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Out Came the Sun

Page 15

by Mariel Hemingway


  We ended up talking most of the night. No one got to the movie. I even forgot how much I dreaded being in a bar. The man’s name was Stephen Crisman, and he was one of the managers of the Hard Rock. He had been with the restaurant from early on, in London, and had come to the States to open up the New York branch. Come back to the States, to be more precise—he was from Virginia. Mostly, that first day, he talked about spending time on the Potomac with his dog. That led to him telling me his dog’s name, Black Thorn, and then showing me a picture of Black Thorn, which he carried in his wallet like a picture of a child. Black Thorn was a Belgian Tervuren—that’s the Belgian sheepdog, midsize, highly intelligent, and highly active—and Stephen said that he loved to watch him run through Central Park. We talked about dogs for a while, and then other animals, and then places you might go with those animals: hikes in the mountains, walks in the forest.

  It was ten, and then it was eleven, and Stephen raised his hand to get the attention of a waiter and asked me if I wanted a real drink. Though I never really drank, I asked him what he thought we should have, and he said champagne: a blink later, a bottle arrived at the table. I drank because I didn’t want to seem like the kind of person who couldn’t be casually social, though I limited myself to a half glass and flushed it down with probably a gallon of Evian. When Liz showed up, she said hello to Stephen, like he was an old friend, and I did quick reconnaissance to make sure that she wasn’t interested in him. “No,” she said. “Not me and Steve. He’s just a friend. Have fun.”

  Stephen and I stayed there talking until long past midnight. Other friends came and went, but I never saw another soul. Finally, Stephen asked if I wanted him to walk me home. Sure, I said, and he told me that he’d take me through the park. I had always stayed away from the park at night. A girl couldn’t walk through there alone. But with her own urban cowboy to escort her and protect her? I felt fearless and excited. We walked slowly, and he showed me the statues he loved most: a dog near Strawberry Fields and an Alice in Wonderland statue that we sat on. He held my hand like Sean had in the Sun Valley Opera House.

  At one point, while we were walking up a hill toward the reservoir, he grabbed me and kissed me. I literally felt my legs buckle and the blood rush out of my head. He put his hand on my back to steady me, and I felt more than safe: I felt located. We didn’t get to my apartment until almost four in the morning, and at the stairs he kissed me again. I kissed him back and thanked him, and he asked if he could come up and I said no. “You have to leave,” I said. It wasn’t only prudishness that made me send him away. It was love, and I wanted to be alone and let myself feel it. I bolted my apartment door and went to the window to see if he was still there. He was, down on the street, looking up at the window. The expression on his face was the same one I thought was on mine—satisfaction and a little bit of wonder.

  I hoped he would call me. I may have even prayed. He did, apparently, but I missed him, and finally Liz got in touch with me and said that Stephen was looking for me. We met that night for dinner, and the next night and the night after that. A week later, he was going to see his parents in Virginia, and he asked me to come along. We walked and walked, and ended up on a bridge over the Potomac where he had played as a kid. He turned to me with a look in his eyes that I had never seen before. It seemed momentous and a little terrifying. “Mariel,” he said, “I want to take care of you forever.” I almost fell into the water. I didn’t know if I had been proposed to, technically, but the offer seemed perfectly tailored for me: I had spent years taking care of other people, and here was someone promising to reverse that pattern. This was love. I was sure of it. Suddenly everything was clear. Stephen’s offer was basic emotional math, as simple as one plus one.

  People say that when you get seriously involved with someone, you get involved with his whole family. In that regard, Stephen was a good match. His family was normal, or at least normal enough. His mother was a little bit controlling and neurotic, but she was kind, and she loved Stephen tremendously. His father was a nice man who had PTSD from combat action, and he was a little stern, especially when Stephen started to participate in the great social experiment of the sixties. But those were minor wrinkles in a generally smooth fabric. Stephen had a brother who worked with him in the restaurant business, and they got along well. When I was young and would spend time in other people’s houses, I would often wonder if they were really happy, deep down. The Crismans seemed to be.

  But if Stephen’s family elevated him, what did that mean about me and my family? I was in a phase during which I kept my distance from them. Right around the time I got together with Stephen, Margaux went to rehab. She had been through a bad period in her career—modeling offered diminishing returns and was destructive to her sense of self, and any hope she had of starting a second career as an actress had been scuttled by poor performances and poor choices—so she turned to the bottle. Well, she turned back to it. She drank because she always drank, because she was a Hemingway and came from a family with Wine Time. Alcohol was so much a part of her everyday life that no one in my family understood why she’d need to go to rehab. My parents, I think, figured that it had to be some other substance—drugs, maybe—because alcohol alone wasn’t a problem. What was the problem? If you thought you were drinking too much, just water down your wine with ice. That’s what they had done. The shame of it was that their own relationship with alcohol prevented them from seeing what Margaux really needed, which was support—support in the abstract sense, support in the concrete sense, a sympathetic ear, time spent in conversation, whatever version of it seemed like it might work. There’s lots of literature about middle children, about the ways in which they get lost between difficult older children and favored younger children, and Margaux was a nearly perfect example of this. My parents had poured so much energy into Muffet, both in terms of worrying about her and in terms of the resources needed to keep her afloat. And during that period when Muffet demanded all their attention and all their worry, Margaux seemed like she had figured everything out. She left Ketchum and turned up as a supermodel. My parents must have watched as she signed her million-dollar contract and thought that she was set for life. But they didn’t have any real concept of money at that level—how much actually found its way into Margaux’s hands, how much was taken by managers and agents, how much of it was promised but never actually delivered. By the early eighties, she had almost certainly burned through all of her money, but the things that she did to keep herself in the orbit of the fashion world—appearing on talk shows, being in People magazine—made it look like she still had it. Margaux got the same message I did: Your mother’s sick. Your sister’s crazy. Your life is fine on the surface, which is as far as we’re willing to look.

  For my part, mostly, I saw Margaux’s life as sad. I didn’t see how it was going to get better. And Margaux was difficult for me in different ways than Muffet was. She wasn’t an easy person to get along with, and she represented certain kinds of behavior that terrified me. She was the adventurer, and the libertine, and the one who was unashamed to be self-absorbed in certain respects. And though all those things were part of her charisma, they were also warning signs for me. At one point, she was out in Idaho visiting my parents, and she did a television interview in which she looked awful. I must have said something out loud, because Stephen always treaded a little lightly around the idea of Margaux. He knew that I had issues with her. Again, most of the issues were danger zone issues. When she gained weight, I felt panic, as if that virus of disorderly living might infect me too. But I wasn’t mature enough to go directly to the source and try to make her better—or, more likely, lead her to someone else who would make her feel better. I just took aggressive steps, and sometimes even obsessive ones, to prevent that part of my life from resembling hers. Was it selfish? I suppose in a sense it was, but I worried that if I was sucked into the vortex of her life, I would never get my own in order. I paid special attention to my diet. I started new exercise
regimens. I doubled down on clean living. “No, thanks,” I’d say at lunch, to dessert, and feel like I was getting my hands around the largest problems in my life. It was self-deception, certainly, but it kept the day moving forward: tick-tock, one small controlled decision at a time to ensure that the world didn’t spin out of control.

  I also became obsessed with monogamy. Up to that point in her life, Margaux had been through a number of relationships, always with maximum drama. Sex was part of her life in obvious and not always pleasant ways. I hadn’t liked it when other kids had teased me about her, or when people made offhanded comments about her life as a model, and so I went to great lengths to make sure that I wasn’t that kind of person. The second that I had a serious boyfriend, especially one I loved and who had pledged to take care of me, I locked into the relationship. We became inseparable. I came to meet him at the Hard Rock, despite my problems with the place; I hung out with a book or a journal while Stephen wrapped up work. We went away for the weekend to the Hamptons and stayed with friends who would become central to our lives for years—writers, publishers, artists, journalists. It felt vibrant and meaningful, the opposite of the sometimes hollow loneliness that New York had represented before I met Stephen.

  What was it like to have a new girlfriend who was a working actress? I think about that often, how Stephen balanced his sense of pride in me, not to mention the reflected glory of fame, with his insecurity and possessiveness. It couldn’t have been easy. It didn’t feel easy from my end. In 1984, I was hired to work on a film called The Mean Season, a thriller directed by Phillip Borsos. Phillip was a recognized talent in Canada, where he won a series of awards for short films in the seventies and then broke out with his first feature, The Grey Fox, in 1983. That movie starred Richard Farnsworth as Bill Miner, a famous Canadian train robber, and The Mean Season was a serial-killer story set in Miami at a time when the city was threatened by an oncoming hurricane. The film was based on a novel by John Katzenbach, a Miami Herald columnist, and none of it was groundbreaking, but it was compact and competent, and Phillip seemed like the kind of talent who could make something of it all on the screen. Plus, there was the matter of the casting. I would be playing Christine, the girlfriend of Malcolm Anderson, the protagonist and reporter played by Kurt Russell.

  Working with Kurt was a dream, and a different kind of dream than I had ever really experienced. Whereas Eric Roberts had been intense in all the wrong ways, and Woody had been quick to establish a weird kind of intimacy, Kurt was as solid and sane a person as I had ever met, in Hollywood or out. When I met him, it was like meeting a brother: we didn’t have any sexual chemistry, despite the fact that we were supposedly playing lovers, but he was comfortable beyond anything I could have imagined from an actor. He was all about the work. He loved his job. He showed up on time, had fun, kept the crew loose, asked smart questions, did a great job, and left for the day. It was crazy, by which I mean it wasn’t crazy at all. For me, it was a rare glimpse of what normal actually meant and how it could coexist with artistry. And I really liked that. Part of me longed to be that: to do the work as a professional and be seen in that light by everyone around me. Kurt’s strategy for life appealed to me much more than De Niro’s, for example. I didn’t want to become another person. I wanted to use acting to get better and better at being myself.

  There’s a famous story—people say that it’s apocryphal but I will continue to believe it—about the making of Marathon Man and a scene for which Dustin Hoffman was supposed to play sleepless and strung out. Being a devoted Method actor, he stayed awake all night and showed up on set looking awful. Laurence Olivier, his costar, asked him if something was wrong, and Hoffman explained that it was his way of getting in touch with the character. Olivier started to speak, stopped for a beat, cleared his throat. “Why not try acting?” he asked. “It’s much easier.” It reminds me of The Mean Season and Kurt Russell, and the way he represented an alternative to the tortured-artist model that seemed so prevalent on sets.

  Kurt’s sanity illuminated something deeper too. At home, for most of my childhood, I saw a family of Eric Robertses rather than a family of Kurt Russells. My parents had to alter their states significantly to have any chance at self-expression. They were so repressed—by circumstance, by genetics, by a misguided marriage—that they couldn’t be themselves in any healthy way. To express themselves, they took extreme measures, with the help of alcohol. They thought they were getting the poison out when in fact they were putting more of it in. When they blew up at one another, when they said horrible things, when they retreated to their corners hurt and alienated, they never did it with any real ability to control the effects, and so the damage spread. Why not try acting? It’s much easier.

  Because of Kurt—and Phillip, who had a similar philosophy—shooting The Mean Season went quickly. The film came together beautifully in the editing room, and it ended up the way I thought it would, as an elegant bit of pocket Hitchcock. Sadly, we were working with the wrong studio. Because of various corporate shifts and sleights, they didn’t put very much money behind the P&A—that’s the Prints and Advertising budget, basically the entire public promotion of the film. And when it finally came out, it had to compete with a surprising surge in quality dramas—Witness, The Killing Fields, A Passage to India, Amadeus—not to mention now-classic teen movies like The Breakfast Club and huge comedies like Beverly Hills Cop. It didn’t do much business, but it remains a fond memory and a fine film.

  * * *

  ABOUT A MONTH AFTER WE MET, Stephen and I took a trip to the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area in western Montana. He wasn’t much for the trip at first; he played the city boy trapped out in the middle of nowhere, complaining about where he could get a hamburger or a beer, about how it was miles to civilization. We went out hiking, and his complaining took on a different tone. All of a sudden, he felt sweaty and a little sick. He had chest pains. The guides got out their first aid kits and started to work Stephen over, and they decided that there was a very real chance that he was having a heart attack. His heart was beating hard for a prolonged period of time. The guides were worried—beyond that, they were stunned. They had no idea what to do. I called a nearby ranger station, and within about twenty minutes a helicopter came and landed in the middle of the forest: the pilot was a Vietnam vet who knew how to get into and out of precarious places. One of the nurses on the chopper recognized me. “Are you?” she said. I stared back at her, maybe a little more coldly than was necessary, but it just seemed so out of place.

  There was only room for one patient on the helicopter, which meant that I couldn’t go with Stephen, and when the blades started whirring and the helicopter lifted off, I thought that maybe that was it. I had found my true love and then lost him in the wilderness. I might never see him again. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I woke up around dawn and got the horse saddled to take me back to the ranch. But the horses were’t allowed to run, and they knew it. I gave the reins back to the guide and took off running myself. It was fifteen miles, which was a considerable distance but not impossible—after all, it was a life-and-death situation, and people run marathons every day.

  When I arrived at the ranch, I was wiped out, both physically and mentally. The first person I saw, coming up the road, was Stephen. He looked fine. I was rooted to the spot with disbelief. Was it a mirage? I was glad to see him and thrilled that everything seemed fine and out of my mind with confusion and fury. I ran up to him and punched him in the stomach. Stephen took the punch with equanimity. He explained that he had experienced something that they called a benevolent phenomenon. To this day, I haven’t looked it up to see if it’s real. When they took him to the hospital, he was all hooked up to an EKG machine, even though he was starting to feel better. There was a man next to him, another emergency patient, and that man died: he went into cardiac arrest right there and couldn’t be revived. That was enough for Stephen. He pulled out all the tubes and simply walked away. He did what he wanted to do from
the moment we got out into the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area: he bought himself a McDonald’s hamburger and went to a bar to drink a beer. Then he went back to the ranch.

  This answered none of my questions. Was he okay? Did he think he would have health problems later in our marriage? Was I going to be widowed prematurely? Or did he make up the whole thing so that he could have a hamburger?

  To recover from our Bob Marshall trip, I took Stephen to my house in Salmon. I knew that it would fix everything. The place was magical—I had created it with a mix of love and excitement, and then I had found a person who could be there with me, completing the space. But that went about as well as Bob Marshall. Stephen didn’t understand Salmon at all. My phone there was a party line, which I loved — you might pick up the phone and hear Shirley from across the street, three hundred pounds and in curlers, just chatting distractedly with her daughter in town, and you’d have to clear your throat to get her to vacate the line. Stephen didn’t find that as charming as I did. He didn’t find it charming at all. Plus, he was worried about his heart. He never went for walks. He didn’t want to explore in town. And there were sex issues too. He wouldn’t initiate, and he kept his distance when I did. I loved him, and I wanted nothing more than closeness, but his health scare was a barrier between us.

  After a week or so in Salmon, we drove down to Ketchum to meet my parents. I hoped that it would be the magical mirror image of when I had met his parents in Virginia—not that everyone would get along, but that it would lead to another moment of pure intimacy between me and Stephen. That didn’t happen. My mother took an instant dislike to him. “His hair is too long,” she said, but she seemed to have a bigger problem with his air of confidence, which she dismissed as swagger. My father was polite, like he was to everyone, and the two of them stayed up late and sparred intellectually. I was up in my bedroom, and I could hear my father’s voice, like it was one of the dinner parties from when I was a kid: “People say that modernism started in the twentieth century, but all the people who started it had roots in the nineteenth century. Nothing’s new, really. ‘New’ is just a word people use when they don’t want to understand what came before.”

 

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