get some food at the Hard Rock Cafe.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “I’ll go to the movie, but that’s all.” The Hard Rock wasn’t my scene. It seemed gross, too much fame on display, and for all the wrong reasons.

  “Just meet me there,” Richard said. “Some other friends are coming too.” So there we were, before the movie, a group of us talking about our lives and what was missing in them.

  After Star 80, I had resettled in New York and resumed my normal existence, such as it was. I hung out with friends. I read scripts. I did a little theater. There were moments of celebrity here and there—people recognized me on the street, and one spring I was invited to the Met Ball, the lavish event to benefit the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. But I was lonely. I had never really been in love. My plan, I said, was to solve it all unconventionally, artistically, the way my grandfather would have: I would move to Paris, smoke tons of Gitanes, and have a baby on my own, in the most bohemian manner imaginable.

  The other people at the table either nodded or shook their heads. Some of them encouraged me, asked me which arrondissement I’d live in. Others objected, on various grounds. Richard got especially upset. He said something rude about Paris and then sank into a kind of churlish silence. I assumed that he had some problem with Paris or single motherhood. I learned years later that he had feelings for me and was hurt by the prospect that I might run off like this. At the time, that never occurred to me. I thought he was gay.

  As we were talking, a guy came up the stairs at the other end of the room. He drew my attention immediately, because he looked like he was from Idaho, or at least some movie director’s idea of Idaho—he was wearing a periwinkle blue button-down shirt, cowboy boots, and sunglasses, and he had long reddish-brown hair that reached to his shoulders. “I would stay around if I met someone like that,” I said, pointing.

  This didn’t do anything good for my one friend’s mood. He got even quieter. “That’s just stupid,” he said.

  I went on. “Yeah,” I said. “That guy seems cool. That’s the kind of person I’d like to fall in love with and marry.” He passed close by our table and went into the back. We left and went to the movie, after which we compared notes on the Hard Rock and both decided that it wasn’t our scene: too much wanting to be noticed, too much flash, not enough soul.

  The next week, another friend of mine, Liz, invited me back to the Hard Rock. “I know some people who worked there, and I can get us into a special VIP area.”<
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  “Forget it,” I said, again. The only thing that sounded worse than going to the Hard Rock was going to the VIP area at the Hard Rock.

  “Do it for me,” Liz said. “Please.” Liz had a high-class American accent—classic Upper East Side—and always reminded me of Holly Golightly, which gave her elevated status in my mind. Liz was only a couple of years older than me but seemed to be far more pulled together. She wanted to be a writer and had a very grown-up apartment on lower Park Avenue with beautiful furniture that was expensive but not gaudy—a Biedermeier desk and a side table that was made from a stack of old Louis Vuitton trunks and suitcases in cream and brown leather. How could anyone be so elegant without trying? I wanted to have her style, though it was probably far too precious for me. Even her hair dried perfectly straight. Liz seemed to live effortlessly.

  When I got to the Hard Rock, they whisked me upstairs to the roped-off room. Liz was running late—elegantly late—and there were no cell phones in those days, so I did what you always did back then when you waited for someone: I sat alone at the bar, drank Perrier, and tried not to look too bored.

  After a few minutes, I noticed the guy from the previous week, the one with the cowboy boots, cutting through the far corner of the VIP room. He noticed me noticing him, and he came up and introduced himself.