Out Came the Sun

by Mariel Hemingway

  I wasn’t waiting for Stephen to come upstairs. He wasn’t allowed. Mom made Stephen sleep in the guest room. I pretended that Dad and Stephen were making too much noise with their conversation, got Stephen in a clinch, and whispered to him that he should come up and visit me after everyone was asleep. He did, and I snuck him out before anyone woke up.

  Morning started with coffee. The smell was sharp and bracing. I was so happy that I was almost whistling: I was in the house where I grew up with the man I loved. My mother appeared, but before I could say hello she scowled and shouldered me out of the way. “You smell like sex,” she said.

  I was shocked. “How would you know what sex smells like?” I returned. She raised her hand and almost slapped me, but she just huffed off to her room instead. I was furious and embarrassed, but most of all I was sad. My mother probably hadn’t been held in years, sexually or otherwise, and I had an impulse to run upstairs after her and hug her.

  Stephen and I did our best in Ketchum during the summer. Muffet was at the house, and he watched her with a kind of professional curiosity, observing her Wine Time and her long walks. She was doing well during that period, staying bright-eyed, though she was still an eccentric. A simple question could trigger a lavish, spiraling story. I took long walks of my own, hiking Bald Mountain almost every day by myself. The summit is at almost ten thousand feet, and when I got to the top, my face beet red and my heart thumping, I felt a surge of something that I can only describe as immortality. Stephen came once, but he didn’t want to push himself, and I got too far ahead of him. But his irritation ebbed, and I kept at the mountain, and by the time we left we were relaxed and focused, if not exactly blissful.

  And then, it was back to New York, back to life as an actress and some kind of celebrity, learning how to renegotiate all of that from within a serious relationship.

  That fall, Annie Leibovitz was assigned to shoot me for Vanity Fair. She had recently joined the magazine as a staff photographer after years at Rolling Stone. Around the time of Personal Best, we had done a great photo shoot where she took pictures of me in an all-white racquetball court. She had seen the Playboy pictures of me (by which I mean the Playboy photos of Dorothy Stratten) that Bob Fosse had leaked, and she wanted to photograph me topless too.

  I agreed—always the people pleaser—but as the issue got closer to publication, I got more and more nervous. I was a woman in a serious relationship now, not the carefree young person I had pretended to be just a few months earlier. What would Stephen think of the photos? I got on the telephone and started to pester Vanity Fair to pull the photos from the issue. I raised every kind of stink: I appealed to their sense of decency, wheedled, maybe even bullied a bit (though I was a completely ineffective bully). Vanity Fair didn’t listen. Or rather, they listened, but then went ahead and published the photos anyway. Stephen didn’t say anything directly, but I could tell that the whole situation made him unhappy.

  There was plenty to make him happy too, including the fact that we were continuing to move toward marriage. Plans solidified to the point where we told my parents. My mother delivered a classic Puck response: “If you have kids,” she said, “they’re going to be retarded.” I think she was a little shocked that Stephen and I were so serious, that it wasn’t just a passing fancy. I would have liked her to have a real conversation with me about it—about Stephen, about commitment, about the good and bad things about marriage. I was still in my early twenties, and though I was sure that I was in love, I was unsure about most everything else. But it wasn’t my mother’s way to communicate straightforwardly. She did what was familiar to her: fired off a cruel remark and then withdrew into disapproval.

  My dad didn’t talk to me about the decision either. He might have been receptive to a conversation, but I was too scared to open the door. To me, initiating a discussion would have been a form of inviting failure. If I explored my feelings and the relationship somehow fell apart, then I would be ruining my one chance at happiness—and that’s exactly what I believed, that I had one chance, and that if I didn’t grab at the brass ring, I was out of luck.

  12

  THE WEDDING IN THE CHURCH

  “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND,” Stephen said. We were at a restaurant in New York, a few minutes after our rehearsal dinner. Our guests had mostly said their good-byes and wished us good luck. We were in the back hallway having a massive fight.

  “You don’t,” I said. “And you never will.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “You’re ridiculous. I can’t believe I’m thinking of spending my life with you.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t,” I said. “Why would you want to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with you?”

  “Oh, is that you?” he said. “I thought you didn’t know what you wanted.”

  “Shut up,” I said. “I’m going to the car.”

  I moved to leave. He reached out for me, and his hand closed around the strap of my dress. I turned away from him, and the strap ripped. “You’re just lucky that wasn’t my wedding dress,” I said.

  He laughed a little at that. “So the wedding’s on?”

  “We’ll see,” I said, and I laughed a little at that. We were both jittery, on the brink of a big commitment, a little raw from fear and intimidated by how much was about to change. Stephen left angry, and I stayed in a hotel in Manhattan by myself. And then, the next morning, without any real resolution from the fight, we met at Saint Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue and became man and wife. It was December 9, 1984, just two weeks after my twenty-third birthday.

  If you had asked me five years before if I cared about having a wedding filled with pomp and circumstance, I would have said no, that what was important was true love, and that I could have been married by a justice of the peace while wearing a barrel for all I cared. That would have been a lie. The second that it was clear that Stephen and I were really going through with the wedding, my mind filled with pictures of fairy-tale princesses and castles. I had a costume designer, Julie Weiss, make a dress for me that was based on Grace Kelly’s wedding gown.

  During the service, I realized that Stephen was still a little woozy from the night before: maybe a little dazed, maybe a little hungover. The second we exited the church, he put on a pair of big sunglasses. “Who the hell do you think you are?” I asked. “Michael Jackson?” He frowned, but not like he had frowned the night before. This was a loving married frown.

  We drove back to New Jersey, where we lived at the time, for the reception, which was the second part of my fairy-tale plan: I had decorated the whole house like Christmas, white with pink bows, and picked out the perfect wedding cake. It was a great celebration, a big blowout—Stephen was able to get cheap alcohol from the restaurant, and there was plenty of drinking all around.

  Getting married, at that point, in my family, was an equivocal thing. Both of my sisters had already been married, and both of them had seen their marriages end. And while they were happy for me, they were also sad in a road-not-taken kind of way. I think that Margaux was especially bothered by the possibility that she might never have children. But I loved having my whole family there at the wedding. Margaux was sober—she had been to rehab recently—though she had gained some weight and didn’t look much like a supermodel anymore. Muffet was good, in Muffet terms: she was medicated and living at home, deep enough in the caretaker mode that she could rationalize the absence of a normal life. My mother actually made it too. I suppose I had never seriously considered the possibility that she would miss her youngest daughter’s wedding, but she hadn’t been to the Salmon house, and she wasn’t in the best of health. But she came out to New York and then to Alpine, where she was genuinely impressed by the way that we had decorated, by the house, and by the sense of ceremony. She responded to order and to effort, because it reminded her of what a life looked like when it was purposeful. She could see that I had devoted myself to the project of preparing the place, and that, for her, was as important as the
emotional aspects of the wedding.

  I’m not sure what my family thought about Stephen, except that they approached him cautiously. My father was nice and polite, as always—he didn’t want any kind of tension or friction with anybody ever. My mother was more openly suspicious, but it was hard to tell if she was specifically concerned about Stephen or just generally worried about any movement in my life that took me away from her.

  As soon as the party ended, Stephen and I went straight to the airport and took a night flight to London, where we stayed at Claridge’s. We could only afford two nights there, and we were in a daze: Stephen slept most of the way on the plane, and he couldn’t snap out of it once we arrive in England. I pouted and felt neglected, a new wife with a husband who couldn’t find energy. After two nights, we shifted over to a friend’s house in St. John’s Wood. Stephen got better the afternoon we checked out of the hotel, but by the time we were at the house, he was in a dark mood, not angry exactly, but brooding. He was having cold feet, it seemed—he tried to explain it to me, but he wasn’t very good at articulating his feelings, and I became terrified that he was talking around some larger set of concerns, or some definite reason that things couldn’t work. As best as I could tell, he was afraid of what was coming in our life—he wasn’t sure what challenges we’d face, or how we would cope with them as a couple.

  The second half of the honeymoon, in Paris, didn’t clarify matters at all. One afternoon, I went shopping. It made sense to me: I was in Paris on my honeymoon, and there was a dress I wanted. Stephen became so angry that I was shopping that he just shut down. That was how he fought: rather than screaming, he just got quieter and quieter, as if he wasn’t sure he would ever speak to me again. I don’t know whether he was concerned about money, or whether it was an issue of control, but it seemed senseless to me—I was bringing in most of the money, and it wasn’t an extravagant purchase. In Paris, on the street, I had a shock of uncertainty. Maybe I had made a terrible mistake. What if I had married the wrong person? He had been elusive in his own way in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area. I hadn’t understood the way he had disappeared from the scene and then resurfaced as if nothing had happened. But I hadn’t seen this level of intense, quiet fuming.

  The doubt passed. We returned to New York and resumed our life together. I was finally part of a different family, which was exciting and liberating. It gave me the chance to avoid some of the same mistakes that had plagued my own family—though I couldn’t have known at the time that it would also give me the chance to repeat them. Soon enough, the problems of the honeymoon were repaired and replaced by the excitement of newlywed life in New York City. From the start, Stephen and I were great as a pair, in the sense that we worked great together in social situations. When people came over for dinner, we both knew how to switch on a certain energy. He adopted a kind of brash persona and he liked to talk about sex and shock people; I was the more conservative counterweight. But we told jokes to (and about) each other, and we showed affection when others were around.

  Even when we weren’t at parties, we were together all the time—I wasn’t working on a movie, so he could spend his days with me before heading over to the restaurant at night, at which point I could go with him if I wanted to—and it felt like we were getting closer and closer. We talked about everything, except that we didn’t talk about anything. The minute the conversation turned to more serious matters—whether it was because we were bumping up against an uncomfortable part of the relationship or business his wasn’t going well—he shut down, and when he did, I just backed off. I stopped being open. It was how I was brought up.

  In retrospect, I should have lived with him for a few years before we got married. But what can you do about retrospect? He was older, and I assumed he knew better, and I was shy and felt that maybe living together was a mistake. There was a large part of me that believed in the fairy tale that I had created for our wedding day: you could have all the intimacy and all the sex and all the emotion you wanted, but you had to be married first.

  Stephen’s first marriage also cast a long shadow. His first wife had had been small and dark-haired, very curvy, very English. Whenever he described her, she seemed like some kind of fairy or sprite, a delicate being who moved through the world with a perfectly feminine grace and ease. What was worse, whenever Stephen described other past girlfriends, they were the same type. There was one girl, Gabriela, whom he rhapsodized about. She was his ideal. She was everything he wanted in a woman, except for the part where they hadn’t been right for each other. Not long after we were married, we were walking through Central Park, and he gasped. “What?” I said. He shook his head: nothing, he said. But I followed his gaze. “Is that Gabriela?” I said. He nodded reluctantly. The woman he was looking at was—again—a tiny, voluptuous brunette. I was this big blond oaf, an all-American girl without an especially womanly figure (there but for the grace of implants) and a weird voice to go along with my round moon face. Where did I fit in?

  Stephen said that I was being silly and that he loved me. “I love you too,” my weird voice answered.

  * * *

  AFTER THE MEAN SEASON, I didn’t get another job for what seemed like years. In retrospect, it was only a matter of months, and maybe that wasn’t the issue so much as the fact that it felt like a beat too long. I had expected to come back to New York after the honeymoon, spend a little while growing accustomed to married life, and then start working again. I guess you could say that I expected marriage to be like a movie set: four intense months figuring out the rules and forging relationships, and then something new. But the something new didn’t come. I heard about other actresses my age getting roles that sounded interesting, and about directors I had worked with starting projects without giving me a call or an audition.

  My agent at the time was Sam Cohn. He liked to have lunch with me at the Russian Tea Room, possibly because I was a pretty girl, but he didn’t give me any substantive career advice. Nobody explained to me how the business actually operated—what kind of roles I should take, which directors I should work with, whether it made sense to do a small part in a certain prestigious project or whether I could survive a high-profile bomb. It was taken for granted that I was in the industry, that I was a working actress with a fairly visible profile, and that was the extent of the discussion.

  In the spring of 1985, I appeared in a play at the Manhattan Theatre Club called California Dog Fight. It wasn’t a success, but it started me thinking more about the craft of acting, and that summer, for the first time, I started to take acting lessons. It wasn’t something I had ever thought about. My entire career had been an accident, really. My first job had surfaced because I was Margaux’s little sister, and I had sustained and extended that accident. There were probably untapped reserves of talent, I figured, whether comic or dramatic, and an acting coach could help me discover them.

  It had the opposite effect. The second I started to get formal instructions, I became self-conscious and stiff. One early piece of advice I remember was “Don’t move your eyebrows so much”—that produced a tornado of self-doubt and analysis. What if I moved them? Would I seem untrustworthy? Was that something that they said to all actresses or was it an issue only for me? Were there certain moments when I should just throw it all out the window and move my eyebrows like crazy? I thought about Margaux’s difficulties with acting, most of which seemed to come from a surplus of thinking. Wasn’t the job simpler than that, at some level? Wasn’t it about putting yourself in situations, finding the place in your head (or heart) that could make sense of that artificial circumstance, and reacting accordingly?

  Years later, after even more trial and error, I finally found an acting coach whose advice made sense to me. “You know how to act,” he said. “That’s not your problem. But learn more about the roles you’re picking, and more about yourself, and then trust that the intersection of those two things is okay. Acting’s not your issue. It’s a more general problem of self-confidence
, or feeling like you’re where you should be.” But that was faraway at that point. Instead, I was taking classes, putting myself out there, going on auditions, and not finding any more success—or, it seemed, any roles at all. I started to think that maybe I didn’t know how to get from one place to another, careerwise. It wasn’t a good feeling, and the occasional moments of uneasiness I was feeling in my relatively new marriage didn’t make me feel any better.

  That’s when Superman IV surfaced. I had seen the first two Christopher Reeve movies, like everyone else in America, and I hadn’t seen the third, which people didn’t like. There was something off in the tone, they seemed to feel, an uneasy relationship between the heroic aspects of the story and the comic casting of Richard Pryor. But the third one did well enough at the box office that a fourth was ordered, and the script found its way to me.

  I read it at home over a weekend. It was terrible. The story was about a villain named Nuclear Man who was cloned from a hair of Superman’s that was being exhibited in a museum. It didn’t make any sense on its face, not even in comic-book terms. Still, I agreed to meet the director, Sidney J. Furie, a polite older man who had directed the spy movie The Ipcress File and the Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues. He seemed fine, but I was worried about the production company, Golan-Globus, which had a reputation for cheap-looking movies that were rushed out in order to make quick cash. My thought process became a constant balancing act. Con: It’s Superman. Pro: Christopher Reeve is in it, and Gene Hackman—who had skipped Superman III—was back. Con: Have you read the script? Pro: It’s filmed in London. Con: Again, have you read the script? In the end, the pros won out, not to mention the price tag. It was paying work in a studio film, and I didn’t feel that I was in any position to say no.