Out Came the Sun

by Mariel Hemingway

  “Oh,” I said. “Whatever.” I set it back down. Margaux swooped in, collected the pieces of jewelry that looked like they might be something. The ring stayed there for me.

  * * *

  WHEN MY MOTHER PASSED AWAY, my father hit the road. He had a huge gray-green transport van that he outfitted with a bed, a satellite dish, and a top-of-the-line sound system. He was going to drive around the country, listening to classical music and fishing. I thought it was a great idea, and I told him so. He nodded. “Muffet will be fine here at the house,” he said. “And I’ll be fine out, not here at the house.”

  We had one long conversation before he went. “I wish things had been easier,” he said.

  “No one could have done anything about it,” I said. “It’s cancer.”

  “Not that,” he said. “I wish I could have been a more hands-on father. I tried. But I wasn’t raised that way, and I didn’t always know how to do it right.”

  “You did fine,” I said. “You helped me kill a rattlesnake.”

  “What?” He tilted his head quizzically. I reminded him of the walk we had taken in Salmon, and how he had told me that I needed to take a rock and crush the snake. He protested. “I wasn’t saying animals should be killed.”

  “I understand,” I said. “I understood. But I liked that you liked the idea of the house in Salmon.”

  “And I like that you like the idea of the van,” he said. And he climbed up into it and drove away.

  15

  THE WEIGHT IN THE EYES

  ONE OF THE HEALERS I consulted recommended going back to work. “When there is a trauma,” she said, “the body wants to go home.”

  And so I went to Santa Fe (where I hadn’t been very often) to a movie set (where I had) to make a TV movie called Into the Badlands. I stood on desert ground and looked up at mesas and tried to either lose myself or find myself. Either one would have been okay.

  But it was different. Something had changed. I couldn’t use the set to distract myself the same way I had a decade before, and I couldn’t easily locate myself there either. In the past, I had adopted the cast and crew as a family. I had gone out to eat with them, become fast friends, had intimate conversations, imagined we would always be in one another’s lives. In New Mexico, I kept my distance, ate meals alone, thought mostly about going home.

  The movie wrapped. I went back to Idaho. And then, slowly but surely, I panicked. Every morning I made breakfast. Every afternoon I took Dree for a walk. All the while, I was gripped by the fear that I was disappearing inside domestic life.

  When I shared my concerns with Stephen, he nodded. “Why are you nodding?” I asked him.

  “Because I agree with you.”

  “You agree that I’m finished as an actress?”

  He shook his head. “No, no. I just think that you mishandle things somehow.” Now I was the one shaking my head. This wasn’t the conversation I wanted to have. But he was already moving forward into his main point. “You’re not mysterious enough,” he said. “That’s why people don’t see you as a movie star. You need to create a real sense of mystique, so that people wonder about you even when you’re not around.” I told friends what Stephen had said, expecting them to condemn him, but they laughed indulgently. He’s just doing what men do, they said. He’s just trying to solve things, they said. He doesn’t know any better, they said.

  One evening, with Dree in my lap and Stephen next to me on the couch, and with a movie starring someone else on the TV, I pledged to myself that I was going to do whatever it took to work things out. I was going to flush out the tensions in the marriage, even if it meant that there would be no more marriage. I was going to find my way back to work, even if it meant adjusting my idea of motherhood. None of it was easy, but who said life would be easy? Sometimes you had to hoist a rock and stare down the rattlesnake.

  And then I got pregnant again.

  It was an accident. I wasn’t happy. It’s a strange thing to say about a child who would bring me so much joy, who continues to do so today, but the first glimmerings of our second daughter did not come at a happy time. I said it was great news, but the smile was frozen on my face. Stephen and I were fighting all the time, I wasn’t working as much as I needed to, and I was sure that a second baby would extend the marriage, hold me there against my will while the professional coastline receded. The boat I was on bobbed in the water, and I couldn’t see land in any direction, no matter how hard I looked.

  * * *

  THE FIRST TIME my father climbed into his van and drove away, he was gone for a few months. The second time, he stayed out on the road only a month, and the third time only a week. His plan had changed—or rather, someone had changed his plan. A woman named Angela had befriended Muffet during one of his trips, and then she befriended my father when he returned. Soon enough, she was spending more time with him than with Muffet, and then he was spending more time with her than with Muffet. And then Angela wasn’t my father’s girlfriend anymore. She was his fiancée.

  It was a summer wedding in 1989, just over a year after my mother’s death. All the sisters were there. Muffet and I wore pink. Margaux wore green. The two of them carried flowers, and I wore flowers in my hair. Dree wobbled around, clutching her bottle. I was highly pregnant with the second baby, and in some of the photos I’m wearing a worried smile, as if I’m not quite sure what’s ahead of me. When I look closely at my face, I remember how I felt. There’s a weight in the eyes. In those same photos, my dad looks wonderful: happy, dapper, glowing with the promise of something new.

  He and Angela moved into a new condo together, and Muffet got her own apartment. “It’s great for her,” my dad said. It wasn’t. Pretty quickly, it was apparent that Muffet couldn’t be on her own. She started to drink more heavily—thirty years of Wine Time had created habits that were hard to break—and she seemed to take her medication only when the mood seized her.

  I remember coming back after some time away, visiting Muffet’s apartment, and stopping at the door from shock. It was like a crack house, with jugs of Gallo wine everywhere and cigarette burns in the furniture. For years, she had been the one who kept order in the house, but it was order kept for others. On her own, she went completely slack. I helped her clean and tried to talk to her about it, but her stories were becoming more outlandish again. She was waiting for money from someone in Russia, she said. “A prince, I think,” she said. “It’s all coming in pretty soon, and then I can take care of all of this.”

  And then she was walking down the street in Ketchum, knee-high socks bunched around her ankles.

  And then she was standing on the corner of the street, telling stories to people she didn’t know.

  And then it was a man from Atkinson’s, the local butcher, calling my father to tell him that Muffet was stealing meat. “We don’t want to make a big deal out of it,” he said. “But it does have to stop.”

  Within a year, Muffet went to live in a home in Twin Falls. As angry as I was when I heard about it, it was the best thing for her. She had a caretaker who watched over her, who gave her money for coffee and books, who made sure that she remembered to call everyone else in the family and let them know how she was doing. “I’m coming home soon,” she would tell me on the telephone. “Daddy says I can live there again.”

  * * *

  OUR SECOND DAUGHTER was born in August 1989. We named her Langley, which was a name Stephen and I had picked years before—on the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area trip, in fact. We had played a kind of first-love game: what will we name our babies? We both liked Langron, which was a boy’s name from Stephen’s side of the family. Late in the pregnancy, I sensed it was a girl, and I changed the name a little bit. Neither of us, I don’t think, ever thought of the CIA connection, even though Stephen had grown up in Virginia. Langley Fox Hemingway Crisman joined the family.

  But the family was changing. When Langley was two months old, I moved with the girls from Idaho back to Los Angeles, to a small house on
Betty Lane in Coldwater Canyon. The thought was that Stephen would spend most of his time in New York, managing the restaurants, and I would spend most of my time in Los Angeles. We would see each other whenever we could. We weren’t separating, but I had reached a point where I couldn’t justify being distant from the movie business. If I passed into the limbo that claimed many actresses, it wasn’t going to be for lack of trying.

  What I was trying for, at first, was comedy. Of all the movies I had done in recent years, the one that had given me the most satisfaction was Creator. I liked comedy. It let me escape from my own mind. It let me exaggerate aspects of my own personality. It let me have fun. There was a script circulating about a soap-opera writer who was losing control of the show that he created. Network executives were meddling. Actors’ egos were rearing their ugly heads. He tries to escape to the country, gets into an accident, and wakes up inside the fictional world of the soap opera. John Candy was starring, and I wanted one of the female leads.

  The movie, Delirious, was directed by Tom Mankiewicz. Tom was Hollywood royalty. His father was Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who had been responsible for some of the most important movies in the history of American film—he had produced The Philadelphia Story, written All About Eve, and directed The Quiet American. Tom had been a successful writer and was then debuting as a director. When I expressed interest in the part, he resisted. He didn’t really want me. He didn’t see me as a comedienne: in Manhattan, the most famous comedy I had done, I was mainly a foil for Woody, the young girl who laughs at his jokes and cries when he says he can’t see her anymore. But I kept at Tom until he let me audition, and when I went in to read, I was really good.

  Tom was about twenty years older than me, and everything about him was old-fashioned. He ate classic Hollywood lunches at classic Hollywood restaurants and had classic Hollywood whiskey along with them. He was a throwback to the Golden Age of Hollywood, but he was also a throwback to my grandfather’s generation. He was intelligent, erudite, and effortlessly interesting: during lunch, he might start a story about Bette Davis, or James Mason, or Humphrey Bogart, and you knew you were getting an insider’s perspective.

  On set, Tom was a gentleman director, which meant that he thought and cared deeply about what he was making but didn’t rule with an iron fist. That left it up to the actors, which was fine with me. In the opening scene of the film, my character is in a phone booth, calling her mother, and she accidentally knocks all her change off a ledge. While she’s down on the floor getting it, John Candy’s character—who is late for a meeting to protect his show—barrels through the lobby. She’s reaching for change. He steps on her hand. He helps her up and tears the sleeve off her dress. It was madcap comedy, which was almost an athletic endeavor. You had to be in the right part of the frame at the right time, which meant moving fast and with precision.

  Delirious was also an opportunity to work with John Candy. It was easy, as an audience member, to take him for granted: I had seen him, like everyone else, in Stripes and Splash and Planes, Trains and Automobiles. But I hadn’t seen the personal side of him, and that was the revelation. John was one of the best people I have ever worked with: loving, normal, generous to everyone on set. At the end of the night, he bought pizza for the crew. He loaned money to people if they needed it. At the same time, you could see that he was tortured, in a sense, because he never went home. He stayed with the crew, slept on set. Delirious was one of five movies he did that year.

  We shot mostly in Los Angeles, but the beginning and end of the film took place in New York, so I went back home on a work trip. It was almost the polar opposite of the careful, quiet alienation that I had experienced when Stephen and I had last lived there together. We saw each other. We had a great time. I worked all day, and after we wrapped for the day I brought the whole cast to our restaurant, at which point I got out of the way and let Stephen charm everyone in sight. I watched him from a distance, in love with him again in some ways, and more hurt than ever in others. Why couldn’t we be warm and easy with each other when we were alone?

  The movie wasn’t a hit. But I have a soft spot for the film, not just because of my fondness for Tom and John, but because the story has a strange emotional resonance. John’s character revises his own life, which seems like a wish-fulfillment story, but there are darker aspects to it. What does it mean to obsessively revise your own existence? Does that prevent you from living it? And since the rewrite conceit of the film is so clearly fictional, what did that mean for reallife change? I also thought about my grandfather and the way he had built his own myth as an obsessive rewriter, as a man whose genius lay in revisiting his writing continually until he found the perfect word or phrase. How much thought and rethought were really necessary? How important was instinct? How irreversible were decisions?

  A few years after Delirious, in the middle of making a Western called Wagons East, John Candy died in his sleep on set. Tom called me to break the news. I wasn’t shocked. John had never been in good health. But I was tremendously saddened, because John had been such a warm, loving, generous person, and the story could have ended differently. Or could it?

  * * *

  “I’M DONE,” STEPHEN SAID. I was sitting in a chair, a book in my lap, and the letters went all out of focus. Did he want to end the marriage?

  “What?” I said.

  “This restaurant business is ridiculous,” he said.

  “Right,” I said. “Restaurants.” I knew that business was bad, or at the very least immensely stressful. Stephen was always under the gun. He was always on the telephone, putting out a fire or lighting a fire under someone. No matter how many locations he opened, no matter how packed they were, we never seemed to make enough money from it. At some point, he had discovered why. To oversee the restaurants’ business operations, he had hired a veteran controller, but the man had a gambling problem, and he ended up skimming money out of the restaurants to pay off his own debts. Stephen didn’t press charges because the man had a family, and it seemed unfair to add insult to injury. But the skimming just deepened the sense of financial despair and further fractured the relationships on the business side of the restaurant. And Stephen never complained to me about it until he announced, one day, that he couldn’t go on.

  “I’m just exhausted,” he said. “I feel like I have poured my life into these restaurants, and I have nothing to show for it.”

  “What are you going to do?” I said.

  “I was thinking about being a film producer,” he said.

  “Great,” I said. He had dabbled in it already: the two of us had coproduced a small movie called Suicide Club, a modern-day adaptation of a Robert Louis Stevenson short story. I had worried about Stephen encroaching on my world, but Suicide Club had been a good experience—I was creating, and he was seeing me create, and it lessened the tension between us.

  “Yes,” he said, and that was the extent of the conversation. Between the late eighties and the early nineties, communication between us had worsened. We had become so distant from each other emotionally that it didn’t seem possible that we could work together. There was hardly any intimacy left, conversational or otherwise. And sex had become the one thing I thought it would never be: a Cold War battleground. When I would mention that to girlfriends, they assured me that marriage always took its toll on sex. “It becomes a routine,” one would say. Another one would nod excitedly: “That’s why you have to tell him what to do. Specifically, I mean. Tell him what you like and what you don’t.”

  I tried being explicit once. We were in bed, and he was down under the covers. “You know,” I said, “I don’t really like that. I mean, I like it, but not right away. Let’s do something else first.” I started to explain what I wanted. Stephen wasn’t saying anything. I looked down at him. His expression was frozen. He wasn’t looking at me or even through me. It was like he was looking at nothing, like he would always be looking at nothing. That was the last time I tried to clarify what I wanted.


  More and more, I receded inside parenting. I had loved being with one daughter, and two was even better. Get Dree fed, get Langley fed. Get Dree dressed, get Langley dressed. Motherhood was a list of tasks I could check off in my mind. The one part of the day that thwarted me was playtime. “Let’s play house,” Dree would say, leading me by the hand into the yard. You’d think that child’s play would be easy. But I couldn’t just stand there by the plastic play set and pretend that I was a doctor or a waitress or a mommy. It was too strange to me, both familiar and foreign, not real but also in a sense too real. I said a few lines halfheartedly and then took Dree by the hand and led her back into the house.

  16

  THE MAN IN THE MIDWEST

  “YOU KNOW ROCK STARS?” my agent asked.

  “I know of them,” I said. “Which one?” I was at home, in the kitchen. The phone cord was stretched out across the room. Dree was eating. Langley was in the other room, starting to wake up.

  “The one with the long name. Mellencamp.”

  “John Cougar Mellencamp?”

  “He doesn’t use the Cougar anymore, I don’t think.”

  “I know him. Why?”

  “He wants to meet with you. For a project.”

  “A music video?” I moved closer to the base of the phone. It seemed like the call might be ending quickly.

  “No. A movie. He’s directing.”

  I was intrigued. I stopped moving toward the phone. “A real movie?”

  “Completely real. Larry McMurtry wrote it. And he had you in mind while he was writing.”

  I turned and stepped back into the kitchen. This was something else entirely. Larry McMurtry had written The Last Picture Show, one of the best movies of the early seventies, and his books had been the basis for movies like Hud, Terms of Endearment, and Lonesome Dove. “Tell me more,” I said.