I went to London, where I had this little apartment in Knightsbridge. I was by myself, mostly—Stephen was back in New York, and I didn’t have any close friends on the cast or crew—so I would mostly just exercise, jumping rope for an hour or an hour and a half every morning. The exercise was connected to a growing sense of food compulsion. It wasn’t an eating disorder, exactly, so much as an intense interest in controlling my intake. I read a book called Fit for Life, by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, which was popular at the time. They believed in the principles of natural hygiene and proposed eating mostly what they called “live” foods, not to mention those with a high water content.
The diet made perfect sense, but because of how I was, I took it to an extreme. If the Diamonds advised that eating fruit until noon was good, then I would eat fruit all day. If they said that you should never have protein and carbohydrates at the same time, I would store them in different cabinets. At night I permitted myself to have real food, which was real only by the standards of a highly regulated eater: big bowls of salad, mostly. Eating mostly fruit, drinking gallons of black tea, I was probably high on low calories and caffeine, but I rationalized it all by telling myself that I was making healthy choices. But every healthy choice was a specific rejection of someone else’s lifestyle. I wasn’t going to get sick like my mom. I wasn’t going to have a heart attack like my father. I wasn’t going to put on weight like Margaux or lose my mind like Muffet. I was going to stay on the straight and narrow, nutritionally and psychologically and sexually and physically and in every other respect.
The movie was preposterous, but it wasn’t painful. I found what I could in the part. I could always find something. Maybe it was a little intimate scene with Chris in which I could connect on a human level. The whole set felt a little arch and false, but I had a way of making sense of that: I had just organized a kind of fantasy wedding, and I translated that feeling to the set, told myself repeatedly that it was just a game of pretend—a consequential and expensive one, maybe, but a game nonetheless. There was something about the life of a superhero that appealed to me. I had spent my life hiding personal pain, thinking my way through how I appeared to the outside world. Equating that with Superman’s life was grandiose and a little bit silly, but it also made a certain kind of sense.
There was an ethical issue too. I always believed that once you have agreed to do something, you are obligated to let go of your doubts. If you’re doing a job for money, you can’t complain all the time. You can’t be both in it and out of it. Just find the reasons that keep you located in the work.
For me, finally, what made the project worthwhile was the city, the paycheck, and above all the opportunity to work with Gene Hackman. Gene and I had some great conversations about acting, but he was just as interested in talking about my grandfather’s writing. Specifically, he was interested in making a film of Across the River and Into the Trees. He would have been perfect for it. The character he projected on-screen was authentically a part of his personality. He was a man of action who was also highly sensitive, a thoughtful person who could occasionally be impulsive in the name of action (which was good) but also in the name of greed or lust (which was bad). I experienced this firsthand. At some point during the shoot, Gene hit on me somewhat—nothing too drastic, but he made it known that he was interested—and that soured me on him. It probably shouldn’t have. He had the right to be interested, certainly, and he never treated me with disrespect. I didn’t know his arrangement with his wife or whether he was even entirely serious. I just got flustered because I flustered easily.
But Superman IV helped my marriage, in a sense. Whenever Stephen visited, I was excited to see him. And when he was away, I felt better about him. In my mind, I created a happy life that went along perfectly so long as we stayed within the boundaries of what made us happy. Challenges were threats, so I decided that the best way to avoid threat was to avoid challenges.
* * *
“COME IN,” I SAID. “Welcome to Sam’s Café.” And they came in: Robert De Niro, Kevin Bacon, Walter Cronkite, and more.
Right after we got back to New York, Stephen and I opened a restaurant. In the press, people talked about him as one of the creators of the Hard Rock Cafe, which was a little bit of a stretch. Isaac Tigrett had founded the business, though Stephen had been instrumental in things from early on—he had created the guitar bar. But he had been in the Hard Rock business for almost a decade, and he was frustrated. Isaac was almost a stereotypical eccentric multimillionaire, always flying off either to pursue enlightenment or to party—sometimes both—and Stephen felt, at times, that he had been reduced to a babysitter. And then there was the way the marriage affected his ego. I could tell, at times, that he didn’t feel like he was keeping pace, that he worried he was too small-time to be with a Hollywood actress. After weeks of deliberation, we came up with the idea that he should open his own restaurant. It was an exciting prospect for both of us. We got his brother to be our general manager and found a location on the Upper East Side.
For me, the most enjoyable part was imagining the look of the place. That was always where I went, whether it was as a teenager sketching out the Salmon house or a bride-to-be designing my own wedding. The idea I had was to make it rustic, a rural refuge in the middle of the city. We decorated with pictures of cows and hung quilts on the walls (including an early American quilt that Woody Allen had given me when we made Manhattan). People thought the name came from Casablanca. It didn’t. In fact, the name came from Stephen. If we were out walking in the street, or shopping in the grocery store, and he wanted to get my attention, he had learned not to call out to me. My name was rare enough that people would turn around to look. So he had picked up the habit of calling me Sam, which I liked—it was nondescript and androgynous, a little sexy.
We opened the restaurant in 1986, and it quickly became a hot eighties hangout, with young Wall Street guys stopping in for dinner on their way home, or celebrities dropping by. Ahmad Rashad gave People magazine a quote about how much he loved our pasta. I liked that first wave of attention, but once we were set up and established, my interest waned. I wasn’t the kind of girl to stay there until closing time. Stephen had to be there whenever possible—restaurants are a cash business, and his oversight was needed to make sure that everything was working, even down to checking that bartenders weren’t underpouring or overpouring. Our days began to diverge. There were plenty of times when I was waking up as he got home. That was an additional complication: late hours in the restaurant world meant that Stephen would drink, and my childhood had made me defensive and withdrawn around people who drank.
* * *
IN THE SAME PEOPLE magazine article that includes Ahmad Rashad’s praise of our pasta, I talked about the restaurant as a break from movie work. I think I called Sam’s a “diversion.” But I was starting to worry that I wasn’t in high demand as an actress. I had expectations about the kind of roles I deserved; after all, I had worked with Woody Allen and Robert Towne and Bob Fosse. I didn’t want to start grabbing wildly at movies that weren’t right for me. But I also didn’t want to pass on movies out of a misguided snobbery; plenty of young actresses were making names for themselves by picking projects that seemed like riskier choices.
My first acting job after Superman IV was a miniseries called Amerika. Even though I was still on the fence about TV, I jumped at the opportunity because my character got to do some song-and-dance work, which was always a dream of mine—as a kid, I was obsessed with variety shows like The Sonny & Cher Show, and I loved the idea of being able to do that kind of thing on a set. The plot was fairly complicated, a post-apocalyptic story about a band of rebels trying to re-create a democratic republic.
Amerika was a difficult experience, and not just because we filmed in Nebraska in the grip of a vicious winter. The cold had a deeper dimension too: I was acutely aware of how alienated I was becoming from the day-to-day business of things. When the camera was on and the director calle
d “Action!” I loved being there. I became animated and energized. But when the director said “cut,” I immediately felt exhausted. If you had been on set, you would have seen me over by the side, head down, motionless. I just didn’t have the energy to participate in the process when I wasn’t actually on camera.
Back at home, the feeling of disconnection didn’t go away. I re-created the New York I had known as a teenager: lots of time by myself, long walks, exercise. I read You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, one of the pioneers of the self-help movement, and started to write daily affirmations in a journal: I, Mariel, love and accept myself. I, Mariel, am healthy, h-appy, and successful. I, Mariel, am healthy, happy, and skinny. It was obsessive-compulsive, though I wouldn’t have put it that way at the time—or for a long time after that. All I knew was that when I wasn’t doing those things, I went slack.
And so, over the months, I began to find myself more and more at the empty center of my days. When I was helping out at the restaurant, I did a perfectly competent job, but I kept a certain emotional distance from the work. When I was at home with Stephen, I played the part of a good young wife, even as I saw that we weren’t interacting enough with each other. I was occupied but not fully engaged, there but not fully present. I was, not for the first time and not for the last, performing my own life.
13
THE SPIRIT IN THE ROOM
“HOLD THE POSE,” the yoga teacher said.
“Can you sense the increase?” the healer asked, pressing the crystal into my hand.
“Know yourself relaxing,” the hypnotist said. “Know yourself dissolving and reconstituting.”
“The last time, you said that you had an injury,” the energy worker said, flattening a palm against each of my shoulders. “This time, I’m just going to place my hands here. Try to let your body communicate.”
Some people feel under the weather, and they go to a doctor. Other people feel like they’re out of shape, and they go to a personal trainer. In the late eighties and early nineties, I felt uncertain in nearly every part of my life. I wasn’t happy in my marriage: fault lines had already opened up between us and exposed a basic lack of communication. I wasn’t happy in my career: the sense of unlimited promise and expansion I had felt in my early movies was gone, and I was feeling stranded. I wasn’t happy with my body: I was thin but always wanted to be thinner. I wasn’t happy with my mind: I had left high school, bypassed college, and hadn’t really found an intellectual challenge that kept me focused. And behind it all, my family still hovered as an original problem that I hadn’t quite solved.
Was I rudderless? Was I depressed? I don’t know that I thought about it in specific terms. But I was starting to get a little lost, and I went looking for answers. In Hollywood, in the late 1980s, that meant participating in various spiritual endeavors. Some were straightforward. Others were less so. But all were potentially ways out of my malaise.
There was some precedent. Throughout Personal Best, I was in physical pain. The training was grueling and the hours long. One of the guys on the set told me about a masseuse who was also a healer, a guy who did bodywork but also released personal trauma. I went to see him, and it was a kind of epiphany. During the massage, I would be focused on the stretching and the soreness, but then all of a sudden there was a welling up of some underground sorrow, and I would find myself crying deeply. I didn’t know where it was coming from.
I knew, though, that I loved the feeling. It was a purification, a setting aside of all the imperfections of my life. Up to that point, whenever I had felt that way, it had been as a result of discipline. Cleaning my room obsessively was one kind of discipline. Taking long hikes in the mountains was another kind. Exercising for hours was another.
The most common form of discipline in my young life was food control. Fat, for me, was a visible sign that something else was wrong: it was connected to Margaux’s unhappiness (because unhappiness made her drink too much, which made her gain weight) and Muffet’s craziness (because her episodes made her take tons of pills, which made her listless and puffy). My mother was thin, but she had always been thin, even before the cancer, and deep down that was probably the role model who made the most sense to me. So I turned to food strategies, which meant turning away from food. I never had bulimia, because of my mortal fear of throwing up, but I did every other obsessive thing with food that was humanly possible. One month, I might take a popular diet to the extreme, eating raw vegetables for all three meals. The next month, I might eat one meal a day of snack food and otherwise subsist on towering cups of iced coffee. It was obsessive. There’s no question about that. But the alternative, which was feeling unregulated and out of control, was unacceptable.
But in the late eighties, as a new wife who ran a restaurant with her husband, turning away from food seemed less and less possible. Instead, I started to turn back to yoga. Yoga was something that had been around since the early seventies—I remember going to a session with Margaux when I was staying with her in New York during the promotion of Lipstick. In the eighties, I started to get more into it, and like everything else, I didn’t exactly do it in moderation. Whatever other people did, I would do fivefold. If something was healthy, then more of it was healthier, right? Of course, when I threw myself headlong into yoga, I didn’t exactly pull back on my other obsessions. I kept eating mostly fruit and drinking tons of coffee: in other words, sugar and caffeine, not a great combination for settling your mind. And so, when that didn’t make me feel calmer, I tried to find other programs, other gurus. I started going to healers and other spiritual counselors. I wasn’t especially selective about which kinds of programs at first, in part because I was searching, and looking at different programs was part of the search. I was eager for deeper connection, and that meant trying however I could to find the spirit in the room.
Most of the visits were secret visits. It wasn’t that Stephen was a total skeptic. He was receptive when it was his idea or connected to someone he knew. Isaac Tigrett was into various Eastern mystics, including Sathya Sai Baba—Baba, a beatific-looking Indian man in his fifties, was a guru who was said to be the reincarnation of an earlier spiritual master, also named Sai Baba. Stephen had this big portrait of Sai Baba in the apartment he shared with his Hard Rock friends, but when we were married and I started talking about similar things, yogis and spiritual paths, he dismissed them. In retrospect, his policy was pretty clear: he was fine with whatever choices I made, so long as they didn’t take up too much of my time and take me away from him. If he had only been able to say that, we could have fought it out and maybe solved it. But he wasn’t straightforward, and I wasn’t perceptive.
I started going to different kinds of healers, and I developed a complicated relationship with their ideas. If someone brought me a healing crystal, I didn’t exactly believe in its powers as described. But I was also a good audience member and a willing participant, and I wanted to keep enough hope alive so that the possibility felt good to me. There was also a performance component, of course, because I was an actress, and there was a sense in which the sessions with healers were directly replacing movie sets as a means of measuring my own personality development. Ten years earlier, working steadily, I might have processed my own insecurity and fear through a role. Without as many roles, I started to overinvest in the spiritual side of things. I might take the crystal in my hand and say that I thought I felt the crystal’s power, or that I thought I was getting a faint glimmer of a past life. And then, in the wake of that admission, the economics of the process kicked in. Healers and energy workers affect a certain altruism, but most of them are businesspeople, and they have a vested interest in setting up a circuit where you’re paying them to preserve this illusion.
At one point, Stephen and I sought a higher spiritual source. We went to India, to Bangalore, and because of our relationship with Isaac Tigrett, we had a private audience with Sai Baba. As wide-eyed as I could be back in the States with a palmist or a crystal healer, I was
a little skeptical with Sai Baba, the founder of the Sathya Sai Organization. There was a long history of people falling under the spell of charismatic Indian gurus, only to become disillusioned later. I was well aware of how John Lennon had come to feel about the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, that he was a skirt-chasing charlatan preying on all these gullible Western celebrities. We had our audience with Sai Baba. My back was up. But he was just a calmly intense man in his late fifties with an orange robe and a big Afro. He looked a little bit like Jimi Hendrix. He spoke to me. He had insights about my life and how it might be brought under control with more mindfulness. They weren’t especially specific insights, but they were broadly helpful, in that they reminded me that I was in charge of my own life. I was calmed by him more than I was changed by him. But even with Sai Baba, there were parlor tricks that belonged in a magic show more than in a spiritual session: he materialized ash in his hands and then produced these giant diamond earrings for me. They weren’t real diamonds, of course—you can’t run a business giving away real diamonds.
* * *
WHEN YOU SEARCH FOR MEANING, there’s always a tension between looking to the outside world and looking within yourself. For a woman, of course, there’s a third option, one that combines elements of the first two: having a baby.
When Stephen and I had visited the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area, I had thought that I was pregnant, though it turned out to be a false alarm. But we always knew that we wanted kids, and we never took any precautions. At some point, we got more serious about making it happen: I started taking my temperature, keeping track of ovulation, that kind of thing. And then, in the spring of 1987, I found out I was pregnant.
Out Came the Sun Page 17